Robespierre’s Speech of 8 Thermidor
Full speech, translated by rbzpr
Original: Oevres de Maximilien Robespierre, Tome X
Session of 8 Thermidor of the Year II (26 July 1794)
Against the new factions and the corrupt deputies
Discourse pronounced by Robespierre, at the National Convention, in the session of 8 Thermidor… found among his papers by the commission charged with examining them.
Others draw flattering pictures to you; I come to tell you helpful truths. I do not come to carry out the ridiculous terrors spread by perfidity; but I want to smother, if it is possible, the flames of dissension by the only force of truth. (I will reveal the abuses who tend towards the ruin of the patrie and which only your integrity can repress.) I will defend before you your outraged authority, and violated freedom. If I also tell you something of persecutions of which I am the object, you will not do me injustice; you have nothing in common with the tyrants whom you fight. The cries of the outraged innocence do not importune your ear. The cries of outraged innocence do not importune your ears, and you are aware that this cause is not foreign to you.
The revolutions that have changed the face of empires before us only had the purpose of a change of dynasty, or the passage of power of a single one to the one of many. The French Revolution is the first that was founded on the theory of the rights of humanity, and on the principles of justice. The other revolutions only required ambition; ours imposes virtues. Ignorance and force have absorbed them in a new despotism; ours, coming from justice, can only repose on its breast. The Republic, imperceptibly caused by necessity and by the fight of the friends of freedom against always recurring conspiracies, has, so to say, slithered through all the factions; but it has discovered their power organized around it, and all the means of influence in their hands; also hasn’t it stopped being persecuted from its birth onwards in person of all men of good faith who fought for it. It is that, in order to maintain the advantage of their position, the heads of the factions and their agents have been obliged to hide themselves under the form of the Republic; Précy in Lyon and Brissot in Paris, shouted Vive la République! All the conspirators have even adopted, with more alacrity than any other, all the expressions, all the words of rallying patriotism. The Austrian, whose occupation was to fight the revolution; the Orléanais, whose role was to play patriotism, found themselves on the same line, and the one and the other couldn’t be distinguished from a republican anymore. They didn’t fight our principles, the corrupted them; they didn’t blaspheme against the revolution, they attempted to dishonour it under the pretext of serving it; they declaimed against tyrants, and conspired for tyranny; the praised the Republic, and slandered the republicans. The friends of liberty seek to overthrow the power of tyrants by the force of truth; the tyrants seek to destroy the defenders of liberty by calumny; they give the name of tyranny to the actual ascendancy of the principles of truth. Whenever this system could prevail, liberty is lost; it doesn’t have [any] legitimacy than perfidity and no other criminal than virtue, because it is in the nature of things itself that there is [one] influence everywhere where men are gathered, the one of tyranny or the one of reason. When the [latter] is proscribed as a crime, tyranny reigns; when the good citizens are condemned to silence, it must be that scoundrels dominate.
I need to pour out my heart here; you likewise need to hear the truth. Do not believe that I come here bringing any accusation; a more pressing need occupies me, and I do not undertake the duties of others; it is so about imminent dangers that this object no longer has a secondary importance. I come, if it is possible, to dispel cruel errors; I come to smother the horrible ferments of dissension by which one wants so set ablaze this temple of liberty and of the entire Republic; I come to unveil the abuses who tent towards the ruin of the patrie, and which your integrity alone can suppress. If I also tell you something of persecutions of which I am the object, you will not do me injustice; you have nothing in common with the tyrants who persecute me: the cries of oppressed innocence aren’t foreign to your hearts; you do not despise justice et and humanity, and you are aware that these plots aren’t foreign to your cause and the one of the patrie.
Ah! what is therefore the foundation of this odious system of terror and calumnies? Towards whom do we have to be dreadful, to the enemies or the friends of the Republic? Is it to tyrants and to rogues that our fear belongs, or to good men and to patriots? We, dreadful towards patriots! we who have torn the hands off of all factions conjured against them! we who fight them every day in order to say so to the hypocritical intriguers who still dare to oppress them! we who persecute the scoundrels who seek to prolong their troubles by deceiving us with inextricable impostures! We, dreadful towards the National Convention! And what are we without it? and who has defended the National Convention at the risk of their life? who is dedicated to its preservation, when execrable factions conspire its ruin on the soil of France? who is dedicated to its glory, when the evil henchmen of tyranny preach atheism and immorality in its name; when so many others maintain a criminal silence on the felonies of their accomplices, and seem to wait for the signal of carnage to bath in the blood of representatives of the people; when virtue itself was silent, frightened by the horrible ascendancy which audacious crime has taken? And against whom were the first strikes of conspirators destined? Against whom die Simond conspire at Luxembourg? Who were the victims picket out by Chaumette and by Ronsin? In which places did the band of assassins have to walk first when opening the prisons? Which are the objects of the calumnies and the attacks of tyrants against the Republic? Are there no daggers for us in the shipments which England sends to its accomplices in France and in Paris? It is us whom one assassinates, and it is us whom one depicts dreadful! And which are therefore the great acts of severity which we are blamed for? Who have been the victims? Hébert, Ronsin, Chabot, Danton, Delacroix, Fabre d'Églantine, and some other accomplices. Is it their punishment which we are reproached for? No one would dare to defend them. But, if we only have denounced the monsters whose death has saved the National Convention and the Republic, who can fear our principles, who can accuse us of the advance of injustice and of tyranny, if it is not them who resemble it? No, we haven’t been too severe : I testify the Republic, which breathes! I testify the National Representation surrounded by the respect due to the representation of a grand people! I testify the patriots who still wail in the dungeons which the scoundrels have opened to them! I testify the new crimes of the enemies of our freedom, and the guilty perseverance of the tyrants leagued against us! One speaks of our rigour, and the patrie reproaches us for our weakness.
Is it us who have plunged the patriots into the dungeons, and carried out the terror in all shapes? It is the monsters who have accused us. Is it us who, forgetting the crimes of the aristocracy and protecting the traitors, have declared war on peaceful citizens, raised crimes or incurable prejudices, or indifferent things, in order to find culprits everywhere, and to make the Revolution dreadful to the people itself? These are the monsters whom we have accused. Is it us who, pursuing old notions, product of the obsession of traitors, have aimed the sword at the majority of the National Convention, demanded in the popular Societies the head of six hundred representatives of the people? This are the monsters whom we have accused. Has one already forgotten that we have thrown ourselves among them and their perfidious adversaries in a time where one…
You know the operation of your enemies. They have attacked the National Convention in bulk; this project has failed. They have attacked the Committee of Public Safety; this project has failed. Some time ago, they declared war on certain members of the Committee of Public Safety; they seem to only claim to overwhelm a single man; they always march towards the same goal. That the tyrants of Europe dared to proscribe a representative of the French people, this is undoubtedly the excess of insolence; but that the Frenchmen who call themselves republicans work on executing the death sentence pronounced by the tyrants, that is the excess of scandal and of opprobrium! Is it true that one has peddled odious lists, where one nominates for victims a certain number of members of the Convention, and which one claims to be the work of the Committee of Public Safety, and thus mine? Is it true that one had dared to has dared to suppose the session of the Committee, rigorous orders who have never existed, arrests never more chimerical? Is it true that one has sought to persuade a certain number of irreproachable representatives that their perdition was resolved? all those who by some error had paid an inevitable tribute to the fatality of the circumstances and to human weakness, that they were doomed to the fate of conspirators? Is it true that the imposture had been spread with so much artifice and audacity that a great number of members would not dare to spend the night in their house anymore? Yes, the facts are constant and the proofs of these two manoeuvres are in the Committee of Public Safety. You could reveal many others of them to us, you, deputies returned from a mission in their departments; you, substitutes called to the functions of representatives of the people, you could tell us that this intrigue has worked to fool you, to embitter you, to drive you in a disastrous coalition! What is said, what is done in these suspect cliques, in these nocturnal gatherings, in these repasts where perfidy would distribute to the guests the poisons of hatred and calumny? What do they want, the originators of these machinations? Is it the safety of the patrie, the dignity and unity of the National Convention? Who are they? What facts justify the horrible idea which one wanted to give to us? Which men have been accused by the Committees, if not the Chaumettes, the Héberts, the Dantons, the Chabots, the Delacroixes? Is it the memory of conspirators which one wants to defend? Is it the death of conspirators which one wants to avenge? If one accuses us of having denounced some traitors, then one thereby accuses the Convention which has accused them; then one accuses justice which has struck them; then one accuses the people which has applauded their punishment. Who is the one who attacks the national representation, the one who pursues his enemies, or the one who protects them? And since when does the punishment of crime terrify virtue?
This is however the root of these projects of dictatorship and of the attacks against national liberty, in general attributed to the Committee of Public Safety at first. By which fatality was grand accusation suddenly transported on the head of a single one of its members? Strange project of one man, to engage the National Convention to butcher itself in detail by its own hands in order to clear for him to path to absolute power! Others perceive the ridiculous side of these charges; it is up to me to only see the atrocity of them. You will at least report to public opinion of your dreadful obstinacy to persecute the project of slaying all the friends of the patrie, [you] monsters seek to ravish me the esteem of the National Convention, the most glorious price of a mortal’s work, which I have neither usurped, nor taken over, but which I have been forced to conquer! Show an object of the terror to the eyes of someone whom one reveres and loves, it is for a sensible and honest man the most awful of tortures; to make him suffer, it is the biggest of felonies. But I call all of your indignation on the atrocious manoeuvres employed in order to underpin these extravagant calumnies.
Everywhere, the acts of oppression have been multiplied in order to expand the system of terror and of calumny; impure agents lavish unjust arrests; destructive financial projects threatened all the modest fortunes, and brought despair into an innumerable multitude of families bound to the Revolution; one terrified the nobles and the priests by concerted motions; payments of the creditors of the State and the public functionaries were suspended; one overheard at the Committee of Public Safety an order which would revive the persecutions against the members of the Commune of 10 August, under the pretext of a surrender of accounts. At the bosom of the Convention one claimed that the Mountain was threatened, because some members serving this part of the hall believed themselves [to be] in danger; and, to interest the entire National Convention in the same cause, one suddenly revealed the affaire of seventy three imprisoned deputies, and one blamed me for all these events, which were absolutely foreign to me; one said that I wanted to immolate the Mountain; one said that I wanted to shed the other part of the National Convention; one portrayed me here like the persecutor of seventy three imprisoned deputies; there one accused he of defending them; one said that I supported the Marais (this was the expression of my calumniators). It is remarkable that the most powerful argument which the Hébertist faction had employed, in order to prove that I was moderate, was the objection that I had brought to the proscription of a big part of the National Convention, and particularly my opinion on the proposal to decree the accusation of the seventy three imprisoned in a previous report.
Ah! certainly, when at risk of offending public opinion, only consulting the sacred interests of the patrie, I tore only at a hasty decision those whose opinions would have led me to the scaffold, if they would have triumphed; when, on other occasions, I exposed myself to the whole fury of a hypocritical faction in order to reclaim the principles of strict equity towards those who have judged me with more precipitation, I was undoubtedly far from thinking that one would have to hold me accountable of such conduct; I would have presumed too bad of a country where this was remarked, and where one had given pompous names to the most essential duties of integrity; but I was even further from thinking that one day, one would accuse me of being the executioner of those who I have satisfied, and the enemy of the national representation, which I have always served with devotion; I expected even less still that one would accuse me at the same time of wanting to defend it and of wanting to butcher it! Anyway, nothing could ever change my feelings or my principles. Regarding the imprisoned deputies, I declare that, far from having played any part at the decree which concerns them, I found it at least very extraordinary in the circumstances; that I have never occupied myself with them in any way since the moment where I have made towards those everything which my conscience had dictated me. Regarding the others, I have explained myself on some [of them] frankly; I have believed to fulfil my duty. The rest is a fabrication of atrocious deceptions. Regarding the National Convention, my first duty, as my first penchant, is boundless respect for it. Without wanting to absolve the crime, without wanting to justify per se the fatal errors of many, without wanting to stain the glory of the energetic defenders of liberty, or to weaken the illusion of a sacred name in the annals of the Revolution, I say that all the representatives of the people whose heart is pure have to renew the confidence and the dignity that suits them. I only know two parties, the one of good and the one of bad citizens; I know that patriotism is not an affair of the faction, but an affair of the heart; that it consists neither in insolence, nor in a brief passion which does respect neither the principles, nor the common sense, nor morals; even less in the devotion to the interests of a faction. The heart withered by the experience of so many betrayals, I believe in the necessity of appealing predominately to the honesty and to all the generous feelings to the succour of the Republic. I think that, everywhere where one meets a good man, wheresoever he sits, it is necessary to take him by the hand and to press him against one’s heart [TN: to hug him]. I believe in the fatal circumstances in the Revolution, which have nothing in common with the criminal plans; I believe in the detestable influence of conspiracy, and above all in the sinister power of calumny. I see the world full of fools and rascals; but the number of rascals is the smallest; it is those whom one has to punish for the crimes and troubles of the world. Therefore, I do not attribute the felonies of Brissot and of the Gironde to the men of good faith who have been misled sometimes, I do not attribute to all those who believed in Danton the crimes of this conspirator; I do not attribute the ones of Hébert to the citizens whose sincere patriotism was sometimes led beyond the exact limits of reason. The conspirators wouldn’t be conspirators, if they wouldn’t have the artifice to hide cleverly enough in order to usurp for some time the confidence of good men; but there are certain signs at which one can detect the dupes of accomplices, and the error of crime. Therefore, who would make distinction? Common sense and justice. Ah! how much common sense and justice are necessary in the human affairs! Wicked men call us men of blood, because we have waged war against the oppressors of the world; thus, we would be human if we were reunited at their sacrilege league in order to slay the people and to ruin the patrie !
To the rest, if it consists of privileged conspirators, if it consist of the inviolable enemies of the Republic, I agree to impose on myself on their account an eternal silence. I have fulfilled my task; it is about saving the public moral and the conservative principles of liberty, it is about snatching from oppression all the generous friends of the patrie.
It is them whom one accuses of attacking the national representation! And where would they search another support? After having fought all your enemies, after being devoted to the fury of all the factions in order to defend both your existence and your dignity, where would they seek asylum, if they didn’t find it at your bosom?
They aspire, one says, supreme power; they already exercise it… Thus, the National Convention doesn’t exist! Thus, the French people is wrecked! Stupid calumniators! Have you noticed yourself that your ridiculous declamations are not an injury done to an individual, but to an invincible nation, which masters and punishes the kings? For myself, I would have an extreme repugnance of defending myself personally before you against the most cowardly of all the tyrannies, if you weren’t convinced that you are the genuine objects of attacks of all the enemies of the Republic. Ah! that I justify their persecutions, if they didn’t fall into the general system of their conspiracy against the National Convention? Have you not noticed that, in order to isolate yourself from the nation, they have publicized to the face of the universe that you were dictators reigning by terror, and disavowed by the unspoken vow of the French? Have they not called our armies the conventional hordes? the French Revolution, the Jacobinism? And, while they affect to give to a small individual exposed to the insults of all the factions, a gigantic and ridiculous importance, what can be their goal, if not to divide you, to depreciate you by denying your actual existence, similar to the impious who denies the existence of the Divinity whom it fears?
Yet the word of dictatorship has its magical effects; it makes liberty wilt; it depreciates the government, it destroys the Republic; it degrades all the revolutionary institutions, that one presents as the work of a single man; it makes odious the national justice, which it presents as instituted by the ambition of a single man; it directs on this point all the hate and all daggers of fanaticism and of aristocracy.
What terrible use the enemies of the Republic have made of a single name of a Roman magistracy! And if their erudition is so fatal to us, what would be that of their treasures and of their intrigues? I do not speak of their armies; but that it would be allowed to me to send back to the duke of York and to all the royal writers the patents of this ridiculous dignity, which they sent me the first. There is too much insolence at kings, who are not certain to conserve their crowns, to arrogate themselves the right to distribute it to others! I conceive that a ridiculous prince, that this species of filthy and sacred animals which one still calls kings, can revel in their baseness and honour themselves of their ignominy; I conceive that the sons of George, for example, could have regret for this French sceptre which one fiercely suspects them of having coveted, and I sincerely pity this modern Tantalus. I will even confess at the shame, not of my patrie, but of the traitors which it has punished, that I have seen unworthy representatives of the people which would have changed this glorious title for the one of the valet of the chamber of George or of the one of Orléans. But that a representative of the people who feels the dignity of this sacred character, that a French citizen worthy of his name could compromise his vows up to guilty and ridiculous magnitudes which he has contributed to tear apart, that he submits himself to civic degradation in order to descend into the villainy of the throne, that is what only appeared similar to these perverted beings who do not even have the right to believe in virtue! What do I say, virtue! It is a natural passion, no doubt; but how they know it, these corrupt souls who never opened themselves but to cowardly and ferocious passions; these wretched intriguers who never bound patriotism to any moral idea, which marched in the Revolution after some important and ambitious personage, after I don’t know which despised prince, like formerly our lackeys to the step of their masters? But it exists, I testify to you, sensible and pure souls; is exists, this tender passion, imperious and irresistible, torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; this profound horror of tyranny, this zeal compassionate for the oppressed [ones], this sacred love of the patrie, this most sublime and saint love of humanity, without which a grand revolution is only a glorious crime which destroys another crime; it exists, this generous ambition of founding on earth the first Republic of the world. This egotism of non-degraded men, which finds a heavenly delight in the calmness of a pure conscience and in the ravishing spectacle of the public good, you feel it in this moment which burns in your souls; I feel it in mine. But how would our vile calumniators la feel it? How would the man born blind not have the idea of light? Nature has refused them a soul; they have some right to doubt, not only the immortality of the soul, but its existence.
They call me tyrant… If I would be one, they would crawl at my feet, I would stuff them with gold, I would ensure them the right to commit all the crimes, and they would be grateful. If I would be one, the kings which we have defeated, far from denouncing me (what tender interest they take at our liberty!) would lend me their culpable support; I would deal with them. In their distress, which they await, if not the help of a faction protected by them, who sells them the glory and liberty of our country? One arrives at tyranny with the aid of rascals; where do those run who fight them? Towards the tomb and towards immortality. Which is the tyrant who protects me? Which is the faction I belong to? It is yourself. Which is this faction which since the beginning of the Revolution has struck down the factions, has made disappear so many accredited traitors? It is you, it is the people, it is the principles. Voilà the faction to which I am devoted to, and against which all the crimes are leagued.
It is you whom one persecutes, it is the patrie, it is all the friends of the patrie. I still defend myself. How many others have been oppressed in the darkness? Who will ever dare to serve the patrie, when I am obliged here to respond to such calumnies? They quote like the priest from an ambitious plan the most natural effects of civisme and of liberty; the moral influence of the ancient athletes of the Revolution is today assimilated by the ones of tyranny. You are yourself the most cowardly of all tyrants, you who slander the power of truth! What do you pretend, you who want that truth be without strength in the mouth of the representatives of the French people? The truth, no doubt, has its power, it has its wrath, its despotism; it has accents [that are] touching, terrible, who resound with strength in the pure hearts as in the guilty consciences, and which is not gifted more with the falsehood of imitating than Salome with imitating the thunderbolts from the sky; but accuse nature of it, accuse the people of it, which wants it and which loves it.
There are two powers on earth, the one of reason and the one of tyranny; everywhere where the one rules, the other one is banished. Those who denounce as a crime the moral force of reason thereby search to bring back tyranny. If you do not want that the defenders of principles obtained some influence in this difficult fight of liberty against intrigue, you consequently want that victory remains with intrigue. If the representatives of the people who defend its cause cannot obtain its esteem with impunity, what will be the consequence
of this system, if not that it is no longer allowed to serve the people, that the Republic is outlawed and tyranny restored? And which tyranny [is] more odious than the one who punishes the people in person of its defenders? Because the freest thing which would be in the world, even under the reign of despotism, is it not friendship? But you, who make a crime out of it to us, are you jealous of it? No, you only take the gold and the perishable goods which the tyrants hand out to them who serve them. You serve them, you who corrupt the public morals and protect all the crimes; the guarantee of conspirators lies in forgetting the principles and in corruption; the one of defenders of liberty lies in the public conscience. You serve them, you who, always within or beyond truth, preach by turns the perfidious moderation of the aristocracy, and sometimes the fury of false democrats. You serve them, stubborn preachers of atheism and of vice. You want to destroy the representation, you who degrade it by your conduct or who trouble it by your intrigues. Which is the guiltiest, the one who attacks security by violence, or the one who attacks its justice by seduction and by perfidity? To deceive it, that is to betray it ; to push it to acts contrary to its intentions and to its principles, that is to tend towards its destruction; because its power is founded on virtue itself and on the national confidence. We cherish it, we who, after having fought for its physical security, today defend its glory and its principles! Is it like thereby that one marches towards despotism? But what cruel mockery to raise citizens, always outlawed, into despots! And what else are those who have constantly defended the interests of their country? The Republic has triumphed, never its defenders. Who am I, I who has been accused? A slave of liberty, a living martyr of the Republic, both the victim and the enemy of crime. All the rascals outraged me; the most indifferent actions, the most legitimate [ones] of others, are crimes for me. A man is slandered for knowing me. One forgives others their felonies; one makes a crime to me of my zeal. Take away my conscience, I am the unhappiest of all men; I do not even enjoy the rights of the citizen. What do I say? I am not even allowed to fulfil the duties of a representative of the people.
It is here that I have to let escape truth and unveil the real wounds of the Republic. The public affairs continue a perfidious and alarming march; the system combining the one of Hébert and the one of Fabre d'Eglantine is now carried out with an incredible audacity; the counter-revolutionaries are protected; those who dishonour the Revolution with the forms of Hébertism do this openly; the others, with more reserve. Patriotism and liberty are outlawed by the ones and by the others. One wants to destroy the revolutionary government in order to immolate the patrie to the scoundrels who tear it apart, and one marches towards this odious goal by two different paths : here, one openly slanders the revolutionary institutions; there, one seeks to make them odious by excess; one torments men [that are] void or peaceful; one plunges each day the patriots into the dungeons, and one promotes aristocracy with all his power; it is here that one appeals to indulgence, humanity. Is there the revolutionary government which we have instituted and defended? No, this government is the rapid and safe march of justice, it is the lightning cast by the hand of liberty against crime; it is not the despotism of rascals and of the aristocracy; it is not the independence of crime, from all divine and human laws. Without the revolutionary government, the Republic cannot grow stronger, and the factions smother it in its cradle; but, if [the Revolutionary Government] falls into perfidious hands, it becomes itself an instrument of counter-revolution. Now, one seeks to pervert it in order to destroy it. Those who slander it and those who compromise it by acts of oppression are the same men. I will not elaborate all causes of these abuses; but I will show you a single [one], which will suffice to explain you all the fatal effects: it lies in the excessive wickedness of the agents subordinated to a respectable authority constituted at your bosom. It lies in this Committee [of General Security - TN] of men of which it is impossible to not search and respect the civic virtues; it is more a reason of destroying an abuse which is committed without their knowledge, and which they are the first ones to fight. In vain a fatal policy claimed to surround the agents of which I speak of a certain superstitious prestige; I cannot respect rascals; I adopt still much less this royal maxim, which is useful to harness them; the weapons of liberty must only be touched by pure hands; purify the national surveillance instead of palliating its vices. Truth is only a reef for corrupted governments; it is the support of ours. For myself, I tremble when I contemplate that the enemies of the Revolution, that the former professors of royalism, that the ex-nobles, the émigrés maybe, are suddenly made revolutionary and transformed into clerks of the Committee of General Security in order to take revenge on the friends of the patrie for the birth and of the successes of the Republic. It would be strange enough that we would have the kindness of paying the spies of London or of Vienna in order to help us to make the police of the Republic. Now, I do not doubt that these persons there wouldn’t have arrived often. It is not that these folks wouldn’t be made of titles of patriotism by arresting pronounced aristocrats; that leads abroad to sacrifice some French [people] guilty towards their patrie, provided that they immolate the patriots and destroy the Republic?
To these powerful motives, who have already incited me to denounce these men, but uselessly, I add another, which holds to the weaving which I had begun to develop. We are taught that they are paid by the enemies of the Revolution in order to dishonour the revolutionary government in itself and to slander the representatives of the people of which the tyrants have ordered the waste. For example, when the victims of their perversity complain, they excuse themselves by telling them: It is Robespierre who wants this; we cannot dispense ourselves from it. The infamous disciples of Hébert once used the same language in the time where I denounced them; they called themselves my friends; then, they had adjudged me for convinced of moderation ; it is still the same species of counter-revolutionaries who persecute patriotism. Until when will the honour of citizens and the dignity of the Convention will be at the mercy of these men? But the trait which I come to cite is only a branch of the system of wider persecution of which I am the object. By developing this accusation of dictatorship made the order of the day by the tyrants, one is focused to charge me of all their iniquities, of all the wrongs of fortune or all the rigours commanded by the safety of the patrie. One said to the nobles : It is him alone who has proscribed you; one said at the same time to the patriots : He wants to save the nobles; on says to the priests: It is him alone who persecutes you; without him you would be peaceful and triumphant; one said to the fanatics : It is him who destroys religion; one said to the persecuted patriots: It is him who has ordered this or who doesn’t want to prevent this. One sends to me all the complaints of which I cannot stop the causes, by saying : Your fate depends on him alone. Suborned men in public places spread this system every day; it was there in the place of the sessions of the Revolutionary Tribunal, in the places where the enemies of the patrie expiate their felonies; they said: Here are the sentenced unfortunate [ones]; who is the cause of this? Robespierre. One particularly focused on proving that the Revolutionary Tribunal was a tribunal of blood, created by me alone, and that I controlled it absolutely in order to have butchered all the good men and likewise all the scoundrels, because one wanted to arouse against me enemies of all kinds. This cry resounded in all the prisons; this plan of proscription was executed at the same time in all the departments by the emissaries of tyranny. This is not all; one has proposed lately projects of finance who adorned me [with] calculations in order to sadden the less fortunate citizens and to multiply the [number of] unhappy [people]. In vain I have often called the attention of the Committee of Public Safety on this object; fine! would you believe that one has spread the rumour that they were even my work, and that in order to accredit this one has imagined to say that there existed in the Committee of Public Safety a commission of finances and that I would be the president of it? But as one wished to ruin me, above all in the opinion of the National Convention, one pretended that I alone had dared to believe that it could contain within some men unworthy of it. One says to every deputy returned from a mission in the departments that I alone had provoked his recalling. I was accused by men [that are] very unofficial and very insinuating of everything good and everything bad which has been made. One accurately reported to my colleagues everything of I have said, and above all the things I have not said. One carefully spread the suspicion that one had contributed to an act which could displease anyone; I had done everything, demanded everything, commanded everything; because one must not forget my title of dictator. When one had formed this storm of hatred, of vengeance, of terror, angered pride, one believed that It was time to burst. Those who had reasons to dread me se flattered themselves that my certain ruin would assure their safety and their triumph. While the English and German papers announced my arrest, hawkers of newspapers screamed [about] it in Paris. My colleagues, in front of whom I speak, know the rest much better that me; they know all the attempts which one has made according to them in order to prepare the success of a fiction which would seem [like] a new edition of the one of Louvet. Several could give account of the unexpected visits which have been paid to them in order to dispose them to proscribe me. Finally, one assured that one would generally be informed in the National Convention that an act of accusation would be brought forward against me. On a probed the spirits on this subject, and everything proved that the integrity of the National Convention has forced the calumniators to abandon or at least to adjourn their crime. But who were they, these calumniators? What I can respond at first, is that, in a royalist manifesto found among the papers of a known conspirator who has already undergone the penalty due to his felonies, and which seemed to be the text of all the calumnies revived in this moment, one reads in clear words this conclusion, addressed to all kinds of public enemies: If this astute demagogue existed no more, if he had paid with his head [for] his ambitious manoeuvres, the nation would be free; everyone could publish his thoughts; Paris would have never seen within it this multitude of murders vulgarly known under the false name of judgements of the Revolutionary Tribunal. I can add that this passage is the analysis of proclamations made by the princes forming a coalition and the foreign newspapers in the pay of kings, who like this seemed to give every day the watchword to all the conspirators of the interior. I only cite this passage of one of the most accredited of these writers.
Thus, I can respond that the originators of this plan of calumnies are firstly the duke of York, M. Pitt, and all the tyrants [that are] armed against us. Who [is] next?… Ah! I do not dare to name them in this moment and in this place; I cannot resolve to entirely tear apart the veil that covers this profound mystery of iniquities; but I can affirm this positively, that, among the originators of this weaving, are the agents of this system of corruption and of extravagance, the most powerful of all means invented by foreign countries in order to ruin the Republic, are the impure apostles of atheism and of the immorality whose basis it is.
It is a very remarkable circumstance that your decree of … , which strengthens the shaken bases of the public moral, was the signal of an outburst of fury of the enemies of the Republic; it is in from time that occurred the murders and new calumnies, more criminal than the murders. The tyrants thought that they had a decisive defeat to repair. The solemn proclamation of your veritable principles destroyed within one day the fruits of many years of intrigues. The tyrants triumphed, the French people was placed between famine and atheism, more odious than famine. The people can put up with hunger, but not with crime; the people can sacrifice everything, except for its virtues. Tyranny has not made yet this insult to human nature, to make a shame to it out of moral and a duty out of depravity; the most evil of the conspirators have reserved it to the French people in its glory and in its power. Tyranny has only demanded from men their goods and their life; we requested these within our consciences; with one hand they presented us all the evils, and with the other they stripped us of [our] hope. Atheism, escort of all crimes, pours over the people mourning and despair, and over the national representation suspicions, scorn and opprobrium. A just indignation, compressed by terror, secretly fermenting in all hearts; a terrible eruption, inevitable, boiling in the entrails of the volcano, whereas small philosophers playing stupidly on its crime with great scoundrels. Such was the situation of the Republic, which, had the people consented to suffering from tyrannies, would be that it shook the yoke of it violently, liberty would equally be lost; because by its reaction it would have lethally wounded the Republic, and by its patience it would be rendered unworthy. Also, of all the wonders of our revolution, the one that our posterity will conceive the smallest, is that we have been able to escaped this danger. Immortal graces you will become! You have saved the patrie; your decree of [18 Floréal] alone is a revolution; you have struck at the same time atheism and priestly despotism; you have advanced by a half century the fatal hour of the tyrants; you have attached to the cause of the Revolution all the pure and generous hearts; you have showed this to the world in all the brilliance of its heavenly beauty. O day [that is]forever fortunate, where the whole French people rose in order to make to the creator of nature the only homage worthy of him! What touching assembly of all the objects which can enchant the eyes and the heart of men! Oh honoured age! generous ardour of the children of the patrie! naive and pure joy of the young! delicious tears of tender mothers! Oh divine charm of innocence and beauty! Oh majesty of a great people [rendered] happy by the only sentiment of its strength, of its glory and of its virtue! Being of beings! on the day where the universe left your omnipotent hands, did it shine with a more pleasant light in your eyes than on this day where, breaking the yoke of crime and of error, it seemed worthy of your looks and of its destiny to you?
This day had left on France a deep impression of calmness, of happiness, of wisdom and of goodness. At the sight of this sublime reunion of the first people of the world, which had believed that this crime still existed on earth? But when the people, in whose presence all the private vices disappeared, returned in its domestic homes, the intriguers reappear and the role of charlatans start again. It is since this time that one has seen them agitating with a new audacity and seeking to punish all those who had disconcerted the most dangerous of all complots. Would you believe that within the public elation, men had answered with signs of fury to the touching acclamations of the people? Would one believe that the president of the National Convention, speaking to the assembled people, was insulted by them, and that these men were representatives of the people? This single trait explains everything which has happened since then tout. The first attempt which the malevolent [ones] made was to seek to dishonour the great principles which you have proclaimed and to erase the touching memory of the national festival. Such was the goal of the character and the solemnity which one has given to what one had called the affair of Catherine Théot. Malevolence has known well to take part in the political conspiracy, hidden under the name of some devoted imbeciles, and one presented to public attention only a mystic farce and an inexhaustible subject of indecent or puerile sarcasm. The real conspirators escaped them (sic), and one made resound [in] Paris and all France the name of the mother of God. At the same moment, one sees a multitude of disgusting pamphlets hatching, worthy of Père Duchesne, whose goal was to dishonour the National Convention, the Revolutionary Tribunal; to revive the religious quarrels, to begin a persecution as atrocious as impolite against the weak or credulous spirits, imbued with some superstitious memory. In fact, a multitude of peaceful citizens and even of patriots have been arrested on occasion of this affair; and the guilty [ones] still conspire freely; because the plan is to save them, to torment the people and to multiply the [number of] unhappy [people]. What hasn’t be done in order to reach this goal? Open preaching of atheism, stray violence against religion, excitations committed under the most indecent forms, persecutions directed against the people under the pretext of superstition; system of famine, at first by monopolizations, then by the war aroused in every lawful trade under the pretext of monopolization; incarcerations of patriots: everything tended towards this goal. At the same time, the la National Treasury stopped the payments; one reduced to despair, by Machiavellian projects, the small creditors of the State; one used violence and la ruse in order to make them subscribe to commitments fatal to their interests, to the name of the law itself which disavowed this manoeuvre. Every occasion to hurt a citizen was seized with avidity, and all occasions were disguised, according to the purpose, under the pretexts of the public good. One served the aristocracy, but one disturbed it, one terrified it purposely to enlarge the number of the unhappy [ones], and to push it to some act of despair against the revolutionary government. One publicized that Hérault, Danton and Hébert were victims of the Committee of Public Safety, and that it was necessary to avenge them by the ruin of this Committee. One wanted to spare the heads of the armed force; one persecuted the judges of the Commune, (and one talked of recalling Pache to the functions of mayor). While representatives of the people strived to persuade their colleagues that they could only find salvation in the ruin of the members of the Committee, while judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who had grossly plotted in favour of the conspirators accused by the Convention, said everywhere that it was necessary to stand up to oppression, and that there were twenty-nine thousand patriots determined to overthrow the present government, this is the language which [was] used [by] the foreign newspapers which, in all the moments of crisis, had always faithfully announced the plots about to happen amidst us, and whose originators seem to have relationships with the conspirators. It takes a riot at the criminals; consequently, they have gathered in Paris, in this moment, from all parts of the Republic, the scoundrels who desolated it in the times of Chaumette and of Hébert; those whom you have ordered by your decree to be transferred to the Revolutionary Tribunal.
One rendered the revolutionary government odious in order to prepare its destruction. After having accumulated all the orders and having directed all the blame for them on those whom one wanted to ruin by a system [that is] dull and universal of calumnies, one had to destroy the Revolutionary Tribunal or compose it of conspirators; to appeal to aristocracy itself; to offer impunity to all the enemies of the patrie, and to show to the people its most zealous defenders as the originators of everything bad [that has] happened. If we succeed, the conspirators say, it is necessary to contrast by an extreme indulgence with the present state of things. This word contains the whole conspiracy. What were the crimes reproached to Danton, to Fabre, to Desmoulins? To preach clemency for the enemies of the patrie, and to conspire in order to assure them an amnesty [which would be] fatal to liberty. What would it look like, if the originators of the plot, of which I come to speak, were among those who have lead Danton, Fabre and Desmoulins to the scaffold? What did the first conspirators do? Hébert, Chaumette and Ronsin aimed to render the revolutionary government insupportable and ridiculous, whereas Camille Desmoulins attacked it in satirical writings, and Fabre and Danton intrigued to defend him. The ones slandered, the others prepared the pretexts of calumnies. The same system is continued openly today. By which fatality [do] those who formerly declaimed against Hébert [now] defend his accomplices? How [did] those who had declared themselves the enemies of Danton become his imitators? How [do] those who formerly accused certain members of the Convention extremely, find themselves leagued with them against the patriots which one wants to ruin? Cowards! thus, they wanted to make me descend to the tomb with ignominy! And I only would leave on earth the memory of a tyrant! With which perfidy they abused my good faith! How they seem to adopt the principles of all the good citizens! How naive and caressing their feint friendship was! Suddenly their faces are covered with darkest clouds; a ferocious joy shone in their eyes; this was the moment where they believed [that] their measures [were] made well to overpower me. Today, they caress me again; their language is more plus affectionate than ever; three days before, they were ready to denounce me as a Catiline; today, they attribute to me the virtues of Cato. It takes them time to renew their criminal weavings. How atrocious their goal is! but how despicable their means are! Judge this by a single trait. I have been charged momentarily, in the absence of one of my colleagues, to supervise a Bureau of General Police, recently and weakly organized at the Committee of Public Safety. My brief administration is limited to provoke about thirty arrests, be it for releasing persecuted patriots into liberty, be it for ensuring some enemies of the Revolution. Well! Will one believe that this single word of General Police has served the pretext to place on my head the responsibility of all operations of the Committee of General Security, of the errors of all constituted authorities, of the crimes of all our enemies ? Is there possibly no arrested individual, no upset citizen who was told about me: This is the originator of your troubles ; you would be happy and free, if he existed no more. How could I either recount or guess all the kinds of impostures that have been clandestinely insinuated, be it in the National Convention, be it elsewhere, in order to render me odious or dreadful? I will limit myself to saying that since over six weeks, the nature and the strength of calamine, the impotence to do good and to stop the evil, have forced me to completely abandon my functions of a member of the Committee of Public Safety, and I swear that even in this I only consulted my reason and my patrie. I prefer my quality of a representative of the people to the one of a member of the Committee of Public Safety, and I put my quality as a man and French citizen before everything.
Anyway, voilà within less than six weeks that my dictatorship is expired, and that I didn’t have any kind of influence on the government. Has patriotism been more protected? the factions more timid, the patrie happier? I would wish so. But this influence is limited at all times to advocate the cause of the patrie before the national representation and at the tribunal of public reason; I was allowed to fight the factions that threatened you; I wanted to uproot the system of corruption and of disorder that they have established, and which I regard as the only obstacle to the consolidation of the Republic; I thought that it only could seat on the eternal bases of morality. Everything is leagued against me and against those who had the same principles. After having defeated the disdain and the contradictions of many, I have proposed you the great principles engraved in your hearts, and which have blasted the plots of counter-revolutionary atheists. You have consecrated them; but this is the fate of principles of being proclaimed by good men, and applied or opposed by the wicked. Even on the eve of the festival of the Supreme Being, one wanted to make it retreat under a frivolous pretext; since [then] one has not ceased to throw ridicule on all those who stick to these ideas ; since [then] one has not ceased to promote everyone who could wake the doctrine of conspirators whom you have punished. Recently one comes to make disappear the traces of all the monuments which have consecrated the great times of the Revolution. Those who remembered the moral revolution which avenged you for calumny and which founded the Republic are the only [ones] who have been destroyed. I have not seen at several [people] any penchant to follow the fixed principles, to maintain [on] the path of justice traced between the two reefs that the enemies of the patrie have placed on our way. While it is necessary that I conceal these truths, that one brings me the hemlock! My reason, not my heart, it on the point of doubting this virtuous Republic whose plan I have traced [to] myself.
I believed to sense the true goal of this bizarre imputation of dictatorship; I am reminded that Brissot and Roland have already filled Europe with it in the time where they exercised a nearly limitless power. In which hands are today the armies, the finances and the interior administration of the Republic? In the ones of the coalition that persecutes me. All the friends of principles are without influence ; but it isn’t enough for them to have taken away an uncomfortable supervisor by the desperation of good; its existence alone is for them an object of dread, and they have meditated in the shadows, unbeknownst by their colleagues, the project of snatching the right to defend the people with one’s life. Oh! I would abandon it without regret! I have the experience of the past, and I see the future. Which friend of the patrie can want to survive the moment where it is no longer allowed to serve it and to defend oppressed innocence? Why remain in an order of things where intrigue eternally triumphs over truth, where justice is a deceit, where the vilest passions, where the most ridiculous fears occupy in the hearts the place of the sacred interests of humanity? Why sustain the torture to see this horrible succession of traitors more or less used to hiding their hideous soul under the veil of virtue, and even of friendship, but all of which leave to posterity the trouble to decide which of the enemies of my country was the most cowardly and the most atrocious [one]? Seeing the multitude of vices that the torrent of the revolution has rolled pell-mell with the civic virtues, I sometimes feared, I admit, to be stained in the eyes of posterity by the impure vicinity of perverted men who introduced themselves among the sincere friends of humanity, and I applaud myself for seeing the fury of the Verreses and of Catilines of my country tracing a profound line of demarcation between them and all good men. I have seen in history all the defenders of liberty attacked by calumny; but their oppressors are also dead! The good and wicked [ones] disappeared from earth, but under different circumstances. French [people], do not bear that your enemies dare to depress your souls by their desolating doctrine. No, Chaumette, no [Fouché], death is no eternal sleep. Citizens, efface from the tombs this maxim engraved by the sacrilegious hands which throws a funeral veil on nature, which discourage the oppressed innocence, and which insults death. Engrave this instead there: death is the beginning of immortality.
I promised, some time ago, to leave a testament redoubtable to the oppressors of the people. I come to publicize it from this moment with the independence which is appropriate for the situation where I placed myself: I leave to them the terrible truth, and death!
Representatives of the French people, it is time to resume the pride and the elevation of character which is appropriate for you. You are not made for being governed, but to reign the custodians of your confidence : the respect that they owe you doesn’t consist of vain flattery, in these flattering stories, lavished to kings by ambitious ministers, but of the truth, and above all of the profound respect for our principles. One has told you that everything is good in the Republic : I deny this. Why did those who, two days ago, predicted you so frightful storms, not see more than light clouds yesterday? Why do those who told you once : I tell you that we are walking on volcanoes, believe that they only walk on roses today? Yesterday they believed in conspiracies: I declare that I believe in them in this moment. Those who tell you that the foundation of the Republic is an undertaking so easy, you are wrong, or rather they cannot fool anyone. Where are the wise institutions, where is the plan of regeneration which justify this ambitious language? Is one only occupied with this great object? What do I say, did one not want to proscribe those who have organized them? One praises them today because one believes themselves weaker: therefore one will proscribe them still tomorrow, when one becomes stronger. Within four days, one says, the injustices will be fixed: why have they been committed with impunity for four months? and how, within four days, will the originators of our troubles be corrected or hunted? On speaks much to you about your victories with an academic lightness which would make believe that they cost our heroes neither blood nor work : told with less pomp, they would seem greater. It is neither by rhetorician phrases, nor even by military exploits, that we will conquer Europe, but by the wisdom of our laws, by the majesty of our deliberations, and by the greatness of our characters. What has one done to turn our military success into the profit of our principles, to prevent the dangers of victory, or to assure the fruits? Supervise the victory; supervise Belgium. I warn you that your decree against the English has perennially been violated; that England, so maltreated by our discourse, is spared by our weapons. I warn you that the philanthropic comedies played by Dumouriez in Belgium are repeated today; that one amuses themselves with planting trees fruitless of liberty on enemy soil, instead of picking the fruits of victory, and that the defeated slaves are favoured at the cost of the victorious Republic. Our enemies withdraw, and we leave our intestine divisions. Contemplate the end of the campaign; fear the interior factions; fear the intrigues favoured by the distance on a foreign land. One has sown division among the generals; the military aristocracy is protected ; the loyal generals are persecuted ; the military administration is wrapped in a suspect authority; one has violated your decrees in order to shake [off] the yoke of a necessary surveillance. These truths are well worth of epigrams.
Our interior situation is much more critical. A reasonable system of finances is to create: the one that governs today is mean, prodigal, meddlesome, ravenous, and in fact absolutely independent of your supreme surveillance. The foreign relations are completely neglected; almost all the agents employed in the foreign powers, decried for their incivisme, have openly betrayed the Republic with an audacity unpunished until today.
The revolutionary government merits all your attention: would it be destroyed today, tomorrow liberty would be no more. It is not necessary to slander it, but to remind it of its principle, to simplify it, to decrease the innumerable crowd of its agents, above all to purge them: it is necessary to return security to the people, but not to its enemies. It’s not about impeding the justice of the people by new shapes; the penal law necessary has to have something vague, because, the present character of conspirators being dissimulation and hypocrisy, it is necessary that justice could seize them in all shapes. A single way of conspiring let unpunished would render illusory and would compromise the salvation of the patrie. The guarantee of patriotism lies therefore neither in the slowness nor in the weakness of national justice, but in the principles and in the integrity of those who it is entrusted to, in the good faith of the government, in the frank protection which it grants to patriots, and in the energy with which it represses the aristocracy; in the public spirit, in certain moral and political institutions which, without impeding the march of justice, offer a safeguard to good citizens, and suppress the evil [persons] by their influence on the public opinion and on the direction of the revolutionary march and which will be proposed to you when the closest conspiracies allow the friends of liberty to breathe.
Let us lead the revolutionary action by maxims [that are] wise and constantly protected ; let us severely punish those who abuse revolutionary principles in order to hurt the citizens; one would be ell convinced that all those who are charged with the national surveillance, free from every spirit of faction, strongly want the triumph of patriotism et and the punishment of the guilty : everything is in order; but if one feels that too influential men secretly desire the destruction of the revolutionary government, that they are inclined towards indulgence instead of justice; if they employ corrupted agents, if they today slander the only authority which imposes it on the enemies of liberty and withdraw themselves on the next day for intriguing once more; if, instead of rendering liberty to the patriots, they render it indistinctly to the conspirators, so that all the intriguers ally themselves in order to slander the patriots and to oppress them. All these causes are to blame for the abuses, and not the revolutionary government, because there is not a single one of it who wouldn’t be insupportable under the same circumstances.
The revolutionary government has saved the patrie; it is necessary to save [the revolutionary government] itself from all the reefs; it would be bad to conclude believing that it is necessary to destroy it by this alone that the enemies of the public good have paralyzed it at first, and now strive to corrupt it. This is a strange way to protect the patriots by releasing the counterrevolutionaries, and by making the rogues triumph! It is the terror of crime what makes up the security of innocence.
Furthermore, I am far from attributing the abuses to the majority of those whom you have given your confidence, the majority itself is paralyzed and betrayed; intrigue and the foreign [powers] triumph. One hides themselves, one conceals, one errs; thus one conspires. One was audacious, one meditated a grand act of oppression, one surrounds themselves with force in order to suppress public opinion after having angered it; one seeks to seduce the public functionaries whose loyalty one fears; one persecutes the friends of liberty: thus one conspires. One suddenly becomes soft and even flattering; one secretly does dangerous insinuations against Paris; one seeks to benumb public opinion; one slanders the people; one erects in crime the civic solicitude; one doesn’t expel the deserters, the enemy prisoners, the counter-revolutionaries of all kind which gather in Paris, and one takes away the gunners, one disarms the citizens; one intrigues in the army; one seeks to seize everything : thus one conspires. [During] the last days one sought to give you the change to the conspiracy; today, one denies this; it’s even a crime to believe in this. One scares you, one assures you by turns: the real conspiracy, it is here.
The counter-revolution lies in the administration of finances.
It is all about system of counter-revolutionary innovation, disguised under the appearance of patriotism. It seeks to foment agiotage, to weaken the public credence by dishonouring the French loyalty, to favour the rich creditors, to ruin and to discourage the poor, to multiply the [number of] unhappy [ones], to deprive the people of the national goods, and to imperceptibly bring the ruin of the public fortune.
Who are the supreme administrators of our finances? Brissotins, Feuillants, aristocrats and known rascals; these are the Cambons, the Mallarmés, the Ramels; these are the companions and the successors of Chabot, of Fabre and of Julien (de Toulouse).
To palliate their pernicious plans, they lately advised to approach the Committee of Public Safety, because one didn’t doubt that this Committee, distracted so many and from so great works, would assume confidence, as it has happened a few times, [of] all the projects of Cambon. It is a new ploy imagined in order to multiply the enemies of the Committee, whose ruin is the principal goal of all conspiracies.
The National Treasury, directed by a hypocrite counter-revolutionaries named Lhermina, perfectly assists their views by the plan which it has adopted to put chains on all the urgent spending, under the pretext of an scrupulous attachment to the forms, to not pay anyone but the aristocrats, and to upset the discomforted citizens by rejections, by delays, and often by odious provocations.
The counter-revolution lies in all parts of the political economy. The conspirators have all rushed, against our will, into violent measures, that only their crimes rendered necessary, and reduced the Republic to the most awful paucity, and which would have famished it if not for the concurrence of most unexpected events. That system was the work of the foreign [powers], which [have] proposed it for the venal body of the Chabots, the Luliers, the Héberts and so many other scoundrels. It takes all the efforts du genius in order to bring the Republic back to a natural and mild government, which alone can nourish abundance, and this work has not begun yet.
One remembers all the crimes provided to realize the pact of famine born by the infernal genius of England. In order to save us from this disaster, it took two miracles equally undreamed: the first is the return of our convoy sold to England before its departure from America, and on which the cabinet of London counted, and the abundant and premature harvest which nature has presented us; the other is the sublime patience of the people, which has even suffered from hunger in order to conserve liberty. It is still left to overcome the shortage of arms, of vehicles, of horses, which is an obstacle to the harvest and to the farming of lands, and all the manoeuvres woven [during] the last year by our enemies, which they do not fail to renew.
The counter-revolutionaries have rushed here in order to join their accomplices, and to defend their patrons by the force of intrigues and of crimes. They count on the imprisoned counterrevolutionaries, on the people of the Vendée and on the deserters and the enemy prisoners, who, according to all opinions, escape since some time in shoals in order to give way to Paris, like I have already denounced in vain multiple times at the Committee of Public Safety; finally, on the aristocracy, which secretly conspires around de nous. One excited violent discussion in the National Convention; the traitors, hidden far from here among the foreign hypocrites, drop the mask; the conspirators accuse their accusers, and will lavish all the ploys once used by Brissot in order to smother the voice of the truth. If it can’t master the Convention by this mean, it will divide it into two factions ; and a wide field is opened to calumny and to intrigue. If it master for one moment, they will accuse of despotism and of resistance to the national authority those who energetically fight their criminal league; the cries of oppressed innocence, the buck words of outraged liberty will be denounced as the clues of a dangerous influence or of a personal ambition; you believe to be returned under the blade of former conspirators. The people were indignant; one called it a faction; the criminal faction continued to exasperate it; it sought to divide the National Convention from the people; finally by the force of attacks one hopes to get through the troubles in which the conspirators will push the aristocracy and all their accomplices in order to slaughter the patriots and to re-establish tyranny. This is a part of the plan of the conspiracy. And who is it necessary to attribute this wrongs to? To ourselves, to our cowardly weakness for crime and to our guilty abandonment of principles proclaimed by ourselves. We are not wrong about this: to found a huge Republic on the bases of reason and equality, bind by a vigorous tie all the parts of this huge empire is not an undertaking which lightness can achieve: it’s the masterpiece of virtue and human reason. All factions are born in shoals within a great revolution; how to suppress them, if you don’t constantly submit all passions to justice? You have no other guarantor of liberty than the rigorous observation of the principles and the universal morality you have proclaimed. If reason doesn’t reign, it is inevitable that crime and ambition reign; without it, victory is nothing but a means of ambition and a danger for liberty itself, a fatal pretext which intrigue abuses in order to benumb patriotism on the edge of the abyss; without it, what matters victory itself? Victory only makes arms ambition, benumbs patriotism, arouses pride, and digs with its brilliant hands the grave of the Republic. What does it matter that our armies chase before them the armed forces of kings, if we retreat before the destructive vices of public liberty? What does it matter to us to defeat the kings, if we are defeated by the vices that bring tyranny ? Now, what have we done against them lately? We have proclaimed great prices.
What has not been done to protect them amidst us! What have we done to destroy them? Nothing, because they raise their insolent head, and threaten virtue with impunity; nothing, because the government has retreated before the factions, and they find protectors among the custodians of public authority; so we wait for all the ills, because we abandon the empire to them. On the path we are [on], to stop before the end, is to perish, and we have retrograded shamefully. You have ordered the punishment of some villainous originates of our ills; they dared to resist to the national justice, and one sacrificed to them the fates of the patrie and of humanity! So we wait for all the plagues that could carry the factions who ferment with impunity. Amidst all ardent passions, and in a such vast empire, the tyrants, whose armies I perceive fugitive, but not enveloped, but not exterminated, withdraw in order to leave you as prey to your internecine dissensions which they kindle themselves, and to an army of criminal agents which you do not even are able to see. Let go for a moment the reins of the revolution: you see military despotism taking it over, and the head of the factions overthrowing the debased national representation; a century of civil wars and of calamities will desolate our patrie, and we will perish for not having wanted to seize a moment [that is] marked in the history of men for founding liberty; we yield our patrie up to a century of calamities, and the maledictions of the people will tie into our memory, which must be dear to the mankind! We won’t even have the merit of having undertaken great things for by virtuous motives; one will confuse us with the unworthy agents of the people who have dishonoured the national representation, and we will share their felonies by leaving them unpunished. Immortality unfolded before us, we will perish with ignominy. The good citizens will perish; the wicked will also punish; will the outraged and victorious people leave then in peace [while] enjoying their crimes? Would the tyrants themselves not break these vile instruments? What justice have we done towards the oppressors of the people? Which are the patriots [that are] oppressed by the most odious abuses of the national authority which they have avenged? What do I say! who are those who were able to make heard the voice of oppressed innocence with impunity? Have the culprits not established this awful principle that to denounce a disloyal representative is to conspire against the national representation? The oppressor answers to the oppressed with incarceration and new insults. Do the departments, where these crimes have been committed, ignore them nonetheless because we forget them? and do the complaints which we reject not resound with more force in the oppressed hearts of the unhappy citizens? It is so easy and so sweet to be just! Why devote ourselves to the opprobrium of culprits by tolerating them? But what! will the tolerated abuses not increase? Will the unpunished culprits not fly from crimes to crimes? Do we want to share so much infamy, and devote ourselves to the dreadful fate of oppressors of the people? What titles do they have to impose them even to the worst tyrants? One faction would forgive to another faction; soon, the scoundrels would avenge the world by slaying each other, and, if they escaped from the justice of men or their own fury, would they escape from the eternal justice which they have insulted by the most horrible of all crimes ?
Regarding myself, whose existence seems to the enemies of my country like an obstacle for their odious projects, I readily agree to make their sacrifice, if their dreadful empire shall still last. Ah! who could desire to see even longer this horrible succession of traitors more or less used to hide their hideous soul under a mask of virtue until the moment where their crime seems ripe, all of which will leave to posterity the trouble to decide which of the enemies of my patrie was the most cowardly and most atrocious [one]?
If one proposed here to pronounce an amnesty in favour of the perfidious deputies, and to place the crimes of all representatives under the safeguard of a decree, redness would cover the face of all of us; but to leave on the head of the loyal representatives the duty to denounce the crimes, and yet on the other side to yield them up to the rage of an insolent league, if they dare to fulfil it, is this not an even more shocking disorder? This is more that protecting crime, it is sacrificing virtue to it!
People, remember that, if justice doesn’t reign with absolute power in the Republic, and if this word doesn’t mean the love of equality and of the patrie, liberty is but a vain name! People, you who are feared, whom one flatters and is misunderstood; you, recognized [as] sovereign, which is always treated as a slave, remember that everywhere where justice doesn’t reign, the passions of the magistrates [do], and that the people has changed [its] shackles, and not [its] fate!
Remember that there is at your breast a league of rogues which fights against public virtue, and which has more influence than you [do] yourself on your own affairs!
Remember that, far from sacrificing this multitude of rascals to your happiness, your enemies want to sacrifice want to sacrifice you to this bunch of rascals, the originators of all your ills, and the only obstacles for public prosperity! Know that everyone who will rise to defend your cause and the public moral will be stricken with insults and proscribed by the rascals; know that every friend of liberate will always be placed between duty and calumny; that those who could not be accused of having betrayed will be accused of ambition; that the influence of integrity and of the principles will be compared to the force of tyranny and to the violence of the factions; that your confidence and all your esteem will be titles of proscription for your friends; that he cries of oppressed patriotism will be called cries of sedition, and that, not daring to attack yourself en masse, one will proscribe you in detail in person of all good citizens, until the ambitious [persons] would have organized their tyranny. Such is the empire of the tyrants [that are] armed against us, such is the influence of their league with all corrupted men, always tending to serve them. Thus the scoundrels impose on us the law to betray the people, hardly to be called dictators! Do we submit to this law? No! Let us defend the people, at the risk of being esteemed by it; that they run to the scaffold by the path of crime, and we by the one of virtue.
Will we say that everything is well? Will we continue to praise someone who is wrong by habit or by practice? We would ruin the patrie. Will we reveal the hidden abuses? Will we denounce the traitors? We will be told that we are shaking the constituted authorities, that we want to acquire personal influence at their expense. What will we do then? Our duty. What can one object to someone who wants to tell the truth and who agrees to die for it? Let us say then that there is a conspiracy against public liberty; that it owes its strength to a criminal coalition which intrigues within the Convention; that this coalition has accomplices in the Committee of General Security and in the bureaus of this Committee which they control; that the enemies of the Republic have opposed this Committee to the Committee of Public Safety, and have thereby constituted two governments; that members of the Committee of Public Safety enter this conspiracy; that the coalition [that is] thereby formed seeks to ruin the patriots and the patrie. What is the remedy to this ill ? Punishing the traitors, renewing the bureaus of the Committee of General Security, refining this Committee itself, and subordinating it to the Committee of Public Safety, refining the Committee of Public Safety itself, constituting the unity of the government under the supreme authority of the National Convention, which is the centre and the judge, and thereby crushing all the factions of weight of the national authority, in order to raise the strength of justice and liberty on their ruins: such are the principles. If it is impossible to reclaim them without passing for an ambitious [person], I will conclude of this that the principles are proscribed, and that tyranny reigns among us, but not that I have to remain silent about them; because, what could one object to a man who his reasonable and who knows [how] to die for his country?
I am made to combat crime, not to govern it. The time is not here where good men can serve their patrie with impunity; the defenders of liberty will only be outcasts, as long as the horde of rogues is in control.
dededos
snowghoul
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass
