While the Republican armies were succeeding in blocking the invasion forces of the coalition of foreign powers, Robespierre was charged by the Committee of Public Safety to present a report on the situation of France in which he laid out what was at stake in the revolutionary process.
Citizen people’s representatives,
Today we are drawing the attention of the National Convention to the greatest interests of the homeland. We are here to place before you the situation of the Republic in relation to the various powers of the world, and in particular those peoples attached to our cause by nature and reason; but that intrigue and perfidy seek to range with our enemies.
As we emerge from the chaos into which the treasons of a criminal Court and the reign of the factions had plunged the government, the French people’s legislators should determine the principles of their policy towards the friends and enemies of the Republic; they should deploy before the eyes of the universe the real character of the nation they have the glory of representing. It is time to teach the imbeciles who are unaware of it, and the perverts who pretend to doubt it, that the French Republic exists; that there is nothing precarious in the world but the triumph of crime and the endurance of despotism; it is time for our allies to show as much faith in our wisdom and luck as the tyrants bearing arms against us fear our courage and power.
The French Revolution gave the world a shock. The fervour for liberty of a great people was bound to displease the kings who surrounded it. But it was a long way from that unspoken attitude to the perilous resolution to declare war on the French people, and even further to the monstrous league of so many powers essentially divided in their interests.
To unite them, what was needed was the policy of two courts whose influence dominated all the others; to embolden them, they needed alliance with the actual king of the French, and the treasons of all the factions that flattered and threatened him by turns, in order to reign in his name, or to raise another tyrant on the wreckage of his power.
A time that was to give birth to the greatest prodigies of reason was also to be tainted by the ultimate excesses of human corruption. The crimes of tyranny accelerated the advance of liberty, and the advance of liberty multiplied the crimes of tyranny by exacerbating its fear and rage. Between the people and its enemies there was a continuous reaction, whose increasing violence achieved in a few years the work of several centuries. […]
Pitt was grossly mistaken about our Revolution, like Louis XVI and the French aristocrats, misled by their contempt for the people; a contempt based solely on awareness of their own baseness. Too immoral to believe in the republican virtues, too lacking in philosophy to take a step towards the future, George’s minister was behind his century; the century was rushing forward to liberty and Pitt wanted to turn it back towards barbarism and towards despotism. So the general course of events has so far disappointed his ambitious dreams; the various instruments of which he made use have been broken one after another by the people’s strength; he has watched them disappear, Necker, d’Orléans, La Fayette,2 Lameth, Dumouriez, Custine, Brissot and all the pygmies of the Gironde. So far the French people has extracted itself from the threads of his intrigues, like Hercules from a spider’s web. […]
After 1791, the English faction and all the enemies of liberty had seen that a republican party existed in France that would not compromise with tyranny, and that that party was the people. As partial killings, such as those of the Champ-de-Mars3 or Nancy,4 seemed insufficient to destroy it, they resolved to make war on it: hence the monstrous alliance of Austria and Prussia, and then the league of all the powers armed against us. It would be absurd to attribute this phenomenon mainly to the influence of the émigrés, who for years, and rather to France’s advantage, wearied all the courts with their impotent clamour; it was the work of the foreigners’ policy, supported by the power of the agitators then governing France.
To involve the kings in this rash enterprise, it was not enough to have tried to persuade them that, apart from a few republicans, the whole nation secretly hated the new régime and was awaiting them as liberators; it was not enough to have guaranteed the treason of all the chiefs of our government and our armies: to justify this odious enterprise to their exhausted subjects, they even had to be spared the embarrassment of declaring war on us. When they were ready, the dominant faction declared it on them. You will remember with what profound cunning it contrived to involve the natural courage of the French and the civic enthusiasm of the popular societies in the furtherance of its perfidious plans.5 You know with what Machiavellian impudence those who left our national guards without weapons, our fortresses without munitions and our armies in the hands of traitors, were urging us to go and plant the tricolour on the far edges of the world. Those treacherous ranters insulted tyrants, only to serve them; with a single stroke of the pen, they overturned all the thrones and added Europe to the French empire: a sure way to hasten the success of our enemies’ plots at the moment they were urging all governments to declare against us.
The sincere partisans of the Republic thought differently. Before breaking the fetters of the entire universe, they wanted to ensure their country’s liberty; before carrying war to foreign despots, they wanted to make it on the tyrant who was betraying them; convinced moreover that a king was a poor guide to lead a people to the conquest of universal liberty, and that it is for the power of reason, not the force of arms, to propagate the principles of our glorious Revolution. […]6
The time had come when the British government, after creating so many enemies for us, had resolved to join the league openly itself; but the national will and the opposition party frustrated the ministry’s plan. Brissot had war declared on it: it was declared on Holland, it was declared on Spain;7 because we were wholly unprepared to fight these new enemies, and the Spanish fleet was ready to join the English fleet.
With what base hypocrisy did the traitors make much of alleged insults to our envoys, arranged in advance between them and the foreign powers! With what impudence did they invoke the dignity of the nation, with which they were trifling so insolently!
The cowards! They had saved the Prussian despot and his army,8 they had fertilized Belgium with Frenchmen’s purest blood; more recently they were talking about municipalizing Europe, and they drove the unhappy Belgians back into the arms of their tyrants: they had delivered our treasure, our stores, our weapons, our defenders to our enemies: sure of their support, and proud of all those crimes, the vile Dumouriez had even dared to threaten liberty in its sanctuary! … O homeland! What tutelary divinity managed to pull thee from the immense abyss opened to swallow thee in those days of crime and calamity when, in league with thy numberless enemies, thy ingrate children plunged their parricidal hands into thy breast and seemed to be fighting over thy scattered limbs, to deliver them all bloody to the ferocious tyrants sworn against thee; in those frightful days when virtue was proscribed, perfidy crowned, calumny triumphant; when thy ports, fleets, armies, fortresses, administrators, representatives, all had been sold to thine enemies! It was not enough to have armed the tyrants against us: they wanted to condemn us to the hatred of nations, and render Revolution hideous in the eyes of the universe. Our journalists were in the pay of foreign courts, like our ministers and a portion of our legislators. Despotism and treason presented the French people to other peoples as an ephemeral and contemptible faction, the cradle of the republic as a den of crime; august liberty was travestied as a vile prostitute. For the summit of perfidy, the traitors tried to push patriotism itself into unconsidered actions, and themselves prepared the substance of their calumnies: covered in all the crimes, they accused virtue of them and flung it into dungeons, and charged with their own extravagance the friends of liberty who were its avengers or victims. Through the good offices of the coalition of powerful and corrupt men, which placed in perfidious hands all the levers of government, and at the same time all the wealth, all the trumpets of renown and all the channels of opinion, the French Republic no longer had a single defender in Europe, and captive truth could find no way to cross the frontiers of France or the walls of Paris. […]
Nevertheless the French people, alone in the universe, was fighting for the common cause. What became of you, you peoples allied to France? Were you only the allies of the king, and not the nation? Americans, was it the crowned automaton named Louis XVI who helped you to throw off the yoke of your oppressors, or was it our arms and our armies? Was it the wealth of a despicable court that supplied you, or was it the tributes of the French people and the products of our heaven-favoured soil? No, citizens, our allies have not abjured the sentiments they owe us: but if they have not detached themselves from our cause, if they have not ranged themselves with our enemies, it is no fault of the faction that tyrannized us. […]
It will suffice to inform you of the bizarre stratagem that the Austrians tried recently. Just as I had finished this report, the Committee of Public Safety received the following note, handed to the chancery in Basle:
‘It was on the 18th of October that the question of the invasion of Neufchâtel was debated in the Committee of Public Safety. The discussion was very animated: it lasted until two hours after midnight. Only one member of the minority opposed it. The business was only suspended because Saint-Just, who is its rapporteur, left for Alsace: but it is now widely known that the invasion of Neufchâtel has been decided by the committee.’
It is worth pointing out to you that there has never been any mention of Neufchâtel in the Committee of Public Safety. […]
Whatever the result of this command plan may be, it can only be favourable to our cause; and if it happened that some genius inimical to humanity pushed the government of some neutral countries into the party of our common enemies, he would be betraying the people he ruled without serving the tyrants. At least we would be stronger against him for his baseness and our decency; for justice is a large part of power.
But it is important from now on to take in the whole map of Europe in a single view; what we need here is sight of the political world agitating around us and because of us.
From the moment a plan for a league against France was formed, people thought of involving the different powers with a proposal for dividing up this beautiful country. This plan is today proven, not only by the events, but by authentic documents. At the time when the Committee of Public Safety was formed, a plan of attack and dismemberment of France, drafted by the British cabinet, was communicated to the members who then comprised it.9 Little attention was paid to it at the time, because it seemed very unlikely and because distrust of confidences of that sort is quite natural; since that time, though, the facts have verified it every day.
England had not neglected itself in the proposed division: Dunkirk, Toulon, the colonies, not to mention the chance of the crown for the Duke of York, which was not renounced, but those portions that were to form the share of other powers were sacrificed. There was no difficulty in bringing into the league the Stadtholder of Holland10 who, as we know, is not so much the prince of the Batavians as the subject of his wife, and consequently of the Berlin court.
As for the political phenomenon of the king of Prussia’s alliance with the head of the House of Austria, we have already explained it. Just as two brigands who are fighting over the spoils of some traveller they have murdered will forget their differences to rush together at a new quarry, so the Viennese monarch and the one in Berlin suspended their former differences to fall on France and devour the nascent Republic. However, the apparent conjunction of those two powers masks a real division.
Austria could well be the dupe here of the Prussian cabinet and its other allies.
The House of Austria, exhausted by the extravagances of Joseph II and Leopold,11 long since poorly conducted by the standards of Charles V, Philip II and Maria-Theresa’s12 old ministers; Austria, today governed by the whims and the ignorance of a court of children, is expiring in the French Hainault and in Belgium. If through our own imprudence we do not help it ourselves, these last efforts against France can be regarded as the convulsions of its death agony. The empress of Russia13 and the king of Prussia have already divided Poland without it,14 and have presented it, as full compensation, with the conquests it might make in France with their help; in other words Lorraine, Alsace and French Flanders. England is encouraging its folly, to ruin us, while staying out of sight itself. It is trying to conserve its own forces at the expense of its ally, and advancing towards its particular goal while leaving Austria, as far as possible, to carry the whole burden of the war. On another side, the Roussillon, French Navarre and the departments bordering on Spain have been promised to his Catholic majesty.
There is no one who has not been led astray, down to the little Sardinian king with the hope that he might one day become king of the Dauphiné, Provence and the lands neighbouring his former States.
What could be offered to the powers in Italy, which cannot survive the ruin of France? Nothing. For a long time they resisted the league’s solicitations; but they gave way to intrigue, or rather to the orders of the English ministry, which threatened them with fleets from England. The territory of Genoa15 was the scene of a crime of which the history of England alone can give an example. Ships of that nation, together with French ships handed over by the Toulon traitors, entered the port of Genoa; immediately the scoundrels aboard them, English and rebel Frenchmen, seized the Republic’s vessels that were in the port under the protection of the law of nations; and all the Frenchmen found in them were butchered. How cowardly it is, that Genoese senate, for not dying to a man to prevent or avenge this outrage, and for managing to betray its own honour, the Genoese people and the whole of humanity at the same time!
Venice, more powerful and also more political, has maintained a neutrality in keeping with its interests. Florence, of all the states in Italy the one to which the triumph of our enemies would be most fatal, has finally been subjugated by them and dragged against its will to its ruin. So despotism weighs down even on its accomplices, and tyrants armed against the Republic are the enemies of their own allies. In general, the Italian powers are perhaps more deserving of France’s pity than her anger: England recruited them as it recruits its sailors; it press-ganged the peoples of Italy. The most culpable of the princes of that country is the king of Naples, who showed himself worthy of his Bourbon blood by embracing their cause. One day we may quote you on this subject a letter written in his own hand to his cousin the Catholic, which will serve at least to prove to you that terror is in no way foreign to the hearts of the kings allied against us. The pope is not worth the honour of a mention.
England also had the effrontery to threaten Denmark with its squadrons, to force it to comply with the league; but Denmark, ruled by an astute minister,16 repulsed its insolent demands with dignity.
The resolution taken by the King of Sweden, Gustav III, to become generalissimo of the allied kings, can only be attributed to madness. The history of human idiocies offers nothing to compare with the delirium of that modern Agamemnon,17 who exhausted his states and left his crown at the mercy of his enemies, to come to Paris and shore up the king of France.
The regent,18 more wisely, paid closer attention to the interests of his country and its people; he withdrew into the terms of neutrality.
Of all the rogues decorated with the name of king, emperor, minister or politician, people insist, and are not far from believing it, that the most adroit is Catherine of Russia, or rather her ministers; for one should be suspicious of these far-off imperial reputations, prestige created by policy. The truth is that under the old empress, as under all women who hold the sceptre, it is men who govern. For the rest, the policy of Russia is imperiously determined by the very nature of things. That country combines the ferocity of savage hordes with the vices of civilized peoples. The rulers of Russia have great power and great wealth: they have the taste, the ideas, the ambition for the luxury and arts of Europe, and they reign in a climate of iron; they feel the need to be served and flattered by Athenians, and they have Tartars for subjects: these contrasts in their situation have inevitably turned their ambition towards trade, the food of luxury and the arts, and towards conquest of the fertile lands that border them to the West and South. The Petersburg court wants to emigrate from the sad countries it inhabits to European Turkey and Poland, just as our Jesuits and aristocrats emigrated to Russia from the gentle climates of France.
She contributed greatly to the formation of the league of kings who are making war on us, and she alone profits from it. While the powers that rival her own are coming to break themselves on the rock of the French Republic, the empress of Russia is conserving her forces and building up her means; she lets her gaze wander, with secret joy, on one side over the vast territories subject to Ottoman rule, on the other over Poland and Germany: everywhere she imagines easy usurpations or rapid conquests: she believes the moment is near when she can make the law in Europe, at least she will be able to in Prussia and Austria; and in the partitioning of peoples to which she admitted those two henchmen of her august banditries, who can prevent her from taking the lion’s share with impunity?
You have before your eyes Europe’s record and your own, and you can already extract a major conclusion from it: that the universe has an interest in our conservation. Let us suppose France was annihilated or dismembered: the political world would crumble. Remove that powerful and necessary ally that used to guarantee the independence of mediocre states from big despots, and Europe as a whole is enslaved. The small Germanic princes, the reputedly free cities of Germany are swallowed up by the ambitious houses of Austria and Brandenburg;19 Sweden and Denmark sooner or later fall prey to their powerful neighbours; the Turk is pushed back across the Bosphorus and erased from the list of European powers; Venice loses its wealth, its trade and its respect; Tuscany, its existence; Genoa is erased; Italy becomes the mere plaything of the despots surrounding it; Switzerland is reduced to misery, never again to recover the energy given to it by its ancient poverty; the descendants of William Tell would succumb to the efforts of tyrannies humiliated and vanquished by their ancestors. How could they dare even to invoke the virtues of their forefathers and the sacred name of liberty, if the French Republic had been destroyed before their eyes? What would they mean, if they had contributed to its ruin? And you, brave Americans, whose liberty, established by our blood, was also guaranteed by our alliance: what would be your destiny if we no longer existed? You would fall back under the shameful yoke of your former masters: the glory of our common exploits would be sullied; the titles of liberty, the declaration of the rights of humanity would be annihilated in the two worlds. […]
So if the very policy of governments must dread the fall of the French Republic, what would be the attitude of philosophy and humanity? Liberty perishes in France; all nature is veiled in a funeral shroud, and human reason retreats to the abysses of ignorance and barbarity. Europe would fall prey to two or three brigands, who would avenge humanity only by making war on each other, and the fiercest of whom, by crushing its rivals, would take us back to the reign of Huns20 and Tartars.21 After so great an example, and so many wasted prodigies, who would ever again dare declare war on tyranny? Despotism, like a shoreless sea, would spread across the surface of the globe; soon it would cover the heights of the political world where the ark containing the charters of humanity is kept; the earth would become merely the heritage of crime; and the blasphemy uttered by the second Brutus,22 more than justified by the impotence of our generous efforts, would become the cry of all magnanimous hearts: O Virtue, they might say, thou art then but a vain name!
Oh! Which of us does not feel all his faculties enlarged, which of us does not feel raised above humanity itself, on reflecting that we are not fighting just for one people, but for the universe; for the men who are alive today, but also for all those who will exist? Would to heaven that these salutary truths, instead of being shut inside these narrow confines, could sound at once in the ears of all peoples! At that same moment, the torches of war would be extinguished, the advantages of imposture would disappear, the fetters of the universe would be broken, the wellsprings of public calamity dried up, all peoples would become a single people of brothers, and you would have as many friends as there are men on earth. You can at least proclaim them in a way slower to establish truth. That manifesto of reason, that solemn proclamation of your principles, will be well worth the cowardly and stupid diatribes that the insolence of the vilest tyrants dares to publish against you.
Besides, should even the whole of Europe declare against you, you are stronger than Europe. The French Republic is invincible, like reason; it is immortal, like truth. When liberty has made such a conquest as France, no human power can drive it out. Tyrants, lavish your treasure, assemble your satellites, and you will hasten your ruin. Your reverses attest it; your successes even more. One port23 and two or three fortresses bought with your gold; so that is the worthy outcome of the efforts of all those kings, helped over five years by the chiefs of our armies and by our government itself! Learn that a people you could not vanquish with such means is an invincible people. […]
Force can overthrow a throne; only wisdom can found a Republic. Unravel the endless schemes of our enemies; be revolutionary and political; be terrible to the wicked and helpful to the unfortunate; avoid both cruel moderation and the systematic exaggeration of false patriots: be worthy of the people you represent; the people hates all excesses: it does not want to be deceived, or protected, it wants to be defended and honoured.
Carry illumination into the dens of these modern Cacuses24 where they share the spoils of the people while conspiring against its liberty. Suffocate them in their lairs, and punish at last the most odious of all crimes, that of dressing up counter-revolution in the sacred emblems of patriotism, to assassinate liberty with its own weapons.
The period in which you are is the one destined to try republican virtue most sorely. At the end of that campaign, the infamous London ministry can see the league almost ruined by its crazed efforts, the arms of England dishonoured, its fortune shaken, and liberty ensured by the vigorous character you have displayed: within, it can hear the cries of the English themselves, ready to call it to account for its crimes. In its fright, it has set back until January the opening of this parliament whose approach terrifies it. It will use the time to launch the latest attacks it is plotting against you, to make up for the inability to vanquish you. All the indications, all the news, all the documents seized for some time past, refer to this project. Corrupt those people’s representatives who can be corrupted, slander or murder those they cannot corrupt, and in the end achieve the dissolution of national representation, that is the objective of all the manoeuvres we are witnessing, all the patriotically counterrevolutionary means that perfidy is lavishing to whip up a riot in Paris and overthrow the entire Republic.
Representatives of the French people, be aware of your strength and dignity. You can feel a legitimate pride. Congratulate yourselves not only on having annihilated royalty and punished kings, overthrown the culpable idols to whom the world had grovelled; but above all on having astonished it with an act of justice of which it had never seen the like, by running the blade of the law across the criminal heads that rose among you, and on having so far crushed the factions with the weight of the national will!
Whatever the personal fate that awaits you, your triumph is assured. For the founders of liberty, is not death itself a triumph? Everything dies, both the heroes of humanity and the tyrants who oppress it: but under different conditions. […]
One of our most sacred duties was to make you respected here and abroad. Today we have tried to give you a faithful picture of your political situation and to give Europe a high opinion of your principles. This discussion also has the specific object of exposing the plots of your enemies to turn your allies against you, especially the Swiss Cantons and the United States of America. With this in mind, we propose the following decree:
The National Convention, wishing to make clear to the universe the principles that guide it and that should govern relations between all political societies; wishing at the same time to confound the perfidious manoeuvres employed by its enemies to alarm those faithful allies of the French nation, the Swiss Cantons and the United States of America, as to its intentions;
Decrees the following:
Article I – The National Convention declares, in the name of the French people, that the firm resolve of the Republic is to be terrible to its enemies, generous to its allies, just to all peoples.
II – The treaties that bind the French people to the United States of America and the Swiss Cantons will be faithfully observed […]