THE JUDICIARY POWER HAS LOST CONFIDENCE.

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It is the virtue of the judiciary power, when it remains entire and strong, to supply every other; but itself is supplied by none. It was the mainstay and the resource of our ancient France, in her most terrible moments. In the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, it sat immutable and firm, so that the country, almost lost in the tempest, recovered and found itself still in the inviolable sanctuary of civil justice.

Well! even that power is shattered. Shattered by its inconsistency and contradictions. Servile and bold at once, for the king and against the king, for the pope and against the pope, the defender of the law and the champion of privilege, it speaks of liberty and resists for a century every liberal progress. It also, and as much as the king, deceived the hope of the people. What joy, what enthusiasm, when the parliament returned from exile, on the accession of Louis XVI.! And it was in answer to that confidence that it joined the privileged class, stopped all reform, and caused Target to be dismissed! In 1787, the people sustained it still, and, by way of recompense, the Parliament demanded that the States-General should be restored in imitation of the old form of 1614, that is to say useless, powerless, and derisive.

No, the people cannot confide in the judiciary power.

What is most strange, is, that it was this power, the guardian of order and the laws, that began the riot. Disturbances first begin about the Parliament, at every lit de justice. They were encouraged by the smiles of the magistrate. Young counsellors, such as d'Esprémesnil or Duport, mindful of the Fronde, would willingly have imitated Broussel and the Coadjutor. The organised Basoche furnishes an army of clerks. It has its king, its judgments, its provosts, old students, as was Moreau at Rennes, or brilliant orators and duellists, like Barnave at Grenoble. The solemn prohibition that the clerks should not wear a sword, did but make them the more pugnacious.

The first club was the one opened by counsellor Duport at his house in the Rue du Chaume in the Marais. There he assembled the most forward of the Parliament people. advocates and deputies, especially the Bretons. The club being transferred to Versailles, was called the Breton Club. On its return to Paris with the Assembly, and changing its character, it took up its quarters at the convent of the Jacobins.

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THE BRETON CLUB-ADVOCATES.

Mirabeau went but once to Duport's; he used to call Duport, Barnave, and Lameth, the Triumgueusat.* Sieyès also went but would not return there: "It is a den of political banditti, said he; they take outrages for expedients. Elsewhere he designates them still more harshly: "One may imagine them to be a set of wicked blackguards, ever in action, shouting, intriguing, and rioting lawlessly, recklessly, and then laughing at the mischief they had done. To them may be attributed the greater part of the errors of the Revolution. Happy would it have been for France, if the subaltern agents of those early perturbators, on becoming leaders in their turn, by a sort of customary hereditary right in long revolutions, had renounced the spirit by which they had been so long agitated!

These subalterns alluded to by Sieyès, who will succeed their leaders (and who were far superior to them), were especially two men,-two revolutionary levers, Camille Desmoulins and Danton. Those two men, one the king of pamphleteers, the other the thundering orator of the Palais Royal, before he was that of the Convention, cannot be further mentioned in this place. Besides, they are about to follow us, and will soon never leave us. In them, or in nobody, are personified the comedy and tragedy of the Revolution.

:

Presently they will let their masters form the club of the Jacobins, and will go and found the Cordeliers. At the present, all is mingled together: the grand club of a hundred clubs, among the cafés, the gaming-houses, and women, is still the Palais Royal. There it was that on the 12th of July, Desmoulins cried To arms! And there, on the night of the 13th, sentence was passed on Flesselles and De Launey. Those passed on the Count D'Artois, the Condés and the Polignacs, were forwarded to them; and they had the astonishing effect, hardly to be expected from several battles, of making them depart from France. Hence arose a fatal predilection for the means of terror which had so well succeeded. Desmoulins, in the speech which he attributes to the lamp (lanterne) of La Grève, makes it say, "That strangers gaze upon it in an ecstasy of astonishment; that they wonder that a lamp should

* Meaning the Three Knaves,-a parody, of course, on triumvirate.-C. C.

have done more in two days than all their heroes in a hundred years.

Desmoulins renews ever with inexhaustible wit the old jokes that filled all the middle ages on the gallows, the rope, and the persons hung. That hideous, atrocious punishment, which renders agony visible, was the usual text of the most joyous stories, the amusement of the vulgar, the inspiration of the Basoche. This found all its genius in Camille Desmoulins. That young lawyer of Picardy, with a very light purse and a still lighter character, was loitering briefless at the Palais, when the Revolution made him suddenly plead at the Palais Royal. A slight impediment in his speech did but render him the more amusing. His lively sallies playing about his embarrassed lips, escaped like darts. He followed his comic humour without much considering whether it might not end in tragedy. The famous judgments of the Basoche, those judicial farces which had so much amused the old Palais, were not more merry than the judgments of the Palais Royal; † the difference was that the latter were often executed in La Grève. (the place of execution).

What is most strange, and a subject for reflection, is, that Desmoulins, with his roguish genius and mortal jests, and that bull of a Danton, who bellows murder, are the very men who, four years later, perish for having proposed The Committee of Clemency!

Mirabeau, Duport, the Lameths, and many others more moderate, approved of the acts of violence; several said they had advised them. In 1788, Sieyès demanded the death of the ministers. On the 14th of July, Mirabeau demanded De Broglie's head! Desmoulins lodged in his house. He marched willingly between Desmoulins and Danton; and, being tired of his Genevese, preferred these men, directing the former to write, and the latter to speak.

was

Target, a very moderate, prudent, cool-headed man intimate with Desmoulins, and gave his approbation to the pamphlet De la Lanterne.

Camille Desmoulins, Discours de la Lanterne aux Parisiens, p. 2. He insinuates, however, rather adroitly, that those rapid condemnations are not without inconvenience, that they are liable to cause mistakes, &c.

See the judgment of Duval d'Esprémesnil, related by C. Desmoulins in his letters.

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BARBARITY OF THE PUNISHMENTS.

This deserves an explanation: Nobody believed in justice. save in that of the people.

The legists especially despised the law, the jurisprudence of that time, in contradiction to all the ideas of the age. They were well acquainted with the tribunals, and knew that the Revolution had not more passionate adversaries than the Parliament, the High Court of Justice (le Châtelet), and the judges in general.

Such a judgment-seat was the enemy. To give up the trial of the enemy to the enemy, and charge it to decide between the Revolution and its adversaries, was to absolve the latter, render them stronger and more haughty, and send them to the armies to begin a civil war. Were they able to make one? Yes, in spite of the enthusiasm of Paris and the taking of the Bastille. They had foreign troops, and all the officers were for them; they had especially a formidable body, which then constituted the glory of France, the officers of the navy.

The people alone, in that rapid crisis, were able to seize and strike such powerful criminals. But if the people should mistake? This objection did not embarrass the partizans of violence. They recriminated. "How many times," would they reply, "have not the Parliament and the Châtelet made mistakes?" They quoted the notorious mistakes in the cases of Calas and Sirven; they reminded their opponents of Dupaty's terrible memorial for three men condemned to the wheel,—that memorial burnt by the Parliament that was unable to answer it.

What popular trials, would they again say, can ever be more barbarous than the procedure of the regular tribunals, just as they now are, in 1789.-Secret proceedings, made entirely on documents that the defendant is not allowed to see; the accusations uncommunicated, the witnesses non-confronted, save that last short moment when the defendant, but just emerging from the utter darkness of his dungeon, bewildered by the light of day, comes to sit on his bench, replies or not, and sees his judges for the two minutes during which he hears himself condemned.* -Barbarous procedure, more barbarous sentences, execrable punishments!We shudder to think of Damiens torn with pincers, quartered, sprinkled with molten lead.-Just before

* A truly eloquent passage in Dupaty's memorial for three men condemned to be broken on the wheel, p. 117 (1786, in 4to.).

LA GRÈVE AND FAMINE.

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the Revolution, a man was burned at Strasburg. On the 11th of August 1789, the Parliament of Paris, itself expiring, once more condemned a man to be broken on the wheel.

Such punishment, which was torture even for the spectator, wounded the souls of men, made them furious, mad, confounded every idea of justice, and subverted justice itself; the criminal who suffered such torture seemed no longer guilty; the guilty party was the judge; and a world of maledictions was heaped upon him. Sensibility was excited into fury, and pity grew ferocious. History offers several instances of this sort of furious sensibility which often transported the people beyond all the bounds of respect and fear, and made them rack and burn the officers of justice in place of the criminal.

A fact, too little noticed, but which enables us to understand a great many things, is, that several of our terrorists were men of an exquisite feverish sensibility, who felt cruelly the sufferings of the people, and whose pity turned into fury.

This remarkable phenomenon chiefly showed itself in nervous men, of a weak and irritable imagination, among artists of every kind: the artist is a man-woman. * The people whose nerves are stronger followed that impulse, but in the earlier period never gave it. The acts of violence proceeded from the Palais Royal, where the citizens, advocates, artists, and men of letters were predominant.

Even among these men, nobody incurred the whole responsibility. A Camille Desmoulins might start the game and begin the hunt; a Danton hunted it to death-in words, of course. But there was no lack of mute actors for the execution, of pale furious men to carry the thing to La Grève, where it was urged on by inferior Dantons. In the miserable crowd surrounding the latter, were strange looking figures, like beings escaped from the other world; spectral looking men, mad with hunger, delirious from fasting, and who were no longer men. It was stated that several, on the 20th of July, had not eaten for three days. Occasionally, they were resigned, and died without injuring anybody. The women were not so resigned; they had children. They wandered about like lionesses. In every riot they were the most inveterate and furious; they uttered

I mean a complete man, who, having both sexes of the mind, is fruitful however, having almost always the sense of irritation and choler predominant.