DIES IRÆ.
"The country in danger!" was the cry which electrified France, as crowds of volunteers started from all parts for the frontier. Now, for the first time, the hymn of the Revolution resounded through the realm, as, solemnly singing it, five hundred Marseillais marched towards Paris. But the danger not only came from the foreign enemy, already victorious in several places on the frontier; it lurked at the very heart of the capital, in a hostile Court, ready to make common cause with the invader. Here lay the paramount cause of the 10th of August, collateral causes being the deposition of Pétion, the beloved Mayor of Paris, and the dismissal of the Girondin Ministry. Madame Roland declares that Roland and herself knew no more concerning the 10th of August—when the Palace of the Kings of France was stormed, and the Royal Family forced to take refuge in the bosom of the National Assembly—than did the outside public.
Came the question how to proceed with this poor King, from whom every shred of authority had departed! Suspension of the executive power, appointment of a tutor to the Dauphin, removal of the Royal Family to the Luxembourg, were the first measures adopted by the Assembly. But its orders were countermanded, and the Royal Family taken to the dungeon-like tower of the Temple instead of to the palace assigned them; while the Swiss troops—who had incurred the deadly hatred of the populace of Paris by firing on and killing them by thousands, in their defence of the Tuileries—were imprisoned in the Abbaye, the most exposed of the prisons. For a new power had mysteriously sprung into existence on that night of the 10th of August—the insurrectionary Commune. Whence its authority—by whom elected—none could say; but, by the occult law of revolutions, the leadership suddenly passed from the Assembly into its hands. One man at that moment was the soul of the Commune, the man who, if any one, had made the 10th of August: the man who could suffer thousands to be massacred, yet weep like a woman over the death of one he loved: the man who summed up his political practice in that famous my, "We must dare, and again dare, and without end dare!" To name Danton is not so much to speak of a single man as of a whole section of the people. He was great because he represented such a vast mass of the national life; but his greatness was disfigured because this national life itself was turbid and corrupt. If Robespierre might be called the abstract idea of the Revolution, its will was Danton, just as Marat seems to have been its avenging demon.
No man of the Revolution inspired Madame Roland with such instinctive antipathy as Danton. Robespierre she admired, before their common party had split into the hostile camps of Gironde and Mountain; Marat, whom she had never seen, she long held to be a kind of myth or popular scarecrow; but Danton was a solid fact, thrown much into her presence, and whom she was obliged to reckon with. "I never," says she, "beheld so repulsive and atrocious a countenance; and, although I argued that I knew nothing against him, and that the most honest men necessarily have two kinds of reputation when party strife runs high—in fact, that we should not go by appearances—I could not reconcile that face with a well-meaning man. I never saw anything so characteristic of brutal passions, of the most astounding daring, half-veiled under an assumption of jovial good-nature."
This Commune—destined to take so leading and sanguinary a part in the subsequent events of the Revolution—counted among its members the fierce and fickle Tallien, the medical student Chaumette, a vampire-like creature who seemed to batten on blood, and Hébert, destined to infamous notoriety as the Père Duchesne. A significant addition was made, without any official election whatever, to this ominous corporation, for between the 11th of August and the 2nd of September, Marat stole forth from the holes and cellars where he lay habitually hidden, and took his seat in the Commune. The "friend of the people" emerged into the light to preach the extermination of the great of the land. In Marat—who cultivated hatred as a fine art and celebrated the praise of murder, who even made Robespierre quail with his threats of burning tyrants alive in their palaces, and of impalling senators on their benches in the Assembly—we recognise not so much a man as the dreadful summing up of centuries of wrong. To understand, nay, to absolve this man, who had "made himself Anathema," because hate consumed him like a raging sickness, we must recall those tillers of the soil, worked like galley-slaves on the high-roads, those trembling peasants who ate their daily bread with the terror of criminals, those poor Bretons who considered "hanging as a deliverance from worse evils." We must recall these wrongs here; for the blackest days of the Revolution, the sanguinary days of September, were approaching with giant strides.
Such were the elements of the new Commune before which the National Assembly faded. The country, however, was once more appealed to, and this time without the distinction of active and passive citizens: which had been an oligarchical device of the Constituent Assembly, whereby the majority of the French nation were excluded from the suffrage, on the ground that those who did not pay a certain minimum in taxes were not entitled to the franchise. Meanwhile, the Girondins, with some modifications in the Cabinet, had been triumphantly recalled to office. Danton became Minister of Justice, the geometrician Monge of the Marine, and Pache (afterwards nicknamed "the Tartuffe of Politics" by Roland's wife) was made Minister of War at the recommendation of her husband, who, on taking office, began by renewing the staff in most of the Government offices. Champagneux he made General Secretary, the excellent Bosc Postmaster-General, and placed Lanthenas in the Arts and Science Department. Each Minister had very large secret funds placed at his disposal, employed mostly in issuing papers, circulars, and placards of all kinds, the walls being made the great vehicle of political education. Louvet, author of Faublas, became the editor of Roland's paper, the Sentinel, most of the political circulars for which were composed by Madame Roland herself. The Minister of the Interior, besides seeing to the free circulation of provisions, had, in fact, little to do but to publish manifestoes; for such was the universal jealousy of the concentration of power, that the only bodies that possessed any were those who could lay claim to none.
What kind of Government should France now adopt was the question. Madame Roland would fain have seen a Republic inhabited by citizens such as Plutarch had taught her to love. Rut she forgot the dissimilarity of conditions: that enormous proletariat of France—hungry, violent, ignorant, tumultuous—about to be enfranchised, and to affect directly the future working of political institutions. Her own party, the Girondins, were the only men in the State whose culture would have rendered them fit to realise such a form of Government in its purity; but the foreign invasion, by driving the people into a frenzy of rage and fear, rendered unpopular all measures but those of violence and terror.
Longwy and Verdun had been taken by the Prussians; Paris lay exposed to the enemy; in the very capital a portion of the population secretly rejoiced at these defeats of the French army. A panic of desperation seized the people. They did not tremble for their country alone; they trembled still more for that newly-born liberty, already so dearly purchased. "Vivre libre ou mourir!" became the universal cry. The press of volunteers to the public places to inscribe their names on the altar of the country was so enormous that numbers had to be sent away. It seemed as though soldiers sprang from the ground, as those armed men were fabled to have done from the dragon's teeth of Cadmus. But the fact of so many patriots departing for the frontier seemed to promise Royalists a freer field for cabal. In the latter days of August were made numberless arrests of nobles, recalcitrant priests, and citizens of dubious patriotism—as many as five thousand being seized in one night. The Abbaye, St. Pelagie, the Conciergerie, and other prisons—or convents suddenly turned into such—were full to overflowing.
On the 2nd of September 1792 the inhabitants of Paris were wrought up to a fever-heat of excitement. The air was full of farewells to the volunteers departing for the frontiers; the muffled roll of drums filled the air; an enormous black flag waving from the Town Hall seemed to prognosticate destruction and death; the clatter of horses and arms, seized in the nation's name, was heard as they were being taken to the gates; the alarm-bells were pealing; volleys of cannon thundered in quicker and quicker succession; the desperate looks of the people, the sinister rumours afloat—everything foreboded the outbreak of some imminent catastrophe.
Was it the premeditated act of the Commune? Had it been engendered in the monstrous imagination of Marat? Or had Danton—with his famous, "Let my name be branded and my memory perish, if only France be free!"—aimed the first blow? Or, again, did the Paris mob of its own accord turn upon its prisoners, vowing that not a Royalist should survive to triumph, if the enemy entered its walls? Each successive historian of the French Revolution, from Michelet to Lamartine and Louis Blanc, has assigned the hideous responsibility of the September massacres to different sets of men. But there is sometimes a fatal conjunction of circumstances in which distinct causes work darkly towards the same events, and it seems that, if the prison massacres were unhappily projected by the leaders of the Commune, there was yet no distinct organization or directing Committee, but that the people itself, to judge from the conduct of some of its organized sections—moved by an impulse of rage and despair—turned furiously upon its internal foes, and, breaking all social bonds, constituted itself judge and executioner in one.
The first signal for the horrible crimes about to be committed was the transfer of some twenty-four prisoners, chiefly priests, to the Abbaye, the most crowded of all the prisons. This transfer was significant, when taken in connection with the removal of the gaoler's family, and that of several men, by the orders of Danton, among whom happened to be Desmoulins' schoolmaster. The carriages containing these priests, followed by an escort of Marseillais and other federate troops, were soon surrounded by a booting, yelling, menacing crowd, to whom a cassock was the symbol of counter-revolution and civil war; and, whether the attack first began on the outside, or was provoked by one of the priests, a spark was enough to blow the passions of the multitude into a destructive blaze.
Then were the prison doors burst open. Half-clad men, armed with pikes, with a strange glare in their savage, hunger-bitten faces, swarmed about the court-yards. Prisoners were at first simply hauled from their cells, dragged along the passages, driven pell-mell into the court-yards, and cut down ruthlessly like grass falling beneath the mower's scythe. Some, delirious with fear, flung themselves of their own accord on the weapons of their executioners; others resisted to the death, and fell pierced by successive wounds. To put some kind of limit to these ghastly butcheries, a kind of infernal Tribunal was at last instituted in a gloomy vault, with self-appointed judge and jury, where Maillard, dread arbiter of September, sat with book and inkstand before him to try culprits, pronounce judgments, acquit a few, and send the mass to destruction. In this carnival of death there were some deeds over which history, in mercy to mankind, should draw the veil, as the cruel murder and dastardly usage of the Princess de Lamballe, whose head, severed from the body, was stuck on a pike and paraded by a wretch through the streets of Paris, and in front of the Temple itself, before the sickened eyes of Louis XVI. There were also deeds of devotion and filial heroism such as humanise these otherwise demoniacal proceedings. Thus Mademoiselle de Sombreuil saved her father's life by enfolding him in her arms and making her body a rampart for him; she even disarmed the murderers by her courage, beauty, and despair. But, not content with the actual horrors of the scene, historians have not scrupled to add to them, and the story that the unhappy girl was forced to drink a tumbler of blood to redeem her father is proved to have grown out of the fact that, on having fainted, one of the ferocious band hurried to bring a glass of water, into which, as she took it, there fell a drop of blood from his sanguinary hand.
These "bacchanals of blood" lasted from three to four days and nights. Prison after prison was invaded and emptied of its human contents; the appetite seemed to grow with what it fed upon; the massacres became more indiscriminate as they proceeded. And was there no power in Paris to arrest this defilement of the cause of freedom? Alas! the power in whose hands the real authority, and not its shadow, was vested—the Commune and the armed sections commanded by Santerre the Brewer—took no steps to stop the massacres. This fact, among other indications, seems a proof that they originated and abetted them. And where, it may be asked, was Roland, the Minister of the Interior, all this time?
On Sunday, the 2nd of September, Madame Roland tells us, towards five o'clock in the afternoon—about the time when the prisons were invested—she was alone at home, when the Ministerial residence was surrounded by about two hundred men, loudly calling for the Minister and for arms. On their refusing to go, after having been vainly assured that Roland was not in, the brave woman sent some of the protesting servants to ask ten of the number to come and speak to her. Her calmness, her beauty, her high intrepidity, must have produced something like awe in those rough sans-culottes, who usually eyed with suspicion every person less tattered than themselves. Quietly inquiring on what errand they had come, and being told that they were citizens going to Verdun, who wanted arms, she pointed out to them that the Minister of War, and not of the Interior, was the person to whom they should have addressed themselves. They had been there already, muttered they; these Ministers were traitors! They demanded to see Roland. Matters wore a suspicious look, when one remembers the date; but Madame Roland, keeping her superb self-possession, proposed to take them over the place herself, adding further that, if they had to make complaints, it was to the Commune they should be addressed, or that, if they wished to see Roland, he was to be found at a Cabinet Meeting held at the Hotel de la Marine. Thereupon they retired. Madame Roland, stepping on to a balcony, saw a furious demagogue, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up above the elbow, brandishing a sword, and declaiming against the treachery of the Ministers. After some more parley, the mob retired to the beating of drums, taking one of the valets as a hostage.
Some days afterwards, Madame Roland learned that Danton had gone to Pétion, and in his brusque way cried, "Do you know what they have done now? Made out an order of arrest against Roland!" "Who has?" demanded Pétion. "Oh, that committee of enragés. I have taken the order; here it is. We cannot allow them to act thus! The devil! Against a Member of the Council, too!" Pétion took the order, read it, and, giving it back to him with a smile, said, "Let be; it will produce a good effect." "Produce a good effect!" said Danton, curiously examining the Mayor. "No; I cannot allow it."
Madame Roland very naturally connects the two hundred sans-culottes with the order of arrest, which she considers was only rendered abortive by Roland's absence from home. Subsequent events seem to justify her supposition. But in her antipathy to Danton she suspects him of complicity, whereas his conduct proves, on the contrary, that he would have wished the Girondins for allies, if they would have suffered him to carry on the Revolution after his own method; but this their humanity revolted from.
This order of arrest against Roland; the two emissaries of the Commune nominally appointed to protect Pétion's precious person, but in reality to mount sentinel over him; the powerlessness of the Members of the Assembly, who had no armed force at their beck and call; Madame Roland's remark to Bancal on the 5th, "We are under the knife of Robespierre and Marat"—all this helps to explain the else inexplicable quiescence of the Minister of the Interior.
But a change had come over the face of the Revolution. The massacres, it may be said, were in substance not nearly as bad as the atrocities over and over again committed, as history records. But atrocities committed in the name of liberty and fraternity—there is the pity of it! By them, declares the humane Michelet, the cause of freedom in Europe was retarded for a century. And well may it be so! For all the best minds began to lose faith in this uprising of the French nation, which they had hailed as the dawning of a new era. With the rivers of blood spilt so ruthlessly they sullied the pure, new-born idea of equality; with the red glare of their terror they blotted out the clear sunrise that had promised a better day. "You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution," was Madame Roland's cry to Bancal. "Well, I am ashamed of it! Scoundrels have defiled it! It is become hideous! . . . To remain in power is degrading, yet we are not allowed to leave Paris . . ."
Already, on the 11th of September, Roland wished to send in his resignation. "But," said his wife, "Brissot has been scolding me terribly, and declaring that for my husband to quit the Administration at such a juncture would prove a public calamity."