HISTORY BY FLASH OF LIGHTNING. I.—THE TERROR.

THE student in his readings of history, or rather of the documents upon which history is built, comes every now and again upon a document so vivid, so poignant, so full of light, that he realises as he reads it that be has been placed for the moment in touch with the past in a way which is altogether special and apart. The fog of history—for there is a fog of history quite as much as a fog of war—rolls back, and for an instant be sees things and men as they were. He says, with Coleridge:

"I see no longer, I myself am there."

As Leigh Hunt said of the legend of Hero and Leander, "The story's heart still beats against its side."

To change the metaphor, a flash of lightning for an instant, but for an instant only, discovers every feature of the scene. The vision is as clear as it is instantaneous.

Such a lightning-flash on the history of the French Revolution is afforded by one of the secret Reports made to Lord Grenville, our Foreign Minister during the Terror, • The Report in question is quoted by M. Leatre in One Of his remarkable studies of the doenments of the Revolution.

printed in the second volume of "The Dropmore Papers,"— those marvellous five volumes of history, social and political, which, if they were not printed in a Blue-book, would be regarded as among the beat Memoirs in the language. Before we quote this particular piece of history by flash of lightning .

we must say a word or two about the document. It is nothing less than a Minute of the proceedings of the Secret Committee of Nine, itself a Committee of the Committee of Public Safety, which was drawn up by the secretary of that Committee, and sent in a very roundabout way to Lord Gren- ville. In other words, the secretary of this secret and all- powerful Committee, the very mainspring of the Terror, was to all intents and purposes a spy of the British Government.

and reported to them the doings of his bloodthirsty masters.* The following letter from Francis Drake, the British Agent at Genoa, dated November 9th, 1793, gives an account of the document we are going to quote :—" I have the honour to enclose a detailed account of the sitting of the Committee of Nine on the 2nd September last. Your Lordship may rely on the authenticity of it as it was drawn up by a person who is employed as secretary to that Committee, and who conceals his real principles under the cloak of the most extravagant Jacobinistn. Lord Mulgrave will explain to your Lordship

the route by which his communications are transmitted to me. I humbly beg leave to observe to your Lordship

that if the enclosed paper should be seen by any except his Majesty's Ministers, it might possibly lead to a discovery which would be very fatal to the writer of it."

The enclosure, entitled "Bulletin No. 1," is dated Monday, September 2nd,—clearly a slip for September 3rd. It begins by the statement that the Committee of Nine sat on ,

September 1st from midday till six o'clock on the evening of the 2nd. It reassembled at eleven o'clock at night on that

same day at its usual place, the house of the inept but none the less infamous Pache, and again sat, with that frenzied energy which Burke noted as one of the most dangerous signs of the Revolution, for some eight hours,—i.e., till seven on the morning of September 3rd.

The Report summarises the various points discussed by the Committee, which covered an enormous number of subjects connected with the internal government of France and of Paris,—such as the Royalist counter-plots. It deals with foreign affairs of all sorts, including hopes as to the way in which the British Opposition was going to get the mastery of Mr. Pitt. Then follow allusions to Turkey, Spain, the guillotine, and finance. Towards the end we are told that the death of the Queen ad of the Brissotins and those arrested on May 31st was agreed upon. "On the subject of the Queen, Cambon observed that Forgues said that they were in treaty with Brussels, Vienna, and Prussia on that subject, and that perhaps by alarming them, but putting off the judgment, they might greatly farther

their object. Heraut, Barrere, Jean Bon St. Andre, and Hebert rose in fury against this proposition ; saying that to keep Louis XVII. [i.e., the Dauphin] alive served the same

purpose in every way ; that the blood of the Queen was necessary to associate the Revolutionary Tribunal with the Convention, and to make the town of Paris co-partner of the destinies of the Convention; that the death of Capet was more especially the deed of the Convention, While that of the Queen would be the deed of Paris, of the Tribunal, and of the army of the Revolution."

Lastly, we are given a verbatim report of a speech by , Hebert—a speech made at seven o'clock on the morning of September 3rd—the document which we have described as showing us the moral physiognomy of the Terror as by a flash of lightning. It is the whole of the Terror in little. We See the Terrorists not only caught like rats in a trap, and biting, raging, scuttling, and squealing, but, stranger still, fully realising and analysing the awful situation in which they were placed, with all its hopelessness and helplessness. The thought of the welter of blood and terror which they had created, and of the appalling mountain of human agony piled up by their own hands, literally maddened them. It made them incapable not only of pity and human feeling, but even of any intelligent effort towards self-preservation. They were petrified by the horror of their deeds. They turned the Gorgon's head upon themselves. Hebert's cry, from a heart overwhelmed by the bitterness of death, that they are all doomed and that nothing can save them echoes like a dreadful chorus through his speech. They knew they must perish as miserably and as certainly as their victims had perished, and the thought went to their heads like wine.

They were drunk, but not, as the world thought, with fanaticism. It was not the fury of political zealotry or the lust of blood that made them kill men, women, and children, but the dread intoxication of despair. They had no illusions. They did not even for a moment think of themselves as martyrs or patriots. "We must die, but let as many as possible die with us and share our agony!" That was their only consolation. Warm newly shed blood seemed a kind of anodyne. It was all very well to make speeches about liberty and tyrants and so forth in the Convention, but in the dreadful privacy of the Committee-room what could such empty pretences avail ?

There they must face the awful fact that each of them was ready and willing to betray his neighbour to death to save his own skin if only it were of any use. But even treachery could bring no succour. Even though they could make a binding Agreement with the Powers, the Powers could not carry out the Agreement. The world at large must inevitably refuse to endorse such an amnesty. Their crimes bad doomed them to a punishment from which there was no escape. Had they known the Elizabethan drama, how the words of the bellman in Webster's tragedy would have come home to them. The couplet describing the course of man's life is exactly fitted to their case:—

" His life a general mist of error ; His death a hideous storm of terror."

Here is Hebert's speech, for we must not stand any longer between our readers and this mad torrent of vitriol:— " He said :—'I have promised the head of Antoinette. I shall go and cut it off myself if you are slow in giving it to me. I have promised it on your part to the sans culottes, who are demanding it, and without whom you cease to be. The instinct of the Republic makes them wish to unite themselves to us by this expiatory sacrifice, and yet you hesitate! But I will tell you one thing that will decide you. I cannot see light where it is dark ; I cannot see roses when there are only daggers. I know not whether there remains to you any hope of the Republic, of the Constitution, or of the safety of your persons; but I know this: that if you have any, you greatly deceive yourselves.

You will all perish. It cannot be otherwise. I do not know whether it has been well or ill done to bring the thing to where it is. But there it is !

Your generals are all betraying you, and they will all betray you. I should myself be one of the first to do it if I were a general of yours and a less conspicuous figure, and if I saw the chalice of making a good bargain that would preserve my life. Be sure that Pache and myself and all the judges of the King cannot save her. 'Twould only be possible by changing the face of Europe, and that cannot be at present. The kings, if they seek to destroy us, will work themselves an ill that in twenty years' time will destroy them.

But we shall not perish the less. France will be conquered; she will be humbled here and will submit herself there ; be sure of it.

We shall all perish, and those who have done like us. If they promised us an amnesty they would not hold to it, because they could not keep it; only you would be stabbed or poisoned instead of being quartered. We live for nothing but vengeance, and that may be immense. In dying let us leave to our enemies all the germs of their own death; and in France so great a destruction that the mark of it will never die.

To achieve this you must satisfy the sans culottes. They will kill all our enemies, but to do that we must keep them at a white beat, and the only way is by the death of Antoinette.

She is their quarry, the Brissotins are ours. It is the spoil of our enemies' treasure-house. Remember that the way to make them dare everything is to persuade them of what I cry loudly to them every day: that in this crisis, whatever happens, their obscurity is their safeguard, and that we alone shall answer for everything. Therefore let them rally strongly to us because the profits are for them and the dangers ours.

That is all I have to say, and now you know my opinion.'

With this he went out, not waiting a moment more. It was seven o'clock in the morning of the 3rd of September." Just imagine the appalling energy and ferocity of a man who could sit up all night and then pour forth this lava-streamt of invective at seven o'clock in the morning ! But if this is wonderful, what are we to say of the man who sat before his Minute-book and listened to it all, and seemed the humble, submissive scribe of sound Jacobin principles ? Yet in his heart all the time was burning a rage so intense that he dared to betray every word and act of the Committee to Pitt. The man who could act such a part must indeed have had nerves of iron.

But we spoil the impression of Hebert's speech by comment, and will say no more except to remind our readers that Burke in a memorable passage notes how a democracy instinctively feels that, unlike a personal tyrant, it can never be brought to book, or made to account for its deeds. The obscurity of the individuals who make up the democracy protects them. "No man apprehends in his person that he can be made subject to punishment." Had the docu- ment containing Hebert's speech been shown to Burke by Grenville, or had he and Hebert reached the same truth by different roads ?