Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty Part 17

On September 2, the only persons handed over to the cut-throats, were at the Abbey, the Carmelites, and Saint-Firmin. On September 3, the ma.s.sacre became more general. The a.s.sa.s.sins had said: "If there is no more work, we shall have to find some." Their desire realizes itself.

Work will not be lacking. There is still some at the Force, where the Princess de Lamballe, the preferred victim, is {367} murdered. The a.s.sa.s.sins, who at the Abbey had been paid at the rate of eight francs a day, get only fifty sous at the Force. They work with undiminished zeal, even at this reduction. If necessary, they would work for nothing. To drink wine and shed blood is the essential thing. The negro Delorme, servant to Fournier "the American," distinguishes himself among them all. His black skin, reddened with blood, his white teeth and ferocious eyes, his b.e.s.t.i.a.l laugh, his ravenous fury, make him a choice a.s.sa.s.sin. There is work too at the Conciergerie, at the great and little Chatelet, the Salpetriere, and the Bicetre. A great number of those detained are people condemned or accused of private crimes which had absolutely nothing in common with politics. No matter; blood is wanted; they kill there as elsewhere. At the Grand Chatelet, work is so plenty, and the a.s.sa.s.sins so few, that they release several individuals imprisoned for theft, and impress them into their service. One of these unfortunate accidental executioners begins in a hesitating way, strikes a few undecided blows, and then throws down the hatchet placed in his hands. "No, no," he cries, "I cannot.

No, no! Rather a victim than a murderer! I would rather receive death from scoundrels like you, then give it to innocent, disarmed people.

Strike me!" And at once the veteran murderers kill the inexperienced cut-throat. There was a woman, known on account of her charms as the Beautiful Flower Girl, who was accused of having wounded {368} her lover, a French guard, in a fit of jealousy. Theroigne de Mericourt, an amazon of the gutters, was her rival. She pointed her out to the a.s.sa.s.sins. They fastened her naked to a post, her legs apart and her feet nailed to the ground. They burned her alive. They cut off her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with sabre strokes. They impaled her on a hot iron. Her shrieks carried dismay as far as the outer banks of the Seine.

Theroigne was at the height of felicity.

At the Salpetriere there was still another spectacle. This prison for fallen women is a place of correction for the old, of amendment for the young, and an asylum for those who are still children. More than forty children of the lower cla.s.ses were slain during these horrible days.

The delirium of murder reached its height. Gorged with wine mingled with gunpowder, intoxicated with the fumes and reek of carnage, the a.s.sa.s.sins experienced a devouring, inextinguishable thirst for blood which nothing could quench. More blood, and yet more blood! And where can it now be found? The prisons are empty. There are no more n.o.bles, no more priests, to put to death. Very well! for lack of anything better, they will go to an asylum for the poor, the sick, and the insane; to the Bicetre. Vagabonds, paupers, fools, thieves, steward, chaplains, janitor, all is fish that comes to their net. The butchery lasts five days and nights without stopping. Ma.s.sacre takes every form; some are drowned in the cellars, others shot in the courts.

Water, fire, and sword, every sort of torture.

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The cut-throats can at last take some repose. They have worked all the week. There are still some, however, who have not yet had enough, and who are going to continue the ma.s.sacres of Paris in the provinces. The Communal Council of Surveillance has taken care to send to every commune in France a circular bearing the seal of the Minister of Justice, inviting them to follow the example of the capital.

September 9, the prisoners who had been detained at Orleans to be tried there by the Superior Court, entered Versailles on carts. At the moment when they approached the grating of the Orangery, a.s.sa.s.sins sent from Paris under the lead of Fournier "the American" sprang upon them and immolated every one. Thus perished the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Lessart, and the Duke de Brissac, former commander of the Const.i.tutional Guard. Fournier "the American"[2] returned on horseback to Paris and began to caracole on the Place Vendome; Danton loudly felicitated him on the success of the expedition, from the balcony of the Ministry of Justice.

During all this time, what efforts had the a.s.sembly made to put a stop to the murders? None, absolutely none. Never has any deliberative body shown a like cowardice. Neither Vergniaud's voice nor that of any other Girondin was heard in protest. Indignation, pity, found not a single word to say. Speeches, {370} discussions, votes on different questions, went on as usual. Concerning the ma.s.sacres, not a syllable.

During that infamous week, neither the ministers, the virtuous Roland not more than the others, neither Petion, the mayor of Paris, nor the commander of the National Guard sent a picket guard of fifty men to any quarter to prevent the murders. A population of eight hundred thousand souls and a National Guard of fifty thousand men bent their necks under the yoke of a handful of bandits, of two hundred and thirty-five a.s.sa.s.sins (the exact number is known). People trembled. At the a.s.sembly the old moderate party had disappeared. There were not more than two hundred odd deputies present at the shameful and powerless sessions. Terrorized Paris was in a state of stupor and prostration.

The murderers ended by execrating themselves. Tormented by remorse, they could see nothing before them but vivid faces, reeking entrails, bleeding limbs. "Among the cut-throats," M. Louis Blanc has said, "some gave signs of insanity that led to the supposition that some mysterious and terrible drug had been mingled with the wine they drank." Some of them became furious madmen. Others sought refuge in suicide, killing themselves the moment they had no one else to kill.

Others enlisted. They were chased out of the army. Among these was the man who had carried the head of the Princess de Lamballe on a pike.

One day when he was boasting of his murders, the soldiers became indignant and {371} put him to death. Others still were tried as Septembrists and sent to the scaffold. The guilty received their punishment, even on this earth. Well! there are people nowadays who would like to rehabilitate them! In vain has Lamartine, the founder of the Second Republic, exclaimed in a burst of n.o.ble wrath: "Has human speech an execration, an anathema, which is equal to the horror these crimes of cannibals inspire in me, as in all civilized men?" In vain have the most celebrated historians of democracy, Edgar Quinet and Michelet, expressed in eloquent terms their indignation against these crimes. In vain has M. Louis Blanc said: "Every murder is a suicide.

In the victim the body alone is killed; but what is killed in the murderer is the soul." There are men who would not alone excuse, but glorify the a.s.sa.s.sinations and the a.s.sa.s.sins!

[1] M. Mortimer-Ternaux, _Histoire de la Terreur_.

[2] Claude Fournier-Lheritier, was born in Auvergne, 1745, and served as a volunteer in Santo Domingo, 1772-85, with Toussaint l'Ouverture, whence his sobriquet "the American."

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x.x.xVI.

MADAME ROLAND DURING THE Ma.s.sACRES.

Madame Roland's hatred was appeased. The ambitious _bourgeoise_ throned it for the second time at the Ministry of the Interior, and the Queen groaned in captivity in the Temple tower. The Egeria of the Girondins had not felt her heart swell with a single movement of pity for Marie Antoinette. The fatal 10th of August had seemed to her a personal triumph in which her pride delighted. The parvenue enjoyed the humiliations of the daughter of the German Caesars. Her jealous instincts feasted on the afflictions of the Queen of France and Navarre.

Lamartine, indignant at this cruelty on Madame Roland's part, has repented of the eulogies he gave her in his _Histoire des Girondins_.

In his _Cours de Litterature_ (Volume XIII. Conversation XXIII.), he says: "I glided over that medley of intrigue and pomposity which composed the genius, both feminine and Roman, of this woman. In so doing, I conceded more to popularity than to truth. I wanted to give a Cornelia to the Republic. As a matter of fact, I do not know what Cornelia was, that mother of the {373} Gracchi who brought up conspirators against the Roman Senate, and trained them to sedition, that virtue of ambitious commoners. As to Madame Roland, who inflated a vulgar husband by the breath of her feminine anger against a court she found odious because it did not open to her upstart vanity, there was nothing really fine in her except her death. Her role had been a mere parade of true greatness of soul." What Lamartine finds fault with most of all is her hostility to the martyr Queen. He adds: "She inspired the Girondins, her intimate friends, with an implacable hatred against the Queen, already so humiliated and so menaced; she had neither respect nor pity for this victim; she points her out to the rebellious mult.i.tude. She is no longer a wife, a mother, or a Frenchwoman. She poses as Nemesis at the door of the Temple, when the Queen is groaning there over her husband, her children, and herself, between the throne and the scaffold. This ostentatious stoicism of implacability is what, in my view, kills the woman in this female demagogue."

Alas! if Madame Roland was guilty, she was to be punished cruelly. The colleague of the _virtuous_ Roland was the organizer of the September ma.s.sacres. The republican sheepfold dreamed of by the admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was invaded by ferocious beasts. Human nature had never appeared under a more execrable aspect than since its so-called regeneration. Madame Roland was filled with a nave astonishment. After having sown the wind she was {374} utterly surprised to reap the whirlwind. What! she said to herself, my husband is minister, or, to speak with great exactness, I am the minister myself, and yet there are people in France who are dissatisfied!

Ungrateful nation, why dost thou not appreciate thy happiness? Madame Roland resembled certain politicians, who, having attained to power, would willingly disembarra.s.s themselves of those by whose aid they reached it. For the second time she had just arrived at the goal of her ambition. Who dared, then, to pollute her joy? Why did that marplot, Danton, come with his untimely ma.s.sacres to destroy such brilliant projects and banish such delightful dreams? The man who, as if in derision and ant.i.thesis, allowed himself to be called the Minister of Justice, produced the effect of a monster on Madame Roland.

The republic as conceived by him had not the head of a G.o.ddess, but of a Gorgon. Its eyes glittered with a sinister l.u.s.tre. The sword it held was that of an a.s.sa.s.sin or a headsman.

Madame Roland was greatly astonished when, on Sunday, September 2, 1792, toward five in the evening, when the ma.s.sacres had already begun, she saw two hundred men of forbidding appearance arrive at the Ministry of the Interior and ask for her husband, who was absent. Lucky for him he was; for albeit a minister, they had come to arrest him in virtue of a mandate of the Communal Council of Surveillance. Not finding Roland, the two hundred men retired. One of them, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his {375} elbows, and a sabre in his hand, declaimed furiously against the treachery of ministers. A few minutes later, Danton said to Petion: "Do you know what they have taken into their heads? If they haven't issued a decree to arrest Roland!"--"Who did that?" demanded the mayor.--"Eh! those devils of committeemen. I have taken the mandate; hold! here it is!"

What was Madame Roland doing the next day, when the worst of the ma.s.sacres were going on? She gave a dinner, and allowed the Prussian, Anacharsis Clootz, who came, moreover, uninvited, to make a regular defence of these horrible murders. "The events of the day," she says in her Memoirs, "formed the subject of conversation. Clootz pretended to prove that it was an indispensable and salutary measure; he uttered a good many commonplaces about the people's rights, the justice of their vengeance, and of its utility to the welfare of the species; he talked a long while and very loudly, ate still more, and fatigued more than one listener."

And yet, revolutionary pa.s.sions had not extinguished every notion of humanity and justice in Madame Roland's soul. On that very day she induced her husband to write a letter to the National a.s.sembly concerning the ma.s.sacres. But how weak and undecided is this letter, and how public opinion must have been lowered and debased when it could regard Roland as a courageous minister! In place of scathing the murderers with the energy of an {376} honest man, he pleads extenuating circ.u.mstances in their favor. "It is in the nature of things and according to the human heart," he said in his pale missive, "that victory should lead to some excesses. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, continues to roar long after the tempest; but everything has its limits and must finally see them determined. Yesterday was a day over whose events we ought, perhaps, to draw a veil. I know that the terrible vengeance of the people carries with it a sort of justice; but how easy it is for scoundrels and traitors to abuse this effervescence, and how necessary it is to arrest it!" This language produced not the least effect. The ma.s.sacres went on, and Roland remained minister; although in his letter of September 3 he had written: "I ask the privilege of resigning if the silence of the laws does not permit me to act." The _virtuous_ Roland sat in the Council beside his colleague, the organizer of this human butchery. September 13, he addressed a letter to the Parisians in which he burnt incense to himself, bragged about his character, his actions, and his firmness, and carried his infatuation so far as to write: "I have twice accepted a burden which I felt myself able to bear." Ah! how difficult it is to renounce even a shadow of power, and of what compromises with their consciences are not ministers capable in order to retain for a few days longer the portfolios that are slipping from their hands! In the depths of his soul Roland, like his wife, had the profoundest horror of the murders and {377} the murderers. And yet notice how he extenuates them in his letter to the Parisians: "I admired August 10; I trembled over the results of September 2; I carefully considered what the betrayed patience of the people and their justice had produced, and I did not blame a first impulse too inconsiderately; I believe that its further progress should have been prevented, and that those who were seeking to perpetuate it were deceived by their imagination or by cruel and evil-minded men. If the erring brethren recognize that they have been deceived, let them come; my arms are open to them." That was a very prompt amnesty. Already the a.s.sa.s.sins are but erring brethren, and the minister welcomes them to his arms!

The Gironde kept silence, or, if it spoke, it was to attribute, like Vergniaud, the ma.s.sacres "to the _emigres_ and the satellites of Coblentz." Later on, they were horrified by the crimes, but it was when others were to profit by them. Each taken by himself, the Girondins did not hesitate to condemn the murders; but taken as a whole, they considered merely the interests of their party. Were not three of them still in the Ministerial Council? What had they to complain of, then? The September ma.s.sacres are the most striking expression of what abominations the ambitious may commit or allow to be committed in order to maintain themselves a few weeks longer in power.

But there is a voice in the depths of conscience {378} which neither interest nor ambition can succeed in stifling. Madame Roland could not blind herself. The odious reality appeared to her. At last she saw the yawning gulf beneath her feet, and she uttered a cry of terror. A secret voice warned her that her fate would be like that of the September victims. After the 9th of that fatal month her imagination was vividly impressed. b.l.o.o.d.y phantoms rose before her. She wrote on that day to Bancal des Issarts: "If you knew the frightful details of these expeditions.... You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution; well, I am ashamed of it; it has become hideous. In a week ... how do I know what may happen? It is degrading to remain in office, and we are not permitted to leave Paris. We are detained so that we may be destroyed at the propitious moment."

From that time a rising anger and indignation took possession of the mind and heart of the Egeria of the Girondins, and constantly increased until the hour when she ascended the steps of the scaffold. She writes in her Memoirs, apropos of the September ma.s.sacres: "All Paris witnessed these horrible scenes executed by a small number of wretches (there were but fifteen at the Abbey, at the door of which only two National Guards were stationed, in spite of the applications made to the Commune and the commandant). All Paris permitted it to go on. All Paris was accursed in my eyes, and I no longer hoped that liberty might be established among cowards, insensible to the worst outrages that could be perpetrated {379} against nature and humanity, cold spectators of attempts which the courage of fifty armed men could have prevented with ease.... It is not the first night that astonishes me; but four days!--and inquisitive people going to see this spectacle! No, I know nothing in the annals of the most barbarous peoples which can compare with these atrocities."

What a striking lesson for those who play with anarchical pa.s.sions and end by falling themselves into the snares they have laid for others!

Nothing is more deserving of study than this retaliatory punishment which is found, one may say, on every page of revolutionary histories.

The hour was coming when the Girondins and their heroine would repent of the means they had employed to overset the throne. This was when the same means were employed against them, when they recognized their own weapons in the wounds they received. Then, when they had no more interest in keeping silence, they sought to escape a complicity that gained them nothing. Instead of the luminous heights which in their golden dreams they had aspired to gain, they fell, crushed and overwhelmed, into a dismal gulf, full of tears and blood. How bitter then were their recriminations against men and things! It was only to virtue that the dying Brutus said: "Thou art but a name." The Girondins said it also to glory, to country, and to liberty. Those among them who did not succeed in fleeing, disavowed, denounced, and insulted each other before the revolutionary tribunal. At the {380} Conciergerie they intoned the Ma.r.s.eillaise, but parodying the demagogic chant in this wise:--

Contre nous de la tyrannie[1]

Le _couteau_ sanglant est leve.

Read the Memoirs of Louvet, Buzot, Barbaroux, Petion, and Madame Roland, and you will see to what extremes of bitterness the language of deceived ambition can go. They are paroxysms of rage, howls of anger, shrieks of despair. Consider the difference between philosophy and religion! The philosophers curse, and the Christian pardons. Yes, as Edgar Quinet has said, "Louis XVI. alone speaks of forgiveness on that scaffold to which the others were to bring thoughts of vengeance and despair. And by that he seems still to reign over those who were to follow him in death with the pa.s.sions and the furies of earth." Louis XVI. will be magnanimous and calm. A celestial sweetness will overspread his royal countenance. An infernal rage will distort the heart and the features of the Girondins. What pains, what tortures, in their death-struggle! Earth fails them, and they do not look to heaven. What accents of disgust and hatred when they speak of their former accomplices, now become their executioners!

"Great G.o.d!" Buzot will say, "if it is only by such men and such infamous means that republics {381} can arise and be consolidated, there is no government more frightful on this earth nor more fatal to human happiness." He will address these insults, worthy of the imprecations of Camillus, to the city of Paris: "I say truly, that France can expect neither liberty nor happiness except from the irreparable destruction of that capital."

Barbaroux will be still more severe. His anathemas are launched not only at Paris, but at all France. "The people," he says, "do not deserve that one should become attached to them, for they are essentially ungrateful. It is the absurdest folly to try to conduct to liberty people without morals, who blaspheme G.o.d and adore Marat.

These people are no more fit for a philosophic government than the lazzaroni of Naples or the cannibals of America.... Liberty, virtue, sacred rights of men, to-day you are nothing but empty names." Petion, before dying, will write to his son this letter, which is like the testament of the Gironde: "My greatest torment will be to think that so many crimes went unpunished; vengeance is here the most sacred of duties.... My son, either the murderers of thy father and thy country will be delivered to the severities of the law and expiate their crimes upon the scaffold, or thou art under obligation to free thy country from them. They have broken all the ties of society; their crimes are of such a nature that they do not fall under ordinary rules. From such monsters every one is authorized to purge the earth."

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Madame Roland will be not less vehement than Buzot, Barbaroux, and Petion. She will address these severe but just reproaches to her friends who had not been valiant enough in their own defence: "They temporized with crime, the cowards! They were to fall in their turn, but they succ.u.mb shamefully, pitied by n.o.body, and with nothing to expect from posterity but utter contempt.... Rather than obey their tyrants, than descend from the bar and go out of the a.s.sembly like a timid flock about to be branded by the butcher, why did they not do justice to themselves by falling on the monsters to annihilate them rather than be sentenced by them?" It is not her friends alone whom her anger will lash, but the sovereign people, the people once so flattered, whom she will pursue with her anathemas. "The people," she will say, "can feel nothing but the cannibal joy of seeing blood flow, in order that they may run no risk of shedding their own. That predicted time has come when, if they ask for bread, dead bodies will be given them; but their degraded nature takes pleasure in the spectacle, and the satisfied instinct of cruelty makes the dearth supportable until it becomes absolute." The Egeria of the Girondins will comprehend that all is lost, that even her blood will be sterile, and that France is condemned either to anarchy or a dictatorship.

"Liberty," she will exclaim, "was not made for this corrupt nation, which leaves the bed of debauchery or the dunghill of poverty only to brutalize itself in license, and howl as it {383} wallows in the blood streaming from scaffolds." Like the d.a.m.ned souls in Dante, Madame Roland will leave all hope behind, and when, a few days after Marie Antoinette, she ascends the steps of the guillotine, instead of thinking of heaven, like the Queen, she will address this sarcastic speech to the plaster statue which has replaced that of Louis XV.: "O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!"

But let us not antic.i.p.ate. The Girondins are still to have a glimmer of joy. The Republic is about to be proclaimed.

[1] The b.l.o.o.d.y _knife_ of tyranny is lifted against us.

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x.x.xVII.

THE PROCLAMATION OF THE REPUBLIC.

"One of the astonishing things in the French Revolution," says one of the most eminent writers of the democratic school, Edgar Quinet, "is the unexpectedness with which the great changes occur. The most important events, the destruction of the monarchy and the advent of the Republic, came about without any previous warning." The most ardent republicans were royalists, not merely under the old regime, but after 1789, and even up to August 10, 1792. Marat wrote, in No. 374 of the _Ami du Peuple_, February 17, 1791: "I have often been represented as a mortal enemy of royalty, but I claim that the King has no better friend than myself." And he added: "As to Louis XVI. personally, I know very well that his defects are chargeable solely to his education, and that by nature he is an excellent sort of man, whom one would have cited as a worthy citizen if he had not had the misfortune to be born on the throne; but, such as he is, he is at all events the King we want. We ought to thank Heaven for having given him to us. We ought to pray that he may be spared to us." Marat praying, {385} Marat thanking Heaven! and for whom? For the King. Does not that prove what deep root royalty had taken in France? April 20, 1792, the same Marat bitterly reproached Condorcet with "shamelessly calumniating the Jacobin Club, and perfidiously accusing it of wishing to destroy the monarchy" (_L' Ami du Peuple_, No. 434). June 13, he attacked those who violated the oath taken at the time of the Federation, and said: "To defend the Const.i.tution is the same thing as to be faithful to the nation, the law, and the King" (_L' Ami du Peuple_, No. 448).

During the entire continuance of the Legislative a.s.sembly, when Robespierre, having left the tribune, was pretending to educate the people by means of his journal, what he defended to the utmost was the royal Const.i.tution. Madame Roland relates that after the flight to Varennes, when the prospect of a republic loomed up, possibly for the first time, at a secret meeting, Robespierre, grinning as usual, and biting his nails, asked ironically what a republic might be. In June, 1792, the entire Jacobin Club was royalist still. It proposed to drop Billaud-Varennes, because Billaud-Varennes had dared to put the monarchical principle in question. On the 7th of July following, two months and a half, that is, before the opening of the Convention, at the time of the famous Lamourette Kiss, all the members of the a.s.sembly swore to execrate the Republic forever. Three weeks after September 2, Danton alleged the paucity and the weakness of the republicans, compared with the royalists, as {386} motives for the ma.s.sacres.

Petion has said: "When the insurrection of August 10 was undertaken, there were but five men in France who desired a republic."