Hippolyte
Carnot is much to blame in
this matter.
this matter.
Macaulay
The
financial difficulties produced by the war carried to the height
the discontent of that larger body of people who cared little about
theories, and much about taxes.
The meeting of the States-General was the signal for the explosion of
all the hoarded passions of a century. In that assembly, there were
undoubtedly very able men. But they had no practical knowledge of the
art of government. All the great English revolutions have been conducted
by practical statesmen. The French Revolution was conducted by mere
speculators. Our constitution has never been so far behind the age as to
have become an object of aversion to the people. The English revolutions
have therefore been undertaken for the purpose of defending, correcting,
and restoring,--never for the mere purpose of destroying. Our countrymen
have always, even in times of the greatest excitement, spoken reverently
of the form of government under which they lived, and attacked only what
they regarded as its corruptions. In the very act of innovating they
have constantly appealed to ancient prescription; they have seldom
looked abroad for models; they have seldom troubled themselves with
Utopian theories; they have not been anxious to prove that liberty is a
natural right of men; they have been content to regard it as the lawful
birthright of Englishmen. Their social contract is no fiction. It
is still extant on the original parchment, sealed with wax which was
affixed at Runnymede, and attested by the lordly names of the Marischals
and Fitzherberts. No general arguments about the original equality of
men, no fine stories out of Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos, have
ever affected them so much as their own familiar words,--Magna
Charta,--Habeas Corpus,--Trial by Jury,--Bill of Rights. This part of
our national character has undoubtedly its disadvantages. An Englishman
too often reasons on politics in the spirit rather of a lawyer than of
a philosopher. There is too often something narrow, something exclusive,
something Jewish, if we may use the word, in his love of freedom. He
is disposed to consider popular rights as the special heritage of the
chosen race to which he belongs. He is inclined rather to repel than to
encourage the alien proselyte who aspires to a share of his privileges.
Very different was the spirit of the Constituent Assembly. They had
none of our narrowness; but they had none of our practical skill in the
management of affairs. They did not understand how to regulate the order
of their own debates; and they thought themselves able to legislate for
the whole world. All the past was loathsome to them. All their agreeable
associations were connected with the future. Hopes were to them all that
recollections are to us. In the institutions of their country they found
nothing to love or to admire. As far back as they could look, they saw
only the tyranny of one class and the degradation of another,--Frank
and Gaul, knight and villein, gentleman and roturier. They hated the
monarchy, the church, the nobility. They cared nothing for the States or
the Parliament. It was long the fashion to ascribe all the follies which
they committed to the writings of the philosophers. We believe that
it was misrule, and nothing but misrule, that put the sting into those
writings. It is not true that the French abandoned experience for
theories. They took up with theories because they had no experience of
good government. It was because they had no charter that they ranted
about the original contract. As soon as tolerable institutions were
given to them, they began to look to those institutions. In 1830 their
rallying cry was "Vive la Charte". In 1789 they had nothing but theories
round which to rally. They had seen social distinctions only in a
bad form; and it was therefore natural that they should be deluded by
sophisms about the equality of men. They had experienced so much evil
from the sovereignty of kings that they might be excused for lending a
ready ear to those who preached, in an exaggerated form, the doctrine of
the sovereignty of the people.
The English, content with their own national recollections and names,
have never sought for models in the institutions of Greece or Rome. The
French, having nothing in their own history to which they could look
back with pleasure, had recourse to the history of the great ancient
commonwealths: they drew their notions of those commonwealths, not from
contemporary writers, but from romances written by pedantic moralists
long after the extinction of public liberty. They neglected Thucydides
for Plutarch. Blind themselves, they took blind guides. They had no
experience of freedom; and they took their opinions concerning it
from men who had no more experience of it than themselves, and whose
imaginations, inflamed by mystery and privation, exaggerated the unknown
enjoyment;--from men who raved about patriotism without having ever had
a country, and eulogised tyrannicide while crouching before tyrants.
The maxim which the French legislators learned in this school was, that
political liberty is an end, and not a means; that it is not merely
valuable as the great safeguard of order, of property, and of morality,
but that it is in itself a high and exquisite happiness to which order,
property, and morality ought without one scruple to be sacrificed. The
lessons which may be learned from ancient history are indeed most useful
and important; but they were not likely to be learned by men who, in all
their rhapsodies about the Athenian democracy, seemed utterly to forget
that in that democracy there were ten slaves to one citizen; and who
constantly decorated their invectives against the aristocrats with
panegyrics on Brutus and Cato,--two aristocrats, fiercer, prouder, and
more exclusive, than any that emigrated with the Count of Artois.
We have never met with so vivid and interesting a picture of the
National Assembly as that which M. Dumont has set before us. His
Mirabeau, in particular, is incomparable. All the former Mirabeaus
were daubs in comparison. Some were merely painted from the
imagination--others were gross caricatures: this is the very individual,
neither god nor demon, but a man--a Frenchman--a Frenchman of the
eighteenth century, with great talents, with strong passions, depraved
by bad education, surrounded by temptations of every kind,--made
desperate at one time by disgrace, and then again intoxicated by fame.
All his opposite and seemingly inconsistent qualities are in this
representation so blended together as to make up a harmonious and
natural whole. Till now, Mirabeau was to us, and, we believe, to most
readers of history, not a man, but a string of antitheses. Henceforth he
will be a real human being, a remarkable and eccentric being indeed, but
perfectly conceivable.
He was fond, M. Dumont tells us, of giving odd compound nicknames.
Thus, M. de Lafayette was Grandison-Cromwell; the King of Prussia was
Alaric-Cottin; D'Espremenil was Crispin-Catiline. We think that Mirabeau
himself might be described, after his own fashion, as a Wilkes-Chatham.
He had Wilkes's sensuality, Wilkes's levity, Wilkes's insensibility to
shame. Like Wilkes, he had brought on himself the censure even of men
of pleasure by the peculiar grossness of his immorality, and by the
obscenity of his writings. Like Wilkes, he was heedless, not only of
the laws of morality, but of the laws of honour. Yet he affected, like
Wilkes, to unite the character of the demagogue to that of the fine
gentleman. Like Wilkes, he conciliated, by his good-humour and his high
spirits, the regard of many who despised his character. Like Wilkes,
he was hideously ugly; like Wilkes, he made a jest of his own ugliness;
and, like Wilkes, he was, in spite of his ugliness, very attentive to
his dress, and very successful in affairs of gallantry.
Resembling Wilkes in the lower and grosser parts of his character, he
had, in his higher qualities, some affinity to Chatham. His eloquence,
as far as we can judge of it, bore no inconsiderable resemblance to that
of the great English minister. He was not eminently successful in long
set speeches. He was not, on the other hand, a close and ready debater.
Sudden bursts, which seemed to be the effect of inspiration--short
sentences which came like lightning, dazzling, burning, striking down
everything before them--sentences which, spoken at critical moments,
decided the fate of great questions--sentences which at once became
proverbs--sentences which everybody still knows by heart--in these
chiefly lay the oratorical power both of Chatham and of Mirabeau. There
have been far greater speakers, and far greater statesmen, than either
of them; but we doubt whether any men have, in modern times, exercised
such vast personal influence over stormy and divided assemblies. The
power of both was as much moral as intellectual. In true dignity of
character, in private and public virtue, it may seem absurd to institute
any comparison between them; but they had the same haughtiness and
vehemence of temper. In their language and manner there was a disdainful
self-confidence, an imperiousness, a fierceness of passion, before which
all common minds quailed. Even Murray and Charles Townshend, though
intellectually not inferior to Chatham, were always cowed by him.
Barnave, in the same manner, though the best debater in the National
Assembly, flinched before the energy of Mirabeau. Men, except in bad
novels, are not all good or all evil. It can scarcely be denied that the
virtue of Lord Chatham was a little theatrical. On the other hand there
was in Mirabeau, not indeed anything deserving the name of virtue,
but that imperfect substitute for virtue which is found in almost all
superior minds,--a sensibility to the beautiful and the good, which
sometimes amounted to sincere enthusiasm; and which, mingled with
the desire of admiration, sometimes gave to his character a lustre
resembling the lustre of true goodness,--as the "faded splendour wan"
which lingered round the fallen archangel resembled the exceeding
brightness of those spirits who had kept their first estate.
There are several other admirable portraits of eminent men in these
Memoirs. That of Sieyes in particular, and that of Talleyrand, are
master-pieces, full of life and expression. But nothing in the book has
interested us more than the view which M. Dumont has presented to us,
unostentatiously, and, we may say, unconsciously, of his own character.
The sturdy rectitude, the large charity, the good-nature, the modesty,
the independent spirit, the ardent philanthropy, the unaffected
indifference to money and to fame, make up a character which, while it
has nothing unnatural, seems to us to approach nearer to perfection than
any of the Grandisons and Allworthys of fiction. The work is not indeed
precisely such a work as we had anticipated--it is more lively, more
picturesque, more amusing than we had promised ourselves; and it is, on
the other hand, less profound and philosophic. But, if it is not, in
all respects, such as might have been expected from the intellect of M.
Dumont, it is assuredly such as might have been expected from his heart.
*****
BARERE. (April 1844. )
"Memoires de Bertrand Barere": publies par MM. Hippolyte
Carnot, Membre de la Chambre des Deputes, et David d'Angers,
Membre de l'Institut: precedes d'une Notice Historique par
H. Carnot. 4 tomes. Paris: 1843.
This book has more than one title to our serious attention. It is an
appeal, solemnly made to posterity by a man who played a conspicuous
part in great events, and who represents himself as deeply aggrieved by
the rash and malevolent censure of his contemporaries. To such an appeal
we shall always give ready audience. We can perform no duty more useful
to society, or more agreeable to our own feelings, than that of making,
as far as our power extends, reparation to the slandered and
persecuted benefactors of mankind. We therefore promptly took into our
consideration this copious apology for the life of Bertrand Barere. We
have made up our minds; and we now purpose to do him, by the blessing of
God, full and signal justice. It is to be observed that the appellant in
this case does not come into court alone. He is attended to the bar
of public opinion by two compurgators who occupy highly honourable
stations. One of these is M. David of Angers, member of the institute,
an eminent sculptor, and, if we have been rightly informed, a favourite
pupil, though not a kinsman, of the painter who bore the same name. The
other, to whom we owe the biographical preface, is M. Hippolyte Carnot,
member of the Chamber of Deputies, and son of the celebrated Director.
In the judgment of M. David and of M. Hippolyte Carnot, Barere was a
deserving and an ill-used man--a man who, though by no means faultless,
must yet, when due allowance is made for the force of circumstances and
the infirmity of human nature, be considered as on the whole entitled
to our esteem. It will be for the public to determine, after a full
hearing, whether the editors have, by thus connecting their names with
that of Barere, raised his character or lowered their own.
We are not conscious that, when we opened this book, we were under the
influence of any feeling likely to pervert our judgment. Undoubtedly we
had long entertained a most unfavourable opinion of Barere: but to this
opinion we were not tied by any passion or by any interest. Our dislike
was a reasonable dislike, and might have been removed by reason. Indeed
our expectation was, that these Memoirs would in some measure clear
Barere's fame. That he could vindicate himself from all the charges
which had been brought against him, we knew to be impossible; and his
editors admit that he has not done so. But we thought it highly probable
that some grave accusations would be refuted, and that many offences
to which he would have been forced to plead guilty would be greatly
extenuated. We were not disposed to be severe. We were fully aware that
temptations such as those to which the members of the Convention and
of the Committee of Public Safety were exposed must try severely the
strength of the firmest virtue. Indeed our inclination has always been
to regard with an indulgence, which to some rigid moralists appears
excessive, those faults into which gentle and noble spirits are
sometimes hurried by the excitement of conflict, by the maddening
influence of sympathy, and by ill-regulated zeal for a public cause.
With such feelings we read this book, and compared it with other
accounts of the events in which Barere bore a part. It is now our duty
to express the opinion to which this investigation has led us.
Our opinion then is this: that Barere approached nearer than any person
mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of
consummate and universal depravity. In him the qualities which are the
proper objects of hatred, and the qualities which are the proper objects
of contempt, preserve an exquisite and absolute harmony. In almost every
particular sort of wickedness he has had rivals. His sensuality was
immoderate; but this was a failing common to him with many great and
amiable men. There have been many men as cowardly as he, some as cruel,
a few as mean, a few as impudent. There may also have been as great
liars, though we never met with them or read of them. But when we put
everything together, sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery,
mendacity, barbarity, the result is something which in a novel we should
condemn as caricature, and to which, we venture to say, no parallel can
be found in history.
It would be grossly unjust, we acknowledge, to try a man situated as
Barere was by a severe standard. Nor have we done so. We have formed
our opinion of him, by comparing him, not with politicians of stainless
character, not with Chancellor D'Aguesseau, or General Washington, or Mr
Wilberforce, or Earl Grey, but with his own colleagues of the Mountain.
That party included a considerable number of the worst men that ever
lived; but we see in it nothing like Barere. Compared with him, Fouche
seems honest; Billaud seems humane; Hebert seems to rise into dignity.
Every other chief of a party, says M. Hippolyte Carnot, has found
apologists: one set of men exalts the Girondists; another set justifies
Danton; a third deifies Robespierre: but Barere has remained without
a defender. We venture to suggest a very simple solution of this
phenomenon. All the other chiefs of parties had some good qualities; and
Barere had none. The genius, courage, patriotism, and humanity of the
Girondist statesmen more than atoned for what was culpable in their
conduct, and should have protected them from the insult of being
compared with such a thing as Barere. Danton and Robespierre were indeed
bad men; but in both of them some important parts of the mind remained
sound. Danton was brave and resolute, fond of pleasure, of power, and of
distinction, with vehement passions, with lax principles, but with some
kind and manly feelings, capable of great crimes, but capable also of
friendship and of compassion. He, therefore, naturally finds admirers
among persons of bold and sanguine dispositions. Robespierre was a
vain, envious, and suspicious man, with a hard heart, weak nerves, and a
gloomy temper. But we cannot with truth deny that he was, in the vulgar
sense of the word, disinterested, that his private life was correct, or
that he was sincerely zealous for his own system of politics and morals.
He, therefore, naturally finds admirers among honest but moody and
bitter democrats. If no class has taken the reputation of Barere under
its patronage, the reason is plain: Barere had not a single virtue, nor
even the semblance of one.
It is true that he was not, as far as we are able to judge, originally
of a savage disposition; but this circumstance seems to us only to
aggravate his guilt. There are some unhappy men constitutionally prone
to the darker passions, men all whose blood is gall, and to whom bitter
words and harsh actions are as natural as snarling and biting to a
ferocious dog. To come into the world with this wretched mental disease
is a greater calamity than to be born blind or deaf. A man who, having
such a temper, keeps it in subjection, and constrains himself to behave
habitually with justice and humanity towards those who are in his power,
seems to us worthy of the highest admiration. There have been instances
of this self-command; and they are among the most signal triumphs of
philosophy and religion. On the other hand, a man who, having been
blessed by nature with a bland disposition, gradually brings himself
to inflict misery on his fellow-creatures with indifference, with
satisfaction, and at length with a hideous rapture, deserves to be
regarded as a portent of wickedness; and such a man was Barere. The
history of his downward progress is full of instruction. Weakness,
cowardice, and fickleness were born with him; the best quality which he
received from nature was a good temper. These, it is true, are not
very promising materials; yet, out of materials as unpromising, high
sentiments of piety and of honour have sometimes made martyrs and
heroes. Rigid principles often do for feeble minds what stays do for
feeble bodies. But Barere had no principles at all. His character was
equally destitute of natural and of acquired strength. Neither in the
commerce of life, nor in books, did we ever become acquainted with
any mind so unstable, so utterly destitute of tone, so incapable of
independent thought and earnest preference, so ready to take impressions
and so ready to lose them. He resembled those creepers which must lean
on something, and which, as soon as their prop is removed, fall down in
utter helplessness. He could no more stand up, erect and self-supported,
in any cause, than the ivy can rear itself like the oak, or the wild
vine shoot to heaven like the cedar of Lebanon. It is barely possible
that, under good guidance and in favourable circumstances, such a man
might have slipped through life without discredit. But the unseaworthy
craft, which even in still water would have been in danger of going down
from its own rottenness, was launched on a raging ocean, amidst a storm
in which a whole armada of gallant ships was cast away. The weakest and
most servile of human beings found himself on a sudden an actor in a
Revolution which convulsed the whole civilised world. At first he fell
under the influence of humane and moderate men, and talked the language
of humanity and moderation. But he soon found himself surrounded by
fierce and resolute spirits, scared by no danger and restrained by no
scruple. He had to choose whether he would be their victim or their
accomplice. His choice was soon made. He tasted blood, and felt no
loathing; he tasted it again, and liked it well. Cruelty became with
him, first a habit, then a passion, at last a madness. So complete and
rapid was the degeneracy of his nature, that within a very few months
after the time when he had passed for a good-natured man, he had brought
himself to look on the despair and misery of his fellow-creatures with
a glee resembling that of the fiends whom Dante saw watching the pool
of seething pitch in Malebolge. He had many associates in guilt; but he
distinguished himself from them all by the Bacchanalian exaltation which
he seemed to feel in the work of death. He was drunk with innocent and
noble blood, laughed and shouted as he butchered, and howled strange
songs and reeled in strange dances amidst the carnage. Then came a
sudden and violent turn of fortune. The miserable man was hurled down
from the height of power to hopeless ruin and infamy. The shock sobered
him at once. The fumes of his horrible intoxication passed away. But he
was now so irrecoverably depraved that the discipline of adversity only
drove him further into wickedness. Ferocious vices, of which he had
never been suspected, had been developed in him by power. Another class
of vices, less hateful perhaps, but more despicable, was now developed
in him by poverty and disgrace. Having appalled the whole world by great
crimes perpetrated under the pretence of zeal for liberty, he became
the meanest of all the tools of despotism. It is not easy to settle the
order of precedence among his vices, but we are inclined to think that
his baseness was, on the whole, a rarer and more marvellous thing than
his cruelty.
This is the view which we have long taken of Barere's character; but,
till we read these Memoirs, we held our opinion with the diffidence
which becomes a judge who has only heard one side. The case seemed
strong, and in parts unanswerable; yet we did not know what the accused
party might have to say for himself; and, not being much inclined to
take our fellow-creatures either for angels of light or for angels of
darkness, we could not but feel some suspicion that his offences had
been exaggerated. That suspicion is now at an end. The vindication is
before us. It occupies four volumes. It was the work of forty years. It
would be absurd to suppose that it does not refute every serious charge
which admitted of refutation. How many serious charges, then, are here
refuted? Not a single one. Most of the imputations which have been
thrown on Barere he does not even notice. In such cases, of course,
judgment must go against him by default. The fact is, that nothing can
be more meagre and uninteresting than his account of the great public
transactions in which he was engaged. He gives us hardly a word of
new information respecting the proceedings of the Committee of Public
Safety; and, by way of compensation, tells us long stories about things
which happened before he emerged from obscurity, and after he had again
sunk into it. Nor is this the worst. As soon as he ceases to write
trifles, he begins to write lies; and such lies! A man who has never
been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means; a man
who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and
he who has not read Barere's Memoirs may be said not to know what it
is to lie. Among the numerous classes which make up the great genus
Mendacium, the Mendacium Vasconicum, or Gascon lie, has, during some
centuries, been highly esteemed as peculiarly circumstantial and
peculiarly impudent; and, among the Mendacia Vasconica, the Mendacium
Barerianum is, without doubt, the finest species. It is indeed a superb
variety, and quite throws into the shade some Mendacia which we were
used to regard with admiration. The Mendacium Wraxallianum, for example,
though by no means to be despised, will not sustain the comparison for a
moment. Seriously, we think that M.
Hippolyte Carnot is much to blame in
this matter. We can hardly suppose him to be worse read than ourselves
in the history of the Convention, a history which must interest him
deeply, not only as a Frenchman, but also as a son. He must, therefore,
be perfectly aware that many of the most important statements which
these volumes contain are falsehoods, such as Corneille's Dorante, or
Moliere's Scapin, or Colin d'Harleville's Monsieur de Crac would have
been ashamed to utter. We are far, indeed, from holding M. Hippolyte
Carnot answerable for Barere's want of veracity; but M. Hippolyte
Carnot has arranged these Memoirs, has introduced them to the world by
a laudatory preface, has described them as documents of great historical
value, and has illustrated them by notes. We cannot but think that, by
acting thus, he contracted some obligations of which he does not seem
to have been at all aware; and that he ought not to have suffered any
monstrous fiction to go forth under the sanction of his name, without
adding a line at the foot of the page for the purpose of cautioning the
reader.
We will content ourselves at present with pointing out two instances
of Barere's wilful and deliberate mendacity; namely, his account of
the death of Marie Antoinette, and his account of the death of
the Girondists. His account of the death of Marie Antoinette is as
follows:--"Robespierre in his turn proposed that the members of the
Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should be
brought to trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He would have
been better employed in concerting military measures which might have
repaired our disasters in Belgium, and might have arrested the progress
of the enemies of the Revolution in the west. "--(Volume ii. page 312. )
Now, it is notorious that Marie Antoinette was sent before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, not at Robespierre's instance, but in direct
opposition to Robespierre's wishes. We will cite a single authority,
which is quite decisive. Bonaparte, who had no conceivable motive to
disguise the truth, who had the best opportunities of knowing the truth,
and who, after his marriage with the Archduchess, naturally felt an
interest in the fate of his wife's kinswomen, distinctly affirmed that
Robespierre opposed the trying of the Queen. (O'Meara's "Voice from St
Helena", ii. 170. ) Who, then, was the person who really did propose that
the Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should
be tried? Full information will be found in the "Moniteur". ("Moniteur",
2d, 7th and 9th of August, 1793. ) From that valuable record it appears
that, on the first of August 1793, an orator, deputed by the Committee
of Public Safety, addressed the Convention in a long and elaborate
discourse. He asked, in passionate language, how it happened that the
enemies of the Republic still continued to hope for success. "Is it,"
he cried, "because we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian
woman? Is it because we have shown so strange an indulgence to the race
of our ancient tyrants? It is time that this unwise apathy should cease;
it is time to extirpate from the soil of the Republic the last roots of
royalty. As for the children of Louis the conspirator, they are hostages
for the Republic. The charge of their maintenance shall be reduced to
what is necessary for the food and keep of two individuals. The public
treasure shall no longer be lavished on creatures who have too long been
considered as privileged. But behind them lurks a woman who has been the
cause of all the disasters of France, and whose share in every project
adverse to the revolution has long been known. National justice claims
its rights over her. It is to the tribunal appointed for the trial
of conspirators that she ought to be sent. It is only by striking
the Austrian woman that you can make Francis and George, Charles and
William, sensible of the crimes which their ministers and their armies
have committed. " The speaker concluded by moving that Marie Antoinette
should be brought to judgment, and should, for that end, be forthwith
transferred to the Conciergerie; and that all the members of the house
of Capet, with the exception of those who were under the sword of the
law, and of the two children of Louis, should be banished from the
French territory. The motion was carried without debate.
Now, who was the person who made this speech and this motion? It was
Barere himself. It is clear, then, that Barere attributed his own mean
insolence and barbarity to one who, whatever his crimes may have been,
was in this matter innocent. The only question remaining is, whether
Barere was misled by his memory, or wrote a deliberate falsehood.
We are convinced that he wrote a deliberate falsehood. His memory is
described by his editors as remarkably good, and must have been bad
indeed if he could not remember such a fact as this. It is true that the
number of murders in which he subsequently bore a part was so great that
he might well confound one with another, that he might well forget what
part of the daily hecatomb was consigned to death by himself, and what
part by his colleagues. But two circumstances make it quite incredible
that the share which he took in the death of Marie Antoinette should
have escaped his recollection. She was one of his earliest victims.
She was one of his most illustrious victims. The most hardened assassin
remembers the first time that he shed blood; and the widow of Louis
was no ordinary sufferer. If the question had been about some milliner,
butchered for hiding in her garret her brother who had let drop a word
against the Jacobin Club--if the question had been about some old nun,
dragged to death for having mumbled what were called fanatical words
over her beads--Barere's memory might well have deceived him. It would
be as unreasonable to expect him to remember all the wretches whom
he slew as all the pinches of snuff that he took. But, though Barere
murdered many hundreds of human beings, he murdered only one Queen. That
he, a small country lawyer, who, a few years before, would have thought
himself honoured by a glance or a word from the daughter of so many
Caesars, should call her the Austrian woman, should send her from jail
to jail, should deliver her over to the executioner, was surely a great
event in his life. Whether he had reason to be proud of it or ashamed of
it, is a question on which we may perhaps differ from his editors; but
they will admit, we think, that he could not have forgotten it.
We, therefore, confidently charge Barere with having written a
deliberate falsehood; and we have no hesitation in saying that we never,
in the course of any historical researches that we have happened to
make, fell in with a falsehood so audacious, except only the falsehood
which we are about to expose.
Of the proceeding against the Girondists, Barere speaks with just
severity. He calls it an atrocious injustice perpetrated against the
legislators of the republic. He complains that distinguished deputies,
who ought to have been readmitted to their seats in the Convention, were
sent to the scaffold as conspirators. The day, he exclaims, was a day
of mourning for France. It mutilated the national representation; it
weakened the sacred principle, that the delegates of the people were
inviolable. He protests that he had no share in the guilt. "I have had,"
he says, "the patience to go through the 'Moniteur', extracting all the
charges brought against deputies, and all the decrees for arresting and
impeaching deputies. Nowhere will you find my name. I never brought a
charge against any of my colleagues, or made a report against any, or
drew up an impeachment against any. " (Volume ii. 407. )
Now, we affirm that this is a lie. We affirm that Barere himself took
the lead in the proceedings of the Convention against the Girondists. We
affirm that he, on the twenty-eighth of July 1793, proposed a decree
for bringing nine Girondist deputies to trial, and for putting to death
sixteen other Girondist deputies without any trial at all. We affirm
that, when the accused deputies had been brought to trial, and when some
apprehension arose that their eloquence might produce an effect even on
the Revolutionary Tribunal, Barere did, on the 8th of Brumaire, second
a motion for a decree authorising the tribunal to decide without hearing
out the defence; and, for the truth of every one of these things so
affirmed by us, we appeal to the very "Moniteur" to which Barere has
dared to appeal. ("Moniteur", 31st of July 1793, and Nonidi, first
Decade of Brumaire, in the year 2(? ). )
What M. Hippolyte Carnot, knowing, as he must know, that this book
contains such falsehoods as those which we have exposed, can have meant,
when he described it as a valuable addition to our stock of historical
information, passes our comprehension. When a man is not ashamed to tell
lies about events which took place before hundreds of witnesses, and
which are recorded in well-known and accessible books, what credit can
we give to his account of things done in corners? No historian who does
not wish to be laughed at will ever cite the unsupported authority of
Barere as sufficient to prove any fact whatever. The only thing, as far
as we can see, on which these volumes throw any light, is the exceeding
baseness of the author.
So much for the veracity of the Memoirs. In a literary point of view,
they are beneath criticism. They are as shallow, flippant, and affected,
as Barere's oratory in the Convention. They are also, what his oratory
in the Convention was not, utterly insipid. In fact, they are the mere
dregs and rinsings of a bottle of which even the first froth was but of
very questionable flavour.
We will now try to present our readers with a sketch of this man's life.
We shall, of course, make very sparing use indeed of his own Memoirs;
and never without distrust, except where they are confirmed by other
evidence.
Bertrand Barere was born in the year 1755, at Tarbes in Gascony. His
father was the proprietor of a small estate at Vieuzac, in the beautiful
vale of Argeles. Bertrand always loved to be called Barere de Vieuzac,
and flattered himself with the hope that, by the help of this feudal
addition to his name, he might pass for a gentleman. He was educated for
the bar at Toulouse, the seat of one of the most celebrated parliaments
of the kingdom, practised as an advocate with considerable success,
and wrote some small pieces, which he sent to the principal literary
societies in the south of France. Among provincial towns, Toulouse seems
to have been remarkably rich in indifferent versifiers and critics. It
gloried especially in one venerable institution, called the Academy of
the Floral Games. This body held every year a grand meeting which was a
subject of intense interest to the whole city, and at which flowers
of gold and silver were given as prizes for odes, for idyls, and for
something that was called eloquence. These bounties produced of course
the ordinary effect of bounties, and turned people who might have been
thriving attorneys and useful apothecaries into small wits and bad
poets. Barere does not appear to have been so lucky as to obtain any of
these precious flowers; but one of his performances was mentioned with
honour. At Montauban he was more fortunate. The academy of that town
bestowed on him several prizes, one for a panegyric on Louis the
Twelfth, in which the blessings of monarchy and the loyalty of the
French nation were set forth; and another for a panegyric on poor Franc
de Pompignan, in which, as may easily be supposed, the philosophy of the
eighteenth century was sharply assailed. Then Barere found an old stone
inscribed with three Latin words, and wrote a dissertation upon it,
which procured him a seat in a learned Assembly, called the Toulouse
Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Polite Literature. At length the
doors of the Academy of the Floral Games were opened to so much
merit. Barere, in his thirty-third year, took his seat as one of that
illustrious brotherhood, and made an inaugural oration which was greatly
admired. He apologises for recounting these triumphs of his youthful
genius. We own that we cannot blame him for dwelling long on the least
disgraceful portion of his existence. To send in declamations for prizes
offered by provincial academies is indeed no very useful or dignified
employment for a bearded man; but it would have been well if Barere had
always been so employed.
In 1785 he married a young lady of considerable fortune. Whether she was
in other respects qualified to make a home happy, is a point respecting
which we are imperfectly informed. In a little work, entitled
"Melancholy Pages", which was written in 1797, Barere avers that his
marriage was one of mere convenience, that at the altar his heart was
heavy with sorrowful forebodings, that he turned pale as he pronounced
the solemn "Yes," that unbidden tears rolled down his cheeks, that his
mother shared his presentiment, and that the evil omen was accomplished.
"My marriage," he says, "was one of the most unhappy of marriages. " So
romantic a tale, told by so noted a liar, did not command our belief. We
were, therefore, not much surprised to discover that, in his Memoirs,
he calls his wife a most amiable woman, and declares that, after he
had been united to her six years, he found her as amiable as ever. He
complains, indeed, that she was too much attached to royalty and to the
old superstition; but he assures us that his respect for her virtues
induced him to tolerate her prejudices. Now Barere, at the time of his
marriage, was himself a Royalist and a Catholic. He had gained one prize
by flattering the Throne, and another by defending the Church. It is
hardly possible, therefore, that disputes about politics or religion
should have embittered his domestic life till some time after he became
a husband. Our own guess is, that his wife was, as he says, a virtuous
and amiable woman, and that she did her best to make him happy during
some years. It seems clear that, when circumstances developed the latent
atrocity of his character, she could no longer endure him, refused to
see him, and sent back his letters unopened. Then it was, we imagine,
that he invented the fable about his distress on his wedding day.
In 1788 Barere paid his first visit to Paris, attended reviews, heard
Laharpe at the Lycaeum, and Condorcet at the Academy of Sciences, stared
at the envoys of Tippoo Sahib, saw the Royal Family dine at Versailles,
and kept a journal in which he noted down adventures and speculations.
Some parts of this journal are printed in the first volume of the work
before us, and are certainly most characteristic. The worst vices of
the writer had not yet shown themselves; but the weakness which was
the parent of those vices appears in every line. His levity, his
inconsistency, his servility, were already what they were to the
last. All his opinions, all his feelings, spin round and round like a
weathercock in a whirlwind. Nay, the very impressions which he receives
through his senses are not the same two days together. He sees Louis
the Sixteenth, and is so much blinded by loyalty as to find his Majesty
handsome. "I fixed my eyes," he says, "with a lively curiosity on his
fine countenance, which I thought open and noble. " The next time that
the king appears all is altered. His Majesty's eyes are without the
smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an
ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought
up. It is the same with more important questions. Barere is for the
parliaments on the Monday and against the parliaments on the Tuesday,
for feudality in the morning and against feudality in the afternoon. One
day he admires the English constitution; then he shudders to think
that, in the struggles by which that constitution had been obtained, the
barbarous islanders had murdered a king, and gives the preference to
the constitution of Bearn. Bearn, he says, has a sublime constitution, a
beautiful constitution. There the nobility and clergy meet in one house,
and the Commons in another. If the houses differ, the King has
the casting vote. A few weeks later we find him raving against the
principles of this sublime and beautiful constitution. To admit deputies
of the nobility and clergy into the legislature is, he says, neither
more nor less than to admit enemies of the nation into the legislature.
In this state of mind, without one settled purpose or opinion, the
slave of the last word, royalist, aristocrat, democrat, according to the
prevailing sentiment of the coffee-house or drawing-room into which he
had just looked, did Barere enter into public life. The States-General
had been summoned. Barere went down to his own province, was there
elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned to
Paris in May 1789.
A great crisis, often predicted, had at last arrived. In no country,
we conceive, have intellectual freedom and political servitude existed
together so long as in France, during the seventy or eighty years which
preceded the last convocation of the Orders. Ancient abuses and new
theories flourished in equal vigour side by side. The people, having no
constitutional means of checking even the most flagitious misgovernment,
were indemnified for oppression by being suffered to luxuriate in
anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule every principle on which
the institutions of the State reposed. Neither those who attribute the
downfall of the old French institutions to the public grievances, nor
those who attribute it to the doctrines of the philosophers, appear
to us to have taken into their view more than one half of the subject.
Grievances as heavy have often been endured without producing a
revolution; doctrines as bold have often been propounded without
producing a revolution. The question, whether the French nation was
alienated from its old polity by the follies and vices of the Viziers
and Sultanas who pillaged and disgraced it, or by the writings of
Voltaire and Rousseau, seems to us as idle as the question whether it
was fire or gunpowder that blew up the mills at Hounslow. Neither
cause would have sufficed alone. Tyranny may last through ages where
discussion is suppressed. Discussion may safely be left free by rulers
who act on popular principles. But combine a press like that of London
with a government like that of St Petersburg; and the inevitable effect
will be an explosion that will shake the world. So it was in France.
Despotism and License, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that
mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely
blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed
hope and terror, that agonising travail and that portentous birth.
Among the crowd of legislators which at this conjuncture poured from all
the provinces of France into Paris, Barere made no contemptible figure.
The opinions which he for the moment professed were popular, yet not
extreme. His character was fair; his personal advantages are said to
have been considerable; and, from the portrait which is prefixed
to these Memoirs, and which represents him as he appeared in the
Convention, we would judge that his features must have been strikingly
handsome, though we think that we can read in them cowardice and
meanness very legibly written by the hand of God. His conversation was
lively and easy; his manners remarkably good for a country lawyer. Women
of rank and wit said that he was the only man who, on his first arrival
from a remote province, had that indescribable air which it was supposed
that Paris alone could give. His eloquence, indeed, was by no means so
much admired in the capital as it had been by the ingenious academicians
of Montauban and Toulouse. His style was thought very bad; and very bad,
if a foreigner may venture to judge, it continued to the last. It would,
however, be unjust to deny that he had some talents for speaking and
writing. His rhetoric, though deformed by every imaginable fault of
taste, from bombast down to buffoonery, was not wholly without force
and vivacity. He had also one quality which, in active life, often gives
fourth-rate men an advantage over first-rate men. Whatever he could do,
he could do without effort, at any moment, in any abundance, and on any
side of any question. There was, indeed, a perfect harmony between his
moral character and his intellectual character. His temper was that of
a slave; his abilities were exactly those which qualified him to be a
useful slave. Of thinking to purpose, he was utterly incapable; but he
had wonderful readiness in arranging and expressing thoughts furnished
by others.
In the National Assembly he had no opportunity of displaying the full
extent either of his talents or of his vices. He was indeed eclipsed
by much abler men. He went, as was his habit, with the stream, spoke
occasionally with some success, and edited a journal called the "Point
du Jour", in which the debates of the Assembly were reported.
He at first ranked by no means among the violent reformers. He was not
friendly to that new division of the French territory which was among
the most important changes introduced by the Revolution, and was
especially unwilling to see his native province dismembered. He was
entrusted with the task of framing Reports on the Woods and Forests.
Louis was exceedingly anxious about this matter; for his majesty was a
keen sportsman, and would much rather have gone without the Veto, or
the prerogative of making peace and war, than without his hunting and
shooting. Gentlemen of the royal household were sent to Barere, in
order to intercede for the deer and pheasants. Nor was this intercession
unsuccessful. The reports were so drawn that Barere was afterwards
accused of having dishonestly sacrificed the interests of the public
to the tastes of the court. To one of these reports he had the
inconceivable folly and bad taste to prefix a punning motto from Virgil,
fit only for such essays as he had been in the habit of composing for
the Floral Games--
"Si canimus sylvas, sylvae sint Consule dignae. "
This literary foppery was one of the few things in which he was
consistent. Royalist or Girondist, Jacobin or Imperialist, he was always
a Trissotin.
As the monarchical party became weaker and weaker, Barere gradually
estranged himself more and more from it, and drew closer and closer to
the republicans. It would seem that, during this transition, he was for
a time closely connected with the family of Orleans. It is certain
that he was entrusted with the guardianship of the celebrated Pamela,
afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald; and it was asserted that he received
during some years a pension of twelve thousand francs from the Palais
Royal.
At the end of September 1791, the labours of the National Assembly
terminated, and those of the first and last Legislative Assembly
commenced.
It had been enacted that no member of the National Assembly should sit
in the Legislative Assembly; a preposterous and mischievous regulation,
to which the disasters which followed must in part be ascribed. In
England, what would be thought of a Parliament which did not contain one
single person who had ever sat in parliament before? Yet it may safely
be affirmed that the number of Englishmen who, never having taken
any share in public affairs, are yet well qualified, by knowledge and
observation, to be members of the legislature is at least a hundred
times as great as the number of Frenchmen who were so qualified in 1791.
How, indeed, should it have been otherwise? In England, centuries of
representative government have made all educated people in some measure
statesmen. In France the National Assembly had probably been composed of
as good materials as were then to be found. It had undoubtedly removed a
vast mass of abuses; some of its members had read and thought much about
theories of government; and others had shown great oratorical talents.
But that kind of skill which is required for the constructing,
launching, and steering of a polity was lamentably wanting; for it is a
kind of skill to which practice contributes more than books. Books are
indeed useful to the politician, as they are useful to the navigator and
to the surgeon. But the real navigator is formed on the waves; the real
surgeon is formed at bedsides; and the conflicts of free states are
the real school of constitutional statesmen. The National Assembly had,
however, now served an apprenticeship of two laborious and eventful
years. It had, indeed, by no means finished its education; but it was
no longer, as on the day when it met, altogether rude to political
functions. Its later proceedings contain abundant proof that the members
had profited by their experience. Beyond all doubt there was not in
France any equal number of persons possessing in an equal degree the
qualities necessary for the judicious direction of public affairs; and,
just at this moment, these legislators, misled by a childish wish to
display their own disinterestedness, deserted the duties which they had
half learned, and which nobody else had learned at all, and left their
hall to a second crowd of novices, who had still to master the first
rudiments of political business. When Barere wrote his Memoirs, the
absurdity of this self-denying ordinance had been proved by events, and
was, we believe, acknowledged by all parties. He accordingly, with his
usual mendacity, speaks of it in terms implying that he had opposed it.
There was, he tells us, no good citizen who did not regret this fatal
vote. Nay, all wise men, he says, wished the National Assembly to
continue its sittings as the first Legislative Assembly. But no
attention was paid to the wishes of the enlightened friends of liberty;
and the generous but fatal suicide was perpetrated. Now the fact is,
that Barere, far from opposing this ill-advised measure, was one of
those who most eagerly supported it; that he described it from the
tribune as wise and magnanimous; that he assigned, as his reasons for
taking this view, some of those phrases in which orators of his class
delight, and which, on all men who have the smallest insight into
politics, produce an effect very similar to that of ipecacuanha.
"Those," he said, "who have framed a constitution for their country are,
so to speak, out of the pale of that social state of which they are the
authors; for creative power is not in the same sphere with that which it
has created. "
M. Hippolyte Carnot has noticed this untruth, and attributes it to
mere forgetfulness. We leave it to him to reconcile his very charitable
supposition with what he elsewhere says of the remarkable excellence of
Barere's memory.
Many members of the National Assembly were indemnified for the sacrifice
of legislative power by appointments in various departments of the
public service.
financial difficulties produced by the war carried to the height
the discontent of that larger body of people who cared little about
theories, and much about taxes.
The meeting of the States-General was the signal for the explosion of
all the hoarded passions of a century. In that assembly, there were
undoubtedly very able men. But they had no practical knowledge of the
art of government. All the great English revolutions have been conducted
by practical statesmen. The French Revolution was conducted by mere
speculators. Our constitution has never been so far behind the age as to
have become an object of aversion to the people. The English revolutions
have therefore been undertaken for the purpose of defending, correcting,
and restoring,--never for the mere purpose of destroying. Our countrymen
have always, even in times of the greatest excitement, spoken reverently
of the form of government under which they lived, and attacked only what
they regarded as its corruptions. In the very act of innovating they
have constantly appealed to ancient prescription; they have seldom
looked abroad for models; they have seldom troubled themselves with
Utopian theories; they have not been anxious to prove that liberty is a
natural right of men; they have been content to regard it as the lawful
birthright of Englishmen. Their social contract is no fiction. It
is still extant on the original parchment, sealed with wax which was
affixed at Runnymede, and attested by the lordly names of the Marischals
and Fitzherberts. No general arguments about the original equality of
men, no fine stories out of Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos, have
ever affected them so much as their own familiar words,--Magna
Charta,--Habeas Corpus,--Trial by Jury,--Bill of Rights. This part of
our national character has undoubtedly its disadvantages. An Englishman
too often reasons on politics in the spirit rather of a lawyer than of
a philosopher. There is too often something narrow, something exclusive,
something Jewish, if we may use the word, in his love of freedom. He
is disposed to consider popular rights as the special heritage of the
chosen race to which he belongs. He is inclined rather to repel than to
encourage the alien proselyte who aspires to a share of his privileges.
Very different was the spirit of the Constituent Assembly. They had
none of our narrowness; but they had none of our practical skill in the
management of affairs. They did not understand how to regulate the order
of their own debates; and they thought themselves able to legislate for
the whole world. All the past was loathsome to them. All their agreeable
associations were connected with the future. Hopes were to them all that
recollections are to us. In the institutions of their country they found
nothing to love or to admire. As far back as they could look, they saw
only the tyranny of one class and the degradation of another,--Frank
and Gaul, knight and villein, gentleman and roturier. They hated the
monarchy, the church, the nobility. They cared nothing for the States or
the Parliament. It was long the fashion to ascribe all the follies which
they committed to the writings of the philosophers. We believe that
it was misrule, and nothing but misrule, that put the sting into those
writings. It is not true that the French abandoned experience for
theories. They took up with theories because they had no experience of
good government. It was because they had no charter that they ranted
about the original contract. As soon as tolerable institutions were
given to them, they began to look to those institutions. In 1830 their
rallying cry was "Vive la Charte". In 1789 they had nothing but theories
round which to rally. They had seen social distinctions only in a
bad form; and it was therefore natural that they should be deluded by
sophisms about the equality of men. They had experienced so much evil
from the sovereignty of kings that they might be excused for lending a
ready ear to those who preached, in an exaggerated form, the doctrine of
the sovereignty of the people.
The English, content with their own national recollections and names,
have never sought for models in the institutions of Greece or Rome. The
French, having nothing in their own history to which they could look
back with pleasure, had recourse to the history of the great ancient
commonwealths: they drew their notions of those commonwealths, not from
contemporary writers, but from romances written by pedantic moralists
long after the extinction of public liberty. They neglected Thucydides
for Plutarch. Blind themselves, they took blind guides. They had no
experience of freedom; and they took their opinions concerning it
from men who had no more experience of it than themselves, and whose
imaginations, inflamed by mystery and privation, exaggerated the unknown
enjoyment;--from men who raved about patriotism without having ever had
a country, and eulogised tyrannicide while crouching before tyrants.
The maxim which the French legislators learned in this school was, that
political liberty is an end, and not a means; that it is not merely
valuable as the great safeguard of order, of property, and of morality,
but that it is in itself a high and exquisite happiness to which order,
property, and morality ought without one scruple to be sacrificed. The
lessons which may be learned from ancient history are indeed most useful
and important; but they were not likely to be learned by men who, in all
their rhapsodies about the Athenian democracy, seemed utterly to forget
that in that democracy there were ten slaves to one citizen; and who
constantly decorated their invectives against the aristocrats with
panegyrics on Brutus and Cato,--two aristocrats, fiercer, prouder, and
more exclusive, than any that emigrated with the Count of Artois.
We have never met with so vivid and interesting a picture of the
National Assembly as that which M. Dumont has set before us. His
Mirabeau, in particular, is incomparable. All the former Mirabeaus
were daubs in comparison. Some were merely painted from the
imagination--others were gross caricatures: this is the very individual,
neither god nor demon, but a man--a Frenchman--a Frenchman of the
eighteenth century, with great talents, with strong passions, depraved
by bad education, surrounded by temptations of every kind,--made
desperate at one time by disgrace, and then again intoxicated by fame.
All his opposite and seemingly inconsistent qualities are in this
representation so blended together as to make up a harmonious and
natural whole. Till now, Mirabeau was to us, and, we believe, to most
readers of history, not a man, but a string of antitheses. Henceforth he
will be a real human being, a remarkable and eccentric being indeed, but
perfectly conceivable.
He was fond, M. Dumont tells us, of giving odd compound nicknames.
Thus, M. de Lafayette was Grandison-Cromwell; the King of Prussia was
Alaric-Cottin; D'Espremenil was Crispin-Catiline. We think that Mirabeau
himself might be described, after his own fashion, as a Wilkes-Chatham.
He had Wilkes's sensuality, Wilkes's levity, Wilkes's insensibility to
shame. Like Wilkes, he had brought on himself the censure even of men
of pleasure by the peculiar grossness of his immorality, and by the
obscenity of his writings. Like Wilkes, he was heedless, not only of
the laws of morality, but of the laws of honour. Yet he affected, like
Wilkes, to unite the character of the demagogue to that of the fine
gentleman. Like Wilkes, he conciliated, by his good-humour and his high
spirits, the regard of many who despised his character. Like Wilkes,
he was hideously ugly; like Wilkes, he made a jest of his own ugliness;
and, like Wilkes, he was, in spite of his ugliness, very attentive to
his dress, and very successful in affairs of gallantry.
Resembling Wilkes in the lower and grosser parts of his character, he
had, in his higher qualities, some affinity to Chatham. His eloquence,
as far as we can judge of it, bore no inconsiderable resemblance to that
of the great English minister. He was not eminently successful in long
set speeches. He was not, on the other hand, a close and ready debater.
Sudden bursts, which seemed to be the effect of inspiration--short
sentences which came like lightning, dazzling, burning, striking down
everything before them--sentences which, spoken at critical moments,
decided the fate of great questions--sentences which at once became
proverbs--sentences which everybody still knows by heart--in these
chiefly lay the oratorical power both of Chatham and of Mirabeau. There
have been far greater speakers, and far greater statesmen, than either
of them; but we doubt whether any men have, in modern times, exercised
such vast personal influence over stormy and divided assemblies. The
power of both was as much moral as intellectual. In true dignity of
character, in private and public virtue, it may seem absurd to institute
any comparison between them; but they had the same haughtiness and
vehemence of temper. In their language and manner there was a disdainful
self-confidence, an imperiousness, a fierceness of passion, before which
all common minds quailed. Even Murray and Charles Townshend, though
intellectually not inferior to Chatham, were always cowed by him.
Barnave, in the same manner, though the best debater in the National
Assembly, flinched before the energy of Mirabeau. Men, except in bad
novels, are not all good or all evil. It can scarcely be denied that the
virtue of Lord Chatham was a little theatrical. On the other hand there
was in Mirabeau, not indeed anything deserving the name of virtue,
but that imperfect substitute for virtue which is found in almost all
superior minds,--a sensibility to the beautiful and the good, which
sometimes amounted to sincere enthusiasm; and which, mingled with
the desire of admiration, sometimes gave to his character a lustre
resembling the lustre of true goodness,--as the "faded splendour wan"
which lingered round the fallen archangel resembled the exceeding
brightness of those spirits who had kept their first estate.
There are several other admirable portraits of eminent men in these
Memoirs. That of Sieyes in particular, and that of Talleyrand, are
master-pieces, full of life and expression. But nothing in the book has
interested us more than the view which M. Dumont has presented to us,
unostentatiously, and, we may say, unconsciously, of his own character.
The sturdy rectitude, the large charity, the good-nature, the modesty,
the independent spirit, the ardent philanthropy, the unaffected
indifference to money and to fame, make up a character which, while it
has nothing unnatural, seems to us to approach nearer to perfection than
any of the Grandisons and Allworthys of fiction. The work is not indeed
precisely such a work as we had anticipated--it is more lively, more
picturesque, more amusing than we had promised ourselves; and it is, on
the other hand, less profound and philosophic. But, if it is not, in
all respects, such as might have been expected from the intellect of M.
Dumont, it is assuredly such as might have been expected from his heart.
*****
BARERE. (April 1844. )
"Memoires de Bertrand Barere": publies par MM. Hippolyte
Carnot, Membre de la Chambre des Deputes, et David d'Angers,
Membre de l'Institut: precedes d'une Notice Historique par
H. Carnot. 4 tomes. Paris: 1843.
This book has more than one title to our serious attention. It is an
appeal, solemnly made to posterity by a man who played a conspicuous
part in great events, and who represents himself as deeply aggrieved by
the rash and malevolent censure of his contemporaries. To such an appeal
we shall always give ready audience. We can perform no duty more useful
to society, or more agreeable to our own feelings, than that of making,
as far as our power extends, reparation to the slandered and
persecuted benefactors of mankind. We therefore promptly took into our
consideration this copious apology for the life of Bertrand Barere. We
have made up our minds; and we now purpose to do him, by the blessing of
God, full and signal justice. It is to be observed that the appellant in
this case does not come into court alone. He is attended to the bar
of public opinion by two compurgators who occupy highly honourable
stations. One of these is M. David of Angers, member of the institute,
an eminent sculptor, and, if we have been rightly informed, a favourite
pupil, though not a kinsman, of the painter who bore the same name. The
other, to whom we owe the biographical preface, is M. Hippolyte Carnot,
member of the Chamber of Deputies, and son of the celebrated Director.
In the judgment of M. David and of M. Hippolyte Carnot, Barere was a
deserving and an ill-used man--a man who, though by no means faultless,
must yet, when due allowance is made for the force of circumstances and
the infirmity of human nature, be considered as on the whole entitled
to our esteem. It will be for the public to determine, after a full
hearing, whether the editors have, by thus connecting their names with
that of Barere, raised his character or lowered their own.
We are not conscious that, when we opened this book, we were under the
influence of any feeling likely to pervert our judgment. Undoubtedly we
had long entertained a most unfavourable opinion of Barere: but to this
opinion we were not tied by any passion or by any interest. Our dislike
was a reasonable dislike, and might have been removed by reason. Indeed
our expectation was, that these Memoirs would in some measure clear
Barere's fame. That he could vindicate himself from all the charges
which had been brought against him, we knew to be impossible; and his
editors admit that he has not done so. But we thought it highly probable
that some grave accusations would be refuted, and that many offences
to which he would have been forced to plead guilty would be greatly
extenuated. We were not disposed to be severe. We were fully aware that
temptations such as those to which the members of the Convention and
of the Committee of Public Safety were exposed must try severely the
strength of the firmest virtue. Indeed our inclination has always been
to regard with an indulgence, which to some rigid moralists appears
excessive, those faults into which gentle and noble spirits are
sometimes hurried by the excitement of conflict, by the maddening
influence of sympathy, and by ill-regulated zeal for a public cause.
With such feelings we read this book, and compared it with other
accounts of the events in which Barere bore a part. It is now our duty
to express the opinion to which this investigation has led us.
Our opinion then is this: that Barere approached nearer than any person
mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of
consummate and universal depravity. In him the qualities which are the
proper objects of hatred, and the qualities which are the proper objects
of contempt, preserve an exquisite and absolute harmony. In almost every
particular sort of wickedness he has had rivals. His sensuality was
immoderate; but this was a failing common to him with many great and
amiable men. There have been many men as cowardly as he, some as cruel,
a few as mean, a few as impudent. There may also have been as great
liars, though we never met with them or read of them. But when we put
everything together, sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery,
mendacity, barbarity, the result is something which in a novel we should
condemn as caricature, and to which, we venture to say, no parallel can
be found in history.
It would be grossly unjust, we acknowledge, to try a man situated as
Barere was by a severe standard. Nor have we done so. We have formed
our opinion of him, by comparing him, not with politicians of stainless
character, not with Chancellor D'Aguesseau, or General Washington, or Mr
Wilberforce, or Earl Grey, but with his own colleagues of the Mountain.
That party included a considerable number of the worst men that ever
lived; but we see in it nothing like Barere. Compared with him, Fouche
seems honest; Billaud seems humane; Hebert seems to rise into dignity.
Every other chief of a party, says M. Hippolyte Carnot, has found
apologists: one set of men exalts the Girondists; another set justifies
Danton; a third deifies Robespierre: but Barere has remained without
a defender. We venture to suggest a very simple solution of this
phenomenon. All the other chiefs of parties had some good qualities; and
Barere had none. The genius, courage, patriotism, and humanity of the
Girondist statesmen more than atoned for what was culpable in their
conduct, and should have protected them from the insult of being
compared with such a thing as Barere. Danton and Robespierre were indeed
bad men; but in both of them some important parts of the mind remained
sound. Danton was brave and resolute, fond of pleasure, of power, and of
distinction, with vehement passions, with lax principles, but with some
kind and manly feelings, capable of great crimes, but capable also of
friendship and of compassion. He, therefore, naturally finds admirers
among persons of bold and sanguine dispositions. Robespierre was a
vain, envious, and suspicious man, with a hard heart, weak nerves, and a
gloomy temper. But we cannot with truth deny that he was, in the vulgar
sense of the word, disinterested, that his private life was correct, or
that he was sincerely zealous for his own system of politics and morals.
He, therefore, naturally finds admirers among honest but moody and
bitter democrats. If no class has taken the reputation of Barere under
its patronage, the reason is plain: Barere had not a single virtue, nor
even the semblance of one.
It is true that he was not, as far as we are able to judge, originally
of a savage disposition; but this circumstance seems to us only to
aggravate his guilt. There are some unhappy men constitutionally prone
to the darker passions, men all whose blood is gall, and to whom bitter
words and harsh actions are as natural as snarling and biting to a
ferocious dog. To come into the world with this wretched mental disease
is a greater calamity than to be born blind or deaf. A man who, having
such a temper, keeps it in subjection, and constrains himself to behave
habitually with justice and humanity towards those who are in his power,
seems to us worthy of the highest admiration. There have been instances
of this self-command; and they are among the most signal triumphs of
philosophy and religion. On the other hand, a man who, having been
blessed by nature with a bland disposition, gradually brings himself
to inflict misery on his fellow-creatures with indifference, with
satisfaction, and at length with a hideous rapture, deserves to be
regarded as a portent of wickedness; and such a man was Barere. The
history of his downward progress is full of instruction. Weakness,
cowardice, and fickleness were born with him; the best quality which he
received from nature was a good temper. These, it is true, are not
very promising materials; yet, out of materials as unpromising, high
sentiments of piety and of honour have sometimes made martyrs and
heroes. Rigid principles often do for feeble minds what stays do for
feeble bodies. But Barere had no principles at all. His character was
equally destitute of natural and of acquired strength. Neither in the
commerce of life, nor in books, did we ever become acquainted with
any mind so unstable, so utterly destitute of tone, so incapable of
independent thought and earnest preference, so ready to take impressions
and so ready to lose them. He resembled those creepers which must lean
on something, and which, as soon as their prop is removed, fall down in
utter helplessness. He could no more stand up, erect and self-supported,
in any cause, than the ivy can rear itself like the oak, or the wild
vine shoot to heaven like the cedar of Lebanon. It is barely possible
that, under good guidance and in favourable circumstances, such a man
might have slipped through life without discredit. But the unseaworthy
craft, which even in still water would have been in danger of going down
from its own rottenness, was launched on a raging ocean, amidst a storm
in which a whole armada of gallant ships was cast away. The weakest and
most servile of human beings found himself on a sudden an actor in a
Revolution which convulsed the whole civilised world. At first he fell
under the influence of humane and moderate men, and talked the language
of humanity and moderation. But he soon found himself surrounded by
fierce and resolute spirits, scared by no danger and restrained by no
scruple. He had to choose whether he would be their victim or their
accomplice. His choice was soon made. He tasted blood, and felt no
loathing; he tasted it again, and liked it well. Cruelty became with
him, first a habit, then a passion, at last a madness. So complete and
rapid was the degeneracy of his nature, that within a very few months
after the time when he had passed for a good-natured man, he had brought
himself to look on the despair and misery of his fellow-creatures with
a glee resembling that of the fiends whom Dante saw watching the pool
of seething pitch in Malebolge. He had many associates in guilt; but he
distinguished himself from them all by the Bacchanalian exaltation which
he seemed to feel in the work of death. He was drunk with innocent and
noble blood, laughed and shouted as he butchered, and howled strange
songs and reeled in strange dances amidst the carnage. Then came a
sudden and violent turn of fortune. The miserable man was hurled down
from the height of power to hopeless ruin and infamy. The shock sobered
him at once. The fumes of his horrible intoxication passed away. But he
was now so irrecoverably depraved that the discipline of adversity only
drove him further into wickedness. Ferocious vices, of which he had
never been suspected, had been developed in him by power. Another class
of vices, less hateful perhaps, but more despicable, was now developed
in him by poverty and disgrace. Having appalled the whole world by great
crimes perpetrated under the pretence of zeal for liberty, he became
the meanest of all the tools of despotism. It is not easy to settle the
order of precedence among his vices, but we are inclined to think that
his baseness was, on the whole, a rarer and more marvellous thing than
his cruelty.
This is the view which we have long taken of Barere's character; but,
till we read these Memoirs, we held our opinion with the diffidence
which becomes a judge who has only heard one side. The case seemed
strong, and in parts unanswerable; yet we did not know what the accused
party might have to say for himself; and, not being much inclined to
take our fellow-creatures either for angels of light or for angels of
darkness, we could not but feel some suspicion that his offences had
been exaggerated. That suspicion is now at an end. The vindication is
before us. It occupies four volumes. It was the work of forty years. It
would be absurd to suppose that it does not refute every serious charge
which admitted of refutation. How many serious charges, then, are here
refuted? Not a single one. Most of the imputations which have been
thrown on Barere he does not even notice. In such cases, of course,
judgment must go against him by default. The fact is, that nothing can
be more meagre and uninteresting than his account of the great public
transactions in which he was engaged. He gives us hardly a word of
new information respecting the proceedings of the Committee of Public
Safety; and, by way of compensation, tells us long stories about things
which happened before he emerged from obscurity, and after he had again
sunk into it. Nor is this the worst. As soon as he ceases to write
trifles, he begins to write lies; and such lies! A man who has never
been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means; a man
who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and
he who has not read Barere's Memoirs may be said not to know what it
is to lie. Among the numerous classes which make up the great genus
Mendacium, the Mendacium Vasconicum, or Gascon lie, has, during some
centuries, been highly esteemed as peculiarly circumstantial and
peculiarly impudent; and, among the Mendacia Vasconica, the Mendacium
Barerianum is, without doubt, the finest species. It is indeed a superb
variety, and quite throws into the shade some Mendacia which we were
used to regard with admiration. The Mendacium Wraxallianum, for example,
though by no means to be despised, will not sustain the comparison for a
moment. Seriously, we think that M.
Hippolyte Carnot is much to blame in
this matter. We can hardly suppose him to be worse read than ourselves
in the history of the Convention, a history which must interest him
deeply, not only as a Frenchman, but also as a son. He must, therefore,
be perfectly aware that many of the most important statements which
these volumes contain are falsehoods, such as Corneille's Dorante, or
Moliere's Scapin, or Colin d'Harleville's Monsieur de Crac would have
been ashamed to utter. We are far, indeed, from holding M. Hippolyte
Carnot answerable for Barere's want of veracity; but M. Hippolyte
Carnot has arranged these Memoirs, has introduced them to the world by
a laudatory preface, has described them as documents of great historical
value, and has illustrated them by notes. We cannot but think that, by
acting thus, he contracted some obligations of which he does not seem
to have been at all aware; and that he ought not to have suffered any
monstrous fiction to go forth under the sanction of his name, without
adding a line at the foot of the page for the purpose of cautioning the
reader.
We will content ourselves at present with pointing out two instances
of Barere's wilful and deliberate mendacity; namely, his account of
the death of Marie Antoinette, and his account of the death of
the Girondists. His account of the death of Marie Antoinette is as
follows:--"Robespierre in his turn proposed that the members of the
Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should be
brought to trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He would have
been better employed in concerting military measures which might have
repaired our disasters in Belgium, and might have arrested the progress
of the enemies of the Revolution in the west. "--(Volume ii. page 312. )
Now, it is notorious that Marie Antoinette was sent before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, not at Robespierre's instance, but in direct
opposition to Robespierre's wishes. We will cite a single authority,
which is quite decisive. Bonaparte, who had no conceivable motive to
disguise the truth, who had the best opportunities of knowing the truth,
and who, after his marriage with the Archduchess, naturally felt an
interest in the fate of his wife's kinswomen, distinctly affirmed that
Robespierre opposed the trying of the Queen. (O'Meara's "Voice from St
Helena", ii. 170. ) Who, then, was the person who really did propose that
the Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should
be tried? Full information will be found in the "Moniteur". ("Moniteur",
2d, 7th and 9th of August, 1793. ) From that valuable record it appears
that, on the first of August 1793, an orator, deputed by the Committee
of Public Safety, addressed the Convention in a long and elaborate
discourse. He asked, in passionate language, how it happened that the
enemies of the Republic still continued to hope for success. "Is it,"
he cried, "because we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian
woman? Is it because we have shown so strange an indulgence to the race
of our ancient tyrants? It is time that this unwise apathy should cease;
it is time to extirpate from the soil of the Republic the last roots of
royalty. As for the children of Louis the conspirator, they are hostages
for the Republic. The charge of their maintenance shall be reduced to
what is necessary for the food and keep of two individuals. The public
treasure shall no longer be lavished on creatures who have too long been
considered as privileged. But behind them lurks a woman who has been the
cause of all the disasters of France, and whose share in every project
adverse to the revolution has long been known. National justice claims
its rights over her. It is to the tribunal appointed for the trial
of conspirators that she ought to be sent. It is only by striking
the Austrian woman that you can make Francis and George, Charles and
William, sensible of the crimes which their ministers and their armies
have committed. " The speaker concluded by moving that Marie Antoinette
should be brought to judgment, and should, for that end, be forthwith
transferred to the Conciergerie; and that all the members of the house
of Capet, with the exception of those who were under the sword of the
law, and of the two children of Louis, should be banished from the
French territory. The motion was carried without debate.
Now, who was the person who made this speech and this motion? It was
Barere himself. It is clear, then, that Barere attributed his own mean
insolence and barbarity to one who, whatever his crimes may have been,
was in this matter innocent. The only question remaining is, whether
Barere was misled by his memory, or wrote a deliberate falsehood.
We are convinced that he wrote a deliberate falsehood. His memory is
described by his editors as remarkably good, and must have been bad
indeed if he could not remember such a fact as this. It is true that the
number of murders in which he subsequently bore a part was so great that
he might well confound one with another, that he might well forget what
part of the daily hecatomb was consigned to death by himself, and what
part by his colleagues. But two circumstances make it quite incredible
that the share which he took in the death of Marie Antoinette should
have escaped his recollection. She was one of his earliest victims.
She was one of his most illustrious victims. The most hardened assassin
remembers the first time that he shed blood; and the widow of Louis
was no ordinary sufferer. If the question had been about some milliner,
butchered for hiding in her garret her brother who had let drop a word
against the Jacobin Club--if the question had been about some old nun,
dragged to death for having mumbled what were called fanatical words
over her beads--Barere's memory might well have deceived him. It would
be as unreasonable to expect him to remember all the wretches whom
he slew as all the pinches of snuff that he took. But, though Barere
murdered many hundreds of human beings, he murdered only one Queen. That
he, a small country lawyer, who, a few years before, would have thought
himself honoured by a glance or a word from the daughter of so many
Caesars, should call her the Austrian woman, should send her from jail
to jail, should deliver her over to the executioner, was surely a great
event in his life. Whether he had reason to be proud of it or ashamed of
it, is a question on which we may perhaps differ from his editors; but
they will admit, we think, that he could not have forgotten it.
We, therefore, confidently charge Barere with having written a
deliberate falsehood; and we have no hesitation in saying that we never,
in the course of any historical researches that we have happened to
make, fell in with a falsehood so audacious, except only the falsehood
which we are about to expose.
Of the proceeding against the Girondists, Barere speaks with just
severity. He calls it an atrocious injustice perpetrated against the
legislators of the republic. He complains that distinguished deputies,
who ought to have been readmitted to their seats in the Convention, were
sent to the scaffold as conspirators. The day, he exclaims, was a day
of mourning for France. It mutilated the national representation; it
weakened the sacred principle, that the delegates of the people were
inviolable. He protests that he had no share in the guilt. "I have had,"
he says, "the patience to go through the 'Moniteur', extracting all the
charges brought against deputies, and all the decrees for arresting and
impeaching deputies. Nowhere will you find my name. I never brought a
charge against any of my colleagues, or made a report against any, or
drew up an impeachment against any. " (Volume ii. 407. )
Now, we affirm that this is a lie. We affirm that Barere himself took
the lead in the proceedings of the Convention against the Girondists. We
affirm that he, on the twenty-eighth of July 1793, proposed a decree
for bringing nine Girondist deputies to trial, and for putting to death
sixteen other Girondist deputies without any trial at all. We affirm
that, when the accused deputies had been brought to trial, and when some
apprehension arose that their eloquence might produce an effect even on
the Revolutionary Tribunal, Barere did, on the 8th of Brumaire, second
a motion for a decree authorising the tribunal to decide without hearing
out the defence; and, for the truth of every one of these things so
affirmed by us, we appeal to the very "Moniteur" to which Barere has
dared to appeal. ("Moniteur", 31st of July 1793, and Nonidi, first
Decade of Brumaire, in the year 2(? ). )
What M. Hippolyte Carnot, knowing, as he must know, that this book
contains such falsehoods as those which we have exposed, can have meant,
when he described it as a valuable addition to our stock of historical
information, passes our comprehension. When a man is not ashamed to tell
lies about events which took place before hundreds of witnesses, and
which are recorded in well-known and accessible books, what credit can
we give to his account of things done in corners? No historian who does
not wish to be laughed at will ever cite the unsupported authority of
Barere as sufficient to prove any fact whatever. The only thing, as far
as we can see, on which these volumes throw any light, is the exceeding
baseness of the author.
So much for the veracity of the Memoirs. In a literary point of view,
they are beneath criticism. They are as shallow, flippant, and affected,
as Barere's oratory in the Convention. They are also, what his oratory
in the Convention was not, utterly insipid. In fact, they are the mere
dregs and rinsings of a bottle of which even the first froth was but of
very questionable flavour.
We will now try to present our readers with a sketch of this man's life.
We shall, of course, make very sparing use indeed of his own Memoirs;
and never without distrust, except where they are confirmed by other
evidence.
Bertrand Barere was born in the year 1755, at Tarbes in Gascony. His
father was the proprietor of a small estate at Vieuzac, in the beautiful
vale of Argeles. Bertrand always loved to be called Barere de Vieuzac,
and flattered himself with the hope that, by the help of this feudal
addition to his name, he might pass for a gentleman. He was educated for
the bar at Toulouse, the seat of one of the most celebrated parliaments
of the kingdom, practised as an advocate with considerable success,
and wrote some small pieces, which he sent to the principal literary
societies in the south of France. Among provincial towns, Toulouse seems
to have been remarkably rich in indifferent versifiers and critics. It
gloried especially in one venerable institution, called the Academy of
the Floral Games. This body held every year a grand meeting which was a
subject of intense interest to the whole city, and at which flowers
of gold and silver were given as prizes for odes, for idyls, and for
something that was called eloquence. These bounties produced of course
the ordinary effect of bounties, and turned people who might have been
thriving attorneys and useful apothecaries into small wits and bad
poets. Barere does not appear to have been so lucky as to obtain any of
these precious flowers; but one of his performances was mentioned with
honour. At Montauban he was more fortunate. The academy of that town
bestowed on him several prizes, one for a panegyric on Louis the
Twelfth, in which the blessings of monarchy and the loyalty of the
French nation were set forth; and another for a panegyric on poor Franc
de Pompignan, in which, as may easily be supposed, the philosophy of the
eighteenth century was sharply assailed. Then Barere found an old stone
inscribed with three Latin words, and wrote a dissertation upon it,
which procured him a seat in a learned Assembly, called the Toulouse
Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Polite Literature. At length the
doors of the Academy of the Floral Games were opened to so much
merit. Barere, in his thirty-third year, took his seat as one of that
illustrious brotherhood, and made an inaugural oration which was greatly
admired. He apologises for recounting these triumphs of his youthful
genius. We own that we cannot blame him for dwelling long on the least
disgraceful portion of his existence. To send in declamations for prizes
offered by provincial academies is indeed no very useful or dignified
employment for a bearded man; but it would have been well if Barere had
always been so employed.
In 1785 he married a young lady of considerable fortune. Whether she was
in other respects qualified to make a home happy, is a point respecting
which we are imperfectly informed. In a little work, entitled
"Melancholy Pages", which was written in 1797, Barere avers that his
marriage was one of mere convenience, that at the altar his heart was
heavy with sorrowful forebodings, that he turned pale as he pronounced
the solemn "Yes," that unbidden tears rolled down his cheeks, that his
mother shared his presentiment, and that the evil omen was accomplished.
"My marriage," he says, "was one of the most unhappy of marriages. " So
romantic a tale, told by so noted a liar, did not command our belief. We
were, therefore, not much surprised to discover that, in his Memoirs,
he calls his wife a most amiable woman, and declares that, after he
had been united to her six years, he found her as amiable as ever. He
complains, indeed, that she was too much attached to royalty and to the
old superstition; but he assures us that his respect for her virtues
induced him to tolerate her prejudices. Now Barere, at the time of his
marriage, was himself a Royalist and a Catholic. He had gained one prize
by flattering the Throne, and another by defending the Church. It is
hardly possible, therefore, that disputes about politics or religion
should have embittered his domestic life till some time after he became
a husband. Our own guess is, that his wife was, as he says, a virtuous
and amiable woman, and that she did her best to make him happy during
some years. It seems clear that, when circumstances developed the latent
atrocity of his character, she could no longer endure him, refused to
see him, and sent back his letters unopened. Then it was, we imagine,
that he invented the fable about his distress on his wedding day.
In 1788 Barere paid his first visit to Paris, attended reviews, heard
Laharpe at the Lycaeum, and Condorcet at the Academy of Sciences, stared
at the envoys of Tippoo Sahib, saw the Royal Family dine at Versailles,
and kept a journal in which he noted down adventures and speculations.
Some parts of this journal are printed in the first volume of the work
before us, and are certainly most characteristic. The worst vices of
the writer had not yet shown themselves; but the weakness which was
the parent of those vices appears in every line. His levity, his
inconsistency, his servility, were already what they were to the
last. All his opinions, all his feelings, spin round and round like a
weathercock in a whirlwind. Nay, the very impressions which he receives
through his senses are not the same two days together. He sees Louis
the Sixteenth, and is so much blinded by loyalty as to find his Majesty
handsome. "I fixed my eyes," he says, "with a lively curiosity on his
fine countenance, which I thought open and noble. " The next time that
the king appears all is altered. His Majesty's eyes are without the
smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an
ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought
up. It is the same with more important questions. Barere is for the
parliaments on the Monday and against the parliaments on the Tuesday,
for feudality in the morning and against feudality in the afternoon. One
day he admires the English constitution; then he shudders to think
that, in the struggles by which that constitution had been obtained, the
barbarous islanders had murdered a king, and gives the preference to
the constitution of Bearn. Bearn, he says, has a sublime constitution, a
beautiful constitution. There the nobility and clergy meet in one house,
and the Commons in another. If the houses differ, the King has
the casting vote. A few weeks later we find him raving against the
principles of this sublime and beautiful constitution. To admit deputies
of the nobility and clergy into the legislature is, he says, neither
more nor less than to admit enemies of the nation into the legislature.
In this state of mind, without one settled purpose or opinion, the
slave of the last word, royalist, aristocrat, democrat, according to the
prevailing sentiment of the coffee-house or drawing-room into which he
had just looked, did Barere enter into public life. The States-General
had been summoned. Barere went down to his own province, was there
elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned to
Paris in May 1789.
A great crisis, often predicted, had at last arrived. In no country,
we conceive, have intellectual freedom and political servitude existed
together so long as in France, during the seventy or eighty years which
preceded the last convocation of the Orders. Ancient abuses and new
theories flourished in equal vigour side by side. The people, having no
constitutional means of checking even the most flagitious misgovernment,
were indemnified for oppression by being suffered to luxuriate in
anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule every principle on which
the institutions of the State reposed. Neither those who attribute the
downfall of the old French institutions to the public grievances, nor
those who attribute it to the doctrines of the philosophers, appear
to us to have taken into their view more than one half of the subject.
Grievances as heavy have often been endured without producing a
revolution; doctrines as bold have often been propounded without
producing a revolution. The question, whether the French nation was
alienated from its old polity by the follies and vices of the Viziers
and Sultanas who pillaged and disgraced it, or by the writings of
Voltaire and Rousseau, seems to us as idle as the question whether it
was fire or gunpowder that blew up the mills at Hounslow. Neither
cause would have sufficed alone. Tyranny may last through ages where
discussion is suppressed. Discussion may safely be left free by rulers
who act on popular principles. But combine a press like that of London
with a government like that of St Petersburg; and the inevitable effect
will be an explosion that will shake the world. So it was in France.
Despotism and License, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that
mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely
blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed
hope and terror, that agonising travail and that portentous birth.
Among the crowd of legislators which at this conjuncture poured from all
the provinces of France into Paris, Barere made no contemptible figure.
The opinions which he for the moment professed were popular, yet not
extreme. His character was fair; his personal advantages are said to
have been considerable; and, from the portrait which is prefixed
to these Memoirs, and which represents him as he appeared in the
Convention, we would judge that his features must have been strikingly
handsome, though we think that we can read in them cowardice and
meanness very legibly written by the hand of God. His conversation was
lively and easy; his manners remarkably good for a country lawyer. Women
of rank and wit said that he was the only man who, on his first arrival
from a remote province, had that indescribable air which it was supposed
that Paris alone could give. His eloquence, indeed, was by no means so
much admired in the capital as it had been by the ingenious academicians
of Montauban and Toulouse. His style was thought very bad; and very bad,
if a foreigner may venture to judge, it continued to the last. It would,
however, be unjust to deny that he had some talents for speaking and
writing. His rhetoric, though deformed by every imaginable fault of
taste, from bombast down to buffoonery, was not wholly without force
and vivacity. He had also one quality which, in active life, often gives
fourth-rate men an advantage over first-rate men. Whatever he could do,
he could do without effort, at any moment, in any abundance, and on any
side of any question. There was, indeed, a perfect harmony between his
moral character and his intellectual character. His temper was that of
a slave; his abilities were exactly those which qualified him to be a
useful slave. Of thinking to purpose, he was utterly incapable; but he
had wonderful readiness in arranging and expressing thoughts furnished
by others.
In the National Assembly he had no opportunity of displaying the full
extent either of his talents or of his vices. He was indeed eclipsed
by much abler men. He went, as was his habit, with the stream, spoke
occasionally with some success, and edited a journal called the "Point
du Jour", in which the debates of the Assembly were reported.
He at first ranked by no means among the violent reformers. He was not
friendly to that new division of the French territory which was among
the most important changes introduced by the Revolution, and was
especially unwilling to see his native province dismembered. He was
entrusted with the task of framing Reports on the Woods and Forests.
Louis was exceedingly anxious about this matter; for his majesty was a
keen sportsman, and would much rather have gone without the Veto, or
the prerogative of making peace and war, than without his hunting and
shooting. Gentlemen of the royal household were sent to Barere, in
order to intercede for the deer and pheasants. Nor was this intercession
unsuccessful. The reports were so drawn that Barere was afterwards
accused of having dishonestly sacrificed the interests of the public
to the tastes of the court. To one of these reports he had the
inconceivable folly and bad taste to prefix a punning motto from Virgil,
fit only for such essays as he had been in the habit of composing for
the Floral Games--
"Si canimus sylvas, sylvae sint Consule dignae. "
This literary foppery was one of the few things in which he was
consistent. Royalist or Girondist, Jacobin or Imperialist, he was always
a Trissotin.
As the monarchical party became weaker and weaker, Barere gradually
estranged himself more and more from it, and drew closer and closer to
the republicans. It would seem that, during this transition, he was for
a time closely connected with the family of Orleans. It is certain
that he was entrusted with the guardianship of the celebrated Pamela,
afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald; and it was asserted that he received
during some years a pension of twelve thousand francs from the Palais
Royal.
At the end of September 1791, the labours of the National Assembly
terminated, and those of the first and last Legislative Assembly
commenced.
It had been enacted that no member of the National Assembly should sit
in the Legislative Assembly; a preposterous and mischievous regulation,
to which the disasters which followed must in part be ascribed. In
England, what would be thought of a Parliament which did not contain one
single person who had ever sat in parliament before? Yet it may safely
be affirmed that the number of Englishmen who, never having taken
any share in public affairs, are yet well qualified, by knowledge and
observation, to be members of the legislature is at least a hundred
times as great as the number of Frenchmen who were so qualified in 1791.
How, indeed, should it have been otherwise? In England, centuries of
representative government have made all educated people in some measure
statesmen. In France the National Assembly had probably been composed of
as good materials as were then to be found. It had undoubtedly removed a
vast mass of abuses; some of its members had read and thought much about
theories of government; and others had shown great oratorical talents.
But that kind of skill which is required for the constructing,
launching, and steering of a polity was lamentably wanting; for it is a
kind of skill to which practice contributes more than books. Books are
indeed useful to the politician, as they are useful to the navigator and
to the surgeon. But the real navigator is formed on the waves; the real
surgeon is formed at bedsides; and the conflicts of free states are
the real school of constitutional statesmen. The National Assembly had,
however, now served an apprenticeship of two laborious and eventful
years. It had, indeed, by no means finished its education; but it was
no longer, as on the day when it met, altogether rude to political
functions. Its later proceedings contain abundant proof that the members
had profited by their experience. Beyond all doubt there was not in
France any equal number of persons possessing in an equal degree the
qualities necessary for the judicious direction of public affairs; and,
just at this moment, these legislators, misled by a childish wish to
display their own disinterestedness, deserted the duties which they had
half learned, and which nobody else had learned at all, and left their
hall to a second crowd of novices, who had still to master the first
rudiments of political business. When Barere wrote his Memoirs, the
absurdity of this self-denying ordinance had been proved by events, and
was, we believe, acknowledged by all parties. He accordingly, with his
usual mendacity, speaks of it in terms implying that he had opposed it.
There was, he tells us, no good citizen who did not regret this fatal
vote. Nay, all wise men, he says, wished the National Assembly to
continue its sittings as the first Legislative Assembly. But no
attention was paid to the wishes of the enlightened friends of liberty;
and the generous but fatal suicide was perpetrated. Now the fact is,
that Barere, far from opposing this ill-advised measure, was one of
those who most eagerly supported it; that he described it from the
tribune as wise and magnanimous; that he assigned, as his reasons for
taking this view, some of those phrases in which orators of his class
delight, and which, on all men who have the smallest insight into
politics, produce an effect very similar to that of ipecacuanha.
"Those," he said, "who have framed a constitution for their country are,
so to speak, out of the pale of that social state of which they are the
authors; for creative power is not in the same sphere with that which it
has created. "
M. Hippolyte Carnot has noticed this untruth, and attributes it to
mere forgetfulness. We leave it to him to reconcile his very charitable
supposition with what he elsewhere says of the remarkable excellence of
Barere's memory.
Many members of the National Assembly were indemnified for the sacrifice
of legislative power by appointments in various departments of the
public service.
