Chapter VI: The Rise of the Jacobin Party

The French Revolution can be divided into many periods, and several parties directed it in turn. But, broadly speaking, besides its minor phases, it contained two movements, successive and distinct. The first movement began in 1789, and lost its force in 1791. The second movement came to the front in 1791, when the earlier one was dying out; helped by external circumstances, it quickly swept everything before it; and it carried on the Revolution, by new methods and for different objects, until 1794. The first movement was chiefly political in form, and although social questions entered deeply into it and gave it its irresistible force, still to the end its social aspects were subordinate. Its leaders were politicians. Its object was the creation of a new political order. Its attention was fixed upon political change. The second movement had its political aspects too, and political issues mingled largely with it. But it sprang primarily from social causes. Its leaders succeeded because they claimed to be social reformers. Its favourite objects were the transference of property, the extinction of poverty and riches, the creation of a new social state. The one movement of course was inextricably bound up with the other, and no exact dates marked their beginnings or their ends. But the rise of the new principles, and their triumph over the old, was the chief characteristic of the later Revolution, and was the reason why, after 1791, the Revolution went forward and developed afresh.

There is no doubt that in 1791 there were many signs of a pause and a reaction. The Revolution was clearly victorious. The worst features of the old system--its despotism, its privilege, its inequality, its corrupt Court, its antiquated law-courts, its favoured aristocracy and Church--had been swept away. The widest freedom in politics, in industry, in discussion, had been established, though it was not always observed on the popular side. The blight of feudalism and the intolerable burdens of taxation had disappeared. The majority of Frenchmen felt that their wishes were satisfied and their aims attained. Accordingly, the fever and enthusiasm of the earlier days naturally abated. Men began to long for a period of quiet, after the stormy triumphs and excitement of the past two years, and to fall back out of the turmoil of politics into the routine of daily life. Such a movement was both natural and inevitable, and in 1791 it involved no serious danger to the cause of progress. The consequence was that the great mass of citizens gradually withdrew from politics. The numbers at the polls steadily fell. In 1790 and in 1791, all over the country, the elections showed an increasing number of absentees. In many places only a third or a fourth of the electorate voted. In others only a tenth or a twelfth appeared. In Paris less than one-tenth of the number of voters continued to take part in the elections, and even that proportion steadily tended to decline. The duties of voting imposed by the new Constitution were so cumbrous that they demanded a great sacrifice of time. Politics had become both laborious and disorderly; and most men would only consent to the sacrifice and discomfort which they involved, under the influence of strong excitement. Thus, when the excitement began to lessen, the part which busy people played in politics declined, and the control of the elections, and the power which it carried, fell to those who had no pressing occupations and whose enthusiasm had not waned.

But while the majority thus passed out of politics, an active and dissatisfied minority remained. All over France, and especially in Paris and in the great provincial cities, there were many, in 1791, to whom the policy of the leaders of the Revolution, and the action of the great party which ranged itself behind Lafayette and the Lameths, had caused increasing discontent. To them the Revolution, so satisfactory to many, had brought only disappointment. Their vague but ardent anticipations of a new social state seemed as far as ever from realisation. The leaders of the Assembly were beginning to speak of the Revolution as accomplished, and yet all over France there were unmistakable evidences of disorder and distress. It is true that trade had been largely stimulated by the issue of the Assignats; but the credit of the Assignats did not last long, and the improvement was consequently temporary and fictitious. The condition of the labouring class was still unsettled. The pressure of hunger, in spite of the abundant harvest of 1790, was still in many places keen.

The middle classes, both in the towns and in the country, had clearly been great gainers by the Revolution. They had broken down the insolent ascendency of the class above them. They had secured for themselves the chief authority in the State. They were enjoying to the full the sense of their new importance--the sense that from a position of utter insignificance they had risen to be the actual rulers of the land. Thus the tradesmen, the lawyers, the prosperous artisans, the 'active citizens' of the towns, proud of their rights and places in the new Constitution, in the municipalities, in the National Guard, rejoiced in the success of the Revolution, and only regretted that it gave them so much to do; while the farmers and proprietors in the country districts, set free from the yoke of feudalism, shared the satisfaction of the bourgeois in the towns. But below these classes came another, which had no such cause for self-congratulation. The Métayers and smallest land-owners, the holders of an acre or half an acre of land, the labourers who had no land at all, had gained far less than their superiors. They had indeed escaped from the cruel burden of the old taxes, from the personal tyranny of their seigneurs, from the militia-service, from the necessity of forced labour. But they looked for more than that. They had not yet seen opened to them any path towards prosperity. The wealthy neighbours, who added to their earnings, had been scared or swept away by the Revolution. Wages were even more difficult to obtain than before. The prospect of living without hunger seemed to their troubled minds to be as distant and remote. Men who had no capital could not profit by the sale of the Church lands. Even some of those who, having a little capital, had hurried to invest it in the purchase, found too late that the bargain was a bad one, for the lands had been so much neglected that they required fresh capital to work them up. The consequence was that, although the sale of Church lands must in very many cases have been of advantage to the peasants, yet in some cases the small buyers, who had expended all their savings in the purchase, were ruined by the rash investment, and joined the great army of the needy poor.

The causes which led to disquiet in the country were reproduced still more strongly in the towns. To Paris and the great provincial cities flocked many of those who could not find subsistence in the country. There work might be more easily forthcoming. There, at any rate, it was easier to make their voices heard. But in Paris the same dislocation of industry prevailed. The National Assembly had abolished the guilds and the old restrictions upon trade, and had established complete freedom of labour. But a change so large, however beneficial it might be--and there were not wanting politicians in Paris, among whose voices Marat's diatribes rose most shrilly, to criticise the Assembly's action--could not be accomplished without much confusion. Moreover, the influx from the provinces tended to make employment scarcer, and the influence of political excitement did not help towards tranquillity. The consequence was that the general destitution did not disappear. In vain the State came forward to appease it by opening public workshops in Paris. The regular work and the high wages offered, which were actually equal to the highest day-wages then to be obtained in France, drew applicants from all quarters, but only increased the difficulties of the problem. The great towns in the departments followed the example of the authorities in Paris. Toulouse and Amiens, Besançon and Lyons, and many other places speedily found that they had thousands of applicants for work which nobody required to have done, and which was generally neglected by those who undertook to do it. In Paris the numbers employed by the municipality rose to twenty and then to thirty thousand, but still the outlook remained as unsatisfactory as ever, and the discontent of the poorest classes unallayed.

There were thus, by the summer of 1791, large numbers of people, both in town and country, who would not tolerate the idea that the Revolution was over, and who still hoped for a share in the spoils of freedom. To meet and govern their wishes, to remove the causes of their trouble, to convert them into fairly contented citizens, was no easy task. The greatest statesmen might well have failed in the endeavour, for social perplexities are wont to tax the wisdom of the most experienced politicians. Unfortunately, the politicians then at the head of affairs in France were neither experienced nor wise. They were not alive to the dangers which threatened. They did not attempt to understand their cause. Satisfied that they had regenerated France, they did not fully believe in the existence of the grievances put forward, and they had no notion of what they ought to do to meet them.

The truth is that the dominant party in 1791, the party represented by Lafayette and Bailly, by Barnave and the Lameths, were in an impossible position. They were pledged to support the King and the new Constitution. They were pledged to resist republicanism. Their instincts led them to sympathise with the idea of a well-ordered freedom, based on property and on the predominance of the middle-class. But such a system was difficult to reconcile with the theory which they preached. For two years past they had been proclaiming the absolute equality of men, the sovereignty of the whole people, the pure democracy of Rousseau's dream. For two years past they had been busy stripping the Crown of its attributes, denouncing its agents, limiting its power. Thus, when they endeavoured to pause, when they began to insist upon the necessity of maintaining the monarchical system, when they plainly showed their intention not to admit the poorest class to power, that class retorted by echoing the theories which they had taught them, and by resenting the consequences which they deduced. Logically, the position of the Constitutional party was untenable, and to fail in logic was then a crime in France. Morally and materially their position was untenable too. For their action could not be reconciled with the dogmas on which they professed that all government was based.

Accordingly, as the Revolution went forward, the moderate majority found itself growing unpopular with the poor. The decrees which imposed a property qualification for all the rights of active citizenship, for electors and elected alike, were bitterly resented by those whom they excluded from power, and were clearly inconsistent with the philosophic formulas to which their authors habitually appealed. The manner in which the municipal authorities and the National Guards used the force at their disposal to support the new order and to suppress all who seemed inclined to resist it, was sometimes irritating and oppressive. The uncertainty on each occasion whether the party in power would applaud and sanction a popular outbreak, or would take fright and endeavour to punish it, deprived their action of its moral weight. The policy which first abolished the old industrial system to clear the way for free combination, and which then, in June 1791, taking alarm at the unions which sprang up among the workmen, interfered to prohibit all combinations for the future, was not likely to ensure respect. The policy which first induced the State to seek popularity by an enormous extension of public workshops, and which then, in the summer of 1791, frightened at the results of its folly and at the number of strangers flocking to Paris, drew back and suddenly dissolved the workshops, and bade the strangers return to their homes, was certain to lead to distress and disappointment. Had the party in power been consistently firm, had it shown its determination at all costs to keep order and never to yield to threatening agitation, it might have been wrong, but it might have been respected. As it was, it was never strong enough to be feared. It was only strong enough to become disliked.

Thus, with the large discontented element in France, with the people who were most miserable and needy, and who were specially numerous in Paris, there was, in 1791, a growing sense that the Revolution had so far been a failure, that it had not corresponded to its own promises or to their passionate hopes, that it had not in any way materially benefited them, and that a new Revolution was needed, to do for the poor what the earlier movement had done only for the comparatively rich. The strength of this feeling it is difficult to estimate, but there seems no doubt that it was widely spread. With it there went a deep conviction that the new movement would never come from the party in power, and that new leaders and principles were wanted to carry the democratic theory logically out.

It was on these grounds, and supported by this sentiment, that the Jacobin party rose. The root of the Jacobin theory was that all power and right resided in the people, and that when the people acted, law and government must give way before them. The people were sovereign and could not do wrong. Consequently, it was the business of the people to watch their rulers very closely, to supervise their conduct jealously, to remind them that they were only agents and puppets of a sovereign always suspicious and alert. If the sovereign chose to come forward, no Ministers or rulers must interfere to thwart it. They must obey, whatever it might command. Obviously, according to this theory, popular movements, whatever their character might be, were merely the highest expression of the law. Even if attended by violence and murder, they were still the action of the sovereign. Those who obstructed them were traitors and usurpers. Those who punished them were guilty of a crime. It is possible to understand how this theory, which is no travesty of the Jacobin creed, planted deeply in mediocre minds, where the baldest logic took the place of reason, might lead those who believed in it to anarchy, while they believed they were on the road to freedom.

Another direct result of the doctrine was the dogmatism and self-assertion which it bred. The people having become the sovereign, every man in his own estimation, however ignorant of politics before, became a responsible ruler too. The Jacobin was filled with a sense of vast responsibility, puffed up with pride in his new importance. The Government, the Law, the Church, the public functionaries, had suddenly become his nominees, and he must personally see that they did their duty. A curious inflation accordingly appeared in his tone. His language became that of a dictator. His belief in himself mounted to an extraordinary level of conceit. The self-confidence which goes with youth perhaps helped to throw him off his balance, for it is interesting to notice how largely the doctrine found recruits among the young. Not only individuals, but public bodies, seemed to catch the spirit of self-assertion. Even small municipalities began to insist on acting as independent sovereigns, refused to listen to any superiors, and placed their own laws above the laws of the Assembly. An extreme instance was afforded by the little town of Issy l'Evêque, where the priest, an enterprising politician, acting apparently as leader of the parish, assumed a brief but magnificent dictatorship, issued a complete code for the government and administration of the town, imposed taxes, imprisoned his opponents, seized upon grain, confiscated and partitioned the land in the neighbourhood, and exercised undisputed the prerogatives of a sovereign prince. When the people were admittedly sovereign, it followed, in the view of the enthusiast, that any proportion of the people could be sovereigns too, and, provided that he were a patriot, every man might be a law unto himself.

When these deep-rooted ideas showed themselves in action, the results were inevitably disastrous. The labouring population, possessed with the belief that supreme power had been transferred to them, naturally wished to use it, as their superiors had used it in the past, in order to enrich themselves. A general resistance began to rent, tithes, taxes, and money-claims of any kind. While abolishing feudal sovereignty and privilege, the Assembly had endeavoured to confirm all those rights which the feudal seigneur enjoyed as contractor and lessor; but this distinction the peasant naturally did not understand. While abolishing many odious imposts, the State had of course been compelled to substitute some taxes for them. But the peasant, who had only grasped the idea that the Revolution was in some way to set him free from all irksome demands, resented the new taxes as an encroachment on his rights. In many cases he proceeded to help himself to any property of the State which came within his reach. Squatters settled upon the confiscated Church estates. Bodies of men assembled and cut down the timber upon the public lands. Mobs stormed the custom-houses and drove out the clerks. Armed associations prevented the collection of taxes. The idea, originating in minds easily confused, tended to become a passion, and when it was resisted, violence was the result.

It was in this way that the Jacobin theory, deduced from philosophy, welcomed by young enthusiasts, scarcely understood by the mass of the people, who applauded it because it opened the way to the satisfaction of their wants, spurred on by opposition, embittered by panic, suspicion, persecution, and translated into action by physical distress, gradually took root in the minds of the poor. But it was by violence that the theory triumphed. It is exceedingly difficult to form a just impression of the part which force played in politics in France in the years 1790 and 1791. On the one side, writers pass over the incidents of disorder. On the other side, they amass them without analysis or explanation, and thereby produce an impression which is probably in some measure false. Historians seem on this point to imagine that facts are a matter of political opinion. There were undoubtedly, in 1790 and 1791, tranquillising influences at work. The decisive triumph of the party of reform, the satisfaction ensuing on the sale of the Church lands and on the issue of the Assignats, the establishment of the new Constitutional authorities, the activity of the bourgeois guards, who went so far as to organise combinations between National Guards in different districts for the common object of suppressing anarchy, the natural instinct of every nation to secure as soon as possible the reign of order--all these causes made for peace, and produced periods of general tranquillity. But still the records of those years are full of signs of deep-seated confusion, of riots, murders and acts of pillage, which were perhaps to be expected, but which cannot be ignored.

The spirit of disorder appeared in many forms. In some cases the outbreaks were due to fear and hatred of 'aristocrats.' In some they were a recrudescence of the peasant war against the châteaux. In some they arose from the conflict between the priesthood of the old ecclesiastical system and the decrees of the National Assembly, and these religious controversies, heated by passion and embittered by ancient rancours, produced, especially at Nîmes and Montauban and over the whole of the South of France, a terrible agitation almost amounting to civil war. In some cases they were due to purely local and personal reasons. In many cases they were caused by the fear of starvation, and their object was the seizure of grain. In others, especially at Lyons and Marseilles, they were due to the excessive severity displayed by the National Guards in maintaining order, and to the bitter conflict that was beginning between the bourgeois and the labouring population. Elsewhere, as at Avignon, they originated in a political revolution, and called to the front the large ruffianly element which, under the lax rule of the Popes, had for long been allowed to harbour in that city. In other cases, again, there is little doubt that criminals took advantage of the disorder of the time to make politics the pretext for private plunder. All sorts of opportunities for disorder offered, and in the midst of such vast changes it was inevitable that those opportunities should be sometimes abused.

The most serious feature of these outbreaks was that, instead of their becoming rare and abortive as time went on, the tendency of events, especially after 1791, was in the opposite direction. Their political influence increased. Instead of the law becoming stronger, and the disorderly element falling under the ban of the respectable majority, the law appeared to grow steadily weaker, and the resistance of the respectable majority declined. The disorderly element organised itself, won elections, proclaimed its principles, and seated itself in the seat of power. The National Assembly decided to 'veil the statue of the law.' Mob-leaders were enthroned as law-givers in the towns where their violence had made them supreme. Their opponents, royalists, priests or bourgeois, became their prey, for outrages committed on those who were unpopular were almost certain to go unpunished. It was not the number of people killed which made the riots serious. It was the fact that they could be killed with impunity, the fact that there was no certain protection against violence for anyone who by creed or opinion or report was obnoxious to the mob. It was this general insecurity which brought the Jacobins to the front. For, wherever the law is paralysed, the most violent are the most powerful, and the French bourgeois, brave enough in the pursuit of glory, seems to lack moral courage for resistance, when intimidation and outrage threaten him within his gates.

Another very noticeable point in the history of the Jacobin triumph is the completeness of the party organisation. It is the first modern example of what organisation in politics can do. Although the club-lists afterwards included a great variety of names, the number of genuine Jacobin politicians, apart from the vague crowds whom they directed, seems never to have been very large. So far as one can judge by the polls, the Jacobins in Paris, even at the height of their power, appear not to have exceeded ten or eleven thousand. Two good judges, Malouet and Grégoire, who had many opportunities of observation, and who belonged to totally different parties, agreed later in reckoning all the Jacobins in the country at about three hundred thousand, and the highest estimate only gives them one hundred thousand more. The leaders of the new party belonged chiefly to the middle class. Lawyers and small professional men, clerks and journalists, men accustomed to take the lead in practical affairs, ready with tongue or pen, anxious to make their way in life, with sufficient knowledge to be self-confident and insufficient knowledge to be wise, played the largest part among them. From this class came most of the conspicuous leaders, Danton and Robespierre, Desmoulins and Fréron, Hébert and Chaumette. A few others were writers and professors, students like St. Just, actors like Collot d'Herbois, priests like Grégoire, Jean Bon St. André, Chabot and Lebon, gloomy visionaries like Marat, or foreigners like the amazing Anacharsis Clootz, who assured the Legislative Assembly that his heart was French, though his soul was 'sans-culotte.' Later on the quality deteriorated, and a lower and worse element enveloped the rest. But the important Jacobin leaders were men of education, although they often condescended in pursuit of popularity to adopt worse manners than their own.

It was through their success in organisation that these men attained to power. From the first the Jacobin Society in Paris, with its many great names and high prestige, had attained an exceptional position, and that position it immensely strengthened by establishing branch societies all over France. In the autumn of 1790, the Club in Paris founded a newspaper to circulate among its members, and entrusted the task of editing it to Laclos. Before the end of the year, it was able to publish a list of over a hundred and twenty provincial clubs, all affiliated to the Society in Paris, in constant correspondence with it, taking their views from its leaders and directing their policy by theirs. To these clubs flocked the energetic young Radicals of the provincial towns. They became centres of advanced revolutionary feeling. Their members had faith, enthusiasm, recklessness, ambition; they organised local politics, suggested or connived at political riots, and every day claimed a larger part in the direction of local affairs. In some large cities the authorised Jacobin Club had an unauthorised club or combination behind it, composed of less respectable and responsible politicians, who popularised the doctrines of the superior body, and supplemented them, when necessary, by force. As the year 1791 advanced, the number of affiliated clubs steadily increased. In August, it had risen to nearly four hundred. In the autumn and winter, it rose more rapidly still. In June, 1792, it had reached twelve hundred; and by the end of August in that year, one fairly competent observer reckons that there were twenty-six thousand Jacobin clubs in France. The value of this widespread organisation in giving to the party strength and cohesion cannot be placed too high. When it is remembered that this was the only federation in existence--for all attempts made by other parties to found similar organisations were broken up by force--it is more easy to realise the influence which the Jacobins wielded upon politics, and to understand how the Club in Paris, even when distrusted and unpopular, was able to face its enemies and to hold its own.

Meanwhile another organisation, destined to give the Jacobins command of the capital, had been growing up in Paris. The Revolution had restored to Paris the local freedom of which the monarchy had stripped her, and one of the first objects of Parisian politicians had been to establish a municipality in the capital. After the taking of the Bastille, the informal Assembly of Parisian electors, which, in the collapse of the old system, had temporarily usurped administrative power, was replaced by a more regular body, entitled 'The Three Hundred,' elected by the various districts, and charged with the task of preparing a permanent constitution for the city. It was this body--The Three Hundred--which, with Bailly at its head, had governed Paris during the year that followed, and which by its somewhat irritating action had earned unpopularity with the poor. But on the whole, in spite of many mistakes, and in the face of many difficulties, it did useful and necessary work. However, in the early autumn of 1790, this body was replaced by a new system which remained the responsible government of Paris until the reaction after the Terror. Under it, the city was divided into forty-eight Sections. The Sections elected a number of representatives, who formed the municipal council, and some of whom formed the municipal executive[7]. At the head of the whole organisation was the Mayor, elected by the votes of the citizens of Paris. The Mayor, as the head of this great organisation, became an official of the first importance. The National Guard was under his orders. The resources of the capital were at his command. He and his council controlled the politics of Paris, and the politics of Paris governed France. Besides that, each of the forty-eight Sections had its own elected authority, a permanent committee of sixteen members, to carry out the orders of the municipal body, invested with some powers of administration and police. The Jacobins, in accordance with their theory, argued that all the Sectional Assemblies ought to sit permanently, that the active citizens ought to meet every day, and that the municipality ought daily to take their opinions on current questions. The sovereign people, they declared, could not properly delegate their authority to representatives. The more practical theory, however, of representative government carried the day. But the Jacobins carried a clause which provided that the voters of any Section should assemble, whenever fifty active citizens in that Section demanded it, and that all the forty-eight Sections should assemble, if eight of them simultaneously presented a request. The result was that, in quarters where Jacobin views prevailed, and especially in the poorer Sections of Paris, the Sectional Assemblies were constantly meeting, and urging their opinions on the municipal body. When the majority in the quieter Sections ceased to take an active part in politics, the revolutionary Sections were able, by persistent pressure and by resorting to violence and riot, to manipulate the municipal elections, to dictate to the municipal body, and ultimately to control that great organisation and to use its forces for the furtherance of their views.

The death of Mirabeau prepared the way for the accession of the Jacobin leaders to power. Even before that, Robespierre was a familiar figure in the Assembly, but during the summer months of 1791, his influence and importance in it steadily increased. From the first, he had been the most conspicuous advocate of Rousseau's theory, the most deeply convinced exponent of the Jacobin belief. His principles were to his mind absolutely clear. To gain complete equality for men, to protest in the name of justice against any law which permitted considerations of circumstance or necessity to interfere with abstract rights, to establish in the world the reign of sentimental logic, based on the philosophy of the _Contrat Social_, this was his unwavering creed. It governed his hopes, his policy, his life. He loved to expound its principles, to revel in its phrases, to declaim about its fine desires. He never tired of speaking, and this, in one shape or another, always was his theme. The Assembly might laugh or chatter, audiences might come and go, but nothing checked the rhetoric of Robespierre. His self-complacency was as intense as his faith. He was the chosen minister of Virtue, to preach its gospel to the regenerated world. That seems to have been his profound conviction, and that was unquestionably the foundation of his strength.

There is little doubt that in this respect the man was honest. His weak sentiment was real. His love of order and of decency was genuine. His incorruptibility was known and rare. His conceit was phenomenal. His power of self-deception was unbounded. On the whole, Robespierre was faithful to his theories. He was capable, as he showed on more than one occasion, of attacking popular proposals, if they seemed to him opposed to principle. He did not, it is true, denounce the lawlessness and outrage which he naturally detested; but his reticence was probably due, less to the calculations of a subtle policy, than to his singular faculty of persuading himself, whenever riots or massacres occurred, that it was only the people executing justice, and that the justice of the people must be right. Robespierre never took the lead at critical moments, when decisive action was needed. He was constitutionally nervous and undecided. He had none of the audacity which made Danton great. Fearless in sophistry, he was timid in action. On certain occasions it is very difficult to free him from the charge of cowardice, and yet it is possible that his hesitation arose chiefly from the necessity, which he always felt, of reconciling his action with his theory, before he could act with a clear conscience. In disguising crime in the panoply of virtue, so satisfactorily as to deceive himself, Robespierre had no peer. The Jacobin theory set above the law the action of the sovereign people. That action showed itself in riots. Those riots involved terrorism and loss of life. If consequences of that kind followed, they could not be prevented. Only the depravity of human nature, which rendered them necessary, must be deplored. Thus Robespierre, the high-priest of the doctrine, was always the readiest to defend it, to throw over every lawless action the mask of verbal sentiment and virtue. And thus he became the leader of his party. His policy was ultimately the most deadly, because its desperate logic was the outcome of a theory which could do no wrong. If statesmanship be the compromise of theories with facts, Robespierre was essentially no statesman, for to his fatal and narrow idealism any compromise with the realities round him was unknown.

The summer of 1791 is the critical period in the fortunes of the rival parties. When the majority lost in Mirabeau their strongest leader, Robespierre, the chief of the new party, came to the front. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that at this time the future was still undecided, and the Jacobin triumph by no means secured. Had the party in power possessed a few men of practical vigour and wisdom, it seems just possible that the Revolution might have paused, and might have been guided into the path of ordered freedom. But they had no organisation. They did not see their danger. They had no experience to help them, and Mirabeau was dead. The King's unfortunate flight to Varennes in June, and the manifesto in which he set forth his grave complaints against the Revolution, played into the hands of the advanced party. It greatly increased the difficulties of the majority, who desired to keep Louis on the throne. It was followed by an outbreak of Jacobin activity, which, however, displayed many varieties of view. Danton and the Cordeliers, Brissot and Desmoulins boldly demanded the establishment of a republic, but their opinions were not shared by all their party. Marat proposed the appointment of a Dictator to put all his enemies to death. The partisans of the Duke of Orleans declared for Louis' deposition, with the object of securing the throne for the Duke. But the declarations of the Jacobin Club were curiously uncertain. They demanded Louis' deposition, but they hesitated to propose the abolition of the throne. On the 1st of July, at a session of the Club, Billaud-Varennes was not allowed even to speak on behalf of a republic. Some days later, on the evening of the 13th, influenced possibly by the reaction in the Assembly, Robespierre came forward and declared that he personally was not a republican, and that 'the word republic did not signify any particular form of government'; while even Danton avoided the question and confined himself to attacks upon the inviolability of the king.

The majority in the Assembly took advantage of the divisions among their opponents to assert their views. Barnave and the Lameths, and the party which they directed, rallied to the support of the new Constitution. In vain the Republicans protested. Deserted by the Jacobin Club, ill-supported by their leaders, closely watched by Lafayette, they attempted to keep alive the agitation by a demonstration, on the 17th July, in the Champ de Mars. The object was to secure signatures for a monster petition demanding the dethronement of the king. It does not appear that the objects of the gathering were sinister or dangerous; but the disorder of the time, the furious language in which Marat, Desmoulins and other advanced leaders incited the people to violence, and the difficulties of their own position, naturally alarmed the Constitutional party. The municipality, taking its cue from the Assembly, determined to put the demonstration down; and, owing to blunders which cannot well be explained, but which can easily be imagined, the result was a fierce and sanguinary disturbance, ending in serious loss of life. How far Lafayette and Bailly were to blame for their conduct, or whether it is fair to impute blame to them at all, will always be matter for discussion. But it is most instructive to notice the effects which the 'massacre of the Champ de Mars' produced. It was the one occasion in the history of the Revolution when the party of order, rightly or wrongly, decisively asserted themselves, and it shows convincingly how strong they were, had they realised their strength and known how to use it. For the moment their triumph was complete. The Republican agitation collapsed. The leaders who inspired it, but who had kept in the background, suddenly disappeared from politics. Danton, under threats of prosecution, retired to the country. Robespierre summarily changed his lodgings. Marat hid himself and prepared to escape to England. Desmoulins suspended the issue of his paper. The Constitutional party opened a new club called the Feuillants, and many of the Jacobins joined it at once. Of the three hundred deputies who were members of the Jacobin Club, all but seven retired. And Louis was successfully re-established on the throne. Had the majority possessed any vigour or cohesion, they might conceivably have stamped out the Jacobin movement, and have secured the freedom which they fancied they had won.

Instead of that, they threw away their victory. Barnave, Malouet and a few other members of the majority did make an attempt to organise their party, and some idea of an effectual revision of the Constitution was entertained. But it ended in nothing. The fatal want of union and of practical ability which characterised the party, their lack of definiteness and insight, their fondness for glib talk and theory, frustrated the idea. Slowly but steadily, Robespierre's influence reasserted itself in the Assembly. The Jacobin leaders returned to public life, and resumed their tactics unimpeded. The only permanent results of the 17th July were to widen the breach between the party in power and the party which was still excluded, and to leave in the minds of those who had suffered, and in the great mass of the poor who sympathised with them, abidingly bitter memories of injustice calling for expiation and revenge.

The reviving influence of the Jacobins was clearly seen in September and October, 1791. Helped by the blind fatuity of the royalists, they were able to carry a resolution rendering members of the existing legislature ineligible for election to the next, and thus driving their most active opponents, for a time at any rate, out of power. The revision of the Constitution told slightly against them, but it came to very little, and all its worst faults were retained. When the Constituent Assembly separated at the end of September, Robespierre and Pétion, not Lafayette or Barnave, were its heroes with the populace of Paris. And in the months which followed, the power of their party increased. In spite of the motion which the majority of the Assembly had passed just before its dissolution, forbidding the affiliation of popular clubs and their interference in the general election, the Jacobin clubs rapidly multiplied, and threw all their energies into the electoral contest. The abolition of the property qualification for deputies had already been secured by the persistence of Robespierre. The retirement of Lafayette from the chief command of the National Guard, and the abolition of that post as a permanent office, considerably weakened the Constitutional party. The growing sense of weariness with politics, and the desire to rest from agitation felt by the bulk of the people, began to show itself more distinctly. The renewal of the whole of the legislature and of one-half of all the local officials, afforded an opportunity for many moderate and experienced men to retire, and for more pushing and ambitious politicians to fill their places. The number of elections, and the fact that they were held so near together, prevented many voters from recording their votes. The necessity of taking the oath to observe the new ecclesiastical system disfranchised a large number of scrupulous Catholics. The intimidation practised by the Jacobins against all reactionary voters, of which there are clear examples but the effects of which it is difficult to estimate, must have kept many quiet people away. All over France the proportion of voters who came forward to vote was very small. The result showed, in the new Assembly, a considerable increase in the advanced party, and many new-comers who hurried at once to join the Jacobin Club. But it showed also that the majority of voters loyally adhered to the new Constitution, were fully prepared to give it a trial, and were well represented even in Paris itself.

Unhappily, however, for France, the majority never found the time to rally. From the end of 1791, the shadow of war began to darken the political horizon. At the critical moment, when the nation had to choose between the majority, which wished to consolidate the new system, and the minority, which wanted to destroy it for something else, the alarm of invasion redoubled the panic and disorder, paralysed any possible reaction, and threw Frenchmen off their balance again. The war with Europe meant a struggle both for freedom and for national existence. In the tumult of that struggle all other considerations were flung to the winds. And the men who could best save the Revolution and maintain the honour of the country became the heroes and the tyrants of France.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: The 144 representatives of the Sections formed the General Council of the Commune; 48 of these formed the municipal body; and 16 of these were the actual Administrators, distributed among five departments, of 'subsistence,' 'police,' 'finance,' 'public establishments,' and 'public works.' See Mortimer-Ternaux's _Histoire de la Terreur_, vol. i. Appendix III, where the whole subject is thoroughly discussed.]