书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
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第788章

For, if France exists, it is owing to the thirty-five military chiefs and crowned kings of which he is the last direct scion; without their thousand years of hereditary rule and preserving policy the intruders into the Tuileries who have just profaned their tombs at St. Denis and thrown their bones into a common ditch,[153] would not be Frenchmen. At this moment, were suffrages free, the immense majority of the people, nineteen Frenchmen out of twenty, would recognize this innocent and precious child for their King, the heir of the people of which their nation and country is formed, a child of eight years, of rare precociousness, as intelligent as he is good, and of a gentle and winning expression. Look at the other figure alongside of him, his fist raised and with insults on his lips, with a hang-dog face, bloated with brandy, titular governor, official preceptor, and absolute master of this child, the cobbler Simon, malignant, foul-mouthed, mean in every way, forcing him to become intoxicated, starving him, preventing him from sleeping, thrashing him, and who, obeying orders, instinctively visits on him all his brutality and corruption that he may pervert, degrade and deprave him.[154] - In the Palais de Justice, midway between the tower of the Temple and the prison in the rue de Sèvres, an almost similar contrast, transposing the merits and demerits, daily brings together in opposition the innocent with the vile. There are days when the contrast, still more striking, seats criminals on the judges' bench and judges on the bench of criminals. On the first and second of Floréal, the old representatives and trustees of liberty under the monarchy, twenty-five magistrates of the Paris and Toulouse parliaments, many of them being eminent intellects of the highest culture and noblest character, embracing the greatest historical names of the French magistracy, -Etienne Pasquier, Lefèvre d'Ormesson, Molé de Champlatreux, De Lamoignon, de Malesherbes, - are sent to the guillotine[155] by the judges and juries familiar to us, assassins or brutes who do not take the trouble, or who have not the capacity, to give proper color to their sentences. M. de Malesherbes exclaims, after reading his indictment, " If that were only common-sense!" - In effect those who pronounce judgment are, by their own admission, "substantial jurymen, good sans-culottes, natural people." And such a nature! One of these, Trenchard, an Auvergnat carpenter, portrays himself accurately in the following note addressed to his wife before the trial comes on:

"If you are not alone, and the companion can work, you may come, my dear, and see the twenty-four gentlemen condemned, all of them former presidents or councillors in the parliaments of Toulouse and Paris. Irecommend you to bring something along with you (to eat), it will be three hours before we finish. I embrace you, my dear friend and wife."[156]

In the same court, Lavoisier, the founder and organizer of chemistry, the great discoverer, and condemned to death, asks for a reprieve of his sentence for a fortnight to complete an experiment, and the president, Coffinhal, another Auvergnat, replies,"The Republic has no need of savants."[157]

And it has no need of poets. The first poet of the epoch, AndréChénier, the delicate and superior artist who reopens antique sources of inspiration and starts the modern current, is guillotined; we possess the original manuscript indictment of his examination, a veritable master-piece of gibberish and barbarism, of which a full copy is necessary to convey an idea of its "turpitudes of sense and orthography."[158] The reader may there see, if he pleases, a man of genius delivered up to brutes, coarse, angry, despotic animals, who listen to nothing, who comprehend nothing, who do not even understand terms in common use, who stumble through their queries, and who, to ape intelligence, draggle their pens along in supreme stupidity.

The overthrow is complete. France, subject to the Revolutionary Government, resembles a human being forced to walk with his head down and to think with his feet.

_____________________________________________________________________Notes:

[1] Cf. "The Revolution," book I., ch. 3, and book III., chs. 9 and 10.

[2] Grégoire, " Memoires," II., 172. "About eighteen thousand ecclesiastics are enumerated among the émigrés of the first epoch.

About eighteen thousand more took themselves off, or were sent off, after the 2nd of September."[3] Ibid., 26. "The chief of the émigré bureau in the police department (May 9, 1805) enumerates about two hundred thousand persons reached, or affected, by the laws concerning emigration." - Lally-Tolendal, "Défense des Emigrés," (2nd part, p. 62 and passim).

Several thousand persons inscribed as émigrés did not leave France.

The local administration recorded them on its lists either because they lived in another department, and could not obtain the numerous certificates exacted by the law in proof of residence, or because those who made up the lists treated these certificates with contempt.

It was found convenient to manufacture an émigré in order to confiscate his possessions legally, and even to guillotine him, not less legally, as a returned émigré. - Message of the Directory to the "Five Hundred," Vent?se 3, year V.: "According to a rough estimate, obtained at the Ministry of Finances, the number enrolled on the general list of émigres amounts to over one hundred and twenty thousand; and, again, the lists from some of the departments have not come in." - Lafayette, "Mémoires," vol. II., 181. (Letters to M. de Maubourg, Oct. 17, 1799 (noté) Oct. 19, 1800.) According to the report of the Minister of Police, the list of émigrés, in nine vols., still embraced one hundred and forty-five thousand persons, notwithstanding that thirteen thousand were struck off by the Directory, and twelve hundred by the consular government.