Critical Miscellanies (vol. 1 of 3), Essay 1: Robespierre

Part 1

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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. I. Essay 1: Robespierre

London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

ROBESPIERRE.

PAGE

Introduction 1

Different views of Robespierre 4

His youthful history 5

An advocate at Arras 7

Acquaintance with Carnot 10

The summoning of the States-General 11

Prophecies of revolution 12

Reforming Ministers tried and dismissed 13

Financial state of France 14

Impotence of the Monarchy 17

The Constituent Assembly 19

Robespierre interprets the revolutionary movement rightly 21

The Sixth of October 1789 23

Alteration in Robespierre's position 25

Character of Louis XVI. 28

And of Marie Antoinette 29

The Constitution and Robespierre's mark upon it 34

Instability of the new arrangements 37

Importance of Jacobin ascendancy 41

The Legislative Assembly 42

Part 2

Robespierre's power at the Jacobin Club 44

His oratory 45

The true secret of his popularity 48

Aggravation of the crisis in the spring of 1792 50

The Tenth of August 1792 52

Danton 53

Compared with Robespierre 55

Robespierre compared with Marat and with Sieyes 57

Character of the Terror 58

II.

Fall of the Girondins indispensable 60

France in desperate peril 61

The Committee of Public Safety 65

At the Tuileries 67

The contending factions 70

Reproduced an older conflict of theories 72

Robespierre's attitude 73

The Hebertists 77

Chaumette and his fundamental error 80

Robespierre and the atheists 82

His bitterness towards Anacharsis Clootz 86

New turn of events (March 1794) 90

First breach in the Jacobin ranks: the Hebertists 90

Robespierre's abandonment of Danton 91

Second breach: the Dantonians (April 1794) 95

Another reminiscence of this date 97

Robespierre's relations to the Committees changed 98

The Feast of the Supreme Being 101

Part 3

Its false philosophy 103

And political inanity 104

The Law of Prairial 106

Robespierre's motive in devising it 107

It produces the Great Terror 109

Robespierre's chagrin at its miscarriage 112

His responsibility not to be denied 112

(1) Affair of Catherine Theot 113

" Cecile Renault 114

(2) Robespierre stimulated popular commissions 115

The drama of Thermidor: the combatants 117

Its conditions 118

The Eighth Thermidor 119

Inefficiency of Robespierre's speech 121

The Ninth Thermidor 123

Famous scene in the Convention 125

Robespierre a prisoner 127

Struggle between the Convention and the Commune 129

Death of Robespierre 131

Ultimate issue of the struggle between the Committees and the Convention 132

ROBESPIERRE.

A French writer has recently published a careful and interesting volume on the famous events which ended in the overthrow of Robespierre and the close of the Reign of Terror. These events are known in the historic calendar as the Revolution of Thermidor in the Year II. After the fall of the monarchy, the Convention decided that the year should begin with the autumnal equinox, and that the enumeration should date from the birth of the Republic. The Year I. opens on September 22, 1792; the Year II. opens on the same day of 1793. The month of Thermidor begins on July 19. The memorable Ninth Thermidor therefore corresponds to July 27, 1794. This has commonly been taken as the date of the commencement of a counter-revolution, and in one sense it was so. Comte, however, and others have preferred to fix the reaction at the execution of Danton (April 5, 1794), or Robespierre's official proclamation of Deism in the Festival of the Supreme Being (May 7, 1794).

M. D'Hericault does not belong to the school of writers who treat the course of history as a great high road, following a firmly traced line, and set with plain and ineffaceable landmarks. The French Revolution has nearly always been handled in this way, alike by those who think it fruitful in blessings, and by their adversaries, who pronounce it a curse inflicted by the wrath of Heaven. Historians have looked at the Revolution as a plain landsman looks at the sea. To the landsman the ocean seems one huge immeasurable flood, obeying a simple law of ebb and flow, and offering to the navigator a single uniform force. Yet in truth we know that the oceanic movement is the product of many forces; the seeming uniformity covers the energy of a hundred currents and counter-currents; the sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is subject to untold conditions of elevation and subsidence; the sea is not one mass, but many masses moving along definite lines of their own. It is the same with the great tides of history. Wise men shrink from summing them up in single propositions. That the French Revolution led to an immense augmentation of happiness, both for the French and for mankind, can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its beneficent results untempered by any mixture of evil, can only be maintained by men as mad as Doctor Pangloss. The Greek poetess Corinna said to the youthful Pindar, when he had interwoven all the gods and goddesses in the Theban mythology into a single hymn, that we should sow with the hand and not with the sack. Corinna's monition to the singer is proper to the interpreter of historical truth: he should cull with the hand, and not sweep in with the scythe. It is doubtless mere pedantry to abstain from the widest conception of the sum of a great movement. A clear, definite, and stable idea of the meaning in the history of human progress of such vast groups of events as the Reformation or the Revolution, is indispensable for any one to whom history is a serious study of society. It is just as important, however, not to forget that they were really groups of events, and not in either case a single uniform movement. The World-Epos is after all only a file of the morning paper in a state of glorification. A sensible man learns, in everyday life, to abstain from praising and blaming character by wholesale; he becomes content to say of this trait that it is good, and of that act that it was bad. So in history, we become unwilling to join or to admire those who insist upon transferring their sentiment upon the whole to their judgment upon each part. We seek to be allowed to retain a decided opinion as to the final value to mankind of a long series of transactions, and yet not to commit ourselves to set the same estimate on each transaction in particular, still less on each person associated with it. Why shall we not prize the general results of the Reformation, without being obliged to defend John of Leyden and the Munster Anabaptists?

M. D'Hericault's volume naturally suggests such reflections as these. Of all the men of the Revolution, Robespierre has suffered most from the audacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience of others. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or a prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in their martyrology. Michelet and M. D'Hericault treat him as a mixture of Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We are reminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to the first Bonaparte: 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can afflict the human mind.' This bold aphorism touches one of the roots of the judgments we pass both upon men and events. It is because people so irrationally think fit to insist upon perfection, that Robespierre's admirers would fain deny that he ever had a fault, and the tacit adoption of the same impracticable standard makes it easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to deny that he had a single virtue or performed a single service. The point of view is essentially unfit for history. The real subject of history is the improvement of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor in public affairs since the world began saw the true direction of improvement with an absolutely unerring eye from the beginning of his career to the end. It is folly for the historian, as it is for the statesman, to strain after the imaginative unity of the dramatic creator. Social progress is an affair of many small pieces and slow accretions, and the interest of historic study lies in tracing, amid the immense turmoil of events and through the confusion of voices, the devious course of the sacred torch, as it shifts from bearer to bearer. And it is not the bearers who are most interesting, but the torch.

* * * * *

In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the diplomatic history of the fifteenth century by a couple of important treaties, and famous in the industrial history of the Middle Ages for its pre-eminence in the manufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry hangings, Maximilian Robespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five and thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father was a lawyer, and, though the surname of the family had the prefix of nobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this decorative prefix became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped it. His great rival, Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate, and one of the charges made against him was that he had styled himself Monsieur D'Anton.

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