Whilst the probability of conflict with other nations seemed to be receding, Brissot, the leader of the ‘Brissotins’ (Girondins), intervened in the Legislative Assembly in favour of war. On 29 December, he maintained that ‘the war is necessary to France for her honour […] The war is a national benefit’. On 30 December, he spoke of a ‘crusade of universal liberty’. Here, Robespierre replies to Brissot in a speech to the Jacobin Club which began on 2 January 1792 and was concluded at a session on 11 January.
[…] Shall we make war or shall we make peace? Shall we attack our enemies, or shall we wait for them at home? I believe that this wording does not express the question in all respects or to its full extent. What position should the nation and its representatives adopt in the circumstances we are in now, towards our internal and external enemies? That is the real point of view from which it should be seen, if we want to assimilate it in its entirety and discuss it with all the exactitude it deserves. What matters, above all else, and whatever the fruit of our efforts may be, is to enlighten the nation on its true interests and those of its enemies; not to deprive liberty of its last resource, by misleading the public mind in the present critical circumstances. I will attempt to meet this objective by responding mainly to the opinion of M. Brissot.
If a few broad strokes, if the brilliant and prophetic painting of a war ending in fraternal embraces from all the peoples of Europe are sufficient arguments to decide such a serious question, I will concur that M. Brissot has resolved it perfectly; but his speech seemed to me to display a vice that is negligible in an academic discourse, but that is of some importance in the greatest of all political discussions; this is that he has ceaselessly avoided the fundamental point of the question, to erect his entire system off to the side on an absolutely ruinous foundation.
Of course I like the idea of a war undertaken to extend the reign of liberty just as much as M. Brissot, and I too could surrender to the pleasure of recounting all its marvels in advance. Were I the master of France’s destinies, could I but direct its forces and its resources at will, I would long ago have sent an army to Brabant, I would have helped the Liégeois and smashed the fetters of the Batavians;2 these expeditions are much to my taste. But I would absolutely not, to tell the truth, have declared war on rebellious subjects. I would even have deprived them of the will to assemble;3 I would not have allowed enemies who are more formidable and closer to us to protect them and give rise to more serious dangers within.
But given the circumstances in which I find my country, I cast an anxious glance about me, and I wonder whether the war to be waged will be the one that enthusiasm promises us; I ask myself who is proposing it, how, in what circumstances, and why?
That – our wholly extraordinary situation – is where the whole question resides. You have unceasingly looked away from it; but I have proved what was clear to everyone, that the proposal for the present war was the outcome of a plan formed long ago by internal enemies of our liberty; I have shown you its aim; I have pointed out its means of execution; others have proved to you that it was just an obvious trap: one orator, a member of the Constituent Assembly, has spoken truths on this matter that are in fact very important;4 there is no one who would not have spotted this trap, considering that it was after constantly protecting the rebel emigrations and emigrants that people were proposing to declare war on their protectors, at the same time as continuing to defend the internal enemies confederated with them. You have yourselves acknowledged that the war was pleasing to the émigrés, that it pleased the ministry, the Court intriguers, that numerous faction whose leaders, only too well known, have directed every step taken by the executive power; all the trumpets of the aristocracy and the government are sounding the signal for it in unison; finally, anyone who could believe that the conduct of the Court, since the beginning of this revolution, has not been steadfastly opposed to the principles of equality and respect for the people’s rights, would be regarded as a madman, if he meant it in good faith; anyone who could say that the Court would suggest a measure as decisive as war, without relating it to its own plans, would not be giving a much better impression of his judgement. Now, can you say it makes no difference to the good of the state whether the enterprise of war is led by the love of liberty or the spirit of despotism, by loyalty or perfidy? Yet what did you reply to all these decisive facts? What did you say to dissipate such well-founded suspicions? Your response to the fundamental principle of this whole discussion calls your entire system in question.
‘Distrust,’ you said in your first speech, ‘distrust is a frightful state: it prevents the two powers from acting in concert; it prevents the people from believing in demonstrations by the executive power, cools its attachment, reduces its submissiveness.’5
Distrust is a frightful state! Is that the language of a free man who believes that no price is too high for liberty? It prevents the two powers from working in concert! Is it still you who are speaking here? What! It is the people’s distrust that prevents the executive power from functioning; and it is not its own will? What! It is the people who ought to believe blindly in the demonstrations of the executive power; and it is not the executive power that ought to merit the people’s trust, not through demonstrations, but through deeds? Distrust cools its attachment! So to whom does the people owe attachment? To a man? To the work of its hands, or to the homeland, to liberty? It reduces its submissiveness! To the law, no doubt. Has that been lacking until now? Who has the more reasons for self-reproach in this respect, the people or its oppressors? That text caused me some surprise, and I confess that it did not diminish when I heard the commentary with which you developed it in your last speech.
You informed us that distrust needed to be banned because there had been a change in the ministry.6 What! You, who possess philosophy and experience, you, whom I have heard twenty times saying, on the politics and the immortal spirit of courts, all that any man having the faculty of thought thinks on the subject; it is you who claim that the ministry ought to change with a minister! I am in a position to explain myself freely on the subject of ministers: firstly because I do not fear being suspected of speculating on their succession, either for myself or for my friends; secondly because I have no desire to see them replaced by others, being convinced that those who aspire to their jobs would be worth no more than they are. It is not ministers that I am attacking; it is their principles and their actions. Let them change, if they can, and I will fight their detractors. I have the right, therefore, to examine the foundations of the endorsement you are giving them. You blame Minister Montmorin who ceded his place, to transfer public confidence to Minister Lessart who has taken over his role! God forbid that I should waste precious moments in drawing a parallel between those two illustrious defenders of the people’s rights! You dispatched two certificates of patriotism to two other ministers, for the reason that they had been drawn from the the class of plebeians,7 but I say quite frankly that the most reasonable assumption, in my opinion, is that in our present circumstances plebeians would never have been called to the ministry if they had not been thought worthy of being nobles. I am astonished that a representative of the people should place confidence in a minister whom the people of the capital feared to see given a municipal post; I am astonished to see you recommending to the public goodwill the Minister of Justice,8 who paralyzed the provisional court of Orleans,9 by refraining from sending it the important cases; the minister who grossly slandered the country’s patriotic societies in front of the National Assembly, to bring about their destruction; the minister who, more recently, asked the present Assembly to suspend the establishment of the new criminal courts, on the pretext that the nation was not yet ripe for juries, on the pretext (who would believe it!) that winter is too rough a season to establish this institution, declared an essential part of our constitution by the constitutional act, demanded by the eternal principles of justice, and by the unbearable tyranny of the barbaric system that still weighs down on patriotism and on humanity; that minister, the oppressor of the Avignonnais people, surrounded by all the intriguers you yourself have denounced in your writings, and the declared enemy of all patriots steadfastly attached to the public cause. You have also taken under your protection the present Minister of War. Ah! For pity’s sake, spare us the effort of discussing the conduct, the connections and the staff of so many individuals, when the only questions should concern principles and the homeland. Not content with eulogizing these ministers, you then want to isolate them from the views and society of men who are notorious for being their advisers and collaborators.
No one doubts today that there is a powerful and dangerous alliance against equality and against the principles of our liberty; it is known that the coalition which laid sacrilegious hands on the foundations of the constitution is actively pursuing the means to complete its work; that it is dominant at court, that it controls ministers; you have admitted that it had a plan to extend ministerial power still further, and to aristocratize national representation; you have begged us to believe that the ministers and the court had nothing in common with it; you have contradicted, in this connection, the vigorous assertions of several speakers and general opinion; you thought it enough to allege that a few plotters could not harm liberty in the slightest. Are you unaware that it is plotters who do real harm to peoples? Are you unaware that a few plotters, backed by the force and treasure of the government, are not to be ignored? That you yourself once made a law to prosecute with energy some of those we are talking about here? Are you unaware that since the king’s departure, whose mystery is starting to become clearer, they have had the power to make the revolution retreat, and to commit with impunity the most reprehensible attacks on liberty? Where has it come from all of a sudden, all this indulgence, or this feeling of security?
Do not be alarmed, the same speaker has told us, if this faction wants war; do not be alarmed if the court and the ministers want war too; or if the papers, bribed by the ministry, are preaching war: ministers, to tell the truth, will always side with moderates against patriots; but they will side with moderates and patriots against the émigrés. What a reassuring, what a luminous theory! Ministers, you admit, are the enemies of patriots; the moderates, for whom they have declared themselves, want to make our constitution aristocratic; and you want us to adopt their plans? Ministers, as you yourself say, are bribing some newspapers whose job is to extinguish the public mind, to efface the principles of liberty, to sing the praises of its most dangerous enemies, to slander all good citizens; and you want me to trust the views and principles of these ministers?
You believe that agents of the executive power are more disposed to adopt the maxims of equality, and defend the people’s rights in all their purity, than to compromise with members of the dynasty, with friends of the Court, at the expense of the people and the patriots whom they openly call agitators? But aristocrats of every stripe are demanding war; all the aristocracy’s toadies are repeating the war cry: so probably, no one should doubt their intentions. For myself, I admire your good luck and do not envy it. Your destiny was to defend liberty without distrust, without displeasing its enemies, without finding yourself in opposition to the court, or the ministers, or the moderates. How easy and smiling the paths of patriotism have become for you!
Speaking for myself, I have found that the further one advanced in this career, the more obstacles and enemies one encountered, the more often one was deserted by people with whom one had started out; and I must confess that if I saw myself like that, surrounded by courtiers, by aristocrats, by moderates, then I should be tempted at the very least to think I was in fairly bad company.
If I am not mistaken, the weakness of the reasons with which you have tried to reassure us on the intentions of those who are pressing for war, is very striking evidence that can prove them conclusively. Far from approaching the real state of the question, you have always avoided it. Everything that you have said is therefore beside the point. Your opinion is based on nothing but vague and foreign hypotheses.
[…] It is in the nature of things that the march of reason should be slow and gradual. The most depraved government finds powerful support in the prejudices, the habits, the education of peoples. Despotism even corrupts men’s minds to the point of making them adore it, to the point of making liberty appear suspect and frightening at first sight. The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution. No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies. […]
Before losing yourselves in the politics and the states of the princes of Europe, start by turning your gaze to your internal position; restore order at home before carrying liberty abroad. But you claim that this task should not even concern you, as if the ordinary rules of common sense did not apply to great politicians. Restoring order in our finances, halting the depredations that afflict them, arming the people and the national guards, doing all the things this government has tried to prevent so far, so that we may fear neither the attacks of our enemies, nor ministerial intrigues; reviving through beneficent laws, through a character sustained by energy, dignity and wisdom, the public mind and the horror of tyranny, the only things that can make us invincible against all our enemies: all of those are just ridiculous ideas; war, war, as soon as the court asks for it; that tendency dispenses with all other concerns, you are even with the people the moment you give it war; war on fugitives from the national court, or on German princes; trust, idolatry, for the enemies within. But what am I saying? Do we have them, any enemies within? No, you don’t know of any, you only know about Koblenz.10 Did you not tell us that the seat of evil is in Koblenz? So it is not in Paris? So there is no connection between Koblenz and another place that is not far from here? What! You dare to say that what has set the revolution back is the fear inspired across the nation by fugitive aristocrats it has always despised; and yet you expect of this nation prodigies of every kind! Learn then that in the judgement of all enlightened Frenchmen, the real Koblenz is in France; that the one in the bishopric of Trier is but one of the supports of a widespread conspiracy being hatched against liberty, and whose home, whose centre, whose leaders are among us. If you do not know that, you are a stranger to all that is happening in this country. And if you do know it, why do you deny it? Why distract public attention from our most formidable enemies, to fix it on other objects, to lead us into the trap where they are waiting for us?
Some others, who are vividly aware of the depth of our ills, and know their true cause, are evidently mistaken on the remedy. In a sort of despair, they want to hurl themselves into a foreign war, as if they hoped that the mere change brought about by war would bring us to life, or that order and liberty would eventually emerge from the general confusion. They are committing the most disastrous of errors, for they do not discern the circumstances, and confuse ideas that are absolutely distinct. There are in revolutions movements contrary to liberty and movements that favour it, as in illnesses there are salutary crises and mortal ones.
The favourable movements are those aimed directly against tyrants, like the Americans’ insurrection, or that of 14 July. But war on the outside, provoked, directed by the government in the circumstances we are in now, is a movement in the wrong direction, a crisis that could lead to the death of the body politic. Such a war can only send public opinion off on a false scent, divert the nation’s well-founded anxieties, and forestall the favourable crisis that attacks by enemies of liberty might have brought on. It was from that angle that I first argued against the drawbacks of this war. During a foreign war the people, as I said, distracted by military events from political deliberations affecting the essential foundations of its liberty, is less inclined to take seriously the underhand manoeuvres of plotters who are undermining it and the executive government which is knocking it about, and pay less attention to the weakness or corruption of representatives who are failing to defend it. This policy has been known since the beginning of time, and whatever M. Brissot may have said, the example I cited of the Roman aristocrats is strikingly relevant. When the people demanded its rights against the usurpations of the Senate and patricians, the Senate would declare war, and the people, forgetting its rights and resentments, would concentrate on nothing but the war, leaving the Senate its authority and preparing new triumphs for the patricians. War is good for military officers, for the ambitious, for the gamblers who speculate on these sorts of event; it is good for ministers, whose operations it covers in an impenetrable, almost sacrosanct veil; it is good for the court, it is good for the executive power whose authority, whose popularity and ascendancy it augments; it is good for the coalition of nobles, plotters, moderates who govern France. This faction can place its heroes and members at the head of the army; the court can entrust the forces of the state to men who, when the time comes, can serve its interests with greater success, because a sort of reputation for patriotism will have been worked up for them; they will win over the hearts and the trust of the soldiers only to attach them more strongly to the cause of royalism and moderation; that is the only seduction I fear where the soldiers are concerned, for I need no reassurance as to the likelihood of their deserting the public cause openly and voluntarily. The sort of man who would look with horror on the betrayal of the homeland can still be led by adroit officers to run its best citizens through with steel; the perfidious words republican and agitator, invented by the sect of hypocritical enemies of the constitution, can turn deceived ignorance against the people’s cause. Now, the destruction of the patriotic party is the great objective of all their plots. It is not a counter-revolution that I fear, it is the advance of false principles, of idolatry, and the loss of public spirit. Now do you believe it would be a trivial advantage for the court and the party of which I speak to confine the soldiers, put them in camps, divide them into army corps, isolate them from the citizens, so as to substitute imperceptibly, under the imposing names of military discipline and honour, that spirit of blind and absolute obedience, the old military spirit, for the love of liberty, the popular sentiments that had been maintained by their communication with the people? Although the spirit in the army may still be good in general, should you really conceal from yourselves the fact that intrigue and suggestion have had some success in several corps, and that it is no longer entirely what it was in the first days of the revolution? Do you not fear the system steadily followed for so long, for bringing the army round to a pure love of kings, and for purging it of the patriotic spirit, which seems always to have been regarded as a plague that would ravage it? Can you behold without some small anxiety the minister’s travels and the nomination of some general famous for disasters involving the more patriotic regiments?11 Do you count for nothing the arbitrary power of life and death with which the law will invest our military patricians, from the moment the nation settles on war? Do you count for nothing the police authority that will be given to the military chiefs of all our frontier towns? Have all these facts been answered with a dissertation on the Roman dictatorship, and the parallel between Caesar and our generals? It has been said that the war would intimidate the aristocrats within, and would cut off the source of their operations; not at all; they know the intentions of their secret friends too well to fear the outcome; they will be the more active in pursuing the veiled war that they can wage on us with impunity, by sowing division, fanaticism, and by corrupting opinion. It is then that the moderate party, clothed in the liveries of patriotism, whose leaders are the architects of this scheme, will deploy its sinister influence to the full; it is then that in the name of public security they will impose silence on anyone who might dare to voice some slight suspicions on the conduct or intentions of the agents of the executive power on which the moderate party is based, of the generals who will have become, like it, the hope and the idol of the nation. If one of these generals should happen to achieve some sort of apparent success, which will not, I believe, prove very damaging to the emigrants, or deadly to their protectors, what ascendancy will he not provide for his party? What services will he not be able to render to the court? It is then that a more serious war will be waged on the true friends of liberty, and that the perfidious system of egoism and intrigue will triumph. Once the public mind has been corrupted, then how far will the executive power and the factions serving it not be able to extend their usurpations? There will be no need to compromise the success of these plans with imprudent haste; perhaps there will be no hurry to propose the plan of action that has already been discussed: it could be that one or another could be adopted; what can (the party) not expect from time, from listlessness, ignorance, internal divisions, manoeuvres by the extensive cohort of its accomplices in the legislative body, in a word from all the components it has been preparing for so long?
Our generals, you say, will not betray us; and if we were betrayed, so much the better! I will not tell you that I find this taste for betrayal singular; for I am in perfect agreement with you on that. Yes, our enemies are too adept to betray us openly, as you expect; the kind of betrayal we have to fear, which I have just spelt out to you, that kind does nothing to alert public vigilance, it prolongs the slumber of the people until the moment the shackles go on; that kind leaves no expedient untried; all those who lull the people to sleep favour its success; and take good note that to achieve it, there will not even be any need to make war seriously; it is enough to put us on a war footing, it is enough to give us the idea of a foreign war; even if no other advantage was gained from it but the millions being counted in advance, it will not have been wholly wasted effort. Those twenty millions, especially at the present moment, have at least as much value as patriotic addresses in which confidence and war are preached to the people.
I am discouraging the nation, you say. No; I am enlightening it; to enlighten free men is to awaken their courage, to prevent that courage itself from becoming a stumbling-block to their liberty; and if I should turn out to have done nothing more than expose so many traps, than refute so many false ideas and defective principles, than stop outbursts of dangerous enthusiasm, then I will have advanced the public mind and served the homeland. […]