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 Robespierre.A study. 
 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013586023 
 
R 
 
 OBESPIERRE 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 HILAIRE BELLOC, B.A. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "DANTON," ETC. 
 
 mew l^ork 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1902 
 

 897257 
 
 THE CAXTON PRESS 
 NEW YORK. 
 
 ■'.'.■-ilDitU} 
 y HAM !/i I .J 
 
TO THE 
 
 LORD BASIL TEMPLE BLACKWOOD 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Very often I have sat alone at evening before a fire of 
 logs in a room near the Rue St. Honord, and tried to 
 call up for myself the great men who from that air 
 challenged necessity, and, within the screen of their 
 armies, created the modern world. 
 
 There surrounded me upon such occasions the furniture 
 of their epoch. My eyes rested upon details that were 
 not only in the tradition of the Revolution, but were often 
 used and admired when the Convention was sitting ; and 
 all about me, in the severe taste of the French bourgeoisie 
 and in the paucity of ornament that accompanies a certain 
 austere carelessness for fortune, was the atmosphere of 
 those lives to which my thoughts continually turned. The 
 medium in which I attempted to evoke their shadows was 
 their own and was in a fashion my inheritance. About 
 me and in my ears was the clear and sounding life of Paris, 
 nor was my imagination disturbed by any recent memories 
 of privilege, by the sophistries of the modern rich, or by 
 the jargon of the evanescent and false philosophies by 
 whose aid the academies attempt to escape from the 
 traditions of Europe. I was so situated that the justice 
 and endurance of the Republic were as evident as material 
 things, and I knew without any doubt that the stoical 
 temper was, in the fine phrase of a contemporary, the 
 permanent religion of humanity. 
 
 My solitude was not unvisited. It was possible in 
 such a place and with such memories to move in a great 
 company, to hear in the streets the rumble of the guns, 
 and to see the high palaces of the city full of the people 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 conquering. I well imagined Condorcet, that had the 
 strength to write, in the extremes of his poverty and 
 hiding, so noble a defence of his creed ; I could raise up 
 the beauty of St. Just, the indefatigable concentration of 
 Carnot, stretched out on the floor of the committee, 
 poring with candles over the large maps of the defence. 
 There, also, distinct and living beyond the rest, I could 
 summon the great figure of Danton, and his good-fellow- 
 ship, and his soul that always recalled the Marne and 
 that, when it was close to death, could not help remem- 
 bering the pleasant country beside Aube. I had some 
 communion with the Girondins ; the gravity of Vergniaud, 
 the fire of Barbaroux, the sombre anger of Isnard. Across 
 these scenes I could follow Marat, that was never him- 
 self, and that carried a mad torch without sequel, but 
 just avoiding catastrophe. There also were the armies, 
 the volunteers thrown out in streams from the gates, the 
 return of '95. Or from the trenches the heavy buildings 
 of Charleroi would stand against a June dawn, with the 
 high, bare land of Fleurus over them, and La Diane, the 
 bugle-call, waking the young men out of the trenches to 
 the battle. 
 
 Yet these still moved like clouds, unstable, and I 
 found at last this insufficiency attaching to such 
 reveries, that their images would remain insecure, and 
 that the mind arose from them unsatisfied, since they 
 lacked stuff and avoided any certain gaze. Had such a 
 dreaming reposed upon mere fancies, it would have been 
 proper food for poetry or for fiction, but the deeds and 
 the men whose story proved so great that it could thus 
 rise from the dead were true. The lives had been lived 
 and the things done. Then it was not possible to rest 
 content in the shadows ; it became necessary to fiU out 
 the whole truth, and since one was already certain of 
 the idea in which all these things were contained, it 
 became a business to explore their reality. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IX 
 
 For this there was no refuge but history, and hence 
 it became at first a labour, but at last a delight, to build 
 them up from innumerable details, and to make of what 
 had been fugitive, if grandiose, imaginaries, certain and 
 well-guarded possessions. 
 
 In this task a great deal is for the moment 
 sacrificed; the high pleasure of mingling with a 
 greater past will not, any more than music will, permit 
 without injury to itself the contact of industry. The 
 dissonance of varying judgments, the domestic incidents 
 of heroes, the comic and the grotesque which our 
 little minds reject for the sake of the unities but which 
 Nature never leaves unmixed with her epics — all these 
 disturb and harden. Records divorced from critical 
 appreciation, or falsified all out of tune with each other, 
 mere praise, mere blame, mere numbers bewilder the 
 mind. It is as though our parts were not intended to 
 grasp the numberless impressions upon whose integration 
 historical truth reposes. 
 
 Nevertheless, the sacrifice repays. It is like the 
 growing of slow timber upon a sheltered hill ; you seem 
 to have established an enduring thing. There stand 
 out at last a vigour and a plenitude that are to the 
 unsubstantial origins of such a search what touch, sight, 
 and hearing are to memory. Then, when reality is 
 reached, it is easy to be sure ; and when so much doubt 
 and contradiction are resolved into a united history, the 
 continual admission, for the sake of exactitude, of what is 
 petty, sordid or fatiguing does but make more human, 
 and therefore more certainly true, what had before been 
 lyrics or idols. 
 
 Now, there are attached to this method of approaching 
 history two features which require an apology. In the 
 attempt to fix exactly an historic figure, it is necessary 
 first to make the physical environment reappear. In the 
 great phrase of Michelet such history must be " a resur- 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 rection," and there is no resurrection without the resurrec- 
 tion of the flesh. In the second place, it is necessary to 
 admit laborious and dusty discussion, not only of disputed 
 events, but of the inner workings of a mind. It is the 
 attempt to achieve either of these ends that gives such 
 history as that which I have attempted its burden of 
 endeavour. It is the attempt to unite the two which 
 lends also to such a book a necessary, but inartistic 
 incongruity. I could not illustrate that burden and that 
 incongruity better than by referring to the very subject 
 of the pages that follow. 
 
 Nothing would be easier than to make a drama of 
 the life of Kobespierre, were one content to neglect the 
 exactitude of historical record. On the other hand, 
 nothing would be easier — seeing the enormous amount 
 of material that has been accumulated with regard to 
 him, the mass of his written work, and the great host of 
 witnesses that have left their impression of him for 
 posterity — than to write down a voluminous chronicle in 
 which the self-contradictions should be stated, but not 
 explained, and in which all the sequence of the great 
 story and all its poignancy should be neglected. I say 
 either of these, the drama or the chronicle, would follow a 
 straight road. But when it comes to the combination of 
 both, there is imposed a task in which perfection is 
 impossible, and whose fulfilment I know will certainly not 
 be found in this book. Yet such a combination is the 
 first duty of history. 
 
 Let me take an instance, one out of a hundred, of 
 what I mean. In the last seven weeks of the Terror, 
 when that system had, as it were, passed into frenzy, 
 Robespierre was regarded universally as its author and 
 king. There must be some foundation for a tradition 
 which all contemporaries, domestic and foreign, unques- 
 tioningly accepted. Nothing could be easier and nothing 
 would more satisfy the sense of the dramatic in history 
 
PREFACE 
 
 » 
 
 than to present him as the guilty conceiver of an enor- 
 mous crime, and to make Thermidor the retribution. 
 Turn to the documents of these seven weeks and you 
 will discover that he would not sign the lists of the con- 
 demned, that he protested against nearly all the more 
 famous of the prosecutions, and that the body directly 
 responsible for them, the Committee of PubUc Safety, 
 regarded him as a danger; more, you will find that 
 the spokesman of that body says that Robespierre 
 perished "because he attempted to put a curb on the 
 Revolution"; and you will find that those who chiefly 
 overthrew him were men determined to push the Terror 
 to a further extreme. What is to be made of such a con- 
 tradiction ? In fiction such a crux can never arise ; in 
 history, and especially in the history of this man, such 
 paradoxes are the ordinary material of the story, and 
 one may not so correct and omit as to lend the whole 
 an artificial simplicity. It is even necessary, in present- 
 ing one single figure, not only to admit every record, 
 however contradictory, but to analyse, to discuss, and at 
 the risk of great tedium, to bolt out the best reading of 
 that hidden spring of the mind. 
 
 So much for what is wearisome in the life of Robes- 
 pierre. It is the more wearisome because he had but 
 one theme, because he could speak of nothing but of that 
 theme and of himself, the voice of it, and because the in- 
 tricate problem of his rise stands contrasted with the 
 plain and terrible scenes whose interest for us to-day is 
 still that of an armed combat to men watching from the 
 heights. 
 
 And if the necessity of discussion threatens tedium, 
 the attempt to recover physical details may introduce 
 another danger : it may make the history seem doubtful. 
 It will be discovered by my reader that continually 
 throughout the following pages I have introduced that 
 kind of description which is expected rather in the evidence 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 of an eye-witness or in the creations of fiction. I know 
 that such an attempt at vivid presentation carries with 
 it a certain suspicion when it is appUed to history ; I can 
 only assure my readers that the details I have admitted 
 can be proved true from the witness of contemporaries 
 or from the inference which their descriptions and the 
 public records of the time permit one to draw. I have 
 but rarely illustrated the sources from which they are 
 derived, because if this method were made to depend 
 upon foot-notes there would be no reading of the book. 
 
 A single instance of the way in which a scene may 
 be built up must suffice to excuse their absence; take 
 the impression, in the ninth chapter, of the Committee 
 of Public Safety on the night between the 8 th and 
 9th Thermidor, and of the dawn coming into the 
 room. There are a few accounts of it remaiaiag in 
 somewhat contradictory memoirs, but there is no exact 
 contemporary description of that scene. How am I 
 certain that my own description is true ? Because there 
 remains at the observatory in Paris a record of the sultry, 
 overcast weather of that morning, and of the increasing 
 heat and distant thunder of the day; because Mercier 
 has given us the details and the situation of the room ; 
 because many men still living have been able to describe 
 to me the aspect of the two great halls in the PavUlon 
 de Flore; because one may check upon the map the 
 road that Collot and Billaud must have followed from 
 the Jacobins to the great staircase of the Tuilleries; 
 because we have a record of the exact time when St. Just 
 rose to leave, and one can estimate how far the daylight 
 was advanced. I could quote fifty places in that one 
 page which would each demand a footnote to show from 
 whence were drawn the threads of which the whole is 
 woven. But I know that the method requires an apology 
 and I have therefore presented it in these few lines. 
 
 Finally, I owe it to my readers to disclaim research. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 xui 
 
 The work that remains to be done with regard to Eobes- 
 pierre does not lie in the discovery of new documents ; 
 there are too many already, and those that would have 
 told us most were burnt by Courtois. I say that it 
 is impossible to add seriously to the collection of facts 
 which M. Hamel made in the course of something 
 like a lifetime more than thirty years ago. It is a 
 record containing nothing but facts, each one sub- 
 stantiated and every document quoted, and it is nearer 
 2000 than looo pages long. The work which re- 
 mains to be done upon Robespierre is the explanation 
 of him. There are the facts in a vast accumulation. 
 They contradict each other ; they present a problem 
 not only of the greatest intellectual interest, but of some 
 considerable moment to those who would comprehend 
 the nature and the origin of our modern politics. To 
 arrive at the sharp truth with regard to this man, who, 
 at the Renaissance of European democracy, was made for 
 a few months a kind of god, is to understand perhaps the 
 problem which the immediate future presents to us, and 
 even if it does not do this, the solution may help us to 
 understand the Revolution in which our modern theory 
 began. 
 
 To explain that man imperfectly is all I have at- 
 tempted. It has been so difficult that (with the ex- 
 ception of a slight essay upon the town of Paris) it 
 has provided the occupation of two years. Now that 
 the work is over I could almost wish that instead of 
 wandering in such a desert it had been my task to 
 follow St. Just and the wars, and to revive the memories 
 of forgotten valour. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I. THE PERSON AND CHARACTER OF ROBESPIERRE 
 II. THE DESCENT AND YOUTH OF ROBESPIERRE 
 III. VERSAILLES .... 
 
 rv. PARIS 
 
 V. THE WAR 
 
 VI. ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS . . 
 
 VII. THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE . 
 
 VIII. THE TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 
 
 IX. THE FOUR MONTHS . . 
 
 X. "thermidor" .... 
 
 PAOS 
 
 vii 
 I 
 
 39 
 
 69 
 
 103 
 
 146 
 193 
 
 233 
 269 
 297 
 
 331 
 
 NOTES 
 
 I. ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE " MEMOIRS OP CHARLOTTE 
 
 R0BESPIERI1,E " . 368 
 
 IL ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK . .375 
 
 III. Robespierre's supposed attempt at suicide . •377 
 
ROBESPIERRE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PERSON AND CHARACTER OF 
 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 In presenting the story of Kobespierre this must be 
 attempted at the outset as a key to the whole: the 
 picture of himself. A man of insufficient capacity, bent 
 into the narrowest gauge, tenacious of all that statesmen 
 least comprehend, and wholly ignorant even of the 
 elements of their science, became for a brief time the 
 personification of a vast national movement of which 
 he was but barely in sympathy with one single aspect, 
 and that the least inspiring and the least fruitful. How 
 did such a position come to him, and why did it remain 
 even for those few months ? This same man, singularly 
 ill-fitted to his country, to its traditions and its native 
 humour, to its colour, religion, and every essential, fell 
 suddenly from power by no general rising of opinion, 
 by no discovery of discord between himself and those 
 who had worshipped him. He fell by a kind of mighty 
 triviality; a small chance of intrigue and conspiracy 
 that yet carried in itself much of the fate of our civili- 
 sation. How is such a fall to be explained ? 
 
 The secret of his eminence and of his extinction 
 lies in himself. The men, the circumstances that sur- 
 roimded him are well known. The environment of his 
 
 A 
 
2 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 personality has been fully studied. Every attempt to 
 solve the problem of his career from these data has 
 failed; every such attempt has but resulted in the de- 
 lineation of a caricature, or in the evocation of mere phan- 
 tasy. The causes of that supreme elevation and that 
 immediate fall do not lie, as they do with the vast 
 majority of such historical accidents, in the pressure 
 of surrounding things ; they must be sought from within. 
 The problem cannot be approached from the standpoint 
 of that fierce and open youth which was recasting 
 Europe; the youth from which his concealed activities 
 so strangely differed, and which will always be as clear 
 and plain as the good dayUght. You can solve it only 
 by standing where his own soul stood, looking out with 
 his own pale eyes to see the bodiless world stretched 
 on one unsupported truth, and feeling in yourself, as 
 you read, that proximity of fixed conviction to organic 
 weakness, which he knew to be his compound, and which 
 determined the whole of his life. 
 
 The unravelUng of his motives, the establishment 
 of his relation to the great movement with which he 
 is sometimes erroneously identified, the exact fixing of 
 his proportions and capacities are not idle speculations. 
 So to present the real man has this double purpose, 
 each part of which is full of value : it helps to explain 
 the growth and character of symbolic figures in general ; 
 it presents from a special standpoint the various web 
 of the Revolution in particular. A life of Robespierre 
 should show of what stuff are made those single- 
 thoughted, narrow exponents of a wide enthusiasm 
 round whom the legends gather, and who ^tend to stand 
 in history as embodied principles, losing their real selves 
 in the effect of time — and in a Ufe of Robespierre there 
 should also be apparent that comedy wherein lies the 
 artistic interest of the great story of France and 
 Europe. 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 3 
 
 The first of these objects, the use of this life as the 
 16 of so many others, must be left for my book itself 
 develop ; the second, the dramatic value of his career, 
 ids a longer apology. 
 
 The combination of unexpected accidents, the failure 
 
 set plans, the perverse results of fate, the incon- 
 tous roles thrust suddenly upon ill-chosen men, the 
 issure of unseen forces to which society suddenly 
 ponds, the entry of heroes, and the birth of songs, 
 
 these make up in history a tapestry of connected 
 nes to -which finality alone is lacking, nor is there 
 lent any dramatic element that should satisfy the 
 ad saving only purpose. Now the best medium 
 ough which that ceaseless flow of action may be 
 wed is the life of a devotee. 
 
 The noble, sane, and generous leaders of mankind 
 d a false unity to their world and make us partisans 
 we read. The picture of a general period does but 
 ect in one phase or another the general life of man- 
 id, and, as from a superior height, reduces to a normal 
 el the accidents of personality. But the mind of the 
 husiast, especially if he be dried up by the heat of 
 
 conviction, affords every needed contrast, and one 
 )reciates from a low level and in a slanting light 
 
 high relief of history. For thence you may watch 
 
 insuflSciency of a man to his part, the rude horseplay 
 environment, the expected that fails to arrive — all 
 
 embroglio. You see the lining of the shield and 
 )w what kind of thing is at the core of that which 
 ious trappings turn into a high priest or a king. You 
 ceive not only the mechanism of the idol itself, but 
 ) that thirst for the ideal which creates idolatry, and 
 a long acquaintance with the inner life of one that 
 11 succeed and fail in a moment of intense public 
 Lvity, there is half-resolved at last that prime contra- 
 bion of political society, whereby enthusiasm, breeding 
 
4 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 as it does the most violent ill-judgment, the worst deeds 
 and the widest deviation from truth and from reality, 
 is yet seen to be commingled with that permanent 
 appreciation of justice which is at once the divinest 
 and the most perilous attribute of the soul. 
 
 Robespierre would have stood much more securely 
 in history were he merely of that kind who, in the 
 passionate quest for a final state, or in^ an immediate 
 attempt to remedy injustice, come out in the open to 
 ruin the conventions and to remodel' the permanent 
 framework of society. He would not have aiforded the 
 problem which it is the matter of this book to examine 
 if he could be set down at once in the run of the re- 
 formers, nor is a thorough knowledge of his life of value 
 because it shows the ordinary type of those who lead 
 or perfect great movements. It is precisely because the 
 phenomenon of his immense popularity and brief hold 
 of power is special and peculiar that the study of him 
 becomes an appreciation of what makes in human history 
 for the high growths of fierce religions and for the persis- 
 tent following of symbolic figures, It is as an original 
 that he takes the stage. 
 
 There are men upon whom the pretensions of wealth 
 and the self-created values of rank work as an irritant 
 corrosive; they feel the primary dignity of man to be 
 insulted by such fables, but they feel the insult especially 
 as directed against themselves, and in their attempt to 
 avenge it they lose proportion, calling in all evils angrily 
 to remedy this one. He was not of these. 
 
 There are others in whom the material suffering of 
 the oppressed raises so generous an indignation that they 
 are willing to pay the penalties of exaggeration and of a 
 kind of frenzy, so only they may see righted the gross 
 wrong that forbids human bread to the poor. He was 
 not of these. 
 
 There are others again who, with the experience of 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 5 
 
 an enslaved nationality, and of its consequence in tke 
 enslavement of the human will, pursue with ardour for 
 years, by every means, the independence of their country, 
 an ideal which, under such conditions, is one with that 
 of individual freedom. To such, patience and a practical 
 mind are commonly granted, and they ultimately achieve 
 success by force of arms. He was not of these. 
 
 There are others, far less blessed, in whom the mani- 
 fest iniquities of living breed a furious hatred of their 
 kind. Yet in them also there burns something of the 
 divine, and because it is by evil that their anger is 
 aroused, they also reveal God. He was not of these. 
 
 There are yet others in whom the fine rage for a 
 normal polity and for equal law, rises at the close of 
 some corrupt time and turns them creative ; from these 
 proceed, as by an outburst of organic life, new and 
 vigorous institutions that preserve the State for genera- 
 tions from decay. In the company of the Revolution, 
 which could boaSt, as it were, an army of such men, he 
 yet could not count himself of that kind. 
 
 He was divorced from all those spirits who, in what- 
 ever form the reaction towards simplicity may possess 
 them, are united by a common inspiration, and are 
 occupied and driven by the afflatus of some genius; 
 instruments of an outer power. What, then, was his 
 place among the Revolutionaries whose doctrines waken, 
 whose tenacity disturbs, but whose efforts, rising from a 
 memory of original right, can therefore remould man- 
 kind ? That he is to be reckoned among those who 
 thus make starting-points in history no one will take it 
 upon his conscience to deny, and unless we admit the 
 common error by which he is nothing but a void, an 
 emptiness defined by a mass of negatives, it is necessary 
 to see the man himself, and, so far as the distance of 
 time will permit it, to cause him to appear. 
 
6 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 It is wisest, in attempting the resurrection of a man, 
 to follow the natural order of observation and to see him 
 physically as all could see him in his time, before one 
 seeks out the remote springs of his action, or approaches 
 an analysis of his temper. 
 
 In height Robespierre was a little below the medium, 
 but this feature, which would not in itself convey an 
 impression of insignificance, went with a certain slight- 
 ness of build that left him unnoticed unless, by the 
 accident of the tribune, he were withdrawn from the 
 crowd. His frame was of a delicate mould, his hands 
 and feet small and well-shaped, his chest neither broad 
 nor deep. He had not that vitality of action which pro- 
 ceeds from well-furnished lungs; neither the voice noi 
 the gesture, the good-humour, nor the sudden powers 
 that belong to men whose fires have draught to them. 
 Indeed his complexion, though clear, was of that pale 
 cast which we often associate with a kind of morbidity, 
 and he was throughout his youth and public life affected 
 with the frequent approach, though never with the con- 
 tinuance, of ill-health. The recollection of this pallor 
 and of the delicacy of his skin gave rise (when his hving 
 presence was no longer there to correct the error) to an 
 impression of sourness and nervous bile which has vitiated 
 most historical descriptions ; for, as will be seen in much 
 that follows, his temper was even beyond the common, his 
 smile, though cold, was frequent, and his patience firm. 
 
 He had, in common with the whole of that French pro- 
 fessional class from which he sprang, a pronounced habit 
 of order, a regularity of demeanour, and a very remarkable 
 capacity for prolonged mental work ; but this last so tended 
 to expend itself upon imaginaries and perpetual deduc- 
 tions that he lost the sustenance which it afforded in 
 countless other cases to the more practical minds of the 
 Revolution ; nor did it produce in him that reaction to- 
 wards common things which was so marked in Carnot, 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 7 
 
 and which had at the end begun to appear in St. Just. 
 This appetite for arrangement evoked in his mind a char- 
 acter which must be mentioned later ; in his outer life 
 it gave him the neatness of dress which has so often 
 been justly insisted upon by the historians of the Revolu- 
 tion. He pushed to some excess an amiable vice whereby 
 the care of the person was made the special social duty 
 of the old regime, and is still preserved in exaggerated 
 reverence by the social class of which he formed a mem- 
 ber. Moderate as was his expenditure at every period 
 of his life, he found the means for a careful wardrobe, 
 and devoted a regular portion of his time to its main- 
 tenance. In the variety of colours which the age per- 
 mitted he chose such as were best suited to his type and 
 presence, and, partly from a desire to avoid exaggeration, 
 partly from taste, he preferred the sober colours of the 
 contemporary fashion of his rank, a warm brown or olive 
 green for the colour of his coat. Later he ventured 
 upon the brighter colours of '93, and especially upon a 
 favourite light blue, which the accident of two dates has 
 rendered famous. In the careful elegance of his silk 
 stockings, in the buckles which, even after the change 
 of fashion in 1792, he continued to wear upon his shoes, 
 in his white stock and small lace wristbands, he displayed 
 at every point the general taste of his society, but 
 that heightened by a far more scrupulous attention and 
 a somewhat greater choice than his neighbours could 
 show. It is evident that with such a taste he would 
 observe to a detail the conventions of the age in his 
 barbering. His brown hair, carefully brushed back and 
 standing fully outwards, was powdered with exact and 
 daily regularity, and it is related of him that in all the 
 vigils and alarms of the last years, even when those 
 street battles joined up whole days and made men forget 
 sleeping and waking, he was never seen unshaven tiU the 
 awful watch that ended his life. 
 
8 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Such habits were necessarily accompanied by an 
 erect figure, by a rapid though not decided step, and by 
 a certain slight vivacity in the movements of the head, 
 though he dealt as rarely as any other northerner in the 
 language of gesture, being restrained in every attitude 
 and careful to preserve his poise. 
 
 When you came to look at his face there was ap- 
 parent a peculiar character which engravers and sculptors 
 greatly exaggerated after his death, but which a study 
 of contemporary painting reduces to juster proportions ; 
 it consisted in the prominence of the facial bones and 
 a lack of softness in the contours. This meagre hard- 
 ness produced no very striking or violent effect, but it was 
 sufficiently emphatic to place him, when we call up the 
 great gallery which the Eevolution affords, in the group 
 of over-keen, sharp-featured portraits wherein are foimd 
 also Siey^s, Jean-Bon, Camus, Couthon, and many other 
 dissimilar men united only in a common appearance of 
 emphasis and precision. 
 
 Such effects as this accident of leanness produced in 
 his expression were heightened by details that often 
 accompany its presence. Thus the cheek-bones were 
 high and formed the broadest part of his face. His 
 nose was short, delicate and quite without an arch, his 
 Ups compressed and thin; and there was an insufficient 
 development of the jaw accompanied by a sharpness of 
 the chin, which, when his Httle constant smile was 
 absent, lent a somewhat false appearance of bitterness 
 to his appearance. The upper part of his face, that the 
 hoUowness of his cheeks thus threw into relief, was 
 remarkable for a featiu-e which the hair-dress of the 
 eighteenth century tended indeed to exaggerate, but 
 which yet was common to half the public men of the 
 time ; I mean the broad, high and retreatiag forehead 
 which seems to promise grasp and rapid reason, but 
 which ignores the mysteries and is unacquainted with 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 9 
 
 doubt. You may find it in every profile of all the 
 Bourbons, of Diderot, of Voltaire and even of Mirabeau. 
 For the rest his head was regular though somewhat 
 small, and such impressions as it might afford of in- 
 tellectual power, or rather alacrity, were increased by 
 an upward holding of it common to men of his inferior 
 stature. His words thus reached the whole of an 
 assembly, and the direction of his gaze, which was 
 commonly above the horizon, added to his carriage an 
 air of confidence that was hardly in keeping with the 
 attitude of his mind. 
 
 His eyes, whence most his self pierced outward, gave 
 immediate evidence of the homogeneity, sincerity and 
 circumscription as they did also of the half-unquiet of his 
 mind and of its imfittedness for reception. For the slight 
 prominence of their brows made them seem deeper set 
 and closer together than they really were, but this gave 
 no special effect of energy or profundity since their colour 
 and a physical weakness in their action modified or 
 destroyed their impression. They were peculiarly pale 
 and of a neutral greenish grey, not without light but 
 quite bereft of brilliance; so far from possessing that 
 command which is common to the vision of those who 
 control parliaments, a nervous weakness that caused a 
 recurrent trembling in their lids compelled him to the 
 use of spectacles when he was at work or Avhen (as was 
 his universal habit) he read his speeches. The expression 
 of these eyes of his was not unkindly, and it accentuated 
 the slight, smiling tension which was the common contour 
 of his lips ; but an over-rapid glance that seemed to watch 
 upon every occasion, gave evidence of what became in 
 circumstances of danger an unbalancing habit of suspicion. 
 Then, too, he would often raise his forehead in wrinkles 
 when he spoke and play a little with his fingers. These 
 nervous faults that took away so much from his physical 
 capacity for dominion were repeated also in certain slight 
 
lo ROBESPIERRE 
 
 movements of the lower face that gained upon him in 
 moments of irritation or of concentrated attention; as 
 though the slight tremor from which his eyes suffered 
 provoked a sympathetic action in the facial muscles of 
 the jaw. 
 
 But it would be very ridiculous to make of these 
 symptoms a principal matter in the picture of Robespierre. 
 They were generally absent from his later, as they were 
 entirely from his earlier life, and they serve but as indica- 
 tions of the manner in which his temperament was 
 affected by an extreme success and a corresponding 
 danger, for either of which it was utterly unsuited. In 
 evidence of this it may be noted that his face was free 
 from the lines which constant anxiety or ceaseless 
 assiduity drew upon those of his contemporaries, nor 
 had he any marked development of such indications of 
 character, save in the furrows that flank the mouth and 
 that stand commonly for some perception of irony and 
 for a habit of self-control. 
 
 I will believe that his voice though somewhat weak 
 and possessing no wide range, yet had a power of very 
 varied modulation, was sympathetic and clear. It was 
 pitched to such a tenor that in the silence generally 
 accorded to him it reached with exact articulation to the 
 furthest recesses of the galleries in the Menus Plaisirs, or 
 even in the vast oval of the Manfege. But whenever 
 a hubbub arose he was quite unable to meet it, and 
 would either endure till it had passed or succumb to it 
 as to a physical oppression. In the open air, when there 
 were no walls to make a sounding-board, he could hardly 
 be heard. In all this he differed widely from those whom 
 he supplanted, from Mirabeau and Danton, whose deep, 
 loud voices could fill an open arena, and in any closed 
 and violent debate could sound like large bells above a 
 gale. If there was any other thing to help the success 
 of his oratory beside the clarity of articulation and the 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER ii 
 
 pitch to which I have alluded, it lay in the reputation 
 that a small surrounding of friends had made for his 
 manner; a reputation inherited from his half-literary 
 youth in college and at Arras, where it is indubitable 
 that he had exercised a permanent if exiguous charm, 
 and one that Camot, Le Bas, Desmoulins or the Roberts 
 would certainly remember. 
 
 Such in general, then, is the picture one must take 
 with one in following his adventure and tragedy. A 
 figure slight but erect and sufficiently well filled, a little 
 dainty and always exquisitely fitted, not disdainful of 
 colour but contemptuous of ornament, he maintained to 
 the end those externals which had been the enamel of 
 the old society ; shaming, astonishing or irking the sick 
 slipshod of a Marat, the casual rough negligence of a 
 Danton, the dust of maps and floors that soiled a sleep- 
 less Carnot, the common tongue of a Hubert or the 
 guard-room coarseness of a Hanriot. We must see his 
 small, set and pointed, but open and somewhat lifted face 
 developing in the course of a stress for which he was not 
 made and which a nascent ambition could alone compel 
 him to suffer, some growing nervousness of manner. His 
 pale complexion upon whose temples and forehead the 
 veins would show, his blonde, grey-green, short-sighted, 
 luminous but weakening eyes, his lips compressed and 
 thin, but often set to an expression of advance or atten- 
 tion, his large retreating forehead, his reserve of gesture 
 — all these form the expression of which a voice some- 
 what high and tenuous but not without attraction was 
 the organ. 
 
 He passes up the Revolution as in his physical gait 
 he passed up the gangway of the parliament : rapidly, 
 but not over decidedly; lacking, apparently, the power 
 of controlling others, but with the constancy of attitude 
 that proceeds from strict limitations and with a singular 
 fixity of carriage, A man, with all this, absorbed in the 
 
12 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 effort after form, possessed of a considerable literary am- 
 bition, pale, insufficient, exact, laborious, he does not seem 
 much, more than the successful and locally prominent 
 county lawyer, a trifle pedantic but enjoying a sound con- 
 nection of justly admiring and somewhat unimpressive 
 friends ; one that, entering politics, might draft or criticise, 
 but that could hardly attract a general observation. 
 
 This he should have been, and such things he should 
 have done. What did he ? 
 
 He held first a group, then a great political machine, 
 then a sovereign assembly, and at last a nation, attentive. 
 He became the title and front of the republic : the kings 
 regarded him ; he put some fear into the priests ; the armies 
 converged upon his tenement; the general run of European 
 society stood aghast at his supposed enormities ; the most 
 generous, the most practical, and the most violent of the 
 great Reformers alike insisted upon his bearing their 
 standard ; he may become for the martyrs and prophets 
 of complete democracy an idol, as he has already become 
 their legend. Whence did this astonishing contrast be- 
 tween his native, probable career and his actual fate pro- 
 ceed ? It proceeded from the fact that his character 
 contained a something which the special nature of the 
 time craved, which it insisted upon and would not aban- 
 don. That something was but one factor of his whole 
 temperament, it might have lain dormant though it could 
 never have been atrophied, but certainly it would have 
 suffered neglect in ordinary times, and with that neglect 
 he would himself, in ordinary times, have remained 
 contented. 
 
 To discover this hidden and permanent part of him 
 which the Revolution deified, it is necessary to examine 
 what inner temper accompanied or gave rise to the exter- 
 nals I have described, and such a task I shall now under- 
 take : to show the mind that made this body. 
 
 The character of Robespierre is contained in these 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 13 
 
 two connected facts : First, that he was a man of the old 
 regime — divining nothing outside of it, undisturbed by 
 that germinating of the future which worked in and 
 troubled the great minds around him, and threw an 
 energy of travail into their splendid tragedy; secondly, 
 that he had to an inhuman, or (if the word be preferred) 
 to an heroic, degree the potentiality of intense conviction ; 
 for God had given him a kind of stone tabernacle within 
 the soul where he could treasure absolute truths and this 
 tabernacle remained impregnable. 
 
 Of these two qualities I would speak in their order. 
 
 It was uniquely because Robespierre was a man of the 
 old regime that he received so unquestioningly the philo- 
 sophy which that world produced for its own destruction, 
 and his strict confinement to this society it was that made 
 him so universally accepted as the leader of its exodus. 
 Men full of the time to come suffered from the suspicion 
 that attaches to whatever is strange; Danton was too 
 much inspired by the future realities, the creations of 
 the revolution ; the Girondins were too much up in the 
 light outside their time and their world. But for Robes- 
 pierre every trick that wearies us now, every detail which 
 we reject as faded in colour or stilted in design, was part 
 of a political fortune. His long classical allusions, his 
 well-apportioned phrases, the symbolism that seems tinsel 
 to us now, were the very air of that time ; it was thought 
 a sound mark in a man that he should unconsciously 
 accept such habits always. They were to his generation 
 what wordy compromises, the allusive style, the pretence 
 of knowledge, and the jargon of science are to ours ; — 
 things which a man rejects to his interior and lasting 
 good, but to his immediate hurt ; things which make 
 easy and successful the lives of those who do not perceive 
 or who are content to forget their triviality. Of such 
 advantage is it never to have passed the gates of one 
 city. 
 
14 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 It is a necessity proceeding from the very nature of 
 change that each period of a definite colour and temper, 
 while making an ideal perhaps of things long past, 
 despises the epoch immediately preceding it. So the 
 fifth century saw nothing but vileness in the sunset of 
 the gods, drew up a baleful legend to condemn the 
 memory of Julian, broke the statues in the gardens of 
 Lutetia, and threatened even our immemorial worship of 
 wells and trees. So the Renaissance neglected altogether 
 and left for dead the exquisite last of the Gothic ; planted 
 Goujon's caryatides upon the green walls of Philip 
 Augustus and dominated the roofless turrets and the 
 crumbling machicolations of the old Louvre under the 
 high pride of an Italian palace. So we, who retrace the 
 pointed windows, yearn for the perfumes, the visions 
 and the colours, and even in our every political creation 
 do but recreate — whether we know it or not — the middle 
 ages, are amused or more often disgusted by the great 
 century from which we sprang. But if we are to com- 
 prehend the Revolution which was the outcome of that 
 century, especially if we are to appreciate a character 
 so steeped in the influence of that time, it is necessary 
 to lose a little of this modern aversion and to love a little, 
 if we are to understand it, the generation which used 
 "Liberty" as a password or a talisman, and which by 
 the arms of America and France, by the economic science 
 of England created our own time. 
 
 What was that generation, and where can its influ- 
 ence still be found ? 
 
 I should be ungrateful to the forest of Marly and 
 to the stone basin hung with silence, were I to forget 
 the men whose shadows can still startle us at evening 
 or the impress of the great kings. The genius of these 
 woods does not pass, or if it passes, passes in a slow 
 transformation that infinitely exceeds the hurried move- 
 ments of men and that lives the slow life of the sacred 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 15 
 
 trees. It would seem as though the presence of the 
 dead were native to the undergrowth and the neglected 
 lawns, and as though whatever power preserves the past 
 in its peculiar places, worked with a greater mastery 
 under the veil of loneliness and sleep. Here the rare 
 echoes are returned as though from a grave space of 
 years, the springs have an older gaiety, the autumns a 
 sadness more majestic, the summers are more profound, 
 the winters have a more Saturnian brooding because 
 Time mingles with them all : and the half-forgotten 
 human minds from whose clear vision proceeded, and 
 in the framework of whose society was formed the chief 
 enterprise of politics, visit these places again, I think, for 
 their influence is certainly to be discovered here. 
 
 Nor here only : the courtiers whom Voltaire de- 
 lighted, the women whose eyes caught the new 
 enthusiasms of humanity, the swords and the youth 
 that were to marshal the great wars, are found — or 
 something more than their memories is found — wherever 
 the scrolled gates and the severe avenues still lead to 
 unspoilt manors. There is a great house by the pleasant 
 and misty Orge upon the way to Orleans, in whose noble 
 rooms or by the shores of whose wide and secret lake you 
 may discover that spirit aUve ; there is in the meadows 
 of the Boutoime in the western Pastures, haunted and 
 alone, an inn where the Girondins held their table for an 
 evening as they went up towards Paris and their re- 
 public in the declining summer of '91; everywhere 
 France preserves, exterior to and higher than, the limits 
 of change, the walls and the gardens to which these men 
 can return. 
 
 By such influences my own childhood and youth 
 were in part surrounded. Even after a hundred years 
 something in the flesh remained of it. Remote and 
 secluded, there were characters which held to the 
 tradition; women from whom I heard of their fathers 
 
1 6 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 in the guard of the Palace, and men strictly formed in 
 what had once been the new stoicism of the Emile and 
 fixed and anchored backwards to the legend of Diderot 
 and the hard crystal of the Encyclopaedia. I should, 
 then, be able to show what influences they were that 
 trained the early manhood of Robespierre; what that 
 generation was whose every impress he received and of 
 whose salvation in Rousseau it was his in particular to 
 make an exalted and irrefragable creed. 
 
 Of that society, the heirs and executors of so vast 
 and changeful a past, the main imprint was leisure. By 
 which I mean, not the leisure which wealth or a secure 
 pride convey — pride was but in a powerless few, wealth 
 was rare and attached often to a mere office. I mean 
 that the entire framework of the old regime presupposed 
 and compelled repose and the spontaneous action of the 
 mind. The least instructed of the poor, the most un- 
 balanced and cynical of the rich alike moved in an 
 atmosphere of economic protection, of custom and of 
 set tasks. The eager competition that accompanies 
 the rare re-births of history, that spurred the twelfth 
 and the sixteenth centuries, that has enfevered and 
 exhausted our own generation, was absent even from the 
 conception of the men who preceded the Republic. And 
 if a large repose was the lot (as it was the lot) even of 
 wretched peasants who lacked bread and wine, still more 
 was it the moulding condition of the professional class 
 into which the vigour, the honesty, and the initiative of 
 the nation had gathered. There was thrown over them 
 as over the nobles, but over them with a more creative 
 effect, the invariable and perhaps beneficent effect of 
 ample room and quiet hours. In their art they pro- 
 duced or admired the mists of early morning, the faces 
 of young girls, the charming promises of April ; in their 
 music simple and enduring cadences, airs rather than 
 harmonies; in their letters, the subtle values of exact 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 17 
 
 phrase appeared. They enjoyed that unconscious agree- 
 ment with their mould, that plenitude of satisfaction 
 which, since it releases the mind from the rasp of effort, 
 fires it for direct creations, and fits it to overthrow the 
 very environment which it thinks eternal. Nothing in 
 the Revolutionaries more startles our moderns than this, 
 that they took for granted so much and had so many 
 dogmas. Yet it was partly the same spirit which forbade 
 even the fashions to change until the whole flood of 
 the new world had broken; just when that generation 
 was fullest of Nature, just then it would have seemed 
 to them rank madness to have grown a beard. 
 
 The Professionals then — to whom of course Robes- 
 pierre belonged — were compelled by the conditions of 
 their time to use intellects which no stress fatigued: 
 they sought principles, and leisure discovered philosophy. 
 The sentiment and the genial civilisation of their lives 
 made them accept that Philosophy as absolutely as they 
 accepted their social conventions. 
 
 Partly their education (classical, severe, scholarly, 
 instinct with Rome), but much more the huge moral 
 deficit of the time, the great social debt that demanded 
 pajmient, and by which Europe had swung out from 
 the normal, turned that Philosophy into the channel of 
 politics, and at last this phenomenon was apparent in the 
 rank where some great nobles, many squires and all the 
 lawyers mingled — that they had in their leisure returned 
 to the abstractions which are at the base of political 
 science. Their art and music had tinged those abstrac- 
 tions with a colour of sensitive affection; the spectacle 
 of a world visibly decaying from the effect of political 
 inequality had lent passion to their convictions, had 
 made them regard this faith of theirs as a kind of water 
 of youth, and their very conventionality had left the 
 mind free to create a new society upon the plan of their 
 creed. 
 
 B 
 
1 8 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 This tide of influence threw up upon its crest the 
 fame and the influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau. 
 With the mention of his name a long digression is 
 necessary, for it was he who cast into an exact mould 
 and forged into permanent form the demand of the 
 eighteenth century. It was given to him alone to 
 restate with exactitude and power the universal theory 
 of the State : it was of Rousseau dead that the genera- 
 tion of the Revolutionaries made themselves apostles, 
 and it was of Rousseau's formula that Robespierre in 
 especial made something, as it were, divine: a unique 
 and permanent revelation of the perfect state. 
 
 The state may be explained or left unexplained. It 
 commonly seems of little moment to the security of 
 its order and of less to the happiness of its citizens 
 whether its analysis be attempted or no, for it is evident 
 that our human nature makes (as it is made by) society, 
 and that we live in our own country as in a native and 
 necessary air. Nevertheless it will ever be the attempt 
 of men, since men are also reasonable, to develop and 
 maintain some explanation of their arrangements, and 
 to discover those first principles upon which obedience to 
 a rule and the nature and limits of political authority 
 are founded. And this attempt springs from two sources : 
 first, that the eager and doubtful mind of man, conscious 
 of the divine within it, and therefore malcontent with 
 the mysteries and limitations by which it is surrounded, 
 will not rest from attacking and resolving the disturbing 
 complexity of its environment ; this spontaneous force of 
 the intellect is the source of the social as of every other 
 philosophy, and is the prime and noblest mobile of political 
 inquiry. The second source of such a science is more 
 immediate and practical. It resides in the necessity 
 which change produces for some standard of continuity. 
 How is this new condition or that unusual combination 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 19 
 
 of circumstances to be met without a disarrangement of 
 our social tradition and without offence to that sense of 
 justice in whose satisfaction alone humanity can repose ? 
 We cannot answer these new questions unless we have 
 arrived at some clear principle from whose application to 
 the modern circumstance a special rule may be deduced. 
 Such and such an institution by its very age seems to have 
 introduced a new offence into living ; we are in danger of 
 confusing things and ideas, we are disturbed and feel a 
 necessity of correcting back to a normal outline the ex- 
 crescences of time. But in what measure are we to act ? 
 Are we in a particular case to abolish, to reform, or to 
 reinvigorate ? We cannot tell unless there have been laid 
 down some few clear absolutes by which the condition of 
 that institution may be judged. This practical need, the 
 need which gives rise to codes and is reflected in ritual 
 phrases, is the second origin of political theory, and so 
 true is it that humanity cannot finally escape its action 
 that the very men who most affect to- despise meta- 
 physical definitions, and who are most proud to pin 
 themselves to custom for the regulation of their country, 
 are themselves, in that sanctification of mere habit, 
 proposing a tremendous dogma of universal application 
 by which some few states have outlasted fevers, but a 
 hundred have been bled to death and finally de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 I have said that the eighteenth century of its nature 
 was impelled by the first of these forces ; it tended to 
 philosophise. Physical discoveries already sufficient to 
 excite were not yet so numerous nor so wide in range as 
 to confuse the deductive powers of the mind ; and, as I 
 have said, order and a kind of artificial quiet which 
 brooded over the ruins of the old world commanded the 
 minds of men for whom manual labour and economic 
 strain were alike unknown, to examine and define them- 
 selves. Moreover the period possessed this mark of high 
 
20 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 abstraction, that its speculation covered all tlie field of 
 thought, and that no one was content till he had linked 
 up the various provinces of inquiry iato a united system. 
 Locke that wrote of government, also made education a 
 hobby, and coloured all he wrote by his cold appreciation 
 of the sequence of ideas ; Rousseau that wrote of govern- 
 ment, also made education a hobby, and coloured all he 
 wrote by his instinctive and passionate regret for a lost 
 simplicity. 
 
 But if the eighteenth century would of itself, by its 
 quality of leisurely decay, have framed philosophies, and 
 in framing them would necessarily have devised for its 
 intellectual satisfaction a theory of the State, there was 
 also and especially present in it what I have called the 
 second som'ce of political science. It was in extreme 
 need of a guide and standard for reform. 
 
 It is not a necessary accompaniment of secular change 
 that this need should be felt, though it is an invariable 
 effect of time that such a need should exist ; but our 
 western Europe by the great historical accident which 
 makes it the evident head of the world not only felt the 
 need of, but suffered the actual demand for, reform. It 
 not only knew that it was sick; it also conceived an 
 appetite for health. For our civilisation has, above all 
 others, great diversity of parts coupled with clear and 
 united memories; the soul of Europe is one, personal and (it 
 would seem) unaffected by time ; its body is differentiated 
 to excess, and bears a thousand marks of a changing 
 historical environment. From the complexity of its 
 structure and the variety of its origins proceed those 
 anomalies which threaten at great intervals to destroy it ; 
 but from its principle of unity and from its consciousness 
 of itself Europe perceives and combats the approach of 
 its own dissolution. The thread is never lost, the basis 
 of equilibrium is not forgotten. We preserved in the 
 darkness of the ninth century as in the troubling 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 21 
 
 glory of the sixteenth the terminology, the method of 
 thought, the mode of beauty, and the main conquests 
 of the mind which we had inherited through those 
 thousand years ; we have still in Europe one language, 
 and even our shrines are the same. 
 
 A hundred years ago it was not a local trouble of 
 invasion nor a passing mania for wasting our energies 
 in deserts, nor even the rebellion of a part against the 
 whole that threatened us, but something graver and more 
 universal. The whole fabric of Europe was in a dis- 
 location between its outer self and the ideas upon which 
 that self reposed. It is true to say that the supernatural 
 had never disappeared so nearly from the western mind 
 — yet never had the social institutions raised upon the 
 recognition of the supernatural absorbed more wealth 
 or supported a more dangerous luxury. Land was 
 owned as the Eomans owned it, men thought of that 
 ownership as absolute — yet the terms, the expensive 
 formulae, the irritant conventions attaching to land were 
 still feudal, and an absolute dominion was dealt with as 
 though it were a tenure. The conceptions of punishment 
 and restraint were those of a society whose central organi- 
 sation, homogeneity, and facile communications permit a 
 certain mild and consistent pressure — yet the criminal 
 courts of Europe retained (though they tampered with) 
 the crude violence that accompanies insecurity and that 
 punishes by vengeance the palpable crimes of primitive 
 and isolated communities. A hundred examples might 
 be given of the tension which racked Europe as the 
 populations awoke to these anomalies. One more enor- 
 mous than all the rest overshadowed and menaced her. 
 We, the makers or the heirs of the Christian theory 
 and the Roman law, had lapsed into the grossest 
 form of inequality. A direct domestic power, mixed 
 and disguised here and there with an indirect and 
 economic control, gave to an ill-defined oligarchy the 
 
22 
 
 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 privilege of an isolated control. That privilege was 
 accompanied always by ignorance of human conditions, 
 often by insolence, sometimes by a glaring contrast be- 
 tween the man and his pretensions — yet it coexisted with a 
 mode of thought that spoke of humanity in the general, 
 with a theory of jurisprudence drawn from the strict 
 egahtarianism of the Roman Code, and commonly with 
 the political importance of the nobles. 
 
 The century at its very opening set out under the 
 guidance of Locke to perfect an instrument of remedy 
 which a hundred years of discussion had already freed 
 from custom and confusion. It formularised and made' 
 familiar a prime theory of the State. Before its first 
 generation was grown old the educated and articulate 
 part of Europe had universally consented to repeat a 
 species of creed, to admire a rational basis for the State, 
 to give a reply in legal form to every question of political 
 right, and to every interpellation against authority. They 
 explained the machinery of society by the legal metaphor 
 of contract or mutual obligation, and deduced from this 
 definition the clearest rules for legislation and the most 
 logical excuses for the exercise of governmental power. 
 
 There still lingers in our academies a debate as to 
 whether the men of the eighteenth century chose the 
 right metaphor wherein to express the fundamental 
 truths of politics. The debate is but an irrelevant and 
 tedious discussion of nomenclature, worthy of the atmos- 
 phere in which it flourishes. There exists a true theory 
 of the State which has everywhere been accepted, and is, 
 in many forms, the starting point of all political know- 
 ledge. We differ as to the best form of the executive ; 
 as to the best machinery for connecting that one function 
 with the whole ; as to the proper mode and extent of the 
 exercise of legislative power. We differ upon the reality and 
 value of local characteristics, and upon the practical effect 
 of special reforms; but we are agreed that sovereignty 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 23 
 
 must ultimately reside in the community, that subjection 
 to an equal law is the condition of citizenship, that the 
 governed are normally a part of government. These 
 truths, which the noblest of English documents has called 
 " self-evident," may be expressed as being part of the 
 nature of man, as being a reflection of the divine plan, 
 or they may be yet more precisely laid down and be 
 made capable of more exact deductions by the use of 
 mathematical or legal metaphors. But whether the 
 organic, the theological, or the contractual method be 
 used, the end is the same, though each is fitted to 
 special problems. They are all but indirect ways of pre- 
 senting what escapes direct definition : that there must 
 in a normal and living state be a circulation of power 
 from the individual to the community, and through the 
 executive of the community back to the individual again ; 
 that the moral right of government reposes upon an 
 impUed consent, and that a state is in its fullest perfec- 
 tion only when the interior liberty or balance which 
 makes us self-dependent beings is in part transformed 
 into an exterior and civic liberty of the whole. 
 
 The men of the eighteenth century, inheriting a 
 certain tradition of phrase and needing something applic- 
 able and direct, used the legal expression of this truth, 
 and chose to express its nature by the parallel of a 
 CONTRACT of association or employment. 
 
 So insistent was the approaching call for change that 
 the precision of the terms in which politics should be de- 
 fined increased with every treatise : became the test of 
 every opinion. A standard of strict regularity and of 
 the utmost simplicity was felt in that time to be not 
 only consonant to the clarity of its thought, but necessary 
 to the terrible work which refused to be delayed. The 
 second generation of the century, the men whose activi- 
 ties coincided with the Seven Years' War and the 
 lethargy of France, the rise of the cabinet system in 
 
24 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 England, had heard no other than the legal form of 
 social science, and would have regarded as merely bar- 
 barous other theories than that which now explained 
 so easily the nature of the State ; nor, however much they 
 differed upon the results of its application, could men of 
 the most opposite camps conduct even a quarrel save in 
 terms of the Social Contract. 
 
 The third generation, the men who had Louis XVI. 
 for a contemporary, came under an influence that 
 directed and in part produced the Revolution; for the 
 general philosophy and trend of the century was gathered 
 up, woven, stamped by the genius of Rousseau. The " 
 nature of his influence is very commonly ignored, yet to 
 ignore it is to miss the very spirit of the Revolution. 
 Rousseau may be said to have grasped all the material 
 of the time and to have worked in it that mysterious 
 change whereby the inorganic clusters into organic form, 
 lives and can produce itself. The wit, the irony, the 
 indignations of the eighteenth century, the certitude also 
 that was at their root, he, whose wit was peevish and slight, 
 and whose indignation tearful, transformed from vague 
 inanimate passions into a kind of personality that could 
 will and do. Thus he who could be said to have 
 fashioned nothing yet created something, and without the 
 power to discover or to frame he had that rare inexplic- 
 able mastery by which breath is blown into the clay. 
 
 It is useless to ask whence such a peculiar force pro- 
 ceeded, as it is useless to analyse the poets. It is enough 
 to note the great evidences of it that appeared not only 
 in his work but in the vast effects which that work pro- 
 duced. In his sincerity, his backward yearning for a 
 past Eden, his inhuman sensitiveness at the contact of 
 the world, he had all the character of the men that 
 impel the origins of religions and he was found (after not 
 a little ridicule) to be the agent of a mission. Moreover, 
 aU this chiefly shone in the talent peculiar to such rare 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 25 
 
 forerunners, for this prophet under the searching and 
 withering light of an intense rationahsm was granted 
 what none of those cynics or well-poised critics of his 
 had known — the living word. Those who least compre- 
 hend his influence are those who least apprehend the 
 value of his medium : the direct force and ultimate keen 
 edge of the French phrase. Men who profess astonish- 
 ment at the spell he threw over the nation are like for- 
 eigners who misread half our own history because they 
 cannot weigh the power that the Jacobean translation 
 of the Bible has exercised over the English race. 
 
 This man did many things to the innumerable youth 
 that succeeded and attempted to fulfil his plan. He 
 touched them with extravagant simplicities, filled them 
 with uncontrollable angers against injustice — angers that 
 blundered against the unnecessary balance of things. He 
 bequeathed to them, more than is fitted for the humour 
 and doubts of this world, an angry gift of tears. Most 
 ignorant of childhood, he propounded for them fantasies 
 of education in which the brooding evil of mankind was 
 passed aside, yet, child-like and a dreamer, he inspired 
 them with a power of vision. Because of him there 
 were landscapes in the Revolution, and Nature, her dis- 
 tances and her infinite moods, ran, from his sources, 
 through the tramping of their armies and the whirlwind 
 of their debates. But one thing in especial he did 
 beyond all these. In the shortest of his pamphlets, the 
 " Contrat Social," he fixed in little adamantine clauses the 
 political creed which men demanded. 
 
 That system has been identified with what we loosely 
 call democracy. The identification is inappreciative and, 
 on the whole, erroneous. What Rousseau wove together 
 as the ultimate political expression of his time was a body 
 of exact and correlated assertion deduced from this prime 
 truth that what is common to all men is utterly beyond 
 the accidents by which they differ, as in mathematical 
 
26 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 science one dimension is beyond and infinitely contains 
 the last — as a solid exceeds a plane. So the Church has 
 spoken of souls ; so the Empire had written of citizens. 
 Government to be government of right, proceeded from 
 the union of such units, which, but for their union, could 
 not be. That corporate entity, the Nation, had a Will, and 
 the expression of that Will was the Law. So Rousseau, 
 within limits that could afford to be exiguous because the 
 material he used was imperishably hard, devised the 
 political formula that was to remould Europe. 
 
 Upon these postulates and by the trumpet of a 
 marvellous prose he proclaimed the Reform, and fixed 
 in the minds of his contemporaries definitions of political 
 right. As it was into a political channel that the public 
 need was more and more urgently directed, this political 
 Right soon seemed the whole of Right ; its establishment 
 and defence acquired the force and quality of a religion. 
 The whole community was to be, manifestly and ex- 
 plicitly, the Sovereign; the executive was to become 
 openly and by definition its servant ; the vague thesis of 
 equality, upon which jurisprudence reposed, was brought 
 with exactitude and vigour into every detail, and made a 
 test of every law ; the limits of individual liberty were to 
 be enlarged till they met for boundary the general liberty 
 of all. 
 
 And yet, as I have said, there did not flow from this 
 system the institutions which we associate with our 
 modern overtoppling states. He postulated no crude 
 machinery of majorities, he saw that government by 
 deliberation was free in proportion as the community 
 was limited and its life autarchic, growing its own corn. 
 He made a faith in God and in immortality the necessaries 
 of a happy nation. He wisely suspected representative 
 bodies, that commonly proceed from, that always tend 
 toward, and that can only vigorously coexist with pluto- 
 cracy. Alone of his time he had the intuition that self- 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 27 
 
 government demands unchangeable and fundamental laws, 
 and by the unconscious vision of such minds he perceived 
 what history now proves of enduring societies, that such 
 a constitution was more lasting if it came from beyond the 
 wall and was imposed by an accepted "law-giver" who 
 could regard the state from without and embrace it as a 
 whole. So Etruria gave Rome her religion and so the 
 forgotten message came from Crete to the Hellenes. He 
 presupposed no republic though he made of kingship 
 and all its parallels a magistracy ; and he admitted in his 
 age what his youth had denied and what all should per- 
 ceive in ideal systems, that men are a little too prone 
 to sin for such simplicity to preserve a facile existence. 
 
 Such was the development of political theory in the 
 eighteenth century, and such was the most famous 
 exponent of its system when, eleven years before the 
 opportunity for its application arrived, Rousseau that 
 had survived to read the Declaration of Independence, 
 died and became a god. 
 
 I have dealt at this length with the politics of the 
 time and with the organ they produced, because the 
 tragedy with which this book is concerned is political. 
 I return to the character of Robespierre and take up 
 again its main condition — that he was a man of the old 
 regime. A man so utterly the product of his day could 
 not but accept all this political standard as a mathe- 
 matical truth, nor could he help revering its exponent as 
 the seer and guide of a necessary change. 
 
 He took the first postulates of the " Contrat Social " 
 for granted, knowing well that every one around him did 
 the same. He deduced from them, and still deduced 
 with a fatal accuracy of process, with a fatal ignorance 
 of things, and with no appreciation of the increasing 
 chances of error, until his deductions had departed pro- 
 digiously from their starting point, and began to prove 
 
28 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 themselves in every practical application absurd. The 
 resistance which such absurdities met he thought to be 
 a wilful rejection of strict logic, due to the corruption 
 of private motives or to the casuistry of wicked men. 
 In such a path, wholly of the mind and divorced from 
 reality, his being was absorbed. 
 
 When we say that Kobespierre was entirely a man 
 of his time, it means, of course, far more than this accep- 
 tation of the one political creed. It means the bright 
 dress, the busy attitude, the Latin training, the pedantry 
 of classical allusion which I have already mentioned, 
 and which will appear very evidently in his actions. It 
 means also that there was inherited in him, and that 
 he was reminiscent of, the charm which clung like a 
 September mist to the society of even his rank— for that 
 rank was nearly noble. A certain bearing and manner, 
 a certain carefulness in his relations with the world, were 
 part of the toilet and the phraseology to which he had 
 been born. This, which the glory of the Kevolution 
 obscures, it is imperative that any student of his life 
 should remember, for as the turbulence and frenzy of 
 '93 proceeded, his ordered figure almost shone against 
 a scene of so much disorder. His absorption in his own 
 rank and generation involved all this; but though he 
 must always be imagined coloured with the special habits 
 of his environment, it is yet the atmosphere of political 
 dogmatism whose origin I have examined at such length, 
 which must be chiefly retained when one considers him 
 in history. It was this political atmosphere that Eobes- 
 pierre breathed, and thought the mere natural air of the 
 world. He was hardly born when the famous pen was 
 moulding the details of the " Contrat Social " ; when first 
 he could speak the lawyers of the country towns were 
 making it their talk. The stagnant security of provin- 
 cial life that never fails to exaggerate the characteristics 
 of its generation, that turns the social code into a deca- 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 29 
 
 logue, that solemnly retains tlie chance example of the 
 rich, and that ignores the cynicism with which a capital 
 can temper its enthusiasms ; the unlaughing temper of 
 a decaying family pride ; the effect of early scholastic 
 interests, and of college prizes, and of his masters' praise ; 
 the decent drawing-rooms of middling wealth ; the vague 
 but continual adulation of contented elders and obscure 
 women — all these make any man not possessed of dis- 
 quietiDg vigour sink into the hardest rut of his time, and 
 Kobespierre long before his thirtieth year had taken 
 every phrase of the coming reform as unquestioningly as 
 a discovery in physical science or a new process in 
 geometry. 
 
 Now there were in France, and for that matter 
 throughout Europe, thousands of men to whom the 
 accidents of that generation were as native, and its 
 poUtical creed as unquestioned as they were to Kobes- 
 pierre. What, then, lifted him out from all those 
 thousands whom in even mediocrity of vision he largely 
 resembled ? It was the second and much rarer character 
 which I gave him at the head of this analysis : that what- 
 ever he held, he held it with incredible tenacity, and 
 that he had in his mind an impregnable fortress wherein 
 he preserved his convictions unalterable. 
 
 Those whom it is customary in soft times to call 
 fanatics are of two kinds. There is he who maintains 
 what he very well knows to be incapable of positive 
 proof, and very far from being a self-evident proposition 
 — as, that the Book of Mormon fell from heaven, that 
 Pinkish Elephants are alone of animals divine, or that 
 some chief or king is descended from a Bear. The 
 fanatic that would convince others of these truths will 
 sometimes threaten with the sword, or be at the pains 
 of working wonders to prove them ; but most commonly 
 it is by an earnest advocacy and by the power of insis- 
 tent repetition that he will convert his hearers to accept 
 
30 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 his vision. It is his glory that the thing he premises 
 has in it something wholly unusual, and he praises it 
 as a chief virtue in his proselytes that they accept reality 
 by the channels of affection and appreciation rather than 
 by those of comparison and experience. Robespierre was 
 emphatically not of this kind. 
 
 But there is a second kind which has often, oddly 
 enough, a more irritant effect upon humanity than the 
 first. They attach themselves to some principle which is 
 or highly probable, or generally acceptable, or even self- 
 evident, and armed with this truth, which few care (and 
 sometimes none are able) to deny, they proceed to a 
 thousand applications of their rule which they lay down 
 as an iron standard, crushing the multiple irregularities 
 of living things. Of these it has been well said that 
 they go to the devil by logic. It is in their nature to 
 see nothing of the mysteries, and to forget that the 
 aspects of truth must be co-ordinated. They do not 
 remember that the Divine Nature in which all truths 
 are contained and from which all proceed, has not as 
 yet been grasped by the human mind, and they fail to 
 perceive at how prodigious a rate the probability of 
 divergence increases as deduction proceeds step by step 
 from its first base in principle. Yet so strong is the cur- 
 rent of deduction in us that when such fanatics most 
 disturb and torture us by their practical enormities we 
 are for ever reproaching ourselves with the unreason- 
 ableness of our instinctive opposition, and thinking, as 
 their system reposes on a truth and is consistent, that 
 therefore its last conclusions may not be denied ; and it is 
 this weakness in us that gives fanatics of the latter sort 
 their power. Of this kind were the lawyers of the later 
 middle ages, of this kind are the defenders of many 
 modern economic theories, and of this kind was Robes- 
 pierre. 
 
 The man who believes in this fashion and who applies 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 31 
 
 his belief as this sort of conviction impels him, displays 
 many secondary characteristics which, when we have noted 
 them (and added some personal accidents to complete 
 the picture) wiU put before us in its larger lines the 
 singular temper of Robespierre. Thus he wUl have an 
 appearance of conceit or vanity, but that appearance will 
 be misleading; for it is not the ordinary man's simple 
 repose in self — it is his devotion to the obvious, his 
 knowledge that he is absolutely consistent, that makes 
 Robespierre an egotist. No man, almost, in history so 
 incessantly haunted his audience with his repeated per- 
 sonality — but he certainly imagined that he was but 
 emphasising the equaUty of men, the immortality of the 
 soul, and all the other connected dogmas of the perfect 
 State. He was infinitely suspicious and for ever seeing him- 
 self abandoned — but it was because he was quite certain 
 of his truths, and was convinced (generally with reason) 
 that others less single-minded than himself were acting 
 against what they knew to be political justice. It was 
 not he but justice that stood alone in the hall ; his 
 opponents were opposing not him but self-evident and 
 conspicuous truth. 
 
 Again, this unique conviction destroyed humour and 
 proportion. Did he hear a gibe against his wearisome 
 insistence ? It seemed to him a gibe against the liberty 
 and the God whom he preached. He missed relative 
 values, so that he was in politics like a man who in 
 battle has no sense of range ; he blundered unexpectedly 
 upon oppositions; he shot short or over the heads of 
 opponents. By as much as matters were removed from 
 his immediate handling he judged them wildly — I mean 
 in practical affairs. Thus his handling of the Jacobins 
 was admirable and uniformly successful, of the Parlia- 
 ment generally so, of the Provinces and Paris somewhat 
 uncertain, of foreign affairs puerile ; nor did he in any 
 single instance that I can recall perceive the ultimate and 
 
32 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 practical consequences of a decree launched on an exist- 
 ing and complex society; he was content to judge each 
 law of itself by the touchstone of the One Truth. 
 
 But the converse is also true, and this is a matter 
 not sufficiently seized in the general wonder at his 
 success. In proportion as things were quite near him 
 and of his own audience he understood them. He had 
 proved himself a successful advocate before '89 — after 
 it he can be shown to have watched faces well and to 
 have gauged the temper of crowds. He rode the 
 Jacobins, and time and again could steer the Parlia- 
 ment when others failed. I will even believe that but 
 for the singular lapse which closed his life, and to which 
 I shall in a moment allude, he would have continued to 
 the end to impress and direct the Great Committee. 
 
 He has been called implacable in his hatred — here 
 again, as in his vanity, a false impression is conveyed. 
 He was bewildered by the opportunist, and still more by 
 the man who was tenacious of ideals other than his own. 
 He could not but believe the man who dealt with facts 
 and who arranged a combination of forces to have about 
 him something impure; he could not but believe the 
 man who was attached by affection to this or that incon- 
 sistency to have about him some aberration of morals. 
 That practical temper and those inconsistencies of affec- 
 tion which are the general tone of all mankind, he, on 
 the contrary, imagined to be peculiar to some few evil 
 and exceptional men, and these he was for removing 
 as abhorrent to the perfect State and corrupting to it. 
 " You say that self-government is of right, and yet you 
 will not immediately grant the suffrage to all ? You are 
 insincere, a liar, a deceiver of the people." " You say 
 you believe in God, and yet you oppose the execution of 
 this atheist ? You are corrupt and perhaps bribed. If 
 God be really God, this infinite God and his Majesty 
 must certainly be defended. But perhaps you do not 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 33 
 
 believe in Him — then you also must go the way of the 
 man you are defending." "You say the people are 
 sovereign, and yet you are seen in the house of men 
 who approved of the middle class militia firing on the 
 crowd ? Then you are a traitor." Wherever men of the 
 usual sort perceive but one of the million inconsistencies 
 of life — inconsistencies that vary infinitely in degree, and 
 that must be of a rare sort to be counted as crimes 
 or aberrations — Kobespierre saw but glaring antitheses ; 
 something unjust, untrue, and very vile. 
 
 WhUe theory thus led him to violent animosities, it 
 forbade him sincere affections. This, which is the widest 
 gap in the texture of his mind and the principal symp- 
 tom of his unnatural abstraction, explains a great part of 
 his adveaStures. There can be no better corrector of in- 
 tellectual extravagance than the personal love of friends, 
 for this gives experience of what men are, educates the 
 mind to complexity, makes room for healthy doubt, puts 
 stuff into the tenuous framework of the mind, and pre- 
 vents the mere energy of thought from eating inward. 
 Many loved him. One man, Lebas, died simply for his 
 sake. Another, St. Just, though losing a little of his 
 illusion at the end, for many years made a messiah of 
 Robespierre. He himself cannot be said to have loved 
 with consistent passion a single individual. He was not 
 without kindliness, he reciprocated adoration with courtesy 
 and goodwill, but his soul lacked whatever organ can 
 attach us to our fellows. Nor had he, as I think, in 
 spite of his sensitive hours, his musings at sunset, and 
 lus frequent seclusions, those permanent emotions which 
 are correlative to human affections. For all his lonely 
 walks and reveries, he took, as I should imagine, but 
 sUght pleasure in colours, and was divorced from Nature 
 — ^from the movement of life, and from the troubling 
 inspiration of distances and wide horizons. 
 
 Again, to be so absolutely sure of so many things 
 
 c 
 
34 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 because one has them all connected in a perfect system 
 must of necessity breed an insane intolerance, and, per- 
 haps, persecution. I do not mean an intolerance of plain 
 outrage or a persecution of men that deny the first prin- 
 ciples of political morality ; I mean an interference with 
 the minutest actions and with matter remote from the 
 prime springs of opinion. It is a grave historical error 
 to confuse Robespierre with the Terror — indeed, it is 
 an error no longer committed save by historians whose 
 ignorance of the French language and of recent research 
 preserves them in a traditional net ; but his special use of 
 the Terror, the few instances in which he leant personally 
 upon its awful authority, were of the very kind that 
 men can least patiently bear ; they dealt with^ domestic 
 matters, with chance phrases, with private morals. He 
 has been called a Puritan; he was partly an inquisitor. 
 His idea that he was the servant and agent of pure 
 right made him in this and in that a tyrant, just where 
 tyranny is most monstrous. To one man or another, for 
 moments only, a tyrant ; but a tyrant just in those little 
 things wherein tyranny is most intolerable. 
 
 It would be very false to find in all this an absence 
 of the great virtues ; their balance and general presence 
 it was that he lacked. Certainly he loved truth, making 
 it indeed far too easy of attainment, and thinking it 
 entirely achieved in that one formula of one depart- 
 ment of inquiry which possessed him. Certainly, also, he 
 loved Truth in action — Justice. Or rather he could 
 not tolerate that his conception of Justice (which 
 was of course a purely political conception) should 
 suffer the least injury. But, though he was too ab- 
 sorbed for Pride, he was empty of positive Humility 
 altogether ; and Charity (the appreciation of living things, 
 and the salt and good moderator of life) was never granted 
 to him at all. When men are judged by the right they 
 could and meant to do — ^whiqh is the final mami,er — h© 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 35 
 
 will be judged with some leniency: for the thing in 
 which he was wrapped up was an idea of fulfilling justice. 
 It was so partial as to warp and destroy the mind ; its 
 insufficiency and misapplication offends the sense and 
 angers a wider experience, yet it was — for him — an idea 
 of fulfilling justice. That which condemned him at last 
 among his contemporaries, which has somewhat falsified 
 him in general literature, and will bring him no aifection 
 in accurate and detailed history, was, not that he did 
 wrong, seeing well what right was, but that there was 
 something misshapen in the outline of his mind ; that 
 his one temptation of power was not excused by ability, 
 and that the extravagance of often absurd and some- 
 times monstrous conclusions was inharmonious to a 
 character that burned with none of the interior and 
 generative fires. 
 
 To this main direction of his spirit one must add 
 a little Uterary ambition which never indeed controlled 
 him, but which, since he was industrious, clung to 
 and rather belittled his whole career — for he was in- 
 capable of great phrase. He had also a power of 
 expression not wholly to be despised, connected with 
 his certitude, always approaching and sometimes sur- 
 passing a conventional eloquence. He was sufficiently 
 conscious of his inability in matters of construction and 
 lay apart from action — and though he was attentive, 
 laborious, concerned at the close of his life with a 
 himdred details of government, yet real action was never 
 demanded of him. It is an error to praise his courage 
 or condemn his cowardice. He was firm, but never gave 
 his firmness an opportunity of exercise save in matters 
 purely moral. He showed no terror in the face of grave 
 physical dangers, and he was wholly indifferent to the 
 opportunities of combative fame — to all that side of his 
 imperfect humanity nothing but negation applies. He 
 would certainly have died — it may almost be said that 
 
36 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 he did die — for Ms principles; had he been compelled 
 to fight physically for them he would have fought — 
 but very awkwardly. Finally, he was affected by his 
 isolation of mind in this way, that, while of a type very 
 willing to remain unknown, yet, once he became famous, 
 he was prone to exaggerate his real self even in his own 
 eyes. He tended under the high temptation of success to 
 be convinced of his own sanctity, and under the pressure 
 of fame he hardened rather than dissolved the shell that 
 cut him off from men. 
 
 Whoever has in him sharp differences from the normal 
 or grave lacunae, these will appear under the attrition of 
 time if the whole character be brought into play. The 
 whole character of Eobespierre would by no means have 
 appeared in any ordinary career; but the Kevolution 
 brought into the most complete activity a mind so 
 entirely political, and — not however until he had been 
 subjected to a great strain of power — this flaw appeared 
 in him, that in order to impress something of himself 
 upon the world he gave up a little of these absolutes 
 upon which alone his force depended and which were 
 his talisman. It was with the advent of the extreme 
 period of the Kevolution that this lapse, long germinat- 
 ing, became at last apparent. He had first felt, then 
 chosen, power, but not till that date did he abandon his 
 natural limits of negative definition and attempt to create 
 something positive and distinct from the liberal Republic 
 to which the general genius of France was tending. The 
 experiment was hke the thrusting of an obstacle into 
 machinery of great power working at a prodigious speed : 
 things split and cracked, the fabric of the new state 
 rocked from extremes of violence to extreme reaction, 
 and in a vast confusion which destroyed its author, the 
 Revolution ended : Thermidor. 
 
 There, is the person, the character and the principal 
 
PERSON AND CHARACTER 37 
 
 political effect of Robespierre. To what is such a spirit 
 fitted ? In times of peace to a consistent obscurity ; in 
 times of armed change to be a sign or watchword, to be 
 worshipped or followed as a name. 
 
 This truth, that such unnatural consistency in the 
 exposition of a new creed uplifts the cold expositor 
 and makes of his name something other and far greater 
 than himself, is the reading of Robespierre. It was 
 hardly he that stood in the Jacobin mind of '91 ; it 
 was not he himself at all that was returned first deputy 
 of Paris in '92, least of all was it for the true Robes- 
 pierre that the Commune rose. The centre of an office, 
 an insignium, he lasted till he attempted to rule, and then 
 the illusion fell in ashes. Here is perhaps the solution 
 of the capital problem of the time, why this small 
 exsanguine figure should have passed unscathed through 
 such heats and, insistent, restrained, should have led such 
 a column as the shouting march of the Reform. 
 
 For what was the Revolution ? Whence proceeded 
 the indomitable armies and the new songs ? The under- 
 thing which we touch in the single lines of the poets 
 and in certain phrases of music, nourished it from within. 
 It lived by the guide of the soul, it was full of that flame 
 which burns up once suddenly in the lives of men when 
 the boy leaps into manhood. There ran through it the 
 vigour by which the springs also come and whatever 
 enters into youth from the world outside. There was 
 a spirit in it which is the whole theme of Lucretius, the 
 centre of being, the power to create. To have looked 
 into the souls of the Convention (by which Robes- 
 pierre first was raised and which at last he controlled), 
 would have been to experience every shade of energy, of 
 desire, and of irradiation, of colour, and of force. In that 
 company he passed, a portent ; a pale exception that had 
 been turned for a time to an idol, but that, in the 
 coming back of the realities, contrasted and jarred. It 
 
38 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 was the dull and early dawn of a July day, coming 
 in by a shaded window, and slowly revealing things that 
 ended him suddenly as a dream is ended. 
 
 He stood, a pale exception, a man all conviction and 
 emptiness, too passionless to change, too iterant to be an 
 artist, too sincere and tenacious to enliven folly with 
 dramatic art, or to save it by flashes of its relation to 
 wisdom. When so many loved and hated men or 
 visions, till their great souls turned them into soldiers, 
 he knew nothing but his Truth and was untroubled. 
 
 The hopeless oneness of structure that is for living 
 things a negation of life, the single outlook and 
 exiguous homogeneity of his mind, made him in the first 
 troubling hopes of the Revolution a shaft or guide, in 
 its dangers and betrayals an anchor, in its high, last, 
 and vain attempt to outstrip our human boundaries, a 
 symbol, and in its ebb of return to common living a 
 tedium and a menace. For when men full of human 
 complexity reposed at last in victory and had leisure 
 to balance things again, he was seen to have neither 
 instinctive human foreknowledge nor the sad human 
 laughter, and there was no exile in his eyes. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE DESCENT AND YOUTH OF ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Robespierre was born, somewhat unduly,^ at two o'clock 
 of the morning of May the 6th, 1758, in his father's 
 house at Arras. His ancestry, his father's position, his 
 name, the very parish in which he was born determine 
 for us with the greatest precision the conditions that 
 should have impressed his whole- career, for it is remark- 
 able that in the case of this man, whose inner part stands 
 like a riddle in modern history, the original conditions 
 of life and its externals are certainly more distinctive and 
 possibly better known than is the case with any of his 
 contemporaries. His family, house, occupation, friends, 
 all point to one special type so familiar to French society, 
 that we should of right expect in him a character simple 
 and consonant with its peculiar tradition. We find, upon 
 the contrary, nothing but an empty frame ; we are given 
 the Hmits of his action and the boundaries of his experi- 
 ence; but what he became, subject though he was to 
 those limits and boundaries, was something dissonant. 
 
 Nevertheless it is of primary importance to know 
 these conditions of his birth, because it is only in them 
 that we can establish the arena wherein his mind took 
 action ; and since they all centre round the long descent 
 through which he could trace his name, it is in the story 
 of his family that I would begin to show the atmosphere 
 by which he was surrounded. 
 
 A tradition of some value gives an Irish origin to 
 
 1 His father and mother were married io January. He was born in 
 May. 
 
 S9 
 
40 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the Eobespierres, and ascribes their immigration into 
 Picardy^ to the Catholic persecution in England at the 
 close of the sixteenth century. In support of this tra- 
 dition, widely spread as it is in his own district, no 
 documentary evidence has appeared; but very shortly 
 after the supposed date of this settlement — namely, in 
 the first years of the seventeenth century — they were 
 established in Garvin, a little place on the high road as 
 you come from Lille, about twelve miles before Arras. 
 There, throughout the century, they are the public 
 notaries, the town-clerks, the officials of the little borough ; 
 but it must not be imagined that we have here to deal 
 with that middle legal class which was the fibre of the 
 two hundred years of Boto-bon administration and from 
 which so much of the Revolution proceeded. 
 
 We have not to do with the Dantons, the Jean Bon, 
 and the rest in whom a sound professional training linked 
 to an ignorance of the territorial world made some ob- 
 server (whose name I forget, but whose gibe is often 
 quoted) compare the parliaments of the great reform to 
 a meeting of country attorneys. The Robespierres were 
 gentlemen by a thousand tests, and it is of the first 
 importance to any student of the Revolution that he 
 should appreciate the exact quality of the class to which 
 such a principal figure belonged. It is necessary to see 
 
 ' It is remarkable that while his Parisian biographers make such 
 ludicrous guesses as " Eoberts-Peter " for the English original of the 
 name, the local tradition will have it "Eobertspeare," a much more likely- 
 combination. The tradition, unsupported though it be by any document, 
 has in its favour the fact that this corner of France was a favourite 
 refuge for the Catholics under Elizabeth, and provided a base for the 
 propaganda of the counter-Reformation. It is also remarkable and 
 hardly explicable on any other hypothesis than that of a foreign origin, 
 that a family bearing arms and boasting the title of gentlemen and 
 admitted to the privileges of that rank should be discovered securely 
 settled and publicly known as early as the minority of Louis XIII., and 
 yet should have left no traces of their presence under the Valois. The 
 continued clerical protection afforded to his famUy is not without its 
 value in this connection. 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 41 
 
 in Robespierre not only the son of a certain ancestry two 
 centuries old, but the son also of men jealous of a social 
 privilege, carefully moulded by a family profession into the 
 legal habit of thought, tending in spite of themselves 
 to lose a little of their claims to rank, yet keeping its 
 memory, associating always, though on a somewhat lower 
 plane, with the few families and interests that governed 
 the Artois. Poor, never indebted, locally prominent but 
 devoid of public ambition, their position in Garvin for 
 a hundred years points to the whole of such a set of con- 
 ditions. They were protected as religious refugees of a 
 certain rank were throughout the north-east; that pro- 
 tection (as one would expect) increased with the influence 
 of Louis XIV. and the slow reaction in England against 
 the Stuarts. In the critical year of 1688 Robert de 
 Robespierre ^ was granted the lieutenancy of the county 
 of ^fipinoy, and though that function was nothing grander 
 in practice than the headship of a local bureaucracy and 
 tax-collecting machine, yet its title had enough sound 
 about it to make it the occasional perquisite of nobility ; 
 and a family that while empty of land had kept to their 
 " de " with pertinacity were partly rewarded, partly con- 
 firmed by such an appointment. When Yves de Robes- 
 pierre, eight years later, applied to the Heralds' College 
 for his arms,^ it was but the reaffirmation of his right to 
 bear a coat with whose traditional escutcheon he himself 
 furnished the authorities. 
 
 The close of the seventeenth century and the opening 
 of the eighteenth marked a slight change in the fortunes 
 of the family ; it lost a little of its pride, it took on a 
 
 1 He was the great-great-grandson of Maximilian, the last of the 
 family to marry a noble (Eictrude de Bruille). 
 
 ' Yves was one of Robert's sons and the great-great-uncle of Maxi- 
 milian. For the benefit of those who are interested in such things, 
 I may mention that the arms were found by Hamel in d'Hauterive's 
 "Armorial de la France" (i. 33, and p. 374), and are described as "Or, 
 with a band sable ; charg^ demi vol, argent." 
 
42 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 little of ambition. It entered into the first of a series 
 of inferior but well-dowered alliances, and yet the son 
 of this first bourgeois marriage was raised to the higher 
 branch of the profession, and was removed from the 
 local dignity of Carvin to the more useful if more com- 
 petitive society of the capital of the province. It was 
 Robert's son Martin that married the daughter of a 
 well-to-do post-master with large stables in the town, 
 and their son, Maximilian (the elder), that settled at 
 Arras as a barrister in 1720. It was he who bought 
 the house of the Rue des Rapporteurs, who established 
 the relations of the family with the Abbey of St. Waast 
 and with the Archbishopric, and who wove the social web 
 upon which the family depended for over seventy years. 
 
 The site and appearance of his house, the centre 
 from which he built up the new foundation of the family, 
 are typical of its character and future fortunes. 
 
 The Revolution, if a close examination be made of its 
 principal actors, will be found to proceed from a few 
 special provincial centres, for France, unified and cen- 
 tralised as she is, possesses beyond any other nation the 
 energy that proceeds from the contrast and strong inter- 
 action of the almost tribal divisions that make up the whole. 
 In that, Gaul is still Gaul ; and I mention a few of those 
 groups when I name the mountains of the higher Isere, 
 the Delta of the Rhone, the great valley of the Gironde ; 
 the mysticism and conviction of Brittany, the sense of 
 Champagne, the hard idealism of the highlanders of the 
 Cevennes, the broad content of Normandy. With each 
 of these something separate — Vizille, the war song; 
 Vergniaud, the early revolt of Rennes, Danton, Jean 
 Bon, or the rebels' march of 1793 — is associated. But of 
 these none form a more curious study than the group 
 of provinces that hold the north-east — Flanders, Picardy 
 and the Artois. Here is a spirit that should be of the 
 borders, a place where the large heart of the midlands 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 43 
 
 and vines might meet the steady vision of the Teuton 
 and mix to make a population of sohd mediocrity. 
 There is nothing of the kind. If such a barrier mixture 
 is found anywhere in France it is in the profound and 
 wholesome valley where the woods are fed by the shallow 
 Moselle. It is not in the north-east. There, on the 
 contrary, this paradox appears; whatever is old, Patois 
 in speech and still attached to local terms and measures 
 is also luxuriant, almost wanton, in art and in the manner 
 of living. Kich Flanders is in their blood, what they say 
 is eloquent ; they are of that low country that brought 
 forth Kubens on its far north - eastern, Desmoulins on 
 its south-western edge. Their architecture is riotous in 
 detaU, verging on the fantastic in its general conception. 
 They are a pasture-land in Europe ; high towers dominate 
 them ; they paint the clouds and delight in woodwork and 
 dark rooms. But all this has provoked and excited an 
 opposite pole on the same soil. The French reoccupation, 
 coinciding as it did with the first establishment of the 
 Bourbon bureaucracy brought in a new class as frigid, 
 regular and determined as the old was manifold and 
 untrammelled. I will not deny that there was latent in 
 the blood even of that class a potential enthusiasm, for 
 these horizons will not let the soil rest, but as a body they 
 were pushed by a kind of official reaction into a habit of 
 order and somewhat pedantic accuracy in all affairs. 
 
 All this contrast is set out in stone in the town of 
 Arras. There you have the old ianer city full of the 
 quaint and the grotesque ; sprawling over it is the Abbey 
 of St. Waast that a man might draw in a dream ; that 
 inner town is grouped round the superb, rich belfry 
 of the abbey ; it is marked at every corner by innumer- 
 able stepped gables, and to the smallest ornaments on the 
 door-posts it calls up the voluptuous magic of Flanders 
 and the tilled fens. Outside this nucleus in which Spain 
 and Austria sowed the Renaissance in so rich a soil, 
 
44 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 runs like a ring the cold town of the classical philo- 
 sophers, of the bureaucracy, of the encyclopaedia; the 
 formal provincial streets that reflect in some poor way 
 the spirit which the grand si&cle had imposed upon the 
 capital. By an accident that it seems fantastic to treat 
 symbolically and that yet may be an efiect of the elder 
 Maximilian's judgment and partly a cause of his grand- 
 son's career, the house in the Eue des Rapporteurs was 
 situated just within the official French quarter, yet in 
 easy touch with the Flemish centre in which the bishop, 
 the great abbey and the town life of the provincial 
 nobility exercised their power. 
 
 The house ^ itself is small, square, unornamented, 
 bourgeois, white. All built for utility, standing at a 
 corner of two streets, immediate to the Place du Th^§,tre, 
 close therefore at once to the posting houses of the Paris 
 road and to the municipal offices, it has continued to 
 fulfil even since the end of the Robespierrean connection 
 some such purpose as that for which the old barrister 
 designed it, being always tenanted by men of good 
 position in the town though dependent upon its commerce 
 or administration. It is wonderfully dull. There is no 
 garden, no court, no sign of carving or careful panels; 
 and its whole atmosphere is that of the unmomentous 
 past lying behind the family ; a tradition of exactitude 
 and probity mixed with a little pride of name. For 
 all this dulness and lack of colour something of their 
 claims and legends survived. When Charles Edward, 
 
 ' The Place du Theatre is right on the road from the station. The 
 Eue de Rapporteurs runs into the little square on its northern side, and 
 the house of the Robespierres is the long white house on the left of the 
 first corner. It must be remembered, by the way, that all my description 
 of this as a, long-inhabited freehold of the family's is debatable matter. 
 There is proof in Arras that the Robespierres possessed other houses 
 at various times, but I do not think it so certain that they lived in them 
 or that one need necessarily doubt the universal tradition, including 
 that of the family itself, that the White House was a family freehold 
 of long standing. 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 45 
 
 having lost everything in the '45, took to mysticism, he 
 founded, among others, a lodge of the Rosicrucians at 
 Arras in 1757 and gave the headship of it to the son of 
 the barrister in the Rue des Rapporteurs, the uncle of 
 the Revolutionary.^ That Catholic, quasi-noble and 
 emigrant tradition, continued also in the growing in- 
 timacy between the family and the cathedral, but strong 
 as the sentiment was it could not survive the effect 
 of many years in which hard work had brought no 
 fortune. The " de " which the ancestors had clung to 
 so firmly became merged in the name,^ and another of 
 those unfortunate marriages which had already marked 
 the decline of their pretensions came in this same year 
 of 1757 to lower them further. 
 
 It was a love match. Maximilian-Bartholomew, the 
 old barrister's son, a man of immediate impulse, fell into 
 a violent and lifelong passion for the daughter of a 
 brewer in the suburb of Rouxville, by name Carrault; 
 his father strongly opposed the union. An intrigue 
 hastened the marriage; by that, in all probabihty, the 
 father's objection was overridden, and the race was 
 continued on the insufficient dowry and the lower blood 
 of this alliance.^ 
 
 It is probable that Robespierre's birth (he was the 
 eldest of four children of the marriage) broke down part 
 of the old man's prejudice. At least he stood godfather 
 
 ^ In the archives at Arras the first proceedings of this lodge are signed 
 "Ch. Stnwart" and "Deberkley " I It is interesting to those who follow 
 the crop of secret societies which developed in the last century and their 
 connection with freemasonry to know that the present "Constancy" 
 Lodge at Arras claims, and can, I believe, establish a direct descent from 
 Charles Edward's whimsical foundation. 
 
 ' Kobespierre's father and grandfather both sign "Derobespierre." 
 He himself, successful and rising to public office in the capital, re- 
 assumed the separate particle, and did not finally drop it till as late as 
 June 1790. 
 
 ' That the marriage rather impoverished than helped the Robespierres 
 is proved by the son's inability to set up a house of his own and by the 
 lack of resources at the father's death. 
 
46 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 at the Church of the Madeleine when Lenglart baptized 
 the child some few hours after its birth ; and the names 
 given to him were Maximilian-Mary-Isidore.^ 
 
 Coming from such a family, Robespierre should have 
 left some sequence of administration to influence through 
 his posterity, or his collateral descendants, the new era 
 at whose creation he assisted, and of which he falsely 
 imasrined himself an author. It was the honourable fate 
 of many of his contemporaries to hand down a tradition 
 with their name and to claim over a society that is 
 tenacious of ancestry and descent the special precedence 
 due to their own labours and eminence, and to their 
 legacy of public talent. Danton, had he returned to 
 the France of which he had been the defender, could 
 have seen his nephew professing in the University 
 whose new vigour had arisen under the hand of the 
 Convention; and though by an accident of cehbacy 
 his own son's name was not preserved, yet his family 
 is still represented in the administration of his native 
 town, and continues to exercise upon a higher plane 
 the functions in which his own father had served Arcis. 
 Cambon, a principal architect of the constrictive Revo- 
 lution, sees in his descendants an example of the same 
 fortune, profitable alike to his family and to the state. 
 The sound bourgeois stock from which he, the municipal 
 officer, the merchant, and the financier, drew was the most 
 vital in France, and it was on such a strip that the new 
 administrative class was grafted. Of this characteristic 
 in the Revolutionary tradition Carnot again gives a yet 
 more conspicuous example. Himself of the legal ancestry 
 that played so great a part in the reform, a mind in 
 which the engineer and the soldier combined to design 
 and to fortify liberty, his great legend was fruitful beyond 
 
 ^ Who was his godmother 7 All we know of it is the name " Marie 
 Antoinette " written right across the register in a large, round and some- 
 what illiterate hand ; probably that of a, child. <• 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 47 
 
 that of any contemporary; the exile and the death in 
 poverty to which the meanness of the foreign garrison 
 drove him had no evil effect upon the chances of his 
 family, and did little even to promote its success. By 
 a kind of natural inheritance his son took his place 
 in '48, and continued till his death to exercise in the 
 senate an influence as firm and wide as it was ill-adver- 
 tised. A Carnot of the third generation occupied, with 
 honour and devotion, the chief magistracy, and was killed 
 in the midst of its duties ; those of the fourth are rising 
 to a continued eminence in the service of the Republic, 
 a mixture stiU of the soldier with the man of letters 
 and of science, and still proving the vigour of their 
 Burgundian blood. The Cavaignacs, son and grandson 
 of a less famous Conventionnel, yet take their place upon 
 the long Republican tradition, and if their stoicism, touch- 
 ing as it does the boundary of the puritanical, is too 
 high for their contemporaries, it yet continues to earn for 
 their present as it will for their future representative the 
 imiversal respect of the nation. 
 
 Robespierre should, then, have left some kind of 
 fanuly thread for history to pick up, if his fortunes had 
 proved in any way parallel to those of his colleagues. 
 They had been regicides as he had ; they were without 
 exception members of the band that was at once the 
 advanced guard and the general staff of the Revolution ; 
 and if that prime factor in the permanence of poUtical 
 influence be considered — I mean the solid origins of 
 ancestry combined with a long tenure of local govern- 
 ment — his claims to such a posterity were, as the last 
 pages have shown, superior to those of the men I have 
 cited. But it is the note of Robespierre's life and of the 
 subsequent chances of his house that his position and 
 his legend were as imique and exceptional as his charac- 
 ter. Whether it was the horror that the eddies and the 
 backwash. of opinion threw up upon his name, or more 
 
48 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 probably an instinctive recognition of how unpolitical 
 were his qualities, the generations that succeeded him 
 took no heed of his collateral descendants, a name that 
 might have at least fascinated by terror, and that even 
 proved attractive to the extremists of 1848 was allowed 
 to fall into obscurity. The very rank of which the 
 French of that class are so tenacious was let drop with- 
 out an effort, and in these last years that family has, so 
 far as I can trace it, disappeared through the death of 
 most inconsiderable representatives.^ 
 
 Charlotte, indeed, the elder of his two sisters, lived on 
 into the reign of Louis Philippe,^ dependent upon a small 
 pension that Bonaparte had granted, and that the routine 
 of a government department continued, though somewhat 
 diminished, throughout the changes of the restoration 
 and those of the monarchy of July. A silent and 
 dignified figure, she maintained to the close of her long 
 life a reserve that was a little marked by the bitterness 
 which had warped her character in youth. Here and 
 there at rare intervals her name startled the ear of 
 some chance visitor who might enter the poor flat of 
 her friend and protectress, and there are yet living, or 
 but lately dead, several men who have told how, as boys, 
 they turned their heads suddenly at the introduction to 
 a Robespierre.' This last representative of the House 
 
 ' The last near collateral descendant of Robespierre's — a great-great 
 nephew — was run over by a train near Carvin two years ago. He was a 
 local chemist, and with him ended the family. But there still lives in 
 Grenelle, or did recently, in the Rue de la Fdd^ration, a great-grandson of 
 Robespierre's first cousin, also born near Carvin. This gentleman who, 
 oddly enough, has preserved the "de" attaching to the family, is a coal 
 merchant, and has or had a son in the 8th Hussars. This is, I think, the 
 only stock of the name even remotely connected with the Revolutionary. 
 
 ^ It is in the Archives of the twelfth Paris Arrondissement that she 
 died at four in the morning of August 4th, 1834, at the age of seventy-four 
 years, at No. 3 Rue de la Fontaine. 
 
 ' The late M. Jules Simon mentioned in his memoirs, published in Ths 
 Temps newspaper, a visit paid by him to Mademoiselle Robespierre in 183 1, 
 three years before her death. He went with his tutor, Lebas, of whom there 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 49 
 
 at Arras did not die "without leaving for history the most 
 valuable materials. Her notes upon her brother's youth, 
 collected and amplified (not without rhetoric and ready- 
 made phrases) by Laperronaye,' yet form the best original 
 we possess on which to found our idea of the sombre 
 adolescence and more contented early manhood which 
 preceded his last five Kevolutionary years. 
 
 When Maximilian was but seven years old, and before 
 the youngest child, Augustin, could speak, the first blow 
 of the many that were to drive his character inward fell 
 upon him. His mother died, and his father, a man 
 whose extreme sensibility had half unfitted him for 
 assiduity and entirely for success, saw slip from him in 
 a moment the affection for whose sake he had mis- 
 shaped his career and checked the fortunes of his family. 
 The shock did but hasten the process that his whole 
 life had discovered. He could work no more. His 
 practice left him, and by an impulse that is not un- 
 common to such men tortured by memories, he broke 
 from the ruins of his duty and the associations with 
 which his house was surrounded, to wander aimlessly 
 beyond the frontiers, in Germany and in England, living 
 at random on chance lessons and on such small sums as 
 his relations could send him. He left his children to 
 the more sober guardianship of their mother's family. 
 His despair killed him ; and the news of his death, 
 reaching Arras when Maximilian had barely entered his 
 tenth year, produced a yet more profound impression 
 upon the boy than his mother's loss of less than three 
 
 is some mention in this book. I also have it on the authority of M. Aude- 
 brand that M. Joigneux, the senator for the C6te d'Or, who died five years 
 ago, met her several times in 1830, and I have based part of my descrip- 
 tion on his notes. 
 
 ' I have no space in a footnote to prove the genuineness of these 
 memoirs upon which I have not hesitated to base my appreciation of 
 Robespierre's boyhood, but a long note at the end of the book develops 
 the argument in their favour. They have been thought false upon curiously 
 little evidence. 
 
 D 
 
50 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 years before. In the situation where he had now fallen 
 many things combined to stamp permanently upon his 
 habit of thought the hard directness which continued to 
 distinguish it. His misfortunes had come just at the 
 age when a precocious imagination may be most vividly 
 affected. They were not so ample as to force him into 
 quick and active observation. His poor father had left 
 untouched the little patrimony at Arras; the youth 
 that lay before him would necessarily be one of some 
 humiliation and of continued labour, but of an assured 
 if moderate success. To many the effect of such an 
 introduction to life would be to breed a determination 
 for material advancement, and a mere end in the recovery 
 of wealth; but there ran round Robespierre's mind a 
 covering of idealism which, if thin, was crystalline. It 
 constrained his energies to particular channels, and gave 
 misfortune the power not only to spur, but also and 
 chiefly to mould and bend the mind. Thus early he 
 began to consider his own self and his rights, and his 
 isolation. He brooded and lost his boyhood. The eldest 
 of that little family of orphans, perceiving already that 
 the protection of his mother's people, for all their dignity 
 and kindness, was something a little lowering to the 
 name he had inherited from his grandfather, he took on 
 responsibility and a habit of disappointed but persistent 
 thought. It made him at last a scholar, then a lawyer, 
 but it forbade him to forget or take life well. 
 
 There was at that time in Arras a bishop of the 
 name of De Conzi^, a great noble of course, as every 
 bishop was before the Revolution,^ but full of judgment 
 and of heart, wise and wUling to examine. An applica- 
 tion was made to him to use his influence for the boy, 
 and he very readily assented. Two generations of inti- 
 macy and good relations between the Robespierres and 
 
 ^ Of the 154 bishops that France enjoyed before the Kevolution, but 
 three were of the rank of the apostles ; all the rest were territorials. 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 51 
 
 the see of Arras, and the memory of official connections 
 throughout the province, made it easy to find the help 
 that was needed. The great abbey of St. Waast, which 
 was lord of a third of the town, and a coequal power 
 with the king and the bishop in its government, pro- 
 cured him a scholarship in the University of Paris. I 
 need not detail here the secular conservatism by which 
 founders still disposed of the scholarships in those 
 colleges, nor detail the story of the college of Arras.^ 
 It is enough for my purpose to mention that this little 
 foundation had been merged into the great institution of 
 Louis le Grand, which still keeps its place after the vast 
 reconstruction of this hundred years. It was to those 
 high walls and narrow courts that he passed in his 
 twelfth year, and it was the Jesuits that trained for 
 twelve years, as he passed into a pale manhood, the 
 exact deductions of his mind. 
 
 So far his childhood at Arras had had little good 
 and had languished. His sisters, placed by a similar 
 care in an excellent convent (perhaps a trifle above their 
 station), saw him from time to time, playing alone and 
 especially devoted to his birds, his pet pigeons. Such 
 lessons as he did showed his aptitude and precocity, and 
 he went up to Paris expected to do well enough in his 
 studies, with a character from his former masters of a 
 rather melancholy taciturnity. But he was gentle. The 
 entry into Paris, which is always a new pain to the French 
 (for their hearts have roots at home) was perhaps a 
 third grief to the child. He had lost both father and 
 mother, now his home, and for two years he saw no more 
 of his birds or his sisters. But a cousin, a Canon of 
 Notre Dame, a De la Roche, a petty noble, in rank and 
 sort what he was, often received him and left a tradition 
 of gratitude until his death. In Paris at last he found 
 
 ' I have a short note on It upon page 388 of my essay on "Paris" 
 (published by Mr. Edward Arnold). 
 
52 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the sustenance for which his mind was fitted ; he attained 
 scholarship, or rather a very ready famiUarity with his 
 authors, a very wide field of classical reading, and a 
 special exactitude in his knowledge of the texts and of 
 the history of the old civilisation. It is customary, and 
 on the whole just, to decry the portentous number of 
 antique allusions that flood the Kevolution, and that are 
 nowhere more thickly sown than in Robespierre's own 
 speeches, but they are proof at least in their volume and 
 accuracy of the training through which he passed, and 
 illustrate the academic success upon which was founded 
 his future eminence. 
 
 His delicate, if still morbid and narrowly furnished 
 mind, his refined if restrained and unboyish manner, left 
 him free to earn the esteem of his superiors and perhaps 
 the neglect of his equals, saving that Camille Desmoulins, 
 a mad-cap from Guise, witty, ebullient, pleasing in his 
 health and vivacity, a genial stammerer, three years his 
 junior, became his fast friend, and had for him, it seems, 
 a kind of hero-worship, such as later he inspired for a 
 time in the high youth of St. Just. But of the two it 
 was Robespierre (though later he left so inferior a mark 
 upon the letters of his country) that greatly excelled ia 
 his studies. 
 
 From his sixteenth year he was the head of his 
 school in composition, latinity, and a judgment of his 
 classics, and saving that he had not yet approached 
 philosophy, was already regarded as the first scholar of 
 the foundation. In his seventeenth, the honours he had 
 acquired received a reward which is of curious interest 
 to the student of the Revolution. 
 
 Louis XVI., a young king returning from his corona- 
 tion at Rheims, made a progress from Notre Dame up 
 to St. Genevieve on the hill of the university, and took 
 for his station on the way the great college that led the 
 Latin quarter. He made a kind of state entry, and a boy 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 53 
 
 had to be deputed to read him a Latin speech. Robes- 
 pierre was very naturally chosen. The speech, such as 
 it should be for such an occasion, revised moreover by 
 the obsequious care of an efficient master, contained 
 nothing of any moment, and is, I believe, destroyed 
 The contrast, however, of this unknown child nervously 
 reciting his panegyric in the magnificent but fatigued 
 presence of what held all France, should stand perma- 
 nently in the history of the time ; because, taking them 
 each simply as they were, brute accident was to set 
 them against each other; a rare and momentary light 
 was to put these two in view for ever ; the fame of each 
 vastly exceeding his natural obscurity; the one by the 
 unhappy inheritance of a crown, the other by the pure 
 chance of violent change were to be heard of after and 
 remembered. 
 
 Nothing remains of his further studies. His scholar- 
 ship presupposed a course of law ; he bent himself to 
 it for the three years that followed his degree. When 
 he was twenty-two, in 178 1, his connection with the 
 college ended. He had earned its gratitude and patron- 
 age ; his younger brother, Augustin, a boy of insignificant 
 abilities, was permitted to succeed to the endowment, 
 and he himself was voted a sum of ;^2 5 by way of 
 a prize that was sometimes granted to those who had 
 done best on the foundation. He wisely returned to 
 Arras, where tradition, good-will, and some patronage 
 awaited him, and where he had been familiar in the 
 summer vacations since the death of his host and cousin 
 in Paris. He took up an even life in the family house, 
 harboured his sister, was easily enabled by his every 
 limitation and virtue to adopt a laborious daily habit. 
 There lay like a restricted, clear, monotonous road before 
 him a career that fitted his persistent character. Its 
 goal was the old legal position and social prestige that 
 his family had earned, and of which he now took up 
 
54 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 successfully tlie tradition his father had imperilled. It 
 was able to satisfy that craving for recognition which 
 was no determining character of his, but certainly an 
 enduring foible. He was in reach of and could enjoy 
 the station he demanded ; it suited him to the fuU 
 to admit the conventional superiority of some, and to 
 receive the equally conventional solicitations of many more 
 in his native town. The intense political convictions 
 which underlay his mind would at the worst have seemed 
 but an amiable exaggeration of words, at the best (and 
 most probably) would have remained unheeded ; for he 
 was a man that found no necessity for their active 
 realisation in the existence about him. His ambition 
 was but to be the respected and successful lawyer of the 
 Artois. He more than fulfilled it. 
 
 I have said little of the happy changes that his 
 temper suffered by this transition from a morbid boy- 
 hood to academic success and local distinction: they 
 must be imagined from what I have barely detailed 
 of his adolescence. But that boyhood must be re- 
 membered, because men in great crises — sometimes by 
 the mere waste of years — are found ever returning to 
 the springs of their childhood ; and so at the end to him, 
 who had to pass through such a furnace to such a 
 death, there returned the self-pity, the tenacious assertion 
 of his rights, sufferings, and convictions, which certainly 
 early misfortunes had branded into his mind. For the 
 moment this destiny was peaceably obscured. He lapsed 
 in his twenty-third year into the polite discussion that 
 passed for the intellectual life, and into the minute 
 graces that were the true interests of his rank and place 
 and time. The atmosphere was native, and he continued 
 increasingly to enjoy what was best in the Artois. It was 
 not unwise to find enough in the good life of his town ; 
 it entered into him very fully, and when all such 
 clothings were forgotten he maintained by a kind of 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 55 
 
 instinct up to the scaffold the little methods that were 
 inherited from these eight years. 
 
 The life into which he entered had for its foundation 
 that kind of practice at the bar of his province which, in 
 its weight and yearly increase, is the mark of a prosperous 
 future in the courts; it had literary occupation for its 
 permanent satisfaction, and for its flower the conversa- 
 tion and manners of a sound society. That would be a 
 very false judgment which would find nothing but the 
 mean or the ridiculous in the narrow sphere wherein his 
 professional industry triumphed, and whose careful pro- 
 vincial urbanity at once charmed, flattered, and trained 
 him. It is true that centralisation had already reached 
 its worst effects in the social spirit of France, and espe- 
 cially that the drain upon the economic resources of the 
 country towns had struck them with lethargy. The tran- 
 sition from that state to the activity and local patriotism 
 which distinguishes the modern municipaUties of the 
 country could only be forced by the Kevolution : to the 
 court and to Paris, Arras, or Guise, or Caen were little 
 stagnant marshes. But there were features in the life of 
 such towns which, while inferior in value to the political 
 qualities they have since developed, yet redeemed their 
 influence and made them specially fitted to be the train- 
 ing ground of the revolutionaries. Corruption and decay 
 had but enhanced the position of the privileged classes 
 within them; the guarantees surrounding leisure pro- 
 tected the growth of that conviction in abstract verities 
 without whose presence reform is meaningless.-' Philo- 
 sophy of one school became a religion in these distant 
 places, and they could furnish in a small way the spirit 
 of academies. Had the change, which was a mechanical 
 
 ' Allusions to the "Eights of Man,'' "Natural Law," &o., are five 
 times more numerous in the Cahiers of the priests and nobles than in 
 those of the Commons, and are practically absent in the agricultural 
 petitions. 
 
56 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 necessity for the close of tlie eighteenth century, sprung 
 from centres less vain and somnolent, France might have 
 fallen into a confused tangle of immediate and merely 
 practical remedies ; she would never have founded those 
 general principles which can be applied to every trans- 
 formation under which political or economic injustice 
 may hide itself. Democracy, being creedless, could not 
 have survived ; for, in the things of the mind, a creed is 
 the condition of endurance. 
 
 Moreover a great charm lay in the stiff decencies 
 of their ritual. This charm you may yet recover in the 
 avenues where discussion lingers under the elms of the 
 Mall, or in the moats upon autumn evenings when you 
 see waters covered with still leaves. The rivers of the 
 French, which are slow streams full of memories, slip 
 under the old walls of their cities and carry on con- 
 tinually a light draught of the past. The spirit that 
 haunts them was once a breath for living men; it 
 tempted but it partially excused the universal desire for 
 the formal and emotional expression of ideals ; and this 
 desire which is the spring of literary mediocrity sur- 
 rounded and inspired the youth of Kobespierre ; it 
 furnished him with companions of his kind, led on and 
 permitted his ceaseless and valueless exercise in composi- 
 tion ; all that circle of " de's," wigs, coloured coats and 
 swords, as it were, compelled a man to write. 
 
 This gentle literary tide set at Arras through the 
 channel of a local academy, formed upon a model 
 common to many provincial capitals. This self-con- 
 stituted society, half an exclusive club, half a solemn 
 imitation of the famous body in Paris, had been formed 
 ^ 1738 — it has passed through the vicissitudes of six 
 generations. In the last century it naturally took on 
 every feature of the dignified but faiUng tradition in 
 which the class that formed it moved. More than half 
 noble, decent and solid in matter, a trifle pompous in 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 57 
 
 ceremony, boasting titles a little antiquated for the time, 
 an election to it was yet a good mark of a man's position 
 in his town, and it is worthy of notice that Robespierre 
 filled his place in it as the successor of a canon of the 
 cathedral. It was two years after his return to Arras 
 that this honour, or rather status, was given him. Two 
 years more and he was secretary to the society under 
 the quaint style of " chancellor " — it was in this capacity 
 that he received Carnot, then in garrison with the 
 Engineers at Arras. He passed from that little office 
 to the presidency of the body, and had the task of 
 welcoming into it the daughter of Keralio, whose name, 
 upon no evidence whatever,^ has been linked with his 
 in a kind of drama. He had become, though one of 
 the youngest, yet one of the most industrious and 
 perhaps of the most prominent members of this somewhat 
 faded community, when the great doors opened on his 
 thirtieth year and let in the furnace-light wherein the 
 very memory of all this disappeared. 
 
 His connection with that provincial body was 
 a small part even of the small life which pre- 
 ceded his public fame. Nevertheless it is in that 
 framework that one can best judge a character in 
 him that proved enduring — I mean his industry, 
 and secondary success in letters. It was as Member of 
 the Academy of Arras that he exercised rather than 
 acquired the persistent habit of writing which bound 
 itself into all his actions, forbade the growth in him 
 of rapid decision or of sudden appeal, and perhaps con- 
 tributed at last not a little to his fall. To nourish this 
 
 ' Mademoiselle de Keralio, the daughter of a little known historian, 
 herself aspired to letters. She wrote a " Life of Elizabeth of England " 
 and drew up a, plan for the universal history of the whole world from 
 the earliest times to the present day. She later married Eobert at the 
 outset of the Eevolution, entered Paris, edited with her husband the 
 Mercure Nati/mal, and was one of the principal advocates of Kobes- 
 pierre in the earlier Revolution. 
 
58 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 habit he required nothing so weighty as fame, but at 
 least a constant public mention, nor was he content 
 unless his every expression was moulded by a literary 
 standard. And this is somewhat of a contradiction in 
 him and somewhat of a stumbling-block to his biographers; 
 for his prodigious effect upon one generation of men 
 depended upon an illusion or an appreciation very 
 remote from the considerations of style. It was partly 
 as an even orator, partly as a judge of assemblies, but 
 mainly as one principle incarnate that he was able to 
 arrest the attachment of men, yet in his own wishes, 
 without a doubt, the wish to be remembered for a certain 
 facility and polish of writing stood continually. 
 
 It is well neither to exaggerate the mediocrity of his 
 compositions at this period nor his own ambitions with 
 regard to them. They exhibit in their style the special 
 politics which later, whether he were under the most 
 grievous strain or the opportunities of the widest action, 
 he was incapable of changing. They procured him 
 some flattery. He gained an equal mention, and 
 divided the first prize, with Lucretelle when the 
 Academy of Metz offered a prize for the best essay on 
 that abuse of the criminal law whereby the families of 
 the condemned were struck with legal infamy. It was 
 just such a subject, dealing with traditions of whose 
 origins he had never heard, with anachronisms whose 
 gradual development seemed to him merely monstrous, 
 as was best suited to his even and ritual pen, and his 
 treatment of it was sure to match the simple and definite 
 sociology of the time. The thirty-odd pages of square, 
 blue sermon-paper that remain as the proof of his labour 
 have in them nothing which is not exactly consonant 
 with his method. They contain the common condemna- 
 tion of all that hung in a deadweight, undefended, about 
 the progress of the old regime — the usual praise of, and 
 appeal to, the young king, whom in France all then 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 59 
 
 looked forward to as tlie introducer of a new time ; the 
 Latin quotations, the peroration and the restrained and 
 lifeless rhetoric of what has well been called the " good 
 manners " of prose. The manuscript contains, moreover, 
 curious signs of a habit that increased with his years, 
 and that is typical of the conscious mind which directed 
 his literary effort, for it is full of erasures and second 
 thoughts. There remains nothing from his pen, hardly 
 so much as a warrant or a hurried note, in which this 
 feature does not recur ; it is in keeping with his small, 
 slow, cramped, and hesitating hand ; ^ nor does the second 
 (or third) phrase he may substitute ever express a second 
 or third form of thought, it is ever the hesitation of 
 style, or even the rewriting of the same thing after an 
 interval of doubt.^ 
 
 This success added a little to his local renown. It 
 tempted him, in 1785, to a second competition, in which 
 he failed — that of the Academy of Amiens — for an eulogy 
 on the poet Gresset. The work is insignificant, and con- 
 tains but one phrase to arrest the reader, the very typical 
 sentence : " Gresset, you were a great poet, but you were 
 more — you were a honest man. And as I praise your 
 work, I shall not be compelled to turn my eyes away 
 from your life." To any remonstrance that such plati- 
 tudes verged upon the appalling, Eobespierre would have 
 replied that they dealt with a sublime truth, and he would 
 have remained untouched; he was to find an audience 
 for them and to preach them like a religion when exalta- 
 
 1 The hand might be of any period. It is clear, not very sloping, but 
 very small and irregular. He has one remarkable trick that the cynical 
 might misinterpret : he never puts in a capital letter even after a full 
 stop, save for the first person. 
 
 ^ There are several interesting examples of this nervous habit. In the 
 warrant of the arrest of Theresa Cabarrus he signs his name, scratches it 
 out, and signs it again. In his last speech he has three or four phrases 
 (notably the threatening passage where he was interrupted) which are 
 deleted and then rewritten in the same form. 
 
6o ROBESPIERRE 
 
 tion had burnt up the saving balance of humour, and 
 when the corrupt class, whose cynicism restrains such 
 tediums, was destroyed. 
 
 Yet the praise of an eighteenth-century minor poet, 
 of a man whom Greuze might have illustrated, and who, 
 I think, moves exactly in the furniture of the time, 
 should have suited Robespierre; for this anomaly is 
 to be remarked in him, that of his insufficient and dull 
 exercises in writing, by far the least dull and the least 
 insufficient are to be found in themes that demand a 
 little grace,^ and this accident, which is remarkable in 
 several letters, appears especially in his verse. 
 
 There was at Arras, side by side with and far less 
 stable than the Academy of which I have spoken, a little 
 trifling society, which seemed, as it were, the Academy 
 at play. They called themselves " Rosati," met yearly 
 in the spring beside the melancholy Scarpa outside the 
 walls, drank wine, wore roses, and delighted each other 
 with passable or valueless songs. To this society, a 
 product of the passion for cabals and passwords which 
 possessed the eighteenth century, all, or nearly all, the 
 members of the Academy would come; here Carnot, 
 Marescot, and Fosseux, the elderly clerics of the Chapter 
 — all the small, straight world of the town — read rhymes 
 which have been properly forgotten. Among these, those 
 of Robespierre, possessed of little talent, and often pass- 
 ing the boundary of the absurd, yet did occasionally 
 redeem themselves by a touch of grace, or even — what 
 will seem surprising — a sustained irony. The little 
 madrigal to Opheha^ is quoted with its ending 
 couplet : — 
 
 ' There is, of course, the example of a letter written to a lady who 
 wished to paint his portrait. Hamel traces the MSS. of this only as far 
 as 1862. It was then bought into a private English collection, and ia now 
 in the British Museum. 
 
 " Of whom tradition says that she was English. 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 6i 
 
 " To be the more beloved of all 
 By doubting if beloved you are.'' 
 
 The " Mouchoir du Predicateur '' is what all the 
 former readers of Voltaire were writing. Neither very 
 witty, nor by any means original in style, it is yet on a 
 level with the many easy little satires of these twenty 
 years. 
 
 In all this mass of continual composition no energy 
 is to be discovered, still less any bitterness, complaint, or 
 judgment. His life had entered a quiet phase, his needs 
 were satisfied ; his local repute, increasing as he went, left 
 him contented. The grappling conviction that underlay 
 his method of thought met no obstacle, and was called 
 to no exercise. If I have insisted thus far upon the 
 industrious facility with which his ordered leisure turned 
 to authorship, it is to introduce the permanent literary 
 form in which he cast himself, which coloured all his 
 later action, and which helped to make him, when the 
 elections of the great year fell upon Arras, one of the 
 few expositors of that forgotten town. Until that oppor- 
 tunity, however, during the eight years of his residence 
 and practice, his verse and prose were but a sort of 
 embroidery upon the serious work which established his 
 name among his fellow-citizens and gave him the social 
 basis from which he naturally obtained the ear of his 
 province, on which he appealed in his election address, 
 and in consonance with which he was returned a deputy 
 to the States-General. That work was legal. 
 
 This tangible advantage, which suited his character 
 to a nicety and explains his successful introduction to 
 politics, was connected with the importance necessarily 
 attached in France to local courts. There is in France 
 no circuit of assize. A man pleads before the small fixed 
 tribunals of the cantons or before the higher courts of the 
 towns, and even an appeal need not appear at the capital, 
 save under the rarest conditions. It is true that one great 
 
62 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 division of legal work could only be done in Paris, even 
 under the old regime. The fact that Paris monopolised 
 Chancery and what we should call Parliamentary work drew 
 many young barristers thither ; but the bulk of legal work 
 in France lies in the provinces, and this system of resident 
 courts was yet more marked before the Revolution. In 
 his province no code, but a mass of local custom, decided 
 most criminal and nearly all civil decisions. These cus- 
 toms gave a complexity to the system of law which made 
 it at once necessary and profitable to fix one's practice 
 permanently in a provincial capital. By this means a 
 man became a specialist in a matter that required the 
 greatest industry to master; he was secure against an 
 overstocking of the market in so hard a business. The 
 confusion that these ancient customs made was increased 
 by a mass of conflicting and over-lapping jurisdictions^ that 
 had their source in the same immemorial conservatism. 
 It was a handsome living in itself to be able to give ad- 
 vice to clients as to the boundaries of these jurisdictions 
 or the chances of his case escapmg the interference of 
 a side court as third party. It needs no further descrip- 
 tion of such abuses to show what opportunities they 
 afforded to individual application, and how by mere ex- 
 ample they forced men to react towards simplicity and 
 reform. His first pleadings, however, did not last beyond 
 a couple of terms.^ 
 
 The friendship of De Conzi^, and the academic suc- 
 cess which had so well rewarded his first patronage, 
 led that bishop to offer Robespierre within a year of 
 his being called to the bar one of the minor judicial 
 
 1 For instance, in Arras itself there were the Seigniorial Courts, the 
 Bishop's, the King's and that of the Abbey of St. Wast, all existing side by 
 side, with ill -defined jurisdictions ; and superior to them all, though 
 possessing no very exact powers, the provincial Council instituted by 
 Charles V. in 1530. 
 
 = Michaelmas, 1781, and Hilary, 1782. At the end of the latter term 
 he was ofiered the post I speak of. 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 63 
 
 posts within his gift. He was installed a magistrate 
 in the ecclesiastical court. Insignificant as the office 
 was, it carried with it, in the wretched conditions of 
 the times, the power of life and death. Within a few 
 months its duties disgusted a character in which the 
 demand for reform and the faith in Rousseau, if pedantic 
 and reiterated, were yet profoundly sincere. This dis- 
 gust, springing in the main from his tenacity of opinion 
 and a just estimate of the ignominies of the criminal 
 law, was undoubtedly heightened in the case of Robes- 
 pierre by the foibles that already warped his attitude 
 towards the world. He was not without nervousness; 
 his judgments, like his style, erred continually upon 
 the side of sensibility. The classes also which lay 
 in misery below his own somewhat perturbed his cul- 
 ture, as they certainly much more excited his sense 
 of justice. It may have been as a general conse- 
 quence of its duties that he resigned his place; it 
 would seem more probable, as his sister directly testifies, 
 that he abandoned it under the shock of having to pass 
 a capital sentence.^ In any case he begged to be 
 relieved of the office, and lost by that decision neither 
 the respect of his benefactor nor the prestige he had 
 begun to enjoy among his neighbours. 
 
 He returned to his ordinary practice, and his success 
 was immediate ; but from the outset he mixed with that 
 success a characteristic reputation for scruple. He wished 
 to be singled out for his justice and his defence of the 
 poor. He introduced into the most particular cases the 
 most general and inopportune considerations — but he 
 continually won his case. He won a case for the Carnots, 
 whom he already knew, recovering a legacy for an old 
 servant of theirs; but he so dragged in the immutable 
 principles that the younger Carnot swore at him in court. 
 He gave the most excellent advice to a man who had 
 
 > "Memoirs of Charlotte Bobespierre," first edition, p. 69. 
 
64 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 been disinlierited. under a will that left a large fortune 
 "under condition of joining the reformed church"; the 
 will was null at law, but Eobespierre could not be content 
 with saying this and giving legal reason, he adds in his 
 advice to his client (a priest), " Remember that there is 
 no more formidable enemy to liberty than fanaticism." 
 
 A much more famous case, one that went far on appeal 
 and that, by the nature of the case, brought his name for 
 a moment before the eighteenth -century philosophers, 
 was a defence of the wealthy Vissery who had put up a 
 lightning conductor on his house at St. Omer, and had 
 thereby so aifrighted an old maid, his neighbour, that she 
 prosecuted him and his conductor as a public danger. 
 It was ordered to be pulled down. On appeal this was 
 reversed. On further appeal (when Robespierre is em- 
 ployed) the final decision was a kind of compromise. 
 The mind of Robespierre was made for such a case. 
 Here was philosophy and all the light of the century 
 called into question ! Here was Franklin to be de- 
 fended ! The very narrowness of his sincerity and zeal 
 lent him power, and in a little while, what with his 
 rising name and the nature of his brief, a certain fame 
 spread about his subject. After winning his case 
 in May 1783 (a bare year since he had accepted the 
 magistracy of which I have spoken, and within a few 
 months of his resignation) he was permanently estab- 
 lished in the reputation that led at last to Paris. 
 
 Of the years that follow not very much has been 
 preserved ; their general tenor and the further foundation 
 of his good position alone is certain. A few letters, one 
 specially famous, a few decisions, are all the documents 
 that remain. It was during this period of his early 
 manhood, as he approached his thirtieth year, that he 
 added to his legal work the literary industry I have 
 already described. It is to these years also that belong 
 the vague traditions upon which a faint legend rather 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 65 
 
 than a history has grown. There was some talk of a 
 marriage between himself and his cousin, Anais Des- 
 horties.^ The project was not pursued, and certainly 
 neither here nor at any other time can you connect Jiim 
 with a romance. Even at the very end, when he felt 
 that he was leaving the world and walked at sunset in 
 Thermidor with Eleanor Duplay up the wooded hiU of 
 Passy, the woman with him was not near to him. The 
 vague attraction of his voice and the false appeal which 
 his over-sensitiveness produced led to this or that passage 
 of sentiment, but — almost alone of the men of the 
 Kevolution — he brings in no interest of love. 
 
 These years, in every rare detail that survives, em- 
 phasise the absorption into one social class of which 
 I have spoken. He never signs without the " de " ; he 
 addresses Camot by that title on his reception into the 
 Academy. His dogmatic liberalism spares the Churches, 
 maintains the decencies, and is concealed by all the 
 habits of the old rank which he has recovered. Ten 
 men were present when — at the close of this period — 
 he received the Duke of Guines as a guest of his literary 
 society. He was careful to allude to "citizens" in 
 his address, but the ten men who heard him were all 
 noblesse — of the sword or the gown. In his daily life, 
 too, he merged with the industrious but protected class 
 which these accidents indicate. He woke at six, worked 
 in his study till eight, pleased by the sound of birds. 
 Then he would spend the ample care that fashion 
 demanded upon his person. The barber came to shave 
 and powder him; he drank his glass of milk and went 
 out across the square to the courts. They rose at two, 
 and when he had returned to the principal early meal 
 that is still the custom of the north, he walked abroad 
 a little ; sometimes for the stiff ritual of his calls, more 
 
 ' The daughter of his father's sister. She later married a lawyer of 
 Anas, and died in 1847. 
 
66 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 often alone. And these walks, in which his solitude 
 followed that of his literary master, he would enshrine 
 in amiable but unimportant prose. He arranged his 
 papers for the evening, supped, worked again in his 
 study for a while, and slept at ten. And these very 
 common habits of his time and profession he coloured 
 only by a meticulous regularity and by a curious self- 
 absorption. He was by nature absent-minded ; somewhat 
 from shortness of sight but more from the bent of his 
 temper; over-thoughtful in the street, even forgetful of 
 immediate things and details; a little silent amid the 
 conversation of his friends. 
 
 With all this he did not miss at all the general tide 
 about him; he was ready, months before the States- 
 General met, to address an audience as "the possible 
 makers of a new world"; his written advice in two 
 legal cases — one concerning the rights of Bastards, the 
 other a Lettre de Cachet — are a little more certain, a 
 little more forward even than the general average of 
 the assertions and passages which announced the coming 
 change. 
 
 He was, then, by his established repute, by the known 
 bent of his poUtics, by his freedom from all entanglement 
 and by the expository position he had acquired (in the 
 district men already expected his pleadings and his 
 essays), marked out for a place in the new politics. In 
 the August of 1788 the news reached Arras that the 
 States-General were to be summoned; he launched at 
 once his pamphlet or manifesto: "An Appeal to the 
 Artesian People." 
 
 This pamphlet, an octavo of some eighty pages, has 
 a quality of immediate and practical appUcation which 
 was rare in the run of his appeals. It contains, of 
 course, a certain excess of frigid oratory. That was 
 not his alone: it was the time's. But it has also a 
 certain detail of analysis 5 it expresses a number of 
 
DESCENT AND YOUTH 67 
 
 definite grievances peculiar to the province, and, what is 
 more remarkable, it deals exactly with the historical 
 origins of the peculiar complexity of jurisdiction and 
 tenure under which Artois laboured. It meets and expects 
 the practical arguments of opponents. It was bought and 
 read immediately, and its edition was exhausted.^ It 
 made more sure what was already sure — his candidature ; 
 it placed him higher in the order of election than, for 
 all his solid reputation, his youth might otherwise have 
 permitted. 
 
 The decree fixing the nature of the elections and 
 the number of the Commons appeared in January 
 1789. In March he issued, not a pamphlet, but a 
 direct and personal declaration of his candidature. 
 Moderate as it is, one can find in it the self-regard and 
 the self-mirroring of '94 — and it closes with this sen- 
 tence, five years before its time : " The Supreme Being 
 will hear my prayers. He knows their sincerity 
 and their fervour. I can hope that He will fulfil 
 them." 
 
 In Arras the election was complicated to a degree. 
 I will not weary my readers with its recital. In the 
 first general meeting he was chosen. In the second 
 electoral college he was chosen again — the 13 th out of 
 180 names. On the 26th of April, when the final 
 choice of eight members of the Commons was made, 
 he passed with some difliculty, the Sth upon the list, 
 and his political career began. 
 
 It is not the details of such a confused machinery 
 that interest history: it is the attitude of Kobespierre 
 during the last week of this trial. He seemed to have 
 found an atmosphere and to have awakened. He spoke 
 incessantly, eagerly, and well. He made himself the 
 mouthpiece of a protest of the Commons against the 
 
 1 I know of no original copy. In the form in which it may now be 
 consulted, it has received many later additions from bis pen. 
 
68 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 privileged orders ; ^ he helped to draw up the grievances 
 of the surrounding parishes : he had found his trade. 
 
 That exceptional energy spent itself in success, but 
 though exhausted in so few days it was typical of those 
 rare occasions in the life before him, when sudden (or 
 long-nourished but newly apparent) ambitions lifted him 
 from one step to another in his career. 
 
 On the first of May the united deputies of the 
 province met in the cathedral. On the morrow Eobes- 
 pierre went back into insignificance ; but the coach 
 was on the Paris road, and he knew that his stage was 
 to be the world. 
 
 ' This is bnt a conjectare, based npon an allusion to "a persistent and 
 interrupting lawyer " among the Commons, in a contemporary letter of 
 the Due de Guines. The Dake was president of the Combined Electoral 
 College of the Artois. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 VERSAILLES 
 
 Late in the afternoon of Monday, the third of May, the 
 deputies of the three orders began to fill Versailles. 
 With them life and an influence of crowds was poiu-ing 
 up the long valley, threatening the majestic Park, the 
 dead order and magnificence of the three avenues, the 
 formal trees, the silent regularity of the palace. Spring 
 introduced this advent of ideas ; the new leaves in 
 Satory, the easy airs, the clear twilight of lengthening 
 days mixed in with the promise of change; nothing 
 stood certain, but everything was troubled with expecta- 
 tion and renewal. This ferment working France and 
 the city had thrown out an essence — the Parliament. It 
 was to discover in itself the quality of a vintage, to 
 remember the oldest things in the soil and to create. 
 
 This force of many men turned corporate, this crowd 
 which was like all France caught in a mirror, mingled 
 with and passed through the throngs that Paris had sent 
 up, curious or applauding, to the royal town, and Ver- 
 sailles added to them all the gardens of her wide roads. 
 Eddies impeded the flowing of the streets ; the German 
 of the palace guard, the new political catchwords of the 
 populace, the last epigram of the cynics surrounded the 
 more famous as they were set down at their lodgings ; 
 faces that had already a vague reputation arrested the 
 crowd. Mounier from the mountains, where the first 
 protest had been read, half-drowned in the roar of the 
 Eomanche outside the hall; the long, hard visage of 
 
 Si^yfes, certain, dry as his pamphlets; the angry, great 
 
 69 
 
70 
 
 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 head of Mirabeau. Through all this, among the very 
 least of the new-comers, unknown in a mass of un- 
 knowns, Robespierre passed down with his few com- 
 panions, to the cheap sign of the Fox in the Rue Sainte- 
 Elizabeth/ 
 
 The little glories of Arras dropped off him into the 
 distance; he was lonely, and content to be lonely. It 
 seemed that in a new world so vast and so represen- 
 tative nothing could raise him from insignificance. In 
 that new world he began, from the very outset of the 
 debates, steadily and imperceptibly to rise. How ? The 
 contrast of his beginning and his end is so striking, and 
 its comprehension so vital to his story, that, before telling 
 of his first actions in the Parliament, I would state and 
 examine the problem it involves. 
 
 Robespierre in the Artois, successful, narrow, con- 
 fined to provincial destinies, and filling easily without 
 the strain of high ambition or of unfulfilled capacities a 
 place half inherited and wholly congenial, presented a 
 definite figure. That career of local conventions and 
 middling dignities, the best of what Arras could afibrd 
 and as ample as the little circle of the town permitted, 
 suited him, as did his careful, hardly fashionable clothes, 
 or the pedantic accuracy in accent and grammar which 
 often rises from the uneasy pride of a country town. 
 His rigidity of conviction was indeed suitable for great 
 scenes, but it was of its nature neither troubling as are 
 enthusiasms, nor pushed from within by destiny as is a 
 creative genius. Versailles could not find in him a for- 
 gotten principle to be revived, a new message to be 
 given, nor a great act to be accomplished ; and on that 
 account, because his principal quality of faith accepted 
 only what so many then agreed upon, and because of 
 
 ' This street, somewhat lengthened in the modem town, has become 
 the Bue Dupleasis. 
 
VERSAILLES 71 
 
 its very security and absoluteness, it is easy to imagine 
 him, had the Eevolution not called him from his Pro- 
 vince, living to old age a small unfamous life, to be 
 enshrined later in a biography of local worthies. In re- 
 habilitating the legal reputation of his family, and in 
 leaving a decent tradition to the freehold in the Eue des 
 Rapporteurs, he would have done enough and have been 
 thoroughly himself. 
 
 At home, therefore, he is an explicable man. Nor 
 will it prove impossible, as I hope this book will show, 
 to find a just place for him in his later domination, when 
 his name had become a sign in Europe, and was used 
 currently throughout France as the token of the Re- 
 volution. 
 
 But if the origins of his career present no problem, 
 and if even his latter tragedy is fitted to its time, there 
 lies between them a link that has constantly disturbed 
 the calculations of historians. For the first twelve 
 months of the Parliament, without interruption or per- 
 ceptible date of origin, his influence steadily increased 
 from a nonentity to a kind of fame, untU by 1790 it 
 was clearly seen that he might pass from that mere fame 
 onwards to the position of a master. The enormous 
 disturbance that wholly recast the society of his country 
 seemed to preserve for him some similar environment 
 from which he derived the nourishment of his increase, 
 and he grew continually in the same soU. What was 
 there in 1789 to indicate its presence? Into what 
 could the unknown and somewhat paltry figure strike 
 root at Versailles in the first brilliant months of the 
 States-General, where unanimity of purpose impressed 
 six hundred men, and was led by the best talent of 
 the nation? where wit and generosity and experience, 
 coupled with all the self-satisfaction of an exclusive 
 culture and of protected wealth, formed an area for such 
 a wide mind as Mirabeau's, and seemed repugnant at 
 
72 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 once to the incessant dogmatism of Robespierre's temper 
 and to tke species of idolatry upon which he was later 
 to depend. 
 
 A Picard, young without youth, very middle-class for 
 his pretensions, wearying with his reiterations the chance 
 few that met him, mediocre in literary ability though 
 touched by literary ambition; capable, apparently, of 
 little but affirmations (and these delivered in a voice of 
 no great strength, read through great spectacles from 
 manuscripts that desired, but were rarely permitted, to be 
 interminable), he was but a lost unit among the hundreds 
 whose rallying points were the trained advocacy of 
 Cazalfes, the laconic summaries of Si^yte, the wit of 
 Talleyrand, the loud facility of Maury, the proper liberal 
 breadth of Lafayette, the Irish energy of poor LaUy,^ the 
 knowledge of men that added distinction to the falsity of 
 the Archbishop of Aix, the early enthusiasms of Barnave, 
 and the dominating genius of Mirabeau. It is no wonder 
 that he was lost in such a summary of France and that, 
 had we nothing of the later time, he would remain all 
 but unknown. 
 
 The obscure, but firm position which, in spite of his 
 insignificance, he took up for himself at this outset of the 
 Revolution, the emplacement where he could repose, and 
 upon which was firmly planted the ladder of his rise, lay 
 in a little group whose place in the States-General, the 
 memoirs of fashionable contemporaries have minimised, 
 and which history therefore tends to take too little 
 into account. The Assembly, coalesced by an accident, 
 rejecting by an instinct common to all French dehbera- 
 tions the spirit of party (there were no political in- 
 heritances to preserve nor highly salaried posts to be 
 obtained), turned, not to registering the decrees of a 
 
 ' It must have been Lally's son that died, an old man, some six years 
 ago, in Soho. Poor and quite alone. Supported by the charity of the 
 French Hospital. 
 
VERSAILLES 73 
 
 government, but to the framing of true decisions that 
 were the fruit of living debates ; and it was led by several 
 and independent orators. To the extreme left, bearing 
 with them the future fortunes of the Keform, the Garats, 
 Volneys, St. Etiennes, Gr^goires, Barnaves — men whose 
 very names later stand separate and hostile— afforded at 
 that moment a solid nucleus round which the principles 
 of 1789 could crystallise and take on form. This at- 
 mosphere of an uncompromising theory was not so much 
 the most favourable, it was rather the only, centre of 
 action for a man destined to be a leader in the later 
 Revolution. Save these, no organic part of the Assembly 
 survived; rare individuals, disunited, "lived," and came 
 at last to be saved by Robespierre in '93 and in Ther- 
 midor to manage his death. They were but spectators ; 
 the actors of the change were the extremists of '89. 
 
 It may be asked how names, not yet famous, some 
 of them absolutely unknown, could find in an obscure 
 corner of that great Parliament the framing necessary 
 to their future renown and power ; the answer lies in 
 considering the nature of leadership in war rather than 
 the ordinary development of political life. The rapid 
 succession of the Revolution, each phase introduced by 
 arms, approaches much more nearly, in what may be 
 called " the physics " of its development, to a campaign 
 than to a political reform. Therefore the element in- 
 separable from a prolonged struggle— an element some- 
 times absent in the defeated camp but always present 
 upon the side that will ultimately be victorious — appeared 
 among the revolutionary leaders ; unknown or untried 
 men, many even that had seemed incapable of sound 
 general judgment, yet having in them an intimate sym- 
 pathy with the terrain and with the character of the 
 war, become of themselves the successful generals at its 
 close. 
 
 Now Robespierre was in no sense such a leader, but his 
 
74 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 reiteration of the Rousseauan theory threw him at once 
 among them, and the band in which he moved, himself 
 the least regarded, was altogether composed of such men. 
 They went on ahead of the Revolution, and as the great 
 laws were one by one decreed, these laws did but fill 
 up formulse which the extremists were remembered to 
 have pronounced. A fatality of success distinguished 
 such minorities throughout the movement. They al- 
 ready held as a faith defined what France as yet held 
 only vaguely by instinct: they could not fail to become 
 the depositories of the creed. So the Mountain in 1792 
 (hated for September, and repulsive to the Plain), yet 
 acquired the mastery of the Convention. So, earlier, 
 in 1 79 1 the Girondins of the Legislative, ridiculed a 
 little for their idealism, vain and at first defeated, yet 
 made the policy of the nation and accelerated the war. 
 So here at the outset, in 1789, the weak Left were to 
 dictate to a half-unwilling Assembly principles which the 
 event of every struggle confirmed. 
 
 They were certain ; and the tension of that certainty 
 of theirs became like a cord stretched to a special note; 
 when the note was sounded France without responded 
 in harmony. Faith, then, proved the strongest thing; 
 and the doubts of the pedants, the reluctant hypocrisy of 
 the Right, the invective of the last of the wits broke against 
 it. This was the gate by which Robespierre came in. 
 
 On the 4th of May, in a scene that a dozen re- 
 lations have rendered memorable, the States-General 
 met in the Church of Our Lady for the Veni Creator, 
 and filed out in order through the silent crowd to hear 
 the Mass of the Holy Ghost at St. Louis. Dressed ia 
 the black court suit that was uniform to the whole 
 600 Commons, in his sword and his silk cape, Robes- 
 pierre, mixed with a pomp and ritual that were congenial 
 to him, entered upon the career of debate which was 
 
VERSAILLES 
 
 75 
 
 to become his whole being. His mind that knew no 
 attachment to the theatrical, and had but little ap- 
 preciation of the dramatic, yet had, in common -with 
 that of every mystic, a sense of symbolism and a need 
 for externals. The scene in St. Louis, the liberal and 
 even startling sermon of the Bishop of Nancy, the shock 
 of the pubUc applause, confirmed whatever imagination 
 he had framed in Arras of the r6le of the States-General. 
 The vigorous origins that dignified the march of the 
 Commons into history, the unanimity that was their 
 earliest character, and the special form that their demand 
 obtained, provided his introduction to public Ufe; and 
 his nature, which was not devoid of timidity, and which 
 was easily convinced of isolation, received every en- 
 couragement to action when he found the Third Estate 
 so imbued with his Rousseau as to proclaim a theoretic 
 right on the second day of its session, and to insist above 
 all things upon a name: they would sit in one house 
 with the nobility and clergy; they would depend only 
 on the absolute mandate of the whole nation; they 
 demanded the title of National Assembly.^ 
 
 Such encouragement, then, moved him to action. 
 What form did that action take ? If he succeeded in 
 launching himself into a world that knew nothing of 
 him and desired but little acquaintance with the dryness 
 of chance provincials, it was by an extreme assiduity. 
 So negligible was his person, and so ineffective his 
 method of address at this date and with such an 
 audience, that one discovers the nature of his activity 
 only by putting together very various and meagre testi- 
 monies. For months the half-official Moniteur does not 
 mention his name; for half a year, even Barrfere with 
 his thousands of careful notes, misspells it ; upon more than 
 
 1 The term "National Assembly" was not, as has been pretended, 
 new or irregular. It had, indeed, no historical precedent, but it had 
 been, for five months before the Parliament met, the common phrase by 
 which it was described, even in the letters of the court. 
 
76 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 one occasion he is " Mr. X ," and his generalisations 
 
 are sometimes cut short in the reports by an ignoble "&c." 
 
 The States-General had not been sitting eight days 
 when the Commons heard for the first time the accurate 
 articulation and the weak but carrying voice which were 
 destined to become a vehicle of command and to assume 
 the power of the Republic. 
 
 It was on Tuesday, the twelfth of May, that he went 
 up into the Tribune to suggest an amendment to the 
 motion of Rabaut St. Etienne, who, in the general demand 
 that was rising for the adhesion of the nobility and the 
 clergy, and the unity of the Assembly, had attempted 
 conciliation and had urged the sending of a deputation to 
 confer with the two privileged orders and to attempt 
 their conversion. The amendment for which Robespierre 
 pleaded and which he laid on the table in form, was in 
 itself insignificant; partly from the uncertainty of the 
 procedure, partly because its author was unknown, the 
 amendment was not even put, but it is worthy of notice 
 not only as his first political act, but because it exhibits a 
 character which, for all his phrasing, was a principal part 
 of his later ascendency. He had the touch of assemblies ; 
 he grasped with rapidity their general spirit, distin- 
 guished it from its individual components, saw where 
 the avenues of persuasion lay, and had an instinct how 
 Parhaments might be led and how controlled. In this 
 amendment he had advised a double action consonant to 
 the separate characters of the two houses in question. 
 To the clergy, largely elected in opposition to the hier- 
 archy, and full of the new enthusiasm, he proposed an 
 appeal; to the nobles, whose majority he had justly 
 weighed, he would have sent nothing but a formal sum- 
 mons. It would certainly be refused, but it would con- 
 stitute an act and be of record.^ 
 
 * This, his first speech, we should know nothing of from the papers. 
 He spoke late in the debate, and his name was not yet known. We heat 
 
VERSAILLES 
 
 77 
 
 To see in this amendment an act of forensic judgment 
 it is not necessary to depend upon the doubtful appre- 
 ciations we may form to-day. The masterly grasp of 
 Mirabeau fixed upon Robespierre's suggestion; he may 
 have passed the sentence so commonly attributed to him 
 and declared that the young lawyer from Artois " would 
 go far, for he believed all he said " ; it is certain that on 
 this day (the first in which Mirabeau had so much as 
 heard of Robespierre) he adopted the proposal, and the 
 motion that Mirabeau brought forward upon the following 
 Monday, the 1 8 th, was in substance Robespierre's own. 
 
 The incident was the first example of a quahty I 
 have already described. Things that were very close 
 to him he could thus judge with accuracy, especially 
 if they had to do with the play of a deliberative 
 assembly, but in proportion as they were distant from 
 his immediate surroundings and foreign to the nature 
 of debate he lost his hold upon them. The close of 
 his life will show his ignorance of the provinces in 
 his hesitation to appeal to them ; of Paris in his law of 
 the 22nd Prairial; of the campaigns in his arrest of 
 Hoche and suspicions of Carnot, and especially of Foreign 
 Affairs in his crude abandonment of the intricate and 
 well-organised scheme that Danton had conceived in 
 
 1793- 
 
 Had the work of the Constituent Assembly proceeded 
 in a social medium more lethargic than that of France, 
 and had an incomplete and dangerous reform worked 
 itself out amidst the commonplace self-suflSciency of the 
 wealthy ; had that compromise, which so many have since 
 desired, been established; had the liberal nobility per- 
 suaded the squires, or had the commons discovered the 
 perils of the ideal, Robespierre would have moved securely 
 and low down in a society that was his own : his name 
 
 of it only in his own letter to Buissait at Arras, written on the 24th of 
 May. 
 
78 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 gradually assuming so mucli importance as to be correctly 
 spelt in the newspapers and his person becoming as well 
 known in drawing-rooms as that of a hundred others. 
 Ridiculed somewhat for his intense and narrow creed, 
 treated impatiently for dogmatism and self-repetition, he 
 would yet have formed a useful member of the committee 
 to which he was attached, he would have returned to 
 Arras full of little honours for the provincial town to 
 magnify, and would have found his life well content in a 
 society where order should have been established upon a 
 comfortable and gradual decline of power. 
 
 He was not of those who were then possessed with 
 the first driving energy of the new time, and it was with 
 frigidity and a slight astonishment that he saw the 
 great summer of '89 riot past him. In his social exacti- 
 tude, his phrases and his reticence, he was still the old 
 regime provincial I have described, and that other part of 
 him, the little shrine wherein he kept his principles as 
 hard as diamonds, did nothing for him in the interval 
 between the first orderly meeting of the States-General 
 and the days — nearly a year after — when Paris began 
 to take up an articulate creed of reform. Once that 
 desire was felt in the capital it was of necessity that this 
 man, whose peculiar quality it was to be the exponent of 
 one idea, should fill more and more the place reserved to 
 the functionaries of a creed, until at last a sharp moment 
 of fanaticism seemed to promise him a complete mastery 
 because he had always kept the faith. But of that crea- 
 tive passion which was to generous minds the principal 
 gift of the Revolution he felt as yet no breath, and even 
 later, when he had become a leader, it was long his 
 single service to enunciate and define as though no storm 
 blew. 
 
 His history, therefore, in a time whose every act merits 
 the detailed attention of Europe — for in that summer our 
 new life was founded — is but the history of an isolated 
 
VERSAILLES 
 
 79 
 
 mind. The great days that the Kevolt drove like a 
 charioteer, left him silent ; and amid all the reputations, 
 some that came suddenly out of the earth, and some that 
 fell as suddenly into contempt or nothingness, his alone 
 stood still, unmade and unendangered. He grew to be 
 somewhat noticed as a useful member of the Left ; and if 
 one gathers what little evidence remains of his interior 
 life during the whirlpool of June and July, one finds only 
 set phrases, the expected content in political success, a 
 little astonishment, and here and there an example of 
 that close but ill-selecting observation ^ which was the foU 
 to his perpetual abstraction, and to his common errors of 
 judgment. He spoke not unfrequently, always as un- 
 certain of his position before the Assembly as he was 
 certain of his thesis ; he was listened to very carelessly, 
 and reported more carelessly stilL 
 
 Once, indeed, during the whole two months he excited 
 some general attention and applause when he replied 
 with rhetoric of unusual strength to the Archbishop of 
 Aix, who had come, holding a piece of black bread, to beg 
 a grant from the Commons for the poor, but who desired 
 only to prolong the quarrel of the orders till an armed 
 reaction might reconquer privilege. 
 
 " You are the minister of a sublime religion which has 
 poverty at its foundations ... go and tell your col- 
 leagues that they need delay the Commons no longer 
 with the affectation of urgency ... for your canons 
 permit you to sell the very vessels of the altar in the 
 cause of the poor ; you have no need of such resources. 
 You have but to dismiss your liveries, and to sell your 
 coaches, and to empty your palaces somewhat ; you will 
 find ample material for largesse." 
 
 The style was inspired by Mirabeau, and though such 
 
 > Thus this (in his letter of the 24th) on Target : " . . . Every one was 
 on tip-toe to hear him, with his great reputation. He gave vent to a 
 number of commonplaces, which he very much emphasised, and we soon 
 saw that he was a greatly overrated man." 
 
8o ROBESPIERRE 
 
 passages were found more frequently in his speeches as 
 the Revolution advanced, they remained something exotic 
 to the literary flavour of his work. Had he been fitted 
 to achieve, or had he learnt that spontaneity which made 
 the first reputations of '89, he would have taken his place 
 far more rapidly before the Assembly and the caste that 
 still governed the nation : a caste to which in part he be- 
 longed. But he would also have fallen into the struggle 
 of violent parties, and have been lost very early under the 
 name of some faction. He would not have advanced by 
 that kind of subterranean way of his, unmolested, and 
 emerging at last into a secure popularity, above the 
 arena. 
 
 He did indeed, in the end of May, take a step 
 calculated to secure his position with his party. The 
 province of Brittany that is always the evening or the 
 morning star of France, that preserved and organised 
 the national spirit of Gaul when Rome fell, that alone 
 determinedly opposed the unity of the middle ages, 
 that is now proud of a picturesque isolation, was then a 
 foreruimer of the Revolution. Its deputies of the 
 Commons and most of its clergy^ joined to form a 
 society that was at Versailles the only definite and well- 
 arranged group of radicals : meeting first in the vault, 
 later on the first floor ^ of the Caf^ Amaury at the corner 
 of the Rue de la Pompe and the main road to St. Cloud. 
 The Left in general saw the tactical advantage of such an 
 organisation; Mirabeau, Barnave, Gr^goire, obtained admis- 
 sion, untU at last in June, with close upon two hundred 
 members, who met before each debate and drew up their 
 
 ^ The noblesse of Brittany bad taken tbe singular lesolntion of boy- 
 cotting the States-General. They sat at home and solemnly ratified or 
 rejected its decrees. 
 
 '^ At least that is the only way in which we can reconcile the 
 "Souterrain" of Montjoie (ii. 121), the "Cavern" of Damont, and the 
 detailed account that an eye-witness (M. Ang^) gave to M. Tb^nard 
 (who commnnicated it to Anlard) of the meeting in the first floor. 
 M, Aug^ remembered and preserved the chair of Bobespierre, 
 
VERSAILLES 8i 
 
 programme, they were easily the leaders of the Assembly. 
 This " Brutus club " Robespierre of course joined. But 
 he was not content with joining only. He was careful 
 to be among its earliest arrivals, he was present at its 
 least-attended meetings, and he thus gave evidence of 
 that instinct (for it was instinct rather than plan) 
 whereby he recognised the immense force which such 
 caucuses, disciplined and exterior to the main deliberative 
 body, exercise in politics. Such later, and with a power 
 irresistibly increased, were the Jacobins. 
 
 For the rest, he was still the minor official lost in 
 the general mass of the Assembly. His voice was not 
 heard on the day when the decisive step was taken, 
 and when Si^yes proposed and carried his last appeal to 
 the clergy and the nobility. When a week later the 
 Commons took the name of National Assembly, on the 
 1 2th of June, and began by that illegality the triumph of 
 ordered law, he was equally silent. Whether or no the 
 rehgious leaning of his character, and the love of ceremony 
 that was in it led him with Bailly to the procession of 
 the Corpus Christi, remains unknown ; we know that he 
 did not vote for the observation of the Feast. On that 
 famous Saturday, two days after, when the six hundred 
 deputies stood in the rain before the locked and guarded 
 door of their hall, he was but an insignificant point of 
 the gathering, catching from the rumours that reached 
 its further ranks the purport of the insult that the king 
 had offered them. He went in with them all across the 
 streaming pavement, and under the dull sky to the 
 Tennis Court in the Rue St. Francois ; he took, as others 
 did, the oath to give France a constitution, and signed 
 the roll with the rest. But all that increasing furnace 
 did not reach his heart or consume him, for there was 
 nothing in his mind inflammable, and David was inspired 
 by a later time when he drew him in that scene with 
 two hands upon his breast " as though he had two hearts 
 
 F 
 
82 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 for liberty." He must have stood at the foot of the 
 table whence Bailly dictated the vow, as reserved and 
 apart as he had remained in the Assembly; seeing in 
 that bare and memorable hall the scene of nothing 
 more than a natural political success. He assisted, silent 
 as ever, at the Royal Session of the following Tuesday, 
 and heard stubbornly, like any other of the Parliament, 
 the last vigorous pronouncement of the French Crown. 
 He remained with the deserted Commons at its close and 
 witnessed Mirabeau's gesture of defiance to De Br^z^ and 
 the angry repartee, which, like the majority of historical 
 phrases, has become permanent under an altered form.^ 
 Five days later the Commons had been joined by the 
 greater part of the clergy, and by that liberal nobility 
 of which Robespierre had himself given to a friend so 
 inadequate a description.^ 
 
 This crisis in the history of the National Assembly 
 renewed the opportunities in which he could appear; it 
 was the moment for deputations between the Commons 
 and the recalcitrants of the two orders, and the Com- 
 mons, strengthened in their revolt against the Crown by 
 the adhesion of so many clergy and of a few great lords, 
 rapidly assumed an assured position. When Mirabeau's 
 proposal to send a committee to treat with the king had 
 passed, Robespierre, because he already seemed to repre- 
 sent a group of the extreme Left, was chosen to join it 
 with Mirabeau himself, Pdtion, Buzot, and the rest of 
 the twelve. It was on Friday, the loth of July, that 
 the committee or deputation attended at the palace to 
 urge the king to yield. We have no record of how this 
 
 1 Mirabeau's own words — at least as he himself relates them in his 
 thirteenth letter to his constituents — are much tamer than the famous 
 •• we are here by the will of the people." They are longer, and end with 
 "... then you must ask for the employment of force, for we shall not 
 leave our places save under the pressure of bayonets." 
 
 " In the letter of the 24th of May. " Reasonable men, in very small 
 number, and even they not exempt from the prejudices of their class. . . ." 
 Moreover, he confounds Lafayette and the Due d'Orleans in one batch 
 
VERSAILLES 83 
 
 second personal interview with the king, whom he had 
 not addressed since the speech-day at Louis-le-Grand, 
 affected Robespierre ; ^ but we know that the king's reply 
 was a declaration of war against the Assembly. On the 
 morrow Necker was dismissed, and with the loss of that 
 self-sufficient banker, the Parliament at Versailles, and, 
 what was of greater moment, the liberal opinion of Paris, 
 knew that the king had abandoned the respectable solu- 
 tions of half-foreign philosophers, had ignored the tide 
 of France, and had taken refuge with the soldiers. He 
 had determined to appeal to the swords around him, to his 
 nobiUty, and to the emblazoned traditions that still hang 
 like a vain and antique ornament upon western society. 
 But the result of the conflict neither the Assembly, nor 
 the Crown, nor the nobility could guess ; a real France, 
 full of the old epics, of laughter, and of tragedy, rose up 
 and enthroned herself and dwarfed them all. 
 
 AU the world knows what followed the dismissal of 
 Necker : Camille Desmoulins running into the garden of 
 the Palais Royal with the news, astonishing and rousing 
 the Sunday morning crowd ; the Monday spent in arms ; 
 next day, the 14th of July, the fall of the Bastille and 
 the capitulation of the Court. 
 
 Robespierre was not among the hundred deputies 
 that went to Paris on the i Sth at the instance of the 
 king, with Bailly at their head, and found the town 
 "like a wood of muskets," but he was appointed to be 
 one of the second hundred that accompanied the king 
 the next day, and that saw him receive at the Poissy 
 gate the keys that Henry IV. had accepted, when, two 
 hundred years before, there had been founded that splen- 
 did power which was now stripped even of its externals. 
 He collected with care the signs of the popular feeling, 
 
 1 In a second letter of his (written on July 23rd) one might expect 
 some description of his feelings at the palace, but there is only a common- 
 place denunciation of the intrigues of the Court against the Assembly. 
 
84 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 noted the cheers for the nation as the king passed into 
 the H6tel de Ville, for the Crown as he came out of it 
 with the national cockade. Then for the rest of the 
 week, when the greater part of his colleagues had re- 
 turned to Versailles, he passed with curiosity rather than 
 enthusiasm over the sites which the struggle had rendered 
 famous, and heard for the first time the applause of the 
 street ; for every deputy of the Commons was deified at 
 that moment/ 
 
 With that experience, or rather with his return to 
 Versailles and the deputies six days later, closes the first 
 stage of his entry into public life. It had been passed 
 in a succession of scenes, each throbbing up higher as 
 water throbs with a rising energy from an open sluice, 
 until at last the old society in one day and night was 
 overwhelmed. He had come to the time when the first 
 emigrants began their fatal treason, when Cond4 had 
 passed the frontier, and when the king's younger brother, 
 the Comte d'Artois, had fled in company with that family 
 of Polignac which was later to ruin him and his house. 
 But all that drama had passed him by and left him still 
 similar to himself, secure in the narrow confines of his 
 exact intelligence, and quite untouched by passion. 
 
 We have a picture of his mind during those two 
 months, not only in the brief reports of his rare speeches, 
 but in two letters which he wrote to a friend in Arras, 
 the one at the close of May, the other just at the point 
 we have reached, when he re-entered Versailles after his 
 visit to Paris on the fall of the Bastille. In both, written 
 under what should have been such different conditions 
 of emotion, the same paleness of thought, the same 
 absolute phrases are to be discovered ; the same mixture 
 of sound general appreciations and astonishingly false 
 particular judgments. He sees that Mounier and Target 
 cannot last, but on the same page he calls Mirabeau 
 
 ' All this Is in his letter of the 23rd to Buissart. 
 
VERSAILLES 85 
 
 " nul," and gravely prophesies that his position will be 
 destroyed by the evil effect of his reputed morals. He 
 describes with enthusiasm the king coming bareheaded 
 to the Assembly to announce the renunciation of his 
 former claims on hearing of the fall of the Bastille ; he 
 puts some energy and much acuteness into his picture 
 of the king's entry into Paris. But the enthusiasm, the 
 energy, and the detail all express themselves in phrases 
 of a false ring. " Tyranny," " despotisms," and all the 
 simple extremes do service for the complexity of the 
 royal claim and tradition. The words lack stuff; he 
 can find no epithet for the conquered Bastille but " s^jour 
 delicieux," and the commonplace is the foundation of the 
 whole : for all the world like a sermon or a leading article. 
 The scaffolding of the old world had given way with a 
 crash ; the dust of the ruin still hung in the air, and the 
 noise of it was roUiug out to the kings beyond the Khine 
 and the Channel when this slight and rather dapper 
 lawyer, erect and often thinly smiling, was hurrying, 
 full of an amiable curiosity, through an armed Paris, with 
 national guards to show him the lions, and gratified by 
 the occasional applause of passers-by, who noticed a 
 deputy, but did not yet know so much as his name. 
 Underneath this grotesquely petty surface, and fixed 
 into this common spirit, there lay the certitudes upon 
 whose display the whole people would one day insist, as 
 upon relics or gems, till they came to worship the man 
 who always wore them as the imique furniture of his 
 mind. 
 
 The Versailles and the Assembly which he found on 
 his return from Paris were new. August and September 
 were an origin ; all the entanglement of existing and 
 legal privilege had been cut, and the great doubt as 
 to whether a reform would be possible or no was solved. 
 The Revolution had begun ; it was in order ; it was the 
 Law. To arrest it a counter-stroke, itself illegal and 
 
86 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 violent, would be needed, and the Crown had partly 
 lost the principal resource for such a counter-plan — I 
 mean the Administration, which in countries long or- 
 ganised as bureaucracies is a fine net holding in all the 
 state. The Administration where it was new (as in the 
 municipalities), owed its life directly or indirectly to the 
 Assembly; where it was old (as in the courts of law), 
 tended to admit its authority. There was indeed a 
 violent opposition to the majority in the now united 
 Parliament, but there was no open opposition to the 
 existence of such a Parliament ; unless indeed we count 
 that splendid scatter-brain who daily paced up and down 
 his solitary hour in the empty hall that had been the 
 House of the nobles, and thus made act and record that 
 there were still Lords in the constitution. 
 
 Now therefore, that the way to remodelling France 
 was open, there arose for reasoning men a necessity of 
 definition: renimciations and affirmations to baptize 
 democracy, and the recital of a creed which is the first 
 business of conviction if it is to be practical and to 
 build upon a sure design. With every formula an in- 
 stitution would be born, but the new things rose out 
 of the idea and were seen clearly in the mind before they 
 assumed words and passed on from phrases to reahty. 
 In such a sequence the function of Robespierre was clear 
 and his position at once enhanced and defined. He did 
 not rise above the obscurity of the first sessions, nor did 
 he outdistance as yet any of the lesser competitors for 
 popularity and fame; the medium of clamour was still 
 uncongenial to his destiny and temper. But it will often 
 be observed in the working of deliberative assemblies 
 that with the entry of a special point into the discussion 
 an unknown authority is revealed. He may carry but 
 little weight, yet he cannot but be heard since he has the 
 matter by heart and is ready upon every turn of argu- 
 ment ; in spite of ridicule and indifference his name 
 
VERSAILLES 87 
 
 cannot fail to pierce if only by the frequency of its 
 repetition. Here tlie matter of debate was the new 
 theory of society, and in that Kobespierre, full of con- 
 nected dogmas, was a specialist in the extreme. The 
 memory of Rousseau presided always in that hall, and 
 here a kind of shrivelled Rousseau, desiccate and incap- 
 able of development, but built of the elements of the 
 Rousseauan Book, appeared with a living voice. 
 
 There were present in France during the height of 
 that summer, through its failing harvest, and with the 
 turn of autumn when the vintage was ready, two great 
 movements side by side. The first of these was an 
 anarchy in the countrysides; mere humanity going for- 
 ward between the extinction of the old faint light and 
 the rare dawn. The second was the mind moving over 
 the face of such waters ; the Assembly, passing with the 
 rapidity of pure thought from definition to organisation 
 and casting decrees that only after years of warfare and 
 the innumerable moulding accidents of a century of ex- 
 perience have become the unquestioned laws of the 
 modem state. 
 
 Robespierre lived in this mind, hearing nothing of 
 the loud storm in France, and heeding only the words of 
 a debate ; but to appreciate at once his meagre quality 
 of insistence, the temper of those to whom it was 
 addressed, and the rising populace who later lifted him 
 upon their shoulders, it is necessary to see the Parliament 
 lit up by the burning of title-deeds and manors, chorused 
 by the noise of the new district clubs in Paris, calling its 
 orders over the roar of the furnace and doing everything 
 to the rising and falling of flames. Into the picture of 
 that conflagration, though it gave all its meaning to the 
 time, I cannot enter ; it is the business of this book to 
 examine not the Revolution, nor even the Parliaments, 
 but a mind isolated and feeding inwardly upon itself. 
 
 It would be tedious and of little purpose to recount 
 
88 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 every instance of his interference in the debates that 
 affirmed the rights of the citizen, that laid the founda- 
 tions of the Constitution and that destroyed the shell 
 of the old regime. He combated Lally's vague and 
 repressive motion of the 20th of July, proposed under 
 the terror of the provincial riots ; he combated it again 
 when on the 23 rd the Assembly passed it in the panic 
 that followed the lynching of old Foulon in the Place 
 de Greve. A month later he defended the four burghers 
 of Marienburg whom Esterhazy had arrested of his own 
 authority. Though his speech is lost he was one of 
 the many who opposed the word '' established " in con- 
 nection with public worship in the Constitution. At 
 the close of August he did two things very typical 
 of his abstractions. First he defined a necessary liberty 
 for the Press in terms that showed how completely the 
 organic aspect of the State escaped him, and how 
 thoroughly he was wrapped up in the conceptions of 
 individual contract; for he proposed the abolition of 
 all save private prosecution for libel. He saw that a 
 citizen could have a claim ; he did not see how the 
 more general evil of false news or of the corruption of 
 morals by a press in the control of a few might prove the 
 principal menace to the very form of society which the 
 Revolution was launching upon Europe. Secondly, he 
 wrangled hard for a word in connection with the right 
 of the nation to tax itself, thinking that with the phrase, 
 'consenting to the budget," all was lost, and with the 
 phrase, " establishing the revenue," all was saved. Sup- 
 ported by the bulk of the Left his first proposition passed ; 
 his second helped to modify the cause in question. He 
 was in all this but one amid innumerable speakers, but 
 it is pertinent to know that at this moment, and in 
 connection with the Press law, Mirabeau, who had 
 watched and followed his action from the opening of 
 the States-General, who was his colleague at the Breton 
 
VERSAILLES 89 
 
 Club, and who had, presumably, put him among the 
 Deputies of the loth of July, came closely into touch 
 with him and helped him into fame. 
 
 It stood to reason that he would support his friend 
 Lepelletier de St. Fargeau in his demand for an annual 
 parliament, and that he would denounce as a monstrosity 
 the royal power to veto a bill. There were occasions 
 when the Assembly saw in him nothing but unreasonable 
 logic incarnate, and refused to listen. Whether it was 
 he who cried out " dues, not rights '' during the " orgy " 
 of the 4th of August when the nobles were throwing 
 all their feudal privileges by the board, is not certain. 
 But he spoke with an approach to violence when, six 
 weeks later, the King hesitated to promulgate the aboli- 
 tion of those privileges, and in the first days of October, 
 just before Paris stormed the Court, he was still protest- 
 ing against the continued reluctance which Louis showed 
 in signing the Declaration of Rights. 
 
 Thus whenever some obstacle appeared to the facile 
 deductions of his politics, or some negation of their 
 absolute verity was heard, he hurried to the Tribune. 
 Thus, also, he was continually absent from it when the 
 detailed work and curious interests of that prodigious 
 Reform were the issue. To the end detail missed his 
 mind and fact disturbed it. But there are three occa- 
 sions very well worth observing, because they form an 
 exception to his earlier and more natural conduct, and 
 because they are the origins of that temptation which he 
 was to feel towards the crowd ; the first inconsistencies 
 and the first taste of idolatry that warmed and enlarged 
 whatsoever little in him could be enlarged or warmed. 
 This temptation when he yielded to it was to make him 
 more than a logician. It magnified his shadow till that 
 shadow enveloped the multitudinous strength of Paris 
 itself. 
 
 The occasion of the first of these inconsistent de- 
 
90 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 partures was when he insisted on the right of search and 
 on the opening of the private letters which Castelnau 
 was caught bearing (ten days after the Bastille) from the 
 Court to the King's emigrant brother. The Right quoted 
 Pompey burning the letters to Sertorius; and Eobes- 
 pierre, with an outburst half demagogic and certainly 
 divorced from his native pedantry, thrust into his speech : 
 " What care I for Caesar or Pompey ? " The second was 
 his demand that poor Besenval, who had but obeyed his 
 orders and taken command of the garrison of Paris be- 
 fore the revolt, should be detained in spite of the muni- 
 cipality's order for his enlargement. It is true he quoted 
 legaHty, saying that the municipality was not there to 
 arrest or to release ; they were not a court of justice. But 
 his motive in speaking was not legality; it was that 
 touch of the desire to lead and to appeal which was 
 beginning to work in him. He saw a vision of the 
 people moving. 
 
 The third step in his original development forms so 
 sharp a climax in the history of the Revolution and of 
 his own life, that it merits an ampler attention. 
 
 It was autumn. The feudal dues and the antique 
 parochial government had gone ; they had not been re- 
 placed. Forced labour had gone still earher ; the roads 
 lay unmended. The provincial tariffs were abolished in 
 principle, they were thought abolished in fact ; this popular 
 conception caused but longer wrangles and delays at 
 the custom-houses of the provincial barriers. Anarchy 
 multiplied that friction in exchange which had been the 
 curse of the old regime ; the harvest, barely sufficient in 
 amount, reaped by men uncertain of their market, dis- 
 tributed over broken roads and open to the passing mobs 
 of the Great Fear, failed the towns. 
 
 To the fixed revolutionary purpose with which Paris 
 had inflamed its soul there was added that great spur of 
 the soul — hunger. The young men and women fasting 
 
VERSAILLES 91 
 
 saw more than the lawyers knew; they saw the wide 
 descent to '93, and bread and equality made a mixed 
 desire. With the first days of October the mass of Paris 
 was set in motion by the folly of the Court. The guards 
 and the regiment of Flanders had sat at table on the 
 stage of the theatre in the palace. The white cockade 
 had been kissed and worn and baptized in the wine of 
 two nights; and a noble song, a separate thing in the 
 musical frivolity of the time, had touched that nerve of 
 loyalty which is the life of soldiers. There were con- 
 founded in this mad hope and in this chivalric treason, 
 nobles merely selfish, the Queen merely Hapsburg, — 
 perhaps also terrified for and determined on preserving 
 the future power of her child ; regiments of the French 
 blood, foreign mercenaries, and the King himself had con- 
 sented. That it was an armed menace to the Assembly 
 and hence to Paris and to the Kevolution was not con- 
 tested. Therefore the enthusiasm and high courage 
 which marked the small garrison of the palace did but 
 increase the anger of the nation and of the Parliament, 
 for it gave to this forlorn hope an appearance of energy 
 and of remote success. 
 
 On Monday the 5 th of October a driving storm 
 broke over Paris. Spontaneously, at the noise of a 
 drum snatched up, the streets filled with women and 
 a strength of four battalions, half an army corps, eight, 
 ten thousand grotesquely armed, bareheaded, singing, 
 pushed their faces against the wild rain and surged 
 up the half-impassable valley road with a vague but 
 terrible object in Versailles. Food, an equal right, the 
 breaking of the foreign pride in arms, but, more than 
 all, that great afflatus which makes of single souls in 
 such moments the parts and organs of a whole people, 
 pushed them on against the cold and the intolerable 
 gale. At their head, gaunt, dry-eyed and full of the 
 future, Maillard went, black and leading. Behind them 
 
92 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 followed a great host of struggling men dragging two 
 guns by lanyards and hauling on to the same unknown. 
 On the further side of the tempest they were marching 
 to the Republic and the great wars. 
 
 It was when the river had found an estuary and 
 when this unnumbered energy had enlarged upon the con- 
 vergence of the avenues in the great space before the 
 palace that Maillard, organiser and voice, chose out 
 twelve women and went into the hall of the Assembly. 
 Outside the parliament house was a perpetual noise like 
 the sea in easy weather ; the rain beat on their windows, 
 the mob moved and circled with a continuous trampling 
 and a general voice. Within there was the customary 
 order, and, at the entry of Maillard and his twelve 
 mothers, silence. 
 
 Very tall, long-visaged, pale, all dressed in close 
 black serge with no white at his wrists or neck, splashed 
 with the mud of twelve violent mUes and dripping with 
 the storm, this executioner's figure looked with eyes 
 over-bright at the Tribune from which there was expected 
 freedom and sufficient food for men. He then saw there, 
 short, contained, erect, the cold, small face, the neat and 
 careful habit, the new expectancy of Robespierre, who 
 answered the complaint of the hungry by demanding 
 an inquiry, by confirming the popular dread of secret 
 plots against the city, and who spoke in that extreme 
 moment for the extreme men of his kind. They had 
 been thought mere lawyers over-particular for exactitude, 
 they were now discovered to be the only hand which the 
 Parliament could reach out to the people. 
 
 His voice, that had something in it hard and im- 
 perfect, yet also was distinct, and in that moment he used 
 the modulations which can play upon a phrase. His eyes, 
 that were weak, found it possible in this high moment 
 to be direct and unveiled. The little committee of the 
 populace and their leader, older and more terrible by 
 
VERSAILLES 93 
 
 many years than his own youth, heard delighted the 
 enunciation of their own policy; they had received a 
 vigorous support from the Left and had savoured the 
 silent acquiescence of the great hall. They were con- 
 ducted and went out in silence. 
 
 Thus Robespierre first touched a thing that never 
 wholly possessed him and yet changed his exact course, 
 followed him in spite of himself and at last threw him 
 down from a high false place : power. 
 
 The days of October did not only bring him face to 
 face for the first time with the people, nor did they 
 only reveal to him and them for the first time the 
 unconscious tribunate within him. They also dropped 
 him, who had been lost on the periphery of Versailles, 
 down into the centre of Paris. 
 
 When the palace had been entered and when after 
 the hungry night the violence of the morning had 
 compelled the Court to follow down to the capital, the 
 capture of the King whom the populace thus brought 
 with them through the continuing rain was but a part of 
 their achievement. They brought also the oratory and 
 the metaphysics of the Assembly to the middle place 
 where the history and therefore the stuff and power 
 of France resided. The orators addressed an audience 
 worthy of them, so that they caught substance from the 
 complexity of the crowds; the metaphysicians found 
 their formulae turned to a gospel, because the people are 
 the makers of religion. Versailles stood upon a mono- 
 tonous unfruitful century of splendour, symmetry and 
 mechanical decay. It was a violent artifice run up by 
 mere wealth suddenly in a forest. Paris was fifteen 
 hundred years; a dense soil of dead things transformed 
 and fermenting, an infinite potentiality of production. 
 At Versailles there was not an inch of Gothic, a bare 
 corner of the Renaissance ; very little even of that earnest, 
 grotesque and learned seventeenth century, which is a 
 
94 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 battlefield and is therefore alive. All in its architecture 
 was the dead order of the younger Mansard and the 
 official last of Gabriel, nor was there anything in harmony 
 to respond to the enthusiasm of the attack or to the 
 chivalry of the defence. But in Paris if the Assembly 
 challenged the Christian hierarchy, Julian presided at 
 the council ; if they looked for a civic defence Philip 
 the Conqueror enrolled the bourgeois guard ; if the mob 
 rose they were joined from all the narrow streets by the 
 shadows of a hundred leaders ; if the nobility remembered 
 at last that the sword made a difference, the eldest son 
 of the Plantagenets stirred in the earth of Notre Dame. 
 
 Paris was ready for the highest energies, straining 
 like a runner at the crease, therefore when the few last 
 days of lonely debate at Versailles were over and when 
 the Assembly had met in the archbishop's palace on 
 the Island of the Cit^, waiting for the riding-school to 
 be prepared, everything was ready for the ultimate entry 
 of Danton, and the first stone of the Commune had 
 been laid. 
 
 It is evident that there was no immediate part for 
 Robespierre in the new life that this meeting of the 
 Parliament and the capital aroused, for he was not of the 
 kind who renew their power from without, or in whom 
 sudden accidents and friction light up genius. Never- 
 theless, when he was given to Paris by the chance of 
 October, a road was opened to him, for in Paris there 
 awaited him a world that could comprehend him: in 
 Versailles he had been utterly alone. 
 
 Versailles had neglected and silenced a man suffi- 
 ciently silenced and neglected by nature. He was a 
 gentleman, and was seen in the drawing-rooms, especially 
 in those of that half-noble set which played with theories. 
 But save perhaps a note of decent ridicule, what could 
 he add to them ? The rich, the world over, have one 
 appetite, which is for the sensation of novelty. He 
 
VERSAILLES 95 
 
 could give tliem nothing but phrases of which the very 
 servants at their tables were tired. Perhaps, now and 
 again the extravagance of his complete deductions might 
 startle some one hearer into a momentary interest, but 
 his conventional precision and all that rigid ill-ease 
 which marks the self-respecting provincial was so much 
 weight dragging him down into obscurity. There was 
 no populace, no middle class, only the awful and repeated 
 mediocrity of display, of superior mind and of patronage 
 in the smart, the intellectual and the liberal aristocracy : 
 three names for one thing. But in Paris, he that never 
 breathed largely, at least could breathe. In Paris was a 
 populace of whom he knew little, and who knew nothing 
 of him, but who made him an idea because he made an 
 idea of them; and, above all, in Paris there was that 
 professional middle class which was fitted with exacti- 
 tude to his expression, which had awaited hungrily 
 and which received with gratitude the tenacious re- 
 petition of truth that was his special function. To 
 one it was the pleasure of following out strict logic, to 
 another it was the pleasure of hearing affirmed and de- 
 fined what he had long held in the vague ; to all it was 
 the acceptation of a well-comprehended equal whose very 
 limitations were the virtues their rank admired. 
 
 In Versailles it was a little ridiculous to lodge away 
 down at the sign of the Fox, and to boast that four 
 farmers sat at table with one. In Paris a man might 
 lodge on the third floor of the Rue Saintonge, and have 
 all the world asking him to dinner; it was but an ad- 
 dress. The general life and the real interests of a capital 
 released his pride from a daily fret, and left him free 
 to his theories. 
 
 The six months that follow the entry of the Assembly 
 into Paris form a very natural division in the life of 
 Robespierre and are, at least, sufficiently marked out in 
 the general history of the Revolution to be treated as 
 
96 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 a whole. The deputies met in the great Hall of the 
 ArcWvdch^ on the 12 th of October 1789; at the close 
 of March 1790 Robespierre was elected president of the 
 Jacobins.^ 
 
 With that word "Jacobins" the key to his career 
 is in one's hand; for just what he lacked, and would 
 have continued to lack in the Parliament, that he found 
 and increased in the famous society which seemed later 
 half-identified with his name, and which gave him a 
 hold over all France. If he was more mentioned in the 
 papers, more recognised by the Court, and of some little 
 more influence in the national debates, it was because he 
 came to every effort with the armour that the Jacobins 
 were forging for him; because, also, if he was checked 
 (as he was for ever being checked), the Jacobins formed 
 a base for him and a fortress of retreat. 
 
 What was the nature of this society? How could 
 it lend such power to a man ? Whence came the great 
 rapidity of its growth, and why was it suited to him in 
 especial ? It was the new theory organised like an army ; 
 it was by its restricted room and numbers suited to an 
 individual; it expanded later because it was the one 
 mode in which the resistance of the people to reaction 
 could mould itself throughout the country. It was not 
 in the Assembly but in the club that Robespierre opened 
 his door on fame, and if we are to know Robespierre, it 
 is more important to comprehend this society than any 
 other part of all that made up the Revolution, and though 
 I leave an examination of its activity and character to a 
 later chapter and to a period when it controlled France, 
 I must here admit a note upon its origin. 
 
 In some way, upon which authorities have differed, 
 
 ^ It is remarkable that In the " Histoire des Jacobins " this fact is 
 omitted. Indeed, in the imperfect list of the first presidents of the club, 
 M. Aulard, having drawn it up from signed documents only, leaves out 
 the month of April 1790 altogether. The evidence of his presidency is 
 contained in a third letter to Buissart — that of April i, 1790. 
 
VERSAILLES 
 
 97 
 
 the Breton Club continued under another name when the 
 Assembly was transferred to Paris. By one testimony ^ it 
 appears iu the Place des Victoires, by another it is directly 
 transferred to the Rue St. Honors ; the general result is 
 that the members of the Breton Club, sooner or later — 
 probably in late November 1789^ — reunited in Paris. 
 Wherever they may have fixed their first meetings, it is 
 certain that by December 1789 they had hired the refec- 
 tory of the old Jacobin convent in the Rue St. Honor^, 
 at a rent of eight pounds a year.® 
 
 The Dominicans of the Rue St. Honor^, like their 
 more important house in the University and like every 
 religious establishment ia the capital, were in active 
 decay. Of their exact numbers I have been able to 
 discover no record, but their chapter-house, their library 
 was empty ; their walls ruinous. The Head received the 
 radical club with enthusiasm ; it was upon his proposition 
 that the monastery was opened to them and at his in- 
 stance that the low rent was fixed ; the members of the 
 House joined its sessions. In this broken and mouldering 
 place, set back in its dark courtyard and, as it were, secret, 
 the direction of the Revolution grew. From this it never 
 departed till, in Thermidor, the Revolution itself may be 
 said to have turned to decline. 
 
 In these first months of its life the society, though 
 already intense, was but little known. The public did 
 not attend it. No reports were published. Its gatherings 
 were small. We have hardly a record of it, save from 
 half-a-dozen royalist attacks, and of the month of April 
 which Robespierre presided only one quiet clerical debate 
 
 1 Thus Montjoie, a singularly unreliable man, will have it that the club 
 sat at 407 Place des Victoires, -independently of the Jacobins for sometime 
 after the formation of the latter. Bevillieu Lepeaux will have it that 
 there was no true continuity, &c. 
 
 2 Mounier says " at the beginning of 1790." That can hardly be just, for 
 De Lameth, an active member, recollected the admission of non-deputies 
 in December 1789. 
 
 ^ A. de Lameth, " Histoire de I'Asaembl^e Conatituante," i. 442 (note). 
 
 G 
 
98 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 has come down to us : the proposal of a cur^ to rest con- 
 tent with the advance reform had abready made. Nor 
 would even Eobespierre's election to its presidency at this 
 early date be worth mention were it not for the supreme 
 influence which the club was destined to acquire. 
 
 Paris, then, which gave him everything at last, was to 
 give him, even as early as the spring of 1790, his first 
 point of vantage in the chair of the Jacobins ; there he 
 was to be heard by the numerous witnesses who, by 
 the consistent policy of the club, included whatever in 
 the professional and trading classes was liberal and 
 distinguished. 
 
 The first months of obscurity were over and the day 
 was passed when (almost the last of his humiliations in 
 the court tovm) his absurd formula for the signing of law, 
 "Be this law sacred and inviolable for all," had called 
 forth the wit of a Gascon, and when the repartee " No 
 Anthems ! " had raised a great laugh all over the Assembly 
 at Versailles. A month of Paris had destroyed for the 
 wits the cultivated isolation in which such ridicule was a 
 weapon. He could now continually propose a phrase or 
 motion equally didactic ; the Assembly would neglect to 
 condemn it and the public would even applaud. 
 
 I have no space to detail his speeches upon the decrees 
 and laws that passed before the Assembly in that autumn 
 and winter with the order and rapidity of a train of 
 thought ; it must suffice to recall the principal occasions 
 upon which he spoke and the tone of his iaterference. 
 When, immediately after the arrival of the Assembly in 
 Paris, the lynching of a baker at a stone's-throw from the 
 Arch^v^chfe provoked the proposition of martial law, he, of 
 course, denied its necessity under any circumstances what- 
 soever. When in the next month it was discussed what 
 classes of citizens might be excluded from full citizenship, 
 he spoke, of course, for the actor, for the Protestant, and 
 for the Jew, simply asking whether they were not mear 
 
VERSAILLES 99 
 
 The Parliament, cautious and intent upon immediate 
 applications, selected and postponed. The Protestant, 
 appreciable in the nation, practically represented in the 
 Assembly, was fused into the new state. For the Actor, 
 what could be done ? A prejudice, still strong among 
 Europeans, regarded the continual assumption of emo- 
 tions always false and often evil, as a ruin to the character. 
 No law debarred actors from civic privileges, how could a 
 law restore their pubhc standing? The Parliament masked 
 the position with a resolution and passed on. As for the 
 Jews, his arguments were of no avail. The Assembly 
 adopted that theory by which they are regarded as a 
 tol«rated but alien colony, and gave them all the criminal 
 and civU privileges but left them under all the political 
 disabilities which such a definition involves. 
 
 On two occasions Robespierre came down from these 
 absolutes. Once when, like a lawyer, he spoke mildly of 
 a partial revolt organised by the old provincial Parhament 
 of Cambr&is, and once when in the debate on the size of 
 the new departmental bodies, he exposed in a really 
 practical application the Rousseauan view of Assemblies. 
 " If there are to be Assemblies, let them be large. A 
 small one works too well." For he had here, as every- 
 where, the weakening of arbitrary authority at heart and 
 the uplifting of that right to self-government which 
 resides in the individual ; a right that is easily deflected 
 by too able a representative body. 
 
 These debates, however, saw Httle of him and made 
 no great mark. His defence of the Jews is forgotten, his 
 pleading for the Protestants swallowed up in that of 
 abler men; what remains is the persistent attack which 
 he led against the fixing of any but a universal suffrage. 
 In this he very nearly appeared a leader, he was always 
 well up in the front of the attack and even showed a 
 kind of passion in his determination to oppose. It was 
 the whole of himself, the root principle of all : — for if a 
 
lOO ROBESPIERRE 
 
 criterion of wealth or standing limited the civic right 
 by ever so little, the Man was no longer the basis of 
 the State, but there remained only property, or land, 
 or letters, or some accident of the Man. From the first 
 proposal in early October to the final decree at the 
 close of January, he wore and broke himself against this 
 barrier, the foreign theory of the Assembly that the 
 privilege of representation was limited by the ability 
 to pay taxes. That he had grown greater in the process 
 is most apparent by the scene of the night of the final 
 vote; the storm of the 23rd of January. 
 
 He had so far lost hope that he recalled to his use 
 his legal training and offered wise terms. " Let the 
 Assembly suspend all action till the taxes were re- 
 arranged. If a certain minimum of direct taxation were 
 required to make a man a voter that would disfranchise 
 nearly all his own people in the Artois. The land was 
 largely on lease and the basis of taxation was narrow. 
 He did not ask a final decision, he demanded only a 
 suspension of the law until it should be made more clear 
 that only the very indigent were included in the dis- 
 franchised." 
 
 What was there in this that provoked such scenes in 
 the Manfege ? The Eight left their benches, and poured 
 into the floor of the hall, the noise drowned all speech, 
 and Robespierre was like a man standing under a steep 
 wave of assault. Why ? Because his proposal hinted at 
 the reversal of a decree, and the decrees of the Assembly 
 were to be laws graven. 
 
 This stands first in the political spirit of the time, 
 that everything the Assembly did was thought to be 
 done for ever. France, by an organic and spontaneous 
 fusion which a mind foreign to the French has called 
 " anarchy," was plastic for a moment ; it was the busi- 
 ness of that moment to model, while it was yet plastic, 
 what would so soon become a rigid society. The prin- 
 
VERSAILLES loi 
 
 ciples, therefore, that underlay their effort the Assembly 
 feared to depart from, lest by too long discussion and 
 the permission of too much yagary they should leave no 
 completed work at the end of their short two years. 
 
 Robespierre failed. The next day it was a law that 
 the electorate should consist of those who paid at least 
 some little tax ; that the elected must at least have 
 some little fortune. Of the wisdom of this it is no part 
 of my business to judge. The wisest, Mirabeau himself, 
 feared the wayward indigence of the ruined towns and the 
 dependence of the meaner peasants upon the seignorial 
 power ; and among the historians, Michelet himself con- 
 dones the fault. It affected the Revolution profoundly, 
 for it exasperated the discontent of Paris of which 
 Maillard was a hidden captain. It prevented the legal- 
 ity of what was there fated to rise, and made of the 
 egalitarian conclusions that were in the blood of the 
 Revolution and that could not but become its open 
 principles, a philosophy in revolt. 
 
 The two months that followed had less of his effort 
 in them than the character of their debates might have 
 warranted. They turned so largely upon judicial matters 
 that he, a competent authority, should have played a 
 greater part in them. But his reputation was no 
 longer for these things, and it was in the character of 
 Robespierre to note his own reflection in the popular 
 mind. When a renewed incendiarism destroyed the 
 country houses, he was still vigorously opposing martial 
 law, and clinging with a false pedantry to his phrases. 
 He used in a speech the legal jargon of a lawyer and 
 spoke of " arson." A deputy of the Right became a little 
 angry and cried, " Call them brigands.''" " I will call them 
 citizens accused of arson." "Oh! call them brigands 
 and have done with it," " I will confine myself to the 
 exact truth and call them citizens accused hut not yet 
 proved guilty of arson." That interlude shows one all 
 
I02 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 his thinness in the debates of the late winter. But 
 this exact and unreal method raised him, for it was 
 the principal contrast to the old regime and showed, 
 alive, the new Keason on which men feasted. He did 
 indeed stand apart in a memorable way in the debate 
 on the monastic orders, but this, which was the origin 
 of a whole attitude towards the clergy, I describe later. 
 It must suffice here to insist upon the theoretic character 
 of all he said throughout February and March. 
 
 Such an attitude was meant for the Jacobins, and 
 very steadily, without intrigue, he was made prominent 
 by their ternper. So at the end of March they elected 
 him to the chair. He was not yet the first nor near 
 the first. Barnave was their orator, Duport their 
 head, Mirabeau their attendant. But he had been re- 
 cognised. His special fitness for the management of 
 debate, his quasi-official quality, had obtained an oppor- 
 tunity. Neither he nor those who saw him there forgot 
 its exercise. This little thing, the choosing of the 
 extremist for a minor honour, was almost the last act 
 of the united reformers. With April a man of acute 
 observation would have seen the first appearance of two 
 resistances that were to split the State; the real power of 
 the King, the postulates of the Church. These wedges 
 had by the summer made wide clefts, within a twelve- 
 month they had turned the Revolution from prose to 
 vision; at last they brought forth '93 and there was 
 nothing but war. 
 
 • ••••• • 
 
 Such was the uneventful process of his entry into the 
 politics of his country. It was a year since he had left 
 Arras for the Parliament. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 PARIS 
 
 Since I am unravelling in this book tne tracK of an 
 individual and solitary mind, I discover myself to be 
 perpetually neglecting the medium in which that mind 
 acted, the medium which it so strangely neglected, and 
 yet which chose to exalt it utterly beyond its due. I am 
 neglecting the Eevolution. 
 
 It is impossible rather than difficult to combine that 
 mind with those surroundings. The main fact which 
 has impressed itself upon me, as I have learnt more 
 and more of what Robespierre might be — the contrast 
 and dissociation between himself and the time that 
 deified him — forbids any just weaving of such separate 
 textures. I have shown him a nonentity; I am about 
 to show him a laborious aspirant ; I shall show him in 
 the end a symbol, and at last a victim to his own mis- 
 understanding of the illusion that made him a chief. 
 Yet that would be no story of himself which did not 
 pause here and there to consider the prodigious changes 
 in the landscape through which — blinded by a distant, 
 unapproachable, and perhaps imaginary goal — he was 
 passing. 
 
 The world he had entered in May 1789 was full of 
 a great, vague, gentlemanly hope, but it was strictly con- 
 fined to the traditions of its ancestry. It could think 
 only in terms of its decadence. Its physical metaphors, 
 its immediate appreciation of thmgs, were drawn from a 
 dying society. In ten months something — I will attempt 
 its outline, but none can pretend to its full presentment 
 
104 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 — had brought forth new terms, new postulates, even new 
 physical details in the habitual experience of the mind. 
 A tide set contrary to the common sequence of change : 
 men thought, as it were, in the future ; their memories 
 were warped or transfigured by the expectation of that 
 which they were making, as, in more ordinary times, 
 our picture of what we are makiag is warped or trans- 
 figured by the colour of our memories. Whence came 
 that more than natural impulse? From without; for 
 it is not in men to think beyond themselves. From 
 what outer region did it come ? I will hazard the reply 
 that the energy and self-development of that high moment 
 came from the infinite past of which we, each of us, bear, 
 more tenuous but far less mortal than our troubled selves, 
 the living ghost. The tribe was awake ; the village ; 
 the clan marching in the hills. The man that had made 
 the world was asking himself again those prodigious ques- 
 tions which once, in his beginnings, he had answered with 
 immediate simplicity: he had slept and was refreshed, 
 therefore he attacked their solution with a morning 
 vigour ; but he had slept and had forgotten and his lair 
 had grown tangled in his sleep. How was it no one 
 asked him counsel on the wars ? Who was this he was 
 obeying ? Where was the common sanction and the sign 
 of the chief ? How was this, that he was tried and con- 
 demned by some foreign influence, and why did he tremble 
 before strange judges ? Where were his neighbours that 
 had the sole right to judge a man ? How came he to 
 be without land or arms ? Where was God ? He had 
 slept in complexity, and complexity had stifled his sleep. 
 But for all the tortuous errors and overgrowths of 
 time there is a remedy, and that remedy is the blood in 
 us ; the fields and the rivers. The old thing out of which 
 we draw (what they used to call the Mother of the Gods) is 
 simple and resolves all things bac^^ward into simplicity 
 it never dies in the souls of men. Therefore when once 
 
PARIS 105 
 
 in a thousand years accumulated evil by some quick acci- 
 dent arouses nature, all the state grows young and is ready 
 to combat — a new religion leaps out like a sword. Its 
 unity and simphcity are keen like the edges of a sword. 
 It cuts off the bonds of men so that they wonder how 
 bonds were ever laid on them. In these moments it is 
 easy to rebuild a world : and then time comes in again to 
 corrupt, and corruption awaits another resurrection. 
 
 All this (which is Nature herself in whom we repose) 
 ran up the central life of the Revolution and drove it. 
 Its rhetoric would seena meaningless or puerile, its 
 exaggerations grotesque, had there not been left the 
 Poets whose function it is to reconcile with our sober 
 admiration and with the vast self-sufficiency of normal 
 times those fantastic strainings out to the things beyond 
 the world. Among these, two of the greatest, Shelley 
 and Hugo, have caught the union of that effort with 
 the fruitful seasons, mingling the Revolution and the 
 winds in the noise of united verses ; making '93 a storm 
 of rain before harvest. 
 
 Now this character of the Revolution, by which it 
 could create as though from a void, had in a summer 
 and a winter passed, as it were, through generations of 
 development. All the new things for whose secure 
 establishment we should of right demand a long space 
 of time and the opportunity for a slow forgetfulness, 
 here stood out fresh, untrammelled by memories. For 
 it was in the nature of this crisis that the immediate 
 past fell out of sight altogether. There stood between 
 '89 and '90 the strange barrier between sleep and waking ; 
 and the Assembly in Paris in the second spring took up 
 the thread of immemorial rights, left vaguely unremem- 
 bered the motives of the last generations, precisely as 
 a man waking recovers his identity of yesterday and 
 leaves to an instantaneous dissolution the thin dreams 
 of the night. Whatever in dreams is awful or confused 
 
io6 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 or madly inconsequent, and whatever in them provokes 
 their flight back into nothingness, that quality attached, 
 in the mind of 1790, to the old disorder. It is a 
 prodigy whose appearance in history is too rare for an 
 exact comprehension. I know no metaphor to present 
 it save that which I have used. 
 
 It was in May that these six hundred Commons had 
 met all dressed in the order of their rank and doubtful 
 on particulars of pride. What had happened in eleven 
 months when with April a new spring brought in the open 
 road for Paris and for Robespierre ? In that past May the 
 provinces, jealous, lethargic, wrapped in a ragged heraldry 
 of centuries,^ sent up their anarchic complaints from their 
 ill-attested census and doubtful boundaries : in this April 
 France seemed over-clearly mapped into the exact de- 
 partments, oppressed with statistics, ranged like a model. 
 In that May a confused and interwoven tapestry of ranks 
 and privileges, real in the mind of each however unreal in 
 the eye of government, were the whole texture of society : 
 in this April their very names had almost passed out of 
 debate or argument. In that May — a thing to us in this 
 country and at this time impossible to seize — all the 
 nerves of power ran up and met under a strict and 
 corrupt court, or, in the strained tangle of the old regime, 
 broke somewhere on the road and left the executive 
 paralysed : in this April there was hardly left one power 
 that in law could clash with another, nor any part 
 absolute in the State, but all its functions were co-ordinate 
 and their mutual reactions defined. The long agony of 
 the land, the death of feudalism ; the abrupt decline of 
 monasticism, its exhaustion and silence; the arbitrary 
 courts, half living and half dead under the weight of 
 custom and of the unquestioned, distant crown ; the 
 
 ^ For instance, Beam refusing deputies ; sending them only in 
 August 1789 : insisting that no customs should be changed. By Jlarcli 
 1790 it was quietly become " the department of the lower Pyrenees." 
 
PARIS 107 
 
 hundreds of dark uncomprehended titles, the " Consuls " 
 of the South; the corporations, the privileges, all had 
 wreathed up suddenly and gone. The void was filled. 
 Upon all those new arrangements that seem to us to 
 bear too sharp a mark of rigidity there was then cast 
 not the softness but certainly the colour of youth, and 
 the palace rose to music, and if the light was hard it was 
 hard with the hardness of morning. 
 
 Amid such origins the presence of Robespierre took 
 on something established and permanent; the standard 
 by which he would have remade all the State was 
 common to the mass of men about him, but he repeated 
 its formula and applied its test with a regularity and 
 consistency that were not yet grown wearisome and that 
 even seemed like safeguards amid so much perplexity. 
 For with the new society which the opening season of 
 1790 proclaimed, the first reactions also, the first 
 resistances and the first menace of confusion ap- 
 peared. 
 
 For the moment he gauged with extreme accuracy 
 every element in his position — or rather his open and 
 reiterated catechism of reform fitted exactly the con- 
 victions of his neighbours. Thus he slid, as it were, 
 from the Provincial to the Parisian. In his quarrel with 
 Beaumetz^ he insisted upon a fiscal change in the 
 Artois, upon direct taxation, that burden most odious to 
 peasants, in order to qualify his reluctant Artesians for the 
 vote, that privilege most desired of the poHtical crowds 
 in the capital. Again, when Desmoulins praised him in 
 
 * Beamnetz was a noble, head of the council of the Artois, and a 
 coUeagae and opponent of Robespierre's in the States-General. When 
 the suffrage was limited to taxpayers, Robespierre pointed out that the 
 form of tenure in his province would disfranchise the majority of farmers : 
 true to his principles, he proposed to impose a direct tax in order to in- 
 clude them among active citizens. It may be imagined with what eager- 
 ness Beaumetz seized upon the occasion to attack. Robespierre's reply Is 
 contained in a rare pamphlet, published by Pettier, of Lille. 
 
io8 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 his paper for having half- insulted the Court,^ Robespierre 
 at once and vigorously denied the words ascribed to him. 
 He was indeed, after another year of steady advance, to 
 become the voice against the Crown, but he achieved 
 that fame by no human excess of language; he kept 
 consistently to his formulae ; he worked not against the 
 character and person, but against the glamour and tradi- 
 tion of the King; he escaped the charge of demagogy, 
 yet he undermined the base of the royal power. To 
 speak constantly of " the executive," to call the King 
 " the salaried agent of the nation," ^ to urge, and to help 
 in passing, the resolution that forbade him to declare 
 war,^ were the expressions of a political attitude. There 
 was throughout his political activity at this moment a char- 
 acter of careful and continuous effort that closely resembled 
 the legal work at Arras : he put into his daily speeches 
 in the Manage, and into his nightly repetitions of them 
 at the Jacobins, the regular assiduity of a country prac- 
 tice, filling up his hours as punctually and methodically 
 as he had filled them in the bare room of the Rue des 
 Rapporteurs. Though he spoke almost daUy, and some- 
 times at a prodigious length, yet every speech was 
 written out in that small, cramped hand of his, covered 
 with erasures and re-erasures, laboured with a pedantic 
 nervousness in the choice of words. These reams of 
 manuscript, read out through spectacles, scheduled,* 
 annotated, the occupation of unvarying mornings, are 
 the chief witness to the nature of his success. In '89, 
 
 ' Calling the Dauphin "Marmot." See BSvolutions de Frrnice et de 
 Brabant, No. 28. 
 
 " It was on the 17th May that he called the King " Premier Commis 
 de la Nation " — a phrase the Assembly shouted down. 
 
 ' So I call for shortness the refusal o£ the Assembly to give in to 
 Mirabean, and to let the King hare the initiative in the declaration of 
 war (22nd May). 
 
 * Consider this contrast. Not a note of Danton's remains. England, 
 France, Germany, even America contain everywhere, in private and publio 
 collections, the MSS. of Bobespierre, 
 
PARIS 109 
 
 at Versailles, very little regarded; in the winter and 
 spring of '90 familiar at last to the small group of 
 Jacobins, and already a target for the conservative 
 pamphlets, his progression through the summer depends 
 upon and is explained by this unwearying industry. If 
 the word can be used of a mind and body so acute, he 
 plodded. 
 
 What, then, was the ultimate nature of his renown 
 when, with the end of the summer, he had risen into 
 the first rank ? Why, that he had come to stand for 
 a fixed mark, for the certain repetition of what nearly 
 all men held to be the prime theory of government. 
 You bought your Bivolutions de Paris; you read regu- 
 larly your Moniteur, your Patriate Frangais, your Ami du 
 Peuple, even your Ades des Apdtres ; and daily you found 
 Robespierre attacked when you would have been attacked, 
 praised for what you wished to see praised, printing what 
 you wished to see printed and firm. The image was 
 colourless, and the more enduring for its lack of colour. 
 It was fixed in the public mind as popular arithmetical 
 rules are fixed in it ; repetition, unquestioning acceptance, 
 the test of repeated applications, affirmed it. Men knew 
 that they themselves were at once passionate and tempted ; 
 they saw their own foibles reflected even in the grandeur 
 of others. This compromise, that angry cry, another's 
 friendships were suspicious from their very emotion ; 
 they betrayed politicians like you or me, too violent for 
 judgment, perhaps, or perhaps bribed by the Court, or 
 perhaps using the Revolution as a means to power. With 
 Robespierre — a stencil, a fixed outline — there could be 
 no danger of such vagaries. That he was mechanical, 
 uncreative, was the condition of his eminence.^ He was 
 
 ' Here is one instance out of hundreds of the way he could say just 
 the commonplace thing that the public desired to hear. When a certain 
 number of Americans (and the Americans served as a model for the earlier 
 Eevolution) presented themselves at the bar of the Assembly with one 
 Paul Jones at their head, and begged to join in the first feast of the 
 
no ROBESPIERRE 
 
 like a seal of metal with whicli Paris could be sure of 
 registering its official words. 
 
 One principal matter occupies the history of 1790 — 
 the Civil Constitution of the clergy. From this the grave 
 disorders of '91, the tragedies of '92 were to proceed. 
 The attitude of Robespierre throughout the debates was 
 the first revelation of his method, showed him as the 
 secure interpreter of the people. Foolishly logical in the 
 application of principles, he became a mouthpiece of the 
 theories, but all the whUe he was conscious of how httle 
 the general instinct of France would as yet permit a 
 thorough policy of attack. He covered the retreat of 
 the priests, holding a careful balance when all the rest of 
 the Left was for sounding a charge. This double attitude 
 of his proceeded from no intrigue : his power of political 
 calculation did not appear till much later in the Revolu- 
 tion. It proceeded from the exact consonance of his mind 
 with the Rousseauan model, and with the spirit of the city 
 in the centre of which he acted. His instincts, that ran to 
 dogma, to the necessity of religion in the State, and to a 
 hatred of the Voltairean negation, preserved him from 
 a thousand enmities, and put into his hands what was 
 to be, two years later, another thread of power — the 
 tradition of protecting Catholicism. 
 
 Before I deal with the speeches and votes in which 
 he defined his relations to the Church, I would give some 
 picture of the enormous blunder which the Assembly was 
 about to commit. 
 
 Great social forces drive themselves out of their own 
 channel ; they undermine their banks. The renewal of 
 France imperilled all the future of its work by leaving 
 to one side — all France had so left it — a principal 
 tradition bound up with the national existence. The 
 
 Federation in July, the Speaker (thinking the episode insignificant) 
 thanked them in a few careless words. Bobespierre, full of the memory 
 of Franklin, demanded and obtained the printing and official distribn- 
 tion of their address. 
 
PARIS III 
 
 Catholic Church holds in the fabric of that country a 
 place so intimate that it is sometimes a question for the 
 curious how far the religion of the Eoman Empire has 
 moulded Gaul, and how far the Gallic spirit may be 
 made to account for the character of Western worship. 
 
 Consider France. The conversion of the West was 
 not complete, the sixth and seventh centuries were 
 planting Christianity in the remoter hills, when the 
 vague territory which still clung to the memories of 
 a united province assumed the principal r61e in 
 history. The Iberian peninsula was lost, the Italian was 
 overshadowed by Byzantium, the British islands were 
 barbarous, and Germany was but a narrow frontier 
 march of combats when the transformation of our 
 society was working in the "Terra Major." When the 
 seal of Charlemagne was set upon the charter of civiKsa- 
 tion — the last testament of Kome, and the original 
 statute of the middle ages — ^it was from Gaul that his 
 imperial power proceeded. There were his armies re- 
 cruited, thence they set out for their ceaseless marches, 
 passing, as to an exterior conquest, Eoncesvalles, Mau- 
 rienne, the Khine ; and the fringes of his kingdom closed 
 roimd the solid quadrilateral of France. As her ver- 
 nacular arose it was a medium for the first epics of 
 Christendom ; in it was propagated the reform of Hilde- 
 brand ; and when the work of the Normans was accom- 
 plished, the sermon preached at Clermont extended it 
 throughout the world. It was the tongue of an armed 
 nobility from the Tyne to the Euphrates; at last a 
 Courtenay spoke it from the throne of Constantinople. 
 In Paris, at the Jacobins of the southern gate, the School 
 was defined; there Aquinas lectured and there the 
 Summa was conceived. On this soil the universities 
 arose; the typical kingship of the Most Christian King 
 ruled it orderly when the Reconquista still made Spain 
 a battlefield, when England was a feudal revolt, when 
 
112 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the Germans were bewildered in the meshes of Italy ; nor 
 was it till the approach of the Schism that rent our 
 Europe and thrust Catholicism inward to its centre, that 
 the establishment of new nationalities and the confirma- 
 tion of new literatures diminished this ancient hegemony. 
 For the thousand years during which our race and its 
 religion were kneaded, the French and the Church were 
 one body. 
 
 All this the French had forgotten, and under the 
 pressure of the Revolution the nation attempted to enter 
 a channel exterior to the main watershed of its history. 
 The narrow class which alone remained articulate at the 
 close of the eighteenth century were absorbed in a philo- 
 sophy so rarefied that the stuff of Christianity seemed to 
 it dross and meaniagless. The clergy had suffered the 
 infection, ritual had degenerated to phrase, the typical 
 architecture of northern faith was left in ruins,'' the life 
 of the religion was obscured. The great places of the 
 Church were filled without a thought of decency by men 
 whom a chque of favourites might choose ; ^ so ingrained 
 was the corruption that Louis XVI., devout and simple, 
 continued in its tradition as naturally as in the etiquette 
 of his Court. Even after the Restoration and on into our 
 own time, something pohtical marred and cast suspicion 
 upon the clerics of the reaction, till Lacordaire founded the 
 great work which is but now beginning to prove its vigour. 
 In the Revolution only the poor and the remote preserved 
 the germs of Catholic vitahty — to the Assembly and 
 
 ^ Not only had they ceased to build the Gothic, they had utterly 
 ceased even to understand it. I have seen, in connection with the writing 
 of an essay on Paris, some hundreds of prints of the eighteenth century, 
 representing the churches of the city. Not one of them has reproduced 
 the detail of the Gothic or caught its spirit, and what is perhaps more 
 remarkable, there is not one true reproduction of the facade of Notre 
 Dame. 
 
 '^ Thus in Bobespierre's own town of Arras, that great Abbey of 
 St. Waast which dominated it was given to Cardinal de Bohan, the man 
 of the Diamond Necklace. 
 
PARIS 113 
 
 Paris they were unknown, and such defence as the 
 Church could find had to be left to men like Maury, a 
 dissolute, loud, political priest, destined to intrigue, to 
 survive into the corruption of the Kestoration, to snatch 
 a cardinal's hat, and to die somewhere half-starved and 
 imremembered.'^ 
 
 In February 1790 monasticism had passed almost 
 without a protest.^ In June was perfected the scheme 
 by which it was imagined that the clergy could be ab- 
 sorbed into the State, and Catholicism dead be wrapped in 
 the winding-sheet of a civil administration. That error 
 provoked the whole crisis of '90-91 ; round the resist- 
 ance of the hierarchy may be grouped all that reaction 
 which was the mark of the autumn, the winter and the 
 following spring ; all that fury and exaltation which the 
 reaction in its turn excited among the liberals. Of that 
 spirit, the Crown, the nobility, the army — all the conser- 
 vative forces of the nation — took advantage. Their com- 
 bined attack upon the Revolution must not be taken as 
 being the strong thing it seems : it would have had no 
 basis but for the seething of the country-sides, the angers 
 of provincial rehgion, and the priests determining on a 
 civU war. 
 
 Of the disendowment of the Church no mention has 
 
 * Maury's life was a full commentary on the cause of which he made 
 himself the spokesman ; a little picture of the old corruption. The son 
 of a cobbler, he pushed himself into the Academy, and thence into the 
 States-General : in '95 he was made a cardinal and nuncio at Frankfort 
 — at last returning from his emigration to be Archbishop of Paris under 
 Napoleon. After the Eestoration he was driven out by his own chapter, 
 achieved a final success by obtaining the Papal blessing, and died, a poor 
 and abandoned adventurer, in 181 7, in a house of the Lazarists. 
 
 2 Not abolished, of course, but its recognition by the State, its secular 
 connection with officialdom dissolved ; and much the greater part of its 
 property taken from it. It is astonishing how little resistance this decree 
 provoked ; a proof of the utter degradation into which monasticism had 
 fallen. No one feature of French life, with the possible exception of the 
 village councils, was more revivified by the new freedom than this funda- 
 mental institution of the Catholic Church. 
 
 H 
 
1 14 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 been made, because it was not the true cause of the 
 Schism. Proposed before the Assembly had left Ver- 
 sailles, ratified immediately after its arrival in Paris, the 
 confiscation of the corporate goods of the Church and 
 the appointment of salaries for its hierarchy, had not a 
 little attracted the starving clergy of forgotten villages, 
 had broken the economic power of the great bishops, and 
 had presented to the Revolution, in the immense landed 
 estates of the dioceses, a security against the new currency 
 whose issue was the most immediate of fiscal necessities. 
 Nevertheless, that whole movement had in it a feature 
 which foreign historians too frequently neglect, it worked 
 of necessity against the grain of the country, it could 
 never be perfectly executed, public action halted tardily, 
 long behind the decrees. It was not tiU April that the 
 first assignats were issued, it was not till a year later 
 that the land upon whose value they were based began 
 to sell with any readiness. 
 
 To remedy a false situation and to solve, as it thought, 
 the religious question upon the most reasonable lines, the 
 Assembly, that had already heard the priests defined as 
 "functionaries," proceeded to build up artificially and 
 by rule a church of stone and iron to replace the 
 living organism whose grave maladies they had mistaken 
 for dissolution. It was proposed to assimilate the com- 
 plex traditions of Catholicism, its hoary anomalies and 
 its depths on depths of mystery with the plain new creed 
 of the democratic bureaucracy. To every department a 
 bishop — elected by the people; to every commuae a 
 priest — elected by the people. The link with Rome was 
 just preserved in an official announcement from each 
 diocese as its see was filled. Dogma was left, by im- 
 plication, to occasional Galilean councils. 
 
 There is no marvel in the imposition of so extrar 
 ordinary a mould upon the fabric of French rehgion. 
 The whole mass of educated Frenchmen, I repeat, had 
 
PARIS 115 
 
 in that last generation of the eighteenth century been 
 cut off from religion. Never before, since his philo- 
 sophers had surrounded Julian in his palace on the 
 island, had Lutetia lost so much of her worship; never 
 since in all the dogmatic negations of our century have 
 the ruling intellects of France so thoroughly ignored the 
 colour and kind of Christianity. Nor was this all : the 
 Assembly had here and there among its most powerful 
 and brilliant men, orators whom a special tradition urged 
 against the Apostolic see : Camus, the last of the Jansen- 
 ists, that would only speak of the " Bishop of Kome " ; 
 Lanjuinais, the Canonist of Kennes, trained to defend in 
 the courts of Brittany " the Gallican liberties " ; Rabaut 
 St. Etienne, whose amiable round face concealed very 
 bitter memories and who had been born, he did not him- 
 self know where, the child of persecution. 
 
 TreUhard's report upon the anarchy of the reUgious 
 administration and the gross inequalities of the benefices 
 was read on the 30th of May. De Boisgelin, the vigor- 
 ous Archbishop of ALx, academician, poetaster, liberal, 
 court preacher ^ rose to answer and struck the new note ; 
 a creed as important as the creed of Rousseau was 
 discovered to be alive and the Revolution had polarised 
 upon two centres of attraction — hence was to spring the 
 oivil war. 
 
 " Jesus Christ sent out His apostles for the saving of 
 souls. He gave that task neither to magistrates nor to 
 kings. . . . You are urged to-day to suppress a portion 
 of that ministry,^ to define its power, to arrange the 
 limits of its jurisdiction. That power was founded 
 and those limits set by the apostles. There is no human 
 power that can touch or meddle with it of right. . . ." 
 
 ' He fled later on to England, became a cardinal, re-entered with the 
 Concordat and died at the age of seventy-two Archbishop of Tours in the 
 year that Napoleon was crowned. Two things lay him under suspicion 
 as a poet— he translated Ovid and arranged a metrical version of the 
 Fsalms. 
 
 ' The Civil Constitution destroyed 51 out of 134 dioceses. 
 
ii6 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 The debates proceeded. On the morrow Kobespierre 
 read his precise essay, which, being an essay, he did not 
 hesitate to divide into three heads: that the number 
 and functions of the clergy should be limited by their 
 direct use to society (he admitted and applauded that 
 use); that they should be elected by the general voice; that 
 they should be the salaried servants of the community. 
 So far it was a feast of commonplaces and of agreement 
 with the committee that had studied the question and 
 framed the bill. But at the close of his speech he did 
 something that indicated at once his acute political 
 touch and the compromise that he was determined to 
 maintain between the Church and the new society. He 
 knew that every one had something in his mind which no 
 one dared to mention — celibacy. 
 
 Should the State ratify such marriages as these 
 men, its new servants, might choose to contract? It 
 would seem in keeping with the Rights of Man. But 
 then, if a priest married, could his bishop drive him 
 from his cure; could the Church forbid the exercise 
 of his ministry ? If not, what power of interior dis- 
 cipline had the Church ? What remained of the con- 
 tention that the civil constitution left her intact ? Here 
 was a peculiar and sacred custom grown to be part and 
 parcel of Latin Christianity — to touch it was to awaken 
 with a stroke of horror the dormant Catholicism of the 
 nation, to neglect it was to deny in practice to a servant 
 of the State one of the primary rights common to all 
 citizens. 
 
 In all impassable situations there is some such 
 test matter which reveals the self-contradiction that 
 marks a deadlock. When a man is prepared to dis- 
 cover and present such a test question to a nervous 
 assembly, he has given proof of leadership because he 
 has shown political daring. This Robespierre knew. The 
 instinct in him to publish himself continually, the desire 
 
PARIS 117 
 
 to be heard first on a matter that could not but become 
 of major interest, the exact appreciation he had of what 
 the Assembly was, all appeared in the form he gave to 
 his venture. He mixed hesitation into his advance. 
 
 " I come now," he said, like any professor, " to another 
 matter. It will be generally agreed that it might be 
 well to bind every citizen as far as possible to 
 society. . . ." One or two anxious men on the Right 
 and a prelate or so smelt heresy and began to protest ; the 
 Left applauded as though to a peroration . . . yet he had 
 said nothing. He continued with extreme care, " I desire 
 to say nothing that might offend common sense or even 
 the public opinion of our time. . . ." The applause and 
 the protests grew general. He looked round quietly, folded 
 his manuscript and left the tribune. In this way did 
 Robespierre deal with the celibacy of the clergy. He 
 established the reputation of a pioneer, but he had used 
 neither the word marriage nor the word priest, and he 
 had escaped a battle royal.^ 
 
 The debates proceeded. For days he spoke in each 
 without advancing anything further than his original 
 proposition and without departing from his original 
 caution. On the 9 th of June he defended the popular 
 election of bishops and used a phrase purely in the tradi- 
 tion of Rousseau. " I recognise the grave inconveniences 
 that attach to this method of choice, but when virtue is 
 departed from most individuals you will find it in the 
 corporate existence of the people. The clergy as a body 
 were they to nominate the bishop could not but be 
 sectional in spirit. I conclude on the whole for the 
 people. . . ." 
 
 When, on and after the i6th, the salaries of the 
 
 ' Loustalot, in the 49th number of the Revolutions de Paris, proves 
 at once the position these sentences acquired for Robespierre and the 
 monstrous untruths of which journalism can be guilty. He speaks of an 
 address of thanks from " 500 priests of Picardy." He promises to publish 
 their namesj but he is not so foolish as to keep his promise. 
 
ii8 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 clergy were discussed, his many speeches preserved the 
 same attitude of repetition and of careful handling. He 
 spoke, as he had spoken at Versailles, of " the poverty " 
 that underlay the foundations of Christianity, he attacked 
 the higher salaries proposed for the bishops, he left un- 
 opposed the lower incomes of the parish clergy. To the 
 first of these he returned with an approach to energy ; on 
 the 22nd he rallied the new functionaries on their 
 debts, asked them if they were "eovdemned to receive 
 twelve hundred a year." He spoke at some length and 
 with fervour for the mass of the lower clergy. He closed 
 the conflict by demanding on the 28 th of June pensions 
 for all aged priests, beneficed or non-beneficed. His 
 words in this definite offer to a great group of opinion 
 are worth a literal transcription. 
 
 " I call only for a measure of justice. These men 
 have grown old in the ministry, their labours can have 
 brought them nothing but infirmity. They have some 
 claim to your indulgence by their ecclesiastical title ; and 
 by something more, by their necessity." ^ 
 
 The Assembly refused his demand, but his defence was 
 permanently remembered. Throughout the summer he 
 emphasised his position. He defended in August a 
 priest that had sheltered a conspirator; he lent the 
 ecclesiastical profession a peculiar sanctity when he 
 appealed against its admission to civil office; he is all 
 for liberty in the debate on the Soutane, and when the 
 constitution of the clergy had been voted — signed by the 
 King and notified to Rome ; when, in October, the mass of 
 the French Church had revolted in a famous protest and 
 when these grumblings of active opposition were met by 
 the decree enforcing on the priests an oath of loyalty to 
 the Constitution — he stood aside. Amid all that in- 
 cessant political movement of his there is one fortnight of 
 silence. It is the fortnight in November when the angry 
 
 ^ Moniteur, 24th and 29th of June 1790 
 
PARIS 119 
 
 Assembly, seeing the confiscated Church lands hanging in 
 the market and hearing the persistent cry from pulpit 
 after pulpit for resistance, determined to coerce the 
 Church, ordered the administration of the civic oath 
 to the clergy and threatened to deprive all those who 
 refused it. 
 
 Time and a long sequence of political effect have 
 proved to us the fundamental importance of the ecclesi- 
 astical question in 1790. At the time it seemed but one 
 of a hundred points in the triumph of a reasonable order. 
 The passages I have quoted are evidence of Eobespierre's 
 method in debate, and of his advocacy of the clergy ; the 
 whole attitude on which I have insisted helps to explain 
 the future development of his power : the half-unwUling 
 support which, during the Terror, the silent Eight con- 
 tinued to aiford him. His way of dealing with the priests 
 in 1 790 laid the strongest foundations of his success and 
 reveals his inner sentiment most clearly. Nevertheless, 
 it was almost unheeded by the radicals. The Robespierre 
 whom the professional classes of the capital had begun to 
 regard as their epitome and whom chance hundreds 
 already addressed from every part of France was to them 
 the " unflinching tribune " ; the bulwark against com- 
 promise and to reaction. 
 
 It was he that stood against Mirabeau in the vio- 
 lent debate of the 27 th of July, when there was a 
 question of canalising, as it were, the public fury 
 against Conde,^ it was he that conquered in the division. 
 When, on the 20th of June, all titles of nobility were 
 abolished, it was he that was most particular to drop the 
 " de " with ceremony. It was he that first did that ridi- 
 culous thing and dragged out of their obscurity the 
 forgotten family names of the nobles, calling Mirabeau 
 
 ' For I take it to be certain that Mirabean's special attack on Cond^ wab 
 but a feint to prerent a general attack on the Court and on the sympatbiy 
 of the Court with the intrigues of the emigrants. 
 
120 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 " Riquetti," Lafayette "Mottier." To the crowd such puer- 
 ilities seemed so many acts of faith, and he alone dared 
 make them. It was he, again, that was for ever defending 
 private soldiers and sailors against the rigour of the new 
 code, that protested most energetically against the thanks 
 that were voted to Bouill^ for the fierce repression whereby 
 he had re-established discipline at Nancy. In every acci- 
 dent that could bring the pure theory of the Revolution 
 into conflict with realities or with calculated opposition it 
 was his voice which was most demanded : he never failed 
 to make it heard. He was already believed, at the ap- 
 proach of autunm, to be the centre of resistance against the 
 reaction that was rising as the clergy closed their ranks 
 or as the irritation in the army developed and the foreign 
 intrigue began to organise. He had become a personage 
 with whom Mirabeau found it necessary to treat ; whom 
 here and there throughout the territory other revolu- 
 tionaries, destined to names as famous as his own, ad- 
 dressed from the silence or confusion of their provinces. 
 
 Among these letters was one which wove iato his Hfe 
 and into the Revolution an episode of worship : a devotion 
 that coloured the Terror and brought into the empty 
 simplicity of Robespierre's own life the pomp of ardour. 
 It was a message from St. Just. 
 
 That boy — noble, disordered, of an extreme beauty, 
 tall, graceful in gestures — matched his distinction with 
 words that seemed found or chosen for his pecuhar cast 
 of body and of soul. His purpose, his enthusiastic courage, 
 his sudden eloquence, were later to enter the Republic 
 like a strain of fierce music. He surrounds the Robes- 
 pierrean tradition as a frame half grotesque, half gorgeous 
 may surround a hard, imperfect drawing; yet, incongruous 
 as he was to the man whom he followed, he lends to 
 this man's story a wild interest that preserves it. Once 
 already St. Just had flashed into the Revolution when 
 he burnt the pamphlets of the reaction in his southern 
 
PARIS 121 
 
 village and swore to defend the new order, stretching out 
 his hand over the flame in a pagan memory. The thea- 
 trical in which that time abounded, the pedantic by which 
 it was continually marred, became in him, by I know not 
 what touch of brilliancy, the dramatic or the revelation of 
 antiquity. 
 
 He possessed also this supreme quality : that time and 
 battles put ballast to his angers and his visions, that 
 under strain he grew greater than himself. When he 
 came to his end he had reached to the appreciation of 
 ordered law and to the power of creating new things. 
 
 The allegiance of this genius, the acceptation of his 
 mission by such a mind, was a final mark of the stage 
 Kobespierre had reached in his advance. It christened 
 him leader. 
 
 With this assured success the summer drew into 
 autumn ; with the autumn ^ a further development tided 
 him on a further stretch of his way. The Jacobins, the 
 small half-secret place where he had gradually out- 
 stripped Duport, the Lameths and Barnave, were the 
 caucus whose leadership was to give him as an appanage 
 the leadership of the whole Left, of the mountain and 
 at last of the Eepublic. They had blossomed from a 
 single stem into an undergrowth, multiplied and become 
 a nation. This transformation was the work of the great 
 Federation of July — the thousand towns that are like the 
 pillars of France had touched through their delegates the 
 direct issues of the struggle. The provincial Federations 
 throughout the country had prepared a generous though 
 a facUe enthusiasm ; that enthusiasm had, during those 
 few days of sheer light in July, discovered a material 
 on which it could work ; it had felt the strengthening of 
 the reaction, it had seen the enemy from beneath his 
 
 ' Hamel speaks of this letter as "coming some time in the middle of 
 August." It can only have come at the very end of the month, for 
 it is dated the igth, and could not have taken less than a week or 
 ten days to reach Farii. 
 
122 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 own walls, from the streets that surrounded the palace. 
 Against this enemy the organisation — the inquisition — of 
 the Jacobins of the Rue St. Honor^ was designed. The 
 provincial Federations returned to their homes and set up 
 everywhere a model of the central society. These, linked 
 into a hard discipline with the mother house, receiving 
 its orders, taking in light from it as from the eye of 
 Paris, set up posts and beacons for the liberals : watch- 
 towers of suspicion. Wherever the new municipal life 
 had arisen in the vast awakened territory, this network 
 of the clubs had its unit and agent : they garrisoned and 
 organised France. The autumn made the Jacobins be- 
 cause it made the reaction. The clergy in revolt pro- 
 voked that other clergy who were devotees to the reform. 
 Thus it was at the close of August that the King signed 
 the Civil Constitution ; at the close of October that De 
 Boisgelin and the thirty bishops of the Assembly issued 
 their " Exposition of Principle," at the close of November 
 that the oath was insisted upon by the violent decree of 
 the Assembly — from that date the stirring of the villages 
 became a turmoil : the priests cried martyrdom. And 
 side by side with the growth of this solid resistance, 
 with the growth therefore of new hopes in the Court, 
 in the foreign cabals, in the emigrants, went the increase 
 of the Club, the watcher and jailer of the court and the 
 foreigner. The membership of the Jacobins of Paris had 
 in early 'go been but 400 — mostly drawn from the 
 Assembly : it had risen with the late summer to over a 
 thousand, mostly citizens. Opinion exterior to the ParUa- 
 ment dominated it and chose the favourites. 
 
 A week before the Bang consented in despair to 
 sign the Civil Constitution of the Church, there were 
 152 provincial clubs associated with the Club. A few 
 weeks after the attempt to administer the oath had 
 failed they had risen to 227, a month later to 343; 
 yet a month later to 406 — half France. It had re- 
 
PARIS 123 
 
 cognised its own immensity and power, had drawn up 
 its first lists/ had arranged its method of command 
 when December called a kind of halt and left opposed 
 the two forces : old France resurrected by the radicals' 
 capital error, new France turned angry and ready for 
 every suspicion, later for every violence, in defence of 
 the liberty it had won. The deadlock in the organisa- 
 tion of the new clergy, the refusal of the oath, the 
 manifest sympathy for the priests felt by the thousands 
 of little villages which the Kevolution itself had rendered 
 autonomous and whose freedom it dared not curb, the 
 doubt as to what would be the action of Rome, the 
 foreign intrigues turned back again underground — all 
 these left action doubtful. 
 
 The year 1791 was introduced therefore by a curious 
 silence. The situation was like that which has appeared 
 in certain battles : the ground is won, the general advance 
 has been successfully made, but the enemy is known to 
 be strongest in his last line. His retirement has but 
 concentrated his resistance and the attack hesitates before 
 the final blow. There has been neither rout nor capitu- 
 lation — an open plain of dangerous width lies between 
 the positions the advance has conquered and the last 
 trenches of the defence. In such a crisis at the worst 
 hesitation, at the best delay, seizes on the victorious 
 army; its tension relaxes; the men talk to each other. 
 So the Revolution hesitated and so before its final ad- 
 vance the reaction gathered. 
 
 The radicals turned in upon themselves, to dinners, 
 evening arguments and confabulations, to concerting 
 plans — even to domestic interests. The marriage of 
 Desmoulins two days before the New Year is very typical 
 of the time. The Left in unison seem to retire into 
 
 ^ The first list is that of December 1790. The material of this I have 
 drawn from a speech of Desmoulins, from the preface of Aulard's 
 Bistoire des Jacobins, and (with some reserve) from Michelet's traditional 
 accoont of the development of the club. 
 
124 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 their homes ; they come to the marriage, doing honour 
 to their pamphleteer. Brissot, Potion, Robespierre sign 
 the register in the vestry; the priest, unconstitutional, 
 of course — (Desmoulin's old head-master) — gives his 
 paternal benediction to the love-match. It was as 
 though men were saying, " Soon the supreme struggle 
 will blind us ; let us go back and rest for a moment in 
 the past." 
 
 This lull seemed perhaps an opportunity to the 
 failing grasp of a man who has appeared but fitfully 
 in these pages of a single biography — who yet filled 
 the time : Mirabeau. The decrees on the Civil Constitu- 
 tion of the Clergy had passed ; the oath had been pre- 
 sented and in the main refused,^ but the Pope's brief 
 had not yet fallen to decide an active struggle. 
 
 Mirabeau caught the opportunity of the lull; he 
 noticed death approaching ; he came up out of his degra- 
 dation ; he took every advantage of the moment ; he 
 intrigued and intrigued. But his intrigues were even 
 at this time not mainly directed to the sustenance of 
 the throne or to the establishment of that hmited mon- 
 archy and that English model which haunted his travelled 
 experience — they were mainly directed to the warding 
 off of foreign interference, to keeping high the stability 
 and honour of the country abroad, to preventing the 
 Court from looking beyond the frontiers. On either 
 side he touched failure. His reports came almost un- 
 heeded to the Court cabal that saw nothing in his 
 genius but a useful trick wherewith to deceive the 
 populace : his suspected acceptance of the King's money, 
 his creed of compromise and balance roused against 
 
 ' All the bishops but four, and two-thirds of the priests refused 
 the oath. So seriously was the farce taken that these four bishops were at 
 the pains of haying every canonical rule observed when they instituted 
 their schismatic colleagues. Three of them were even at the pains of 
 laying on hands, and the Gallioan Ohuich that lived two years was in 
 possession of Apostolic orders. 
 
PARIS 
 
 125 
 
 him in a final effort the anger of the Left and the 
 political puritanism of the Jacobins. Duport, Barnave, 
 the Lameths grew stronger and more bitter against hinn 
 as he weakened ; it was apparent as the winter pro- 
 ceeded that he must lose his hold. 
 
 The last day of February, a date not often remem- 
 bered, should form a landmark ; it was the beginning of 
 Mirabeau's agony, and the end of his prodigious resistance. 
 At the Jacobins that night a kind of storm broke over 
 him ; the accumulated suspicion which had grown round 
 his name, the accumulated effect of so many partial but in- 
 creasing defeats in debate came then together and raged 
 about him openly — Duport and Lameth blamed him 
 almost by name, all the eyes of the long library turned on 
 him, and every outburst of applause that met the denuncia- 
 tion of compromise fell upon him like a shower of arrows. 
 Many things that were to mark the later Revolution 
 flared up under the lamps of that evening — the open 
 quarrel with the Court, the abandonment of old leaders, 
 the omnipotence of the Club, the schism that was 
 to branch into further and further divisions till one 
 small remnant, the Mountain, should alone be left 
 for '93. 
 
 Especially this appeared: the deliberate idolisation 
 of the new names and the false worship of Robespierre. 
 For the very action of Mirabeau's which the club was 
 condemning, and which put the match to their indigna- 
 tion, had been supported in the Parliament by Robes- 
 pierre. He also had argued with a cold exactitude of 
 principle, as had Mirabeau with a violent eloquence, to 
 defeat the law against emigration ; and when the greater 
 man, despairing of France, bent upon saving the Crown, 
 had thundered out, " Silence, you thirty voices ! " he had 
 seemed to draw the lesser man into the vortex of his energy, 
 and to be making a protection for Robespierre against the 
 interruptions of the Left. Robespierre, simply because 
 
126 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 it seemed to him an inconsistency, refused to trammel 
 liberty, even in order to check the tide of emigration. 
 
 The Parliament in the morning had seen this, but the 
 club in the evening would have nothing of the truth. It 
 ■was entering the phase of enthusiasm where men see not 
 what is, but what they will, and though Mirabeau quoted 
 in his defence the agreement of Robespierre, his argument 
 went for nothing. The people had been up and out that 
 day ; they had marched to Vincennes, had been checked 
 by Lafayette — now definitely an enemy — had poured 
 about the Tuileries, had challenged the defenders of the 
 King. On such a day the extremists refused to remember 
 anything in Robespierre but that he was their principle 
 in the flesh. They mutinied against the man whose 
 wisdom and whose affections, whose apprehension of what 
 France was, but also whose debts and whose attachments 
 of birth and habit, combined now to make him something 
 separate from the reform. If both had defended the 
 right of emigrants to pass the frontiers, the club was 
 determined to find corruption in Mirabeau's defence, in 
 Robespierre's an excess of zeal for liberty. 
 
 It was with pathetic and sincere insistence that 
 Mirabeau attempted a reply. The reply was listened to 
 without murmurs, but without applause. The gist of it 
 appeared in a phrase that came certainly from his large 
 heart, his memories of leadership, and his appreciation of 
 failure, and perhaps of disaster. " I shall always be one 
 of you — even if it comes to exile." It was to come to 
 the longest of exiles. 
 
 He sat down, his vigour gone, the strong poise of his 
 head abandoned, and in the powerful forwardness of his 
 face a hollowness and a kind of resignation ; the falling 
 of so much sustained and rebutting effort. His mastery 
 was ended. Desmoulins, sitting not far off, and watching 
 him closely as the club dissolved, wrote down this note : 
 " He has passed into Olivet." ^ 
 
 * Siv. de France et de Brabant, No. 67. 
 
PARIS 127 
 
 For a month a kind of lull surrounded the departure 
 of this great man. March was empty, hardly occupied 
 by insignificant debate,^ and by a coincidence common 
 enough ia the history of great movements, a shadow of 
 silence passed backward out of what was to come. Mira- 
 beau spoke less, demanded less ardently. A weight came 
 on him and on France. His sleep left him, and his 
 strength. With the end of the month he died proudly, 
 and, as long as his eyes could follow life and the sun, they 
 were fixed upon the Crown he had attempted to save. 
 
 It has been said that Mirabeau dying left the world 
 empty for Robespierre to fill. The phrase is exaggerated 
 and false. We now, who can tell what Robespierre was 
 to become, see in it an element of truth. For that time, 
 and for the appreciation of the exact course which fame 
 took with Robespierre, it has not even such an element. 
 The effect of Mirabeau's death upon the career of Robes- 
 pierre was negative and tardy ; an artist had disappeared, 
 and round his death-bed there gathered a sunset in 
 whose glow was lost the effect of lesser reputations, 
 and only on the diffusion of which it could be discovered 
 that one man especially remained to stamp by reitera- 
 tion upon the public a name rather than a character. 
 This is much truer, that since things lost are replaced 
 by things of their own kind, Mirabeau dying left France 
 in heritage or as a ward to Danton. But this is truer 
 stUl, that when Mirabeau was dead, one great, hidden, 
 suspected, unmentioned verity was released into the day- 
 light ; the King was afraid of himself. 
 
 What had passed in that soul? History has never 
 solved the problem, and never will, because he could 
 barely speak or write or express, though he was of the 
 first importance in France. Louis was Catholic, he was 
 sincere, he was (so far as political terms may be used of 
 
 ' For instance, there was nothing of Robespierre's but the defence of 
 an obscnre priest. 
 
128 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 character) a liberal ; he was French and he was patriotic ; 
 he could love a little and was very firm upon the loves 
 he comprehended. He may be said with justice never 
 to have betrayed the Church, and never to have signed 
 a decree that seemed to him enormous or essentially 
 inimical to society. But there ran in him a something 
 very mysterious, which one of the fatal short cuts of 
 history has chosen to describe as weakness. If it was 
 weakness, it was a weakness like a muscular weakness 
 of the heart, or like a nervous fault, something extra- 
 neous to his general self; something that made him — a 
 man not without firmness, and, alas ! not without ruse — 
 suddenly stupid at moments, and in a crisis utterly at sea. 
 
 The Kevolution is still near to us, it reveals itself 
 partially by documents and more by its political effects. 
 The personality of Mirabeau grows out of it on the dis- 
 tance, as the Alps grow out of the summer plains when 
 a man follows the shallow Durance downwards to the 
 Rhone, and sees at last the majesty of the hills he came 
 from. Assuredly the more the Revolution is studied the 
 more will it be seen that the Court leant heavily upon 
 Mu'abeau. The staff broke in death. There remained 
 in the noisy palace that had still so great a power no 
 principle of support. 
 
 There remained the Queen, who but for her disdain 
 and birth might now merit the description of petulant ; 
 there remained the ruck of sword-men, mostly noble, the 
 dregs that incapacity had left stranded even in that 
 springtide of opportimity ; and there remained the virtue 
 of a few good women who knew less of the world than 
 children do. Lastly, by an irony of kiagship, the very 
 theory of the Court, in its domestic ordering, gave the 
 King the principal power. And the King was afraid. A 
 mob had been to him from the first days of '89 what 
 breakers are beneath to a man unused to boats, or a 
 horse beneath a man that cannot ride. 
 
PARIS 129 
 
 Mobs were very little in tlie Revolution. The more 
 the people were determined, and the more they achieved, 
 the less of the mob was there in their arrangement : for a 
 mob is the people powerless. But what there had been 
 of them — especially the roaring irruption of October — 
 had left the King suddenly without bearings. This fear 
 determined his inconsistencies, or, at least, if not this, 
 then nothing can explain them. His firmness, his 
 natural piety, his pride (which was not small) left him 
 when he saw humanity enormous and disorganised ; he 
 was more afraid of it than are even landsmen of the 
 sea. 
 
 To this weakness, emphasised as it was by the hun- 
 dred separate misconceptions of France that haunted his 
 wife, his friends, his confessor, his guards, the puissant 
 and manifold spirit of Mirabeau had stood corrective. 
 Such a man, with the vices or necessities of large desires, 
 with the comprehension or compromise of wide vision, 
 filled up, supplemented, the inequahties and emptiness 
 of the palace. There was nothing about him single or 
 direct enough to parry the just accusation 1 at followed 
 him ; he had need of the Court, or at the best he had 
 affection for it; from one time to another the colour or 
 the pressure of the world allured or drove him away 
 from principle ; he had received a pension ; he had 
 weighed the dead France against the living and he had 
 hesitated very much at the sharp solutions that drive 
 through the complexity of existing culture, tearing (as 
 he feared) the web of society. But this man to whom 
 a mixture of wisdom, energy, and physical foible, had 
 combined to give statesmanship, conquest, temptation, 
 and something of incertitude or prudence — this man had 
 been the very medicine of the Court. Every power in him 
 was what the Court had lacked, every wistfulness in him 
 for justice helped him to link the Court up with the 
 Beform and to preserve it in spite of itself. Above all, 
 
 I 
 
I30 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 his grasp of reality held united from either side the 
 formulae of the conquering Left and the empty echoes of 
 a dying ceremonial. This bond and support was gone. 
 
 By a wretched coincidence Louis was to experience, 
 within a few days of that loss, just such an accident as 
 most bewildered him. Mirabeau died upon the 2nd of 
 April. Upon the 1 8 th the King blundered in public. 
 
 It would be foolish to read into the i8th of April 
 more than exactly happened. Certainly it was not 
 religious scruple that drove the King to leave his 
 palace to make his Easter communion at St. Cloud. 
 His communion would have been valid enough at the 
 hands of any chance priest. By one account^ he had 
 already communicated in the palace. Almost as cer- 
 tainly it was no definite plan to fly the city. He 
 would not have fled thus through the streets in state and 
 with good warning. It was a desire to find air and room, 
 to be himself, to show how much remained to him and 
 to re-enter his own personality (with which every habit 
 of kingship was involved) that led him to St. Cloud. 
 St. Cloud was his favourite sojourn and his habit for that 
 time of the year; he knew he risked a little in the 
 proposal, he delighted in the prospect of success over 
 that little risk. The result was overwhelming: the 
 streets, full of an intricate mixture of protesting citizens 
 and revolted militia, the vain eiforts of Lafayette, the 
 mob, not dangerous nor inspired by a special hatred 
 but still the mob, barred up his passage. His coach 
 swung there three hours on its high great springs: his 
 own face looked out blameless and alarmed over in- 
 numerable faces. At last be despaired. He re-entered the 
 palace and there was no one to tell him the meaning of 
 what he had seen. After this accident, to him incompre- 
 hensible or monstrous — or perhaps confirming the dread 
 that had hitherto been but inexactly rooted — he accepted 
 
 * Lafayette's. 
 
PARIS 
 
 131 
 
 what can only have been hitherto a plot formed by 
 others. He looked, not yet indeed to the foreigner, but 
 to the frontier ^ for safety, and was ready for flight. 
 
 Two months separated this accident from that 
 catastrophe. They were marked by a temper of acute 
 antagonism rather than by any appearance of definite 
 policy. Historians upon either side pretend to find in 
 these months the beginnings of republicanism in the 
 clubs or the symptoms of overt treason at the Court. 
 It is the spirit of the time rather than the exact witness 
 of documents that provokes them to such exaggeration. 
 The plain truth is that while the Crown and the politi- 
 cians still kept their old claims intact the disappearaiice 
 of Mirabeau had left an unbridgeable gulf between the 
 parties. It was not more than this. There were many 
 who would have been willing enough to have demanded 
 openly the help of the kings in the defence of their 
 King, but they did not direct the policy of the Court. 
 That policy still depended upon the decision of Louis, 
 and Louis, though bewildered by a thousand suggestions, 
 would not as yet have let drop the nation he ruled into 
 the abyss of an invasion. There were many, again, espe- 
 cially on the south side of the river, in the University, 
 in the Cordeliers, who would openly have attacked the 
 palace. But they did not direct the opinion of the city. 
 They can hardly be said to have influenced the Jacobins 
 who were now become the permanent judges and 
 moderators of the revolutionary movement, and stood 
 for an organised force covering the whole of France 
 with a system of societies. 
 
 Since, then, an acute tension in the political atmos- 
 phere accompanied by a certain pettiness in political 
 action was the mark of that opening summer. Persons 
 
 ' I take it as certain that he intended nothing but a flight to the high 
 hill of Montmddy, and that he remembered Mirabeaa's advice of finding a 
 refuge in the provinces. 
 
132 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 began to take the place of principles in the affections, 
 terrors, and hatreds of men. Thus Lafayette and the 
 ministry became an object of direct persistent attack and 
 thus Robespierre himself passed more and more for the 
 pure democracy of which he was but the sign and the 
 title. It is curious to note how in the very moment 
 that public report, in spite of himself, exalted him^ — 
 in this triumph of individuals — Robespierre could not 
 find it in him to speak the names of opponents or to 
 unsheath invective. He was thrown back, as it were, 
 upon his literary faculty ; he seemed to abandon combat. 
 
 Contrast with such a mind Danton, about to attack 
 Lafayette, the man ; quarrelling with him body to body 
 on the day of the 1 8th of April. He had seen, touched, 
 and felt that stiff, but rather sentimental personality. 
 It was through the medium of such real and physical 
 acquaintance that men of Danton's kind appreciated the 
 growth of the reaction. They knew that the National 
 Guard was becoming more and more the middle class 
 armed; they knew that a conflict between it and the 
 mass of popular opinion might any day break out ; but 
 they summed up their knowledge in their mistrust of 
 Bailly and of Lafayette. 
 
 Robespierre, in proportion as the quarrel approached, 
 withdrew himself more and more into generalities. He 
 saw the danger of the National Guard turned a weapon 
 for the counter-revolution, but to meet that danger he 
 could do nothing but recite as a speech a vast essay full 
 of just reasoning. An appeal for a purely democratic 
 organisation of the militia took the place with him of 
 definite political action at the end of April, and, what is 
 yet more characteristic of the man, this essay was but a 
 repetition and expansion of an opiuion which he had 
 already laid down four months before, when no crisis 
 called for it, and when only a man enamoured of absolute 
 principles could have dealt with the matter at all. 
 
PARIS 
 
 133 
 
 This abstraction is illustrated in his every action, but 
 two especially mark and emphasise it. It was he who 
 broke the continuity of the revolutionary parliaments, and 
 it was he, of all others, who at such a time attempted to 
 abolish capital punishment. 
 
 It was on the 1 8 th of May that he urged the Assembly 
 to the decree which contributed so much to the disasters 
 of the succeeding year, for it was he who opposed with 
 the most convincing pertinacity the re-election of the 
 members of the Assembly whose term was drawing to a 
 close. There could be found no better proof of his 
 temper and of the surroundings that put a halo on that 
 unreality of his, than the proposal of such a decree at 
 such a moment. The confidence that they were building 
 up something eternal inspired his audience ; a conviction 
 that immediate matters should never disturb fundamental 
 decisions inspired the orator. If there were one thing 
 desirable to a man that could foresee the advent of war, 
 and the outbreak of an acute conflict between the Revolu- 
 tion and the Crown (one thing that Mirabeau, had he 
 survived, would have demanded), that thing would have 
 been the retention in public office of the men who were 
 now familiar with the machinery they had created. But 
 it is common to all systems of democracy to demand a 
 rotation in the distribution of power, and as though no 
 immediate considerations interfered, as though France 
 were really at leisure to build up her Utopia, Robespierre 
 proposed, argued, and carried his theorem. The majority 
 was enormous, and the pamphlets of all the revolutionaries, 
 from Desmoulins to Barrfere,^ applauded and pointed out 
 as its author the unique probity of Robespierre. 
 
 In his denunciation of capital punishment, at the 
 same period of monotonous political work, the curious 
 wiU not fail to notice a certain humour. That contrast 
 lay in no inconsistency of character; the speech was 
 
 ' See Eiv. de France et des Roymimes, No. 78 ; PatrioU Franfaia, 647. 
 
134 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 thoroughly in keeping with his manner, proceeded from a 
 profound conviction, was of a piece in its classical quota- 
 tion, in its pedantic balance, with every portion of his 
 legislation. Nor was he alone in pursuing the ideal of 
 Eousseau. Potion, a man of just, profound, and exact 
 decision, well versed in jurisprudence, and of a very 
 practical acquaintance with men, agreed with and sus- 
 tained him. Eobespierre would have abolished capital 
 punishment even for political crimes. The Assembly, 
 startled and dignified by phrases that were not without 
 nobility, yet refused to follow him, and heard unpersuaded 
 a true stroke : " Every time you kiU a man by law you 
 destroy something of the sacredness of man." 
 
 Standing here at the gates of the civil war, fifteen 
 months from the massacres of September, the whole 
 discussion seems to us unreal. Marat, who more than 
 any other had ready in him the beginnings of violence, 
 and who was, so to speak, the Terror already in being, 
 felt its falseness, and quarrelled with the conclusions of 
 Robespierre ; ^ but it would not be just to find in the 
 debate an exceptional ignorance of the conditions imder 
 which Prance lay. It was not doubted in '91 that aU 
 this thrashing out and settling of the principal points 
 of the code would be final, and the sincere energy which 
 Robespierre displayed in the matter proceeded from a 
 belief which he certainly held in common with the mass 
 of his contemporaries, that the last foundations of a new 
 state were being laid. 
 
 The discussions went on their peaceable way, raising 
 him, as it was their special function to do, higher and 
 higher in the public esteem. There were in early June 
 wearisome verities on the Uberty of the Press ; he quoted 
 Cato. He spoke (as on a foregone conclusion) condemning 
 the attack that a priest had made against the Parhament. 
 He was a candidate for the fortnightly presidency of the 
 * Ami du People, 48. 
 
PARIS 
 
 135 
 
 Parliament, and failed. He attempted single-handed to 
 speak against the pensions of recalcitrant officers. In 
 these meaningless debates he confirmed his power with 
 the general; he did not arouse the animosity of the 
 minority. It would seem as if for the moment even the 
 attacks upon him in the royalist journals had ceased, 
 and as if the position he now occupied, a position of 
 security and of rather banal prominence, was principally 
 due to his imperfections of mental vision, to his care 
 against mixing with the immediate quarrel of the time, 
 and perhaps to his failure to perceive where that quarrel 
 was tending. Yet this period left an enduring mark upon 
 his career. It was at this moment, for example, that he 
 was elected to one of the numerous forensic functions, 
 now thrown open to the popular choice: he that had 
 already been chosen for the chief magistrate of Versailles 
 was now made public prosecutor of the town of Paris, and 
 it was also upon the tradition of these six weeks that he 
 set the foundation of the permanent hegemony which he 
 began to exercise over the Club and the city when, two 
 months later, the great Assembly closed. He resigned 
 the functions to which he had been elected by Versailles, 
 not (as he pretends in his letter to that town) because it 
 was his duty to accept those for which Paris had chosen 
 him, but because he was now embedded in the political 
 temper of the capital, a temper from which he could no 
 longer escape, and which had absorbed the whole of 
 his mind. 
 
 It was during this peaceable and monotonous advance 
 that there fell upon the recollection and security of his 
 new life the disturbance of the 20th of June; the flight 
 of the royal family, their recapture, the long suspense 
 that ended in the massacre of the Champ de Mars. 
 
 It is nearly always true of the great days of the 
 Eevolution, especially of the scenes in its earlier period, 
 that they leave Kobespierre aside. It is true of this as of 
 
136 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the rest. By an accident wMcli fitted strangely well with 
 his character, he had on that day of the 20th of June 
 strolled out of Paris to enjoy the flattery and regrets 
 of Versailles. When he returned to the city it was to 
 find the uproar of consternation, the King's flight dis- 
 covered ; and to hear a word that, had he been at all of 
 the stuff of those he led, would have illuminated his 
 mind. Condorcet had pronounced the word " Republic." ^ 
 
 He retiurned to the Assembly in the early afternoon 
 of the following day. He made a speech of no moment 
 to the Jacobins in the evening, he added such a common- 
 place declaration as might be demanded of him, but 
 admitted at least these picturesque words that he was 
 " wUling to be rid of the royal individual who cost forty 
 millions." 
 
 When he came to be alone and with his friends he 
 was altogether disturbed, and it was clear that he had 
 lost his footing. For such men, who live in ideas rather 
 than in their application, a continuity of the social 
 medium is a necessity. They must, so to speak, find 
 leisure in the constant habits of their environment, or 
 their minds would be too much disturbed to follow out 
 the ceaseless definitions of the intellect. The flight of the 
 King shattered all the security and all the continuity 
 which, after the first great change of base in '89, had 
 continued for two years to mark the society in which 
 the Revolution moved. If the King's object were to 
 escape beyond the frontiers, and if he succeeded in that 
 object, the whole State was put in the gravest peril, and 
 the disturbing factor, which Robespierre was later to 
 combat with such insistence, the advent of war, was made 
 certain and immediate. Upon this scheme of a remo- 
 
 ^ There is an endless discussion as to who first spoke that word. A 
 hundred bad used it in their writings. I think Aulard has proved that it 
 was first proposed to abolish monarchy in the drawing-room of the 
 Condorcets. 
 
PARIS 137 
 
 delled state (to whose last touches he had so largely 
 contributed and whose very design he had done so much 
 to plan) was thrust the necessity, perhaps, of a whole 
 reconstruction by the flight of the King. The machinery 
 of the executive was dissolved. The checks with which 
 the new situation was surrounded had for a moment 
 disappeared. The constitutionals were made by this 
 accident into bitter conservatives. 
 
 P^,tion hved then in the Faubourg St. Honore, 
 beyond where the English embassy now stands. That 
 afternoon, the afternoon of the 21st, Robespierre went 
 round to his rooms during the short recess in the session 
 of the Assembly. He met there (in company with 
 Brissot), the future light of the Gironde, the woman who 
 had come up to Paris five months before and who was 
 already beginning to exercise upon the political society of 
 the capital an influence which she retained till death; 
 the wife of old Roland. It was in the presence of her 
 form and attraction that this little committee of ex- 
 tremists debated the problem which the flight of the 
 royal famUy had created.^ 
 
 To the more square-built and deeper Potion the solution 
 was in that great name, " The Republic," which was to 
 become in a short year an idol for all the people. Robes- 
 pierre, with his little laugh, bit his nails nervously and 
 asked once or twice, " What is a Repubhc ? " France 
 was not yet republican at all, and he was not the one to 
 feel the magic of words. He took then the extreme 
 leadership of indignation, but nothing more. The Parlia- 
 ment had refused to decide anything ; had talked of " the 
 King's abduction " ; Robespierre turned from them to his 
 special field, to the Jacobins, and that night put on an 
 
 ^ On this passage Dnmont is a common liar. Madame Boland is trnst- 
 worthy upon facts, but upon tendencies and judgments embittered and 
 biassed. See ber " Memoirs," 1. 298, 299 (ist edition). 
 
138 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 attitude in the dim chapel,^ to protect his ill-ease he 
 lifted the shield of demagogy, and began that litany of 
 himself which wearied and aUenated within three years 
 the more practical of his followers. 
 
 It was ten at night when he stood in the tribmie of 
 the club. The opportunities of the moment gave him 
 daring ; he impeached the confusion and the hesitation of 
 the deputies and turned their meaningless phrase, " the 
 abduction of the King," into an accusation of treason; 
 then once more he exalted himself, and pretended that 
 such clear words might lead him to his death. This false 
 effect — for it can hardly have been other than consciously 
 false — led to cheers. He stood up silent in a storm of 
 praise. The ovation was witnessed by the ministers, 
 by Bailly, by Lafayette, by all that from conviction, or 
 doubt, or habit, were determined to use the occasion for 
 the purposes of reaction. They entered at the moment his 
 speech closed. It seemed as though the King's flight 
 was to throw the two armies of opinion one at the other, 
 and as though Robespierre would be found once for all in 
 the camp against which Lafayette was determined to lead 
 an assault with whatever he could gather of the armed 
 militia he had so long commanded. Danton was there ; 
 in a violent and direct phrase he accused these men as 
 they entered of treason, and he enveloped Robespierre 
 in the armour of the Cordeliers : thrust him among the 
 fighters. Next day that vision of immediate hostility 
 was dispelled. It was learned that the royal family had 
 been stopped, and were returning. 
 
 The word " Republic " was silenced, the old conditions 
 reappeared, shaken and uncertain indeed, but still the 
 only basis upon which political discussion could move. 
 AU retreated somewhat from the position of those violent 
 three days, the reaction threatened less loudly; the 
 
 1 The club had moved earlier in June from the library to the deserted 
 chapel of the monastery. 
 
PARIS 139 
 
 democrats consented to resume the discussion of the 
 Constitution. 
 
 There followed three weeks in which the angry dis- 
 content of the populace and the demand for the King's 
 dismissal found none but chance and irresponsible leaders. 
 That crisis ended in the presentation of the two petitions 
 from the Cordeliers and from the Jacobins for the recon- 
 sideration of the position of the King : if you will, for his 
 abdication or removal. 
 
 With the violence that was the outcome of that 
 movement Robespierre is entirely dissociated. His name 
 is continually mentioned as a leader by those who foresaw 
 or who accelerated the approaching disaster, but he gives 
 them no excuse for such an attitude. 
 
 When the second great Federation had, on the 14th 
 of July, brought up its great crowds of provincial revolu- 
 tionaries to the city, he could find nothing less cautious 
 than the phrase, " As for monarchs, let them so act as to 
 make monarchy respected." He took a personal and 
 active part in preventing the Club, of which he was now 
 almost the master, from attacking the principle of 
 monarchy. He urged and succeeded in persuading them 
 to have nothing to do with the petition. 
 
 The Federation had been held upon a Thursday, 
 The Friday and Saturday he occupied in a determined 
 effort to prevent extreme measures on the part of the 
 malcontents ; it was one of his moments of energy. Here, 
 as later, during the debate on the war, he saw violence 
 endangering the reconstruction which occupied every 
 faculty of his mind. It was evident that the old regime 
 was arming. The senile Vadier, that had babbled of 
 republicanism, was a sign of the change. He babbled 
 a recantation. The various forces of reaction, which 
 had taken so long to gain cohesion and discipline, 
 were now united, and were ready to attack at a signal 
 the discipline, the secrecy, the universal presence of the 
 
I40 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Jacobins. On the eve of the quarrel Robespierre again 
 spoke decisively against the public presentation of the 
 petition to depose the King, and caused the club to 
 send deputies to withdraw their portion of that petition, 
 which was already upon the altar of the Champs de 
 Mars. The Parliament had declared the petition illegal. 
 He would abide within the law. All this pronounced 
 attitude of his might be summed up in the contem- 
 porary phrase of Brissot : " A law is passed, and we must 
 obey it." 
 
 The moment was too critical for such reservations 
 to produce their effect. The following day, Sunday, the 
 17th, at evening, when the sun was setting or had set, 
 the excesses of the crowd, their murder of two vagrants 
 whom they thought spies,^ their defiance of the hasty 
 decree which forbade the petition, their angry trooping 
 to sign it, had led to the declaration of martial law. 
 Bailly had appeared in the great empty plain where, 
 three days before, the Federation had attempted to 
 continue the traditions of unanimity and where the 
 mound and altar in a lonely central place recalled the 
 oath and upspringing of the preceding year. The con- 
 flict between Lafayette's militia and the populace had 
 taken place, the women, children, and married men had 
 fallen, and before it was yet dark the massacre of the 
 Champs de Mars had opened the short and violent 
 reaction, the weeks of insolence which proved but a 
 preface for greater and more terrible reprisals of 
 years. 
 
 That conflict determined a great change in the life 
 of Robespierre. He left his loneliness in the Rue 
 Saintonge, his vague popularity, his sacred distance, to 
 enter into the familiar idolatry of one family; to be 
 
 ^ I use the phrase for shortness. It was not the crowd on the Cbamp 
 de Mars who did this. It was the mob at the Gros Caillouz, whither the 
 spies had been sent. 
 
PARIS [41 
 
 made, as it were, a god of one known temple, to direct 
 from a single and famous centre his increasing power 
 over the later fortunes of tlie reform. 
 
 If one would follow this transition, it is necessary to 
 see him once more in the society of which he had become 
 the spokesman. 
 
 The Jacobins were in session. In the flood of the 
 reaction, in the victory of the conservatives, all but a 
 handful of the politicians had already resigned their 
 tickets : half-a-dozen alone remained, surrounded by the 
 ordinary members. The impoverished club had met 
 as usual after the dinner-hour, and as the long summer 
 light was failing, and the candelabra were beginning 
 to make shadows in the vaults and to show the gaps 
 in the long benches of the nave, there came to its 
 remnant of deputies,^ with their great band of radical 
 voters beside them, the news of what had passed at sun- 
 set on the Champs de Mars. Almost simultaneously 
 with that passionate rumour they heard the loud cries 
 of opponents without, and the clanking jostle of arms 
 that goes with a mob of irregulars. The National Guard, 
 the bourgeoisie in arms, were coming back east from their 
 fatal error ; a great group of them had passed, or been 
 forced by the rush of the riotous return, out of the Rue 
 St Honore into the irregular square that formed the 
 entrance to the old hall of the convent. There they 
 stood shouting and hooting for awhile against the radi- 
 cals, and feeding by their insult the growing passion 
 within. 
 
 The club had rarely tolerated tumult, especially at 
 this stage of the reform. Extreme as it already was in 
 
 1 Roederer, Robespierre, Buzot, CorroUer, Boyer (the bishop), Potion. 
 All the other liberal deputies had seceded the day before, and formed 
 what was afterwards known as "The Feuillants," that held their 
 meeting in the convent over the way. Many returned later on the 
 address which Robespierre himself drew up and presented in the name 
 of the parent society. 
 
142 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 principle, and fanatical as the wars were to make it in 
 the near future, yet so far it had maintained a habit of 
 composure. Its membership — it was for much the 
 greater part made up of professional men — its sense of 
 its own importance, the academic theses which 'it de- 
 lighted to discuss, lent it an undue gravity, and pre- 
 served it from the habitual violence that was even then 
 a feature of the Cordeliers, and that the invasion evoked 
 later in every public meeting. But that night they gave 
 way to a furious hubbub which proceeded at once from 
 their indignation at the action of Lafayette, from the 
 suddenness of the conflict, and the fear of the unknown 
 in the darkness that immediately succeeded it. Their 
 vehement anger was nourished by that mingling of im- 
 potence and confusion which of all things will most 
 exasperate men met in numbers. It was they that had 
 originated the petitions, yet it was they also that had 
 withdrawn first and had counselled prudence. In a 
 sense they felt themselves part authors of this tragedy ; 
 they only raged the more against the men and the policy 
 whose stupidity had led to such a climax. Through the 
 uproar, which drowned debate as the night deepened, 
 Robespierre alone made his high voice heard. In a 
 speech that has not come down to us, but whose manner 
 and persistence were of the kind to which the club 
 always listened, he put some measure to their excite- 
 ment, and by half-past ten or thereabouts, aided by the 
 exhaustion and curiosity of his audience, he had reduced 
 the fire to embers ; before eleven the chapel was empty- 
 ing, the members rising from their benches. Madame 
 Roland, who had been present at this meeting, bethought 
 herself of Robespierre as she sat at home surrounded by 
 the growing terrors of the crisis. She went, or says she 
 went,^ up into the Rue Saintonge in the Marais to offer 
 
 1 A little Inconsistently, since she also says in her "Memoirs" that, at 
 the Bame hoar, she was refusing shelter to Bobespierre's early friend, 
 
PARIS 143 
 
 him asylum in her house ; but she tells us that when 
 she got to his door, somewhat before midnight, he had 
 not yet returned. In this she is truthful, though she 
 is wrong in ascribing terror to a man who was as igno- 
 rant of panic as of valour. What had happened was 
 this. 
 
 There was in the meeting at the Jacobins a man 
 called Duplay. A Highlander from Auvergne, ruddy, 
 tall, and strong, though verging upon age; a master 
 carpenter by trade, of some property, an owner of horses, 
 and a type of the older generation. He had welcomed 
 the Revolution as the climax of the theories that had 
 entertained his class and its superiors for a lifetime. 
 His ready and simple mind had found in the oratory of 
 Robespierre the same quality of expression that took 
 captive then and for years the middle classes of the 
 capital. Duplay's single devotion to those few and 
 fundamental political ideas which were the main interest 
 of his life, made him a kind of devotee of the speaker 
 who presented them with such clearness, and whose 
 narrow deductions never wandered by an inch from their 
 guidance. Moved as much by charity as by this distant 
 hero-worship, he came to the rescue of his idol, seeing in 
 him a man who would not comprehend the risks which 
 that evening had produced. And in this he was an acute 
 observer, for Robespierre in the great crises of his life, 
 partly from excessive introspection, partly from a natural 
 inaptitude to grasp reality, was blind alike to opportunity 
 and to danger. He stood beside the door as Robespierre 
 was making to go out, told him his name, and begged 
 bim to hide, if only for that night, in his house. The 
 younger man was persuaded, and followed him. 
 
 The street was full of menace ; the terror of the short 
 reaction was already weighing upon Paris. The mode- 
 
 Madame Eobert, on the plea that her house was too well known by 
 Lafayette's faction. 
 
144 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 rates and the strong tories were thoroughly allied ; the 
 alliance was still numerous and powerful ; it had used its 
 weapons and had won its first skirmish; the National 
 Guard could be relied upon. They thought, perhaps, that 
 they were winning a campaign, and with the feverish 
 haste of uncertain men, the mere six hours after the com- 
 mand to fire were long enough to give birth to a complete 
 policy. They could not see that they had but pulled the 
 first trigger in a civil war, that wounded mothers bring- 
 ing in dead children were to furnish the arguments of 
 the future, and that in two years poor Bailly himself was 
 to meet death in the rain on the spot where he had given 
 his orders to the Guard. For the moment the reaction 
 had won. Danton was in flight, soon to be off on that 
 short unknown visit to England.^ Desmoulins had 
 thrown down his pen, and of all the group none were 
 in greater danger than Kobespierre. 
 
 Duplay hurried him westward along the Rue St. 
 Honor4 till they had nearly reached its end and stopped 
 at last where the short Rue St. Florentin comes in from 
 the south. Here on the north side of the street was a 
 house which the lamp of the opposite opening picked out 
 against the night.^ They passed through a wide arch- 
 way into the outer courtyard, where great stacks of planks 
 and lumber, a saw-pit, and a shed, marked Duplay's 
 trade, and saw at the farther end of the paved quad- 
 rangle a lower house connected by a wing with the front 
 upon the street. 
 
 A light shone in the windows ; they entered to find 
 the wife and her two young daughters waiting anxiously 
 to receive the master safe from the club on this night of 
 clamour. He introduced his guest and they offered him 
 a sanctuary, remembering his growing name. So, a little 
 
 ^ Of which I can find nothing save a mention in some private notes 
 communicated to me by a friend that he lived in Greek Street, Sobo- 
 3 See note 3 at the end of this book. 
 
PARIS 145 
 
 before midnight on this his first introduction to peril, he 
 came under the roof which (with one trifling interval) 
 was to be his home for three years of an unimagined 
 fame, and on which he was to turn his eyes — so far as 
 blood would let him — in the last hours of his life as he 
 approached the neighbouring scaffold. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE WAR 
 
 The year between the domestic victory of Lafayette and 
 the fall of the monarchy is a labyrinth or a crucible. 
 There passes into it and is lost, all of that first reform 
 which was imagined to have achieved finahty; there 
 emerges from it the high exaltation of the Republic. 
 The Constitution of 1791, " which might be revised, but 
 not for thirty years,"-' was a vast reconstruction: the 
 decent tradition of Europe cleared of excrescence ; suited 
 to the philosophy of the time ; made normal. It was full 
 of detail; its multitudinous parts had received the exact 
 attention of lawyers ; statesmen had debated its checks 
 and balances. The spirit of '93 was a creation, or at the 
 least the resurrection of some infinite past in the race; 
 it had the simplicity and the violence of a religion, its 
 consequence and propaganda, called by a thousand names, 
 are the leavening ferment of the modern world. What 
 was the nature of the maze in which the sober common- 
 places of the leisured were lost (they have not reappeared), 
 and of what kind was the chemistry which fused the old 
 elements into this prime matter of equality ? Two con- 
 temporaneous accidents answer this question : the Great 
 War and the nature of the new Parhament. 
 
 Of the war I shall deal in its place. It was the 
 governing condition that dominated the mind of Europe ; 
 we are altogether its heirs. But the war would not have 
 fulfilled the plan of history, nor have given rise to the 
 
 ' The decree of 31st August 1791. On this decree an historian bag 
 passed the commentary, " Oh, human decisions, how frail ye aie I " 
 
 146 
 
THE WAR 
 
 147 
 
 spectacle of democracy had it not in its origin contended 
 against forces so complex and so resistant as to provoke 
 an intense activity. The Revolution was compelled to 
 develop energies hitherto unknown in degree and sur- 
 passing the line that bounds experience. The dense 
 medium that so compelled it to call up new things, was 
 furnished by the constitutional contrasts of 1791. I 
 would therefore detail at some length what kind of dis- 
 crepancies the Legislative Assembly displayed, nor will 
 the description, though tedious, be found irrelevant, for it 
 explains the continued increase of Robespierre. 
 
 The Legislative Assembly appears at first sight to be 
 but the natural successor of the Constituant. Accus- 
 tomed in our modern pohtics to the regular procession of 
 parliaments, we see the second Assembly coming in natural 
 order after the dissolution of the first ; it is more demo- 
 cratic, because the general march of the nation is towards 
 democracy, it proceeds to certain extremes, it declares 
 war. The conservative elements of 1789— 179 1 dis- 
 appear during the year of the Legislative. At last, 
 again in a natural order, the term of its powers intro- 
 duces in 1792 a third, and yet more extreme, Assembly, 
 openly Republican, proceeding through the Terror to 
 delirium, and finally to exhaustion in 1794. Such is 
 the picture that the three Parliaments of the Revolution 
 call up if they be examined superficially, and the Legis- 
 lative appears in them as a natural link between the 
 orderly hope of the Constituant and the prophetic fury 
 of the Convention. But the picture is false. Not only 
 was the spirit of the Legislative Assembly a tangle far 
 more complex than that of a simple progression towards 
 democracy, but the very causes of the dilemma of 1792 
 and of the passion that followed its solution in war and 
 insurrection lay buried at the heart of that tangle. 
 
 In the first place, the Legislative Assembly was an 
 anachronism. The electoral colleges which chose it were 
 
148 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 themselves elected precisely at the moment when the King 
 seemed — not without violence — to have been limited to 
 his functions under the Constitution; for they were elected 
 in early June before the flight to Vineennes. Nor were 
 the electoral colleges even permitted to elect when the 
 shock of the King's desertion had followed immediately 
 upon their formation. Monarchist though they were, that 
 blunder (had they proceeded to vote as the regulations 
 demanded, in the last days of June) might have led them 
 to the choice of men more determined or more violent 
 than would earlier have suited their taste. The sharp 
 definitions of the crisis might have created a clear 
 national policy. As it was, the meeting of the electoral 
 colleges was postponed till the 5 th of August. Before 
 that date Lafayette had won, and their choice was exer- 
 cised in the extreme of the great reaction. In a word 
 then, the Legislative which, upon a national and universal 
 suffrage would have been almost a Republican Assembly, 
 was falsified not only by a restricted franchise, nor only 
 by indirect election, but also and especially by the re- 
 volution in opinion which lay between the moment of its 
 origin and that of its first exercise of power. 
 
 In the second place, the Legislative suffered in a 
 higher degree than any other product of the Reform, 
 from a divorce between its theoretical and its actual func- 
 tions. It is a note of the whole Revolution that while 
 its philosophy presupposed the peace and level of an 
 absolutely normal state, the wild adventures in the midst 
 of which it was compelled to act were abnormal in the 
 extreme. A scientific accuracy in the delimitation of every 
 new political power or commercial standard, an almost 
 geometrical analysis of the commonwealth and a precise 
 mechanical arrangement of all society — the whole based 
 upon the tolerance and enlightenment of men secure in 
 liberty — these acts of precision so roused and armed the 
 love of ancient custom and the sad postulates of religion. 
 
THE WAR 149 
 
 that not only every foreign, but many domestic interests 
 openly challenged the change. War, rhetoric and even 
 demagogy became the necessary methods whereby was 
 defined and achieved a system whose object had been 
 only peace and whose foundation lay in the cold abstrac- 
 tions of science. The period teems with the ironic con- 
 trast of just, or rather self-evident, decrees and the most 
 enormous and violent illegalities. The Legislative was 
 elected to carry out steadily in detail the Constitution 
 whose general spirit had been defined in the preceding 
 two years — it discovered the task of a European war. 
 It was designed to argue points with the executive and 
 to define the remaining petty doubts upon the exact 
 power of the Crown — it found that Crown, and the exe- 
 cutive dependent on it, actively intriguing with rebels 
 and foreign enemies to destroy the Kevolution. It was 
 given the mission of an attorney and found itself com- 
 pelled to the career of a soldier. This anomaly disturbed 
 every issue in the year that saw the first invasion: it 
 divided the counsels of the nation, shattered its internal 
 unity, and raised up before the French the thing that 
 bewilders and maddens a community — a danger hidden 
 and elusive, enemies in the night. They could no longer 
 be certain of their weapons or their authority. The 
 people fell into an anarchy of doubt and violence, and 
 there proceeded from this confusion of concealed powers 
 a suspicion that became coextensive with the whole 
 national life; a terror that haunted, poisoned, and came 
 very near to destroying France. 
 
 But a third more tangible evil aifected the twelve 
 months during which this Parliament endured. The 
 nation was no longer legally led by its principal men. 
 The general impatience with a false and uncertain 
 guidance, the popular action that consequently arose 
 outside and against the government are the chief causes 
 of the position which Robespierre assumed at this period. 
 
I50 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 This therefore is the chief mark of the year ; that 
 because a decree forbade the re-election of Members 
 of the last Parliament, the clubs, the old leaders of 
 the first year, the established reputations — all France — 
 worked as it were in spite of the Parliament. Thus the 
 nation thought itself able to neglect the deputies and thus 
 arose among the revolutionaries that disastrous rivalry 
 between the politicians that were within and those that 
 were without the walls of the new Assembly. This 
 rivalry at last became the quarrel of the Mountain and 
 the Gironde. 
 
 There is this great weakness attaching to government 
 by representation, that it presupposes an eminence in 
 those elected. Direct mandate and delegation are justly 
 the theory of a special crisis, but the general life of 
 any deliberative assembly is necessarily senatorial; for 
 who can be at the pains of evoking the General Will 
 of his constituents at every five minutes of the working 
 day, or what General Will however lively could stand 
 the strain of so frequent a resurrection ? If therefore 
 the senate is discovered to be composed of very mediocre 
 men and if the commerce, science and military grades 
 of a nation have their leaders elsewhere, there must 
 fall upon it the contempt and impotence that always 
 go with a discrepancy between authority and power. It 
 is true that some nations attempt to evade this danger by 
 a sublime fiction and pretend to see in the deputy some- 
 thing other than the man himself, making him, as it were, 
 a being whose very ordinary exterior conceals an inspired 
 genius. The price of this comfortable superstition is a 
 tangle of anomalous laws, a lethargy in the action of 
 government, the exhaustion of wealth, military disaster 
 and a gradual decline. 
 
 There is no space for me to enter here into the discus- 
 sion of this vice in parliaments, a vice which has succeeded 
 in weakening their consideration throughout the modern 
 
THE WAR 
 
 151 
 
 world. It is enough for the purpose of this book to 
 point out that the disaster of possessing a representative 
 assembly below the height of its mission has been avoided 
 for great spaces of time in a variety of ways: by so 
 framing the machinery of election as to make it cor- 
 respond with the hierarchy of excellence that everywhere 
 exists, by providing through the criticism of permanent 
 oflScials some test for the ability of the elected, and so 
 forth. In the Revolution, the French people whose 
 passion for municipal affairs, whose strict and cen- 
 tralised homogeneity, and whose general level of in- 
 telligence fit them ill for the parliamentary system, 
 were upon two great occasions well served in the accident 
 of election. The Constituant Assembly of 1789, pro- 
 ceeding from every corporate body and consulting local 
 patriotism, had collected in one place the talent and 
 energy of the nation ; the Convention of 1792, springing 
 as it were from the inspiration of a people in arms, or 
 rather at bay, gathered what was most powerful and 
 most ready in the new spirit of the wars and discovered 
 a common enthusiasm wherewith to transform for the 
 moment its most insignificant members. In either case an 
 exceptional occasion of supreme interest to all produced 
 for France an exceptional success in a political method of 
 which she has always divined the fallacy and suspected 
 the oligarchic and corrupt tendencies. 
 
 The Legislative had no such fortune. The resolution 
 of the 1 8 th of May which forbade re-election, typical as it 
 was of that theoretical calm against which every circum- 
 stance cried out, might have suited Utopia or a small 
 republic at peace : it was fatal to France in 1791. The 
 tried men, the standard-bearers of the sects, the very 
 buffoons who were the foil to such dignity, were excluded 
 from the Parliament. Barnave, off, marrying himself 
 in Grenoble ; Cazalfes wandering in England ; Barrfere 
 silent ; the Abb^ Maury half in hiding ; Bailly retired to 
 
152 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Nantes, were so many landmarks of public attention 
 withdrawn. As for the members who remained in activity 
 their popularity or public effect still further weakened 
 the moral authority of the Parliament. Si^yfes was 
 working and publishing in the conservative and high 
 assembly called the Department of Paris; Robespierre 
 was the public prosecutor-elect of Paris, a leader and 
 master in the Jacobins ; Desmoulins was the chief pam- 
 phleteer of the advance ; Lafayette was again a general on 
 service, soon to be in command of the frontier; strong 
 Potion was the mayor of Paris. 
 
 Thus whatever France had come to regard as the political 
 world was standing apart, conducting its own campaigns. 
 The Parliament upon which was to fall the task of resolu- 
 tion and action in the face of Europe seemed at its origin 
 to be separate and to suffer from insignificance ; later it 
 appeared dependent on the clubs. Were it my business 
 (which, thank Heaven, it is not) to write down here the 745 
 names of those who composed it, readers fully acquainted 
 with the Revolution might recognise a dozen ; the rare 
 students who have examined every detail of the period 
 might pretend to the knowledge of some thirty; those 
 whose general education has been supplemented by some 
 reading upon the period would be arrested by four or 
 perhaps five names — they would see Vergniaud, Carnot, 
 Condorcet, Herault de S^chelles . . . Couthon . . . Brissot. 
 So far a general thesis of inevitable monotony has 
 occupied my description of this transition. It has been 
 necessary to introduce it in order to show on what new 
 platform Robespierre was to stand. Freed from the dis- 
 cipline and general talent of the Assembly, segregated, a 
 unique figure, already in public office, having for his 
 centre of effort a small and highly favourable debating 
 hall — everything conspired to " set " him, as it were, in 
 the framing that suited him best. Some few knew well, 
 he himself had not yet begun to suspect, that the isola- 
 
THE WAR 153 
 
 tion of a nascent idolatry, the new pedestal that cut him 
 off from experience, were to falsify his popularity, to lead 
 him where he would not go, and at last, in '94, exhaust 
 him altogether. No man can feed upon himself; these 
 repetitive and single-sided men least of all. 
 
 ■This mixture of isolation and of power is the story of 
 Robespierre during all that autumn and winter of 1791-92: 
 a power whoUy unfruitful — as suited him — an isolation 
 that belonged not only to the height of the tribune of the 
 Jacobins or to the silence of an audience, but to the pro- 
 found variance between his views upon foreign policy and 
 those of general opinion. Nowhere is the paradox of his 
 career more startling than now, when his very opposition 
 but confirms the public trust in his probity. His ignorance 
 of the great rising that is covering all France but empha- 
 sise the abstraction, and (as was thought) the profundity 
 of his faith. He counted more and more with the Jacobins, 
 and therefore with the Revolution, because he seemed to 
 care less than nothing for their bias of the moment. They 
 made him, as it were, an anchor for what they knew to be 
 changeable in themselves. They swung to him as ships 
 swing to their moorings in a strong tide-way. 
 
 Consider the decline of 1791, and the thoughts of 
 which the peasantry, the citizens, the salons — all that 
 lived outwardly — were full as the days shortened into the 
 winter darkness and the fate of war. The peasantry had 
 bought the Church land ; even now it was ploughing. 
 The under-quarrel of the priest and the schismatic had 
 pierced through the enveloping verbiage with which it had 
 as yet been covered, and the ceaseless vitality of religion 
 had reappeared to startle all that philosophy of the pedantic 
 rich. Reason, standing single, had shrivelled in the flame 
 that came up out of nature against it. There was no 
 " civil " church, there was no " Galilean " establishment — 
 there was nothing save Catholicism seeking its enemy: 
 the master-error of the early Revolution was discovered 
 
154 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 It had thought to have given decent guarantees to a 
 superstition dying, and it found it had insulted a religion 
 whose intensity increased with time. From this crisis 
 there arose the first threat of the civil war. To take but 
 the clergy as an example. While half the clergy mourned 
 their country in silence, half saw nothing of moment 
 either in country or freedom but only in the Church of 
 God. In such a passion dogma and theology, that are as 
 abstract and as deductive as the Revolution itself (it is 
 their child), were forgotten ; the concrete objects of the 
 moment seemed all in all. For instance, Avignon, on 
 which a thousand jests had passed for ages, which Catho- 
 licism had forgotten, became in an hour a sacred ground. 
 It was an island in France, an historical absurdity, an 
 inheritance of the Papacy's degradation and corruption, 
 a memory of enslavement, something to be bought out — 
 no matter, it was sacred ground. The mere demand for 
 the civic oath, the mere proclamation of the reunion with 
 French soil, led to the massacre of Lescoyer at the altar — 
 a massacre directed by women. On that news, the French- 
 men of the old city felt a small implacable thing menac- 
 ing the unity of the nation and their liberty : they killed 
 it. The Tower of the Glacifere, a bastion of that castle 
 which seems a rock and is huge enough to hold all the 
 dead bodies of the middle ages, was filled with their 
 victims. And to this one chief disaster a himdred 
 menaces attached throughout the kingdom. In the 
 Cevennes the villages fought faction fights of Heretic 
 and Catholic; in Vendue and in Brittany the churches 
 were seized from the schismatics ; at Caen, right in the 
 town, a schismatic priest had been thrown from his office 
 at the very altar. 
 
 The agony of a divided allegiance worked on and 
 infuriated the pubUc mind. France Catholic had bought 
 the land of the establishment, and the heart of France is 
 in the land. The peasant, who had made all the elder 
 
THE WAR 155 
 
 saints and half the ritual, clung sullenly to his posses- 
 sions. " By our Lady," he had a right to his purchase : 
 all his gods confirmed him. 
 
 France, atheist, refined and vicious, the pestilence of 
 the eighteenth century, was suddenly become a sound 
 fanatic. Lord ! how evil was this Revolution, how blasphe- 
 mous ! The Httle marquises at Coblenz and at Turin 
 were astonished at the licence of manners. Catherine 
 of Russia was aU chastity, chivalry, and would help 
 Gustavus of Sweden, a Quixote of Marie Antoinette's; 
 fleets were to be sent to the coasts of Brittany by those 
 admirable devotees of celibacy. 
 
 Thus when this religious war was conceived, all the 
 nation was in a turmoil. With the exception of that very 
 small minority — the refined agnostics of the governing 
 classes, the rare and the isolated mountain villages 
 where Protestantism was still a social force — there was 
 no one in whom the old religion, dwindled to indifference, 
 did not knock at the heart : yet there was hardly any 
 one either (save in some definitely rebel districts) who 
 did not painfully refuse to attack the Revolution, and feel 
 some indignation at the honest fanaticism of the clerical 
 Revolt. This tearing apart of the affections led to every 
 violence and embittered every phrase, for nearly every 
 man became a kind of enemy to his own childhood; 
 such evil had the self-sufficiency of the Constituant 
 Assembly and the blunder of the Civil Constitution of 
 the Clergy already achieved. 
 
 But in the rising storm, see how little Robespierre 
 comprehended. He had maintained his friendly con- 
 nection with his friends in the Church ; he had made a 
 speech or two in mild defence of the clergy, treating 
 the whole matter by the light of his principles, seeing in 
 religion at least some necessary dogmas, and in the priest 
 a puzzling citizen. The mustering for civil war he still 
 took for a calm field in which he might sow his theories. 
 
156 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 In the very days when the awful tragedy of the Glacifere 
 was acted in the crossways of the South, he was off on 
 a triumphal tour to his province, to greet his brother 
 and sister at Arras, to be drawn in his carriage by the 
 citizens, to be delighted at the illumination of the town 
 in his honour, to receive a civic crown for himself and 
 for the absent Potion (whose name was so often coupled 
 with his own), to rest in a local glory from what had 
 certainly been the devoted labour of two wonderful years. 
 It would not be just to say that he saw nothing of the 
 religious ferment, but the very rarity and insignificance 
 of his allusions to it heightens the impression of unreality 
 which this passage in his hfe conveys. He goes to call 
 upon an old friend, a connection of that Abbey of St. 
 Waast under whose shadow he had played as a child, 
 and of that good bishop, De Conzi^, who had befriended 
 his youth. He is coldly received and wonders why! 
 He hears of a miracle in some church or other of the 
 town (a lame man hearing the mass of a non-juring 
 priest threw down his crutches and walked) ; he mentions 
 the matter in a letter to Paris,^ not with indignation 
 nor with doubt, but with a tolerant and commonplace 
 irony, the faint echo of Voltaire: such a comment as 
 might have slipped into some satirical verse or other at 
 the Rosati, years before the Revolt. 
 
 All the long debate of October, the fierce decrees 
 of November, sent powerful reverberations throughout 
 the provinces. The Assembly was being led at last. 
 Young men from the South had given that inchoate, 
 unknown body of youth a voice ; the steady flame of 
 Vergniaud, the gusts of Isnard were creating the in- 
 fluence which was later to be called the " Gironde." It 
 was just before Robespierre's departure that Gensonn^ 
 had presented his report upon the condition of the West, 
 showing how far the religious quarrel had proceeded. 
 
 ^ Written to Duplay on the 17th of October. 
 
THE WAR 
 
 157 
 
 It was tlie day after his return to Paris (the 29th of 
 November) that the Assembly passed the violent decree 
 which covered the Church with the first shadow of the 
 Terror. 
 
 His absence therefore exactly corresponded with the 
 crisis which first in all the revolutionary movement 
 caused the French to step outside equality and reason 
 and to initiate exceptional laws. Yet he said nothing 
 of it either in his speeches at Bdthune (in which sad 
 town a second ovation awaited him)^ nor in his letters 
 home. Fauchet, the constitutional Bishop of Caen, had 
 asked for extreme measures ; Forn^, who held a similar 
 office in Bourges, who modelled himself upon Robes- 
 pierre/ had said everything in favour of leniency. 
 Isnard in a manner magnificent and terrible, but 
 touching upon fanaticism, had called the whole move- 
 ment rebellion (which it was) and had passed the 
 extreme of violence when he said, "No God but the 
 Law," when he shouted that no trial and no witnesses 
 were needed against manifest insurrection (November 
 14). The committee had closed its sitting, the decree 
 passed. The civic oath was to be administered to the re- 
 fractory clergy within a week ; a refusal made the refuser 
 suspect. He could be domiciled at discretion ; if he 
 disobeyed an order as to his domicile he could be 
 imprisoned for a year. This violent climax, a decision 
 which the Crown vetoed, ended the first phase of the 
 religious quarrel. 
 
 One indication only of what he might have said at 
 the Jacobins, had he not chosen such a time as suitable 
 for a visit to his native place, we have in his letter to 
 that club, and the occasion of it is a whole commentary 
 
 ' To those who are acquainted with this town it may be interesting to 
 hear that he stopped at the sign of the Golden Oak. 
 
 * This man was one of the many who had an idolatry for Maximilian. 
 He was a don of the University of Toulouse ; between sixty and seventy 
 years of age, and mad. 
 
158 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 upon his continual attitude towards Catholicism : an entry 
 into his mind. It was upon the 9th of November, just 
 when the debate hung even, that Condorcet published 
 in his paper, the Courrier de Paris, a supposed letter of 
 Robespierre's. It declared that no principle of toleration 
 should apply " to the faith that is intolerant of all others." 
 Condorcet was deceived ; indeed he only gave the letter 
 as " an extract communicated to him " ; but it did not 
 need Robespierre's immediate and vigorous denial to 
 establish the falsity of the letter. It was opposed to aU 
 he had said or thought during his whole political life. 
 What is remarkable, then, is not that it was perceived to 
 be an error on the part of the Courrier, but that Robes- 
 pierre should have sent so immediately^ an emphatic, 
 angry denial, to be read by Couthon, his friend, to the 
 club when it was still turbulent with the conquering 
 eloquence of Isnard. It meant that he still held abso- 
 lutely in the close of 1791 to the principles that had 
 seemed to him all-sufficient in 1789. Michelet has 
 called his attitude throughout this initial year a traffick- 
 ing with the priests, a determination to rely upon them 
 in the future. It was nothing of the kind. It was 
 simply the necessary consequence of logic in a mind 
 that had not yet formed any plan of ambition, and that 
 was as absolute and restricted as a mathematical identity. 
 To no man (this letter said) could a question be asked of 
 right upon his opinions, nor a punishment be inflicted for 
 a true answer, nor should any be constrained to follow this 
 or that declaration of faith or discipline. 
 
 If he had been all but silent upon the religious 
 quarrel, he was entirely so upon a matter that yet might 
 have given him much more opportunity for discussion, 
 and that worked in the new debates parallel with the 
 
 ' It must have been despatched the moment the post reached the 
 north, and have been -d, hot ansvrer by return, for there are but five days 
 between the printing of the sheet and the arrival of his denial. 
 
THE WAR 
 
 159 
 
 question of the priests. This matter was the ques- 
 tion of the emigration. He had spoken already 
 in the earlier months of the year defending the 
 right of aU to come and go. I cannot but believe that 
 if he neither wrote one word nor on his return made one 
 allusion to the great debate on the proscription of the 
 emigrants it was because he still clung to that absolute 
 and useless principle of peaceful firmness. On this again 
 he was directly opposed to the popular feeling, but far 
 more certainly than in the dilemma of the religious in- 
 surrection. The emigrants were (for the most part) 
 frank traitors. There was no hypocrisy or mincing; 
 they were wilKng to fight in defence of something 
 superior to the nation — the feudal class of Europe. When 
 the man whose fierce name recurs like a chorus through- 
 out these scenes, Isnard again, come from a dry place, 
 the harsh deserts of the Ehone, Isnard, " the wind of 
 Africa," had startled all the Assembly with a truth, 
 France was solid in applause. For he had said, " I ask 
 this Assembly and France . . . and you, sir ! " — to a 
 startled noble that had groaned — " whether any one will 
 maintain that these men are not plotting agaiast their 
 country ; " he flamed into menace, talked of " the punish- 
 ments of the people that resemble the punishments of 
 God, since they work when the laws are silent." All 
 that cavalry charge of his raised the Assembly to its 
 feet. Its echo struck the Jacobins. A decree passed 
 that the emigrants were to return at the New Year, or 
 to be liable to confiscation and death. Robespierre, by 
 speech to his surrounders in the north, and to his Paris 
 home by letter, remained unapplauding.^ 
 
 But I would not convey of this man, even in the 
 preparatory time of mere applause, when he had not yet 
 
 ' The answer of Monsieur to this decree is worth recalling: "In the 
 name of all common sense, book i., section i., article i., chapter i., para- 
 graph i., come back to your right minds." 
 
i6o ROBESPIERRE 
 
 approached the responsibility of power, an impression 
 only of nullity and of the dry bones of thought. The 
 stamp which he has left upon history is far too 
 profound for such a judgment to be true. His con- 
 victions, though they were but individual, pierced and 
 acted; when these convictions agreed with some prac- 
 tical conclusion, he was full of argument, of application, 
 and of judgment. 
 
 This power or talent, which, as I say, appeared when 
 some matter congenial to him had been matured by 
 others for his reception, and when his mind (that com- 
 monly worked in a void) was given something real which 
 it could grasp, was very rapidly developed, and was perhaps 
 publicly appreciated for the first time when the Jacobins 
 began their great debate upon the war. 
 
 From this moment Eobespierre, who had been 
 brought out from utter obscurity by the days of 
 October, who had been given the first honours of 
 debate in 1790, whom the death of Mirabeau had 
 left with an exaggerated glory, and whom for six 
 months the prestige of the Jacobins and the popular 
 sufirage had still further advanced, passed into the 
 public mind as a man capable of administration. 
 He had pursued a policy, and presented a combined 
 plan — much later, by incessant degrees, he was to 
 attempt the executive function, and by a fatal error 
 born of the blind energy of '93, the satisfaction of that 
 ambition was to be granted him. 
 
 He had returned upon the 25 th of November to find 
 a full tide going the way of the democrats ; Potion was 
 elected mayor, Manuel was clerk, Danton his vicegerent; 
 extreme decrees had passed the Assembly by great 
 majorities or unanimity. The petty fellow that a certain 
 false kind of history would make him out to be would 
 have drifted in such a torrent. But how can a man 
 drift when the centre of his universe is in himself? 
 
THE WAR i6i 
 
 Robespierre in the midst of this overwhelming tendency 
 continued to develop his particular thesis. 
 
 In Paris he found an insistent cry for war. There 
 had come to the minds of all the moral certainty that 
 attack was impending, that the only defensive was to strike. 
 This instinct had impelled the city, was obtaining the 
 provinces, on his return. He opposed it. His principal 
 barrier was Isnard. 
 
 This man, who resembled in his meagre and direct 
 expression, in the hght of his eyes and in his dark coun- 
 tenance and rapid balance of words the principal orators 
 of America ; who had in his spirit much of Jefferson or 
 (to pass to the other pole), in his inspiration, a cousin- 
 ship with Lincoln, was presiding at the Jacobins. A 
 sword had been laid on the table by the tribune. He had 
 accepted and embraced the sword. That sword ^ was the 
 symbol of a crusade. He demanded war, and all France 
 was ready to follow. The frenzy that can drive an 
 assembly to the ridiculous had captured all the chapel 
 when Robespierre came up, collected, into the tribune. 
 Looking up at the public galleries with the same destruc- 
 tive calm that had marked all his attitude for the year, 
 changing his glasses for reading, he turned to his speech 
 as to a task and declaimed his list of suspicions against 
 the pohcy of war. 
 
 Like so many of his public appeals, it has the length 
 and tedimn of a little book. For a solid hour it 
 must have detained the club with its consecutive logic 
 and with its occasional literary excellence; yet these 
 wearying pages which a modern can scarcely complete 
 were thought sublime. The Jacobins, whose majority 
 continued to support Brissot with his cry for an im- 
 mediate offensive, yet voted the printing of this speech, 
 and one might see in the paradox of that vote all the 
 
 1 Presented, I believe, by an American. 
 
1 62 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 future success tliat lay before Robespierre. They were 
 devoted to him beyond the necessities of agreement.^ 
 
 Two forces in him gave him this personal ascendancy 
 over the club, and, through the club, over the elections of 
 the next year, and through them at last over the nation. 
 The first was his one talent ; a talent supremely important 
 in the Revolution : he could manage a debate. He led 
 on his audience continually, not always to the immediate 
 triumph of his thesis, but invariably to a support and 
 applause of himself; he never passed the limit of what 
 popularity may dare. He supported the most uncon- 
 genial proposition by a repetition of the cardinal principles 
 which were the religious dogmas of the time and the 
 invariable provokers of applause. Nor did the revolu- 
 tionaries ever rise from some speech of his without 
 experiencing the dangerous and useless satisfaction which 
 proceeds from listening to the public utterance of our 
 most cherished commonplaces. All through the debates 
 which culminated in the speech of the 1 8th of December 
 this suppleness, his continual reticence of phrase, mark 
 his long fence with the Parliament, the war-party, the 
 Gironde. He spared persons, he praised a defensive 
 preparation, he laid emphasis on the disloyalty of the 
 executive, he connected the whole of his arguments and 
 made them depend upon the texts of the time. But 
 he opposed war. 
 
 And the second force was tenacity. This quality has 
 upon the French in their political efforts an irresistible 
 success, and if it is generally admirable in their eyes it 
 becomes a kind of heroic virtue when the national 
 character is intensified by some common danger. The 
 consistency they seek in themselves, the base of con- 
 viction which is necessary to their exact deductions, 
 they will always seek and sometimes imagine in a 
 leader. Here in Robespierre it was tangible. He 
 * Xhe speech is in the journals of the society, Nos. no, in. 
 
THE WAR 163 
 
 seemed to be their creed in person. They heard 
 him, after the great voice of Vergniaud; the new storm 
 of Isnard, the rising name of Guadet, still reasoning 
 coldly and coming to his own conclusions unmoved. In 
 the face of all Germany arming and of the preaching of 
 civil war within, he could still repeat the old truths con- 
 cerning the danger that standing armies are to liberty. 
 This attitude which we now condemn because it palls on 
 us the French then thought sublime, because such 
 commonplaces were the reiteration of their safeguards. 
 He did not gain majorities for his contention, but he 
 finally confirmed the public faith iu himself. 
 
 Robespierre, then, at the head of a conquering opinion 
 in general politics, yet stood alone, or nearly alone, on 
 the one thing that mattered, combating the war and, 
 among men who idolised him chiefly for his extremes, 
 combating enthusiasm. When loyalty to the nation was 
 synonymous with loyalty to political freedom and when 
 every force that could excite the best minds — the 
 avengement of insult, the strength that is impatient of 
 challenge, the vision of free states throughout Europe, by 
 which dream the Eevolution lived — made straight for 
 war, he passionless, stood out. It might be imagined that 
 this isolation was fruitless in history. On the contrary, 
 it had the highest effect upon the next two years. It 
 preserved the Jacobins. He created, not indeed a mass 
 of votes within them, but a nucleus in which resided 
 their peculiar spirit : a very powerful political body lay 
 entrenched outside the Parliament, the permanent opposi- 
 tion of its leader to the principal policy of the Legislative 
 Assembly gave a strength to all those irregular forces 
 upon which — when the war and the defeats came — the 
 salvation of the Revolution was to depend. The 
 extremists had opposed war. When the war turned ill 
 they had all the more right to direct it to success. 
 
 This opposition and its increasing value is best seen 
 
164 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 by following the sequence of events and the political 
 adventures that, in the following three months, led up to 
 the war. 
 
 The great debate on the war at the Jacobins 
 closed upon the 25th of January. It had lasted two 
 months, and had determined the fate of the Revolution 
 more certainly than had the intrigues of the Court or the 
 growing enthusiasm of the Parliament. For the club 
 had now covered all France with its affiliated societies, 
 and the vast body thus formed was a strict unity, 
 organised, centralised, and moving like an army at com- 
 mand. It possessed the force which the Constitution of 
 1 79 1 had removed from politics, which the temper of 
 the Girondins suspected and destroyed authority, dis- 
 cipline whereby alone things corporate achieve iadivi- 
 duality and can exercise a single will. The Jacobins, 
 not by voting for war (they presumed to no such decrees), 
 but by emphasising throughout France the danger in 
 which France lay, by urging the volunteers, by increasing 
 the suspicion against the Court, and especially by the open- 
 ness and publicity of their debates, had created the war. 
 It was at this moment, with the opening of the new year, 
 that the violent exaltation of spirit which the battles were 
 destined to fix in permanence began to appear under the 
 guidance of the club and to show itself in a mass of sym- 
 bolism of ritual phrases and of sublime absurdities. The 
 occasional red cap of the peasantry began to be worn for 
 liberty in the debates, pikes were forged as though the 
 spears of the armies of romance still had a use among 
 guns, the King had become nothing but " the executive 
 power," and every speech seemed to presuppose an 
 imaginary and epic world. There had risen a gale of 
 great adventures. 
 
 This period had seen, also, all the decisive steps. 
 The King's secret letter to his brother-in-law of Austria, 
 the lover's stroke whereby Madame de Stael had forced 
 
THE WAR 165 
 
 her Narbonne, dainty, graceful and confused, into the 
 ministry of war, his foohsh boastful report that seemed to 
 take for granted the opening of a campaign, lastly (on the 
 very day that closed the debate at the Jacobins) the 
 threat launched against Leopold by the Assembly — all 
 these had established the platform upon which the agita- 
 tion for immediate hostilities rose. Throughout so rapid 
 and constructive a change Kobespierre had remained 
 immovable, repeating ra his last protest the spirit and the 
 very phrases of his first. Yet throughout the two months 
 he had been politic in the extreme : watching his 
 audience, even in the chair yielding to rebuke, and by a 
 quaHty that was iaherent to a character that never left 
 his mind, avoiding every personal encounter and every 
 reproach of private malice. 
 
 Now because men of Kobespierre's temper are so 
 rare, or perhaps because they so rarely achieve power, 
 his story in February and March 1792 has misinterpreted 
 him before history. It makes him seem absorbed in a 
 personal quarrel, and, despairing of his political am- 
 bition, wasting himself in an attack against the chief of 
 his conquerors. Brissot was politically at the head of 
 the movement for war ; Brissot was the link that bound 
 the republicans of the salons to the new band of young 
 orators from the Gironde ; Brissot was to make the 
 ministry that declared hostilities against Austria. When 
 therefore it is seen how Robespierre follows him per- 
 sistently, like an enemy, and when Brissot in turn is 
 seen watching Robespierre as the chief opponent of his 
 plans, there is read into this antagonism a common 
 quarrel of disappointed vanity jealous of success. The 
 reading is erroneous. It would link up the past of 
 Robespierre and his future, both evidently those of a 
 man lost in abstractions, by a very real and living 
 interest : it leads his biographers into a dozen incon- 
 sistencies ; and especially distorts the judgment of 
 
1 66 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Michelet, who lias to present in 1792 a little morose 
 oifended figure full of bitterness against the Gironde, 
 and fixed wholly against their chief as a personal enemy 
 and yet in 1793 defending them from death, in 1794 
 so removed from actuality as to fall before a conspiracy 
 whose persons his political ideal forbade him to attack. 
 Robespierre's struggle with Brissot, which is the con- 
 temporary commentary upon the declaration of war and 
 which interprets as it originates the fatal division of 
 1793, stands congruous with the character and circum- 
 stances of both men, and is capable of being presented as 
 an explanation of their future fortunes. 
 
 Close on forty, short, lean, stooping a little in his 
 rapid gait, intelligent, over-active, Brissot had travelled, 
 heard, seen, read widely and become divided during this 
 great movement that was so well suited to his varied 
 if restricted powers, between the absorbing interest of 
 political intrigue and the defence of those principles to 
 which he was sincerely attached. All that ennobles 
 youth, the resistance to circumstance, the persistent 
 following of a high ideal, the refusal to abandon personal 
 restraint and dignity in the stress of poverty, had been 
 absent from his past. Born somewhere of some one in 
 the dull Beauce, coming to Paris a famished boy-lawyer, 
 he had parried off starvation with a supple, too facile and 
 somewhat unscrupulous pen, a bohemian sojourn in Eng- 
 land, an abolitionist tour in the United States, a few 
 weeks in the Bastille, had crammed him with every 
 passing volatile or ignoble experience. He became one 
 of those many to whom Orleans offered a disdainful pro- 
 tection, had been married to one of the dependents of 
 the Palais Royal and had entered the Revolution by its 
 least reputable door. For all this slime of doubtful 
 adventures and self-betraying journalism, he was well 
 fitted for the Reform. He was devoted to and inspired by 
 the omnipresent genius of Rousseau ; he could boast the 
 
THE WAR 167 
 
 compliments of Voltaire ; lie had a sound judgment of 
 men and of history ; he possessed to a very high degree 
 that talent in the arrangement and mixing of characters, 
 which is the menial and servile necessity of all effective 
 parliamentary action. Ardently patriotic, a clear thinker 
 and a framer of consistent policies, he erred in his 
 appetite for intrigue. He had sold his reputation in 
 youth for food, he never sold his principles for wealth. 
 Now, when so much depended upon him, when he could 
 overthrow and form a ministry and was even supposed 
 to hold the patronage of the minor offices, his shiny 
 black coat and little meagre apartment confessed a 
 poverty above which he took no kind of paios to rise; 
 for he was childless and satisfied with power alone. 
 This man, whose description already accounts for half the 
 antagonism which existed between him and the clear, 
 vague Puritanism of Kobespierre, widened the gulf be- 
 tween his party and the extremists of the Mountain 
 by in part supporting the superiority, and wholly direct- 
 ing the power, of a social class in Paris which, as we shall 
 see, established the dates and details of the war policy 
 though it could not claim to have produced it. 
 
 All this upper-class Kepublicanism, later called the 
 Gironde, was by nature opposed to that for which 
 Robespierre stood in the Revolution and which just 
 before his fall he imagined to have erected into the 
 religion of an ideal state. It is true that he was vain 
 and that the dream in which his mind held itself con- 
 stantly remote from reality was full of his own image, 
 prophet and seer of the new world. But it is not true 
 that merely his offended vanity and the sight of others 
 achieving power oppressed him. It was the idea, the 
 colour of the gradual Girondin success that moved him to 
 a ceaseless and vigilant opposition. Men of this kind, 
 fanatical in conviction, unobservant of details, never fail 
 to group in a common condemnation whatever different 
 
1 68 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 things may be opposed to their ideal. They miss com- 
 plexity ; and therefore Robespierre seeing so many forces 
 at work, all apparently inimical to each other, yet all 
 sinning against his fixed religion, took to imagining plots, 
 conspiracies and secret alliances that had no existence. 
 He was right indeed in his intuitive conviction that the 
 Court was actively allied with Austria and sooner or later 
 would force on the invasion by which it hoped to be 
 saved. But he was utterly wrong in the imagination that 
 Narbonne was but a masque for Lafayette and that all 
 the varied mass of reaction lay beneath the leadership of 
 the Gironde. I repeat, the quarrel was not personal upon 
 Robespierre's side ; it was an attack on the whole social 
 complexion of the Gironde. Desmoulins indeed, who was 
 then Robespierre's man, rounded upon Brissot with a 
 pamphlet whose awful wit ate like an acid for a year into 
 the dominant party, undermined them and led them 
 at last to the scaffold; but the voice was Desmoulins' 
 own. Robespierre in each of his frequent speeches was 
 as innocent of personal attack as he was incapable of 
 personal appreciation. 
 
 It was by the following steps that Brissot saw 
 approaching and helped to introduce the war. Within 
 a fortnight of the close of the debate at the Jacobins, the 
 alliance between Prussia and Austria was concluded : upon 
 the yth of February. The Court knew it. The alhance 
 was the work much more of Russia seeking a free hand 
 in Poland than of Louis or his wife. It meant no imme- 
 diate hostilities; on the contrary it contained clauses 
 expressly framed for delay. The brother of Marie An- 
 toinette was also the son of Marie-Thdrfese, and the tradi- 
 tion of the Hapsburgs, the play of many strings whereby 
 that family depend upon the dissensions of Europe as 
 athletes upon their apparatus, was strong in the mind of 
 Leopold. He had more interests to watch than the issue 
 of the debates in Paris, and it was with a sincere desire to 
 
THE WAR 169 
 
 temporise that^ while sending a general in case the arch- 
 bishopric should he attacked, he yet ordered the Elector 
 of Treves ^ to disband the imigris. But the alliance — ■ 
 the first definite act since Pilnitz — was signed; and the 
 Court knew it. 
 
 There was drawn up within the Tuileries, under 
 the eye of the Queen, by the hand of Barnave,^ a 
 document which could not but precipitate the quarrel. 
 It originated the insolent series of domestic interference 
 whose climax was to be the manifesto of the Duke of 
 Brimswick, and whose intolerable pretensions roused the 
 French to their ultimate successes. It travelled round 
 by way of Brussels to Vienna, and was received again in 
 Paris through the Austrian ambassador as though it had 
 been the spontaneous expression of the Emperor. On 
 the 1st of March it was read to the Assembly; the Par- 
 liament heard with indignation that Leopold saw fit to 
 condemn the Jacobins as a " pernicious sect," and the 
 capital was admitted to the private mind of foreigners 
 upon its internal economy. While they were yet pre- 
 serving an indignant silence to hear this Macedonian 
 playing the steward in Greece, destiny had gone before 
 intrigue, and Leopold was dead. 
 
 In ten days Brissot had opposed to the haste and 
 bigotry of Leopold's son a new and consolidated power. 
 For it was upon the loth of March that he attacked, 
 with the details and references of a prosecution, the 
 King's foreign minister, Delessart. He was followed by 
 the chief voice of his party, Vergniaud. 
 
 Vergniaud's power ordinarily resided in a vibration 
 of tone and a grave balance of words, but that day 
 he recalled Mirabeau, and with the same gesture of 
 
 ■ This ecclesiastic was a young man, genial, a glutton, and enormously 
 fat. The door of liis carriage was made of a special size to fit him. 
 
 * Madame de Stael, iii. 270. She had a better chance of knowing than 
 any one. 
 
lyo ROBESPIERRE 
 
 menace that the dead man had thrown out in the 
 Constituante, he branded the moment with a phrase. 
 Beyond the windows of the Manage the palace was 
 moving with men — they reached six thousand before 
 the close of the struggle, and Murat was their type 
 — a sword. Vergniaud called up mere words whose 
 strength lay in their appeal to a populace that was half 
 in arms. ..." Terror and a secret fear have come out 
 often enough upon us from your doors ! to-day let them 
 enter in. . . ." The Court yielded. Delessart abandoned 
 his office ; the fatuous Narbonne, whatever he may have 
 meant to do, was relieved of power. By the Thursday 
 of the next week the King had sent for a man already 
 in his middle age, but whose dark hair, touched here and 
 there with steel, whose vigorous, great eyebrows, rapid 
 glance, and forward gesture of the arms betrayed Pro- 
 vence and the cavalry. It was Dumouriez. 
 
 The struggle of the lower nobihty had forged and 
 twisted him ; the Revolution released him as it re- 
 leased so many of his peers to an active career, but 
 could not free him as it did the younger men from 
 the tortuous vices of egotism and cabals, the nemesis of 
 privilege in the State. He might have led his brigade 
 at thirty-five, his corps at forty. His face still carried 
 the sword-cuts of a fine defence, unhorsed in the hussars, 
 when the decline of old France was running through the 
 seven years' war. He had great knowledge of soldiers, 
 more of men. The curse that attaches at once to aristo- 
 cratic and to arbitrary societies combined in the old 
 ri^gime to force him into the bypaths of secret diplo- 
 macy. He had known the Bastille. Such subservience 
 to fate had not soured his jolly temper nor dimmed his 
 courage, but he had lost all conviction and had nothing 
 left in him but ambition, a good heart, and a great irony. 
 Out of this imperfection he became at last a traitor, but, 
 alas ! that such a man should have dragged out an old 
 
THE WAR 171 
 
 age in exile, got daubed with the bribes of Pitt, or have 
 tried to rest in death out of his own soil between the 
 hills and in the silence of the Thames. 
 
 This man, not without patriotism and accepting the 
 Revolution as a thing achieved, but bent especially upon 
 personal success, reinforced the democracy at a charge. 
 Upon the 19th of March,^ after but four days of hesi- 
 tation he appeared at the Jacobins. 
 
 The last few weeks had produced a symbolism that 
 invariably accompanies political exaltation and whose 
 methods savour to less active times of the grotesque 
 or the insane. Dumouriez, most eager to accept in full 
 a movement which he had never comprehended, fell 
 to what must have been to him the most ridiculous of 
 humiliations and stood up in the tribune with the red 
 cap upon his head. The gulf that lay between Robes- 
 pierre's single idea with its permanence and directness 
 and the mixture of political intrigues that surrounded 
 the Gironde was very apparent in what followed; for 
 when Dumouriez had raised his hand as though to swear 
 a new allegiance to the nation in its extreme necessity, 
 and had met with the great wave of applause upon which 
 he had calculated when he planned the stroke, Robes- 
 pierre, precise and austere, took his place in the tribune. 
 With the usual play of spectacles, fumbling and manu- 
 script, in the usual weakness of tone and amid the usual 
 enwrapping silence he read out his usual complaint. 
 
 " He was delighted to see a minister at the Jacobins : 
 he only hoped that the war — if it had to come — would 
 be prosecuted as sincerely as they had heard promised. 
 He was sorry to see that a member who had opposed the 
 printing of Dumouriez' speech had been hissed. No one 
 should be hissed in a free assembly. If Dumouriez was 
 really a friend and protector of the popular movement, 
 the Jacobins would support him ..." and so forth. 
 » And not the i6th, as he says in his " Memoirs." 
 
172 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 The whole was a web of generalities and platitudes, the 
 underlying text that never appeared on the surface was a 
 permanent suspicion of all the parliamentarians, Court, new 
 ministers, salons, Brissots, generals and Feuillants lumped 
 into one incongruous body in the speaker's mind. But it 
 was not the speech itself that was the most characteristic 
 part of his attitude, it was rather a little incident that 
 marked his entry into the tribune. As he went up the 
 steps some friend or other clapped the red cap upon his 
 carefully powdered hair. Robespierre had, for once, a 
 flash of anger : all it meant was hateful to him, disorder, 
 delirium, the mania for war, the loss — as he feared — of 
 his own leadership and of the method and creed which 
 he worshipped far more than success. He flung the cap 
 on the ground and left it there, and so opened his speech 
 with restrained passion. 
 
 A month passed between that night and the declara- 
 tion of war. With every session of the Jacobins and with 
 every act of the ministry during that time his peculiar 
 isolation was emphasised. He went on his way preach- 
 ing his eternal doctrine and in every speech and pamphlet 
 reasserting one or all of his half-dozen dogmas. Also he 
 thought that he had lost, but the Revolution was to 
 show very soon the immense force of that persistence ; the 
 defeats were to lift him, the disillusion of the Girondins 
 under the stress of a shameful campaign was to enhance 
 the reputation of their opponent and to recall his pro- 
 phecies of evil ; within six months he was to be elected 
 for the city with a kind of unanimity. But in these last 
 days of March he could not get his speeches printed, 
 sometimes they were hardly heard. 
 
 On the 26th, in a famous speech upon nothing in 
 particular, he had preached a personal God, and the 
 phrase, " Providence, that arranges our destinies far 
 better for us than we do for ourselves," had brought 
 the passionate Guadet to his feet. He was full of 
 
THE WAR 
 
 173 
 
 those things which found Robespierre intolerable : the 
 encyclopsedia, common sense and the vivacity of the 
 most cultured society in France. 
 
 "I have heard the name 'Providence' continually 
 throughout this speech; and it seems to me I heard it 
 said that Providence kept on saving the Eevolution in 
 spite of itself. I cannot understand a man like Robes- 
 pierre countenancing superstition at this moment." 
 
 Robespierre improvised a reply, not without elo- 
 quence, but on the proposal to print this sermon and 
 send it round to the affiliated societies, there was such 
 a hubbub that no decision could be taken. 
 
 On the 30th it was still worse. The renewed pro- 
 posal to print provoked a renewed disturbance, and when 
 the Bishop of Paris, from the chair, explained the drift of 
 the speech and its religious value, Santhonax, near the 
 door found the moment opportune to cry " No Monkish- 
 ness," and the meeting ended in a huge noise. 
 
 He did indeed guide the club still when his opinion 
 was at one with the general feeling. When the soldiers 
 of the Revolt at Nancy were liberated from their galleys 
 and feasted in Paris as a symbol of the triumph of the 
 Revolution, his protests against a delay in their reception 
 were successful. His attack on Lafayette (put forth as 
 was ever his habit, in that impersonal manner, " There is 
 a general," &c., . . . ) was applauded and accepted. But 
 as a leader throughout these last weeks of the peace, he 
 stood more and more alone. He could not claim to con- 
 trol the club. The tradition that had clothed him and 
 that had made even a memory of the Constituante 
 greater than the actual presence of the Legislative 
 seemed failing in the flood of new names, in the high 
 success of Vergniaud and his comrades, in the power 
 of a Girondin ministry about to lead the novel temper 
 of the people into a popular war. 
 
 For Brissot ever at work to knit his schemes had 
 
174 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 brought Dumouriez at evening to the Rolands, had made 
 the old Stoic Minister of the Interior, and had found in 
 that minister's young wife the soul of the new cabinet. 
 For close upon a month a purely Girondin ministry had 
 directed the vigorous policy of the nation, had summoned 
 Austria to frank terms and had prepared — as it thought 
 — the appeal to arms. Under such an influence one 
 force after another melted from Robespierre, leaving 
 him in his tenacity for peace, in his disdain for glory 
 almost solitary. What saved him ? A personal 
 popularity which all this change could not affect, the 
 habit of thousands of silent, obscure democrats who 
 knew nothing of the salons and for whom the Gironde 
 had yet to be tested by success in the campaign, the 
 fixity of his principles that formed the landmark of 
 the drifting crowd — all these things attached to him. 
 They were dormant for the moment in the cry for defence 
 and armies; they were by no means paralysed, and 
 Robespierre was wrong (as he ever was in his appreciation 
 of men) when he now thought himself deserted. He 
 abandoned the post of public prosecutor to which he had 
 been elected. His brooding doubt and his bitterness at 
 a future of loneliness and failure reached their climax 
 with the advent of war. 
 
 On the 19th of April Dumouriez read in the 
 Parliament the terms upon which Austria would con- 
 sent to peace. The Princes of Alsace were to receive 
 back all their feudal rights ; there were to be serfs 
 again in France nor was any form of compensation 
 to be tolerated. To the Pope, Avignon was to be re- 
 stored ; to the French Crown, every lost function whereby 
 it could " repress that which might cause anxiety to 
 neighbouring states." Therefore on the morrow, in the 
 crowded and silent hall of the Manage, Dumouriez 
 triumphed and the King of France peering short-sightedly 
 at his notes, read in a very ordinary voice his declaration 
 
THE WAR 
 
 175 
 
 of war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia. The 
 world was never again the same. 
 
 Hitherto I have followed through this chapter the 
 fortunes and opinions of a man whom Nature had not 
 intended to be great, and to whom the accident of the 
 Eevolution had as yet given nothing but a steadfast, 
 brilliant, and fictitious popularity. I have shut out the 
 general picture by standing within his closed mind, for it 
 has been my task not to present the immense travail of 
 that new world, but to consider one only of those whom 
 it affected, one ia whom it did not see itself reflected, 
 and whom it in no way inspired with its profound energy. 
 
 But here, as I have written the word War, the insigni- 
 ficance of such a theme appals me, and I see that not even 
 the truth about this one individual can be made plain 
 unless some glimpse of that portentous background is 
 admitted to the scene. For to write of Kobespierre's 
 suggestive monotone, and in so writing to stumble upon 
 that great debate into which there entered, and still enter, 
 all the powers of the world; which forms our modern 
 legend, and from which we nations derive our blood and 
 pride, as families once did theirs from the Carlovingian 
 memory, is like sitting up in a darkened room throughout 
 the night upon some exact calculation, and at last to look 
 up by chance and see through the shutters that it is 
 dawn. Then one abandons for a moment the ceaseless 
 labour of mechanical details, and throws open the windows 
 to the air and the day. Beneath the house a falling lawn 
 discovers all the country-side, and the eye rests upon life 
 everywhere growing and awakening: this infinity is framed 
 rather than bounded by the amplitude of the horizon. 
 
 I turn, then, from the consideration of the enigma 
 whose solution is the matter of this book, to recall the 
 magnitude and complexity of the new forces that created 
 the Kepublic. 
 
176 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 From the death of Mixabeau, through the flight of 
 the King on to the massacre of the Champ de Mars 
 and the Declaration of Pilnitz, the ancient forms of 
 French life, though upon the eve of extinction, were 
 yet maintained ; by which I do not mean that the titles 
 of the noblesse, or even the '' de," were heard, nor that 
 lethargy still possessed the mass of the nation, but that 
 the indifference of the upper classes to religion, com- 
 bined with a concern for its establishment, the ineradicable 
 habit of monarchy (where monarchy had been real), the 
 sullen hesitation of the peasants, and the natural division 
 between foreign and domestic affairs were the limits that 
 bounded the miud of France. 
 
 There was, however, latent, and as yet but potential, 
 beneath the ruined shell of society a spirit which in art, 
 arms, and politics drew from the very centres of life. It 
 was a thing not meant for daylight; it was the energy 
 which all sane institutions work to control, and to which 
 tradition gives laws and limitations ; for it is as destructive 
 as the elemental fire, and no one can look on it and live. 
 This primal spirit breaks down all the varied incon- 
 sequence of matter, it attempts to create from the begin- 
 ning like a god, and, like a god wrestling with matter, it 
 accomplishes imperfectly and with infinite pains and 
 terrors its task of forcing a mind into the dead chaos of 
 things. This spirit, which no one has yet named, though 
 its spark Hes at the base of all existence, sometimes pierces 
 dangerously through for a moment to purge the world. It 
 was so with Islam, and it was so with the revolutionary 
 wars. The accident that lifted from it its immemorial 
 blindness was the friction of '92. For there is set to the 
 mind of man a boundary of endurance which may be com- 
 pared to that degree of heat at which the atoms of a sub- 
 stance change their relation to each other, and produce 
 new forms through violence. If that boundary be passed, 
 the common stuff of the mind takes on a form in which 
 
THE WAR 177 
 
 exist all heroisms, and the lyric and madness also. The 
 threat to internal liberty, the dread of a vast disappoint- 
 ment, the incubation of the quarrel between the citizen 
 and the religion of the citizen, the buying of the Church 
 lands, the maturity of reaction — all these irritants received 
 an intolerable accession from the menace of foreign inter- 
 ference, and from the discovery in the dull mass of the 
 new Parliament of that Force of the Word which was 
 called the Gironde. By patriotism and by anger the 
 whole nation received as a mission what had been 
 but a civic concern. Men began to take the things 
 of waking as we do those of dreams; there was in all 
 they did a colour of vision ; its extravagance, its 
 mixture of incongruous things, its awful spell, driving 
 the mind; its power to achieve. From this proceed 
 the large cadences of Vergniaud, the frenzy or pro- 
 phecy of Isnard, the folly of red caps and pikes — but 
 there is one example that sums up all : Kouget de Lisle, 
 a mile from the Khine, in the last hours of peace coming 
 into that crowded dinner and singing with the daughters 
 of Dietrich his new song; for the Marseillaise with its 
 platitudes and its immortal phrases set to such a kind of 
 tune is the whole of '92. 
 
 What followed all the world knows. How every 
 question was asked and answered in two years, and how 
 the force for such a work proceeded from the open furnace 
 of the Terror. I must return to the story. The purpose 
 of the digression with which I have delayed it is to show 
 that Robespierre — since it is upon that slight and con- 
 stant figure that I must remain — stands out hencefor- 
 ward a black outline against a conflagration. Not he, but 
 some fantastic shadow of him, is cast outward from the 
 flame and broadens ; as the fire first exaggerated, so the 
 fury of its highest glow transfigured, and at last its fall 
 consumed him. 
 
 The first months of the war are an embroglio whose 
 
 u 
 
178 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 complex elements must be separately seized if one is to 
 understand the various angers that united to discover a 
 simple and violent solution in the insurrection of the 
 loth of August. In these eddies Robespierre appears 
 now from one aspect, now from another — not because 
 their movement caught him but, on the contrary, 
 because he stood fixed and apart, now seeming a butt, 
 now remembered as a true prophet, now half a leader, 
 and at last overwhelmed and hidden by the rush of 
 action. The physical battle over, he reappeared with all 
 his popularity intact. 
 
 The factors of the situation were these. The King 
 was powerful : it is the neglect of that elementary truth 
 which vitiates half the French and nearly all the foreign 
 histories of the period. He had suffered what was for 
 royalty insult, especially from the Parliament, and since 
 we know that he was to fall, the inevitable error whereby 
 historians read their own acquaintance with the future 
 into the minds of contemporaries makes us exaggerate 
 his difficulties in the spring of 1792. He could and did 
 exercise his veto, and that when the public opLnion most 
 resented it. The whole administrative system and the 
 whole hierarchy of the regular army centred in his hands, 
 and that centralisation was far from being a fiction in a 
 country which had grown increasingly familiar with 
 bureaucracy for six generations. No disposition of 
 troops could be made, no general orders could be issued 
 without his acquiescence, nor, commonly, apart from 
 his initiative, and he possessed under his immediate 
 orders and with a security in their discipline and de- 
 votion, the only regular troops and the only men who had 
 seen service in the capital: in number close upon four 
 thousand men, whom the royalists of the miUtia could 
 readily bring up to a fuU six. 
 
 Dependent upon this power of the King and trust- 
 ing in its maintenance were these two forces: the 
 
THE WAR 179 
 
 general officers in active command — especially Lafayette : 
 Dumouriez at the Foreign Office, a man whose energy 
 and initiative were the only true forces in the whole 
 ministry. 
 
 Lafayette was a soldier, he knew the rottenness of the 
 old army and the softness of the new ; he had a detesta- 
 tion and, at that moment, a legitimate dread of anarchy ; 
 his abstract principles were all for a constitutional mon- 
 archy, his personal emotions (which are in such men far 
 more powerful than any theories) had turned to a fine 
 loyalty and human affisction for the royal family ; nor is 
 it unjust to add that a certain bitterness at the way his 
 popularity had melted and the Revolution escaped him 
 coloured, though it did not direct, his attitude in this 
 crisis. By one of those complications that differentiate 
 history from constructed fiction, the Queen, who was 
 the soul of the Court and whom he was chiefly bent 
 on saving, detested him, and would rather have been saved 
 by a plaster Narbonne or the living devil of the Jacobins 
 
 In Dumouriez two elements met: the dominant factor 
 was personal ambition — for it to be said that he had 
 made and led the great war of the Revolution, and been 
 the master of its success; the secondary factor was a 
 regard for the society he had known with its salons, its 
 king and its diplomacy, as the only thing possible in 
 France. For such a man the spirit '93 was to seem an in- 
 comprehensible welter, the first rising of it in the insurrec- 
 tion of '92 a muddling catastrophe. Both these men then 
 depended in different ways, for their repelling of the in- 
 vaders, on the power of the King, while the King and his 
 Court desired nothing so much as the success of the 
 foreign armies and their rapid arrival before the capital. 
 So much for the Tuileries. 
 
 In opposition to the palace, the Assembly over whom 
 Brissot's lobbying and the young oratory of the Gironde 
 had now an absolute mastery desired merely an en- 
 
i8o ROBESPIERRE 
 
 thusiastic, crusade : a cavalry charge. From the ranks 
 of their supporters, from the salon of Madame Roland 
 and the coterie of the Patriate Frangais, the ministry had 
 been drawn. But they could not forget that though it 
 was the " Girondin ministry " its head and by far its 
 most powerful man was Dumouriez whom indeed they 
 supported right on into the Republic, but whom they 
 knew well to have little in common with that clear 
 enthusiastic religion of theirs that .put for the goal of 
 its armies the vision of a free world. These Stoics felt 
 upon their flank a force that hampered and exasperated 
 them as they bent their energies against the Court ; that 
 force was the popularity of men outside their society and 
 their philosophy, the unreason of the populace, the over- 
 reason of the mob's preachers, the violence of Paris and 
 especially that instinctive, inarticulate determination to 
 keep the nation one and disciplined — a determination 
 odious to their creed of local autonomy. Because this 
 determination was most evident in the great system 
 which the thousand societies of Jacobins had thrown over 
 France and which they directed from the Rue St. Honor^ 
 and because that coldness and over-reason of the popular 
 critics (with its opposition to the war and its everlasting 
 suspicion of parliamentary methods) was personified in 
 Robespierre, therefore they marked out the nucleus 
 of the Jacobins (of which club they were all members 
 and whose majority they still affected) as an enemy, 
 and especially they besieged the person of Robespierre. 
 Such were the Gii'ondins, and to them a successful war 
 was a necessity — and a thing taken for granted. 
 
 To the third party in this triangular struggle a 
 special attention is required, for it is the heir of the 
 future of the Revolution and the habitat of my subject. 
 The town of Paris, eager, querulous, direct, and boiling 
 with ill-ordered passions ; national but full of a local 
 pride, extreme in democracy, careless of death, deter- 
 
THE WAR 
 
 I8l 
 
 mined to be the gaoler or the executioner of treason, has 
 through fifteen hundred years slowly realised the French 
 people. There was not as yet, in the early summer 
 of 1792, an expressed or conscious Parisian will to be 
 master of the Parliament or to inform the whole State, 
 but the city was clearly a magnet to the revolutionary 
 genius of the proviuces and the centre of its expression 
 in speech and writing. Already its idol had been made 
 a god of ia the Artois, soon its mandatories were to be 
 the merciful tyrants of Lyons or the butchers of Nantes. 
 Of this Paris the club of the Cordeliers with Danton for 
 its leader were already the arms and the lungs ; that hard 
 minority of the Jacobins that gave the club all its spirit, 
 was the brain ; and the name continually on the lips of 
 the street was that of the voice of the Jacobin theory, the 
 iQterminable and iuflexible monotony, Eobespierre. He 
 stood like a ritual, a perpetual solace of repetition to 
 those who beheved. Thus, while the natural division 
 would seem to lie between the Court and the two liberal 
 parties of Girondin and Jacobin, to these last the 
 Girondins were confounded with the Court, and beyond 
 the gulf stood Robespierre and his pure faith denouncing 
 intrigue. 
 
 It is not wonderful then that, as the opening of a 
 campaign is marked by an immediate assault on the 
 first lines of defence to clear the road, so the Girondins, in 
 the necessity of preparing public opinion for the struggle, 
 made a charge upon the position of Robespierre, who 
 had opposed the war, and would still oppose a crusade. 
 Within a week after the declaration of hostilities, on 
 Wednesday, the 25 th of April, the attack upon Robes- 
 pierre was made and failed. 
 
 It was able and thorough; all the voting power 
 that Brissot could still command mustered in the 
 club. He himself, for a full two hours, broke down, 
 so far as argument could, the imaginary denuncia- 
 
1 82 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 tions of his enemy. His common sense, his know- 
 ledge of books and languages, his travels were his 
 allies. He assailed Robespierre's mere leadership of 
 opinion : " What have you done ? What are you in the 
 Revolution?" Robespierre's perpetual fear of arms and 
 of dictators he justly ridiculed, and in a passage that 
 should be, but is not, famous, he exposed, as was done 
 but rarely in that time, the absurdity of current historical 
 parallels. Robespierre had thought Lafayette a Cromwell, 
 a pink and white Cromwell with a weak nose. 
 
 "Those who see a Cromwell in Lafayette," said 
 Brissot, " know neither their country, nor the time 
 they live in, nor Cromwell, nor Lafayette. It needs a 
 certain force of character to become a Lord Pro- 
 tector. . . ." 
 
 He attacked the whole Robespierrean scheme of sus- 
 picion, the underground intrigues, the supposed alliance 
 between the Court and himself, Brissot. He did it with 
 evidence, documents, and personal asseveration. He 
 demanded some shadow of proof for these ceaseless 
 accusations. All right reason was on his side, and yet 
 history has justified Robespierre's intuition upon the 
 main point. The Court was betraying, and all those 
 who maintained its generals were unconsciously (he 
 thought consciously) leading the nation to disaster. 
 
 Throughout Brissot's long speech cries and interrup- 
 tions had disturbed him. In its first part, Desmoulias 
 had called out "Scoundrel" very loud and frequently; 
 in its second the public galleries interfered. At its 
 close, Robespierre went straight to the steps of the 
 tribune. He was not in the list of speakers ; he claimed 
 a point of order. Guadet, who was down to speak, sup- 
 planted him, and in a speech far more passionate and 
 far less reasoned than Brissot's, yet touched a quicker 
 nerve; for he spoke of "the love of the people" and 
 of the danger of idols. He proposed that Robespierre 
 
THE WAR 183 
 
 should withdraw from public life. He was a cause of 
 dissension in the club and in the city, and his ceaseless 
 denunciations disturbed the machinery of the democratic 
 advance. 
 
 That such a speech should exasperate the public 
 galleries was natural, it was more significant of the times 
 that the club itself joined in the tumult. Hats in the 
 air and cries disturbed Guadet and inflamed him, Kobes- 
 pierre with the Puritan in him at an icy boiling point 
 begged his friends to be silent. 
 
 "All men have a right to a public hearing. More- 
 over, these cries prevent me catching the accusations 
 made against me. I shall take all interruptions as the 
 acts of men who wish me ill." He stood up in his 
 place to say this, and turned to the galleries. 
 
 They gave him his silence, and when Guadet, who 
 felt that Brissot and he had lost, came down from the 
 tribune, Kobespierre, in one of those rare improvisations 
 that revealed him, used, in addition to his perpetual 
 habit of hard moderation in tone the weapon of irony 
 that he had played with in his youth, but that the 
 sincerity and preaching of his public career had forgotten. 
 
 " Do you not see," he began, leaning humbly towards 
 his enemies and speaking constrauiedly and coldly, " that 
 if I were to retire it would argue vanity ? Why then I 
 should be posing and I should seem a great man, whereas 
 M. Brissot alone has the right to establish men by cate- 
 gories. Nor do I see the effect my retirement would 
 have since I have no places in my gift, and no talent 
 for parliamentary combinations." 
 
 It was eleven, and the club hated late hours; they 
 cheered him and streamed out, leaving one, Simond, to 
 hold forth till close on midnight to sleepy votaries. On 
 the next day but one, the Friday, his victory was com- 
 plete. With Danton in the chair, they voted the printing 
 of his defence, sent it to the aflSliated societies, and 
 
1 84 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 left on record their condemnation of Brissot and 
 Guadet. 
 
 To that domestic check fate was about to add a blow- 
 far more decisive, a blow that silenced party for a moment, 
 and, while it further undermined Gironde, raised Robes- 
 pierre in the estimation even of close observers, yet 
 united all the national parties against the Court. For 
 it was on the next day, Saturday, the 28 th, that Theobald 
 Dillon's fifteen hundred met the first fire of the war and 
 were struck with panic ; in the disorderly flight of these 
 recruits their general was massacred. 
 
 Whether, as Dumouriez hints, the ambuscade was the 
 direct result of Court treason, or whether (as was more 
 likely from the character of the Irishman that led them) 
 an over-confidence in such troops had produced the dis- 
 aster, it is certain that the army as a whole was quite 
 unfitted for war. Enthusiasm distorts. The burning 
 levies had no conception of that hard truth by which 
 military strength lies more than half in military habit and 
 unreasoning obedience. Peasants snatched into the ranks 
 displayed the pitiful simplicity that has added a note of 
 farce to these tragedies — those Picards of Quidvrain, for in- 
 stance, who being for the first time under fire leapt from 
 their ditch, waved their hats and shrieked in their patois, 
 " For God's sake, gentlemen, take care ; there are people 
 here where you are shooting." Everywhere, also, politics 
 had disturbed the armies, and insufficient equipment, 
 detachments of insufficient strength (for political generals 
 have two fronts to think of and keep their armies to- 
 gether, while bad discipline is afraid of large separate 
 posts) ruined such general plans as Dumouriez may 
 have issued to the forces. One force pushed up the 
 gorge of the Ardennes to Givet, which is the salient 
 angle of the French against the Netherlands. There 
 it stood stUl, unable to gather more than 10,000 men. 
 The foreign mercenaries obeyed their officers and boldly 
 
THE WAR 185 
 
 deserted in formation — as the Koyal AUemand. Else- 
 where the officers went over to the imigris, their French 
 soldiers refusing to follow. As at Bercheny where they 
 carried off the colours, which a certain sergeant observing, 
 he was so angry that he galloped after his deserting 
 superiors and boldly wrested away the standard from a 
 young ensign that was trotting at the tail. With these 
 he returned to the loyal camp, and his regiment still 
 preserves them. Worst of all, the army of the centre 
 that might at any moment have marched to reinforce 
 the north stood still, partly because the men were of poor 
 training, partly because their plan had been to hold all 
 the frontier from the Vosges to the Ardennes, but mainly 
 because Lafayette who commanded them had his face 
 turned towards Paris, and was determined not so much 
 upon the campaign as upon saving the King. 
 
 The news of all this breakdown came upon the city 
 in May. Upon the first of the month came the rumour 
 of Dillon's disaster and death. Next day the defeat of 
 Biron. Then the Austrian occupation of Guienne. At 
 that moment, had the armies of the eighteenth century 
 been in the habit of silent preparation and had the allies 
 preserved a larger and mobile force on the north-east, 
 nothing could have saved the Revolution. The Court 
 took on a different air, there was a brilliance and gaiety 
 ia it that recalled Versailles. That large neutral and inar- 
 ticulate minority of opinion in Paris, a minority that still 
 lay in the rut of habit and desired repose, was wilhng to 
 support the Crown ; it hoped in some vague way that the 
 failure of this Girondin war would bring them back strong 
 government and security without a national humiliation. 
 Keactionary groups partly controlled the streets. 
 
 The Assembly and the Girondin ministry that still 
 hung on to power and had not yet openly quarrelled with 
 their master, Dumouriez, were vigorous in decrees. The 
 exile or transportation of the non-juring priests was 
 
1 86 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 passed : it was ordered that the King should dismiss that 
 great guard, part of which the law allowed him, part of 
 which he had gathered iu spite of it ; finally, with the 
 new month, on the 8 th of June the Parhament called 
 upon the provincial cantons (that sent delegates to the 
 annual Federation a month later) to furnish each five 
 men in arms, and these they proposed to establish and 
 train in a great camp of 20,000 men under Paris; some 
 said to furnish the frontier, some to watch the King, 
 
 The King consented to dismiss his guard. Indeed the 
 measure was purely verbal. The Guard ceased to exist as 
 a corporate body, but its members were lodged near the 
 palace in private houses, while the nucleus of trained 
 mercenaries, the Swiss, were sent into barracks a short 
 march from Paris, at Rueil, not ten miles along the best 
 of roads. 
 
 Upon the edict against the insurrectionary priests, 
 however, and upon the formation of the camp of 20,000 
 he put an uncompromising veto, and would not be shaken, 
 so strong was the Court at this moment. On the 1 3 th, 
 Dumouriez having taken sides with the King, poor old 
 Roland was driven to protest against him, with the 
 result that the Girondin ministry found itself suddenly 
 dismissed, and Dumouriez, who had thought to be the 
 master of the moment by his defection — who had, 
 indeed, been named minister of war — discovered the 
 Court to be more subtle and stronger than he was; 
 within two days he had fallen from power and gone off to 
 command the disorganised forces in the north. 
 
 There followed one of those great scenes of the 
 Revolution, the vastness of whose moving crowds and 
 the sense -of whose force and tide has formed a prin- 
 cipal picture for historians. The mobs of the east of 
 the city, of St. Marceau and of St. Antoine, grumbled 
 for seven days, fell imder their accustomed leaders, and, 
 with some vague object of menacing or witnessing the 
 
THE WAR 187 
 
 King, with a memory also that it was the anniversary of 
 the Tennis Court, they made the 20th of June. They 
 poured before the startled Assembly, occupied the palace 
 with a noisy and terrifying good-humour, saw Louis wear 
 the red cap, and melted back into the unorganised im- 
 potence of numbers. They had rehearsed an insurrection 
 and had done nothing ; for no one was quite sure of what 
 the Court might intend. 
 
 In the Jacobins the climax of the dismissal of the 
 ministry and the final isolation of the Court had somewhat 
 calmed the ceaseless quarrel between the Girondins and 
 Kobespierre. The lull that followed the first disasters of 
 the war left him far more secure than he had been even 
 after his victory against Guadet and Brissot. He had 
 proved to be the great adviser, the seer. The role suited 
 him too well to be abandoned for revenge or triumph ; he 
 continued to advise on his unwavering line — it did not 
 affect him that this line coincided for the moment with 
 what the anger and disappointment of the Girondins 
 desired. 
 
 Upon one matter indeed he stood somewhat apart, 
 rather in silence than in the expression of his undoubted 
 contempt; I mean upon the insurrection of the 20th of 
 June. To the Girondins, with whom the revolutionary 
 anger was a kind of goddess, this insurrection seemed 
 a good thing, a reply at once to the Court and to the 
 pedants, a proof of the new vigour with which the people 
 meant by force of arms to defend the full reform, but 
 to Robespierre it was doubly odious : as anarchy and 
 as a handle for the Court. Also, later, he made it an 
 accusation against Potion that the Mayor of Paris had 
 believed himself the author of the insurrection. For 
 the rest, Robespierre concentrated now, as the Girondins 
 did, against Lafayette. 
 
 Lafayette had sent an open letter to Paris — a letter 
 that had half made the Revolt in protest. A week after 
 
1 88 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 that day he appeared ab the bar of the Assembly and had 
 the inconceivable folly to counsel and patronise the French, 
 advising them to a national resistance when their great 
 blame of him lay in his inattention to that national resist- 
 ance. He talked like the Austrian, dragging in the 
 " Jacobin Faction " and echoing Leopold's letter of the 
 winter. In this he ruined himself and his vague consti- 
 tutional-loyalist-aristocrat-middle-class cause. The Court 
 was far too strong to need him, the Kevolution suspected 
 him, the Jacobins determined to destroy him. A farcical 
 review on the terrace of a hundred men who were to 
 save the State, then next day of a ragged thirty, a return 
 to his command, an attempt at civil war, finally an 
 interrupted flight after the loth of August and the fall 
 of the throne, ended in Austrian prisons the revolutionary 
 career of the most patriotic, liberal, vain, sincere, and 
 courageous noodle that ever boasted quarterings or gloried 
 in constitutions and top-boots. 
 
 Robespierre's two attacks upon that general took the 
 form of huge literary compositions, the second of some 
 merit, and containing at least this phrase : " You intrigue 
 and intrigue and intrigue. You are of the calibre of 
 a palace revolution. It is beyond your strength to 
 interrupt the revolution of a world." 
 
 This speech marks the last moment in which he can 
 be watched or can count as an influence upon the fall of 
 the monarchy. To repeat a phrase I have already used 
 in this chapter, action overwhelmed him, and he dis- 
 appeared submerged. The receding flood found him, in 
 that totally new world which the i oth of August made, 
 still standing, more than ever an idol, repeating the same 
 ritual, and destined to be the first elected deputy of the 
 capital. 
 
 The I oth of August was Danton, and I give the 
 story of it in another place. It was a supreme action, 
 and Robespierre was so much the negation of action that 
 
THE WAR 189 
 
 the presentation of that battle is utterly incongruous to 
 an analysis of his career. He did not fly or hide or 
 withdraw, but he escaped its influence altogether, and 
 the one thing we know of him in the clear and dreadful 
 night that Lucille Desmoulins sufiered and described 
 and that her husband and his friends filled with arms, is 
 that he sat at home in the noise of the toosin, very 
 impassive in face of Barbaroux, or any other violent man ; 
 and then next day, not six hours after the final victory 
 of the people, made a good literary speech at the 
 Jacobins, in which he very calmly advised the new 
 powers to do all those vigorous new things upon which 
 they had already determined. 
 
 But I would not leave that prodigious event from 
 which proceed the power and confidence of European 
 democracy and whose success was also that of our new 
 anxious world without noticing two things. First, the 
 date on which the King may first be counted as definitely 
 in arms against the capital; secondly, the appearance 
 that the disturbance took on for a casual and accurate 
 contemporary, whose curious and almost unknown account 
 happens to have survived. 
 
 The decisive moment is surely the nth of July, 
 a month before the insurrection. Vergniaud's speech 
 of the 3rd had summed up the case against the King. 
 Lamourette's empty concord of the 7th had but empha- 
 sised its own vanity, for that same day the King's 
 friends, the Department of Paris, had dismissed the 
 mayor, Potion, saying that he had made the insurrection 
 of the 20th of June. But it was on the nth that the 
 Parliament issued its public appeal to the nation, and 
 declared the " Peril of the Commonwealth," and it is 
 from this day that Louis weakens politically, strengthens 
 himself militarily. On the 12 th his confirmation of 
 Potion's dismissal begins the universal exasperation. On 
 the 1 3th he submits to the decree of the Assembly rein- 
 
I90 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 stating Potion. It was his first great check. The 14th he 
 hears the violent sadness of the Federation, and if it be 
 urged that it was principally the insolent Declaration of 
 Brunswick that launched the Revolt (which is true), and 
 that the arrival of the Marseillais and their guns made it 
 possible, it is still more noteworthy that on the 23 rd, two 
 days before Brunswick signed his mad draft, and five 
 before it was known in Paris, the Federations running 
 up from every part of France had all demanded the 
 deposal of the King. 
 
 It is certainly at this moment that France moves. 
 The King had been the King ; now he begins to be a 
 fortress for the invader held from within. Though no one 
 dared call for the name of a Republic, the thing sprang 
 out alive. " Not only the towns but the peasants," or 
 (as we should put it in England), " not only the middle 
 classes but the slums," understood the danger which the 
 parliament in the teeth of the Court had declared to be 
 public and imminent. A little too late for her immediate 
 purpose, early enough for honour, and sufficiently, in the 
 end, to conquer Europe, France at last really armed. It 
 was not only that the volunteers flocked in, it was also 
 that most men then began to stand ready in their mind 
 for death. An infinite reserve for resistance was created 
 by the soul of France. 
 
 As for the second point, the effect and description of 
 the day of the Revolt, it is drawn from the letter which a 
 genial bourgeois kind of a fellow, one Azema,^ Member for 
 the Aude, sent to his constituents, taking for his text that 
 admirable, admirable proverb of the Languedoc, Mai usa 
 ne pot dura. 
 
 It was two in the morning, yet the anxious Assembly 
 was still in session under the thousand candles in the 
 vast oval of the Manage. Az6ma wearied and walked out 
 
 ' The letter is unpublished, bat may be found quoted in the Rivdution 
 Franfaiae for August 1894. 
 
THE WAR 191 
 
 into the night. The long roll of drums by which the 
 French introduce action, " the g^n^rale," began to sound 
 far off from the guard-rooms of the section, and the 
 tocsin swung in all the belfries, but the streets were 
 empty, and the noise echoed up into a clear air with 
 stars. So many were watching on that night that all 
 the windows seemed lit as with an illumination, and under 
 the oppression of this unnatural loneliness and of all those 
 eyes expecting morning, he came back again to his seat 
 in the hall. 
 
 At six o'clock the Assembly suspended its sitting, and 
 he went out northward by the Feuillant Door. Up the 
 street, in what is now the Place Vendome, he saw guns 
 massed ; erect and silent gunners. He turned back, past 
 the palace — there was no one in the square. Within, 
 the royal garrison was at review. He reached the river 
 and walked on eastward to the H6tel de Ville, where the 
 insurrectionary Commune sat poising its blow. The Place 
 de Greve was empty. Then back again westward by the 
 HaUes, and everywhere he passed through lonely streets 
 to the noise of the bells. As it neared seven o'clock 
 small groups began to pass him, women among them. 
 He drew near the wall to let a batch from Marseilles 
 go by singing; they were dragging a couple of guns. 
 By the time he reached the Feuillant Door again he saw 
 a great mob gathered about it ; there was no entering. 
 He went round westward to try the Capuchin Gate, and 
 as he was struggling thither, the noise of the volleys 
 came from the palace; the mob roared and streamed 
 back outward to the Tuileries. At last he entered the 
 hall of the Parliament, and saw there, behind the grating 
 of the reporters' box, the King and Queen and their 
 children ; then he knew that the game was won. 
 
 About him, two hundred of the seats were empty. 
 The Assembly sat silent for a while, and outside the 
 monotony of the loud battle was broken at last by the 
 
192 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 louder clamour of the charge, and the palace admitted 
 its great torrent of men. Twenty deputies, of whom he 
 was one, were sent out to parley with the crowd ; they 
 were swept by its pressure back and inwards from the 
 Carrousel. They re-entered the Parliament and every 
 one looked at his neighbour, listening to the guns. Then 
 as the cannon passed up beneath their windows a threat 
 or a savage exultation from without came in with the 
 growing heat of the morning; fear dropped from them, 
 the conquest, the dangers, the enemy marching on the 
 city, the Republic born, ran through them with the 
 August sunlight, and in one of those sudden actions that 
 made the three Parhaments of Revolution like soldiers, 
 they started up together and cried out repeatedly the 
 name of the nation. Then the nation took the throne, 
 the orb, and the lUies, and in the lodge behiad the screen 
 that veiled him, the face of the last king was blotted out. 
 When it was evening Az^ma went out in the dark 
 among the bearers and their lanterns and tried to count 
 those that still lay dead in the courtyard and the gardens. 
 There were lost in that short time and in that little 
 space, more men than have^ fallen in battle through- 
 out this African war. 
 
 ' Written in March igoi. In this I follow Aulard, who has read every- 
 thing there is to read, and quotes 5000. Az^ma, who saw only what 
 remained after a whole day's work with the stretchers, gives a much lowei 
 figure. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 
 
 In the presence of such a recasting as that of the loth 
 of August a man is tempted to write not a chapter but a 
 book. The time itself, grown used to a fundamental 
 transformation, yet spoke of this new upheaval in 
 whispers, calling it " Kevolution." Open any memoir 
 at random, read any speech of the succeeding autumn, 
 and you wiU find this one thought running through 
 them — a new basis of equilibrium had been discovered. 
 Mai usa Tie pot dura : the doubts and coverings of '91, 
 the re-entrant agonies of early '92 had broken down as 
 under a strain, and the real quarrel was ready to be 
 threshed out — that is, the real truth had come up into 
 the dayhght. Shall I put it in one word ? Terrible, 
 perhaps, to our time and to the ears of moderns, but 
 finally explicative of that catastrophe ? The " upper 
 class" had gone. 
 
 Hitherto the Kevolution, working on a theory, meta- 
 physical, preaching or postulating the dogma " equality," 
 had had for its material those old divisions of society which 
 not a century of persistent effort has appreciably weakened 
 in Europe. Its leaders saw " the People " as worshippers 
 see their God ; and they made an image of " the People " 
 after their own image. One group was for excluding 
 (and succeeded in excluding) the proletariat from the 
 vote; another claimed a full suffrage for "the People." 
 In the chapel of the Jacobins night after night a vision 
 of "the People" filled the darkness of the nave above 
 the candles, haimted the remote and deserted chancel. 
 
 ^93 N 
 
194 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 It inflamed a hundred orators, and inspired the noblest 
 rhetoric of that tribune. But " the People " were not there ; 
 doctors, lawyers, contractors, master carpenters, master 
 masons, many young lords, and a few old livers ^ made up 
 the audience to which could be thrown such golden 
 enthusiasms. Peuple ce jour te fera eternel. 
 
 The " People " had been a factor spoken of, admitted 
 to exist — the First Clause of a Creed — but what it was 
 they did not know any of them till, on the loth of 
 August, the People appeared. Then the democrats 
 were tested by fire, and it was seen which loved enough 
 or believed enough to guide or serve or tolerate this 
 great giant half awake and a child. For the People dis- 
 covered what the leisure of the eighteenth century least 
 expected in them, the epic song, ritual, the necessity for 
 colours — even for the colour of blood. 
 
 The King — all save his person and the new legend 
 surrounding it — had disappeared in that victory ; but it 
 was not only the King, very much more had disappeared. 
 Consider why the Girondins had been able to establish 
 their power in the year of the Legislative Assembly ; why 
 the Jacobins, their enemies, had hesitated throughout 
 and been divided, and pretended that the Kepublic was 
 a silly name; why the Assembly had seemed doubtful 
 on the critical day of the battle. It was because until 
 the loth of August Society lay stratified; after the loth 
 of August the strata commingled. And the underlying 
 
 ^ Take any part of the list of members of the club at random ; take 
 the letter "A." Under "A" there are but twenty-seven names, and in 
 these twenty-seven I find a famous chemist (Adet), later a diplomat. 
 The lieutenant-general of Poitou (Agier), a duke (Aiguillon), a hotel- 
 keeper (Agier), a large merchant (Allart), an ambassador (Alguier), a 
 famous surgeon and his brother (the two Andres), a well-known author 
 and his brother (the Andrieux), a private gentleman of political ambitions 
 (Anthoine), a marquis (Aoust), a provincial barrister (Armand), a large 
 paper manufacturer (Arthur), the lieutenant-general of Aix and judge of 
 the Court of Appeal (Audier), an officer (Aubriet}, a wine merchant of 
 Cognac (Augiet}. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 195 
 
 bulk, a thing hitherto spoken of in philosophic formula, 
 feared as mobs, worshipped as a force, but neither touched 
 and appreciated by the politicians, nor of itself organised 
 for action — never a personality — now knocked at the gates, 
 or rather entered as one living man enters and occupies 
 his own place in arms. I shall show it later in the 
 Municipal Coimcil of '93. 
 
 This conquering force was the more irresistible from 
 the fact that for years the upper class had preached its 
 right to govern, that from '89 the rhetoricians had taken 
 the People for their base, and that latterly it had been 
 flattered, appealed to, used against the Crown. So the 
 Girondins, so the philosophy of the eighteenth century 
 was determined to resurrect the People, to bring the mass 
 articulate again into the life of a great European nation ; 
 see how that sudden plunge back into the level of nature 
 shook the world. 
 
 First there appeared what must always follow a 
 sudden appeal to the popular voice : the reputations 
 already made turned into watchwords and provoked 
 enormous enthusiasms quite out of keeping with the 
 value of the men they marked for honour. Secondly, 
 and later, this too appeared : the primary instincts of the 
 People, thrust into the petty debates of cultured men, 
 produced divergencies and conflagrations. The gentry 
 strained themselves to be worthy of the inner force that 
 wells from below and supports societies in peril ; they 
 caught from the People the overwhelming influence of 
 general passions that disturbs a horde, and they turned 
 their debates into battles. 
 
 The second effect was an open breach between the 
 Mountain and the Gironde. The cause of this was the 
 exaltation of whatever names had, by the agencies of the 
 clubs, fixed themselves on the popular ear — and among 
 these there was no name like Robespierre's. He was 
 himself ready to admit the title that the People, turbu- 
 
196 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 lent, life-giving, offered to him who was uncreative, fixed 
 in every convention of his frozen class. 
 
 This sudden change in the nature of his progress 
 Robespierre accepted with an ease that would be aston- 
 ishing did we not know how much of the politician 
 entered into and made flexible the methods of his fixed 
 mind. He went over bodily to Paris and the new incar- 
 nate populace ; moved with them at their pace, and (what 
 was more remarkable) consented to accept not a few of 
 their inconsistencies ; he was like a man afoot that finds his 
 road end in a flooded river, and at once takes boat without 
 inquiry, and welcomes the speed of the current. From 
 the loth of August till his election on the Jth of Sep- 
 tember, from that to the first session of the Convention, a 
 fortnight later, he plunges deep into Paris. 
 
 Already before the i oth of August, there had been 
 something like a determined plot to put him at the head 
 of the movement ; Barbaroux had seen and despised him ; 
 he had refused to make his room the headquarters of 
 the Revolt. But now, afterwards, in spite of that refusal, 
 Paris was determined upon Robespierre ; and the medium 
 of government into which Paris thrust him was the Com- 
 mune. For the Commune of Paris had become the brain 
 of the Revolution — the Commune was to turn later 
 (when the Republic had been declared and the Conven- 
 tion launched), into its driving power. The men that 
 had made the reform, the world that survived till early 
 '92, had fallen, as it were, through a broken platform into 
 an abyss. The discussions became futile. The Assembly 
 could not govern. The Revolution was legal — it was 
 even over-legal — but here was a fiction of legality which 
 could not stand the common daylight. That these six 
 hundred, who had but a few days since protected Lafay- 
 ette, that hardly knew their own mind, that had never 
 understood the disaster that threatened the Crown, should 
 be left in control would have been something so counter 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 197 
 
 to the common sense of the moment that even in the 
 remoter provinces it would have stood for anarchy and 
 for France open to the invader. The dying Legislative 
 had but one function to fulfil : to register the decrees of 
 whatever was for the moment the necessary usurper, the 
 dictator. That dictator and usurper was the Commune. 
 
 I know how monstrous this body appears to those 
 who are unacquainted with the nature of France. I know 
 that the voters who named it were called in haste, 
 secretly, at night. I know that it sprang from a con- 
 spiracy, and outstepped all the boundaries which the 
 Revolution had hitherto laid down for itself. I know 
 that by arithmetic and paper arguments one can show, 
 if one chooses, that it was irresponsible and arbitrary ; a 
 body of men that had captured the nation. But I say 
 that a man who does not understand the hegemony of 
 Paris, and who does not understand the rapid instinctive 
 actions by which Paris determines each step in the 
 development of the nation, is a man unfitted to deal 
 with the history of France. He is like one who writes of 
 England, not knowing that England has been, and still 
 is, a country governed by one class; or like one that 
 would analyse the conditions of Russia, not knowing how 
 that sphinx lives by the interior life of an intense reli- 
 gion. No body in France could pretend to government 
 at that moment save the City, and whether from a 
 minority or no, it was yet from the articulate, deter- 
 mined, and representative part of Paris that the new, 
 irregular Commune proceeded. The mass may not have 
 voted — a great part were forbidden by law to vote, and 
 for a great part the machinery of voting did not exist — ■ 
 but they were very willing to fight under the orders and to 
 accept the voice of the new irregular Commune as though 
 it were that of the people. It was the Commune that had 
 attacked the palace, had organised the new militia, and 
 had imposed its man, Danton, upon the mmistry. The 
 
198 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Commune was therefore, in the month that lay between 
 the fall of the Crown and the arrival of the Convention, 
 the supreme power in France. 
 
 Now, observe how in the heat of this miracle Robes- 
 pierre stood impassive, and how, his determination or 
 ambition helping, it was yet the tradition formed of him 
 that pushed him into power. Two days after the loth 
 of August — on Sunday, the 12 th — he appeared at the 
 session of the insurrectionary Commune. He was met 
 with immediate and continued applause. Yet he had 
 nothing to tell them save that they were " named by the 
 people," which was not particularly true, and that " the 
 wisdom of the people was watching over the safety of the 
 country," whereas it was the very foil to wisdom, it was 
 blind instinct that was doing it. At great length, utterly 
 out of touch with the fever of the time, he developed 
 his perpetual theme. The note had hardly changed since 
 the time of buckled shoes and swords. Yet the Com- 
 mune offered and offered itself to him. They sent him 
 to be their spokesman before the Assembly. He accepted 
 the task, and found himself presenting a petition that 
 the old directory of the city should be discharged. In 
 truth it was not a petition, it was an imperative com- 
 mand. 
 
 Robespierre, with his spectacles, his attitude of 
 peering at the manuscript, read out a long defence 
 of the new body, thoroughly argued upon legal grounds. 
 He must have known that he was slipping from his 
 absolutes : he was addressing a national parliament 
 legally deputed and he was pleading for an irregular 
 and illegal body that was in successful revolt. He 
 excused himself to himself by this thought, that, but 
 for the illegal Commune the absolute political justice 
 he demanded could not have arrived. 
 
 This deputation entrusted to his leadership is the 
 first of the many evidences, great and small, of the 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 199 
 
 place that was being thrust on him and of the way his 
 contemporaries regai'ded him. 
 
 When the new Commune struck a medal in com- 
 memoration of the loth of August they were careful 
 to send it first of all as a gift or a homage to Robespierre : 
 to him that had sat in his little bare room thinking 
 of nothing but the pure right while the people were 
 fighting. So men bring food for idols, but at least this 
 food is eaten by the priests. 
 
 Around Robespierre at this moment there accumu- 
 lated prints, medals, statuettes, congratulatory addresses, 
 which he could do nothing but preserve and arrange, and 
 which remained intact, a witness to the idolatry, when 
 they were sold at auction to strangers after Thermidor. 
 
 And here is another evidence of his forward move. 
 
 The one thing that most decisively emphasised the 
 power of the new Commune was that it, in theory a 
 mere municipal body, undertook to form a tribunal to 
 jud'3[e the treason of the Court. This usurpation of 
 power is so illustrative of the power of t.. j capital that 
 all the extreme acts following the fall of the Crown,^ 
 aU the estabUshment of democracy absolute seem un- 
 expressive beside it. It pretended to a kind of royal 
 dignity, to be a fountain of justice or of vengeance. 
 Had the Assembly retained a pulse of vitality it would 
 have resisted such an act of sovereignty. So far fronr 
 resenting it the Assembly was willing to decree, but a 
 week after the fall of the palace,^ that a tribunal chosen 
 by the city should be formed. It was even willing to 
 allow the electors of Paris to name the members of that 
 tribunal. It was willing to allow their meeting, voting, 
 
 ^ There was declared the same . day, by the Commune at least, 
 Universal Suffrage, and the Assembly ratified the vote on the morrow. 
 They assumed immediate jurisdiction over all the buildings and prisons 
 of the capital, protecting the Louvre, sending their victims to La Force. 
 They put their own officers at the gates. 
 
 ^ On August I J. 
 
200 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 and establishing their right to judgment that very night 
 in the great room of the town hall ; and when Paris had 
 achieved its usurpation and the ballot was taken as to 
 who should preside at the future trial of the royalists 
 that had defended the palace, the first name to appear 
 was that of Robespierre ; Robespierre who had not put 
 himself forward as a candidate, who was unwilling to 
 take a part so active and so responsible, and who re- 
 signed at once the dangerous office that had been pressed 
 upon him. 
 
 On the same day it was Robespierre who was sent 
 to the mayor of the old and broken municipality, to 
 his old comrade, Pdtion, to see whether some agreement 
 could be come to between what had been the legal power 
 in the town, and this new flaming insurrectionary thing. 
 I will not believe that this moment determined the 
 beginning of the quarrel between Potion and Robespierre. 
 That quarrel was part of the general strain between the 
 Mountain and the Gironde ; a necessary outcome of the 
 divided temper which the Convention was to show. 
 But it is typical of the way that Robespierre was pushed 
 on upwards. He was an ensign before the advance of 
 this new radical wedge that had come in to split Trance 
 into the camps of '93, and to be driven by the hammer 
 of the invasion permanently into the fabric of the 
 country. 
 
 As this fortune fell upon him, and as he yielded to 
 its opportunity, the last dust of the old order crumbled. 
 Lafayette fled from his command and was condemned 
 by the Parliament that in its old freedom had absolved 
 him. The department of the Somme whose executive 
 had refused to admit the legality of the decrees of 
 this new revolutionary Parisian government was broken 
 by the subservient Assembly and sent before the new 
 high court which the Commune itself had formed. 
 Within a fortnight of the storming of the palace it 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 201 
 
 was plainly evident that the Eepublic was born, and to 
 Robespierre, I think, it was suggested that the perfect 
 state lay in sight. This chance bound him to the city 
 for ever, and the worship the city paid him thrust him 
 on towards that function of ruler for which neither he 
 nor others then knew his complete unfittedness. 
 
 The 26th of August is the date round which these 
 origins cling, for at that date the extreme danger of 
 France became openly apparent. On that Sunday it 
 was known that Longwy on the rock that overlooks the 
 frontier had surrendered. On that Sunday (Vendue was 
 firing the first shots) the Assembly decreed that every 
 priest that had within a fortnight neither taken the oath 
 nor voluntarily fled the country should be transported 
 to the colonies. On that Sunday they decreed that any 
 discussion of capitulation by any citizen in the frontier 
 towns should be punished with death. They withdrew 
 aU weapons from those who would not volunteer for the 
 frontier; they authorised that vast inquisition of arms 
 throughout the capital which led to the registering, the 
 imprisonment, and the public noting of the minority 
 that had plotted against the nation. Not knowing what 
 hghtning the air held, they prepared the massacres of 
 September. 
 
 In the stroke of the invasion the Parliament seemed 
 to remember for a moment that it needed no teaching, 
 and was willing on its own account to borrow something 
 of the energy of the times. Even Lamourette, a bishop 
 and the author of the futile compromise of a few weeks 
 before, found it possible to speak the language of the 
 Revolution, deplored that some "had escaped from 
 popular justice" on the loth of August, spoke of the 
 unhappy, bewildered, imprisoned Hapsburg woman as 
 " one stUl atrocious to the nation " ; called her what she 
 would once have been had she dared, " the executioner 
 of our country " ; and in general showed what exaltation 
 
202 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the mildest had caught in this new experience. He was 
 a priest, and he was astonished and inflamed to find that 
 God sometimes permits mere strength to threaten for a 
 little while. A disciplined army, a thing that thought 
 itself like steel, had passed the frontier and was on the 
 straight road to Paris. 
 
 On that same 26th of August began the elections 
 for the new Parliament that was so soon to meet and in 
 these the fortune of Kobespierre remains still rising and 
 constant. Paris named its primaries, elected an electoral 
 college of a thousand, sent up in that great crowd the 
 mass of names that stand for '93. Eobespierre's own 
 section, the Place Vendome, which (since the last fort- 
 night had transformed even language) was called the 
 " Place des Piques," elected him unanimously to the 
 college, and elected him president of the primary as 
 well. He was ill,^ partly unable to attend ; his name was 
 enough. Duplay was elected with him, and in the 
 growing madness of that week Paris waited to hear the 
 names of its members. 
 
 On the eve of the massacres of September, one hesi- 
 tates a little where to place this self-observing, undis- 
 covered mind. I have continually remarked through- 
 out this book how removed he was from the creative 
 passions that surrounded him; how their product, the 
 greatest drama of the world, passed by him as a tide 
 slips under a mist. It is true of the joys and the gran- 
 deurs ; it is true also of September. When the irregular 
 committee (which, to the eternal hurt of his country, 
 Marat inspired) had determined upon the massacres — for 
 I believe they were so determined ^ — when Manuel had 
 
 * He was so excused in the register of the Primary which Hamel saw 
 before the war. I believe these records perished with so many others of 
 the town archives in the destruction of the H6tel de Ville in 1871. 
 
 ^ The arguments I find in favour of the exclusive responsibility of 
 Marat and his committee will be found on pp. 183-84 of my " Danton," 
 and in Appendix iv. pp. 340-46 of the same book. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 203 
 
 announced to the Commune that Verdun was besieged ; 
 when on that same Sunday, the 2nd of September, the 
 chance orderly came running into the hall where they 
 were meeting, and told them that the prisons were 
 invaded, and that a massacre had begun, Robespierre, 
 nominally the leader, forced to be a leader by his con- 
 temporaries, might as well not have existed. 
 
 Michelet talks of his " diving down beneath the sur- 
 face and disappearing " during those terrible three days. 
 That sentence is the result of too imperfect a research. 
 Robespierre did not even hide. He was there, he sat 
 in the Commune, he did what little work he could in the 
 general attempt to prevent the horrible vengeance ; but 
 as soon as there appeared a moment for action, all the 
 inactive in his constitution plainly showed. 
 
 One single thing remains of what he did : be was 
 one of three that were sent to the Temple to see that no 
 attack should be made upon the royal family. Even 
 that was hardly an action, for there was no question of 
 an attack ; the long band of tricolour tied all round the 
 town wove a charm about it, and his journey was but a 
 formal visit and return. 
 
 All through those terrible three days it was the law 
 that the elections should proceed. They proceeded as if 
 Paris were not assuming her chief responsibility before 
 history, and as though one of the great crimes that 
 hamper nations in their passage through time were not 
 threatening to restrict throughout a century and more the 
 action of liberty. On Monday, the second day of the 
 massacres, the electoral college met in the archbishop's 
 palace. The hall was restricted for those thousand men ; 
 they moved to the Jacobins. On the Wednesday when 
 the last of violence was grumbling in the streets, 
 they elected Robespierre, not with the unanimity that 
 later saluted Danton, but by a strong majority, the first 
 
204 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 deputy for Paris/ It was the only decision of the 
 day. 
 
 It was therefore in the atmosphere, and surrounded 
 by the effect of September, that he entered his Re- 
 public, and yet it is as a man pure from any reproach 
 of September that history must regard him. Even con- 
 temporary debate cleared him of a calumny so evidently 
 incongruous to his character ; the process of research has 
 put it beyond any question — he was not only innocent of 
 the blood; he was innocent even of comprehending that 
 September had broken the ramparts of the new order, and 
 had prepared the coalition of Europe. " See what comes 
 to these people who dethrone kings ? They become 
 possessed with devils." 
 
 The elections of Paris were the final blow that struck 
 apart for ever the Left (in which Robespierre mingled and 
 which he was to lead) from the Gironde. 
 
 On that quarrel hangs the future fortune of the 
 Revolution. And I will therefore beg my reader to per- 
 mit some analysis of its nature. Its origins have ap- 
 peared more or less obscurely in my last chapter, because 
 it was there necessary to enter into the confused details 
 of Robespierre's public attitude. When the story of the 
 personality is left aside for a moment, and the general 
 field of '92 is regarded, the salient relief of the year is 
 the contrast, and at last the opposition of the Gironde 
 and the extreme Left. What was the grievance against 
 the Gironde ? 
 
 It is universally appreciated that men of a high 
 political idealism find difficult or impossible the disci- 
 pline necessary to prolonged common action in an 
 assembly. Even when the issue is absolutely clear (as 
 for instance when it is the defence or the iudependence of 
 
 * 338 to 187. There were nearly 400 abstentions, probably due to the 
 fact that the great disturbance was not yet ended : 200 more voted at 
 Danton's election the next day. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 205 
 
 one's country), the tendency of the mass to disintegrate 
 is apparent ; when the main principle of common action 
 has been achieved the disintegration appears to become 
 a fatal necessity, and enthusiasts of this kind that are, as 
 it were, picked infantry for a charge, lose the faculty for 
 defending a position. 
 
 The system of party does not rely for its motives, but 
 depends for its bond upon the distribution of patronage. 
 It is deepest rooted where a state is governed by its 
 wealthy citizens ; throughout the world, the permanence, 
 tradition, and organisation of the teams of public debate 
 are strong in proportion to the magnitude of pubhc sala- 
 ries, and one might almost add to the unreality of the 
 issues that are discussed. 
 
 It stands to reason, therefore, that he who is pos- 
 sessed of any political creed, or that has received a reve- 
 lation of pohtical justice, will be the worst of materials 
 for the exercise of this base and necessary method of 
 cohesion. Nor is this all. There is in such passionate 
 convictions a potentiality of high differentiation, which is 
 the despair of historical philosophy. The apostles, the 
 reformers of every age of conviction, turn that age to a 
 battlefield. It would seem as though the nearer one 
 pushed up towards the central truth which inspires men 
 with certitude, and puts their awful energy into the 
 creeds, one got nearer also to the general paradox by 
 which that central unity is itself the origin of all differ- 
 ences, the creator of infinite tones and colours. Whether 
 we are dealing with the irresistible advance of the 
 Christian Church throughout its early development, or 
 with the triumph of a political system (as in the case of 
 the Revolution), or with a profound economic change, 
 which may be the form of our next new development, 
 the advance of such conquerors can never be like that of 
 an army, but must always be like that of a tide ; eddy- 
 ing, self-returning, appreciable only in the mass, and 
 
206 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 out of such contradictions come the only enduring 
 things. 
 
 This tragic part of faith, that it impels the most 
 violent energies into the smallest details of the creed is 
 undoubtedly the underlying cause of the great quarrel 
 which had first arisen in the debate on the war in De- 
 cember and January, which had broken out openly when, 
 in the spring, Kobespierre and Brissot had made targets of 
 each other in the Jacobins, and which this high moment of 
 the Revolution forced into its final form compelling either 
 faction to attempt the destruction of the other. 
 
 Of the Gironde as the chiefs of the opposition the 
 Mountain had been jealous ; in the Gironde as crusaders, 
 the Mountain had seen contemptible fanatics — possibly 
 allies of the Court. In the Gironde, political, and there- 
 fore necessarily intriguing, working through boudoirs, 
 and weaving cabals, the Mountain had discerned that 
 impure element of compromise which from the very open- 
 ing of the States-General the extreme Left had fought 
 as their principal enemy. When they met in Madame 
 Roland's room, Desmoulins and Robespierre knew how 
 the chairs stood round ; they knew the footstool. They 
 saw Barbaroux, Gensonn^, Brissot, Guadet form a coterie 
 ruling them and persuading France. 
 
 I have said that Brissot and Robespierre were the 
 two opposite types upon which we can fix to appreciate 
 the acerbity of the struggle. You may also see it in 
 the breach between the two comrades, Robespierre and 
 Potion. It is developed and recognised when Danton, in 
 the garden of the ministry on a famous day in August, 
 drives Roland and Servain where he chooses like domes- 
 tics. All that Girondin spirit had depended upon the 
 unrealities of '92, the restricted suffrage, the uncertain 
 power of the Court, the upper-class tradition of security, 
 the upper-class illusions with regard to the nature of 
 social discipline, and — if the word convention can be 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 207 
 
 used, of minds so lofty and erect as those of Vergniaud, 
 Potion, and Isnard — upon the upper-class convention that 
 manners are in some part a chief component of political 
 talent. 
 
 The loth of August had brought all the realities of 
 the inner fires to the surface, and in the test of sheer 
 democracy the Gironde receded, took on the defensive. 
 The Mountain grew and turned master. 
 
 Until the i oth of August the forces of either were in 
 great part alhed. All the quarrels at the Jacobins, all the 
 contempt or envy, on the one hand, against the men who 
 sat round Madame Koland — against " the drawing-room " 
 — on the other all the hatred or disdain of statesmen for 
 extremists had been, in the main, inferior to the general 
 action of the Kevolution. Both factions had exercised their 
 principal energies in watching, at last in combating the 
 Crown. It was the Gironde, not the Mountain, that had 
 launched Paris at the King on the 20th of June; it was 
 neither the one nor the other that had forced the TuUeries ; 
 each could accuse the other of violence and demagogy, 
 each could accuse the other of hesitation. Both were 
 imited against an enemy that might overwhelm them 
 with the first success of Brunswick: the 6000 armed 
 ia the TuUeries, the monarchy upright, menacing the 
 end of all their common creations. The loth of August 
 in destroying this common enemy destroyed the bond. 
 It was apparent that the Gironde survived, and that the 
 full victory of its republican theory was too great for its 
 temper to bear. Roland, with his white hair and vener- 
 able, quiet voice, reminded one of nothing but the past : 
 Vergniaud had the good manners of oratory, he was a 
 great gentleman by right of the quality of his genius : 
 there could be felt in him the future Defender of the 
 King. Brissot was the intrigue of early '92, blundering 
 on into a time as little fitted for intrigue as molten 
 metal is to chiselling ; Guadet was the personal quarrel 
 
2o8 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 of March carried on into September ; Isnard, in a time 
 that was listening from day to day for the news of a fresh 
 disaster, stood for the forgotten fever in which war had 
 been determined. 
 
 Therefore throughout August Robespierre and all the 
 Mountain had deliberately mixed with the insurrectionary 
 Commune; had taken a species of delight in asserting 
 its authority over the dying Legislative Assembly. It 
 was the opportunity for revenge, or perhaps, in Robes- 
 pierre's own case (and he was the most determined 
 opponent of reconciliation), the opportunity for imposing 
 a complete democracy upon men who by their view and 
 manner, if not by their professions, diverted and corrupted, 
 as he thought, the republican spirit. Already the accusa- 
 tion of "Federalism," of weakening the country by an 
 excessive local autonomy, of not grasping the peril of 
 France, had been launched against them; already they 
 had begun to chafe against the Commune ^ and to accuse 
 the Mountain of arbitrary violence, when the massacres of 
 September came, to brand all that division in deep upon 
 the soul. Terror, disgust, the sense of the provinces behind 
 them, led the Gironde to a definite attack on Paris, to a 
 policy of separating Paris out as a criminal, and therefore 
 inevitably to a policy of decentralisation : invasion or no 
 invasion. Paris answered with the Elections. She chose 
 her primaries four days before the massacres. She began 
 voting at their close, she voted on for close on a fortnight 
 more ^ — and she did not repudiate the slaughter. 
 
 I have said that Robespierre had nothing to do with 
 the lynching. It is true of practically all the Mountain. 
 Still the twenty-four whom Paris elected were very nearly 
 the list of the Ami du Feuple, and Marat himself was 
 
 ' They broke the Commune. Then they repealed their vote; then 
 later, on August 30, they summoned it to the bar of the Assembly, and 
 then they gave way for the second time. 
 
 » Till the 19th. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 209 
 
 chosen seventh. The great misunderstanding which ended 
 in the Terror had been launched with a sufficient cause. 
 The pure eyes of the Gironde could become — as they 
 remained to the scaffold — indignant eyes condemning 
 outrage: the conquering energy of the Mountain could 
 seem a sword of justice in the hand of the Republic, 
 cutting down treason and rebelhon within, parrying and 
 guarding on the border. 
 
 From the first meeting of the Convention with closed 
 doors and under empty galleries in the empty hall of the 
 Tuileries, from the first public session when they trooped 
 into the Manege and saw the Legislative melt out and 
 lapse into the streets,^ there appeared in Robespierre the 
 one thing then necessary to his success ; he admitted vio- 
 lence and fell in with the spirit of his supporters. 
 
 He was conspicuously lacking in all that we know in 
 history to belong to leaders. He abhorred their pecuhar 
 vices ; he had not so much as heard of their principal 
 quahties. The communion that your leader has with 
 men, his corporate character, was a thing utterly unknown 
 to Robespierre, it could have found no place in his 
 exclusive and positive logic. The leader's vague but 
 irresistible mandate seemed to him non-existent, a fiction 
 of parasites ; the leader's necessary seizure of power, when, 
 in special dangers, the organised mass demands anima- 
 tion and unison, seemed to him a common usurpation. 
 Throughout the Revolution the men who had something 
 in them of that magic of the leader he suspected, tracked, 
 and, if he could, destroyed. He saw it and hated it in 
 Dumouriez, he tasted it and opposed it in Vergniaud. 
 Perhaps later the jar of it in Danton led him to the betrayal 
 of that friend. The men that sum up other men and 
 evoke loyalty must sin in two ways, by the concupiscence 
 
 ' The outgoing and incoming Parliaments were curiously careful to 
 maintain a continuity of authority. With the King a prisoner and the 
 permanent officials in disorder, it was a necessity. 
 
 O 
 
2IO ROBESPIERRE 
 
 of power and by the fondness for boon companions ; they 
 come to find in either vice a necessary food. They 
 exist by an insatiate superiority, and they enlarge and 
 temper this insolence by a genial lenience for, and com- 
 monly a participation in, the feast of the senses. Both 
 these sins were odious to Robespierre. He was designed 
 uniquely to register and to express: he could never 
 inspire. Yet he became a kind of leader — he led more 
 than armies ; at last he all but imposed a religion. 
 
 This paradox is the theme of every page in which 
 his name appears. It proceeded, as I have said con- 
 tinually throughout this book, from the sharp and deep 
 impression which one face of his metallic spirit had 
 struck into the popular mind. The people took his 
 name, put it up for a Ldbarum, and under the veil of 
 the name they raised the man himself; but something 
 more was needed to produce the short accident of his 
 final pre-eminence. He had to avoid the checks that 
 would have diverted so gradual and insistent a pro- 
 gression as was his towards power. How was it that 
 in '89 he avoided the officialism to which he was tempted 
 and which would have buried him ? In '90 that he 
 kept the sympathy of the priests ? In '9 1 that he 
 restrained the Jacobins ? In early '92 that he could 
 oppose the war ? There was in all that precaution an 
 element of political intrigue and, at last, of ambition, 
 but much the most of it was the chance of his character. 
 His temper made the statesmen his enemies ; their 
 enmity forced him into the channel that led straight to 
 '94 ; the pressure of that enmity forbade the least diver- 
 gence. 
 
 So now a circumstance, fortunate for the moment, 
 preserved the dominion of Robespierre by permitting 
 him to abandon his reserve, his bitter generalities and 
 his innuendoes of the earlier part of the year. Paris 
 demanded champions ; the Gironde, which was the 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 211 
 
 majority of the Convention, the executive power, the 
 provinces — almost the Republic — charged against the 
 deputation of Paris ; the twenty-four. Robespierre 
 undertook the defence, and that with an extraordinary 
 unity of action; he let everything leave his mind save 
 the interest of a ceaseless direct attack upon the coterie 
 of the Rolands and the weaving into that attack of his 
 ancient formulae. 
 
 In this he had no rival. He was alone with the 
 people. Marat, without weight or balance, giving plea- 
 sure only to fools and even by fools never followed : 
 Marat, who had not hesitated to conceive the massacres of 
 September, was not a target. He had to be killed before 
 he could be deified. The Gironde made him a butt or 
 held him up as an excuse for their violence, but even 
 were he overthrown (as five months later they would 
 have overthrown him by trial) ; even were he murdered 
 (as ten months later he was murdered), Marat's fall was 
 not the fall of the Mountain. Danton was occupied in 
 the larger things. He was reaping the fruits of Valmy, 
 attempting to preserve the neutrality of England; his 
 mind was full of the armies, he was weary of the crisis 
 that paralysed the Convention; he would have recon- 
 ciled. 
 
 Robespierre alone was plunged and absorbed in that 
 political struggle. He accepted the burden of Paris and 
 took upon his misshapen shield with unalterable fixity of 
 purpose all the spears of the Gironde, while outside his 
 mind, unheeded, rushed the autumn of '92, 
 
 Here, as in every written attempt to explain the 
 man, one must omit the background. Yet it is perhaps 
 the greatest picture in history; the first rising of the 
 nation, the armies driven to the frontier before the south- 
 westerly gales of that autumn, the charges under the torn 
 sky of Jemappes. 
 
 These things passed beside him in his self-absorption, 
 
212 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 and even in that great time it is only in debate and 
 writing and through the mind that you find him re- 
 vealed. 
 
 Valmy passed ; the invasion was thrust back home ; 
 the cheers and singing of Jemappes ran through Paris ; 
 Dumouriez, turned to an idol, was planning what miracles 
 of exterior politics might be worked with his victorious 
 and ragged army — running to Paris to intrigue, driving 
 back to the frontier to intrigue. Europe, both central and 
 remote, was being sucked into the whirlpool of what was to 
 be a universal war. But Kobespierre, all the mornings, sat 
 in the little room above the carpenter's shed writing of 
 himself and democracy; all the afternoons pursued the 
 tireless theme at the Manfege ; all the evenings reiterated it 
 at the Jacobins : preaching self and equality and giving 
 the Gironde the blows that Paris delighted to see given. 
 
 New expressions came to his pen. Names, insults, 
 and direct venom ; a habit extraneous to his character. 
 It was one of those moments of extreme vigour that 
 diversified his progress, a recollection of the last week 
 of Arras, of the nights of July '91 in the club. And 
 to the natural heat of such a moment a long memory of 
 accusation and domestic humiliation added the personal 
 note : awoke vanity a little and stirred him. 
 
 For, as I have said, it was his enemies that put this 
 new power into him. 
 
 Consider the nature of his experience and the nature 
 of his suffering beneath it, during this past year of 
 1792. Commonly silent when the radicals had met in 
 the spring at the Hotel Brittanique and made a court for 
 Madame Roland ; knowing that in his frequent absence, 
 after his early departures, he was mentioned only for 
 his awkwardness in such good company ; less virile than 
 these Buzots and young Barbaroux, ungenial, pretentious, 
 he had in their presence something of what the poor 
 feel in the houses of the rich — shame, self-defence, and 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 213 
 
 secret angers. Consider also with what profound sincerity 
 he suspected all that world. If he, a virtuous man, was 
 so ridiculous, where was their virtue ? He noticed their 
 elegance, their memories of society; he saw them 
 plotting combinations and policies together. He saw 
 that hiding of self which is peculiar to good breeding. 
 Absolute sincerity tempered in a sharp creed is like a steel 
 instrument of surgery. With this he probed the falsity 
 of Dumouriez ; he laid bare the inner nerve of meddle- 
 someness that inspired Brissot's activity, and he remained 
 silent. They knew that he knew them. 
 
 These men had become the ministry. The Rolands 
 had been installed in their magnificent Hotel of the Home 
 Office in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champ. There had 
 been modest banquets, stoical splendours, many servants 
 and lights round the table of the Gironde. They had been 
 power, when he had behind him only a Paris without votes, 
 the leadership of the Jacobins and the adoration of simple 
 men. Then came the war, the war that the Girondins made, 
 and that he had consistently opposed. It had gone ill. The 
 populace had risen under the menace of Brunswick and 
 overthrown the Court, and, in the rush, destroyed also 
 the platform on which the gentlefolk and the decent 
 philosophers had built up an Utopia. The populace had 
 lifted up suddenly to a great eminence all that he 
 represented and led : he could not forbear from revenge, 
 and the men who belonged to the Rolands could not 
 forbear from attacking him, from destroying him if 
 possible,, lest his immense popularity should make him a 
 master, and they and their Republic should be drowned 
 in the flood of Paris. 
 
 Brissot, in the Patriate Frangais} at the very opening 
 of the Republic, on the 22nd of September, raised 
 an alarm against him, spoke of the "Demagogues": 
 Buzot, two days later, in the open Parliament asked " If 
 
 "39, 1 140- 
 
214 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 they were the slaves of the members for Paris," m-ged 
 and carried a committee to watch and menace Paris, 
 demanded a guard from the departments; and said 
 all this, turning to the benches of the Mountain, and 
 thrusting out a gesture against Kobespierre. La Source 
 asked, " What was Paris more than any other depart- 
 ment? " Rebecqui, on the same day, the 2Sth (it was the 
 stormiest of the early debates), said in so many words, 
 " We know the truth at Marseilles : a party aims at 
 the dictatorship and Robespierre is its head." 
 
 Robespierre accepted the challenge. Hitherto, since 
 the loth of August, he had but agreed with the 
 Commune and shown himself a frank partisan of the 
 city which he represented. Now he consented to become 
 a weapon and to strike at the heart of the provincial 
 clique in which Paris discovered inefficiency, lukewarm- 
 ness, disintegrating federalism, the loss of the State. 
 His action was the easier because his enemies fell into 
 the error common to passion — they expressed tendencies 
 and general dangers as facts and particular perils. 
 Robespierre was as yet but an enormous reputation : they 
 tried to prove against him, as in a court of law, the 
 absurd charge of tyranny and attempted dictatorship. 
 He was senior member of the group that included Marat : 
 they attempted to fasten on him the horror of September. 
 To rebut such charges was an easy triumph. He heard 
 Rebecqui out, noted him like a lawyer, took the tribune, 
 and, as an athlete a weight, sustained irony for two hours. 
 
 "It was good for the Republic and worthy of Marseilles 
 that any danger of preponderance should be watched and 
 extinguished as it rose. Rebecqui had thought to dis- 
 cover that danger, and had named its author. The 
 principal safeguard of the Republic was this heroic 
 jealousy and suspicion." 
 
 He spoke prodigiously of himself and all he had 
 done for the Revolution. He was careful in his 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 215 
 
 articulation and touched every enemy with the point 
 of a rapier : to Potion in the chair he recalled 
 their friendship, but he smiled unpleasantly as he 
 recalled it. Every interruption of the majority he 
 bore out with patience. He took up the thread of 
 his speech when the protest was spent, laboured and 
 succeeded in making the masters of the Convention 
 ridiculous. He advertised his person to the hundreds of 
 new obscure deputies that had come up from the provinces 
 under the terror of September ; that had been taught to 
 fear Paris — and Robespierre as the master of Paris. 
 These men came round a little later; their influence 
 began to support the Mountain; they began to weaken 
 the Gironde.'^ 
 
 This 25 th of September was then, in spite of the 
 fluctuating majority, an open victory for Robespierre. 
 Young Barbaroux, " Barbaroux of Marseilles " (who 
 spoke of himself in the third person, a noble trick), 
 supported Rebecqui : quoted a chance phrase of Panis 
 that Robespierre would make a good dictator. It fell flat. 
 Vergniaud himself could not save the Gironde from the 
 effect of the debate. Robespierre went forward. He 
 enlarged over the Jacobins; he caused them that day 
 to begin their proscriptions by the exclusion of Brissot. 
 He felt himself in the saddle ; called up his brother and 
 sister from Arras; established his whole household and 
 the small accumulation of its fortune in the house of 
 the Rue St. Honord. He began to issue his lengthy 
 journal, '' Letters to my Constituents," by which he could 
 get into touch with the support of the whole city as in the 
 Convention he touched the galleries with his voice, and 
 received from them, as it were, the ratification of Paris. 
 
 ^ It is characteristic of Robespierre that the best notes on which to 
 reproduce this scene and speech are contained in Robespierre's own 
 account in the first number of his " Letter to my Constituents." There 
 are also, however, the Moniteitr and the Dibais of the day. 
 
2i6 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 It is irripow.iblo Uj omit a rofcronce to these papers. 
 His jnd(;futivaLlo pen, his oIoko bent attitude of the 
 spectacled writer, his ondless phrasing stood out from 
 all the words of them. " It is not enough to overthrow a 
 throne: our business is to raise upon its ruins a holy 
 oqiaality and the imprescriptible rights of man. One 
 empty word does not create a republic ; it is made rather 
 by the character of its citizens. ITie soul of the Republic 
 is yirtue, that i.s, the love of one's country and a large- 
 hearted devotion that merges private into public interesta," 
 and so forth, for nearly thirty pages. Save when hn is 
 describing his own speech, he is reiterating all the 
 commonplaces of the liberals, the exact phrases of 
 early '92, of '91, of '90. The interest of it lies not 
 80 much in the evidence it affords of his one inc^sant 
 note, as in the quality of the public attention that never 
 wearied of it. It is only in times of high fervour 
 approaching delirium that humanity can tolerate such 
 repetitions. So in "revivals" men and women sway 
 ecstatic to phrases they have heard a thousand times. 
 
 All October he maintained the steady fire of his 
 pamphlets, the pressure of the club upon the Parliament; 
 Dumouriez returning victorious, he consented to embrace 
 him in a fomous scene; he took care to avoid the 
 trail of Marat, he concentrated upon the Girondc. He 
 spoke Uttle at the Convention, but after standing over 
 tho deputies for a month as the menace of Paris, he 
 provoked a second scene on the 29th of October. 
 Again he ltstonf;d with patience to the Gironde and 
 he replied again at great length and with insistent and 
 controlled acidity to the long diatribe of Louvet: he 
 had the triumph of hearing him.self definitely accused 
 of attempting power. He put off for a week the 
 solemn defence in whose ritual he delighted, and when 
 tho day came, on the 5 th of November, he issued from 
 Uie orde^ to the applause of Paris in the galleries. By a 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 217 
 
 vote iKwirly iiiiaiiinioiiK tho I'arliainout loft liim innocont; 
 in tho uvonillf,^ as his cuKl-oni wuw, ho wont to tho Jacobins 
 to hamuior in tho blow. Tho occaHion wa.s too groat for 
 him to toll lii.H own triiimiili. Merlin of Thionville and 
 Mamiol gave tho opic of tho day under the sinilo of Jean- 
 Bon St. Aii(lr6 in tho chair : all tho radicals. And who 
 was tho last to bring hia homage ? Garnior of the Aube, 
 tlio uidmown man who was in Thormidor to drag down 
 Robuspiorro with a Phrase. 
 
 1 have no spaco to give in full tho rear-guard action 
 tliat the Giroiido longlit after thin defeat. November is 
 full of it. Louvot, to whom tho Parliament had refused 
 tho right of rtiply — so utterly had his attack failed — 
 pul>li,slie(l a ridiculous pamphlet called "Robespierre and 
 his lloyalislH ": liolaiid sent it out broadcast at the public 
 expense.' Tho nowspapors of tho Gironde, wealthy and 
 official, continued more moderately than buforo but with 
 equal in.sisUuico to strike at the prdostal that supported 
 Robespierre; but though the Gironde was the Govern- 
 ment and (a fact not without importance) tho last tradi- 
 tion of (uiltiire, tlio groat party could neither weaken tho 
 man nor the city tliat op[)()sod it. Paris filtered, as it 
 wore, into tho Convention ; its central information the 
 colour of passion it leant to that knowledge; tho more 
 exact ineniorios it (lossossod of the King's treason, of 
 tlie nature of tho o\A and discroditod compromiso, affected 
 those provincials. l)o|)uties lodging soattt^rod up and 
 down Paris siispeotoil the capital less and absorbed more 
 of its temper. Day by day and debate by debate small 
 groups and individuals broke oil' from tho majority upon 
 which tho power of tho Ciirondins depended. 
 
 Hero is an anocidoto that shows the kind of resistance 
 the party met with in its new methods of self-defence 
 
 ' Among other places, to Arras. The town council, proud that one 
 fellow-oltken of theirs should ba so famous, replied to liolaud in a very 
 uiigry letter. 
 
2i8 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 and the kind of thing that ultimately ruined it. Gorsas 
 was editing his "Courrier of the 83 departments" on 
 the lines that his clique demanded, regularly attacking 
 the senior member for Paris. He suffered from an illu- 
 sion common to editors and believed as he wrote that he 
 was but a mouthpiece of the people, yet he believed 
 he could say what he chose and that it would still be 
 the people that were saying it. A shock roused him 
 from such complacency. 
 
 His paper received a letter (printed on the 14th of 
 November) asking why Robespierre was attacked suddenly 
 after a particular date. The writer was a subscriber from 
 the foundation of the paper : he had read Gorsas all these 
 three years writing the regular praises of the typical 
 revolutionary, and he did not understand the change. 
 Gorsas could not answer the truth; perhaps he hardly 
 recognised it himself. He could not say, " You see, we 
 of the Gironde are poets, with a fine vision of our generous 
 and equal republic ; we are gentlemen, we hate violence 
 and we are good orators and statesmen: we are menaced 
 by the position of the Convention in this turbulent 
 capital, and the vast popularity of Robespierre ia that 
 capital frightens us. We must break it if we can. 
 Moreover, we find his character exasperating; he is a 
 divot to a creed, and he has joined and will lead the 
 party of massacre." Gorsas could not, I say, plead in 
 this fashion, so he simply answered (in his issue of the 
 20th) that, " He with his own ears had heard Robespierre 
 talking of God to a crowd." Imagine the effect of such 
 a reply upon the worthy citizen to whom it might be 
 addressed! One thing the Girondins failed in, and it 
 was their ruin. They could never touch and feel the 
 people.^ 
 
 * For instance, Madame Boland, the danghter of a small shopkeeper 
 and artisan, complains on the supreme night of her arrest of the smell of 
 the crowd. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 219 
 
 Of fifty such pieces of journalism I choose one other, 
 because it expresses with admirable exactitude the com- 
 plaint against Robespierre. It is not just; it neglects 
 the sincerity that dominated and still absorbed Robes- 
 pierre's temptations of vanity or ambition; it proceeds 
 from the pen of a man in the Lucretian tradition of 
 Diderot, grandly indignant with religions, and irritated 
 that the name of God should still linger so tenaciously. 
 But the man was very great, and he has driven his chisel 
 in deep. It is Condorcet's. 
 
 "... And there are some who ask why there are 
 always so many women hanging round Robespierre: at 
 his house, in the galleries of the Jacobins and of the 
 Convention. It is because this Revolution of ours is a 
 reUgion, and Robespierre is leading a sect therein. He is 
 a priest at the head of his worshippers. . . . Robespierre 
 preaches ; Robespierre censures ; he is furious, grave, 
 melancholy, exalted — all coldly ; his thoughts flow regu- 
 larly, his habits are regular ; he thunders agaiast the rich 
 and the great ; he lives on next to nothing ; he has no 
 necessities. He has but one mission — to speak, and he 
 speaks unceasingly ; he creates disciples ... he has 
 every character, not of the maker of a religion, but of the 
 originator of an opinion ; he has an ascetic reputation 
 about him ... he talks of God and of Providence ; he 
 calls himself the friend of the humble and the weak ; he 
 gets himself followed by women and by the poor in spirit ; 
 he gravely receives their adoration. . . . He is a priest, 
 and wUl never be other than a priest. . . ." ^ 
 
 That is how Condorcet saw, despised, and was op- 
 pressed under the rising fame of a man who was destined 
 to catch France, as he had caught Paris, under the singular 
 
 ' Hamel quotes all this at great length (ii. 522), and, what is very 
 remarkable, he here admits one of the few sober criticisms made upon bis 
 hero. The original essay may be read in full in the CAronique de Farii 
 for the 9th November 1792. 
 
220 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 attraction of his grave self- exposition and the ceaseless 
 similar activity of his mind. But Robespierre added 
 much that autumn to the little Condorcet saw in him. 
 He that had taken a brief for Paris, followed up like a 
 duty all the Parisian attacks on the early hesitation of 
 the Convention, and consented to lose a great part of his 
 united theory. He began to demand (for the sake of the 
 Revolution) policies inconsistent with his Rousseau, he left 
 his deductions somewhat. This abandonment of a part 
 of himself, this transformation in him, which grew to be 
 so conspicuous in the winter of '93, is first clearly settled 
 for history in December '92. 
 
 Let me describe with special insistence the outset of 
 this new career, in which passions distinct from his 
 unpassionate soul lit Robespierre, as it were, from with- 
 out. The phase of transition began with the King's trial; 
 by the time Louis had suffered, Robespierre had been 
 struck irretrievably by the storm, and drove before it. 
 The King and Robespierre are the opposing poles of that 
 autumn. 
 
 I can see, between the victim of the Convention and 
 the man who was leading a resolute minority in, and was 
 soon to be the master of, the Convention, a sharp and 
 dramatic contrast: a contrast not only of circumstance 
 (that is evident), but also of mood. 
 
 The beginning of the King's agony coincided with the 
 beginning of Robespierre's great advance and satisfaction, 
 and of the two gates the one man passed through the ivory, 
 the other through the horn: one was compelled or permitted 
 by his fate to touch the first truths ; the other was snared 
 into the illusion that ended in his ruin. 
 
 I will not pretend that real things are sad to men ; 
 God made real things, and all that God has made is 
 good. But when a man or a class has lived remote and 
 shielded in an unreal world, the first plunge into reality 
 is a shock like the transition of death. Gentlemen 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 221 
 
 know it when they fall to the common condition of 
 the world. 
 
 For Louis, then, all in those December and January 
 days became the trouble of being an ordinary man in 
 adversity, the sadness of reality, the reality of winter 
 daylight, of long nights without sleep, of rain, and almost 
 of despair. But for religion it would have been despair. 
 Louis, accused, tried, condemned, fell back upon the one 
 character in him that gave stuff to his unfortunate small- 
 ness— he became simple, and in his calamity his simplicity 
 grew conspicuous. When, on the i ith of December, he 
 had first appeared before the Convention, it was after a 
 morning in which he had breakfasted with his wife and 
 children, ia which he had played a quiet game with his 
 little son, in which he had insisted upon petty but pathetic 
 details in the matter of his clothing, in the matter of his 
 right to privacy. He had gone out into the drizzle pain- 
 fully, unshaven, stooping, and pale, still gross in body, 
 his brown coat his principal care, and had said little as 
 they drove to the Parliament. 
 
 Seated before the Convention he had refused to 
 admit his signatures to a hundred documents where his 
 hand was only too plainly apparent; it was puerile, but 
 so human that the chord of pity was again touched. 
 Once even he did admit his hand, at the foot of some 
 pension or bribery or other, saying that "that was in- 
 deed his signature, for it was an act of charity." It was 
 imbecile, but no one could fail to see the plain man 
 instructed by lawyers. 
 
 When he returned under the rain from the Parlia- 
 ment, Chaumette, the most bitter journalist of the republi- 
 cans, the secretary of the new Commune, sat beside him 
 in the carriage, and the King was still more an ordinary, 
 unfortunate man. 
 
 They spoke a few words upon the bread they were 
 eating — unhappy communion. The King, fatigued, left 
 
222 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 part of the loaf aside. Chaumette had a scruple in 
 throwing it out of the window: "his grandmother had 
 told him as a child that the waste of bread was a great 
 sin." Louis, torpid and automatic, his bulging eyes 
 lapsing into stupor, made some kind of reply; said this 
 grandmother was evidently a woman of sense. The King 
 noted mechanically the streets through which the car- 
 riage passed; made stupid and simple remarks upon 
 their history and appearance. Chaumette replied to 
 him as one traveller vulgarly met with another of equal 
 insignificance might reply to the commonplaces of a 
 stage-coach. All these silly little human details the 
 people heard, and Louis became for them what he had 
 never yet become — an ordinary man, a fool like any one 
 of us. 
 
 For a fortnight the prosecution was abandoned, 
 while above it raged the increasing quarrel, of the 
 Mountain and the Gironde. When later Louis was 
 again before his judges the hesitation that must always 
 take men upon the eve of those legal decisions which 
 involve the life of a man sharpened this advocate of his 
 — the pity of the general people. The majority was 
 so small, in the case of some of them self-contradiction 
 was so evident, that the deputies of the Convention 
 seemed themselves to be the accused. 
 
 His passion, his last will, his tearing from his family, 
 these throughout France, and, alas, throughout Europe, be- 
 came the subject of I know not how many prints, pamph- 
 lets, ballads. I have before my eyes as I write the best 
 known of the pictures that swelled the English propa- 
 ganda: in this, with the most ridiculous nobility of 
 feature, he is seen breaking away in the awful morning 
 of his execution from his wife (to whom is lent a very 
 inconsistent dignity), and from his children, who are 
 evidently made in that picture the children of all of us. 
 
 When a man commits a great crime those who 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 223 
 
 (driven by the necessities of a common religion or of 
 politics) undertake his defence, can never resist the 
 temptation to a gross unreasonableness. They will pre- 
 sent his sufferings to you continually : they will take for 
 granted with a smile or with a violent ellipsis of indigna- 
 tion, that no proofs of his guilt exist. They postulate 
 innocence, refuse to plead, and harp day after day upon 
 his punishment. So it was with Louis, but a man 
 would be over-bitter who in these days of ours, now that 
 the quarrel against monarchy has been so thoroughly 
 settled, should grudge him the unreasoning consolation 
 of loyalty that he received. 
 
 To deny that he had been guilty of treason is simply 
 to deny the right of a nation to safeguard its own 
 defence, and to deny that the executive is the servant 
 of the national interest. But there was in the cere- 
 monial of the old monarchy which has now departed 
 from Europe something which could easily disturb an 
 intellect so infirm ; nor will any one who values justice 
 deny that the man who brought such incalculable mis- 
 fortunes upon his country had acted on his lights of 
 honour, had avoided a breach between his own soul and 
 the judgment of God. The caricaturists did well when 
 they represented him in every ignominious detail, yet 
 passing into Paradise. 
 
 The day came for his death, and again under clouds 
 that had covered the sky throughout that month, pur- 
 sued by the damp, unwholesome chill that for a month 
 had been the atmosphere of his tragedy, he went out of 
 life under aU the circumstances which can most throw 
 man back upon himself: there is something naked and 
 therefore sublime in his departure. 
 
 Against this set what had happened to the man who 
 as a boy eighteen years before had read that speech to 
 his young King in the premier college of the university. 
 Illusion surrounded Robespierre throughout that trial; 
 
224 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the illusion that he was in some way a victim, the illu- 
 sion that the Commune was the nation, and could rightly 
 press upon the Parhament, the illusion that the people 
 whose hold over the executive was still a dogma at the 
 back of his mind, was in this special case forbidden from 
 judging (for he knew by how vast a majority the nation 
 was opposed to the death of the King), the illusion that his 
 consistent opposition to the penalty of death could in the 
 case of a character like his own find an exception for a 
 despot — that inconsistency was to lead him to watch the 
 Terror unmoved, and perhaps to use it as a weapon. 
 Above all he suffered the illusion that a man can bargain 
 with his own faith and yet remain all himself. 
 
 When, in the last days of November, Cambon had 
 proposed the suppression of the salaries of the Church — 
 on the same occasion that Danton, just off for the armies, 
 made his short and famous defence of popular religion — 
 Robespierre insisted that the way out of their difficulties, 
 financial and all, was the immediate arraignment of the 
 King.^ 
 
 Five days later, on the 3rd of December, he de- 
 livered in the Convention his principal speech upon the 
 culpability of Louis. 
 
 Already he had passed down so many steps in his 
 lapse from the character of his part. He had already 
 found his ambitions. He had defended the Commune 
 against the Legislative in August like a partizan; he 
 had turned quite suddenly to a ritual use of the word 
 " Republic " ; he, the opponent of the war, had illogically 
 flattered the lyrical enthusiasm that prepared Valmy — 
 an enthusiasm he did not comprehend, and which yet he 
 consented to serve. So now in an even and unaccented 
 speech there appeared incongruously his determination to 
 
 • The speech also contains a further example of his regular support of 
 the priests. I omit it because it would only interrupt the purely political 
 action with which I am here concerned. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 225 
 
 be the Lector of the new republican world, in which he 
 so bitterly envied the Girondins their place of rheto- 
 ricians, and of which he was jealously to watch for a 
 short time Danton, as the powerful executive. Thus he 
 speaks of the necessity " of disregarding the kings, and of 
 considering only the establishment of liberty and of a 
 republic." For the first time in his life he permitted 
 to pass his lips the demand for the death of a 
 man. 
 
 It is by no accident that for three years of increasing 
 violence he almost alone of the revolutionaries had never 
 threatened death even in the vaguest terms; had not 
 spoken of the sword of the law, nor cried with Isnard 
 that the axe of the Revolution awaited traitors. It was 
 consistent with his whole mind, with the whole develop- 
 ment of his youth, to find such things repugnant ; it was 
 consistent also with that hesitation he always had in 
 leaving principles to speak of men. His demand for 
 death, therefore, though upon this first occasion it was 
 exceptional, though it was with regard to what he sin- 
 cerely did believe to be the greatest of political crimes, 
 and an occasion never to be repeated, yet certainly had 
 something in it of deflection from the very narrow path 
 and strait which he had followed since first he read his 
 Rousseau alone in the fields by the Scarpe; and into 
 that deflection the ambitions of his new leadership 
 undoubtedly entered as a cause. 
 
 A day or two later he descended to permitting at 
 the Jacobins the destruction of the bust of Mirabeau; 
 Duplay proposed it — (he can hardly have done so of his 
 own initiative) ; Robespierre in a kind of false enthusiasm 
 supported a proposition of which he was not improbably 
 the author. But even here when he was doing what a 
 crowd wUled, his lack of proportion and his abstraction 
 appeared, for in denouncing Mirabeau he must also 
 denounce Helvetius, whose bust stood somewhere in the 
 
 P 
 
226 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 hall, and whom he remembered Rousseau to have 
 hated/ 
 
 The Gironde noted and laughed. They dragged 
 back into the light the forgotten day when Robespierre 
 had proposed the Pantheon for Mirabeau's funeral, and 
 Robespierre, in the meshes of his new self-contradiction, 
 was at the pains to pubUsh a laborious and hardly 
 successful apology. 
 
 The attitude upon which I am now insisting con- 
 tinued throughout the trial of the King. He seemed on 
 one occasion to argue like any Herbert in favour of an 
 immediate and arbitrary execution, and became for a 
 moment the target of a violent and physical opposition 
 in the Parliament. The hold that he was getting upon 
 that mob of Paris for which the Girondins had conceived 
 a terror and an abomination, pointed him out already as 
 a possible master, and when Guadet, accusing him of a 
 kind of despotism, forced Robespierre to a protest, that 
 protest was met by repeated threats of arrest from all 
 sides of the hall, but the extreme Left: a curious re- 
 hearsal of a scene that was in eighteen months to destroy 
 him. He was driven from the tribune, came up into it 
 again, received some support from the Mountain to which 
 such scenes were lending cohesion and discipline, re- 
 affirmed his demand for the King's immediate trial, and 
 ended his unsuccessful speech in a silence, which perhaps 
 his own calm had in a fashion imposed upon his 
 opponents. 
 
 When Louis appeared at the bar Robespierre defended 
 the action of the Commune in the rigour of the imprison- 
 ment it had imposed upon the King. On the 23rd of 
 December, three days before the date of the King's second 
 appearance and final trial, Robespierre again spoke, this 
 time at the Jacobins, saying that those who might upon 
 
 1 He spared Priestley, of whom he knew, I presume, neither good no? 
 ill, and wbQSe bust, crowned with fi^d^d l^ur^ls, stood third. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 227 
 
 that occasion appear to promote delay should be treated 
 as suspects, that those even should be treated as suspects 
 who did not actively vote for immediate condemnation. 
 He was even at the pains of ridiculing the defence made 
 by Des^ze, and on the 27 th, in a speech of excessive 
 length, he hammered round his main point, that had the 
 King been an ordinary criminal with such proof of 
 treason against him, any court would have settled the 
 matter in twenty-four hours. He treated with an angry 
 contempt the proposition that the judgment of Louis 
 should be referred to a popular vote, and his bitterness 
 was greater because he knew that he was plunging deeper 
 and deeper into contradictions of himself. There was a 
 note of threatening never heard before from his lips, and 
 only to reappear long after when he had become some- 
 thing of a master. " Citizens, it is to be decided whether 
 you are rebels or the benefactors of humanity." When 
 it was cast up against him that this demand for an 
 immediate and summary vengeance was that of but a 
 small minority in the nation, he threw away all his past 
 for an hour and defended such minorities; spoke like 
 any don of " the virtue which is always to be discovered 
 in minorities." 
 
 The road he had taken drove him into mere sophistry ; 
 of all methods the most naturally odious to a consistent 
 man. 
 
 That attitude of Paris and of Robespierre was 
 answered in the most famous of Vergniaud's speeches. 
 It has been turned into a defence of the King. It was 
 not that. It was the hesitation of a man who can see 
 many things at once, and who fears immediate decisions. 
 He knew Europe. He saw the approach of madness 
 over the nation, the great ring of wars. He heard the 
 cries in the street against the King, the pressure of 
 the crowd, and with the presentiment that haunted all 
 the Gironde he felt the shadow of death sweep over the 
 
228 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 hall as the mob rolled past outside. He had haunting 
 him as he spoke that terrible illiterate Commune of 
 '93, the great menace to all the older time — and the 
 Girondins for all their democracy were the spirit and 
 culture of the older time. That Commune was sitting 
 and watching a mUe away. At Vergniaud and all of 
 his, all the balancing Gironde, the scornful suspicions 
 of the Left were thrown in one phrase, " Remember the 
 sense of justice that is still somewhere in you, like a 
 lamp left in a tomb." ^ To the Left these great men 
 seemed cowards because they halted a little before 
 Europe arming and the plunge into '93. 
 
 It was the afternoon of the isth of January. The 
 meagre light of winter had already faded, the three great 
 groups of candles hung lit over the immense hall. The 
 last of the discussion limped on past the dinner-hour, 
 and after they had dined, the women of the Palais Royal, 
 the coterie of ]6galit4 trooped in to tarnish what was 
 most convinced and ascetic in the Republic with their 
 venal and corrupt applause. The rich of the faction of 
 Orleans sat there together determined on death. For 
 one of them, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, death waited 
 also. He was stabbed for his vote in a caf6 of the Palais 
 Royal, and on his mask that was modelled after death 
 there still lies the smile of his birth and riches. 
 
 A roll-call of names began and a vote from each was 
 demanded. 
 
 Robespierre came among the first by the accident of 
 his election, the senior member for Paris. He had not 
 so far caught, nor did he ever so far catch, the vigom* of 
 the great renewal as to achieve terseness; so when 
 Vergniaud, presiding, called out " Robespierre," and when 
 there was demanded of him (as of every member present 
 in turn) an exact expression of his reasons for his vote, 
 he lapsed into the literary verbosity which had suited 
 
 ' The phiase is St. Just's. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 229 
 
 the discussions of the year before, but which were so 
 grotesquely out of place upon this terrible occasion when 
 they could only recall his older and more consistent self. 
 Of what kind must that man have been to have persisted 
 even under the spell of tragedy in such long phrases as 
 these ? The importance of the occasion compels me to 
 transcribe them. They are commonly neglected and 
 very well worthy of remembrance. There is no space to 
 give them in fuU. 
 
 " I have no taste for long speeches upon selt-evident 
 matters. They are of a sinister augury for the fortunes 
 of liberty. I have ever made it a special point to leave 
 aside the distinctions of logomachy, which only appear 
 when there is a desire to evade the logical consequences 
 of some recognised principle. I have never learned the 
 art of dividing my political existence in such fashion as 
 to find in myself two separate functions, that of the 
 judge and that of the statesman. I am incapable of so 
 outraging reason and justice as to regard the life of a 
 despot as being of greater weight than that of common 
 citizens, and of putting my intellect to the rack in order 
 to save the greatest of criminals from a fate which the 
 law pronoimces against crimes far less grave, and which 
 the law has already inflicted upon his accomplices. I 
 will remain inflexible against oppressors, because I re- 
 main compassionate for the oppressed. I know nothing 
 of that humanity which is for ever sacrificing whole 
 peoples and protecting tyrants. The sentiment which 
 drove me to beg from the Constituent Assembly the 
 abolition of capital punishment, is the very same which 
 to-day drives me to ask for its special application to the 
 arbitrary ruler of my country, and to monarchy itself in 
 his person. I have no occasion to prophesy or to conjure 
 up future and unknown despots, and I will use no such 
 vision to excuse me from striking this man whom I have 
 
230 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 declared convicted as has, uniformly, this Assembly. I 
 vote for death." ^ 
 
 This is, not in full but in its gist, the long declaration 
 with which Robespierre confirmed his adhesion to the 
 new political force, to the Commune which now wrapped 
 him up, and in whose fortress he stood. It would not be 
 just to him to read into it mere pedantry, as one can read 
 mere pedantry into so many of his discourses; still less 
 would it be just to cast ridicule in such a moment upon 
 the too violent personal note which leads in every 
 sentence, almost, with the word " I." It was not written ; 
 it was spoken. Rhetoric and the sting of a hundred 
 insults ; his violent and embittered quarrel with pohtical 
 opponents whom he certainly believed to be moderates, 
 compromisers, and the enemies of liberty, gave him suffi- 
 cient passion to make this outburst (in the ears of the 
 Assembly) a piece of pure rhetoric ; and it is specially to be 
 noted that the very same quality which lent him his 
 tenacity to principle gave him, when once he had departed 
 from his own path, an obstinacy to continue in that false 
 direction. He sat down flushed and angry, having thrown 
 down a gauntlet at the Gironde. So one after another 
 the Mountain voted — for the deputies of Paris came in a 
 group — Danton especially rang over the hall in three 
 lines : "I am not a politician ; I vote for death." 
 
 The long night went on like an interminable litany. 
 Men passed in and out of the hall to sleep, to eat, and to 
 return. The dawn broke uneasily, a winter transition into 
 a winter daylight. The short day passed and stUl one 
 after another the coloured coats moved up from their 
 benches to the tribune, turned round, and addressed their 
 audience : cried in a loud voice : " Death absolute," " Death, 
 but respite," " Banishment," " Imprisonment," each ia his 
 kind. One after another they signed the minute of their 
 declaration, and went down the steps again to give way 
 
 ' The whole may be found in the Moniteur of January 21, 1793. 
 
ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 231 
 
 to the next. The second evening came and they were 
 still voting. Three hours passed in which the votes were 
 unsealed, inscribed, and counted with the most exact 
 care, then within an hour of midnight, before men 
 exhausted and almost entered into a world of sleep, 
 haunted with the terrors and the presentiments of sleep, 
 Vergniaud, his own eyes drooping with the same fatigue, 
 read out in his grave and peaceful voice : " It is with a 
 profound sadness that I declare the majority of the 
 Assembly to be for death." 
 
 Very few days remained. The appeal of Louis' counsel 
 was rejected. Poor old Malesherbes ^ — short, vulgar, a 
 hero — pleaded vainly ; touching all, but achieving nothing. 
 The appeal to the people, the last hope of the Gironde, 
 was rejected. In the war and the public danger 
 it appeared too much like an abdication of power. A 
 letter from the King of Spain promising I know not 
 what support, or threatening I know not what punish- 
 ment, was rejected. 
 
 On the 2 1 st Robespierre sat after the morning meal 
 in the household of the Duplays. The youngest of the 
 daughters asked him what was toward that the streets 
 should be so full of people. He answered that there 
 was that doing which she would do ill to see, and bade 
 some servant go and shut the great outer door of the 
 archway that gave upon the street.^ Louis XVI. went 
 by past the house with his gaolers and his priest in the 
 lane of a vast and silent crowd. Before the midday 
 meal the procession retinrned along that same Rue St. 
 Honor^ from the great square beyond. The line of the 
 
 ' Every one should read of the death of this man of the old regime. A 
 year later he waited calmly in his garden for his arrest, and on approach- 
 ing the scaffold betrayed all the emotions of relief from the tedium of 
 living. 
 
 ' This story was told by Lebas, who had it from his aunt. 
 
232 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Capetians was broken and the last of the true kings was 
 sunk in the quicklime of the Madeleine. 
 
 In that cold and ill-lit hour was let loose the fury of 
 the governments of Europe, closed the Neutrality of 
 England, and sacrificed the sympathy of America. When 
 the door was unlocked and Robespierre reappeared 
 among men it was to face problems and a turmoil which 
 he had in part let loose, he that had so consistently 
 opposed the armed crusade. Then a fortnight and 
 France was at war with the whole world.^ 
 
 1 An exaggeration. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 
 
 The Girondins were struck and were falling. They 
 never had been France, but only a superb opposition, 
 opposing tyranny from the vague sky of the ideal. On 
 the death of the King, who had stood for the positive 
 tradition of the nation, they came to a last rally; with 
 the spring season they fell. Their fall and their sacrifice 
 are the other names for the estabhshment and growth 
 of the Terror. France reseized herself with violence : 
 out of her instinct for united government and for a head 
 at Paris came the despotism of Paris over the depart- 
 ments, of the brain over the body. 
 
 I have insisted at such length in my last chapter 
 upon the sharp five months of the struggle that lay 
 between the imprisonment and the execution of the 
 King, because that space had transformed Kobespierre. 
 He had entered it the idol rather than the chief of a 
 political minority ; he had been the cantator of the 
 sacred texts, preaching, thinking himself a man op- 
 pressed by the regular forces of government and batter- 
 ing from below, in a hopeless opposition, what were then 
 the sure foundations of the Gironde. The war, which he 
 detested, had come. The palace which was the common 
 enemy he saw half-allied with the drawing-room of 
 Eoland, with what he thought to be nothing but an in- 
 triguing clique ; — Dumouriez and Brissot were in his eyes 
 the leaders of this shameful cabal. He was perhaps the 
 first at the Jacobins, but the club was still a battlefield. 
 He had feared the 20th of June. In August he had 
 
234 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 shut himself in at home, disappointed and disdainful on 
 the eve of the assault on the Palace.^ 
 
 In a day and a night, not by his work — by work 
 done in spite of him — his whole position had changed. 
 He was permitted to pass from opposition to action : 
 the price to be paid for mingling with the Commune, 
 and for accepting Paris and violence was his old consis- 
 tency; he paid it. He consented to become in part the 
 mouthpiece of that violence, in part only did he remain 
 the professor and logician of the strict revolutionary 
 theory. This compromise made him, long before 
 January, the chief target of the moderates : of the pure 
 visionaries, the great souls that surrounded Vergniaud. 
 Having been singled out for their principal attack, he 
 could not fail to reap the fruits of any victory against 
 them. When months later the Gironde disappeared, as 
 it was fated to disappear, it was to the profit especially of 
 Robespierre who had not grasped the nature of its peril, 
 who had attacked it only in debate. 
 
 The February of 1793 was an empty month of 
 silence. That silence covered the slow convergence of 
 the coalition. It was the moment of leisurely preparation 
 with which the eighteenth century had hitherto intro- 
 duced its wars^ and corresponding to that leisure dragged 
 on in Paris the sluggish inefficiency of the ministry and 
 their supporters. The thing that was to overthrow them 
 was indeed gathering in strength and unity : the Com- 
 mune, re-elected in December, full of complaint and anger, 
 
 ' Barbarous was a vain, courageous, young and sensitive hero, as full of 
 exaggeration as any other poet, but there is substantial truth in his 
 account of his interview with Kobespierre in the house of the Duplays, 
 in his disgust at "the Shrine," and in his mention of Madame 
 Duplay's protest that an insurrection would result in the death of Bobes- 
 pierre. 
 
 ' For instance : war is declared on England and Holland on February 
 2. No general action is fought for weeks upon weeks. Spain with- 
 draws her ambassador, yet there is no state of war till March 8. 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 235 
 
 an illiterate^ populace, had had, though illiterate, a 
 Girondin for its mayor, an excellent, respectable and 
 rather famous doctor, one Chambon.^ He had resigned 
 the incongruous post and Pache had replaced him : Pache 
 who had passed from the ministry of war, who felt the 
 danger and was angered by the lack of control over the 
 armies. That enduring thorn of the Revolution, famine, 
 troubled Paris to the disorders of the 25 th ; the Jacobins 
 meddled with " a republican constitution " ; in the last 
 days of the month the questions on the situation of the 
 army were growing urgent : little groups threatened 
 order in the streets. But as a whole the note of 
 February was silence. 
 
 What had passed under the feeble hand of Roland, 
 the ineptitude of Beurnonville ^ at the War Office, the 
 intrigue of Dumouriez ? There had arisen a combination 
 of follies that promised the immediate success of the 
 European governnjents and the overthrow of the Revolu- 
 tion. These follies had a common centre ; they proceeded 
 from a common but heroic folly, the deliberate theory of 
 the GLrondins and their refusal to touch earth. That party 
 would not move by an inch out of those traditions of '91 
 and '92, the traditions of pure freedom, which were sacred 
 to them in every circumstance, to which they could 
 admit no exception even to save freedom itself. All the 
 
 * It is interiBsting to mark in the documents the gulf that lay between 
 the insurrectionary Commune of the loth of August (lawyers, doctors and 
 dons) and that of December which was the practical result of their egali- 
 tarian theory and was purely popular. It is hardly an exaggeration to 
 say that there is misspelling in every document issued from the H6tel de 
 Ville during the ensuing eighteen months. 
 
 ' A curious career ! He resigned a month after his election and took 
 to writing of obstetrics, became an authority thereon, and died, secure in 
 that wholly professional reputation, in 1826. 
 
 ' Beurnonville is still a kind of byword for inefficiency in the French 
 army. I quote from Boursier's book the famous despatch of the victory 
 in which the loss of his brigade was " One drummer boy : slightly 
 wounded : Thumb." Unused to colonial warfare, the French discover 
 nothing but the comic in such despatches. 
 
236 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 accidents of Freedom — the local autonomy, the power of 
 the towns and the departments over their own resources, 
 the voluntary recruiting of the army, the absolute in- 
 dependence of the law courts — things necessary to their 
 perfect state — they refused to touch under any plea 
 of emergency. Round the dwindhng majority of such 
 recalcitrance or prepossession Paris moved imeasily like 
 the sea swelling under a false calm. 
 
 Questions began to be asked, the answers to them 
 were delayed. The condition of the army was doubted. 
 Was its wastage replaced ? Had its discipline stood the 
 inaction of the winter ? Had the reinforcements Danton 
 urged and carried passed beyond the mere vote ? Were 
 they in being ? Had the Gironde, whose whole creed — 
 never abandoned, leading them unchanged to the guillo- 
 tine — was liberty, had they enforced the harsh decrees 
 that pressed goods and men for the war? They were 
 the Government, and their answers meant nothing. 
 
 There is this fatality attaching to the weak govern- 
 ment of a great state, whether its faults be those of 
 an imtenable, untimely enthusiasm or those of sheer 
 mediocrity, that its disasters cannot but be cumulative 
 and reach a climax. It has no power of slowly retrieving 
 its errors : the consequences of its folly heap up with an 
 uncontrollable rapidity, propagating themselves. So it 
 was with the Girondins. All February those great 
 orators, full of the god, stood steadfast and disdainful 
 before the menace of Paris, wrapped up in a vision of 
 the Republic that should destroy the kings. And March 
 answered all these questions which they had thought 
 mere faction: which even from the mouth of Danton, 
 returned from Belgium and almost the emissary of 
 Dumouriez, they had refused to treat as a sign of the 
 national danger. 
 
 The roll of evil news came in with the first days 
 of the month; it continued uninterrupted, vastly in- 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 237 
 
 creasing till at its close sheer necessity and the immin- 
 ence of death produced the Terror. On the 3rd Vendee 
 rose, on the 4 th the Austrians broke the French line 
 ia the north (how wastage had thinned it !), all the sth 
 and 6th JAhge the republican, the one city that was a 
 thorough friend in Belgium, ran bodily across the snow, 
 men, women, and children, following the French rout, and 
 flying from the old Austrian master, from the charge of 
 the Hungarian sabres. At the opening of that week 
 (Sunday, the 3rd) Brittany first moved ; before its close 
 the gathering reaction at Lyons reached its head; the 
 royalists, the failing rich, the unemployed, the devout, 
 aU the enemies of the new and dreadful aspect of the 
 armed Revolution, gave themselves a mayor who was 
 a symbol of civil war. Unhappily for the Gironde, 
 every man in France that regretted Privilege and the 
 King called himself "Girondin." Lyons was within a 
 few weeks of entrenching against the Republic. 
 
 On Thursday the Sth (aU this being still rumour, 
 either unknown or casting only a very vague, uneasy 
 panic before it) Danton and Lacroix together challenged 
 the government in the Parliament. " Tell us exactly 
 the situation of the armies. Reheve the doubts of the 
 city." Then as the executive refused to speak, these two 
 men, the commissaries from Belgium, said that since the 
 government was silent they would tell the whole story. 
 Lacroix: especially, the soldier, striking at the unsoldierly 
 Beumonville, implored action. He described the break- 
 up of discipline in the winter, the quarrels and the 
 doubts of Belgium, the rags and the hunger in the lines, 
 the numbers of an orderly and veteran enemy rising 
 against them continually. 
 
 "You decreed thirty thousand reinforcements. The 
 army has received none." 
 
 And this piece of rhetoric was nearly true. Compulsion 
 alone could raise all the drafts needed for this struggle — 
 
238 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 a nation of civilians has never understood what is meant 
 by the losses of an army at the front. But compulsion 
 was odious and impossible to the Gironde. 
 
 This debate roused the Commune. Next day, Friday, 
 and all Saturday the great black flag flapped in the 
 driving wind from the towers of Notre Dame. The 
 University saw it in the sky, the slums of the Boucherie 
 saw it ; the gunners out by the Invalides could not loose 
 its little distant mark from their minds. The Faubourg 
 St. Antoine down its narrow streets leading to the river 
 (streets that frame the cathedral beyond) saw it and 
 moved; all Paris began moving. Men went out from 
 section to section calling for volunteers, saying there was 
 not a moment, that Paris alone knew the truth, that the 
 provinces would be too late. As the undetermined 
 questioning crowd gathered outside the H6tel de Ville, it 
 could only find for its orders, like a pall, the great dark 
 cloth covering the face of the building, and sewed on 
 to it hugely in staring white letters the word " Danger " : 
 the motto that had introduced September. 
 
 Yet a perilous lethargy hung over the capital. The 
 streets filled, there were cries for massacre in the Jacobins 
 (and the Jacobins condemned the cries), but no single 
 will impelled the thousands, they could find no point 
 of attack, they eddied furiously upon themselves. 
 
 The Gironde feared a second September, and knew 
 that this time they might be the victims. Louvet, not 
 a cowardly man, went to the brave but cautious Petion 
 by night and told him that some one at the Jacobins 
 had cried for " the purging of the Parliament." P6tion 
 opened his window and thrust out his hand into the 
 darkness. " Nothing wUl be done," he answered ; " it is 
 raining." 
 
 Nor was anything done of what was feared. Some 
 hundreds broke into the printing offices of the Gironde's 
 papers and destroyed the presses. Some hundreds 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 239 
 
 massed uncertainly near the Tuileries. On the next 
 day, Sunday, tlie i oth, the Gironde still feared violence ; 
 in the debate that was the first step towards the 
 Terror, their benches on the right were empty, and the 
 extremists had no obstacle between them and 
 the application of their remedy. If a tradition may 
 be trusted, Vergniaud sat there alone with a great 
 empty space about and behind him, making it his duty 
 to protest even in that crisis against the stabbing of 
 Liberty; but his protest led nowhere. For there was 
 instituted, towards midnight on that Sunday, the high 
 court that was to be the sword of the Terror: the 
 Revolutionary Tribunal. The Commune had put its 
 first pressure upon the Convention and a united govern- 
 ment was begun. 
 
 It was Liudet's proposal — -it might have come from 
 almost any part of the half-empty hall. Only Vergniaud, 
 proudly and defiantly sustained in its last hour, the 
 theory of his band, the pure Republic. He moved that 
 the voting should be by a roll-call of names. 
 
 " "We wish to see who they are," he called through the 
 silence, " that talk of killiug Freedom in the name of 
 Freedom." 
 
 The solemnity of that special voting could not affect 
 the issue. One man even, desperate for a dictatorship 
 that should save the country, opposed the nomination of 
 a jury. The Convention dared not go so far. As it 
 was, the judges were to be named by the Convention, 
 the jury were to be chosen from Paris and the home 
 departments — that was enough despotism even for such 
 a moment. Before the dawn of Monday the Republic 
 had been given its most un-repubUcan instrument. 
 
 Sprung from the night and from peril, fuU of the 
 inner fire of the Revolution, this tribunal needed but a 
 motive power to send it out against the rebellion and 
 against the kings. That spirit of life which was breathed 
 
240 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 into it at last was the Great Committee. For the Great 
 Committee was to prove the swordsman capable of using 
 such a sword. Let me pursue the rapid and over- 
 whelming month that created it.^ 
 
 Even as they were voting the establishment of the 
 court for treason Vendue had instituted a tribunal of 
 her own, and at Machecoul had massacred the re- 
 publicans. That was on the evening of the Sunday; 
 on the Tuesday Dumouriez had issued and posted 
 throughout Belgium a letter of revolt which has been 
 condemned by many historians, but which was not without 
 a great excuse, nor without its basis of truth. It said 
 virtually, " I have failed, but the reason I have failed is 
 that you have attempted I know not what insane crusade 
 unknown to miUtary history and lacking military know- 
 ledge. You have pillaged the churches, ridden over 
 the people, and with that refused reinforcements. You 
 have tried to make great phrases do the work of men." 
 So frightened was the Gironde of what the publication of 
 this letter might rouse in Paris that the government 
 withheld it and kept it secret for a fortnight.^ 
 
 Meanwhile the last and greatest blow fell upon this 
 critical opening of the year. A week after writing that 
 letter, half in treason, with an alternative policy in case 
 of failure, but doubtless determined to win, Dumouriez 
 assaulted the heights of Neerwinden. One portion of 
 his army, the left under Miranda,* fought with stubborn- 
 
 ^ As a fact, the revolutionary tribunal, thongh decreed on March lo, 
 did not begin sitting till April 2, and tried no case until the Committee 
 of Public Safety had been formed. 
 
 2 It was not published in Paris till March 26, but it was posted all 
 over Brussels on March 12, the day it was written : from which dis- 
 crepancy in dates it is argued that Dumouriez was already keeping a gate 
 open for his later betrayal. So he was, as is proved by his publishing the 
 letter in Brussels as a proclamation ; but historians forget that it reached 
 the government in Paris as early as the 1 5th. 
 
 ' Miranda, a Peruvian, was valiant even for that valiant mixture of 
 the Indian and the Spaniard. He was nothing but a soldier of fortune ; 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 241 
 
 ness; it was opposed to the massed batteries of the 
 Austrian right where the young Prince Charles was 
 making his fictitious reputation at the head of the 
 strongest position in the field. For seven hours Miranda 
 broke himself without support or reserve up the slopes 
 of the hUl and against the concentrated fire. It may or 
 may not have been the truth that Dumouriez was 
 successful upon the right ; ^ it is certainly true that he 
 hated Miranda, that he had put Miranda upon the left 
 with insufiicient forces and that on Miranda's retreat he 
 was himself compelled to faU back from the village that 
 he was disputing. 
 
 The retreat was conducted without disorder, Du- 
 mouriez had made up his mind to treason. For a 
 fortnight he parleyed easily with the enemy, taking 
 them into his confidence, and turning them into a kind 
 of allies. 
 
 During that period of doubt and fury, the Convention, 
 still Girondin by its majority and bewildered, turned 
 upon Danton. The one man who might have saved the 
 unity of the Convention and who was willing to have 
 made a buckler for the Girondins passed on the i st April 
 through a fire of taunt and invective that drove him for 
 the moment into a frenzy. 
 
 It was upon that complex and perilous situation — the 
 government known to be feeble, losing its majority; the 
 strongest man on the Left suspected of complicity with 
 a doubtful general; the Commune, crying out loudly 
 against the inefficiency of the executive and willing to 
 give almost any blow anyivhere so that it could strike 
 energy into the conduct of affairs — it was upon such a 
 
 fought for Guatemala, enlisted with the revolutionary French armies, 
 returned to South America and helped the rebellions. He was taken 
 by the Spaniards and died in prison at Cadiz in 1816. 
 
 ^ The evidence even on that plain point is not convincing. The most 
 favourable to Dumouriez is the account in his own memoirs. 
 
 Q 
 
242 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 welter that there fell the news of Dumouriez' treason. 
 He had gone over to the enemy, despairing of the 
 Revolution. His army had refused to follow; even the 
 three German-speaking regiments, over whom the young 
 Due de Chartres hoped to exercise some influence, had 
 remained loyal. 
 
 The supreme peril of revolutionary France has been 
 variously placed by historians at several dates; it has 
 been placed at the crisis of early September '92, when 
 Brunswick had turned the position of the Argonne and 
 was marching upon Paris; but at that time winter was 
 on the side of the French, and Brunswick's army was 
 but a vanguard of the great wars. It has been placed 
 at the fall of Valenciennes in July '93 : but at that time 
 the Terror was alive; a dictatorship compelling armies 
 and raising men daily by regiments out of the ground. 
 I would rather put it at this moment of Dumouriez' 
 treason. The crisis had in it something moral, more 
 dangerous than anything that preceded or came after; 
 it was evident that this great cavalry soldier, a man for a 
 long time not without hope of glory in the revolutionary 
 career, had shrugged his shoulders, despaired of doing 
 anything more with such ievies as the French had been 
 '•educed to and had thought the nation itself destroyed. 
 
 There was something of that despair over the town of 
 Paris. There was not in France one body apparently that 
 was ready to take up vigorously and to organise the 
 immediate necessities of the national defence. The 
 government to whom that duty fell were a group of 
 men embedded in a violent quarrel with the capital, 
 afraid that at any moment an abortive insurrection like 
 that of the loth of March might turn into a massacre 
 like that of the previous September. The one man that 
 had in him the power of organisation and the conquering 
 energy to effect the transformation that was needed, 
 Danton, was for the moment at the ban. He had re- 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 243 
 
 turned from Belgium as the apologist of Dumouriez, 
 never doubting of his loyalty, determined to preserve the 
 only soldier left to the country ; he had but barely 
 escaped from the storm of the ist of April when the 
 treason of Dumouriez was known in Paris. It seemed to 
 overwhelm him. 
 
 It was a feature peculiar to the Revolution even in 
 these moments of paralysis that, until its whole work 
 was done, unsuspected springs of energy were never 
 wanting to it ; it had the power of resurrection. There 
 lay always beneath the alternate frigidity and chaos of its 
 public a national force which could not but express itself 
 somewhere, now through the Commune, now through the 
 Parliament, now through a crowd. It is this permanent 
 gift of self-creation which has done most to lend to the 
 Revolution in the eyes of the French its legend of the 
 fatal and the superhuman. 
 
 In this April, when the Commune had nothing to 
 suggest, when the crowds had abandoned the streets, 
 when Paris was deserted, and the Parliament hope- 
 lessly divided, it was out of that divided Parlia- 
 ment that the life-giving thing was to come. And 
 it is typical of the impersonal forces which drove these 
 men in spite of themselves that the two statesmen who 
 on the 5 th and 6th of April created the Committee 
 of Public Safety came from opposing sides: each a 
 member of violent parties which one would have 
 thought interlocked and merely wrestling, and made 
 useless by the violence of their struggle. It was Isnard, 
 the full Girondin, that proposed ; it was Danton that, by 
 his support, carried the proposition to form the great 
 committee, and when it was formed, France had been 
 given a centre, an organ of national will, that, in changing 
 forms, was to lead at last twelve hundred thousand men 
 past the frontiers and on into the capitals of the kings. 
 
 It is astonishing how little Robespierre either said or 
 
244 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 did in the short two months that created this dictatorship 
 upon the ruins and anarchy following Louis' execution. 
 He proposes nothing, he does nothing ; even his standing 
 quarrel with the Girondins is carried on with less per- 
 tinacity and in a kind of bewilderment. He does not 
 know himself; and, untrue as the criticism was when it 
 was made, he gives support to the accusation of Condorcet 
 that the approach of danger rendered him silent. With 
 the making of the Committee of Public Safety he had 
 nothing whatsoever to do. The hammering out of the 
 new weapon, the value of the debate, passed him by and 
 seemed meaningless to him, as the action of a sculptor 
 would pass by a man wholly ignorant of the arts; yet 
 this newly created thing in whose making he had done 
 nothing was to be the principal instrument of his final 
 domination. Once it was made he watched it, pressed 
 upon it, at last entered it, and with the despotic power it 
 gave its members, abusing somewhat the public illusion 
 as to his domination of it, it was as a member of the 
 Committee of Public Safety that, a year after, he pre- 
 tended to rule France. 
 
 The vote was taken and a Httle body of nine men, 
 debating in secret, Unked closely by common labours, 
 alone instructed upon the whole situation of the country, 
 began to change and canalise the course of the revolu- 
 tionary flood. Why was that date the origin of a new 
 thing; the gate of the Terror, and, for that matter, of 
 the victories ? Because the moment the Committee was 
 formed it was inevitable that power should concentrate 
 in its hands, and in developing my thesis of the false 
 position which Robespierre came to occupy in the State 
 I must describe the nature of this despotism whose advent 
 I have called inevitable. 
 
 When a country is by tradition centralised, that is, 
 when it has got rid of class government, when the con- 
 nection between the citizen and government works directly 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 245 
 
 along known channels, whose direction is defined not by 
 custom but by law and which converge to one source 
 of authority, it is evident that whatever name you give 
 to the chiefs of the bureaucracy, those chiefs will be the 
 trustees of Government. Centrahsation demands too 
 vast an army of officials and too strict a discipline to 
 permit of indirect pressure by the rich upon this or that 
 part of the machine. It is highly representative, its 
 personnel is drawn from every class, it protects public 
 interests: but it is absolute. You may surround the 
 institution with careful safeguards, you may have (as 
 you have in modern France) a social spirit which puts 
 that great machine into the hands of unambitious, 
 devoted, and similar men ; or it may happen, as it has 
 happened once or twice in the military crises of the 
 nation, that genius and creative power seize upon it, 
 making its mastery more evident, more picturesque, and 
 for the moment more useful. But whatever it is that 
 holds the threads at the centre, that thing, passively or 
 actively governs France. 
 
 An Englishman will understand this foreign condition 
 more easily if he considers the vaguer forces that deter- 
 mine the fortunes of his own country. Make certain that 
 a spirit is leavening the public schools, or that some philo- 
 sophy has captured the universities ; appreciate the tone 
 in which the rich talk of the new rich whom they have 
 to assimilate ; hear the decisions of the few men who 
 control our press, and you have arrived at a knowledge 
 of what turn the whole Empire will take. 
 
 To leave this metaphor, which might prove a source 
 less of conviction than of irritation, and to return to the 
 nature of the Government without which the French 
 would feel they had lost their civilisation, consider in 
 what necessity the Committee of Public Safety arose. For 
 more than six months France had been in the hands 
 of the feeblest of governments. Until the fall of the 
 
246 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 monarchy there was, however much we talk about the 
 King's being a prisoner or about the licence of the 
 Jacobins, a definite governing power in the Tuileries, which 
 power gave its orders to the whole machinery of France ; 
 indeed it was because that power was so definite — con- 
 trolled the armies, appointed the administration — and 
 because it was so palpably opposed to the national spirit 
 that an armed attack had to be made upon it. What 
 could not be abolished by a vote had to fall on the issue 
 of a battle. When it was gone, and after the short 
 interlude of vigour which Danton presided, and whose 
 name is Valmy, the armies indeed continued to protect 
 France from invasion, but the hold of the Government over 
 the nation was failing. The Constitution of '9 1 was de- 
 signed for a time of peace. Liberal, almost American in its 
 provision for local autonomy, it gave no machinery for the 
 binding of the fasces of the nation, or for sending it in 
 a mass against the enemy. Moreover, the energy of the 
 Girondias was taken up in an incessant defence against 
 the great capital that surrounded and would oppress the 
 majority of the Parliament. The ministry of Roland 
 was unable to command its generals, to levy its taxes, 
 to compel the enlistment of reiuforcements ; the result 
 had been the breakdown of March. 
 
 Perhaps the best evidence of the anarchy of the 
 situation was the state of mind in which men had Hved 
 through the 9th and loth of that month. Would 
 Paris rise ? Would there be a massacre ? Of whom ? 
 That all these questions had been asked was sufficient 
 proof that as there was no government to enforce the 
 levies and munitions, so there was no power strong 
 enough to prevent a repetition of September. 
 
 Now iu April with the formation of the two engines 
 of the Terror, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Com- 
 mittee of Public Safety, this anarchy ended. The Terror 
 was not an anarchy, it was a despotism ; the appreciation 
 
THE, FALL OF THE GIRONDE 247 
 
 of that truth is the appreciation of the latter revolution. 
 It was more than a despotism — it was a mihtary dic- 
 tatorship. For two months the nine men who had been 
 given such ample powers had passing through their 
 hands the nomination of all officers, the reports of all 
 spies and agents, the accounts of all the arsenals and 
 depots, the establishment of all the munitions of war. 
 They were supposed only to survey and to check ; they 
 very quickly became the only possible government. For 
 it was they that saw with the clearest vision the extreme 
 peril of the nation, and it was known that they alone 
 could appreciate the situation of France. So rapidly 
 did their power grow, in these two months, that I 
 would even go so far as to call them the authors of the 
 weakening of the Parliament; they thought it a last 
 resource for the strengthening of the nation. For it 
 seems to me that the report of the 29th of May, in 
 which the committee sifted and exposed the breakdown 
 of the national forces, was the trumpet-call which led to 
 the mutilation of the Convention three days later. I 
 would fix the room where Danton and his colleagues sat 
 organising the beginning of the national defence, and 
 take it as the point of view from which the distorted 
 accident of the insurrection of the 2nd of June falls into 
 perspective. 
 
 Side by side with that hidden but fundamental 
 power, trailed on the last quarrels of Paris and the 
 Gironde. The Gironde, seven days^ after the formation 
 of the committee, sent Marat before the Revolutionary 
 Tribunal. The Revolutionary Tribunal was Parisian, and 
 acquitted Marat. 
 
 On the 15 th, Pache, the Mayor of Paris, read at 
 the bar of the Convention a demand on the part of 
 the Commons for the removal of twenty-two Girondin 
 
 ' 13th of April, by 220 to 92. But over a hnndred members of the 
 Badical Left were away on mission to the armies. 
 
248 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 deputies ; on the 1 8tli the Commune declared itself 
 insurrectionary — that is, no longer responsible to the 
 National Parliament, but taking order and counsel as 
 it chose. A month the two forces faced each other. 
 Then, with the close of May, with the coming in of the 
 warm season and the flowering of '93, the Gironde that 
 had made such a stout battle for legality fell. 
 
 It was on the 1 7th of May that the Commune united 
 its armed force, chose a general for it, and prepared for 
 action. The Gironde countered (still meeting arms with 
 laws) by naming, next day, a committee of twelve that 
 should report upon the illegalities committed by the town. 
 The committee reported openly that the Commune was 
 conspiring against the whole system of national repre- 
 sentation, it demanded an increased guard for the Parlia- 
 ment, and it arrested Herbert — which was like arresting 
 the Commune in the flesh. On the 2Sth Isnard, from the 
 chair, rose before a mass of petitionaries (who were still de- 
 manding the dismissal or abstention of the twenty-two), 
 and cried with doom in his deep voice : " If the national 
 representation be touched, I tell you in the name of all 
 France that men will soon be looking along the banks 
 of the river to find if Paris had ever stood by the Seine." 
 
 Nothing after this could save the integrity of the 
 ParUament. The Commune, from a common and furious 
 enemy, became an enemy specially menaced and insulted ; 
 within a week it had broken its opponent. 
 
 The story of that day of revolt, though Robespierre 
 himself appeared in it so little, merits the telling, for it 
 was the victory of his party. 
 
 Disaster upon disaster, the victorious march of the 
 Vendeans, the besieging of Valenciennes (the last for- 
 tress), culminated in the explosion at Lyons and the 
 massacre of the Jacobins in that town ; the news of this 
 reached Paris on the morning that the Convention was 
 attacked. 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 249 
 
 Already, three days before, mobs bad moved against 
 it, bad broken its doors, bad mixed with the Assembly, 
 voting with them in a farcical turmoil, and crying out 
 against the insult offered to the city by the Government's 
 action in arresting Herbert. The irregular committee at 
 the Evech^ had, partly by threats, partly by ruse, pro- 
 duced an apparent unanimity among the sections. A 
 chance soldier that had never yet been a soldier, Han- 
 riot,^ was at the head of 120 cannon, and led the few 
 hundreds of armed men that appeared in the court of 
 the Carrousel on the morning of the 2nd of June. 
 
 There was a long comedy played before the Parliament 
 accepted its humiliation. H^rault de Sechelles, the 
 Speaker, proposed to go out and meet and parley with the 
 enemy; thirty members of the Mountain sat unmoved 
 upon his left, and saw defile before them the uncertain 
 hundreds of the Convention. They knew that a capitu- 
 lation could be the only end. In the Carrousel, under 
 the sunlight, Hanriot at the head of the troops reiterated 
 the plain demand of the extremists of the city for the 
 destruction of the Gironde : " You have no orders to 
 give. Hand over to the people the victims they have 
 demanded." 
 
 The Convention did not immediately return to debate 
 upon its own humiliation. It passed through the centre 
 of the palace to the terrace overlooking the garden, as 
 though to find help from the National Guard that were 
 massed in the distance, and whose doubtful attitude 
 might, had there been sufficient determiaation in the 
 Parliament, have been converted into a defence of that 
 body. They re-entered the theatre to find it invaded by 
 the crowd in arms, and then necessity compelled them 
 
 1 An irregular appointment, purely popular. Hanriot was one of the 
 few leaders of the Eevolution that had no pretension to birth or letters. 
 He had been first a servant, then a player in village fairs. He was a 
 drunkard, and very courageous. 
 
250 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 to the self-destruction from which they never raised 
 themselves till the fall of Kobespierre. 
 
 With the populace sitting on the benches beside 
 them (even voting), with the President suggesting names 
 to be added or cancelled, the Committee of Twelve was 
 broken and the twenty-two deputies that the Commune 
 had continually demanded were voted under arrest. Some 
 had already been wUHng to resign ; others, like Lanjuinais 
 the Breton (a man proud of his memories), had inflexibly 
 remained at their post, defining themselves as members and 
 limbs of the People, part of the sovereign, an indivisible 
 portion of the general rule. Others had fled. But every 
 suggestion to mitigate the full evil of that day had been 
 made and had failed. Danton had proposed himself a 
 hostage; the Commune had even been wUling to offer 
 as security for the lives of the members that were ex- 
 pelled a similar number of their own leaders. And this 
 also should be remarked, that though the Gironde was 
 sacrificed, no one dared go beyond the proposition that 
 they should remain under arrest in their own houses. 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of all the mitigations which 
 surrounded the fate of the Gironde at that moment, it 
 was evident that the Parliament had consented to pass 
 under a yoke. It did many great things after that ; it 
 saved the unity of the nation ; it may be said to have 
 led the army in the person of its deputies on mission. 
 It established a hundred of the national institutions, 
 especially the great schools ; it registered that constitu- 
 tion which was never put in force, but which surely 
 marks the most complete scheme of democracy. It was 
 the Convention that made modern France, and Napoleon 
 did nothing save defend and organise its work ; but in 
 spite of all this it lived for a year in servitude. The 
 Committee, and side by side with the Committee, first 
 the Herbertists, then the Terror, and at last in a fashion 
 Robespierre, ruled it. 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 251 
 
 With the 2nd of June once more Robespierre in- 
 creased, as, by a kind of fatality, he increased regularly 
 with every great day of the Revolution. 
 
 The arrest of the Girondins and the evident failure 
 of the Convention, was so profitable to the Jacobins, 
 and therefore to Robespierre, that he is regarded with 
 too general a consent as in some part its author. It 
 was so evidently the close of his two years' battle with 
 the Rolands, and seemed so complete a revenge for the 
 insults of the preceding autumn that many see him 
 planning it. That is a misreading of history. Robespierre, 
 through the whole of April and May, continued his speeches 
 upon the most abstract matters. Every time indeed that 
 Paris growled at the remaining power of the Gironde, 
 Robespierre at once took up her complaint and urged their 
 retirement. He was ready to be the organ of the Jacobins 
 in insisting upon the paralysis that the twenty-two laid 
 upon the country, and he was especially himself when he 
 argued against Danton's attempt to conciliate them. But 
 he did not go to the EvSch^, he gave no orders, and he 
 could furnish no suggestion save that of " a moral in- 
 surrection " against men who had for months resisted the 
 open threat of massacre. 
 
 It was the Committee that permitted or made the 
 2nd of June ; the Committee was already the executive, 
 stronger even than the Commune. And this the whole 
 character of the day proves. 
 
 The insurrection had in it something unreal; Paris 
 did not really move. Robespierre the younger said more 
 than he meant when he marvelled at " a hundred 
 thousand under arms and no blood spilt." The supreme 
 folly of the Gironde and of their futile Twelve in sending 
 Marat to the Revolutionary Tribunal and to triumphant 
 acquittal, their blindness in arresting Herbert for an 
 attack upon their party in the Pere Duchesne, would 
 not in itself have done the work. In this great city of 
 
252 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 three-quarters of a million souls, of 200,000 men, it may 
 be doubted if 5000 met in the sections on the night 
 that determined the insurrection against the Parliament. 
 But Paris inert had agreed with Paris active. The 
 Committee also saw that France under the Gironde lay 
 open ; it could not forbear to save the country in spite of 
 the law. 
 
 It may be asked in what way the fall of the Gironde 
 left Robespierre higher than it found him. It was by 
 leaving to the Jacobins the initiative in pure politics. The 
 great Committee would order the armies and the arrests, 
 but upon all the general legislation of the moment it was 
 the club of the Rue St. Honor^ that led the debates and 
 framed the laws. From that date it dictated them to 
 the ParHament. Now Robespierre was the head of the 
 club, its chief exponent ; and the ramifications which the 
 society sent out throughout France met in his hands or 
 were known to lie under his central influence. This it 
 is which explains the innumerable letters and appeals 
 which begin from that moment to accumulate in the 
 house of Duplay ; he was the moral head of an organisa- 
 tion that held the country by a thousand local threads. 
 Separate from and superior to that organisation had stood 
 the authority of the Parliament, and when, with the 
 elimination of the twenty-two, the Parliament sank, the 
 Jacobins assumed control of all save the executive of the 
 Revolution. They drafted the new fundamental laws, 
 they rehearsed the debates of the Convention, they be- 
 came the arena. 
 
 An example of the change may be found in Robes- 
 pierre's " Declaration of the Rights of Man." It had 
 been nothing but an academic essay a few weeks before ; 
 he had made no attempt to turn it into a bill, it had 
 delighted the Jacobins as a literary rather than a political 
 effort ; but after the 2nd of June, when the new constitu- 
 tion was discussed, this essay became a code. 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 253 
 
 And there was that other force always helping 
 Robespierre : helping him now. Paris took for her 
 permanent ensign a name which had been mixed longest 
 with hers, the name of the man who had led in phrases 
 her attack upon the Gironde, the name which the Gironde 
 itself had consented to regard as that of its principal 
 enemy. And hence Robespierre becomes, as it were, the 
 title of unity ; the head under which men looked for the 
 resistance to Federahsm, and the consistent landmark to 
 which the Republic turned in the fierce defence of that 
 unity which it made during the ensuing year. 
 
 And he on his side began to watch with more keen- 
 ness the growth of his popularity from the immense to 
 the universal. He gave himself a master, consented to 
 attime everything he did to this public reputation, and 
 served almost abjectly his own hunger for a popular name. 
 It is characteristic of him here, as in his whole career, 
 that he hesitated before action ; rather permitted action 
 to be thrust upon him. The pressure was irresistible. 
 On the eve of the insurrection his two friends, his fore- 
 runners, St. Just and Couthon, entered the Committee of 
 Public Safety.^ He himself for seven weeks more sat 
 watching from without, receiving the reports from their 
 lips, and ready when the door was quite opened to him, 
 to enter. 
 
 It is of interest to note the manner in which the 
 pressure was exercised. Throughout the month of June 
 he debates, criticises, judges the new constitution, which 
 was to have been put in force with the cessation of the 
 war. That constitution was an instrument of the gravest 
 importance. It was taken to be the final pact between 
 the nation and the Revolution, to be the final work of 
 democracy. There has been raised against it the com- 
 plaint that it was drawn up in a few days as a momen- 
 tous expedient in order to appease the anger of the 
 
 ' Added with three others to the original nine on May 30. 
 
254 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 departments whose members had been expelled and who 
 were already arming to attack Paris: this opinion has 
 thrown it into some contempt and neglect, but it is false. 
 This constitution, which, if it be examined, will be found 
 to be as complete a model of democracy as that of any 
 of the western states of America, was the labour of over 
 six months in committee, it was but the last forms and 
 half a score of additional clauses that were the result of 
 the crisis, and even these were nothing new in character ; 
 they were only the reiteration of principles already deter- 
 mined, but with regard to which the revolt of Normandy, 
 of Lyons, of Bordeaux, necessitated a more emphatic 
 declaration. 
 
 During these debates Robespierre took on an attitude 
 of censor which no one withstood, and which was witness 
 to the accession of power the fall of the Gironde had 
 brought him. He was not in opposition ; on the contrary, 
 the Constitution was so full of his own spirit, of the 
 Jacobin essay, that he had no motive to do anything 
 but applaud — his daily speech with its daily reservations, 
 doubts, and revisions (often just and clear-sighted) was 
 but the more evidently an advertisement. He opposed 
 just so much as a man may who has no purpose in 
 opposing at all, and by that action betrayed his motive. 
 The whole was judicial, calm, and pedantic in the true 
 Jacobin tradition. 
 
 Did Rouffron suggest that the inviolability of repre- 
 sentatives was a danger ? Robespierre defended that ia- 
 violability with every circumstance of careful reasoning 
 and deference to Rouffron's age: called him "le digne 
 veillard," and strung out at immense length all the 
 arguments in favour of immunity with which the con- 
 stitutional lawyers of this country had provided the 
 Revolution. 
 
 Did the Committee suggest that the electors of every 
 commune could be called together at any time by the 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 255 
 
 demand of a certain number among tliem ? Kobespierre 
 gave bis reasons for fixed dates alone being retained, and 
 ■wben there was a feeling in the committee in favour of 
 " arbiters " — chance judges chosen by the parties to settle 
 commercial disputes — Eobespierre demanded regular 
 magistrates ; and the spring of all these preachings, petty 
 amendments and essays was his determination to press 
 upon the Committee; to establish his mastery by 
 reiteration. 
 
 The time was propitious. There was but one man 
 that could have been to him at that moment, not an 
 adversary indeed, but a rival, and Danton a man of wide 
 view and therefore with no following, a man who was so 
 bent upon the danger, the civil war and the invasion as 
 to be consumed with action, was failing. The great 
 fatigues were falling upon him with the full summer, and 
 he let drop out of his hand the lever of government 
 which he had now twice grasped — in the August of the 
 past year and now in this April — a man so evidently 
 made to govern that every one was glad when he con- 
 sented to command. Not only was he failing in political 
 activity, turned inward upon himself, dragged back by 
 the memories of his wife, and (full of her last advice) 
 preparing a second marriage, but he had also in him a 
 distaste for political speeches. Eobespierre, " whom his 
 congregation asks to speak and who speaks continuously," 
 filled up and occupied all the scene. In a time which 
 still had a passion for hearing its dogmas asserted, re- 
 asserted, developed, declaimed ; before an audience that 
 by the accident of the Jacobin organisation held the 
 nation, and that was just so near to mediocrity as to 
 demand sermons, he held his pulpit and professed. In the 
 vigorous and exaggerated phrase of Michelet, "Danton 
 looked at the perpetual movement and tremor of those 
 jaws and felt that they were eating him up." 
 
 The result was certain. On the loth of July the 
 
256 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Committee — that is, Danton — resigned ; in a fortnight 
 the new Committee was named and Robespierre was a 
 member of it. 
 
 This was the result which Robespierre's watching for 
 all this while, his pressing upon the doors of govern- 
 ment by a combination of insistence and vigilance, his 
 monotony, his popularity and his repeatedly verified sus- 
 picions, had drawn from the Parliament. By a curious 
 fatality the date of his entry into the Committee was 
 exactly a year to a day before the moment that threw 
 him from power. 
 
 There is very little truth in his contention that he 
 entered with reluctance upon the responsibilities of power. 
 He was proposed by a man fully in his confidence, 
 thoroughly his friend ; a man who a few days before and 
 a few days later, was to appear as his principal supporter ia 
 the affair of Custine. He entered it as the only member 
 who would under the circumstances be supported by at 
 least two other members, satellites, Couthon and St. Just ; 
 what was called with some exaggeration, the Triumvirate. 
 
 Nevertheless, when he said that he was reluctant to 
 take office in the circumstances of the Terror (and under 
 the immediate memory of the death of Marat), it was not 
 a hypocritical speech ; it was the expression of something 
 that certainly always lay in his mind — the desire to be 
 free to criticise, to exercise a sovereignty wholly moral, 
 and the instinct that his power lay in opposition. He 
 was indeed able for a year to build up the foundations of 
 positive action, but his very fibre told him the whole 
 time that such an effort on the part of such a man as he, 
 could not finally succeed. 
 
 I have said that Danton, wearied, already Ul, oppressed 
 by the fears and feverish heat which were mixed up with 
 the growing Terror, had slipped from government. He 
 had used this great instrument of the arbitrary Com- 
 mittee which covered all France with a buckler, en- 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 257 
 
 forced unity and fed the armies, doing its work as piti- 
 lessly as a conqueror or as the devastations of nature. It 
 was in his character, its great energies and its necessities 
 for repose, to let drop almost at the moment of its crea- 
 tion the levers of the thing he had made. His heart was 
 troubled. The imprisoned Girondins, with whom he had 
 partly lived, and between whom and the Mountain he 
 twice offered to throw a bridge, haunted him. The 
 increasing momentum of the Terror, escaping control and 
 becoming a frenzy, terrified him ; it was the first thing he 
 had yet come upon in his powerful life of which he felt him- 
 self unable to be a master ; nor does anything bewilder and 
 weaken men of strong simplicity more than the presence 
 of a force stronger and simpler than themselves. To this 
 impression of weakness and of despair his fever and his 
 sickness added. He lapsed from government, to speak 
 only once or twice, with the same principles, but with a 
 failing voice, at last to take refuge in his home and in 
 the country sides. When he reappeared it was to curb, 
 if possible, if not to fall in curbing, the storm which he 
 had himself let loose. 
 
 Robespierre replacing him at such a moment (for the 
 popular voice counted enormously even in the Committee, 
 and even the Committee demanded some head) was a 
 man by nature opposed to the Terror, but so much colder 
 and self-concentrated than Danton that, for the sake of 
 success, he would permit it. Throughout June and July 
 it became evident that a man who would appear to govern 
 must yield to the crisis. Danton fled from it; Robes- 
 pierre, being much less of a man, was content to yield. 
 
 The enemy advanced almost without a check ; Valen- 
 ciennes, long besieged, was on the point of falling ; a week 
 after the expulsion of the Gironde, the Vendean revolt 
 had reached the Loire, Saumur had been taken, and the 
 Girondins fanned the furnace. The members who were 
 detained in their houses escaped if they chose from the 
 
 B 
 
258 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 single gendarme that guarded each of them ; those who 
 remained, remained only through pride. Potion/ Bar- 
 baroux, Guadet, Buzot, and the rest, left Paris at their 
 opportunity. They aroused the civil war. 
 
 The Cotentin, which is the garden of the north, 
 remained faithful, but Calvados rose ; the town of Caen 
 issued a manifesto directly federal, menacing Paris, and 
 it armed a battahon to march on the capital The Eure, 
 even Evreux, asleep in its hollow, was awakened ; Buzot 
 called up yet another battalion there, and they took the 
 road to Paris. Vendue was for the King, Central Nor- 
 mandy for the pure Republic of the Girondins, but they 
 were each opposed to the " monsters " — the legend of the 
 anarchy in Paris ; and who could tell that they would not 
 join hands ? They were but three long marches one from 
 the other. 
 
 On the 24th of JuneAmar demanded on the part of the 
 lower committee, who were the police, that the Girondins 
 remaining should be taken from their nominal arrest and 
 imprisoned. On the 8 th of July St. Just presented the 
 report which has been unjustly accused of severity, and 
 which should rather be judged by its principal phrase. 
 " If you punish these men, remember that you may not 
 punish opinion. Outlaw those who have fled, for they 
 are rebels, but try none of those that remain on the score 
 of politics." On the same day Condorcet, violent and 
 embittered as were all his well-bred chque against the 
 Mountain, and who had published a violent attack on 
 the Montagnarde constitution, was impeached, and 
 fled. 
 
 Wimpfen, from the army of the north, had abeady 
 said that he would "obey the Convention and return to 
 
 1 Potion's flight is typical of the laxity with which the Girondins were 
 guarded, and of the lightness of their arrest. He went out to dine with 
 a friend. The policeman told off to watch him went down to eat in the 
 kitchen, and Potion walked out of the door. In ten days he h?id ^ainei 
 Noimandy. 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 259 
 
 Paxis, but at the head of 60,000 men." All June and July 
 were a challenge, and at the moment that Robespierre 
 entered the committee the violence of the " mad dogs," 
 the " enrages,' was coming as surely as the breaking of 
 thunder, or the tension of an unnatural day in our 
 northern summers. Valenciennes, Conde, Mayence had 
 gone ; Caesar's Camp (as they called it) within a hundred 
 miles of Paris, had surrendered. The French in Frank- 
 fort had been butchered. For the men that followed 
 Herbert, for the extreme men that will in all times of 
 revolution preach revolt and that think to find liberty 
 in the negation of law, it was a moment of opportunity, 
 or (as they doubtless thought it) of providential freedom. 
 They began their clamour for mere vengeance ; the fury 
 of '93 seized them, and if from some further place their 
 souls can remember Europe, they can still boast that they 
 created a wild moment in which no restraint stood be- 
 tween man instinctive and his complete licence. 
 
 How was that tyranny permitted ? The govern- 
 ment a secret thing, hidden in the Committee, the 
 government which Danton would have made open and 
 the proof of whose existent imity was perhaps not 
 evident until Carnot had joined the great committee, 
 might, had it been clearly a master, have prevented the 
 sudden wind of death that arose as Mediterranean winds 
 blow from Africa : the sirocco that made hotter the hot 
 month of July and with August and with the first days 
 of September was to blast the nation. 
 
 It was not only the danger in which France found 
 herself, it was much more the impossibility of driving 
 the mad energy of the moment into useful channels 
 that pushed things on to their extreme. On either side 
 it was the individual that was killing, and there was 
 nothing to restrain the individual. In Normandy the 
 members of the Gironde who had escaped, inflamed 
 one individual soul, the soul of a woman, poor and noble 
 
26o ROBESPIERRE 
 
 and silent ; she came up to Paris and she killed Marat.* 
 In Lyons it was the individual, the noble or the priest, that 
 organised an immediate revolt and killed Chalier. In Paris 
 the effect of this was still revenge and individual passion. 
 It was Herbert, peculiarly himself, hardly representing a 
 community, that pushed on the Terror. It was more 
 the terror of opinion and of readiness for evil than of 
 acts.^ It was a terror which oppressed the mind and 
 prepared it for the madness of the autumn, rather than 
 a terror of the revolutionary tribunal; but under the 
 pressure of it and for the moment Robespierre sank, 
 afraid that were he to oppose it he would be opposing 
 something corporate and would be throwing to the winds 
 the popularity which, as he thought, already gave him 
 the aspect of complete power. 
 
 On this account he would not discover his personal 
 action until the end of that violent moment of prepara- 
 tion. When he did appear at the end of September it 
 was with a certain moderation, but never with that 
 control which a wider man would have dared : a control 
 that might have saved the Gironde, and that in the 
 height of the winter might have admitted the " committee 
 of clemency." 
 
 I will attempt to put myself in the shoes of this 
 man who, when the fatal violence of '93 rose up in 
 eruption, was permitted, and I think was willing, to take 
 the helm. He was unworthy of it and perhaps knew 
 himself unworthy. He yielded to the pressure, but his 
 pedantry had this virtue attached to it, that it permitted 
 
 ^ On Marat's death Eobespierre could find no phrase but this : " I am 
 myself marked out for daggers." 
 
 ' The statistics of the revolutionary tribunal will show what I mean. 
 France had been fighting the world since January, yet of death sentences 
 there were but 9 in April, g in May, 28 in June (of which 20 were for one 
 plot), II in July (including Charlotte Corday and the 7 conspirators of 
 Orleans), 5 in August, 19 in September. It is an extraordinarily meagre 
 lUt. 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 261 
 
 him to be cold and to show his disdain. Koux the wild 
 priest he broke ;^ later in August the same spirit, this 
 time erroneous, led him to refuse Danton's proposal — the 
 sheer necessity of the time — that the committee (which 
 he himself swore never to re-enter) should be recognised 
 as the only government. But while the Terror was thus 
 distasteful to him, and while he kept up his formula 
 even to the refusal of a necessary dictatorship for the 
 committee, he had not the general view that would 
 have permitted him to organise the awful power of what 
 had become a despotism, to turn it against the enemies 
 only of the Revolution and to repress, as by his morals 
 he desired to repress, the gross licence which boiled up 
 with every week of the advancing summer. 
 
 If one might express a longing with regard to deeds 
 past and sins inexpiable, the longing would be that two 
 things might have happened together : that the Revolt, 
 Lyons, Marseilles, Toulon, Vendue, Brittany, Normandy 
 might have fallen suddenly (as they would have fallen 
 before modern armies and before a modern rapidity of 
 communication), and that the genius of Danton had not 
 been so mixed with clay nor so mortal : had survived 
 the stress of the time and been able before the autumn 
 to follow up the domestic victories and to organise the 
 full force of the Republic against the invader. 
 
 These things were not permitted. The extreme 
 peril of the Revolution endured too long; August and 
 September were full of it. The liberty we enjoy was 
 defended as in a fortress and encircled upon every side. 
 It was thought about to perish and the thought 
 maddened.^ You could not go a clear hundred miles 
 
 ' Boux had said, " Yours is no democracy because you permit riches." 
 It was partly by Danton's act but still more by Robespierre's that he was 
 struck off the list of the Cordeliers. 
 
 ^ Here is an example of the madness. Therasson proposed that the 
 deliberations of the Committee of Public Safety should be Public I It was 
 with the greatest difficulty that Bobespierre got the proposition rejected. 
 
262 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 from Paris without finding its enemy marching forward 
 and victorious. That situation gave the Herbertists the 
 reins of opinion, and all the autumn, half the winter 
 became an orgy. Robespierre had not the power to 
 resist ; he submitted, and the spirit he hated, the spirit 
 he might in a greater mood have resisted, branded him. 
 He loved to be called the government. Before the 
 spring he was called the Terror. 
 
 There was much beside his ambition that conspired, as 
 it were, against his natural fortune. To be master by the 
 moral authority of the Jacobins was to hold in one's hands 
 the hauls of the great web that covered the towns of 
 France; when such a man entered the Committee of 
 Public Safety he was thought as a matter of course to be 
 master of that also. Then what was he ? Did he not 
 hold the whole power ? Pressed by the worst of licence, 
 for the moment an unwilling slave of Herbert and his 
 madmen he was yet — if he was to call himself the 
 master — bound to go with that flood. More than this. 
 At the very moment when a general levy was decreed 
 he was elected, for the first time. President of the Con- 
 vention.^ It was with him in the chair that the news 
 of the capitulation of Marseilles was heard, that the 
 petition of Bordeaux for mercy was accorded, that 
 Normandy admitted the failure of her revolt. But it 
 was also during his presidency that worse news came: 
 that Toulon admitted the English fleet,^ and that the 
 strength of the resistance of Lyons was endangering the 
 Republic. 
 
 He yielded. The Herbertists demanded, and re- 
 demanded the blood of the Girondists;' he permitted 
 their trial to proceed. With the entry of the wildest ideas 
 
 ' August 23. He was also at the time President of the Jacobins. 
 " 28th of August. 
 
 • I have no space to quote them. Let those who wish to follow the fuiy 
 read the 24th number of the Pire Pucheine. 
 
THE FALL OF THE GlRONDE 263 
 
 into the State at bay and in the delirium of a close 
 siege, with the proclamation of the republican calendar 
 and the beginning of the six months' struggle with 
 Christianity the Terror became real, weighed on all 
 France, and began the useless marvel of blood that 
 ended with Thermidor. 
 
 It does not concern this book to describe the end of 
 those great men whose fall was also the first heavy 
 wound of the Republic. 
 
 What is to be said of the man whom legend has 
 made responsible for their blood and for that of so many 
 others ? Certainly he did not cause it to flow ; almost 
 as certainly he could have checked the disaster. But he 
 was absorbed and contained by the fear of something 
 general, the fear of the corporate power of Paris, or, as 
 he called it, the People, from which his reputation pro- 
 ceeded, and of whose lips he had become the servant. 
 
 It was (like all his appreciations of things general 
 and living) an error. It was not the people that de- 
 manded the blood of the Girondins : it was a small, in- 
 tense and violent faction that had the name of the 
 people always upon its lips, that passed for the people 
 because it was in the tradition of the popular vengeance 
 and of the great mob violence of the past years. He 
 did not oppose. He excused in platitudes, and that is 
 all that can be said of his position towards the Gironde 
 in its last hour. 
 
 Save this : that at the moment when the Terror was 
 turning from a political method to a fanaticism he 
 developed — it is a thing his closer students might think 
 incredible in the light of his past — yet he did develop a 
 kind of firmness utterly different from his mere tenacity. 
 He had always been direct ; for two years, since the be- 
 ginning of a quarrel with the Gironde, he had been acid ; 
 but now, whatever it was in him that had produced 
 directness, and latterly a sympathy of expression, was 
 
264 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 lifted to the power of assault, and a personal managing 
 of things. He desired, with a vague prevision of '94, to 
 show that he could kill or save. 
 
 There are two occasions within ten days of each other 
 which very well illustrate this change : the great de- 
 bate of the 25th September, and his action upon the 3rd 
 October. 
 
 In the first the effect of new victories was weighing 
 upon the Assembly, and when Briez appeared before it, 
 excusing the fall of Valenciennes, the Parliament had 
 acquired a certain hardness of temper which Robespierre 
 reflected. Briez said plaialy, " I did my best ; I saw 
 death from quite near by, and at least I preserved for 
 the nation an important garrison." There were many 
 answers to the pathetic apology, one only was stiffened 
 into epigram, and that was Robespierre's: "Are you 
 dead ? " He had been in Valenciennes ; the town had 
 surrendered ; he came back alive. 
 
 A slight illness that had affected Robespierre a week 
 before, returned after the effort of that debate, and he 
 did not reappear till the day when there was question 
 of killing the Gironde, yet on this second occasion also 
 he showed a certain strength and mastery. 
 
 The benches were half empty ; Amar,^ rising to read 
 his report against the Gironde, spoke to a house of which 
 he knew well that the majority even among its di- 
 minished numbers desired to be absent. He asked 
 them to vote that the doors should be closed, and that no 
 one should leave the house till a decision had been 
 taken ; then he read out in sentences that swept like a 
 scythe the condemnation of the whole party of the 
 moderates. A movement began (it originated from a 
 private member) for sending before the revolutionary 
 
 1 Amar has so little to do with this book that I fear his extraordiDary 
 personality has been neglected in it. He will reappear in Thermidor. 
 Let this anecdote suffice. He chose the month before the abolition of all 
 tities of nobility to purchase one at a considerable expense. 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 265 
 
 tribunal not only the twenty-two of the Gironde, but the 
 seventy- three who had in June signed a protest against 
 their exclusion. That motion was of a kind which, in 
 the height of the Terror, it was almost impossible to 
 resist; from what motive it was that Robespierre alone 
 resisted it, it would be difficult to say. It may have 
 been the tortuous sense of justice which never deserted 
 him ; it may have been a panic lest the Convention should 
 wholly destroy itself in these passions and leave the 
 Republic empty; but I would be more inclined to be- 
 lieve that it was a new determination to be daring. He 
 wished to try himself in power, to ride the Assembly, to 
 set himself as a firm obstacle against " the madmen," to 
 begin leading for once rather than be led by Paris, and 
 in general, to have the inner satisfaction that he had 
 come to a place where he (that had always imposed his 
 principles) could at last impose also his decisions upon 
 the details of policy. 
 
 Just as the Convention was abandoning itself to one 
 of those unhappy floods in which lassitude mixed with 
 partisanship could drive them into the worst of their 
 excesses and abandonments, just as a fatal division would 
 have been taken, Robespierre spoke. 
 
 The deputies were already streaming to the bar 
 to vote that the division should be taken on the roll- 
 call of the names, and that the friends of the Gironde, 
 if any remained, should be marked in such a manner. 
 
 He rose and refused to support Billaud Varenne in 
 his motion for that roll-call; a motion that underlined 
 the Terror, and that wotild have left each man to stand 
 for ever before history as the judge or the accomplice 
 of the Gironde. He said : — 
 
 " I do not see the necessity of regarding the national 
 Convention as divided into two classes — that which is the 
 friend of the people, and that which is made up of 
 conspirators and traitors. We have no right to decide 
 
266 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 suddenly that we have to deal with any other con- 
 spirators than those that are named in the report. Let 
 us take the original decree upor^ its merits, and vote 
 purely and simply upon that." 
 
 And he made a second and much more important 
 interruption in the debate. It was proposed to include 
 with the Gironde in the same decree of accusation the 
 seventy- three who had protested against the 2nd of June. 
 He opposed. " I speak in the face of the people, and 
 speak frankly. I will be judged only by my conscience. 
 You must, even at this hour, distinguish between opinions 
 and acts." The Herbertists and the Left began to mur- 
 mur. He continued : " Citizens, be sure of this. You 
 have no ultimate defenders save those who dare to 
 speak in the moments when something seems to im- 
 pose silence." 
 
 He went on, speaking of "the faction," trailing out 
 a peroration, but he had saved the Right from a general 
 execution. 
 
 In this moment which, though the violent men 
 that drove the storm could not know it, was the doom 
 of their effort, a spirit that was not wholly human 
 disturbed the nights with tragedy; the Terror boiled, 
 and men approached the limits where despair and vision 
 meet. It was the last clutch of the great wrestling, 
 the moment of tottering before the throw. The mind of 
 Paris lost hold of the ground ; Dalua, the oldest of the 
 gods, the spirit of Celtic madness, took a part in this 
 strain of the western fortunes, vengeance and darkness 
 entered in with him also. Twisted into the same 
 whirlwind, all the heroisms and the first victories 
 appeared. 
 
 The empty head of Orleans fell ; but that same day 
 Dubois Crance broke into Lyons at the tail of an artillery 
 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 267 
 
 duel, and spared the place like a soldier : ^ a whole army 
 was set free for the frontiers. 
 
 A week later a kind of Sabbat led the Queen, very 
 haggard and proud, to the guillotine;^ but Cholet was pre- 
 paring — Cholet, the great fight in which the Republic 
 fought and fought, not noticing the hours, till at last it 
 broke the Vendeans. 
 
 In the hour that the Queen died Wattignies was won. 
 All the day before, the centre had charged uselessly 
 against the Austrian cannon, the right had been broken 
 by the Hungarian cavalry and had lost its guns. The day 
 seemed so lost to the Republic that Coburg did not call 
 upon the Duke of York and the English for reinforce- 
 ment ; but on the morrow, the 1 6th of October, a mist 
 that a lyric has called the " Destiny of France " came 
 down upon the plain. Carnot, tall and hard, dragged 
 off the young recruits to the right, appeared on the 
 plateau and, when the fog lifted at midday, took the 
 last earthworks at the bayonet, himself leading, losing 
 half his men, and opening the blockade of the frontier. 
 Then he put off the uniform in which he had raised 
 the blood of the boys behind him, and posted home 
 sombrely to Paris in his long grey civilian coat, to tell 
 the Convention coldly that the new order was saved, but 
 to make no mention of his charge. All the week was 
 breathless. Naples to her ruin declared war, the last of 
 the coalition. The non-juring priests were outlawed. 
 
 It was in the agony and bewilderment of such success 
 following upon such a crisis (Paris had lain awake to 
 hear the issue of the struggle) that the Gironde went to 
 
 ' He found his own cousin there, commanding the rebels, and per- 
 mitted a number of evasions. Read in this connection the vivid memoirs 
 of Mile. d'BrcheroUes, which have recently been very well translated into 
 English, there you will hear of how this mousquetaire shaved in a great 
 silver bowl, chosen out of the loot, and laughed, and granted largess. 
 
 ' By far the best impression of her is David's thumb-nail sketch, taken 
 as she went by in the cart. 
 
268 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 tlie guillotine; and opened the way downwards for all 
 the revolutionaries. They at the approach of death 
 were possessed with a spirit of feasting and a call from 
 the sunlight came up northward to them and glorified 
 their end. 
 
 It was already the time of the vintage. The vine- 
 yards by the great river and on the hills that bound it 
 like low walls were full of men and made a moving 
 tapestry under the mUd pleasure of their autumn. At 
 this season a secret working runs through all wine, and 
 something that is more generous than content gives 
 praises for the summer past and rests from creation with 
 the silent plenitude of energy. The vine prepares life, 
 and supports it against the season of darkness and cold. 
 This link of the summer ended and the mists beginning, a 
 viaticum for winter, was for these men in Paris a viaticum 
 before the long time death. These clear souls, chained 
 in the north, received the influence, and the passing of 
 the Gironde was ennobled by the dignity and certitude 
 that accompany enthusiastic calm. It was as though 
 the rainy gloom of those last days in Paris had been lit 
 from somewhere by the soft sky of October where it 
 protects the garden of the Pyrenees. 
 
 On the last day of the month they sang their song 
 together, and Vergniaud that had best loved freedom 
 died the last, still inspired by grave music. So the 
 Republic narrowed, but whatever narrows, rages upon 
 itself, and ends. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 
 
 What is it ia the story of this man's soul that turns the 
 eye inward and forbids the appreciation of realities ? It 
 is as though in the mere writing of him some subtle 
 sympathy proceeded from a spirit so long silent and drew 
 one into its own void and vagueness, where his one 
 stuff, his firm and isolated conviction, hung rare and 
 alone. 
 
 Time and again it has seemed in the nature of this 
 book to call up the armies, or at least to fill its pages 
 with the creative noise of Paris ; time and again the 
 persistent monotone that enspelled the tribune of the 
 Jacobins has cut off as with a curtain the outer sound of 
 the Kevolution from my mind. His innumerable chosen 
 phrases, his reams of blue paper, close-written and erased, 
 have been fine threads cramping my hand, and I have 
 lost the description of an experiment so vast and terrible 
 that a pen recording it should properly turn without 
 effort to reproduce its majesty. But Robespierre preach- 
 ing Robespierre, the one political right insisting for ever 
 on the one poUtical right, has cast over the sublime 
 accidents of those four years a curious and vumatural 
 hush, and has dominated all the colours with a screen 
 of something colourless. So divers cannot hear the waves 
 for the singing in their ears. 
 
 The period of which I am about to treat in this 
 chapter emphasises more than all that went before it the. 
 strange contrast between Robespierre's life within and the 
 
 outer clamour that frames him. I am about to treat of 
 
 369 
 
270 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the crisis and agony of the Revolution ; of the five months 
 that open with the execution of the Queen and close with 
 that of Danton ; of the passage from the sunlight to the 
 sunlight, from the last leaves to the spring again, in which 
 darkness the Revolution ran out beyond itself and in- 
 sisted upon a path that could only lead to the abyss — ^yet 
 in that wild drive Robespierre's whole history is con- 
 cerned with an interior thing, and, writing of it, I am 
 confined to but one intense episode of morals; a vivid 
 sin, remote from which, uncertain and ill-defined, pass 
 shadows, faint echoes, phantasms of action. The angry 
 victories at the Bayonet, the strange new months and 
 days, the great persecution of the Church, the aggrava- 
 tion of the Terror, the giant's wrestle with rebellion, the 
 frenzy of the reprisals, the silent despotism of the Com- 
 mittee—of itself a full subject for a book — all these must 
 go by almost unheeded that there may be told in a few 
 pages what passed in an empty space of thought. And 
 this glaring and teeming passage of our immediate past 
 must be abandoned for the single crisis of one solitary 
 mind. 
 
 Of what nature was that crisis ? It was the tran- 
 sition of Robespierre from the self-deception and gradual 
 ambition which had risen in him throughout the past 
 two years to the definite acceptation of the new position 
 which he was to hold for so brief a time in '94. He who 
 had never governed one individual, at last attempted to 
 govern, or rather to pass as the chief power in, the nation. 
 
 Was that determination fully conscious ? Yes ; with 
 this qualification, that it was intimately mixed up with 
 that illusion by which all of us read our own person- 
 alities into our conception of abstract right. He would 
 have told you that he wished, as a tribune rather than 
 as a leader, to make a right world, but in practice that 
 wish became a necessity to rule. 
 
 Now ruling and the power of one man were opposed 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 271 
 
 to all that had made him : to the sublime theory of 
 which he had been so jejune, but so sincere, persistent, 
 and faithful an exponent. Therefore, when he passed the 
 boundary that lay between his old complaints, suspicions, 
 and love of praise, and his new plan of supremacy, he 
 abandoned his very self. That abandonment was to force 
 him to two great disasters or crimes. First, he hesitated 
 — till it was too late — to join those who had risen with 
 Danton to stop the Terror; secondly, he was compelled, 
 as a consequence of this political intrigue, to give up 
 Danton to the political necessities of the Committee. 
 Essentially a man innocent, or incapable, of intrigue, 
 this last betrayal should have seemed a crime to him ; 
 essentially a man of few and clear principles, and abhor- 
 ring arbitrary power, his temporising with the Terror 
 (which was in its nature martial law) was a direct nega- 
 tion of his own theory of political justice. It is the 
 method and consequence of his double fall that I have 
 to develop in what follows. 
 
 The Girondins were dead. 
 
 The scene upon which the Republic entered when it 
 had sealed its mysteries with such a sacrifice was one 
 whose motive and prime force was the unnecessary con- 
 tinuance of a state of siege in spite of, and on into the 
 beginnings of military success : it was the momentum of 
 the Terror. But the Terror, thus continued, grew pro- 
 digiously, and it is this charge beyond which lends to 
 the awfiil passage of that winter its dissociation from 
 human experience, its dark experiments, its furious asso- 
 lutions. Here men broke apart from their closest political 
 bonds, from the sense of things, and from themselves. 
 It lay with Robespierre's own decision to follow or to 
 resist the swirl. Had he joined the moderates, as they 
 themselves believed he would join them, the Republic 
 would have endured. 
 
272 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 It is a truth not easily appreciated, yet one wluch 
 determines all the end of his life, and which I therefore 
 would set forth fully, that he accepted at this moment, 
 by I know not what miscalculation of social forces, 
 the side that could not endure, and abandoned the re- 
 action toward simplicity and normal law which should 
 have been the special function of his rule. At the head 
 of the Convention and the club, passing for the master 
 of the Committee, the primary weakness in him appeared 
 as it had never appeared during all the years of oppo- 
 sition and criticism. He did not know how men were 
 governed, nor had he ever understood what are the cor- 
 rectives to violence ; he accepted all that the real powers 
 (Carnot, Prieur, the lower committee, certaiD representa- 
 tives on mission) might demand, so only he could still 
 think himself an infallible head of the democracy. 
 
 I know that he may be taken as yielding only to an 
 irresistible thing : there is an atmosphere of excess in '93 
 that seems to overwhelm and excuse the revolutionaries. 
 How many men chiefly responsible for that time lived 
 on into the Restoration, sUent, respected, even provincial ; 
 how many protest with justice in their memoirs that even 
 the worst of the Terror was a thing driven by necessity. 
 
 Look over France and you see nothing but a cavalry 
 charge in which time is eaten up by fury, as a field 
 passes like a river and is eaten up under the hoofs of 
 straining horses. The 2nd of June is already very old, 
 the Monarchy (a year dead, not a year buried) is for- 
 gotten — or only remembered for chance vengeance — it 
 is so passed that these executions, the Queen, Bailly, 
 the Dubarry, each utterly separate from the other, mark 
 out sporadically (the first diplomatic, the second a popular 
 revenge, the third a show), the last shots of the Crown's 
 pursuers. The monarchy is so utterly passed that it 
 has become an incomprehensible legend. Its true quality 
 is already so forgotten that republicans accusing one 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 273 
 
 another drag up the charge of " royalism " like a mean- 
 ingless epithet, a conventional abuse. France driYing at 
 the most extreme realisation of the Kevolution, cutting 
 off her past, living and dead together, accepting a new 
 calendar of Keason, forgetting in her tempest religion 
 and the link of history, and even the divisions of time, 
 seems something upon which we cannot reason : a storm 
 or a wild music. Seen as a drifting thing on such a tide 
 you may make of Kobespierre in the autumn of '93 a 
 toy of forces so superior to himself that the analysis of 
 his motives becomes indifferent. But from within his 
 own soul things had another aspect. 
 
 Look at the centre of that mind and you wUl perceive 
 one dominant act : a great refusal ; the self-desertion that 
 broke its self-reHance, the last compromise between his 
 ambition and his faith. This abandonment crumbled 
 the small central pillar upon which, had he but known 
 it, all his power reposed. It was as a man of debate, 
 wary, minute — but especially definite and inflexible — 
 that his rise had been permitted. That epithet of "in- 
 corruptible," in which plutocratic societies and their 
 historians can now find nothing but the comic, had in it 
 at that time something of the sublime. In the quiet 
 times of decadence, in the times of the merchants and 
 the years that prepare defeats and shame, it is something 
 to remain unmoved by the opportunities of wealth: in 
 the times of crisis and of revolution it touches upon 
 the heroic to maintain with a ceaseless activity, how- 
 ever monotonous, the road to an exact and certain 
 goal. 
 
 I have spoken of the first breach which was made 
 in that wall of his; his alliance with Paris. A year 
 before, in the autumn of '92, he had accepted Paris, and 
 in accepting the spokesmanship of that city he had fallen 
 from his first position, he had ceased to be the single 
 exponent of the creed. But that initial corruption which 
 
 s 
 
274 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 he suffered just after the fall of the monarchy was not 
 final, nor was it irretrievable; it was a first but not a 
 complete abandonment of '89. I have said that it was 
 in part the product of ambition, but it was not yet wholly 
 that, and Robespierre bitterly defending himself against 
 the Gironde could always plead honestly that he remem- 
 bered the Gironde reactionary, based upon a limited 
 suffrage, mixed up through Brissot with intrigue, perhaps 
 (he was sincere in thinking it) with the Court, certainly 
 with the shifty pohtics of Dumouriez. He could plead 
 before the tribunal of his own conscience that France 
 until the death of the King was m two camps, and that 
 a man did service only by joining a party discipline. He 
 could plead that he was senior member for Paris, and 
 that Paris alone had the light, that the provinces were 
 largely led by reaction and did not know the peril ia 
 which the future of the Revolution stood. 
 
 When the King's head had fallen, and when the execu- 
 tive broke down in the hands of visionaries he could 
 still hold himself in the main consistent, and if he 
 demanded the dismissal of the moderates he could say, 
 " In theory I still hold for the pure Republic. When peace 
 is restored I will maintain the sanctity of the national 
 representation — but the times are not normal; unless 
 something is done we shall have the enemy in the 
 capital with the summer." This kind of defence had 
 now broken down. 
 
 A crime is the matter of a moment, but the self- 
 deception that often leads up to crime is a process. 
 That process I have shown him suffering in the summer 
 of '93. He had been, as it were, compelled to accept 
 the great opportunity of the 2nd of June, he had been 
 called to power. He had not been unwilling. The two 
 friends, St. Just and Gouthon, had held open for him 
 the doors of the Committee and had mounted guard 
 for him in the Hall of the Two Pillars. By a kind of 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 275 
 
 gravitation lie had passed the door and had entered the 
 Committee at the close of July. 
 
 He had obtained an increasing jurisdiction at the ex- 
 pense of an increasing trouble of the mind. He knew that 
 he was becoming something mixed, somewhat larger, but 
 much lower than, the little Robespierre that had been 
 an anchor to the Revolution for four years. Men odious 
 to him, the Herbertists, the men of dirt and of mere 
 passion, had pressed upon France all August, and he 
 had submitted — in order that there should be no rift 
 in the unanimity that supported him. The blood and 
 the clamour for blood that in the drowsy heats had 
 sickened and broken down the great nature of DantoU;, 
 had been endured by this less generous and drier 
 mind. 
 
 But he had been troubled. He had saved the 
 seventy-three. He had not rejoiced but had rather 
 drawn back into himself at the death of Vergniaud and 
 his companions. Still he did not move for fear that, 
 moving, he should lose his place. He gave up all 
 initiative, save those spasmodic movements of which the 
 most famous is the 3rd of October, because initiative and 
 originality endanger a spokesman. There is no doubt 
 that ambition began to possess him altogether, and that 
 he had subjected and harnessed to his ambition all the 
 strict logic that was his only principle of vitality. Even 
 the great news of Wattignies that had been for the 
 nation a song of deliverance, turned in him to a political 
 opportunity, a lucky chance permitting him to affirm 
 himself and to escape the risk of " moderatism " that he 
 had run in the month before. 
 
 He hardened. But the soul of a man, however 
 adust, has still something of the organic, and when the 
 organic turns rigid it is dying ; it grows brittle and can 
 be broken to pieces. 
 
 This is why I have called his entry into the winter 
 
276 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 and his policy during those five months to the spring — 
 Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivose, Pluviose, Ventose and on 
 into Germinal — his temptation. There was still con- 
 stantly open to him the road to return. He would by 
 an alliance with Danton have been able at one moment 
 to stop the Terror and to let France slip back into the 
 normal. Paris was certainly ready, the provinces would 
 have followed. But he saw his nominal supremacy 
 endangered, he felt near him Hke guards the Committee, 
 able to expose him at any moment and to show that 
 they were the true master. He feared for his reputation 
 of authority, and he did not dare. By yielding to that 
 direct temptation, by choosing something against his per- 
 manent self, he was led on to '94, and, in spite of his 
 recent protests in the Committee he became the outer 
 title of the Committee's policy. He was led on to the 
 sacrifice of Danton, of Desmoulins his friend, of poor 
 Lucille, the wife of Desmoulins ; Lucille, whose letter he 
 was compelled to treat as a proof of conspiracy, the 
 hostess of so many evenings. 
 
 As nearly as such strict minds can, he approached 
 hypocrisy ; and since things good and evil carry in 
 themselves salvation and damnation, this great refusal 
 fell back upon him to his hurt. He that had been the 
 symbol of the Revolution found himself the symbol of 
 a rigour that grew from pitilessness to fury ; it did 
 him no service to attack it silently from within ; out- 
 wardly he was still the later, useless Terror, and as 
 the later, useless Terror he fell ; finding that whoever 
 permits is an author ; that God demands confession open 
 and full recantations. 
 
 This is the tragedy which I have to follow to the 
 close of this book. It is not only a private tragedy; 
 it is the catastrophe of the Revolution, because the man 
 who suffered it was not only a man, but also such 
 a symbol of equality that, for all his paucity of in- 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 277 
 
 vention and action, no republican can utterly deny him 
 the title of great. 
 
 When the Girondins suffered, the shock of the axe 
 trembled through France ; it was felt at Arcis and 
 aroused Danton. Danton returned. But there is 
 something in these puissant natures which lends itself 
 not only to the creative activities, but also to the after 
 effects, of fever. Men who have ridden in a regiment 
 know what it is after nights of bivouac by low rivers in 
 the autumn meadows to find the reins trembling in their 
 hands when they mount before morning, to lose grip 
 with their knees and to fear disasters. They take an 
 obstacle uneasily, and they blunder in their orders. 
 Some such accident of nerve had fallen upon the Cham- 
 penois. He came back, stUl a giant, still forcing a loud 
 note, but within uncertain, losing opportunities and 
 coming too late and too gradually into the advance. He 
 was determined to stop the Terror, but the action of his 
 determination grew and formed itself slowly — had his 
 nature permitted it he might have sounded a charge that 
 would have dragged Robespierre in with the mel^e of the 
 moderates, have persuaded him (who saw nothing largely) 
 that general power was on this new side. 
 
 In capturing Robespierre Danton would have caught 
 in with hiTTi the whole movement and force of which 
 Robespierre was the accredited chief. The Jacobins 
 would have been divided, the Committee would have 
 split, its majority would have appealed to the Conven- 
 tion. The Commune certainly would have risen or 
 attempted to rise in defence of the guillotine, but Danton 
 and his policy would have won. For certainly the 
 majority of the committee would not have dared to call 
 up a battalion, and certainly Paris, the sections, the guns, 
 would not have followed the Commune or Herbert.^ The 
 
 ^ This statement needs no such proof as could be drawn from research. 
 The enormous sale of the Vieux Corddier when that pamphlet was issued 
 
278 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 moral authority of the Convention, mutilated and silent 
 as it was, yet was the one thing which stood. To the 
 Convention everything was referred, and by it alone, 
 legally, would anything be ratified. It would have been 
 galvanised into life by such a return of the national 
 vigour as Danton — the Danton of '92 — ^might at once 
 have inspired and expressed. 
 
 Had Danton struck at once on his return, this tide 
 would, I say, have set so strongly as to drag Kobespierre 
 in with it, the Terror would have ceased before January. 
 As it was, Danton waited a month, and Robespierre had 
 time to hesitate and to fall into his false r61e. 
 
 The execution of the Girondins fell on the 31st of 
 October; Madame Roland had been guillotined on the 
 8th of November; on the loth her husband had stabbed 
 himself by the roadside in Normandy. Danton did not 
 come back till the i8th of November; his first speech 
 in the Convention was not heard till the 26th,^ and it 
 did not deal with the Terror. 
 
 Desmoulins, whom Danton had sent out to do the 
 work, but who was also half the inspiration of it, did 
 not put his pen to the famous pamphlets that shook the 
 system of the Terror till the 3rd of December, and this, 
 the first number of the Vieux Cordelier, did not appear 
 till the sth. By that time for six weeks the Committee 
 had been preparing, had pressed round Robespierre who 
 sat in its midst : had made him feel that the full powers 
 of the Dictatorship were still necessary to them. But 
 the Committee were not yet enemies of his. The 
 Committee did not plot or plan such a pressure ; it was 
 an inevitable result of the nature of their organisation. 
 
 More than this, he had seen St. Just, his right 
 hand, plunge fully into the policy of coercion — St. 
 
 with the object of stopping the Terror and the difficulty which the great 
 Committee (in a country trained to centralised government) found in 
 suppressing the movement are alone ample evidence. 
 ' Moniteur, Sth Frimaire. 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 279 
 
 Just, become by an accident partly a worker, knowing 
 the armies, a drafter of reports, would not have followed 
 the return to clemency; Robespierre would have been 
 alone with Couthon. 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of all these reasons for hesita- 
 tion, his continued balance between the policy of pity 
 and that of the Committee's despotism, his ultimate 
 decision, and his abandonment of the Dantonists, afford 
 an abundant material for the study of the man. 
 
 Danton returned at the moment when Robespierre 
 was supporting the only part of the moderate programme 
 in which he felt that his leadership would retain com- 
 plete security, and that part, moreover, of which he had 
 become, by his consistent action through four years, a 
 kind of protector : he was defending the Church. 
 
 Brumaire — all early November — had been a riot of 
 Herbertism. It was suited to the breakdown of all 
 reality that the Commune should imagine that the roots 
 of Catholicism had withered. Chaumette, Clootz, Mor- 
 moro the printer, from his cave in the Rue de la Harpe, 
 passed up and down the city like raving missionaries 
 " unpriesting." They pruned the old tree. It was at 
 this moment that the nullity of the schismatic church 
 appeared, and that, with a siacerity which perhaps saved 
 their souls, such priests as had clung for Hvelihood or by 
 routine to a faith they had never held, came in con- 
 fessing an emptiness of the mind. Gobel was easUy 
 persuaded. He resigned his bishopric, and came into the 
 Convention, with half his clergy and all the Commune 
 at his back, to renounce his orders. The movement, 
 passing very rapidly, and falling in three months into 
 nothingness, ran throughout the new dioceses. 
 
 Of all the instances take these two. Parens, the 
 vicar of Boississe le Bertrand, near Melun, wrote to the 
 Convention on November 7 (17th Brumaire) a letter: 
 " Here are my papers. I am, or have been, a priest — 
 
28o ROBESPIERRE 
 
 that is to say, a charlatan." Also, he asked for a small 
 pension. " Because," said the Rabelaisian, " a man who 
 can only chant oremus has no way of earning his liveli- 
 hood " {Moniteur, 1 7th Brumaire). Again, the yet more 
 thorough, ecclesiastic who suddenly appeared before a 
 session of the Commune, abjured and begged that " in 
 the roll of citizens they would change his name from 
 that of Erasmus, which it had hitherto been, to that of 
 Apostate." 
 
 The sacred vessels were brought before the Parlia- 
 ment in mascarades, there was pillage in more than one 
 church, the saturnalia reappeared. The vestments, I 
 believe, of Dubois found a fitting place upon the back 
 of an ass, and his mitre was put on the beast's head — a 
 last expiation of the regency. On the 20th Brumaire^ 
 was held in Notre Dame the feast that may or may not 
 have been called that of the Goddess of Reason. The 
 Commune, with very partial success, ordered the church 
 doors throughout the city to be closed. Ten days later, 
 on the 1st of Frimaire, Herbert, in the Jacobins, de- 
 manded the last extremities — the execution of the 
 seventy-three, the sacrifice of Madame Elizabeth. " The 
 extermination of the Capets." It was plain that the 
 wave which had risen up against all religion was drag- 
 ging anarchy in its wake. 
 
 This crisis affords the first landmark in the rapid pro- 
 gress of Robespierre towards the reputation of supreme 
 power. He caught Herbertism just at the top flight of 
 its extravagance, and stood out as the Arrester, the 
 moderator of the Revolution. That the great Committee 
 was the true author of Herbert's fall there can be no 
 doubt. They had determined on the Terror as a prac- 
 tical instrument, a military necessity, they would not let 
 it turn into a weapon for the extremists, nor let its 
 authority slip from their hands into that of Herbert and 
 ^ loth November. 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 281 
 
 his friends. Yet, though the committee determined the 
 breaking of Herbert, the opportunity was singularly fitted 
 to make Robespierre appear as though he was acting 
 alone. The whole matter was bound up with religion, 
 and reHgion had been Robespierre's department, as it 
 were, for two years. Herbertism was inspired by a 
 hatred of Christianity ; Robespierre, by that faint in- 
 heritance of it which had produced the Vicaire Savoyard. 
 For more than a year he had been the only hope of 
 that great body of citizens who hesitated, troubled, be- 
 tween their new republicanism and their memories of 
 the Church. Up to the close of his life he was destined 
 to express, and to depend upon, his benevolent neutrality 
 towards Catholicism. 
 
 His speech on this occasion, which began the destruc- 
 tion of one party of his rivals, is often quoted to show 
 the texture of his mind. It is from beginning to end a 
 defence, as nearly passionate as his manner permitted, 
 of the idea of God; the last rhetoric of the Deism of 
 Rousseau. He exclaimed in one of those clear insights 
 from which his pedantry did not wholly debar him : — 
 
 " Atheism is of its nature oligarchic . . . when the 
 conception of God comes to be attacked, the attack will 
 not proceed from the popular instinct, but from the rich 
 and the privileged." 
 
 It was a prophecy of our own time. 
 
 The attack on religion, which had been the triumph 
 of the Commune of '93, marked also the highest point 
 of its power ; it had aroused in those who had hitherto 
 remained indifferent a prodigious hostihty, it had pre- 
 pared reaction. And the Committee — that is, the 
 workers of the Committee, the majority — grew afraid. 
 
 The Committee determined to attack Herbert and 
 the old commune not as extremists, but as undisciplined 
 men, and as men likely to provoke by their madness a 
 return to milder things. They feared reaction. 
 
 For Camot, a reaction at this moment meant the 
 
282 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 stoppage of the convoys, the lack of munitions, the 
 failure of recruits ; he needed the Terror. For Couthon 
 (not in the committee but, as it were, a department of 
 the government in himself — Finance) it meant the dis- 
 appearance of the currency, the total collapse of the 
 depreciated assignats, the bankruptcy of the nation in 
 the midst of the wars ; he needed the Terror. Jean-Bon 
 St. Andr6 needed it to man his ships and to provision 
 and to build them ; St. Just to drive his armies ; Prieur 
 to enforce his plans. This need for the Terror was not 
 yet actively expressed, but the committee were watchiag 
 for the first cries against severity, and Robespierre, who 
 hesitated and desired clemency, who in standing an 
 obstacle to the Herbertian faction and in defending 
 religion had seemed to prepare the return to pity — 
 Robespierre sat among his colleagues and knew how little 
 of a master he was in that room. He felt their eyes 
 on him and he did not go where he would. 
 
 Then came a few hard winter weeks, during which 
 the Committee organised their plan against Herbert and 
 the Commune of Paris. Robespierre knew that in 
 surrounding this insurrectionary they had no thought 
 of checking the Terror. He admitted their mastery and 
 was willing to continue the Terror. 
 
 The lively art of Desmoulins, the sense of Danton 
 had not divined this. Both these men, the greater and 
 the lesser, were determined to arrest the persecution and 
 to relieve the State. It was time. The opposition to 
 Herbert which Robespierre had so conspicuously led 
 encouraged them. They believed themselves to have 
 some favour with the Committee. They thought 
 themselves certain of Maximilian. It is to this day a 
 matter of doubt whether he did not himself inspire the 
 first of Desmoulin's pamphlets.^ It was on the iSth 
 Frimaire, the 5 th of December, that the first number of 
 
 ' He admits having seen the proof-sheets, and we maj presume that 
 he actnally corrected them. 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 283 
 
 the Vieux Cordelier appeared; on the loth the second, 
 on the 15 th the more famous third. Desmoulins 
 hammered into what he believed to be the rifted stuflf 
 of the Terror the phrases of Tacitus Uke wedges. It 
 was not only the terrible irony of his pen nor the 
 climax of his genius spurred on to its highest just on 
 the edge of his doom ; it was also the return of humanity 
 that lent his efforts so much power. 
 
 Desenne's shop became the centre of whatever was 
 read and debated. The Vieux Cordelier was caught up 
 from the presses by crowds that filled the streets, it 
 passed by thousands into all hands ; became a common 
 cry throughout the capital. 
 
 "Women ran through the hall of the Convention 
 demanding the liberation of their sons, and Camille's 
 whole programme seemed to have gained the city: a 
 " Committee of Clemency " was demanded. Everything 
 prepared the reaction : all that Christmas was a noel of 
 victories. It was known in one week that the Republic 
 was saved ; in one week between Christmas Eve and the 
 New Year Paris heard of the Vendeans crushed at 
 Savenay, of the forcing of the lines of Wissembourg, of 
 Landau relieved, of the enemy passing back home over 
 the Rhine. 
 
 Desmoulins in the first four numbers of his pamphlet 
 had taken for granted that Robespierre would defend the 
 same cause. On the 7th of January, however, some- 
 thing had passed in the Committee. What it was will 
 never be known, but Robespierre appearing at the 
 Jacobins disclaimed the cause of pity. All his new power 
 compelled him to the retractation ; he remembered how 
 the generals turned to him,^ behind the back of the 
 
 > There is to be seen at the archives a carious little pocket-book, in 
 the first seventeen pages of which Bobespierre has made his private notes 
 on policy. Among these one may find that he had down the names of the 
 generals, his proposal for their disposition, and his judgment upon their 
 
284 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Committee ; how it was to him that the smallest private 
 appeals were directed. 
 
 Let me retrace the last steps that led Eobespierre to 
 this desertion. 
 
 Just upon Christmas he had promised a " Committee 
 of Justice " which might have been made — and which he 
 probably intended to make — into a court of revision for 
 the gradual liberation of the prisoners. Camille had 
 written the fourth number of the Vieux Cordelier as an 
 appeal by name to Robespierre. 
 
 " My Robespierre, I call you here by your name, for 
 I remember the moment when Pitt had you alone left 
 to withstand his coalition, and when but for you the 
 ship would have perished: the Republic was passing 
 into chaos. . . . Oh ! my old college friend, remember 
 that there is something more durable in love than in 
 this fear, and clemency (Tertullian tells it us) is like 
 a ladder of falsehoods, but reaches to heaven. You came 
 very close to that idea when you spoke of a Committee 
 of Justice . . . but why should the word 'Pity' have 
 become a crime in the Republic ? " 
 
 On that same day, the 2ist of December,^ at the 
 Jacobins Nicholas the public printer had cried out to 
 Camille, " Camille, you seem very close to the guillotine," ^ 
 and Camille had answered gaily, "Nicholas, you seem 
 
 appeals, as though he were himself concerned with the department of 
 war. Here are his judgments on the generals Damas, Marceaa, Hocbe. 
 And it was his brother who had just found out the genius of Bonaparte 
 at Toulon. 
 
 ' And on the same day (the coincidence is grotesque enough to merit 
 a record) the Convention after a long and stormy debate decided that the 
 habit of speaking with the hat on was disrespectful. " It has grown too 
 common of late," said Eobespierre, and when there was cited the example 
 of the Quakers he replied with some justice, "Quakers are usually ex- 
 ceptions that prove a rule." 
 
 " There is a discussion whether Robespierre put up Nicholas to warn 
 Camille. There is no proof but a tradition to that efEeot. Nicholas was 
 indeed Robespierre's man, but on the other hand Robespierre would 
 never have put the thing so bluntly. 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 285 
 
 very close to making a fortune. It is but a year since 
 that you made your dinner off a baked apple, and here 
 you are printer to the State." It was the first pass of 
 the duel that opened between the indulgents and the 
 extremists, a duel in which, by the spring, each had 
 perished, leaving the Committee supreme. 
 
 On the 7 th of January, then, the 1 8 th Nivose, the 
 growing irritation against Camille broke out openly in 
 the club. The opportunity coincided with Robespierre's 
 recantation. It was known that the silent royalist 
 faction which lay under the city, a minority ready to 
 strike, had raised its head at the appearance of the Vieux 
 Cordelier. Apart from the Herbertist group that 
 Desmoulins aimed at, apart from the men whom he 
 called by name and cut and wounded with his style, 
 the common republicans fell into an ill-ease and were 
 alarmed. Robespierre had determined to follow the 
 Committee, but he remembered his friend. He 
 attempted compromise. Desmoulins was not in the 
 mood for it ; he could see that Robespierre was tempted 
 to abandon him, but he thought he had enough hold to 
 prevent it. Some days before he had offered to burn 
 his No. 3 — he had offered it in a rhetorical manner. 
 
 " You complain of the third Number ? I can under- 
 stand it : I have given orders that it shall not be 
 reprinted. I will even burn it publicly, so that you 
 promise to read my No. 5." 
 
 This Robespierre took up at the Jacobins, and seeing 
 Desmoulins in front of him, looking him straight in the 
 eyes and with the slight perpetual smile upon his lips, 
 he excused him ; apologised for him to the club. 
 
 " There is no need to expel Camille. We will burn 
 his pamphlet." 
 
 Robespierre, a man incapable of repartee, had laid 
 open his guard, and Camille could not resist the advan- 
 tage. He laughed out after his opening stutter. 
 
2 86 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 " Burning is not a convincing reply." 
 
 It was Rousseau's own answer to tlie public burning of 
 his "Emile." Robespierre, whose whole life it was to 
 play the part of Rousseau in power, heard, as it were, his 
 own self laughing at him in Desmoulins' reply. His 
 smUe left him, and he abandoned the last thread of 
 the alliance with the indulgents. 
 
 The Terror began to surround Desmoulins. The 
 final withdrawal of Robespierre left him to the warnings 
 of anxious friends. Once, in his house at evening, they 
 hesitated at his courage and begged him to retire a little 
 that audacious skirmishing line of pamphlets. Lucille, 
 gracious, unrestrained, and wayward, put her hand upon 
 an objector's mouth and said, "Let him save the 
 country in his own way. Whoever dissuades him shall 
 have none of my chocolate." They had something in 
 them both of children. Fate took them in the spring, 
 and they died within a very few days one of the other; 
 the lives also of both these lovers accused Robespierre 
 when he came to die. 
 
 I have held throughout this book that Robespierre was 
 never really master; nevertheless, it must be admitted 
 that in this moment of January, after the 1 2th, when 
 he had broken with Desmoulins, when Billaud-Varennes 
 had publicly threatened Danton in the Convention,^ when 
 St. Just, summoned back from the armies, had reinforced 
 him with a supreme energy, Robespierre might have 
 thought himself a master ; the pressure of the committee 
 upon him was underground; it was easy to persuade 
 himself. 
 
 I might -waste pages in the analysis of that tortuous 
 process whereby a man convinces his own mind till it 
 adopts an attitude beyond its powers. It is enough for 
 me to describe him as one now permitted to speak for 
 
 1 "Woe to the man that defends Fabie d'Eglantine I " 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 287 
 
 the government, one that kept that position only by a 
 constant attention to every gust that blew from the 
 right or the left, one whom all consulted, implored or 
 execrated as though he had been the true author of the 
 Terror, and one who consented to be so flattered and to 
 pass for France. 
 
 He was lying in wait for the spring-time: then — the 
 victories having made a full security, his rivals having 
 disappeared — he would come in and save the nation 
 from the Terror, he would abandon the Committee : he 
 would impose his perfect Repubhc and he would write 
 on the first page of a new constitution the name of God 
 and the nature of his simple worship. 
 
 This imagination of his was the more emphasised 
 by the coincidence of his private view and of that of 
 the Committee in the matter of the " madmen " : the 
 Herbertists. These men were the special obstacles to his 
 theory. Their looseness, their blind and negative revolt, 
 their very persons were repulsive to his ideal. In the 
 disasters of the sunmaer, when the extreme part of 
 the nation gave them an arm, they had imposed them- 
 selves somewhat upon his government; the Committee 
 had been compelled to follow them. But he had watched 
 and dogged them with that ceaseless attention and 
 readiness that was his unfailing method ; with them, as 
 with Brissot, as with the Constitutionals of the early 
 Revolution he had followed the tactics of yielding and 
 disappearing, gathering into himself such strength as he 
 had, and when a breathing space was given suddenly 
 exercising that strength. This kind of action which was 
 as much a part of his nature as his reserved gestures and 
 his power of ceaseless, similar writing, conquered once 
 more and for the last time. 
 
 I have shown how he took advantage of and gripped 
 the Herbertists in the anti-reHgious crusade. How he 
 threw them. In that effort he had received, from the 
 
288 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 side of Danton, the unexpected aid of Desmoulins. He 
 had used it. He pressed the extremists (whom he 
 thought to be ruining the State) so close that they be- 
 came hunted men. He caused Carrier to be recalled from 
 Nantes. He posed as the sanctuary between the ven- 
 geance of the KepubHcans and the Vendeans. He was 
 actually the saviour of those moderate or silent men 
 whom the hysteria of Carrier at Nantes would have thrust 
 into a common holocaust with the insurgents against 
 whom those very moderates had heroically defended the 
 city.^ 
 
 There was a month of hesitation during which no 
 step was taken. The Committee still called for the con- 
 tinuance of the Terror, Desmoulins, now thrust wholly 
 back upon Danton, continued to call for clemency; 
 behind the movement, though he spoke so little, it was 
 known that the great voice of Danton himself gave orders 
 to the staff of the indulgents and demanded the return 
 to peace. In his drawing-room of the Cour du Com- 
 merce, below the rooms of Lucille and Camille, was held 
 almost daily the council of war that might succeed in 
 opening the prisons. 
 
 I will not deny that Robespierre feared this also 
 and for twenty reasons. He feared that the Committee 
 of Clemency, if it originated too early or from any 
 brain save his own, would destroy his leadership. 
 He feared something creative, passionate, and immediate 
 in the character of Danton, which would have swamped 
 such a man as he, had it received strength to 
 come out again into the arena. He was angry at the 
 open opposition of " No. S " of the Vieucc Cordelier, at the 
 frank Dantonism of " No. 6," which seemed to say to the 
 
 ^ In my own family there is clear proof of this, for my great-grand- 
 father, a firm republican, was thrown into prison by Carrier. His wife, 
 desiring to save him, thought at once of Robespierre. She travelled to 
 Faiis, caused a note to be delivered to him, and her husband was saved. 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 289 
 
 populace, "Forget Eobespierre and forget the govern- 
 ment. You are the General Will and you have but to 
 demand the end of the Terror." He was angry because 
 his great mystery, his puppet-show of a special police 
 had been almost exposed by the attack on H^ron,^ 
 but still, his principal care for the moment was the 
 destruction of the extreme Left, and he succeeded. 
 
 On the 4th of March (14th Ventose) Carrier, the 
 maddest of the Avengers, being returned from his massacres 
 and drownings at Nantes, destituted of power, confined 
 to his club of the Cordeliers, and pacing and raging in 
 idleness like a cheetah caged, the Left (which thought 
 itself the Commune and even the city, but was in truth 
 only a group of men) attempted a wholly insufficient 
 revolt. The Cordeliers met. They ordered crape to be 
 veiled over the Declaration of the Eights of Man, " Until 
 the people should have recovered their rights by the 
 destruction of the faction." The " faction " meant not only 
 Danton and clemency, it meant also Eobespierre and his 
 policy of restraining the proconsuls in the provinces. 
 Carrier himselt spoke like a Bacchanal using mere 
 symbols. " I mean by the faction the men who calum- 
 niate the guillotine." Herbert still full of his private 
 quarrel, of the check Eobespierre had inflicted on him 
 
 ^ Here there Is some hesitation in judgment. So many contemporaries 
 lived to remember what they called "the dictatorship of Eobespierre," 
 and insisted with such unanimity (when Michelet questioned them) that 
 H^ron was the "Black Friar" of the revolutionary leader, that both 
 Michelet and history have accepted it as a fact. This much of the legend 
 is true : Robespierre did exercise (through a system of reporters, agents 
 and clerks that centred in H^ron), a powerful pressure upon the police 
 system and even upon the lower committee. Nevertheless I maintain the 
 opinion which I have no space to develop that he had no real power. 
 Individuals appealed to him because he had become a legend, and by this 
 system of agents and of intrigues he could often do a great deal for 
 individuals, but on the great lines of national policy, power certainly lay 
 with the majority of the great Committee. It is impossible to notice the 
 vacillation of Bobespierre in the matter of the Vieux Cordelier and of the 
 policy of moderation without being convinced of the truth of this view. 
 
 T 
 
290 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 in the autumn, of the reversal which Robespierre more 
 than any other had forced upon his policy of unchris- 
 tianising France, remembering the way that Robespierre 
 had hesitated and seemed to inspire Desmoulins in 
 the beginning of his career — Herbert, who saw in all 
 this the end of the revolutionary effort and a kind of 
 treason, the giving up of the keys, put the thing 
 squarely. 
 
 " When I talk of the faction," he called out across 
 the vaults of the hall of the Cordeliers, " I mean those 
 who saved the seventy-three in October." 
 
 They proceeded to a farcical insurrection. The want 
 that had been chronic in Paris from two years before '89, 
 and that lasted on till the organisation of a new society 
 (the Revolution, in fact) produced the modern wealth of 
 France — that famine they thought their ally. It betrayed 
 them. The populace ascribed the lack of food to the 
 Herbertists themselves, to the ravages of the revolutionary 
 armies, and to that way of theirs by which they went on 
 raging for impossible extremes, as though men needed 
 neither food nor repose. 
 
 The frost and silence of the last of winter con- 
 demned these men. No section was in their favour; 
 a certain number of sections denounced them by name. 
 In the night of the 13th of March they were arrested; 
 after a trial that was a mere sentence upon such wild 
 pleas as revolutions alone imagine, they were condemned, 
 and executed on the 24th of March. With Herbert, Clootz, 
 and their companions ended the faction of the extremists. 
 The "revolutionary army" (gangs terrorising the home 
 departments) was disbanded, and there was nothing more 
 heard of the policy of mere vengeance. The Commune 
 ceased even to pretend that it was Paris. It became (the 
 committee allowed such toys) the machine of Robespierre. 
 All the power of the Left had vanished. There still 
 remained the moderates, the Right, 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 291 
 
 With the fall of Herbert it might be thought that the 
 calm was beginning. Eobespierre had destroyed that side 
 of the battle which he was known to have disfavoured. 
 It seemed natural that he should lead their opponents, 
 the moderates, to victory. 
 
 There passed, upon the contrary, a scene that finally 
 proves the hoUowness of his domination. 
 
 He had been attacked for a month by such an illness 
 as had already, four or five times since the gathering of 
 the States-General, kept him apart from the debates. 
 Mention of it would be of no moment did it not prove a 
 point which should never be forgotten in his career. In 
 his silence (he was absent from the Committee, from the 
 Convention, and from the Jacobins for forty days) the 
 Terror increased. It was not his presence nor his initia- 
 tive that moved it. He had left his room to receive as 
 good news from the Committee the fall of Herbert. 
 Immediately afterwards he was asked in his turn for 
 the Dantonists. 
 
 It was the moment in which Robespierre was most 
 tenacious of his popular leadership, parading it.^ The 
 demand for the heads of the Indulgents was not made by 
 the workers only. St. Just, who made the whole busi- 
 ness his, whose speech destroyed the men of the Vietix 
 Cordelier, demanded it. H^rault de S^chelles (Danton's 
 chief friend, and destined to die with him) had already 
 been dismissed from the committee and arrested — it is 
 probable that every member except Robespierre and 
 Lindet approved of the demand. Lindet, head of the 
 commissariat, refused bluntly to sign. "I am here to 
 feed the people, not to kill patriots." 
 
 What Robespierre said or did will never be known. 
 This much can be conjectured, that he protested, hesi- 
 
 ' There is even a question whether he did not at this moment offer the 
 command of Paris to Buonaparte in the place of Hanriot, whom the mode- 
 lates were attacking as thej had attacked Herbert. 
 
292 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 tated — tlien yielded ; and, having yielded, went the full 
 length of his fall, consented to help in every way, and 
 despatched a business that troubled him like a crime, 
 burying it away under the earth, as though with Danton's 
 body Danton's murder could also decay. 
 
 On the very night before the two committees met to 
 decide upon what proved to be the assassination of the 
 Kepublic, Humbert, that had been Robespierre's host in 
 the Rue Sanitonge during his first two years in Paris, 
 asked him to dine. Danton was there. They sat together, 
 Robespierre silent and troubled, Danton reviving to the 
 rough gaiety of '92. He attempted, with an advance 
 that was brusque but courageous, to launch a pohtical 
 discussion, and, turning to Robespierre, he asked why 
 there were still so many victims. 
 
 "Royalists and conspirators I can understand; but 
 those who are innocent ? " 
 
 Robespierre answered with a false phrase — 
 
 " And who says that any innocent man has perished ? " 
 
 He plunged back into an uneasy silence: waited a 
 moment, then rose and abruptly disappeared. 
 
 Next day he took upon himself the weight of this 
 friend's blood when he consented to the demand of the 
 Committee. 
 
 I repeat, he consented. He certainly did not pro- 
 pose ; as certainly, I would maintain, he attempted at 
 first to ward off the blow from the indulgents, but he 
 dared not try a fall with the Committee. 
 
 Upon what is such a conviction based ? In the strict 
 spirit ot modern analysis it is difi&cult to reply. Robes- 
 pierre furnished the notes upon which St. Just made the 
 report that silenced the Conventionj They still exist in an 
 English collection : they are hurried, disjointed. When 
 the Convention hesitated, it was he who spoke most 
 determinedly against hearing Danton and Desmoulins at 
 the bar, who called such procedure " privilege," and 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 293 
 
 who, perhaps, sealed the fate of his colleague. Upon the 
 surface — ^if the Committee of Public Safety be taken as 
 certain and imited, and if only what appears be con- 
 sidered — he was among the first, even the leader, of those 
 who determined the sudden arrest on the night of the 
 31st of March. 
 
 Nevertheless he did not lead, he yielded. The proofs 
 of it are wholly moral, but they are convincing. Con- 
 sider that he had not yet, and did not in moments far 
 more perilous, sacrifice any one to his mere ambition. 
 That ambition tempted and at last ruined him, is the 
 argument of this chapter ; that he exercised it pitilessly, 
 or made it a permanent and conscious motive is what not 
 only the few salient facts presented in this book, but 
 every one of the thousand documents and anecdotes re- 
 maining combine to deny. In so far as such ambitions 
 have something in them glorious, he was quite lacking in 
 that sense of glory ; in so far as they have in them some- 
 thing careless of principle and violent, every portrait of 
 him, every recollection of him, omits such a feature. His 
 hardness was all of logic ; his ambition was a thing coming 
 after success, overlying and corrupting, but never entering 
 the close fibre of this man. 
 
 Moreover, Danton was not then his danger. Perhaps 
 in the past June, perhaps even in the crisis of December, 
 he might have been afraid of a continuous rivahy. But 
 in March ? Danton and his friends had been uncertain or 
 silent for over a month. They had rejoiced indeed at the 
 fall of Herbert, but they had been the object of no public 
 adulation nor of any public appeal since December. There 
 was but one thing that Danton menaced — the Terror. 
 The destruction of Herbert, which (after his revolt) the 
 Committee thought a necessity, made that menace more 
 formidable. After such an example Danton had but to 
 speak (so it seemed) and the descent towards peace 
 would begin. But Robespierre was not concerned to 
 
294 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 defend the Terror. On the contrary he had been, if 
 anything, its opponent. At its cessation he would have 
 received an added popularity, and he was therefore aim- 
 ing at such a cessation. 
 
 There are two further arguments, which appear so 
 light that I hesitate to bring them forward; but they 
 are so convincing to those who go right into the docu- 
 ments and the atmosphere of '94, that it would be a pity 
 to omit them — they are, first the exclamation of Billaud- 
 Varrenes four months later, secondly the character of the 
 notes used by St. Just in his indictment of the Indul- 
 gents. 
 
 It is a matter to which I will return in its place, and 
 which I bring forward here for but a moment. On the 
 day that Robespierre fell, in Thermidor, Billaud-Varrenes 
 was one of his most violent accusers. He was a man of 
 defiant and straightforward language, bull-necked, violent, 
 immoderate in gesture. There came from his extreme 
 anger a rush of words that were neither calculated nor 
 suited to the occasion; there were absent, therefore, all 
 the elements of a pre-constituted plan. Well, in that 
 harangue the first thing he remembered was Robespierre 
 attempting to defend Danton in the committee. Consider 
 that we have no records of what passed within those 
 walls where the Ten sat judging France. The memoirs 
 of the men who survived are necessarily excuses, and 
 are often contradictory. Barrfere, the fullest of them, is 
 also the least trustworthy, and I take that attitude of 
 Billaud's, in Thermidor, to be a piece of sudden passion, 
 a cherished accusation worth all the later testimony, 
 even if that testimony accused Robespierre (which it 
 does not) of having procured the arrest of the Indulgents. 
 
 As to the notes given to St. Just, I fear it is impos- 
 sible, without a reproduction of them and a comparison 
 of them with Robespierre's other writings, to convince 
 my readers of their quality. Nervous, hurried, discon- 
 
TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 295 
 
 nected, they are unique in the mass of documents that 
 Kobespierre left behind him. There is not present in 
 them that choice of words which is hardly ever missing 
 even in his most casual writings. There are one or two 
 erasures, but they are not the result of thought and 
 fastidiousness (as were commonly his second phrases), 
 they are the result of mere haste. He has written 
 a word that would be useless, meaningless, or illegible, 
 and he substitutes, in almost equal haste, another. 
 That is the testimony of the writing. It has every 
 mark of a document demanded at a moment's notice by 
 his friend, and drafted in the hour before he spoke. 
 
 For, his vote once given in the Committee, he perse- 
 vered as men persevere in a monstrous evil. After such 
 a vote, Danton saved would be Danton an enemy, and 
 Danton an enemy following the very path of popular 
 clemency that Robespierre intended to follow. Such a 
 Danton would have meant the end of the Committee, 
 the end of that ideal of a half-religious, half-political 
 dominion which Robespierre thought now to be in his 
 grasp, and with which he desired " to make this nation 
 the refuge of the oppressed and the terror of oppressors." 
 
 He gave his vote, and fell into the fatal groove which 
 that beginning made for him ; he was to race down it, 
 through the aggravation of the Terror, to his own death, 
 and was to hear in the agony of Thermidor the name of 
 Danton striking him down like a spear. 
 
 I have described elsewhere the trial, the condemna- 
 tion and the death of the Indulgents. Here I am con- 
 cerned only with the man who had permitted this 
 sacrifice, and who shut himself in alone throughout that 
 morning and refused himself to all. 
 
 Hidden in his room over the narrow yard whence 
 the conquerors had run out to see the tumbrils go by, 
 he heard the roaring of the crowd, the creaking of the 
 
296 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 heavy wheels. Could he believe these men to be guilty, 
 or the Republic to be saved by such an abandonment? 
 He sat there with his set face in the little room, beginning 
 to see himself as the Republic incarnate. 
 
 Therein lay the core of this great tragedy — ^he saw 
 some other greater thing that was not himself, but a 
 vision of the Republic bearing his own features, and 
 began to worship it as did the crowd. He thought this 
 awful day would make that vision of the Republic in 
 some way real, and he confused the final advent of pure 
 freedom and of absolutely equal law with the vain but 
 portentous imagery of such a cloud. This sacrifice of 
 certain right for some larger but vanitary thing worked 
 in his mind like a poison, and on this first warm evening 
 of the year his inner security, which the vacillation of the 
 winter had already shaken, left him altogether. 
 
 After the sun had set over the guillotine, and as his 
 room darkened, he felt that the tumbrils had dragged 
 his spirit after them, and from that moment he was 
 drawn towards his end. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE FOUR MONTHS 
 
 It is well to put to every division of a book a name that 
 shall indicate its scope and thesis: there are many that 
 might tempt one other than this which I have put at 
 the head of the last stretch of the race. It would have 
 been consonant with the vague tradition we have of the 
 Revolution and with the false unity which the mind 
 lends to every story, to call it " The Dictator." Robes- 
 pierre gradually come to the supreme power in the State, 
 exercising it with an arbitrary wUl, punished by a sudden 
 revolt, would satisfy the spirit of drama. It is such a 
 simple reading as has commonly been adopted of the 
 tragedy ; but it is false. Had I adopted that reading I 
 could have made his story reach a natural end and have 
 set the notes to a harmony. But the end was abrupt 
 and unexpected, the harmony was absent, at least so far 
 as his own life is concerned. If harmony was there, it is 
 not to be discovered in a simple play of individual re- 
 tribution, but only in the great purpose which gives to 
 the history of Europe the movement of a providence. 
 He was never dictator. To call him that is to overlook 
 all modern research. 
 
 I might have spoken of this httle time as "The 
 Terror " ; the Terror in chief, the Climax of it. It killed 
 as many in seven weeks as had fallen in Paris during 
 five years.^ To the onlooker it was nothing but the 
 
 ' Up to the law of Prairial there had been 1220 execations in Paris. 
 Ton may add to these a hundred or so at the most for the period before 
 the Terror. In the seven weeks succeeding the law there were 1376. 
 
 "97 
 
298 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 delirium of the Terror. To the imprisoned, noting this 
 vast accession to their cells, this daily catastrophe; 
 trembling at the enormous lists, and waiting each for 
 his name to be called down the stone corridors, it was 
 nothing but the delirium of the Terror. But to Robes- 
 pierre it was not that at all ; he had helped to lead to 
 it, but he neither desired to make it, nor did he 
 use it. 
 
 I have called the period "The Four Months." If there 
 were a house in a London street where some tragedy im- 
 explained, still debated, had passed, and of which the 
 mystery should haimt you to the point of demanding 
 an analysis, you could not preface that analysis with a 
 word indicative of a definite solution, for no definite 
 solution could be reached ia your recital : you could but 
 give for title the name — the mere number of the place : 
 concentrate your reader upon the walls and windows 
 which stood there dumb, not having yielded a secret; 
 whose interest, indeed, lay in the doubt that attached 
 to them. 
 
 So it is with Robespierre. I have put at the head 
 of his time of power — or failure — that title of "The 
 Four Months," because the limits of time alone are 
 single and clear, within them there stood an intricate 
 and ravelled process whose uncertain character I shall 
 take to be somewhat as follows. 
 
 Robespierre from his inner room, his shrine, at the 
 Duplays passed for the Master of the RepubUc : Robes- 
 pierre in the public mouth was the name of the Republic, 
 of the Terror, of everything. Robespierre in his own 
 mind was willing, was perhaps persuaded, to think him- 
 self the master of the Republic. Robespierre in the 
 great Committee — which alone was the true centre of 
 power, which alone could command men, bayonets, guns, 
 and money — was the outer man, the politician. He 
 talked, he stood in the sun, he seemed their power in- 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 299 
 
 carnate, but to them within that sumptuous room,^ he 
 was the object of a mingled jealousy and irritation. He 
 did no work, he reproached them, he absented himself. 
 When he would have made the Terror excessive it was 
 but for a moment and for the ends of his religion. When 
 they were determined to persevere or extend its extreme 
 rigour as a kind of martial law, he bickered and quarrelled, 
 finding that rigour of theirs opposed to this Kousseauan 
 religion of his. I say, therefore, that Robespierre passing 
 — his mere name and reputation passing — for the Re- 
 public, accepted the homage at once, used it as things 
 to him essential, to the Committee valueless. I say that 
 he thought of himself as the RepubUc in person, and 
 that every word spoken in the Rue St. Honor^ confirmed 
 him in that r61e. Evidently then when the Terror passed 
 into gross conflict with common sense and necessity, 
 when the madness that had seized the Republic had to be 
 caught by some handle and put down, that handle, in spite 
 of himself, was Robespierre. He had passed for Power, 
 he had to sufi"er as though he had been really Power. 
 He had brought into the Terror personal quarrels that 
 made it the easier to combine against him. By his 
 character he provoked reaction. The committee were 
 glad to sacrifice him — they were unwittingly sacrificing 
 themselves. And when he fell there fell also with 
 him that high strain of democracy absolute which for 
 an unnaturally long period of time he had been able 
 to inspire in the populace. His violent death was a 
 gasp and tremor in which the common world and its 
 necessities returned. The whole vision of the great year 
 
 ' I say "sumptuous" on the authority of Meroier. Now Mercier is 
 a liar, but I can believe him here : the small employee coming in from 
 time to time to bring papers to his masters, finding them seated in that 
 royal room on the ground-floor and overlooking from their great inlaid 
 table the gardens of the palace, splendid in the hot summer of '94, and 
 the terrace of the old kings, carried away what was evidently a powerful 
 and direct impression. 
 
300 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 expired. It has left only that permanent part of visions ; 
 the troubling void, hunger, memory of the ideal which 
 will still work in our society till it is compelled to the 
 final change. We are driven to our unknown to-day by 
 the memory of '93. 
 
 Let me show his centre of eflfort and describe what 
 influence surrounded him as he approached the comedy 
 of power. For three years he had lived in that in- 
 fluence ; it had accentuated as time proceeded ; but now 
 that with the spring of 1794 he was lifted above all sup- 
 ports, and left with a gulf beneath him which determined 
 his utter ruin, the vast height of the r61e, and the 
 startling inadequacy of the actor are best grasped 
 through an appreciation of the home in which he moved 
 and the physical things that formed his most immediate 
 and continuous world. You will see in the picture of 
 that home of his how his vast renown rose from little 
 things, and was like a great smoke from a small fire of 
 weeds on a clear evening. 
 
 And by this I am very far from saying that the 
 humility and obscurity of his refuge should suggest a 
 meanness of the mind or an inadequacy of the spirit 
 to its mission. It was among the chief glories of the 
 eighteenth century that a man was regarded, I do not 
 say independently of adventitious rank or office, but 
 certainly independently of his material wealth in spite 
 of all the subtle suggestions that this coarsest and falsest 
 of criteria may carry with it. The Jacobite tradition had 
 been able, two generations before, to flourish in an atmos- 
 phere of misery and to feed on dreams; yet another 
 generation and Rousseau might be blamed for parasitical 
 attachment to the great, but never for a desire to 
 accumulate or to deal ; Goldsmith's brave lyrics were not 
 tarnished by the disorder of a garret, his spendthrift 
 negligence did nothing to hurt his fame. Washington 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 301 
 
 was still a hero in valley forge, lie would have remained 
 as great had he died in the rags and frost of that winter. 
 And of all the men who thus claimed immunity from 
 the judgments of greed, none carried the tradition higher 
 than the revolutionaries. Men, for the most part of a 
 solid professional position, they impoverished themselves 
 by their own enthusiasms. Condorcet dying starved, a 
 refugee from the miserable garret of St. Sulpice, Danton 
 bequeathing a pitiful and ruined fortune, Carnot m old 
 age wrapped up and stiff before the empty grate of his 
 exile — three men at utter variance in their political and 
 social ideals testify together to the common stoicism and 
 to the common freedom of the great souls that remade 
 the world. Such as chose to save their comfort and 
 increase their revenues by supple treason, the Tallyrands, 
 the Fouches, and the rest, were branded by their contem- 
 poraries with an odium that no later softness has found 
 it possible to efface; for in those days the iaterest of 
 haggling seemed paltry compared with the tide of living, 
 and bribery that is the lever of stable governments was 
 not hidden by any decent and necessary veil of hypocrisy. 
 That time, whose fault it was to over-glorify the spirit of 
 man, gave it at least a worthy plane of action and could 
 see it existing of itself, distinct and untrammelled. 
 
 I would not then convey any contrast of poverty with 
 fame. Moreover the household in which Robespierre 
 found his repose was not poor. Duplay's income, apart 
 from the earnings of his trade, amounted to a full six 
 himdred pounds a year, and he had retired upon the 
 proceeds of his savings until the outbreak of the Revolu- 
 tion, and the empty houses upon his hands compelled 
 him to re-enter business. He occupied a good leasehold, 
 of which the rent was but an eighth of his revenue, and 
 even found himself able to purchase it when the sale 
 of monastic land was decreed. The spirit, also, that 
 animated this home was sound and dignified; it was a 
 
302 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 good bourgeois place, such as France grows by nature in 
 thousands, and such as, in their great increase during the 
 last hundred years, now form the stable basis of her 
 power. 
 
 But Robespierre set in this frame — Robespierre 
 to whom the populace had lent such splendid imagina- 
 tions — was mesquin ; that is, paltry and ringing false; 
 he was something that seemed unworthy of his theme, 
 insipid and anaemic. In the intimacy of this man in 
 whom the nation had chosen to discover an harmonious 
 congeries of great qualities one might cynically expect 
 many things. A charlatan; one drinking fame; one 
 seizing the moment to mould a plan — it would not have 
 disappointed a melodramatic observer to find him sombre 
 and silent. 
 
 Well, he was none of these things. The society 
 of his privacy pleased him because it could offer him 
 a perpetual adulation of an unheroic kind. There he 
 could pour out daily for years the excellent but un- 
 developed principles which animated his public utterances. 
 The very virtues of simplicity, sobriety and rectitude 
 which he honestly valued, yet furnished him also with a 
 domestic audience whose knowledge of the world was 
 necessarily limited and who could find a mild perpetual 
 pleasure in the reiteration of just maxims. So perhaps I 
 can best express the quality of the interior he fitited 
 so well by saying that if some widely travelled and vigor- 
 ously minded man — and there were many such who 
 followed his public character with an absorbed interest 
 and even with devotion — if such a man had followed 
 him home to mark his domestic and real life he would 
 not have been shocked or angered or transported or 
 roused, but merely bored. 
 
 An honest man from the great hills of Auvergne, 
 one that had "got on," was his silent, devoted and 
 proud host. A young man coming in almost every 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 303 
 
 evening, to touch the spinet in his reveries, to sit silent 
 absorbing experience, was one of his principal -worship- 
 pers: a boy in whose veins ran the blood of Michael 
 Angelo ; a Buonarotti enamoured of this last Re- 
 naissance. Lebas, just, unlaughing, very brave; St. 
 Just, grown less devoted, his eyes not resting from the 
 wars, were his supporters. The eldest daughter of the 
 house, Eleanor, was the betrothed who had known very 
 little of affection, who sat like the rest in the circle of 
 the man. Whatever it was in him that made it possible 
 for others thus to follow — I presume his faith — radiated 
 here intensely over a little group as, outwardly, it had 
 radiated over and drawn up the faces of the whole 
 people. They tolerated even the perpetual repetition 
 of his presence. The great mirror of the mantelpiece 
 repeated him ; the great full-length portrait opposite the 
 door ; a metal bust upon the writing-table ; prints upon 
 the wall, repeated him. In the obsession of Robespierre, 
 night after night they watched and missed reality and in 
 that obsession of himself his own mind also was at last 
 fixed and bhnd. And so, as Paris outside escaped from 
 the influence, they still, and he himself, remained subject 
 to it. But St. Just was a little silent ; he had begun to 
 feel footing in the real world and had already understood 
 the soldiers. 
 
 From that cavern or temple which even now, rebuilt 
 a century since, has something secret and remote about 
 it, his orders issued; and his power, founded on an 
 imaginary, proceeded for the moment absolute over the 
 city. He had permitted the death of Danton; this 
 negative sin pushed him on to positive extravagance 
 in policy. 
 
 He had been compelled to admit first the Terror, then 
 the exaggeration of the Terror, now he was compelled 
 to follow it as it washed out to ruin. His new need 
 dragged him in the wake of the committee. If he was to 
 
304 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 be master (and he was already in a fashion master) how 
 could he attack the vehicle that bore him ? It is charac- 
 teristic of the men who will be masters (they are never 
 masters, for a man is only the master by consent of the 
 community) that they misapprehend the forces to their 
 hand. If they hear some shouting in the street they 
 take it for the People ; if they read six newspapers they 
 say, " this is Public Opinion " ; and if by an unhappy 
 accident they enter government, they take ten men 
 round a table to be the nation. So it was with Robes- 
 pierre. He had no finger on the pulse of France. He 
 heard minorities — dwindhng crowds — still shouting in 
 the street ; he sat with the rest of the Committee in the 
 great room of the Tuileries; he thought the tide was 
 still rising, and he consented to rise with it. In truth it 
 had begun to ebb. 
 
 What would a true leader have done on the edge of 
 the deliverance, on the eve of Fleurus? He would 
 have declared his conversion to normal law, and Paris 
 and all France would have made him more than a king. 
 He would even now, even after the execution of Danton, 
 have said, " This is the end. The Republic may breathe 
 again." But Robespierre never understood breathing and 
 living things. 
 
 The very day that Danton's head fell, the last shadow 
 of the old executive disappeared. Carnot proposed the 
 putting in commission of all the ministry, the subjec- 
 tion of these bodies to the Committee of Public Safety. 
 
 Carnot a few days later desired to arrest Hoche;^ 
 that grave step was taken. Did Robespierre protest ? No 
 one can tell. The veil covering these deliberations has 
 never been lifted. He did not sign. But he was for 
 those distant armies so palpably the ruler that Hoche 
 wrote to him saying, " You know my virtues and I yours. 
 
 * The decree is signed on the nth April. It is wholly in Carnot's 
 handwriting, save one word, an unimportant erasure. 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 305 
 
 Save me if you can. If you cannot save me from my 
 enemies, I shall die still praising your name."^ Some 
 one spoke and saved Hoche. He remained in prison 
 unmolested. 
 
 I repeat, what he did within the Committee cannot 
 be known. It is certain that he argued, contradicted, 
 offended, alluded a little of his popular mastery ; occa- 
 sionally threatened. It is equally certain that, with all 
 his repugnance for signing lists of the condemned, he 
 permitted the desperate policy of the Committee to take 
 its course. His real life was not in that room, it was 
 in the exterior and empty authority in which he de- 
 lighted. The Committee said, as it were, "Do what 
 you will with your popularity so long as you do not 
 break our labour." Kobespierre said, "Do what you 
 wUl with your plodding and your military executions so 
 long as I can use your name for my Idea." And the 
 populace and the Convention said, " This is Kobespierre; 
 he is the Kepublic, and perhaps also the Committee; let 
 us follow." These three misunderstandings are the whole 
 mystery of the spring of '94. 
 
 In the legend so created for him he revelled. On 
 the 7th of May he preached another — almost the last — 
 of those essays on religion and morals that did in truth 
 bind his hearers, though they have exasperated posterity. 
 Robespierre was excellent in his texts; in his exegesis 
 intolerably wearisome. He had said to Elizabeth Duplay, 
 that was about to be his sister-in-law, this charming 
 
 1 If (any one thinks it easy to write history, let him read this little 
 story. Hoche is, by the admission of every one, the bravest and the 
 frankest of the young generals. He writes to Robespierre as to a friend, 
 and so convinced are the bureaucrats of the reality of his friendship that 
 the letter is kept from Bobespierre. It never reached him. Carnot, on 
 the testimony of all history, is an honest man ; all the Carnots have 
 always been of the most loyal republican strain ; yet Carnot (on the 
 authority of his own son, "Memoirs," i. 450) says, "I had all the pains in 
 the world to save Hoche from Eobespierre." It is evidently a misunder- 
 standing and a quarrel, bnt what passed 7 
 
3o6 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 thing : '' Little one, you are laughing at religion ; you do 
 not yet know quite how much comfort and hope is 
 hidden in the depths of a permanent trust in God." 
 But when he would develop this before a Parliament, 
 when he would impose it upon a nation, he rang hoUow, 
 and seemed merely the dictator turned priest. Why? 
 Because he was altogether wanting in that principal 
 faculty of a creator of laws — the sentiment that a nation 
 is a person, and must be addressed with the directness 
 and the humour with which one would address the 
 individual. 
 
 I need not quote from that long speech ; it would be 
 a repetition of the whole five years — for he at least never 
 by thought added an inch to his mental stature. It 
 had in it a little of the old irony. " The neighbouring 
 governments approach the sublime ; at this moment they 
 chronicle with tenderness every action of their kings." 
 He struck the new note of the Four months in trampling 
 down the Herbertists that were gone, men who would 
 have turned irreligion into a system, and who made an 
 effort to thrust out the generosity of nature herself The 
 end of the whole was the sentence by which, perhaps, 
 his mixed memory is best retained : — 
 
 "The French people recognise the being of a God 
 and they recognise the immortality of the Soul." 
 
 With that phrase he thought that he had laid down 
 the principle of pure religion, that from it the future 
 would flow. For he thought (and all thought with him) 
 that he and his contemporaries stood on nothing old 
 and were pure creators; but behind them came the living 
 church trembling with a hundred dogmas and as multiple 
 as her innumerable years, as old as bread and wine. So 
 his one truth went up therein, like breath in a frost ; to- 
 day it is acknowledged and forgotten. 
 
 The poor remnant of the Convention, " the French 
 people," voted as they were bid. The populace also was 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 307 
 
 in that hall unseen, it also had a great unconscious vote 
 to cast. It voted the renascence of Catholicism. 
 
 He was certainly surrounded with enthusiasm at this 
 moment ; caressed. The letters which he kept so care- 
 fully, the vast accumulation which Courtois in great part 
 destroyed, now reached their greatest intensity, witnessed 
 to frenzy in the auditory or proved in a hundred absurdi- 
 ties to what an extent his mere name had passed up into 
 permanent meaning and had become the new epoch.^ 
 
 It was at this moment also that his apotheosis had 
 reached the point of exciting counter fanaticism. In 
 a remote, damp and sombre house an aged mystic, 
 a certain mad Catherine Th^ot, held a secret society 
 of others as mad as herself. Gerle, the ex-Carthusian 
 that had met Robespierre in the first Parliament years 
 before, was there ; so were a doctor of the Orleans, and 
 an old countess. They would sit upon blue thrones and 
 leave in the midst a white throne for Robespierre, " the 
 Messiah." ^ It remained empty. It was the moment in 
 which (20th of May) Ladmiral the clerk had asked for 
 him vaguely, wishing to kill him, and finding him out 
 had walked round to Collot d'Herbois and shot and 
 missed him. It was the moment when C^cile Renauld, 
 a girl of twenty, sauntered after dark, at nine, into the 
 courtyard of the Duplays with two knives in her market- 
 basket (22nd of May). There was even a talk of a plot 
 against the Committee. St. Just was called back from 
 
 ' At Marian in the ohnroh they sang, perhaps for a victory, the Te Deum. 
 At its close the people cheered for the Republic. _ Then some solemn 
 man remembered Robespierre. They cheered for Robespierre, and the 
 commune of Marian sent him a letter describing the incident. It is 
 interesting to remark that the sister of Mirabeau also wrote to him 
 at this epoch. If the phrase, " Dear Robespierre," seems a little cold, 
 it must be remembered that it was from a woman whose brother had been 
 disinterred and his ashes thrown to the winds. 
 
 ' There exists also a touching letter from an old man in a lost village 
 who calls him " The Messiah of the New World." 
 
3o8 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the army of the north/ came to Paris for a week, saw the 
 nonsense of it and went back to his soldiers. 
 
 But the key to the end was akeady supplied in the 
 phrase of one of these thousand letters. " A reputation 
 which not even enemies attempt to assail." ^ That was the 
 truth, and it was the particular truth that kiUed him. 
 No one could deny his sincerity, no one at that time 
 dreamt of denying his creed. He tortured men with 
 consistency. They could not destroy him with argument, 
 they attacked him at last with the sudden revolt of 
 nature. Barfere in his account to the Convention of the 
 attempt of C^cile Renauld supplied, unconsciously, another 
 argument. He spoke (and it was true enough) of 
 the way in which Robespierre had become abroad a 
 personification of the Revolution : for the English, who 
 made him out a kind of tyrant ; for the Germans, who 
 turned him into a proverb — we know now that he might 
 have added, " for that peaceful foreigner posterity who 
 judges things impartially and is often wrong." He meant 
 his appeal to mean, "We are specially indignant at the 
 attempt on Robespierre's life, because he is taken by most 
 ignorant people for the Republic itself, and therefore the 
 attempt was an attempt on the Republic." But the Con- 
 vention was thinking silently as it listened, "Why do 
 ignorant people think him to be the Republic ? " 
 
 The Feast of the Deity, the solemnity that his speech 
 of a month before had caused to be decreed, followed 
 that passage of enthusiasm and danger. He caused 
 himself (it would be pedantic to use any other phrase 
 — the Convention was not free) to be elected President 
 for the second time upon the Fourth of June ; on the 8 th 
 Paris had its fill of Symbolism, and the ridiculous, which 
 dogs symbolism as the fear of waking will dog a good 
 
 ' This letter was signed by all the committee, and oddly enough twice 
 over by Eobespierre. 
 
 " The expression is in Vaquier's letter at the end of Courtois' collection 
 and report. 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 309 
 
 dream at the end of the night, caught up that festival 
 in mid way and broke it even as it was acting. 
 
 To Robespierre, who was never touched by the 
 ridiculous, this feast was entrancing. By nine o'clock 
 of that brilliant summer morning he was already pacing, 
 impatient, fasting, in the halls of the Tuileries. 
 
 Vilate met him and said, " Have you breakfasted ? " 
 
 "No," said Robespierre, "... look out at that 
 garden and at all the people flocking. Nature is coming 
 in. . . ." 
 
 Vilate proposed that he should breakfast. They went 
 up hastily to eat something in Vilate's little room at 
 the top of the Pavilion de Flore, and Robespierre, still 
 absorbed, went to the attic window more than once, looked 
 out from that height and repeated — 
 
 " That part of humanity is the most absorbing of all. 
 ... I could say the whole world was here . . . there 
 are tyrants who will grow pale when they hear of 
 this. . . ."1 
 
 Then under the growing heat he went through the 
 show of cardboard and strong colours burning the statue 
 of Atheism, walking at the head of the Parliament to the 
 Champ de Mars, wrapped up in the applause of the 
 crowd, and in the music, and in the new, simple and 
 perfect religion he was giving to the world. All the 
 while his little figure in its white nankeen breeches and 
 blue coat was overwhelmed by the great tricolour sash 
 and the great tricolour plumes of the full dress : it was 
 the only time that he approached in appearance the 
 deputies on mission, for he was never with the armies. 
 But a man that had known our Europe better than 
 David would have concealed among these symbols a 
 figure of Laughter, tiptoe, with the legs of a faun and 
 pointed ears. 
 
 He came back to his home filled — ^falsely — with the 
 
 ' "Vilate," p. 34 of the original edition. 
 
3IO ROBESPIERRE 
 
 sense of power. He came back happy, and found happi- 
 ness there: Lebas' little son had been born that day. 
 Then in the full illusion of the opening summer, seeing 
 himself everywhere, and feeling France as though it were 
 mixed with his own blood, he imagined a full authority ; 
 he drafted the law of the loth of June — the 22nd 
 Prairial ^ — and began to reveal himself as he was. It was 
 just two days after he had most appeared as a symbol 
 over France that he began the plunge down into reality 
 and recognition. 
 
 The decree of that day — a decree drawn up in his 
 own hand ^ — proposed by his man, Couthon, forced upon 
 the Assembly by his voice and the vague menace of his 
 omnipotent reputation — may be stated in the single word, 
 tyranny ; but it was a tyranny such as never could last 
 for a year on this earth, such as no remote lord of Africa 
 could have exercised over his own bought slaves. 
 
 It had one major clause : it suppressed the defence. 
 The revolutionary tribunal was not based upon forms. 
 It was a court-martial, the mere servant of the Terror. But 
 it had maintaiued the exterior of law. It was not the 
 right of defence that led to the numerous acquittals, or 
 that imperilled the yet more numerous condemnations. 
 But the defence delayed and gave a formality to the action 
 of the court. It made it civilian; it forbade summary 
 execution. The law of Prairial was designed to make the 
 Committee as absolute as a conqueror is over a city taken 
 by assault. 
 
 I have said that Robespierre made this law ; forced 
 it upon the Convention. He desired, then, to make the 
 Committee tyrant — and he thought the Comtnittee was 
 
 1 But he is not the author of the law of the 17th April, which summoned 
 all cases of conspiracy and treason to Paris. Here, as so often, he is doing 
 nothing but following on the action of others, since the law of the 22nd 
 Prairial would have been nothing but for this predecessor. 
 
 ' As was also the instruction to the committee that were terioriaing 
 the south, the "Commission d'Orange," 21st Floreal. 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS ■ 311 
 
 one with him, as he thought the nation was. He did 
 more. When Bourdon, of the Oise,^ a man whom he 
 fixed for destruction, claimed that no member of the 
 Assembly could be brought before the revolutionary 
 tribunal without the consent of the Assembly, he vigo- 
 rously maintained that the discussion should be let drop. 
 " Give us the strength," he cried in a sudden inspiration, 
 " to bear the great burden you have laid upon our 
 shoulders." That is, make us dictators absolute, trust 
 us with all powers to save the Kepublie. Already, in the 
 first debate on the law, he had insisted against any 
 adjournment ; he had argued it clause by clause, and, 
 with a species of closure by menace, he had dictated it to 
 the ParHament ; he had passed it in one sitting. He 
 made the law, and he only. Why did he make it ? 
 
 I will hazard this paradox. It cannot be proved, it 
 is but an hypothesis, but it is the only hypothesis that 
 explains all. He made it in order to impose the pure 
 Republic upon the nation, and connected with that 
 idea was a determination to end the Terror. Could a 
 gross accentuation of the Terror tend to close it — save by 
 extermination ? It was not thus the problem presented 
 itself to him. His chief antagonists, the men whom he 
 thought to stand between him and the goal of the 
 Revolution, were the irresponsible proconsuls in the 
 provinces. He demanded in this law a sword against 
 them. Some time before,^ in a note written in his 
 own hand, and signed first by him, the committee had 
 recalled Fouch4 from Lyons. At the end of May he, 
 almost of his own initiative, had arrested Thereza 
 Cabarrus, the mistress of TaUien.^ He aimed directly at 
 
 ^ There is an MS. note of Robespierre's on Bourdon : " This man goes 
 about with the gait and habit of a criminal, seeking the opportunities of 
 crime." 
 
 2 On the 7th of Germinal (the 27th March). 
 
 ' This warrant of arrest (of the 22nd May) was the most direct cause 
 of the fall of Robespierre. It is a curious document, very characteristic 
 
312 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Tallien himself, who had spilt so much blood at Bor- 
 deaux, and had taken suddenly in that unhappy city to 
 lounging across drawing-rooms, and to posing as the 
 southern voluptuary ; an actor. 
 
 There was a kind of man (there were but six or seven 
 of them in the Convention) particularly odious to Kobes- 
 pierre, and he was of such a nature that what was odious 
 to him he believed of necessity to be odious also to God, 
 to Natvu-e, and to the Republic. This kind of man, who 
 had taken advantage of the Revolution in order to excel 
 in licence, who was the very antithesis of Rousseauan 
 stoicism, who was commonly an atheist, always an evil 
 Uver, seemed in the eyes of Robespierre to be a cancer in 
 the State. If it be asked why, to achieve his final pur- 
 pose to destroy these men and to impose upon the nation 
 the Republic that haunted him he had recourse to 
 such a venture as the law of the 22 nd of Prairial, the 
 answer is that men so utterly out of touch with reality as 
 he was can imagine no strength save the crude absolute 
 of power. Just as some modern men in politics will 
 conduct a war under the impression that victory means 
 something they have seen on a stage, a thing of one 
 blow, so this insufficient intellect thought that mastery 
 did not exist unless it were final and one. And this it 
 thought because it had in no way the genius of mastery. 
 
 That he had it in his mind to stop the Terror, to 
 
 of his habits ; it is written out in his own hand ; he has signed it first 
 at the top, then he has scratched out his first signature and signed it 
 again at the bottom. There are no capital letters, not even to the word 
 " Republic " ; and as nothing from his hand could be written without a re- 
 casting of style, there is even in these few lines an erasure. Therezia 
 Cabarrus was a Spaniard, not yet of age. Six years before, on the eye of 
 the Revolution, she had been married as a girl of fifteen to the Marquis 
 de Fontenay, who divorced her. Tallien married her in the winter after 
 Thermidor (26th December, '94), and divorced her in 1802. In 1805 she 
 married the Prince de Chimay, and died long after in his castle at Chimaj, 
 still bearing that unlucky title. She had borne seven children to these 
 three husbands, and four others besides. 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 313 
 
 appear as a kind of saviour of France, we know, not from 
 the calculated accounts made long after the reaction 
 (they are valueless), but from the natural outbursts of 
 Thermidor. 
 
 Barr^re, just after the death of Robespierre, let 
 loose a sentence that betrays it all : " He perished 
 because he would have stopped the great career of the 
 Revolution." Billaud, a fanatic not to be trusted with 
 the sword, violent, worthy of death, therefore a man 
 whose expletives must necessarily be honest, poured out, 
 as wiU be seen in a moment, a torrent of invective 
 against Robespierre in the debates that determined his 
 fall ; and all this invective turns upon Robespierre's 
 attempting to stop the Terror. I repeat, it cannot be 
 absolutely proved but it is the only workable hypothesis, 
 that the law of the i oth of June was the wUd grasping at 
 the full externals of power by a man who did not under- 
 stand the nature of power ; and he so grasped at it because 
 he believed that all France was behind him, and that 
 he would be able quickly and without debate to end the 
 welter of persecution and to save society ; there was then 
 something in this unsoldierly man of the Caesarist, and 
 every Caesar has felt something in common with him — 
 none more than Napoleon. 
 
 Now, from the law of the 22nd of PraLrial, and from 
 the direct determination of Robespierre to wipe out the 
 few remaining men that seemed to obstruct the advent 
 of a settled and an ideal state, there sprang two things. 
 
 The committee found itself finally omnipotent ; that 
 was the first thing. 
 
 The second thing was that the men whom he so openly 
 aimed at, entered, as their nature was, into a conspiracy. 
 
 To the committee, of which Robespierre erroneously 
 imagined himself to be the master, which he thought to 
 be, like the Convention, awed by the memory of his awful 
 popularity, the law of the 22nd of Prairial was what a 
 
314 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 gift of money is to a man already wealthy and avaricious 
 and deep in speculations. Camot (insisting upon the 
 feeding of the armies and believing that the Terror alone 
 could do it) ; Barrfere (determined to keep in existence the 
 organ of government with which he alone was acquainted, 
 and of which he was the mouthpiece) ; Prieur (considering 
 the breakdown of his foreign policy which would follow 
 too close an examination of the committee by the Conven- 
 tion) — they and all the rest of the committee saw in the 
 Terror a means of government which appeared to be fail- 
 ing them as the victories increased. They seized upon 
 the law of Prairial as an opportune completion of their 
 power ; they used it as Kobespierre never wished it to be 
 used, and when he asked them immediately after the 
 passing of the decree for the heads of the last few men 
 that remained (as he believed) the enemies of his system, 
 he was bluntly refused. The Committee was weary of 
 his affectation of control ; it was determined to use for 
 its own purposes the law which he had made; to cen- 
 tralise the action of the government and especially its 
 power of sudden stroke and punishment in Paris. In 
 seven weeks it had put to death nearly 1400 men. 
 
 From this sprang the obscure quarrel upon which, 
 in the face of all the contradictions and secrecy which 
 throw a veil over the debates of the Ten, historians can 
 never be secure judges. Only one thing is certain that 
 he attended the meetings of the Committee with reluct- 
 ance, that he argued against their most fundamental deci- 
 sions, that he threatened them with an obstinacy that can 
 only have been based upon a false judgment of his power 
 of control, and that, in fine, he grew increasingly irksome 
 to the handful of men who were still governing France. 
 
 The lower committee, which controlled the police of 
 the city, was already uniformly hostile to him. Vadier 
 got up in the most ridiculous fashion the case of the old 
 mystic Catherine Th^ot ; he presented his report to the 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 315 
 
 Convention in such a fashion that he appeared to be 
 defending Kobespierre, while in every phrase the old 
 buffoon knew that he was wounding him and bleeding 
 him; in every phrase he ridiculed religion, and Robes- 
 pierre in the chair sat silent and disgusted. This was 
 less than a week after the passing of the law. 
 
 Robespierre's answer to that insult was a kind of revolt 
 against the committees. He came indeed regularly enough, 
 he signed before the middle of Messidor six important docu- 
 ments with his colleagues ; on the 1 6th of that month he 
 wrote out a letter to the representatives on mission in the 
 name of the Committee; on the 28th he even took the 
 initiative in recalling Dubois Craned from Rennes, and on 
 the same day he was glad enough to sign an order for the 
 release of thirty-three prisoners whom Rousselin had ar- 
 rested in Troyes. It cannot be said that he absented him- 
 self in body from the committee. It has been proved that 
 between the law of the 22nd Prairial to the day of his 
 fall in Thermidor, he was actually absent from the com- 
 mittee but six times, just once a week ; but though he 
 was not physically absent he was morally separated from 
 the majority of his colleagues. He only came to inter- 
 fere with their principal work. Of all the lists of the 
 hundreds that were sent in that terrible summer to the 
 revolutionary tribunal, he signed after the beginning of 
 Messidor but one, and that the least important, and when 
 he came to defend himself in his long final speech to the 
 Convention on the day before his fall, he said in so many 
 words : — 
 
 " I will not make public the debates of the Com- 
 mittee ; I will confine myself to saying that for the last 
 six weeks the force of calumny has made it impossible 
 for me to arrest the torrent of evU deeds. ... I far 
 prefer my character of a representative of the people 
 to that of a member of the Committee of Fublio 
 Safety." 
 
3i6 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 In the same speech he said (and he was perfectly 
 sincere in it) : — 
 
 "I -was but for a few days at the head of the 
 police because one of my colleagues was absent; I was 
 concerned with the arrest of perhaps some thirty men, 
 and yet that little time has given an excuse for telling 
 every man that if he is imprisoned it is I who am to 
 blame." 
 
 The suspicion with which he was haunted was not 
 wholly just. There was indeed a definite conspiracy 
 already formed against him, but that conspiracy was 
 extraneous to the Committee. It was Fouchd and Tallien 
 and their friends, the lost men of the Convention, men 
 utterly inferior to the Government, that were weaving the 
 conspiracy. The Committee, exasperated at his pride, 
 his silence, his opposition, his refusal to accept their 
 policy, were yet not actively dragging him down ; it was 
 because his name had become identified with that of the 
 Revolution, because he had yielded to the great tempta- 
 tion of the winter, that now this nemesis had come. He 
 could not escape from the accusation that he was him- 
 self the Republic, himself the Government, and himself 
 the Terror. He had chosen to pass for the Revolution 
 incarnate ; now that, with the victories certain and the 
 nation safe, the Terror was becoming odious, he was com- 
 pelled still to pass, in spite of himself, for the incarnate 
 Terror, and in all the cabinets of Europe, in all the 
 prisons throughout France, Robespierre was the name of 
 that intolerable anachronism.^ 
 
 Caught in this trap, which his own yielding to 
 ambition had laid, Robespierre advanced to meet his fate 
 by falling into every error that could ruin him. 
 
 ^ When Madame Duplay was thrust into the prison on the 9th of Ther- 
 midor (a prison from which she never came out alive), one of the prisoners 
 asked who she Was, and another answered, " She was the Queen, but now 
 she is dethroned." On this string even the jailers harped as the rest of 
 her household came in under arrest. 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 317 
 
 I have described in an earlier portion of this book 
 how by nature he avoided the mention of personal 
 names. How, in the great quarrel with the Girondins 
 upon the question of war, for once that he said the 
 word " Brissot " or " Roland " his opponents spoke his 
 own name ten times. 
 
 On his Hps there were always such phrases as, "a 
 certain faction," " men of such and such a kind," and 
 so forth; it was mania for generalities upon which he 
 could pursue his mania for deduction. 
 
 I have described also how, when he merged into the 
 new violence of Paris after the i oth of August, he for a 
 moment became more direct and how there was apparent 
 in him a permanent bitterness and a kind of venom which 
 pricked his opponents to fury. He was then upon a 
 rising tide; the people demanded government; he was 
 one of the conquerors of the Gironde. 
 
 Now that he was losing, this feature reappeared. In 
 the beginning of the great quarrel in which he fell he 
 had attempted to make a general description which his 
 audience were intended to apply to Bourdon. Bourdon 
 rose up in a fury, crying, '' It has been pointed out pretty 
 clearly in this speech that I am a scoundrel." Robes- 
 pierre, losing control, had answered from the tribune : 
 "In the name of the country, let these interruptions 
 cease. It is an awful peril for any man to name himself 
 If he is determined to recognise himself in the portrait I 
 have drawn, in the portrait which my duty has compelled 
 me to draw, it is not in my power to prevent him." From 
 several quarters of the hall there had arisen the cry of 
 "Names!" Robespierre had only answered, "I will 
 name them when I must." ^ 
 
 That was in Prairial. In Messidor, as his danger 
 drew nearer, he broke out into direct invective. He 
 
 ' In the debate on the law of Frairial see Moniteur of the 26th 
 Frairial, the year IL 
 
3i8 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 attacked Fouchd on the nth of July, and when FoucW 
 replied on the 14th, the day of the great anniversary, 
 Robespierre met him with further direct accusations. 
 
 " What is this fear which troubles him ? Is it perhaps 
 the eyes of the people ? Is it perhaps that his wretched 
 face proves him too clearly the author of a crime ? " 
 And he ended with the straight words : " These men have 
 put patriots in prison because they dared to break silence. 
 That is the crime of which I accuse Fouch^." 
 
 But though he had only six or seven in mind, he 
 that had passed by his own fault for the Master of the 
 Terror seemed to be accusing every one. He made the 
 Convention tremble and the Jacobins. And who shall 
 say that he took no pleasure in such a simulacrum of 
 power ? Yet even that had left him. The great victories 
 in the north-east had thrown the populace into an ardent 
 need for repose. It was like the craving for sleep that falls 
 upon men who have overstrained their powers in a bout 
 of feverish games. And the centre of all authority, the 
 only immediate possessors of material power, the Com- 
 mittee, were against him. The seven workers were 
 leaving him ostracised, and were drawing a sharp line 
 between themselves and his two friends, Couthon and 
 St. Just. 
 
 To these difficulties he added yet another. It will 
 be remarked that men in their difficulties, and especially 
 before their death, often return to the influences of their 
 chUdhood. In such crises the stirp of the man re- 
 appears. So Robespierre, that had always preached 
 himself, seen himself, and, if the phrase be not unjust, 
 unconsciously worshipped himself, now in these last days 
 returned to the self-pity of that mournful and isolated 
 time of his orphanage. He found all power leaving him, 
 and thought himself a victim. Perhaps he still believed 
 that the people of Paris in some vague way would 
 support him. He was wrong. There was but one thing 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 319 
 
 ready to support him, the Commune of Paris, and that 
 Commune did not represent the people at all. He had 
 himself thrust in upon it his own supporters. 
 
 Down in Nantes a young representative on mission ^ 
 intercepted two letters which Fouch6 had written to his 
 sister. They spoke plainly of the coming attack, "in 
 which it was hoped that all would turn for the best." 
 He sent them back to the Committee of Pubhc Safety. 
 Perhaps by their enmity, perhaps by this young man's 
 tardiness, the letter did not come until Robespierre had 
 fallen. 
 
 It was on the 5 th of Thermidor that he first received 
 a clear warning. The two committees united to send 
 him a note summoning him as though he were a power 
 outside them and inimical to them : it was a kind of 
 writ. He came to them and rephed to their ques- 
 tions ; but a trial of that kind where a man suspected of 
 betraying or attacking the body he belongs to is called up 
 before his colleagues, goes as it were by default ; it is a 
 verdict, and condemns of itself. He met the supreme 
 moment of danger in a manner that was a summary of 
 his whole life ; he fell back upon his pen. 
 
 There was lying on the little plain table of his room a 
 mass of sheets which he had been working, modelling, re- 
 casting during all these weeks of increasing uncertainty.^ 
 He turned to them and perfected his plea. For two 
 days he wrote unceasingly. Around him, inspiring him 
 a little in his defence, was the severity that had 
 been the furniture of his strict simplicity; the plain 
 small bed ; ' the Httle deal shelf where his few books, his 
 
 ^ A person of the name of Bo. 
 
 ^ That is a mere conjecture, but it is Miohelet's, and surely sound. 
 Kg one can look at those innumerable collections or savour the close 
 style and great length of the speech without seeing in it a labour of much 
 more than the last two days. 
 
 ^ Those who care for detail may be curious to learn that the curtains 
 of this bed were made out of an old blue dress of Madame Duplay's. 
 
320 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Rousseau, Corneille and Pascal stood together ; the straw- 
 bottomed chair. He ■wrote and wrote with the noise of 
 the carpenters beneath his window, and, in the street be- 
 yond the archway of the courtyard, the noise of the city 
 in summer, and, twice, the cries and terror of the tumbrils. 
 It was the shrine or cell whence he had seen all the 
 height of the Revolution go by, and in which he had 
 moulded a hundred speeches that had expressed, but not 
 determined, its course. It was the room in which he 
 had sat, certain of his own mind when he told them to 
 shut the outer door upon the passage of Louis to his 
 death : in which, disturbed but evilly tenacious he had 
 heard come into him the death-song of Danton. Now he 
 himself was here parrying off the end, he thought, with 
 scratched and repeated phrases. 
 
 He left his room but twice in these forty-eight hours. 
 Once to walk out at sunset for the last time with 
 Eleanor — his dog beside him. Again in the same 
 evening to make a vague, troubling speech at the 
 Jacobins on the persecution that virtue was suffering; 
 that he was suffering. It roused the club, still his chief 
 weapon, to present a petition to the Convention ; and that 
 petition seemed yet another menace to the Parliament. 
 
 On the evening of the 7 th his work was done. It is 
 to be noted that he never doubted of its success ; he was 
 more confident at the close of his labour than he had 
 been in all the growing peril of Messidor. 
 
 In the last hours of daylight, in the warmth and splen- 
 dour of a weather that was but just beginning to intro- 
 duce the oppression of storm, he left his completed phrases 
 and, taking the boy, Nicholas Duplay,^ that had sometimes 
 been his secretary, walked up and out to the hill of 
 Chaillot. There he sauntered, talking gently of common 
 
 ' They called him " Nicholas of the wooden leg " because he had lost 
 a limb at Valmy. He was the nephew of Duplay. He lived on well into 
 our century and had a son, who became a doctor of some repute and has 
 preserved this little scene, 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 321 
 
 tilings, quietly gay, catching at the midges with his 
 hand, permitting himself at moments reverie. The next 
 day he read his speech to the Convention. 
 
 There is no need to detail the character or to quote 
 the many phrases of his defence. Noted on its margin 
 were names he did pronounce, its character lay in an 
 opening sentence. 
 
 " I shall make it my task to expose the abuses that 
 are about to ruin the country, and that your honesty 
 alone can correct. If I speak of the persecution to which 
 I have been latterly subject, count it no crime in me, the 
 cause is your cause also. ... I come here to make no 
 accusations : that province is in the hands of others." 
 
 In a famous and dignified passage that has a quality 
 parallel to but lower than nobility, he asks what Mnd of 
 tyranny that can have been in him which made all the 
 tyrants of Europe find him their chief enemy; he pro- 
 phesies clearly and with a separate marked passage the 
 advent of a military despotism upon his ruin, and, since it 
 might come to death, he passed upon death, upon his own 
 death, his final judgment : — 
 
 " Believe me, it is not an eternal sleep. I would have 
 it written upon all graves that they are the entry to im- 
 mortality." 
 
 It was not upon the Convention, vmcertain, reading 
 into his words the menace he may have intended to 
 convey, that he depended. He depended in the last 
 resort upon the great society that had so long been the 
 mistress of the Eevolution, and over which his name still 
 stood like a command. That evening he re-read his 
 appeal in the crowded chapel and before the high passion 
 of the Jacobins. They heard him with such zeal that he 
 seemed to them in his lonely tribune the Eeform living, 
 the Reform on the threshold of death. He ended with : — 
 
 " This that you have heard is my testament and my 
 wilL" 
 
322 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Then he lifted off the spectacles that spoilt his gaze, 
 showed his sharply featured face silhouetted by the 
 candles before it, and, leaving his manuscript, said to 
 them all : — 
 
 " If I must drink the hemlock, I will drink it." 
 
 David of the swollen jaw cried out to him loudly 
 from the throng and darkness of the nave : — 
 
 " I will drink it with you." 
 
 Frenzy and something lyrical caught the press of the 
 Jacobins and ran, a flame, along the haU. Billaud- 
 Varennes, CoUot d'Herbois, chiefly enemies; Dubarran, 
 Duval, lesser men, were listening there also ; they were 
 recognised. One at least was struck at with a poniard ; 
 they were pushed through the doors of the chapel out 
 into the night, and behind them the club, enthusiastic 
 and possessed with a presentiment, feeling that their 
 vision and this man of theirs would end together and 
 that the turn of the battle had come, cried that a 2nd 
 of June was needed, that Paris should march upon the 
 Parliament, that one last stroke of the scythe would clear 
 the field. 
 
 As the fugitives fled angrily from the arches of the 
 courtyard they heard the air full not only of clamour, 
 but of rising and conquering music. The Jacobins sang 
 of the Kepublic, and with the falling of their chorus their 
 power passed out into the void and was extinguished. 
 
 So the Jacobins ended their song. But three spirits 
 that night, the three fates of Robespierre, kept watch 
 till the morning — the Conspiracy, the Commune, the 
 Committee. The Committee was the foremost. The 
 Commune thought itself the immediate power. The 
 Conspiracy was the one thing active and determined, 
 the one thing that understood how far this mixture of 
 tyranny, special policy, sjrmbolism, and madness had 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 323 
 
 overshot the mark ; how much France and the Conven- 
 tion demanded rest. 
 
 The Conspiracy. — And none of the three slept. 
 The Conspirators went from one to another; they threw 
 away at last their shreds of theory, their mask of prin- 
 ciple, for the mere sake of existence. They put before 
 themselves the simplest of objects: to live and to kill 
 what would have stopped their living; for they were 
 livers all of the worst, plunged up to the neck in sense, 
 and half ruined in their earliest youth by the excess of 
 living. Yet they grasped hold of life with the blind 
 tenacity of panic, because life was all they knew. God 
 gave it them, and the name of Fouch4 is enough to show 
 the material they were permitted to use. 
 
 All that night, then, in the defence of their lives, they 
 worked with every lever and upon every side to upset the 
 last strong ruins of Robespierre's power. They approached 
 the isolated politicians of the Mountain and plied them with 
 what could not be denied, the name of master that was 
 given to Robespierre ; his latter dissociation from the strict 
 republicans, and his leaning to the Right. The Moun- 
 tain gave them some disdainful pledge — it did not seem 
 enough. 
 
 They passed, did these men whom all in common 
 despised, but in whom all in common saw a kind of 
 necessary vengeance, to the silent relics of what had 
 been the moderates : to Boissy d'Anglas with his great 
 name, to Si^yfes with his memories — perhaps to Gregoire. 
 To these they promised (with how little belief in their 
 Vord and with what unconscious power of prophecy!) 
 the close of the Terror. None knew better than the 
 Conspirators that their own deaths would be the surest 
 opportunity for the entry of civil law and of amnesties. 
 But the Conspirators played here upon the surest chord. 
 So identified was the Terror with extreme theory and 
 with the person of Robespierre that it seemed as though 
 
324 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 to end the one was to end the other too ; and the man 
 was easiest ended. It was slowly, and in the painful 
 decision of the sleepless morning, that the Right thus 
 consented to vote against the man who had so long stood 
 between them and the guillotine. 
 
 The Commune. — There was also in Paris that second 
 force which has run through these pages like a chord. 
 Paris had once felt her mastery, had organised her 
 authority, and had, with the proud irresponsibility which 
 belongs aUke to kings and aristocracies, enforced herself 
 upon the inaction of the nation. The municipal govern- 
 ment, framed in the moment of most extreme danger, 
 and depending upon the theory of the city's leadership, 
 remained; and the men that composed it still thought 
 themselves in some legitimate way the masters. If such 
 and such were arraigned, the Commune were the justice 
 of France to judge their treason; if the national effort 
 weakened they were the ordained and elected force to 
 restore its vigour. They did not know how much they 
 had lost France ; they had lost Paris itself, these last 
 abandoned extremists whom a receding tide had left 
 stranded, whom the sections would not follow, and whose 
 command now seemed extravagant. Yet in good faith 
 and even with confidence they also kept vigil. If 
 Robespierre feU, there fell with him all their creed of 
 justice. 
 
 Hanriot, on the 2nd of June, had achieved one revolu- 
 tion, he was sure he could achieve another, and in the 
 night he sent out his orders to the sections and their 
 cannon. We shall see how they hesitated and doubted 
 and did little. 
 
 France, for which Paris exists, had no more need 
 of Paris. Payan, however, pxire Robespierrean, not even 
 Parisian, worked hard at the head of the municipality 
 for Robespierre. Haughty and a little flippant, that 
 young man next day entered the den of the Committee 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 
 
 325 
 
 at noon and escaped safe. He also did not sleep, all 
 the night he summoned, organised, and watched. 
 
 If the Commune had still been the Commune all the 
 armed men would have stirred in the night and out of 
 the mouths of twenty little narrow streets the pikes and 
 the cannon would have poured upon the Place de Grfeve 
 till the whole great square would not have held them. 
 It would have been once more the 2nd of June or the 
 I oth of August ; Paris made united by a word of com- 
 mand or authority. But Authority was wanting. The 
 General Will that was known as Authority was silent. A 
 lesser authority remained, the Parliament ; and by Autho- 
 rity the French people live. Robespierre (whom Hanriot 
 and aU the Commune sat up that night to defend) dared 
 not defy Authority. He perished because he could not 
 sign an order outside law and separate from the general 
 mandate. 
 
 The Committee. — Up in a high room of the Pavilion de 
 Flore, the southern pavilion of the palace, five of the Com- 
 mittee sat in silence round the great table. The despotic 
 council that the Republic had imposed upon herself with 
 a marvellous instinct to her own salvation was at the 
 extreme verge of its power, and the night, that had 
 inspired their secrecy and intensity for many months of 
 doubtful struggle and that had nourished their continued 
 silence, still presided like a steadfast mistress over their 
 end. The battle was over, and it is fitting to regard 
 those few hours of darkness as the close of a great 
 action in which, take them for all in all, these ill- 
 assorted men had saved the nation. 
 
 Nor was their passing watched by the overhanging 
 night alone. Beneath their windows, the wall of the 
 TuUeries — a gulf over Paris, a cliff, below which the 
 Seine ran low and meagre in the great heat, up which 
 there surged at this late hour the noise of the flood of 
 reaction, confused, eddying, rising— was the abrupt em- 
 
326 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 blem of the suddenness of this end. The relaxation 
 of inhuman heroisms, inflexible cruelties, mad judg- 
 ments, and unattainable visions was come, and with 
 the loosening of the hard revolutionary grasp there 
 snapped at once the bond that had held the strange 
 fabric rigid. Next day all the new France was to lapse 
 into turmoil. But the confusion of waters was the 
 launching of a ship, and years after the Modern State, 
 that men thought lost, was to ride even and secure. 
 
 The five were Barrfere, a Gascon, uncertain, waiting; 
 the three workers — Carnot, the soldiery the lawyers 
 Prieur and Lindet — and lastly, St. Just. But these five, 
 of whom certain historians in the light of what was to 
 come, would make two camps, were by no means so 
 clearly divided. A kind of suspicion made the silence 
 difi&cult, and sharpened the ear of each to the scratch- 
 ing of the quills. Yet no one had spoken the word, or 
 even harboured it. Barr^re was still unsure, Carnot still 
 absorbed in orders. They knew Robespierre that had 
 irked and half deserted them, to be in jeopardy. St. Just 
 they knew to be his shield-bearer. Yet one thing only 
 concerned the workers, to be allowed to continue their work; 
 and one thing only concerned Barrere, to be allowed to 
 remain the voice and the official of what was now with- 
 out question the sole government. Nevertheless Robes- 
 pierre's continued power would have widened the gulf 
 between him and the Committee, while if the balance 
 trembled ever so little against him, that little would 
 prove enough to throw Carnot and all Camot's following 
 into the opposing scale, and the Committees would 
 become the executioners of the triumvirs. As yet that 
 had not come, and the five still worked in silence. 
 
 They had so sat for about an hour with barely a word 
 between them, save when one or the other passed round 
 an order for the rest to sign. 
 
 It was eleven o'clock, the Jacobins had just poured 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 327 
 
 their angry flood into the street, chasing Billaud and 
 CoUot before them. This last ran, beside himself, 
 down the dark lane of the stables, followed by his 
 clique, and gathering round him as he passed into the 
 palace some few of the lower committee. They sprang, 
 full of their defeat and insults, up the great staircase of 
 the pavUion, and calling and reviling confusedly, broke 
 into the room where the five were sitting. 
 
 CoUot d'Herbois, ill-balanced, with his tortured 
 face of anger and shame, threw out openly against St. 
 Just all those words which had worked under the surface 
 of so many minds for so long. 
 
 " They, the Committee, the whole Kepublic was op- 
 pressed. They could not breathe. There was a dictator- 
 ship, and it was even insolent. Here to-night in the 
 crisis of their fortunes it had left them face to face with 
 a chUd. Why was not Robespierre there to answer him ? 
 Where was Couthon ? They were left with a boy, St. Just, 
 to deal with ; they were insulted with a child." 
 
 He would repeat the word, " a child, a child." It 
 was the best insult he could find to pay back in their 
 own coin the stings of the Jacobins. 
 
 St. Just's great beauty, his stature, his youth, his 
 birth, were a power to him. He had risen when his 
 enemies stumbled in, and had asked coldly, as though it 
 was small talk, " what was on at the Jacobins." During 
 the confused rush of words that poured from Collot, 
 mingled with the interjections of the rest, St. Just 
 remained standing. Then he sat down, as quietly, and 
 took paper to draft what he had determined to say to the 
 Convention in the morning, leaving on the other side of 
 the table a small erect crowd that still cried and menaced, 
 and that the remaining members of the great Committee 
 half supported, half soothed into silence. 
 
 What scene was that which occupied the remaining 
 hours ? The accounts are varied, the details confused. 
 
328 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 It was barely half-an-hour before midniglit when St. Just 
 sat down to write ; his head held, as he had always held 
 it, stiffly in the half-military stock that recalled the 
 eastern victories. But midnight came early in the scene. 
 For hours there were outbursts of recrimination on the 
 part of the new-comers, unanswered or hardly answered 
 by the young man before them, with his eyes downward : 
 with the fine oval of his face fixed like steel enamelled. 
 
 And in those hours the workers still worked, Barrfere 
 still temporised. Perhaps some few of the interrupters 
 slept. St. Just wrote on, drawing up that requisitory 
 which, had it been pronounced, might have saved his 
 friend. 
 
 An uneasy dawn, the long early dawn of midsummer 
 began to mark the tall curtains of the room and to show 
 reality shivering. The twin candelabra bm:nt paler, and 
 the details of the high cornice, the regal details that the 
 committee had inherited, appeared against the painted 
 ceiling. The polished woodwork of the parquetted floor 
 shone in the half light. The workers still worked on, 
 Barrfere still hesitated — indeed, he hardly understood the 
 quarrel. The whole of the second committee had filtered 
 in, and sprawled half asleep, half awake in the midst of 
 their masters. The fool Lecointre, ia an agony, thinking 
 all depended upon immediate action, had armed himself to 
 the teeth, stuffed into his trousers pockets two pistols with 
 miniature bayonets, the points of which poked outwards, 
 and had been hammering at the door. Not he but his 
 note had at last been admitted. It merely urged them to 
 arrest Hanriot and check the Commune — a plan which 
 eight hours more did not suffice to argue out or determine. 
 Meanwhile the one representative of Robespierre still sat 
 impassible as the light grew ; he scratched out, rewrote 
 and moulded his thesis of defence. Throughout this work 
 he lifted his head from time to time to speak in some 
 commonplace phrase or other to his colleagues. He 
 
THE FOUR MONTHS 329 
 
 avoided any general enmity. When he addressed the 
 two committees as a whole it was to assure them that 
 the Committee of Public Safety should see his work 
 before he read it to the Convention, nor could even an 
 eye-witness have known that those four colleagues of 
 his were ready for his death ; and for that of Couthon, 
 absent, and for that of Robespierre. 
 
 When it had been for some time fuUy light, so that 
 the candles were blown out and the faces of these sleep- 
 less men, though haggard and unnatural, turned to the 
 new task of a new day, St. Just rose at last, and took 
 his hat and his papers gravely, and passed out from the 
 room, to which he returned so soon outlawed, a prisoner, 
 and maimed. Without, it smelt of morning. But the 
 morning was not sunlit. There was no promise in the 
 deserted streets, nor any lifting of the heart. The sky 
 was ominous and veiled, the air charged with the silent 
 approach of storm as he passed up the narrow streets to 
 his home. 
 
 Robespierre, back under his own roof, thought to 
 have found security. 
 
 That short summer night, in which his fate was 
 gathering, as the thunder did, weighed upon him with no 
 incumbent menace, and conveyed, to him, no prefatory 
 silence of doom. His mind, still absorbed in those 
 abstractions whose matter was little beyond the image 
 of himself, remained equable and closed as ever to the 
 portents that were already troubling so many between 
 the daylight and the daylight. The influence of the time, 
 the close air and the dark sky, the vision of the crowded 
 prisons, the indefinable unquiet rumour that passes 
 through great cities as they await a climax in their 
 history, left undisturbed that unnatural ease of his which 
 had earned him falsely the titles of greater men. Yet 
 he was the victim upon whom this tragedy converged. 
 The general face of nature, whose features men more 
 
330 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 ordinary and more human comprehend by a generous 
 instinct, was fixed upon him with a gaze that might have 
 moved him to heroie exclamation or to frenzy, had not 
 his soul been incapable alike of enthusiasms or of terrors. 
 It was upon him — if one may personify the physical 
 character of a time — that this July night had fixed the 
 level eyes of necessity. He did not feel the gaze ; he was 
 able to repose. The scene at the Jacobins which had 
 drawn such a cry from David and will ever remain a 
 mark in the history of his country, had not the power to 
 change the course of those habits which best reflected his 
 interior life. He continued the exact care of his clothing 
 and his unalterable determination to purge mankind of 
 evil and to restore it to its origins of simplicity. He slept 
 soundly his short and easy sleep, rose at his accustomed 
 hour, dressed with minute care and with the touch of 
 over-neatness that had distinguished him from the deli- 
 rious crowd, and put on for the encounter of that day 
 the light-blue coat which had become his habitual wear 
 and which he had first used six weeks before in the feast 
 of the Supreme Being. 
 
 As he left the house Duplay came to the door with 
 him, anxious and full of warning: a generous friend. 
 Robespierre answered him with the thin but almost 
 genial smile that was the constant mark of his assurance. 
 "The Convention was honest in the main — all great 
 masses of men were honest." 
 
 So he went out into the stifling air and under the 
 grey sky with the restrained and decent step that all men 
 had recognised so long, crossed the street and turned 
 down the narrow lane to the palace, leaving behind him 
 the unsatisfied foreboding of a simple and loyal man, 
 humbler, but much wiser than himself; for he never 
 came home, and he never slept again. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 ««TH E RMID O R» 
 
 It was close on noon. The Convention had met, troubled 
 under a troubled sky, and busy with an instinct that will 
 sometimes permeate great assemblies ; the vague anxiety 
 that, for all their hesitation, fate is using them for a 
 certain work. Each member of those obscure hundreds 
 felt himself helpless and in doubt, but knew how that 
 very helplessness would leave him at the mercy of such 
 orgasms as seize suddenly upon multitudes; for at this 
 late hour men had learnt the fallacy of corporate action 
 and had discovered that a number gathered is far more 
 than the sum of its individuals, and that there broods 
 over it, ready to drive it to madness, or heroism, or panic, 
 or superhuman resolutions, the spirit of the Horde. 
 
 Two little groups present there knew very well at 
 what they aimed, yet, though they were direct opposing 
 enemies, their aims were not strictly contrasted. It was 
 the arena, the moment and necessity for victory, that 
 drew them up against one another, and the necessity for 
 an issue that made the life of Robespierre the stake 
 of the game. 
 
 The first group were those few conspirators to whom 
 the rule of a Puritan and the pressure of one man had 
 grown from the odious to the intolerable. They were 
 indeed mere spokesmen, and it is a character never to be 
 forgotten in the history of Thermidor that by a mixture 
 of confusion and disgust the solid opposition to Maxi- 
 milian abandoned its expression to men whose character 
 
 331 
 
332 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 none valued and whose violence and irresponsibility left 
 them free for every adventure. They were a voice, were 
 Fr^ron, Tallien, FoucW and the rest, but they spoke (if 
 they succeeded) for a definitely formed opinion. They 
 spoke for the irritation of the working members of the 
 great Committee; for the jealousy and exasperation of 
 a lower committee that was almost unanimous; for 
 the fears of many extremists returned from their work 
 in the provinces and dreading vengeance. All these 
 (and there might be added to them many soldiers, 
 diplomats, administrators), were fighting the final success 
 of a regime in which an extreme political idealism and 
 the fanaticism for its tribune might destroy the whole 
 accomplished work of one, the pleasures of another, the 
 life of a third. 
 
 Against the conspirators there were ranged a yet 
 smaller body, the friends of Robespierre but the friends of 
 much more. Couthon, St. Just, Lebas, Payan felt a net 
 drawing round their Perfect State just at its rising. The 
 practical and the judicious — compromise — ^perhaps re- 
 action — were appearing on the horizons of their battle- 
 field and converging upon their great experiment. A 
 way had to be cut through such enemies and their 
 scheme saved to the world. For the Perfect State had 
 from a goal become a present vision to these men and 
 their adherents ; in them, by a rare political phenomenon, 
 success had not dissipated the ideal nor turned it into a 
 memory, but had raised it above earth and given it 
 the strength and reality of a creed. They had passed 
 from affirmation to prophecy, and where the enthusiasm 
 of others had fed upon the war and the defence and had 
 fallen with the victories, theirs only grew the more lyrical 
 and exalted from what they conceived to be the military 
 security of their new world. 
 
 Of these men the most determined, the sanest and 
 yet the most inspired was St. Just. Very young and 
 
"THERMIDOR" 333 
 
 violent as he was, he yet had the broadest view and the 
 largest potentialities — he was not ignorant of humour; he 
 could bargain. He had formed of the social spirit that 
 the Jacobins were occupied in creating a fuller and a more 
 human conception than had any of his circle. He would 
 have given it a religion, he would have organised a 
 legislature that would be popular without anarchy, and an 
 executive that would have remained impersonal and re- 
 presentative without any exaggeration of numbers. I 
 would not convey that he was of a calibre to guide 
 the Kepublic nor pretend that such a flame could, in 
 ordinary times, have done more than consume ; had (for 
 example) Robespierre achieved his plan, the boy St. Just 
 would surely have failed where the man Carnot succeeded. 
 But I mean that among those enthusiasts of which he 
 formed a member, it was he who most thoroughly entered 
 into men, whose dream would have made the better poem 
 or picture, whose art was the firmest. He had been a 
 soldier, he had seen the common man at work in the 
 trenches by Charleroi, he had touched earth, and at the 
 head of charges he had had breathed into him that 
 vast spirit of an army which magnifies every sense in 
 man. If Robespierre had been his attachment, yet he 
 was less of an idol to him than to the crowd; what 
 he came to defend that day was His Republic, and in the 
 defence of it he was even willing to depose his Mend 
 a little, by a step or two, from the throne. 
 
 This young man stood at the foot of the tribune 
 as the minutes were read and the correspondence opened. 
 When the formalities were over he turned to CoUot 
 d'Herbois in the chair and claimed to open the debate. 
 Collot d'Herbois, his enemy and his antagonist of the 
 night before, caught no other voice, and St. Just stood 
 at the desk and spread before him the report which he had 
 prepared during the last session of the committee. 
 
 The high, glazed roof, which alone gave light to the 
 
334 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Theatre of the Tuileries, and which emphasised the portent 
 of the Convention with gloom, showed his long hair and 
 straight figure conspicuous in the centre of the rings of 
 hearers. So, his head haloed, his mouth and lower face 
 in darkness, he pitched his clear voice to that level of 
 reason and pleading which he had determined to be 
 necessary for the occasion ; he abandoned gesture, and in 
 his first words struck the tone of argument and debate. 
 Had the whole of his defence been heard as we can read 
 it now, balanced, careful, appealing to all that the Con- 
 vention most valued and ready for every suggestion, his 
 cause would certainly have won. For that document has 
 nothing in it which the Kepublic did not desire. Even 
 to-day there appears in it just the remedy for the block 
 into which things had jostled. He would have consoli- 
 dated the great Committee (whose divisions were the 
 prime source of the whole evil) by making at least six sig- 
 natures necessary to every act. Six would leave him and 
 his friend and Couthon still powerless if the Committee 
 were against them. He would have restrained the Terror, 
 especially in the provinces. And the gist of all this 
 labour, the wisest as it was the most ineffectual of 
 his life, lay in a resolution by. which the Convention 
 should establish checks upon the arbitrary power of the 
 executive. 
 
 I say, if this speech had been read fully, in the tone 
 and with the spirit he brought to it, his cause would 
 have been gained. He had not completed the first phrase, 
 declaring his opposition to every faction, when the cry 
 was heard which began the fall of Robespierre. 
 
 Tallien, from a little knot near the door, called out to 
 him, " Tear down the veil ! " 
 
 This man and his associates were neither secure nor 
 able. It will be seen how, as the afternoon proceeded, 
 they nearly blundered into failure, as they had all but 
 blundered into it the day before. The mad inconsequence 
 
"THERMIDOR" 335 
 
 of Fr&on, the base over-cunning of Foucli^, the vulgar 
 melodrama of Tallien himself, were qualities ill fitted to 
 conspirators. And yet in the end they blundered, not 
 into failure, but upon the very object they had set before 
 themselves, and the beginning of their success was this 
 cry of Tallien's, which was meant to be nothing but an 
 iuterruption, but which happened to cut short at its 
 outset the careful speech that would have saved the life 
 and but half diminished the influence of Robespierre. 
 
 The varied scene that followed can never be under- 
 stood by those who would see in it a mere battle between 
 opposing political priuciples. It was the result of so 
 many separate forces, some of them nothiag but indi- 
 vidual panic or hatred, that it might almost have appeared 
 a blind turmoU driven by fate one way, as a wind drives 
 the innumerable confusion of cross-seas and eddies. But 
 there was present there a certain interior current of opinion 
 that accounted for the main direction, at least since it de- 
 termined the final action of the majority, and it was upon 
 the sUent and obscure majority that the fortimes of this 
 day depended. An appreciation of that interior current 
 will explain the issue. 
 
 It sprang from two ill-connected but allied emotions : 
 the reaction against the Terror; the fear of an attack 
 on the Convention. 
 
 For the first, it wUl seem here, as thoughout the few 
 weeks which were treated of in the last chapter, a strange 
 thing that such a reaction should attach a special enmity 
 to Robespierre. The more intimately one knows the man, 
 the more closely one examines the details of his last actions, 
 the more apparent does it become that he was now the 
 principal opponent of the Terrorists. Had some miracle 
 invested him at this moment with the supreme power, 
 the executions he might have ordered would have been 
 those of the executioners themselves ; and perhaps, of all 
 the definite and anxious groups opposed to him in Ther- 
 
336 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 midor, none had a juster view or a more direct objective 
 than that which sought to destroy him because he stood 
 for the weakening of their awful engine of government. 
 But his own scheming, the known opinion of his friends in 
 the Commune, his public name had filled the air of Paris 
 with a false idea. The name of Kobespierre had taken 
 the place of Providence, and had become the origin of all. 
 If men " thou'ed " and " yea'ed," it was Robespierre. If 
 they were bent and forced into an egalitarian model, it 
 was Robespierre. And what was the supreme physical fact 
 from which no one could escape ? What stood like an 
 obsession in the public mind ? The stream of the con- 
 demned ; a useless and disgusting survival, jarring in a 
 noisome contrast against the summer light, against the 
 new hopes of the nation, and the cheering for the victories. 
 When the last forty-five, obscure, unmeriting death, had 
 passed that day out of the Cour du Mai, when that convoy 
 had forced through the unwilling crowd of the suburbs, 
 through their murmurs, and (as some say) ^ their active 
 force, then it was against Robespierre that the workmen 
 called out loudly. In spite of himself the tumbrils were 
 Robespierre. He had been proud to stand before Europe 
 as the Revolution personified; the result of so hiding 
 himself behind a symbol was that he had to stand also 
 for the system which was now fallen to odium. An 
 assembly cannot escape the atmosphere of the capital in 
 which it meets. The law of Prairial had centered aU the 
 horror upon Paris, and the judgment of Paris ran in 
 common, like a thing taken for granted, through the 
 dumb mass of the Parliament. The provinces, in which 
 his name had begun to stand for moderation, had no time 
 to be heard. 
 
 The second element in the opinion ot the Conven- 
 
 • Michelet is probably wrong, at least in his description of the military 
 being used to restrain the populace. Hanriot cannot possibly have been 
 there. He was lunching with friends a mile off, in the Bne St. Antoine. 
 
"THERMIDOR" 337 
 
 tion, the fear of an armed attack, was perhaps the most 
 powerful, as it was certainly the most tangible and 
 obvious of the forces making against " the triumvirs." It 
 is certain that some one had imprudently raised the 
 cry of a 31st of May the night before at the Jacobins, 
 and Couthon had there passed that wild resolution which 
 expelled from the Club every member of the Conven- 
 tion that had voted against the printing of Kobespierre's 
 speech. 
 
 These two perils, the peril of the Terror and the 
 peril of an attack on the Parliament, were enough 
 in the tension of Thermidor to gather a coalition of 
 defence. 
 
 But what a great run of acts had risen to make 
 such a coalition certain and formidable ! There had 
 been no such "organisation of the thunderbolt" since 
 that day, fourteen months before, when in the agony 
 of the invasion and in the face of the blind obsti- 
 nacy of the Gironde, Danton had permitted the 2nd 
 of June. Hanriot was known to have sent out his 
 orders; the sections were assembling. The gunners 
 had already passed from two districts. Members coming 
 in from the carrousel, had seen the pieces go rum- 
 bling by. Hanriot had been summoned by the com- 
 mittees, and had refused to come; that of itself was 
 insurrection. Payan had come, but insolently; pitting 
 the real power of Paris against their theory of authority, 
 and they had let him go. That was an act of submission 
 to the Commune. The Jacobins had organised their 
 deputations to the Hotel de VtUe. Duplay, the host, the 
 friend, the adorer of Robespierre, had been seen in the 
 midst of their deputations. 
 
 The night and the early morning had been full of 
 arms, and even at that moment of midday the great 
 crowd of the Convention waited in every rare interval 
 of silence for a sound like doom, the Tocsin. The awful 
 
 Y 
 
338 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 bourdon of Notre Dame ^ that had twice before called up 
 the cannon like younger brothers and filled the streets 
 with united men, might at one moment or another send 
 its distant hum into the deep pit where the ParUament 
 stirred and dreaded. The Tocsin did not sound tiU night 
 had fallen, and by that time their unanimity in action 
 and the inertia of a Paris sick of blood and refusing to 
 rise for a man, had saved the Convention. 
 
 But the mainspring of this opposition to the Com- 
 mune, that was growing with every moment in the 
 Tuileries, was not fear. If there were many Sidyfes in 
 the Convention, yet were there more Legendres. The 
 solid sense of Cambon, the republican confidence of the 
 Left Centre, the remaining and general enthusiasm for the 
 work of the Revolution, armed these men with the deter- 
 mination that a faction, even if it had all the capital at 
 its back, should not destroy the national representation. 
 And they beUeved, what was perhaps the truth, that with 
 the success of any attack upon their body, government 
 would finally fall into the hands of one man. 
 
 So under the nausea that the Terror had caused, and 
 under the fear of and indignation against the menace of 
 the Commune, the opinion of the majority formed and 
 grew. Robespierre, more than ever an emblem, was now 
 in the eyes of the Parhament the figurehead of that 
 terrible Commune, which — in spite of himself — was 
 assuming his name and preparing revolt. 
 
 But the first phase of the struggle was confused. 
 There was as yet no certitude that this formed and 
 enlarging opinion would be put into action. TaUien's 
 cry had provoked a violent applause ; the applause pro- 
 ceeded only from his immediate followers. A second 
 incident provoked a little the tendency to general action. 
 St. Just might yet have continued when BUlaud-Varennes, 
 
 1 Bat the great bell never rang ; by some fate it is silent unless the 
 city really moves. 
 
"THERMIDOR" 339 
 
 his face alive with passion, cried to CoUot in the chair 
 that he would speak on a point of order. It was a sight 
 to see Collot (hissed, turned out, and stabbed at in the 
 Jacobins the night before) give BiUaud (hissed, turned out, 
 and stabbed at with him) the right to raise a point of 
 order. Billaud carried a great deal in his heart. St. Just 
 had promised him an explanation — -just as the Parlia- 
 ment met he had sent him a short note of refusal, 
 saying, " I will open my soul to the Convention." He 
 remembered that struggle in the dawn and was 
 aflame. 
 
 BUlaud then, fresh from the Committees that were 
 coming into the hall with him as Tallien spoke, saw St. 
 Just reluctantly leave the tribune, sprang into it himself 
 and flung at the Assembly with violence the words that 
 all had dreaded, and which, once launched, could not but 
 drag the majority with him. 
 
 " What I have to speak of is a plot. There is a plot 
 to destroy the Convention. I was at the Jacobins last 
 night, and even there they tried to kill the members they 
 had proscribed. I tell you the Convention is lost unless 
 it acts at once. . . . There are men who wUl destroy you 
 and who have said it in the club." 
 
 Then, with a sudden gesture he probed the nerve of 
 the great audience before him in the crisis of its self- 
 defence. He threw out a rigid arm towards the upper 
 benches of the Left, to the Mountain in the shadow 
 under the gallery, and cried : " There is one of them." 
 
 Thus was provoked the first combined movement of 
 the day ; the movement that gave the Convention a soul 
 and a voice ; that could only end in the loss of Robes- 
 pierre. Great bodies rose to their feet till it seemed as 
 if the whole hall were moving, and a mass of voices called 
 out together at this nameless fellow, an obscure victim 
 whom Billaud had marked out, " Arrest him ! " The 
 public galleries caught the spirit of defence that had 
 
340 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 sprung from the representatives; up there the populace 
 of Paris did what it had never yet done : it cheered the 
 Convention against the Jacobins. The victories and 
 the reaction had accomplished what Vergniaud's grave 
 voice, Isnard's fervour, Desmoulins' pen, and even Danton's 
 mastery had been unable to do : they had reconverted 
 Paris to the dignity and integrity of the nation. The 
 unknown Jacobin, the first victim of the sacrifice, dis- 
 appeared. That honest man Lebas tried to put himself 
 against the flood ; it swept him away ; he sat do^vn under 
 the ominous cry, " k I'Abbaye," and was silent till, within 
 two hours, he gave up his life for the sake of honour. 
 
 The Convention was started and organised on its way. 
 But if anything could have ruined the conspiracy it was 
 surely the nature of the conspirators. For over an hour 
 Billaud and Tallien monopolised the tribune, pouriag out 
 without reason words to unite their audience and words 
 to divide it; without ability, given up to mere passion, 
 they said things much more calculated to confuse than 
 to drill the opposition which they had determined to 
 organise against the triumvirs. Billaud exaggerated the 
 yielding of Robespierre at the time of Danton's arrest 
 into an active impediment : his mind, ill-acquainted with 
 men, could not grasp the fundamental fact that in the 
 eyes of whatever was most active in the Convention, all 
 the attack on Robespierre, was the very resurrection of 
 Danton. Two friends of the dead man prove it. 
 Legendre, remembering Danton, was to do the decisive 
 thing that night and to close the Jacobins. Thuriot, 
 remembering Danton, was to shut Robespierre's mouth 
 in the supreme hour. 
 
 As for Billaud, he stumbled on, falling over himself 
 in his passion. He continued to attack Robespierre for 
 putting a brake on the Terror, for saving La Valette — 
 he did not see that the motive force of the engine before 
 him depended upon a reaction against the Terror. Only 
 
"THERMIDOR" 341 
 
 one thing preserved Billaud from an anti-climax — his in- 
 tensity. That violence of his, spurred on by the memory 
 of a night's insults, inflamed by lack of sleep, so far suc- 
 ceeded that it forbade the Convention to hear Kobespierre, 
 and that great loud cries of " Tyrant ! Tyrant ! " fell upon 
 him from here and there when he attempted to rise. 
 He, the master of so many debates, then judged the 
 moment inopportune and bided his time. 
 
 The active movements, the arrests, began to appear. 
 TalUen, nothing but a comedian, brandished a dagger 
 "with which to die or kill a tyrant," and it is on record 
 that the house saw nothing in the gesture but a piece 
 of actor's foolery. But when he mentioned the name 
 of Hanriot he touched earth again, and the Convention 
 was very willing. Because of the danger, because of the 
 guns gathering into the centre of Paris, they permitted 
 this mime whom every man despised to move the first 
 of the arrests that ended in the wiping out of the 
 Jacobins and in the death of the extremists. Hanriot 
 was declared a prisoner. Down that easy path of free- 
 dom the Convention went racing ; in declaring the arrest 
 of the head of the armed force of Paris, and that of his 
 staff, the Parhament had taken sides at last. All that 
 remained was to see if their policy could be pushed to 
 the very end. They passed yet another vote. They 
 declared themselves " to be in permanent session till the 
 sword of the law had made the Revolution secure." 
 
 Still Robespierre and his were safe ; so far not Robes- 
 pierre but the Commune alone had been touched; it 
 was but the early afternoon, and after the' first furies, 
 what with Tallien's absurdities and BUlaud's random 
 violence, a kind of weariness set in upon the Convention. 
 In voting that Hanriot should be arrested, and that they, 
 the Convention, should remain the only source of govern- 
 iaent, they had, as it were, clinched the first and most 
 practical part of what had become their programme 
 
342 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 of defence. It was not yet certain they would go 
 further. 
 
 At this point in the vast struggle between absolute 
 democracy and varied nature returning, there came an 
 interlude, almost a repose. Barrfere rose. 
 
 Barrfere was a man whose character, though by no 
 means complex, is so foreign to those who are attracted 
 by the study of the past that he is not so much mis- 
 judged as turned into an impossible monster by the 
 greater part of historians. To take but those who are 
 in sympathy with the Reform ; they are almost of neces- 
 sity enamoured of stoicism, leaning always towards 
 Vergniaud or Condorcet, worshipping what is strict and 
 firm in principle. Barrere was empty of principle. He 
 can be described in two words, he was a Gascon 
 official. 
 
 He was a Gascon, therefore he was a brave, phant, 
 ambitious, careless, and somewhat impudent orator. He 
 was an official, and therefore had most at heart the con- 
 servation of his own official position and of the organ of 
 government for which he stood. 
 
 The mouthpiece of the committee, he knew that its 
 unity was essential to the continuance of its power; the 
 sometime associate of Danton in foreign policy, he knew 
 how keenly the divisions within the govermnent were 
 watched by the allies. A go-between who had saved 
 Billaud from St. Just and St. Just from Billaud during 
 the long-drawn quarrel of the night, he had felt the 
 weakness of either party. 
 
 At this moment of indecision it was Barrfere that 
 intervened, and there can be no doubt that he inter- 
 vened to save Robespierre and the unity of the Com- 
 mittee. St. Just's report, had it been delivered, would 
 have been of greater effect. But of the words actually 
 spoken in that famous debate, those of Barrere's two 
 speeches came nearest to saving the Republic from the 
 
"THERMIDOR" 343 
 
 catastrophe that was perhaps the ultimate salvation of 
 the country. 
 
 He spoke in such a spirit of compromise that had 
 the most able advocate been retained for the mere pur- 
 pose of saving lives the work could not have been better 
 done. What the Convention had voted he left voted. 
 Hanriot gone, he proposed to replace him by that refuge 
 against personal power, a commission — a commission 
 formed of the heads of the legions of the National 
 Guards. The Convention feared Payan and Lescot ; but 
 they were Robespierre's men. To leave them untouched 
 seemed hke a retreat before the Commune ; to condemn 
 them, like an attack on Robespierre in person, Barrfere 
 solved the quarrel by suggesting that they should both 
 be summoned and sworn in to protect the Parliament. 
 Finally he argued the cause of the committee against 
 Robespierre's vague accusations of the day before, not 
 as one would combat a man attempting despotism, but 
 as one would reason with a colleague open to conversion. 
 And what is most remarkable in this effort of his is the 
 fact that he did not so much as mention Robespierre's 
 own name — the name of which all men's minds were full, 
 and which when at last it was blurted out could open a 
 battle on the issue of the sound alone. 
 
 So much for the great Committee. As though to 
 increase the effect of a speech that was so calculated to 
 succeed, and that so nearly succeeded, the old man 
 Vadier, rising on the part of the lower committee, and 
 meaning to reassume the attack against Robespierre, 
 did but emphasise the apparent return to peace. His 
 snuffling utterance, his self-repetitions, his heavy bearing, 
 leaning forward on his hands against the raU of the 
 tribune, his uncertain memory did but add a note of 
 the ridiculous to what had been for more than ten 
 trailing hours, and was to be again for a furious and 
 decisive moment, a tragedy. The crowd of young men 
 
344 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 whom this forgotten relic chose to address was moved 
 to laughter. Flattered in some senile way by that 
 laughter, Vadier approached the buffoon, left all men- 
 tion of the more serious attack upon Robespierre, and 
 disported himself in allusions to Catherine Theot and 
 to the absurd pranks that had cast their ineffaceable 
 ridicule over the public idolatry of her god. 
 
 Robespierre allowed the laughter that followed to 
 rise unchallenged, and even constrained himself to smile. 
 Impassionate but stretched to an acute attention, he may, 
 for aU his self-absorption, have noticed that something 
 not far removed from good-humour — at his expense, in- 
 deed, but still good-humour — was coming over those 
 whom he had dominated so long but whom in one or 
 two lightning flashes of that terrible day he had seen 
 as pitiless judges. When Vadier hobbled down the 
 steps from the tribune, the failure of his doting, coming 
 as it did after the abihty of Barrfere, had brought 
 Robespierre very near to safety. It was the moment 
 when he seemed at last secure, and when an observer 
 would have said that the sharp strain of the last two 
 days was to end after all in a slow relaxation: Robes- 
 pierre less powerful; the committee less tyrannical and 
 also less divided; the Convention more master of itself; 
 the Commune become merely Paris ; the Terror ending. 
 
 This was the point of relaxation which the debate 
 had reached when the fortunes of the triumvirs appeared 
 for one moment to revive. Have I made its vagaries 
 seem confused and without direction ? It is because the 
 discussion itself passed through bewildering phases and 
 preserved no logical order save, perhaps, the transition 
 from violence to exhaustion. A living man who had 
 seen it with his own eyes from the galleries would so 
 have described it, and the strange paradox of that 
 moment, when disaster seemed to be receding, would 
 have led him to the conclusion I have named. But 
 
"THERMIDOR" 345 
 
 falsely ; no relaxation nor any solution of tlie crisis was 
 possible save the fate tliat was coming. An orator might 
 soothe the Assembly with suggestion or a dotard amuse 
 it, but the Commune was stUl the Commune. Hanriot 
 sat his horse stUl with a drawn sword for all their votes. 
 It needed but a word to thrust their danger into their 
 faces and to startle them into cohesion. 
 
 Robespierre himself pronounced the word. Tallien, 
 vexed at the laughter that Vadier had provoked, and 
 knowing how nearly allied are laughter and pity, 
 came to the tribune yet again, crying angrily, " The 
 discussion must be brought back to the point . . ." 
 His sentence was not completed. Robespierre, who had 
 once known the Convention better than any other man 
 and who stUl thought he knew it in this transformation 
 and revival, committed the imprudence that closed all 
 free debate and let loose a storm. He stood up in his 
 place without restraint, and with a gesture of anger to 
 which the Convention was unfamiliar, in a voice that had 
 abandoned its former control, he said suddenly, " I shall 
 know well enough how to bring back the debate to order." 
 
 High as was his utterance, weak as he ever appeared 
 on the rare occasions when his zeal or his dignity left him 
 and when he fell to personal issues, yet there was in this 
 sentence a fatal element. It revived the memories of the 
 day before when men had looked at each other and had 
 waited for the name of the proscribed. It was, for all 
 the thin voice that uttered it, a menace; and it drew 
 down upon the head of its author the clamour which it 
 should have been his first business to conjure away. One 
 by one the forces that denied him the right of defence, 
 and that ended by destroying him, rose, now from this 
 bench, now from that, in the solid mass of men before 
 him ; but principally in the centre and left centre this 
 hint of his, a hint at tyranny, raised the loud murmur 
 that grew to a drowning noise and overwhelmed him. It 
 
346 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 was the same cry as that which had angered and pro- 
 voked him an hour before, but now it devoured him. 
 With every effort that he made to speak a monotonous 
 and angry swarm of the same word, " Tyrant ! Tyrant ! " 
 filled the air about him, confusing his thoughts and 
 stinging him out of all control. He that had never 
 there done anything yet but watch and mould his 
 hearers, and deal with them, and choose his words, 
 became like a man struggling with physical oppression. 
 
 A whirlwind sprang. Tallien spoke unheard. The bell 
 rang and covered and confused the eddying of innumer- 
 able voices. This accusation and that, mixed up with 
 the noise of the storm, rose and was lost again. A 
 larger and simpler outcry outweighing every definite 
 voice and every articulate reason, something blinder than 
 man or men, the pack hunting, filled the deep hall with 
 " Tyrant ! Tyrant ! " like a driving foam over seas at night. 
 
 Robespierre at that moment was utterly different 
 from all that the older members of the Convention or his 
 friends or France had known for five years. His ped- 
 antry dropped off him ; hard sentences spoken from the 
 soul, heedless of notes, left his eyes clear of the glasses 
 that had veiled them even during his defence of twenty- 
 four hours before. He did not rise into the tribune, but, 
 stepping out from the bench where he had sat at random 
 into the floor of the hall, he accepted with his eyes the 
 thousand faces whose unity arose to blast him, and he 
 was possessed for a moment of a freedom and energy that 
 were hardly part of himself. He felt. The air was still 
 full of the swarm of " Tyrant ! Tyrant ! " when he passed 
 right in front of the President's chair, across the tribune 
 and the secretaries, and, folding his arms, he looked 
 straight up at the Mountain. 
 
 There was his home. He was a man of subtle 
 temper, over-metaphysical, inclined to posture also : still, 
 he had come out of that band of ardent men who founded 
 
" THERMIDOR " 347 
 
 the Republic. There he had sat not two years before 
 when the newly elected members for Paris and the pride 
 of the Southern Blood had determined the new career of 
 France. Among these old comrades some hand or some 
 voice would be raised. What face looked out at him 
 thence from the darkness beneath the galleries ? Dubois 
 Craned, that had been a mousquetaire, that was all a noble 
 and that had still a small smUe playing about his large 
 mouth. This soldier, cropped-haired, bronze-faced, strait- 
 headed, looked down upon him and made no sound. 
 Robespierre had denounced him once because he, a 
 soldier, dared to give quarter in Lyons ; he had recalled 
 him from the west. And with Craned you may read 
 all the Mountain. Some in that party feared, some 
 despised, some condemned the influence of a single 
 man; but of all the soil whence he had sprung no 
 one moved. Then, because he was hunted and alone, 
 he turned himself round, still outwardly contained, but 
 with the nervous quivering of his jaws working again, 
 and saw the hundreds upon hundreds that went up 
 in tiers and were the plain and the Right; royalists 
 under him, silent men, men who " continued to live " in 
 the Terror. He had never yet depended upon them; 
 they had continually depended upon him. He begged — 
 it was abject, but he was never a fighter — the alliance 
 of those of whom he had once been protector ; a mix- 
 ture of violent cries, of hidden laughs, and of silence 
 foiled him. He called them the " pure men " — that 
 is, the men without politics, a just title — it raised no 
 echo. 
 
 To a gulf of silence another wave of intolerable 
 sound succeeded. He sought to dominate it by speech, 
 but in the chair above him, whether distraught by the 
 renewed anarchy or whether deliberate, CoUot d'Herbois 
 refused to listen but only called for order, ringing his 
 great bell. 
 
348 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Then Robespierre, quite beside bimself now and 
 shouting epithets, turned upon him and called on 
 hina for a last time — called him a " Speaker of mur- 
 derers," but even as he turned, the thing he found was 
 no longer the expected enemy. It was not CoUot 
 d'Herbois that he saw above him presiding, but a yoimg 
 man from the valley of the Marne, a man who had 
 come from the poplars and slow rivers, the Pouilleuse; 
 from the place where you may see a long way off on the 
 edges of the sky the great lull of Rheims and the vines, 
 and the forest over all. Thuriot sat above him, and the 
 memory of Danton ran through the hall. That young 
 commander, a smile of the Champagne, had neither time 
 to silence him nor to give him speech, when, as Robes- 
 pierre exhausted by so violent an effort against a wall 
 of men left an interval of silence, another man from the 
 Marne — from the little Aube — another Danton again 
 returning, the unknown Garnier, cried across the hall: 
 "The blood of Danton chokes you." 
 
 Not knowing well what he said, confused by such 
 different adversaries (he had within the hour been ac- 
 cused of defending Danton), Robespierre looked up a 
 moment, cried out, "So, you reproach me with Dan- 
 ton . . ." and then by a movement unique in his life, 
 he ran up the extreme gangway of the Left and faced the 
 Convention. He had leaned more and more away from 
 the pure Republic, more and more back to mysticism 
 and tolerance and alliance with the creeds, but in this 
 supreme moment he stood in the place belonging to the 
 extreme stoics from whom he had drawn his first 
 powers and to whose keeping after death his legend 
 was to return. It was a thing mysterious and crammed 
 with meaning that he who had eschewed all poignancy 
 and all sudden force of gesture, whose very nature was 
 opposed to immediate effects, now stretched out his 
 hands in the attitude which is at once that of appeal 
 
"THERMIDOR" 349 
 
 and of despair, and cried out, "Vote for my death." No 
 one answered. 
 
 A certain Louche t, an obscure, just man, one that 
 later stood out firmly for the Kepublic against the 
 muddy flood of the reaction, called out clearly across the 
 silence, " Arrest him ! " 
 
 The cry determined not only his arrest — that was 
 of course — but was also the cue for as signal an act of 
 heroism and of devotion as our modern history records. 
 Le Bas that had consistently loved him, and upon whose 
 clear northern temper no suspicion of unreason can 
 attach itself, rose in his place and said that if Robespierre 
 was to die, he also demanded death. His friends near 
 him caught his coat to pull him down. Out in the 
 Rue St. Honor^ an admirable woman was waiting for his 
 return ; a child, rather, and her child.^ In a noble en- 
 thusiasm he threw everything away for honour. Then, 
 shamed by so much virtue, Augustin, that had never 
 done much good to himself nor much evil to the public, 
 rose also, saying that what his brother suffered he would 
 suffer. But if one triumvir, then three also of necessity and 
 logic had to pass. Couthon, in spite of his lameness, St. 
 Just, in spite of his contemptuous silence, suffered the 
 vote. All these three, a little band that had dreamed 
 vain things were put to the judgment of the Assembly ; 
 and when Thuriot asked for the Noes, so silent was the 
 Mountain that he could write in the register that yet 
 remains, " Unanimity." So, in a hubbub that declined 
 into repose, the last scene of the Republic was acted. 
 
 Some one asked them to leave the Assembly and 
 stand at the bar. They went and stood. Then another 
 asked why no officers had them in custody. It was 
 because the officers could not yet believe that this had 
 
 ' Who lived to be Lebas the Hellenist, professor and friend of all the 
 university, tutor to the third Napoleon, but yet a republican and a, 
 guide to younger republicans. 
 
3SO ROBESPIERRE 
 
 happened. When the order was given by the president, 
 the ushers formally laid their hands upon the shoulders 
 of the men that had imagined a new earth. There was 
 nothing more to be done. A few vain remarks and 
 platitudes, a sudden enthusiasm for the Kepublic which 
 the Convention thought to have saved, the stampede of 
 the public galleries, and the adjournment for two hours 
 ended this memorable victory. It was not yet five of the 
 afternoon ; four hoiurs had decided the battle. 
 
 When this first part of the work was accomplished 
 the sky gave no relief; an unnatural evening ready for 
 further evil brooded sultry and oppressive above the city. 
 
 In the minds of men also a strange mixture of close 
 activity and of reluctance, things moving in silence, filled 
 the remaining hours of daylight. This contrast pro- 
 ceeded from the spirit that lends all its irony to Ther- 
 midor. Paris was confused. To judge by the immediate 
 readiness or fury of the Commune it might have been 
 the great loth of August, the rising for national exist- 
 ence ; it might have been full peace to judge by the 
 quiet certitude of the Convention. Each was deceived. 
 The Parliament had no force to meet the populace had 
 the populace armed ; the municipal body had no populace 
 to arm. The legal authority of the one, the moral 
 leadership of the other, turned into a smoke of phrases ; 
 iind, after most inconsequent adventures, the midnight 
 struggle in which the drama ended was but the success 
 of a few dozens over a handful of individuals. 
 
 Yet so tenacious was the tradition of the Kevolution 
 in the hearts of the politicians, so little did they see how 
 the great victories had calmed political violence, that 
 each group went on, in the air and dissociated from 
 reality, thinking, the one that a city, the other that a 
 nation was behind it. At the Hotel de Ville the full 
 enthusiasm of '93 blazed out ; the great words were 
 
"THERMIDOR" 
 
 351 
 
 rediscovered and the sharp decisions upon which the 
 Kevolution had hitherto turned were taken. It was 
 five o'clock when Herman's note,^ official but very non- 
 committal in its language and in the person of its bearer, 
 came to the Commune. Fleuriot-Lescot received it and 
 the insurrection the municipality had planned took shape 
 immediately. The Council-General was summoned, Payan 
 did what in a greater moment and for a national purpose 
 Danton had done; he opened the doors to the general 
 crowd; the crowd entered but was silent. With that 
 kneading of direct action and passion which the Revolu- 
 tion had discovered, the Commune threw out decree after 
 decree, each in the right order, each so framed that had 
 there been a Paris to answer them, an organised army 
 with its spirit and its plan would have arisen in two 
 hours ; but they worked in a void. 
 
 The barriers were to be shut, the tocsin rung, the 
 drums were to beat the mobilisation, the cannons were 
 summoned, the sections were to meet to remain in per- 
 manence and to arm ; Hanriot was given his objective — 
 the Convention ; the Convention was " to be freed." But 
 these gates, beUs, drums, marches and attacks, were not 
 machines whose levers the Commune held ; they depended 
 upon men for their agency or no bells would ring, no 
 drums beat. The very theory of the Commune had dis- 
 solved cohesion in the solvent of liberty, and the fatigue 
 of the great wars had drugged spontaneity to sleep. Such 
 few citizens as gathered in the sections, debated on false 
 issues ; hesitated, dared not. The tocsin rang spasmodic- 
 ally here and there ; ceased in St. German's, began too late 
 in St. Antoine, was made a quarrel of in St. Roch. Only 
 the thin bell of the Hotel de Ville itself swung continuously 
 
 ' It was nothing but what he was bound to send ; an official message 
 of the arrest despatched to the municipality of Paris by the hand of a 
 messenger. The mayor got it at five o'clock, about a quarter of an hour 
 after tke vote, so it must have been sent from the luileries. 
 
3S^ ROBESPIERRE 
 
 in its dainty cupola, as though to show that only the 
 federate band of the municipality felt that the moment 
 was supreme or could maintain a purpose. As for the 
 mother of the city, Notre Dame, it was silent. 
 
 To this torrent of active, empty decrees in the Hotel 
 de VUle there was answered another torrent, paper also, 
 in the great room of the PavUlon de Flore. The Con- 
 vention was not without a head, the Committee of Public 
 Safety lent itself to be the organ and authority of the law. 
 The decrees fell like leaves; to swing the gates open, to ring 
 no peal, to dissolve the sections, none to obey Hanriot, 
 to arrest every man that rebelled. They signed and 
 signed ; they called the lower committee in to help them ; 
 what authority their names would give was poured out 
 as though the great Committee had never hesitated, and 
 as though the moment were indeed (as some historians 
 have been misled into thinking it) the crisis of a long 
 struggle and the end of a set plan. If they failed they 
 were willing to risk the fate of failure. Carnot gave his 
 name to half the documents, Barrer^ to nearly all, Prieur 
 to whatever was presented to him. In this decision to 
 throw away the scabbard the Committee were actiag as 
 their enemy the Commune also desired to act ; but with 
 more thoroughness. For when young Payan had sum- 
 moned the Council-General of the municipality in the 
 Hotel de Ville there were hesitations : not all consented to 
 sign the list of insurrection, and there was some attempt 
 to destroy even such signatures as had been given. 
 
 What meaning could attach to these opposing bat- 
 talions of words, these soundless batteries of official 
 papers ? This ; the Commune was but half obeyed, 
 but the Committee and the Convention seemed to be 
 obeyed altogether. Every citizen that sat down to his 
 meal, every gate left open, every beU left silent appeared 
 a homage to the Parliament. Had they turned to 
 positive decrees; had they ordered action, Paris would 
 
"THERMIDOR" 353 
 
 not have moved much more for them than for the 
 Hotel de Ville, but the negative commands of the Com- 
 mittee fell on a neutral Paris, and clothed their authors 
 with an appearance of power. For if to a lethargic man 
 one says, " Do this," another, " Do not do this," the second 
 appears to be the master. 
 
 Meanwhile Paris dined. The Convention, while its 
 Committee thus slaved, had adjourned till seven ; it 
 mingled with the life of the city, it dined with the rest. 
 
 And the five prisoners dined. 
 
 There are gaps in the story of Thermidor that are 
 like the inconsequent accidents of a dream. There 
 should have been a pomp and some great force holding 
 these men — Eobespierre, Lebas, Couthon, St. Just 
 should have gone off the prisoners of a brigade — they 
 went down the few steps to the rooms of the lower com- 
 mittee with no one but the ushers of the house to guard 
 them. There, attended only by the sergeant's guard that 
 was constantly posted and that had received no accession 
 of strength, they very easily and soberly dined. 
 
 What came to rescue them and to affirm the insur- 
 rection ? A great mob or the organisation of a bat- 
 talion ? Nothing of the kind. Hanriot, heavy with 
 wine, started off with a couple of aides-de-camp and 
 perhaps half-a-dozen Mends. In the Rue St. Honord 
 Courtois called him names out of window. He passed 
 on. Farther down the street he met a gentleman 
 walking ; he heard the gentleman mentioned as opposed 
 to Robespierre; he had him sent off under a corporal 
 and four men to the post of the Palais Eoyal.^ He 
 appeared at the rooms of the lower committee and 
 argued with the guard ; they opposed his opinions. He 
 drew his sword as he stood in the doorway. A deputy 
 of the committee got up on the table and ordered the 
 guard to arrest him and his companions. They did so, 
 
 1 An eye-witness told Gallois this. 
 
354 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 and as he was a strong and violent man they boiindrhim 
 with cords.^ Meanwhile Robespierre, not a little dis- 
 turbed at a man's leaping on the table where he was dining, 
 rose from his plate and napkin and interrupted his meal 
 to advise Hanriot not to resist ; saying he desired nothing 
 more than a trial at the bar of the revolutionary tribunal. 
 The others sat on at meat till the scuffle was over. 
 
 There is something terrible in this splash of gro- 
 tesque : the handful that appeared on the great stage 
 of a decisive hour, without audience, in such a small 
 domestic way, and without any one circumstance of 
 tragedy. The incongruity of such unaccented scenes 
 determining so great an event was part of the spirit of 
 Thermidor : it fell in with the silence and stillness of the 
 air, with the steady grey sky, the even, growing heat, and 
 the delay of the storm. 
 
 Some while yet before seven, their meal over, little 
 detachments of the guard took each of the five separately 
 to separate prisons. Lebas to La Force,^ along the 
 narrow streets eastwards, past the very doors of the 
 Commune. St. Just to the old Scotch college on the 
 hill of the university. It had been made a rough 
 prison of for the time, and there, encased in lead, 
 the brain of the last Stuart watched in the wall beside 
 him. Robespierre was taken beyond to the Luxembourg : 
 the two others to St. Lazare and to La Bourbe. 
 
 All this went easily and well. The note of that dinner 
 table was continued. There was no rebelHon or violence, 
 nor even argument. Robespierre was confident of trial ; 
 the rest were either silent with pride (as was St. Just), 
 or left their fate to the confidence of Robespierre (as 
 
 ' The official report says: " The said sergeant being ordered to bind 
 hil hands and feet, this was accomplished with great accuracy." 
 
 * When Madame Lebas says in her " Memoirs," " The oonciergerie," she 
 must be thinking of the scene which I shall describe in a moment. Lebas 
 was certainly taken first to La Force as the registers show. The jailers 
 refusing to receive him he was led to the conciergerie. 
 
'THERMIDOR" 
 
 355 
 
 did Lebas and Augustine). None marked their passage, no 
 appeal was made ; the astounding silence of Paris left an 
 empty and wide road for their various passages. 
 
 Meanwhile the Commune, that had seized reality and 
 was determined on a supreme effort, had all prepared, as 
 it thought, to save the Kepublic in which it still pas- 
 sionately lived, and for which this man still stood. 
 
 The Commune had done much since the first insurrec- 
 tionary call, though but two hours had been given them 
 in which to act. They had raised the Jacobins; at 
 seven, just as the prisoners reached their prisons, the 
 remnant of the great club met to make a wing of the 
 insurrection. I say " a remnant," yet it was still the 
 Jacobins. A man could stand up in it and say he had 
 voted against Kobespierre and the momentary violence 
 that followed such a declaration was succeeded by his re- 
 call and by an attempted apology. It sent a deputation 
 to the Commune ; it declared a permanent session. 
 
 The sections, the primary assemblies whose permanent 
 officials and whose interested leaders were men drilled 
 and chosen by what had been Robespierre's organisation, 
 met also. The common citizens came in small numbers, 
 and such as came were uncertain, leaning if anything 
 towards the Convention. They passed neutral votes. 
 They did not march. The night oppressed them, 
 and the universal falling back into repose. Also the 
 Commune with a strange audacity, being in reality a 
 dead relic but thinking themselves all Paris, declared 
 outlaws all those whom they called conspirators against 
 the deputies. They forbade any man to follow the 
 national authority, saying that till the nation and liberty 
 were saved they alone ruled. 
 
 One part of the officials heard them — the jailers. At 
 St. Lazare an excuse was found for refusing to receive 
 Augustine ; he was led away to La Force, and there two 
 municipals in arms took him their wUlLng prisoner for 
 
35^ ROBESPIERRE 
 
 the Commune, and brought him back to the Hotel de 
 Villa rescued, the first of the five. So Lebas, refused 
 at La Force and sent on to the Conciergerie on the Island, 
 was freed. Just as he went off, a hired carriage driving 
 up brought him his wife and her sister, who implored 
 his return. He was tender to her and remembered the 
 little child : he told her to wait till the morning. She 
 went home, and he to the gathering crowd of the 
 insurrection at the Hotel de Ville; but they did not 
 meet again, for in the night this man, whose simple and 
 republican mind compels me to admiration as I write 
 his name, gave himself death. 
 
 While the Commune sent out its emissaries to the 
 university to rescue St. Just, and to La Bourbe to rescue 
 Couthon, Kobespierre had thrown away the last of the 
 cards fate offered him. 
 
 They had taken him first to the Luxembourg in a 
 cab. He had gone up the hill of old quarter simply, 
 hardly under a guard.^ The wide Rue Tournon received 
 the closed carriage in which he drove, and he reached 
 the palace. The porter replied as the porter of every 
 prison had replied that evening, but he, not from a 
 premonition but from an insistent legality, demanded 
 admission. The Convention had arrested him ; he would 
 obey it. He desired to stand his trial. Of all this the 
 porter knew nothing, and, half tempted by an apparent 
 safety, he permitted his companions (for they were 
 hardly his enemies) to drive him down the hill again 
 — they scarcely knew whither. 
 
 Since all the jailers in the capital showed this same 
 temper, Charnier perhaps, or the gendarme with him, 
 bethought him of a guard-room. The armed force, the 
 sections, were at least doubtful or perhaps loyal to the 
 Parliament, and he was half sick of his mission. The 
 nearest guard-room was that of the Mairie on the Island, 
 
 ' There vere with him only Charnier and one gendarme. 
 
" THERMIDOR " 
 
 3^7 
 
 through the oldest and darkest streets of the university ; 
 therefore he drove his charge down to the river, and 
 across the Pont-Neuf to the Goldsmith's Quay. They 
 left him there less under arrest than among neutrals. 
 
 It was still light, more or less, in the street without ; 
 the Place de Grfeve beyond the law courts, across the 
 Seine, was fiUing with men; the lamps that swung 
 over the narrow streets were being lowered for light- 
 ing. The clear noise that comes up from a French 
 town on long summer evenings was the chorus of 
 that little scene. 
 
 The militia guard of the Island would neither fight 
 for Kobespierre nor detain him. They had paid little 
 heed to the Commune; they had understood little of 
 the Convention. They found Robespierre among them, 
 and were somewhat embarrassed. He sat, still powdered, 
 careful and restrained at the rough table which a dozen 
 dirty uniforms, the drippings of one oil-lamp, and the 
 growing darkness infected with squalor. Here was the 
 famous name they had heard of so often — perhaps the 
 Republic in person ; they were not over sure. They 
 would neither fight for him nor detain him. 
 
 Had he remained there steadfast to his first deter- 
 mination, sleeping that night on the planks of the guard- 
 room and demanding his trial next day at the bar of the 
 revolutionary tribunal, he might have left the Island safe 
 to return to freedom ; lessened indeed, part only of 
 government, but still alive — he and his theory alive. 
 The river was his bulwark; the great law courts, in 
 whose vaults he sat half a prisoner, were his refuge. He 
 guessed it, but there ran in him that fatal flaw of vision- 
 aries, by which in easy times they lose their wealth and 
 in times of tumult their lives ; he could not judge upon 
 or mould the things under his hand, but continued to 
 live in the things beyond the world. A sharp accident 
 persuaded him against himself. 
 
358 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 Hanriot, released at last, had sought Kobespierre at 
 the Luxembourg, and had returned without him. The 
 Commune had again sent out to discover him. There 
 appeared in the doorless arch of his refuge some few 
 figures of the Hotel de Ville. They had come for him 
 and had found him there, almost the last of the Five. 
 He refused to follow them and to step outside the law. 
 The darkness grew. They returned. He suffered him- 
 self to be led on by their ardour and their active habit ; 
 he came out into the dying light and no hand stopped 
 him nor was any bayonet crossed. He passed through 
 the labyrinth of tall houses, before the porch, where, as a 
 boy, he had remembered the chapter of the cathedral and 
 his cousin the priest that had loved him ; over the old 
 bridge of Notre Dame where the river was stiU broad 
 silver, and came out upon the Place de Grfeve with his 
 companions, who rejoiced as at a kind of triumph. 
 
 Indistinguishable in the heavy darkness a crowd 
 there disputed and eddied. There was a little faint 
 acclamation : he did not heed it. They hurried him 
 through the uncertain hundreds towards the high and 
 delicate fagade that showed blacker against the eastward 
 arch of the night, and under the lowering sky of a re- 
 turning storm. It seemed a creature ready for prey. 
 Its tall, great windows were all lit and menaced the west 
 like eyes ; its soul of insurrection moved in it as though 
 with a voice and an intelligence it could drive Paris 
 against the nation and hurl the Convention from the 
 sombre palace that stood up a mile away, a fortress 
 against the last bars of daylight. That living beast was 
 the Commune. It swallowed him up. 
 
 The great hall that he entered upon the first floor 
 
 was filled with men^ and ablaze with candles. Save 
 
 Couthon all the rescued had arrived: like Hanriot, 
 
 bound early in the evening by haJf-a-dozen enemies and 
 
 1 Ninety-seven signed the roll, but there were many more present. 
 
" THERMIDOR 
 
 359 
 
 easily cut loose later by a handful of friends. They were 
 surrounded by the Commune vigorous and creating 
 vigour : without, an increasing crowd seemed to support 
 them, and the Commune stUl gathered. One would 
 have said in this first hour of the night that the Revolt 
 was on the march and already victorious. But with 
 Robespierre himself, their standard of whom they knew 
 so little, there had come in upon them the paralysis that 
 arises from thought. The organisation ceased, the orders 
 failed, his signature was wanting and remained wanting. 
 
 There is not in the whole five years a moment in 
 which the man appears more nakedly than in this night 
 which was his last. His unalterable principle, his failure 
 in the face of things, his fixed purpose in morals, his 
 final irresolution in action are the master-keys that read 
 him. For four hours he stopped the advance of time 
 with debate, disputing the strict right of insurrection, 
 doubting it, demanding persuasion. In the heat of de- 
 spair, of violent appeals, and almost of commands to their 
 own king, time raced by these men for whom time was 
 everything; the hours went furiously on, uselessly, like 
 an unharnessed river. 
 
 But in the Convention that same tide of time flow- 
 ing was harnessed and ground out action in a great mUl 
 till every pulse of it produced a decision and completed 
 a force. 
 
 They outlawed the municipality, Hanriot, at last the 
 five members themselves. Legendre found wisdom in 
 the stress, went with a knot of guards and shut the 
 Jacobins where active Vivier was still in the chair ; 
 arrested him. The Convention named leaders for an 
 armed force. They sent throughout the dark streets 
 and to each of the Ul-attended, yawning sections a decree 
 to rouse and decide them ; they caused to be read at 
 the crossways and shouted by criers their terrible " Hors 
 la Loi!" which has been like the bell of the plague 
 
36o ROBESPIERRE 
 
 throughout French history and which Buonaparte alone 
 survived. 
 
 The men in the Hotel de Ville heard it. At the 
 extreme corner of the Grfeve where the old Kue de la 
 Vannerie then came in, the outposts of the Convention 
 had lit torches and were trumpeting it out on the stroke 
 of twelve to the mob in the square: conquering their 
 irresolution; deciding them. The tocsin had ceased. 
 There was a silence in the great room among the rebels 
 to hear the criers; some one ran but and seized them, 
 but it was too late, the crowd was shaken, no gun-crew 
 was formed. Then as though to mark the silence and to 
 proclaim doom the tenuous chimes of midnight tinkled 
 from the clocks of the Boucherie, of the Cathedral, and 
 of St. Jean ; the 9th Thermidor had ended and the i oth 
 rolled in the end. 
 
 The air had been very still in the unnatural heat of 
 the night, but the first breezes before rain stirred with 
 the turn of morning, and upon the silence which nothing 
 had yet disturbed, save the subdued debate of the 
 crowd, the occasional rallying cry of Hanriot from the 
 windows or the sudden shout of the " Mors la Zoi," 
 thunder broke. Kevealed in sharp flashes, driven by 
 the terror of the storm, the doubters poured off home 
 under the sheets of rain. Some hauled away their 
 pieces, some abandoned them, until in the second hour 
 of the morning, when the thunder had rolled off along 
 the river-plain and the rain withdrawn had refreshed 
 the city with a new air, there remained but a group 
 here and there gazing to no purpose at the windows, 
 and the half-deserted guns: twin shadows, men and 
 cannon reflected in the pools of the pavement. 
 
 Within, the wiser men had already despaired ; but the 
 more determined still wrestled with the man in whose 
 quarrel, as they thought, they had challenged death. 
 The wiser called for arms and had them piled upon the 
 
" THERMIDOR " 361 
 
 table of tlie inner room ; the more determined summoned 
 Robespierre for the last time. He sat at the centre of 
 the great baize table, enthroned, as it were, having on his 
 left the mayor, on his right Payan, and before him the 
 document all signed by his defenders and awaiting his 
 name ; the last arm of the defence at bay. 
 
 For the appeal to the sections had failed, the messen- 
 gers had returned to report only confusion, and the Com- 
 mune bethought them of one section at least to which 
 the mere name of Robespierre should be a shaft of leader- 
 ship. The grave relic of Mansard which we call the Place 
 Vendome and in which the bronze pillar of Napoleon 
 recalls at once in its majesty the embodiment of the 
 Revolution in arms and in the marks of its fall the 
 modern parody of insurrection, was a section under 
 the name of " the Pikes." Therein Robespierre had lived 
 and to this the last appeal was made. It was written 
 out by Lerebours who alone survived of all that company ; 
 Payan, Louvet, Legrand had put their names to it — they 
 laid it before Robespierre. He held the pen doubtfully 
 and would not sign. A final urging disturbed him but failed 
 to startle him iato action. It proceeded from Couthon. 
 
 The cripple with large painful eyes came to him, like 
 a reminiscence of his past four months of power ; a man 
 upon whose fevered debiUty far more than upon the 
 creative angers of St. Just Robespierre had been able to 
 impress the sanctity of his system. 
 
 Couthon then, just released from prison, came in on 
 the arms of two gensdarmes. It was past one o'clock ; 
 the columns of the Convention were on the road to 
 the assault, there was not an hour left in which to 
 decide. When Robespierre had thanked the men that 
 supported his friend, and while his mind was yet moved 
 by the reunion of the proscribed, Couthon added his 
 plea to all that St. Just had said more passionately 
 and to the hard phrases of Le Bas. 
 
362 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 For half-an-hour or more he bore the scene, the 
 crowd of men standing and crying against his principle ; 
 then slowly, with the half irresolution which had im- 
 dermined him throughout that night he traced the 
 first letters of his name. He saw forming, in this aban- 
 donment of all himself, the first signature that ever he 
 had put to rebellion ; an insult to his single dogma and 
 a denial of the general will; he dared not achieve the 
 sacrilege. With that beginning he ended ; he refused to 
 complete the signature, and putting down the pen, he 
 laid his head on his left hand and stared at the paper 
 before him. The clock on the fagade struck two. 
 
 The scene was over. Whether he had signed or no, 
 nothing would have come of it save an abdication of the 
 close consistency of his life. Time, which he had refused 
 to consider, now overwhelmed him. Already the two slow 
 mobs that the Convention had gathered were converging 
 on the Place de Grfeve ; Barras from the Quays, Leonard 
 Bourdon from the markets had met and joined their 
 forces in front of the Hotel de Ville. No cannon opposed 
 them. If Hanriot ran out to rally a dozen gunners 
 it led to nothing but his own rough handling ; he broke 
 away covered with wounds, ran through the archway and 
 hid in the inner yard of the Town Hall. The last 
 remaining cannon of the defence were mingled with 
 those of the assailants and turned against the building. 
 Leonard Bourdon and his following crowded up the great 
 central staircase and the Commune had fallen. 
 
 From the windows of the main hall on the first floor 
 Le Bas had seen the troops of the Convention fill the 
 square. He walked into the small room adjoining, took 
 a loaded pistol, shot himself and fell dead. With the 
 first light his enemies took him out and buried this 
 soldierly, unlaughing man side by side with Kabelais in 
 the damp narrow yard of the St. Paul. The shot began 
 what was for some a panic, for the rest a stupefaction. 
 
"THERMIDOR" 363 
 
 Augustine, never worthy or decided, leapt out upon the 
 cornice of the fapade, stood for a moment above the crowd 
 and then dashed himself down upon the steps of the great 
 porch. They picked him up yet living and carried him 
 into the lodge. Lescot stood suddenly up and made a 
 movement as though to defend his leader, but he had done 
 no more than rise when the end came. 
 
 For as Robespierre still sat motionless, his elbow on the 
 arm of his chair, his face turned downward and a little 
 away from the door, a boy of nineteen ran up the stair 
 before the rest and stood in the entry. It was Merda. 
 Leonard Bourdon followed close behind; but before a 
 sign or an order could be given Merda had raised his 
 pistol and fired.^ Struck full in the face, his jaw shattered 
 and his blood breaking over the document before him 
 Robespierre fell down ; St. Just that had stood by all the 
 while, receiving the inevitable with great dignity and 
 silence, knelt on one knee beside him and tried to 
 staunch the woimd. Then in a scene whose details 
 have remained to us but whose impression is but a huge 
 confusion, the conquerors poured in and occupied the 
 room with numbers. 
 
 To this, which was the true end of his life, little 
 should be added. The long hours that remained to him 
 were but a confused lethargy ; dull pain, the loss of blood, 
 long fasting, lack of sleep drained his life dry before the 
 guillotine could claim it. 
 
 They took him on a stretcher to the Tuileries where 
 all the prisoners were gathered, and, in the room of 
 the Pavilion Marsan where he had supped the night 
 before they laid him upon the table, giving him for a 
 pillow a deal box, and some one handed him a pistol-case 
 1 See Note II. at the end of this book. 
 
364 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 of cloth with which from time to time he feebly tried 
 to wipe the blood from his face. 
 
 When the sun had already risen they sent doctors to 
 him, who, probing his mouth and taking from it his 
 broken teeth, yet drew no sound from him nor any 
 gesture. Only his eyes, which remained bright, were 
 fixed upon them all the while like those of an animal 
 wounded. They bound his jaw with bandages and left 
 him so, for chance visitors to stare at all the long morn- 
 ing ; and St. Just sat by his side, his eyes red and swollen 
 perhaps from weeping, certainly from vigil. 
 
 During those five interminable hours Kobespierre 
 neither moaned nor mumbled a broken word, but lay 
 quite silent, though at rare intervals the guards jested 
 about him and his wound and his coming fate. But 
 to this silence there was one exception, for as he attempted 
 to reach his garter, which cramped and numbed his 
 leg, an assistant, kinder than the rest, stepped forward and 
 loosened it for him. Then Robespierre whispered in- 
 distinctly with his swollen lips, "Thank you, sir."^ 
 Equality was dying. 
 
 It was long before noon when the prisoners were 
 taken away to the conciergerie ; formalities of a certain 
 length, the reunion of the other outlaws, the identifica- 
 tion of each consumed the day, and it was not till past 
 five of the summer afternoon that the tumbrils rolled 
 out of the great gates of wrought iron. 
 
 A long and useless agony marked the road to the 
 guillotine. So slowly went the carts, and with such 
 frequent shocks and stoppages from the dense crowd, 
 that the bare two miles of road took up nearly as many 
 hours. On the Quai des Lunettes, where his familiar 
 custom had half-endeared him to the stalls, the opticians 
 and their workers saw him go by, and raised no cries. 
 In the Rue St. Denis, the Rue de la Ferronerie, past the 
 
 > Thig man told it to Fetiet, -who told it to Michelet. 
 
"THERMIDOR" 365 
 
 Markets, crowded windows and the reappearance of a 
 luxurious world proclaimed the reaction ; but especially 
 in the Rue St. Honor^ all that society which, since 
 the victories, was reconquering France, made a parade 
 of enthusiasm — and the people echoed it. 
 
 They say that at the western end the soldiers who 
 had lined the whole way could not restrain the flood 
 of the mob ; the house fronts were filled ; there were 
 flowers and ceaseless acclamations. To one the Terror, 
 to another unclean equality, to another madness, to 
 another the Republic, to yet another the threat of 
 punishment seemed to be passing in the tumbril. But 
 as a fact it was only Robespierre. 
 
 He hung limp and exsanguine from the cords that 
 bound him to the cart ; hatless, his stock lost, his light- 
 blue coat dimmed with the accumulations of the night 
 and the dust of prisons, his white nankeen short-hose 
 muddy and splashed with blood, his head loose at the 
 neck ; he looked like a man swooning. 
 
 It is not right to watch him thus, for the man had 
 passed. I will not describe the end. Perhaps Carrier 
 shouted behind the cart, perhaps they played some 
 bacchanalian thing before the empty house of Duplay, 
 perhaps a woman struck him in the Rue Royale. In 
 the great square to which the guillotine had returned 
 for this last sacrifice, the twenty-two were poured out in 
 expiation, Robespierre the last. He gave, as they 
 loosened his bandage, a loud cry of pain. The axe fell, 
 and powder shook from his hair. 
 
 Political effort in its supreme achievements or 
 despairs creates a certain illusion. Matters of a moment 
 pass for things eternal. A mere battle, a single crime, 
 are thought, as they stand up against and terrify the 
 eager mind, to have arrested in some manner the slow 
 
366 ROBESPIERRE 
 
 purpose of God. So it was with this high combing of 
 the revolutionary wave. 
 
 It was imagined at the death of this man that the 
 West would abandon or attempt with an ever-diminishing 
 energy the solution of that awful problem of political 
 freedom whose complexity he had himself so little 
 seized. A relief ran through the kings ; the rich began 
 to draw breath carelessly. It was thought that the 
 Republic, which had certainly suffered madness, would 
 leave no more effect than attaches to the memory of 
 evil dreams. 
 
 Whatever instinct or demand had surged up from 
 the blind depths and origins of mankind, that primal 
 appetite had, it was thought, sunk back into its antique 
 repose. 
 
 But it is not so Kghtly, nor in so immediate a fashion 
 that change can be provoked in the development of a 
 civilisation. The universal reaction which men awaited 
 could find no stuff; the theories counter to democracy no 
 new philosophy in the mere falling of a sharp steel. 
 To-day through the wide perplexities of a world ten- 
 fold his own, the central thought, to which this man 
 was registrar and whose propagation he imagined to be 
 his mission, has reappeared to lead us through unknown 
 dangers to unknown destinies ; for we are certainly on 
 the threshold of the Republic. 
 
 In closing this book, I turn again to himself. I 
 remember his grave for a moment. His bones, buried in 
 a vague field of the suburbs, forgotten beneath the 
 dancing-floor of a common haU, were insulted for twenty 
 years till they were disturbed by the pickaxe in the 
 driving of a road for the rich, and no one knows where 
 they lie. 
 
 I return also to the memory of the jejune, persistent 
 mind which has haunted me throughout the description 
 of his fortunes. I fear to have done him a wrong. 
 
"THERMIDOR" 367 
 
 Such men may be greater witliia tlvan their phrases or 
 their vain acts display them. I kno"w that he passed 
 through a furnace of which our paltry time can re- 
 imagine nothing, and I know that throughout this trial he 
 affirmed — with monotonous inefficiency, but still affirmed 
 — the fundamental truths which our decadence has 
 neglected or despised, and is even in some dens beginning 
 to deny. 
 
 He saw God Personal, the soul immortal, men of a 
 kind with men, and he was in the company of those who 
 began to free the world. God have mercy on his soul 
 and on each of ours, who hope for better things. 
 
NOTES 
 
 NOTE I 
 
 ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE "MEMOIRS OF 
 CHARLOTTE ROBESPIERRE" 
 
 Throughout the second chapter of this book I have used the 
 " Memoirs of Charlotte Kobespierre," and as their authenticity has 
 been doubted, I would explain at some length how the doubt has 
 arisen, and upon what grounds I have taken them to be genuine. 
 It is a matter of great importance to such a study as this, because 
 the character of Kobespierre can only be read in the light of his 
 boyhood and youth, and of that time we have no full record save 
 that of his sister. 
 
 The history of the " Memoirs " is this. A young revolutionary 
 of 1830 published after the death of Mademoiselle Bobespierre 
 (or " de Kobespierre," as she preferred to be called) a book which 
 did not purport to be entirely from her hand, but was his edition of 
 the numerous notes which she had left for the use of history, and 
 which, he said, had been handed to him by her executrix, Mdlle. 
 Mathon. 
 
 The principal authority for regarding the " Memoirs " as 
 spurious is a certain Croker, who was, in the earlier part of this 
 century, an historian, and an ardent critic of, the Kevolution. 
 His fortune enabled him to make a very valuable collection of 
 revolutionary pamphlets and material, the greater part of which 
 is now in the British Museum ; and so great was his reputation 
 during his lifetime that he was offered some prodigious sum (I 
 forget how many thousand pounds) by one of the principal pub- 
 lishing firms of this country (I forget which) to write a history of 
 the Kevolution. 
 
 By that process of copying which is the curse of history, his 
 
 368 
 
NOTES 369 
 
 opinion upon these " Memoirs " has been so often repeated as to 
 acquire a certain fixity. Yet, if his original criticism be examined, 
 it will be discovered that he had no better ground for it than 
 political bias. 
 
 It would be an impertinence upon my part to attack the great 
 authority of Mr. Morse-Stephens, who is without question the 
 only Englishman thoroughly acquainted with the history of the 
 Eevolution, and whose admirable work, the product of an Oxford 
 leisure, has received its reward in an American endowment ; but 
 Mr. Morse-Stephens will not, I think, deny that in this case he 
 has merely followed the authority of Croker, for on reading 
 Croker's MS. notes in the British Museum, I found upon the 
 fly-leaf of the volume Mr. Morse-Stephens' name, and I presume 
 that the book was once his property. 
 
 Now the argument in favour of accepting the authenticity of 
 these " Memoirs " is simply the argument in favour of accepting 
 the authenticity of any book that may be presented to you until 
 some conclusive evidence of chicanery or forgery can be produced. 
 If indeed the book had been published as proceeding entirely 
 from Charlotte Robespierre's own hand, then one would have 
 grave suspicions of the honesty of its publication, for she was 
 not in the habit of long consecutive literary composition, and 
 some parts of the style are evidently those of another hand ; but 
 since the book was not offered under any such guise, but frankly 
 edited as the compilation and working together of her notes by 
 another, there can be no question of false motive in the matter, 
 and any one desiring to suggest that the relations given in them 
 were not from her pen would have to prove one of three things — 
 either, first, that Charlotte was of a character quite different from 
 that which the author of these " Memoirs " betrays ; or, secondly, 
 that Laperronaye was so untrustworthy a man that anything pro- 
 ceeding from him was open to suspicion; or finally (and this 
 would be the best proof of all), that in some one important part 
 of the "Memoirs" a statement demonstrably untrue, and one 
 which Charlotte and he must have known to be untrue, is made. 
 
 None of these three proofs against the authenticity of the 
 " Memoirs " or against their veracity exists. 
 
 Charlotte's character is perfectly well known. She had many 
 acquaintances throughout her long life, and the Lebas family (who 
 
 2 A 
 
370 NOTES 
 
 were her most intimate friends, and who occupied an honourahle 
 position in the society of the University as late as the third 
 empire) have been able to give as clear and consecutive an 
 account of her character in her age, as the private letters and 
 memoirs of the Revolution give it of her youth. She was some- 
 what bitter and jealous ; reserved ; a little vain (there was even 
 some talk of a courtship with Fouch^ !) ; strongly attached to her 
 brother, and not particularly political. She could have no kind 
 of motive in making him out this or that save the motive of 
 domestic affection, which would, of course, prevent her from 
 including the less favourable anecdotes that might attach to his 
 youth, but which would not affect the neutral matter of which 
 the " Memoirs " are principally composed. In a word, she was 
 exactly the woman whom one would expect to leave the notes 
 which she did leave ; they contain not a few allusions to her 
 quarrels with those whom she feared were acquiring too great a 
 domestic influence over her brother, and in all of them she dis- 
 covers herself to be precisely what the tradition of her character 
 would make her. 
 
 Laperronaye's character is also well known ; he was a young 
 and enthusiastic radical, who more than once suffered at the 
 hands of the Restoration for his political opinions. He was, 
 as such enthusiasts must of their nature be, a simple man, 
 and while his own relation of political events would almost 
 certainly be exaggerated and biassed, such a cold forgery as 
 Croker suggests (a forgery requiring, moreover, an intimate know- 
 ledge of human nature, a great self-restraint, and a vast reading) 
 is utterly alien to such a type of mind. 
 
 As to the third method, the discovery in these " Memoirs " of 
 a definite falsehood, I will treat of in a moment. Meanwhile let 
 me examine the methods which Croker used in his analysis 
 of the book. 
 
 He wrote an article in the Quarterly Review, a periodical at 
 that time remarkable for its ability in attack, professing to review 
 this with other memoirs that had been sent him by the editor, 
 and he proceeds to the satisfaction of the middle class of his 
 time, but certainly to the satisfaction of no historian, to demolish 
 the authenticity of Charlotte's notes in the following fashion : — 
 
 In the first place he impugns the morality of the publisher. 
 
NOTES 371 
 
 He does not impugn it by saying this publisher upon such and 
 such an occasion was guilty of such and such a trick, or wittingly 
 foisted such and such a forgery upon the public, he simply says : — 
 
 " In England the assertion of any man of letters or of any 
 respectable publisher that a work was printed from the MSS. of 
 a person lately deceased, would never be questioned — we regret 
 to repeat that it is quite the reverse in France." 
 
 It is difficult to see why Croker was at the pains of going 
 further. If French publishers are notorious rogues, it is evident 
 that any book proceeding from a French firm lies under grave 
 suspicion, and the ontis probandi in the matter of its genuineness 
 lies upon the firm that has the temerity to issue the book. 
 According to this theory it would be necessary for every French 
 publisher to issue as a preface to all posthumous and most con- 
 temporary works a complete and exhaustive proof that in each 
 particular case he had acted honestly. 
 
 But though this assertion of Croker's (had he seriously in- 
 tended to propound it dogmatically), would have been sufficient 
 for his whole argument, he has the grace to go into a little more 
 detail, and attacks the honesty of Laperronaye. The basis of 
 his distrust of Laperronaye is that Laperronaye was a radical, 
 and was prosecuted by the Government for his political opinion. 
 There is not a single atom of proof produced by Croker to show 
 that Laperronaye was a dishonest man, saving the fact that he 
 was a radical and that he suffered such prosecution. I will 
 admit that I )und it a trifle disconcerting to discover that some 
 men regard as criminals all young liberals who live by lecturing 
 and their pen. He does not say, " Laperronaye once forged this 
 or that," nor does he even bring forward what is usually easy to 
 bring forward in the case of violent politicians, examples of his 
 exaggeration or misstatements ; he simply says that Englishmen 
 will always look with suspicion upon those who are prosecuted 
 by monarchic or oligarchic governments for their political opinions. 
 A postulate so puerile, and one so destructive to the credit of the 
 whole English historical school, would seem incredible did not 
 one know the kind of man who was writing and the kind of 
 audience for which he wrote ; nevertheless it is the only argu- 
 ment this astonishing man brings forward to destroy the value 
 of Laperronaye's edition, so far as its author is concerned. 
 
372 NOTES 
 
 I turn now to the more serious part of his argument : the 
 part in which he attempts to prove special points in order to establish 
 his view. I give them in their order, and I think my readers will 
 admit that they are not particularly convincing. 
 
 First he says that Laperronaye could not have had the 
 " Memoirs " because Mdlle. de Robespierre's whole property was 
 left in her will to her host and friend Mdlle. Mathon. The ab 
 surdity of this should be evident on the face of it. People 
 bequeath their literary property every day to those who will have 
 to call in aid for its editing and publication. But it becomes still 
 more absurd when one knows, what Croker apparently did not, but 
 what at that time many living men could have told him, that 
 Laperronaye was an intimate friend of the house, that he was in 
 continual conference with Mdlle. de Robespierre, and that Mdlle. 
 Mathon made no protest against the appearance of the book. 
 
 Secondly, he complains that the style is in many parts "con- 
 tinually smelling of the three great days " of 1830, " no more like 
 what a poor old recluse would have hammered out than it is to 
 Marot or Rabelais." This is rank nonsense. If he is alluding to 
 the phrases that proceeded from Laperronaye's own pen, of course 
 they smell of 1830, just as this book which I have written smells, 
 or at least I hope it smells, of the year 1901. But if he is 
 alluding to the phrases which are supposed to proceed from 
 Mdlle. de Robespierre herself and to form parts of her notes, I 
 can only say that it is utterly unfounded. It is not very easy to 
 distinguish the slight differences of style that arise in the lifetime 
 of one person. Mdlle. de Robespierre may have kept strictly in 
 her old age to the phrases of 1793, or she may have, as most 
 people do, altered a little with the time ; but the simple words 
 in which her brother's youth is noted down belong to no par- 
 ticular kind of modern French style. They are perfectly straight- 
 forward and plain. There is not an expert in the world that 
 could decide from the words or their order at what time between 
 1760 and 1840 they may have been written. 
 
 Thirdly, he says that her age (she was over seventy) "was 
 rather late to set about writing memoirs." This again is non- 
 sense. I repeat, the book does not profess to be of Mdlle. 
 Robespierre's own composition ; it professes only to be an editing 
 and putting together of a mass of notes which she had jotted 
 
NOTES 373 
 
 down in the course of a great number of years, and Croker's 
 contention that the mention of Levasseur's "Memoirs" (a book 
 that only appeared in 1829) proves the book a forgery, has not the 
 least weight, since there is no reason that a woman over sixty 
 should not take note of the literature of her time. If some 
 elderly English lady were now leaving a number of notes 
 of, let Tis say, the Indian Mutiny (which is further from us 
 than the Eevolution was from 1829), it is ridiculous to imagine 
 that she would be incapable of noting some important book upon 
 the subject which had appeared this year, and which seemed to 
 her to be libellous or false in connection with the character of 
 some actor in that episode whose reputation she had at heart. 
 
 Fourthly, he makes great case of Robespierre's being spoken 
 of as belonging to two successive parliaments, and calls this "a 
 slip of Laperronaye's youthful memory." This again is absolutely 
 puerile. Whether the inaccurate phrase is Laperronaye's or Mdlle. 
 de Robespierre's is immaterial, it is just such an error as would 
 never appear in a forgery, and as would appear in rough authentic 
 notes jotted down from memory. Every child in a French 
 school knows that Robespierre was not a member of the second, 
 but only of the first and third parliaments of the Eevolution ; 
 Mdlle. de Robespierre knew it, and Laperronaye knew it as well 
 as Croker (for instance) would know that the short peace of 
 Amiens interrupted the Great "War, of which one nevertheless 
 talks and writes as a continuous struggle of twenty-two years. 
 
 It is evident that upon such arguments as the above one could 
 prove any authority in the world to be doubtful, but there is in the 
 whole of this long article just one clear bit of evidence, and only 
 one, and as might be expected it goes against Croker's contention. 
 He speaks of the letter upon p. 126 (of the i8th of Messidor of 
 the year II.) as obviously false from the terms of recrimination in 
 which it is written ; it is an angry and almost passionate com- 
 plaint against the way she is neglected. Croker asks whether 
 it is possible to believe that such a letter would have been sent to 
 Maximilian, "who was her brother's master and hers." 
 
 It was published by Courtois (when that enemy officially 
 edited the papers seized in Robespierre's house) as being addressed 
 to Maximilian. On the face of it, it is improbable that Charlotte 
 would have addressed such a letter to Maximilian, and Croker 
 
374 NOTES 
 
 should have known that Courtois very often omitted matter in 
 order to turn the collection against Eobespierre. He cannot be 
 called a serious critic who accepts without verification anything 
 which may tend to support his one theory, yet this is just what 
 Croker did. If Croker had looked up the original in the 
 archives he would have found that the letter was not written to 
 Maximilian but to Augustine; it is he, her younger brother, 
 whom Charlotte is reproaching for not visiting her on his return 
 fiom the South, and we know that she had a standing quarrel 
 with him which Eobespierre was always trying to settle. 
 
 I think I have sufficiently shown that Croker is utterly 
 unreliable, and as it is principally upon Croker's authority that 
 doubts have been cast upon these " Memoirs " I think it will also 
 be admitted that, until something more definite can be brought 
 against them, the " Memoirs " must be taken as our principal source 
 of information upon Robespierre's childhood and youth. I cannot 
 refrain, however, from concluding by quoting a characteristic 
 pencil note which Croker has himself added in the spirit of an 
 exegi tnonumentum on the margin of his precious essay : — 
 
 "It is now admitted," he writes, "that the Quarterly Eeview 
 was right, and that these ' Memoirs ' were a gross fabrication, but if 
 it had not been for this exposure they might still have passed for 
 authentic." 
 
 There, in a nutshell, is the spirit which always runs through 
 this kind of falsification of history. A writer, popular for some 
 momentary reason, develops a long process of reasoning upon 
 certain postulates which he aflfirms with commendable vigour, 
 but which he does not himself take the trouble to prove. B, C, 
 and D, eminent and reliable men who have heard that A is an 
 authority, and who are writing upon some cognate subject, come 
 across this point ; they have no time to look up the whole of the 
 authorities ; they turn to an index and they discover that the 
 only man who has treated of it is A. They run rapidly through 
 his conclusions and admit them into their own narratives. Their 
 work, since it is valuable upon any matter which they have 
 examined, is read by the general public ; the single point so 
 quoted is accepted with the rest, and at last the false conclusion 
 arrived at by one charlatan in this one matter is perpetuated on 
 the well-founded authority of a dozen honest man with whose 
 labours it is intermixed. 
 
NOTES 375 
 
 NOTE II 
 
 ON CEETAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK 
 
 There -will perhaps be among my readers a certain number 
 who are familiar with modern Paris, and I take it that they will 
 find some interest in the discovery of the exact sites mentioned in 
 this book. The original buildings have nearly all disappeared; 
 their emplacements, however, are worth tracing. 
 
 The Jacobins. — The Dominican Convent of the Eue St. 
 Honors, in whose chapter or refectory the club originally met, 
 in whose library they held their sessions until May '91, and in 
 whose chapel they sat for the remaining three years of their 
 activity, stood exactly where the covered market called "The 
 March^ St. Honor6" stands now. Indeed, that market was 
 created by the Convention in a decree purposely designed to 
 obliterate the memory of the famous hall. The entrance to the 
 club, three arches surmounted by statues of St. Dominic and 
 St. Catherine of Sienna, was almost yard for yard in that part of 
 the northern side of the Eue St. Honord where the " Rue du 
 March6 St. Honor^ " now comes into it. Of the original build- 
 ings nothing remains. 
 
 Duplay's House. — This house stood upon the site of the 
 modern No. 398 of the Rue St. Honors. It is on the northern 
 side of that street, about a hundred yards before you get to the 
 Rue Eoyale, and just before the opening of the Rue St. Florentin. 
 The house may be recognised, apart from the number, as that on 
 either side of whose central doorway stand a jeweller's shop and 
 a furniture shop. It is the property of M. Vaury, whose bakery 
 is next door. 
 
 There has arisen upon the origin of the present building a 
 discussion which once possessed a certain interest, but the solu- 
 tion of which is now so thoroughly arrived at that the quarrel 
 may be almost neglected. It will suffice for this note if I say 
 that without doubt not a particle of the original building remains, 
 but, save that the front upon the street is a good deal deeper than 
 it was originally, the plan of the house is much what it was ir 
 Robespierre's time. 
 
376 NOTES 
 
 This house was, during the Eevolution, of comparatively slight 
 construction; it was only two storeys high in front, and with a depth 
 of one room. The back, at the end of a courtyard, was also only 
 two storeys high ; and the back and front were joined precisely as 
 they are now by a wing on the western side — that is, on the left 
 side of the courtyard as you come in under the gate ; but there 
 was no corresponding eastern wing opposite as there is now, there 
 was only a blank wall. In the years 1811 and 181 6 two succes- 
 sive reconstructions destroyed all the original walls, and there 
 were even new foundations laid ; it was determined to make the 
 house much higher, and the walls of the original two storeys were, 
 according to the architect's report, not nearly strong enough to 
 bear the weight. They were pulled down, the present house was 
 raised to its six storeys, and the eastern wing was added. The 
 carpenter's shed that stood in the courtyard was at the same time 
 taken away. 
 
 M. Sardou, who possesses a very valuable collection of revolu- 
 tionary MSS. and documents, was under the impression that the 
 house we now see is the original building. It is true that the 
 actual space of Robespierre's room still exists surrounded by four 
 walls, and that the place where the old window was is occupied by 
 the present window overlooking the courtyard. It is the middle 
 window on the left on the first floor ; but the discussion as to 
 whether the room is still in existence is a matter for metaphy- 
 sicians rather than historians. When you have taken away the 
 floor, the ceiling, and the four walls of a room, and in the new 
 house you reproduce on much the same situation a new set of 
 walls, floor, and ceiling, have you still got the original room? 
 The discussion is a trifle scholastic. 
 
 The House in the Rue Saintonge. — This house, where Eobes- 
 pierre lived for two years before he became the guest of the 
 Duplays, stiU exists, and bears the number 64. There is nothing 
 about it very well worth remarking, and it is impossible to be 
 quite certain which rooms he occupied. 
 
 The Manege, in which most of the time of the Constituent 
 Assembly was spent, all that of the Legislative Assembly, and 
 that of the Convention up to May 1793, has been destroyed by 
 the construction of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castiglione. 
 Its site would lie mainly in the roadway, but would partly over- 
 
NOTES 377 
 
 lap the Bodega at the western corner, and to a much greater 
 extent the row of shops at the eastern corner. There is a certain 
 irony in the connection of such modern uses — a drinking bar 
 for the foreign rich and a dressmaker for the foreign rich — with 
 such a past. The principal approach to it was down a narrow 
 lane called " Passage des Feuillants," which ran more or less in 
 the centre of what is now the Rue Castiglione. 
 
 The Hotel de Villa was, of course, destroyed in the Inter- 
 nationalist and CoUectivist revolt of 187 1. The great central hall 
 on the first floor occupies space for space very much the same site 
 as the hall in which the principal meetings of the Commune were 
 held, and in which Eobespierre was arrested and wounded on the 
 morning of the loth Thermidor. The great square in front of it 
 (once the Place de Grfeve, now the Place de THotel de Ville) is 
 much larger than it was in the time of the Eevolution ; it was 
 then irregular, rather triangular than square in shape, and barely 
 more than half its present size. 
 
 Finally, if such a detail can interest the curious, I may remark 
 that the guillotine of Thermidor stood very near where the Obelisk 
 is now in the Place de la Concorde, a few yards to the north and 
 west of it. On the site of the Obelisk was the great statue of 
 Liberty which David had designed. 
 
 NOTE III 
 
 EOBESPIBRKE'S SUPPOSED ATTEMPT AT SUICIDE 
 
 It is not without interest to attempt to determine whether or 
 no Eobespierre attempted suicide on the morning of the loth 
 Thermidor in the Hotel de Ville. That pistol-shot was, as I have 
 said in the text, practically the end of his life, for he lay but half 
 living and bloodless for the remaining hours of the day until his 
 execution in the evening. It is also of great interest from the 
 point of view of an analysis of his character. So important has the 
 question appeared to historians that one may almost know in what 
 category a writer on the Eevolution is to be placed by noting his 
 treatment of the doubt upon Eobespierre's wound. 
 
378 NOTES 
 
 M. Aulard has well said that there is no absolute certainty to 
 be arrived at in the matter, and he himself, by far the greatest 
 living authority on the Kevolution, has refused to decide. Never- 
 theless when I remember that history, which can always make 
 sure of moral tendencies, can never be absolutely sure of facts, 
 and that the evidence it secures is by its nature of a kind that 
 would not be admitted in a court of law, I think the question 
 of Eobespierre's supposed attempt at suicide can be solved with 
 at least as much confidence as a dozen contemporary doubts upon 
 which it has been agreed to accept a final decision. 
 
 I take it that Kobespierre did not shoot himself, but that his 
 wound was inflicted by Merda, shooting, as he says he did, from 
 the door, and I think the following process of proof lends to that 
 opinion a weight which no generalities upon Robespierre's char- 
 acter can possibly outweigh. 
 
 Here is a list of the documents which have decided opinion 
 upon either side. 
 
 First and most important the report of the doctors sent by the 
 Convention to examine the wound when Robespierre lay bleeding 
 on the table in the Tuileries. 
 
 Secondly, the declaration of Dulac which asserts, a year later, 
 that he saw Robespierre extended by the table before any one 
 came in, before, that is, the troops of the Convention had thrust 
 open the door. 
 
 Thirdly, Gallois distinctly states that Merda fired at Couthon 
 and missed him, and that Bobespierre had laid by his side before 
 the irruption of the troops of the Convention, a pistol and its 
 case brought in from the selection of arms in the adjoining room. 
 It was with this pistol-case of soft leather, says Gallois, that 
 Robespierre was wiping his wound during the long hours of his 
 agony in the Tuileries. 
 
 Lastly, there is the declaration of Merda himself, made some 
 little time afterwards, that he shot at Couthon and missed him, 
 and that he then shot Robespierre, and with this declaration is a 
 mass of the most evident nonsense, such as that he leapt at 
 Robespierre with a great sword, and pointing it at his throat 
 said, "There is a God." 
 
 There are one or two other declarations of less importance, 
 but I omit them because they are either absolutely irreconcilable 
 with the facts, or at third hand. 
 
NOTES 379 
 
 Now it is evident that our judgment reposes upon two very 
 different kinds of evidence. First, we have the testimony of men 
 more or less concerned to obtain favours from the victors or to 
 defend the memory of the victims, and tending, therefore, to give 
 a particular version of their own. Secondly, we have a quasi- 
 scientific document into which there could he no object for 
 introducing support of one theory or of the other. It is evident 
 from the mere aspect of the doctors' report that it was written 
 hurriedly, and from its terms that it purports to be nothing but 
 a short, rather conventional and confused statement of the nature 
 of the wound drawn up in technical language. 
 
 It so happens that nearly all the judgments upon that famous 
 pistol-shot have been based upon the contradictory evidence of the 
 first category, while the document, which, so far as I can see, is 
 obviously more reliable, has been more or less neglected. 
 
 If one takes the personal evidence offered, one comes to some 
 such tangle as this : the shot was said to have been fired by a 
 hearty and irresponsible boy,^ who had the greatest interest in 
 making up the story. On the other hand. Bourdon, who was there, 
 backed up his claim to a reward. He also claimed and got back 
 his pistol from the Hotel de Ville where it had fallen. He was 
 known to have held a pistol as he entered the door, and he fired 
 at least at Couthon. He wove into his declaration the wildest 
 gasconading, and instead of making it on the spot, he waited 
 until the next day to appeal for a reward. Against this you have 
 the testimony of a man far more reliable, an employ^ in the Town 
 Hall, who a year later testifies that he saw Kobespierre lying 
 upon the floor before this boy and his armed companions entered 
 the room. It is plain that on evidence like that no one can make 
 up their mind either way, and the only result of it is that while 
 the more romantic of historians have inclined to accept Merda's 
 version, it is the more precise who have defended the theory of 
 suicide. 
 
 This latter conclusion is, however, rendered untenable, I think, 
 
 1 I hope this liar and hard fighter was of Gascon blood ; but it is Im- 
 possible to say so definitely, though he was certainly southern. He was 
 born in 1774, joined the army after Thermidor, was promoted from the 
 ranks and died from wounds received at the Beresina, 8th September 
 1812. He was colonel of the ist Chasseurs at the time. 
 
38o NOTES 
 
 by the evidence of the doctors' report. We know that Eobespierre 
 had been sitting in a kind of silent despair for some time, with his 
 left elbow upon the table, his forehead leaning upon his left hand, 
 the right side of his face towards the great window, and the left 
 side of it towards the door. Now we find from the doctors' 
 report, though that report is rather confused (as Dr. E^clus has 
 well pointed out), that the general direction of the wound was 
 from the lower part of the left cheek near the nose downwards, 
 shattering the lower left jaw and passing out apparently at the 
 back of the neck, for no bullet was found in the wound. There was 
 no mark of burning or of powder on the skin. The wound was 
 small and clean, and there is no doubt that the bullet was con- 
 siderably deflected by the bone. The reader has only to put his 
 own right hand into the awkward position required to inflict such 
 a wound upon himself — if indeed it be possible — to appreciate 
 the extreme improbability of a man's turning a weapon against 
 himself in such a contorted gesture ; especially if this were done 
 in a moment of excitement. If the shot was really fired by 
 Merda, everything is explained. Coming from the whole length 
 of a very large public office, it was more or less spent, and hence 
 the deflection at the bone. The wound was small and clean, 
 which it certainly would not have been coming from a weapon an 
 inch or two from the face, and finally, that there should be no 
 mark of burning or powder upon the skin, seems to me con- 
 clusive. 
 
 THB END 
 
INDEX 
 
 " A," names of Jacobins under, 194 
 
 Abbey of St. Waast, 42-43 ; gives 
 scholarship to Eobespierre, 51 ; 
 de Eohan abbot of, 112 ; Robes- 
 pierre revisits, 156 
 
 Academy, of Arras, 56-57 ; Oarnot 
 received in, Duo de Guines a, 
 guest of, 65 ; of Metz, Robes- 
 pierre's prize from, 58 ; of 
 Amiens, failure of Robespierre to 
 obtain prize of, 59, 60 
 
 Actors, debate on, 99 
 
 Aix, Archbishop of, Robespierre 
 replies to, 79 ; his protest on 
 Civil Constitution, 115 
 
 Allemand, Royal regiment, desert, 
 
 185 
 Alliance, of Austria and Prussia, 
 
 168-169 
 Alsace, claims of feudal lords in, 
 
 174 
 Amar, mentioned, 258, 264 
 
 Amanry, Caf6, site of Breton club, 
 
 80 
 Americans, at bar of National 
 
 Assembly, 109 ; resemblance of 
 
 Isnard to, 161 
 Ancien regime, Robespierre typical 
 
 of, 13 ; spirit of, 14; contrasts of, 
 
 21 ; literary influence in, 56 ; 
 
 anti-Catholicism of, 11 2-1 13 
 Anglas, Boissy d', see " Boissy " 
 Antoinette, see " Marie " 
 Apostacy, of priests, 280-281 
 "Appeal to Artesian People," 
 
 Robespierre's first pamphlet, 66- 
 
 67 
 
 Arms, of Robespierre family 41, 
 andn. 
 
 Arras, described, 43-44; academy 
 of. 56-57 ; College d', SI ; Eobeb- 
 pierre returns to, 53 ; elections 
 in, 67 ; Robespierre revisits, 156; 
 anger of, against Roland, 217 
 
 " Artesian People," see " Appeal " 
 
 Artois, province of, described, 42- 
 44 ; debate on taxes of, 100, 107 
 
 Artois, Comte d', emigrates, 84 
 
 Assembly, see " National," " Legis- 
 lative " 
 
 Audebrand, senator, his anecdote 
 of Mile. Robespierre, 49 n. 
 
 August, loth of, attack on palace, 
 described, 188-192 ; general ef- 
 fect of, 193-195, 207 ; effect of, 
 on Robespierre, 195-197 ; medal 
 commemorating, 199 
 
 Augustine Eobespierre, youngest 
 of family, 49; scholarship at 
 Louis le Grand, 53 ; his death, 
 
 363 
 
 Aulard, quoted, 80 n., 192 n. ; 
 criticised, 96 n. 
 
 Austria, see " Emperor " 
 
 Avignon, massacres at, 154; Em- 
 peror demands restoration of, 174 
 
 Azema, deputy for Aude, his de- 
 scription of loth of August, 190- 
 192 
 
 Baptism, of Robespierre, 46 
 Barbaroux, attacks Robespierre, 
 215; described, 2340. 
 
 2 B 
 
382 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Barnave, draws np letter for 
 
 Emperor, 169, and n. 
 Barr^re, his early notes on Bobes- 
 pierre, 75 ; attitude on gth Ther- 
 midor, 326 ; speeches on loth 
 Thermidor, 342, 343 
 Bastille, fall of, 83 ; Robespierre's 
 
 comment on, 85 
 Beaumetz, Robespierre's quarrel 
 
 with, 107, and n. 
 Besenval, case of, go 
 Beroheny, the colours at, 185 
 Bethune, Robespierre visits, 157 
 Beurnonville, Minister of War, 235 
 Billaud-Varennes, Robespierre op- 
 poses, 245 ; threatens Danton, 
 286 ; attitude on gth Thermidor, 
 327-328 ; his speech on loth 
 Thermidor, 338-342 
 Biron, defeat of, 185 
 Birth, of Robespierre, 39 
 Bishop, see under separate dioceses 
 
 and names 
 Bishops, their protest against Civil 
 
 Constitution, 122-124 
 Boissy d'Anglas, 323 
 Bonaparte, see " Napoleon " 
 " Bourdon," of Notre Dame, 338 
 Bourdon, Leonard, occupies Hotel 
 de Ville on loth Thermidor, 
 362 
 Boyhood, of Robespierre, S0-S3 
 Breton club, 80, 81 ; origin of 
 
 Jacobins, 97 
 Br^ze, de, Mirabeau's reply to, 82 
 Briez, 264 
 
 Brissot, at Desmoulins' wedding, 
 124; his power in I7g2, 115; 
 person described, 166 ; quarrel 
 with Robespierre, 168 ; forces 
 war, 169; formation of Girondin 
 ministry, 174-175, 181-183; prin- 
 cipal debate against Robespierre, 
 213-214 
 Britlanique, Hotel, Rolands at, 212 
 Brittany, in the Revolution, 80 
 
 Buissart, Robespierre's letteri to 
 
 76 «., 82-84 "• 
 Buonarotti, 303 
 
 Cabaeeus, Theresa, Robespierre's 
 warrant of arrest of, 5g, 310 
 
 Caen, Bishop of, see "Fauohet" 
 
 Cahiers, abstract quality of edu- 
 cated, 55 
 
 Camille des Moulins, lee "Des- 
 moulins " 
 
 Carnot, family of, 46-47 ; received 
 in Academy of Arras, 57 ; briefs 
 Robespierre, 63 
 
 Carrault, Robespierre's mother, 45 
 
 Carvin, settlement of Robespierre's 
 family at, 40 ; they leave it for 
 Arras, 42 
 
 Catholicism, Robespierre's attitude 
 towards, no ; and history of 
 France, 1 1 i-i 12 ; and the schism, 
 
 IS3-ISS 
 Cavaignac, family of, 47 
 Character of Robespierre, 12-18, 
 
 27-38 
 
 Charlotte Robespierre, 48, and n. / 
 49, and n. 
 
 Chaumette, at King's trial, 221-222 
 
 Church, Cambon proposed to dis- 
 establish, 224 
 
 Civil Constitution of clergy, 113- 
 119 ; signed by King, 122 
 
 Clergy, see "Civil." Marriage of, 
 Robespierre's attitude to, 117 
 
 College, of Arras, 51 ; of Louis le 
 Grand, 51 ; Robespierre's life at, 
 52 ; King visits, 53 
 
 Committee of Public Safety, formed, 
 243-244 ; Robespierre enters, 
 256-257 ; requires continuation 
 of Terror and drags in Robes- 
 pierre, 293; Thermidor, 325- 
 
 327 
 Commons, election of, at Arras, 67 ; 
 their oath in the tennis court, 81 ; 
 
INDEX 
 
 383 
 
 entry of, into Revolution, 106; 
 and Mirabean, 129 
 
 Commnne, of loth of August, 197- 
 199 ; Robespierre identified with, 
 208; of '94, no longer Parisian, 
 319, 324; insurrection of, 355 et 
 teq. 
 
 Conde, question of, 119 
 
 Condoroet, his view of Robespierre, 
 219 
 
 Conspiracy, the, against Robes- 
 pierre, 323 
 
 Constitution of 1791 ; its break- 
 down, 146 
 
 Contract, see " Social Contract " 
 
 Convention, first meeting of, 209 
 
 Conzie, de, bishop of Arras ; his 
 patronage of Robespierre, 50-51 ; 
 gives Robespierre a magistracy 
 
 Cordeliers, club of, 289-290 ; Vieiix, 
 tee " Vieux Cordelier" 
 
 Oourrier de Paris, 219 
 
 Court party, their attempt at re- 
 action in October 1789, 91 
 
 Cromwell, Lafayette compared to, 
 182 
 
 Crown, intrigues with the enemy, 
 149, 169; a power of, in early 
 part of war, 178 
 
 Danton, family of, 46 ; his flight 
 to England, 144, and n. ; his re- 
 port from Belgium, 237 ; peril of 
 in Dumouriez' treason, 242-243 ; 
 returns to stop the Terror, 277- 
 278; last interview with Robes- 
 pierre, 292 ; death of, 296 
 
 Dauphin, Robespierre's supposed 
 allusion to, 108, and n. 
 
 " De," see under separate names 
 
 Debates, on Civil Constitution, 114- 
 119; on the war, 161-164; on 
 Robespierre's ascendancy, 212- 
 217 ; of 9th Thermidor, 332-349 
 
 Deity, Feast of, 309-310 
 
 Desmoulins, Camille, at College 
 with Robespierre, 52 ; rouses 
 Paris in July 1789, 83; mar- 
 riage of, 123-124 ; attack on 
 Brissot, 158 ; Tieux Oorddier, 
 278-286 
 
 Dillon, General, his defeat and 
 death, 184-185 
 
 Dominicans, offer their convent to 
 Radical club, 97 
 
 Dubois-Cranc4 at siege of Lyons, 
 267 ; abandons Robespierre in 
 Thermidor, 347 
 
 Dumouriez, described, 1 70-1 71 ; 
 forces war, 1 74 ; first successes of, 
 212 ; his defeat at Neerwinden, 
 241 ; and treason, 242 
 
 Duplay, described, 143 ; Robes- 
 pierre enters house of, 143-145 ; 
 elected to his section, 202; Robes- 
 pierre in house of, in '94, 300- 
 304 ; his farewell to Robespierre, 
 330 
 
 Duplay, Eleanor, see "Eleanor" 
 
 Duplay, Nicholas, 320-321, and n. 
 
 Edict, against refractory priests, 
 186 
 
 Education, of Robespierre, 50-54 
 
 Egalit^ execution of, 261 ; patron 
 of Brissot, 166 
 
 Eleanor Duplay, betrothed to Robes- 
 pierre, 303 ; last walk with, 320 
 
 Elections, of Arras, 67 ; of Robes- 
 pierre to Paris, 203-205 
 
 Elector, of Treves, 169 
 
 Emperor, supposed letter of, 169 ; 
 war declared against, 174 
 
 English lady, addressed by Robes- 
 pierre, 60 
 
 Eroherolles, Mile, d', 267 
 
 Family, of Robespierre, 40-48 ; 
 probably Irish, 46 
 
384 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Families, of the ReToIution, 46-47 
 
 Fanatics, natnre of, 29-31 
 
 Father of Bobespierre, see "Mazi- 
 
 milian-Baitholomew " 
 Fauchet, Bishop, 15? 
 Fom^, Bishop, 157 
 Fonch^, recalled from Lyons, 311 ; 
 
 conspires, 316, 319 
 Fez, inn of, 70 
 
 " Gallioan Chueoh" in possession 
 of orders, 124 
 
 Girondins, first appearance, 156- 
 157 ; Bobespierre's antagonism 
 to, 167 ; attack Bobespierre, 181, 
 211, 217, &c. ; main quarrel of, 
 with Mountain, 204-207 ; their 
 position in March 1 793, 236-238 ; 
 their fall, 250 ; saved by Bobes- 
 pierre, 265 ; their end, 268 
 
 Gorsas, 218 
 
 Guadet, 172, 182 
 
 Hamel, preface, ziii; quoted, 60 
 n., 121 n., 202 «., 219 n. 
 
 Handwriting, of Bobespierre, 59, 
 and n. 
 
 Hanriot, in 2nd of June, 249; in 
 Thermidor, 337-341 
 
 Hapsbnrgs, 168 
 
 Helvetius, bis bust broken, 226 
 
 Herbert, power of, 262; his anti- 
 Christian movement, 279 ; his 
 fall, 290 
 
 Heche, 304-305, and n. 
 
 " Sort laloil" 359-360 
 
 Hotel de Ville, in Thermidor, 350- 
 
 363 
 House, of Duplay, tee "Duplay"; 
 of Bobespierres, at Arras, 44 
 
 ISNABD, 159-161 
 
 Jacobins, origin of, 82, 96-98 ; 
 Mirabeau's last speech, 125-127 ; 
 scene at, on 17th of July 1791, 
 141 ; they applaud war, 161 ; 
 great debate on war, 164-165 ; 
 debate of Brissot and Bobespierre 
 in, 181-183; last speech of 
 Bobespierre at, and scene of 8th 
 Thermidor, 321-322 ; closed by 
 Legendre, 359 
 
 Jews, Bobespierre defends, 99 
 
 Eeralio, Mademoiselle de, 57, also 
 "Madame Robert," 143 n. 
 
 Lafayette, attack on, in Jacobins, 
 132 ; and Champ de Mars, 140- 
 141 ; attempts to save crown, 
 179; compared to Cromwell, 
 182; exile and end of, 188 
 
 Lally, ToUendal, and his son, 72, 
 and n, 
 
 Lebas, attempts to save Bobes- 
 pierre, 340; sacrifices himself, 
 349 ; death, 360 
 
 Lebas, ^s, 349 
 
 Lecointre, a fool, 328 
 
 Legendre, Danton's friend, shuts 
 the Jacobins, 359 
 
 Legislative Assembly, character of, 
 147-153 
 
 Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, 89 ; 
 his death, 328 
 
 Letters, of Bobespierre, to Buissart, 
 77-79. 84; to Duplay, 156-157, 
 " to my constituents " 
 
 Lightning-rod, case of the, 64 
 
 Louchet, decides moment of Bobes- 
 pierre's fall, 349 
 
 Louis XVL, visits Robespierre's 
 college, 53; and Mirabeau, 127- 
 130 ; flight of, 136-137 ; intrigues 
 for foreign aid, 164; reads de- 
 claration of war, 174 ; a prisoner. 
 
INDEX 
 
 38s 
 
 192 ; his trial and death, 220- 
 
 232 
 Louis lo Grand, College o^ S'» 
 
 52 
 Lonstalot, his absurdity, 117 
 
 MaohecouIi, origin of Vendean 
 War, 240 
 
 Maillard, bis appearance at Ver- 
 sailles, 91-93 
 
 Mairie, Bobespierre handed to 
 guard of, 356 
 
 Malesherbes, 231, and n. 
 
 Marat, author of the Massacres of 
 September, 202 ; trial of, 247 ; 
 death of, 260 
 
 Marie Antoinette, name of Bobes- 
 pierre's godmother, 46 n, 
 
 Marie Antoinette, Qneen, writes, 
 with Bamave, letter provoking 
 war, 169 ; death of, 261 
 
 Marly, forest of, 14 
 
 Marriage, of Robespierre's parents, 
 date of, 39 ; of Bobespierre pro- 
 posed, 65 ; again proposed with 
 Mile. Duplay, 303 
 
 Marseillaise, origin of, 177 
 
 Martin Bobespierre, aee "Bobes- 
 pierre " 
 
 Mass of Holy Ghost, opens Parlia- 
 ment, 74 
 
 Massacres, of September, 202-204 ; 
 of Champs de Mars, 143-14S 
 
 Maximilian, see " Bobespierre " 
 
 Maximilian - Bartholomew, see 
 "Bobespierre" 
 
 Maury, Abb6, 1 12-1 13, and ». 
 
 Medal, «ee" August" 
 
 Merda, shoots Bobespierre, 363 
 
 Mirabeau, voice of, 10; and de 
 Biiai, 82 ; Bobespierre opposes, 
 120-121 ; last struggle and death 
 of, 124-128 ; bust of, broken, 226 
 
 Miranda, 240-241, and n. 
 
 Monasticism, 113, and n. 
 
 Monsieur, his reply to decree 
 against emigrants, 159, and n. 
 
 "Mouohoir du Pr^dicateur," verse 
 of Bobespierre, 61 
 
 Mounier, on origin of Jacobins, 97, 
 and n. 
 
 Mountain, quarrel of, with Gironde, 
 195 ; character of this quarrel, 
 205-209 ; approached by con- 
 spirators in Thermidor, 323 ; 
 abandons Bobespierre, 347 
 
 Mountjoie, on origin of Jacobins, 97, 
 and n. 
 
 Napoleon, 284, 291 
 
 Narbonne, 165, 170 
 
 National Assembly, its general 
 
 character, 69, &c. ; origin of the 
 
 term, 75, and n. 
 Neerwinden, defeat of Damouriez 
 
 at, 240 
 
 OoiOBEB, march on Versailles, 91- 
 
 93 
 " Ophelia," Bobespierre's verses to 
 
 (probably English), 60 
 Orleans, see " Egalit^ " 
 
 Palace, of Versailles, attack on, 
 see " October" ; of Tuilleries, at- 
 tack on, see "August loth" 
 
 Paris, elections of, to ConventioH, 
 203-Z04 ; attitude of, during 
 Thermidor, 350, 353, &c. 
 
 Potion, 134, 137, 160, 258 
 
 Praiiial, law of, 310 
 
 Priests, edict against refractory, 
 186 
 
 Protestants, Bobespierre defends, 
 99; see also "Jews" 
 
 Befobmebs, general character o^ 
 4-S 
 
386 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Benauld, C&ile, 307-308 
 
 Revolution, generation of, 14-21 ; 
 character of yonth in, 37 ; nature 
 of, 103-107 
 
 Bobespierre, Bobert de, 41 ; Yves 
 de, 41 ; Martin de, 42 ; Maxi- 
 milian (the elder), 42 ; Maxi- 
 milian-Bartholomew, father of 
 Bobespierre, 45 ; his death, 49 
 
 Robespierre, person of, 6-1 1 ; char- 
 acter of, 13-18, 27-38 J birth and 
 descent of, 39-46 ; collateral 
 descendants of, 48, and n. ; at 
 college, SI-S2 ; practises at bar, 
 62-67 > entry into States-General, 
 69-75 ; ^^^ '^'■s* speech, 76-77 ; 
 joins the Breton Club, 80-81 ; 
 first acquaintance with power in 
 October 1789, 92-93 ; effect of 
 Jacobins on, 96-98 ; first general 
 attack on him in Parliament, 100 ; 
 quarrel of, with Beanmetz, 107 ; 
 growing popularity of, 108-109 5 
 St. Just first introduced to, 120 ; 
 enters the household of Duplay, 
 140-145 ; character of his posi- 
 tion during Legislative, 152-153; 
 revisits native province, 156-157 ; 
 opposes war and Brissot, 163, 
 181-183 ; is absorbed by Paris, 
 196, 198 ; elected to Paris, 204 ; 
 causes of his opposition to rivals, 
 209 ; and of his later position, 
 210; great attack upon, 213-218; 
 Condorcet's description of, 219; 
 demands death of the King, 225 ; 
 and votes for, 229 ; enters the 
 Committee of Public Safety, 256- 
 257 ; saves the, 73, 265-266 ; 
 abandons the Moderates and 
 Desmoulins, 283-286 ; last dinner 
 with Danton, 292 ; abandons 
 Danton, 295 ; his idolaters in 
 Dnplay's house, 300-303 ; in the 
 Feast of the Deity, 308-309 ; his 
 last speech, 321-322 ; last morn- 
 
 ing of, 330; fatal error of, on 
 zoth Thermidor, 345 ; arrested, 
 349; joins the Revolt, 358; re- 
 fuses insurrection, 362 ; is shot, 
 363 ; is guillotined, 365 
 
 Boland, Madame, 143, and n., 235 
 
 " Eosati," 60 
 
 Bosicrucians, lodge of, at Arras, 45 
 
 Rousseau, his theory, character, 
 and effect of, 24-27 
 
 Boux, communist, 251 n, 
 
 St. Fahgkau, tee " LepeUetler " 
 St. Just, enters into Revolution, 
 120 ; his appeal to the Gironde 
 in the King's trial, 228, and n. ; 
 enters Committee of Public 
 Safety, 253 ; prepares Robes- 
 pierre's entry thereto, 256; 
 his report on the imprisoned 
 Girondins, 258 ; notes received 
 from Robespierre in report on 
 Danton, 294 ; estranged from 
 Robespierre, 293 ; during night 
 of Sth Thermidor, 327-329; his 
 attempt to save Robespierre on 
 9th Thermidor, 332-334 ; is ar- 
 rested, 349 
 Social Contract, nature of theory 
 of, 18-24; Rousseau's pamphlet 
 on, 25-27 
 
 Tallibn, hia mistress arrested, 
 311 ; attacks Robespierre in Ther- 
 midor, 334 
 
 Temple, Robespierre deputed to 
 guard, 203 
 
 Terror, Robespierre's reluctance to 
 face, 256 ; Danton troubled at> 
 257 ; Robespierre admits, 270 et 
 teq, 
 
 Th^ot, Catherine, 307 
 
 Therasson, proposes public meetings 
 of the great Committee, 261 «. 
 
 Theresa, tee "Cabamu" 
 
INDEX 
 
 387 
 
 Thuriot, in Thennidor, 348, 349 
 Treves, tee " Elector " 
 
 Vadikb, in Thermidor, 343-344 
 Valenciennes, besieged, 248 ; fall 
 
 of, 259 ; Brlez and, 264 
 Vendue, rising of, 237, 240 
 Vendome, Place, "Place des 
 
 Piques," 202, 361 
 Verdnn, besieged, 203 
 Vergniand, bis speech at King's 
 
 trial, 227 ; attitude in March '93, 
 
 239 ; death of, 268 
 Versailles, Robespierre enters, 69; 
 
 ill suited to him, 71, 93-96 
 Vieux Corddier, 277, 278, 283-285, 
 
 288 
 
 Vilate and Robespierre, 309 
 Virtues, of Robespierre, 34, &o. 
 Vivier, at Jacobins on loth Ther- 
 midor, 359 
 Voice, of Robespierre, 10 
 
 Waast, St., tee "Abbey" 
 
 War, declaration of great, against 
 Austria, 174-175 ; against Eng- 
 land and Holland, 234 
 
 Wattiguies, 261 
 
 Wimpfen, his reply to the OcDTen- 
 tioD, 258 
 
 Ttx3 de Robeipleire, 41 
 
BY HILAIRE BELLOC 
 
 DANTON 
 
 A Study» 440 pages. With portraH and notes, Svo, $2,50 
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 Preface 
 
 I. 
 
 The Revolution 
 
 II. 
 
 The Youth of Danton 
 
 III. 
 
 Danton at the Cordeliers 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Fall of the Monarchy 
 
 V. 
 
 The Republic 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Terror 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Death of Danton 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Robespierre 
 
 
 Appendices 
 
 
 Index 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS 
 From The Saturday Review 
 
 "Mr. Belloc's book is a most brilliant production, full of 
 verve and eloquence, containing some passages of high literary 
 merit. He makes his readers love Danton even if they cannot 
 admire or believe in him." 
 
 From Literature 
 " Mr. Belloc has two qualifications for his task: First, he 
 understands and loves France as no Englishman can under- 
 stand and few love it — we would go so far as to say that he 
 is the only English historian who has made the history of the 
 Revolution and the character of the French people engaged in 
 it real for us ; Secondly, he is a marvelous portrait painter." 
 
 From The Spectator 
 "A piece of real tragedy, given with admirable restraint and 
 eloquence. ' ' 
 
 From The Times 
 "Brilliant ... of exceptional merit . . . a book 
 which is to be read with pleasure, and of which the author 
 may be proud." 
 
. DANTON, BY HILAIRE BELLOC 
 
 From The Nation 
 "Mr. Belloc's essay is unmistakably a clever piece of com- 
 position in the broad style. It is always impulsive, often 
 eloquent. ... It brings together in close combination the 
 learning of the schools and a generous enthusiasm of youth, 
 which wamis to the a.spirations of that ' tender-eyed, wandering, 
 unfortunate Ro iisseau who d led of persecution . ' " 
 
 From The Dial 
 " Mr. Belloc's ' Study ' of Danton is a mor^ important con- 
 tribution to the subject, for by his own indeji^ndent investi- 
 gations he has been able to control and occasionally to supple- 
 ment his French predecessors. His treatment reve^^ls vigorous 
 thinking and clear conceptions of many of the characteristic 
 features of the great struggle. There are passages of remark- 
 able descriptive power." 
 
 From The New York Tribune 
 "It is on his record as a politician that he is honored in this 
 book, and it is of a brave, skillful and sane struggle against 
 circumstance that Mr. Belloc gives us, first and last, a vivid 
 impression." 
 
 From The Chicago Times-Herald 
 "Mr. Belloc has produced the first .searching, exhaustive and 
 profound study of Danton's character and the reciprocal influ- 
 ence existing between that character and its times and sur- 
 roundings that has appeared in the English language. He 
 has done more. He has written one of the most fascinating 
 and at the same time well-rounded and masterful historical 
 studies in existence — a monumental work that will be the last 
 word and an authority for many years to come." 
 
 From The Brooklyn Eagle 
 
 "A great story, admirably told. . . . Forms much the most 
 notable contribution recently made to the now enormous mass 
 of literature dealing with the greatest of modern epochs. To 
 say that Mr. Belloc has painted a recognizable portrait of a 
 reraarkalile man would be a totally inadequate estimate of his 
 work. He has done far more. TJie figure on his canvas stands 
 out in such bold outline and broad relief that we instinctively 
 feel ourselves close to a great man." 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK