The “Foreign Plot” and 14 Frimaire
BY OCTOBER the work of the Committee of Public Safety was settling down into something like a smooth business routine. The normal day began at nine o’clock in the morning and lasted until after midnight. Carnot was present virtually all the time; the others constantly came and went. Barère and Billaud spent hours at the Convention, which met in the afternoon. Robespierre spoke there on great occasions. Lindet and Prieur of the Côte-d’Or sat regularly with the Subsistence Commission. Robespierre and Collot d’Herbois were active at the Jacobin society, which met in the evening, usually adjourning at about ten o’clock. All were busy during the day with their own clerks and secretaries. In these circumstances it was late at night before the Committee of Public Safety could formally assemble.
The members had no leisure, hardly enough time for sleep, and practically no home life. Only one, the wealthy Hérault de Séchelles, was an old resident of Paris. The others, coming from the provinces, put up in rooming houses or furnished apartments. Robespierre and Prieur of the Côte-d’Or were bachelors; Saint-Just was engaged; Barère’s republican sentiments had lost him his wife; the wives of the others were not all in Paris. Robespierre lived plainly with his friends the Duplays, at 366 rue Saint-Honoré, near the Jacobin club. Carnot, Barère and Lindet were among his neighbors, all three having quarters within a few minutes’ walk in the same street. Saint-Just and Saint-André were housed a few blocks away in the rue Gaillon, at the Hôtel des États-Unis.
The day’s work was divided into definite stages. Current questions were discussed first. Deputations and petitioners were then received. So far as possible, to save each other’s time, the members took turns at this task of meeting the public. Incoming dispatches were read and distributed early in the day. General deliberation followed, in which the important correspondence was reviewed, measures of “public safety” were decided on, and the decrees to be submitted to the Convention on the next day were considered. Such at least was the program adopted on September 23. How long it proved practicable is not known.
Each member had a particular kind of business to watch over, but their fields were not sharply delimited, and they had to substitute for each other during absences. Responsibility was collective; anyone might sign papers on any subject. It is therefore difficult to determine the real division of labor. By going to the original manuscripts, however, it is possible to discover who wrote, or was the first to sign, each order. Such a study has been made by Mr. J. M. Thompson, an English authority on Robespierre, for 920 documents issued in the four months after September 23. In this period, it seems clear, Robespierre and Barère took the initiative in matters of police, Carnot, Barère and Prieur of the Côte-d’Or attended to matters of war and munitions, Barère and Saint-André to naval affairs, and Lindet to questions of provisioning and supply. Of the 920 documents, Carnot penned or first signed 272, Barère 244, Prieur of the Côte-d’Or 146, Lindet 91 and Robespierre 77. The figures then drop to 29 for Collot, down through 12 for Saint-Just, to only one for Prieur of the Marne.
Each man had his uses, either in Paris or on mission, but if we except Robespierre, who as political expert protected the others from hostile party onslaughts, the most valuable of the Twelve was probably Barère. Like Carnot, Barère drew up a large number of orders and decrees. Unlike Carnot, he gave close attention to many subjects. He was skilful in phrasing the thoughts of others. He excelled at the conference table. With his prodigious memory and ready speech, he could often, late at night, when everyone was tired and the discussion grew confused, bring a whole problem into focus, summarize the arguments, gather up the pertinent facts, and present the issue that had to be decided. He was, moreover, the liaison man between the Committee and the Convention, where he delivered statements of policy and panegyrics on the army, or demanded terrorist measures with a fluency for which he was nicknamed the “Anacreon of the Guillotine.” Barère did not usually tell the exact truth to the Convention. He acquired more of a reputation for personal dishonesty than he deserved, for he told the Convention what the Committee had decided it should hear.
The Committee continued to work through the six ministers of the old Executive Council. On October 26 it created a new Subsistence Commission, which became the headquarters of a vast system of economic regulation. The Committee of General Security, the political police of the Republic, remained a partly autonomous power, though its members had been named by the Committee of Public Safety. The two together were called the governing committees. The guardians of Public Safety, as if anticipating the danger from their fellows of General Security’, decreed on October 22 that the two bodies should meet together once a week; but the decision was ineffective, for only about a dozen joint sessions took place in the Year Two.
The Committee of Public Safety, with its auxiliaries, grew very fast in October. On the 4th, for example, it created twelve special couriers in addition to those attached to the ministries. Exactly a week later this number was increased to thirty. Six carriages were kept always ready in the courtyard below. The clerical force expanded so rapidly that many new rooms in the Tuileries had to be taken over. The War Office was already an immense bureaucracy, and the Subsistence Commission soon had hundreds of employees.
As the Twelve settled down to the routine of governing France, the need for harmony among them became imperative. Their responsibility was collective; no one was their chairman or even their leader; their important decisions were all reached in conference over the green table. In the end the Committee was fatally divided. But even in October one rift appeared. It was not in itself fatal, but it was an omen.
At this point a poet enters the story, Fabre d’Eglantine.
He was born plain Fabre, but he had once won a literary contest at the Floral Games of Toulouse (where Barère also had been honored), and had received the usual prize, a wreath of eglantine, or dogrose, worked in gold. Thereafter he added “Eglantine” to his name. Thus distinguished he came to Paris a few years before the Revolution. He wrote some charming sentimental verses which give him a lasting place in French literature. To his contemporaries he was known as a dramatist and actor, author of one or two successes de scandale, an unscrupulous climber who attacked the reputations of others to gain publicity for himself. When the Revolution came he was soon involved in it. Elected a deputy to the Convention, he sat with the bolder spirits of the Mountain. Meanwhile he showed signs of a new affluence, notable, if not suspicious, in a man of letters.
The poet of the eglantine played a central rôle in politics, but he also found an outlet for his poetic gifts, putting the final touches on the Revolutionary Calendar. This calendar makes necessary a digression.
The Revolutionists from the first had felt the breath of a new era. They had called 1789 the first year of liberty. Then after September 1792 they referred to the first year of the Republic, and after January 1, 1793, to the second year. These expressions, however, were only a manner of speaking. The old-fashioned calendar continued to be used.
The old calendar had the disadvantage of keeping people’s minds upon the Christian tradition. It was a framework to the Christian life, almost impossible to escape from. Its Sundays drew men’s minds to church, its Fridays to fasting, its saints’ days to models of piety, and to superstition. Its cycle of Lent and Easter, Advent and Christmas, set a religious stamp on the passage of time itself. And of course its method of counting years implied that the birth of Christ was the supreme event in human annals.
On October 5, 1793, the Convention abolished the Christian era for public purposes in France. The practical aim was to weaken the influence of revealed religion. Behind this practical aim lay a profound belief that the proclamation of the Republic was the true turning point in man’s destiny. There was also the idea of replacing mere custom by institutions rationally planned. This incredible Convention, in the midst of revolutionary terror, in the two months of September and October, began the codifying of the laws, introduced the metric system, and not only launched a new era but even provided a decimal system for measuring the minutes and hours of each day.
Years were now to be counted from the first day of the French Republic, commonly known as September 22, 1792. The Year Two thus began on September 22, 1793. Each year was divided into twelve months of thirty days (with five days left over, in leap year six), each month into three décades (ten-day “weeks”), each day into ten unnamed “parts,” and each such part again into ten, “down to the smallest measurable portion of time.” This metric system for the day was not made immediately mandatory for public officials, and never was observed.
For three weeks patriots wrote such dates as “fifth day of the third décade of the first month of the second year.” But Quaker-like namelessness was extremely confusing. Fabre d’Eglantine supplied the poetic nomenclature by which the Revolutionary Calendar is best remembered.
Fabre divided the republican year into four parts, each corresponding to a natural season, and made up of three months named after natural characteristics. The year began with the three months of autumn, Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire, named respectively for the wine-harvest, for fog, and for cold. Winter followed, with Nivôse, Pluviôse and Ventôse, the months of snow, rain and wind. Spring began with Germinal, flowered in Floréal, and spread through the ripening fields in Prairial. Summer was ushered in by Messidor, named for crops; passed into Thermidor, named for heat; and ended with Fructidor, the month of fruit and fruition. After Fructidor came the five extra days, or six in leap year, which were to be called the sans-culottides.
The days of the décade were named primidi, duodi, tridi, etc., to décadi, the Republican Sunday. As every Christian day was dedicated to a saint, so every republican day was set aside for the contemplation of a natural object. Most days were assigned to the vegetable kingdom, but the quintidis were specially associated with animals, and the décadis with agricultural implements. The day on which all this was enacted, for example (October 24, 1793), was a tridi, the day of pears, 3 Brumaire, Year Two.
On one matter Fabre’s proposals received an amendment from Robespierre. How were the sans-culottides to be named? It was agreed that they should be a time of celebration. Fabre recommended that they be called, in order, the festivals of Genius, Labor, Actions, Recompenses and Opinion. Robespierre objected. There must, he said, be a festival of Virtue, and it must take precedence over the festival of Genius. Was not Cato a better man than Caesar, or Brutus than Voltaire? The Convention, after discussing this knotty question, followed Robespierre, discarded Actions, and put Virtue first.
It may finally be said of this calendar, in which the Revolutionary psychology is so openly revealed, that the festival of Opinion was to be an exciting day in the Republic. Opinion meant public opinion, which in turn meant the opinions of Jacobins and sans-culottes, other opinions being considered merely private. On the day of Opinion the citizens should be free to say what they pleased about public officials. It was to be a day, as Fabre said, of “songs, allusions, caricatures, lampoons, ironic shafts and wild sarcasms”—in short, a very French occasion. Nothing was to be feared, he went on, from personal vengeance or animosity, for “opinion itself will do justice to the bold detractor of a respected magistrate.”
This same Fabre d’Eglantine, who spoke so reassuringly of false denunciation, approached Robespierre and Saint-Just one day in the middle of October, intimating that he had an important matter to reveal. These two, meeting with the Committee of General Security, gave Fabre an interview. He proceeded to denounce a vast foreign conspiracy, a network of secret dealings between hypocritical patriots and foreign spies.
The bugbear of the Foreign Plot thus rose up to haunt the Mountain. Let us note the circumstances clearly. The Mountain at this very time was consummating its victory. The Girondists arrested on June 2 were about to be put on trial; they were guillotined on October 31. Moreover, about a hundred more “moderates” had just been expelled from the Convention, including seventy-odd who had signed a petition in favor of the victims of June 2, and whom Robespierre was now trying to save from the guillotine. The Republic was further purged by the execution of Marie-Antoinette on October 16, the day of Wattignies. After long struggle the Mountaineers had triumphed. Party strife, however, far from being appeased, became if anything more intense. The stalwarts of revolution, with their old enemies gone, found much to object to in each other.
The Foreign Plot was a myth, but it disguised a mass of intrigue that is almost beyond the power of historians to unravel.
Robespierre and Saint-Just were both men with a strong tendency to believe evil of foreigners, and to accept as a fact any conspiracy that they heard of. Fabre d’Eglantine found it easy to persuade them. The story had a certain plausibility. Spies were known to be active. The papers of an English agent had been found, showing lists of Frenchmen to whom he had paid bribes. And Paris undoubtedly swarmed with shady international adventurers, many of whom were on friendly terms with leading Jacobins.
Hérault-Séchelles had long cultivated a mysterious Belgian named Proli, who was rumored to be the illegitimate son of the Austrian minister Kaunitz. Proli for a time lived at Hérault’s house, and was Hérault’s secretary while Hérault was on the Committee. Proli was a member of the Jacobin club, and probably knew its secrets through his friend Desfieux, who was on its committee of correspondence, and who was in turn a protégé of Collot d’Herbois. There seemed, moreover, to be something off-color about the Spanish grandee Guzmán, the Portuguese Jew Pereira, the Englishmen Rutledge and Boyd—not to mention the mysterious Baron de Batz, a Frenchman, but a royalist and a schemer. Two Jewish bankers, the brothers Frei, who had been ennobled by their Austrian sovereign, were intimate with the outspoken radical Chabot. Chabot was married in September to their sister, who brought him a large dowry. It was whispered that Chabot himself had furnished the dowry as a means of concealing his own ill-gotten gains.
In a somewhat different class, among foreigners, were two members of the Convention: Thomas Paine, a naïve Anglo-American radical, who now found himself in revolutionary complications well over his head, and Anacharsis Cloots, a rich Prussian humanitarian, who described himself as the representative of the human race, and preached international revolution.
The presence in Paris of so many ambiguous characters convinced the Committee of Public Safety that there was in truth a Foreign Plot. This belief in turn enabled Robespierre, as the political strategist for the Committee, to discredit opposing factions by calling them the instruments of hostile powers.
What really was behind the Foreign Plot was the animosity of factional chieftains, and a sordid story of systematic racketeering. Certain prominent Jacobins, through such useful friends as the Baron de Batz, were lining their pockets by attacks on private business. Fabre d’Eglantine was one of this group. The East India Company, the life insurance companies, the water companies, the Bank of Discount were unmercifully milked. The technique was to threaten revolutionary legislation, extort bribes, and speculate in stocks for a fall. When stock companies were abolished in August, greedy eyes turned to the profits that might be made from the liquidation of their assets.
The game was dangerous. Exposure would be the more fatal because of the high principles which all professed. Robespierre, the Incorruptible, and the Committee of Public Safety, most of whom were men of probity, could be expected to be severe.
Fabre d’Eglantine became frightened. As an ally of Danton he had to fear denunciation by the Hébertists, though numerous Hébertists were involved in the same kind of corruption. He decided to attack some of the Hébertists first. To compromise them without spoiling his own chance of profits, he brought the old charge hackneyed by years of use—he accused them of conspiracy with foreigners. The Hébertists were thus menaced by the Law of Suspects. Fabre was free to go on with his own maneuvers, for if the Hébertists should call him a grafter he could now represent himself as a patriot insulted out of pure vengeance. Taking advantage of his position on the committee of the Convention charged with India Company affairs, he falsified the decree by which the liquidation of the company’s assets was arranged, and gained for himself and his accomplices a booty of 500,000 livres. The scheme was so successful that even when Chabot squealed to Robespierre a few weeks later, and the India scandal came uncertainly to light, Robespierre believed that the financial intrigues were a part of the insidious foreign conspiracy, and Fabre d’Eglantine, along with Danton, went untouched.
The India scandal was the reality, the Foreign Plot the myth. Both contributed to wreck the Mountain, but the myth had the more immediate and pronounced effect. Providing a means for repressing the Hébertists, it marked a turning point in the Revolution. The drift to the left which had swept away every government of the past five years was now slowed down. It was now the radicals who bore the fatal taint of treason. Significantly enough, one of the first men arrested because of the Foreign Plot was the notorious agitator Maillard, who had led the famous march of the women on Versailles in October 1789.
The Foreign Plot momentarily strengthened the Revolutionary Government, at the cost of dividing the Mountain on which that government was ultimately based. It played into the hands of the Committee of Public Safety; but it introduced even into the Committee the poison of distrust. For Fabre denounced one of the Twelve—Hérault-Séchelles.
Robespierre and Saint-Just did not like Hérault-Séchelles. His noble birth, his wealth, his elegant manners, his flippancy, his irony, his self-assurance and frank love of pleasure inspired in his two colleagues a chill hauteur, a stiff sense of middle-class disapproval. If there was any sincerity in Hérault’s character, as there may have been, since he had made sacrifices for the Revolution, it was so encrusted with affectation as to be well hidden from sight; and certainly Robespierre and Saint-Just would not have the subtlety to detect it. Between two moralists and an esthete there could be little understanding.
When Robespierre and Saint-Just heard Fabre accuse their colleague they were probably neither surprised nor pained. Robespierre had long feared treachery in the Committee. It seemed all too likely that Hérault was selling official secrets to the Austrians through Proli. He could be classified as a Hébertist. He was one of the few whom Hébert never attacked. Like the Hébertists, he seemed to favor an expansionist war. He had his own paid agents in Switzerland. He was the friend of Carrier, a radical soon to be famous as the Terrorist of Nantes.
Hérault was too powerful to be abruptly arrested. On the other hand, if Fabre’s charges were true, he could not be kept in the counsels of the Committee. He was sent late in October on mission to the department of the Upper Rhine. Mathiez, the chief authority on the subject, declares that the Committee sent him off in order to be rid of him. Barère, in his Mémoires, says that Hérault applied for leave. It is hard to see why the Committee, if it believed Hérault a traitor, should purposely send him with full powers to Alsace, a frontier region, near the battlelines, and on the borders of Switzerland where he was thought to be intriguing. It seems likely that Hérault, sensing trouble, asked to go to Alsace, and that the others in the Committee, who had to treat him as an equal, granted his request as an easy means of removing him from Paris.
The almost simultaneous departure of Hérault, Saint-Just and Collot left in Paris only five of the Twelve—Robespierre, Barère, Carnot, Billaud and Prieur of the Côte-d’Or. They were soon joined by Robert Lindet returning from Normandy. These six were virtually the Committee of Public Safety until almost the end of the year. Together they faced the crisis of what was called Dechristianization, built up a kind of planned economy, and advanced a little further along the devious road that led from anarchy toward order.
Robespierre took the lead in dealing with Dechristianization. He saw in it the workings of the Foreign Plot, a shameful travesty of Revolutionary principles, instigated by persons who wished to disgrace the Republic before the world. He called it “ultra-revolutionary,” by which he meant that it was a form of counterrevolution. The ideas of universal upheaval and an international crusade against tyrants he also branded as “ultra.” He used the corresponding term “citra” for those who thought the Revolution was going too far. “Ultra” and “citra” are of course relative terms. Robespierre himself would be “ultra” to Brissot, Brissot to Lafayette, Lafayette to many who thought themselves soundly revolutionary in 1789. For some people Robespierre would be “citra,” falling short of the true aims of the Revolution. He was indeed accused of favoring an outworn fanaticism.
Unless we beg the question by seeing in Robespierre the true norm and essence of the Revolution (as Mathiez tends to do), it is hard to see how the Dechristianizing movement was really ultra-revolutionary. It sprang from authentic Revolutionary sources, the Jacobin club and the Paris Commune, and it was a natural outgrowth of Jacobin ideas. When Robespierre opposed it he was opposing something in the Revolution itself, not something “beyond” the Revolution. Moreover, if revolution means change, overturn, innovation, then the Dechristianizers of 1793 were the revolutionists, and Robespierre was an exponent of counter-revolution, or at least of orderly change arrived at under the authority of government.
The abolition of the Christian calendar, the reduction of the salaries paid to bishops, the laws forbidding the clergy to teach school, all coming in September and October, showed that the National Convention was in a decidedly anti-clerical mood. The spirit of the French Revolution since 1789 and before, with its emphasis on the individual and the state, was opposed to the claims of the Catholic church. On the plea that religion was an individual matter, vows had been forbidden, monasticism destroyed, public and collective worship severely regulated. In the belief that political allegiance should come before religious affiliation, the clergy had been elected like other public officials, and were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. Most of them refused the oath, and the church became the firmest pillar of counter-revolution. More laws followed, repressing the clergy for political reasons; and, in the general anarchy of the times, religious believers suffered from much persecution that was not endorsed by the national government. In these circumstances the fact that Christianity was never formally outlawed does not seem very important.
The Jacobins of 1793, including Robespierre, saw little difference between revelation and superstition. At most they would consider Jesus a worthy moralist and good sans-culotte. Billaud-Varenne, it may be remembered, wrote a diatribe against the church before the Revolution started. Barère was observed at the Floral Games to have “sucked in the impure milk of modern philosophy.” Saint-André, once a Protestant minister, was now a militant deist. Virtually all the members of the Convention were followers of natural religion; they believed in a Supreme Being conveniently distant, dwelt on man’s abundant capacity for natural virtue, and regarded priests as charlatans and revealed mysteries as a delusion. Revealed religion, they would say, was in its death throes, soon to expire before the searching eye of reason.
But the Committee of Public Safety had the task of governing the country, and saw the danger of needlessly arousing antagonism to the Republic. Couthon, indeed, down in Auvergne, out of touch with his colleagues, succumbed to the hysteria of Dechristianization. The attitude of the Committee in Paris was very different. It is shown in a letter drafted by Robespierre and signed by him, by Carnot and Collot, and by Billaud-Varenne, author of the Last Blow against Prejudice and Superstition.
The letter was to André Dumont, representative on mission in the Somme. “It has seemed to us,” it read, “that in your last operations you have struck too violently against the objects of Catholic worship. … We must be careful not to give hypocritical counter-revolutionists, who seek to light the flame of civil war, any pretext that seems to justify their calumnies. No opportunity must be presented to them for saying that the freedom of worship is violated or that war is made on religion itself. Seditious and uncivic priests must be punished, but the title of priest must not be openly proscribed. In regions where patriotism is lukewarm or sluggish the violent remedies necessary in rebellious and counter-revolutionary regions must not be applied.” Dumont was indignant at this reprimand.
Agitation reached its high point in Paris a few days later. Patriots gave up their Christian names, taking instead the names of classical heroes or of Revolutionary martyrs, such as Brutus, Gracchus or Marat. One enthusiast called himself No-God-the-Father, Pas-de-bon-Dicu, implying in the bon that he would perhaps accept a Supreme Being. A petition circulated in the city asking the Convention to abolish the constitutional clergy and to stop paying salaries to churchmen. Gobel, constitutional bishop of Paris, with a number of his clergy, came before the Convention, declared that he had seen a new light, abjured his priesthood, handed over his crozier and his ring, and donned ostentatiously the cap of liberty. The Convention applauded; some of its members who had once taken holy orders imitated the bishop. Throughout the city the section committees closed the churches; the Commune forbade their being reopened; and in the provinces, where the same proceedings had begun independently, the example of Paris spurred on the Dechristianizers.
The cathedral of Notre-Dame, standing four-square and ancient amid the hubbub, was invaded by the evangelists of a new religion. On a décadi, 20 Brumaire (November 10), it saw the culmination in a popular form of the learned efforts of Diderot and Voltaire. A symbolic Mountain was constructed in the nave. At its summit stood a little Greek temple dedicated “To Philosophy.” On a rock half way up burned a Torch of Truth. Girls dressed in white with tricolor sashes, and crowned with flowers and oak leaves, moved up and down the mountainside during the ceremony, while an actress from the opera impersonated Liberty. The Convention (where Liberty was officially embraced by the chairman and secretaries) decreed that Notre-Dame should henceforth be known as the Temple of Reason, and then joined the city fathers and a great crowd of people at the new shrine.
Robespierre regarded this performance as a ridiculous masquerade. He knew that it was impolitic in a nation of Catholics. He had before him the reports of government observers, who declared that the whole movement was superficial, that the same people who were fierce rationalists when in crowds together often relapsed into their old ideas when they went home, fearing the wrath of God or the death of their unbaptized children.
In forcible Dechristianization, besides the principle of religious freedom, was involved a serious political question, the old question of the relative powers of the national government, the Commune and the patriotic societies. The exhibition in Notre-Dame was a trial of strength between the city leaders and the Convention. As usual the Convention yielded in outbursts of applause. Irresponsible radicals in Paris were allowed to open wider the already yawning breach between the church and the Republic. Robespierre conceived it to be the duty of the Committee to bring the Convention back to its senses, and to gain control once and for all over the Commune, and if possible over the Jacobins. To gain this end nothing was more useful than the Foreign Plot.
Revolutionists from that time to ours have availed themselves of foreign conspiracies, but whatever may be said of Hitler or Stalin, it seems to be true that Robespierre really believed in this one.
On the troubled day of September 5 the assemblies of the Paris sections, those hothouses of revolutionary exuberance, had been limited to two meetings a week. Some of them turned themselves into popular societies so as to be undisturbed in their sessions. These societies were then organized under a Central Committee, on the initiative of two Frenchmen, Desfieux and Dubuisson, and two foreigners, Proli and Pereyra. This committee in turn, with other men active in the Commune, and with certain advanced Conventionals including the German Anacharsis Cloots, backed the petition against the clergy, and instigated Gobel to abdicate his priesthood. The same group organized the celebration of 20 Brumaire in Notre-Dame.
These leftists were in sober fact discrediting the Republic in the judgment of the world. Robespierre believed that they deliberately meant to do so. In his eyes they were hired by hostile powers to push the Revolution to a ridiculous and ruinous excess. The people, he said, was not really present in the popular societies. This was true, for the popular societies of Paris were dominated by a few hundred organizers. But, he explained, the real people was present in the Jacobin club of the rue Saint-Honoré.
At the Jacobins he made his main attack, and there, on November 21, he delivered one of the great speeches of his career.
“Some have supposed,” he said, “that the Convention, in accepting civic offerings [thus Robespierre chose to interpret the Convention’s presence at Notre-Dame] has proscribed the Catholic religion. No, the Convention has not taken this rash step, and will never take it. Its intention is to maintain the freedom of religion that it has proclaimed, and to repress at the same time those who would abuse their freedom to trouble public order. It will not allow peaceable ministers of religion to be persecuted, but it will punish them severely whenever they dare to use their functions for the deception of citizens or the arming of prejudice and royalism against the Republic. Priests have been denounced for saying the mass; they will say it longer if an attempt is made to prevent them. He who would prevent them is more a fanatic than he who says the mass.
“Some would go further. Under pretense of destroying superstition they would make a kind of religion of atheism itself. Any philosopher, any individual may have on that matter whatever opinion he pleases. Whoever would make a crime of atheism is a madman, but the public man, the legislator, would be a hundred times more mad to adopt such a doctrine. The National Convention abhors it. The Convention is not a writer of books, an author of metaphysical systems; it is a political and popular body, charged with protecting not only the rights but the character of the French people. Not for nothing has it proclaimed the declaration of the rights of man in the presence of the Supreme Being. It will be said perhaps that I am narrow-minded, a man of prejudice, even a fanatic. I have already said that I spoke not as an individual or as a systematic philosopher, but as a representative of the people. Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.”
At this point the Jacobins applauded with vigor, and Robespierre, after praising the belief in God in words not recorded, continued:
“I repeat: we have no other fanaticism to fear than that of immoral men, paid by foreign courts to reawaken fanaticism and give our Revolution an appearance of immorality, characteristic of our cowardly and savage enemies.” Foreign courts, he said, maintain two armies. One is on the frontier. “The other, more dangerous, is in our midst; it is an army of spies, of paid rascals who insert themselves everywhere, even in the heart of the popular societies.” He named a few, including Proli.
“I demand that this Society purge itself finally of this criminal horde! I demand that Dubuisson be driven from the Society, and also two other intriguers, one of whom lives with Proli under the same roof, and who both are known to you as his agents: I mean Desfieux and Pereira. I demand that a purifying scrutiny be held at the tribune, to detect and drive out all the agents of foreign powers who under their auspices have introduced themselves into this Society.”
The Jacobins responded immediately to this powerful address. The men named by Robespierre were dropped. It became evident which way the wind was blowing; arrests of Jacobins had been taking place for more than a month (though Fabre d’Eglantine’s part was not generally known); many of the brethren were involved with foreigners in the financial scandals; no one could be sure that the Law of Suspects might not engulf him. No one could afford to seem to fear an investigation; Robespierre’s demand for a “purifying scrutiny” was therefore echoed by many, including Hébert. Hébert declared that plotters were trying to embroil him with Robespierre, the “friend of truth.” He denied that he was an atheist, affirmed that a good Jacobin must accept the Gospel maxims, and that Jesus Christ was the true founder of the popular societies. Hébert, it must be repeated, was not the head of a party. His name was used later, like Trotsky’s among Communists, to describe a “deviation.” He was one among many, important because he was an official of the Paris municipality, and editor of a violent paper, the Père Duchesne.
The Convention presently passed a law reaffirming the freedom of religion.
At the Jacobins the purifying scrutiny began at once, and lasted for several weeks. Members took turns at the tribune of the society, exposing themselves to the public inspection and free comment of the others. There was something in Jacobin psychology which made this procedure not only a political advantage but a delight. Denunciations were prepared beforehand and virtuously launched. Members then justified themselves by reviewing their careers, expatiating on their aims and motives, showing that they were neither “new patriots” who had joined the bandwagon late, nor old Girondists or Fayettists now parading a false purity. Hypocrisy was the vice most feared, and with reason, for in these giddy times, when without the appearance of conformity a man might go to jail or to the guillotine, no one could tell what anyone at heart believed.
Those of the Committee of Public Safety who were in Paris passed the scrutiny with success, though Robespierre had to protect Barère, who was branded as a waverer. Robespierre, Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne were the ones in whom the society most often expressed its confidence—a sign that Jacobin opinion was to the left of the average for the Committee. Couthon passed through the “crucible,” as he called it, soon after his return, rejoicing that members had to give account of themselves “in the presence of the people,” and “undergo in a way the Last Judgment.” Poor Cloots, the visionary from the Rhineland, was assaulted by Robespierre as an agent of foreign tyrants, a preacher of universal revolution and ringleader in the “philosophic masquerade” of Dechristianization. He was expelled. Hébert passed, and also Fabre d’Eglantine, who managed to persuade the brothers that he owed his prosperity to the earnings of his pen. Their time had not yet come.
Two days after Robespierre’s great speech, the society, “astonished that there exists in Paris any other society than the Jacobins,” decreed that the Central Committee of the Paris patriotic clubs should be investigated and dissolved, because, said a member, it might become “liberticide.” Thus the attack on the Commune began. The same attack was meanwhile pushed by the Committee of Public Safety.
It was obviously necessary, if the Revolutionary Government was to govern—if, for example, the Committee of Public Safety was to make its religious policy effective—to control the independent ardors of subordinate officials. Dechristianization was symptomatic: throughout the country there were communes, Jacobin clubs, representatives on mission, all with their own ideas on what the Revolution meant, who, in the judgment of the Committee, were ruining the Republic by irreligious extravagance. Others, even patriots, lagged behind the official views of Paris. Even patriots could not be trusted, and behind the forefront of articulate and demonstrative patriots lay the vast mass of Frenchmen, men and women who did not want a Republic, and who thought of their new rulers as ungodly regicides. When power is in the hands of men who will not take instructions, or when the ruling philosophy is not generally accepted (both of which were now the case), then a government of necessity either falls or becomes a dictatorship.
Unity and efficiency were made necessary also by plans for coordinating the economic resources of the country. The government could exist only if the armies were provisioned, and enough food made available, at sufficiently low prices, to prevent the poorest consumers from rising in rebellion. To meet these needs the law against hoarding and the General Maximum had been enacted, and were strengthened by the Law of Suspects; but the economic regulations were at best extremely difficult to enforce, and were often applied, or not applied, or misapplied, to suit the political views of those who, in various places, happened to be influential. Requisitioning led to endless confusion; departments professed themselves poor, to save their produce for themselves; representatives on mission, Revolutionary Armies, agents for the eleven real armies, for the eighty-three departments, for Paris and other communes, roamed the length and breadth of the country, finding their supplies where they could, trying to outwit each other, disregarding, because of the pressure behind them, the needs of the country as a whole. The Subsistence Commission set up in October was authorized to plan production and distribution on a national scale. We may be sure that Robert Lindet, after long sessions with the commission, pointed out, at the nightly conferences of the Committee, the almost insuperable obstacles in the way of economic coordination.
Saint-Just’s law of October 10, proclaiming the government revolutionary until the peace, granted the Committee a certain authority over the constituted bodies. But the wording was vague, and the effects rather nebulous. Sporadic progress was made. The Convention decreed on November 25 that its members, when acting as representatives on mission, must exactly obey the orders of the Committee. On December 4 Barère and Billaud won another victory in the Convention, defeating an attempt of the Paris Commune to assemble the revolutionary committees of the sections. Some control was even won over the Jacobins. The purge initiated by Robespierre served this end. The Committee requested the society to submit a list of its affiliated clubs. Objections arose, but Hébert and Danton both supported the Committee, which, with the list in its possession, proceeded henceforth to deal directly with some thousands of patriotic organizations.
Billaud-Varenne, who had become a kind of minister of the interior, because charged with much routine correspondence with the provinces, took the lead in framing new administrative machinery. This onetime drifter, ex-schoolteacher and ineffectual lawyer, showed himself a different man now that he was in a place of power. In 1789 he had been the most immoderate, of the Twelve in his attacks on public authority. Now he demanded that authority be absolute and unquestioned.
On November 17 Robespierre made one of his infrequent speeches in the Convention. It was a challenge to the world. “Should all Europe declare against you, you are stronger than Europe! The French Republic is as invincible as reason; it is as immortal as truth. When liberty has made a conquest of such a country as France, no human power can drive her out.” This bold assertion was a confession of religious faith. It was backed up by practical arrangements. Barère, following Robespierre, announced that Billaud-Varenne on the next day would present an important message from the Committee.
Billaud appeared, therefore, before an expectant assembly. He fainted, perhaps from overwork, before his address was finished, but was able to go on.
He began by describing the prevailing anarchy, which he said was characteristic of the infancy of republics. Everywhere the laws were without vigor. In some places they were not even known. Everywhere the wise measures of the Convention were distorted by local officials to promote their own ambitions. “So long as the laws,” he said, “to have their full execution, pass through the successive interposition of secondary authorities, each of these authorities becomes the supreme arbiter of legislation; and the first which receives a law at the moment when it is enacted is undoubtedly a more powerful authority than the lawmaker, because it may suspend or stop execution as it pleases, and so destroy the law’s existence and effect.” Hence came all the troubles of federalism, a “legal anarchy,” a “political chaos,” in which counter-revolutionaries of all descriptions could manage their intrigues.
Billaud proposed a rigorous centralization of power. All public officials were to become mere “levers” for the transmission of a force; this force was the will of the people, as determined in the Convention and its Committee of Public Safety. No one, whatever his position, was henceforth to possess any immunity. Anyone, even members of the Convention, could be arrested if he obstructed the public will. “No inviolability for anyone at all!” cried Billaud. We are called anarchists, he said. “Let us prove that this is a calumny, by substituting of our own free will the action of revolutionary laws for the continual oscillations of so many interests, groupings, wills, passions that clash with each other and tear the breast of our country. Surely this government will not be the iron hand of despotism, but the reign of justice and reason.”
Away with political opposition! In England, of course, an opposition was necessary, because cabinet ministers could not be trusted. “Here, on the contrary [to quote a speech at the Jacobins two days before Billaud’s at the Convention], the unity of the Republic requires that there be none. Discussion is doubtless necessary, but only on means of effecting the public good. Is there an opposition party, a right wing, in the Jacobins and the other popular societies? Obviously not. Then why should there be one in the Convention?” Alas, why? Two waves of rightists had been removed from the Convention in six months. But always another seemed to form.
At the end of the discussion of Billaud’s proposal the question arose of how elected officials, when dismissed by the central power, were to be replaced. It was agreed that no further elections could be held. Couthon, just back from Auvergne, found the formula: “The right of election belongs essentially to the sovereign people. To impair it is a crime, unless extraordinary circumstances demand it for the people’s welfare. Now, we find ourselves in these extraordinary circumstances. … Those who appeal to the rights of the people mean to pay a false homage to its sovereignty. When the revolutionary machine is still rolling, you injure the people in entrusting it with the election of public functionaries, for you expose it to the naming of men who will betray it.” It was decided that the Convention, meaning the Committee of Public Safety, should appoint the successors to elected office holders.
The law of 14 Frimaire (December 4), passed virtually as Billaud proposed it, definitely founded the revolutionary dictatorship. It was the constitution of the Reign of Terror. Nor was it merely ephemeral. It created the Bulletin des lois, which existed until 1929, the organ by which French legislation was formally published. Setting up a strong central power, providing channels for the quick flow of authority from Paris to the remotest village, sweeping away all intermediate agencies that could obstruct or twist the policies of government, it recalled the age-old efforts of kings and ministers to bring order out of feudalism, and anticipated the means by which Napoleon organized modern France. The law of 14 Frimaire, “extraordinary” though the circumstances in which it was enacted, proves the profound continuity that joined the Revolution to past and future.
By the new law the Convention became “the sole center of the impulse of government.” Counterfeiting the Bulletin des lois was to be punished by death. Officials who perverted the laws which they were charged with enforcing were to spend five years in irons and have half their property confiscated. All the constituted authorities, departments, districts and communes, to which the revolutionists of 1789 had given an almost unbounded freedom, were put under the grim inspection of the two governing committees. A swarm of locally elected administrators, or those of them who survived the purge for which the new law provided, became “national agents” removable at the pleasure of the Convention. Administrators were forbidden to assemble under any pretext; they were to correspond only in writing. Revolutionary Armies not authorized by the Convention were dissolved. Committees of surveillance were integrated with the recognized agencies of government. No armed force, tax or loan was to be raised except by national law. No official or official body was to alter or expand its lawfully established functions. The enforcement of all these provisions was handed over to the Committee of Public Safety.
The Revolutionary Government, thus consolidated, was still considered to be provisional. The constitution of the preceding summer, enshrined and venerated in the hall of the Convention, was still looked to as the ultimate basis of government. But the ideas that went into the law of 14 Frimaire were not really provisional. They have contributed as much to the making of modern states as the more liberal philosophy for which the Revolution is better known. Modern states exist by the ideas of unity, order, subordination and efficiency, and by the idea of law as the will of a sovereign power. Twentieth century states, democratic or dictatorial, share these ideas; and these are the ideas of 14 Frimaire, proclaimed at a time when the rest of Europe was largely feudal.
The law of 14 Frimaire, it is hardly too much to say, had as permanent a significance as the Declaration of the Rights of Man. They were poles apart, for they attacked antithetical extremes, anarchy and despotism. Each was a statement of a fundamental demand, one for public order, the other for individual liberty. The dualism that they express is an old one in political science, and the practical commentary is also an old one: that the best state must have elements of both, more order than the men of 1789 arranged for, more freedom than the men of 1793 would allow.
The new organizing law was an instrument of Terror because the government which it strengthened was the creation of a minority, the triumphant leaders of the Mountain, itself a party among republicans, who in turn were only a party among the original revolutionists, who in their turn did not include all the people in France. As in the name of liberty France now possessed the most dictatorial government it had ever known, so, in the name of the people, it now had the political system which, of all systems in its history, probably the fewest people really liked. The ruling group knew that in a free election it would not be supported. It knew that it did not represent, in the sense of reflecting, the actual wishes of actual men and women. It claimed to represent, in the sense of standing for, the real will of the real people, the fundamental, unrealized, inarticulate ultimate desires, the true welfare, of Frenchmen and of mankind, present and future. This was the Revolutionary faith.
Meanwhile actual Frenchmen had to be dealt with, those who did not yet share the faith, or who though sharing it differed in the methods which they recommended. The Terror waxed in fury. Everywhere voices were heard demanding unity, and division multiplied without end; loyalty was praised, and conspiracy flourished; confidence was eulogized as the supreme bond of society by men who trusted no one, and whose every act, and almost every word, made confidence impossible. Suspects poured into the prisons, and the guillotines fell more frequently on outstretched necks. The more the deaths mounted, the more enemies the executioners had to fear. The more severe the government became the more opposition it aroused, and the only answer to opposition seemed to be an increase of severity. The longer the Terror lasted the more deeply the Terrorists were compromised by it, and the more fearful they became of letting any but themselves control the machinery of power.
By the end of the year, according to the best figures, 4,554 persons had been put to death by revolutionary courts. Over 3,300 of these perished in December, for it was in December that rebellious Lyons was punished and the civil war in the Vendée put down. Many of the Vendéans, caught with arms in their hands, would have been sentenced by a milder government than that of the Republic. No class escaped; most of the executed Vendéans were peasants, and three-quarters of all victims came from the shopkeeping, laboring and agricultural classes. It was not only aristocrats who felt the sharp edge of a new order.
In Paris, before the year was out, even Mountaineers began to hint for clemency. The Committee of Public Safety went its way. The loud voice of Collot d’Herbois, who since his trip to Lyons had good reason to fear a reaction, rang out over the benches of the Jacobins:
“Some wish to moderate the revolutionary movement. What! Can a tempest be steered? The Revolution is one. We cannot and we must not check its motion. Citizens, patriotism must be always at the same height! If it drops for an instant it is no longer patriotism. …”
The tragedy of the Terror lies partly in this interpretation of patriotism.