find sufficient defenders in the patriot jurors, and conspirators did not deserve to be indulged with advocates. : Assuredly, of all the iniquitous prostitutions of the name of law which the world has ever seen, this was the greatest. His colleagues of the committees were at once exasperated and alarmed— but they did not venture to resist the law was passed on the 10th June; and soon after, when their dread of Robespierre was removed, they found it a very convenient accession to their own authority, and resisted an attempt to repeal it. But what Robespierre's distinct object was in proposing it we are nowhere told, nor do we see. He had, on the 25th of December, 1793, announced the necessity of giving additional powers to the Tribunal, and had carried a decree that the Committee of Public Safety should, within the shortest possible delay, propose a plan for its more active organization; but at that time Hebert and Danton were alive and formidable while at the present juncture it seems to us that any facility which his projects might derive from the acceleration of the proceedings and the extended power of the Public Accuser, (both already great enough, one would have thought,) was dearly purchased by the new power given to the committees, which had shown such symptoms of opposition, and, above all, by the danger of raising so momentous a question at such a crisis. Surely it would have been more prudent to have attacked Collot and, Tallien by the same machinery that had overthrown Desmoulins and Danton, than to have risked a preliminary battle on such odious grounds. Either Robespierre must have been the blindest and rashest of men, or this law must have had some special object and intended operation which has not been explained-any more than another important, and, as it seems to us, very imprudent step which followed. It was about this time that he began to absent himself from the committees. The historians attribute this secession to the opposition he met in these bodies; but this, surely, after proposing a law which had given them collectively new powers of life and death, seems a very irrational motive. His absence left in the hands of his adversaries the weapon he had forged to exterminate them. Yet we confess we have no other reason to suggest. The Committee of Public Safety-the real sovereign power continued sullenly subservient, though he was represented in it only by Couthon, (St. Just was on a mission)—but the Committee of General Security attempted to involve him in a strange and almost ludicrous danger. This committee-which had the department of internal police-happened to discover that there lived in an obscure quarter of Paris an old woman of the name of Catherine Theot, who had the same mania as our Johanna Johanna Southcott, of believing that, at the age of seventy, she was to become the mother of the Saviour, who was now to be born again, and to commence his final reign; she called herself the Mother of God,' and, like Johanna, she found many votaries. Her name of Theot was changed into Theos, the Greek for GOD; and she and her followers (amongst whom was an old priest named Gerle, who had been a member of the Constituent Assembly) appear to have been the most absurd and impious, but at the same time innocuous and contemptible fanatics that ever insulted religion and common sense. With maniacs of this description it was natural that the great name of Robespierre, who had now made himself the apostle of deism, should mingle itself with their visions. The Committee of General Security heard of these bedlamites-which probably Robespierre himself had never done-and they seized the favourable opportunity of throwing on him all the ridicule and discredit of a fanaticism to which they reckoned that his recent exhibition in the festival of the Supreme Being would render him obnoxious. A report was accordingly prepared on this subject, nominally by one Vadier, but really by the lively and sarcastic pen of the celebrated fabricator of reports, Barrère, in which Robespierre was sneeringly alluded to, though not named. The whole of this affair was prepared, and the report read in the Convention, without his knowledge. There was no proof whatsoever that he knew anything of his fanatic admirers: the injury therefore to his reputation was not great-but the insult was. His power was at once too fearful and too fragile to tolerate levity. Its essence was terror and silence; and he wished to be spoken of neither en bien ni en mal. He had lately made a vigorous complaint of the fulsome adulation with which the Moniteur and some other journals affected to treat him, which he said was offensive to his taste and his patriotism, and injurious to his character: he would of course be as little tolerant of sarcasm and calumny. At this crisis, as at all the former, his prudence seems to have made him desirous of withdrawing from his recent prominence, and of escaping back into the safer individuality under the shade of which he had already accomplished such wonderful successes. And now Fouquier Tinville began to give effect to the law of the 10th of June; and a conspiracy was invented, the most ridiculous in its pretexts, the bloodiest in its consequences, and the most incomprehensible in its objects, of all that had been hitherto hatched. The miserable prisoners accumulated in the several jails, and particularly in the Luxembourg, were accused of conspiring to organize a body of men to make war on the Convention. Fouquier, Fouquier, on this occasion, caused the dock of the tribunal to be enlarged so as to contain sixty culprits at once. He even caused the guillotine to be erected in the great hall of the Palais-in the side chambers of which the tribunal held its sittings, as our courts do in Westminster Hall. This, by the reiterated order of the government, he reluctantly removed; but the work of blood was not interrupted. In three days-the 7th, 9th, and 10th of July, 1794 -one hundred and seventy-one prisoners were immolated for the impossible crime of making war on the republic from the depths of their dungeons. Looking at the state of parties at this moment, and knowing that both sides were, in mutual jealousy and alarm, preparing to devour each other, we know not how to account for this redoubled activity of the tribunal. Fouquier Tinville alleged, and we think proved, at his trial, that though he might have acted too zealously, he never did so spontaneously. The Committees, trembling for their own heads, could hardly have ventured on such gratuitous slaughter. We can discover no direct interest that Robespierre could have had in the death of this obscure crowd of innocuous victims. We really have been sometimes tempted to satisfy ourselves with M. Thiers' flippant explanation, that they went on murdering, not with any motive or object, but par l'habitude funeste qu'on en avait contractée.' But is it not possible that Robespierre, having seceded from the committees, might have hoped to depopularize the remaining members by secretly instigating Fouquier Tinville to mark their administration with a violence more odious than his own?-and did he mean one day to reproach Collot d'Herbois, Barrère, and Billaud-Varennes, his rival triumvirate, with the ELEVEN HUNDRED* victims who perished subsequently to his secession ?-nearly half the number of all (2635) that had fallen since the first institution of the tribunal. We know not that it has been before remarked how great a proportion of the whole slaughter was perpetrated after Robespierre had abdicated his ostensible responsibility; yet it is an important fact. This leads us to a few general observations on the degree of Robespierre's guilt, as compared with that of his colleagues and of the nation at large. It is very natural that the French nation-when it in some degree recovered its senses-should have been anxious to exculpate itself *The exact number guillotined between the 20th of June, about which time Robespierre seceded, to the 27th of July, the day of his final fall, was eleven hundred and eight! Our readers must observe, that all these numbers relate to the single Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris. Similar and even more dreadful and extensive massacres were going on simultaneously all over France. The crimes committed in Arras alone rival those of Paris; of these Guffroy has given a summary, which occupies an octavo volume: those of Lyons and Nantes would fill several, from from all these enormous and unparalleled crimes. The shame and remorse of his colleagues-the party rancour of his adversariesand the national vanity of all, readily combined to load Robespierre's memory with the accumulated and undivided guilt, and concurred in representing him as the head of a small faction which by some deplorable accidents had been enabled to dictate their code of blood to a reluctant and indignant people; in short, as we noticed in the outset, he is made the scape-goat of the Revolution. Every Frenchman has an interest in adopting this exculpatory hypothesis; and even the more recent English writers have been too apt, instead of going back to the original and contemporaneous sources of information, to content themselves with compiling from the compilations of the French-all of them prejudiced on this. subject, and some of them-the smart coxcomb Thiers, for instanceof no individual authority whatsoever. But is it not evident that, as to the French people, such excuses would be as inadequate in reason as they are false in fact? Would the national character be much mended, if we were to admit that they were such dastards as to allow, from sheer cowardice, a handful of villains to commit such crimes, and to send to one execution, in one day, a greater number of persons than-if we believe these apologetical historians-Robespierre's whole faction contained? Robespierre was neither a Cromwell nor a Buonaparte. His power was not founded on an irresistible military force. His force was the PEOPLE itself. He was really their child and champion, the incarnate type of Public opinion*-which, in revolutionary times, means the opinion of the most violent of the Public. That the predisposition of Robespierre's personal character may have coincided with the bloody extravagances of the times we do not deny; but we are satisfied that the bloody extravagances of the times outran his predisposition. No doubt there were millions of poor persecuted Royalists and Christians, who deplored and detested-even independently of their own personal sufferingsthis frightful system: perhaps even it might be truly said that a numerical majority of the nation, including women and children, was innocent; but, that the great and predominant masswhich the republican constitution designated as active citizens, and which, politically and practically constituted the nation— concurred zealously-furiously-in all the worst revolutionary extremities, cannot be denied-and France can no more divest herself of a part in the guilt of Robespierre than in the glories of Napoleon in truth she had a more immediate and direct share in the guilt than in the glory. : * La Révolution incarnée c'est Robespierre; avec son horrible bonne foi, sa naïveté de sang, et sa conscience pure et cruelle.—Nodier, Оп On the whole, therefore, we are convinced that the safest, and indeed only satisfactory clue to the mystery of Robespierre's supernatural atrocities, would be found in a close examination and development of the varying symptoms and progressive paroxysms of the popular frenzy, which, under the palliative title of public opinion, he found it necessary-at first, for his aggrandisement, and at length for his safety-to gratify; but which, latterly at least, he was more disposed to restrain than stimulate. But the stupendous tragedy is arrived at its last act-the THREE GREAT DAYS of 1794, commonly called the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Thermidor, but in our calender the 26th, 27th, and 28th of July!-a curious coincidence-and what a bloody anniversary has been that same 28th of July! There is no portion of Robes. pierre's life so well known as his last two days. Our object having been chiefly to suggest inquiry, and to invite explanation on doubtful points of his history, and having already far exceeded the limits we originally proposed to ourselves, we shall abstain from retracing the events of those extraordinary days. We shall content ourselves by noticing two or three minor but not unimportant points, which bear some relation to, and afford some corroboration of our preceding views. We have already noticed our inability to account for the sacrifice of Danton. That murder seems to have been Robespierre's suicide. On the ninth Thermidor, in the height of the terrible conflict, and at a moment when Robespierre seemed deprived by rage and agitation of the power of articulation, a voice cried- It is Danton's blood that is choaking you!" Robespierre, indignant, recovered his voice and his courage to exclaim- Danton!-Is it then Danton you regret? Cowards!-Laches!-why did you not defend him?' There was spirit, truth, and even dignity in this bitter retort--the last words that Robespierre ever spoke in public. But it must not be supposed that it was as a man of blood that his enemies pursued him; they had been his associates, and continued to be his imitators. They quoted the fate of Danton, because their own case was similar to his, and they had now become very much alive to the horror of sacrificing one's colleagues. But of Robespierre's more atrocious crimes-the wholesale massacres-the perennial murders of the innocent and the virtuous-not a eensure was breathed. Nay, one of the most virulent of his assailants, Vadier, in the height of the storm, accused him of having endeavoured to save from the scaffold the enemies of the people, and of having officiously interfered with Fouquier Tinville to suspend the execution of conspirators!' The only other point we shall notice is the manner of Robespierre's capture and death. It is generally supposed that he attempted |