The Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, a mere instrument of the Committee of Public Safety, limited itself in reality, as Fouquier-Tinville justly remarked during his trial, to executing its orders.It surrounded itself at first with a few legal forms which did not long survive.Interrogatory, defence, witnesses--all were finally suppressed.Moral proof--that is, mere suspicion--sufficed to procure condemnation.The president usually contented himself with putting a vague question to the accused.To work more rapidly still, Fouquier-Tinville proposed to have the guillotine installed on the same premises as the Tribunal.
This Tribunal sent indiscriminately to the scaffold all the accused persons arrested by reason of party hatred, and very soon, in the hands of Robespierre, it constituted an instrument of the bloodiest tyranny.When Danton, one of its founders, became its victim, he justly asked pardon of God and men, before mounting the scaffold for having assisted to create such a Tribunal.
Nothing found mercy before it: neither the genius of Lavoisier, nor the gentleness of Lucile Desmoulins, nor the merit of Malesherbes.``So much talent,'' said Benjamin Constant, ``massacred by the most cowardly and brutish of men!''
To find any excuse for the Revolutionary Tribunal, we must return to our conception of the religious mentality of the Jacobins, who founded and directed it.It was a piece of work comparable in its spirit and its aim to the Inquisition.The men who furnished its victims--Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon--believed themselves the benefactors of the human race in suppressing all infidels, the enemies of the faith that was to regenerate the earth.
The executions during the Terror did not affect the members of the aristocracy only, since 4,000 peasants and 3,000 working-men were guillotined.
Given the emotion produced in Paris in our days by a capital execution, one might suppose that the execution of so many persons at one time would produce a very great emotion.But habit had so dulled sensibility that people paid but little attention to the matter at last.Mothers would take their children to see people guillotined as to-day they take them to the marionette theatre.
The daily spectacle of executions made the men of the time very indifferent to death.All mounted the scaffold with perfect tranquillity, the Girondists singing the Marseillaise as they climbed the steps.
This resignation resulted from the law of habitude, which very rapidly dulls emotion.To judge by the fact that royalist risings were taking place daily, the prospect of the guillotine no longer terrified men.Things happened as though the Terror terrorised no one.Terror is an efficacious psychological process so long as it does not last.The real terror resides far more in threats than in their realisation.
3.The Terror in the Provinces.
The executions of the Revolutionary Tribunals in the provinces represented only a portion of the massacres effected in the departments during the Terror.The revolutionary army, composed of vagabonds and brigands, marched through France killing and pillaging.Its method of procedure is well indicated by the following passage from Taine:--``At Bedouin, a town of 2,000 inhabitants, where unknown hands had cut down the tree of liberty, 433 houses were demolished or fired, 16 persons were guillotined, and 47 shot down; all the other inhabitants were expelled and reduced to living as vagabonds in the mountains, and to taking shelter in caverns which they hollowed out of the earth.''
The fate of the wretches sent before the Revolutionary Tribunals was no better.The first mockery of trial was quickly suppressed.At Nantes, Carrier drowned and shot down according to his fancy nearly 5,000 persons--men, women, and children.
The details of these massacres figured in the Moniteur after the reaction of Thermidor.I cite a few lines:--``I saw,'' says Thomas, ``after the taking of Noirmoutier, men and women and old people burned alive...women violated, girls of fourteen and fifteen, and massacred afterward, and tender babes thrown from bayonet to bayonet; children who were taken from beside their mothers stretched out on the ground.''
