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French Revolution

{170} <h3> CHAPTER XII </h3> <h3> THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE </h3> The disappearance of Louis XVI from the scene left the Mountain and the Gironde face to face, to wage their faction fight, a fight to the knife; while France in her armies more nobly maintained her greater struggle on the frontier. There for a while after Valmy all had prospered. Brunswick had fallen back to Coblenz. A French army under the Marquis de Custine had overrun all the Rhineland as far as Mainz. Dumouriez, transferred from the Ardennes to the Belgian frontier, had invaded the Austrian Netherlands. On the 6th of November he won a considerable victory at Jemmappes, and towards the end of December, he controlled most of the province. The Convention, elated at these successes, issued decrees proclaiming a crusade against the European tyrannies, and announcing the propaganda of the principles of liberty. But in practice the French invasion did not {171} generally produce very edifying results. Generals and troops plundered unmercifully, to make up for the disorganization of their own service and lack of pay, and even the French Government imposed the expenses of the war on the countries that had to support its horrors. The close of the year 1792 marked a period of success. The opening of 1793, however, saw the pendulum swing back. New enemies gathered about France. Sardinia, whose province of Savoy had been invaded, now had a considerable army in the field. At short intervals after the execution of Louis, England, Holland, Spain, joined the coalition. And the Convention light-heartedly accepted this accumulation of war. To face the storm it appointed in January a committee of general defence of twenty-five members; but Danton alone would have done better than the twenty-five. While the trial of the King proceeded he was casting about for support in the assembly for a constructive policy. He stretched a hand to the Girondins; they refused it; and Danton turned back to the Mountain once more, compelled to choose between two factions the one that was for the moment willing to act with him. {172} Through February and into March the military situation kept getting worse, and the Mountain made repeated attacks on the Gironde. On the 5th of March news reached Paris that the Austrians had captured Aix-la-Chapelle, and that the French general Miranda had been compelled to abandon his guns and to retire from before Maestricht, which he was besieging. Danton, who was in the north, arranging the annexation of the Netherlands to France, started for Paris at once. On the 14th the capital heard, with amazement and alarm, that the Vendée had risen in arms for God and King Louis XVII. The Vendée was a large district of France, a great part of the ancient province of Poitou, lying just to the south of the Loire and near the Atlantic Ocean. A great part of the country was cut up by tracts of forest and thick and numerous hedges. The peasants were fairly prosperous, and well-affected to the priests and seigneurs. The latter were mostly resident landlords, holders of small estates, living near and on kindly terms with their peasantry. The priests and nobles had long viewed the Revolution with aversion, an aversion intensified by the proclamation of the Republic and the execution of the King. And {173} when, on the 26th of February, the Convention passed an army ballot law and sent agents to press recruits among the villages of the Vendée, the peasants joined their natural leaders and rose in arms against the Government. The Vendéens were, in their own country, formidable opponents. They had born leaders, men who showed wonderful courage, dash, and loyalty. They prayed before charging an enemy, and on the march or in battle sang hymns, always the most irresistible of battle songs. Their badges were the white flag, the Bourbon lilies, and the cross. For awhile they swept everything before them. Danton arrived in Paris on the 8th of March. He immediately attempted to reconcile the factions of the assembly, and to persuade its members to turn their wasted vigour into war measures. From neither side did he receive much encouragement. To his demands for new levies and volunteer regiments, Robespierre replied that the most urgent step was to purify the army of its anti-revolutionary elements. To his proposal that the executive should be strengthened by composing the ministry of members of the Convention, the Girondins opposed their implacable suspicion and hatred. But Paris had long been working up {174} its hostility to the Gironde; an insurrectional committee had just come into existence that aimed at dealing with them after the fashion in which it had dealt with Louis on the 10th of August; and the Girondins' stand against Danton precipitated the outbreak. On the 9th of March a premature and imperfectly organized insurrection occurred, directed against the Gironde. The demonstrators marched against the Convention, but were held in check by a few hundred well-affected provincial national guards. On the 10th it became known that Dumouriez was severely pressed by the Austrians and in danger of being cut off. Under the influence of this news, and with the Girondins showing little fight because of the event of the day before, the Convention passed a measure of terrorism; it voted the establishment of a Revolutionary Tribunal to judge "traitors, conspirators, and anti-revolutionists." In vain Buzot and other Girondins pointed out that this meant establishing "a despotism worse than the old." Danton, unquenchably opportunist, supported the measure, and it was carried. Immediately after this he left Paris for the frontier once more. On the 18th of March Dumouriez was severely defeated at Neerwinden. And now not {175} only was the Vendée in arms, but Lyons, Marseilles, Normandy, appeared on the point of throwing off the yoke of Paris and of the Jacobins; the situation looked well-nigh desperate. A week later the papers published letters of Dumouriez which showed that ever since the trial of the King the Girondin general had been factious, that is, had been as much inclined to turn his arms against Paris as against the Austrians. Danton was now back from the frontier; he and Robespierre were at once elected to the committee of general defence; and that committee declared itself in continuous session. Extraordinary measures were now passed in quick succession which, added to the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, made up a formidable machinery of terrorism. Deputies of the Convention were sent out on mission to superintend the working of the armies and of the internal police. They were given the widest powers,—were virtually made pro-dictators. On the 1st of April was passed a new law of suspects to reinforce the action of the representatives on mission and of the Revolutionary Tribunal. On the 6th of April was created the executive power that Danton urged the need of so pertinaciously; this was the Committee of {176} Public Safety, a body of nine members of the Convention, acting secretly, directing the ministers, and having general control of the executive functions. The Girondins had to submit to the measure, and their opponents secured control of the Committee. Among its first members were Danton, Cambon, and Barère. Just as the Committee of Public Safety came into existence the situation on the frontier was getting even worse. On the 4th of April Dumouriez, fearing that the Convention would send him to the Revolutionary Tribunal, made an attempt to turn his army against the Government, and failing, rode over into the Austrian lines. At the same time, Custine was being driven out of Alsace by the Prussians, who, on the 14th of April, laid siege to Mainz. With the Mountain immensely strengthened by the formation of the Committee of Public Safety, the attack on the Girondins increased in vigour. Robespierre accused them of complicity with Dumouriez in treasonable intentions against the Republic. The Gironde retaliated, and, on the 13th of April, succeeded in rallying a majority of the Convention in a second onslaught against Marat for his incendiary articles. It was decreed that the Ami du peuple should be sent to the Revolutionary {177} Tribunal. It was the last success of the Girondins, and it did not carry them far. The Jacobins closed their ranks against this assault. They had the Commune and the Revolutionary Tribunal under their control. The former body sent a petition to the Convention demanding the exclusion of twenty-two prominent Girondins as enemies of the Revolution; and a few days later the Tribunal absolved Marat of all his sins. Incidentally to the bitter struggle between the two factions, great questions, social, political, economic, were being debated, though not with great results. They could really all be brought back to the one fundamental question which the course of the Revolution had brought to the surface. What was to be the position of the poor man, and especially of the poor man in the modern city and under industrial surroundings,—what was to be his position in the new form of social adjustment which the Revolution was bringing about? What about the price of food? the monopoly of capital? the private ownership of property? Such were some of the questions that underlay the debates of the Convention in the spring of 1793. The food question was dealt with in various {178} ways. The famous law of the Maximum, passed on the 3rd of May, attempted to regulate the prices of food by a sliding scale tariff. The measure was economically unsound, and in many ways worked injustice; it alarmed property holders and alienated them from the Government. On its own initiative the Commune made great efforts, and with some success, to maintain the food supply of the city, and to keep down the price of bread. Spending about 12,000 francs a day, less than half a sou per head, it succeeded for the most part in keeping bread down to about 3 sous per pound. But by virtue of what theory of government were the poor entitled to this special protection? Was the Jacobin party prepared to advance towards a socialist or collectivist form of government? Of that there was no sign; and several years were yet to pass before Babeuf was to give weight to a collectivist theory of the State. There were special reasons of some force to explain why the Convention, however much it might be addicted to humanitarian theories, however anxious it might be to curry favour with the lowest class, should keep a stiff attitude on the question of collectivism and property. The whole financial system of the Revolution, endorsed by the {179} Convention as by its predecessors, was based on the private proprietorship of land and on increasing the number of small proprietors. Not only was the Convention bound to maintain the effect of the large sales of national lands that had already taken place, but the prejudices and temper of its members made in the same direction. Robespierre, trying to reconcile the narrow logic of a lawyer with the need of pleasing his ardent supporters, based his position on a charitable and not on a political motive: "Public assistance is a sacred debt of Society. Society is under the obligation of securing a living for all its members, either by procuring work for them, or by securing the necessaries of existence to those who are past work." Although the Convention maintained a conservative attitude in regard to the question of real property, it was decidedly inclined towards a confiscatory policy in all that related to personal wealth. This did not, however, become well marked until after the conclusion of the great struggle between the Mountain and the Gironde, which entered its last phase in May. On the 12th of that month the Convention voted the formation of an army of sans-culottes for the defence of Paris, a measure of more {180} significance for the internal than for the external affairs of France. On the 14th the Gironde made their reply by reading an address of the city of Bordeaux offering to march to Paris to help the Convention. On the 15th the Commune proceeded to appoint one of its nominees as provisional general of the national guard of Paris. And on the following day the Girondins, alarmed into an attempt at action, proposed to the assembly that the municipal authorities of Paris should be removed from office and that the substitutes for the deputies to the Convention should be assembled at Bourges in case the Convention itself should be attacked and destroyed. This last proposal was highly characteristic of the Girondins, heroic as orators, but as members of a political party always timid of action. The Committee of Public Safety, already tuned to its higher duties and viewing the faction fight of the assembly with some slight degree of detachment, steered a middle and politic course. Barère proposed a compromise, which the Girondins weakly accepted. But its enemies continued strenuous action, formed a new insurrectional committee, and set Hébert's infamous sheet, the Père Duchesne, {181} howling for their blood. This newspaper deserves a few lines. Hébert, a man of the middle class, after a stormy youth drifted into revolutionary journalism. With much verve, and a true Voltairian spirit, he at first took up a moderate attitude, but being a time server soon discovered that his interest lay in another direction. From the middle of 1792 he rose rapidly to great popularity by his loud defence of extreme courses. The Père Duchesne, copies of which are at this day among the greatest of bibliographical curiosities, was written for the people and in a jargon out-Heroding their own, a compound of oaths and obscenities. The Père Duchesne was nearly always in a state of grande joie or of grande colère, and at the epoch we have reached his anger is being continuously poured out, the filthiest stream of invective conceivable, against the Girondins. With Marat and Hébert fanning the flames, the insurrectional committee drew up a new list of 32 suspect deputies. The Committee of Public Safety, appealed to by the Girondins, ordered the arrest of Hébert. On the following day, the 25th of May, the Commune demanded his release. Isnard, one of the {182} Gironde, that day acting as president of the Convention, answered the deputation of the Commune with unbridled anger, and concluded by declaring that if Paris dared to lay one finger on a member of the Convention, the city would be destroyed. There was in this an unfortunate echo of the Duke of Brunswick's manifesto. On the 26th Robespierre, at the Jacobin Club, gave his formal assent to the proposal that an insurrection should be organized against the Gironde. Two days later Hébert was released, and the Commune and the committees of the sections began organizing the movement. As a first step Hanriot, a sottish but very determined battalion leader, was placed in supreme command of the national guard. The movement took place on the 31st of May. On that day the Convention was subjected to the organized pressure of a mob of about 30,000 men, the greater part national guards. The Convention was not invaded, however, nor was there any attempt, any desire, to suppress it as an institution. For the leaders fully realized that it was by maintaining the Convention as a figurehead that they could continue the fiction that the Government {183} of France was not local, or Parisian, but national, or French. But while refraining from a direct attack on the Convention they subjected it to a pressure so strong and so long continued that they converted it, as they intended, into an organ of their will. For three days Hanriot and his men remained at the doors of the Convention, and for three days, with growing agitation, the members within wrestled with the problem thus insistently presented at the point of bayonets and at the mouth of cannon. Motions of all sorts, some logical, some contradictory, were presented. Robespierre moved the arrest of twenty of his colleagues. The Committee of Public Safety, anxious to retain supreme power, tried for some middle course that might satisfy the mob. Barère proposed that, to relieve the Convention from its difficulty, the Girondins should pronounce their own exclusion from the assembly. The impetuous Isnard, one of the few attacked members present, accepted. This was on the 2d of June. On the basis of the self-exclusion of the Girondin deputies the Committee of Public Safety now believed it could regain control of the situation, thereby demonstrating that it {184} had formed an inadequate estimate of Hanriot. It decided to proclaim the suppression of the insurrectional committee, and it announced this to Hanriot at the same time as the self-exclusion of the Girondins. But Hanriot, sitting his horse at the doors of the Convention, was resolute and tipsy, a man of the sword not to be moved by parliamentary eloquence. He declined to accept any compromise, and ordered his guns to be brought up and unlimbered. The Convention was immediately stampeded by this act of drunken courage. The members attempted to escape. But every avenue, every street was closed by Hanriot's national guard, and Marat, blandly triumphant, led the members back to the hall sacred to their deliberations. There, ashamed and exhausted, at eleven o'clock that night, the Convention mutilated itself, suspended twenty-two of its members, and ordered the arrest of twenty-nine others. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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