The Outline of History - H. G. Wells (most recommended books txt) 📗

save the, republic as he conceived it, and, he imagined it could be saved by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to have the republic. The living spirit of the republic, it seemed had sprung from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king. There were insurrections: one in the west, in the district of La Vende, where the people rose against the conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests; one in the south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the royalists of Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing royalists.

 

Nothing could have better pleased the fierce heart of the Paris slums. The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering began. [7] The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood. The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre's antagonists were guillotined, atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined, Danton was guillotined because he thought there was too much guillotine; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood, and needed more and more, as an opium-taker needs more and more opium.

 

Danton was still Danton, leonine and exemplary upon the guillotine. Danton, he said, no weakness!

 

And the grotesque thing about the story is that Robespierre was indubitably honest. He was far more honest than any of the group of men who succeeded him. He was inspired by a consuming passion for a new order of human life. So far as he could contrive it, the Committee of Public Safety, the emergency government of twelve which had now thrust aside the Convention, constructed. The scale on which it sought to construct was stupendous. All the intricate problems with which we still struggle today were met by swift and shallow solutions. Attempts were made to equalize property. Opulence, said St. Just, is infamous. The property of the rich was taxed or confiscated in order that it should be divided among the poor. Every man was to have a secure house, a living, a wife and children. The labourer was worthy of his hire, but not entitled to an advantage. There was an attempt to abolish profit altogether, the rude incentive of most human commerce since the beginning of society. Profit is the economic riddle that still puzzles us today. There were harsh laws against profiteering in France in 1793England in 1919 found it necessary to make quite similar laws. And the Jacobien government not only replanned -in eloquent outline- the economic, but also the social system.

 

Divorce was made as easy as marriage; the distinction of legitimate and illegitimate children was abolished . . . A new calendar was devised, with new names for the months, a week of ten days, and the like that has long since been swept, away; but also the clumsy coinage and the tangled weights and measures of old France gave place to the simple and. lucid decimal system that still endures . . . There was a proposal from one extremist group to abolish, God among other institutions altogether, and to substitute the worship of Reason. There was, indeed, a Feast of Reason in the cathedral of Notre-Dame, with a pretty actress as the goddess of Reason. But against this Robespierre set his face; he was no atheist. Atheism, he said, is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the idea of the people.

 

So he guillotined Hbert, who had celebrated the, Feast of Reason, and all his party.

 

A certain mental disorder became perceptible, in Robespierre as the summer of 1794 drew on. He was deeply concerned with his religion. (The arrests and executions of suspects were going on now as briskly as ever. Through the streets of Paris every day rumbled the Terror with its carts full of condemned people.) He induced the Convention to decree that France believed in a Supreme Being, and in that comforting doctrine, the immortality of the soul. In June he celebrated a great festival, the festival of his Supreme Being. There was a procession to the Champ de Mars, which he headed, brilliantly arrayed, bearing a great bunch of flowers and wheat ears. Figures of inflammatory material, representing Atheism and Vice, were solemnly burnt; then, by an ingenious mechanism, and with some slight creakings, an incombustible statue of Wisdom rose in their place. There were discourses -Robespierre delivered the chief one- but apparently no worship . . .

 

Thereafter Robespierre displayed a disposition to brood aloof from affairs. For a month he kept away from the Convention.

 

One day in July he reappeared and delivered a strange speech that clearly foreshadowed fresh prosecutions. Gazing on the multitude of vices which the torrent of Revolution has rolled down, he cried, in his last great speech in the Convention, I have sometimes trembled lest I should be soiled by the impure neighbourhood of wicked men . . . I know that it is easy for the leagued tyrants of the world to, overwhelm a single individual; but I know also what is the duty of a man who can die in the defence of humanity. . . .

 

And so on to vague utterances that seemed to threaten everyone.

 

The Convention heard this speech in silence; then when a proposal was made to print and circulate it, broke into a resentful uproar and refused permission. Robespierre went off in bitter resentment to the club of his supporters, and re-read his speech to them!

 

That night was full of talk and meetings and preparations for the morrow, and the next morning the Convention turned upon Robespierre. One Tallien threatened him with a dagger. When he tried to speak, he was shouted down, and the President jingled the bell at him. President of Assassins, cried Robespierre, I demand speech! It was refused him. His voice deserted him; he coughed and spluttered. The blood of Danton chokes him, cried someone.

 

He was accused and arrested there and then with his chief supporters.

 

Whereupon the Hotel de Ville, still' stoutly Jacobin, rose against the Convention, and Robespierre and his companions were snatched out of the hands of their captors. There was a night of gathering, marching, counter-marching; and at last, about three in the morning; the forces of the Convention faced the form of the Commune outside the Hotel de Ville. Henriot, the Jacobin commander, after a busy day was drunk upstairs; a parley ensued, and then, after some indecision, the soldiers of the Commune went over to the Government. There was a shouting of patriotic sentiments, and someone looked out from the Hotel de Ville. Robespierre and his last companions found themselves betrayed and trapped.

 

Two or three of these men threw themselves out of a window, and injured themselves frightfully on the railings below without killing themselves. Others attempted suicide. Robespierre, it seems, was shot in the lower jaw by a gendarme. He was found, his eyes staring from a pale face whose lower part was blood.

 

Followed seventeen hours of agony before his end. He spoke never a word during that time, his jaw being bound up roughly in dirty linen. He and his companions, and the broken, dying bodies of, those who, had jumped from the windows, twenty-two men altogether, were taken to the guillotine instead of the condemned, appointed for that day. Mostly his eyes were closed, but, says Carlyle, he opened them to see the great knife rising above him, and struggled. Also it would seem he screamed when the executioner removed his bandages. Then the knife came down, swift and merciful.

 

The Terror was at an end. From first to last there had been condemned and executed about four thousand people.

 

36.12 The Directory

 

It witnesses to the immense vitality and the profound rightness of the flood of new ideals and intentions that the French Revolution had released into the world of practical endeavour, that it could still flow in a creative torrent after it had been caricatured and mocked, in the grotesque personality and career of Robespierre. He had shown its deepest, thoughts, he had displayed anticipations of its methods and conclusions; through the green and distorting lenses of his preposterous vanity and egotism, he had smeared and blackened all its hope and promise with blood and horror, and the power of those ideas was not destroyed. They stood the extreme tests of ridiculous and horrible presentation. After his downfall, the Republic still ruled unassailable. Leaderless, for his successors were a group of crafty or commonplace men, the European republic struggled on and presently fell and rose again, and fell and rose and still struggles, entangled but invincible.

 

And it is well to remind the reader here, of the real dimensions of this phase of the Terror, which strikes so vividly upon the imagination and which has therefore been enormously exaggerated relatively to the rest of the revolution. From 1789 to late in 1791 the French Revolution was an orderly process, and from the summer of 1794 the Republic was an orderly and victorious state. The Terror was not the work of the whole country, but of the town mob which owed its existence and its savagery to the misrule, and social injustice of the ancient rgime; and the explosion of the Terror could have happened only through the persistent treacherous disloyalty of the royalists which, while it raised the extremists to frenzy, disinclined the mass of moderate republicans from any intervention. The best men were busy fighting the Austrians and royalists on the frontier. Altogether, we must remember, the total of the killed in the Terror amounted to a few thousand, and among those thousands there were certainly a great number of active antagonists whom the Republic, by all the standards of that time, was entitled to kill. It included such traitors and mischiefmakers as Philip, Duke of Orleans of the Palais Royal, who had voted for the death of Louis XVI. More lives were wasted by the British generals alone on the opening day of what is known as the Somme offensive of July, 1916 than in the whole French revolution from start to finish. We hear so much about the martyrs of the French Terror because they were notable, well-connected people, and because there has been a sort of propaganda of their sufferings. But let us balance against them in our minds what was going on in the prisons of the world generally at that time. In Britain and America, while the Terror ruled in France, far more people were slaughtered for offencesvery often quite trivial offences- against property than were condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal for treason against the State. Of course, they were very common people indeed, but in their rough way they suffered. A girl was hanged in Massachusetts in 1789 for forcibly taking the hat, shoes, and buckles of another girl she had met in the street. [8] Again, Howard the philanthropist (about 1773) found a number of perfectly innocent people detained in the English prisons who had been tried and acquitted, but were unable to pay the jailer's fees. And these prisons were filthy places under no effective control. Torture was still in use in the Hanoverian dominions of his Britannic majesty King George III. It had been in use in France up to the time of the National Assembly. These things mark the level of the age. It is not on record that anyone was deliberately tortured by the French revolutionaries during the Terror. Those few hundreds of French gentlefolk fell into a pit that most of them