MEMOIRS OF BARI:RE.*
MOST English readers who know anything at all about Barere have taken their ideas of him from Macaulay's review of these Memoirs which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of April, 1844. The Memoirs themselves appeared in Paris in 1843, two years after Barere's death, edited by Hippolyte Carnot, son of the famous "Organiser of Victory," and father of the late President. Macaulay's review was a characteristic piece of work, in firm outlines and broad colours. Macaulay persuaded himself that Bathe was a scoundrel of the first water, approaching nearer -than any other historic personage "to the idea of consummate and universal depravity." Macaulay never comprehended the subtle nuances of personal character. He compared Hallam to the "banging Judge," but the comparison was more suited to himself. He had strong likes and dislikes, as witness hie treatment of Bacon and of William Penn, and Barere was one of the persons he chose to dislike with an intense hatred rare even in the numerous passionate judgments of persons connected with the French Revolution. Now, we may say at once that Macaulay's judgment of Barere will "never do." The hatred was too obvious, the English prejudice against an avowed and apparently honest hater of England was too keen ; and since Macaulay wrote, moreover, many facts have come to light bearing on the Revolution which must make one pause before accepting the theory that the chief actors in that titanic struggle were devils incarnate. To us, after reading these most interesting Memoirs, and after due reflection on the remarkable era to which they relate, Barere seems not very dissimilar from many other men, whether Frenchmen or of other nations. He was certainly no saint, and does not pretend to be so ; he had grave faults of character; but to say that he was a compound of "sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, barbarity," is to say what is inherently improbable, and what cannot be proved to be true by an appeal to the known facts of history.
Let us give, in the first place, some idea of Barere's life. He was born at Tarbes, in the Pyrenees, in 1755, his father being a lawyer and the possessor of a little fief in the valley of Argeles, whose feudal rights he renounced voluntarily long before they were abolished in that " pentecostal night" of August 4th. Barere was sent to Toulouse University, and was afterwards called to the Bar, his first case being the defence of a young woman accused of infanticide. His pene- trating mind led him to seek the advice of a famous anatomist, who proved to demonstration that the child was still-born. Barre won his case, and became celebrated, his next cases adding to his fame. Dividing his time between law and literature, Barere would probably have decided completely for the former, had it not been for an early visit to Paris the year before the Revolution broke out, when he was drawn into
• Memoirs of Bertrand Boxers, Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety during the Revolution. Sow filet translated by no IT. Payen-Payne. 4 vols. London: H. S. Nichols. the whirlpool of politics, which, he says, "was the cause of all my misfortunes." He was the next year elected by his own district to the States-General; and it is certainly some tribute to his character that his own people in the lovely valleys of the Pyrenees trusted him all through. He had apparently been in favour of some kind of consti- tutional Monarchy, feeling, as he puts it, that the French, subjected for generations to servility and oppression, were no more fit for a Republic than were the Turks. But when the National Convention declared for the Republic on Septem- ber 21st, 1792, Barere became definitely Republican, and from that time on he was foremost in the defence of the French Republic against the conspiracy of Kings. He pre- sided over the Convention on historic occasions, and he was at the head of the Committee of Public Safety. Denounced by Freron (for whom he expresses the most unbounded hatred and contempt) and by Lecointre, he was arrested and detained for eight months, was accused of having filled France with prisons and Revolutionary Tribunals, was tried and sen- tenced. The line of defence taken by Barere was that the Revolutionary Tribunal was created on the proposal of Denton before the Committee of Public Safety existed, and that the horrible Law of Suspects was due to Merlin of Thionville and the Committee of Legislation, and had no connection with the Committee of Public Safety. Strong reaction was, how- ever, in the air, and Barere was condemned to imprisonment under some personal indignities, in the Isle of Oleron, and afterwards at Saintes, whence he escaped with the aid of friends, and was for some time at Bordeaux, penniless, and obliged to borrow the very coat he wore. He had the greatest hatred and contempt of the Directory, and it was only after the 18th Brumaire (which he regarded as a sad but inevit- able catastrophe) that he was pardoned and set free by Napoleon. He expressed to Napoleon the gratitude he felt for this act, but he loses no opportunity of stating his hatred of the Napoleonic system, and the character and person of Bonaparte himself. Carnot personally introduced Barere to Napoleon, and requested him to interest himself in so able a man, and the First Consul offered to the ex-Committeeman of Public Safety a post as a kind of subsidised editor and general observer of the public pulse. This duty Barere felt he could not accept, and he preferred to throw himself into literary work, publishing translations, studies in theatrical art, and living in literary society, regarded in the last years of the Empire as somewhat of a suspect. After the return of the Bourbons, Barere took refuge in Brussels, which city he found charming, and at Mons, returning to France after the July Revolution. As an old man, he was elected by his fellow-citizens a member of the Departmental Council of the Hautes Pyrenees, and he lived in that beautiful country until his death in 1841.
We have said that instead of being an atrocious scoundrel, as Macaulay painted him, Barere was not unlike the majority of men. We can scarcely judge the chief actors in the French Revolution by the ordinary standards of humdrum life. No leading man felt his head secure on his shoulders for forty- eight hours together, and it is not easy for any of us to say how he would or would not act under such appalling con- ditions. Barere freely admits that he found politics dangerous and demoralising, and something is to be forgiven to one flung so suddenly into such a vortex. He seems to have been a man with not a little of the artist in his temperament. A situation impressed him, a character repelled him or attracted him, some little dramatic scene affected him in the midst of tremendous events. He caused much hatred and suspicion by magnifying, in a dramatic way, the deeds of the French Revolutionary armies, in the tribune of the Convention. He was given to rhetoric at times when those around him thought deeds, not words, essential at the moment. To Macaulay, with his common-sense and plain, downright intellect, this kind of man seemed a poltroon ; but that is not a necessary hypothesis, and there is abundant evidence that, at very serious crises, Barere behaved in a far from cowardly way. The positive evidence for his excessive sensuality is slender, and his unhappy marriage may be partly set up as an excuse for irregular conduct. It would have been better for him had he never entered the political arena, as Danton, in a well- known passage, exclaimed it would have been better for him- self also ; but, being there, we do not know that Barere's opinions and actual doings will not bear favourable comparison with those of most of the leading actors in that great drama, though we admit that the standard is a very low one.
Barere saw clearly into the faults of the ancien rggime, and as clearly into the mental and moral condition into which the French people had been brought. "They desire to be free, but cannot be just," he declared, and we do not know that a more truthful verdict could, on the whole, be passed on the Revolution. His characterisation of Louis XVI. is excellent, —a weak, good-natured man, devoted to eating and hunting, but with a "keen sense of order and justice." Necker he regarded as a quack, he loathed Marat as a bloodthirsty villain, and Danton as the type of the ambitious, unscrupu- lous demagogue. His strongest denunciations are reserved for Robespierre, whose feline malignity has never been better unveiled than in these pages. Though himself a victim of the reaction of Thermidor and a vehement opponent of Tallien, Freron, Barras, and the rest who helped to bring that about, Barere rejoiced at the fall of Robespierre, who, he clearly shows, deliberately intended to forestall the great Corsican by setting up his own dictatorship. St. Just is also vigorously denounced, though he is regarded by Barere as an able and more clear-sighted man than the "sea-green Incor- ruptible." If Barere has one hero amid all these hundreds of pages of vehement denunciation, it is Mirabeau, whose intrigue with the Court scarcely affects him. We might perhaps have added Carnot, to whom he pays a deserved tribute; but even for Carnot he has abuse, scarcely merited. For the chief heroes of the Parisian mob, the men of the Commune, Barere expresses intense loathing; and he loses no opportunity of denouncing the levity, cruelty, sensationalism, and ambitions designs of Paris itself. He finds the true life of France in the provinces, and especially in that interesting country from which he himself came. Barere seems to have been at first favourable to constitutional Monarchy, but from September 21st, 1792, when the Republic was declared, he became a very thorough Republican, and he does not seem to have swerved from that ideal during his active career. His Republic was the legal, moderate Republic of what might be called the Left Centre. He declared that the Commune and the Jacobin Club together ruined his ideal. Absent from Paris during the preparation for August 10th, he was thoroughly hostile to the September massacres, hostile to the establishment of the Revolutionary Committees, hostile to the Law of Suspects, and to the monstrous law of the 22nd Floreal. He defends the Committee of Public Safety as rendered necessary by the coalition of monarchical Europe, and repels the accusations brought against that body. His judgment of the Napoleonic Empire appears to us sound. He exposes, sometimes minutely, Bonaparte's intrigues and devices, denounces his colossal egotism, and sees in his Spanish enterprise, many particulars of which he gives, the principal cause of his ruin.
We have said that Barere hated England, and this, perhaps, has been the chief cause why Macaulay and other English people have BO intensely disliked Barere. He estab- lished and carried on for a time a so-called Anti-British Journal for the sake of arousing his fellow-countrymen against England. Yet even here we must be just to Barre, who fails to distinguish between two classes of English opinion, and who had in his mind the very faulty and cor- rupt political system of England as it revealed itself to him in the last century. He detested Pitt, and tells us not a few stories of Pitt's subsidies, reporting a saying of Pitt to the French Commissioner for the exchange of prisoners in England : Your Frenchmen are neither very unreasonable nor very dear; I obtained for five hundred guineas a copy of the orders of the Directory for the descent on Ireland." The "gold of Pitt" runs "glittering like a brook" through all these pages, and it is evident that Barere is sincere in his belief that it is the fixed intention of Pitt to muti- late and humiliate France, though he gives us no evidence of Pitt's hatred before 1793. Barere, in truth, confounds England with her Government; and though this was quite correct after Napoleon's designs became a danger to all Europe, it was not correct in the earlier war with the Directory, as Barere himself admitted when he appealed from the Government to the people. Barere met Erskine in Paris and had great admiration both for him and for Fox, who, according to him, were not so friendly towards Napoleon after the Peace of Amiens as they have often been represented. A " fair-haired " Englishman also called on Barere in Paris, who turned out to be Sir Francis Burdett. While indulging the dislike for England, Barere was wise enough to discern the folly of Napoleon's Orders in Council directed against English trade. Indeed, as we have said. Barere's general body of abstract opinions seems to us to be fairly sound and reason- able, though he is evidently egotistic and perhaps malicious. His Memoirs, now translated into English for the first time, are not by any means the least valuable of the documents upon which we base our conception of the French Revolution.
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