Critical Miscellanies

Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), by John
Morley

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Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) Essay 1: Robespierre
Author: John Morley
Release Date: March 3, 2007 [EBook #20733]
Language: English
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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
BY

JOHN MORLEY
VOL. I. Essay 1: Robespierre
London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE
MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
ROBESPIERRE.
I.
PAGE
Introduction 1
Different views of Robespierre 4
His youthful history 5
An advocate at Arras 7
Acquaintance with Carnot 10
The summoning of the States-General 11
Prophecies of revolution 12
Reforming Ministers tried and dismissed 13
Financial state of France 14
Impotence of the Monarchy 17
The Constituent Assembly 19
Robespierre interprets the revolutionary movement rightly 21
The Sixth of October 1789 23

Alteration in Robespierre's position 25
Character of Louis XVI. 28
And of Marie Antoinette 29
The Constitution and Robespierre's mark upon it 34
Instability of the new arrangements 37
Importance of Jacobin ascendancy 41
The Legislative Assembly 42
Robespierre's power at the Jacobin Club 44
His oratory 45
The true secret of his popularity 48
Aggravation of the crisis in the spring of 1792 50
The Tenth of August 1792 52
Danton 53
Compared with Robespierre 55
Robespierre compared with Marat and with Sieyès 57
Character of the Terror 58
II.
Fall of the Girondins indispensable 60
France in desperate peril 61
The Committee of Public Safety 65

At the Tuileries 67
The contending factions 70
Reproduced an older conflict of theories 72
Robespierre's attitude 73
The Hébertists 77
Chaumette and his fundamental error 80
Robespierre and the atheists 82
His bitterness towards Anacharsis Clootz 86
New turn of events (March 1794) 90
First breach in the Jacobin ranks: the Hébertists 90
Robespierre's abandonment of Danton 91
Second breach: the Dantonians (April 1794) 95
Another reminiscence of this date 97
Robespierre's relations to the Committees changed 98
The Feast of the Supreme Being 101
Its false philosophy 103
And political inanity 104
The Law of Prairial 106
Robespierre's motive in devising it 107
It produces the Great Terror 109

Robespierre's chagrin at its miscarriage 112
His responsibility not to be denied 112
(1) Affair of Catherine Théot 113
" Cécile Renault 114
(2) Robespierre stimulated popular commissions 115
The drama of Thermidor: the combatants 117
Its conditions 118
The Eighth Thermidor 119
Inefficiency of Robespierre's speech 121
The Ninth Thermidor 123
Famous scene in the Convention 125
Robespierre a prisoner 127
Struggle between the Convention and the Commune 129
Death of Robespierre 131
Ultimate issue of the struggle between the Committees and the
Convention 132

ROBESPIERRE.

I.
A French writer has recently published a careful and interesting volume

on the famous events which ended in the overthrow of Robespierre and
the close of the Reign of Terror.[1] These events are known in the
historic calendar as the Revolution of Thermidor in the Year II. After
the fall of the monarchy, the Convention decided that the year should
begin with the autumnal equinox, and that the enumeration should date
from the birth of the Republic. The Year I. opens on September 22,
1792; the Year II. opens on the same day of 1793. The month of
Thermidor begins on July 19. The memorable Ninth Thermidor
therefore corresponds to July 27, 1794. This has commonly been taken
as the date of the commencement of a counter-revolution, and in one
sense it was so. Comte, however, and others have preferred to fix the
reaction at the execution of Danton (April 5, 1794), or Robespierre's
official proclamation of Deism in the Festival of the Supreme Being
(May 7, 1794).
[Footnote 1: La Révolution de Thermidor. Par Ch. D'Héricault. Paris:
Didier, 1876.]
M. D'Héricault does not belong to the school of writers who treat the
course of history as a great high road, following a firmly traced line,
and set with plain and ineffaceable landmarks. The French Revolution
has nearly always been handled in this way, alike by those who think it
fruitful in blessings, and by their adversaries, who pronounce it a curse
inflicted by the wrath of Heaven. Historians have looked at the
Revolution as a plain landsman looks at the sea. To the landsman the
ocean seems one huge immeasurable flood, obeying a simple law of
ebb and flow, and offering to the navigator a single uniform force. Yet