1793.

THE ANARCHISTS.

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attacked the commune, which he accused of setting up a new and aristocratic religion. "Atheism," said Robespierre, "is aristocratic; it is the natural religion of the lazy and the rich. On the contrary, the belief in a Deity is a popular, a universal belief, moreover a necessary one. If God did not exist, we should invent him."

Hebert, Chaumette, and the commune, intimidated by the apostrophes of Robespierre, drew back, recanted their atheism, and abolished their worship of reason. But at the same time they vented their spleen by redoubled attacks upon the moderates, with whom they implicated Danton. Whilst the anarchists in the municipality thus quailed, the original and more active agitators in the Cordelier club showed more stubbornness. Ronsin and Rossignol, generals of the party, who had commanded with all brutality in La Vendée, were accused by Phelippeau, and put in arrest. To show its impartiality, the government at the same time arrested those of the mode rates who were accused of embezzlement and corruption, such as Chabot, Bazire, and Julien. The parties now became declared. The anarchists exclaimed against the counterrevolutionists, as they called the moderates, and, through the medium of Hebert's journal, the Pere Duchesne, cast upon them all every kind of calumny and abuse. They accused Danton as a rank moderate; nor did that personage deny, though he avoided to admit, the truth of the accusation. Camille Desmoulins, the friend of Danton, the very man who began the revolution by grasping his pistols on the news of Necker's dismissal, and mounting on a table in the Palais Royal to proclaim the necessity of immediate and open resistance, he too was a moderate, and now commenced a journal, which he called the Vieux Cordelier, in opposition to Hebert.

Naught is more surprising in the revolution, than the talents which it actually gave, rather than excited in men who, even in its stirring commencement, might be, and were universally, classed with the dull. We have seen Robespierre become even eloquent by dint of habit, by position, by the times, and the opinions which he represented; and now we find in the vulgar ringleader of riot, in Desmoulins, a suavity and refinement blended with a force, a power of writing, in short, that the most cultivated age cannot exceed. The pretended translation of Tacitus, in which he depicts the tyranny of the convention, is a chef d'œuvre of its kind. His apostrophes against Hebert unite to Vergniaud's warmth a contemptuous irony unsurpassed in the warfare of the pen. Both parties were summoned to the Jacobins, as to the bar

of public opinion. Both pleaded their cause; and Robes pierre, contented at first with the injuries inflicted by their mutual accusation on the characters of each, silenced the uarrel for the time. His policy was very different from that vhich ruined the Gironde. He never wasted temper and trength in vain and irritating attacks; but smiled, and smoothed, and affected calm, till a fair and full opening was afforded by the imprudence of his enemies; then, with a tiger's spring, he crushed them. Such, at least, was Robes pierre's constant course when in the vigor of his mastery. He let loose the anarchists: they instantly fell to vaporing and plotting. The members of the committee of public safety appeared to them imbecile sovereigns, and the whole system perplexed and complicated. They imagined a simple form of government, consisting of a general and a judge, both with dictatorial power. A revolutionist at that time saw but two administrative functions and necessities, of fighting foreign enemies and beheading domestic foes, the latter to be designated by interest or humor. With these ideas the anarchists tried every means of raising an insurrection. They accused the convention of the public scarcity, of all existing ills. They already had acquired the majority in one section; and the commune, or its magistrates, Hebert and Chaumette, supported them, though with hesitation. They proceeded, by the dissemination of small pamphlets and placards in the markets and other populous quarters, to stir up the people against the convention. But it was no longer an irresolute party, a feeble ministry, and the name of law, which reigned. A committee in the assembly was appointed to take their writings into consideration; and on the morrow all the leading anarchists were arrested. With Ronsin and Vincent, vaporers and soldiers, were taken Chaumette, the apostle of Reason, Hebert, the infamous insulter of the dying queenhow they were welcomed by the population of the prisons!— the apostate archbishop Gobet, and Anacharsis Clootz. They passed without delay to the tribunal, and from thence to the scaffold, on the 24th of March.

The Jacobins, although consenting to the destruction of those who outrivalled them in revolutionary zeal, were not without qualms, which the exultation of the moderates increased. Robespierre had been accused of moderatism. It behoved him, as before, to wash away such stain in blood. The Vieux Cordelier of Desmoulins, the discourses in favor of clemency, sounded like menace in the ears of the sanguinary, who dreaded a reaction, and the punishment which it might bring to them. The colleagues of Robespierre enter

794.

EXECUTION OF DANTON.

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tained this fear, and deemed that they had more cause for it; since, by the execution of the leading zealots, they had just weakened, or indeed annihilated, the popular party. Their counsel was to crush the moderate, and annihilate them equally. Hérault de Sechelles, one of those nobles who had embraced the revolution, and who, even on the benches of the Mountain and the Jacobins, preserved the aspect of high birth, happened at that moment to have given shelter to an accused person. Although the friend of Danton, he was arrested. The latter was warned of his danger; he could not be blind to it; yet he could not make up his mind to resist or grapple with Robespierre in the convention. A portion of Danton's past audacity and eloquence would have shaken the assembly but the guilty man's hour was come; a fatuitous apathy benumbed his faculties; and the ferocious Danton was led to prison unresistingly, with his friends Desmoulins, Phelippeau, and Lacroix. They were brought before the tribunal with the other moderates previously arrested, the ex-capuchin Chabot, Bazire, and Fabre d'Eglantine, frenetic Jacobins in their day. Once in prison, his fate irrevocably decided, Danton recovered his wonted audacity. He was indignant at the idea of his being even accused. What! Danton and Desmoulins! the one who began the revolution, the other who accomplished it on the 10th of August! Well might it be said that the revolution, like Saturn, produced its children but to devour them. They, too, passed to the scaffold which they had erected, and to which they had sent so many. Desmoulins had called himself the procureur général de la lanterne. He died almost unmanned by the thoughts of a young and loving wife, who underwent a similar fate. Danton, at the foot of the scaffold, was prevented by the executioner from embracing his friend Hérault. "Go, churl! you can't at least prevent our heads from embracing in yon sack. One thing consoles me; 't is that Robespierre follows us. Why should I regret to die? I have enjoyed the revolution, have spent, have drunk, have debauched. Let us go to slumber." Such were amongst the last, and with his life but too consistent, words of Danton. What an epoch, when such men of blood were doomed to endanger themselves in invoking clemency, and perish in the cause of humanity!

Now that the leaders of the revolution were punished with death for lack of honesty or zeal, it seemed unjust and inconsistent to allow any holding by the least tie to aristocracy and the ancient government to live. All the relics of nobl families were now sacrificed. The duc de Chatelet, the marshals of Noailles and Mailly, men of eighty years, too aged I!!.--5

י

to emigrate; the dukes of Béthune and Villeroy; many of the members of the old magistracy; Malesherbes, the defender of Louis, all his family, his children and grandchildren, perished together. Men were wanting, and the rage of the Terrorists vented itself upon women, who perished at this epoch in greater numbers than the other sex. Madame du Barri and the duchess de Grammont-personages that recall the memory of Louis XV.-survived to die on the scaffold of the revolution. The wives of the condemned were alway included in the sentence. One day saw a troop of girls proceed to die for having made a cockade, or carolled an imprudent air; the next, an establishment of nuns, or a crowd of poor peasant women from La Vendée, such as Riouffe describes, tied and heaped in carts, like calves, and ignorant of their guilt and their fate, stupified with fear, as they went to slaughter. The princess Elizabeth, sister of Louis, made at this time one of a devoted batch, and perished almost unnoticed. The inhabitants of the streets through which these daily processions passed, became at length disgusted, and dared to show it by shutting their shops. The scaffold was, in consequence, removed to the opposite extremity of Paris; not, however, relaxing its activity. Nor were such scenes confined to the capital: the Terrorists in the provinces rivalled the zeal of their metropolitan brethren, nay, refined upon their means of destruction. Carrier, at Nantes invented the noyades: he housed his victims in the marine stores, tied them in couples, and embarked them in boats prepared for the purpose; they put out laden; a plank was struck out when at sufficient distance from shore. Darkness and the tide concealed the extent of the wholesale murder, which was revealed, however, by the islands of floating carcasses besetting ships as they entered the river, and by the fish proving poisonous, because gorged with such unusual food. The tribunals of Arras, in the north, and Orange, in the south, rivalled that of Nantes in atrocity. Such is but a feeble outline of the Terror.

Robespierre and the Jacobins, forming the sovereign committee, had again triumphed. They had anticipated both anarchists and moderates, and stricken each party ere it had gathered strength. But, without enemies, how was this knot of rulers to remain united? Robespierre could alone pretend to govern. In him popularity was concentrated. The Jacobins were at his command; and he now got possession of the municipal power, by appointing a new mayor, and a commander of the armed force, Henriot, who was devoted to him. Couthon, and St. Just, his colleague in the committee, were

1794.

FESTIVAL OF THE SUPREME BEING.

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personally attached to Robespierre: Barrère feared him. Carnot, Prieur, and Lindet affected to occupy themselves with merely the details of government, leaving the high influence to their brethren. Collot d'Herbois and Billaud-Varennes were jealous of Robespierre: they looked upon him as a moderate in heart, as a man who wished to stop the revolu tion, not to continue it, like them. They were right. Robespierre saw plainly that the power even of the committee could not endure. Popularity with the mere mob was too uncertain a support: and terror, though a powerful chain, might soon be strained to cracking. He looked around, he thought, he studied, and to excite some new fanaticism, seemed to him the only measure of consolidating power, and concentrating it in his proper person. He meditated the life of Mahomet, and that of Cromwell. To found a new sect, became his policy and his ambition. Nor was the aim an ill-judged one; save that the character and genius of the man were most unfit for the task. He tried, however, and commenced by making the convention decree the existence of a Supreme Being. Some time after, the same authority ordained a fête in honor of the Deity. Robespierre caused himself to be chosen president of the convention for the day, and by consequence high-priest of the ceremonial. David, as usual, was intrusted with the arrangement of worship and procession. An amphitheatre was erected in the gardens of the Tuilleries; opposite to which divers wooden figures were erected, representing Atheism, Discord, &c. A statue of Wisdom, in marble, was concealed by three figures. After having then made the convention, and the votaries of the new worship wait for him, Ro bespierre appeared magnificently dressed, plumed and robed, bearing flowers, and ears of corn in his hand. After music, and a speech, he came forward, set fire to Atheism and Discord, the flames and smoke of which, however, so besmutted poor Wisdom, that the congregation could not refrain from a laugh, whilst the more devout called the circumstance an evil omen. The day was beautiful, being the eighth of June. Robespierre himself was elated. He even smiled, and wore a radiant countenance. In the procession from the Tuilleries to the Champ de Mars, inebriated with triumph, he forgot himself so far as to walk alone far in advance of the convenion; many of whose members forgot their customary prudence likewise, and in lieu of incense, saluted the high-priest with imprecations. "The Capitol is near the Tarpeian rock, said they. He was called Pisistratus, and bade to beware a tyrant's fate.

The odium and jealousies excited against Robespierre by