The Missions to Alsace
ONCE upon a time (so the next episode might begin), while a very young Republic was struggling with an old, old Empire, one of its fairest provinces was in deep trouble. This province was on the border between the warring countries. Its people were mixed; they faced both ways. Bad and designing men stirred them up. Everybody was uncertain, excited, afraid. The soldiers of the Emperor had broken in, fierce Croats and other fighters from the east. All seemed lost, when suddenly two youths appeared, close friends, almost brothers, sent from the capital of the Republic to save the day. The two youths went to work with a will. They punished the bad men, brought back the courage of their troops, gave them shoes, food, guns; and soon the Emperor’s army turned and fled. The two youths then departed as quickly as they had come, after taking only a few weeks to perform their task.
This sounds like a story from the never-never land. Serious historians are not supposed to put off their readers with fairy tales. And yet, when the strictest methods of history have been used, when the evidence has been gathered, when conflicting reports have been cancelled out, prejudices allowed for, exaggerations discounted, and enthusiasms watered down, when we have been as critical and as coldly judicial as we please, a certain fairy-tale atmosphere still hangs over the mission of Saint-Just and his friend Le Bas to Alsace—although, to be sure, the good people and the bad people are not so easy to distinguish as one might wish.
It was in Alsace that the danger from the Allies was most pressing in the last two months of 1793. The enemy, as seen from Paris, was like one of those flabby masses which when pushed in one place protrude in another. The Austrians were checked in the north at Wattignies on October 16; but to assemble the force for this victory the French armies in the east had been weakened; the Prussians therefore advanced toward the river Saar, and on October 13, while Carnot and Jourdan were preparing for battle in Flanders, an Imperial host burst through the French lines at Wissembourg, drove back the French in utter disorder, and streamed into the department of the Lower Rhine almost to the walls of Strasbourg.
The Committee of Public Safety immediately dispatched Saint-Just to the threatened spot. The decision was made on October 17. News of Wattignies had not yet reached the green room. Marie Antoinette had been guillotined the day before; the trial of the Girondists was about to open; the Foreign Plot had just been denounced by Fabre; within the Committee Hérault-Séchelles was suspected by his colleagues. The British and the royalists held Toulon. The war in the Vendée was at its height. Lyons had fallen a week ago, but the Committee feared that the rebel leaders would undo the Jacobin triumph by scattering secretly through the south.
Alsace was therefore only one problem among several, but it was a problem that presented difficulties of its own. The people of Alsace were German in language and tradition. They had belonged to the French crown for more than a century, and had become loyal to France largely because the old monarchy did not use modern methods of assimilation. Before the Revolution, even in France, ideas of sovereignty and national unity were only partly developed, so that many local peculiarities existed. Alsace continued to be mostly German, the substance of its law unchanged, its Lutheran minorities officially respected, its people subject to relatively light taxes and more free than the rest of France to carry on commerce with Germany. In a sense parts of Alsace were still within the Holy Roman Empire from which they had been conquered. Certain German rulers, among them the prince-bishop of Speir and the margrave of Baden, held lands in northern Alsace where they collected feudal rents and kept a vague legal jurisdiction. Law cases were sometimes appealed from Alsatian courts to the higher courts of these German princes. Agents of the same princes were active in Alsatian villages. Many Alsatians outside the cities thought of their German lord as their true ruler, considered the transfer to France as a piece of high politics far over their heads, and, seeing Frenchmen rarely, viewed them with detachment.
The Revolution swept all provincial liberties away. The modern state which the Revolution created could not tolerate such eccentric overlappings as existed in Alsace. The new idea of airtight sovereignty shut out the authority of the German princes. The abolition of feudal dues deprived them of a historic source of income. Thus the old treaties of annexation were violated; the emperor protested as guardian of German rights, and the friction that resulted was one of the first causes of the war. Alsatian peasants were cut off from the lords to whom they had always looked, and from the formless thing called Germany to which they had not ceased to belong. They could hardly help feeling like orphans in the new France.
Alsace nevertheless responded eagerly to the first stirrings of the Revolution. The peasants were glad to be rid of their feudal payments. The educated classes of the cities were already half French—a fact that seems less remarkable when we remember that French civilization at this time permeated the whole German world. The Alsatians had the advantage of belonging to the country which, in 1789, sent a thrill of hope through the unprivileged classes of most of Europe. Alsace therefore produced its contingent of Revolutionary leaders.
But in 1793, when the Allied forces came in from the north, events in France had gone far beyond the expectations of 1789. In Alsace as elsewhere there was much disaffection. Strasbourg was a prey to outsiders, somewhat as Lyons became a few weeks later. The religious troubles were acute. The peasants grumbled over requisitions. The dominance of Paris was especially resented because of the habits of local liberty that had grown up under the Bourbons.
Now the Imperial army, in which nationality counted for nothing, was commanded by an Alsatian, Wurmser, born in Strasbourg. As he moved into Alsace he invited the natives to join him. Some did so gladly. He set about restoring the old régime, had Te Deums sung in the churches for his victories, and masses celebrated for the soul of the deceased French queen. With Wurmser came a swarm of civil servants of the expropriated German princes, bent on reclaiming the lands and revenues lost by their masters. Many peasants received them with open arms, hoping to return to the old familiar village life. Moreover in the Imperial army, besides Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Wallachians and various kinds of Germans, was the force known as the Army of Condé, seven infantry battalions and twelve cavalry squadrons of French émigrés. These embittered Frenchmen brought a turmoil of revenge into the invaded districts. Even so, they were welcomed by many Alsatians who had turned against the Revolution.
The flood of the old régime was rolling into the Republic, and no man could tell where it might stop. Age was personified in the two commanders, for Wurmser was sixty-nine years old, and his Prussian colleague, the duke of Brunswick, fifty-eight. They were both trained in the old-fashioned school of warfare, and were actually much less formidable than they seemed. Unknown to the French, Brunswick was under orders not to disable the Republican army, not to take advantage of its mistakes, and not to give much help to the Austrians, whom the Prussian court continued to regard as its most dangerous enemy. This diplomatic situation was doubtless a greater advantage to the Republic than the youth of its defenders. The contrast remains, however: after the disasters of mid-October the Army of the Rhine was given to Pichegru, who was thirty-two, the Army of the Moselle to Hoche, who was twenty-five, and the supreme civilian power to Saint-Just and Le Bas, who were respectively twenty-six and twenty-eight.
Saint-Just completely overshadowed Le Bas and determined the policies of their joint mission. Their first report to the Committee of Public Safety, written from Saverne in Alsace, has recently been discovered by an American historian, Mr. E. N. Curtis. The manuscript, in Saint-Just’s hand, bears a significant correction. Saint-Just in his haste wrote, “I have given you this detail,” then catching the error changed “I” to “we.” Le Bas did not object to this domination, was perhaps not even aware of it. The two agreed perfectly; Le Bas worshiped Saint-Just as a paragon, almost a saint; they were personal friends, and Saint-Just was engaged to marry Le Bas’ sister.
Fiery, peremptory, curt, Saint-Just was the same man who, less than two weeks before coming to Alsace, had prevailed upon the Convention to vote the government revolutionary until the peace. By revolutionary government he meant government that went straight to its objectives without the formalities of law. He detested verbiage, bureaucracy, red tape. It is impossible to govern without being laconic, he said; and some of his dispatches were models of concision. He patterned himself on those men of few words, the Spartans, adopting a stern demeanor that had been foreign to his youth. With the rigidity of a man who knows himself to be right, he could be cordial in the circle of those who supported him, coldly exclusive to those outside. Someone remarked that he carried his head as if it were the holy sacrament.
Saint-Just and Le Bas arrived in Alsace equipped with “extraordinary powers.” Nine representatives armed with “unlimited powers” were already operating in the neighborhood. As members of the Convention and Representatives of the People, these men recognized no authority above them, regarding even the Committee of Public Safety as simply a group of their equals. In taking this attitude they followed the Convention itself, which in October refused to invest its main Committee with control over the representatives on mission. Not even Saint-Just, in putting through the decree of October 10, had been able to win that concession from the assembly.
Saint-Just, for his part, came to Alsace with the idea that the representatives already there had failed. He ignored them from the start. One of his first acts was to write to the Committee asking for their recall. Some were recalled, but others were sent in their place. The Committee, however, continued to correspond almost exclusively with Saint-Just and Le Bas, leaving the other representatives to fret and fume, complain of neglect, and declare that the ascendancy of Saint-Just robbed them of all effective authority.
Acute tension developed between Saint-Just and some of the other representatives on mission. Arising from the struggle between the Committee and the Convention, this clash was a significant incident in the growth of the Revolutionary dictatorship. But it showed even more clearly how little of a real dictatorship had yet been established, for it exposed the disorganization and divergency of powers. The conflict illustrated at the same time the differences, which were becoming increasingly real, between Robespierrism and Hébertism, for Saint-Just was the closest in the Committee to Robespierre, and the other representatives in Alsace were inclined to be ultra.
Intertwined and confused with these political quarrels the real purpose of the mission to Alsace worked itself out. Saint-Just and Le Bas were commissioned to the Army of the Rhine. The Army of the Moselle was presently added to their jurisdiction. They were expected to organize the forces by which the invaders could be driven from France.
The weeks from October 22, the day of their arrival in Alsace, to November 16, when they temporarily left Strasbourg for the front, were the most constructive period of the mission. After November 16 the civilian representatives became increasingly involved in party disputes, and the work of driving out the enemy fell more largely to the military commanders, Pichegru and Hoche.
Saint-Just was known from his great speech of October 10 to have definite ideas on dealing with soldiers. The question to him was above all one of morale. The troops must be made to feel that they fought in their own cause, for the salvation of the democratic Republic; they must have faith in the men who ordered their movements both from behind the lines and on the battlefield; and they must believe that the highest officials of government were really concerned about the welfare of common soldiers. The Army of the Rhine in particular, beaten and dispirited, huddled before the walls of Strasbourg, demoralized by the conviction that it had been betrayed, needed above all else to have its confidence restored. Saint-Just did not hesitate to dramatize himself as the long awaited angel of retribution. On his first day in Strasbourg he issued a proclamation.
The Representatives of the People, sent on extraordinary mission to the Army of the Rhine, to the soldiers of that army
Strasbourg, 3rd day of the 2nd month of the 2nd year of the Republic One and Indivisible.
[October 24, 1793]
We arrive! and we swear in the name of the army that the enemy shall be conquered. If there are traitors or even persons lukewarm to the cause of the people we bring the sword that is to strike them. Soldiers, we come to avenge you and to give you leaders who will take you to victory. We are determined to search for merit, to reward and advance it, and to pursue all crimes whosoever they be who commit them. Courage, brave Army of the Rhine; you shall henceforth have, along with liberty, good fortune and victory!
All chiefs, officers and agents of government whatsoever are commanded to satisfy within three days the just grievances of the soldiers. After this interval we will ourselves hear these grievances, and we will give such examples of justice and severity as the army has not yet seen.
SAINT-JUST, LE BAS
It was to lay a foundation for discipline, not to encourage petty complaining, that Saint-Just invited the men to make their grievances known. On the same day, apparently a few hours later, he issued another proclamation, announcing the victory at Wattignies. Discipline, he said, was the quality to which the Army of the North owed its success. This thesis he many times repeated.
The officers needed disciplining perhaps even more than the men. Many of them were in the habit of spending the nights in Strasbourg. Officers and men alike had been encouraged by other representatives to take part in the Jacobin politics of the city. With the officers setting so poor an example, and keeping such lax control, the morale of the troops broke down, and soldiers wandered aimlessly over the countryside looking for food or adventure.
Saint-Just set about the purging of army officers which for some time had been a feature of national policy. Many were arrested as traitors or aristocrats; the result was to rid the army of a number of officers that the troops distrusted. Saint-Just affirmed that for the good of the army at least one general must be put to death. The victim was Isambert, a man of sixty, who had weakly surrendered his post to a handful of Austrian hussars; he was condemned by a military court, and shot before the eyes of the assembled troops. Half a dozen other officers met the same fate, including one brigadier.
Officers were ordered to stay with their men. Generals were instructed to sleep in their tents. General Perdieu was dismissed for being in the theater in Strasbourg a few hours after his unit, stationed in the extreme front lines, had been attacked by the enemy. A certain Captain Texier, on his way to the theater a few nights later, had the misfortune to ask directions of Citizen Saint-Just himself. The captain was arrested. Army surgeons also felt the hand of the new master. They were ordered to remain with the men in battle instead of withdrawing safely to the rear. They were commanded also to stop the abuse of hospitalization papers, which soldiers were using as an official pretext for shirking.
Troops were forbidden to leave their places in camp; all outstanding permits to go out were canceled; officers were made responsible for full contingents. A cavalry trooper who asked leave to go home to watch over his private fortune was publicly degraded. It was decreed that anyone trying to slip by stealth into Strasbourg would be shot. And repeatedly Saint-Just ordered Pichegru to drill his men.
To the Austrians, when they suggested a parley, he gave one of his laconic answers. “The French Republic takes from and sends to its enemies nothing but lead.”
The troops meanwhile had to be fed, clothed and armed. They were as ragged and ill equipped as the Army of the North whose needs drove Jourdan almost frantic. Corruption and graft ran through the whole system of supply. Saint-Just decreed that dishonest purveyors, if convicted, should be shot; if only suspected, sent to the interior to prison. The Law of the Maximum was to be rigorously enforced. The authorities of eight adjoining departments were ordered to furnish grain and fodder within twelve days. Local authorities in places along the roads were required to supply horses and wagons.
In Strasbourg the demands were especially heavy. On October 31 the city officials were told to raise five thousand pairs of shoes and fifteen thousand shirts. On the same day a forced loan of nine million livres was exacted, to be paid by 193 citizens whose names were attached to the order. Four days later the impatient proconsuls were demanding why these levies had not yet produced results. On November 6 the mayor was instructed “to excite the zeal of all citizens” to supply the army with shoes, coats and hats. On the next morning, from ten o’clock to one, the most wealthy of the persons refusing the forced loan was made to sit, as a lesson to himself and to others, on the scaffold of the guillotine. A week later two thousand beds were demanded from the “rich” of Strasbourg, and on the next day ten thousand pairs of shoes from the “aristocrats” of the same city. Every overcoat in the city was also requisitioned. Since Strasbourg had hardly more than 40,000 inhabitants, it is evident that the tribute of beds (if ever collected) was not paid by the rich only, and that the ten thousand pairs of shoes were not all from the feet of aristocrats—except so far as “aristocrat” was a mere political expression.
To enforce such sweeping ordinances, and to deal with suspects, revolutionary courts were needed. Saint-Just and Le Bas, on their second day in Alsace, created such a court to travel through the department of the Lower Rhine. They extended the authority of the old military tribunal, giving it jurisdiction over persons charged with favoring the enemy or with dishonesty in the furnishing of supplies. It was impossible to separate, in any clear cut way, violations of military discipline or of economic regulations from the larger question of treason against the Republic. In Alsace, as we have seen, there were many who sympathized with the invaders. It is a moot question whether such sympathies were nationalistic, whether Alsatians were attracted to the invaders because the invaders were German. There is not much reason to think so. Throughout France there were people who hoped the Allies would win. Those who took this stand did not mean to be traitorous to France; they believed that the French government was in the hands of a clique of radicals to whom they owed no allegiance.
There was, however, a group in Alsace which, in the name of liberty, wished Strasbourg to return to its ancient status as a free city in the Empire. At the end of October a letter was seized at the French outposts. It was addressed to an unnamed citizen of Strasbourg, whom the bearer was to recognize by his stammering and his spectacles. Edelmann, one of the department administrators, fitted this description. The letter was signed by an émigré, the marquis of Saint-Hilaire, and it announced that within three days a party of disguised émigrés would slip into Strasbourg and take possession of the city.
The letter was actually a forgery, written by a certain Metz to ruin Edelmann, a personal enemy. Saint-Just assumed that it was genuine. He did not in any case trust the departmental administration or the other constituted authorities. These bodies had long ceased to be made up of their original elected members. They had been purged in the past by earlier representatives on mission, and were now full of political appointees not especially sympathetic to Saint-Just and Le Bas.
Saint-Just acted immediately on the Edelmann affair, either because he believed the letter authentic or because he saw in it a means of compromising political adversaries. He ordered every house in Strasbourg searched for outsiders, and invited the inhabitants of the city to denounce all suspects. On October 30 he asked the Strasbourg Jacobins for their frank opinion on the administrators of the Lower Rhine. Three days later he dissolved both the departmental administration and the municipality of Strasbourg. The Strasbourg Jacobins, taken by surprise, protested. Saint-Just defended his action by throwing doubt on the loyalty and the competence of the ejected officials. It was necessary for him to play up the dangers of treason in order to staff the government with men whom he could trust. He was involved in the old vicious circle: so little could the Mountaineers cooperate with each other, so far was France from that great surge of fellow feeling which some historians have depicted, that when a man assumed a heavy responsibility, as Saint-Just did in Alsace, he felt obliged to surround himself with a picked band of adherents, enlarging, in the process, the number of suspects, non-cooperators and political opponents.
Contending leaders had to assure themselves of popular support. More than factional rivalry was at stake; Saint-Just had definite ideas on the improvement of society, and believed that more economic equality was a necessary step to moral regeneration. The working class suffered from high prices and uncertain employment. Fear of leaving their families destitute deterred men from serving in the army. Political leaders, as people of wealth became estranged from the régime, looked with increasing favor on the poor, seeing in them the most patriotic and republican element in the country. Saint-Just, therefore, from motives drawn from both principle and expediency, sought to protect the working classes. For this purpose as well as to supply the army he rigidly enforced the requisitions and the maximum prices. Going a step further, he ordered that, from the proceeds of the forced loan levied on the 193 well-to-do citizens of Strasbourg, two million livres should be set aside for the “indigent patriots” of the city. The sum was increased by more than half a million livres by later decrees.
Saint-Just thus adopted in Alsace the same program for redistributing wealth which Couthon was introducing in Puy-de-Dôme. They aimed at helping the needy, without, however, going to such lengths as the Temporary Commission set up by Collot d’Herbois at Lyons. Collot d’Herbois was a Hébertist; Saint-Just and Couthon became the staunchest of Robespierrists. These latter two anticipated in November, in the regions committed to their charge, the social program which issued a few months later in the laws of Ventôse.
Saint-Just and Le Bas left Strasbourg on November 16. That night the Prussians tried to surprise the garrison at Bitche, a town on the frontier where four roads came together. They were repelled, and Saint-Just and Le Bas, from Bitche on the 21st, announced that the Republic was victorious from Saarbrücken to the Rhine. But the enemy was by no means yet driven from Alsace.
Meanwhile the political crisis came to a head in Strasbourg in the absence of the two proconsuls. Local affairs for some time had been dominated by two outsiders. One was Monet, the mayor of Strasbourg, who had survived Saint-Just’s purge of the municipality; he was even younger than Saint-Just, came from Savoy, held everything German in contempt, and was a Hébertist. The other was Euloge Schneider, a German from beyond the Rhine, a round-shouldered ex-monk and an authority on Greek literature; he had crossed into Alsace in 1791, became vicar to the constitutional bishop, edited a stormy sheet that was a kind of local Père Duchesne, and was now, at the end of 1793, public prosecutor of a revolutionary court. This court was not the one established by Saint-Just and Le Bas, but had been set up by other representatives on mission shortly before Saint-Just arrived.
Monet and Schneider detested each other, and were detested by the great majority of Alsatians. Neither was French in background, though Monet was French in language. They were foreign adventurers of the kind dreaded by Robespierre, seeing the Revolution partly as the local maneuvers in which they were engaged, partly as a world-wide movement in which men of all nationalities might share. They had little sense of solidarity with the rest of France, or of allegiance to the National Convention.
On the very day of Saint-Just’s departure a number of French-speaking strangers appeared in the streets of Strasbourg, fierce looking men with bristling mustaches, wearing red caps and armed with sabers. They were high-pressure patriots, some sixty in number, recruited by Monet among the Jacobins of neighboring departments. They called themselves the Propaganda, and, housed in the deserted college, organized and given a military guard, they set about promoting advanced Revolutionary doctrine. Monet intended to use them for two main purposes, to make the Alsatians forcibly French, and to exterminate the revealed religions, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, all of which were heavily represented in Strasbourg.
Strasbourg, like other provincial towns, saw its Feast of Reason on 30 Brumaire, the 20th of November. A great procession formed at nine o’clock in the morning, made up of Propagandists, girls dressed in white, local Jacobins, public officials and a miscellany of citizens. Bearing a bust of Marat, the crowd marched to the Temple of Reason, the erstwhile cathedral, over whose portals were placed a large tricolor and a placard reading “Light after darkness.” More flags draped the interior, and in the nave stood the usual symbolic mountain, with statues of Nature and Liberty at the summit. On the mountainside were portrayed “monsters with human face, reptiles half buried in fragments of rock,” symbolizing the frustrated powers of superstition. An orchestra played, and the gathering (alleged to number ten thousand) sang a “Hymn to Nature”:
Mother of the Universe, eternal Nature,
The People acknowledges your power eternal;
On the pompous wreckage of ancient imposture
Its hands raise your altar. …
Monet then made a speech in praise of reason. The surgeon-general of the Army of the Rhine denounced priests, tyrants, rascals, aristocrats, intriguers and moderates. Euloge Schneider abdicated his priesthood; many other clergy also renounced their errors. A fire on the altar consumed “the remains of saints beatified by the court of Rome and a few Gothic parchments,” and outside in the street fifteen cartloads of legal and historical documents from the archives of the diocese went up in flames.
These Dechristianizing activities, and other operations of Monet and the Propaganda, were supported by certain representatives on mission. Two of them, Milhaud and Guyardin, decreed on November 7 the suppression of all outward signs of religion. They had been recalled four days before by the Committee of Public Safety; probably they had not yet received the message, but in any case representatives sometimes stayed on, wielding their powers, long after being asked to return to Paris. The representative Baudot was in Strasbourg on the day of the Feast of Reason. He mingled freely with the marching crowd, and made a speech in the cathedral, “congratulating the people,” according to the contemporary report, “on its arrival at that happy time when all charlatanism, under whatever form it might take, was due to disappear.” Baudot was a physician by vocation, and medicine had made rapid strides in the eighteenth century; but Baudot, taking his cue from Schneider, “abjured a profession which owed its repute only to credulity and imposture.”
Baudot, Lacoste and some of the other representatives believed that the Alsatians were more sympathetic to the Austrians than to France. They denounced the German character of the region, whose language they could not speak, and whose people filled them with aversion. Lacoste spoke of guillotining a quarter of the population. Baudot, on one occasion in Strasbourg when two speeches were to be delivered in French and one in German, forbade the German speech to be made. Both Baudot and Lacoste sympathized with the imported Jacobins of the Propaganda, who, wandering among a people of whose language they were totally ignorant, introduced into Alsace the new horror of nationalistic persecution.
The unfortunate Alsatians had also to put up with Euloge Schneider, who could at least speak their language, but who was a foreigner without sympathy for them as a people. Schneider travelled through northern Alsace with his revolutionary court, trundling along a guillotine, ferociously punishing those whom he convicted. He was apparently not an exceptionally bloodthirsty man, since he put to death only about thirty in several months, but he spread terror by his loud talk and noisy threats, and by the impossibly high fines and long prison sentences which he imposed. A woman whom he found guilty of selling two heads of lettuce at twenty sous, and thus depreciating the purchasing power of the assignats, was condemned to pay a fine of 3,000 livres, spend six months in prison, and be exposed on the scaffold of the guillotine for two hours. Schneider was moreover a man of decidedly loose morals. Probably he did not, as some said, levy a tribute of girls in the places where he passed, but his arrival in a town or village was not an event at which the local families could rejoice.
Saint-Just and Le Bas were back in Strasbourg by November 24. In view of what had happened during their absence, it was increasingly difficult for them to ignore or compromise with the extremists. Yet they had to act warily; they were virtually alone, opposed by all the representatives on mission except one, Lémane, and dependent for getting anything done on the very local politicians that they meant to control. They made concessions, not unwillingly, because they favored in principle some of the objectives for which the more violent parties were working. They had already, just before leaving Strasbourg, signed a decree that the anti-German party would favor. By it the women of Alsace were “invited to give up their German fashions since their hearts are French.” Soon after returning, finding the anti-religious excitement at its height, they ordered the destruction of statues “around the Temple of Reason” (not in it or on it, the expression being perhaps intentionally vague), and decreed that a Republican flag should be flown on the steeple.
Their purpose was undoubtedly to save the cathedral from further mutilation. Saint-Just shared the religious policy of Robespierre. Both men had in them a strain of reverence that was stifled at the sight of Catholicism in practice, but awakened at the sight of vandalism and “philosophic masquerades.” Charles Nodier, a French man of letters who was a boy in Strasbourg at this time, and who saw Saint-Just occasionally, declares that the stern young Representative of the People, pleading on the floor of the Jacobins of Strasbourg, broke into tears at the thought of violations of religious freedom and outrages against the holy sacrament.
After an idyllic interlude, a quick trip to Paris, Le Bas to see his new wife, Saint-Just his fiancée, whom they brought back to Alsace and installed at Saverne behind the lines (for the two young Spartans were human), and perhaps (though there is no evidence) after a hurried conference with the Committee of Public Safety, Saint-Just and his colleague set about repressing Hébertism in Alsace.
The Propaganda was dissolved. Its members were ordered to go home. Word went out that the imprisoned Strasbourg officials should be treated with humanity. Saint-Just demanded from Schneider a public explanation of his conduct. Schneider replied on December 7. “The sans-culottes have bread, and the people bless the guillotine that has saved them.” To acquire a new respectability Schneider then suddenly married a girl at Barr. On December 14 he returned to Strasbourg riding in a carriage full of furniture belonging to his wife. Six horses drew the carriage, because of the weight of the load, according to some; and a group of sympathizers rode on horseback with drawn swords beside the newly married pair. Saint-Just, aided in this matter by Monet’s party, saw a chance to bring about Schneider’s ruin. He accused him of entering Strasbourg with insolent and aristocratic pomp, and condemned him to exposure for four hours on the scaffold of the guillotine. Le Bas wrote a note to the Committee, announcing the sending of Schneider to Paris for trial. “Let us have no faith in cosmopolitan charlatans,” he said, “but trust only to ourselves.” The Revolution had become a national enterprise; foreign enthusiasts were not wanted.
Saint-Just had more difficulty with the rival representatives on mission. The bickering and recrimination continued; conflicting orders on the same subject issued from different headquarters; the army was distracted by civilian chiefs who would not deign to communicate with each other. Baudot accused Lémane of making his decisions while drunk; Lémane denounced Baudot for living in scandalous ostentation. Each asked that either himself or the other be recalled. Lémane complained that agents from the War Office encroached upon his jurisdiction. Baudot was indignant because one of his colleagues had once been a priest. The Committee had decided upon Pichegru for the combined command of the Armies of the Rhine and the Moselle; Saint-Just and Le Bas were about to make the appointment; Lacoste and Baudot anticipated them by appointing Hoche instead. Saint-Just, though he accepted Hoche, protested sharply to the Committee. The Committee reprimanded Baudot and Lacoste, but could do nothing; indeed Lacoste had been recalled two weeks before. Lacoste and Baudot excused themselves by saying that the Committee kept them uninformed and that Saint-Just and Le Bas refused to recognize their existence. In short, the harmony among the representatives, during the whole period of Saint-Just’s mission, remained nil.
The disagreements were no doubt heightened by personal vanity, and fed by revolutionary psychology, for each representative thought himself supreme, believed his policy the only correct one, and distrusted both the achievements and the intentions of those not of his own faction. But there was a far more substantial basis of difference.
Baudot and Lacoste were extremists, who exaggerated the dangers because they delighted in repression. Alsace was no better than Toulon, according to Lacoste; even the Army of the Rhine was full of pro-Austrians. Counter-revolutionists, he said, had been cheered by Saint-Just’s punishment of Schneider. The Propaganda should have been supported and enlarged. Four thousand sans-culottes from outside Strasbourg should be stationed in the city to overawe it. All constituted authorities must again be purged, for the earlier purges had all been unsuccessful; sound Jacobins must be brought from outside Alsace to fill all the public offices. German institutions must be suppressed, and the use of the German language forbidden. Unflinching terror must attach Alsace to the Republic. Unity of power must be established among all authorities. Lacoste and Baudot of course would not be averse to exercising this power themselves. But Saint-Just’s predominance was, said Lacoste, “a veritable dictatorship and a monstrosity.”
Had Baudot and Lacoste had their way, the department of the Lower Rhine would have met the fate of Lyons, or even worse, since at Lyons there was no question of violent denationalization. As it turned out, only about 120 persons were put to death during the Terror in Alsace, about half of them by the court established by Saint-Just. Considering the extent of disaffection, the nearness of the enemy, and the huge totals accumulated in other places, where men like Baudot and Lacoste were in the saddle, the figure for Alsace was not high.
Meanwhile in southern Alsace, in the adjoining department of the Upper Rhine, another of the Twelve was serving as representative on mission. Hérault-Séchelles was one of the most prominent of Jacobins. He was the main author of the Jacobin constitution. He had twice been president of the National Convention. In August 1793, as leader of the ceremonies that commemorated the fall of royalty, he had been the cynosure of Republican France. But he went to Alsace under a cloud. He tried there to open a correspondence with Saint-Just. Saint-Just ignored him, having heard Fabre d’Eglantine’s denunciations a few weeks before. Saint-Just explained his attitude in a hasty postscript to Robespierre. “Confidence no longer has value when shared with corrupt men; in that case [apparently meaning when confidence is not shared with the corrupt] a man does his duty from love of country alone, and this feeling is purer.”
This cryptic remark, written unthinkingly as the confused wording shows, is perhaps for that reason more psychologically revealing. Saint-Just was a political puritan. He could not willingly work with men of whom he morally disapproved. He judged men more by their motives than by the contributions they might make to a common achievement. He feared that the good cause would be tarnished if dubious characters were allowed to promote it. This was not practical politics. Nor was it practical politics, if Saint-Just thought Hérault guilty of the charges against him, to refuse all association with him and so leave him to his own devices.
Hérault was in truth no exemplary character. He was so affected that it was almost impossible to tell what he believed. Some of his writings, the Theory of Ambition, the Reflections on Declamation, composed in aristocratic leisure before the Revolution, might make one wonder whether he could be sincere. He was a nobleman by birth; the fact may well have led him, in self-defense in 1793, to proclaim more advanced doctrines than he really favored; in any case even his most patriotic acts might be thought hypocritical by other Jacobins. In Paris he was involved with certain foreign hotheads, and in Alsace he took with him, as his mistress, a woman whose husband and brother-in-law were émigrés. It was factional politics, however, that led Fabre d’Eglantine to accuse Hérault of conspiring with foreigners against the Republic.
There is no reason to believe that Hérault had any intentions of treachery. But he was out of favor with Robespierre, and is therefore out of favor with the modern Robespierrist writers, who hold, briefly, that Robespierre was always right. Albert Mathiez, the head of the Robespierrist school, took especial pains to prove Hérault a Hébertist and an ultra. Professor Mathiez in these erudite researches was not indifferent to the temptations of faculty politics, for Professor Aulard, holder of a choice chair at the University of Paris, had had the misfortune to call Hérault a Dantonist, thus revealing to the sharp eye of his rival a distressing ignorance of the subject.
Alsace offers a laboratory for estimating Hérault’s extremism. What Hérault did in the Upper Rhine can be compared with what the Robespierrist Saint-Just did in the Lower Rhine. Mathiez recites the story of Hérault’s “excesses”: he cashiered certain constituted authorities, he instituted house-to-house searches, he created a revolutionary tribunal, he regretted that the Alsatians were slow in making denunciations, he arrested suspects and deported them to the interior of France. Saint-Just did all these things at the same time fifty miles away. According to Mathiez, Hérault surrounded himself with the friends of Schneider. But Hérault arrested the Schneider of Upper Alsace, a man named Müller, an admirer of Schneider’s, and like Schneider a radical ex-priest from across the Rhine. Nor did Hérault grant funds to poor sans-culottes on any such scale as Saint-Just did, not to mention a real Hébertist, Collot d’Herbois, with his Temporary Commission at Lyons.
Hérault used language that might be thought extreme. Reporting on his mission, he took unconcealed pride in his rigorous methods. He declared, quoting the famous phrase of an unknown speaker: “ ‘Make terror the order of the day!’ What he said I have done!” Mathiez calls this effusion “a debauch of useless and even harmful civic spirit.” But who among the Revolutionists might not have said as much? And probably it would not have occurred to Hérault to utter the terse dogma of Saint-Just: “The French people is composed of patriots. The others are helots or nothing.”
The significant differences between Hérault and Saint-Just in Alsace reduce themselves to three. Hérault, like Baudot and Lacoste, insisted that the number of patriots was almost infinitesimally small. This attitude advertised one’s own super-patriotism, and might become, as it did at Lyons, an incentive to almost limitless terrorization. With Hérault, however, it issued in the death of only two or three persons in the Upper Rhine, where there were only twelve executions during the whole Terror.
Secondly, Hérault, again like Baudot and Lacoste, created a Revolutionary Army to regenerate the peasants and townspeople of the department. These organizations were frowned upon by the Committee of Public Safety, and all except those authorized by the Convention (which meant the one set up on September 5 under pressure of insurrection) were prohibited on December 4 by the law of 14 Frimaire.
HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES
Thirdly, Hérault actively supported Dechristianization. He was more definitely a philosophe than any other of the Twelve; he had once talked with the eminent Buffon, had travelled far and wide to see the manuscripts of Montesquieu and Rousseau; he shared the ironic spirit of Voltaire, the faith in pleasure preached by Helvétius, the doubts on God which had made the baron Holbach’s name a scandal. He entered with enthusiasm into the business of relieving people of their religious persuasions. This was enough to embroil him with Robespierre. As a matter of fact, however, Hérault showed less impatience of Catholicism in the Upper Rhine than Couthon did in Puy-de-Dôme. Yet Couthon succeeded in becoming an irreproachable Robespierrist.
Hérault is doubtless to be classified as a Hébertist. He showed some of the earmarks, without being a really violent man. Hébertism in any case was not primarily a body of doctrine or set of policies. It was a faction, a shifting combination of persons who were inconvenient or dangerous to the government. Hérault was connected with some of these persons, though perhaps no more so than other Jacobins whom the fatal stigma did not touch.
Some kind of factional plot against Hérault developed while he was in Alsace. A mysterious letter was brought to the representative Lémane, who was in charge at Strasbourg in Saint-Just’s absence. It was addressed to the mayor of Strasbourg, Monet. The signature was again that of the “Marquis of Saint-Hilaire,” now ostensibly writing from Colmar in the Upper Rhine. “I am only here,” said the pretended marquis, “to have a talk with our friend Hérault, who has promised me everything.” This letter was undoubtedly fabricated to compromise Monet and Hérault. Could it have been inspired by Saint-Just himself? No one knows. Conceivably Saint-Just may have caused both the Saint-Hilaire letters to be written, for both played into his hands. The first, compromising Edelmann, had given him a chance to purge the authorities of the Lower Rhine; the second helped to discredit Monet, against whom he was still struggling, and provided evidence to support the charges against Hérault made a few weeks earlier by Fabre d’Eglantine. But this is pure conjecture, and conjecture proves nothing.
Lémane arrested Monet, and set out for Colmar to interview Hérault-Séchelles. But, so he said, his carriage overturned on the way; he was obliged to return to Strasbourg, where, on further reflection, deciding that Monet “enjoyed the confidence of Saint-Just” (this was not true, in view of the difference between Saint-Just and Monet on the Propaganda), he released Monet, put his two coachmen in jail, and sent the incriminating letter without comment to Hérault. Whatever the plot was, it therefore came to nothing.
But Hérault’s name was linked politically with the Hébertists. On December 11 the Committee of Public Safety recalled him, along with Lacoste, Saint-Just’s foe, and Javogues, who had been a thorn in the side of Couthon.
The Committee tried to pacify its quarrelsome and factious agents. Robespierre himself penned a letter to Saint-Just, signed also by Barère and Billaud-Varenne, breathing the spirit of cooperation and broadmindedness. The complaints of Baudot and Lacoste had poured into the green room, and were definitely Hébertist in their tenor. Robespierre, who at this time (December 29) needed the support of the ultras against the citras, ignoring the obvious opinions of the two complainants, declared to Saint-Just that Baudot and Lacoste were inspired by as pure a zeal as he was. We must sink our differences in a higher patriotism, he said. It is not quite clear, even in view of the political situation, why Robespierre, in a confidential dispatch to Saint-Just, should deal so blandly with the matter of extremism.
By this time, the end of 1793, the enemy forces were driven from Alsace, through a combination of maneuvers that need not be described. Saint-Just’s restoration of morale had its effect. Hoche and Pichegru emerged as military heroes. Not until twenty years later was this quarter of France again to be threatened.
But along with the disappearing Austrians went a pitiable host, refugees from the victorious Republic, estimated at from twenty to fifty thousand, perhaps numbering thirty. Men, women and children, families and whole villages, encumbered with bags and bundles, they hurried along with the retreating Imperial columns, riding on the artillery caissons, improvising seats on the supply trains. They were Alsatians, plain people of German language, terrified by this French Republic which they could not understand. Their lives had been disordered by the deluge of new laws, their Lutheran or Catholic religion had been repressed, their language and their costume denounced, their substance taken by requisitions or by exaggerated fines. They had been thrown into panic by undisciplined French soldiers, by their own Jacobin clubs, by Schneider, by the Propagandists, and by Saint-Just, whose moderating influence was not apparent in the confusion.
All these “aristocrats” were pronounced to be émigrés by the Convention. Their lands were confiscated, and they were not allowed to return. The repatriation of the fugitives, who found no warm welcome in Germany, and who soon were looking longingly across the Rhine like the shades in Hades across the river Styx, was a problem long debated in Paris and not settled until years later. Alsace in its way suffered as much as Lyons from the events of 1793.
The French troops pressed northward, reasserting their ephemeral conquest of the preceding year, relieving the French garrisons which had been left as islands by the advancing flood of the Allies. As the Republicans returned, some thousands of Germans abandoned their homes, imitated the twenty-odd thousand Alsatians, and fled with the defeated army.
On December 30 Baudot and Lacoste (it was now three weeks since Lacoste had been recalled) sent a report to Paris that was full of anticipations of the future. They questioned the value of the law of 14 Frimaire by which their authority was diminished. Such unruliness of representatives on mission was in time to undermine the Committee of Public Safety. Writing from Germany, Baudot and Lacoste declared that the German towns had no idea of the Revolution; they asked for more powers in order to spread the Revolutionary ideas; and they said that they were arranging to have the French army supported by the German population. The formula of the late Republican and Napoleonic years was sketched by the two enthusiastic deputies: maintain the French armies by drawing upon the resources of foreigners, and reorganize the occupied countries by applying Revolutionary principles. A new kind of civilization was coming to Germany and to Europe.
Saint-Just and Le Bas returned to Paris in the first week in January. Saint-Just had accomplished his main purpose with brilliant success. The Austrians were out of France. He had perhaps also prevented the Terror from becoming in Alsace the mad slaughter that it became at Lyons. But he had not exactly reconciled Alsace to the Republic. He ignored the mass migration in which his mission ended. Were not the refugees, by his definition, “helots or nothing”? Nor had he attached the other representatives in the region to the Revolutionary Government. He left behind him a group of disgruntled men who were influential enough to be dangerous. Their dissatisfaction came from important differences of opinion, but it was aroused also by Saint-Just’s haughty and exclusive spirit.
Hérault-Séchelles returned in the middle of December. He came back only to his ruin. He was the victim of Fabre d’Eglantine’s false denunciation, suspected of belonging to a non-existent foreign conspiracy. The Dantonists in the Convention attacked him for partisan reasons; certain Hébertists spoke in his favor. Couthon feebly interposed, but Robespierre was determined to put an end to the matter. From its agent in Constantinople the Committee of Public Safety received a document, purloined from the Austrians, which showed that the proceedings of the Committee on September 2 had become known to the enemy. The Committee assumed that the leak had occurred through Hérault. On December 31 Robespierre, Barère, Carnot, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois, in a letter written by Robespierre, offered their colleague his choice: he could submit to investigation, or he could resign. Hérault never again attended a meeting in the green room, and in three months he was dead.
Probably Robespierre really believed that Hérault was guilty of treason. The evidence against him would not convince a judicial mind in time of calm. The charges of Fabre d’Eglantine were mere assertions, and Fabre’s reputation for honesty was low; the document received from Constantinople was so inadequate that it had to be altered before Hérault was put on trial. But with Robespierre the idea of treachery had become an obsession. It does not make Robespierre the less deluded to argue that the victims of the Foreign Plot deserved their fate because they were Hébertists.
In a way, however, Robespierre was by no means deluded. Hérault did, after all, have friends among a faction that threatened the government. He was sacrificed, like many others, not so much to wild revolutionary frenzies (which conservatives are apt to exaggerate), as to the principle of governmental stability, which in the circumstances meant keeping Robespierre and the rest of the Committee of Public Safety in office. And in the low state of public cooperation, with the eternal tendency of the Mountain to split, a governing group, to remain stable or to execute any continuous policy, had to become smaller and smaller, purging and purifying itself of those on whom it could not rely.
And how could Robespierre, or the others in the Committee, rely on Hérault-Séchelles? He had not limited himself in Alsace to executing their collective policy. How could anyone be sure what this scion of the old régime, with his arts of the dancing master and the rhetorician, was really aiming at? Hérault was more a connoisseur of ideas than a believer in them, an opportunist and a lover of excitement, a philosopher of the salons who attempted, with an antique literary republicanism, to take part in the overwhelming reality of the Republic. The real Republic was a turbulent and revolutionary thing, embodying class demands, drawing strength from a moral earnestness that reached the point of fanaticism. Hérault was a skeptic, an ironist, a scoffer, easygoing, amiable. There is surely a place in the world for Héraults, but not by the side of Robespierres, and probably not in revolutions at all.
With Saint-Just back and Hérault gone, the Committee of Public Safety took on early in January the form which it kept until the following summer. Nine of its members were henceforth usually in Paris. Two were away, Jeanbon Saint-André and Prieur of the Marne, except that Saint-André spent the month of Pluviôse in Paris. The nine were later called, with sufficient numerical accuracy, the Decemvirs.