Part 36

Never was character more opposite to that of the Russian autocrat than that of his great coadjutor in the pacification and settlement of Europe, Prince Talleyrand. This most remarkable man was born at Paris in 1754, so that in 1814 he was already sixty years of age. He was descended of an old family, and had for his maternal aunt the celebrated Princess of Ursius, who played so important a part in the war of the succession at the court of Philippe V.[29] Being destined for the Church, he early entered the seminary of St. Sulpice, and even there was remarkable for the delicate vein of sarcasm, nice discrimination, and keen penetration, for which he afterward became so distinguished in life. At the age of twenty-six he was appointed agent-general for the clergy, and in that capacity his administrative talents were so remarkable that they procured for him the situation of Bishop of Autun, which he held in 1789, when the revolution broke out. So remarkable had his talents become at this period that Mirabeau, in his secret correspondence with Berlin, pointed him out as one of the most eminent men of the age.

He was elected representative of the clergy of his diocese for the Constitute Assembly, and was one of the first of that rank in the Church who voted on the 29th of May for the junction of the ecclesiastical body with the _Tiers État_. He also took the lead in all the measures, then so popular, which had for their object to spoliate the Church, and apply its possessions to the service of the state; accordingly, he himself proposed the suppression of tithes and the application of the property of the Church to the public treasury. In all these measures he was deaf to the remonstrances of the clergy whom he represented, and already he had severed all the cords which bound him to the Church.

His ruling principle was not any peculiar enmity to religion, but a fixed determination to adhere to the dominant party, whatever it was, whether in Church or state; to watch closely the signs of the times, and throw in his lot with that section of the community which appeared likely to gain the superiority. In February, 1790, he was appointed President of the Assembly, and from that time forward, down to its dissolution, he took a leading part in all its measures. He was not, however, an orator; knowledge of men and prophetic sagacity were his great qualifications. Generally silent in the hall of debate, he soon gained the lead in the council of deliberation or committee of management. He officiated as constitutional bishop to the great scandal of the more orthodox clergy in the great _fête_ on the 14th of July, 1790, in the Champ de Mars; but he had already become fearful of the excesses of the popular party, and was, perhaps, the only person to whom Mirabeau on his deathbed communicated his secret views and designs for the restoration of the French monarchy.

Early in 1792 he set out on a secret mission to London, where he remained till the breaking out of the war in February, 1793, and enjoyed much of the confidence of Mr. Pitt. He naturally enough became an object of jealousy to both parties, being denounced by the Jacobins as an emissary of the court, and by the Royalists as an agent of the Jacobins; and, in consequence, he was accused and condemned in his absence, and only escaped by withdrawing to America, where he remained till 1795 engaged in commercial pursuits. It was not the least proof of his address and sagacity that he thus avoided equally the crimes and the dangers of the Reign of Terror, and returned to Paris at the close of that year with his head on his shoulders, and without deadly hostility to any party in his heart.

His influence and abilities soon caused themselves to be felt; the sentence of death, which had been recorded against him in his absence, was soon recalled; he became a leading member of the Club of Salm, which in 1797 was established to counterbalance the efforts of the Royalists in the Club of Clichy; and on the triumph of the revolutionists by the violence of Augereau in July, 1797, he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nevertheless, aware of the imbecility of the directorial government, he entered warmly into the views of Napoleon, upon his return from Egypt, for its overthrow. He was again made Minister of Foreign Affairs by that youthful conqueror after the 18th Brumaire, and continued, with some few interruptions, to be the soul of all foreign negotiations and the chief director of foreign policy, down to the measures directed against Spain in 1807. On that occasion, however, his wonted sagacity did not desert him; he openly disapproved of the attack on the peninsula, and was, in consequence, dismissed from office, which he did not again hold till he was appointed chief of the provisional government on the 1st of April, 1814. He had thus the singular address, though a leading character under both _régimes_, to extricate himself both from the crimes of the revolution and the misfortunes of the Empire.

He was no ordinary man who could accomplish so great a prodigy and yet retain such influence as to step, as it were, by common consent into the principal direction of affairs on the overthrow of Napoleon. His power of doing so depended not merely on his great talents; they alone, if unaccompanied by other qualifications, would inevitably have brought him to the guillotine under the first government or the prisons of state under the last. It was his extraordinary versatility and flexibility of disposition, and the readiness with which he accommodated himself to every change of government and dynasty which he thought likely to be permanent, that mainly contributed to this extraordinary result. Such was his address that, though the most changeable character in the whole revolution, he contrived never to lose either influence or reputation by all his tergiversations; but, on the contrary, went on constantly rising to the close of his career, when above eighty years of age, in weight, fortune, and consideration.

The very fact of his having survived, both in person and influence, so many changes of government, which had proved fatal to almost all his contemporaries, of itself constituted a colossal reputation; and when he said, with a sarcastic smile, on taking the oath of fidelity to Louis Philippe in 1830, “_C’est le treisiéme_,” the expression, repeated from one end of Europe to the other, produced a greater admiration for his address than indignation at his perfidy.

He has been well described as the person in existence who had the least hand in producing, and the greatest power of profiting, by revolutions. He was not destitute of original thought, but wholly without the generous feeling, the self-forgetfulness, which prompt the great in character as well as talent to bring forth their conceptions in word or action, at whatever hazard to themselves or their fortunes. His object always was not to direct, but to observe and guide the current; he never opposed it when he saw it was irresistible, nor braved its dangers where it threatened to be perilous, but quietly withdrew until an opportunity occurred, by the destruction alike of its supporters and its opponents, to obtain its direction. In this respect his talents very closely resembled those of Metternich, of whom a character has already been drawn; but he was less consistent than the wary Austrian diplomatist, and, though equaled by him in dissimulation, he was far his superior in perfidy.

It cost him nothing to contradict and violate his oaths whenever it suited his interest to do so, and the extraordinary and almost unbroken success of his career affords, as well as that of Napoleon, the most striking confirmation of the profound saying of Johnson--that no man ever raised himself from private life to the supreme direction of affairs, in whom great abilities were not combined with certain meannesses, which would have proved altogether fatal to him in ordinary life.

Yet was he without any of the great vices of the revolution; his selfishness was constant, his cupidity unbounded, his hands often sullied by gold, but he was not cruel or unforgiving in his disposition, and few, if any, deeds of blood stain his memory. His witticisms and _bon mots_ were admirable, and repeated from one end of Europe to the other; yet was his reputation in this respect, perhaps, greater than the reality, for, by common consent, every good saying at Paris during his life-time was ascribed to the ex-Bishop of Autun. But none perhaps more clearly reveals his character and explains his success in life than the celebrated one, “That the principal object of language is to conceal the thought.”

GEORGE JACQUES DANTON.

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.

[A principal leader in French revolutionary times, born 1759, executed 1794. He was one of the first to advocate violent measures, organized the attack on the Tuileries in 1792, and was principally instrumental in bringing on the dreadful September massacres of the same year, when all those confined in the Paris prisons were slaughtered. On being elected to the convention, he was foremost in forcing on the trial of the king, and afterward, as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, in breaking the power of the Girondists, though he would have spared their lives. He incurred the hate of Robespierre by those inclinations to mercy and moderation which would have put an end to the Reign of Terror, and was sent to the scaffold by the plots of his cunning and implacable adversary.]

Between the demagogue and the highwayman the resemblance is close; both are leaders of bands, and each requires an opportunity to organize his band. Danton, to organize his band, required the revolution. “Of low birth, without a patron,” penniless, every office being filled, and “the Paris bar unattainable,” admitted a lawyer after “a struggle,” he for a long time strolled about the streets without a brief, or frequented the coffee-houses, the same as similar men nowadays frequent the beer-shops. At the Café de l’École, the proprietor, a good-natured old fellow “in a small round perruque, gray coat, and a napkin on his arm,” circulated among his tables smiling blandly, while his daughter sat in the rear as cashier. Danton chatted with her, and demanded her hand in marriage. To obtain her he had to mend his ways, purchase an attorneyship in the Court of the Royal Council, and find bondsmen and indorsers in his small native town.

Wedded and lodged in the gloomy Passage du Commerce, “more burdened with debts than with causes,” tied down to a sedentary profession which demands vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style, and blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a scale that, without the help of a _louis_ regularly advanced to him each week by his coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends meet; his free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and indolent disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way, his rude, violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness, and activity, all rebel; he is ill-calculated for the quiet routine of our civil careers; it is not the steady discipline of an old society that suits him, but the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces, or one in a state of formation. In temperament and character he is a _barbarian_, and a barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century.

A colossus with the head of a “Tartar,” pitted with the small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a growling “bull-dog,” with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried under the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice, and moving and acting like a combatant, full-blooded, boiling over with passion and energy, his strength in its outbursts seeming illimitable, like the forces of Nature, roaring like a bull when speaking, and heard through closed windows fifty yards off in the street, employing immoderate imagery, intensely in earnest, trembling with indignation, revenge, and patriotic sentiments, able to arouse savage instincts in the most tranquil breast and generous instincts in the most brutal, profane, using emphatic terms, cynical, not monotonously so, and affectedly like Hébert, but spontaneously and to the point, full of crude jests worthy of Rabelais, possessing a stock of jovial sensuality and good-humor, cordial and familiar in his ways, frank, friendly in tone; in short, outwardly and inwardly the best-fitted for winning the confidence and sympathy of a Gallic-Parisian populace, and all contributing to the formation of “his inborn, practical popularity,” and to make of him “a grand seignior of _sans-culotterie_.”

Thus endowed for playing a part, there is a strong temptation to act it the moment the theatre is ready, whether this be a mean one, got up for the occasion, and the actors rogues, scamps, and prostitutes, or the part an ignoble one, murderous, and finally fatal to him who undertakes it. He comprehended from the first the ultimate object and definite result of the revolution, that is to say, the dictatorship of the violent minority. Immediately after the “14th of July,” 1789, he organized in his quarter of the city a small independent republic, aggressive and predominant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the riff-raff and a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every available madcap, every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, newspaper scribbler, and stump-speaker, either a secret or avowed plotter of murder, Camille Desmoulins, Fréron, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz, Théroigne, Marat--while, in this more than Jacobin state, the model in anticipation of that he is to establish later, he reigns, as he will afterward reign, the permanent president of the district, commander of the battalion, orator of the club, and the concocter of bold undertakings. In order to set the machine up, he cleared the ground, fused the metal, hammered out the principal pieces, filed off the blisterings, designed the action, adjusted the minor wheels, set it a-going and indicated what it had to do, and, at the same time, he forged the plating which guarded it from the foreigner and against all outward violence. The machine being his, why, after constructing it, did he not serve as its engineer?

Because, if competent to construct it, he was not qualified to manage it. In a crisis he may take hold of the wheel himself, excite an assembly or a mob in his favor, carry things with a high hand, and direct an executive committee for a few weeks. But he dislikes regular, persistent labor; he is not made for studying documents, for poring over papers, and confining himself to administrative routine. Never, like Robespierre and Billaud, can he attend to both official and police duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports, annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly enunciating falsehoods, and acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor; and, especially, he can never become the systematic executioner.

On the one hand, his eyes are not obscured by the gray veil of theory; he does not regard men through the “Contrat-Social” as a sum of arithmetical units, but as they really are, living, suffering, shedding their blood, especially those he knows, each with his peculiar physiognomy and demeanor. Compassion is excited by all this when one has any feeling, and he had. Danton had a heart; he had the quick sensibilities of a man of flesh and blood stirred by the primitive instincts, the good ones along with the bad ones, instincts which culture had neither impaired nor deadened, which allowed him to plan and permit the September massacre, but which did not allow him to practice, daily and blindly, systematic and wholesale murder. Already in September, “cloaking his pity under his bellowing,” he had shielded or saved many eminent men from the butchers. When the ax is about to fall on the Girondists, he is “ill with grief” and despair. “I am unable to save them,” he exclaimed, “and big tears streamed down his cheeks.”

On the other hand, his eyes are not covered by the bandage of incapacity or lack of forethought. He detected the innate vice of the system, the inevitable and approaching suicide of the revolution. “The Girondists forced us to throw ourselves upon the _sans-culotterie_ which has devoured them, which will devour us, and which will eat itself up.” “Let Robespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will soon be nothing left in France but a Thebaid of political Trappists.” At the end he sees more clearly still. “On a day like this I organized the revolutionary tribunal.... I ask pardon for it of God and man.... In revolutions, authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.... It is better to be a poor fisherman than govern men.”

Nevertheless, he professed to govern them; he constructed a new machine for the purpose, and, deaf to its creaking, it worked in conformity with its structure and the impulse he gave to it. It towers before him, this sinister machine, with its vast wheel and iron cogs grinding all France, their multiplied teeth pressing out each individual life, its steel blade constantly rising and falling, and, as it plays faster and faster, daily exacting a larger and larger supply of human material, while those who furnish this supply are held to be as insensible and as senseless as itself. Danton can not, or will not, be so. He gets out of the way, diverts himself, gambles, forgets; he supposes that the titular decapitators will probably consent to take no notice of him; in any case, they do not pursue him; “they would not dare do it.... No one must lay hands on me; I am the ark.” At the worst he prefers “to be guillotined rather than guillotine.” Having said or thought this, he is ripe for the scaffold.

ROBESPIERRE.

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.

[Maximilian Marie Isadore de Robespierre, the most powerful figure among the French revolutionists, born 1758, guillotined 1794. By profession an attorney, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, the States General, in 1789, from Arras. Profoundly imbued with the theories of Rousseau, he was from the beginning a fierce assailant of the monarchy, and after Mirabeau’s death rapidly acquired a commanding position in public affairs. In the National Convention, which succeeded the dissolution of the States General and the abdication and imprisonment of Louis XVI, Robespierre was a prominent leader, and identified himself with the extreme party, the Jacobins, called the “Mountain,” from the elevated seats on which they sat. During this earlier part of his political career he affected opposition to capital punishment, and remonstrated with Danton against the September massacres. He led the Jacobins, however, in demanding the trial and death of the king, and proposed the decree organizing the Committee of Public Safety, which was clothed with omnipotent sway. When he became a member of this terrible body he speedily instituted what is known as “the Reign of Terror,” beginning with the destruction of the Girondists, against whom he formulated the deadly epigram: “There are periods in revolutions when to live is a crime.” Danton was sacrificed to his envy and fears as a dangerous rival. Robespierre’s overthrow, after about a year of practical dictatorship, was owing to two causes, which inspired the wavering courage of his opponents in the convention. The mistress of Tallien, a prominent revolutionist, lay in prison expecting a daily call to the guillotine. Carnot (the grandfather of the present chief of the French republic) attended a dinner-party at which Robespierre was present. The heat of the day had caused the guests to throw off their coats, and Carnot in looking for a paper took Robespierre’s coat by mistake, in the pocket of which he saw the memorandum containing the names of those prescribed for the guillotine, among them his own and those of other guests. On the 9th Thermidor, July 27, 1794, occurred the outbreak in the convention which broke Roberspierre’s power, and on the following day sent him to the guillotine, thus ending the Reign of Terror.]

Marat and Danton finally become effaced, or efface themselves, and the stage is left to Robespierre who absorbs attention. If we would comprehend him we must look at him as he stands in the midst of his surroundings. At the last stage of an intellectual vegetation passing away, he remains on the last branch of the eighteenth century, the most abortive and driest offshoot of the classical spirit. He has retained nothing of a worn-out system of philosophy but its lifeless dregs and well-conned formulæ, the formulæ of Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, concerning “the people, nature, reason, liberty, tyrants, factions, virtue, morality,” a ready-made vocabulary, expressions too ample, the meaning of which, ill-defined by the masters, evaporates in the hands of the disciple. He never tries to get at this; his writings and speeches are merely long strings of vague abstract periods; there is no telling fact in them, no distinct, characteristic detail, no appeal to the eye evoking a living image, no personal, special observation, no clear, frank, original impression.

It might be said of him that he never saw anything with his own eyes, that he neither could nor would see, that false conceptions have intervened and fixed themselves between him and the object; he combines these in logical sequence, and simulates the absent thought by an affected jargon, and this is all. The other Jacobins alongside of him likewise use the same scholastic jargon; but none of them expatiate on it so lengthily. For hours, we grope after him in the vague shadows of political speculation, in the cold and perplexing mist of didactic generalities, trying in vain to make something out of his colorless tirades, and we grasp nothing. We then, astonished, ask what all this talk amounts to, and why he talks at all; the answer is, that he has said nothing and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the same as a sectary preaching to his congregation, neither the preacher nor his audience ever wearying, the one of turning the dogmatic crank, and the other of listening. So much the better if the hopper is empty; the emptier it is the easier and faster the crank turns. And better still, if the empty term he selects is used in a contrary sense; the sonorous words justice, humanity, mean to him piles of human heads, the same as a text from the gospels means to a grand inquisitor the burning of heretics.