Seagreen Corruptible MACAULAY drew a picture of Barere as the
most depraved man in history. 'In almost every sort of wickedness he has had rivals. His sensuality was immoderate; this was a failing common to him with many great and amiable men. There have been many men as cowardly as he, some as cruel, a few as impudent. I here may also have been' as great liars, though we never met with them or read of them. But when we put everything together, sensuality, barbarity, pol- troonery, baseness, effrontery, the result is some- thing to which, we venture to say, no parallel can be found.'
Mr. Gershoy has set out to reverse this judg- ment, which, in less dramatic terms, has been that of most historians. He cannot reverse it, but in his learned, patient, clearly written study he has at least mitigated it. He restores Barere as a near-great man in his earlier lifetime. His vacillations 'between the Gironde and the Jaco- bins were not basically dishonourable—they were attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, in the hope of preventing the French Revolution from tearing itself to pieces. As a member of the terrible Committee of Public Safety he was one of that small group which worked itself almost to death, and in so doing saved not merely France, but (in the eye of history) what the world today has of liberty and equality, though not perhaps of fraternity.
Even so, Gershoy cannot make him a like- able fellow. Others were as merciless as he— Robespierre, St. Just, Carnot—but against their cruelty must be set their honesty, courage and austerity. Barere was time-serving, timorous and
vulgar. He served a purpose; he was the public- relations officer of the Revolution. He always had the right slogan:. The tree of liberty only grows when it is watered with the blood of tyrants,' he said when Louis XV1's sentence was in question. Each time, in 1793 and 1794, that the desperately awaited victories came it was Barere who reported them to the Convention; though his lush rhetoric repels us now, it thrilled the nation and his speeches were called his carmagnules. Even the soldiers were excited by them, and a colonel led his men to the assault with the cry : 'Mes enfants, today we will send Barere to the rostrum!'
But when Robespierre fell, and Barere changed sides just in time, he found he was no longer wanted. He had killed too many people, he had defended the indefensible too often, he was too glib. He escaped the counter-revolutionary terror by hiding from it, and thereafter became a hack writer and informer for Napoleon until he was dismissed as useless in 1807. He lived till the age of eighty-five in his provincial home, poverty- stricken, disliked and perpetually writing third- rate articles, manifestoes and other 'copy' which nobody wanted or would read.
Few politicians who have lived through a revolution and come out safely the other side are praised in history. `J'ai vecu,' said Sieyes when asked what he did, and the epigram is sup- posed to show what a poor creature he was. To be damned for not dying is a hard fate, but the verdict is invariable. The world remembers Mirabeau, Danton and Robespierre; it does not remember Barere. It remembers Lexiin, Trotsky and Stalin; it will have no time for Molotov. But Barere was suave, in his way eloquent and not naturally brutal. None of these things can be said of Molotov; he was just a stony killer. If Macaulay was right in calling Barere Beelzebub, then Molotov was Moloch.
RAYMOND POSTGATE
Previous page
