person, whom her majesty's ministers have the Girondists; Barère, who has the effrontery thought qualified to fill the most important post to declare that he greatly loved and highly esin the empire, has made our task easy. Who- teemed Vergniaud. The decree was passed; ever has read Lord Ellenborough's proclama- and the tribunal, without suffering the pritions is able to form a complete idea of a Car-soners to conclude what they had to say, promagnole. nounced them guilty. The following day was the saddest in the sad history of the Revolution. The sufferers were so innocent, so brave, so eloquent, so accomplished, so young. Some of them were graceful and handsome youths of six or seven and twenty. Vergniaud and Gensonné were little more than thirty. They had been only a few months engaged in public affairs. In a few months the fame of their genius had filled The effect which Barère's discourses at one time produced is not to be wholly attributed to the perversion of the national taste. The occasions on which he rose were frequently such as would have secured to the worst speaker a favourable hearing. When military advantage had been gained, he was generally deputed by the committee of public safety to announce the good news. The hall resounded with applause as he mounted the tribune, hold-Europe; and they were to die for no crime but ing the despatches in his hand. Deputies and strangers listened with delight while he told them that victory was the order of the day; that the guineas of Pitt had been vainly lavished to hire machines six feet high, carry-proof to clamour and obloquy, and which ing guns; that the flight of the English leopard deserved to be celebrated by Tyrtus; and that the saltpetre dug out of the cellars of Paris had been turned into thunder, which would crush the Titan brethren, George and Francis. this, that they had wished to combine order, justice and mercy with freedom. Their great fault was want of courage. We mean want of political courage-of that courage which is meets great emergencies by daring and deci sive measures. Alas! they had but too good an opportunity of proving, that they did not want courage to endure with manly cheerfulness the worst that could be inflicted by such tyrants as St. Just, and such slaves as Barère. They were not the only victims of the noble cause. Madame Roland followed them to the scaffold with a spirit as heroic as their own. Her husband was in a safe hiding-place, but could not bear to survive her. His body was found on the high road, near Rouen. He had fallen on his sword. Condorcet swallowed opium. At Bordeaux, the steel fell on the Meanwhile the trial of the accused Girondists, who were under arrest at Paris, came on. They flattered themselves with a vain hope of escape. They placed some reliance on their innocence, and some reliance on their eloquence. They thought that shame would suffice to restrain any man, however violent and cruel, from publicly committing the flagrant iniquity of condemning them to death. The Revolutionary Tribunal was new to its func-necks of the bold and quick-witted Gaudet, and tions. No member of the Convention had yet been executed; and it was probable that the boldest Jacobin would shrink from being the first to violate the sanctity which was supposed to belong to the representatives of the people. of Barbaroux, the chief of those enthusiasts from the Rhone whose valour, in the great crisis of the tenth of August, had turned back the tide of battle from the Louvre to the Tuileries. In a field near the Garonne was found all that the wolves had left of Pétion, once honoured, greatly indeed beyond his deserts, as the model of republican virtue. We are far from regarding even the best of the Gi rondists with unmixed admiration; but history owes to them this honourable testimony, that, being free to choose whether they would be oppressors or victims, they deliberately and firmly resolved rather to suffer injustice than to inflict it. The proceedings lasted some days. Gensonné and Brissot defended themselves with great ability and presence of mind against the vile Hébert and Chaumette, who appeared as accusers. The eloquent voice of Vergniaud was heard for the last time. He pleaded his own cause, and that of his friends, with such force of reason and elevation of sentiment, that a murmur of pity and admiration rose from the audience. Nay, the court itself, not yet accustomed to riot in daily carnage, showed signs of emotion. The sitting was adjourned, and a rumour went forth that there would be an acquittal. The Jacobins met, breathing vengeance. Robespierre undertook to be their organ. He rose on the following day in the Convention, and proposed a decree of such atrocity, that even among the acts of that year It can hardly be paralleled. By this decree the tribunal was empowered to cut short the defence of the prisoners, o pronounce the case clear, and to pass immediate judgment. One deputy made a faint opposition. Barère instantly sprang up to support RobespierreBarère the federalist; Barère, the author of that commission of twelve which was among To some of these men, and of those who the chief causes of the hatred borne by Paris adhered to them, it is due to say, that the fanato the Girondists; Barère, who in these Me- ticism which had emancipated them from the moirs denies that he ever took any part against | restraints of justice and compassion, had eman And now began that strange period known by the name of the Reign of Terror. The Jacobins had prevailed. This was their hour, and the power of darkness. The Convention was subjugated, and reduced to profound silence on the highest questions of state. The sovereignty passed to the committee of public safety. To the edicts framed by that committee, the representative assembly did not venture to offer even the species of opposition which the ancient Parliament had frequently offered to the mandates of the ancient kings, Six persons held the chief power in the small cabinet which now domineered over FranceRobespierre, St. Just, Couthon, Collot, Billand, and Barère. the streets of Paris, the proconsuls whom the sovereign committee had sent forth to the departments, revelled in an extravagance of cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of the deadly machine rose and fell too slow for their work of slaughter. Long rows of captives were mowed down with grapeshot. Holes were made in the bottom of crowded barges. Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras even the cruel mercy of a speedy death was denied to the prisoners. All down the Loire, from Samur to the sea, great flocks of crows and kites feasted on naked corpses, twined together in hideous embraces. No mercy was shown to sex or age. The number of young lads and of girls of seventeen who were murdered by that execrable government, is to be reckoned by hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed from pike to pike along the Jacobin ranks. One champion of liberty had his pockets well stuffed with ears. Another swaggered about with the finger of a little child in his hat. A few months had sufficed to degrade France below the level of New Zealand. cipated them also from the dominion of vulgar | Cassius or Timoleon, or to call the Fifth Sans. cupidity and of vulgar fear; that, while hardly culottide by its old superstitious name of St. knowing where to find an assignat of a few Matthew's Day. While the daily wagon-loads francs to pay for a dinner, they expended with of victims were carried to their doom through strict integrity the immense revenue which they collected by every art of rapine; and that they were ready, in support of their cause, to mount the scaffold with as much indifference as they showed when they signed the deathwarrants of aristocrats and priests. But no great party can be composed of such materials as these. It is the inevitable law, that such zealots as we have described shall collect around them a multitude of slaves, of cowards, and of libertines, whose savage tempers and licentious appetites, withheld only by the dread of law and magistracy from the worst excesses, are called into full activity by the hope of impunity. A faction which, from whatever motive, relaxes the great laws of morality, is certain to be joined by the most immoral part of the community. This has been repeatedly proved in religious wars. The war of the Holy Sepulchre, the Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the Thirty Years' war, all originated in pious zeal. That zeal inflamed the champions of the church to such a point, that they regarded all generosity to the vanquished as a sinful weakness. The infidel, the heretic, was to be run down like a mad dog. No outrage committed by the Catholic warrior on the miscreant enemy could deserve punishment. As soon as it was known that boundless license was thus given to barbarity and dissoluteness, thousands of wretches who cared nothing for the sacred cause, but who were eager to be exempted from the police of peaceful cities, and the discipline of well-governed camps, flocked to the standard of the faith. The men who had set up that standard were sincere, chaste, regardless of lucre, and perhaps, where only themselves were concerned, not unforgiving; but round that standard were assembled such gangs of rogues, ravishers, plunderers, and ferocious bravoes, as were scarcely ever found under the flag of any state engaged in a mere temporal quarrel. In a very similar way was the Jacobin party composed. There was a small nucleus of enthusiasts; round that nucleus was gathered a vast mass of ignoble depravity; and in all that mass, there was nothing so depraved and so ignoble as Barère. It is absurd to say, that any amount of public danger can justify a system like this, we do not say on Christian principles, we do not say on the principles of a high morality, but even on principles of Machiavelian policy. It is true that great emergencies call for activity and vigilance; it is true that they justify severity which, in ordinary times, would deserve the name of cruelty. But indiscriminate severity can never, under any circumstances, be useful. It is plain that the whole efficacy of punishment depends on the care with which the guilty are distinguished. Punishment which strikes the guilty and the innocent_promiscuously, operates merely like a pestilence or a great convulsion of nature, and has no more tendency to prevent offences, than the cholera, or an earthquake like that of Lisbon, would have. The energy for which the Jacobin administration is praised was merely the energy of the Malay who maddens himself with opium, draws his knife, and runs a-muck through the streets, slashing right and left at friends and foes. Such has never been the Then came those days when the most bar- energy of truly great rulers; of Elizabeth, for barous of all codes was administered by the example, of Oliver, or of Frederick. They most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man were not, indeed, scrupulous. But, had they could greet his neighbours, or say his prayers, been less scrupulous than they were, the or dress his hair, without danger of committing strength and amplitude of their minds would a capital crime; when spies lurked in every have preserved them from crimes, such as corner; when the guillotine was long and hard those which the small men of the committee at work every morning; when the jails were of public safety took for daring strokes of pofilled as close as the hold of a slave-ship; licy. The great queen who so long held her when the gutters ran foaming with blood into own against foreign and domestic enemies, the Seine; when it was death to be great-niece against temporal and spiritual arms; the great of a captain of the royal guards, or half-bro-protector who governed with more than regal ther of a doctor of the Sarbonne, to express a doubt whether assignats would not fall, to hint that the English had been victorious in the action of the first of June, to have a copy of one of Burke's pamphlets locked up in a desk, to laugh at a Jacobin for taking the name of power, in despite both of royalists and republicans; the great king who, with a beaten army and an exhausted treasury, defended his little dominions to the last against the united efforts of Russia, Austria, and France; with what scorn would they have heard that it was im pockets, if they had known how to govern in possible for them to strike a salutary terror That, under their administration, the war against the European coalition was successfully conducted, is true. But that war had been successfully conducted before their elevation, and continued to be successfully conducted after their fall. Terror was not the order of the day when Brussels opened its gates to Dumourier. Terror had ceased to be the order of the day when Piedmont and Lombardy were conquered by Bonaparte. The truth is, that France was saved, not by the committee of public safety, but by the energy, patriotism, and valour of the French people. Those high qualities were victorious in spite of the incapacity of rulers whose administration was a tissue, not merely of crimes, but of blunders. We have not time to tell how the leaders of the savage faction at length began to avenge mankind on each other; how the craven Hébert was dragged wailing and trembling to his doom; how the nobler Danton, moved by a late repentance, strove in vain to repair the evil which he had wrought, and half redeemed the great crime of September, by manfully encountering death in the cause of mercy. The popular notion is, we believe, that the leading Terrorists were wicked men, but, at the same time, great men. We can see nothing great about them but their wickedness. That their policy was daringly original is a vulgar error. Their policy is as old as the oldest accounts which we have of human misgovernment. It seemed new in France, and in the eighteenth century, only because it had been long disused, for excellent reasons, by the enlightened part of mankind. But it has always prevailed, and still prevails, in savage and half savage nations, and is the chief cause which prevents such nations from making advances towards civilization. Thousands of deys, of beys, of pachas, of rajahs, of nabobs, have show themselves as great masters of statecraft as the members of the committee of public safety. Djezzar, we imagine, was superior to any of them in their own line. In fact, there is not a petty tyrant in Asia or Africa so dull or so unlearned as not to be fully qualified for the business of Jacobin police and Jacobin finance. To behead people by scores without Our business is with Barère. In all those caring whether they are guilty or innocent; to things he was not only consenting, but eagerly wring money out of the rich by the help of and joyously forward. Not merely was he one jailers and executioners; to rob the public of the guilty administration. He was the man creditor, and put him to death if he remon- to whom was especially assigned the office of strates; to take loaves by force out of the proposing and defending outrages on justice bakers' shops; to clothe and mount soldiers and humanity, and of furnisning to atrocious by seizing on one man's wool and linen, and schemes an appropriate garb of atrocious rho on another man's horses and saddles, without domontade. Barère first proclaimed from the compensation, is of all modes of governing the tribune of the Convention, that terror must be simplest and most obvious. Cf its morality the order of the day. It was by Barère that the we at present say nothing. But surely it re- Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was provided quires no capacity beyond that of a barbarian with the aid of a public accuser worthy of such or a child. By means like those which we a court, the infamous Fouquier Tinville. It have described, the committee of public safety was Barère who, when one of the old members undoubtedly succeeded, for a short time, in of the National Assembly had been absolved euforcing profound submission, and in raising by the Revolutionary Tribunal, gave orders immense funds. But to enforce submission by that a fresh jury should be summoned. "Ac butchery, and to raise funds by spoliation, is quit one of the National Assembly!" he cried. not statesmanship. The real statesman is he "The tribunal is turning against the Revolu who, in troubled times, keeps down the turbu- tion." It is unnecessary to say that the pri lent without unnecessarily harassing the well-soner's head was soon in the basket. It was affected; and who, when great pecuniary resources are needed, provides for the public exigencies without violating the security of property, and drying up the sources of future prosperity. Such a statesman, we are confident, might, in 1793, have preserved the independence of France without shedding a drop of innocent blood, without plundering a single warehouse. Unhappily, the Republic was sub ject to men who were mere demagogues, and in no sense statesmen. They could declaim at a club. They could lead a rabble to mischief. But they had no skill to conduct the affairs of an empire. The want of skill they supplied for a time by atrocity and blind violence. For legislative ability, fiscal ability, military ability, diplomatic ability, they had one substitute, the guillotine. Indeed their exceeding ignorance, and the barrenness of their invention, are the best excuse for their murders and robberies. We really believe that they would not have cut so many throats, and picked so many Barère who moved that the city of Lyons should be destroyed. "Let the plough," he cried from the tribune, "pass over her. Let her name cease to exist. The rebels are conquered; but are they all exterminated? No weakness. No mercy. Let every one be smitten. Two words will suffice to tell the whole. Lyons made war on liberty; Lyons is no more." When Toulon was taken, Barère came forward to announce the event. "The conquest," said the apostate Brissotine, "won by the Mountain over the Brissotines, must be commemorated by a mark set on the place where Toulon once stood. The national thunder must crush the house of every trader in the town." When Camille Desmou lins, long distinguished among the republicans by zeal and ability, dared to raise his eloquent voice against the Reign of Terror, and to point out the close analogy between the government which then oppressed France and the govern ment of the worst of the Cæsars, Barère rose to complain of the weak compassion which Equally idle would it be to dilate on his sen sual excesses. That in Barère, as in the whole breed of Neros, Caligulas, and Domitians whom he resembled, voluptuousness was mingled with cruelty; that he withdrew, twice in every decade, from the work of blood to the smiling gardens of Clichy, and there forgot public cares in the madness of wine, and in the arms of courtesans, has often been repeated. M. Hippolyte Carnot does not altogether deny the truth of these stories, but justly observes that Barère's dissipation was not carried to such a point as to interfere with his industry. Nothing can be more true. Barère was by no means so much addicted to debauchery as to neglect the work of murder. It was his boast that, even during his hours of recreation, he cut out work for the Revolutionary Tribunal. To those who 66 his health, he gaily answered that he was less busy than they thought. The guillotine," he said, does all;" the "guillotine governs." For ourselves, we are much more disposed to look indulgently on the pleasures which he allowed to himself, than on the pain which he inflicted on his neighbours. tried to revive the hopes of the aristocracy. Whoever," he said, "is nobly born, is a man to be suspected. Every priest, every frequenter of the old court, every lawyer, every banker, is a man to be suspected. Every person who grumbles at the course which the Revolution takes, is a man to be suspected. There are whole castes already tried and condemned. There are callings which carry their doom with them. There are relations of blood which the law regards with an evil eye. Republicans of France!" yelled the renegade Girondist, the old enemy of the Mountain-"Republicans of France! the Brissotines led you by gentle means to slavery. The Mountain leads you by strong measures to freedom. Oh! who can count the evils which a false compassion may produce?" When the friends of Danton mustered courage to express a wish that the Con-expressed a fear that his exertions would hurt vention would at least hear him, in his own defence, before it sent him to certain death, the voice of Barère was the loudest in opposition to their prayer. When the crimes of Lebon, one of the worst, if not the very worst, of the vicegerents of the committee of public safety, had so maddened the people of the Departments of the North, that they resorted to the desperate expedient of imploring the protection of the Convention, Barère pleaded the cause of the accused tyrant, and threatened the petitioners with the utmost vengeance of the government. An immoderate appetite for sensual gratifica"These charges," he said, "have been sug-tion is undoubtedly a blemish on the fame of gested by wily aristocrats. The man who Henry the Fourth, of Lord Somers, of Mr. crushes the enemies of the people, though he Fox. But the vices of honest men are the may be hurried by his zeal into some excesses, virtues of Barère. can never be a proper object of censure. The And now Barère had become a really cruel proceedings of Lebon may have been a little man. It was from mere pusillanimity that he harsh as to form." One of the small irregu- had perpetrated his first great crimes. But the larities thus gently censured was this: Lebon whole history of our race proves that the taste kept a wretched man a quarter of an hour un- for the misery of others is a taste which minds der the knife of the guillotine, in order to tor-not naturally ferocious may too easily acquire, ment him, by reading to him, before he was despatched, a letter, the contents of which were supposed to be such as would aggravate even the bitterness of death. But what," proceeded Barère, "is not permitted to the hatred of a republican against aristocracy? How many generous sentiments atone for what may perhaps seem acrimonious in the prosecution of public enemies? Revolutionary measures are always to be spoken of with respect. Liberty is a virgin whose veil it is not lawful to lift." 66 "Atque utinam his potius nugis tota illa dedisset Tempora sævitiæ, claras quibus abstulit urbi Illustresque animas, impune ac vindice nullo." and which, when once acquired, is as strong as any of the propensities with which we are born. A very few months had sufficed to bring this man into a state of mind in which images of despair, wailing, and death, had an exhilarating effect on him; and inspired him as wine and love inspire men of free and joyous natures. The cart creaking under its daily freight of victims, ancient men, and lads, and fair young girls, the binding of the hands, the thrusting of the head out of the little national After this, it would be idle to dwell on facts sash-window, the crash of the axe, the pool of which would indeed, of themselves, suffice to blood beneath the scaffold, the heads rolling by render a name infamous, but which makes no scores in the panier-these things were to him perceptible addition to the great infamy of what Lalage and a cask of Falernian were to Barère. It would be idle, for example, to relate Horace, what Rosette and a bottle of iced how he, a man of letters, a member of an aca- champagne are to De Béranger. As soon as demy of inscriptions, was foremost in that war he began to speak of slaughter, his heart against learning, art, and history which dis-seemed to be enlarged, and his fancy to begraced the Jacobin government; how he re- come unusually fertile of conceits and gascocommended a general conflagration of libraries; nades. Robespierre, St. Just, and Billaud, how he proclaimed that all records of events whose barbarity was the effect of earnest and anterior to the Revolution ought to be destroy-gloomy hatred, were, in his view, men who ed; how he laid waste the abbey of St. Denis, pulled down monuments consecrated by the veneration of ages, and scattered on the wind the dust of ancient kings. He was, in truth, seldom so well employed as when he turned for a moment from making war on the living to make war on the dead. VOL. V.-81 made a toil of pleasure. Cruelty was no such melancholy business, to be gone about with an austere brow and a whining tone; it was a re creation, fitly accompanied by singing and laughing. In truth, Robespierre and Barèr might be well compared to the two renowne hangmen of Louis the Eleventh. They were 3 H⭑ alike insensible of pity, alike bent on havoc.] of the Girondists, in the murder of the Queen, But, while they murdered, one of them frowned and canted, the other grinned and joked. For our own part, we prefer Jean qui pleure to Jean qui rit. In the midst of the funereal gloom which overhung Paris, a gaiety stranger and more ghastly than the horrors of the prison and the scaffold distinguished the dwelling of Barère. Every morning a crowd of suitors assembled to implore his protection. He came forth in his rich dressing-gown, went round the antechamber, dispersed smiles and promises among the obsequious crowd, addressed himself with peculiar animation to every handsome woman who appeared in the circle, and complimented her in the florid style of Gascony on the bloom of her cheeks and the lustre of her eyes. When he had enjoyed the fear and anxiety of his suppliants, he dismissed them, and flung all their memorials unread into the fire. This was the best way, he conceived, to prevent arrears of business from accumulating. Here he was only an imitator. Cardinal Dubois had been in the habit of clearing his table of papers in the same way. Nor was this the only point in which we could point out a resemblance between the worst statesman of the monarchy and the worst statesman of the Republic. in the destruction of Lyons, he durst not show himself within that sacred precinct. At one meeting of the society, a member complained that the committee to which the supreme direction of affairs was intrusted, after all the changes which had been made, still contained one man who was not trustworthy. Robes pierre, whose influence over the Jacobins was boundless, undertook the defence of his col league, owned there was some ground for what had been said, but spoke highly of Barère's industry and aptitude for business. This seasonable interposition silenced the accuser; but it was long before the neophyte could venture to appear at the club. At length a masterpiece of wickedness, unique, we think, even among Barère's great achievements, obtained his full pardon even from that rigid conclave. The insupportable tyranny of the committee of public safety had at length brought the minds of men, and even of women, into a fierce and hard temper, which defied or welcomed death. The life which might be any morning taken away, in conse quence of the whisper of a private enemy, seemed of little value. It was something to die after smiting one of the oppressors; it was something to bequeath to the surviving tyrants a terror not inferior to that which they had Of Barère's peculiar vein of pleasantry a themselves inspired. Human nature, hunted notion may be formed from an anecdote which and worried to the utmost, now turned furiousone of his intimate associates, a juror of the ly to bay. Fonquier Tinville was afraid to Revolutionary Tribunal, has related. A cour. walk the streets; a pistol was snapped at tesan who bore a conspicuous part in the Collot D'Herbois; a young girl, animated ap orgies of Clichy, implored Barere to use his parently by the spirit of Charlotte Corday, power against a head-dress which did not suit attempted to obtain an interview with Robes her style of face, and which a rival beauty was pierre. Suspicions arose; she was searched; trying to bring into fashion. One of the ma- and two knives were found about her. She gistrates of the capital was summoned, and was questioned, and spoke of the Jacobin received the necessary orders. Aristocracy, domination with resolute scorn and aversion. Barère said, was again rearing its front. These It is unnecessary to say that she was sent to new wigs were counter-revolutionary. He had the guillotine. Barère declared from the trireason to know that they were made out of the bune that the cause of these attempts was long fair hair of handsome aristocrats who evident. Pitt and his guineas had done the had died by the national chopper. Every lady whole. The English government had organ. who adorned herself with the relics of crimi- ized a vast system of murder, had armed the nals might justly be suspected of incivism. band of Charlotte Corday, and had now, by This ridiculous lie imposed on the authorities similar means, attacked two of the most emiof Paris. Female citizens were solemnly nent friends of liberty in France. It is need. warned against the obnoxious ringlets, and less to say, that these imputations were not were left to choose between their head-dresses only false, but destitute of all show of truth. and their heads. Barère's delight at the suc- Nay, they were demonstrably absurd; for the cess of this facetious fiction was quite extrava- assassins to whom Barère referred rushed on gant; he could not tell the story without going|certain death, a sure proof that they were into such convulsions of laughter as made his hearers hope that he was about to choke. There was something peculiarly tickling and exhilarating to his mind in this grotesque combination of the frivolous with the horrible, of false locks and curling irons with spouting arteries and reeking hatchets. not hirelings. The whole wealth of England would not have bribed any sane person to do what Charlotte Corday did. But when we consider her as an enthusiast, her conduct is perfectly natural. Even those French writers who are childish enough to believe that the English government contrived the inferna! But though Barère succeeded in earning the machine, and strangled the Emperor Paul, honourable nicknames of the Witling of Terror, have fully acquitted Mr. Pitt of all share in and the Anacreon of the Guillotine, there was the death of Marat and in the attempt on Roone place where it was long remembered to bespierre. Yet on calumnies so futile as those his disadvantage, that he had, for a time, talked which we have mentioned, did Barère ground the language of humanity and moderation. a motion at which all Christendom stood That place was the Jacobin Club. Even after aghast. He proposed a decree that no quarter be had borne the chief part in the massacre' should be given to any English or Hanoverian |