admirers. European society believed
that he had affinity with it. It took him to be a man of authority,
integrity, and order, an enemy of corruption and of war, who fell
because he attempted to bar the progress of unbelief, which was the
strongest current of the age. His private life was inoffensive and
decent. He had been the equal of emperors and kings; an army of
700,000 men obeyed his word; he controlled millions of secret service
money, and could have obtained what he liked for pardons, and he lived
on a deputy's allowance of eighteen francs a day, leaving a fortune of
less than twenty guineas in depreciated assignats. Admiring enemies
assert that by legal confiscation, the division of properties, and the
progressive taxation of wealth, he would have raised the revenue to
twenty-two millions sterling, none of which would have been taken from
the great body of small cultivators who would thus have been for ever
bound to the Revolution. There is no doubt that he held fast to the
doctrine of equality, which means government by the poor and payment
by the rich. Also, he desired power, if it was only for
self-preservation; and he held it by bloodshed, as Lewis XIV. had
done, and Peter the Great, and Frederic. Indifference to the
destruction of human life, even the delight at the sight of blood, was
common all round him, and had appeared before the Revolution began.
The transformation of society as he imagined, if it cost a few
thousand heads in a twelvemonth, was less deadly than a single day of
Napoleon fighting for no worthier motive than ambition. His private
note-book has been printed, but it does not show what he thought of
the future. That is the problem which the guillotine left unsolved on
the evening of June 28, 1794. Only this is certain, that he remains
the most hateful character in the forefront of history since
Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men.

XX

LA VENDEE

The remorseless tyranny which came to an end in Thermidor was not the
product of home causes. It was prepared by the defeat and defection of
Dumouriez; it was developed by the loss of the frontier fortresses in
the following July; and it fell when the tide of battle rolled away
after the victory of Fleurus. We have, therefore, to consider the
series of warlike transactions that reacted so terribly on the
government of France. At first, and especially in the summer of 1793,
the real danger was not foreign, but civi