Lectures on the French Revolution

XIX. ROBES PIERRE

LectFrRevol_201-250.indd 246 4/27/12 10:18 AM XIX ROBES PIERRE We reach the end ofthe Reign ofTerror, on the 9th ofThermidor, the most auspicious date in modern history. In April Robespierre was absolute. He had sent Hebert to death because he promoted disorder, Chaumette because he suppressed religion, Danton because he had sought to restrain bloodshed. His policy was to keep order and authority by regulated terror, and to relax persecution. The governing power was concentrated in the Committee of Public Safety by abolishing the office ofminister, instead ofwhich there were twelve Boards ofAdministration reporting to the Committee. That there might be no rival power, the municipality was remodelled and placed in the hands ofmen attached to Robespierre. The dualism remained between representation in the Assembly and the more direct action ofthe sovereign people in the Town Hall. When the tocsin rings, said a member of the Commune, the Convention ceases to exist. In other words, when the principal chooses to interfere , he supersedes his agent. The two notions of government are contradictory, and the bodies that incorporated them were naturally hostile. But their antagonism was suspended while Robespierre stood between. The reformed Commune at once closed all clubs that were not Jacobin. All parties had been crushed: Royalists, Feuillants, Girondins , Cordeliers. What remained ofthem in the scattered prisons of France was now to be forwarded to Paris, and there gradually disposed of. But though there no longer existed an opposing party, there was still a class of men that had not been reduced or reconciled . This consisted chiefly of deputies who had been sent out to LectFrRevol_201-250.indd 247 4/27/12 10:19 AM ROBESPIERRE suppress the rising ofthe provinces in 1793. These Commissaries of the Convention had enjoyed the exercise of enormous authority; they had the uncontrolled power of life and death, and they had gathered spoil without scruple, from the living and the dead. On that account they were objects of suspicion to the austere personage at the head of the State; and they were known to be the most unscrupulous and the most determined of men. Robespierre, who was nervously apprehensive, saw very early where the danger lay, and he knew which of these enemies there was most cause to dread. He never made up his mind how to meet the peril; he threatened before he struck; and the others combined and overthrew him. He had helped to unite them by introducing a conflict of ideas at a time when, apparently, and on the surface, there was none. Everybody was a Republican and a jacobin, but Robespierre now insisted on the belief in God. He perished by the monstrous imposture ofassociating divine sanction with the crimes ofhis sanguinary reign. The scheme was not suggested by expediency , for he had been always true to the idea. In early life he had met Rousseau at Ermenonville, and he had adopted the indeterminate religion of the "vicaire Savoyard." In March 1792 he proposed a resolution, that the belief in Providence and a future life is a necessary condition ofjacobinism. In November, he argued that the decline ofreligious conviction left only a residue ofideas favourable to liberty and public virtue, and that the essential principles ofpolitics might be found in the sublime teaching of Christ. He objected to disendowment, because it is necessary to keep up reverence for an authority superior to man. Therefore, on December 5, he induced the Club to break in pieces the bust of Helvetius. Although Rousseau, the great master, had been a Genevese Calvinist , nobody thought of preserving Christianity in a Protestant form. The Huguenot ministers themselves did nothing for it, and Robespierre had a peculiar dislike of them. Immediately after the execution of Danton and before the trial of Chaumette, the restoration of religion was foreshadowed by Cauthon. A week later it was resolved that the remains of Rousseau, the father of the new church, should be transferred to the Pantheon. On May 7, Robespierre brought forward his famous motion that the Convention acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being . His argument, stripped of parliamentary trappings, was this. 247 LectFrRevol_201-250.indd 248 4/27/12 10:19 AM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The secret ofthe life of a Republic is public and private virtue, that is, integrity, the consciousness of duty, the spirit of self-sacrifice, submission to the discipline ofauthority. These are the natural conditions of...