508 ROBESPIERRE'S PRUDENCE. hear it. The rumour of it was not the less extensive among the clergy. Some thousands of priests wrote to Robespierre, expressing their earnest gratitude. In one month, he received letters to the amount of a thousand francs, and verses in every language, whole poems of 500, 700, and 1500 verses, in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Robespierre continued to speak in favour of the clergy." On the 16th of June, he asked the Assembly to provide for the subsistence of ecclesiastics who were seventy years of age and had no benefices or pensions. On the 16th of September, he protested in favour of certain religious orders that the Assembly had unjustly reckoned among the Mendicants. Again, at the last hour, on the 19th of March, 1791, when, in open ecclesiastical warfare, the lower clergy, led away by the bishops, left but little hope of their being ever able to be reconciled with the spirit of the Revolution, Robespierre protested against the measures of severity proposed, and said it would be absurd to make a special law against the factious speeches of priests: that nobody could be prosecuted for speeches. This was advancing too far, and exposing himself to be attacked. A member on the left exclaimed: Go over to the right!" He felt the danger, stopped short, reflected, and became prudent. He would have compromised himself, had he continued this patronage to the priests, in the critical state of affairs at that time. Nevertheless, they must have known and felt quite sure, that, if the Revolution ever halted, they would find a protector in that politician. 4616 The Jacobins, by their party spirit, which went on increasing, Révolutions de France et Brabant, the Courier de Provence, the Point du Jour, the Ami du Peuple, nor in the Moniteur, (nor in the Histoire Parlementaire, which follows too subserviently the Moniteur, both in this and other matters; for instance, in the voluntary error committed by the Moniteur, relative to the pretended generosity of the clergy on the night of the 4th of August. See my Vol. I,, p. 215.)—M. Villiers relates that Robespierre was affected by the numerous thanks in verse which he received. Dining with M. Villiers, he said to him-"It is said there are no longer any poets; you see that I can make some." * On one single occasion, he appeared adverse to them; but it was an occ..sion in which it was impossible to be favourable to them, when a clerical deputy demanded that ecclesiastics should be elected by ecclesiastics: to except them from the universal rule, election by the people, would have been reconstituting them as a body. ROBESPIERRE'S PRUDENCE. 509 by their fervent and relentless faith, and by their keen and searching inquisitiveness, partook somewhat of the character of the priest. They formed, so to speak, a revolutionary clergy, of which Robespierre became gradually the chief. In this character, he displayed extraordinary prudence, seldom being the first to propose any new measure, but expressing the opinions and being the organ of the Jacobins, without ever outstepping them in their progress. This is especially conspicuous in the question on the kingly power. The unanimity of the memorials sent to the States-General induced the Jacobins to believe that France was royalist. Therefore Robespierre wanted to have a king; not a king a representative of the people, as Mirabeau desired, but delegated by the people and appointed by them,-consequently responsible. He admitted, as almost everybody did at that time, the idle hypothesis of a king to be held chained, gagged, and muzzled, who, doubtless, would not be able to bite, but who, being shackled to such a degree, would most certainly be inert and useless, or rather noxious. The Jacobins were then, as Barnave believed, and they have almost always been, relatively speaking, even in the most violent action of the Revolution, a society of equilibrium. Robespierre used to say, in speaking of the Cordelier Camille Desmoulins (therefore, with greater reason, of the other Cordeliers still more impetuous): "They are going too fast; they will break their necks; Paris was not made in a day; and it requires more than a day to unmake it." The audacity and the grand initiative of the Revolution' belonged to the club of the Cordeliers. CHAPTER VII. THE CORDELIERS. Revolutionary History of the Convent of the Cordeliers (Franciscan Friars). - Energetic individualities in the Club of the Cordeliers.-Their faith in the People. Their impotency of organisation.-Marat's irritability.—The Cordeliers still a young Club in 1790.-Enthusiasm of the moment. -Interior appearance of the Club.-Camille Desmoulins against Marat.Théroigne among the Cordeliers.-Anacharsis Clootz.-The two-fold spirit of the Cordeliers.-One of Danton's Portraits. ALMOST Opposite the Ecole de Medecine, you will perceive, at the bottom of a court-yard, a chapel of a plain but solid style of architecture. This is the sibylline den of the Revolution, the Club of the Cordeliers. There was her frenzy, her tripod, and her oracle. Low, and supported moreover by massive buttresses, such a roof must be everlasting it heard the voice of Danton without being shaken to pieces! : At the present day, it is a gloomy surgical museum, adorned with scientific horrors, and hiding others still more horrible. The back part of the building conceals dismal rooms, and their black marble slabs, on which dead bodies are being dissected. The neighbouring asylum and the chapel were originally the refectory of the Cordeliers and their celebrated school, the capital of the Mystic Theologians, where even their rival, the Jacobin Saint Thomas, came to study. Between the two buildings arose their church, with its vast dismal nave full of marble tombs. All this is now destroyed. The subterraneous church which extended underneath, concealed, for some time, Marat's printing establishment. How strange was the fatality of this place! This edifice had belonged to the Revolution ever since the thirteenth century, and always to its most eccentric genius. There is not so much difference as might be supposed between those Cordelier friars and these Cordelier republicans, or between Mendicant friars and the Sans-Culottes. Religious disputation and political disputation, REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF THE CONVENT. 511 the school of the middle ages and the club of 1790, rather differ in form than in spirit. Who built this chapel? The Revolution itself, in the year 1240. Here it was that it gave the first blow to the feudal world, which it was to destroy on the 4th of August. Note well these walls, which look as though they had been built but yesterday: do they not appear as unshaken as the justice of God? And, indeed, they were first founded by a striking visitation of revolutionary justice. The great lover of justice, Saint Louis, gave the first example of punishing crime in a great baron,-Sire de Coucy; and with the fine that he obtained from him, that monk-king (himself a Cordelier) built the school and church of the Franciscan friars. That was a revolutionary school: about the year 1300, it resounded with the dispute on the Eternal Gospel; and there the question "Has Christ passed away?" was also proposed. This truly predestined spot beheld, in 1357, the first Convention that saved France, when the king and the nobility were vanquished and taken prisoners. The Danton of the fourteenth century, Etienne Marcel, the provost of Paris, there caused a sort of republic to be created by the States, sent thence the allpowerful deputies into the provinces to organise the requisition; and, the boldness of his proceedings inspiring him with still greater audacity, he armed the people with a motto, a memorable decree which intrusted the keeping of the public peace to the people themselves: "If the lords make war on one another, honest folks shall fall upon them." O strange and prodigious delay! that it should have required four centuries more to reach '89! The faith of the ancient Cordeliers, eminently revolutionary, was the inspiration or illumination of the simple and poor. They made poverty the first Christian virtue, and carried its ambition to an incredible degree, even to be burnt to death rather than make any change in their Mendicant robe. True Sans-Culottes of the middle ages in their animosity against property, they went beyond their successors of the Club of the Cordeliers and the whole revolution, not excepting Babœuf. Our revolutionary Cordeliers have, like those of the middle ages, an absolute faith in the instinct of the simple; only, instead of divine light, they term it popular reason. 512 INDIVIDUALITY AMONG THE CORDELIERS. Their genius, entirely instinctive and spontaneous, now inspired, now infuriated, distinguishes them profoundly from the calculating enthusiasm and the moody cold fanaticism which characterises the Jacobins. The Cordeliers, at the period at which we have now arrived, were a far more popular society. Among them there did not exist that division of the Jacobins between the assembly of politicians and the fraternal society composed of workmen; neither was there any trace, at the Cordelier club, of the Sabbat, or directing committee; nor of a newspaper common to the club (except one transient attempt). Moreover, the two societies cannot be compared. The Cordeliers were a Parisian club; the Jacobins an immense association extending throughout France. But Paris would stir and rise at the fury of the Cordeliers; and Paris being once in motion, the political revolutionists were absolutely obliged to follow. Individuality was very powerful among the Cordeliers. Their journalists, Marat, Desmoulins, Fréron, Robert, Hébert, and Fabre d'Églantine, wrote each for himself. Danton, the omnipotent orator, would never write; but, by way of compensation, Marat and Desmoulins, who stammered or lisped, used principally to write, and seldom spoke. However, with all these differences, and this instinct of individuality, there seems to have been a very strong tie, a common attraction, among them. The Cordeliers formed a sort of tribe, all living in the neighbourhood of the club: Marat, in the same street, almost opposite, at the turret, or next to it; Desmoulins and Fréron, together, Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie; Danton, in the Passage du Commerce; Clootz, in the Rue Jacob; Legendre, in the Rue des Boucheries-Saint-Germain, &c. The honest butcher Legendre, one of the orators of the club, is one of the originalities of the Revolution. Although illiterate and ignorant, he did not speak less valiantly among the learned and literary members, without caring whether they smiled or not as honest a man as any, notwithstanding his furious language, and a good-hearted man too in his lucid intervals. The heart-breaking farewell that he pronounced over the tomb of Loustalot very far surpasses all that was said by the journalists, without even excepting Desmoulins. It was the originality of the Cordeliers to be and ever remain |