BARERE'S MEMOIRS.

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, APRIL, 1844.]

THIS book has more than one title to our serious attention. It is an appeal, solemnly made to posterity by a man who played a conspicuous part in great events, and who represents himself as deeply aggrieved by the rash and malevolent censure of his contemporaries. To such an appeal we shall always give ready audience. We can perform no duty more useful to society, or more agreeable to our own feelings, than that of making, as far as our power extends, reparation to the slandered and persecuted benefactors to mankind. We therefore promptly took into our consideration this copious apology for the life of Bertrand Barère. We have made up our minds; and we now propose to do him, by the blessing of God, full and signal justice.

aware that temptations such as those to which the members of the Convention and of the committee of public safety were exposed, must try severely the strength of the firmest virtue. Indeed, our inclination has always been to regard with an indulgence, which to some rigid moralists appears excessive, those faults into which gentle and noble spirits are sometimes hurried by the excitement of conflict, by the maddening influence of sympathy, and by illregulated zeal for a public cause.

With such feelings we read this book, and compared it with other accounts of the events in which Barère bore a part. It is now our duty to express the opinion to which this investigation has led us.

Our opinion then is this, that Barère apIt is to be observed that the appellant in this proached nearer than any person mentioned case does not come into court alone. He is in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to attended to the bar of public opinion by two the idea of consummate and universal deprav compurgators who occupy highly honourable ity. In him the qualities which are the proper stations. One of these is M. David of Angers, objects of hatred, and the qualities which are the member of the Institute, an eminent sculptor, proper objects of contempt, preserve an exquiand, if we have been rightly informed, a favour-site and absolute harmony. In almost every ite pupil, though not kinsman, of the painter who bore the same name. The other, to whom we owe the biographical preface, is M. HippoLyte Carnot, member of the Chamber of Deputies, and son of the celebrated Director. In the judgment of M. David, and of M. Hippolyte Carnot, Barère was a deserving and an ill-used man, a man who, though by no means faultless, must yet, when due allowance is made for the force of circumstances and the infirmity of human nature, he considered as on the whole entitled to our esteem. It will be for the public to determine, after a full hearing, whether the editors have, by thus connecting their names with that of Barère, raised his character or lowered their own.

particular sort of wickedness he has had rivals. His sensuality was immoderate; but 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 mean, a few as impudent. There may also have been as great liars, though we never met with them or read of them. But when we put every thing together, sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, barbarity, the result is something which in a novel we should condemn as caricature, and to which we venture to say, no parallel can be found in history.

It would be grossly unjust, we acknowledge, to try a man situated as Barère was by a severe standard. Nor have we done so. We have We are not conscious that, when we opened formed our opinion of him by comparing him, this book, we were under the influence of any not with politicians of stainless character, not feeling likely to pervert our judgment. Un- with Chancellor D'Aguesseau, or General Wash doubtedly we had long entertained a most ington, or Mr. Wilberforce, or Earl Gray, but unfavourable opinion of Barère; but to this with his own colleagues of the Mountain. That opinion we were not tied by any passion or by party included a considerable number of the any interest. Our dislike was a reasonable worst men that ever lived; but we see in it dislike, and might have been removed by reason. nothing like Barère. Compared with him Indeed, our expectation was, that these Me- Fouché seems honest; Billaud seems humane; moirs would in some measure clear Barère's Hébert seems to rise into dignity. Every other fame. That he could vindicate himself from chief of a party, says M. Hippolyte Carnot, all the charges which had been brought against has found apologists; one set of men exalts him, we knew to be impossible: and his editors the Girondists; another set justifies Danton; a admit that he has not done so. But we thought third deifies Robespierre; but Barère remains it highly probable that some grave accusations without a defender. We venture to suggest a would be refuted, and that many offences to very simple solution of this phenomenon. All which he would have been forced to plead the other chiefs of parties had some good guilty would be greatly extenuated. We were qualities, and Barère had none. The genius, not disposed to be severe. We were fully courage, patriotism, and humanity of the Giron * Mémoires de Bertrand Berère; publiés par MM. dist statesmen, more than atoned for what was HIPPOLYTE CARNOT, Membre de la Chambre des Dé- culpable in their conduct, and should have putés, et DAVID d'Angers, Membre de l'Institut: pré-protected them from the insult of being comcédés d'une Notice Historique par H. CARNOT. Tomes. Paris: 1843.

pared with such a thing as Barère. Danton

like the cedar of Lebanon. It is barely possible that, under good guidance and in favourable circumstances, such a man might have slipped

and Robespierre were, indeed, bad men; but in both of then some important parts of the mind remained sound. Danton was brave and resolute, fond of pleasure, of power, and of dis-through life without discredit. But the unseatinction, with vehement passions, with lax principles, but with some kind and manly feelings, capable of great crimes, but capable also of friendship and of compassion. He, therefore, naturally finds admirers among persons of bold and sanguine dispositions. Robespierre was a vain, envious, and suspicious man, with a hard heart, weak nerves, and a gloomy temper. But we cannot with truth deny that he was, in the vulgar sense of the word, disinterested, that his private life was correct, or that he was sincerely zealous for his own system of politics and morals. He therefore naturally finds admirers among honest but moody and bitter democrats. If no class has taken the reputation of Barère under its patronage, the reason is plain: Barère had not a single virtue, nor even the semblance of one.

worthy craft, which even in still water would have been in danger of going down from its own rottenness, was launched on a raging ocean, amidst a storm in which a whole armada of gallant ships were cast away. The weakest and most servile of human beings found himself on a sudden an actor in a Revolution which convulsed the whole civilized world. At first he fell under the influence of humane and moderate men, and talked the language of humanity and moderation. But he soon found himself surrounded by fierce and resolute spirits, scared by no danger and restrained by no scruple. He had to choose whether he would be their victim or their accomplice. His choice was soon made. He tasted blood, and felt no loathing: he tasted it again, and liked it well. Cruelty became with him, first a habit, then a passion, at last a madness. So complete and It is true that he was not, as far as we are rapid was the degeneracy of his nature, that able to judge, originally of a savage disposi- within a very few months after the time when tion; but this circumstance seems to us only he passed for a good-natured man, he had to aggravate his guilt. There are some un- brought himself to look on the despair and happy men constitutionally prone to the darker misery of his fellow-creatures with a glee passions, men all whose blood is gall, and to resembling that of the fiends whom Dante saw whom bitter words and harsh actions are as watching the pool of seething pitch in Malenatural as snarling and biting to a ferocious bolge. He had many associates in guilt; but dog. To come into the world with this wretched he distinguished himself from them all by the mental disease is a greater calamity than to be Bacchanalian exultation which he seemed to born blind or deaf. A man who, having such feel in the work of death. He was drunk with a temper, keeps it in subjection, and constrains innocent and noble blood, laughed and shouted himself to behave habitually with justice and as he butchered, and howled strange songs and humanity towards those who are in his power, reeled in strange dances amidst the carnage. seems to us worthy of the highest admiration. Then came a sudden and violent turn of fortune. There have been instances of this self-com- The miserable man was hurled down from the mand; and they are among the most signal height of power to hopeless ruin and infamy. triumphs of philosophy and religion. On the The shock sobered him at once. The fumes other hand, a man who, having been blessed of his horrible intoxication passed away. But by nature with a bland disposition, gradually he was now so irrecoverably depraved, that the brings himself to inflict misery on his fellow-discipline of adversity only drove him further creatures with indifference, with satisfaction, and at length with a hideous rapture, deserves to be regarded as a portent of wickedness; and such a man was Barère. The history of his downward progress is full of instruction. Weakness, cowardice, and fickleness were born with him; the best quality which he received from nature was a good temper. These, it is true, are not very promising materials; yet out of materials as unpromising, high sentiments of piety and of honour have sometimes made martyrs and heroes. Rigid principles often do for feeble minds what stays do for feeble bodies. But Barère had no principles at all. His cha- This is the view which we have long taken racter was equally destitute of natural and of of Barère's character; but, till we read these acquired strength. Neither in the commerce Memoirs, we held our opinion with the diffi of life, nor in books, did we ever become ac-dence which becomes a judge who has heard quainted with any mind so unstable, so utterly only one side. The case seemed strong, and in destitute of tone, so incapable of independent parts unanswerable; yet we did not know what thought and earnest preference, so ready to take the accused party might have to say for him impressions and so ready to lose them. He self; and, not being much inclined to take our resembled those creepers which must lean on fellow-creatures either for angels of light or something, and which as soon as their prop is for angels of darkness, we could not but feei removed, fall down in utter helplessness. He some suspicion that his offences had been excould no more stand up, erect and self-support-aggerated. That suspicion is now at an end ed, in any cause, than the ivy can rear itself The vindication is before us. It occupies iour uke the oak, or the wild vine shoot to heaven volumes. It was the work of forty years.

into wickedness. Ferocious vices, of which he had never been suspected, had been developed in him by power. Another class of vices, less hateful, perhaps, but more despicable, was now developed in him by poverty and disgrace. Having appalled the whole world by great crimes perpetrated under the pretence of zeal for liberty, he became the meanest of all the tools of despotism. It is not easy to settle the order of precedence among his vices; but we are inclined to think that his baseness was, on the whole, a rarer and more marvellous thing than his cruelty.

be brought to trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He would have been better em ployed in concerting military measures which might have repaired our disasters in Belgium, and might have arrested the progress of the enemies of the Revolution in the west.”—(Vol. ii. p. 312.)

Now it is notorious that Marie Antoinette was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, not at Robespierre's instance, but in direct op position to Robespierre's wishes. We will cite a single authority, which is quite decisive. Buonaparte, who had no conceivable motive to disguise the truth, who had the best opportunities of knowing the truth, and who, after his marriage with the Archduchess, naturally felt an interest in the fate of his wife's kinswoman, distinctly affirmed that Robespierre opposed the trying of the queen. Who, then, was the person who really did propose that the Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should be tried? Full information will be found in the Moniteur.† From that valuable record it appears that, on the first of August 1793, an orator deputed by the Committee of Public Safety addressed the Convention in a long and elaborate discourse. He asked, in passionate language, how it happened that the enemies of the Republic still continued to hope for success. "Is it," he cried, "because we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian woman? Is it because we have shown so strange an indulgence to the

would be absurd to suppose that it does not refute every serious charge which admitted of refutation. How many serious charges, then, are here refuted? Not a single one. Most of the imputations which have been thrown on Barère he does not even notice. In such cases, of course, judgment must go against him by default. The fact is, that nothing can be more meagre and uninteresting than his account of the great public transactions in which he was engaged. He gives us hardly a word of new information respecting the proceedings of the Committee of Public Safety; and, by way of compensation, tells us long stories about things which happened before he emerged from obscurity, and after he had again sunk into it. Nor is this the worst. As soon as he ceases to write trifles, he begins to write lies; and such lies! A man who has never been within the tropics does not know what a thunder-storm means; a man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie. Among the numerous classes which make up the great genus Mendacium, the Mendacium Vasconicum, or Gascon lie, has, during some centuries, been highly esteemed as peculiarly circumstantial and peculiarly impudent; and among the Mendacia Vasconica, the Mendacium Barerianum is, without doubt, the finest species. It is, indeed, a superb variety, and quite throws into the shade some Mendacia which we were used to regard with admiration. The Mendacium Wrax-race of our ancient tyrants? It is time that allianum, for example, though by no means to this unwise apathy should cease; it is time to be despised, will not sustain the comparison extirpate from the soil of the Republic the last for a moment. Seriously, we think that M. roots of royalty. As for the children of Louis Hippolyte Carnot is much to blame in this the conspirator, they are hostages for the Re matter. We can hardly suppose him to be public. The charge of their maintenance shall worse read than ourselves in the history of the be reduced to what is necessary for the food Convention, a history which must interest him and keep of two individuals. The public deeply, not only as a Frenchman, but also as a treasure shall no longer be lavished on creason. He must, therefore, be perfectly aware that tures who have too long been considered as many of the most important statements which privileged. But behind them lurks a woman these volumes contain are falsehoods, such who has been the cause of all the disasters of as Corneille's Dorante, or Molière's Scapin, France, and whose share in every project ador Colin d'Harleville's Monsieur de Crac would verse to the Revolution has long been known. have been ashamed to utter. We are far, in- National justice claims its right over her. It is deed, from holding M. Hippolyte Carnot an- to the tribunal appointed for the trial of conswerable for Barère's want of veracity. But spirators that she ougnt to be sent. It is only M. Hippolyte Carnot has arranged these Me- by striking the Austrian woman that you can moirs, has introduced them to the world by a make Francis and George, Charles and Wil laudatory preface, has described them as docu- liam, sensible of the crimes which their minisments of great historical value, and has illus-ters and their armies have committed." The trated them by notes. We cannot but think that, by acting thus, he contracted some obligations of which he does not seem to have been at all aware; and that he ought not to have suffered any monstrous fiction to go forth under the sanction of his name, without adding a line at the foot of the page for the purpose of cautioning the reader.

We will content ourselves at present with pointing out two instances of Barère's wilful and deliberate mendacity; namely, his account of the death of Marie Antoinette, and his account of the death of the Girondists. His account of the death of Marie Antoinette is as follows:-"Robespierre in his turn proposed that the members of the Capet family should e banished, and that Marie Antoinette should

speaker concluded by moving that Mare Antoinette should be brought to judgment, and should, for that end, be forthwith transferred to the Conciergerie; and that all the members of the house of Capet, with the exception of those who were under the sword of the law, and of the two children of Louis, should be banished from the French territory. The motion was carried without debate.

Now, who was the person who made this speech and this motion? It was Barère himself. It is clear, then, that Barère attributed his own mean insolence and barbarity to one who whatever his crimes may have been, was in

* O'Meara's Voice from St. Helena, ii. 170.
↑ Moniteur, 2d, 7th, and 9th, of August, 1793.

this matter innocent. The only question remaining is, whether Barère was misled by his memory, or wrote a deliberate falsehood.

or made a report against any, or drew up an impeachment against any."

of these things so affirmed by us, we appeal to that very Moniteur to which Barère has dared to appeal.t

Now, we affirm that this is a lie. We affirm We are convinced that he wrote a deliberate that Barère himself took the lead in the profalsehood. His memory is described by editors ceedings of the convention against the Gironas remarkably good, and must have been bad dists. We affirm that he, on the twenty-eighth indeed if he could not remember such a fact of July, 1793, proposed a decree for bringing as this. It is true that the number of murders nine Girondist deputies to trial, and for putting in which he subsequently bore a part was so to death sixteen other Girondist deputies withgreat, that he might well confound one with out any trial at all. We affirm that, when the another, that he might well forget what part of accused deputies had been brought to trial, and the daily hecatomb was consigned to death by when some apprehension arose that their elohimself, and what part by his colleagues. But quence might produce an effect even on the retwo circumstances make it quite incredible voluntary tribunal, Barère did, on the 8th of that the share which he took in the death of Brumaire, second a motion for a decree auMarie Antoinette should have escaped his re- thorizing the tribunal to decide without hearing collection. She was one of his earliest vic-out the defence; and, for the truth of every one tims. She was one of his most illustrious victims. The most hardened assassin remembers the first time that he shed blood; and the widow of Louis was no ordinary sufferer. If the question had been about some milliner butchered for hiding in her garret her brother who had let drop a word against the Jacobin club-if the question had been about some old nun, dragged to death for having mumbled what were called fanatical words over her beads-Barère's memory might well have deceived him. It would be as unreasonable to expect him to remember all the wretches whom he slew, as all the pinches of snuff that he took. But though Barère murdered many hundreds of human beings, he murdered only one queen. That he, a small country lawyer, who, a few years before, would have thought himself honoured by a glance or a word from the daughter of so many Cæsars, should call her the Austrian woman, should send her from jail to jail, should deliver her over to the executioner, was surely a great event in his life. Whether he had reason to be proud of it or ashamed of it, is a question on which we may perhaps differ from his editors; but they will admit, we think, that he could not have forgot ten it.

We, therefore, confidently charge Barère with having written a deliberate falsehood; and we have no hesitation in saying that we never, in the course of any historical researches that we have happened to make, fell in with a falsehood so audacious, except only the falsehood which we are about to expose.

What M. Hyppolyte Carnot, knowing, as he must know, that this book contains such falsehoods as those which we have exposed, can have meant, when he described it as a valuable addition to our stock of historical information, passes our comprehension. When a man is not ashamed to tell lies about events which took place before hundreds of witnesses, and which are recorded in well-known and accessible books, what credit can we give to his account of things done in corners? No historian who does not wish to be laughed at will ever cite the unsupported authority of Barère as sufficient to prove any fact whatever. The only thing, as far as we can see, on which these volumes throw any light, is the exceeding baseness of the author.

So much for the veracity of the Memoirs. In a literary point of view, they are beneath criticism. They are as shallow, flippant and affected as Barère's oratory in the convention. They are also, what his oratory in the convention was not, utterly insipid. In fact, they are the mere dregs and rinsings of a bottle, of which even the first froth was but of very questionable flavour.

We will now try to present our readers with a sketch of this man's life. We shall, of course, make very sparing use, indeed, of his own memoirs; and never without distrust, except where they are confirmed by other evidence.

Bertrand Barère was born in the year 1755, Of the proceeding against the Girondists, at Tarbes in Gascony. His father was the Barère speaks with just severity. He calls it proprietor of a small estate at Vieuzac, in the an atrocious injustice perpetrated against the beautiful vale of Argelès. Bertrand always legislators of the Republic. He complains loved to be called Barère de Vieuzac, and flatthat distinguished deputies, who ought to have tered himself with the hope that, by the help of been re-admitted to their seats in the Conven- this feudal addition to his name, he might pass tion, were sent to the scaffold as conspirators. for a gentleman. He was educated for the bar The day, he exclaims, was a day of mourning for France. It mutilated the national representation; it weakened the sacred principle, tha the delegates of the people were inviolable. He protests that he had no share in the guilt. "I have had," he says, "the patience to go through the Moniteur, extracting all the charges brought against deputies, and all the decrees for arresting and impeaching deputies. Nowhere will you find my name. I never brought a charge against any of my colleagues, of

at Toulouse, the seat of one of the most celebrated parliaments of the kingdom, practised as an advocate with considerable success, and wrote some small pieces, which he sent to the principal literary societies in the south of France. Among provincial towns, Toulouse seems to have been remarkably rich in indiffe. rent versifiers and critics. It gloried especially

* Vol. ii. 407.

Moniteur, 31st of July, 1793, and Nonidi, first Decade
Brumaire, in the year 2.

came a husband. Our own guess is, that his wife was, as he says, a virtuous and amiable woman, and that she did her best to make him happy during some years. It seems clear that, when circumstances developed the latent atro city of his character, she could no longer en

letters unopened. Then it was, we imagine, that he invented the fable about his distress on his wedding-day.

in one venerable institution, called the Acade-ed his domestic life till some time after he be my of the Floral Games. This body held every year a grand meeting, which was a subject of intense interest to the whole city, and at which flowers of gold and silver were given as prizes for odes, for idyls, and for something that was called eloquence. These bounties produced of course the ordinary effect of bounties, and turn-dure him, refused to see him, and sent back his ed people who might have been thriving attorneys and useful apothecaries into small wits and bad poets. Barère does not appear to have been so lucky as to obtain any of these precious flowers; but one of his performances was mentioned with honour. At Montauban he was more fortunate. The academy of that town bestowed on him several prizes, one for a panegyric on Louis the Twelfth, in which the blessings of monarchy and the loyalty of the French nation were set forth; and another for a panegyric on poor Franc de Pompignan, in which, as may easily be supposed, the philosophy of the eighteenth century was sharply assailed. Then Barère found an old stone inscribed with three Latin words, and wrote a dissertation upon it, which procured him a seat in a learned assembly, called the Toulouse Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Polite Literature. At length the doors of the Academy of the Floral Games were opened to so much merit. Barère, in his thirty-third year, took his seat as one of that illustrious brotherhood, and made an inaugural oration which was greatly admired. He apologizes for re-lively curiosity on his fine countenance, which counting these triumphs of his youthful genius. We own that we cannot blame him for dwelling long on the least disgraceful portion of his existence. To send in declamations for prizes offered by provincial academies, is indeed no very useful or dignified employment for a bearded man; but it would have been well if Barère had always been so employed.

In 1785 he married a young lady of considerable fortune. Whether she was in other respects qualified to make a home happy, is a point respecting which we are imperfectly informed. In a little work, entitled Melancholy Pages, which was written in 1797, Barère avers that his marriage was one of mere convenience, that at the altar his heart was heavy with sorrowful forebodings, that he turned pale as he pronounced the solemn "Yes," that unbidden tears rolled down his cheeks, that his mother shared his presentiment, and that the evil omen was accomplished. "My marriage," he says, "was one of the most unhappy of marriages." So romantic a tale, told by so noted a liar, did not command our belief. We were, therefore, not much surprised to discover that, in his Memoirs, he calls his wife a most amiable woman, and declares that, after he had been united to her six years, he found her as amiable as ever. He complains, indeed, that she was too much attached to royalty and to the old superstition; but he assures us that his respect for her virtues induced him to tolerate her prejudices. Now Barère, at the time of his marriage, was himself a royalist and a Catholic. He had gained one prize by flattering the throne, and another by defending the church. It is hardly possible, therefore, that disputes about politics or religion should have embitter

In 1788, Barere paid his first visit to Paris, attended reviews, heard Laharpe at the Lyca um, and Condorcet at the Academy of Sciences, stared at the envoys of Tippoo Saib, saw the royal family dine at Versailles, and kept a journal in which he noted down adventures and speculations. Some parts of this journal are printed in the first volume of the work before us, and are certainly most characteristic. The worst vices of the writer had not yet shown themselves; but the weakness which was the parent of those vices appears in every line. His levity, his inconsistency, his servility, were already what they were to the last. All his opinions, all his feelings, spin round and round like a weathercock in a whirlwind. Nay, the very impressions which he receives through his senses are not the same two days together. He sees Louis the Sixteenth, and is so much blinded by loyalty as to find his majesty handsome. "I fixed my eyes," he says, "with a

I thought open and noble." The next time that the king appears, all is altered. His majesty's eyes are without the smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought up. It is the same with more important questions. Barère is for the parliaments on the Monday and against the parliaments on the Tuesday, for feudality in the morning and against feudality in the afternoon. One day he admires the English constitution: then he shudders to think that, in the struggles by which that constitution had been obtained, the barbarous islanders had murdered a king, and gives the preference to the constitution of Bearn. Bearn, he says, has a sublime constitution, a beautiful constitution. There the nobility and clergy meet in one house and the commons in another. If the houses differ, the king has the casting vote. A few weeks later we find him raving against the principles of this sublime and beautiful consti tution. To admit deputies of the nobility and clergy into the legislature is, he says, neither more or less than to admit enemies of the nation into the legislature.

In this state of mind, without one settled purpose or opinion, the slave of the last word. royalist, aristocrat, democrat, according to the prevailing sentiment of the coffee-house or drawing-room into which he had just looked, did Barère enter into public life. The statesgeneral had been summoned. Barère went down to his own province, was there elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned to Paris in May 1789.

A great crisis, often predicted, had at last arrived. In no country, we conceive, have in