The Theory of Social Revolutions - Brooks Adams
France was permeated with archaic thought which disorganized the
emerging society until it seemingly had no cohesion. To the French
emigrant on the Rhine that society appeared like a vile phantom which
had but to be exorcised to vanish. And the exorcism to which he had
recourse was threats of vengeance, threats which before had terrified,
because they had behind them a force which made them good. Torture had
been an integral part of the old law. The peasant expected it were he
insubordinate. Death alone was held to be too little to inspire respect
for caste. Some frightful spectacle was usually provided to magnify
authority. Thus Bouille broke on the wheel, while the men were yet
alive, every bone in the bodies of his soldiers when they disobeyed him;
and for scratching Louis XV, with a knife, Damiens, after indescribable
agonies, was torn asunder by horses in Paris, before an immense
multitude. The French emigrants believed that they had only to threaten
with a similar fate men like Kellermann and Hoche to make them flee
without a blow. What chiefly concerned the nobles, therefore, was not to
evolve a masterly campaign, but to propound the fundamental principles
of monarchy, and to denounce an awful retribution on insurgents.
By the middle of July, 1792, the Prussians were ready to march, and
emperors, kings, and generals were meditating manifestoes. Louis sent
the journalist Mallet du Pan to the Duke of Brunswick, the
commander-in-chief, to assist him in his task. On July 24, and on August
4, 1792, the King of Prussia laid down the law of caste as emphatically
as had the Parliament of Paris some twenty years before. On July 25, the
Duke of Brunswick pronounced the doom of the conquered. I come, said the
King of Prussia, to prevent the incurable evils which will result to
France, to Europe and to all mankind from the spread of the spirit of
insubordination, and to this end I shall establish the monarchical power
upon a stable basis. For, he continued in the later proclamation, "the
supreme authority in France being never ceasing and indivisible, the
King could neither be deprived nor voluntarily divest himself of any of
the prerogatives of royalty, because he is obliged to transmit them
entire with his own crown to his successors."
The Duke of Brunswick's proclamation contained some clauses written
expressly for him by Mallet du Pan, and by Limon the Royalist.
If the Palace of the Tuileries be forced, if the least violence be
offered to their Majesties, if they are not immediately set at liberty,
then will the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Germany inflict "on
those who shall deserve it the most exemplary and ever-memorable
avenging punishments."
These proclamations reached Paris on July 28, and simultaneously the
notorious Fersen wrote the Queen of France, "You have the manifesto, and
you should be content." The court actually believed that, having
insulted and betrayed Lafayette and all that body of conservative
opinion which might have steadied the social equilibrium, they could
rely on the fidelity of regiments filled with men against whom the
emigrants and their allies, the Prussians, had just denounced an
agonizing death, such as Bouille's soldiers had undergone, together with
the destruction of their homes.
All the world knows what followed. The Royalists had been gathering a
garrison for the Tuileries ever since Lafayette's visit, in anticipation
of a trial of strength with the Revolutionists. They had brought thither
the Swiss guard, fifteen hundred strong; the palace was full of Royalist
gentlemen; Mandat, who commanded the National Guard, had been gained
over. The approaches were swept by artillery. The court was very
confident. On the night of August 9, Mandat was murdered, an
insurrectional committee seized the City Hall, and when Louis XVI came
forth to review the troops on the morning of the 10th of August, they
shouted, "Vive la Nation" and deserted. Then the assault came, the Swiss
guard was massacred, the Assembly thrust aside, and the royal family
were seized and conveyed to the Temple. There the monarchy ended. Thus
far had the irrational opposition of a moribund type thrown into
excentricity the social equilibrium of a naturally conservative people.
They were destined to drive it still farther.
In this supreme moment, while the Prussians were advancing, France had
no stable government and very imperfect means of keeping order. All the
fighting men she could muster had marched to the frontier, and, even so,
only a demoralized mass of levies, under Dumouriez and Kellermann, lay
between the most redoutable regiments of the world and Paris. The
emigrants and the Germans thought the invasion but a military promenade.
At home treason to the government hardly cared to hide itself. During
much of August the streets of Paris swarmed with Royalists who cursed
the Revolution, and with priests more bitter than the Royalists. Under
the windows of Louis, as he lay in the Temple, there were cries of "Long
live the King," and in the prisons themselves the nobles drank to the
allies and corresponded with the Prussians. Finally, Roland, who was
minister, so far lost courage that he proposed to withdraw beyond the
Loire, but Danton would hear of no retreat. "De l'audace," he cried,
"encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace."
The Assembly had not been responsible for the assault on the Tuileries
on August 10, 1792. Filled with conservatives, it lacked the energy.
That movement had been the work of a knot of radicals which had its
centre in Danton's Club of the Cordeliers. Under their impulsion the
sections of Paris chose commissioners who should take possession of the
City Hall and eject the loyalist Council. They did so, and thus Danton
became for a season the Minister of Justice and the foremost man in
France. Danton was a semi-conservative. His tenure of power was the last
possibility of averting the Terror. The Royalists, whom he trusted,
themselves betrayed him, and Danton fell, to be succeeded by Robespierre
and his political criminal courts. Meanwhile, on September 20, 1792, the
Prussian column recoiled before the fire of Kellermann's mob of
"vagabonds, cobblers and tailors," on the slope of Valmy, and with the
victory of Valmy, the great eighteenth-century readjustment of the
social equilibrium of Europe passed into its secondary stage.
CHAPTER V
POLITICAL COURTS
In the eye of philosophy, perhaps the most alluring and yet illusive of
all the phenomena presented by civilization is that which we have been
considering. Why should a type of mind which has developed the highest
prescience when advancing along the curve which has led it to
ascendancy, be stricken with fatuity when the summit of the curve is
passed, and when a miscalculation touching the velocity of the descent
must be destruction?
Although this phenomenon has appeared pretty regularly, at certain
intervals, in the development of every modern nation, I conceive its
most illuminating example to be that intellectual limitation of caste
which, during the French Revolution, led to the creation of those
political criminal tribunals which reached perfection with Robespierre.
When coolly examined, at the distance of a century, the Royalist
combination for the suppression of equality before the law, as finally
evolved in 1792, did not so much lack military intelligence, as it
lacked any approximate comprehension of the modern mind. The Royalists
proposed to reestablish privilege, and to do this they were ready to
immolate, if necessary, their King and Queen, and all of their own order
who stayed at home to defend them. Indeed, speaking generally, they
valued Louis XVI, living, cheaply enough, counting him a more
considerable asset if dead. "What a noise it would make throughout
Europe," they whispered among themselves, "if the rabble should kill the
King."
Nor did Marie Antoinette delude herself on this score. At Pilnitz, in
1791, the German potentates issued a declaration touching France which
was too moderate to suit the emigrants, who published upon it a
commentary of their own. This commentary was so revolting that when the
Queen read her brother-in-law's signature appended to it, she
exclaimed--"Cain."
The Royalist plan of campaign was this: They reckoned the energy of the
Revolution so low that they counted pretty confidently, in the summer
of 1792, on the ability of their party to defend the Tuileries against
any force which could be brought against it; but assuming that the
Tuileries could not be defended, and that the King and Queen should be
massacred, they believed that their own position would be improved.
Their monarchical allies would be thereby violently stimulated. It was
determined, therefore, that, regardless of consequences to their
friends, the invading army should cross the border into Lorraine and,
marching by way of Sierk and Rodemach, occupy Chalons. Their entry into
Chalons, which they were confident could not be held against them,
because of the feeling throughout the country, was to be the signal for
the rising in Vendee and Brittany which should sweep down upon Paris
from the rear and make the capital untenable. At Chalons the allies
would be but ninety miles from Paris, and then nothing would remain but
vengeance, and vengeance the more complete the greater the crime had
been.
All went well with them up to Valmy. The German advance on August 11,
1792, reached Rodemach, and on August 19, the bulk of the Prussian army
crossed the frontier at Redagne. On August 20, 1792, Longwy was
invested and in three days capitulated. In the camp of the Comte
d'Artois "there was not one of us," wrote Las Casas, "who did not see
himself, in a fortnight, triumphant, in his own home, surrounded by his
humbled and submissive vassals." At length from their bivouacs at
Saint-Remy and at Suippes the nobles saw in the distance the towers of
Chalons.
The panic at Chalons was so great that orders were given to cut the
bridge across the Marne, but it was not until about September 2, that
the whole peril was understood at Paris. It is true that for several
weeks the government had been aware that the West was agitated and that
Rouerie was probably conspiring among the Royalists and nonjuring
priests, but they did not appreciate the imminence of the danger. On
September 3, at latest, Danton certainly heard the details of the plot
from a spy, and it was then, while others quailed, that he incited Paris
to audacity. This was Danton's culmination.
As we look back, the weakness of the Germans seems to have been
psychological rather than physical. At Valmy the numbers engaged were
not unequal, and while the French were, for the most part, raw and
ill-compacted levies, with few trained officers, the German regiments
were those renowned battalions of Frederick the Great whose onset,
during the Seven Years' War, no adversary had been able to endure. Yet
these redoubtable Prussians fell back in confusion without having
seriously tried the French position, and their officers, apparently, did
not venture to call upon them to charge again. In vain the French
gentlemen implored the Prussian King to support them if they alone
should storm Kellermann's batteries. Under the advice of the Duke of
Brunswick the King decided on retreat. It is said that the Duke had as
little heart in the war as Charles Fox, or, possibly, Pitt, or as his
own troops. And yet he was so strong that Dumouriez, after his victory,
hung back and offered the invaders free passage lest the Germans, if
aroused, should turn on him and fight their way to the Marne.
To the emigrants the retreat was terrible. It was a disaster from which,
as a compact power, they never recovered. The rising in Vendee
temporarily collapsed with the check at Chalons, and they were left
literally naked unto their enemy. Some of them returned to their homes,
preferring the guillotine to starvation, others, disguised in peasants'
blouses, tried to reach Rouerie in La Vendee, some died from hardship,
some committed suicide, while the bulk regained Liege and there waited
as suppliants for assistance from Vienna. But these unfortunate men, who
had entered so gayly upon a conflict whose significance they could not
comprehend, had by this time lost more than lands and castles. Many of
them had lost wives and children in one of the most frightful butcheries
of history, and a butchery for which they themselves were responsible,
because it was the inevitable and logical effect of their own
intellectual limitations.
When, after the affair of August 10, Danton and his party became masters
of the incipient republic, Paris lay between two perils whose relative
magnitude no one could measure. If Chalons fell, Vendee would rise, and
the Republicans of the West would be massacred. Five months later Vendee
did rise, and at Machecoul the patriots were slaughtered amidst nameless
atrocities, largely at the instigation of the priests. In March, 1793,
one hundred thousand peasants were under arms.
Clearly the West could not be denuded of troops, and yet, if Chalons
were to be made good, every available man had to be hurried to
Kellermann, and this gigantic effort fell to the lot of a body of young
and inexperienced adventurers who formed what could hardly be dignified
with the name of an organized administration.
For a long time Marat, with whom Danton had been obliged to coalesce,
had been insisting that, if the enemy were to be resisted on the
frontier, Paris must first be purged, for Paris swarmed with Royalists
wild for revenge, and who were known to be arming. Danton was not yet
prepared for extermination. He instituted domiciliary visits. He made
about three thousand arrests and seized a quantity of muskets, but he
liberated most of those who were under suspicion. The crisis only came
with the news, on September 2, of the investment of Verdun, when no one
longer could doubt that the net was closing about Paris. Verdun was but
three or four days' march from Chalons. When the Duke of Brunswick
crossed the Marne and Brittany revolted, the government would have to
flee, as Roland proposed, and then the Royalists would burst the gates
of the prisons and there would be another Saint Bartholomew.
Toward four o'clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1792, the prison of
the Abbaye was forced and the massacres began. They lasted until
September 6, and through a circular sent out by Marat they were extended
to Lyons, to Reims, and to other cities. About 1600 prisoners were
murdered in Paris alone. Hardly any one has ever defended those
slaughters. Even Marat called them "disastrous," and yet no one
interfered. Neither Danton, nor Roland, nor the Assembly, nor the
National Guard, nor the City of Paris, although the two or three hundred
ruffians who did the work could have been dispersed by a single company
of resolute men, had society so willed it. When Robespierre's time came
he fell almost automatically. Though the head of the despotic "Committee
of Public Safety," and nominally the most powerful man in France, he was
sent to execution like the vilest and most contemptible of criminals by
adversaries who would not command a regiment. The inference is that the
September massacres, which have ever since been stigmatized as the
deepest stain upon the Revolution, were, veritably, due to the
Royalists, who made with the Republicans an issue of self-preservation.
For this was no common war. In Royalist eyes it was a servile revolt,
and was to be treated as servile revolts during the Middle Ages had
always been treated. Again and again, with all solemnity, the Royalists
had declared that were they to return as conquerors no stone of Paris
should be left standing on another, and that the inhabitants should
expire in the ashes of their homes on the rack and the wheel.
Though Danton had many and obvious weaknesses he was a good lawyer, and
Danton perceived that though he might not have been able to prevent the
September massacres, and although they might have been and probably were
inevitable under the tension which prevailed, yet that any court, even a
political court, would be better than Marat's mob. Some months later he
explained his position to the Convention when it was considering the
erection of the tribunal which finally sent Danton himself to the
scaffold. "Nothing is more difficult than to define a political crime.
But, if a simple citizen, for any ordinary crime, receives immediate
punishment, if it is so difficult to reach a political crime, is it not
necessary that extraordinary laws ... intimidate the rebels and reach
the culpable? Here public safety requires strong remedies and terrible
measures. I see no compromise between ordinary forms and a revolutionary
tribunal. History attests this truth; and since members have dared in
this assembly to refer to those bloody days which every good citizen has
lamented, I say that, if such a tribunal had then existed, the people
who have been so often and so cruelly reproached for them, would never
have stained them with blood; I say, and I shall have the assent of all
who have watched these movements, that no human power could have checked
the outburst of the national vengeance."
In this perversion of the courts lay, as I understand it, the foulest
horror of the French Revolution. It was the effect of the rigidity of
privilege, a rigidity which found its incarnation in the judiciary. The
constitutional decisions of the parliaments under the old regime would
alone have made their continuance impossible, but the worst evil was
that, after the shell crumbled, the mind within the shell survived, and
discredited the whole regular administration of justice. When the
National Assembly came to examine grievances it found protests against
the judicial system from every corner of France, and it referred these
petitions to a committee which reported in August, 1789. Setting aside
the centralization and consolidation of the system as being, for us,
immaterial, the committee laid down four leading principles of reform.
First, purchase of place should be abolished, and judicial office should
be recognized as a public trust. Second, judges should be confined to
applying, and restrained from interpreting, the law. That is to say, the
judges should be forbidden to legislate. Third, the judges should be
brought into harmony with public opinion by permitting the people to
participate in their appointment. Fourth, the tendency toward rigor in
criminal cases, which had become a scandal under the old regime, should
be tempered by the introduction of the jury. Bergasse proposed that
judicial appointments should be made by the executive from among three
candidates selected by the provincial assemblies. After long and very
remarkable debates the plan was, in substance, adopted in May, 1790,
except that the Assembly decided, by a majority of 503 to 450, that the
judges should be elected by the people for a term of six years, without
executive interference. In the debate Cazales represented the
conservatives, Mirabeau the liberals. The vote was a test vote and shows
how strong the conservatives were in the Assembly up to the
reorganization of the Clergy in July, 1790, and the electoral assemblies
of the districts, which selected the judges, seem, on the whole, to have
been rather more conservative than the Assembly. In the election not a
sixth of those who were enfranchised voted for the delegates who, in
turn, chose the judges, and these delegates were usually either eminent
lawyers themselves, or wealthy merchants, or men of letters. The result
was a bench not differing much from an old parliament, and equally
incapable of understanding the convulsion about them.
Installed early in 1791, not a year elapsed before these magistrates
became as ill at ease as had been those whom they displaced, and in
March, 1792, Jean Debry formally demanded their recall, although their
terms properly were to expire in 1796. During the summer of 1792 they
sank into contempt and, after the massacres, the Legislative Assembly,
just before its dissolution, provided for a new constituency for the
judicial elections. This they degraded so far that, out of fifty-one
magistrates to be chosen in Paris, only twelve were professionally
trained. Nor did the new courts inspire respect. After the 10th of
August one or two special tribunals were organized to try the Swiss
Guard who surrendered in the Palace, and other political offenders, but
these proved to be so ineffective that Marat thrust them aside, and
substituted for them his gangs of murderers. No true and permanent
political court was evolved before Danton had to deal with the treason
of Dumouriez, nor was this tribunal perfected before Danton gave way to
the Committee of Public Safety, when French revolutionary society became
incandescent, through universal attack from without and through
insurrection within.
Danton, though an orator and a lawyer, possibly even a statesman, was
not competent to cope with an emergency which exacted from a minister
administrative genius like that of Carnot. Danton's story may be briefly
told. At once after Valmy the Convention established the Republic; on
January 21, 1793, Louis was beheaded; and between these two events a new
movement had occurred. The Revolutionists felt intuitively that, if they
remained shut up at home, with enemies without and traitors within, they
would be lost. If the new ideas were sound they would spread, and Valmy
had proved to them that those ideas had already weakened the invading
armies. Danton declared for the natural boundaries of France,--the
Rhine, the Alps, and the ocean,--and the Convention, on January 29,
1793, threw Dumouriez on Holland. This provoked war with England, and
then north, south, and east the coalition was complete. It represented
at least half a million fighting men. Danton, having no military
knowledge or experience, fixed his hopes on Dumouriez. To Danton,
Dumouriez was the only man who could save France. On November 6, 1792,
Dumouriez defeated the Austrians at Jemmapes; on the 14th, he entered
Brussels, and Belgium lay helpless before him. On the question of the
treatment of Belgium, the schism began which ended with his desertion.
Dumouriez was a conservative who plotted for a royal restoration under,
perhaps, Louis Philippe. The Convention, on the contrary, determined to
revolutionize Belgium, as France had been revolutionized, and to this
end Cambon proposed to confiscate and sell church land and emit
assignats. Danton visited Dumouriez to attempt to pacify him, but found
him deeply exasperated. Had Danton been more sagacious he would have
been suspicious. Unfortunately for him he left Dumouriez in command. In
February, Dumouriez invaded Holland and was repulsed, and he then fell
back to Brussels, not strong enough to march to Paris without support,
it is true, but probably expecting to be strong enough as soon as the
Vendean insurrection came to a head. Doubtless he had relations with the
rebels. At all events, on March 10, the insurrection began with the
massacre of Machecoul, and on March 12, 1793, Dumouriez wrote a letter
to the Convention which was equivalent to a declaration of war. He then
tried to corrupt his army, but failed, and on April 4, 1793, fled to
the Austrians. Meanwhile, La Vendee was in flames. To appreciate the
situation one must read Carnot's account of the border during these
weeks when he alone, probably, averted some grave disaster. For my
purpose it suffices to say that the pressure was intense, and that this
intense pressure brought forth the Revolutionary Tribunal, or the
political court.
On March 10, 1793, the Convention passed a decree constituting a court
of five judges and a jury, to be elected by the Convention. To these was
joined a public prosecutor. Fouquier-Tinville afterward attained to a
sombre fame in this position. Six members of the Convention were to sit
as a commission to supervise drawing the indictments, the preparation of
evidence, and also to advise the prosecutor. The punishments, under the
limitations of the Penal Code and other criminal laws, were to be within
the discretion of the court, whose judgments were to be final.[40] Death
was accompanied by confiscation of property.
Considering that this was an extraordinary tribunal, working under
extreme tension, which tried persons against whom usually the evidence
was pretty conclusive, its record for the first six months was not
discreditable. Between April 6 and September 21, 1793, it rendered
sixty-three sentences of death, thirteen of transportation, and
thirty-eight acquittals. The trials were held patiently, testimony was
heard, and the juries duly deliberated. Nevertheless the Terror deepened
as the stress upon the new-born republic increased. Nothing more awful
can be imagined than the ordeal which France endured between the meeting
of the Convention in September, 1792, and the completion of the
Committee of Public Safety in August, 1793. Hemmed in by enemies, the
revolution glowed in Paris like molten lava, while yet it was torn by
faction. Conservative opinion was represented by the Girondists, radical
opinion by the Mountain, and between the two lay the Plain, or the
majority of the Convention, who embodied the social centre of gravity.
As this central mass swayed, so did supremacy incline. The movement was
as accurate as that of any scientific instrument for registering any
strain. Dumouriez's treason in April left the northern frontier open,
save for a few fortresses which still held out. When those should fall
the enemy could make a junction with the rebels in Vendee. Still the
Girondists kept control, and even elected Isnard, the most violent among
them, President of the Convention. Then they had the temerity to arrest
a member of the Commune of Paris, which was the focus of radicalism.
That act precipitated the struggle for survival and with it came the
change in equilibrium. On June 2, Paris heard of the revolt of Lyons and
of the massacre of the patriots. The same day the Sections invaded the
Convention and expelled from their seats in the Tuileries twenty-seven
Girondists. The Plain or Centre now leant toward the Mountain, and, on
July 10, the Committee of Public Safety, which had been first organized
on April 6, 1793, directly after Dumouriez's treason, was reorganized by
the addition of men like Saint-Just and Couthon, with Prieur, a lawyer
of ability and energy, for President. On July 12, 1793, the Austrians
took Conde, and on July 28, Valenciennes; while on July 25, Kleber,
starving, surrendered Mayence. Nothing now but their own inertia stood
between the allies and La Vendee. Thither indeed Kellermann's men were
sent, since they had promised not to serve against the coalition for a
year, but even of these a division was surrounded and cut to pieces in
the disaster of Torfou. A most ferocious civil war soon raged throughout
France. Caen, Bordeaux, Lyons, Marseilles, declared against the
Convention. The whole of the northwest was drenched in blood by the
Chouans. Sixty departments were in arms. On August 28 the Royalists
surrendered Toulon to the English, who blockaded the coasts and supplied
the needs of the rebels. About Paris the people were actually starving.
On July 27 Robespierre entered the Committee of Safety; Carnot, on
August 14. This famous committee was a council of ten forming a pure
dictatorship. On August 16, the Convention decreed the _Levee en Masse_.