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tribune, and told the Convention that the time was come for taking the stern attitude of justice, and for striking at all conspirators without distinction. He then moved that Buzot, Barbaroux, Pétion, and thirteen other deputies, should be placed out of the pale of the law, or, in other words, beheaded without a trial; and that Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonné, and six others, should be impeached. The motion was carried without debate.

so much excited that he broke his plate in the violence of his gesticulation. Barère exclaimed that the gullotine had cut a diplomatic knot which it might have been difficult to untie. In the intervals between the Beaune and the Champagne, between the ragout of thrushes and the partridge with trufles, he fervently preached his new political creed. "The ves sel of the revolution," he said, “can float into port only on waves of blood. We must begin. with the members of the National Assembly and of the Legislative Assembly. That rub bish must be swept away."

We have already seen with what effrontery Barère has denied, in these Memoirs, that he took any part against the Girondists. This denial, we think, was the only thing wanting As he talked at table he talked in the Conto make his infamy complete. The most im-vention. His peculiar style of oratory was now pudent of all lies was a fit companion for the foulest of all murders.

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formed. It was not altogether without inge nuity and liveliness. But, in any other age or Barère, however, had not yet earned his par- country, it would have been thought unfit for don. The Jacobin party contained one gang the deliberations of a grave assembly, and still which, even in that party, was pre-eminent in more unfit for state papers. It might, perhaps, every mean and every savage vice, a gang so succeed at a meeting of a Protestant associa low-minded and so inhuman, that, compared tion in Exeter Hall, at a repeal dinner in Irewith them, Robespierre might be called mag-land, after men had well drunk, or in an Ameri nanimous and merciful. Of these wretches can oration on the fourth of July. No legislative Hébert was perhaps the best representative. body would now endure it. But in France, duHis favourite amusement was to torment and ring the reign of the Convention, the old laws insult the miserable remains of that great of composition were held in as much contempt family which, having ruled France during as the old government or the old creed. Cor eight hundred years, had now become an ob-rect and noble diction belonged, like the eti ject of pity to the humblest artisan or peasant. quette of Versailles and the solemnities of Notre The influence of this man, and of men like Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just him, induced the committee of public safety to as a swarm of ephemeral constitutions, demodetermine that Marie Antoinette should be cratic, directorial, and consular, sprang from gent to the scaffold. Barère was again sum- the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a moned to his duty. Only four days after he swarm of new superstitions, the worship of the had proposed the decrees against the Girondist Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries of the deputies, he again mounted the tribune, in Theophilanthropists, sprang from the decay of order to move that the queen should be brought the ancient church; even so, out of the decay before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was of the ancient French eloquence, sprang new improving fast in the society of his new allies. fashions of eloquence, for the understanding of When he asked for the heads of Vergniaud which new grammars and dictionaries were and Pétion, he had spoken like a man who had necessary. The same innovating spirit which some slight sense of his own guilt and degra- altered the common phrases of salutation, which dation; he had said little, and that littie had turned hundreds of Johns and Peters into Scenot been violent. The office of expatiating on volas and Aristogitons, and which expelled the guilt of his old friends he had left to St. Sunday and Monday, January and February, Just. Very different was Barère's second ap- Lady-day and Christmas, from the calendar, in pearance in the character of an accuser. He order to substitute Decadi and Primidi, Nivose now cried out for blood in the eager tones of and Pluviose, Feasts of Opinion and Feasts of the true and burning thirst, and raved against the Supreme Being, changed all the forms of the Austrian woman with the virulence natural official correspondence. For the calm, guarded, to a coward who finds himself at liberty to and sternly courteous language which govern outrage that which he has feared and envied.ments had long been accustomed to employ, We have already exposed the shameless men- were substituted puns, interjections, Ossianic dacity with which, in these Memoirs, he at-rants, rhetoric worthy only of a schoolboy, scur tempts to throw the blame of his own guilt on the guiltless.

On the day on which the fallen queen was dragged, already more than half dead, to her doom, Barère regaled Robespierre and some other Jacobins at a tavern. Robespierre's acceptance of the invitation caused some surprise to those who knew how long and how bitterly it was his nature to hate. “Robespierre of the party!" muttered St. Just. "Barère is the only man whom Robespierre has forgiven." We have an account of this singular repast from one of the guests. Robespierre condemned the senseless brutality with which Hébert had conducted the proceedings against the Austrian woman, and, in talking on that subject, became

rility worthy only of a fishwife. Of the phrase ology which was now thought to be peculiarly well suited to a report or a manifesto, Barère had a greater command than any man of his time; and, during the short and sharp parox ysm of the revolutionary delirium, passed for a great orator. When the fit was over, he was considered as what he really was, a man of quick apprehension and fluent elocution, with no originality, with little information, and with a taste as bad as his heart. His reports were popularly called Carmagnoles. A few months ago, we should have had some difficulty in conveying to an English reader an exact notion of the state papers to which this appeilation was given. Fortunately a noble and distinguished

person, whom her majesty's ministers have thought qualified to fill the most important post in the empire, has made our task easy. Whoever has read Lord Ellenborough's proclamations is able to form a complete idea of a Carmagnole.

The effect which Barère's discourses at one time produced is not to be wholly attributed to the perversion of the national taste. The occasions on which he rose were frequently such as would have secured to the worst speaker a favourable hearing. When military advantage had been gained, he was generally deputed by the committee of public safety to announce the good news. The hall resounded with applause as he mounted the tribune, holding the despatches in his hand. Deputies and strangers listened with delight while he told them that victory was the order of the day; that the guineas of Pitt had been vainly lavished to hire machines six feet high, carrying guns; that the flight of the English leopard deserved to be celebrated by Tyrtus; and that the saltpetre dug out of the cellars of Paris had been turned into thunder, which would crush the Titan brethren, George and Francis.

the Girondists; Barère, who has the effrontery to declare that he greatly loved and highly esteemed Vergniaud. The decree was passed; and the tribunal, without suffering the prisoners to conclude what they had to say, pronounced them guilty.

The following day was the saddest in the sad history of the Revolution. The sufferers were so innocent, so brave, so eloquent, so accomplished, so young. Some of them were graceful and handsome youths of six or seven and twenty. Vergniaud and Gensonné were little more than thirty. They had been only a few months engaged in public affairs. In a few months the fame of their genius had filled Europe; and they were to die for no crime but this, that they had wished to combine order, justice and mercy with freedom. Their great fault was want of courage. We mean want of political courage-of that courage which is proof to clamour and obloquy, and which meets great emergencies by daring and decisive measures. Alas! they had but too good an opportunity of proving, that they did not want courage to endure with manly cheerfulness the worst that could be inflicted by such tyrants as St. Just, and such slaves as Barère.

Meanwhile the trial of the accused Girondists, who were under arrest at Paris, came on. They were not the only victims of the noble They flattered themselves with a vain hope of cause. Madame Roland followed them to the escape. They placed some reliance on their scaffold with a spirit as heroic as their own. innocence, and some reliance on their elo- Her husband was in a safe hiding-place, but quence. They thought that shame would suf- could not bear to survive her. His body was fice to restrain any man, however violent and found on the high road, near Rouen. He had cruel, from publicly committing the flagrant fallen on his sword. Condorcet swallowed iniquity of condemning them to death. The opium. At Bordeaux, the steel fell on the Revolutionary Tribunal was new to its func-necks of the bold and quick-witted Gandet, and tions. No member of the Convention had yet been executed; and it was probable that the boldest Jacobin would shrink from being the first to violate the sanctity which was supposed to belong to the representatives of the people.

The proceedings lasted some days. Gensonné and Brissot defended themselves with great ability and presence of mind against the vile Hébert and Chaumette, who appeared as accusers. The eloquent voice of Vergniaud was heard for the last time. He pleaded his own cause, and that of his friends, with such force of reason and elevation of sentiment, that a murmur of pity and admiration rose from the audience. Nay, the court itself, not yet accustomed to riot in daily carnage, showed signs of emotion. The sitting was adjourned, and a rumour went forth that there would be an acquittal. The Jacobins met, breathing vengeance. Robespierre undertook to be their organ. He rose on the following day in the Convention, and propose a decree of such atrocity, that even among the acts of that year it can hardly be paralleled. By this decree the tribunal was empowered to cut short the defence of the prisoners, o pronounce the case clear, and to pass immediate judgment. One deputy made a faint opposition. Barère instantly sprang up to support RobespierreBarère the federalist; Barère, the author of that commission of twelve which was among the chief causes of the hatred borne by Paris to the Girondists; Barère, who in these Memoirs denies that he ever took any part against

of Barbaroux, the chief of those enthusiasts
from the Rhone whose valour, in the great
crisis of the tenth of August, had turned back
the tide of battle from the Louvre to the Tuile
ries. In a field near the Garonne was found
all that the wolves had left of Pétion, once
honoured, greatly indeed beyond his deserts,
as the model of republican virtue.
We are
far from regarding even the best of the Gi-
rondists with unmixed admiration; but history
owes to them this honourable testimony, that,
being free to choose whether they would be
oppressors or victims, they deliberately and
firmly resolved rather to suffer injustice than
to inflict it.

And now began that strange period known by the name of the Reign of Terror. The Jacobins had prevailed. This was their hour, and the power of darkness. The Convention was subjugated, and reduced to profound silence on the highest questions of state. The sovereignty passed to the committee of public safety. To the edicts framed by that com mittee, the representative assembly did not venture to offer even the species of opposition which the ancient Parliament had frequently offered to the mandates of the ancient kings. Six persons held the chief power in the small cabinet which now domineered over FranceRobespierre, St. Just, Couthon, Collot, Billaud, and Barère.

To some of these men, and of those who adhered to them, it is due to say, that the fana ticism which had emancipated them from the restraints of justice and compassion, had eman

cipated them also from the dominion of vulgar cupidity and of vulgar fear; that, while hardly knowing where to find an assignat of a few francs to pay for a dinner, they expended with strict integrity the immense revenue which they collected by every art of rapine; and that they were ready, in support of their cause, to mount the scaffold with as much indifference as they showed when they signed the deathwarrants of aristocrats and priests. But no great party can be composed of such materials as these. It is the inevitable law, that such zealots as we have described shall collect around them a multitude of slaves, of cowards, and of libertines, whose savage tempers and licentious appetites, withheld only by the dread of law and magistracy from the worst excesses, are called into full activity by the hope of impunity. A faction which, from whatever motive, relaxes the great laws of morality, is certain to be joined by the most immoral part of the community. This has been repeatedly proved in religious wars. The war of the Holy Sepulchre, the Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the Thirty Years' war, all originated in pious zeal. That zeal inflamed the champions of the church to such a point, that they regarded all generosity to the vanquished as a sinful weakness. The infidel, the heretic, was to be run down like a mad dog. No outrage committed by the Catholic warrior on the miscreant enemy could deserve punishment. As soon as it was known that boundless license was thus given to barbarity and dissoluteness, thousands of wretches who cared nothing for the sacred cause, but who were eager to be exempted from the police of peaceful cities, and the discipline of well-governed camps, flocked to the standard of the faith. The men who had set up that standard were sincere, chaste, regardless of lucre, and perhaps, where only themselves were concerned, not unforgiving; but round that standard were assembled such gangs of rogues, ravishers, plunderers, and ferocious bravoes, as were scarcely ever found under the flag of any state engaged in a mere temporal quarrel. In a very similar way was the Jacobin party composed. There was a small nucleus of enthusiasts; round that nucleus was gathered a vast mass of ignoble depravity; and in all that mass, there was nothing so depraved and so ignoble as Barère.

Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could greet his neighbours, or say his prayers, or dress his hair, without danger of committing a capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner; when the guillotine was long and hard at work every morning; when the jails were filled as close as the hold of a slave-ship; when the gutters ran foaming with blood into the Seine; when it was death to be great-niece of a captain of the royal guards, or half-brother of a doctor of the Sarbonne, to express a doubt whether assignats would not fall, to hint that the English had been victorious in the action of the first of June, to have a copy of one of Burke's pamphlets locked up in a desk, to laugh at a Jacobin for taking the name of

Cassius or Timoleon, or to call the Fifth Sansculottide by its old superstitious name of St. Matthew's Day. While the daily wagon-loads of victims were carried to their doom through the streets of Paris, the proconsuls whom the sovereign committee had sent forth to the departments, revelled in an extravagance of cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of the deadly machine rose and fell too slow for their work of slaughter. Long rows of captives were mowed down with grapeshot. Holes were made in the bottom of crowded barges. Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras even the cruel mercy of a speedy death was denied to the prisoners. All down the Loire, from Samur to the sea, great flocks of crows and kites feasted on naked corpses, twined together in hideous embraces. No mercy was shown to sex or age. The number of young lads and of girls of seventeen who were murdered by that execrable government, is to be reckoned by hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed from pike to pike along the Jacobin ranks. One champion of liberty had his pockets well stuffed with ears. Another swaggered about with the finger of a little child in his hat. A few months had sufficed to degrade France below the level of New Zealand.

It is absurd to say, that any amount of public danger can justify a system like this, we do not say on Christian principles, we do not say on the principles of a high morality, but even on principles of Machiavelian policy. It is true that great emergencies call for activity and vigilance; it is true that they justify severity which, in ordinary times, would deserve the name of cruelty. But indiscriminate severity can never, under any gircumstances, be useful. It is plain that the whole efficacy of punishment depends on the care with which the guilty are distinguished. Punishment which strikes the guilty and the innocent promiscu ously, operates merely like a pestilence or a great convulsion of nature, and has no more tendency to prevent offences, than the cholera, or an earthquake like that of Lisbon, would have. The energy for which the Jacobin administration is praised was merely the energy of the Malay who maddens himself with opium, draws his knife, and runs a-muck through the streets, slashing right and left at friends and foes. Such has never been the energy of truly great rulers; of Elizabeth, for example, of Oliver, or of Frederick. They were not, indeed, scrupulous. But, had they been less scrupulous than they were, the strength and amplitude of their minds would have preserved them from crimes, such as those which the small men of the committed of public safety took for daring strokes of policy. The great queen who so long held her own against foreign and domestic enemies, against temporal and spiritual arms; the great protector who governed with more than regal power, in despite both of royalists and republicans; the great king who, with a beaten army and an exhausted treasury, defended his little dominions to the last against the united efforts of Russia, Austria, and France; with what scorn would they have heard that it was im

640

possible for them to strike a salutary terror into the disaffected, without sending schoolboys and school-girls to death by cart-loads and boat-loads!

pockets, if they had known how to govern in
any other way.

That, under their administration, the wai
against the European coalition was successful-
But that war had been
ly conducted, is true.
successfully conducted before their elevation,
and continued to be successfully conducted
after their fall. Terror was not the order of
the day when Brussels opened its gates to Du-
mourier. Terror had ceased to be the order of
the day when Piedmont and Lombardy were
conquered by Bonaparte. The truth is, that
France was saved, not by the committee of
public safety, but by the energy, patriotism, and
valour of the French people. Those high quali-
ties were victorious in spite of the incapacity
of rulers whose administration was a tissue,
not merely of crimes, but of blunders.

The popular notion is, we believe, that the leading Terrorists were wicked men, but, at We can see nothe same time, great men. thing great about them but their wickedness. That their policy was daringly original is a Their policy is as old as the vulgar error. oldest accounts which we have of human misgovernment. It seemed new in France, and in the eighteenth century, only because it had been long disused, for excellent reasons, by the enlightened part of mankind. But it has always prevailed, and still prevails, in savage and half savage nations, and is the chief cause which prevents such nations from making advances towards civilization. Thousands of deys, of beys, of pachas, of rajahs, of nabobs, have show themselves as great masters of statecraft as the members of the committee of public safety. Djezzar, we imagine, was superior to any of them in their own line. In fact, there is not a petty tyrant in Asia or Africa so dull or so unlearned as not to be fully qualified for the business of Jacobin police and Jacobin Our business is with Barère. In all those finance. To behead people by scores without caring whether they are guilty or innocent; to things he was not only consenting, but eagerly wring money out of the rich by the help of and joyously forward. Not merely was he one jailers and executioners; to rob the public of the guilty administration. He was the man creditor, and put him to death if he remon- to whom was especially assigned the office of strates; to take loaves by force out of the proposing and defending outrages on justice bakers' shops; to clothe and mount soldiers and humanity, and of furnisning to atrocious by seizing on one man's wool and linen, and schemes an appropriate garb of atrocious rho on another man's horses and saddles, without domontade. Barère first proclaimed from the compensation, is of all modes of governing the tribune of the Convention, that terror must be simplest and most obvious. Cf its morality the order of the day. It was by Barère that the we at present say nothing. But surely it re- Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was provided quires no capacity beyond that of a barbarian with the aid of a public accuser worthy of such or a child. By means like those which we a court, the infamous Fouquier Tinville. It have described, the committee of public safety was Barère who, when one of the old members undoubtedly succeeded, for a short time, in of the National Assembly had been absolved enforcing profound submission, and in raising by the Revolutionary Tribunal, gave orders immense funds. But to enforce submission by that a fresh jury should be summoned. “Acbutchery, and to raise funds by spoliation, is quit one of the National Assembly!” he cried. not statesmanship. The real statesman is he "The tribunal is turning against the Revolowho, in troubled times, keeps down the turbu- tion." It is unnecessary to say that the pri lent without unnecessarily harassing the well-soner's head was soon in the basket. It was Let the plough," he cried from affected; and who, when great pecuniary re- Barère who moved that the city of Lyons should sources are needed, provides for the public be destroyed. exigencies without violating the security of the tribune, "pass over her. Let her name property, and drying up the sources of future cease to exist. The rebels are conquered; but prosperity. Such a statesman, we are confi- are they all exterminated? No weakness. No dent, might, in 1793, have preserved the inde- mercy. Let every one be smitten. Two words pendence of France without shedding a drop will suffice to tell the whole. Lyons made war of innocent blood, without plundering a single on liberty; Lyons is no more." When Toulon warehouse. Unhappily, the Republic was sub was taken, Barère came forward to announce "The conquest," said the apostate ject to men who were mere demagogues, and the event. in no sense statesmen. They could declaim at Brissotine, "won by the Mountain over the a ciub. They could lead a rabble to mischief. Brissotines, must be commemorated by a mark But they had no skill to conduct the affairs of set on the place where Toulon once stood. The au empire. The want of skill they supplied national thunder must crush the house of every for a time by atrocity and blind violence. For trader in the town." When Camille Desmon legislative ability, fiscal ability, military ability, lins, long distinguished among the republicans diplomatic ability, they had one substitute, the by zeal and ability, dared to raise his eloquent guillotine. Indeed their exceeding ignorance, voice against the Reign of Terror, and to point and the barrenness of their invention, are the out the close analogy between the government best excuse for their murders and robberies. which then oppressed France and the govern We really believe that they would not have ment of the worst of the Cæsars, Barère rose eu so many throats, and picked so many to complain of the weak compassion which

We have not time to tell how the leaders of the savage faction at length began to avenge mankind on each other; how the craven Hébert was dragged wailing and trembling to his doom; how the nobler Danton, moved by a late repentance, strove in vain to repair the evil which he had wrought, and half redeemea the great crime of September, by manfully encountering death in the cause of mercy.

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Equally idle would it be to dilate on his sen sual excesses. That in Barère, as in the whole breed of Neros, Caligulas, and Domitians whom he resembled, voluptuousness was mingled with cruelty; that he withdrew, twice in every decade, from the work of blood to the smiling gardens of Clichy, and there forgot public cares in the madness of wine, and in the arms of courtesans. has often been repeated. M. Hippolyte Carnot does not altogether deny the truth of these stories, but justly observes that Barère's dissipation was not carried to such a point as to interfere with his industry. Nothing can be more true. Barère was by no means so much addicted to debauchery as to neglect the work of murder. It was his boast that, even during his hours of recreation, he cut out work for the Revolutionary Tribunal. To those who his health, he gaily answered that he was less busy than they thought. "The guillotine," he said, "does all;" the "guillotine governs." For ourselves, we are much more disposed to look indulgently on the pleasures which he allowed to himself, than on the pain which he inflicted on his neighbours.

tried to revive the hopes of the aristocracy. "Whoever," he said, "is nobly born, is a man to be suspected. Every priest, every frequenter of the old court, every lawyer, every banker, is a man to be suspected. Every person who grumbles at the course which the Revolution takes, is a man to be suspected. There are whole castes already tried and condemned. There are callings which carry their doom with them. There are relations of blood which the law regards with an evil eye. Republicans of France!" yelled the renegade Girondist, the old enemy of the Mountain-"Republicans of France! the Brissotines led you by gentle means to slavery. The Mountain leads you by strong measures to freedom. Oh! who can count the evils which a false compassion may produce?" When the friends of Danton mustered courage to express a wish that the Con-expressed a fear that his exertions would hurt vention would at least hear him, in his own defence, before it sent him to certain death, the voice of Barère was the loudest in opposition to their prayer. When the crimes of Lebon, one of the worst, if not the very worst, of the vicegerents of the committee of public safety, had so maddened the people of the Departments of the North, that they resorted to the desperate expedient of imploring the protection of the “Atque utinam his potius nugis tota illa dedisset Tempora sævitie, claras quibus abstulit urbi Convention, Barère pleaded the cause of the Illustresque animas, impune ac vindice nullo." accused tyrant, and threatened the petitioners with the utmost vengeance of the government. An immoderate appetite for sensual gratifica"These charges," he said, "have been sug-tion is undoubtedly a blemish on the fame of gested by wily aristocrats. The man who crushes the enemies of the people, though he may be hurried by his zeal into some excesses, can never be a proper object of censure. The And now Barère had become a really cruel proceedings of Lebon may have been a little man. It was from mere pusillanimity that he harsh as to form." One of the small irregu- had perpetrated his first great crimes. But the larities thus gently censured was this: Lebon whole history of our race proves that the taste kept a wretched man a quarter of an hour un- for the misery of others is a taste which minds der the knife of the guillotine, in order to tor-not naturally ferocious may too easily acquire, ment him, by reading to him, before he was despatched, a letter, the contents of which were supposed to be such as would aggravate even the bitterness of death. "But what," proceeded Barère, "is not permitted to the hatred of a republican against aristocracy? How many generous sentiments atone for what may perhaps seem acrimonious in the prosecution of public enemies? Revolutionary measures are always to be spoken of with respect. Liberty is a virgin whose veil it is not lawful to lift."

Henry the Fourth, of Lord Somers, of Mr. Fox. But the vices of honest men are the virtues of Barère.

and which, when once acquired, is as strong as any of the propensities with which we are born. A very few months had sufficed to bring this man into a state of mind in which images of despair, wailing, and death, had an exhilarating effect on him; and inspired him as wine and love inspire men of free and joyous na tures. The cart creaking under its daily freight of victims, ancient men, and lads, and fair young girls, the binding of the hands, the thrusting of the head out of the little national sash-window, the crash of the axe, the pool of blood beneath the scaffold, the heads rolling by scores in the panier-these things were to him what Lalage and a cask of Falernian were to Horace, what Rosette and a bottle of iced

After this, it would be idle to dwell on facts which would indeed, of themselves, suffice to render a name infamous, but which makes no perceptible addition to the great infamy of Barère. It would be idle, for example, to relate how he, a man of letters, a member of an aca-champagne are to De Béranger. As soon as demy of inscriptions, was foremost in that war he began to speak of slaughter, his heart against learning, art, and history which dis- seemed to be enlarged, and his fancy to begraced the Jacobin government; how he re- come unusually fertile of conceits and gascocommended a general conflagration of libraries; nades. Robespierre, St. Just, and Billaud, how he proclaimed that all records of events whose barbarity was the effect of earnest and anterior to the Revolution ought to be destroy-gloomy hatred, were, in his view, men who ed; how he laid waste the abbey of St. Denis, pulled down monuments consecrated by the veneration of ages, and scattered on the wind the dust of ancient kings. He was, in truth, seldom so well employed as when he turned for a moment from making war on the living to make war on the dead. VOL. V.-81

made a toil of pleasure. Cruelty was no such melancholy business, to be gone about with a austere brow and a whining tone; it was a re creation, fitly accompanied by singing and laughing. In truth, Robespierre and Barère might be well compared to the two renowned hangmen of Louis the Eleventh. They were 3 H⭑

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