Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 | Page 5

clubs, the most uncompromising was the Jacobins;
consequently, its principal members were to be found among the party
of the Montagnards. During the hottest time of the Revolution, the
three men most distinguished as Montagnards and Jacobins were Marat,
Danton, and Robespierre. Mirabeau, the orator of the Revolution, had
already disappeared, being so fortunate as to die naturally, before the
practice of mutual guillotining was established. After him, Vergniaud,
the leader of the Girondists, was perhaps the most effective speaker;
and till his fall, he possessed a commanding influence in the
Convention. Danton was likewise a speaker of vast power, and from his
towering figure, he seemed like a giant among pigmies. Marat might be
termed the representative of the kennel. He was a low demagogue,
flaunting in rags, dirty, and venomous: he was always calling out for
more blood, as if the grand desideratum was the annihilation of
mankind. Among the extreme men, Robespierre, by his eloquence, his
artifice, and his bold counsels, contrived to maintain his position. This
was no easy matter, for it was necessary to remain firm and unfaltering
in every emergency. He, like the others at the helm of affairs, was
constantly impelled forward by the clubs, but more so by the incessant
clamours of the mob. At the Hôtel de Ville sat the Commune, a crew of
blood-thirsty villains, headed by Hebert; and this miscreant, with his
armed sections, accompanied by paid female furies, beset the
Convention, and carried measures of severity by sheer intimidation. Let
it further be remembered that, in 1793, France was kept in
apprehension of invasion by the Allies under the Duke of Brunswick,
and the army of emigrant noblesse under the command of Condé. The
hovering of these forces on the frontiers, and their occasional successes,
produced a constant alarm of counter-revolution, which was believed to
be instigated by secret intriguers in the very heart of the Convention. It
was alleged by Robespierre in his greatest orations, that the safety of
the Republic depended on keeping up a wholesome state of terror; and
that all who, in the slightest degree, leaned towards clemency,
sanctioned the work of intriguers, and ought, accordingly, to be
proscribed. By such harangues--in the main, miserable sophistry--he
acquired prodigious popularity, and was in fact irresistible.

Thus was legalised the Reign of Terror, which, founded in false
reasoning and insane fears, we must, nevertheless, look back upon as a
thing, at least to a certain extent, reconcilable with a sense of duty;
inasmuch as even while signing warrants for transferring hundreds of
people to the Revolutionary Tribunal--which was equivalent to sending
them to the scaffold--Robespierre imagined that he was acting
throughout under a clear, an imperious necessity: only ridding society
of the elements that disturbed its purity and tranquillity. Stupendous
hallucination! And did this fanatic really feel no pang of conscience?
That will afterwards engage our consideration. Frequently, he was
called on to proscribe and execute his most intimate friends; but it does
not appear that any personal consideration ever stayed his proceedings.
First, he swept away Royalists and aristocrats; next, he sacrificed the
Girondists; last, he came to his companion-Jacobins. Accusing Danton
and his friends of a tendency to moderation, he had the dexterity to get
them proscribed and beheaded. When Danton was seized, he could
hardly credit his senses: he who had long felt himself sure of being one
day dictator by public acclamation, and to have been deceived by that
dreamer, Robespierre, was most humiliating. But Robespierre would
not dare to put him to death! Grave miscalculation! He was immolated
like the rest; the crowd looking on with indifference. Along with him
perished Camille Desmoulins, a young man of letters, and a Jacobin,
but convicted of advocating clemency. Robespierre was one of
Camille's private and most valued friends; he had been his instructor in
politics, and had become one of the trustees under his
marriage-settlement. Robespierre visited at the house of his _protégé_;
chatted with the young and handsome Madame Desmoulins at her
parties; and frequently dandled the little Horace Desmoulins on his
knee, and let him play with his bunch of seals. Yet, because they were
adherents of Danton, he sent husband and wife to the scaffold within a
few weeks of each other! What eloquent and touching appeals were
made to old recollections by the mother of Madame Desmoulins.
Robespierre was reminded of little Horace, and of his duty as a family
guardian. All would not do. His heart was marble; and so the wretched
pair were guillotined. Camille's letter to his wife, the night before he
was led to the scaffold, cannot be read without emotion. He died with a
lock of her hair clasped convulsively in his hand.

Having thus cleared away to some extent all those who stood in the