R. M. Johnston

“ It is hard when considering the extraordinary features of the reign of terror, to realize that in some directions it was accomplishing a useful purpose. If the Revolution had been maintained so long, in the face of anarchy, of reaction and of foreign pressure, it was only by a policy of devouring flames and demented angels. And meanwhile, whatever might be the value or the fate of republican institutions, unconsciously the great social revolution had become an accomplished fact. ”

“ The details of the famine are scattered broadly through the pages of the contemporaries, and at every point the woman appears, wretched, lamenting, furious, ravenous for food, fighting for it and plundering, her heart dulled with bitterness, and her mouth distorted with curses for those pointed out to her as the cause of all her sufferings. Louis, Marie Antoinette, Brissot, Vergniaud, Hébert, she cared little what the name was, but was equally ready to rend them when told that they stood for the starvation of {85} her children, her sick, or her husband. ”

“ Danton, the possible dictator, the impure man ready to adjust compromises with the enemies of liberty, lax in conscience and in action, Danton too was down. The solid phalanx of the Jacobin Club, the remnant of the Commune, the Revolutionary Tribunal, stood solidly arrayed behind Robespierre; and the Convention voted with perfect regularity and unanimity every decree it was asked for.
But this attitude of the Convention only represented the momentary paralysis of fear. No one would venture on debate, leave alone opposition. ”

“ Art, like literature, languished during the Revolution, or meretriciously touched herself up with the fashionable rouge. Before and after are great periods, but for the moment art seems to have lost its cunning; the artist, like David, turns politician. Fragonard and Greuze both survived to see the Empire, but lost their vogue. The touch of Greuze could hardly be appreciated in the age of Danton; the luscious sweetness of Fragonard was in like case; both of these great artists were ruined by the Revolution and died in poverty. ”

“ Feudalism, mediaevalism, autocracy, had built up a structure of caste distinction and class privilege to which custom, age, stagnation and ignorance, lent an air of preordained and indispensable stability. The Church, most privileged of all corporations, turned her miracles and her terrors, both present and future, into the most powerful buttress of the fabric. The noblesse, supreme as a caste, almost divided influence with the Church. The two, hand in hand, dominated France outside the larger towns. Each village had its curé and its seigneur. ”

“ In the history of the Revolution it is always so; the political and the economic factors are constantly fusing the one in the other.
In a sense, what had happened was that the poor people, the democracy, let us say, of Paris, had now got the King in the city and under their influence; not only the King, but also the assembly,—for it had followed Louis and was installed in a building adjacent to the Tuileries. And the assembly became quickly conscious of the fact that Paris was now unduly weighing on the representation of France, and under the lead of Mirabeau attempted to assert itself. ”

“ The old stagnation, the feudal congestion of Germany and Italy, the immobility of the population, is broken through, the old barriers are shaken down; great centralized states send official, economic, and national action sweeping back and forth; great armies tramp through the whole breadth of Europe; roads are built in all directions to facilitate their movements, people begin to know one another, to mix, to form larger conceptions of humanity.
The most potent of the agencies that effected this change in Paris was the direct work of the deputies themselves. ”

“ Only the people of France could judge Louis, and the Convention stood for the people. Lengthy debates followed on these questions, and the speech of Robespierre, a speech in which he stood nearly alone in taking a logical view of the situation, was perhaps its most remarkable product. Robespierre said: "The assembly has been drawn off on side issues. There is no question here of a legal action. Louis is not an accused person; you are not judges,—you are only representatives of the nation. It is not for you to render judgment, but to take a measure of national security.... ”

“ The Revolution had so far produced popular leaders, but not popular leaders who were of the people, and whose policy was for the people. Mirabeau and Danton looked to the people, but only as opportunist statesmen. Hébert had imitated the people, but for the sake of his own advancement. Robespierre, more honestly, had attempted to be the prophet of the people, but with him democracy was only the sickly residue of Rousseau's Contrat Social, and when it came to measures, to social legislation, he proved only a narrow bourgeois and lawyer. ”

“ The culmination of this system, its visible and emphatic symbol, fastened on Paris like a great bloated tumour eating into the heart of France, was Versailles. But compared with class privilege, the Church, and the seigneur, Versailles was a recent phenomenon, invented by Louis XIV little more than one hundred years before the outbreak of the Revolution. At the beginning of the 17th century the French monarchy had somewhat suddenly emerged from the wars of religion immensely strengthened. ”

“ From Caen, where Brissot and Buzot had been helping to organize Wimpffen's army, there had started for the capital a few days previously a young woman, Charlotte Corday. Full of enthusiasm, like Madame Roland, for the humanitarian ideals that blended so largely with the passions of the Revolution, she represented in its noblest, most fervent form that French provincial liberalism that looked to the Girondins for leadership. Like them she detested the three great figures who had led the Parisian democracy through massacre to its triumph,—Danton, Robespierre, Marat. ”

“ But at the close of the day the French, not to be denied, came again. Jourdan, with St. Just by his side, drove his troops to a last effort, regained the lost ground, and more. The Austrians gave way, turned to flight, and one of the great victories of the epoch had been won. In a few hours the glorious news had reached Paris, and in Paris it was interpreted as an evil portent for Robespierre.
For if there existed something that could possibly be described as a justification for terrorism, that something was national danger and national fear. ”

“ But the new deputies, like the old, were hostile to the discredited Directoire. France wanted some stronger, abler, more honest, more dignified executive than she had; she would no longer tolerate that a gang of shady politicians should fatten in an office they did nothing to make effective. And as the war cloud grew blacker and the national finances more exhausted, the Jacobins themselves undertook to reform the Republic. ”

“ Michelet, as enthusiastic as either, but larger in his views and much more profound as a scholar, sees the Revolution as a whole and hails in it the regeneration of humanity. Within a few days of the publication of his {5} first volumes, France had risen in revolution once more and had proclaimed the Second Republic. She then, in the space of a few months, passed through all the phases of political thought which Thiers, Blanc, Lamartine and Michelet had glorified—the democratic, the bourgeois, the autocratic republic, and finally the relapse into the empire—the empire of Louis Napoleon. ”

“ And it was the part of the Parisian people most nearly touched by hunger that actually raised the standard of revolt.
The women felt the pinch of famine more bitterly than the men, and the women played a noteworthy part in the formation of those deep strata of popular opinion, or instinct, on which in turn each of the revolutionary parties had to build their power. The women were the first to turn the cannon against the King, and they were the last to raise the horrible howl of the guillotine at the prisoners as they {84} passed the prison gates to go to the scaffold. ”

“ What has been said should explain why it is that the Revolution appears even more difficult to treat as a whole at the present day than it did at the time of Thiers and Mignet. The event was so great, the shock was so severe, that from that day to this France has continued to reel and rock from the blow. It is only within the most recent years that we can see going on under our eyes the last oscillations, the slow attainment of the new democratic equilibrium. ”

“ However much they might be saturated with the ideas of Church and State in the Roman-Bourbon form, many of its readers became unconsciously shaken in their fundamental beliefs, and ready to question, to criticize and, when the edifice began to tremble, to accept the Revolution and the doctrine of the rights of the common man.
Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, were at heart essentially aristocrats; for them the common man was an untrustworthy brute of low instincts, and their revolution would have meant the displacement of an aristocracy of the sword by an aristocracy of the intellect. ”

“ His enemies, and they were many in Court circles, could detect easily enough the vanity that entered into his composition, but neither they nor his friends could recognise or appreciate in him that truest liberalism of all which is toleration. La Fayette had already learned the lesson it took France a century to learn, that liberty implies freedom of opinion for others, and that reasonable compromise is the true basis of constructive politics. ”

“ Rarely has a country turned to an individual as France turned to Bonaparte at that moment. And he, playing with cool mastery and well-contained judgment on the political instrument fate had placed in his hands, announced himself as the man of peace, of reform, of strong civil government, of republican virtue. It was one long ovation from Fréjus to Paris.
At Paris Bonaparte judged, and judged rightly, that the pear, as he crudely put it, was ripe. All parties came to him, and Sieyès came {261} to him. ”

“ Mirabeau stood out in the assembly as the one constructive statesman, the one man who might bridge the gulf that still separated the deputies from the responsibility of power and the practice of government. If a constitutional or parliamentary ministry were possible, if both King and assembly would recognise in that the practical step towards re-establishing order and making reform effective, Mirabeau was the necessary leader of such a ministry. In the period that followed the arrival of the King in Paris he amply demonstrated both his qualifications and his defects for such a position. ”

“ And the prisons are full,—of aristocrats, of suspects, of wealthy bourgeois. Those who have money occasionally buy themselves out, and generally succeed in living well; while outside the prison doors, angry, half-demented women revile the aristocrats who betray the people and who, even in prison, eat delicate food and drink expensive wines. Among the prisoners there is some light-heartedness, much demoralization, with here and there, at rare intervals, a Madame Roland or an André Chénier, to keep high above degradation their minds and their characters. ”

“ This power was granted, and in three days the prisons were filled to overflowing, priests and persons of title being specially singled out for arrest.
By the 1st of September Paris was ready to answer the Duke of Brunswick, was ready for the stroke that was to destroy the anti-revolutionists, that was to strike terror to the hearts of all enemies of the people. But the awfulness of the deed delayed its execution. The day passed in high-wrought excitement; at any moment news might arrive of the fall of Verdun,—that might be the signal for the explosion of the popular fury. ”

“ The twenty-five millions without the gates gazed at the hundred thousand within, and the more they gazed the louder and more bitter became their comment, the dimmer and the more tawdry did the glitter of it all appear to them, and the weaker and more half-hearted became the attitude of the one hundred thousand as they attempted by insolence and superciliousness to maintain the pose of their inherited superiority. ”

“ It was they who had to look after the household, to tend the sick, to feed the children, and it was they who day after day, year after year, formed in the long procession waiting to reach the baker's or the butcher's stall. Often enough they stood and struggled for hours, sometimes through the whole night, their hearts aching for the loved ones at home,—at the end of all to find nothing left, to return empty-handed. ”

“ The Constitution of 1791 was compounded partly of political theory, partly of revolutionary effort, of desire to pull down the prerogatives of the monarchy in favour of the middle class. It was prefaced by a declaration of the rights of man that stamps the whole as a piece of class legislation. By this all Frenchmen were guaranteed certain fundamental rights of justice, of opinion, of speech, of opportunity,—these were passive rights. ”

“ The people had never had leaders of their own, had never had a policy save for their demand for a vote and for the blood of their oppressors. And now here was a man of the people who had a popular policy, who put his finger on the question that lay even deeper than that of privilege, that of proprietorship.
Babeuf's doctrine was collectivist. Nature has given every man an equal right to enjoy her benefits; it is the business of society to maintain this equality; Nature imposes the obligation of labour, but both labour and enjoyment must be in common ”

“ For the old sacrament of marriage had been virtually demolished by law; civil marriage and divorce had been introduced, and in the governing classes, so much affected in family life and fortune by the reign of terror, the step between civil marriage and what was no marriage at all soon appeared a distinction without much difference. There seemed only one practical rule for life, to find the means of subsistence, and to have as good a time as possible. ”

“ As the valet of Count Almaviva he has seen the man of privilege at close quarters and has sounded his rottenness and incapacity. Because you are a grand seigneur, he says, you think yourself a great genius; but, Monsieur le Comte, to what do you really owe your great privileges? To having put yourself to the inconvenience of being born, nothing more. I, with all my ability and force, I who can work for myself, for others, for my country, I am driven away from every occupation. ”

“ Just's provocation the attacked party closed its ranks,—the Commune, the ministers, the Cordeliers, Hébert, Hanriot. Proclamations were issued for a new insurrection. But Paris was getting weary of insurrections, wearier still of the obvious blackguardism and peculation of the Hébertists, weariest of the perpetual drip of blood from the guillotine. No insurrection could be organized. ”

“ The nobles of the assembly, led by Noailles, d'Aiguillon, Beauharnais, Lameth, La Rochefoucauld, declared that if the people had attacked the property of the nobles, it was because that property represented the iniquities of feudalism, that the fault lay there, and that the remedy was not to repress the people but to suppress the institution. ”