Chapter 28
Section 28 of A Short History of France by Mary Duclos. This LibreBox recording is in the public domain. Read by Pamela Nagami. Part 4. The Revolution and Europe. Chapter 1. The Reign of Terror. Part 1.
To the monarchy succeeded the Republic. Seldom has any government come into being in such a tragic hour. The Prussians were before Verdun and Longouis. The Austrians were laying siege to Lille. The French army was wholly disorganized.
The soldiers in a large proportion, uninstructed volunteers, in many regiments the officers had deserted to join the invading forces hastening to the relief of the King. The Republic, it is true, possessed several brilliant generals. Dumouriez, Pichegrew, Moreau.
But she was not sure of their loyalty. And as a matter of fact, these great captains were all to pass into the ranks of her enemies. Such as it was, the army was cruelly hampered by the shortage of provisions and munitions. As for the country, the principles of the provinces were still an unknown quantity. The South and West were suspected of royalism,
and Paris, which had invented the Republic, was torn between two parties whose clash and conflict might at any moment strike out the flame of civil war. After the fall of the monarchy, the Constitution of 1790 was naturally good for nothing. A new assembly, the Legislative, was to meet in the autumn in order to elaborate a Republican code. During the two months of interregnum, although the ministers in office were chiefly Girondins,
with every week the opposition gained a greater power. The men of the moment were the deputies of the extreme left, the ultra-democrats, backed by the clubs, Jacobin and Cordellier, and the terrible agitators of the Commune. Despite many rankers and rivalries, they were united by one great article of faith, which they all held in common, the supremacy of Paris.
Paris was the natural king of France in the eyes of the mountain. The left of the chamber was known as the Mountain, because the advanced parties sat at the summit of the amphitheater which served for the sessions of the assembly. No theory was more repugnant to their opponents than deputies of Bordeaux, the Girondes. Roughly speaking, we may say that the Girondes represented the spirit of the provinces,
especially the provinces of the South and the West. The Girondins were partisans of a democratic, a liberal, an Athenian republic. They were opposed to any form of dictatorship, but especially to the absolute sway of Paris. Infernal Paris. Paris, they love to say, is a department,
and as such has a right to an 83rd share of power and influence no more. Especially did they dread the reckless tyranny of the Commune. They were men of aquitaine, enlightened, eloquent, without the grim earnestness and fierce inventiveness of their antagonists. These men of the Gironde, of Bordeaux,
Bordeaux is the capital of the department of the Gironde, were the natural adversaries of the men of the Mountain, who were led by the deputies from Champagne and from Arras, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just. Each group was a nucleus round which gathered the representatives of the North,
the elect of the South. Once more France was shaken and almost divided by their incompatibility. The members of the Gironde were the descendants of those learned, elegant, rhetoricians and magistrates we have met in Alsoneus' Burda Gala. The deputies on the crest of the Mountain were those men of the Northeast
whom Caesar praised as the bravest, most daring and most ferocious of the Gauls, Horum Omnium Fortissimi sunt Belgae. The Gironde was essentially liberal and law-abiding. No less republican than the Mountain and in some ways more extreme, the Gironde, not the Mountain, declared war on Austria.
Its activity was political rather than social. The very cornerstone of the doctrines of the Gironde was the liberty of the individual. To them, the rights of property were sacred. These Aquitaineans with their classic culture and their Latin quotations,
with their love of local life and local color, with their mingling of democratic principles and traditional prejudice had voted conscientiously a change of government. Without any presage of the wild, mad, topsy-turvy world into which that measure was to introduce them,
they had hoped to achieve liberty and make no sacrifice. The men of the Mountain were a more deadly sort of theoricians. The revolution was to them a faith. More than that, one of those terrible superstitions to which the thugs for instance or the disciples of Juggernaut
are willing to immolate both enemies and friends. They too loved liberty. And yet, were willing to sacrifice it to that dearer deity, equality. Or to that holy of holies, the love of country. But their patriotism, although intense, was narrow
and embraced only those Frenchmen who were of their opinion. The struggle was an oligarchy of Jacobins, say some 300,000 of them, controlling six or seven millions of Girondins, Foyons, Royalists or Indifference. I say Jacobins, for the Jacobins were to the Mountain
what the Jesuits were to Rome, an incomparable organ of propaganda and defense. At first a mere club where the Breton members of the National Assembly The Society had moved its headquarters to the desecrated convent of white friars or Jacobins, when the Assembly,
in October 89, had followed the King to Paris. Here the Willam Breton Club, rebaptized Jacobin, became the very center and focus of extreme democratic principles with branches in all the towns, in many of the villages of France. Some 2,400 Societe Populaire,
established throughout the length and breadth of the Republic, entrusted with the most various functions and duties. Their duty was to watch the conduct of citizens and public bodies, to send constant reports to the central society, to inspect and control the elections of local officials,
to keep an anxious eye on the sayings and doings of all suspected persons, such as nobles, priests, men of wealth or standing, political opponents of any sort. They were also employed in the exercise of charity,
in relieving the necessities of widows and orphans, in redressing injustice, in discovering deposits of saltpeter for the use of the armies. Endless were the attributes of the Societe Populaire, but the first and foremost cultural and ubiquitous vigilance committee,
a vast society of revolutionary police. At the date which we have reached, 1792, these societies, charged with the political and moral supervision of the whole French public, were not as yet recruited from the illiterate class. Neither were they as a rule
men of the culture and tradition that marked the Girondins. They were actors with a bee in their bonnet like Marat, priests with views, briefless barristers, local shopkeepers enriched by the acquisition of national estates, that is, church lands or property confiscated by the government
on account of the emigration of the original owners, men of restless intelligence and enthusiastic principle, enchanted by their new importance, positive able organizers and alert mistrust, detected the least symptom of danger to the Republic, and whose harsh patriotism punished
without pity the least variation from the tables of their law. They were the Puritans of Liberty. The Jacobin Club in Paris was the oracle of the Convention. Its endless ramifications implanted Paris like a thorn in the flesh of the most distant provinces. There came a time when
the great Paris was a crime punishable by death. Yet odious as were the means they employed, they ensured unity of direction, a central force and prompt action in the hour of national danger. The Jacobins realized that liberal traditions must be suspended during the tug of war.
Let us recall the way they saved their country and if we cannot admire, we may excuse the greatness of their crimes and exclaim with that fierce old Tory and Papus, Joseph de Maître, The Republic had stumbled to its seat
through a mire of blood. After the fall of the monarchy, Danton had assumed the direction of affairs by right of the natural predominance of energy and passion in a man who sees where he is going and knows what he means. He had no other right than to be the king of the Republic
and to be the king of the Republic. He was simply minister of justice and a giron d'un ministry opposed to his views on most points of politics. But he was determined to save the revolution. He was well aware that the country contained far more
constitutionalists, perhaps even more royalists, than Republicans. The Republic, if it was to come into being, would be a creation of Paris. And a Republic seemed necessary to Danton, at any rate as a phase in the interests of the revolution. The imminent danger ahead was a Bourbon
restoration, a long regency en de Monsieur or Artois, a return to the principles of Louis XV, and France dismembered in payment of the Allies, changed into a second Poland with Flanders given to Austria and Lorraine to Prussia. This, at all risks, Danton
was determined to avert. Paris was full of spies and conspirators. If we can give these names to royalists who thought they had as good a right to their opinions as the revolution to its own revolt. But they were men at any rate who were guilty of communicating with the invaders.
Danton flung them into prison. The Swiss guards who had defended the Tuileries, quantities of non-juring priests, nobles, aristocrats, and especially the fathers, mothers, wives or children of émigrés, considered as hostages. Several ex-ministers of Louis XVI were swept
into the net. On the 28th of August, a house-to-house visitation of the police searched every drawer and every cupboard, sounded every panel, lifted every hearthstone, inquired into every correspondence in the capital, meanwhile the gates of Paris were closed, all communication
with the country was stopped. Paris was a prisoner kept in close confinement. As a result of this inquisition, more than a thousand suspects were added to the immense body of political prisoners already confined in the jails and convents of the city. It is probable that few royalists
were left at large. But was not this huge phalanx of traders dangerous even behind its bolts and bars? Was not its captivity another incentive to the advance of those invaders who came to redress the wrongs of king and queen? And on the very eve of a general election, was not this
royalist fermentation an encouragement to the provinces only to incline to favor a reaction? Across the channel, Burke at that time was crying to the king's party to steal their hearts to pity. He wrote, defuse terror. But it was Danton who took his advice. It was Danton who said to the
assembly, il faut faire peur aux royalistes. It was Danton who said, I looked my crime straight in the face and I chose it. End of section 28.
