EIGHT of the once ruling Twelve were still alive at nightfall of 10 Thermidor. They were all young as age is computed among men in such positions; Lindet was fifty-one, but Prieur of the Côte-d’Or was only thirty-one, and the average (both mean and median) was almost exactly half-way between them. They had half their lives to finish, having already lived, as far as politics is concerned, as fully as men can expect to.
Their ways diverged widely after Thermidor. After scarcely knowing each other before entering the great Committee, and then knowing each other under the most revealing of circumstances, getting tired together after midnight, conferring, reporting, accusing, arguing in high tempers, making up with lowered voices, somehow, until the end, cooperating for the good as all understood it, a compact group keeping its secrets from outsiders—after this year of inescapable intimacy, mutual annoyance and common satisfactions, they resumed their individual lives, eight men who saw no more of each other, yet whose minds went back irresistibly to the same scenes, except indeed for Prieur of the Marne, who was never in Paris during the Year Two, and for Saint-André, whose recollections of the green room were much broken by absence. Eventually they became old men, gray survivors of the past, strangely detached from the extraordinary events about them, still rethinking their year of power, dwelling on alternatives and might-have-beens, nourishing resentments against factions long extinct, meeting for reminiscence with old companions, or opening the eyes of youth by anecdotes of a titanic age. And as they grew old and declined something else took on new life and strength, the memory of Robespierre, whom they had combined to strike down, and whose death, in blasting the vision of the Year Two, had brought their own relegation to the sidelines.
Only Collot d’Herbois did not live to be old. He and Billaud reached Cayenne in the summer of 1795. They suffered the usual rigors, as desperate characters to whom no indulgence could safely be granted, and were kept apart from each other, until both came down with fever. Raving and delirious, both haters of the church, they were cared for by the nuns who kept a hospital in the settlement. Collot soon expired while his old colleague lay deathly sick in the next bed. They had been away from France just a year.
Billaud recovered under the ministrations of the sisters, who grew rather fond of their dreadful patient and protected him from the pitilessness of the governor. In time the authorities became less strict. Always a Rousseauist, Billaud adjusted himself to the state of nature, took up farming, and settled down with a black slave girl, aptly named Virginie who remained faithful to him for the rest of his life. He enjoyed a kind of peace, troubled only by political memories and occasional outbursts which the loving Virginie must have found incomprehensible. News came in 1800 that all political prisoners were pardoned by Bonaparte, but Billaud refused the opportunity to return. Years went by, years spent in tropical agriculture taught him by Virginie, years of rumination which led him to regret the death of Robespierre and Danton, years devoted to lamenting the failure of the “puritan Republic” as he called it, and to the writing of all but unintelligible memoirs, which show a mind progressively deranged by the contemplation of its own virtue. Billaud changed some of his opinions, but he never wavered in believing himself a man of exceptional goodness persecuted unjustly.
When Guiana, long shut off from Europe by British sea power, was returned in 1815 to Bourbon France, the aging exile, fearing a renewal of severe treatment, went with Virginie to the United States, which he did not find to his liking, so that in 1817 he settled in Haiti. The authorities of Haiti, which was then beginning its career as an independent black republic, welcomed him warmly but with some alarm lest he embroil them with France. The president felt obliged to protest when Billaud, having scarcely arrived, stormed openly against the Bourbons and ex-Girondists who held sway in Paris. But Haiti had uses for so ardent a republican, an authentic old Jacobin now turned native. He became counsellor to the high court, advising the citizens on the mysteries of law, which after all he had once studied. He died in 1819, a white-headed man of sixty-three, with Virginie and Haiti left to mourn him, a dignitary in a republic not too far removed from nature.
Jeanbon Saint-André, a very different person, found a very different salvation. He was not known for partisan fury, and was not involved in the machinations of Thermidor. Surviving the surge of reaction against the Committee, he received new administrative assignments, and was presently sent on a mission to Algeria. The Turks took him captive and held him for three years. He returned to France in 1801. Bonaparte, seeing in him one of the ablest of the republicans, offered him employment.
Saint-André faced a question which not all old Jacobins answered in the same way—whether or not to take part in the authoritarian republic which Bonaparte set up in place of the liberal one. Much could be said on both sides, and honest men were of contrary opinions. Saint-André had not abandoned his Revolutionary principles, but he hated inefficiency and disorder, and he saw in Bonaparte a creature of the Revolution, whose enemies were the enemies of the Republic. He accepted the First Consul’s offer. He became prefect of Mainz, a position of delicacy and importance, involving the government of a newly annexed German population on the strategic Rhine frontier.
The republic changed gradually into an empire, and Saint-André changed with it, or perhaps only reverted to a deeper character underlying his republican phase, for he had been no radical until the Revolution made him one, and might have been content before 1789 (when he was already forty, and of mature opinions) with a reorganization of the monarchy in the interests of legal equality, and a chance for Protestants to enjoy public careers—both of which Bonaparte gave. Saint-André accepted the new aristocracy that was presumably based on talent. He became a baron of the empire and officer of the Legion of Honor. He stood at receptions, this onetime orator at the Jacobin club, among marshals, dukes and counts, royalists, émigrés and high functionaries of the church. Yet observers noted that he dressed more simply than others, that he seemed to harbor a half-expressed disdain, that he neither regretted nor concealed having served on the Committee of Public Safety, that he let no one forget that when others present had been in hiding or in connivance with the enemy, when the country was reduced to revolutionary chaos and even the emperor was only an artillery captain, he had done his part to hold the government together.
Remnants of the Grand Army, retreating from Moscow, poured into Mainz in 1813. The hospitals filled up with sick and wounded. Cholera raged in the city. The prefect, making the rounds of the hospitals, caught the contagion and died. He had participated in the whole tremendous drama of his generation, but he was spared the dénouement of Waterloo.
Carnot also accepted Napoleon. He had reason to be disillusioned in the Republic. Thermidor he survived, and he continued to be active in politics, but he was victimized in a later coup d’état (Fructidor this time, of the Year Five), and although a Director, one of the five chiefs of state, he was almost deported to join Billaud in Guiana. He had his property confiscated, was deprived of his seat in the Institute, and saved himself only by fleeing to Switzerland, where the Republican government still relentlessly pursued him. He returned after Bonaparte seized power, and for a few months acted as minister of war. But despite his experiences Carnot remained firm in his old convictions. He surrendered his ministry and entered the Tribunate, the one body in the new government where public discussion was allowed. There he spoke out against some of Bonaparte’s policies, which were to him a profound disappointment, departing as they did ever farther from the republican ideal. In 1807, when the Tribunate was abolished, he retired to private life, busying himself with mathematics, the theory of fortification, and his two children.
The empire rose to heights undreamed of, but the old organizer of victory remained aloof. Then the crash came, and Carnot flew to the emperor’s support. The threat of 1793 was repeated; foreign armies were within the frontiers, bringing with them the Bourbons, worse enemies than Bonaparte in the eyes of unconverted Republicans. During the Hundred Days Carnot tried vainly to repeat the triumphs of the Committee of Public Safety. He served as minister of the interior, and accepted also, without enthusiasm, the title of count of the empire. He was one of the few not to lose his head when news came of Waterloo. But France, exhausted by a generation of struggle, laid down its arms.
Louis XVIII and his advisers had at first held out a program of clemency and oblivion. Even the regicides, those members of the Convention who had voted death to Louis XVI in 1793, had not at first been officially molested. But after the return from Elba, and the Hundred Days, and Waterloo, the restored government took the view that some elderly Jacobins were incorrigible. Regicides who had rallied to Napoleon after his return from Elba were banished in 1816. Over a hundred who had sat in the Convention thus went into exile, among them Carnot, now sixty-three years old.
Alexander of Russia allowed him to settle in Warsaw, where, however, he found the climate too severe. He moved on to Prussia, wandering aimlessly, not yet a national hero, only an old man, a mathematician, an unrepentant revolutionary in a world longing for peace and stability. He relieved the tedium of exile in long conversations with his son, a boy hardly twenty who plied him with questions, took notes from his dictation, and eventually wrote recollections wherein the father took on the lineaments of a giant. Carnot’s grandson became a president of France. He himself died obscurely at Magdeburg in 1823.
Robert Lindet and the two Prieurs gradually slipped back into the middle-class existence from which they had come. They lost their revolutionary excitement, but not their revolutionary beliefs. Seemingly commonplace, their later lives were in reality full of meaning. There were thousands like them, daily engaged in ordinary business, reliable and solid citizens, preeminently bourgeois, who however had once astounded the world, and still withheld their sympathies from the government. That the Revolution, even the Terror, had drawn the support of such men, and that the reaction, when it came, allowed them as a rule to reintegrate themselves into society, illuminates the difference between that day and ours.
Lindet and Prieur of the Marne stayed on in public life for a while after Thermidor, holding rather to the leftist side. Prieur, involved in a neo-Jacobin uprising in 1795, went into hiding for several years. Lindet was charged with complicity in Babeuf’s quasi-socialistic movement of 1796; he accepted the Fructidorian faction that ruined Carnot, and acted as minister of finances in 1799. Neither Lindet nor Prieur of the Marne would recognize Bonaparte’s coup d’état of Brumaire. Both resumed the private practice of law in Paris. Prieur drops from sight during Napoleon’s time, but Lindet is known to have made a fortune of 50,000 francs, between the ages of fifty-seven and seventy-three, and to have commented freely, in his correspondence, on the ostentation and vainglory of the empire.
The last stand of Napoleon, making imminent the return of Louis XVIII, stirred the two retired regicides in their quiescence. Both were solicited by Jacobin friends to join with the emperor. Lindet, an old man, refused; Prieur of the Marne, still hardly more than fifty, consented. Lindet consequently was untouched after 1815; he died peaceably in 1825, aged eighty-two, and was buried at Père Lachaise, the only one of the Twelve to have a grave in Paris. Prieur fled to Belgium, where a host of onetime members of the Convention were tolerated by the new king of the Netherlands, and where he dragged out eleven years of exile, dying in poverty at Brussels in 1827.
Prieur of the Côte-d’Or had little part in public affairs after Thermidor. After Brumaire he withdrew still further from the political stage. Like his friend Carnot, he went back to his interests in science. Restless from inactivity, a bachelor without family concerns, he finally made overtures to the imperial government, applying for a post as inspector in the educational system. Failing to obtain it, and still in his early forties, he went into business, setting up a wallpaper factory in Paris. He made a fair living, wrote a book on the “decomposition of light,” and won a prize for the coloring matter that he used in his factory. In 1811 he was pensioned as a retired colonel, he who had once been minister of munitions. He stood by indifferent while the empire fell, and so remained in France under the restored monarchy, suffering only unofficial embarrassments, as when the Academy of Dijon, in a surge of royalist sentiment, dropped him and Carnot from its list of members. Carnot’s son, returning to France after his father’s death, sought him out, and the two discoursed at length on the great days of the Committee of Public Safety. Finally in 1832 Prieur died at Dijon. He was buried with the honors due a colonel of engineers, but the funeral was kept quiet, for the authorities feared a Republican demonstration. The Republic in 1832 was a revived and growing threat.
Meanwhile Barère lived on and on. Condemned to share the fate of Collot and Billaud, conducted with them through a jeering country to the very wharves from which they departed, saved by a trifling sequence of accidents (“the first time Barère failed to sail with the wind”), placed in confinement and managing to slip out of it, hunted and hidden until the political storm blew over, Barère gradually emerged again into open view and labored to make himself a new place in public life. There was no living man in France, and few dead ones, more closely associated in the public mind with the Terror. He was the Anacreon of the Guillotine, the spokesman of the Committee of Public Safety, the orator whose inflammatory Gascon eloquence had more than once reached the verge of hysteria. And being supple by nature, too realistic to cling to lost causes, too amiable to be a factional chief, too devoted to the Revolution not to assist the revolutionary group in power, he had the reputation of being a weathervane, a false friend, purely self-seeking.
In 1798 he sought to regain official favor by publishing an enormous book, The Freedom of the Seas, or The English Government Unmasked. It was a continuation of his diatribes in the Convention, and anticipated the main ideas of the Continental System. The successful revolutionary factions, thinking him presumptuous even to show his face, spurned the olive branch that he offered. He therefore welcomed the advent of Bonaparte. He hoped for high office, such as Carnot obtained, but he received only a few commissions to write propaganda. His attitude toward Napoleon fluctuated in the following years, as did that of many men of less pliable allegiance, but in the end, during the Hundred Days, he threw in his lot with the empire, and so was banished in 1816.
In Belgium Barère mixed with other exiles, especially for a time with Buonarotti and with Vadier, now in his dotage. A symbolism hangs over the reunion of these three. Vadier personified the eighteenth century. Born in 1736, he spoke the language of the “philosophers.” For Vadier the Revolution meant the stamping out of Catholicism. He had schemed against Robespierre in the famous Théot case because he thought Robespierre too religious. Barère was the Revolution itself, the reflection of its successive phases, sensitive to all its enthusiasms, hopes and hatreds, changeable and volatile yet possessing a core of consistency, a belief in the rights of the individual and of the nation. Buonarotti was the Revolution of the future. Not much younger than Barère, active like him in 1793, though unimportant, Buonarotti understood by the Revolution the conflict between rich and poor. He had been a leader in Babeuf’s “conspiracy of equals.” He was a living link between the First Republic and the socialist writers of the 1830’s in whose circles he became a familiar figure.
The three expatriates talked mostly of the past. All now lamented Thermidor, for however they differed in what they thought the true Revolution was, they could all agree that Thermidor had perverted it. Buonarotti reproached the two others with having betrayed the cause by joining against Robespierre. Vadier and Barère, to justify themselves, expatiated on the purity of their intentions; they had felt it their duty, they said, to halt the mad progress of a dictator. Buonarotti thought that had Robespierre lived the Revolution would have reached its true consummation, a social reorganization in the interests of the working class. So the Robespierre legend grew, or rather two distinct legends, portraying a Robespierre whose irresponsible ambition had led to calamity, and a Robespierre who was an early friend of the proletariat, about to embark on economic revolution when he fell. Both portraits owed most of their vitality to the psychological needs of those who drew them.
Barère returned to France after the revolution of 1830. The new Citizen King enjoyed talking with the old man, trying to probe into the secret facts of the Revolution, and in particular the history of his father, the duke of Orléans, Philippe-Égalité. Once a year for many years the octogenarian regicide, whose circumstances were not very prosperous, received a thousand-franc note sent by the royal hand. The government also made payments to him as a confidential informer. It is not known against whom he informed; the Orléans monarchy, like most French régimes, had irreconcilable enemies to both right and left. He spent his last years at Tarbes, his birthplace at the foot of the Pyrenees, to which he had been a stranger since his youth. There he lived revered by some, regarded by all with awe, an affable old man with the manners of the old régime but with modern ideas, elected by radicals to sit in the council of the department, talking endlessly of the past, writing mountains of memoranda which, when published after his death as his memoirs, became a byword for self-extenuation and unreliability.
The industrial revolution spread rapidly through France in the 1830’s. Poorly paid workingmen objected to a régime operated by the small top layer of the moneyed class. They believed that once, forty years before, a democratic republic had been on the very threshold of existence. Cheap reprints of speeches and writings of Robespierre circulated in the popular quarters. His Declaration of the Rights of Man was avidly read and eagerly discussed. The historians were at work: the laborious Buchez, a democratic mystic, was producing volumes (forty in all), in which the Incorruptible rose up as the Messiah and sacrificial being of the Revolution. In 1840 the first reasonably complete edition of the martyr’s works appeared. With Robespierre as its symbol the Revolution was again stirring, preparing the eruption of 1848 and the Second Republic.
Barère had no deep understanding of the world of his old age. Yet he too, for all his hobnobbing with the Citizen King, still dreamed the dream of the Republic, an ideal state to be hoped for, the substance of everything good. The time being one in which progress was occurring, and believed to be universal, Barère felt an unbounded confidence in the future. The supposed cynic, the suave purveyor of words, shared in the vision.
“The Republic,” he wrote in his closing years, “is the wish of elevated minds and free hearts. It is the utopia of ardent and energetic spirits nourished on the enlightenment of civilization and independence. It is the government of common sense, justice and economy. It is the inevitable tendency of the human race.” He came too to revise his opinion of Robespierre, whom in the heat of political passion he had called a monster, and whose grave he had designated as the repository of political hatred. “He was a man of purity and integrity,” he said on his deathbed, “a true and sincere republican.”
Shortly after making this confession, at the age of eighty-six, in the year 1841, almost half a century after his days of eminence, the last member of the Committee of Public Safety, with his hopes set on the future, left the troubled and revolutionary world in which he had always lived.