 CHAPTER V. POLITICAL COURTS Touching the eye of philosophy, perhaps the most alluring and yet elusive of all the phenomena presented by civilization, is that which we have been considering. Why should a type of mind which has developed the highest appraisions when advancing along the curve which has led it to ascendancy, be stricken with fatuity when the summit of the curve is passed, and when a miscalculation touching the velocity of the descent must be destruction? Although this phenomenon has appeared pretty regularly at certain intervals in the development of every modern nation, I can see its most illuminating example to be that intellectual imitation of Caste which during the French Revolution led to the creation of those political criminal tribunals which reached perfection with Robespierre. When Cooley examined at the distance of a century the royalist combination for the suppression of equality before the law, as finally evolved in 1792, did not so much lack military intelligence as it lacked any approximate comprehension of the modern mind. The royalist proposed to re-establish privilege, and to do this they were ready to emulate if necessary their king and queen, and all of their own order, who stayed at home to defend them. Indeed, speaking generally, they valued Louis XV leaving cheaply enough, counting him a more considerable asset if dead. What a noise it would make throughout Europe, they whispered among themselves, if the rabble should kill the king. Nor did Marie Antoinette dilute herself on the score. At Pilnitz in 1791 the German potentates issued a declaration touching France which was too moderate to suit the emigrants, who published upon it a commentary of their own. This commentary was so revolting that when the queen read her brother-in-law's signature appended to it she exclaimed to Cain. The royalist plan of campaign was this. They reckoned the energy of their revolution so low that they counted pretty confidently in the summer of 1792 on the ability of their party to defend the Tuileries against any force which could be brought against it, but assuming that the Tuileries could not be defended and that the king and queen should be massacred they believed that their own position would be improved. Their monarchical allies would be thereby violently stimulated. It was determined, therefore, that regardless of consequences to their friends the invading army should cross the border into Lorraine and marching by way of Serge and Rodimac occupy Chalons. Their entry into Chalons which they were confident could not be held against them because the feeling throughout the country was to be the signal for the rising invendée and Brittany which should sweep down upon Paris from the rear and make the capital untenable. At Chalons the allies would be but ninety miles from Paris and then nothing would remain but vengeance, and vengeance the more complete the greater the crime had been. All went well with them up to Valmy. The German advance on August 11, 1792 reached Rodimac and on August 19 the bulk of the Prussian army crossed the frontier at Redigné. On August 20, 1792 Longouy was invested and in three days capitulated. In the camp of the Comte d'Artois there was not one of us wrote Las Casas who did not see himself in a fortnight triumphant in his own home surrounded by his humbled and submissive vassals. At length from their pivvox at St. Remy and at Saupé the nobles saw in the distance the towns of Chalons. The panic at Chalons was so great that orders were given to cut the bridge across the Marnie but it was not until about September two that the whole peril was understood at Paris. It is true that for several weeks the government had been aware that the West was agitated and that Rurieri was probably conspiring among the royalists and non-juring priests but they did not appreciate the eminence of the danger. On September 3 at latest Denton certainly heard the details of the plots from his spy and it was then while others quailed that he incited Paris to audacity. This was Denton's culmination. As we look back the weakness of the Germans seems to have been psychological rather than physical. At Vamy the numbers engaged were not unequal and while the French were for the most part raw and ill-compacted levies with few trained officers the German regiments were those renowned battalions of Frederick the Great whose onset during the Seven Years' War no adversary had been able to endure. Yet these redoubtable Prussians fell back in confusion without having seriously tried their French position and their officers apparently did not venture to call upon them to charge again. In vain the French gentlemen implored the Prussian king to support them if they alone should storm Kellermann's batteries. Under the advice of the Duke of Brunswick the king decided on retreat. It is said that the Duke had as little heart in the war as Charles Fox or possibly Pitt or as his own troops and yet he was so strong that Dumaray after his victory hung back and offered the invaders free passage lest the Germans if aroused should turn on him and fight their way to the Marne. To the emigrants the retreat was terrible. It was a disaster from which as a compact power they never recovered. The rising in Vendee temporarily collapsed with the Czech echelons and they were left literally naked onto their enemy. Some of them returned to their homes preferring the guillotine to starvation. Others disguised in peasant's blouses tried to reach Rorari in Lavendee. Some died from hardship, some committed suicide, while the bulk regained liege and there waited as supplyants for assistance from Vienna. But these unfortunate men who had entered so gaily upon a conflict whose significance they could not comprehend had by this time lost more than lands and castles. Many of them had lost wives and children in one of the most frightful butcheries of history and a butchery for which they themselves were responsible because it was the inevitable and logical effect of their own intellectual limitations. When after the affair of August 10 Danton and his party became masters of the Incipient Republic Paris lay between two perils whose relative magnitude no one could measure. If chelons fell Vendee would rise and the Republicans of the West would be massacred. Five months later Vendee did rise and at Machi Kohl the Patriots were slaughtered amidst nameless atrocities largely at the instigation of the priests. In March 1793 one hundred thousand peasants were under arms. Clearly the West could not be denuded of troops and yet if chelons were to be made good every available man had to be hurried to Kellerman and this gigantic effort fell to the lot of a body of young and inexperienced adventurers who formed what could hardly be dignified with the name of an organized administration. For a long time Marat with whom Danton had been obliged to coalesce had been insisting that if the enemy were to be resisted on the frontier Paris must first be purged for Paris warmed with royalists wild for revenge and who were known to be arming. Danton was not yet prepared for extermination. He instituted domiciliary visits. He made about three thousand arrests and seized a quantity of muskets but he liberated most of those who were under suspicion. The crisis only came with the news on September 2 of the investment of Verdun when no one longer could doubt that net was closing about Paris. Verdun was but three or four days march from chelons. When the Duke of Brunswick crossed the Marnay and Brittany revolted the government would have to flee as Roland proposed and then the royalists would burst the gates of the prisons and there would be another Saint Bartholomew. Toward four o'clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1792 the prison of the Abbey was forced and the massacres began. They lasted until September 6 and through a circular sent out by Marat they were extended to Leons, to Rémy's and to the other cities. About sixteen hundred prisoners were murdered in Paris alone. Hardly any one has ever defended those slaughters. Even Marat called them disastrous and yet no one interfered. Neither Danton nor Roland nor the Assembly nor the National Guard nor the City of Paris although the two or three hundred Ruffians who did the work could have been dispersed by a single company of resolute men had society so wielded. When Robespierre's time came he fell almost automatically. Though the head of the despotic Committee of Public Safety and nominally the most powerful men in France he was sent to execution like the vilest and most contemptible of criminals by adversaries who would not command a regiment. The inference is that the September massacres which have ever since been stigmatized as the deepest stain upon the revolution were veritably due to the royalists who made with the Republicans an issue of self-preservation. For this was no common war. In royalist eyes it was a servile revolt and was to be treated as servile revolts during the Middle Ages had always been treated. Again and again with all solemnity the royalists had declared that were they to return as conquerors no stone of Paris should be left standing on another and that the inhabitants should expire in the ashes of their homes on the rack and the wheel. Though Danton had many and obvious weaknesses he was a good lawyer and Danton perceived that though he might not have been able to prevent the September massacres and although they might have been and probably were inevitable under the tension which prevailed yet that any court even a political court would be better than Merritt's mob. Some months later he explained his position to the convention when it was considering the erection of the tribunal which finally sent Danton himself to the scaffold. Nothing is more difficult than to define a political crime but if a simple citizen for any ordinary crime receives immediate punishment if it is so difficult to reach a political crime is it not necessary that extraordinary laws intimidate the rebels and reach the culpable. Here public safety requires strong remedies and terrible measures. I see no compromise between ordinary forms and a revolutionary tribunal. History attests this truth and since members have dared in this assembly to refer to those bloody days which every good citizen has lamented I say that if such a tribunal had then existed the people who have been so often and so cruelly reproached for them would never have stained them with blood. I say and I shall have the ascent of all who have watched these movements that no human power could have checked the outburst of the national vengeance. In this perversion of the court's lay as I understand it the foulest horror of the French Revolution it was the effect of the rigidity of privilege a rigidity which found its incarnation in the judiciary. The constitutional decisions of the parliaments under the old regime would alone have made their continuance impossible but the worst evil was that after the shell crumbled the mind within the shell survived and discredited the whole regular administration of justice. When the National Assembly came to examine grievances it found protests against the judicial system from every corner of France and it referred these petitions to a committee which reported in August 1789. Setting aside the centralization and consolidation of the system as being for us immaterial the committee laid down four leading principles of reform. First purchase of place should be abolished and judicial office should be recognized as a public trust. Second judges should be confined to applying and restrained from interpreting the law that is to say the judges should be forbidden to legislate. Third the judges should be brought into harmony with public opinion by permitting the people to participate in their appointment. Fourth the tendency toward rigor in criminal cases which had become a scandal under the old regime should be tempered by the introduction of the jury. Brigades proposed that judicial appointments should be made by the executive from among three candidates selected by the provincial assemblies. After long and very remarkable debates the plan was in substance adopted in May 1790 except that the assembly decided by a majority of 503 to 450 that the judges should be elected by the people for a term of six years without executive interference. In the debate Casales represented the conservatives Mirabeau the liberals. The vote was a test vote and shows how strong the conservatives were in the assembly up to the reorganization of the clergy in July 1790 and the electoral assemblies of the districts which selected the judges seem on the whole to have been rather more conservative than the assembly. In the election not a sixth of those who were enfranchised voted for the delegates who in turn chose the judges and these delegates were usually either eminent lawyers themselves or wealthy merchants or men of letters. The result was a bench not differing much from an old parliament and equally incapable of understanding the convulsion about them. Installed early in 1791 not a year elapsed before these magistrates became as ill at ease as had been those whom they displaced and in March 1792 Jean de Bray formally demanded their recall although their terms properly were to expire in 1796. During the summer of 1792 they sank into contempt and after the massacres the legislative assembly just before its dissolution provided for a new constituency for the judicial elections. This they degraded so far that out of 51 magistrates to be chosen in Paris only 12 were professionally trained nor did the new courts inspire respect. After the 10th of August one or two special tribunals were organized to try the Swiss guard who surrendered in the palace and other political offenders but these proved to be so ineffective that marred thrust them aside and substituted for them his gangs of murderers. No true and permanent political court was evolved before Denton had to deal with the treason of Dumont Ray nor was this tribunal perfected before Denton gave way to the Committee of Public Safety when French Revolutionary Society became incandescent through universal attack from without and through insurrection within. Denton though an orator and a lawyer possibly even a statesman was not competent to cope with an emergency which exacted from a minister administrative genius like that of Carnot. Denton's story may be briefly told. At once after Valmy the convention established the Republic on January 21 1793 Louis was beheaded and between these two events a new movement had occurred. The revolutionists felt intuitively that if they remain shut up at home with enemies without and traitors within they would be lost. If the new ideas were sound they would spread and Valmy had proved to them that those ideas had already weakened the invading armies. Denton declared for the natural boundaries of France the Rhine the Alps and the Ocean and the convention on January 29 1793 through Dumont Ray on Holland this provoked war with England and then north south and east the coalition was complete. It represented at least half a million fighting men. Denton having no military knowledge or experience fixed his hope in Dumont Ray. To Denton Dumont Ray was the only man who could save France. On November 6 1792 Dumont Ray defeated the Austrians at Jimapes on the 14th. He entered Brussels and Belgium lay helpless before him. On the question of the treatment of Belgium the schism began which ended with his desertion. Dumont Ray was a conservative who plotted for a royal restoration under perhaps Louis Philippe. The convention on the contrary determined to revolutionize Belgium as France had been revolutionized and to this end Kambon proposed to confiscate and sell Churchland and emit asignments. Denton visited Dumont Ray to attempt to pacify him but found him deeply exasperated. Had Denton been more sagacious he would have been suspicious. Unfortunately for him he left Dumont Ray in command. In February Dumont Ray invaded Holland and was repulsed, and he then fell back to Brussels, not strong enough to march to Paris without support. It is true but probably expecting to be strong enough as soon as the Vendian insurrection came to a head. Doubtless he had relations with the rebels. At all events on March 10 the insurrection began with a massacre of Machigot and on March 12 1793 Dumont Ray wrote a letter to the convention which was equivalent to a declaration of war. He then tried to corrupt his army but failed and on April 4 1793 fled to the Austrians. Meanwhile Lavenday was in flames. To appreciate the situation one must read Carnot's account of the border during these weeks when he alone probably averted some grave disaster. For my purpose it suffices to say that the pressure was intense and that these intense pressure brought forth the revolutionary tribunal or the political court. On March 10 1793 the convention passed a decree constituting a court of five judges and a jury to be elected by the convention. To these was joined a public prosecutor Foucait-in-Vull afterward attained a somber fame in this position. Six members of the convention were to sit as a commission to supervise drawing the indictments, the preparation of evidence and also to advise the prosecutor. The punishments under the limitations of the penal code and other criminal laws were to be within the discretion of the court whose judgments were to be final. Death was accompanied by confiscation of property. Considering that this was an extraordinary tribunal working under extreme tension which tried persons against whom usually the evidence was pretty conclusive its record for the first six months was not discreditable. Between April 6 and September 21 1793 it rendered 63 sentences of death, thirteen of transportation and thirty-eight acquittals. The trials were held patiently, testimony was heard and the juries duly deliberated. Nevertheless the terror deepened as the stress upon the newborn republic increased. Nothing more awful can be imagined than the ordeal which France endured between the meeting of the convention in September 1792 and the completion of the committee of public safety in August 1793. Hemmed in by enemies the revolution glowed in Paris like molten lava while yet it was torn by faction. Conservative opinion was represented by the curandists, radical opinion by the mountain, and between the two lay the plain or the majority of the convention who embodied the social center of gravity. As the central mass swayed so did supremacy incline, the movement was as accurate as that of any scientific instrument for registering any strain. Dumoray's treason in April left the northern frontier open, save for a few fortresses which still held out, when those should fall the enemy could make a junction with the rebels in Vinday. Still the curandists kept control and even elected isnard the most violent among them presidents of the convention. Then they had the temerity to arrest a member of the commune of Paris which was the focus of radicalism. That act precipitated the struggle for survival and with it came the change in equilibrium. On June 2 Paris heard of the revolt of Lyons and of the massacre of the patriots. The same day the sanctions invaded the convention and expelled from their seats in the Tuileries twenty-seven curandists. The plain or center now lent toward the mountain and on July 10 the committee of public safety which had been first organized on April 6 1793 directly after Dumoray's treason was reorganized by the addition of men like St. Just and Couton with Prairieur a lawyer of ability and energy for president. On July 12 1793 the Austrians took Conde and on July 28 Valencianese while on July 25 Kleber starving surrendered Mayans. Nothing now but their own inertia stood between the allies and Lavenday. Thither indeed Kellerman's men were sent since they had promised not to serve against the coalition for a year but even of these a division was surrounded and cut to pieces in the disaster of Torfo. A most ferocious civil war soon raged throughout France. Cain, Burdot, Lyons, Marcelle declared against the convention. The whole of the northwest was drenched in blood by the Chouants. Sixty departments were in arms. On August 28 the royalists surrendered Toulon to the English who blockaded the coasts and supplied the needs of the rebels. About Paris the people were actually starving. On July 27 Robespierre entered the committee of safety, Carnot on August 14. This famous committee was a council of ten forming a pure dictatorship. On August 16 the convention decreed the Levé and Mass. When Carnot became minister of war to this dictatorship the Republic had four hundred and seventy-nine thousand demoralized soldiers with the colors under beaten and discredited commanders. Boullet had conspired against the state's general, Lafayette against the legislative assembly and Dumoré against the convention. One year from that it had a superb force, seven hundred and thirty-two thousand strong commanded by Hordant and Pitchegrew, Hoche, Moreau, and Bonaparte. Above all Carnot loved Hoche. Up to Valmy the old regular army however shaken had remained as a corps. Then it became merged in a mass of volunteers and these volunteers had to be armed and disciplined and fed and led against the greatest and strongest coalition which the modern world had ever seen. France under Carnot became a vast workshop. Its most eminent scientific men taught the people how to gather salt-poture and the government how to manufacture powder and artillery. Horses had to be obtained. Carnot was as reckless of himself as of others. He knew no rest. There was that to be done which had to be done quickly and at any cost there was that or annihilation. On October twenty-one, seventeen ninety-four, when the people had gathered in the Champ de Marre to celebrate the festival of victories after the president of the convention had proclaimed that the republic had been delivered, Carnot pronounced what had been accomplished. France had won twenty-seven victories of which eight had been pitched to battles. One hundred and twenty lesser combats, France had killed eighty thousand enemies, had taken ninety-one thousand prisoners. Also one hundred and sixteen places or towns, six after siege. Two hundred and thirty-fourths or redoubts. Three thousand eight hundred cannon. Seventy thousand muskets. Ninety flags. As Benjamin Constant has observed, nothing can change the stupendous fact that the convention found the enemy at thirty leagues from Paris and made peace at thirty leagues from Vienna. Under the stimulus of a change in environment of mind is apt to expand with something of this resistless energy. It did so in the reformation. It may be said almost invariably to do so when decay does not supervene, and it now concerns us to consider, in some rough way, what the cost to the sinking class of attempting repression may be when it miscalculates its power in such an emergency. I take it to be tolerably clear that if the French privileged classes had accepted the reforms of Turgo in good faith and thus had spread the movement of the revolution over a generation, there would have been no civil war and no confiscations, save confiscations of ecclesiastical property. I take it also that there would have been no massacres and no revolutionary tribunals if France in 1793 had fought foreign enemies alone, as England did in 1688. Even as it was, the courts did not grow thoroughly political until the preservation of the new type of mind came to hinge largely on the extermination of the old. Danton's first and relatively benign revolutionary tribunal established in March 1793 was reorganized by the Committee of Public Safety in the following autumn, by a series of decrees of which the most celebrated is that of September 17, touching suspected persons. By this decrees the tribunal was enlarged so that in the words of Danton, every day an aristocratic head might fall. The Committee presented a list of judges and the object of the law was to make the possession of a reactionary mind a capital offence. It is only in extreme exigencies that pure thinking by a single person becomes a crime. Ordinarily a crime consists of a malicious thought coupled with an overt act, but in periods of high tension the harboring of any given thought becomes criminal. Usually during civil wars, test oaths are tendered to suspected persons to discover their loyalty. For several centuries the Church habitually burned alive all those who denied the test dogma of transubstantiation and during the worst spasm of the French Revolution to believe in the principle of monarchy and privilege was made capital with confiscation of property. The question which the Convention had to meet was how to establish the existence of a criminal mind when nothing tangible indicated it. The old regime had tortured. To prove heresy the Church also had always used torture. The Revolution proceeded more mildly, yet acted on suspicion. The process was simple. The Committee of whom in this department Robespierre was the Chief made lists of those who were to be condemned. There came to be finally almost a complete absence of forms. No evidence was necessarily heard. The accused, if inconvenient, was not allowed to speak. If there were doubt touching the probability of conviction, pressure was put upon the Court. I give one or two examples. Salierre, the Senior Associate Judge of the Tribunal, appears to have been a good lawyer and a fairly worthy man. One day in February 1794 Salierre was at dinner with Robespierre when Robespierre complained of the delays of the Court. Salierre replied that without the observance of forms there could be no safety for the innocent. Ba! replied Robespierre. You and your forms. Wait! Soon the Committee will obtain a law which will suppress forms, and then we shall see. Salierre ventured no answer. Such a law was drafted by Cousin and actually passed on twenty-two prior real, June 10, 1794, and yet it altered little the methods of Fouquet and Ville as prosecuting officer. Salierre, having complained of this law of prior real to St. Just, St. Just replied that if he were to report his words or that he was flinching to the Committee, Salierre would be arrested. As arrest was tent amount of sentence of death, Salierre continued his work. Without reasoning the subject out logically from premise to conclusion, or being of course capable of doing so in the mass, Frenchmen had collectively received the intuition that everything must be endured for a strong government, and that whatever obstructed the government must be eliminated, for the process of elimination they used the Courts. Under the conditions in which they were placed by the domestic enemy they had little alternative. If a political party opposed the dictatorship in the Convention that party must be broken down. If a man seemed likely to become a rival for the dictatorship that man must be removed. All who conspired against the Republic must be destroyed as ruthlessly at home as on the battlefield. The Republic was insolvent and must have money as it must have men. If the government needed men it took them all. If it needed money and a man were rich it did not hesitate to execute him and confiscate his property. There are very famous examples of all these phenomena strewn through the history of the terror. The Girondists were liberals, they always had been liberals, they had never conspired against the Republic, but they were impracticable. The ablest of them, Vergnat, complained before the Tribunal that he was being tried for what he thought, not for what he had done. This the government denied, but it was true. Nay more he was tried not for positive, but for negative opinions, and he was convicted and executed, and his friends were convicted and executed with him, because had they remained in the convention the dictatorship through their opposition would have lost its energy. Also the form of the conviction was shocking in the extreme. The defense of these twenty-one men was practically suppressed and the jury were directed to bring in a verdict of guilty. Still the prosecutions of the Girondists stopped here. When they refrained from obstruction they were spared. Danton and his friends may have been and probably were, whether intentionally or by force of circumstances, a menace to the dictatorship. Either Robespierre or Danton had to be eliminated. There was not room for both. On April 1, 1793, Danton, Camille Desmolines, and others were arrested on a warrant signed by such men as Cambes Ceris, Carnot and Prairior. Carnot in particular was a soldier of the highest character and genius. He would have signed no such warrant had he not thought the emergency pressing. Nor was the risk small. Danton was so popular and so strong before a jury that the government appears to have distrusted even Foucaitonville, for an order was given and held in suspense, apparently to Henriot, to arrest the president and the public prosecutor of the revolutionary tribunal on the day of Danton's trial. Under such a stimulant Foucaitonville did his best, but he felt himself to be beaten. Examining Cambon, Danton broke out. Do you believe us to be conspirators? Look, he laughs, he don't believe it. Record that he has laughed. Foucaitonville was at his wit's end. If the next day the jury were asked, if they had heard enough and they answered no, there would be an acquittal and then Foucaitonville's own head would roll into the basket. Probably there might even be insurrection. Foucaitonville wrote to the committee that they must obtain from the convention a decree silencing the defense. So grave was the crisis felt to be that the decree was unanimously voted. When Foucaitonville heard that the decree was on its way, he said with a sigh of relief, faith, we need it. But when it was read, Danton sprung to his feet, raging, declaring that the public cried out trees in upon it. The president adjourned the court, while the hall resounded with the protests of the defendants and the shouts of the police as they tore the condemned from the benches which they clutched and dragged them through the corridors toward the prison. They emerged no more until they mounted the carts which took them to the scaffold. Nor was it safe to hesitate if one were attached to this court. Foucaitonville had a clerk named Paris Fabricius. Now Paris had been a friend of Danton and took his condemnation to heart. He even declined to sign the judgment which it was his duty to do. The next day when he presented himself to Foucait, Foucait looked at him sourly and observed, we don't want men who reason here, we want business done. The following morning Paris did not appear. His friends were disturbed, but he was not to be found. He had been cast into a secret dungeon in the prison of the Luxembourg. So if a man were too rich it might go hard with him. Louis Philippe Joseph, Duke d'Orleans, afterwards known as Egalit, was one of the most interesting figures among the old nobility. The great-great-great grandson of Louis XIII he was a distant cousin of Louis XV and ranked as the first noble of France beyond the royal family. His education had been unfortunate. His father lived with the ballet dancer, while his mother, the Princess Henriette de Bourbon-Conty, scandalised a society which was not easily shocked. During the terror, the son's colloads everywhere avert that the Duke was a son of a coachman in the service of the banker, du Roi. Doubtless this was false, but the princess had abundant liaisons, not much more reputable. Left to himself at sixteen years old, Egalit led a life of extreme profligacy, but he married one of the most beautiful and charming women of the age whom he succeeded in inspiring with a devoted affection. Born in 1747 his father died in 1785, leaving him just at the outbreak of the revolution, the master of enormous wealth, and the father of three sons who adored him. The eldest of these was the future king, Louis Philippe. The man must have had good in him to have been loved as he was throughout life. He was besides more intelligent, touching the revolution and its meaning than any man approaching him in rank in France. The Duke, when a young man served with credit in the navy, but after the Battle of Wichent in 1778, where he commanded the Blue Squadron, he was received with such enthusiasm in Paris that Marie Antoinette obtained his dismissal from the service. From this period he withdrew from court, and his opposition to the government began. He adopted republican ideas which he drew from America, and he educated his children as democrats. In 1789 he was elected to the state's general, where he supported the fusion of the orders, and attained to a popularity which, on one occasion according to Madame de Campagne, nearly made the queen faint from rage and grief. It was from the garden of his palace of the Palais Royale that the column marched on July 14, wearing his colors, red, white and blue, to storm the Bastille. It seemed that he had only to go on resolutely to thrust the king aside and become the ruler of France. He made no effort to do so. Mirabeau is said to have been disgusted with his lack of ambition. He was charitable also, and spent very large sums of money among the poor of Paris during the years of distress, which followed upon the social disorders. The breach with the court, however, became steadily wider, and finally he adhered to the party of Denton and voted for the condemnation of the king. He sent two of his sons to serve in the army. The elder was still with Dumoré at the time of his treason. On April 6, 1793, and when Dumoré's treachery had become known, the assembly ordered the arrest of the Holpe-Rebonne family, and among them the duke was apprehended and sent to Marseille. Thus it appeared that whatever complaint his own order may have had against Agalit, the republic certainly had none. No man could have done more for modern France than he. He abandoned his class, renounced his name, gave his money, sent his sons to the war, and voted for his own relative's death. No one feared him, and yet Robespierre had him brought to Paris and guillotined. His trial was a form. Fouquet admitted that he had been condemned before he left Marseille. The duke was, however, very rich, and the government needed his money. Everyone understood the situation. He was told of the order for his arrest one night when Ed supper in his palace, Ed and Perry, with his friend Montsour de Montville. The duke much moved, asked Montville if it were not horrible, after all the sacrifices he had made, and all that he had done. Yes, horrible, said Montville Cooley, but what would you have? They have taken from your highness all they could get. You can be of no further use to them. Therefore they will do to you what I do with this lemon. He was squeezing a lemon on a soul. Now I have all the juice, and he threw the lemon into the fireplace. But yet, even then, Robespierre was not satisfied. He harbored malice against this fallen man. On the way to the scaffold he ordered the cart in which the duke sat to stop before the Palais Royal, which had been confiscated, in order that the duke might contemplate his last sacrifice for his country. The duke showed neither fear nor emotion. All the world knows the story of the terror. The long processions of carts carrying victims to the guillotine. These increasing in number until after the Law of Pariel they averaged sixty or seventy a day in Paris. Alone, while in the provinces, there was no end. At Nantes, Carrier could not work fast enough by a court, so he sank boatloads of prisoners in the Lure. The Hecatumes sacrificed at Lyons, and the red masses of orange have all been described. The population of Toulon sank from twenty-nine thousand to seven thousand. All those in fine were seized and slain, who were suspected of having a mind tinged with cased or of being traitors to the Republic. And it was the center or the majority of the convention who did this, fatassedly permitting it to be done. That is to say, France permitted it because the onslaught of the decaying class made atrocities such as these appear to be a condition of self-preservation. I doubt if in human history there be such another and so awful an illustration of the possible effects of conservative errors of judgment. For France never loved the terror or the loathsome instruments such as Fouquetinville or Carrier, or Billaud Varanez, or Collaudier Bois, or Henriot or Robespierre or Couton who conducted it. On this point there can, I think, be neither doubt nor question. I have tried to show how the terror began. It is easy to show how and why it ended. As it began automatically by the stress of foreign and domestic war, so it ended automatically when that stress was relieved. And the most curious aspect of the phenomena is that it did not end through the application of force, but by common consent, and when it had ended, those who had been used for the bloody work could not be endured, and they too were put to death. The procession of dates is convincing. When, on July 27, 1793, Robespierre entered the Committee of Public Safety, the fortunes of the Republic were near their nadir, but almost immediately after Carnault took the War Department on August 14 they began to mend. On October 8, 1793, Lyons surrendered. On December 19, 1793 the English evacuated to Lawn, and on December 23 the insurrection in Lavendae received its death blow at Zveny. There had also been success on the frontiers. Carnault put Hoche in command in the Vosges. On December 23, 1793, Hoche defeated Wombseer at Freshwiler when the Austrians, abandoning the lines of Wiesenborg, fell back across the Rhine. Thus by the end of 1793, save for the great border fortresses by Valenciennes and Condé to the North, which commanded the road from Brussels to Paris, the soil of France had been cleared of the enemy, and something resembling domestic tranquility had been restored at home. Simultaneously, as the pressure lessened, rifts began to appear in the knot of men who held the dictatorship in the Republic. Robespierre, Couton and St. Just coalesced, and gained control of the police, while, below the variness, Coulodre won, and secretly, and as far as he dared, Barreté formed an opposition. Not that the latter were more moderate or merciful than Robespierre, but because in the nature of things there could be but one dictator, and it became a question of the survival of the fittest. Carnot took little or no part in active politics. He devoted himself to the war, but he disapproved of the terror, and came to a breach with St. Just. Robespierre's power culminated on June 10, 1794, with the passage of the Law of 22 Priariel, which put the life of every Frenchman in his hand, and after which, save for some dozen or two of his most intimate and devoted adherents, like St. Just, Couton, Le Bas, Fouquet, Flourois, the Mayor of Paris, and Henriot, the commander of the National Guard, no one felt his head safe on his shoulders. It needed but security on the northern frontier to cause the social center of gravity to shift, and Robespierre to fall, and security came with a campaign of Flouros. Hourdain and Pétigrew were in command on the Belgian border, and on June 26, 1794, just sixteen days after the passage of the Law of Priariel, Hourdain won the Battle of Flourois. This battle, though not decisive in itself, led to decisive results. It uncovered Valenciennes and Conde, which were invested, closing the entrance to France. On July 11 Hourdain entered Brussels. On July 16 he won a crushing victory before Louvain, and the same day, Namour opened its gates. On July 23, Pétigrew, driving the English before him, seized Antwerp. No Frenchman could longer doubt that France was delivered, and with that certainty, that terror ended without a blow. Eventually the end must have come, but it came instantly, and according to the old legend, it came, through a man's love for a woman. John Lambertallion, the son of the butler of the Marquis of Bercy, was born in 1769, and received an education through the generosity of the Marquis, who noticed his intelligence. He became a journeyman, printer, and one day in the studio of Madame Lebrun, dressed in his workman's blouse, he met Thérizia Cabarrus, Marquis de Fontenay, the most seductive woman of her time, and fell in love with her on the instant. Nothing apparently could have been more hopeless or absurd, but the revolution came. Tallion became prominent, was elected to the convention, grew to be influential, and in September 1793 was sent to Bordeaux as representative of the chamber, or as pre-counsel as they called it. There he, the all-powerful despot, found Thérizia trying to escape to Spain, in prison, humble, poor, shuddering in the shadow of the guillotine. He saved her. He carried her through Bordeaux in triumph in a car by his side. He took her with him to Paris, and there Robespierre threw her into prison and accused Tallion of corruption. On June 12 Robespierre denounced him to the convention, and on June 14, 1794 the Jacobins struck his name from the list of the club. When Flourus was fought, Thérizia lay in Lafourth, daily expecting death, while Tallion had become the soul of the reactionary party. On the 8th, 3rd, July 26, 1794, Tallion received a dagger, wrapped in a note signed by Thérizia. Tomorrow they kill me. Are you then only a coward? On the morrow the great day had come. Saint Just rose in the convention to read a report to denounce Bilod, Colot, and Camot. Tallion would not let him be heard. Bilod followed him. Colot was in the chair. Robespierre mounted the tribune and tried to speak. It was not without reason that Thérizia afterwards said, this little hand had somewhat to do with overthrowing the guillotine. For Tallion sprang on him, dagger in hand, and grasping him by the throat, cast him from the tribune exclaiming, I have armed myself with a dagger to pierce his heart if the convention dare not order his accusation. Then rose a great shout from the centre. Down with a tyrant, arrest him, accuse him. From the centre, which until that day had always silently supported the Robespierre and dictatorship, Robespierre for the last time tried to speak, but his voice failed him. It's Danton's blood that chokes him. Arrest him! Arrest him! They shouted from the right. Robespierre dropped exhausted on a bench. Then they seized him and his brother and Couton and Saint Just, and ordered that the police should take them to prison. But it was one thing for the convention to seize Robespierre singly and within its own haul. It was quite another for it to hold him and send him to the guillotine. The whole physical force of Paris was nominally with Robespierre. The mayor, Fleureau, closed the barrier, sounded the toxin, and forbade any jailer to receive the prisoners, while Henriot, who had already been drinking, mounted a horse and galloped forth to rouse the city. Fleureau caused Robespierre, Couton and Le Basse to be brought to the city haul. A provisional government was completed. It only remained to disperse the assembly. Henriot undertook a duty which looked easy. He seems to have collected about twenty guns which he brought to the Tuileries and trained on the haul of the convention. The deputies thought all was over. Colloitte Herbois took the chair which was directly in range, put on his hat and calm his set, as Henriot gave the order to fire. We can at least die at our post. No volley came. The men had mutinied. Then the convention declared Henriot beyond the protection of the law, and Henriot fled to the city haul. The convention chose Barres to command their armed force, but save a few police. They had no force. The night was wearing away, and Fleureau had not been able to persuade Robespierre to take any decisive step. Robespierre was indeed only a petty flogging attorney. At length he consented to sign and appeal to arms. He had written two letters of his name, Row, when a section of police under Barres reached the city haul. They were but a handful, but the door was unguarded. They mounted the stairs, and as Robespierre finished the owe, one of these men named Merda fired on him, breaking his jaw. The stain of blood is still on the paper where Robespierre's head fell. They shot Couton in the leg. They threw Henriot out of the window into a cesspool below, where he wallowed all night. While Le Bas blew out his brains. The next day they brought Robespierre to the convention, but the convention refused to receive him. They threw him on a table where he lay, horrible to be seen. His coat torn down the back, his stockings falling over his heels, his shirt open and soaking with blood, speechless for his mouth was filled with splinters of his broken jaw. Such was the man who the morning before had been dictator and master of all the armies of France. Couton was in little better plight. Twenty-one in all were condemned on the tenth thermidor and taken in carts to the guillotine. An awful spectacle. There was Robespierre with his disfigured face, half dead, and Fleurot and St. Just and Henriot next to Robespierre. His forehead gashed, his right eye hanging down his cheek, dripping with blood and drenched with a filth of the sewer in which he had passed the night. Under their feet lay the cripple Couton who had been thrown in like a sack. Couton was paralyzed and he howled in agony as they wrenched him straight to fasten him to the guillotine. It took a quarter of an hour to finish with him while the crowd exalted. A hundred thousand people saw the procession and not a voice or a hand was raised in protest. The whole world agreed that the terror should end, but the oldest of those who suffered on the tenth thermidor was Couton, who was thirty-eight. Robespierre was thirty-five and St. Just but twenty-seven. So closed the terror with a strain which produced it. It will remain a byword for all time and yet appalling as it may have been. It was the legitimate and the logical result of the opposition made by Caste to the advent of equality before the law. Also the political courts served their purpose. They killed out the archaic mind in France, a mind too rigid to adapt itself to a changing environment. Thereafter no organized opposition could ever be maintained against the new social equilibrium. Modern France went on steadily to a readjustment on the basis of unification, simplification of administration and equality before the law, first under the directory, then under the consulate, and finally under the empire. With the empire the civil code was completed, which I take to be the greatest effort at codification of modern times. Certainly it has endured until now. Governments have changed. The empire has yielded to the monarchy, the monarchy to the republic, the republic to the empire again, and that once more to the republic, but the code which embodies the principle of equality before the law has remained. Fundamentally the social equilibrium has been stable. And a chief reason of this stability has been the organization of the courts upon rational and conservative principles. During the terror France had her fill of political tribunals. Since the terror French judges under every government have shunned politics and have devoted themselves to construing impartially the law. Therefore all parties and all ranks and all conditions of men have sustained the courts. In France as in England there is no class jealousy touching the control of the judiciary. End of Chapter 5 Political Courts Chapter 6 of the Theory of Social Revolutions This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. The Theory of Social Revolutions by Brooks Adams Chapter 6 Inferences As to the universe which at once creates and destroys life is a complex of infinitely varying forces history can never repeat itself. It is vain therefore to look in the future for some paraphrase of the past. Yet if society be as I assume it to be an organism operating on mechanical principles we may perhaps by pondering upon history learn enough of those principles to enable us to view more intelligently than we otherwise should the social phenomena about us. What we call civilization is I suspect only in proportion to its perfection a more or less thorough social centralization. While centralization very clearly is an effective applied science civilization is accordingly nearly synonymous with centralization and is caused by mechanical discoveries which are applications of scientific knowledge like the discovery of how to kindle fire how to build and sail ships how to smelt metals how to prepare explosives how to make paper and print books and the like. And we perceive on a little consideration that from the first great and fundamental discovery of how to kindle fire every advance in applied science has accelerated social movement until the discovery of steam and electricity in the 18th and 19th centuries quickened movement as movement had never been quickened before and this quickening has caused the rise of those vast cities which are at once our pride and our terror. Social consolidation is however not a simple problem for social consolidation implies an equivalent capacity for administration. I take it to be an axiom that perfection in administration must be commensurate to the bulk and momentum of the mass to be administered otherwise the centrifugal will overcome the central petal force and the mass will disintegrate in other words civilization would dissolve. It is in dealing with administration as I apprehend that civilizations have usually though not always broken down for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing class since apparently no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in in environment even in slow moving civilizations as fast as environments change. Thus a moment arrives when the minds of any given dominant type fail to meet the demands upon them and are superseded by a younger type which in turn is set aside by another still younger until the limit of the administrative genius of that particular race has been reached then disintegration sets in the social momentum is gradually relaxed and society sinks back to a level at which it can cohere. To us however the most distressing aspect of the situation is that the social acceleration is progressive in proportion to the activity of the scientific mind which makes mechanical discoveries and it is therefore a triumphant science which produces those ever more rapidly recurring changes in environment to which men must adapt themselves at their peril. As under the stimulant of modern science the old types fail to sustain themselves new types have to be equally rapidly evolved and the rise of a new governing class is always synonymous with a social revolution and a redistribution of property. The industrial revolution began almost precisely a century and a half ago since when the scientific mind has continually gained in power and during that period on an average of once into generations the environment has so far shifted that a social revolution has occurred accompanied by the advent of a new favorite class and a readjustment of wealth. I think that a glance at American history will show this estimate to be within the truth. At the same time such rapidity of intellectual mutation is without precedence and I should suppose that the mental exhaustion incident there too must be very considerable. In America in 1770 a well-defined aristocracy held control. As an effect of the industrial revolution upon industry and commerce the Revolutionary War occurred the colonial aristocracy misjudged the environment adhered to Great Britain where exiled lost their property and perished. Immediately after the American Revolution and also as a part of the industrial revolution the cotton gin was invented and the cotton gin created in the south another aristocracy the cotton planters who flourished until 1860. At this point the changing of the environment caused largely by the railway brought a pressure upon the slave owners against which they also failing to comprehend their situation rebelled. They were conquered suffered a confiscation of their property and perished. Furthermore the rebellion of the aristocracy at the south was caused or at all events was accompanied by the rise of a new dominant class at the north whose powers rested upon the development of steam in transportation and industry. This is the class which has won high fortune by the acceleration of the social movement and the consequent urban growth of the 19th century and which has now for about two generations dominated in the land. If this class like its predecessors has in its turn mistaken its environment a redistribution of property must occur distressing as previous redistributions have been in proportion to the inflexibility of the sufferers. The last two redistributions have been painful and if we examine passing phenomena from this standpoint they hardly appear to promise much that is reassuring for the future. Administration is the capacity of coordinating many and often conflicting social energies in a single organism so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests but is possibly the highest faculty of the human mind. It is precisely in this preeminent requisite for success in government that I suspect that the modern capitalistic class to be weak. The scope of the human intellect is necessarily limited and modern capitalists appear to have been evolved under the stress of an environment which demanded excessive specialization in the direction of a genius adapted to money making under highly complex industrial conditions. To this money making attribute all else has been sacrificed and the modern capitalist not only thinks in terms of money but he thinks in terms of money more exclusively than the French aristocrat or lawyer ever thought in terms of case. The modern capitalist looks upon life as a financial combat of a very specialized kind regulated by a code which he understands and has indeed himself concocted but which is recognized by no one else in the world. He conceives sovereign powers to be for sale. He may he thinks by them and if he buys them he may use them as he pleases. He believes for instance that it is the lawful name Moore in America that it is the constitutional right of the citizen to buy the national highways and having bought them to use them as a common carrier might use a horse and cart upon a public road. He may sell his service to whom he pleases at what price may suit him and if by doing so he ruins men and cities it is nothing to him. He is not responsible for he is not a trustee for the public. If he be restrained by legislation that legislation is in his eye an oppression and an outrage to be annulled or eluded by any means which will not lead to the penitentiary. He knows nothing and cares less for the relation which highways always have held and always must hold every civilized population and if he be asked to inform himself on such subjects he resents the suggestion as an insult. He is too specialized to comprehend a social relation even a fundamental one like this beyond the narrow circle of his private interests. He might had he so chosen have evolved a system of governmental railway regulation and have administered the system personally or by his own agents but he could never be brought to see the advantage to himself of rational concession to obtain a resultant of forces. He resisted all restraint especially national restraint believing that his one weapon money would be more effective in obtaining what he wanted in state legislatures than in congress. Thus of necessity he precipitates a conflict instead of establishing an adjustment. He is therefore in essence a revolutionist without being aware of it. The same specialized thinking appears in his reasoning touching actual government. New York City will serve as an illustration. New York has for two generations been noted for a civic corruption which has been theoretically abominable to all good citizens and which the capitalistic class has denounced as abominable to itself. I suspect this to be an imaginative conception of the situation. Tammany Hall is, I take it, the administrative bureau through which capital purchases its privileges. An incorruptible government would offend a capital because under such a government capital would have to obey the law and a privilege would cease. Occasionally Tammany grows rapacious and exacts too much for its services. Then a reform movement is undertaken and finally a new management is imposed on Tammany but when Tammany has consented to a satisfactory sale of prices the reform ends. To change the system would imply a shift in the seat of power. In fine money is the weapon of the capitalist as a sword was the weapon of the medieval soldier. Only as the capitalist is more highly specialized than the soldier ever was he is more helpless when his single weapon fails him. From the days of William the Conqueror to our own the great soldier has been very commonly a famous statesman also but I do not now remember in English or American history a single capitalist who has earned eminence for comprehensive statesmanship. On the contrary although many have participated in public affairs have held high office and have shown ability therein. Capitalists have not unusually however unjustly been suspected of having ulterior objects in view unconnected with the public welfare such as tariffs or land grants. Certainly so far as I am aware no capitalist has ever acquired such influence over his contemporaries as has been attained with apparent ease by men like Cromwell Washington or even Jackson. And this leads advancing in an orderly manner step by step to what is perhaps to me the most curious and interesting of all modern intellectual phenomena connected with a specialized mind the attitude of the capitalist toward the law. Naturally the capitalist of all men might be supposed to be he who would respect and uphold the law most considering that he is at once the wealthiest and most vulnerable of the human beings when called upon to defend himself by physical force. How defenseless and how incompetent he is in such exigencies he proved to the world some years ago when he plunged himself and the country into the great Pennsylvania cold strike with absolutely no preparation. Nevertheless in spite of his vulnerability he is of all citizens the most lawless he appears to assume that the law will always be enforced and when he has need of it by some special personnel whose duty lies that way while he may evade the law when convenient or bring it into contempt with impunity. The capitalist seems incapable of feeling his responsibility as a member of the governing class in this respect and that he is bound to uphold the law no matter what the law may be in order that others may do the like. If the capitalist has bought some sovereign function and wishes to abuse it for his own behoof he regards the law which restrains him as a despotic invasion of his constitutional rights because with his specialized mind he cannot grasp the relation of his sovereign function to the nation as a whole. He therefore looks upon the evasion of a law devised for public protection but inimical to him as innocent or even meritorious. If an election to be lost and the legislature which has been chosen by the majority cannot be pacified by money but passes some act which promises to be annoying the first instinct of the capitalist is to retain counsel not to advise him touching his duty under the law but to advise a method by which he may elude it or if he cannot elude it by which he may have it annulled as unconstitutional by the courts the lawyer who succeeds in this branch of practice is certain to win the highest prizes at the bar and as capital has had now for more than one or even two generations all the prizes of the law within its gift this attitude of capital has had a profound effect upon shaping the american legal mind the capitalist as i infer regards the constitutional form of government which exists in the united states as a convenient method of obtaining his own way against the majority but the lawyer has learned to worship it as a fetish nor is this astonishing four were written constitution suppressed he would lose most of his importance and much of his income quite honestly therefore the american lawyer has come to believe that a sheet of paper soiled with printers ink and interpreted by half a dozen elderly gentlemen snugly dozing in arm chairs has some inherent and marvelous virtue by which it can arrest the march of omnipotent nature and capital gladly accepts this view of american civilization since hitherto capitalists have usually been able to select the magistrates who decide their causes perhaps directly through the intervention of some president or governor whom they have had nominated by a convention controlled by their money or else if the judiciary has been elective they have caused sympathetic judges to be chosen by means of a mechanism like tamony which they have frankly bought i wish to make myself clearly understood neither capitalists nor lawyers are necessarily or even probably other than conscientious men what they do is to think with specialized minds all dominant types have been more or less specialized if not so much as this and this specialization has caused as i understand it that obtuseness of perception which has been their ruin when the environment who favored them has changed all that is remarkable about the modern capitalist is the excess of his eccentricity or his deviation from that resultant of forces to which he must conform to us however at present neither the morality nor the present mental eccentricity of the capitalist is so material as the possibility of his acquiring flexibility under pressure for it would seem to be almost mathematically demonstrable that he will in the near future be subjected to a pressure under which he must develop flexibility or be eliminated there can be no doubt that the modern environment is changing faster than any environment ever previously changed therefore the social center of gravity constantly tends to shift more rapidly and therefore modern civilization has unprecedented need of the administrative or generalizing mind but as the mass and momentum of modern society is prodigious it will require a correspondingly prodigious energy to carry it safely from an unstable to a stable equilibrium the essential is to generate the energy which brings success and the more the mind dwells upon the peculiarities of the modern capitalistic class the more doubts obtrure themselves touching their ability to make the effort even at present and still more so to make it in the future as the magnitude of the social organism grows one source of capitalistic weakness comes from a lack of proper instruments were worth to work even supposing the will of capital to be good and this lack of administrative ability is somewhat due to the capitalistic attitude toward education in the united states capital has long owned the leading universities by right of purchase as it has owned the highways the currency and the press and capital has used the universities in a general way to develop capitalistic ideas this however is of no great moment what is of a moment is that capital has commercialized education apparently modern society if it is to cohere must have a high order of generalizing mind a mind which can grasp a multitude of complex relations but this is a mind which can at best only be produced in small quantity and at high cost capital has preferred the specialized mind and that not of the highest quality since it has found it profitable to set quantity before quality to the limit which the market will endure capitalists have never insisted upon raising an educational standard saving science and mechanics and the relatives overstimulation of the scientific mind has now become an actual menace to order because of the inferiority of the administrative intelligence yet even supposing the synthetic mind of the highest power to be increasing in proportion to the population instead of as I suspect pretty rapidly decreasing and supposing the capitalists to be fully alive to the need of administrative improvements a phalanx of washington's would be important to raise the administrative level of the united states materially as long as the courts remain censors of legislation because the province of the censorial court is to dislocate any comprehensive body of legislation whose effect would be to change the social status that was the fundamental purpose which underlay the adoption of a written constitution whose object was to keep local sovereignty intact especially at the south jefferson insisted that each sovereignty should by means of nullification protect itself it was a long step in advance when the nation conquered the prerogative of asserting its own sovereign power through the supreme court now the intervention of the courts in legislation has become by the change in environment as fatal to administration as would have been in 1800 the success of nullification i find it difficult to believe that capital with its specialized views of what constitutes its advantages its duties and its responsibilities and stimulated by a bar molded to meet its prejudices and requirements will ever voluntarily ascent to the consolidation of the united states to the point at which the interference of the courts with legislation might be eliminated because as i've pointed out capital finds the judicial veto useful as a means of at least temporarily evading the law while the bar taken as a whole quite honestly believes that the universe will obey the judicial decree no delusion could be profounder and none perhaps more dangerous courts i need hardly say cannot control nature though by trying to do so they may like the parliament of paris create a friction which shall induce an appalling catastrophe true judicial courts whether in times of peace or of revolution seldom fail to be substantial protection to the weak because they enforce an established corpus juris and conduct trials by recognized forms it is startling to compare the percentage of convictions to prosecutions for the same class of offenses in the regular criminal courts during the french revolution with a percentage in the revolutionary tribunal and once a stable social equilibrium is reached all men tend to support judicial courts if judicial courts exist from an instinct of self preservation this has been amply shown by french experience and it is here that french history is so illuminating to the american mind before the revolution france had semi political courts which conduced to the overthrow of to go and therefore wrought for violence but more than this france under the old regime had evolved a legal profession of a cast of mind incompatible with an equal administration of the law the french courts were therefore when trouble came supported only by a faction and were cast aside with that the old regime fell the young duke of short rest the son of a galatee or leans and the future louis philippe has related in his journal an anecdote which illustrates that subtle poison of distrust which undermines all legal authority the moment that suspicion of political partiality in the judiciary enters the popular mind in june 1791 the duke went down from paris to vindome to join the regiment of dragoons of which he had been commissioned colonel one day soon after he joined a messenger came to him in haste to tell him that a mob had gathered nearby who were about to hang two priests i ran thither at once wrote the duke i spoke to those who seemed most excited and impressed upon them how horrible it was to hang men without trial besides to act as hang men was to enter a trade which they all thought infamous that they had judges and that this was their affair they answered that their judges were aristocrats and that they did not punish the guilty that is to say although the priests were non jurors and therefore criminals in the eye of the law the courts would not enforce the law because of the political bias it is your fault i said to them since you elected them the judges but that is no reason why you should do justice yourselves denton explained in the convention that it was because of the deep distrust of the judiciary in the public mind which this anecdote shows that the september massacres occurred and it was because all republicans knew that the state and the army were full of traders like du moray whom the ordinary courts would not punish that denton brought forward his bill to organize a true political tribunal to deal with them summarily when denton carried through this statute he supposed himself to be at the apex of power and popularity and to be safe if any men in france are safe very shortly he learned the error in his calculation bilat who was a member of the committee of public safety while denton had allowed himself to be dropped for membership denton had just been married and to an aristocratic wife and the turmoil of office had grown to be distasteful to him on march 30 74 bilat somewhat casually remarked we must kill denton for in truth denton with conservative leanings was becoming a grave danger to the extreme jacobians had he lived a few months longer he would have been a thermidorist bilat therefore only expressed the prevailing jacobian opinion so the jacobians arrested denton camille dismalines and his other friends and denton at once anticipated what would be his doom as he entered his cell he said to his jailer i erected the tribunal i asked pardon of god and men but even yet he did not grasp the full meaning of what he had done at his trial he wished to introduce his evidence fully protesting that he should understand the tribunal since he created it nevertheless he did not understand the tribunal he still regarded it as more or less a court topino lebron the artist did understand it topino sat on the jury which tried denton and observed that the heart of one of his colleagues seemed failing him topino took the waiver aside and said this is not a trial it is a measure two men are impossible one must perish will you kill robus pierre no then by that admission you condemn denton lebron in this few words went to the root of the matter and stated the identical principle which underlies our whole doctrine of the police power a political court is not properly a court at all but an administrative board whose function is to work the will of the dominant faction for the time being thus a political court becomes the most formidable of all engines for the destruction of its creators the instant the social equilibrium shifts so denton found in the spring of 1794 when the equilibrium shifted and so robus pierre who slew denton found the next july when the equilibrium shifted again denton died on the fifth april 1794 about three months later shodan won the florist campaign straightway thermidor followed and the tribunal worked as well for the party of thermidor as it had for the jacobins carrier who had wallowed in blood at nantes as the ideal jacobin walked behind the cart which carried robus pierre to the scaffold shouting down with the tyrant but that did not save him in vain he protested to the convention that were he guilty the whole convention was guilty down to the president's belt by a vote of 498 out of 500 carrier was sent before the tribunal which even though reorganized condemned him therizia cabarros gaily presided at the closing of the chacobin club talion moved over to the benches on the right and therefore the court was ruthless to focay on the 11th their midor 70 members officers or partisans of the commune of paris were sent to the guillotine in only two batches on the next day 12 more followed four of whom were jury men focay's turn came later it may also be worthwhile for americans to observe that a political court is quite as effective against property as against life the duke of orleans is only the most celebrated example of a host of frenchmen who perished not because of revenge fear or jealousy but because the party in power wanted their property the famous law touching suspected persons loy des suspects was passed on september 17 1793 on october 10 1793 that is three weeks afterward saint just moved that additional power should be granted by the convention to the committee of public safety defining by a way of justification for his motion those who fell within the purview of this law among these first of all came the rich who by that fact alone would be considered prima facie enemies to their country as i stated at the beginning of this chapter history never can repeat itself therefore whatever else may happen in the united states we certainly shall have no revolutionary tribunal like the french tribunal of 1793 but the mechanical principle of the political court always remains the same it is an administrative board the control of which is useful or may be even essential to the success of a dominant faction and the instinctive comprehension which the american people have of this truth is demonstrated by the determination with which they have for many years sought to impose the will of the majority upon the judiciary other means failing to meet their expectations they have now hit on the recall which as revolutionary in essence as were the methods used during the terror courts from the supreme court downward if purged by recall or a process tantamount to recall would under proper stress work as surely for a required purpose as did the tribunal supervised by phuket and vill these considerations rather lead me to infer that the extreme complexity of the administrative problems presented by modern industrial civilization is beyond the compass of the capitalistic mind if this be so american society as at present organized with capitalists for the dominant class can concentrate no further and as nothing in the universe is at rest if it does not concentrate it must probably begin to disintegrate indeed we may perceive incipient signs of disintegration all about us we see for example an universal contempt for law incarnated in the capitalistic class itself which is responsible for order and in spite of the awful danger which impends over every rich and physically helpless type should the coercive power collapse we see it even more distinctly in the chronic war between capital and labor which government is admittedly unable to control we see it in the slow of urban politics inseparable from capitalistic methods of maintaining its ascendancy and perhaps most disquieting of all we see it in the dissolution of the family which has for untold ages been the seat of discipline and the foundation of authority for the dissolution of the family is peculiarly a phenomenon of our industrial age and it is caused by the demand of industry for the cheap labor of women and children napoleon told the lawyers who drafted the code that he insisted on one thing alone they must fortify the family for said he if the family is responsible to the father and the father to me i can keep order in france one of the difficulties therefore which capital has to meet by the aid of such administrative ability as it can command is how to keep order when society no longer rests on the cohesive family but on highly volatilized individuals as incohesive as greens of sand meditating upon these matters it is hard to resist the persuasion that unless capital can in the immediate future generate an intellectual energy beyond the sphere of its specialized calling very much in excess of any intellectual energy of which it has hitherto given promise and unless it can besides rise to an appreciation of diverse social conditions as well as to a level of political sagacity far higher than it has attained within recent years its relative power in the community must decline if this be so the symptoms which indicate social disintegration will intensify as they intensify the ability of industrial capital to withstand the attacks made upon it will lessen and this process must go on until capital abandons the contest to defend itself as too costly then nothing remains but flight under what conditions industrial capital would find migration from america possible must remain for us beyond the bounds even of speculation it might escape with little or no loss on the other hand it might fare as hardly as the southern slaveholders no man can foresee his fate in the event of adverse fortune however the position of capitalists would hardly be improved by the existence of political courts serving a malevolent majority whatever may be in store for us here at least we reach an intelligible conclusion should nature follow such a course as i've suggested she will settle all our present perplexities as simply and as drastically as she is apt to settle human perturbations and she will follow logically in the infinitely extended line of her own most impressive precedence end of chapter six inferences end of the theory of social revolutions