Виктор Мари Гюго
Ninety-Three
V
Below crouched dismay, which may be noble, and fear, which cannot fail to be contemptible. Beneath all these passions, this heroism and devotion, this rage, might be seen the gloomy multitude of the anonymous. The shoals of the Assembly were called the Plain, comprising the entire floating element, – men who are in doubt, who hesitate, retreat, temporize, mistrustfully watching one another. The Mountain and the Gironde were the chosen few, the Plain was the crowd. The Plain was summed up and expressed in Sieyès.
Sieyès was a man of a naturally profound mind, full of chimerical projects. He had paused at the Third Estate, and had never been able to rise as high as the people. Certain minds are constituted to rest midway. Sieyès called Robespierre a tiger, who returned the compliment by calling him a mole. He was a philosopher who had attained prudence if not wisdom. He was a courtier, rather than the servant of the Revolution. He took a spade and went to work with the people in the Champs de Mars, hauling the same cart with Alexander de Beauharnais. He urged others to energetic labors which he never performed himself. He said to the Girondists: "Put the cannon on your own side." There are philosophers who are natural wrestlers, and they like Condorcet joined the party of Vergniaud, or like Camille Desmoulins that of Danton. There are philosophers who value their lives, and those who belonged to this class followed Sieyès.
The best vats have their dregs. Still lower even than the Plain was the Marsh, whose stagnation was hideous to look upon, revealing as it did transparent egotism. There shivered the timid in silent expectation. Nothing could be more wretched. Ignominious to the last degree, and yet feeling no shame, hiding their indignation, living in servitude, cherishing covert rebellion, possessed by a certain cynical terror, they had all the desperation peculiar to cowardice; they really preferred the Gironde, and yet they chose the Mountain; when the final result depended on them, they went over to the successful side; they surrendered Louis XVI. to Vergniaud, Danton to Robespierre, and Robespierre to Tallien. They put Marat in the pillory during his lifetime, and deified him after his death. They showed themselves the partisans of the very cause which they suddenly turned against. They seemed to possess an instinct for jostling the infirm. Since they had joined the cause with the understanding that it was a strong one, any sign of wavering seemed to them equivalent to treason. They were the majority, the power, and the fear. Hence springs the audacity of the base.
Hence the 31st of May, the 11th Germinal, the 9th Thermidor, – tragedies where dwarfs untied the knots of giants.
VI
And among these passionate men were to be found others, fanciful dreamers. Utopia was there in all its varied forms, – from the warlike, which admitted the scaffold, to the mild, which would fain abolish the penalty of death; a spectre or an angel, according as one viewed it from the throne or from the side of the common people. Men eager for the fray stood face to face with others who were contented to brood over their dreams of peace. The brain of Carnot created fourteen armies while Jean Debry was revolving in his head a scheme of universal democratic federation. Amid this furious eloquence, amid these howling and thundering voices, some men there were who preserved a fruitful silence. Lakanal was silent, preoccupied with his system for national public education; Lanthenas held his peace, absorbed in his plans for primary schools; Revellière-Lepaux was silent, dreaming of philosophy when it should attain the dignity of religion. Others busied themselves with matters of minor importance and the details of every-day life. Guyton-Morveaux was interested in the improvement of the sanitary condition of hospitals; Maire in the abolishment of existing servitudes; Jean-Bon-Saint-André in the suppression of arrest and imprisonment for debt; Romme in Chappe's proposition; Duböe in the filing of the archives; Coren-Fustier in the foundation of the Cabinet of Anatomy and the Museum of Natural History; Guyomard in the navigation of rivers and the damming of the Scheldt. Men were fanatical about art, even monomaniacs on the subject; on the 21st of January, at the very time when the head of monarchy was falling on the Place de la Révolution, Bézard, the representative of the Oise, went to see a picture of Rubens which had been found in a garret in the Rue Saint-Lazare. Artists, orators, and prophets, giants like Danton, and men as childlike as Cloots, gladiators and philosophers, were all straining for the same goal, – progress. Nothing disconcerted them. The greatness of the Convention consisted in its efforts to discover what degree of reality there might be in that which men call the impossible. At one end stood Robespierre with his eyes fixed upon the Law, and at the other Condorcet gazing with equal steadiness on Duty.
Condorcet was a man enlightened, but given to dreaming. Robespierre possessed executive ability; and sometimes, in the final crises of worn-out conditions, execution signifies extermination. Revolutions have two slopes, – the one ascending, the other descending, – whereon we meet at different stages each season in its turn, from the freezing to the flowery; and each zone produces men suited to the climate, from those who live under the hot rays of the sun, to those who dwell with the thunderbolt.
VII
People pointed out to each other the bend in the left-hand passage, where Robespierre whispered to Clavière's friend Garat that terrible epigram, "Clavière a conspiré partout où il a respiré." In this same bend, well adapted for privacy and suppressed indignation, Fabre d'Églantine quarrelled with Romme, reproaching him for having disfigured his calendar by changing Fervidor into Thermidor. People pointed out the corner where, elbow to elbow, sat the seven representatives of Haute-Garonne, who, being the first called upon to pronounce their verdict upon Louis XVI., had thus answered, one after the other: Mailhe, "death;" Delmas, "death;" Projean, "death;" Calès, "death;" Ayral, "death;" Julien, "death;" Desaby, "death," – eternal reverberation that fills all history, and since the birth of human justice has continued to send forth a funereal echo from the walls of the tribunal. Amid this stormy sea of faces one man would point out to another the individuals whose tragic votes had caused that fearful din: Paganel, who cried, "Death. A king serves no purpose save by his death." Millaud, who said, "If death had never been known, we must to-day have invented it." Old Raffron du Trouillet, who exclaimed, "A speedy death!" Goupilleau, who cried, "The scaffold, at once. Delay but aggravates the pain of death." Sieyès, who with solemn brevity uttered the single word, "Death." Thuriot, who, rejecting the appeal to the people proposed by Buzot, said, "What! The primary assemblies! forty-four thousand tribunals! an endless trial! The head of Louis XVI. would have time to grow gray before it fell." Augustin-Bon-Robespierre, who exclaimed, after his brother, "I ignore that humanity which massacres the people and pardons despots! Death! The demand for a reprieval means a substitution of the appeal to tyrants for the appeal to the people." Foussedoire, who took the place of Bernardin-de-Saint-Pierre, saying, "The shedding of human blood is abhorrent to me; but the blood of a king is not human blood. Death!" Jean-Bon-Saint-André, who said, "No nation can be free until the tyrant dies." Lavicomterie, who expressed himself in this formula: "So long as the tyrant breathes, liberty is strangled. Death!" Châteauneuf-Randon, who cried, "The death of Louis the Last!" Guyardin, who suggested, "Let him be executed at the Barrière-Renversée." The Barrière-Renversée was the Barrière du Trône. Tellier, who said, "Let us forge a cannon of the calibre of Louis XVI.'s head, to fire upon the enemy." And among those inclined to mercy, Gentil was one, who said, "I vote for imprisonment. He who makes a Charles I. makes a Cromwell likewise." Bancal, who said, "Exile. I should like to see the first king of the earth sentenced to earn his living at a trade." Albouys, who said, "Exile. Let this living spectre wander round among the thrones." Zangiacomi, who said, "I vote for imprisonment; let us keep Capet alive for a scarecrow." Chaillon, who said, "Let him live! I do not approve of killing a man for Rome to canonize." While sentences like these fell one after the other from these severe lips, making their way into history, bedizened women in low-necked dresses sat in the boxes, and with list in hand counted the votes as they were given, pricking each name with a pin.
Where tragedy has entered in, horror and pity remain. To see the Convention, at whatsoever epoch of its reign, was to witness anew the judgment of the last of the Capets; the legend of the 21st of January seemed to be interwoven with all its acts; the formidable Assembly was composed of those men whose fatal breath put out the ancient torch of monarchy, which had burned for eighteen centuries; the decisive trial of all kings in the person of one seemed to be the starting-point of the great war which it waged against the past. At whatsoever session of the Convention one might be present, the shadow cast by the scaffold of Louis XVI. never failed to make itself evident. The spectators told each other about the resignations of Kersaint and Roland, and also about Duchâtel the deputy of the Deux-Sèvres, who, being ill, caused himself to be carried to the Assembly, and on his death-bed voted against the execution of the king, – an act which excited Marat to laughter. People looked for the representative forgotten to-day, who, after a session that had lasted thirty-seven hours, overcome by fatigue, fell asleep on his bench, and being roused by the usher when his turn came to vote, half-opened his eyes, murmured, "Death," and fell asleep again.
At the time when the death-sentence of Louis XVI. was passed, Robespierre had eighteen months to live, Danton fifteen, Vergniaud nine, Marat five months and three weeks, and Lepelletier-Saint-Fargeau one day! Brief and terrible was the breath of life in those days.
VIII
The people had a window, opening on the Convention in the shape of the public tribunes, and when this window proved inadequate, they opened the door, and the street-population poured in upon the Assembly. The invasions of the crowd into this senate presented one of the most striking spectacles known to history. Generally these irruptions were amicable. The street fraternized with the curule chair. But friendship with a people who had once, in the course of three hours, taken the cannon of the Invalides and forty thousand muskets besides, was a somewhat formidable relationship. At every moment a procession interrupted the session. There were deputations admitted to the bar, petitions, expressions of respect, offerings. The pike of honor of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was brought in, borne by women. The English offered twenty thousand pairs of shoes for our barefooted soldiers. "Citizen Arnoux," said the "Moniteur," "the curé of Aubignan, in command of the battalion of the Drôme, requests permission to march to the frontier, and begs that his parish may be kept for him." The delegates from the Sections came, bringing in wheelbarrows, dishes, patens, chalices, monstrances, heaps of gold, silver, and gilt, offerings to the country from this ragged crowd, who asked, as a reward, permission to dance the Carmagnole before the Convention.
Chenard, Narbonne, and Vallière came to sing stanzas in honor of the Mountain. The section of Mont-Blanc brought the bust of Lepelletier, and a woman placed a red cap on the head of the president, who embraced her; "the citoyennes of the section du Mail" strewed flowers "before the legislators;" the "pupils of the country," escorted by music, came to thank the Convention for having "paved the way for the prosperity of the century;" the women of the section of the Gardes-Françaises brought roses; the women of the section of the Champs-Élysées presented a crown of oak-leaves; the women of the section of the Temple came to the bar and took an oath "to wed only true Republicans;" the section of Molière presented a medal of Franklin which, by a formal decree, was suspended from the wreath of the statue of Liberty; the Foundlings, who had been declared the Children of the Republic, filed by, dressed in the national uniform; young girls of the ninety-third section came arrayed in long white gowns, and the next day the "Moniteur" contained this line: "The president receives a bouquet from the innocent hands of a fair young girl." The orators saluted the crowds and sometimes flattered them, saying to the multitude; "Thou art infallible; thou art irreproachable; thou art sublime." The lower classes are childlike; they are fond of sugar-plums. Sometimes a riot would invade the Assembly, entering in a fury and departing pacified, like the Rhone flowing through Lake Leman, which is muddy enough on its entrance, but flows out as blue as the sky.
If it continued turbulent, Henriot would now and then order his furnaces for heating the bullets to be brought up to the entrance of the Tuileries.
IX
While this assembly was throwing off the shackles of revolution, it was also promoting civilization. It was a furnace, to be sure, but it was likewise a forge. In this caldron where terror was bubbling, progress also fermented. From that chaos of shadows and tempestuous whirlwind of clouds spread immense rays of light parallel with the eternal laws, – rays that have since rested on the horizon, forever visible in the sky of the nations, and which are called justice, tolerance, goodness, reason, truth, and love. The Convention proclaimed this grand axiom: "The liberty of one citizen ends where that of another begins;" thus summing up in two lines the essence of social science. It proclaimed the sanctity of the poor, as well as of the infirm in the persons of the blind, and of the mutes, whose guardianship had been assumed by the State; it honored maternity in the person of the girl-mother, whom it comforted and lifted up, childhood in the orphans adopted by the State, and innocence in the accused, who was indemnified by the government after his acquittal. It branded the traffic in blacks and abolished slavery. It proclaimed civil consolidation. It decreed gratuitous instruction. It organized national education by the establishment of the normal school in Paris, the central school in the cities, and the primary school in the communes. It founded conservatories and museums. It systematized the Code as well as the weights and measures, and the method of calculation by decimals. It established the finances of France upon a firm basis, and brought about an era of public credit after the long monarchical bankruptcy. It established communication by telegraph, it provided almshouses for old age and the improved hospitals for sickness; it gave the Polytechnic School to the cause of education, the Bureau of Longitude to science, and the Institute to the domain of human intellect. It was at once cosmopolitan and national. Of the eleven thousand two hundred and ten decrees issued by the Convention, the proportion of philanthropic as compared with the political was as two to one. It proclaimed universal morality to be the basis of society, and universal conscience the basis of the law. And it must be remembered that all these reforms – the abolition of slavery, the proclamation of universal brotherhood, the protection of humanity, the elevation of the human conscience, the law of labor changed into a privilege, thus transforming the burden into a comfort, the consolidation of the national wealth, the enlightenment and protection of children, the dissemination of knowledge and science, a light set upon all the mountain-tops, help proffered to the suffering, and the promulgation of all principle – were accomplished by the Convention, with the Vendée gnawing like hydra at its entrails, and the kings of the world leaping like tigers upon its shoulders.
X
Astonishing assembly! The human, the inhuman, and the superhuman, – every type in short might be found there. An epic accumulation of antagonisms, – Guillotin avoiding David, Bazire insulting Chabot, Gaudet mocking Saint-Just, Vergniaud despising Danton, Louvet attacking Robespierre, Buzot denouncing Égalité, Chambon branding Pache: all hating Marat. And how many more names might yet be registered! Armonville, – called Bonnet-Rouge, because at the sessions he invariably wore a Phrygian cap, – a friend of Robespierre, who demanded that the latter should be "guillotined after Louis XVI." to restore the equilibrium; Massieu, a colleague and counterpart of the kindly Lamourette, the bishop, destined to leave his name to a kiss; Lehardy du Morbihan, stigmatizing the priests of Brittany; Barère, the man of majorities, who presided when Louis XVI. appeared at the bar, and who bore the same relation to Paméla as Louvet to Lodoïska; the orator Daunou, who said, "Let us gain time;" Dubois-Crancé, who listened to Marat's whispered confidences; the Marquis de Châteauneuf; Laclos; Herault de Séchelle, who fell back before Henriot, crying, "Gunners, to your pieces!" Julien, who compared the Mountain to Thermopylæ; Gamon, who demanded that a public tribune should be reserved exclusively for women; Laloy, who awarded the honors of the session to Bishop Gobel, who came to the Convention to exchange his mitre for the red cap; Lecomte, who cried, "So we pay homage to the priest who unfrocks himself;" Féraud, whose head was saluted by Boissy-d'Anglas, leaving to history the solution of the query, "Did Boissy-d'Anglas salute the victim in the person of the head, or the assassins in the form of the pike?" the two brothers Duprat, one a member of the Mountain, the other a Girondist, who hated each other, as did the two brothers Chénier.
Many a word has been uttered in this tribune in moments of excitement which has sometimes unconsciously to the speaker aroused the fatal spirit of revolution, and so influenced the existing circumstances that a sense of discontent and passion suddenly sprang to life. As if displeased with what they heard, events seemed to take offence at the words of men, and catastrophes were precipitated by human speech. The reverberation of a voice in the mountain is sufficient to start an avalanche. The utterance of one superfluous word may be followed by a landslide, which might not have happened had no word been spoken. One might almost fancy that events develop a certain irascibility.
Thus a mistaken word falling by chance from the lips of an orator cost Mme. Élisabeth her head.
Intemperance of language was the rule at the Convention. In the discussions threats flew back and forth, crossing one another, like sparks from a conflagration.
Pétion. "Come to the point, Robespierre."
Robespierre. "You are the point, Pétion. I shall come; you need have no fear."
A Voice. "Death to Marat!"
Marat. "When Marat dies, the city of Paris will be no more; and when Paris is gone, there is an end to the Republic."
Billaud-Varennes rose to say, "We wish to – "
Barère interrupted him: "You speak in the plural, like a king."
And another day: —
Philippeaux. "One of the members drew his sword upon me."
Audouin. "President, call the assassin to order."
The President. "Wait."
Panis. "President, I call you to order," – a sally followed by an outburst of rude laughter.
Lecointre. "The Curé of Chant-de-Bout complains that his Bishop Fauchet forbids him to marry."
A Voice. "I see no reason why Fauchet, who has mistresses, should try to prevent other men from having wives."
Another Voice. "Priest, take to thyself a wife."
The tribunes mingled in the conversation, and said "Thou" to the members.
One day the representative Ruamps mounted to the tribune, and, one of his hips being much larger than the other, a spectator called out to him: "Turn that one towards the Right, since you have a cheek à la David!" Such were the liberties that the people took with the Convention. Once, however, during the uproar of the 11th of April, 1793, the president caused a disorderly person in the tribunes to be arrested.
One day, during a session at which the venerable Buonarotti was present, Robespierre had the floor, and spoke for two hours, never removing his eyes from Danton, – sometimes looking straight at him, which was unpleasant enough, but when he looked at him sideways, it was even more disagreeable. His thunders of eloquence were not without effect, ending by an indignant outburst full of ominous words: "We know the intriguers, and those who strive to corrupt, as well as those who are corrupted; we know the traitors also. They are present in this Assembly. They hear our voice, our eyes are upon them, and our gaze pursues them. Let them look above their heads, and they will discover the sword of the law; let them look into their conscience, and there behold their own infamy. Let them beware!" When Robespierre had finished, Danton, with his half-closed eyes turned upwards and one arm hanging over the back of his chair, threw himself back and began to hum, —
"Cadet Roussel fait des discours Qui ne sont pas longs quand ils sont courts."
Imprecations fell thick on every side, – "Conspirator!" "Assassin!" "Scoundrel!" "Seditious!"
"Moderate!" They denounced one another in the presence of the bust of Brutus standing there. Exclamations, insults, challenges! Angry glances interchanged, much shaking of fists, flashing of pistols and half-drawn daggers. An awful outblazing from the tribune. Some talked as if they were pushed up against the guillotine. Heads waved to and fro, frightened yet terrible. The multitude was like a volume of smoke blown all ways at once, – men of the Mountain, Girondists, Feuillantists, Moderates, Terrorists, Jacobins, Cordeliers, and the eighteen regicide priests.
All these men! – a mass of smoke driven about in every direction.
