THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CONVENTION
1.The Legend of the Convention.
The history of the Convention is not merely fertile in psychological documents.It also shows how powerless the witnesses of any period and even their immediate successors are to form an exact idea of the events which they have witnessed, and the men who have surrounded them.
More than a century has elapsed since the Revolution, and men are only just beginning to form judgments concerning this period which, if still often doubtful enough, are slightly more accurate than of old.
This happens, not only because new documents are being drawn from the archives, but because the legends which enveloped that sanguinary period in a magical cloud are gradually vanishing with the passage of time.
Perhaps the most tenacious legend of all was that which until formerly used to surround the personages to whom our fathers applied the glorious epithet, ``the Giants of the Convention.''
The struggles of the Convention against France in insurrection and Europe in arms produced such an impression that the heroes of this formidable struggle seemed to belong to a race of supermen or Titans.
The epithet ``giant'' seemed justified so long as the events of the period were confused and massed together.Regarded as connected when it was simply simultaneous, the work of the armies was confounded with that of the Convention.The glory of the first recoiled upon the second, and served as an excuse for the hecatombs of the Terror, the ferocity of the civil war, and the devastation of France.
Under the penetrating scrutiny of modern criticism, the heterogeneous mass of events has been slowly disentangled.The armies of the Republic have retained their old prestige, but we have been forced to recognise that the men of the Convention, absorbed entirely by their intestine conflicts, had very little to do with their victories.At the most two or three members of the committees of the Assembly were concerned with the armies, and the fact that they were victorious was due, apart from their numbers and the talents of their young generals, to the enthusiasm with which a new faith had inspired them.
In a later chapter, devoted to the revolutionary armies, we shall see how they conquered Europe in arms.They set out inspired by the ideas of liberty and equality which constituted the new gospel, and once on the frontiers, which were to keep them so long, they retained a special mentality, very different from that of the Government, which they first knew nothing of and afterwards despised.
Having no part whatever in their victories, the men of the Convention contented themselves with legislating at hazard according to the injunctions of the leaders who directed them, and who claimed to be regenerating France by means of the guillotine.
But it was thanks to these valiant armies that the history of the Convention was transformed into an apotheosis which affected several generations with a religious respect which even to-day is hardly extinct.
Studying in detail the psychology of the ``Giants'' of the Convention, we find their magnitude shrink very rapidly.They were in general extremely mediocre.Their most fervent defenders, such as M.Aulard, are obliged to admit as much.
This is how M.Aulard puts it in his History of the French Revolution:--``It has been said that the generation which from 1789 to 1799did such great and terrible things was a generation of giants, or, to put it more plainly, that it was a generation more distinguished than that which preceded it or that which followed.
This is a retrospective illusion.The citizens who formed the municipal and Jacobin or nationalist groups by which the Revolution was effected do not seem to have been superior, either in enlightenment or in talents, to the Frenchmen of the time of Louis XV.or of Louis Philippe.Were those exceptionally gifted whose names history has retained because they appeared on the stage of Paris, or because they were the most brilliant orators of the various revolutionary Assemblies? Mirabeau, up to a certain point, deserved the title of genius; but as to the rest--Robespierre, Danton, Vergniaud--had they truly more talent, for example, than our modern orators? In 1793, in the time of the supposed `giants,' Mme.Roland wrote in her memoirs: `France was as though drained of men; their dearth during this revolution is truly surprising; there have scarcely been any but pigmies.' ''
If after considering the men of the Convention individually we consider them in a body, we may say that they did not shine either by intelligence or by virtue or by courage.Never did a body of men manifest such pusillanimity.They had no courage save in their speeches or in respect of remote dangers.This Assembly, so proud and threatening in its speech when addressing royalty, was perhaps the most timid and docile political collectivity that the world has ever known.We see it slavishly obedient to the orders of the clubs and the Commune, trembling before the popular delegations which invaded it daily, and obeying the injunctions of the rioters to the point of handing over to them its most brilliant members.The Convention affords the world a melancholy spectacle, voting, at the popular behest, laws so absurd that it is obliged to annul them as soon as the rioters have quitted the hall.
Few Assemblies have given proof of such weakness.When we wish to show how low a popular Government can fall we have only to point to the Convention.
2.Results of the Triumph of the Jacobin Religion Among the causes that gave the Convention its special physiognomy, one of the most important was the definite establishment of a revolutionary religion.A dogma which was at first in process of formation was at last finally erected.
