Читать книгу The History of French Revolution - Taine Hippolyte - Страница 43

Table of Contents

Ascendancy of the revolutionary party—Theory in its favor—

The constraint thus imposed on men's minds—Appeal to the

passions—Brute force on the side of the party—It profits

by this—Oppression of the minority.

Two advantages give this party the ascendancy, and these advantages are of such importance that henceforth whoever possesses them is sure of being master.—In the first place the prevailing theory is on the side of the revolutionaries, and they alone are, in the second place, determined thoroughly to apply it. This party, therefore, is the only one which is consistent and popular in the face of adversaries who are unpopular and inconsequent. Nearly all of the latter, indeed, defenders of the ancient régime, or partisans of a limited monarchy, are likewise imbued with abstract principles and philosophical speculation. The most refractory nobles have advocated the rights of man in their memorials. Mounier, the principal opponent of the demagogues, was the leader of the commons when they proclaimed themselves to be the National—Assembly.2133 This is enough: they have entered the narrow defile which leads to the abyss. They had no idea of it at the first start, but one step leads to another, and, willing or unwilling, they march on, or are pushed on. When the abyss comes in sight it is too late; they have been driven there by the logical results of their own concessions; they can do nothing but wax eloquent and indignant; having abandoned their vantage ground, they find no halting-place remaining.—There is an enormous power in general ideas, especially if they are simple, and appeal to the passions. None are simpler than these, since they are reducible to the axiom which assumes the rights of man, and subordinate to them every institution, old or new. None are better calculated to inflame the sentiments, since the doctrine enlists human arrogance and pride in its service, and, in the name of justice, consecrates all the demands of independence and domination. Consider three-fourths of the deputies, immature and prejudiced, possessing no information but a few formulas of the current philosophy, with no thread to guide them but pure logic, abandoned to the declamation of lawyers, to the wild utterances of the newspapers, to the promptings of self-esteem, to the hundred thousand tongues which, on all sides, at the bar of the Assembly, at the tribune, in the clubs, in the streets, in their own breasts, repeat unanimously to them, and every day, the same flattery:

"You are sovereign and omnipotent. Right is vested in you alone. The King exists only to execute your will. Every order, every corporation, every power, every civil or ecclesiastical association is illegitimate and null the moment you declare it to be so. You may even transform religion. You are the fathers of the country. You have saved France, you will regenerate humanity. The whole world looks on you in admiration; finish your glorious work—forward, always forward."

Superior good sense and rooted convictions could alone stand firm against this flood of seductions and solicitations; but vacillating and ordinary men are carried away by it. In the harmony of applause which rises, they do not hear the crash of the ruins they produce. In any case, they stop their ears, and shun the cries of the oppressed; they refuse to admit that their work could possibly bring about evil results; they accept the sophisms and untruths which justify it; they allow the assassinated to be calumniated in order to excuse the assassins; they listen to Merlin de Douay, who, after three or four jacqueries, when pillaging, arson, and murder are going on in all the provinces, has just declared in the name of the Committee on Feudalism2134 that "a law must be presented to the people, the justice of which may enforce silence on the feudatory egoists who, for the past six months, so indecently protest against plunder; the wisdom of which may restore to a sense of duty the peasant who has been led astray for a moment by his resentment of a long oppression." And when Raynal, the surviving patriarch of the philosophic party, one day, for a wonder, takes the plain truth with him into their tribune, they resent his straightforwardness as an outrage, and excuse it solely on the ground of his imbecility. An omnipotent legislator cannot depreciate himself; like a king he is condemned to self-admiration in his public capacity. "There were not thirty deputies amongst us," says a witness, "who thought differently from Raynal," but "in each other's presence the credit of the Revolution, the perspective of its blessings, was an article of faith which had to be believed in;" and, against their own reason, against their conscience, the moderates, caught in the net of their own acts, join the revolutionaries to complete the Revolution.

Had they refused, they would have been compelled; for, to obtain the power, the Assembly has, from the very first, either tolerated or solicited the violence of the streets. But, in accepting insurrectionists for its allies, it makes them masters, and henceforth, in Paris as in the provinces, illegal and brutal force becomes the principal power of the State. "The triumph was accomplished through the people; it was impossible to be severe with them;"2135 hence, when insurrections were to be put down, the Assembly had neither the courage nor the force necessary. "They blame for the sake of decency; they frame their deeds by expediency." and in turn justly undergo the pressure which they themselves have sanctioned against others. Only three or four times do the majority, when the insurrection becomes too daring—after the murder of the baker François, the insurrection of the Swiss Guard at Nancy, and the outbreak of the Champ de Mars—feel that they themselves are menaced, vote for and apply martial law, and repel force with force. But, in general, when the despotism of the people is exercised only against the royalist minority, they allow their adversaries to be oppressed, and do not consider themselves affected by the violence which assails the party of the "right:" they are enemies, and may be given up to the wild beasts. In accordance with this, the "left" has made its arrangements; its fanaticism has no scruples; it is principle, it is absolute truth that is at stake; this must triumph at any cost. Besides, can there be any hesitation in having recourse to the people in the people's own cause? A little compulsion will help along the good cause, and hence the siege of the Assembly is continually renewed. This was the practice already at Versailles before the 6th of October, while now, at Paris, it is kept up more actively and with less disguise.

At the beginning of the year 1790,2136 the band under pay comprises seven hundred and fifty effective men, most of them deserters or soldiers drummed out of their regiments, who are at first paid five francs and then forty sous a day. It is their business to make or support motions in the coffee-houses and in the streets, to mix with the spectators at the sittings of the sections, with the groups at the Palais-Royal, and especially in the galleries of the National-Assembly, where they are to hoot or applaud at a given signal. Their leader is a Chevalier de Saint-Louis, to whom they swear obedience, and who receives his orders from the Committee of Jacobins. His first lieutenant at the Assembly is a M. Saule, "a stout, small, stunted old fellow, formerly an upholsterer, then a charlatan hawker of four penny boxes of grease (made from the fat of those that had been hung—for the cure of diseases of the kidneys) and all his life a sot … who, by means of a tolerably shrill voice, which was always well moistened, has acquired some reputation in the galleries of the Assembly." In fact, he has forged admission tickets he has been turned out; he has been obliged to resume "the box of ointment, and travel for one or two months in the provinces with a man of letters for his companion." But on his return, "through the protection of a groom of the Court, he obtained a piece of ground for a coffee-house against the wall of the Tuileries garden, almost alongside of the National Assembly," and now it is at home in his coffee-shop behind his counter that the hirelings of the galleries "come to him to know what they must say, and to be told the order of the day in regard to applause." Besides this, he is there himself; "it is he who for three years is to regulate public sentiment in the galleries confided to his care, and, for his useful and satisfactory services, the Constituent Assembly will award him a recompense," to which the Legislative Assembly will add "a pension of six hundred livres, besides a lodging in an apartment of the Feuillants."

We can divine how men of this stamp, thus compensated, do their work. From the top of the galleries2137 they drown the demands of the "right" by the force of their lungs; this or that decree, as, for instance, the abolition of titles of nobility, is carried, "not by shouts, but by terrific howls."2138 On the arrival of the news of the sacking of the Hôtel de Castries by the populace, they applaud. On the question coming up as to the decision whether the Catholic faith shall be dominant, "they shout out that the aristocrats must all be hung, and then things will go on well." Their outrages not only remain unpunished, but are encouraged: this or that noble who complains of their hooting is called to order, while their interference and vociferations, their insults and their menaces, are from this time introduced as one of the regular wheels of legislative operations. Their pressure is still worse outside the Chamber.2139 The Assembly is obliged several times to double its guard. On the 27th of September, 1790, there are 40,000 men around the building to extort the dismissal of the Ministers, and "motions for assassination" are made under the windows, On the 4th of January, 1791, whilst on a call of the house the ecclesiastical deputies pass in turn to the tribune, to take or refuse the oath to the civil constitution of the clergy, a furious clamor ascends in the Tuileries, and even penetrates into the Chamber. "To the lamp post with all those who refuse!" On the 27th of September, 1790, M. Dupont, economist, having spoken against the assignats, is surrounded on leaving the Chamber and hooted at, hustled, pushed against the basin of the Tuileries, into which he was being thrown when the guard rescued him. On the 21st of June, 1790, M. de Cazalès just misses "being torn to pieces by the people."2140 Deputies of the "right" are threatened over and over again by gestures in the streets and in the coffee-houses; effigies of them with ropes about the neck are publicly displayed. The Abbé Maury is several times on the point of being hung: he saves himself once by presenting a pistol. Another time the Vicomte de Mirabeau is obliged to draw his sword. M. de Clermont-Tonnerre, having voted against the annexation of the Comtat to France, is assailed with chairs and clubs in the Palais-Royal, pursued into a porter's room and from thence to his dwelling; the howling crowd break in the doors, and are only repelled with great difficulty. It is impossible for the members of the "right" to assemble together; they are "stoned" in the church of the Capuchins, then in the Salon Français in the Rue Royale, and then, to crown the whole, an ordinance of the new judges shuts up their hall, and punishes them for the violence which they have to suffer.2141 In short they are at the mercy of the mob. The most moderate, the most liberal, and the most manly both in heart and head, Malouet, declares that "in going to the Assembly he rarely forgot to carry his pistols with him."2142 "For two years," he says, "after the King's flight, we never enjoyed one moment of freedom and security."

" On going into a slaughter-house," writes another deputy, "you see some animals at the entrance which still have a short time to live, until the hour comes to dispatch them. Such was the impression which the assemblage of nobles, bishops, and parliamentarians2143 on the right side made on my mind every time I entered the Assembly, the executioners of the left side permitting them to breathe a little longer."

They are insulted and outraged even upon their benches; "placed between peril within and peril without, between the hostility of the galleries,"2144 and that of the howlers at the entrance, "between personal insults and the abbey of Saint-Germain, between shouts of laughter celebrating the burning of their chateaux and the clamors which, thirty times in a quarter of an hour, cry down their opinions," they are given over and denounced "to the ten thousand Cerberuses" of the journals and of the streets, who pursue them with their yells and "cover them with their slaver." Any expedient is good enough for putting down their opposition, and, at the end of the session, in full Assembly, they are threatened with "a recommendation to the departments," which means the excitement of riots and of the permanent jacquerie of the provinces against them in their own houses.—Parliamentary strategy of this sort, employed uninterruptedly for twenty-nine months, finally produces its effect. Many of the weak are gained over;2145 even on characters of firm temper fear has a hold; he who would march under fire with head erect shuddered at the idea of being dragged in the gutter by the rabble; the brutality of the populace always exercises a material ascendancy over finely strung nerves. On the 12th of July, 1791,2146 the call of the house decreed against the absentees proves that one hundred and thirty-two deputies no longer appear in their places. Eleven days before, among those who take no further part in the proceedings. Thus, before the completion of the Constitution, the whole of the opposition, more than four hundred members, over one-third of the Assembly, is reduced to flight or to silence. By dint of oppression, the revolutionary party has got rid of all resistance, while the violence which gave to it ascendancy in the streets, now gives to it equal ascendance within the walls of Parliament.