CHAPTER XIX. FRENCH REPUBLIC-FROM THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE TO 66 CHAP. XIX. 1795. 1. of seasons of "It is a sad calamity," says Jeremy Taylor, " to see a kingdom spoiled, and a church afflicted; the priests slain with the sword, and the blood of nobles mingled with cheaper sand; religion made a cause of trouble, and the Moral effect best men most cruelly persecuted; government turned, suffering on and laws ashamed; judges decreeing in fear and covetous- nations. ness, and the ministers of holy things setting themselves against all that is sacred. And what shall make recompense for this heap of sorrows, when God shall send such swords of fire? Even the mercies of God, which shall then be made public, when the people shall have suffered for their sins. For so I have known a luxuriant vine swell into irregular twigs and bold excrescences, and spend itself in leaves and little rings, and afford but little clusters to the wine-press; but when the lord of the vine had caused the dressers to cut the wilder plant, and make it bleed, it grew temperate in its vain expense of useless leaves, and knotted into fair and juicy bunches, and made account of that loss of blood by the return of fruit. It is thus of an afflicted kingdom cured of its surfeits, and punished for its sins; it bleeds for its long riot, and is left ungoverned for its disobedience, and chastened for its wantonness; and when the sword hath let forth the corrupted blood, and the fire hath purged the rest, then it enters into the double joys of restitution, and gives God 1 1 Jeremy Taylor, vi. 182, Heber's edition. XIX. CHAP. thanks for his rod, and confesses the mercies of the Lord in making the smoke to be changed into fire, and his anger into mercy." 1795. 2. Example of this in volution. General reaction Reign of Never were these truths more strongly exemplified than in France during the progress of the Revolution. Each France dur- successive convulsion had darkened the political atmoing the Re- sphere. Anguish and suffering incessantly increased; virtue and religion seemed banished from the earth; against the relentless cruelty reigned triumphant. The bright dawn of the morning, to which so many millions had turned in thankfulness, was soon overcast, and darkness deeper than midnight overspread the world. "But there is a point of depression in human affairs," says Hume, "from which the change is necessarily for the better." This change is not owing to any oscillation between good and evil, in the transactions of the world, but to the reaction which is always produced by long-continued suffering, and the provision made by nature for the correction of vicious institutions by the consequences which they produce. Wherever the tendency of institutions is erroneous, an under-current begins to flow, destined to open men's eyes to their imperfections; when they become destructive, it overwhelms them. The result of the conspiracy of Robespierre and the Municipality, proved that this point had been reached under the Reign of Terror. On all former occasions since the meeting of the StatesGeneral, the party which revolted against the constituted authorities had been victorious; on that it was vanquished. The Committees of the Assembly, the subsisting government, crushed a conspiracy headed by the powerful despot who wielded the revolutionary energy of France, and who was still supported by the terrible force of the faubourgs, which no former authority had been able to withstand. This single circumstance demonstrated that the revolutionary movement had reached its culminating point, and that the opposite principles of order and justice were beginning to resume their sway. From that moment the anarchy and passions of the people subsided, the storms. of the moral world began to be stilled, through the receding darkness the ancient landmarks began dimly to appear, and the sun of heaven at length broke through the clouds which enveloped him. "Defluit saxis agitatus humor : Concedunt venti, fugiuntque nubes, CHAP. 1795. 3. event in on the fall An interesting episode in the annals of the Revolution occurred in the prisons during the contest which preceded Singular the fall of the tyrant. From the agitation and cries in the prisons the streets, the captives were aware that a popular move- of Robes ment was impending, and a renewal of the massacres of pierre. 2d September was anticipated from the frantic multitude. Henriot had been heard in the Place du Carrousel to pronounce the ominous words, "We must purge the prisons." The sound of the générale and the toscin made them imagine that their last hour had arrived, and they embraced each other with tears, exclaiming, "We are all now eighty years of age!" After two hours of breathless anxiety, they heard the decree of the Convention cried through the streets, which declared Robespierre hors la loi, and by daybreak intelligence arrived that he was overthrown. The transports which ensued may be imagined; ten thousand prisoners were relieved from the prospect of instant death. In one chamber, a female prisoner, who was to have been brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal that very day, was made acquainted with the intelligence, by means of signs, from a woman on the street, before she ventured to give public demonstration of her joy; her name became afterwards memorable xii. 124, it was JOSEPHINE BEAUHARNAIS, future Empress of ii. 348, 349. France.1 The transports were the same through all France. The passengers leapt from the public conveyances, embraced the bystanders, exclaiming, "My friends, rejoice! Robes VOL. III. 20 1 Mémoires phine, i de José 327. Lac. 125. Mig. XIX. 1795. 4. Universal CHAP. pierre is no more; the tigers are dead!" Two hundred thousand captives in the prisons throughout the country were freed from the terror of death; three hundred thousand trembling fugitives issued from their retreats, and embraced each other with frantic joy on the public roads. An epitaph designed for his tomb expressed in powerful language the public opinion on the consequence of prolonging his life: transports which his fall occasioned. 1 Lac. xii. 126, 128. Deux Amis, xiii. 3, 5. "Passant! ne pleure point son sort; Car s'il vivait, tu serais mort." * The No words can convey an idea of the impression which the overthrow of Robespierre produced in Europe. The ardent and enthusiastic in every country had hailed the beginning of the French Revolution as the dawn of a brighter day in the political world, and in proportion to the warmth of their anticipations had been the grievousness of their disappointment at the terrible shades by which it was so early overcast. The fall of the tyrant revived those hopes, and put an end to those apprehensions. The moral laws of nature were felt to be still in operation; the tyranny had only existed till it had purged the world of a guilty race, and then it was itself destroyed. thoughtful admired the wisdom of Providence, which had made the wickedness of men the instrument of their own destruction; the pious beheld in their fall an immediate manifestation of the Divine justice. "The dawn," it has been not less eloquently than justly said, "of the arctic summer day after the arctic winter night; the great unsealing of the waters; the awakening of animal and vegetable life; the sudden softening of the air; the sudden blooming of the flowers; the sudden bursting of whole forests into verdure, is but a feeble type of that happiest and most genial of revolutions, the Revolution of the 9th Thermidor." 1 + The Revolution of 9th Thermidor, however, was by "Passenger! bewail not his fate, For had he lived, thou hadst died." + MACAULAY, in review of the Memoirs of BARÈRE, Edinburgh Review. CHAP. 1795. 5. volution of midor. no means, as is commonly supposed, at least in its first stages, the reaction of virtue against wickedness. It was the effort of one set of assassins, threatened with death, against another. The leaders of the revolt in the Con- Real nature vention which overthrew the central government, Billaud of the Re Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, Fouché, Amar, Barère, were 9th Therin no respect better, in many worse, than Robespierre and St Just. Equally unscrupulous in the means they employed, equally bloody in the executions they ordered, they were far more selfish in their objects, and more despicable in their characters. With them the Revolution was not, as with Robespierre, a desperate and sanguinary struggle for the happiness of man, in which all its supposed enemies required to be destroyed; it was merely an engine for advancing their private fortunes. They conspired against him, not because they hated his system, but because they perceived it was about to be directed against themselves. Little amelioration of the state government was to be expected from their exertions. It was public opinion, clearly and energetically expressed after the fall of the Committee of Public Salvation, which compelled them to revert to the path of humanity. But this opinion was irresistible; it forced itself upon persons the most adverse to its principles, and finally occasioned the destruction of the very men, who, for their 1Hist. de la own sakes, had brought about the first resistance to the 215, 218. reign of blood.1 Conv. iv. 6. fall of the Salvation. The Convention had vanquished Robespierre by means of a unanimous effort, headed and directed by the com- Gradual mittees; but this revulsion of public feeling proved too Committee strong for the committees themselves. The charm of the of Public Decemviral government was broken when its head was destroyed. On the day after the fall of Robespierre there were but two parties in Paris-that of the committee, who strove to maintain the remnant of their power, and that of the liberators, who laboured to subvert them. Every day brought forth a new proof of the vehement |