Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in France. Georg Brandes

up by their famous leader, Vergniaud, we read: "The rebellious priests are preparing a revolt against the constitution; these insolent myrmidons of absolutism are supplicating all the sovereigns of Europe for money and soldiers wherewith to reconquer the sceptre of France." Roland, as Minister of the Interior, said: "Mutinous and hypocritical priests, concealing their plans and their passions under the sacred veil of religion, do not hesitate to excite fanaticism and to arm their misguided fellow-citizens with the sword of intolerance." When the proposal to banish the priests was under discussion, Vergniaud spoke, half jestingly, half seriously, of the iniquity of bringing evil upon other countries by sending them such a gift. "Generally speaking," he maintained, "nothing can be more immoral than that one country should send into another the criminals of whom it desires to be rid." But he comforts himself with the idea that in Italy they will be received as saints, and that "in this gift of living saints which we are sending him, the Pope will recognise a humble attempt to express our gratitude for all the arms, legs, and other relics of dead saints with which he has favoured our pious credulity during the centuries gone by."

      "Yes," cries Isnard, the future President of the Convention, "let us send these plague-stricken creatures to the hospitals of Italy." And he adds that when a priest is depraved, he is never partly, but always wholly depraved, that to forgive crimes is the same as to commit them, that an end must be put to the existing state of matters, and that the enemies of the Revolution are themselves compelling the Revolution to crush them. From his lips issue for the first time the terrible words which were to be echoed and re-echoed times without number in days to come: "There is no need of proofs." That is to say, all priests accused were at once to be banished.

      And when the fear was expressed that such proceedings would result in civil war, the noted Girondist, Guadet, a disciple of Holbach, reassured the Assembly with a speech containing the following assertion: "Every one knows that a priest is as cowardly as he is covetous, that he wields no weapons but those of superstition, and that, having fought nowhere but in the theological prize-ring, he is a nonentity on the field of battle." It was soon seen how mistaken, in this matter at least, Guadet and his sympathisers were, and what bold, enthusiastic leaders the priests made in the sanguinary civil war which ensued.

      Things reached such a pitch that speakers actually began to excuse themselves when they were obliged to address the Assembly on church matters. François de Nantes (as spokesman of a committee, be it noted) declares: "Our one consolation in being obliged to take up your time with the discussion of church matters is the hope that the measures you will take will prevent the necessity of your ever hearing of them again." His whole speech is a tissue of audacities.

      These sentiments were shared by high and low. One of Louis XVI.'s ministers, the insolent, high-handed Cahier de Gerville, said one day, on leaving the council chamber, to his colleague Molleville, who noted down the expression in his Memoirs: "I wish I had these damned vermin, the clergy of all lands, between my fingers, that I might squeeze them all to death at once." But the spirit of the Revolution found temperate, dignified expression in a letter from the Republic to the Pope, which a woman had been commissioned to write. It is addressed to "The Prince-Bishop in Rome." In the name of the Republic Madame Roland writes: "High-priest of the Roman church, sovereign of a state which is slipping out of your hands, know that the only possible way in which you can preserve state and church is by making a disinterested confession and proclamation of those gospel principles which breathe a spirit of the purest democracy, the tenderest humanity, and the most perfect equality—principles with which Christ's representatives have adorned themselves only for the purpose of supporting and increasing a sovereign power which is now falling to pieces from decrepitude. The age of ignorance is past."

      But such language as this is quite out of keeping with what was generally spoken and written. The period of calm conviction was at an end, that of unbridled passions had begun. The passions followed in the track of the convictions. Hatred of Catholicism reached its climax; it broke out in one great flame all over France. Those were the golden days of the Clubs.

      The Cordelier Club held its meetings in the chapel of a monastery. All the paintings, tapestries, and carvings were torn down; nothing but the skeleton of the church remained. The president's seat was in the chancel, where the rain blew in through the broken panes of the east window. His table was composed of joiners' benches; on it lay a row of red caps, and whoever wished to speak had to put on one of these. Behind him was a statue of Liberty with broken instruments of torture in her hands. Planks, fragments of stalls, of church benches, or of shattered images provided seats for a dirty, wild audience in ragged carmagnoles (as their jackets were called), shouldering spears, or sitting with their bare arms crossed. The orators spoke boldly and to the point; everything was called by its plainest name; an indecent word or audacious gesture roused applause. They were often interrupted by opponents, and at times by the screeching of small owls, which had been driven from their homes under the monastery roof, and now flew in and out through the broken windows seeking food. These were not to be silenced by the chairman's bell; they were sometimes shot, and fell fluttering and bleeding among the crowd. Among the speakers were Danton, Marat, and Camille Desmoulins—the amiable, witty Camille, whose moderation brought upon him the charge of hypocrisy, and who even before the tribunal of the Revolution spoke of the sans-culotte, Jesus. Camille had private reasons for his hatred of the priests. When, in December 1790, he wished to marry his beloved Lucile, without doubt one of the purest and most beautiful of the female characters of the Revolution, no priest would perform the ceremony because he had written in a newspaper article that the religion of Mahomet was as intelligible as the religion of Jesus. He was obliged to recant this assertion and to go to confession before he could be married. But now he made amends. In his newspaper, Le vieux Cordelier, he wrote: "The whole subject of priests and of religions is disposed of when it has been said that they resemble each other in all being equally absurd, and when it has been instanced that the Tatars eat the excrement of the Grand Lama as the greatest delicacy. There is no fool too foolish to be honoured as Jupiter's equal. The Mongolians worship a cow, which is the object of as many genuflexions as the god Apis. … We have not the right to be aggravated by such follies, we who in our simplicity have so long allowed ourselves to be persuaded that it is possible to swallow a god as one swallows an oyster." An influential paper which had a great circulation among the Cordeliers was Loustalot's Les Révolutions de Paris. One of its numbers, published during Lent 1792, contained the following tirade, apropos of the shows at the fair: "In the days when there was a ruling religion in France, the tonsured jugglers allowed no competition during Holy Week. They alone might give performances. Now there is free competition. When the ordinary conjurer shows himself upon his stage he is attired in a cloak and strange headgear, by which he is distinguished from the surrounding crowd; but as soon as the performance is over he takes off his costume. The priest wears his all day long, and performs his part off as well as on the stage. … When will they blush to play the rôle of the harlequins of humanity?" Henceforward the revolutionary nickname of the priests is "theophagi." In the month of April the same newspaper contains an article in which it is proposed to apply to priests the regulations instituted by Johanna of Naples for the control of women of ill-fame. "They ought to be shut up in a house where they can preach and pray as much as they choose for those who seek them there, but should be prohibited from going abroad, so that they may not infect the population." The wine of Voltaire has turned into vinegar, into poison.

      A rival club of a very different type from the Cordeliers' was the Jacobins'. Its intellectual tendency was more serious and more pedantic. Its patron was Rousseau, as its rival's was Voltaire. The original programme of the Jacobins—love of equality, hatred of all established inequality—was derived purely from Rousseau; with it they managed to combine ambition, a cold, calculating, revolutionary spirit of persecution, and, underlying everything else, devotion to rule, that is to say, to the regulation of society according to Rousseau's principles.

      To the student who observes historic phenomena from the literary point of view, nothing in the history of the Revolution is more striking than the distinct manner in which all its men of action and of words acknowledge the literature of the eighteenth century to be the mainspring of their actions and utterances. They seem to seek no other honour than that of transforming ready-made principles into action. At Mirabeau's grave it was told to his honour that he had said of the philosophers: "They have produced