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.

Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary vanity. Never was the chief of a party, sect, or government, even at critical moments, such an incurable, insignificant rhetorician, so formal, so pompous, and so vapid. On the eve of the 9th of Thermidor, when it was necessary to conquer or die, he enters the tribune with a set speech, written and rewritten, polished and repolished, overloaded with studied ornaments and bits for effect, coated by dint of time and labor, with the academic varnish, the glitter of symmetrical antitheses, rounded periods, exclamations, preteritions, apostrophes, and other tricks of the pen. There is no sign of true inspiration in his elaborate eloquence, nothing but recipes, and those of a worn-out art—Greek and Roman commonplaces, Socrates and the hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, classic metaphors like “the flambeaux of discord,” and “the vessel of state,” words coupled together and beauties of style which a pupil in rhetoric aims at on the college bench; sometimes a grand bravura air, so essential for parade in public; oftentimes a delicate strain of the flute, for, in those days, one must have a tender heart; in short, Marmontel’s method in “Belisarius,” or that of Thomas in his “Eloges,” all borrowed from Rousseau, but of inferior quality, like a sharp, thin voice strained to imitate a rich, powerful voice; a sort of involuntary parody, and the more repulsive because a word ends in a blow, because a sentimental, declamatory Trissotin poses as statesman, because the studied elegances of the closet become pistol shots aimed at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed sends a man to the guillotine.

Robespierre, unlike Danton, has no cravings. He is sober; he is not tormented by his senses; if he gives way to them, it is only no further than he can help, and with a bad grace; in the Rue Saintonge in Paris, “for seven months,” says his secretary, “I knew of but one woman that he kept company with, and he did not treat her very well.... Very often he would not let her enter his room”; when busy, he must not be disturbed; he is naturally steady, hard-working, studious and fond of seclusion, at college a model pupil, at home in his province an attentive advocate, a punctual deputy in the Assembly, everywhere free of temptation and incapable of going astray. “Irreproachable” is the word which, from early youth, an inward voice constantly repeats to him in low tones to console him for obscurity and patience. Thus has he ever been, is now, and ever will be; he says this to himself, tells others so, and on this foundation, all of a piece, he builds up his character. He is not, like Desmoulins, to be seduced by dinners; like Barnave, by flattery; like Mirabeau and Danton, by money; like the Girondists, by the insinuating charm of ancient politeness and select society; like the Dantonists, by the bait of joviality and unbounded license—he is the incorruptible.

“Alone, or nearly alone, I do not allow myself to be corrupted; alone, or nearly alone, I do not compromise the right; which two merits I possess in the highest degree. A few others may live correctly, but they oppose or betray principles; a few others profess to have principles, but they do not live correctly. No one else leads so pure a life or is so loyal to principles; no one else joins to so fervent a worship of truth so strict a practice of virtue; I am the unique.” What can be more agreeable than this mute soliloquy? It is gently heard the first day in Robespierre’s address to the Third Estate of Arras; it is uttered aloud the last day in his great speech in the convention; during the interval, it crops out and shines through all his compositions, harangues, or reports, in exordiums, parentheses, and perorations, permeating every sentence like the drone of a bagpipe. In three years a chorus of a thousand voices, which he formed and led indefatigably, rehearses to him in unison his own litany, his most sacred creed, the hymn of three stanzas composed by him in his own honor, and which he daily recites to himself in a low tone of voice, and often in a loud one: “Robespierre alone has discovered the ideal citizen! Robespierre alone attains to it without exaggeration or shortcomings! Robespierre alone is worthy of and able to lead the revolution!” Cool infatuation carried thus far is equivalent to a raging fever, and Robespierre almost attains to the ideas and the ravings of Marat.

First, in his own eyes, he, like Marat, is a persecuted man, and, like Marat, he poses himself as a “martyr,” but more skillfully and keeping within bounds, affecting the resigned and tender air of an innocent victim, who, offering himself as a sacrifice, ascends to heaven, bequeathing to mankind the imperishable souvenir of his virtues. “I excite against me the self-love of everybody; I sharpen against me a thousand daggers. I am a sacrifice to every species of hatred.... To the enemies of my country, to whom my existence seems an obstacle to their heinous plots, I am ready to sacrifice it, if their odious empire is to endure; ... let their road to the scaffold be the pathway of crime, ours shall be that of virtue; ... let the hemlock be got ready for me, I await it on this hallowed spot. I shall at least bequeath to my country an example of constant affection for it, and to the enemies of humanity the disgrace of my death.”

Naturally, as always with Marat, he sees around him only “evil-doers,” “intriguers,” and “traitors.” Naturally, as with Marat, common sense with him is perverted, and, like Marat again, he thinks at random. “I am not obliged to reflect,” said he to Garat, “I always rely on first impressions.” “For him,” says the same authority, “the best reasons are suspicions,” and nought makes headway against suspicions, not even the most positive evidence.

Such assurance, equal to that of Marat, is terrible and worse in its effect, for Robespierre’s list of conspirators is longer than that of Marat. Political and social, in Marat’s mind, the list comprehends only aristocrats and the rich; theological and moral in Robespierre’s mind, it comprehends all atheists and dishonest persons—that is to say, nearly the whole of his party. In this narrow mind, given up to abstractions and habitually classifying men under two opposite headings, whoever is not with him on the good side is against him on the bad side, and, on the bad side, the common understanding between the factious of every flag and the rogues of every degree is natural. Add all this vermin to that which Marat seeks to crush out; it is no longer by hundreds of thousands, but by millions, exclaim Baudot, Jean Bon St. André, and Guffroy, that the guilty must be counted and heads laid low! And all these heads, Robespierre, according to his maxims, must strike off. He is well aware of this; hostile as his intellect may be to precise ideas, he, when alone in his closet, face to face with himself, sees clearly, as clearly as Marat. Marat’s chimera, on first spreading out its wings, bore its frenzied rider swiftly onward to the charnel house; that of Robespierre, fluttering and hobbling along, reaches the goal in its turn; in its turn, it demands something to feed on, and the rhetorician, the professor of principles, begins to calculate the voracity of the monstrous brute on which he is mounted. Slower than the other, this one is still more ravenous, for, with similar claws and teeth, it has a vaster appetite. At the end of three years Robespierre has overtaken Marat, at the extreme point reached by Marat at the outset, and the theorist adopts the policy, the aim, the means, the work, and almost the vocabulary of the maniac; armed dictatorship of the urban mob, systematic maddening of the subsidized populace, war against the bourgeoisie, extermination of the rich, proscription of opposition writers, administrators, and deputies.

Both monsters demand the same food; only, Robespierre adds “vicious men” to the ration of his monster, by way of extra and preferable game. Henceforth, he may in vain abstain from action, take refuge in his rhetoric, stop his chaste ears, and raise his hypocritical eyes to heaven, he can not avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet the streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of the insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which he prances. Destructive instincts, long repressed by civilization, thus devoted to butchery, become aroused. His feline physiognomy, at first “that of a domestic cat, restless but mild, changes into the savage mien of the wild-cat, and next to the ferocious mien of the tiger. In the Constituent Assembly he speaks with a whine, in the convention he froths at the mouth.” The monotonous drone of a stiff sub-professor changes into the personal accent of furious passion; he hisses and grinds his teeth; sometimes, on a change of scene, he affects to shed tears. But his wildest outbursts are less alarming than his affected sensibility. The festering grudges, corrosive envies, and bitter schemings which have accumulated in his breast are astonishing. The gall vessels are full, and the extravasated gall overflows on the dead. He never tires of re-executing his guillotined adversaries, the Girondists, Chaumette, Hébert, and especially Danton, probably because Danton was the active agent in the revolution of which he was simply the incapable pedagogue; he vents his posthumous hatred on this still warm corpse in artful insinuations and obvious misrepresentations. Thus, inwardly corroded by the venom it distills, his physical machine gets out of order, like that of Marat, but with other symptoms. When speaking in the tribune “his hands crisp with a sort of nervous contraction”; sudden tremors agitate “his shoulders and neck, shaking him convulsively to and fro.” “His bilious complexion becomes livid,” his eyelids quiver under his spectacles, and how he looks! “Ah,” said a Montagnard, “you would have voted as we did on the 9th of Thermidor, had you seen his green eyeballs!” “Physically as well as morally,” he becomes a second Marat, suffering all the more because his delirium is not steady, and because his policy, being a moral one, forces him to exterminate on a grander scale.

But he is a discreet Marat, of a timid temperament, anxious, keeping his thoughts to himself, made for a schoolmaster or a pleader, but not for taking the lead or for governing, always acting hesitatingly, and ambitious to be rather the Pope, than the dictator of the revolution. He would prefer to remain a political Grandison; he keeps the mask on to the very last, not only to the public and to others, but to himself and in his inmost conscience. The mask, indeed, has adhered to his skin; he can no longer distinguish one from the other; never did impostor more carefully conceal intentions and acts under sophisms, and persuade himself that the mask was his face, and that in telling a lie, he told the truth.

When nature and history combine to produce a character they succeed better than even man’s imagination. Neither Moliere in his “Tartuffe,” nor Shakespeare in his “Richard III,” dared bring on the stage a hypocrite believing himself sincere, and a Cain that regarded himself as an Abel.