and Robespierre were, indeed, bad men; but in both of them some important parts of the mind remained sound. Danton was brave and resclute, fond of pleasure, of power, and of distinction, with vehement passions, with lax principles, but with some kind and manly feelings, capable of great crimes, but capable also of friendship and of compassion. He, therefore, naturally finds admirers among persons of bold and sanguine dispositions. Robespierre was a vain, envious, and suspicious man, with a hard heart, weak nerves, and a gloomy temper. But we cannot with truth deny that he was, in the vulgar sense of the word, disinterested, that his private life was correct, or that he was sincerely zealous for his own system of politics and morals. He therefore naturally finds admirers among honest but moody and bitter democrats. If no class has taken the reputation of Barère under its patronage, the reason is plain: Barère had not a single virtue, nor even the semblance of one. like the cedar of Lebanon. It is barely possible that, under good guidance and in favourable circumstances, such a man might have slipped through life without discredit. But the unseaworthy craft, which even in still water would have been in danger of going down from its own rottenness, was launched on a raging ocean, amidst a storm in which a whole armada of gallant ships were cast away. The weakest and most servile of human beings found himself on a sudden an actor in a Revolution which convulsed the whole civilized world. At first he fell under the influence of humane and moderate men, and talked the language of humanity and moderation. But he soon found himself surrounded by fierce and resolute spirits, scared by no danger and restrained by no scruple. He had to choose whether he would be their victim or their accomplice. His choice was soon made. He tasted blood, and felt no loathing: he tasted it again, and liked it well. Cruelty became with him, first a habit, then a passion, at last a madness. So complete and It is true that he was not, as far as we are rapid was the degeneracy of his nature, that able to judge, originally of a savage disposi- within a very few months after the time when tion; but this circumstance seems to us only he passed for a good-natured man, he had to aggravate his guilt. There are some un- brought himself to look on the despair and happy men constitutionally prone to the darker misery of his fellow-creatures with a glae passions, men all whose blood is gall, and to resembling that of the fiends whom Dante saw whom bitter words and harsh actions are as watching the pool of seething pitch in Malenatural as snarling and biting to a ferocious bolge. He had many associates in guilt; but dog. To come into the world with this wretched he distinguished himself from them all by the mental disease is a greater calamity than to be Bacchanalian exultation which he seemed to born blind or deaf. A man who, having such feel in the work of death. He was drunk with a temper, keeps it in subjection, and constrains innocent and noble blood, laughed and shouted himself to behave habitually with justice and as he butchered, and howled strange songs and humanity towards those who are in his power, reeled in strange dances amidst the carnage. seems to us worthy of the highest admiration. Then came a sudden and violent turn of fortune. There have been instances of this self-com- The miserable man was hurled down from the mand; and they are among the most signal height of power to hopeless ruin and infamy. triumphs of philosophy and religion. On the The shock sobered him at once. The fumes other hand, a man who, having been blessed of his horrible intoxication passed away. But by nature with a bland disposition, gradually he was now so irrecoverably depraved, that the brings himself to inflict misery on his fellow-discipline of adversity only drove him further creatures with indifference, with satisfaction, into wickedness. Ferocious vices, of which he and at length with a hideous rapture, deserves to be regarded as a portent of wickedness; and such a man was Barère. The history of his downward progress is full of instruction. Weakness, cowardice, and fickleness were born with him; the best quality which he received from nature was a good temper. These, it is true, are not very promising materials; yet out of materials as unpromising, high sentiments of piety and of honour have sometimes made martyrs and heroes. Rigid principles often do for feeble minds what stays do for feeble bodies. But Barère had no principles at all. His cha- This is the view which we have long taken. racter was equally destitute of natural and of of Barère's character; but, till we read these acquired strength. Neither in the commerce Memoirs, we held our opinion with the diffi. of life, nor in books, did we ever become ac- dence which becomes a judge who has heard quainted with any mind so unstable, so utterly only one side. The case seemed strong, and in destitute of tone, so incapable of independent parts unanswerable; yet we did not know what thought and earnest preference, so ready to take the accused party might have to say for him impressions and so ready to lose them. He self; and, not being much inclined to take our resembled those creepers which must lean on fellow-creatures either for angels of light or something, and which as soon as their prop is for angels of darkness, we could not but feei removed, fall down in utter helplessness. He some suspicion that his offences had been excould no more stand up, erect and self-support-aggerated. That suspicion is now at an end. ed, in any cause, than the ivy can rear itself The vindication is before us. It occupies iour like the oak, or the wild vine shoot to heaven volumes. It was the work of forty years. ! VOL. V.-79 3 G had never been suspected, had been developed in him by power. Another class of vices, less hateful, perhaps, but more despicable, was now developed in him by poverty and disgrace. Having appalled the whole world by great crimes perpetrated under the pretence of zeal for liberty, he became the meanest of all the tools of despotism. It is not easy to settle th order of precedence among his vices; but we are inclined to think that his baseness was, on the whole, a rarer and more marvellous thing than his cruelty. be brought to trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He would have been better em ployed in concerting military measures which might have repaired our disasters in Belgium, and might have arrested the progress of the enemies of the Revolution in the west.”—(Vol. ii. p. 312.) Now it is notorious that Marie Antoinette was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, not at Robespierre's instance, but in direct opposition to Robespierre's wishes. We will cite a single authority, which is quite decisive. Buonaparte, who had no conceivable motive to disguise the truth, who had the best oppor his marriage with the Archduchess, naturally felt an interest in the fate of his wife's kins woman, distinctly affirmed that Robespierre opposed the trying of the queen. Who, then, was the person who really did propose that the Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should be tried? Full information will be found in the Moniteur. From that valuable record it appears that, on the first of August 1793, an orator deputed by the Committee of Public Safety addressed the Convention in a long and elaborate discourse. He asked, in passionate language, how it happened that the enemies of the Republic still continued to hope for success. "Is it," he cried, "because we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian woman? Is it because we have shown so strange an indulgence to the would be absurd to suppose that it does not refute every serious charge which admitted of refutation. How many serious charges, then, are here refuted? Not a single one. Most of the imputations which have been thrown on Barère he does not even notice. In such cases, of course, judgment must go against him by default. The fact is, that nothing can be more meagre and uninteresting than his account of the great public transactions in which he was engaged. He gives us hardly a word of new information respecting the proceedings of the Committee of Public Safety; and, by way of compensation, tells us long stories about things which happened before he emerged from ob-tunities of knowing the truth, and who, after scurity, and after he had again sunk into it. Nor is this the worst. As soon as he ceases to write trifles, he begins to write lies; and such lies! A man who has never been within the tropics does not know what a thunder-storm means; a man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie. Among the numerous classes which make up the great genus Mendacium, the Mendacium Vasconicum, or Gascon lie, has, during some centuries, been highly esteemed as peculiarly circumstantial and peculiarly impudent; and among the Mendacia Vasconica, the Mendacium Barerianum is, without doubt, the finest species. It is, indeed, a superb variety, and quite throws into the shade some Mendacia which we were used to regard with admiration. The Mendacium Wrax-race of our ancient tyrants? It is time that allianum, for example, though by no means to be despised, will not sustain the comparison for a moment. Seriously, we think that M. Hippolyte Carnot is much to blame in this matter. We can hardly suppose him to be worse read than ourselves in the history of the Convention, a history which must interest him deeply, not only as a Frenchman, but also as a son. He must, therefore, be perfectly aware that many of the most important statements which these volumes contain are falsehoods, such as Corneille's Dorante, or Molière's Scapin, or Colin d'Harleville's Monsieur de Crac would have been ashamed to utter. We are far, indeed, from holding M. Hippolyte Carnot answerable for Barère's want of veracity. But M. Hippolyte Carnot has arranged these Memoirs, has introduced them to the world by a laudatory preface, has described them as documents of great historical value, and has illus-ters and their armies have committed." The trated them by notes. We cannot but think that, by acting thus, he contracted some obligations of which he does not seem to have been at all aware; and that he ought not to have suffered any monstrous fiction to go forth under the sanction of his name, without adding a line at the foot of the page for the purpose of cautioning the reader. We will content ourselves at present with pointing out two instances of Barère's wilful and deliberate mendacity; namely, his account of the death of Marie Antoinette, and his account of the death of the Girondists. His account of the death of Marie Antoinette is as follows:-"Robespierre in his turn proposed that the members of the Capet family should De banished, and that Marie Antoinette should this unwise apathy should cease; it is time to speaker concluded by moving that Marie Antoinette should be brought to judgment, and should, for that end, be forthwith transferred to the Conciergerie; and that all the members of the house of Capet, with the exception of those who were under the sword of the law, and of the two children of Louis, should be banished from the French territory. The mo tion was carried without debate. Now, who was the person who made this speech and this motion? It was Barère himself. It is clear, then, that Barère attributed his own mean insolence and barbarity to one who whatever his crimes may have been, was in O'Meara's Voice from St. Helena, il. 170. + Moniteur, 2d, 7th, and 9th, of August, 1793. this matter innocent. The only question remaining is, whether Barère was misled by his memory, or wrote a deliberate falsehood. or made a report against any, or drew up an impeachment against any." . Now, we affirm that this is a lie. We affirm that Barère himself took the lead in the proceedings of the convention against the Girondists. We affirm that he, on the twenty-eighth of July, 1793, proposed a decree for bringing nine Girondist deputies to trial, and for putting to death sixteen other Girondist deputies without any trial at all. We affirm that, when the accused deputies had been brought to trial, and when some apprehension arose that their eloquence might produce an effect even on the revoluntary tribunal, Barère did, on the 8th of Brumaire, second a motion for a decree authorizing the tribunal to decide without hearing of these things so affirmed by us, we appeal to that very Moniteur to which Barère has dared to appeal.t We are convinced that he wrote a deliberate falsehood. His memory is described by editors as remarkably good, and must have been bad indeed if he could not remember such a fact as this. It is true that the number of murders in which he subsequently bore a part was so great, that he might well confound one with another, that he might well forget what part of the daily hecatomb was consigned to death by himself, and what part by his colleagues. But two circumstances make it quite incredible that the share which he took in the death of Marie Antoinette should have escaped his recollection. She was one of his earliest vic-out the defence; and, for the truth of every one tims. She was one of his most illustrious victims. The most hardened assassin remembers the first time that he shed blood; and the widow of Louis was no ordinary sufferer. If What M. Hyppolyte Carnot, knowing, as he the question had been about some milliner must know, that this book contains such falsebutchered for hiding in her garret her brotherhoods as those which we have exposed, can who had let drop a word against the Jacobin club-if the question had been about some old nun, dragged to death for having mumbled what were called fanatical words over her beads-Barère's memory might well have deceived him. It would be as unreasonable to expect him to remember all the wretches whom he slew, as all the pinches of snuff that he took. But though Barère murdered many hundreds of human beings, he murdered only one queen. That he, a small country lawyer, who, a few years before, would have thought himself honoured by a glance or a word from the daughter of so many Cæsars, should call her the Austrian woman, should send her from jail to jail, should deliver her over to the executioner, was surely a great event in his life. Whether he had reason to be proud of it or ashamed of it, is a question on which we may perhaps differ from his editors; but they will admit, we think, that he could not have forgotten it. We, therefore, confidently charge Barère with having written a deliberate falsehood; and we have no hesitation in saying that we never, in the course of any historical researches that we have happened to make, fell in with a falsehood so audacious, except only the falsehood which we are about to expose. have meant, when he described it as a valuable addition to our stock of historical information, passes our comprehension. When a man is not ashamed to tell lies about events which took place before hundreds of witnesses, and which are recorded in well-known and accessible books, what credit can we give to his account of things done in corners? No historian who does not wish to be laughed at will ever cite the unsupported authority of Barère as sufficient to prove any fact whatever. The only thing, as far as we can see, on which these volumes throw any light, is the exceeding baseness of the author. So much for the veracity of the Memoirs. In a literary point of view, they are beneath criticism. They are as shallow, flippant and affected as Barère's oratory in the convention. They are also, what his oratory in the convention was not, utterly insipid. In fact, they are the mere dregs and rinsings of a bottle, of which even the first froth was but of very questionable flavour. We will now try to present our readers with a sketch of this man's life. We shall, of course, make very sparing use, indeed, of his own memoirs; and never without distrust, except where they are confirmed by other evidence. Bertrand Barère was born in the year 1755, Of the proceeding against the Girondists, at Tarbes in Gascony. His father was the Barère speaks with just severity. He calls it proprietor of a small estate at Vieuzac, in the an atrocious injustice perpetrated against the beautiful vale of Argelès. Bertrand always legislators of the Republic. He complains loved to be called Barère de Vieuzac, and flatthat distinguished deputies, who ought to have tered himself with the hope that, by the help of been re-admitted to their seats in the Conven- this feudal addition to his name, he might pass tion, were sent to the scaffold as conspirators. for a gentleman. He was educated for the bar The day, he exclaims, was a day of mourning for France. It mutilated the national repre. sentation; it weakened the sacred principle, that the delegates of the people were inviolable. He protests that he had no share in the guilt. "I have had,” he says, "the patience to go through the Moniteur, extracting all the charges brought against deputies, and all the decrees for arresting and impeaching deputies. Nowhere will you find my name. I never + Moniteur, 31st of July, 1793, and Nonidi, first Decade brought a charge against any of my colleagues, of Brumaire, in the year 2. at Toulouse, the seat of one of the most celebrated parliaments of the kingdom, practised as an advocate with considerable success, and wrote some small pieces, which he sent to the principal literary societies in the south of France. Among provincial towns, Toulouse seems to have been remarkably rich in indiffe rent versifiers and critics. It gloried especially * Vol. ii. 407. came a husband. Our own guess is, that his wife was, as he says, a virtuous and amiable woman, and that she did her best to make him happy during some years. It seems clear that, when circumstances developed the latent atrocity of his character, she could no longer endure him, refused to see him, and sent back his letters unopened. Then it was, we imagine, that he invented the fable about his distress on his wedding-day. in one venerable institution, called the Acade-ed his domestic life till some time after he be my of the Floral Games. This body held every year a grand meeting, which was a subject of intense interest to the whole city, and at which flowers of gold and silver were given as prizes for odes, for idyls, and for something that was called eloquence. These bounties produced of course the ordinary effect of bounties, and turned people who might have been thriving attorneys and useful apothecaries into small wits and bad poets. Barère does not appear to have been so lucky as to obtain any of these preci- In 1788, Barère paid his first visit to Paris, ous flowers; but one of his performances was attended reviews, heard Laharpe at the Lycamentioned with honour. At Montauban he um, and Condorcet at the Academy of Sciences, was more fortunate. The academy of that stared at the envoys of Tippoo Saib, saw the town bestowed on him several prizes, one for royal family dine at Versailles, and kept a jour a panegyric on Louis the Twelfth, in which the nal in which he noted down adventures and blessings of monarchy and the loyalty of the speculations. Some parts of this journal are French nation were set forth; and another for printed in the first volume of the work before a panegyric on poor Franc de Pompignan, in us, and are certainly most characteristic. The which, as may easily be supposed, the philo- worst vices of the writer had not yet shown sophy of the eighteenth century was sharply themselves; but the weakness which was the assailed. Then Barère found an old stone in- parent of those vices appears in every line. scribed with three Latin words, and wrote a His levity, his inconsistency, his servility, were dissertation upon it, which procured him a seat already what they were to the last. All his in a learned assembly, called the Toulouse opinions, all his feelings, spin round and round Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Polite like a weathercock in a whirlwind. Nay, the Literature. At length the doors of the Acade- very impressions which he receives through my of the Floral Games were opened to so his senses are not the same two days together. much merit. Barère, in his thirty-third year, He sees Louis the Sixteenth, and is so much took his seat as one of that illustrious brother-blinded by loyalty as to find his majesty handhood, and made an inaugural oration which some. "I fixed my eyes," he says, "with a was greatly admired. He apologizes for recounting these triumphs of his youthful genius. We own that we cannot blame him for dwelling long on the least disgraceful portion of his existence. To send in declamations for prizes offered by provincial academies, is indeed no very useful or dignified employment for a bearded man; but it would have been well if Barère had always been so employed. lively curiosity on his fine countenance, which I thought open and noble." The next time that the king appears, all is altered. His majesty's eyes are without the smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought up. It is the same with more important questions. Barère is for the parliaments on the Monday and against the In 1785 he married a young lady of conside- parliaments on the Tuesday, for feudality in rable fortune. Whether she was in other re- the morning and against feudality in the afterspects qualified to make a home happy, is a noon. One day he admires the English constipoint respecting which we are imperfectly in- tution: then he shudders to think that, in the formed. In a little work, entitled Melancholy struggles by which that constitution had been Pages, which was written in 1797, Barère avers obtained, the barbarous islanders had murder. that his marriage was one of mere conveni-ed a king, and gives the preference to the conence, that at the altar his heart was heavy with stitution of Bearn. Bearn, he says, has a subsorrowful forebodings, that he turned pale as lime constitution, a beautiful constitution. he pronounced the solemn "Yes," that unbid-There the nobility and clergy meet in one house den tears rolled down his cheeks, that his mother shared his presentiment, and that the evil omen was accomplished. 'My marriage," he says, "was one of the most unhappy of marriages." So romantic a tale, told by so noted a liar, did not command our belief. We were, therefore, not much surprised to discover that, in his Memoirs, he calls his wife a most amiable woman, and declares that, after he had been united to her six years, he found her as amiable as ever. He complains, indeed, that she was too much attached to royalty and to the old superstition; but he assures us that his respect for her virtues induced him to tolerate her prejudices. Now Barère, at the time of his marriage, was himself a royalist and a Catholic. He had gained one prize by flattering the throne, and another by defending the church. It is hardly possible, therefore, that disputes about politics or religion should have embitter and the commons in another. If the houses differ, the king has the casting vote. A few weeks later we find him raving against the principles of this sublime and beautiful constitution. To admit deputies of the nobility and clergy into the legislature is, he says, neither more or less than to admit enemies of the nation into the legislature." In this state of mind, without one settled purpose or opinion, the slave of the last word, royalist, aristocrat, democrat, according to the prevailing sentiment of the coffee-house or drawing-room into which he had just looked, did Barère enter into public life. The statesgeneral had been summoned. Barère went down to his own province, was there elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned to Paris in May 1789. A great crisis, often predicted, had at last arrived. In no country, we conceive, have in In the National Assembly he had no opportunity of displaying the full extent either of his talents or of his vices. He was indeed eclipsed by much abler men. He went, as was his habit, with the stream, spoke occasionally with some success, and edited a journal called the Point du Jour, in which the debates of the Assembly were reported. tellectual freedom and political servitude ex- | from bombast down to buffoonry, was not isted together so long as in France, during the wholly without force and vivacity. He had seventy or eighty years which preceded the also one quality which, in active life, often last convocation of the orders. Ancient abuses gives fourth-rate men an advantage over firstand new theories flourished in equal vigour rate men. Whatever he could do, he could do side by side. The people, having no constitu- without effort, at any moment, in any abun tional means of checking even the most flagi- dance, and on any side of any question. There tious misgovernment, were indemnified for op- was, indeed, a perfect harmony between his pression by being suffered to luxuriate in moral character and his intellectual character. anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule His temper was that of a slave; his abilities every principle on which the institutions of the were exactly those which qualified him to be a state reposed. Neither those who attribute the useful slave. Of thinking to purpose, he was downfall of the old French institutions to the utterly incapable; but he had wonderful readipublic grievances, nor those who attribute it to ness in arranging and expressing thoughts furthe doctrines of the philosophers, appear to us nished by others. to have taken into their view more than onehalf of the subject. Grievances as heavy have often been endured without producing a revolution; doctrines as bold have often been propounded without producing a revolution. The question, whether the French nation was alienated from its old polity by the follies and vices of the viziers and sultanas who pillaged and disgraced it, or by the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau, seems to us as idle as the question whether it was fire or gunpowder that blew up the mills at Hounslow. Neither cause would have sufficed alone. Tyranny may last through ages where discussion is suppressed. Discussion may safely be left free by rulers who act on popular principles. But combine a press like that of London with a government like that of St. Petersburg, and the inevitable effect will be an explosion that will shake the world. So it was in France. Despotism and license, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed hope and terror, that agonizing travail and that portentous birth. He at first ranked by no means among the violent reformers. He was not friendly to that new division of the French territory which was among the most important changes introduced by the Revolution, and was especially unwilling to see his native province dismembered. He was entrusted with the task of framing reports on the woods and forests. Louis was exceedingly anxious about this matter; for his majesty was a keen sportsman, and would much rather have gone without the veto, or the prerogative of making peace and war, than without his hunting and shooting. Gentlemen of the royal household were sent to Barère, in order to intercede for the deer and pheasants. Nor was this intercession unsuccessful. The reports were so drawn, that Barère was afterwards accused of having dishonestly sacrificed the interests of Among the crowd of legislators which at this the public to the tastes of the court. To one conjuncture poured from all the provinces of of these reports he had the inconceivable folly France into Paris, Barère made no contempti- and bad taste to prefix a punning motto from Virble figure. The opinions which he for the mo- gil, fit only for such essays as he had been in ment professed were popular, yet not extreme. the habit of composing for the Floral GamesHis character was fair; his personal advan"Si canimus sylvas, sylvæ sint Consule dignæ." tages are said to have been considerable; and, from the portrait which is prefixed to these This literary foppery was one of the few things Memoirs, and which represents him as he ap-in which he was consistent. Royalist or Gipeared in the Convention, we should judge that rondist, Jacobin or Imperialist, he was always his features must have been strikingly hand- a Trissotin. some, though we think that we can read in them cowardice and meanness very legibly written by the hand of God. His conversation was lively and easy; his manners remarkably good for a country lawyer. Women of rank and wit said that he was the only man who, on his first arrival from a remote province, had that indescribable air which it was supposed that Paris alone could give. His eloquence, indeed, was by no means so much admired in the capital as it had been by the ingenious academicians of Montauban and Toulouse. His style was thought very bad; and very bad, if a foreigner may venture to judge, it continued to the last. It would, however, be unjust to deny that he had some talents for speaking and writing. His rhetoric, though deformed by every imaginable fault of taste, As the monarchical party became weaker and weaker, Barère gradually estranged himself more and more from it, and drew closer and closer to the republicans. It would seem that, during this transition, he was for a time closely connected with the family of Orleans. It is certain that he was entrusted with the guardianship of the celebrated Pamela, afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald; and it was asserted that he received during some years a pension of twelve thousand francs from the Palais Royal. At the end of September 1791, the labours of the National Assembly terminated, and those of the first and last Legislative Assem bly commenced. It had been enacted that no member of the National Assembly should sit in the Leg |