Robespierre

Preface

Very often I have sat alone at evening before a fire of logs in a room near tlie Rue St. Honor^, 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 Buch 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-fellowship, and his soul that always recalled the Marne and that, when it was close to death, could not help remembering 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 himself, 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 fill 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-

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rection," and there is no resurrection without the resurrection 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 Robespierre, 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 kins:. There must be some foundation for a tradition which all contemporaries, domestic and foreign, unquestioningly accepted. Nothing could be easier and nothing would more satisfy the sense of the dramatic in history

PREFACE

XI than to present him as the guilty conceiver of an enormous 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 condemned, that he protested against nearly all the more famous of the prosecutions, and that the body directly responsible for them, the Committee of PubHc 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 contradiction ? 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 presenting 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 Robespierre. 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 intricate 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

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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 applied 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 remaining 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 Pavilion de Flore ; because one may check upon the map the road that Collot and Billaud must have followed from the Jacobins do 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 xiii

The work that remains to be done with regard to Eobespierre 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 substantiated and every document quoted, and it is nearer 2000 than looo pages long. The work which remains 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 attempted. It has been so difficult that (with the exception 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 foUow St. Just and the wars, and to revive the memories of forgotten valour.

Contents

PBEFACE .......

I. THE PERSON AND CHAEACTER OF ROBESPIERRE II. THE DESCENT AND YOUTH OF ROBESPIERRE

III. VERSAILLES

Chapter I The Person And Character Of Robespierre

In presenting the story of Robespierre 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 civilisation. 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 surrounded him are well known. The environment of his

A 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 delineation of a caricature, or in the evocation of mere phantasy. 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 daylight. 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 unravelling 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 singlethoughted, 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 life of Robespierre there should also be apparent that comedy wherein lies the artistic interest of the great story of France and Europe.

The first of these objects, the use of this life as the type of so many others, must be left for my book itself to develop ; the second, the dramatic value of his career, needs a longer apology.

The combination of unexpected accidents, the failure of set plans, the perverse results of fate, the incongruous roles thrust suddenly upon ill-chosen men, the pressure of unseen forces to which society suddenly responds, the entry of heroes, and the birth of songs, all these make up in history a tapestry of connected scenes to which finality alone is lacking, nor is there absent any dramatic element that should satisfy the mind saving only purpose. Now the best medium through which that ceaseless flow of action may be viewed is the life of a devotee.

The noble, sane, and generous leaders of mankind lend a false unity to their world and make us partisans as we read. The picture of a general period does but reflect in one phase or another the general life of mankind, and, as from a superior height, reduces to a normal level the accidents of personality. But the mind of the enthusiast, especially if he be dried up by the heat of his conviction, affords every needed contrast, and one appreciates from a low level and in a slanting light the high relief of history. For thence you may watch the insufficiency of a man to his part, the rude horseplay of environment, the expected that fails to arrive — all the embroglio. You see the lining of the shield and know what kind of thing is at the core of that which various trappings turn into a high priest or a king. You perceive not only the mechanism of the idol itself, but also that thirst for the ideal which creates idolatry, and by a long acquaintance with the inner life of one that shall succeed and fail in a moment of intense public activity, there is half-resolved at last that prime contradiction of political society, whereby enthusiasm, breeding as it does tte most violent ill-judgment, the worst deeds and tlie 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 afforded 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 reformers, 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 persistent 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 an enslaved nationality, and of its consequence in the 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 manifest 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 generations 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 whatever 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 mankind ? 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.

It is wisest, in attempting tlie 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 slightness 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 proceeds from well-furnished lungs ; neither the voice nor 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 continuance, of ill-health. The recollection of this pallor and of the delicacy of his skin gave rise (when his living 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 professional 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 deductions 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 towards common things which was so marked in Carnot, and which, had at the end begun to appear in St. Just. This appetite for arrangement evoked in his mind a character 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 Ke volution. 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 member. 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 maintenance. In the variety of colours which the age permitted 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 till the awful watch that ended his life.

g 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 apparent 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 measrre hard-

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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 Revolution affords, in the group of over-keen, sharp-featured portraits wherein are found 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 lips compressed and thin; and there was an insufficient development of the jaw accompanied by a sharpness of the chin, which, when his little constant smile was absent, lent a somewhat false appearance of bitterness to his appearance. The upper part of his face, that the hollowness of his cheeks thus threw into relief, was remarkable for a feature 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 retreating forehead which seems to promise grasp and rapid reason, but which ignores the mysteries and is unacquainted with 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 intellectual 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 unfittedness 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 when (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 jji over-rajpid_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 ajittle 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