Critical Miscellanies | Page 8

had
penetrated his mind with the principle of the Sovereignty of the People.
This famous dogma contained implicitly within it the more indisputable
truth that a society ought to be regulated with a view to the happiness
of the people. Such a principle made it easier for Robespierre to
interpret rightly the first phases of the revolutionary movement. It
helped him to discern that the concentrated physical force of the
populace was the only sure protection against a civil war. And if a civil
war had broken out in 1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages of
authority would have been against the popular party. The first
insurrection of Paris is associated with the harangue of Camille
Desmoulins at the Palais Royal, with the fall of the Bastille, with the
murder of the governor, and a hundred other scenes of melodramatic
horror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrection of the
Fourteenth of July 1789 taught Robespierre a lesson of practical
politics, which exactly fitted in with his previous theories. In his
resentment against the oppressive disorder of monarchy and feudalism,
he had accepted the counter principle that the people can do no wrong,
and nobody of sense now doubts that in their first great act the people
of Paris did what was right. Six days after the fall of the Bastille, the
Centre were for issuing a proclamation denouncing popular violence
and ordering rigorous vigilance. Robespierre was then so little known
in the Assembly that even his name was usually misspelt in the journals.
From his obscure bench on the Mountain he cried out with bitter
vehemence against the proposed proclamation:--'Revolt! But this revolt
is liberty. The battle is not at its end. Tomorrow, it may be, the
shameful designs against us will be renewed; and who will there then
be to repulse them, if beforehand we declare the very men to be rebels,

who have rushed to arms for our protection and safety?' This was the
cardinal truth of the situation. Everybody knows Mirabeau's saying
about Robespierre:--'That man will go far: he believes every word that
he says!' This is much, but it is only half. It is not only that the man of
power believes what he says; what he believes must fit in with the facts
and with the demands of the time. Now Robespierre's firmness of
conviction happened at this stage to be rightly matched by his clearness
of sight.
It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughter with
fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as some
uncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one of
the giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The
history of our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots
against meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots
against papists and their abettors in Lord George Gordon's time, and
Church-and-King riots in Doctor Priestley's time. It would be too
daring, therefore, to maintain that the rabble of the poor have any more
unerring political judgment than the rabble of the opulent. But, in
France in 1789, Robespierre was justified in saying that revolt meant
liberty. If there had been no revolt in July, the court party would have
had time to mature their infatuated designs of violence against the
Assembly. In October these designs had come to life again. The
royalists at Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the presence
of the Queen, they drank confusion to all patriots, and trampled the new
emblem of freedom passionately underfoot. The news of this odious
folly soon travelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily understood
by a populace whose wits were sharpened by famine. Thousands of
fire-eyed women and men tramped intrepidly out towards Versailles. If
they had done less, the Assembly would have been dispersed or
arbitrarily decimated, even though such a measure would certainly have
left the government in desperation.
At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October, amid the slaughter of
guards and the frantic yells of hatred against the Queen, it is no wonder
that some were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If he had
accepted the advice, the course of the Revolution would have been

different; but its march would have been just as irresistible, for
revolution lay in the force of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis,
however, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to carry him in
bewildering procession to his capital and his prison. That great man
who was watching French affairs with such consuming eagerness from
distant Beaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly divined
that this procession from Versailles to the Tuileries marked the fall of
the monarchy. 'A revolution in sentiment, manners, and moral opinions,
the most important of all revolutions in a