putation he vehemently denies in his Memoirs; but our readers will probably agree with us in thinking, that his denial leaves the question exactly where it was. Next, the indefatigable servant of the state falls in with an old republican, who has not changed with the times, who regrets the red cap and the tree of liberty, who has not un scribes his letters with "Health and Fraternity." Into the ears of this sturdy politician our friend pours forth a long series of complaints. What evil times! What a change since the days when the Mountain governed France! What is the First Consul but a king under a new name? What is this Legion of Honour but a new aristocracy? The old su perstition is reviving with the old tyranny. There is a treaty with the Pope, and a provision for the clergy. Emigrant nobles are returning in crowds, and are better received at the Tuileries than the men of the tenth of August. This cannot last. What is life without liberty? What terrors has death to the true patriot? The old Jacobin catches fire, bestows and receives the fraternal hug, and hints that there will soon be great news, and that the breed of Harmodius and Brutus is not quite extinct. The next day he is close prisoner, and all his papers are in the hands of the government. Thus much is certain, that he was not re-learned the Thee and Thou, and who still substrained from exercising the office of censor by any scruple of conscience or honour; for he did accept an office, compared with which that of censor, odious as it is, may be called an august and beneficent magistracy. He began to have what are delicately called relations with the police. We are not sure that we have formed, or that we can convey, an exact notion of the nature of Barère's new calling. It is a calling unknown in our country. It has, indeed, often happened in England, that a plot has been revealed to the government by one of the conspirators. The informer has sometimes been directed to carry it fair towards his accomplices, and to let the evil design come to full maturity. As soon as his work is done, he is generally snatched from the public gaze, and sent to some obscure village, or to some remote colony. The use of spies, even to this extent, is in the highest degree unpopular in England; but a political spy by profession, is a creature from which our island is as free as it is from wolves. In France the To this vocation, a vocation compared with race is well known, and was never more nume- which the life of a beggar, of a pickpocket, of rous, more greedy, more cunning, or more sav-a pimp, is honourable, did Barère now descend. age, than under the government of Bonaparte. Our idea of a gentleman in relations with the consular and imperial police may perhaps be incorrect. Such as it is, we will try to convey it to our readers. We image to ourselves a well dressed person, with a soft voice and affable manners. His opinions are those of the society in which he finds himself, but a lit-Gensonné. He fawned on Robespierre up to tle stronger. He often complains, in the language of honest indignation, that what passes in private conversation finds its way strangely 'to the government, and cautions his associates to take care what they say when they are not sure of their company. As for himself, he owns that he is indiscreet. He can never refrain from speaking his mind; and that is the reason that he is not prefect of a department. In a gallery of the Palais Royal he overhears two friends talking earnestly about the king and the Count of Artois. He follows them into a coffee-house, sits at the table next to them, calls for his half-dish and his small glass of cognac, takes up a journal, and seems occupied with the news. His neighbours go on talking without restraint, and in the style of persons warmly attached to the exiled family. They depart, and he foilows them half round the Doulevards till he fairly tracks them to their apartments, and learns their names from the porters. From that day every letter addressed to either of them is sent from the post-office to the police, and opened. Their correspondents become known to the government, and are carefully watched. Six or eight honest families, in different parts of France, find themselves at once under the frown of power, withour being able to guess what offence they have given. One person is dismissed from a public office; another learns with dismay that his promising son has been turned out of the Polytechnic school. It was his constant practice, as often as he enrolled himself in a new party, to pay his footing with the heads of old friends. He was at first a royalist; and he made atonement by watering the tree of liberty with the blood of Louis. He was then a Girondist; and he made atonement by murdering Vergniaud and the eighth of Thermidor; and he made atonemen: by moving, on the ninth, that Robespierre should be beheaded without a trial. He was now enlisted in the service of the new monarchy; and he proceeded to atone for his republican heresies by sending republican throats to the guillotine. Among his most intimate associates was a Gascon named Demerville, who had been employed in an office of high trust under the committee of public safety. This man was fanatically attached to the Jacobin system of politics, and, in conjunction with other enthu siasts of the same class, formed a design against the First Consul. A hint of this de sign escaped him in conversation with Barère. Barère carried the intelligence to Lannes, who commanded the Consular Guards. Demerville was arrested, tried, and beheaded; and among the witnesses who appeared against him was his friend Barère. The account which Barère has given of these transactions is studionsly confused and grossly dishonest. We think, however, that we can discern, through much falsehood and much artful obscurity, some truths which he labours to conceal. It is clear to us that the government suspected him of what the Italians call a double treason. It was natural that such a suspicion should attach to him. He hau, in times not very remote, zealously preached the Jacobin doctrine, that he who smites a tyrant deserves higher praise than he who saves a citizen. Was it possible that the member of the committee of public safety, the king-killer, the queen-killer, could in earnest mean to deliver his old confederates, his bosom friends, to the executioner, solely because they had planned an act which, if there were any truth in his own Carmagnoles, was in the highest Legree virtuous and glorious? Was it not more probable that he was really concerned in the plot, and that the information which he gave was merely intended to lull or to mislead the police? Accordingly spies were set on the spy. He was ordered to quit Paris, and not to come within twenty leagues till he received Zurther orders. Nay, he ran no small risk of being sent, with some of his old friends, to Madagascar. He made his peace, however, with the government so far, that he was not only permitted, during some years, to live unmolested, but was employed in the lowest sort of political drudgery. In the summer of 1803, while he was preparing to visit the south of France, he received a letter which deserves to be inserted. It was from Duroc, who is well known to have enjoyed a large share of Napoleon's confidence and favour. "The First Consul, having been informed that Citizen Barère is about to set out for the country, desires that he will stay at Paris. "Citizen Barère will every week draw up a report of the state of public opinion on the proceedings of the government, and generally on every thing which, in his judgment, it will be interesting to the First Consul to learn. "He may write with perfect freedom. "He will deliver his reports under seal into General Duroc's own hand, and General Duroc will deliver them to the First Consul. But it is absolutely necessary that nobody should suspect that this species of communication takes place; and, should any such suspicion get abroad, the First Consul will cease to receive the reports of Citizen Barère. "It will also be proper that Citizen Barère should frequently insert in the journals articles tending to animate the public mind, particularly against the English." himself conspicuous even among the crowd of flatterers by the peculiar fulsomeness of his adulation. He translated into French a contemptible volume of Italian verses, entitled, "The Poetic Crown, composed on the glorious accession of Napoleon the First, by the Shepherds of Arcadia." He commenced a new series of Carmagnoles very different from those which had charmed the Mountain. The title of Emperor of the French, he said, was mean; Napoleon ought to be Emperor of Europe. King of Italy was too humble an appellation; Napoleon's style ought to be King of Kings. But Barère laboured to small purpose in both his vocations. Neither as a writer nor as a spy was he of much use. He complains bitterly that his paper did not sell. While the Journal des Debats, then flourishing under the able management of Geoffroy, had a circulation of at least twenty thousand copies, the Memorial Antibritannique never, in its most prosperous times, had more than fifteen hundred subscribers; and these subscribers were, with scarcely an exception, persons residing far from Paris, probably Gascons, among whom the name of Barère had not yet lost its influence. A writer who cannot find readers, generally attributes the public neglect to any cause rather than to the true one; and Barère was no exception to the general rule. His old hatred to Paris revived in all its fury. That city, he says, has no sympathy with France. No Parisian cares to subscribe to a journal which dwells on the real wants and interests of the country. To a Parisian nothing is so ridiculous as patriotism. The higher classes of the capital have always been devoted to England. A corporal from London is better received among them than a French general. A journal, therefore, which attacks England has no chance of their support. A much better explanation of the failure of the Memorial, was given by Bonaparte at St. Helena. "Barère," said he to Barry O'Meara, "had the reputation of being a man of talent; but I did not find him so. I employed him to write; but he did not display ability. He used many flowers of rhetoric, but no solid argument; nothing but coglionerie wrapped up in high-scunding language." During some years Barère continued to discharge the functions assigned to him by his master. Secret reports, filled with the talk of coffee-houses, were carried by him every week The truth is, that though Barère was a man to the Tuileries. His friends assure us that he of quick parts, and could do with ease what took especial pains to do all the harm in his he could do at all, he had never been a good power to the returned emigrants. It was not writer. In the day of his power, he had been his fault if Napoleon was not apprised of every in the habit of haranguing an excitable audimurmur and every sarcasm which old mar-ence on exciting topics. The faults of his quesses who had lost their estates, and old clergymen who had lost their benefices, uttered against the imperial system. M. Hippolyte Carnot, we grieve to say, is so much blinded by party spirit, that he seems to reckon this dirty wickedness among his hero's titles to public esteem. Barère was, at the same time, an indefatigable journalist and pamphleteer. He set up a paper directed against England, and called the Memorial Antibritannique. He planned a work entitled, "France made great and illustrious by Napoleon." When the imperial government was established, the old regicide made style passed uncensured; for it was a time of literary as well as of civil lawlessness, and a patriot was licensed to violate the ordinary rules of composition as well as the ordinary rules of jurisprudence and of social morality. But there had now been a literary as well as a civil reaction. As there was again a throne and a court, a magistracy, a chivalry, and a hierarchy, so was there a revival of classical taste. Honor was again paid to the prose of Pascal and Masillon, and to the verse of Racine and La Fontaine. The oratory which had delighted the galleries of the Convention, was not only as much out of date as the language of Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated in the public mind with images of horror. All the peculiarities of the Anacreon of the guillotine, his words unknown to the Dictionary of the Academy, his conceits and his jokes, his Gascon idioms and his Gascon hyperboles, had become as odious as the cant of the Puritans was in England after the Restoration. weekly to the Tuileries till the year 1807. At length, while he was actually writing the two hundred and twenty-third of the series, a note was put into his hands. It was from Duroc, and was much more perspicuous than polite. Barère was requested to send no more of his reports to the palace, as the emperor was too basy to read them. Bonaparte, who had never loved the men of Contempt, says the Indian proverb, pierces the Reign of Terror, had now ceased to fear even the shell of the tortoise; and the contempt them. He was all-powerful and at the height of the court was felt to the quick even by the of glory; they were weak and universally ab- callous heart of Barère. He had humbled horred. He was a sovereign, and it is probable himself to the dust; and he had humbled himthat he already meditated a matrimonial alli- self in vain. Having been eminent among the ance with sovereigns. He was naturally un- rulers of a great and victorious state, he had willing, in his new position, to hold any inter- stooped to serve a master in the vilest capacicourse with the worst class of Jacobins. Had ties; and he had been told that, even in those Barère's literary assistance been important to capacities, he was not worthy of the pittance the government, personal aversion might have which had been disdainfully flung to him. He yielded to considerations of policy; but there was now degraded below the level even of the was no motive for keeping terms with a worth-hirelings whom the government employed in less man who had also proved a worthless the most infamous offices. He stood idle in writer. Bonaparte, therefore, gave loose to the market-place, not because he thought any his feelings. Barère was not gently dropped, office too infamous; but because none would not sent into an honourable retirement, but hire him. spurned and scourged away like a troublesome Yet he had reason to think himself fortudog. He had been in the habit of sending six nate; for, had all that is avowed in these Mecopies of his journal on fine paper daily to the moirs been then known, he would have received Tuileries. Instead of receiving the thanks and very different tokens of the imperial displeapraises which he expected, he was dryly told sure. We learn from himself, that while pubthat the great man had ordered five copies to lishing daily columns of flattery on Bonaparte, be sent back. Still he toiled on; still he che- and while carrying weekly budgets of calumny rished a hope that at last Napoleon would to the Tuileries, he was in close connection relent, and that at last some share in the with the agents whom the Emperor Alexander, honours of the state would reward so much then by no means favourably disposed towards assiduity and so much obsequiousness. He France, employed to watch all that passed at was bitterly undeceived. Under the imperial Paris; was permitted to read all their secret constitution the electoral college of the depart- despatches; was consulted by them as to the ments did not possess the right of choosing temper of the public mind and the character senators or deputies, but merely that of pre- of Napoleon; and did his best to persuade senting candidates. From among these can- them that the government was in a tottering didates the emperor named members of the condition, and that the new sovereign was not, senate, and the senate named members of the as the world supposed, a great statesman and legislative bodies. The inhabitants of the soldier. Next, Barère, still the flatterer and Upper Pyrenees were still strangely partial to talebearer of the imperial court, connected Barère. In the year 1805, they were disposed himself in the same manner with the Spanish to present him as a candidate for the senate. envoy. He owns that with that envoy he had On this Napoleon expressed the highest dis-relations which he took the greatest pains to pleasure; and the president of the electoral conceal from his own government; that they college was directed to tell the voters, in plain met twice a day, and that their conversation terms, that such a choice would be disgraceful chiefly turned on the vices of Napoleon, on to the department. All thought of naming his designs against Spain, and on the best Barère a candidate for the senate was conse-mode of rendering those designs abortive. In quently dropped. But the people of Argelès truth, Barère's baseness was unfathomable. ventured to name him a candidate for the legislative body. That body was altogether destitute of weight and dignity; it was not permitted to debate; its only function was to vote in silence for whatever the government proposed. It is not easy to understand how any man, who had sat in free and powerful deliberative assemblies, could condescend to bear a part in such a mummery. Barère, however, was desirous of a place even in this mock legislature; and a place even in this mock legislature was refused to him. In the whole senate he had not a single vote. Such treatment was sufficient, it might have been thought, to move the most abject of mankind to resentment. Still, however, Barère cringed and fawned on. His letters came In the lowest deeps of shame he found out lower deeps. It is bad to be a sycophant; it is bad to be a spy. But even among sycophants and spies there are degrees of meanness. The vilest sycophant is he who privily slanders the master on whom he fawns; the vilest spy is he who serves foreigners against the government of his native land. From 1807 to 1814 Barère lived in obscurity, railing as bitterly as his craven cowardice would permit against the imperial administra tion, and coming sometimes unpleasantly across the police. When the Bourbons re. turned, he, as might be expected, became a royalist, and wrote a pamphlet setting forth the horrors of the system from which the Restora tion had delivered France, and magnifying the wisdom and goodness which had dictated the charter. He who had voted for the death of Louis, he who had moved the decree for the trial of Marie Antoinette, he whose hatred of monarchy had led him to make war even upon the sepulchres of ancient monarchs, assures us with great complacency, that “in this work monarchical principles and attachment to the House of Bourbon are nobly expressed." By this apostacy he got nothing, not even any additional infamy; for his character was already too black to be blackened. when compared with those which were de- During the hundred days he again emerged for a very short time into public life; he was chosen by his native district a member of the Chamber of Representatives. But though that assembly was composed in a great measure of men who regarded the excesses of the Jacobins with indulgence, he found himself an ob-sided there, forgotten by all mankind, till the ject of general aversion. When the President first informed the Chamber that M. Barère requested a hearing, a deep and indignant murmur ran round the benches. After the battle of Waterloo, Barère proposed that the Chamber should save France from the victorious enemy, by putting forth a proclamation about the pass of Thermopyla, and the Lacedæinonian custom of wearing flowers in times of extreme danger. Whether this composition, if it had then appeared, would have stopped the English and Prussian armies, is a question respecting which we are left to conjecture. The Chamber refused to adopt this last of the Carmagnoles. year 1830. After the Revolution of July he was at liberty to return to France, and he fixed his residence in his native province. But he was soon involved in a succession of lawsuits with his nearest relations-" three fatal sisters and an ungrateful brother," to use his own words. Who was in the right is a question about which we have no means of judging. and certainly shall not take Barère's word. The courts appear to have decided some points in his favour and some against him. The natural inference is, that there were faults on all sides. The result of this litigation was, that the old man was reduced to extreme poverty, and was forced to sell his paternal house. The Emperor had abdicated. The Bourbons returned. The Chamber of Representatives, As far as we can judge from the few facts after burlesquing during a few weeks the pro- which remain to be mentioned, Barère conceedings of the National Convention, retired tinued Barère to the last. After his exile he with the well-earned character of having been turned Jacobin again, and, when he came back the silliest political assembly that had met in to France, joined the party of the extreme left France. Those dreaming pedants and praters in railing at Louis Philippe, and at all Louis never for a moment comprehended their posi- Philippe's ministers. M. Casimir Périer, M. tion. They could never understand that Eu- de Broglie, M. Guizot, and M. Thiers, in parrope must be either conciliated or vanquished; ticular, are honoured with his abuse; and the that Europe could be conciliated only by the king himself is held up to execration as a hyrestoration of Louis, and vanquished only by pocritical tyrant. Nevertheless, Barore had means of a dictatorial power entrusted to Na-no scruple about accepting a charitable donapoleon. They would not hear of Louis; yet tion of a thousand francs a year from the privy they would not hear of the only measures purse of the sovereign whom he hated and rewhich could keep him out. They incurred the viled. This pension, together with some small enmity of all foreign powers by putting Napo- sums occasionally doled out to him by the deleon at their head; yet they shackled him,partment of the Interior, on the ground that he thwarted him, quarrelled with him about every was a distressed man of letters, and by the trifle, abandoned him on the first reverse. department of Justice, on the ground that he They then opposed declamations and disquisi-had formerly held a high judicial office, saved tions to eight hundred thousand bayonets; played at making a constitution for their couniry, when it depended on the indulgence of the victor whether they should have a country; and were at last interrupted in the midst of their babble about the rights of man and the Sovereignty of the people, by the soldiers of Wellington and Blucher. A new Chamber of Deputies was elected, No bitterly hostile to the Revolution, that there was no small risk of a new reign of terror. It is just, however, to say that the king, his ministers, and his allies, exerted themselves to restrain the violence of the fanatical royalists, and that the punishments inflicted, though in our opinion unjustifiable, were few and lenient him from the necessity of begging his bread. Having survived all his colleagues of the renowned committee of public safety, and almost all his colleagues of the Convention, he died in January 1841. He had attained his eightysixth year. We have now laid before our readers what we believe to be a just account of this man's life. Can it be necessary for us to add any thing for the purpose of assisting their judg ment of his character? If we were writing about any of his colleagues in the committee of public safety, about Carnot, about Robespierre, or St. Just, nay, even about Couthon, Collot, or Billaud, we might feel it necessary to go into a full examination of the arguments in bringing about a reaction, of which none of them saw, and of which none of us may see, the close; and, having brought it about, they marvelled at it; they bewailed it; they exe crated it; they ascribed it to every thing but the real cause-their own immorality and their own profound incapacity for the conduct of great affairs. These, however, are considerations to which, on the present occasion, it is hardly necessary for us to advert; for, the defence which has been set up for the Jacobin policy, good or bad, it is a defence which cannot avail Barère. From his own life, from his own pen, from his own mouth, we can prove that the part which he took in the work of blood is to be attributed, not even to sincere fanaticism, not even to misdirected and ill-regulated patriotism, but either to cowardice, or to delight in human misery. Will it be pretended that it was from public spirit that he murdered the Girondists? In these very Memoirs he tells us that he al ways regarded their death as the greatest calamity that could befall France. Will it be pretended that it was from public spirit that he raved for the head of the Austrian woman? In these very Memoirs he tells us that the time spent in attacking her was ill-spent, and ought to have been employed in concerting measures of national defence. Will it be pretended that he was induced by sincere and earnest abhorrence of kingly government to butcher the living and to outrage the dead; he who invited Na which have been employed to vindicate or to | Terror. Violence, and more violence, blocd, excuse the system of Terror. We could, we and more blood, made up their whole policy. think, show that France was saved from her In a few months these poor creatures succeeded foreign enemies, not by the system of Terror, but in spite of it; and that the perils which were made the plea for the violent policy of the Mountain, were, to a great extent, created by that very policy. We could, we think, also show that the evils produced by the Jacobin administration did not terminate when it fell; that it bequeathed a long series of calamities to France and to Europe; that public opinion, which had during two generations been constantly becoming more and more favourable to civil and religious freedom, underwent, during the days of Terror, a change of which the traces are still to be distinctly perceived. It was natural that there should be such a change, when men saw that those who called themselves the champions of popular rights had compressed into the space of twelve months more crimes than the kings of France, Merovingian, Carlovingian, and Capetian, had perpetrated in twelve centuries. Freedom was regarded as a great delusion. Men were willing to submit to the government of hereditary princes, of fortunate soldiers, of nobles, of priests; to any government but that of philosophers and philanthropists. Hence the imperial despotism, with its enslaved press and its silent tribune, its dungeons stronger than the old Bastile, and its tribunals more obsequious than the old parliaments. Hence the restoration of the Bourbons and of the Jesuits, the Chamber of 1815, with its categories of proscription, the revival of the feudal spirit, the encroachments of the clergy, the persecu-poleon to take the title of King of Kings, he tion of the Protestants, the appearance of a new breed of De Montforts and Dominics in the full light of the nineteenth century. Hence the admission of France into the Holy Alliance, and the war waged by the old soldiers of the tri-colour against the liberties of Spain. Hence, too, the apprehensions with which, even at the present day, the most temperate plans for widening the narrow basis of the French representation are regarded by those who are especially interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Half a century has not sufficed to obliterate the stain which one year of depravity and madness has left on the noblest of causes. Nothing is more ridiculous than the manner in which writers like M. Hippolyte Carnot defend or excuse the Jacobin administration, while they declaim against the reaction which followed. That the reaction has produced and is still producing much evil, is perfectly true. But what produced the reaction? The spring flies up with a force proportioned to that with which it has been pressed down. The pendulum which is drawn far in one direction swings as far in the other. The joyous madness of intoxication in the evening is followed by languor and nausea on the morrow. And so, in politics, it is the sure law that every excess shall generate its opposite; nor does he deserve the name of a statesinan who strikes a great blow without fully calculating the effect of the rebound. But such calculation was infinitely beyond the reach of the authors of the Reign of who assures us, that after the Restoration he expressed in noble language his attachment to monarchy, and to the house of Bourbon? Had he been less mean, something might have been said in extenuation of his cruelty. Had he been less cruel, something might have been said in extenuation of his meanness. But for him, regicide and court-spy, for him who patronized Lebon and betrayed Demerville, for him who wantoned alternately in gasconades of Jacobinism, and gasconades of servility, what excuse has the largest charity to offer? We cannot conclude without saying something about two parts of his character, which his biographer appears to consider as deserving of high admiration. Barère, it is admitted, was somewhat fickle; but in two things he was consistent, in his love of Christianity, and in his hatred to England. If this were so, we must say that England is much more beholden to him than Christianity. It is possible that our inclinations may bias our judgment; but we think that we do not flatter ourselves when we say, that Barère's aversion to our country was a sentiment as deep and constant as his mind was capable of entertaining. The value of this compliment is, indeed, somewhat diminished by the circumstance, that he knew very little about us. His ignorance of our institutions, manners, and history, is the less excusable, because, according to his own account, he consorted much, during the peace of Amiens, with Englishmen of note, such as that eminent nobleman Lord |