this matter innocent. The only question remaining is, whether Barère was misled by his memory, or wrote a deliberate falsehood.

or made a report against any, or drew up an impeachment against any."

Now, we affirm that this is a lie. We affirm that Barère himself took the lead in the proceedings of the convention against the Giron dists. We affirm that he, on the twenty-eighth of July, 1793, proposed a decree for bringing nine Girondist deputies to trial, and for putting to death sixteen other Girondist deputies without any trial at all. We affirm that, when the accused deputies had been brought to trial, and when some apprehension arose that their eloquence might produce an effect even on the rcvoluntary tribunal, Barère did, on the 8th of Brumaire, second a motion for a decree authorizing the tribunal to decide without hearing

of these things so affirmed by us, we appeal to that very Moniteur to which Barère has dared to appeal.t

We are convinced that he wrote a deliberate falsehood. His memory is described by editors as remarkably good, and must have been bad indeed if he could not remember such a fact as this. It is true that the number of murders in which he subsequently bore a part was so great, that he might well confound one with another, that he might well forget what part of the daily hecatomb was consigned to death by himself, and what part by his colleagues. But two circumstances make it quite incredible that the share which he took in the death of Marie Antoinette should have escaped his recollection. She was one of his earliest vic-out the defence; and, for the truth of every one tims. She was one of his most illustrious victims. The most hardened assassin remembers the first time that he shed blood; and the widow of Louis was no ordinary sufferer. If the question had been about some milliner butchered for hiding in her garret her brother who had let drop a word against the Jacobin club-if the question had been about some old nun, dragged to death for having mumbled what were called fanatical words over her beads-Barère's memory might well have deceived him. It would be as unreasonable to "expect him to remember all the wretches whom he slew, as all the pinches of snuff that he took. But though Barère murdered many hundreds of human beings, he murdered only one queen. That he, a small country lawyer, who, a few years before, would have thought himself honoured by a glance or a word from the daughter of so many Cæsars, should call her the Austrian woman, should send her from jail to jail, should deliver her over to the executioner, was surely a great event in his life. Whether he had reason to be proud of it or ashamed of it, is a question on which we may perhaps differ from his editors; but they will admit, we think, that he could not have forgotten it.

We, therefore, confidently charge Barère with having written a deliberate falsehood; and we have no hesitation in saying that we never, in the course of any historical researches that we have happened to make, fell in with a falsehood so audacious, except only the falsehood which we are about to expose.

What M. Hyppolyte Carnot, knowing, as he must know, that this book contains such falsehoods as those which we have exposed, can have meant, when he described it as a valuable addition to our stock of historical information, passes our comprehension. When a man is not ashamed to tell lies about events which took place before hundreds of witnesses, and which are recorded in well-known and accessible books, what credit can we give to his account of things done in corners? No historian who does not wish to be laughed at will ever cite the unsupported authority of Barère as sufficient to prove any fact whatever. The only thing, as far as we can see, on which these volumes throw any light, is the exceeding baseness of the author.

So much for the veracity of the Memoirs. In a literary point of view, they are beneath criticism. They are as shallow, flippant and af fected as Barère's oratory in the convention. They are also, what his oratory in the convention was not, utterly insipid. In fact, they are the mere dregs and rinsings of a bottle, of which even the first froth was but of very questionable flavour.

We will now try to present our readers with a sketch of this man's life. We shall, of course, make very sparing use, indeed, of his own memoirs; and never without distrust, except where they are confirmed by other evidence.

Bertrand Barère was born in the year 1755, at Tarbes in Gascony. His father was the proprietor of a small estate at Vieuzac, in the beautiful vale of Argelès. Bertrand always loved to be called Barère de Vieuzac, and flattered himself with the hope that, by the help of this feudal addition to his name, he might pass for a gentleman. He was educated for the bar at Toulouse, the seat of one of the most celebrated parliaments of the kingdom, practised as an advocate with considerable success, and wrote some small pieces, which he sent to the principal literary societies in the south of France. Among provincial towns, Toulouse seems to have been remarkably rich in indiffe rent versifiers and critics. It gloried especially

Of the proceeding against the Girondists, Barère speaks with just severity. He calls it an atrocious injustice perpetrated against the legislators of the Republic. He complains that distinguished deputies, who ought to have been re-admitted to their seats in the Convention, were sent to the scaffold as conspirators. The day, he exclaims, was a day of mourning for France. It mutilated the national representation; it weakened the sacred principle, that the delegates of the people were inviolabie. He protests that he had no share in the guilt. "I have had," he says, "the patience to go through the Moniteur, extracting all the charges brought against deputies, and all the decrees for arresting and impeaching deputies. Nowhere will you find my name. I never Moniteur, 31st of July, 1793, and Nonidi, first Decade brought a charge against any of my colleagues, of Brumaire, in the year 2.

* Vol. ii. 407.

came a husband. Our own guess is, that his wife was, as he says, a virtuous and amiable woman, and that she did her best to make him happy during some years. It seems clear that, when circumstances developed the latent atro city of his character, she could no longer en dure him, refused to see him, and sent back his letters unopened. Then it was, we imagine, that he invented the fable about his distress on his wedding-day.

in one venerable institution, called the Acade- | ed his domestic life till some time after he be my of the Floral Games. This body held every year a grand meeting, which was a subject of intense interest to the whole city, and at which flowers of gold and silver were given as prizes for odes, for idyls, and for something that was called eloquence. These bounties produced of course the ordinary effect of bounties, and turned people who might have been thriving attor neys and useful apothecaries into small wits and bad poets. Barère does not appear to have been so lucky as to obtain any of these preci- In 1788, Barere paid his first visit to Paris, ous flowers; but one of his performances was attended reviews, heard Laharpe at the Lycamentioned with honour. At Montauban he um, and Condorcet at the Academy of Sciences, was more fortunate. The academy of that stared at the envoys of Tippoo Saib, saw the town bestowed on him several prizes, one for royal family dine at Versailles, and kept a jour a panegyric on Louis the Twelfth, in which the nal in which he noted down adventures and blessings of monarchy and the loyalty of the speculations. Some parts of this journal are French nation were set forth; and another for printed in the first volume of the work before a panegyric on poor Franc de Pompignan, in us, and are certainly most characteristic. The which, as may easily be supposed, the philo- worst vices of the writer had not yet shown sophy of the eighteenth century was sharply themselves; but the weakness which was the assailed. Then Barère found an old stone in- parent of those vices appears in every line. scribed with three Latin words, and wrote a His levity, his inconsistency, his servility, were dissertation upon it, which procured him a seat already what they were to the last. All his in a learned assembly, called the Toulouse opinions, all his feelings, spin round and round Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Polite like a weathercock in a whirlwind. Nay, the Literature. At length the doors of the Acade- very impressions which he receives through my of the Floral Games were opened to so his senses are not the same two days together. much merit. Barère, in his thirty-third year, He sees. Louis the Sixteenth, and is so much took his seat as one of that illustrious brother-blinded by loyalty as to find his majesty handhood, and made an inaugural oration which some. "I fixed my eyes," he says, "with a was greatly admired. He apologizes for recounting these triumphs of his youthful genius. We own that we cannot blame him for dwelling long on the least disgraceful portion of his existence. To send in declamations for prizes offered by provincial academies, is indeed no very useful or dignified employment for a bearded man; but it would have been well if Barère had always been so employed.

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In 1785 he married a young lady of considerable fortune. Whether she was in other respects qualified to make a home happy, is a point respecting which we are imperfectly informed. In a little work, entitled Melancholy Pages, which was written in 1797, Barère avers that his marriage was one of mere convenience, that at the altar his heart was heavy with sorrowful forebodings, that he turned pale as he pronounced the solemn "Yes," that unbidden tears rolled down his cheeks, that his mother shared his presentiment, and that the evil omen was accomplished. My marriage," he says, "was one of the most unhappy of marriages." So romantic a tale, told by so noted a liar, did not command our belief. We were, therefore, not much surprised to discover that, in his Memoirs, he calls his wife a most amiable woman, and declares that, after he had been united to her six years, he found her as amiable as ever. He complains, indeed, that she was too much attached to royalty and to the old superstition; but he assures us that his respect for her virtues induced him to tolerate her prejudices. Now Barère, at the time of his marriage, was himself a royalist and a Catholic. He had gained one prize by flattering the throne, and another by defending the church. It is hardly possible, therefore, that disputes about politics or religion should have embitter

lively curiosity on his fine countenance, which I thought open and noble." The next time that the king appears, all is altered. His majesty's eyes are without the smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought up. It is the same with more important questions. Barère is for the parliaments on the Monday and against the parliaments on the Tuesday, for feudality in the morning and against feudality in the afternoon. One day he admires the English constitution: then he shudders to think that, in the struggles by which that constitution had been obtained, the barbarous islanders had murdered a king, and gives the preference to the constitution of Bearn, Bearn, he says, has a sublime constitution, a beautiful constitution. There the nobility and clergy meet in one house and the commons in another. If the houses differ, the king has the casting vote. A few weeks later we find him raving against the principles of this sublime and beautiful constitution. To admit deputies of the nobility and clergy into the legislature is, he says, neither more or less than to admit enemies of the nation into the legislature.

In this state of mind, without one settled purpose or opinion, the slave of the last word, royalist, aristocrat, democrat, according to the prevailing sentiment of the coffee-house or drawing-room into which he had just looked, did Barère enter into public life. The statesgeneral had been summoned. Barère went down to his own province, was there elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned to Paris in May 1789.

A great crisis, often predicted, had at last arrived. In no country, we conceive, have in

from bombast down to buffoonry, was not wholly without force and vivacity. He had also one quality which, in active life, often gives fourth-rate men an advantage over firstrate men. Whatever he could do, he could do without effort, at any moment, in any abun dance, and on any side of any question. There was, indeed, a perfect harmony between his moral character and his intellectual character. His temper was that of a slave; his abilities were exactly those which qualified him to be a useful slave. Of thinking to purpose, he was utterly incapable; but he had wonderful readiness in arranging and expressing thoughts fur nished by others.

In the National Assembly he had no oppor tunity of displaying the full extent either of his talents or of his vices. He was indeed eclipsed by much abler men. He went, as was his habit, with the stream, spoke occasionally with some success, and edited a journal called the Point du Jour, in which the debates of the Assembly were reported.

tellectual freedom and political servitude ex-| isted together so long as in France, during the seventy or eighty years which preceded the last convocation of the orders. Ancient abuses and new theories flourished in equal vigour side by side. The people, having no constitutional means of checking even the most flagitious misgovernment, were indemnified for oppression by being suffered to luxuriate in anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule every principle on which the institutions of the state reposed. Neither those who attribute the downfall of the old French institutions to the public grievances, nor those who attribute it to the doctrines of the philosophers, appear to us to have taken into their view more than onehalf of the subject. Grievances as heavy have often been endured without producing a revolution; doctrines as bold have often been propounded without producing a revolution. The question, whether the French nation was alienated from its old polity by the follies and vices of the viziers and sultanas who pillaged and disgraced it, or by the writ- He at first ranked by no means among the ings of Voltaire and Rousseau, seems to us as violent reformers. He was not friendly to idle as the question whether it was fire or gun- that new division of the French territory powder that blew up the mills at Hounslow. which was among the most important changes Neither cause would have sufficed alone. Ty-introduced by the Revolution, and was espe ranny may last through ages where discussion is suppressed. Discussion may safely be left free by rulers who act on popular principles. But combine a press like that of London with a government like that of St. Petersburg, and the inevitable effect will be an explosion that will shake the world. So it was in France. Despotism and license, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed hope and terror, that agonizing travail and that portentous birth.

cially unwilling to see his native province dismembered. He was entrusted with the task of framing reports on the woods and forests. Louis was exceedingly anxious about this matter; for his majesty was a keen sportsman, and would much rather have gone without the veto, or the prerogative of making peace and war, than without his hunting and shooting. Gentlemen of the royal household were sent to Barère, in order to intercede for the deer and pheasants. Nor was this intercession unsuccessful. The reports were so drawn, that Barère was afterwards accused of having dishonestly sacrificed the interests of Among the crowd of legislators which at this the public to the tastes of the court. To one conjuncture poured from all the provinces of of these reports he had the inconceivable folly France into Paris, Barère made no contempti- and bad taste to prefix a punning motto from Virble figure. The opinions which he for the mo-gil, fit only for such essays as he had been in ment professed were popular, yet not extreme. the habit of composing for the Floral GamesHis character was fair; his personal advantages are said to have been considerable; and, from the portrait which is prefixed to these Memoirs, and which represents him as he appeared in the Convention, we should judge that his features must have been strikingly handsome, though we think that we can read in them cowardice and meanness very legibly written by the hand of God. His conversation was lively and easy; his manners remarkably good for a country lawyer. Women of rank and wit said that he was the only man who, on his first arrival from a remote province, had that indescribable air which it was supposed that Paris alone could give. His eloquence, indeed, was by no means so much admired in the capital as it had been by the ingenious academicians of Montauban and Toulouse. His style was thought very bad; and very bad, if a foreigner may venture to judge, it continued to the last. It would, however, be unjust to deny that he had some talents for speaking and writing. His rhetoric, though deformed by every imaginable fault of taste,

"Si canimus sylvas, sylvæ sint Consule dignæ.” This literary foppery was one of the few things in which he was consistent. Royalist or Girondist, Jacobin or Imperialist, he was always a Trissotin.

As the monarchical party became weaker and weaker, Barère gradually estranged himself more and more from it, and drew closer and closer to the republicans. It would seem that, during this transition, he was for a time closely connected with the family of Orleans. It is certain that he was entrusted with the guardianship of the celebrated Pamela, afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald; and it was asserted that he received during some years a pension of twelve thousand francs from the Palais Royal.

At the end of September 1791, the labours of the National Assembly terminated, and those of the first and last Legislative Assem bly commenced.

It had been enacted that no member of the

National Assembly should sit in the Leg:"

all hope of such a result. The deposition of | with which, after the victory of the republiLouis was, in our opinion, the necessary con- cans, he and his family were treated. But this sequence of that coalition. The question was we say, that the French had only one alternanow no longer, whether the king should have tive, to deprive him of the powers of first an absolute veto or a suspensive veto, whether magistrate, or to ground their arms and subthere should be one chamber or two chambers, mit patiently to foreign dictation. The events whether the members of the representative of the tenth of August sprang inevitably from body should be re-eligible or not; but whether the league of Pilnitz. The king's palace was France should belong to the French. The in-stormed; his guards were slaughtered. He dependence of the nation, the integrity of the was suspended from his regal functions; and territory, were at stake; and we must say the Legislative Assembly invited the nation to plainly, that we cordially approve of the con- elect an extraordinary Convention, with full duct of those Frenchmen who, at that conjunc-powers which the conjuncture required. To ture, resolved, like our own Blake, to play the this Convention the members of the National men for their country, under whatever form of Assembly were eligible; and Barère was government their country might fall. chosen by his own department.

It seems to us clear that the war with the con- The Convention met on the twenty-first of tinental coalition was, on the side of France, at September, 1792. The first proceedings were first a defensive war, and therefore a just war. unanimous. Royalty was abolished by acclaIt was not a war for small objects, or against mation. No objections were made to this despicable enemies. On the event were staked great change, and no reasons were assigned all the dearest interests of the French people. for it. For certainly we cannot honour with Foremost among the threatening powers ap- the name of reasons such apophthegms, as peared two great and martial monarchies, that kings are in the moral world what moneither of which, situated as France then was, sters are in the physical world; and that the might be regarded as a formidable assailant. history of kings is the martyrology of nations. It is evident that, under such circumstances, But though the discussion was worthy only of the French could not, without extreme impru- a debating-club of school-boys, the resolution. dence, entrust the supreme administration of to which the Convention came seems to have their affairs to any person whose attachment been that which sound policy dictated. Ir to the national cause admitted of doubt. Now, saying this we do not mean to express an it is no reproach to the memory of Louis to opinion that a republic is, either in the abstract say, that he was not attached to the national the best form of government, or is, under ordicause. Had he been so, he would have been nary circumstances, the form of government something more than man. He had held abso- best suited to the French people. Our own lute power, not by usurpation, but by the acci- opinion is, that the best governments which dent of birth and by the ancient polity of the have ever existed in the world have been kingdom. That power he had, on the whole, limited monarchies; and that France, in parused with lenity. He had meant well by his ticular, has never enjoyed so much prosperity people. He had been willing to make to them, and freedom as under a limited monarchy. of his own mere motion, concessions such as Nevertheless, we approve of the vote of the scarcely any other sovereign has ever made Convention which abolished kingly governexcept under duress. He had paid the penalty ment. The interference of foreign powers had of faults not his own, of the haughtiness and brought on a crisis which made extraordinary ambition of some of his predecessors, of the measures necessary. Hereditary monarchy dissoluteness and baseness of others. He had may be, and we believe that it is, a very usebeen vanquished, taken captive, led in triumph, ful institution in a country like France. And put in ward. He had escaped; he had been masts are very useful parts of a ship. But, if caught; he had been dragged back like a run- the ship is on her beam-ends, it may be necesaway galley-slave to the oar. He was still a sary to cut the masts away. When once she state prisoner. His quiet was broken by daily has righted, she may come safe into port under affronts and lampoons. Accustomed from the jury rigging, and there be completely repaired. cradle to be treated with profound reverence, But, in the mean time, she must be hacked he was now forced to command his feelings, with unsparing hand, lest that which, under while men, who, a few months before, had been ordinary circumstances, is an essential part of hackney writers or country attorneys, sat in her fabric, should, in her extreme distress, sink his presence with covered heads, and addressed her to the bottom. Even so there are political him in the easy tone of equality. Conscious emergencies in which it is necessary that of fair intentions, sensible of hard usage, he governments should be mutilated of their fair doubtless detested the Revolution; and, while proportions for a time, lest they be cast away charged with the conduct of the war against for ever; and with such an emergency the the confederates, pined in secret for the sight Convention had to deal. The first object of a of the German eagles and the sound of the good Frenchman should have been to save German drums. We do not blame him for France from the fate of Poland. The first this. But can we blame those who, being re-requisite of a government was entire devotion solved to defend the work of the National to the national cause. That requisite was Assembly against the interference of strangers, wanting in Louis; and such a want, at such a were not disposed to have him at their head in the fearful struggle which was approaching? We have nothing to say in defence or extenuation of the insolence, injustice, and cruelty,

moment, could not be supplied by any public or private virtues. If the king were set aside, the abolition of kingship necessarily followed. In the state in which the public mind ther, was