``The reading of the two volumes of his trial, printed at Amiens in 1795, may be counted as a nightmare.During twenty sessions the survivors of the hecatombs of Arras and Cambrai passed through the ancient hall of the bailiwick at Amiens, where the ex-member of the Convention was tried.What these phantoms in mourning related is unheard of.Entire streets dispeopled;nonagenarians and girls of sixteen decapitated after a mockery of a trial; death buffeted, insulted, adorned, rejoiced in;executions to music; battalions of children recruited to guard the scaffold; the debauchery, the cynicism, the refinements of an insane satrap; a romance by Sade turned epic; it seems, as we watch the unpacking of these horrors, that a whole country, long terrorised, is at last disgorging its terror and revenging itself for its cowardice by overwhelming the wretch there, the scapegoat of an abhorred and vanished system.''
The only defence of the ex-clergyman was that he had obeyed orders.The facts with which he was reproached had long been known, and the Convention had in no wise blamed him for them.
I have already spoken of the vanity of the deputies ``on mission,'' who were suddenly endowed with a power greater than that of the most powerful despots; but this vanity is not enough to explain their ferocity.
That arose from other sources.Apostles of a severe faith, the delegates of the Convention, like the inquisitors of the Holy Office, could feel, can have felt, no pity for their victims.
Freed, moreover, from all the bonds of tradition and law, they could give rein to the most savage instincts that primitive animality has left in us.
Civilisation restrains these instincts, but they never die.The need to kill which makes the hunter is a permanent proof of this.
M.Cunisset-Carnot has expressed in the following lines the grip of this hereditary tendency, which, in the pursuit of the most harmless game, re-awakens the barbarian in every hunter:--``The pleasure of killing for killing's sake is, one may say, universal; it is the basis of the hunting instinct, for it must be admitted that at present, in civilised countries, the need to live no longer counts for anything in its propagation.In reality we are continuing an action which was imperiously imposed upon our savage ancestors by the harsh necessities of existence, during which they had either to kill or die of hunger, while to-day there is no longer any legitimate excuse for it.But so it is, and we can do nothing; probably we shall never break the chains of a slavery which has bound us for so long.We cannot prevent ourselves from feeling an intense, often passionate, pleasure in shedding the blood of animals towards whom, when the love of the chase possesses us, we lose all feeling of pity.The gentlest and prettiest creatures, the song-birds, the charm of our springtime, fall to our guns or are choked in our snares, and not a shudder of pity troubles our pleasure at seeing them terrified, bleeding, writhing in the horrible suffering we inflict on them, seeking to flee on their poor broken paws or desperately beating their wings, which can no longer support them....The excuse is the impulse of that imperious atavism which the best of us have not the strength to resist.''
At ordinary times this singular atavism, restrained by fear of the laws, can only be exercised on animals.When codes are no longer operative it immediately applies itself to man, which is why so many terrorists took an intense pleasure in killing.
Carrier's remark concerning the joy he felt in contemplating the faces of his victims during their torment is very typical.In many civilised men ferocity is a restrained instinct, but it is by no means eliminated.
3.Danton and Robespierre.
Danton and Robespierre represented the two principal personages of the Revolution.I shall say little of the former: his psychology, besides being simple, is familiar.A club orator firstly, impulsive and violent, he showed himself always ready to excite the people.Cruel only in his speeches, he often regretted their effects.From the outset he shone in the first rank, while his future rival, Robespierre, was vegetating almost in the lowest.
At one given moment Danton became the soul of the Revolution, but he was deficient in tenacity and fixity of conduct.Moreover, he was needy, while Robespierre was not.The continuous fanaticism of the latter defeated the intermittent efforts of the former.
Nevertheless, it was an amazing spectacle to see so powerful a tribune sent to the scaffold by his pale, venemous enemy and mediocre rival.
Robespierre, the most influential man of the Revolution and the most frequently studied, is yet the least explicable.It is difficult to understand the prodigious influence which gave him the power of life and death, not only over the enemies of the Revolution but also over colleagues who could not have been considered as enemies of the existing Government.
We certainly cannot explain the matter by saying with Taine that Robespierre was a pedant lost in abstractions, nor by asserting with the Michelet that he succeeded on account of his principles, nor by repeating with his contemporary Williams that ``one of the secrets of his government was to take men marked by opprobrium or soiled with crime as stepping-stones to his ambition.''
It is impossible to regard his eloquence as the cause of his success.His eyes protected by goggles, he painfully read his speeches, which were composed of cold and indefinite abstractions.The Assembly contained orators who possessed an immensely superior talent, such as Danton and the Girondists; yet it was Robespierre who destroyed them.
