"The Girondists forced us to throw ourselves upon the sans-culotterie which has devoured them, which will devour us, and which will eat itself up."[77] - "Let Robespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will soon be nothing left in France but a Thebiad of political Trappists."[78] -- At the end, he sees more clearly still:
"On a day like this I organized the Revolutionary Tribunal: I ask pardon for it of God and man. - In Revolutions, authority remains with the greatest scoundrels. - It is better to be a poor fisherman than govern men."[79]
But he has aspired to govern them; he constructed a new machine for the purpose, and, deaf to its squeals, it worked in conformity with the structure and the impulse he gave to it. It towers before him, this sinister machine, with its vast wheel and iron cogs grinding all France, their multiplied teeth pressing out each individual life, its steel blade constantly rising and falling, and, as it plays faster and faster, daily exacting a larger and larger supply of human material, while those who furnish this supply are held to be as insensible and as senseless as itself. This Danton cannot, will not be. - He gets out of the way, diverts himself, gambles,[80] forgets; he supposes that the titular decapitators will probably consent to take no notice of him; in any event they do not pursue him; "they would not dare do it." " No one must lay hands on me, I am the ark." At the worst, he prefers "to be guillotined rather than guillotine." - Having said or thought this, he is ripe for the scaffold.
III. Robespierre.
Robespierre. - Mediocrity of his faculties. - The Pedant. -Absence of ideas. - Study of phrases. - Wounded self-esteem. - His infatuation. - He plays victim. - His gloomy fancies. - His resemblance to Marat. -Difference between him and Marat. - The sincere hypocrite. - The festival in honor of the Supreme Being, and the law of Prairial 22. - The external and internal characters of Robespierre and the Revolution.
Even with the firm determination to remain decapitator-in-chief, Danton could never be a perfect representative of the Revolution. It is an armed but philosophical robbery; its creed includes robbery and assassination, but only as a knife in its sheath; the showy, polished sheath is for public display, and not the sharp and bloody blade.
Danton, like Marat, lets the blade be too plainly visible. At the mere sight of Marat, filthy and slovenly, with his livid, frog-like face, with his round, gleaming and fixed eyeballs, and his bold, maniacal stare and steady monotonous rage, common-sense rebels; no-one selects a homicidal maniac as a guide. At the mere sight of Danton, with his porter's vocabulary, his voice like an alarm bell of insurrection, his cyclopean features and air of an exterminator, humanity takes alarm; one does not surrender oneself to a political butcher without repugnance. The Revolution demands another interpreter, like itself captivatingly fitted out, and Robespierre fits the bill,[81] with his irreproachable attire, well-powdered hair, carefully brushed coat,[82] strict habits, dogmatic tone, and formal, studied manner of speaking. No mind, in its mediocrity and incompetence, so well harmonizes with the spirit of the epoch. The reverse of the statesman, he soars in empty space, amongst abstractions, always mounted on a principle and incapable of dismounting so as to see things practically.
"That bastard there," exclaims Danton, "is not even able to boil an egg!""The vague generalities of his preaching," writes another contemporary,[83] "rarely culminated in any specific measure or legal provision. He combated everything and proposed nothing; the secret of his policy happily accorded with his intellectual impotence and with the nullity of his legislative conceptions." Once he has rattled his revolutionary pedantry off, he no longer knows what to say. - As to financial matters and military art, he knows nothing and risks nothing, except to underrate or calumniate Carnot and Cambon who did know and who took risks.[84] - In relation to a foreign policy his speech on the state of Europe is the amplification of a schoolboy; on exposing the plans of the English minister he reaches the pinnacle of chimerical nonsense;[85] eliminate the rhetorical passages, and it is not the head of a government who speaks, but the porter of the Jacobin club. On contemporary France, as it actually exists, he has not one sound or specific idea: instead of men, he sees only twenty-six millions simple robots, who, when duly led and organized, will work together in peace and harmony. Basically they are good,[86] and will, after a little necessary purification, become good again.
Accordingly, their collective will is "the voice of reason and public interest," hence, on meeting together, they are wise. "The people's assembly of delegates should deliberate, if possible, in the presence of the whole body of the people;" the Legislative body, at least, should hold its sittings "in a vast, majestic edifice open to twenty thousand spectators." Note that for the past four years, in the Constituent Assembly, in the Legislative Assembly, in the Convention, at the Hotel de-Ville, in the Jacobin Club, wherever Robespierre speaks, the galleries have never ceased to shout, yell and express their opinion. Such a positive, palpable experience would open anybody's eyes; his are closed through prejudice or interest; even physical truth finds no access to his mind, because he is unable to comprehend it, or because he has to keep it out. He must, accordingly, be either obtuse or a charlatan. Actually he is both, for both combine to form the pedant (cuistre), that is to say, the hollow, inflated mind which, filled with words and imagining that these are ideas, revels in its own declamation and dupes itself that it may dictate to others.