Speeches of Maximilien Robespierre/Introduction

by Maximilien Robespierre

MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE

INTRODUCTION

In the year 1770 a boy knocked at the gate of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Mass was just being held, and the youth could still hear the last notes of the organ as he was resting on a bench. He had covered a long distance on his journey: he had come from Arras.

"Praised be Jesus Christ," was the sexton's greeting as he opened the gate. The boy had already been announced, and was at once led to the rector. "So your name is Maximilien Robespierre, my child?" asked the Jesuit who conducted the institution. The young man becomes a scholar, one of the most diligent students of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

He is poor; it is only due to the snobbishness of his relatives that Maximilien is permitted to study in the school of the rich. In Arras, even the bourgeoisie has some pretense to culture. The nobles of the province hire philosophizing abbés and private tutors, and send their sons to Versailles. There they learn the best manners, the most aristocratic ways and the most elegant language, a language that was already so generally accepted, that an Italian, when he wrote the history of his native land in French, in the thirteenth century, justified himself with the statement: "Because the French language has spread all over the world, is least difficult to read, and most pleasant to listen to."^[1] The nobles at Versailles learn to be clever merely in order to amuse themselves and their guests. "The taste of the court must be studied. There is no other place in which natural tact and association with the world may be better learned. Here the mind may be trained to far greater acuteness than under any pedants and one may learn to judge things neatly and correctly," says Molière.

The sons of men of affairs learn quite differently, particularly those whose fathers constitute the upper stratum of the state, filling the parliaments and the bureaus, who buy anything, earn everything, own much and talk rebelliously. These young men work as diligently as if they were already certain that they are destined later to guide the state in the stormy days of the Republic, in the glorious era of Napoleon, and in the narrow-minded period of the Restoration.

The Lycée Louis-le-Grand was a model school. The instruction was given by Jesuits and the reader must not think that the pupils of Don Iñigo Lopez de Recalde of the Castle of Loyola did nothing but pray the paternoster with the sons of the bourgeoisie. Far from it; the Jesuits spoke the jargon of the times; they had been infected with the new pagan Goddess of Reason, and their favorite citation from the unwieldy books of the church, in which everything may be found, was the words of St. Thomas: "There is an order based on reason for the general weal."^[2]

The spirit of this school is that of classicism. The current of discontent, the opposition inherited by the sons of the bourgeoisie from their fathers, since the days of Philip of Valois, is handed down in the schools, and the opposition chooses the words and the spirit of classicism. While during the Renaissance the marble treasures of antiquity that had been buried by the Christian barbarians were again dug out and regarded as a revelation, one now sought in the texts of Tacitus, of Lucretius Carus and Cicero for points of contact to unite the ancient republican culture of the Romans with the new culture unfolding under the bourgeois republic. Again ancient Rome arises to give life to a new generation.^[3]

The maxim uttered by Racine when a young man becomes the general maxim: "Under a king who is a burgher, all the burghers become kings."

These rich youths do not love Cæsar, "this sole creative genius of Rome, the last genius produced by the ancient world, which continued to move in his orbit until its final dissolution." They love Marcus Cato of Utica, who fell upon his sword, the last of all the republicans; they love the narrow-minded and stupid Brutus and idealize his sword, drawn by him against the greatest man of antiquity. These young men do not regard Marcus Cato and Brutus as the hair-brained ideologists of the republic that no longer existed, since the free Roman peasant was no more; they behold only the republican gesture and the struggle against tyranny, which is their dream.

Classicism molded this generation, which was the soil from which the orators of the Revolution sprang. Roman rhetoric is a constituent element of politics and of the rhetoric of the Revolution. One of Robespierre's fellow-students in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand was the brilliant Camille Desmoulins.

When Louis XVI, whose succession to the throne had been hailed throughout the country with jubilation, since it was expected that he would oppose the clergy and the feudal lords, had visited all the churches of the principal cities and reached the chapel of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, having just left the Church of the Penitent Magdalen, the best student was selected to deliver an oration of welcome, and this best student was Robespierre. He showed the draft of his speech to the rector, who was terrified, for the speech was the impassioned appeal of a boy to fight the Roman tyranny. This theme of the youthful Maximilien was later to become the great rhetoric of the Revolution, the rhetoric concerning which Saint-Just said subsequently: "The world has been empty since the Romans, and is filled only with their memory, which is now our only prophecy of freedom."

This was the rhetoric later displayed by Robespierre in the Convention. This is characteristic not only of the later Jacobin, but of the entire revolutionary opposition, of the moderate Feuillante, Mme. Roland, of the Rolandistes, of Mirabeau, Vergniaud and the Girondistes, Carnot and all the others. This element of rhetoric was not merely the external, not merely a figure of speech, but went so far as to befog the eyes of the later revolutionaries to the actual facts. They met with disaster because they confused the ancient, realistic, democratic community, which rested on the basis of true slavery, with the modern intellectual, democratic, representative state, based on the emancipated slavery of the bourgeois system.^[4]

Maximilien had been a lawyer before the Revolution. He undertook cases for the poor; he defended, in his native city, people of low station, rentiers who had been cheated, old women who had been robbed. Robespierre's entire later policy may be evolved from the modes of thought of Rousseau, whose books were then the rage. For Robespierre, no less than for Rousseau, the basis of democracy is a self-governing community. Maximilien says: the legislator must be bound; likewise, his personal will must be joined to the will of the masses; he must himself again return to the people, become a simple citizen. Elections and re-elections must take place again and again.

Robespierre is not so much of a dogmatist as bourgeois historians would make of him. "The Convention," says Robespierre, "is not a writer of books, not a deviser of metaphysical systems; it is a political body, commissioned to safeguard the rights of the French people." He permitted his system to be corrected by the facts. If we may speak of fanaticism, Maximilien is fanatical only in the sense that he never doubted the outcome of the Revolution. "To despair," he says in one of his speeches, "is equivalent to treason."

The arsenal of Maximilien’s power was the Club of the Jacobins. The clubs were then the equivalent of our present political parties; they were formed in various parts of the city; the earliest ones arose at the period of the first session of the Constituent Assembly.

Their destiny reflects the entire history of the French Revolution. At first the clubs were called the "Association of Friends of the Constitution" and all shades of the National Assembly were represented in them. The later course of the Revolution caused them to split again and again.

The Revolution is not a single act of terror, but a process in which the class struggle unfolds in the form of a struggle for power between the various class strata, a struggle assuming the most accentuated forms. After the bloc of absolutism, anchored and sanctified in centuries of habit, was overthrown by the execution of the king, the parties struggled for power as the representatives of various class interests.

Each party, in accordance with the economic position of its adherents, necessarily demanded a different type of republic. We must here make clear in advance that it is a bourgeois revolution of which we speak; the point was the economic emancipation of the large-scale bourgeoisie, of merchant and industrial capital, the first form of capital to develop the tendency to the formation of surplus value. This class, and with it also the exclusively intellectual stratum of the bourgeoisie, is the spiritual source of the French Revolution, if we are justified in regarding the spiritual phalanx which embraces that intellectual movement known as the "bourgeois enlightenment," as the lever of the revolutionary forces, the consciousness and the conscience of the revolution. This spiritual phalanx, however, is only the expression of an immense economic fact; the economic maturity and superiority of the bourgeoisie which was rich in capital, as opposed to the decaying feudal system, which was in a process of economic and moral dissolution. The most consistent representative of the line of evolution of these economic forces and necessities that had been conjured up by the Revolution, was the party of the Girondistes, the representative of the commercial and trading bourgeoisie, which had sent its leaders Brissot and Roland from Lyons to represent it. They called themselves "The Patriots," "The Virtuous," "The True Revolutionaries," and expressed their indignation when the Revolution set in motion the lower estates, the mass of the Paris artisans and workers, and incited them to bloody riots in the prison and street fights. Revolution for the bourgeoisie, by reason of its class situation, has very definite limits, but the lower classes, the masses of workers and peasants, can only favor and demand a single indivisible republic, and complete freedom. Their leader was Marat, the "Friend of the People." They were the true executors of the Revolution, whose aid was at first necessary to the bourgeoisie, but against whom the bourgeoisie was then obliged to set very definite limits on the Left, and ultimately to proceed with great bruality. Between these two extreme classes were the petty bourgeoisie, represented in the Convention by the petty bourgeois intelligentsia led by Robespierre and Danton. They are the vacillating figures of the Revolution; they stand between the parties; they have no sharply defined economic strata behind them. Ideologically, they stand close to the Girondistes, but it is their misfortune that, although externally they are more radical than the Girondistes, they cannot, being petty bourgeois and intellectuals, have any economically clear and attainable goal. They constitute the rigid mental phalanx of the Revolution, the revolutionaries on principle, having a different motive, therefore, than the Girondistes, the "truly virtuous and pure revolutionaries." And of them Robespierre is the most austere, the most truly virtuous, the disciple of Rousseau, the "Roman," equally radical and inexorable both as regards the Right and the Left, and as regards those ambiguous figures who would endanger and defile this moral principle of the Revolution: "Virtue and Reason." Thus, as an "incorruptible," he proceeds even against his friend Danton, likewise against Hébert, the anarchistic, ultra-Left, representative of the petty bourgeois intellectuals, who, in Robespierre's opinion, was endangering the Revolution by his atheistic radicalism, which antagonized the peasants and the unenlightened in general.

Robespierre's Reign of Terror, however, was directed in the first place against the Girondistes, who wished to limit the Revolution and the Republic in the sense of the economic interests of the large-scale bourgeoisie, and who were even suspected of conspiring together with the royalist generals (Lafayette, for instance) because they needed them in order to put through their definitely bourgeois republic against the "common" people. This was treason against the austere principle of the Revolution, which was the object of Robespierre's solicitude, and their heads fell. But the Girondistes did not fail to make use of their strong economic background in the industrial cities of the provinces; the insurrections in La Vendée come to their aid: this is the moment when revolution shifts to counter-revolution, a shift brought about by the most powerful and therefore victorious party; a party guiding the destinies of the Revolution, a party which, after its victory over absolutism, is obliged to limit itself on the Left against a further prosecution of the Revolution by the lower strata.

The fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) was equivalent to counter-revolution, a victory of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. The fall of Robespierre ends the existence of the Club of the Jacobins.

 

Robespierre in the Club of the Jacobins

Robespierre is at the pinnacle of his power when he is President of the Constituent Assembly, Chairman of the Jacobins, and the most important head of the Committee of Public Safety. He frequently absented himself from the sessions of the Constituent Assembly, but rarely from those of the Jacobins, where he presided day after day. He never proposed any measures in the Convention, never seconded any motions in the Committee of Public Safety, unless such measures had been previously discussed at the Jacobins. Having attained the culmination of his power, he attempted to guide the Jacobins of the Province Centrale from his stronghold in Paris, and demanded from them their talents, their men.

The Jacobins exercised an illegal control over all the representatives of the Convention. This right was never "constitutionally" provided in any regulation, but exclusion from the Club of the Jacobins was equivalent to a letter of introduction to the guillotine. Without the support of the Club of the Jacobins, Robespierre was a nobody; without it he had no power at all; only in combination with it can we understand his importance. The task of the Jacobins was the creation of a unified French state in the stormy days of the Revolution. They were the veins in the revolutionary body, the blood-vessels. When centrifugal forces threatened to disrupt France altogether, they, a unified state within the state, saved the Revolution. Robespierre's relation to all the other parties of the Convention can best be understood after a study of the transactions of the Club. It would be ridiculous to believe that Danton was overthrown by Robespierre, or that Robespierre had worked intentionally for the destruction of Danton. The Dantonistes had long lost their power when they were finally overthrown; they had long been excluded from the Club of the Jacobins; only at the very end, when history had already done its work, did Robespierre decide to let Danton fall.

The Club of the Jacobins had its regular cleaning day, i.e., every member had to answer certain questions: what were you before the Revolution? what did you do during the Revolution? what was the size of your fortune before 1789? how much have you now?^[5] These were the most formidable and generally feared occasions. When Danton and Camille Desmoulins appeared before the cleaning-up committee, several members took the floor to demand their exclusion. Fabre d'Eglantine even has a voice shout: "To the guillotine with him!" Robespierre then rose to demand that the name of the man who had suggested the guillotine for Danton be stricken from the list of the Jacobins, and defended Danton in the most eloquent words. He said: "No one has the right to speak against Danton without proofs; any one that speaks against Danton must first show us that he has placed as much courage, as great talents and as much energy in the service of the Revolution as has Danton. I am not identifying myself with him; I am not praising him. … How far should we get if every man unknown to the Revolution thus far, every man who has done nothing for the Revolution, may accuse men like Danton? If Danton is accused, I consider myself also as accused." Any one defended by Robespierre in such terms was safe. The affection of the Club of the Jacobins for Maximilien may be judged by the occasion of his illness, during which period no session of the Jacobins was opened without a preliminary report on Robespierre's health. The affection for him may be measured by the thousands of letters which he received daily from the most remote corners of the Republic, and finally, it may be measured by the hatred of allied Europe. Volumes might be filled with quotations that would show the mud, the calumnies and the lies spewed out by the shyster journals of the times, which recounted tales of his fortune amounting to millions, of his orgies; concerning himself, the Incorruptible, who probably worked most and consumed least in the entire Republic, who had no personal needs whatsoever, who lived not at Versailles or in the Tuileries, but in a furnished room not far from the Convention. It is this love for the Incorruptible that caused Coblenz, London and Vienna—in their desire to assail him and wound him—to speak of the armies of the Republic in no other terms than as the armies of Robespierre, to stamp him the bugbear of the entire continent; and yet, without propaganda, without a press, without friendly parties, to the furthest corner of the colonies—down-trodden humans recognized that the Incorruptible was the man in whose hands their principle was being defended. Is there anything more moving than the fact that the first manifestations of the rise of the colonial peoples evinced themselves under the sign of Robespierre; that the Negroes of Madagascar and Guinea sent letters to Paris addressed to Maximilien and containing the naïve entreaty to liberate them from the rule of their white tyrants?

 

Robespierre as the Realpolitiker of the Revolution

Danton, Marat and Robespierre were the leaders of the Mountain (the Left). In a certain moment, and for a certain time, each of the three embodied the audacity and energy of the French Revolution. History as conventionally written has succeeded in disseminating the most ingenious fabrications concerning each of these three men. Legend relates that Danton was the good-natured, cheerful man, the Mirabeau of the Paris streets, who was basely and vilely consigned to the scaffold by the ambitious Maximilien. According to the same fairy-tale, Marat was the diseased dæmonic paralytic, who twice a day would send forth from his cellar the demand that the populace bring him the heads of five hundred aristocrats before evening, and finally, Robespierre is represented as the fanatic and tyrant who dreamed of being an absolute ruler, who had one man after the other murdered off, until the same fate finally overtook him.

Danton alone is somewhat idealized and arouses some sympathy among these pygmy souls. Above all, he is said to have been engaged in a constant struggle with Robespierre, who was like a tiger turned man.

Of course, all three are represented as dreamers, as persons with imaginative leanings, who were caught in the bloody intoxication of politics and revolution.

Yet it is perfectly apparent that no men were ever obliged to govern a country in a more difficult situation, a more terrible plight, and that no leaders ever brought any nation, under such a catastrophe of the most elementary forces, to such real successes in so short a period of time, as did the dictators of the Committee of Public Safety, first under the leadership of Danton, and then under that of Robespierre.

We shall give a few examples of Robespierre's practical policy.

Louis XVI had been obliged to appoint the Girondiste Brissot-Roland Ministry. The result of the elections had given this party a majority. The conflict with Europe was now apparent to all eyes. The leaders of the party of the Girondistes, being the representatives of the commercial and industrial cities of France, of the rising third estate in the state, which was waging a struggle of many decades against the forces allied with the king, declared, once they had attained power, that the Revolution was over. But they beheld the violently surging forces of the country, the newly arising problems, and they believed that they might consolidate their rule and the existing stage of the Revolution by resorting to the war against Austria, which was inevitable in any case. It must not be forgotten that the bourgeoisie of the large cities was traditionally opposed to Austria, and that nothing had made Louis XVI so unpopular as a marriage with the Hapsburg princess, Marie Antoinette. The Girondistes allied themselves, for the purpose of bringing on this war, with the romantic, empty-pated troubadour, Lafayette, who regarded the Revolution as an opportunity to perform services for his royal lady and who—with this fidelity to his monarch in his heart—became the leader of an army at the boundary. No doubt the thousands of propagandists and the clubs which then called for war were not speculating or calculating on the fact that the war was a subject of barter. Far from it; the men who were then demanding war were great and honest revolutionaries who knew that their weapons held the destiny of a world. Louvet, in the National Assembly, called for war, pronouncing on that occasion the magnificent words: "Yes, war, long live war! France shall take to arms at once! You say that the coalition of all the tyrants against us is a fact! So much the better for the world. At once, as quickly as lightning, let the thousands of soldiers who are citizens take arms against all the fortresses of feudalism. Let their victorious advance be terminated only by the end of slavery. We shall surround the palaces with bayonets, but into each lowly hut we shall bring a translation of the Rights of Man!"^[6]

In the heat of an impassioned speech, Robespierre on one occasion defined the enthusiasm of the French Revolution in the following terms: "Indeed, gentlemen, it does state this absolute irresistible feeling, this profound aversion to tyranny, this enthusiasm for the oppressed, this great and profound love for mankind, without which no revolution can be anything else than a frightful crime annihilating a previous crime. Yes, indeed, we have the ambition to found the first republic in the world; we have the ambition to produce that which no man has ever produced before."^[7]

No doubt the feelings of the Girondiste Louvet were those of the Jacobin Robespierre. Yet, Robespierre was right in not desiring a war at this moment. He was the only man to oppose himself to the enthusiastic militant current of the Revolution at that moment. On January 2 and 11, 1792, he delivered two courageous addresses in the Jacobin Club. Robespierre later declared that the Rolandistes had begun the war on instructions from abroad and made against Brissot and Mme. Roland the formidable accusation (M. Roland, the husband and Minister, was only the wife's shadow; she was the leader of an entire party and ended on the guillotine) that they had declared war in order that the Emperor of Austria might be freed from the necessity of declaring war himself, in other words, to give the Emperor the pretext he wanted, thus committing a great crime against the Revolution. Robespierre was wrong in believing that the men of the year 1792 were acting in understanding with the Austrians; we must lay something to the account of rhetorical exaggeration.

The arguments used by Robespierre in his attack on the war are the same as those used by Marat. Maximilien denounced the war as a weakening of the Revolution. He called Roland a liar and a demagogue, since the danger of Versailles was even greater than that of Coblenz. He said that it would be impossible to march against all the kings of Europe with a king at the head of one's army; he demanded the destruction of tyranny within, before a single soldier should be permitted to leave the frontiers of France. We shall see later how Robespierre himself defended France, and how he became the organizer of the offensive and defensive wars of the Revolution. But no doubt it redounds in no little measure to the honor of Robespierre that precisely the representative of the revolutionary democracy in the French Revolution, precisely he who stands for this democracy, this Revolution, and this radicalism, was an advocate of peace to the last extremity.

 

Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety

The generation that lived in the year 1789 entered the Revolution without any ready-made plan. The aspirations and desires of the entire country about the middle of the eighteenth century are contained in the Cahiers which were written for use on May 5, 1789, for the convoking of the States General to Versailles, in the various cities and boroughs of France. In none of these thousands of complaints and petitions, which contain numerous plans of reform, does the word "republic" occur as much as even once.^[8]

In a general way, the representatives of the third estate desired a legalization of their political rights. Their rebellion and their demands were not in accord with the economic distress, but with their economic ability. Those who were economically weak did not make themselves felt until later; first it was the peasants, then the petty bourgeoisie, the workers, traders and factory helots of Paris. The spark of rebellion was kindled "philosophically" in the conversational salons of the rich patricians. It was "a product of social well-being."

But the bourgeoisie laid the foundation to its rule in the light of the flames of burning feudal castles and to the music of "Ça ira" and "Les aristocrates à la lanterne." In this decade of acute revolution, however, it was possible to accomplish in days what otherwise would have required years, while years performed the work of centuries. In rapid succession, various strata of society seized power by the methods of dictatorship and the rapid success of these methods was often accelerated by use of the death penalty as a means of political struggle.

It is not possible to deny that in this swift stream of events each party, each faction, had its illusion. Nor is it difficult for us to grasp that each event assumed an aspect different from that which its ac-tive protagonists had wished. The Feuillants (the moderate monarchists) enthusiastically advocated a peaceful, moderate monarchy; the Girondistes dreamed of a republic of wages; the Left Jacobins of a sovereignty of the poorest strata of the population; the Hébertistes of a republic safeguarded by an equality of possessions; and each of these factions went to the scaffold with its illusions, embracing death in a complete faith in the "correctness" and "immortality" of its ideas. And yet, the entire significance of the Revolution was achieved after four decades of the most confused and contradictory struggle; a united France, the great nation; the bourgeoisie had consolidated itself. But this is not the only result to be noted on a national or an international scale. It is self-evident that the domination of the Jacobins, as well as the domination of Robespierre, embraced within it the entire illusion of the petty bourgeoisie. But it also bears within it the elements of a new society. The Revolution shot beyond its goal, and that which lay beyond its goal is not mere insanity; this advance is rather the beginning of the new revolutionary principle, namely, it is that which the proletariat has inherited from the French Revolution. Robespierre's demands, were taken over by Babeuf in his Conspiracy of Equals, it was further disseminated by Buonarroti, it became a constituent part of French socialism; it became the ideological basis of the revolutions of 1830, 1848, 1870.^[9] It was critically annexed by Karl Marx; and thus Robespierre and the Jacobins are a part. of the tradition of the Revolution; as Marx says, they are an element in the new world order.

Revolutionary statesmen may attain, in the study of the French Revolution, a plastic vision of the disintegration of a nation into various parts and the birth of a new unit from the débris. The Committee of Public Safety, this engine of the Revolution, this all-fructifying center of energy, without which there is no doubt that counter-revolution would have come out victorious, is also not the result of a ready-made plan, but, on the contrary, each cog of this machine was fashioned by the events of the day and only later became a portion of a unified organism. When the Committee of Public-Safety came into being, two-thirds of France was occupied by enemies, the coast lines were blockaded by the English fleet, the cities in rebellion—and a rebellion led by the Gironde—Toulon and Brest surrendered the keys to these cities to the king, and Danton, who was the head of the first Committee of Safety, was planning to negotiate with the enemy, while Robespierre was of the opinion that negotiation under these circumstances would be equivalent to the beginning of the end; Danton was overthrown in the Convention. Robespierre assumed leadership. It is an error to believe that the Committee of Public Safety tyrannized the Convention, that the Convention led only a shadowy existence. The Committee of Public Safety was appointed by the Convention, regularly reported to the Convention; it was the executive and the legislative function in one. The members of the Convention governed throughout the provinces as commissaires, levied armies, supervised the generals, and appointed the various committees with dictatorial power.

Within the country, two enemies were crystallizing against the Convention, the Moderates and the Ultra-Revolutionaries, the latter led by Hébert. The Ultra-Revolutionaries sabotaged the Convention and turned their efforts against the Committee of Public Safety. They did not accuse Robespierre directly,^[10] but rather the other members of the Convention. Robespierre defended this institution. All the measures of the Convention that led to practical results may be traced back to Robespierre. He attacks particularly the ultra-Lefts for their sabotage against the authority of the Committee of Public Safety and for their anti-religious policy. The fable writers of history have made a sort of super-bonze of Robespierre, a Buddha of the "Goddess of Reason," they have failed to understand his entire ecclesiastical policy. France was a country of peasants, and the exaggerated anti-clerical policy of Hébert, the violent declamations of the rabid former Prussian citizen Anacharsis Klotz, who declared himself to be a "personal enemy of Jesus Christ," could do nothing else than throw the peasants into the camp of the counter-revolution. Maximilien said that any one attempting to use force in order to prevent religious worship was a more dangerous fanatic than the priest who carries out a ceremony. He was obliged to fight Hébert, and in those days a fight meant life or death. Hébert and his adherents went to the guillotine.

It had been declared that Sanson, the hangman, was a monarchist. No doubt he had beheaded Louis XVI, but it was only by way of a discharge of the duties of his office, and the chronicles of the times relate that the hangman on the Place de la Révolution went so far as to strike Hébert several times in the face before beheading him. Yet not only Sanson, but also the remaining Feuillants (monarchists), the Girondistes, the Dantonistes, and particularly Desmoulins, intoned songs of triumph when the cart bearing the ultra-revolutionaries was on its way to the guillotine. They recognized that the Hébertistes were revolutionaries and now began to turn their praises to Robespierre, believing that the Committee of Public Safety would now move more and more to the Right. Robespierre understood this and announced to the Dantonistes in several speeches that the necessity of the struggle against Hébert had been a measure of self-defense, and that the Republic would be able to defend itself against the Right as well as against the Left. When Danton said a few words in favor of Fabre d'Eglantine in the Convention, he was treated to the remark, from the Left, that "Any man who trembles now is guilty."

The Dantonistes became the defenders of all the fatigued. Danton proclaimed that the Revolution must not overstep its own goal. He, the former initiator of the Revolutionary Tribunal; he, at a certain moment the incarnation of the resistance to the foreign foe, now spoke of conciliation and was approaching the faction of the Rights closer and closer. We do not believe that Danton was conspiring against Robespierre; in fact, Danton showed very little activity of any kind during the last few months of his life. But in this most terrible of all moments Danton, the inactive, was a danger for the Committee of Public Safety. His name had a splendid sound; his voice was still the revered and familiar voice; Danton was a moral power behind which all the enemies of the Revolution lay hid.

The Left in the Committee of Public Safety was ceaselessly demanding the heads of Danton and his friends from Robespierre. The Left was opposed to the execution of the Hébertistes; for months they had been putting pressure on Robespierre, and finally Robespierre sacrificed Danton to them.

Danton was handed over to the Revolutionary Tribunal which in those days was equivalent, without further ado, to a sentence of death.

But in all this bloody litigation it must not be believed that the Terror came from above, except for the terror practiced by certain individual persons. During this period, the Terror was dictated from below. In the winter of 1793, with famine raging in Paris, the masses were ready to see traitors and speculators in every corner. The Convention was besieged day and night by delegations demanding the institution of the Terror, the sending out of armies of requisition, each of which was to be accompanied by a portable guillotine. The Girondistes should be sent to the guillotine and the ten thousand women who had signed the petitions for mercy should be murdered at once. Robespierre was at that time Chairman of the Convention and opposed this madness. He said: "The point for us is not only to murder, but to gain the victory by this means!" Owing to his authority, to the boundless confidence the masses had in him, he succeeded in saving thousands from a certain death. He declared that it was necessary to organize this paroxysm of rage, to mold it into talents and energies to be put into the service of the Revolution. Against the will of the Convention he then saved eighty-three members of the Right side of the house from certain death. The Convention was about to draw up its indictment, and only Maximilien's speech saved them from the voyage to the guillotine.

In the Committee of Public Safety, Maximilien had not only a Left opposition, but also a Right opposition. The surviving members of the Committee of Public Safety: Carnot, and particularly those who later, under the Empire, and even under the Bourbons, made a success of things for themselves, succeeded in blackguarding Robespierre; as Napoleon says, he is the scapegoat of the Revolution. Carnot particularly maintained that Robespierre had had no great influence on the course of military events. This is untrue; Robespierre received and promoted generals, gave daily directions, performed the same work as Carnot, besides supervising Carnot, and particularly was suspicious of the generals, being suspicious of military power in any case, and, as he declared almost daily, feeling that a victorious army might become a danger to the Republic. He delivered prophetic speeches in which he declared that the present struggle was a struggle of self-defense, and that the Republic as such would prefer peace. No military dictatorship would have been possible while Robespierre was alive. He worked eighteen hours daily; from eight to twelve in the morning there was the session of the Committee of Public Safety; from one to six in the afternoon, the session of the Convention; from seven to twelve in the evening the session in the Jacobins; the various committees then went on all night.

In the course of this labor, Robespierre succeeded in gathering a host of men about him. The enemies and friends of the Republic recognized that he was its head. If he is accused of seeking the dictatorship, we must point out that he himself best answered this accusation when he asked where was his private army, where were his treasures and his intrigues, and found no one to answer his question; his treasures were the seven francs found in his possession after his death; his army was the devoted battalions of the republicans, and his intrigues were reflected in the fact that he was perhaps the only head of the Revolution who belonged to no clique, to no salon, to no caucus. He could give account of how he had spent each moment of the day, for every moment in his work meant a further step in the advance of the armies at the boundaries against the European coalition.

 

The Ninth Thermidor

In the session of the Convention held on the day on which Maximilien was overthrown, the cowardice and avarice of the trading elements had joined hands. It was no longer possible for them to bear the glances of the Incorruptible.

To destroy Robespierre was equivalent to annihilating the Republic. The men standing to the Left of Robespierre did not understand this fact; they desired revenge for Hébert; but Maximilien's grave became their last resting place also.

The direct object aimed at by Maximilien, the Republic of Virtue, was a Utopia, but just as there may exist in the realm of thought Utopias far more real than the most pregnant thought of the proudest and most self-complacent "Realpolitiker," so history presents cases of Utopians whose domination bequeaths more to those who follow than does the domination of the most consolidated and most carefully calculating "Realpolitiker." Only this Republic of Virtue had been able to withstand the allurements of peace, of corruption and compromise.

When the powers of the past, the Royalists, united with the powers of the future, the elements of the bourgeois republic liberated by the Revolution, to overthrow Maximilien in the session of the Convention held on 9 Thermidor, a member of the Convention shouted: "Robespierre, it is Danton's blood that chokes you!" Maximilien did not grow pale and terrified, as is reported by the chroniclers. Instead, he answered, "Where were you when Danton was sentenced, you cowards?" He himself demanded the indictment that meant his death.

All the intimate friends of the Incorruptible, Saint-Just, Le Bas, the younger Robespierre, the lame Couton, arose and demanded that they also be indicted, All were arrested.

The Town Council of Paris declared itself in permanent executive session and came out for Robespierre. Up to the last moment Robespierre did not wish to lead the Town Council in a struggle against the Convention. The Convention had gathered forces from the provinces in Paris. Maximilien hesitated; the insurrection of the Town Council was suppressed; the "decent" bourgeois society, those who had become rich in the Revolution, who had devoured the juiciest morsels for the past four years, the purchasers of the national estates, the profiteers on army contracts, the speculators, etc.,—these were the victors!

Le Bas shot himself; Robespierre was wounded by a gendarme,^[11] the younger Robespierre threw himself out of the window of the Town Council and was mortally injured.

On the next day a cart trundled off to the guillotine!

They are wounded and bleeding, masses of flesh rather than men. The hangman has very little to do. This cart on its way to the guillotine is a symbol. The men of the Committee of Public Safety, the friends of Robespierre, died fighting; they accepted death as they had accepted the blows of fate—serious and fighting to the last breath.

All the homes of the wealthy in Paris revealed their wealth on the day of 9 Thermidor. The gilded rabble put in its appearance; the ladies of the good and new society celebrated the death of the fallen men with orgies and surrounded the death-cart with wild gestures of delight, for this cart was bearing to the guillotine the first revolutionary government of the world. It was a generation of youth, which had grown up in the nation's greatest days. Saint-Just, the youngest of these republicans doomed to death, was twenty-seven years old; the ls was thirty-seven years of age.

1. Charles Auguste Sainte-Beuve: Causeries du Lundi (1851–1857).
2. Albert Sorel: L'Europe et la révolution française.
3. Theodore Mommsen: History of Rome, New York, 1895.
4. Karl Marx: Die heilige Familie, 1847.
5. Louis Ernest Hamel: Histoire de Robespierre (Paris, 1865–67).
6. Jean Jaurs: Histoire Socialiste.
7. A. Mathiez: Pourquot sommes-nous Robespierristes?
8. A. Aulard: Histoire politique de la révolution française.
9. P. Buonarroti: Observations sur M. Robespierre.
10. Robespierre was not attacked directly either by Danton or by Desmoulins, or by Hébert. The parties to the Right and Left of him declared that they were "defending" Robespierre against the Right or against the Left.
11. The name of the gendarme was Merdat, who was promoted for his deed; he died at the Beresina as one of Napoleon's colonels.—TRANSLATOR.