AND OF THE JACOBINS.

503

and voted, as deputies, laws to disarm those whom they had agitated as Jacobins. The position of these three men was singularly double and whimsical in the year 1790. Their popularity had extended to its utmost by their struggle with Mirabeau in the important debate on the right of making peace and war. And yet did their opinions differ very seriously or essentially? What were they in reality? Royalists.

Accordingly, the only man in the world that Mirabeau hated, from first to last, was he in whom he perceived most plainly a party duplicity-Alexandre de Lameth.

If Lameth, Duport, and Barnave seemed to make only the least advance towards Mirabeau's party, they left room for Robespierre who was rising in importance at the Jacobins. They were very much embarrassed at their position as vanguard, but would not abandon it; they shuffled, hesitated, and made use of all the expedients that cunning and intrigue could supply. However, the progress of events was so rapid that, if they wished to restore any authority to the kingly power, it was very necessary to use dispatch. Charles de Lameth was applauded when he reproached the executive power with "pretending to be dead." This reproach was sincere; for the Lameths perceived that this power, so weakened by themselves, would bury them beneath its ruins, and really desired to restore it to activity.

This appeared evident in the Nancy affair. They voted with Mirabeau, in favour of Lafayette and Bouillé, against the soldiers whom the Jacobin society of which they were the leaders, had not a little contributed to excite into rebellion.

The Assembly, under this frankly or timidly retrograde influence, voted, on the 6th of September, that for two years there should be no primary assemblies,-that the electors already appointed by the primary electors should exercise the electoral power for two years.

The Lameths had for sometime repented of having voted (from animosity against Mirabeau) the decree that prohibited deputies from being ministers. They did not doubt but, under the present circumstances, any kind of change might place the sovereign power in their hands or those of their friends. Accordingly, they earnestly insisted on intreating the king to dismiss the ministers, and, by means of a riot, they contrived

504

INTRUST THEIR JOURNAL TO THE ORLEANS PARTY.

at once to drive away Necker. Contrary to every expectation, the Assembly refused to pray for the dismissal of the others; and Camus, Chapelier, the Bretons, and the two hundred deputies of the left voted against the motion. It became necessary to employ a grand demonstration of the sections of Paris, who demanded, no longer the dismissal, but the trial of the ministers. This desire was presented to the Assembly through the medium of Danton; and this first appearance of this head of Medusa sufficiently testified that they would not hesitate to employ any means of intimidation.

The Court which, at this period, placed its hope in the excess of evils, and was desirous of stating, before Europe, that royalty was no more, would have wished the king to intreat the Assembly to choose the ministers itself. Mirabeau received a hint of the affair, and violently opposed it, doubtless fearing lest the Assembly should choose the ministers among its usual leaders, and abrogate in their favour the decree that debarred the deputies from the ministry.

The triumvirate perceived from that moment that it would never be able to induce the Court to place them in power. The Lameths, brought up at Versailles in the king's favour, knew well that their ingratitude rendered them objects of personal hatred; this induced them to take a very serious step which, for the time being, shows them to be falling off from Louis XVI. and siding with the party of the Duke of Orleans.

On the 30th of October, the bishops had published their Exposition de principes, a manifesto of resistance, which placed all the lower clergy, favourable to the Revolution, under a sort of ecclesiastical Reign of Terror. By way of retaliation, the Jacobins decided, on the 31st, that a newspaper should be formed to publish in extracts the correspondence of the society with those of the Departments,-a formidable publication which would bring to light an enormous mass of accusations against the priests and nobles. Such a journal, which would necessarily denounce so many men to the hatred of the people (nay, perhaps to death) was, in reality, a terrible organ for the man who was to choose and extract from that immense chaos, the names of the devoted parties; was about to be invested, as it were, with a strange and unprecedented power which might have been called the dictatorship of information.

THE PUBLIC TRUSTS ROBESPIERRE.

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The upper leaders of the Jacobins were still, at this period, Duport, Barnave, and Lameth. Who was the grave censor, the pure and irreproachable man to whom they intrusted this power ? Who would believe it? To the author of the Liaisons dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos, the well-known agent of the Duke of Orleans. He it was who, in the Cour des Fontaines, in the very shadow of the Palais-Royal, and at his master's door, published, every week, this collection of accusations, with the title of Journal des Amis de la Constitution, an inexact title; for at that time it did not publish the debates of the society of Paris, but seemed to make a mystery of them; it published only the letters that it received from the provincial societies, and which were full of collective and anonymous accusations; to which Laclos added some article or other, at first insignificant, but afterwards unaffectedly in favour of the Orleans party; so that for seven months (from November to June) Orleanism was pervading France under the respected cloak of the Jacobin Society. Thus this great popular machine, being perverted in purpose, was working for the advantage of possible royalty.

The leaders of the Jacobins would doubtless not have made this strange compromise, if the pecuniary assistance of the Orleans party had not been indispensable to them in the movements of Paris. The Court, which saw everything too late, began to regret that it had not made any attempt to gain over these dangerous men. It first addressed itself to the wellknown vanity of Barnave (December, 1790); and afterwards to the Lameths (April, 1791). It asked advice of Barnave,* of Mirabeau, of Bergasse, of everybody, and it deceived everybody, listening, as we shall see, to nobody but Breteuil, the adviser of flight, civil war, and vengeance.

The public were not in the secret of all these shameful intrigues; but they guessed them instinctively. On whatever side they turned, they found no safe person, no man in whom they could place any confidence. From the galleries of the Assembly and from those of the Jacobins, they were looking and hunting for a countenance of honesty and probity. Of those of their defenders, some expressed only intrigue, fatuity and insolence; others only corruption.

* Mémoires de Mirabeau, VIII., 362.

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THE PROBITY OF ROBESPIERRE.

One countenance alone comforted them, and seemed to say, "I am honest; "* and the dress of the man and his gesture seemed to express the same. His speeches were entirely on morality and the interests of the people,-principles, eternally principles. The man himself was not entertaining, and his person was austere and melancholy, by no means popular, but rather academical, and, in one respect, even aristocratical, in extreme cleanliness, neatness, and style of dress. He seemed also a stranger to friendship and familiarity: even his former college companions being kept at a distance.

In spite of all these circumstances, little calculated to make a man popular, the people so hunger and thirst after righteousness, that the orator of principles, the partisan of absolute right, the man who professed virtue, and whose sad and serious countenance seemed its very image, became the favourite of the people. The more he was disliked by the Assembly, the more he was relished by the galleries; so, he addressed himself more and more to this second assembly, which, from above, presided over the deliberations, believed itself in reality superior, and, as the people, the sovereign authority, claimed the right of interfering, and hissed its delegates.

For this reason, he would naturally acquire a still greater ascendancy at the Jacobins. First, he was wonderfully assiduous and indefatigable, being ever at his post, and ever speaking on every subject. With assemblies, as with women, assiduity will ever be considered the principal merit. Many members became tired, sick of the task, and deserted the club. Robespierre would sometimes tire out his auditory, but was never tired himself. The old members departed; but he remained; new ones came in great numbers, and there they ever found Robespierre. These new members, not yet deputies, but fervent and impatient to arrive at public affairs, already formed, as it were, the Assembly of the future.

Robespierre was devoid of political audacity, that sentiment of power which induces men to grasp authority; neither did

* His face, which was always melancholy, wore not at this period the spectral and sinister expression that it later assumed. A fine medal, still extant, (by Hudon, or his school, in the possession of M. Lebas), expresses, if it be a faithful likeness, benevolence and rectitude, with, however, a strong, and perhaps ambitious tension of the countenance.

THE JACOBINS AND THE PRIESTS.

507

his mind soar into the regions of speculation: he followed too closely his masters,-Rousseau and Mably. Lastly, he was devoid of an extensive knowledge of men and things; he was but little acquainted with history or the European world. But, by way of compensation, he possessed, more than all others, a persevering will, a conscientious, admirable, and indefatigable industry.

Moreover, at the very outset, this man, whom they supposed to be made up of principles and abstractions, had a clear perception of the real state of things. He knew perfectly well (what neither Sièyes nor Mirabeau seemed to know) where power resided, and where he was sure to find it.

The strong ever wish to make power, to create it themselves; but politicians go and seek it where it is.

There were then two powers in France, two vast associations, -one eminently revolutionary, the Jacobins; the other, profiting by the Revolution, seemed able to be easily reconciled to it; I mean the lower clergy, a body of eighty thousand priests.

This was the general opinion, without anybody examining whether morally, in all sincerity, the very idea of Christianity can be reconciled with that of the Revolution.

Robespierre, judging the matter as a politician, did not try to discover in the depths of the new principle a form of new association. He took what already existed, and believed that whoever had on his side the Jacobins and the priests, would be near possessing everything.

A very simple, but very powerful, means of attaching the priest to the Revolution, was to allow him to marry; and Robespierre made this proposal on the 30th of May, 1790. Twice he attempted to make himself heard; but his voice was drowned by the general uproar of the whole Assembly, which appeared unanimously resolved not to hear him. The left, according to every appearance, was unwilling to allow Robespierre to get the start of them on so vital a question. A fact worthy of remark, and attributable only to the influence of the principal Jacobin leaders, is that the newspapers were agreed not to print his speech,* just as the Assembly had been not to

*Perlet speaks of it, and so do a few others; but no mention is made of it in the principal newspapers,-neither in the Révolutions de Paris, the

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