At the end of September 1793 the Convention was faced with an opposition. Briez, a representative of the Assembly on mission in the North, presented a report on the state of the army in the region, criticizing the Committee of Public Safety for not having taken the necessary measures. Seizing the occasion of this weakness, the opposition appointed Briez to the Committee, which it in its turn refused. Robespierre here justifies the measures taken, following which the Committee renewed its confidence in him.
[…]
For some time past the Committee of Public Safety has endured the war being waged on it by some members who are more envious and prejudiced than they are just. While it is busy day and night with the great interests of the homeland, people come here bringing you written denunciations, shrewdly laid out. Could it be then that the citizens you have dedicated to the most arduous tasks have lost the title of imperturbable defenders of liberty, because they accepted this burden? Are those who attack them more patriotic, because they have not received this mark of confidence? Do you maintain that those who have defended liberty and the people’s rights here at the risk of their lives, amid daggers, ought to be treated like vile protectors of the aristocracy? We can stand the calumny and intrigues. But the Convention is connected to the Committee of Public Safety; your glory is bound up with the success of those you have clothed in the nation’s confidence.
We are accused of doing nothing; but has our position really been considered? Eleven armies to run, the weight of all Europe to bear; everywhere traitors to expose, emissaries bribed with the gold of foreign powers to foil, disloyal administrators to supervise, to prosecute; everywhere obstacles and hindrances blocking the execution of wise measures to be smoothed out; all the tyrants to fight, the conspirators to intimidate, almost all of them from a caste once so powerful through its wealth, and still through its intrigues: such are our functions. Do you believe that without unity of action, without secrecy in its operations, without the certainty of finding support in the Convention, the government could triumph over so many obstacles and enemies? No; only the most extreme ignorance, the deepest perversity, could claim that in such circumstances a man would not be an enemy of the homeland if he made a cruel game of degrading those at the helm of affairs, of hampering their operations and slandering their conduct. Your failure to find the necessary strength of opinion would not go unpunished. I need no evidence other than the discussions that have just taken place.
The Committee of Public Safety sees betrayals in the middle of a victory. It dismisses a general, still filled with the confidence and swathed in the glitter of an apparent triumph; and its very courage is called a crime! It expels traitors, and looks over the officers who have shown most public spirit; it chooses them after consulting those people’s representatives who had specific knowledge of the character of each. This operation required secrecy to be fully successful; the safety of the homeland demanded it. All the necessary measures had been taken to maintain this secrecy, even from the other armies. Well! As we waited impatiently to know the result of these measures, we were denounced to the National Convention; our work is criticized in ignorance of its motives; people want us to divulge the Republic’s secrets, to give the traitors time to escape; they seek to show the new choices in an unfavourable light, undoubtedly to prevent confidence from being restored.
There is constant ranting against nobles; people say that they should be dismissed; and by a strange contradiction, when we execute that great revolutionary measure, and even do it as tactfully as possible, we are denounced. We have just sacked two nobles, to wit, one of the men of that proscribed caste, most suspect for their ancient relations with the court, and another known for his links and frequent contacts with foreign nobles, both markedly aristocratic.2 Well! We are accused of disorganizing everything. We were told people only wanted to see real sans-culottes at the head of our armies. We chose those whose new exploits in the business at Bergues and Dunkirk had marked them for national recognition, who won despite Houchard, and who had displayed the greatest talent, for the Hondschoote attack should have been the end of the French army;3 the astonishing success that honoured that army, which forced the siege of Dunkirk to be lifted, is due mainly to Jourdan;4 he is the officer who, when the army unexpectedly found eighteen thousand men well dug in, and was surprised by a frightening artillery barrage, this Jourdan was the one who charged at the head of a battalion into the enemy camp, who passed his courage to the rest of the army, and the capture of Hondschoote was the effect of his skilful deployments and the ardour he managed to inspire.
The chief of staff being rightly regarded with suspicion, we replaced him with a man whose talents and patriotism were attested by all the commissioners; a man known for exploits that singled him out at the very time when the most odious treasons were sacrificing that army. He is called Ernould;5 he distinguished himself in the recent business, and even sustained wounds. And they denounce us!
We made similar changes in the armies of Moselle and the Rhine; all the choices were men of the same character as those I have just described to you. And still they accuse us!
If there are any moral assumptions that could guide the government and serve as rules for legislators, we certainly followed them in these operations.
So what is the cause of this denunciation?
Ah! That day was worth more to Pitt,6 I daresay, than three military victories. What success can he claim, really, unless he can annihilate the national government the Convention has established, divide us, make us tear ourselves apart with our own hands? And if we are seen throughout Europe as imbeciles or traitors, do you imagine the Convention that chose us will be any more respected, or indeed that people will be disposed to respect any authorities you establish later?
It is important therefore that the government take on some substance, and that you replace a Committee that has been denounced with success in your assembly. [Unanimous cries of No! No!]
Individuals are not at issue here; we are concerned with the homeland and principles. I tell you plainly: it is impossible, in this state of affairs, for the Committee to save the state; and if anyone disagrees, I will remind you just how treacherous and extensive is the scheme for bringing us down and dissolving us; how the foreigners and internal enemies have agents paid to execute it; I will remind you that faction is not dead; that it is conspiring from the depths of its dungeons; that the serpents of the Marais have not yet all been crushed.7 [Applause]
The men who rant perpetually, here and elsewhere, against men who are at the head of government, have themselves given proof of baseness or lack of public spirit. Why then do people want to degrade us? Which of our actions is it that has brought this ignominy on us?
I know we cannot flatter ourselves that we have attained perfection; but holding up a Republic surrounded by enemies, fortifying reason in favour of liberty, destroying prejudice and nullifying individual efforts against the public interest, demand moral and physical strengths that nature has perhaps denied to those who denounce us and those we are fighting.
The Committee has a right to the hatred of kings and rogues; if you do not believe in its zeal, in the services it has rendered to the state, then break that instrument; but first consider what circumstances you are in. Those who denounce us are themselves denounced to the Committee; from being accusers today, they are going to become accused. [Applause] But what sort of men are they who are contesting the Committee’s conduct, and who in this session have exaggerated your reversals, to aggravate their denunciations?
The first declared himself a supporter of Custine8 and Lamarlière;9 he was the persecutor of patriots in a major fortress, and again recently dared to advance the idea of abandoning a territory joined to the Republic, whose inhabitants, betrayed by him, are today defending themselves energetically against fanatics and the English.
The second has not yet dispelled the shame of having returned from a place he had been entrusted with defending, after giving it up to the Austrians. If such men succeed in proving that the Committee is not composed of good citizens, there is no doubt that liberty is lost; for there is no doubt either that it would not be to them that enlightened opinion would transfer its confidence, and hand over the reins of government! Let no one think that my intention here is to answer one accusation with another. I am committed to never dividing the patriots; but I do not count as patriots those who only wear the mask of patriotism, and I will expose the conduct of two or three traitors who are the artisans of discord and dissension here. [Applause]
So I think the homeland is lost if the government does not enjoy unlimited confidence, and if it is not composed of men who merit that confidence. I demand that the Committee of Public Safety be replaced. [Emphatic cries of No! No!]
[…] Moving on to the order of the day means opening the door to all the problems I have mentioned. The Convention cannot stay silent on that which tends to paralyse government. The explanations that have been given are inadequate: the result is that those members of the Committee of Public Safety who spoke have seemed to be defending their cause, and you have not given your verdict; that gives the advantage to the men who have slandered it, not always here, but secretly, all the more perfidiously in that they pretend to applaud in front of you when it gives its reports; for I tell you, the most distressing thing I have experienced during this discussion was the sight of Barère being applauded by the very people who have slandered all the Committee’s members constantly and indiscriminately, the very people who would perhaps like to see us with a knife between our ribs. [Applause]
A member said that everyone ought to be able to utter his opinion on the operations of the Committee of Public Safety: I do not deny it. The functions of the Committee of Public Safety are arduous, and because of that it could never save the homeland without the Convention. Saving the homeland calls for great character, great virtues; it calls for men with the courage to propose strong measures, and who even dare to attack the conceit of individuals. [Applause] No doubt everyone is free to say what he thinks of the Committee in his own way; but that liberty should not go so far that a deputy who is recalled from the depths of the departments, because he is thought to have stopped serving the people well, can put himself forward and accuse the Committee. [Applause]
Citizens, I promised you the whole truth, I am going to tell it: In this discussion, the Convention has not shown all the energy it should have; you have heard a report on Valenciennes, whose apparent purpose was to inform you of all the circumstances around the surrender of that place, but whose real object was to indict the Committee of Public Safety. As a prize for his vague accusations, the author of that report is added to the Committee he denounces. Well! I tell you, someone who was at Valenciennes when the enemy entered it is not fit to be a member of the Committee of Public Safety. [Loud applause] This member will never answer the question: Did you die? [Repeated applause] If I had been at Valenciennes in those circumstances, I would never have been in a position to give you a report on the events of the siege; I would have wanted to share the fate of those brave defenders who preferred honourable death to shameful capitulation. [Applause] And since we need to be republican, since we need to have energy, I declare to you that I would never serve on a committee that included such a man.
That may appear harsh; but what seems harsher still to a patriot is that over the past two years, a hundred thousand men have been slaughtered through treason and through weakness: it is weakness towards traitors that is ruining us. People feel sorry for the most criminal individuals, for those who expose the homeland to enemy steel; I myself only know how to feel sorry for unfortunate virtue; I only know how to feel sorry for oppressed innocence; I only know how to feel sorry for the lot of a generous people being butchered with such villainy. [Applause]
I will add a word on the subject of our accusers; freedom of opinion should not serve as a pretext for a committee, which serves the homeland well, being slandered with impunity by those who were in a position to crush one of the heads of the federalist hydra, but failed to do it through excessive weakness; or by those who at this tribune dared coolly to propose that we hand Mont Blanc over to the Piedmontese. [Applause]
As for Billaud-Varenne’s proposal, I attach no importance to it, and I think it impolitic. If the 50 million made available to the Committee could command the Convention’s attention for a single moment, it would be unworthy to work for the salvation of the homeland. I maintain that one does not have to believe in probity to be suspicious of the Committee of Public Safety. [Applause] That the tyrants who detest us, that their paid slanderers, the journalists who serve them so well, are spreading these lies to bring us down, I can understand; but it is not for us to foresee such accusations and answer them; it is enough for me to feel in my heart the strength to defend to the death the people’s cause, which is great and sublime; it is enough for me to despise all tyrants and all the scoundrels who support them. [Applause]
To sum up, I would say that all the explanations that have been given are inadequate. We can despise calumny; but agents of the tyrants surrounding us are watching us and gathering anything that can bring down the people’s defenders; it is because of them, to ward off their impostures, that the National Convention should proclaim that it still has full confidence in the Committee of Public Safety. [Applause]