Selected Writings and Speeches of MaximillianRobespierre

1791-1794

ContentsOn the King’s Flight, Speech given at the Jacobin Club, June 22, 1791.......................................................................................................3On the Death Penalty - Speech at the Constituent Assembly, June 22, 1791.............................................................................................6On Subsistence Goods, 1792....................................................................................................................................................................................8Prospectus for “Le Défenseur de la Constitution”, 1792.................................................................................................................................12Notice to Subscribers, 1792...................................................................................................................................................................................13For the Defense of the Committee of Public Safety, 1793..............................................................................................................................14The Festival of the Supreme Being. Receuil d'hymnes Républicaines. Paris, Chez Barba, Year 2 of the Republic [1793]..........18

First Speech........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 18Second Speech................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 18

Report upon the Principles of Political Morality Which Are to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Interior Concerns ofthe Republic, Speech to the Convention February 5, 1794...........................................................................................................................20On the Enemies of the Nation, Speech given from the tribune of the Convention 7 Prairial, Year II (May 26, 1794)..................24

On the King’s Flight, Speech given at the Jacobin Club, June 22, 1791Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

It’s not to me that the flight of the first public functionary should appear to be a disastrous event. This day could have been themost beautiful of the revolution; it could still become so, and the gain of 40 million in support that the royal individual cost would be the least of the benefits of this day.

But for this other measures must be taken than those adopted by the National Assembly, and I seize a moment where they arenot in session to speak to you of the measures it seems should have been taken and that I wasn’t permitted to propose.

The king chose the moment to desert his post when the opening of the primary assemblies was going to awaken all ambitions,all hopes, and all parties, and arm half the nation against the other by the application of the decree of the marc d'argent, as well as through the ridiculous distinctions established between full citizens, half citizens and quarter citizens.

He chose the moment when the first legislature, at the end of its labors, sees approaching it — with the eye one uses to look on an heir — the legislature that is going to chase it and exercise the national veto in reversing some of its acts. He chose themoment when treacherous priests have, by orders and bulls, stirred up fanaticism, and provoked against the constitution all that philosophy has left behind of idiots in the eighty-three departments.

He waited for the moment when the emperor and the king of Sweden would have arrived at Brussels to receive him, and when France would be covered with harvests so that a small band of brigands, torch in hand, could have starved the nation.

But these aren’t the circumstances that frighten me: let all of Europe league against us and Europe will be defeated.

What frightens me, Messieurs, is the very thing that seems to reassure everyone. And here I need to be listened to until the end. Once again, what frightens me is the very thing that seems to reassure everyone else: it’s that since this morning, all of our enemies speak the same language as us.

Everyone is united; everyone has the same face, and nevertheless it’s clear that a king who had a pension of 40 million, who still disposed of all places, who still had the most beautiful and the most secure crown on his head, could not have renounced so many advantages without being sure of recovering them.

So he couldn’t have based his hopes on the support of Leopold and the King of Sweden and on the army from beyond the Rhine: let all the brigands of Europe league together and they will again be defeated. It is, then, in our midst, it’s in this capital, that the fugitive king left those supports upon which he counts for his triumphal re-entry. Otherwise his flight would be too foolish.

You know that 3 million men armed for freedom would be invincible; he thus has a powerful party of great intelligence in our midst. But look around you and share my fear in considering that everyone wears the same mask of patriotism

These are not conjectures that I am making; these are facts of which I am certain. I am going to reveal all to you, and I defy those who will speak after me to respond to me.

You know the memorandum that Louis XVI left on departing; you noted how he marks in the constitution those things that wound him and those that have the happiness of pleasing him. Read that protest by the king and you will grasp the entire plot.

The king is going to reappear on the frontiers, assisted by Leopold, by the King of Sweden, by d'Artois, by Condé, by all the fugitives and all the brigands whose ranks the common cause of kings would have swollen. In their eyes the ranks will be evenmore swelled.

A paternal manifesto will appear, like that of the emperor when he re-conquered Brabant. The king will say in it: “My people can always count on my love.” The sweetness of peace and even that of liberty will be vaunted in it.

A transaction will be proposed with the émigrés: eternal peace, amnesty, fraternity. At the same time the chiefs in the capital and in the departments, with whom this project is coordinated, on their side will paint the horrors of civil war. Why kill each other in a war between brothers who all want to be free? For Bender and Condé will speak of themselves as more patriotic than us. If, when you had no more harvests to preserve from arson, nor enemy armies on your frontiers, the Constitutional Committee had you tolerate so many nation-icide decrees, would you hesitate to cede to the insinuations of your chiefs when you are only asked to make slight sacrifices in order to bring about a general reconciliation?

I know well the character of the nation. Will the chiefs who had you give votes of thanks to Bouillé for the St Bartholomew’s massacre of patriots in Nancy have any difficulty in the short term in bringing to a transaction a worn out people, one with whom great pains have been taken to wean them of the beauties of freedom, while it was effected to weigh upon them all the charges, and to make them feel all the privations, their preservation impose?

And see how everything works together to execute this plan, and how the National Assembly itself marches to this goal in concert.

Louis XVI wrote to the Assembly in his own hand; he signs that he is fleeing and the Assembly in a lie that is: cowardly, since it could call things by their name in the middle of 3 million bayonets; crude, since the king had the impudence to write: I am not being abducted, I leave so that I can return to subjugate you; perfidious, since this lie tended to preserve to the king his quality and the right to dictate to us, arms in hand, the decrees that would please him. The National Assembly, I say, has todayin twenty decrees called the king’s flight an abduction. We can guess for what reason.

Do you want any other proofs that the National Assembly betrays the interests of the nation? What measures did it take this morning? Here are the principal ones:

The Minister of War will continue in office, under the oversight of the Diplomatic Committee, and the same for the other ministers.

And what is the Minister of War? It’s a man who I have never ceased denouncing to you, who has constantly followed in the steps of his predecessors, persecuting the patriotic soldiers, and naming aristocratic officers. What is the Military Committee that is charged with watching over him? It’s a committee entirely made up of disguised aristocratic colonels and our most dangerous enemies. I need only their works to unmask them. The decrees most fatal for liberty have come from the Military Committee.

What is the Minister of Foreign Affairs? It’s a Montmorin who, a month ago, two weeks ago, answered you saying that the king adored the constitution. It’s to this traitor that you abandon foreign relations! Under whose oversight? Of the Diplomatic Committee, of this committee where reigns an André, and where one of whose members told me that a man of good will, a man who wasn’t a traitor to his country, could not put his feet. I won’t continue this review. Lessart no more has my confidence than does Necker, who left him his coat.

Citizens, have I demonstrated enough the depths of the abyss that is going to swallow up our freedom?

Do you see clearly enough the coalition of ministers of the king, some of whom, if not all, I will never believe did not know of his flight? Do you see clearly enough the coalition of your civil and military chiefs? It is such that I can’t not believe that it didn’t favor that escape, which they confess to have known about. Do you see that coalition with your committees, with the National Assembly?

And as if this coalition wasn’t strong enough, I know that soon a reunion with your best known enemies is going to be proposed to you; in a moment all 89, the mayor, the judge, the general, the ministers, it is said, are going to arrive here! How can we escape? Antony commands the legions that are going to avenge Caesar! And it’s Octavian who commands the legions of the republic.

They talk bout unity, of the need to gather around the same men. Bur when Antony camped around Lepidus and also spoke ofunity there was soon nothing but the camp of Antony, and there was nothing left for Brutus and Cassius but to kill themselves.

I swear that all I have just said is the exact truth. You well know you would never hear it in the National Assembly. And here, among you, I feel that these truths will not save the nation without a miracle of Providence, which deigns to better look after freedom than your chiefs.

But I wanted to at least depose in your transcript a monument of all that is going to happen. At least I would have predicted everything to you; I will have traced the march of your enemies, and I cannot be reproached for anything.

I know that by a denunciation — dangerous for me to make but not dangerous for the public thing; I know that in thus accusing almost all of my colleagues, almost all the members of the Assembly of being counter-revolutionary, some from ignorance, others from terror, others from resentment, others by wounded pride, others from a blind confidence, many because they are corrupt, I raise up against me all the prideful; I sharpen a thousand daggers, I offer myself to all the hatred.

I know the lot that is reserved for me. But if in the beginnings of the revolution, and when I was barely glimpsed in the National Assembly, if when only my conscience was seen I sacrificed my life to the truth, to freedom, to the fatherland, then today, when the suffrage of my fellow citizens, when universal benevolence, when too much indulgence, recognition and attachment have paid me well for my sacrifice, I would receive death almost as a benefit that would prevent me from witnessing the evils that I see to be inevitable.

I have just put the National Assembly on trial. I dare it to do the same to me.

On the Death Penalty - Speech at the Constituent Assembly, June 22, 1791.Translated: for Marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

The news having been brought to Athens that citizens had been condemned to death in the city of Argos, people ran to the temples, where the gods were called upon to turn Athenians away from such cruel and dire thoughts. I come to ask, not the gods, but legislators — who should be the organs and the interpreters of the eternal laws that the divinity dictated to men — to erase from the code of the French the blood laws that command judicial murders, and that their morals and their new constitution reject. I want to prove to them: 1- that the death penalty is essentially unjust and, 2- that it isn’t the most repressive of penalties and that it multiplies crimes more than it prevents them.

Outside of civil society, if a bitter enemy makes an attempt on my life or, pushed away twenty times, he returns again to ravage the field that I cultivated with my own hands; since I have only my individual strength to oppose to his I must either perish or kill him, and the law of natural defense justifies and approves me. But in society, when the force of all is armed against only one, what principle of justice could authorize it to kill him? What necessity can absolve it? A victor who kills his captive enemies is called a barbarian! A grown man who kills a child that he could disarm and punish seems to us a monster! An accused man condemned by society is nothing else for it but a defeated and powerless enemy. Before it, he is weaker thana child before a grown man.

Thus, in the eyes of truth and justice these scenes of death that it orders with so much ceremony, are nothing but cowardly assassinations, nothing but solemn crimes committed not by individuals but by entire nations using legal forms. However cruel, however extravagant the laws, do not be surprised: they are the work of a few tyrants, they are the chains with which they weigh down the human race, they are the arms with which they subjugate it, they were written in blood. It isn’t permitted to put to death a Roman citizen; this was the law the people passed. But Scylla was victorious and said: All those who bore arms against me are worthy of death. Octavian and his companions in crime confirmed this law.

It was a crime worthy of death under Tiberius to praise Brutus. Caligula condemned to death those who were so sacrilegious as to undress before the image of the emperor. Once tyranny invented the crime of lèse-majesté — which were actions either indifferent or heroic — who could have dared to think that it merited a penalty more gentle than death without rendering himself guilty of lèse-majesté?

When fanaticism, born of the monstrous union of ignorance and despotism, invented in its turn the crime of divine lèse-majesté, when it conceived in its delirium the project of avenging god himself, was it not necessary that it offer him blood, and that they bring him down to the level of the monsters who said they were his image?

The death penalty is necessary, say the partisans of ancient and barbarous routine. Without it there is no brake strong enough for crime. Who told you this? Have you calculated all the gears by which penal laws can act on human sensibility? Alas, before death how much physical and moral pain can man endure?

The desire to live cedes before pride, the most imperious of all the passions that master the heart of man. The most terrible of all punishments for social man is opprobrium, is the overwhelming sight of public execration. When the legislator can strikethe citizen in so many sensitive places and in so many ways, why would he reduce himself to employing the death penalty? Punishments aren’t imposed to torment the guilty, but in order to prevent crime by the fear of incurring them.

The legislator who prefers death and atrocious penalties to the gentler means in his power outrages public feeling and weakens the moral sentiment among the people he governs; like a clumsy preceptor who, by the frequent use of cruel punishments, stupefies and degrades the soul of his student; he wears out and weakens the springs of government by wanting

to wind them up too strongly.

The legislator who establishes this penalty renounces the salutary principle that the must effective way to repress crimes is toadapt the punishment to the character of the different passions that produce it, and to punish them, so to say, by themselves. It confounds all ideas, it troubles all relations, and openly contradicts the goal of penal laws.

The death penalty is necessary, you say. If this is true, then why have several peoples done without it? By what fatality were these people the wisest, the happiest and the freest? If the death penalty is the most apt to prevent great crimes, then they should then have been most rare among the peoples who adopted and used it. But the facts are precisely the contrary. Witness Japan: the death penalty and tortures are nowhere more widely used, and nowhere are crimes so frequent and so atrocious. One might almost say that the Japanese want to dispute in ferocity the barbaric laws that outrage and irritate them.Did the Greek republics, where penalties were moderate and where the death penalty was either infinitely rare or absolutely unknown, offer more crime and less virtue than the countries governed by blood laws? Do you think that Rome was soiled with more crimes when in the days of its glory, the Porcian Laws wiped out the severe laws carried out by kings and decimvirs, than it was under Scylla, who revived them, and under the emperors, who carried their rigor to a point of excess worthy of their infamous tyranny. Has Russia been in turmoil since the despot who governs it entirely suppressed the death penalty, as if by this act of humanity and philosophy he wanted to expiate the crime of holding millions of men in the yoke of absolute power?

Listen to the voice of justice and reason. It cries out to you that human judgements are never certain enough to justify a society of men subject to error dealing death to another man. Even if you could imagine the most perfect judicial order, even if you had found the most upright and enlightened judges, there would still remain some room for error or caution. Why forbid yourselves the means of repairing them? Why condemn yourselves to the inability to lend a helping hand to oppressed innocence? What do sterile regrets, illusory reparations matter to a vain shadow, to insensible ash? They are the sad testimony of the barbaric temerity of your penal laws. Take from a man the possibility to expiate his crime by repentance or acts of virtue; pitilessly close off to him any return to virtue, self-esteem, rush his descent, so to speak, into the tomb still covered by the recent stain of his crime is, in my eyes, the most horrible refinement in cruelty.

The first obligation of a legislator is to form and preserve public morals, the source of all freedom, source of all social happiness. When in running to a particular goal he turns away from this general and essential goal he commits the most vulgar and dire of errors. The king must thus present to the people the purest model of justice and reason. If in place of this powerful, calm and moderate severity that should characterize it they place anger and vengeance; if they spill human blood that they could spare and that they have no right to spread; if they spread out before the people cruel scenes and cadavers wounded by torture, it then alters in the hearts of citizens the ideas of the just and the unjust; they plant the seed in the midst of society of ferocious prejudices that will produce others in their turn. Man is no longer for man so sacred an object: we have a less grand idea of his dignity when public authority puts his life at risk. The idea of murder inspires less fear when thelaw itself gives the example and the spectacle. The horror of crime is diminished when it is punished by another crime. Do notconfuse the effectiveness of a penalty with the excess of severity: the one is absolutely opposed to the other. Everything seconds moderate laws; everything conspires against cruel laws.

It has been observed that in free countries crime was more rare and penal laws more gentle. All ideas hold together. Free countries are those where the rights of man are respected and where, consequently, the laws are just. Where they offend humanity by an excess of rigor this is a proof that the dignity of man is not known there, that that of the citizen doesn’t exist. Itis a proof that the legislator is nothing but a master who commands slaves and who pitilessly punishes them according to his whim. I thus conclude that the death penalty should be abrogated.

On Subsistence Goods, 1792Source: Robespierre, Discours et rapports a la Convention. Union Générale d'Editions, Paris, 1988;Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

To speak to the representatives of the people of the means of providing for its subsistence is not only to speak to them about the most sacred of their obligations, but of the most precious of their interests, for without a doubt they are mixed in with it. It is not the cause of the indigent alone that I want to plead, but that of landowners and merchants themselves.

I will restrict myself to recalling some obvious principles that seem to have been forgotten. I will only indicate simple measures that have already been proposed, for it is a matter less of creating brilliant theories than of returning to first notions of good sense.

In every country where nature furnishes man’s needs with prodigality, shortages can only be imputed to the vices of administrations or laws themselves. Bad laws and bad administration have their source in false principles and bad morals.

It is a fact generally recognized that the soil of France produces much beyond what is necessary to feed its inhabitants, and that the current shortages are man-made shortages. The consequence of this fact and of the principle I proposed could be troubling, but this isn’t the moment to flatter ourselves. Citizens, it is to you that the glory to make true principles triumph is reserved, and to give just laws to the world. You are not made to drag yourselves in a servile fashion in the ruts of tyrannical prejudices traced by those who came before you; rather you are beginning a new career, one where no one has preceded you. You should at least submit to a severe examination all laws made under aristocratic despotism, be it noble, ecclesiastic orbourgeois, and up till now you have had no other. The most imposing authority cited is that of a minister of Louis XVI, combated by another minister of the same tyrant. I saw the birth of the legislation of the Constituent Assembly on the commerce in grains; it was nothing but that of the time that had preceded it; it hasn’t changed up to this moment, since the interests and prejudices that were the basis have not changed. At the time of this same Assembly I saw the same events that are being renewed in this era; I saw aristocracy accuse the people, I saw hypocritical intriguers impute their own crimes to the defenders of freedom, who they called agitators and anarchists. I saw an impudent minister whose virtue was allowed to be suspected, demand adorations of France while ruining it, from the midst of these criminal intrigues I saw tyranny emerge armed with martial law in order to legally bathe in the blood of starving citizens. Millions for the minister, from whom it was forbidden to ask for an accounting; bonuses for the profit of the blood-suckers of the people; the unlimited freedom of commerce; and bayonets to calm fear or to oppress hunger: this was the policy vaunted by our first legislators.

The bonuses can be discussed; the freedom of commerce is necessary up to the point where homicidal cupidity becomes an abuse; the use of bayonets is an atrocity. The system is essentially incomplete because it doesn’t bear upon the true principle.

The errors we have fallen into in this regard seem to come from two principal causes;

The authors of the theory have only considered the goods necessary for life as a form of ordinary merchandise, and haven’t made any differentiation between the commerce in wheat, for example, and that of indigo; they have spoken more on the commerce in grains than on the people’s subsistence. And for having failed to allow this fact to enter into their calculationsthey have made a false application of principles evident in general. It is this mixture of true and false which has loaned something specious to an erroneous system. They have even less adapted it to the stormy circumstances brought about by revolutions, and if their vague theory were good in ordinary times it would find no application in the rapid measures that moments of crisis demand of us. They have counted for much the profits of merchants and landowners, and for almost nothing the lives of men. And why? It was the great, the ministers, the rich who wrote, who governed. If it had been the people it’s probable that the system would have

received a few modifications!

For example, good sense indicates this truth: that the commodities that are not essential can be abandoned to the most unlimited speculations of the merchant. The momentary shortage that might be felt is always a bearable inconvenience, and it is enough that in general the unlimited freedom of the market works to the greater profit of and state and individuals. But the lives of men cannot be subject to the same chance. It isn’t necessary that I be able to buy brilliant material, but I do have to berich enough to buy bread for myself and my children. The merchant can very well keep in his storehouse the merchandise that vanity and luxury desire up till the moment when he can sell them at the highest possible price, but no man has the right to pile up stacks of wheat while next to him his like dies of hunger.

What is the first object of society? It is to maintain the inviolable rights of man. What is the first of these rights? The right to exist.

The first social law is thus that which guarantees to all society’s members the means of existence; all others are subordinatedto it. Property was only instituted or guaranteed to cement it. It is in order to live that we have property in the first case. It is not true that property can ever be in opposition with men’s subsistence.

The aliments necessary to man are as sacred as life itself. Everything that is indispensable for its preservation is a property common to all of society. Only the surplus is private property and is abandoned to the industry of merchants. Any mercantile speculation that I make at the cost of the life of my like is not a traffic, but brigandage and fratricide.

In accordance with this principle, what is the problem to be resolved in the matter of legislation on subsistence? It is this: to assure to all members of society the enjoyment of the portion of the fruits of the earth that is necessary to their existence: The price of their industry for landowners and cultivators, and the delivery of the excess to the freedom of commerce.

I defy the most scrupulous defender of property to contest these principles, unless they openly declare that they understand by this word the right to despoil and assassinate their like. How then could it have been claimed that any kind of hindrance or rather, any kind of rule, about the sale of wheat was an attack on property and how could this barbarous system be disguised under the specious name of freedom of commerce? Don’t the authors of this system see that they are necessarily contradicting themselves?

Why are you forced to approve the prohibition of the exportation of grains to the exterior every time abundance isn’t assured for the interior? You yourselves fix the price of bread; do you fix that of spices, or of the brilliant products of India? What is the cause of all these exceptions if it isn’t the very obviousness of the principles I have just expounded upon? What am I saying? The government sometimes subjects the very commerce of luxury items to the modifications that healthy policy calls for. Why would that which deals with the subsistence of the people be necessarily freed of this?

Doubtless if all men were just and virtuous, if cupidity was never tempted to devour the people’s substance, if the rich, docile to the voice of reason and nature, looked upon themselves as the economists of society, or as the brothers of the poor it would be possible to recognize no other law than that of the most unlimited liberty. But if it’s true that avarice can speculate on poverty, and tyranny itself on the despair of the people; if it’s true that all the passions declare war on suffering humanity, why would the laws not repress these abuses? Why wouldn’t it stop the homicidal hand of the monopolizer, as it does that of the ordinary assassin? Why wouldn’t it occupy itself with the existence of the people after having occupied itself for such a long time of the enjoyments of the great and the power of despots?

What then are the means of repressing these abuses? It’s claimed that they are impractical; I say that they are as simple as they are infallible. It is claimed that they offer an insoluble problem, even for those of genius; I say that they present no difficulty to good sense and good faith. I say that they don’t harm neither the interests of commerce nor the rights of property.

Let circulation throughout the entire extent of the republic be protected, but let the necessary precautions be taken so that circulation take place. It’s precisely the lack of circulation that I complain of. For the plague of the people, the sources of shortages, are the obstacles put before circulation under the pretext of rendering it unlimited. Does public subsistence circulate when greedy speculators keep it piled up in their granaries? Does it circulate when it is accumulated in the hands of a small number of millionaires who remove it from commerce in order to render it more precious and rare, who coldly calculate how many families must perish before the merchandise has reached the time fixed by their atrocious avarice? Does it circulate when it only crosses the regions that produced it, before the eyes of indigent citizens who suffer the torture of Tantalus before filling the unknown abyss of some entrepreneur of public starvation? Does it circulate when, next to the most abundant harvests, the needy citizen languishes for not being able to give a piece of gold or a piece of paper precious enoughto obtain a parcel?

Circulation is that which puts products of premier necessity within the reach of all men and brings abundance and life to the hearthside. Does blood circulate when it is engorged in the brain or the breast? It circulates when it freely flows through the body. Subsistence is the blood of the people, and its free circulation is no less necessary to the health of the social body than that of blood to the life of the human body. Favor then the free circulation of grain by preventing all harmful engorgements. What is the means of fulfilling this object? Remove from greed the interest and the ability to carry it out. Three causes favor this: secrecy, freedom without restraint, and the certainty of impunity.

Secrecy: when each can hide the quantity of public subsistence which he deprives all of society of. When he can fraudulently make it disappear and transport it either to foreign countries or to storehouses in the interior. Simple methods, then, are proposed: the first is to take the necessary precaution of learning the amount of grain produced by each region and the amount harvested by each landowner or cultivator. The second consists in forcing grain merchants to sell them in the market and to forbid any transporting of purchases during the night. Neither the possibility nor the utility of these precautions needs to be proven, for neither is contested. Is it their legitimacy? But how could we look upon rules of general policy, commanded by society’s interests as attacks on property? Who then is the good citizen who could complain of being obliged to act with loyalty in broad daylight? Who are the shadows necessary for if not monopolists and rascals? In any event, haven’t I proved to you that society has the right to demand that portion that is necessary for the subsistence of citizens? What am I saying? Itis the most sacred of obligations. How then could the laws necessary to assure its exercise be unjust?

I said that the other causes of the disastrous operations of monopoly were unrestricted freedom and impunity. What more certain way to encourage cupidity and to free it from any hindrance than to pose as a principle that the law doesn’t even have the right to oversight in order to impose the slightest constraint? That the only rule prescribed for it is the power to dare to do anything with impunity? What am I saying? Such is the degree of perfection to which this theory has been taken that it hasalmost been established that those who corner markets are impeccable, that monopolists are humanity’s benefactors, that in the quarrels that arise between them and the people it is the people who are always wrong. Either the crime of monopoly is impossible, or it is real. If it’s a chimera how is it that this chimera has always been believed in? Why have we felt the ravagessince the first moments of the revolution? Why do credible reports and incontestable facts denounce these guilty maneuvers to us? If it is real, by what strange privilege does it alone obtain the right to be protected? What limits would the pitiless vampires who speculate on public misery put on their attacks if bayonets and the absolute order to believe in the purity and beneficence of the monopolists were opposed to any demand? Unlimited freedom is nothing but the excuse, the safeguard andthe cause of this abuse. How could it be the remedy? What is complained of? Precisely those ills that the current system has produced, or at least the ills it could not prevent. And what remedy is proposed? The current system. I denounce to you the assassins of the people and you respond: let them be. In this system everything is against society, everything is in favor of thegrain merchants.

It is here, legislators, that all your wisdom and circumspection are necessary. Such a subject is always delicate to deal with. It is dangerous to redouble the fears of the people and to even seem to authorize its discontent. It is even more dangerous to be

silent about the truth and to hide principles. But if you follow them all inconveniences disappear: principles alone can dry up the sources of evil.

I well know that when we examine the circumstances of this or that particular riot, excited by either the real or man-made shortages of wheat, the influence of a foreign cause can sometimes be recognized. Ambition and intrigue feel the need to stir up troubles. Sometimes it is the same men who excite the people in order to find the pretext to slaughter them and to render freedom itself terrible in the eyes of week and selfish men. But it is nonetheless true that the people are naturally upright and peaceful; they are always guided by pure intentions: those with evil intentions can not move them unless they present a motiveboth powerful and legitimate in its eyes. They profit from discontent more than cause it, and when they bring the people to ill-considered actions, using subsistence goods as the pretext, it’s only because they are predisposed to receive these impressions by oppression and poverty. A happy people has never been a turbulent people. Whoever knows men, whoever especially knows the French people, knows that it is not in the power of a fool or a bad citizen to rise the people up without any reason against the laws they love; even less against its elected representatives and the freedom it has conquered. It is up to the representatives themselves to bear witness to the confidence given them and to disconcert aristocratic evil by taking care of the people’s needs and calming their fears.

The very fears of the people must be respected. How can they be calmed if you remain inactive? The very measures proposed, even if they weren’t as necessary as we think; it is enough that the people desire them, it’s enough that they prove in their eyes your attachment to their interests in order to determine you to adopt them. I have already indicated the nature and the spirit of these laws; I will content myself here with demanding priority for the projected decree that proposes precautionary measures against monopoly, reserving to myself the right to propose modifications if it is adopted. I have already proved that these measures, and the principles upon which they are founded, were necessary to the people. I am going to prove that they are useful to the rich and all landowners.

I don’t take from them any honest profit, any legitimate property. I only take from them the right to attack that of others. I don’tat all destroy commerce, rather the brigandage of the monopolist. I only condemn them to the penalty of letting their like live. Nothing then could be more advantageous to them: the greatest service that a legislator can render men is to force them to be honest men. Man’s greatest interest is not to amass treasure, and the sweetest property is not to devour the subsistence of a hundred unfortunate families. The pleasure of relieving his like and the glory of serving the fatherland are easily worth this deplorable advantage. What use could the unlimited freedom of their odious traffic be to the greediest of speculators? To be either oppressed or oppressors. This latter destiny is atrocious. Rich men, egoists: know how to prevent and prevent in advance the terrible results of the struggle of pride and cowardly passions carry out against justice and humanity. Let the example of nobles and kings teach you. Learn to appreciate the charms of equality and the pleasures of virtue. Or at least content yourselves with the advantages fortune gives you and leave the people bread, labor and morality. It is in vain that the enemies of freedom act to tear at their fatherland’s breast. They can no more stop the course of human reason than that of the sun. Cowardice will not triumph over courage. The genius of intrigue must flee before the genius of freedom. And you, legislators, remember that you are not representatives of a privileged caste, but that of the French people; don’t forget that justice is the source of order; that the surest guarantee of public tranquility is the happiness of citizens, and that the long convulsions that tear states apart are nothing but the combat of prejudices against principles, of egoism against general interest, of the pride and passions of powerful men against the rights and needs of the weak.

Prospectus for “Le Défenseur de la Constitution”, 1792Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

Reason and the public interest began the revolution; intrigue and ambition have halted it. The vices of tyrants and slaves have changed it into a painful state of trouble and crisis.The majority of the nation wants to rest under the auspices of the new Constitution, on the breast of freedom and peace. What causes have deprived it of this double advantage up till now? Ignorance and division. The majority desires the good, but it neither knows the means to reach this goal nor the obstacles that distance them from it. Even the best intentioned of men differ on the questions most strictly related to the general happiness. All the enemies of the Constitution borrow the name andlanguage of patriotism to spread error, discord and false principles. Writers prostitute their venal pens in this odious enterprise. It is thus that public opinion is excited and becomes disorganized; the general will becomes powerless and invalid and patriotism, without a system, without a plan, and without a determined objective, acts slowly and fruitlessly, or sometimes seconds, through blind impetuosity, the evil projects of the enemies of our freedom.In this situation one means alone is left to us to save the public thing, and that’s the enlightenment of the zeal of good citizens in order to lead them towards a common goal. To rally all of them to the principles of the Constitution and the general interest;to bring into broad daylight the true causes of our ills and to indicate the remedies; to develop in the eyes of the Nation the reasons, the general view, and the consequences of the political operations that have an influence over the fate of the State and its liberty; to analyze the public conduct of the personalities who play the principle roles in the theatre of the revolution; tocite before the tribunal of opinion and truth those who with ease escaped from the tribunal of the laws and who can decide thedestiny of France and the Universe. This is without a doubt the greatest service a Citizen can render the public cause.A periodical that would fulfill this project seemed to me to be the occupation most worthy of friends of the Fatherland and humanity. I dare to undertake this. The spirit that guides it is announced by its title: “The Defender of the Constitution.” Placed since the beginning of our revolution at the center of political events, I saw from up close the tortuous march of tyranny. I saw that the most dangerous of our enemies are not those who openly declared themselves such, and I will work to see that this knowledge be made useful for the salvation of my country.I need not say that only the love of justice and truth will guide my pen: it’s on this condition alone that, having descended from the tribune of the French Senate one can still climb to that of the universe and speak, not to the assembly — which can be agitated by the shock of diverse interests — but to humankind, whose interest is that of reason and general happiness. Perhaps when once one has left the theatre to sit among the spectators one can better judge the stage and the actors. At the very least it seems that once having escaped the maelstrom of affairs one breathes in an atmosphere more peaceful and pure,and one has a more certain judgment on men and things, much like he who flees the tumult of the city to climb to the summit of the mountain feels the calm of nature penetrate his soul, and his ideas expand with the horizon.I have seen well-known members of the legislature, who bring together two functions of almost equal importance, recount and appraise in their writings the next day the operations in which they participated the day before in the National Assembly.Though this last occupation sufficed in keeping me completely occupied when it was confided to me, I nevertheless applauded those legislators who rendered that striking homage to the necessity for — and the dignity of — the ministry of philosophical and political writers. I even believe that they have a double right to the esteem of their fellows if they fulfill both tasks with the same integrity. He who declares himself the censor of vice, the apostle of reason and truth must be neither less pure nor lesscourageous than the legislator himself. The errors of the latter leave a great resource to public spirit and opinion. But when opinion is degraded, when public spirit is twisted, the last hope of freedom is annihilated. The writer who prostitutes his pen tohatred, to despotism or corruption — betraying the cause of patriotism and humanity — is more vile than the prevaricating magistrate, more criminal than even the representative who sells out the rights of the people. Such is my profession of faith; such will be the spirit and objective of the work that I consecrate to the freedom of my country.This work will appear every Thursday; each issue will be three or four pages long.

Notice to Subscribers, 1792Source: Le Defenseur de la Constitution no 12;Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

Current circumstances and the approach of the National Convention seem to warn us that the title of “Defender of the Constitution” is no longer appropriate for this work, even though we declared from the beginning that it wasn’t its defects we wanted to defend but its principles. Though our wish was never to defend it against the wishes of the people who could and should perfect it, but against the court and against all the enemies of freedom who wanted to destroy it or have it deteriorate. We will henceforth continue this work under a title more analogous to the conjuncture in which we find ourselves.

Since pressing circumstances have caused a certain delay in the issuing of issues, we will repair this as soon as possible.

For the Defense of the Committee of Public Safety, 1793Source: Robespierre, Discours et rapports a la Convention. Union Générale d'Editions, Paris, 1988;Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

In 1793 the Committee of Public Safety replaced many generals, reorganized headquarters and carried out military operations in secret. Briez, representative on mission with the Armies of the North attacked Robespierre, who defended himself and the actions of the Committee.

If my quality as member of the Committee of Public Safety must prevent me from explaining myself with entire independence on what has happened, then I must abdicate it this instant. And after having separated myself from my colleagues, who I esteem and honor (and it’s well-known that I am not prodigal in the sentiment) I will tell my country the necessary truths. The truth is the only weapon that remains in the hands of the intrepid defenders of freedom in order to bring down the perfidious agents of aristocracy. He who seeks to debase, to divide, to paralyze the Convention is an enemy of the fatherland, whether he sits in this hall or is a foreigner (applause). Whether he acts by stupidity or perversity he is of the party of the tyrants whomake war upon us. But this project of debasement exists in the very places where patriotism should reign, in the clubs that claim to be more than patriotic. War is made on the Convention in the persons of all the defenders of freedom. And what is most deplorable is that this cowardly system has partisans here.

For a long time the Committee of Public Safety has put up with a war made on it by several members who are more envious than just. While it is busy day and night with the great interests of the Fatherland, written denunciations, presented with guile, are brought here. Can it then be that the Citizens you have charged with the most difficult functions have lost the title of imperturbable defenders of freedom because they've accepted this burden? Are those who attack them more patriotic because they haven’t received this mark of confidence? Do you claim that those who defended freedom here at the risk of their lives, in the midst of daggers, should be treated like vile protectors of aristocracy? We will brave calumnies and intrigues. But the Convention is attached to the Committee of Public Safety; your glory is tied to the success of those who youhave garbed in national confidence.

We are accused of doing nothing, but has our position been thought on? Eleven armies to direct, the weight of all of Europe tobear; everywhere there are traitors to unmask, emissaries bribed by the gold of foreign powers to foil, unfaithful administrators to watch over, to pursue; everywhere we must level the obstacles and hindrances to the execution of the wisestmeasures; all the tyrants to combat, all the conspirators to intimidate, those who can almost always be found in a caste once so powerful because of its riches, and even more by its intrigues, these are our functions. Do you believe that without unity in action, without secrecy in its operations, without the certainty of finding support within the Convention that the government could triumph over so many obstacles and so many enemies? No. Only the most extreme ignorance, only the most profound perversity could claim that in such circumstances those who play the cruel game of vilifying those who are at the helm of affairs, of hindering their operations, of slandering their conduct are not enemies of the fatherland. It is not with impunity that you will leave aside the necessary force of opinion. No other proof is necessary than the discussions that have just taken place.

The Committee of Public Safety sees treason in the midst of a victory. It dismisses a general still garbed in the splendor of an apparent victory, and his very courage is called a crime! It expels traitors and casts its gaze on the officers who showed the most civisme. It chooses them after having consulted the representatives of the people who had particular knowledge of the characters of each of them. This operation required secrecy in order to be completely successful, the safety of the fatherlanddemanded it. We took all the necessary measures so that secrecy should be guarded, even if it was only in relation to other armies. And now, at the moment in which we are impatient to know the result of these measures, we are denounced at the National Convention, our work is criticized without knowledge our motives, they want us to divulge the Republic’s secrets, that

we give traitors the time to escape; it is hoped to strike with disfavor the new choices, doubtless in order to prevent the reestablishment of confidence.

The nobles are ceaselessly declaimed against; it is said that they must be dismissed and, by a strange coincidence, when we execute this great revolutionary measure, and we bring to it all possible consideration, we are denounced. We have just dismissed two nobles, that is, one of the men of this proscribed caste, those must suspect by their former relations with the court, and another known for his ties and his zeal with foreign nobles, the one and the other pronouncedly aristocratic. So we're accused of disorganizing everything. We're told that we wanted to see only true sans-culottes at the head of the armies. We chose those whose new exploits in the affairs at Bergues and Dunkirk designated them for national recognition, who won despite Houchard, who deployed the greatest talent, for the attack of Hondschoote should have wiped out the French army. It’s principally to Jourdan that the amazing success that honored that army is due, which forced the raising of the siege of Dunkirk. It is that officer who, at the moment when the army didn’t expect to find 18,000 well-entrenched men, and where it was surprised by the discharge of a frightening artillery, it is Jourdan who at the head of a battalion took off into the enemy camp, which made his courage pass to the rest of the army, and the taking of Hondschoote was the effect of his able dispositions and the ardor he knew how to inspire.

The head of headquarters being justly suspect, we replaced him by a man whose talents and patriotism were attested to by allthe commissioners; a man known by exploits that signaled him at the very time when the most odious treasons sacrificed that army. His name is Ernould. He distinguished himself in the last affair and was even wounded. And we are denounced!

We have made the same changes in the armies of the Moselle and the Rhine. All of our choices were made for men of the character of he I just depicted to you. And we are still accused!

If there are some moral presumptions that can guide the government and serve as rules for legislators, it is certainly those which we have followed in these operations.

What is then the cause for this denunciation?

I dare say that that day was worth three victories for Pitt. What success can he claim if it is not the annihilation of the nationalGovernment established by the Convention, dividing us, and making us tear ourselves apart with our own hands? And if in Europe we pass for imbeciles or traitors, do you think that they will have more respect for the Convention that chose us, that they will even be disposed to respect the authorities that you will afterwards establish?

It is thus important that the government be consistent, and that you replace a committee that has successfully been denounced in your midst (No! No! the assembly cries out with unanimity).

It’s not a question here of individuals; it’s a question of the fatherland and of principles. I declare this: in the current state of affairs, it is impossible for the Committee to save the public thing. And if I am contested on this I will remind everyone how perfidious, how widespread is the system to vilify and dissolve us; how many paid agents foreigners and internal enemies haveto this effect; I will recall that the faction is not dead, that it conspires in the depths of its cells, that the serpents of the Marais have not yet all been crushed (applause.)

The men who perpetually declaim, whether here or elsewhere, against those men who are at the head of the government have themselves given proof of lack of civisme and baseness. Why then do they want to debase us? Which of our acts have deserved this ignominy?

I know that we cannot flatter ourselves that we have attained perfection. But when one must support a republic surrounded byenemies, arm reason in favor of freedom, destroy prejudices, render void individual efforts against the public interest, moral

and physical forces are necessary that nature has perhaps refused both to those who denounce us and those we combat.

The Committee has earned the hatred of kings and rascals; if you don’t believe in its zeal, in the services it has rendered to the public thing, smash this instrument. But before doing so, examine the circumstances in which you find yourselves. Those who denounce us have themselves been denounced to the committee. From the accusers they are today, they are going to become the accused (applause). But who are these men who rise up against the conduct of the Committee, who in this session have worsened your reverses in order to worsen their accusations?

The first declared himself the partisan of Custine and Lamorliére. He was the persecutor of patriots in an important fortress, and lately he dared to advise the abandonment of a territory united with the republic, whose inhabitants, denounced by him, defend themselves with energy against the fanatics and the English.

The second has not yet repaired the shame with which he covered himself in returning from a place whose defense was confided in him after having surrendered it to the Austrians. Without a doubt, if such men manage to prove that the Committee isn’t composed of good men, then liberty is lost, for it will doubtless not be to them that enlightened opinion will give its confidence and hand over the reins of government! And don’t think that it is my intention to render imputation for imputation. Jep commits to never dividing the patriots, but I don’t include among the patriots those who only wear the mask, and I will unmask the conduct of two or three traitors who have here been the artisans of discord and dissension (applause).

I thus think that the fatherland is lost if the Committee doesn’t enjoy unlimited confidence, and if it isn’t composed of men who deserve it. I demand that that the Committee of Public Safety be renewed (No! No! is cried out throughout the assembly)

Interventions by Briez, Jeanbon Saint-André and Billaud Varenne. The order of the day is demanded.

To pass to the order of the day is to open the door to all the misfortunes that I just exposed. The Convention cannot be silent on that which tends to paralyze the government. The explanations that have been given are insufficient. The only result is thatthe members of the Committee of Public Safety who have spoken seemed to be defending their cause, and you haven’t pronounced. It means giving the advantage to those men who slandered it, not always here, but secretly, in a way all the more perfidious for having seemed to applaud it before you when it made its reports. For I say to you that the most painful sentiment I felt was having seen Barére applauded by the very men who have never ceased indiscriminately slandering all themembers of the Committee, by those very men who would perhaps like to see us with a dagger in the breast (applause).

A member has said that everyone should be able to give his opinion on the operations of the Committee of Public safety; I don’t disagree. The functions of the Committee of Public Safety are arduous, and it is because of this that it cannot save the fatherland without the Convention. In order to save the fatherland one must have a great deal of character, great virtues. Men are needed who have the courage to propose strong measures, who even dare to attack the pride of individuals (applause). Without a doubt everyone is free to express his opinion about the Committee. But this freedom should not go so far that a deputy recalled from the depths of the departments because he has been judged to have ceased serving the people well should go on the attack and accuse the Committee (applause).

Citizens, I promised you the whole truth and I'm going to tell it; in this discussion the Convention has not shown all the energy it should have; a report was delivered to you about Valenciennes, the apparent goal of which was to instruct you on all the circumstances surrounding the surrender of that place, but the real object of which was to indict the Committee of Public Safety. As price for his vague accusation, the author of this report is an assistant on the Committee he denounces. Well I say to you, he who was at Valenciennes when the enemy entered there is not fit to be member of the Committee of Public Safety (lively applause). This member will never respond to this question:

Are you dead? (applause repeated several times). If I had been in Valenciennes under those circumstances I would never have

been in a position to deliver a report on the events of the siege. I would have wanted to share the fate of the brave defenders who preferred an honorable death to a shameful capitulation (applause). And since one must be republican, since one must have energy, I say to you that I wouldn’t be member of a committee in which such a man could participate.

This might seem harsh, but what is harsher still for a patriot is that for two years, 100,000 men have been killed by treason or weakness; it is weakness before traitors that harms us. We are tender towards the most criminal men, towards those who deliver the fatherland to the enemy’s steel. I only know how to be moved by the fate of a generous people who are slaughteredwith so much villainy (applause).

I add a word on our accusers: it cannot be that, on pretext of the freedom of opinion, a committee that serves the fatherland well should be slandered with impunity by those who, being able to crush one of the hydra heads of federalism, did not do so due to an excess of weakness, nor any of those who, at this tribune, coldly proposed the abandonment of Mont-Blanc to the Piedmontese. (applause.)

As for the proposal of Billaud-Varenne, I attach no importance to it, and I don’t find this impolitic. If the 50 million put at the disposal of the Committee could fix the attention of the Convention one instant it wouldn’t be worthy of working for the salvation of the fatherland. I say that it is not necessary to believe in probity in order to suspect the Committee of Public Safety (applause). That the tyrants who hate us, their salaried slanderers, the journalists who serve them so well spread those falsehoods to vilify us, this I can conceive. But it’s not up to us to ward off such charges and respond to them. It’s enough that I feel in my heart the strength to defend unto death the cause of the people, which is great and sublime. It’s enough for me to hold in contempt all the tyrants and the rascals who second them (applause).

I summarize and I say that all the explanations that have been given are insufficient. We can hold the slanderers in contempt, but the agents of the tyrants who surround us observe us and gather all they can to vilify the defenders of the people. It’s for them, it’s to ward off their impostures, that the National Convention must proclaim that it maintains its confidence in the Committee of Public Safety.

The Festival of the Supreme Being. Receuil d'hymnes Républicaines. Paris, Chez Barba, Year 2 of the Republic [1793]

Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor.

First Speech

Of Maximilien Robespierre, president of the national convention, to the people gathered for the festival of the Supreme Being, Décadi 20 Prairial, the year 2 of the French Republic, one and indivisible.

It has finally arrived, the forever fortunate day that the French people consecrate to the Supreme Being. The world that he created has never offered a spectacle so worthy of his regard. He has seen tyranny , crime and imposture reign on earth: at this moment he sees an entire nation that is combating all the oppressors of humankind suspend the course of its heroic labors in order to raise its thoughts and its vows towards the great being who gave it the mission to undertake and the strength to execute it.

Is it not he whose immortal hand, by engraving in the heart of man the code of justice and equality, traced there the death sentence of tyrants? Is it not he who, from the beginning of time, decreed the republic and placed on the order of the day, for all centuries and all peoples, liberty, good faith, and justice?

He did not create kings to devour humankind, he didn’t create priests to harness us like vile animals to the chariot of kings and to give an example of baseness, selfish pride, perfidy, avarice, debauch, and falsehood. He created the universe to make known his might. He created men to mutually assist and love each other, and to arrive at happiness by the path of virtue.

It is he who placed remorse and fear in the breast of the triumphant oppressor, and calm and pride in the heart of the innocent oppressed. It is he who forces the just man to hate the wicked, and the wicked to respect the just man. It is he who adorned the face of beauty with modesty, so as to make it even more beautiful. It is he who makes maternal entrails palpitate with tenderness and joy. It is he who bathes with delicious tears the eyes of a son pressed against his mother’s breast. It is hewho silences the most imperious and tender passions before the sublime love of the fatherland. It is he who covered nature with charms, riches and majesty. All that is good is his work, or is him. Evil belongs to the depraved man who oppresses or allows his like to be oppressed.

The author of nature ties together all mortals in an immense chain of love and felicity.

May the tyrants who dared break it perish!

Republican Frenchmen, it is up to you to purify the land they have soiled and to recall the justice they have banished. Liberty and virtue sprang together from the breast of the divinity, and one cannot remain among men without the other.

Generous people, do you want to triumph over your enemies? Practice justice and render the divinity the only cult worthy of it. People, today let us give ourselves over, under its auspices, to the just transports of a pure happiness, Tomorrow we will again combat vices and tyrants; we will give the world the example of republican virtues. And in doing this we honor it again.

Second Speech

Of the president of the National Convention, at the moment when atheism, consumed in flames, has disappeared, and Wisdom appears in its place to be gazed upon by the People.

It has vanished into nothingness, this monster that the genius of kings vomited onto France. May all the crimes and misfortunes of the world disappear along with it. Armed either with the daggers of fanaticism or the poisons of atheism, kings always conspire to assassinate humanity. If they can no longer disfigure the divinity by superstition so as to associate it to their misdeeds, they strive to banish him from earth in order to reign their alone with crime.

People, fear no more their sacrilegious plots. They can no more tear the world from the breast of its author than the remorsefrom their own hearts. Unfortunates, raise up your beaten down heads; you can still raise your eyes to heaven with impunity. Heroes of the fatherland, your generous devotion is not a brilliant folly. If the henchmen of tyranny can assassinate you it is not in their power to entirely obliterate you. Man, whoever you might be, you can yet conceive high thoughts on your own; you can attach your fleeting life to God Himself and immortality. Late nature take on again its entire éclat and wisdom all its empire. The Supreme Being is not obliterated.

It is above all wisdom that our enemies wanted to chase from the republic. It is up to wisdom alone to solidify the prosperity ofempires; it is for it to guarantee us the fruits of our courage. We must associate it then to all our enterprises. Let us be serious and discreet in all our deliberations, like men who are stipulating the interests of the world. Let us be ardent and tenacious in our anger against leagued tyranny, imperturbable in the midst of danger, patient in labor, terrible in reverses, modest and vigilant in success. Let us be generous towards the good, compassionate towards the unfortunate, inexorable towards the wicked, just towards all. We must not count on an unalloyed prosperity or triumphs without obstacles, or on whatever depends on the fortune or perversity of others. We should only rest upon our steadfastness and our virtue. Sole, but infallible guarantors of our independence, let us crush the unholy league of kings more through the grandeur of our character than by the force of our arms.

Frenchmen, you are fighting kings, and so you are worthy of honoring the divinity. Being of beings, author of nature, the stupefied slave, the vile henchman of despotism, the perfidious and cruel aristocrat insults you by invoking you. But the defenders of liberty can abandon themselves with confidence within your paternal breast. Being of beings, we don’t have to address you unjust prayers. You know the creatures who have come from your hands; their needs no more escape your gazethan do their most secret thoughts. The hatred of bad faith and tyranny burns in our hearts along with the love of justice and the fatherland. Our blood flows for the cause of humanity. This is our prayer, these are our sacrifices. This is the cult we offeryou.

Report upon the Principles of Political Morality Which Are to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Interior Concerns of the Republic, Speech to the Convention February 5, 1794

Citizens, Representatives of the People:

Some time ago we set forth the principles of our foreign policy; today we come to expound the principles of our internal policy.

After having proceeded haphazardly for a long time, swept along by the movement of opposing factions, the representatives ofthe French people have finally demonstrated a character and a government. A sudden change in the nation's fortune announced to Europe the regeneration that had been effected in the national representation. But up to the very moment when I am speaking, it must be agreed that we have been guided, amid such stormy circumstances, by the love of good and by the awareness of our country's needs rather than by an exact theory and by precise rules of conduct, which we did not have even leisure enough to lay out

It is time to mark clearly the goal of the revolution, and the end we want to reach; it is time for us to take account both of the obstacles that still keep us from it, and of the means we ought to adopt to attain it: a simple and important idea which seems never to have been noticed…

For ourselves, we come today to make the world privy to your political secrets, so that all our country's friends can rally to the voice of reason and the public interest; so that the French nation and its representatives will be respected in all the countries of the world where the knowledge of their real principles can penetrate; so that the intriguers who seek always to replace other intriguers will be judged by sure and easy rules.

We must take far-sighted precautions to return the destiny of liberty into the hands of the truth, which is eternal, rather than into those of men, who are transitory, so that if the government forgets the interests of the people, or if it lapses into the hands of the corrupt individuals, according to the natural course of things, the light of recognized principles will illuminate their treachery, and so that every new faction will discover death in the mere thought of crime…

What is the goal toward which we are heading? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice whose laws have been inscribed, not in marble and stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave who forgets them and in that of the tyrant who denies them.

We seek an order of things in which all the base and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions are awakened by the laws; where ambition becomes the desire to merit glory and to serve our country; where distinctions areborn only of equality itself; where the citizen is subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, and the people to justice; where our country assures the well-being of each individual, and where each individual proudly enjoys our country's prosperity and glory; where every soul grows greater through the continual flow of republican sentiments, and by the need ofdeserving the esteem of a great people; where the arts are the adornments of the liberty which ennobles them and commercethe source of public wealth rather than solely the monstrous opulence of a few families.

In our land we want to substitute morality for egotism, integrity for formal codes of honor, principles for customs, a sense of duty for one of mere propriety, the rule of reason for the tyranny of fashion, scorn of vice of scorn of the unlucky, self-

respect for insolence, grandeur of soul over vanity, love of glory for the love of money, good people in place of good society. We wish to substitute merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for glamour, the charm of happiness for sensuous boredom, the greatness of man for the pettiness of the great, a people who are magnanimous, powerful, and happy, in place of a kindly, frivolous, and miserable people - which is to say all the virtues and all the miracles of the republic in place of all the vices and all the absurdities of the monarchy.

We want, in a word, to fulfill natures's desires, accomplish the destiny of humanity, keep the promises of philosophy, absolve providence from the long reign of crime and tyranny. Let France, formerly illustrious among the enslaved lands, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples who have existed, become the model for the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed the ornament of the world - and let us, in sealing our work with our blood, see at least the early dawn of the universal bliss -that is our ambition, that is our goal.

What kind of government can realize these wonders? Only a democratic or republican government - these two words are synonyms, despite the abuses in common speech, because an aristocracy is no closer than a monarchy to being a republic....Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are of their own making, do for themselves all that they can do well, and by their delegates do all that they cannot do for themselves….Now, what is the fundamental principle of popular or democratic government, that is to say, the essential mainspring which sustains it and makes it move? It is virtue. I speak of the public virtue which worked so many wonders in Greece and Rome and which ought to produce even more astonishing things in republican France - that virtue which is nothing other than the love of the nation and its law.

But as the essence of the republic or of democracy is equality, it follows that love of country necessarily embraces the love ofequality…

But the French are the first people of the world who have established real democracy, by calling all men to equality and full rights of citizenship; and there, in my judgment, is the true reason why all the tyrants in league against the Republic will be vanquished.

There are important consequences to be drawn immediately from the principles we have just explained.Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, and since your goal is to found, to consolidate the Republic, it follows that thefirst rule of your political conduct ought to be to relate all your efforts to maintaining equality and developing virtue; because the first care of the legislator ought to be to fortify the principle of the government. This everything that tends to excite love ofcountry, to purify morals, to elevate souls, to direct the passions of the human heart toward the public interest, ought to be adopted or established by you. Everything which tends to concentrate them in the abjection of selfishness, to awaken enjoyment for petty things and scorn for great ones, ought to be rejected or curbed by you. Within the scheme of the French revolution, that which is immoral is impolitic, that which is corrupting is counter-revolutionary. Weakness, vice, and prejudicesare the road to royalty….

We deduce from all this a great truth - that the characteristic of popular government is to be trustful towards the people and severe towards itself.

Here the development of our theory would reach its limit, if you had only to steer the ship of the Republic through calm waters. But the tempest rages, and the state of the revolution in which you find yourselves imposes upon you another task…

We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with them. Now, in this situation, the first maximof your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time [both] virtue and terror:

virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most pressing needs.

It has been said that terror was the mainspring of despotic government. Does your government, then, resemble a despotism? Yes, as the sword which glitters in the hands of liberty's heroes resembles the one with which tyranny's lackeys are armed. Let the despot govern his brutalized subjects by terror; he is right to do this, as a despot. Subdue liberty's enemies by terror, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is it not to strike the heads of the proud that lightning is destined?…

To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to pardon them is barbarity. The rigor of tyrants has only rigor for a principle; the rigor of the republican government comes from charity.

Therefore, woe to those who would dare to turn against the people the terror which ought to be felt only by its enemies! Woe to those who, confusing the inevitable errors of civic conduct with the calculated errors of perfidy, or with conspirators' criminal attempts, leave the dangerous schemer to pursue the peaceful citizen! Perish the scoundrel who ventures to abuse the sacred name of liberty, or the redoubtable arms which liberty has entrusted to him, in order to bring mourning or death into patriots' hearts! This abuse has existed, one cannot doubt it. It has been exaggerated, no doubt, by the aristocracy. But if in all the Republic there existed only one virtuous man persecuted by the enemies of liberty, the government's duty would be to seek him out vigorously and give him a dazzling revenge…

How frivolous it would be to regard a few victories achieved by patriotism as the end of all our dangers. Glance over our true situation. You will become aware that vigilance and energy are more necessary for you than ever. An unresponding ill-will everywhere opposes the operations of the government. The inevitable influence of foreign courts is no less active for being more hidden, and no less baneful. One senses that crime, frightened, has only covered its tracks with greater skill…

You could never have imagined some of the excesses committed by hypocritical counter-revolutionaries in order to blight the cause of the revolution. Would you believe that in the regions where superstition has held the greatest sway, the counter-revolutionaries are not content with burdening religious observances under all the forms that could render them odious, but have spread terror among the people by sowing the rumor that all children under ten and all old men over seventy are going to be killed? This rumor was spread particularly through the former province of Brittany and in the departements of the Rhine and the Moselle. It is one of the crimes imputed to [Schneider] the former public prosecutor of the criminal court of Strasbourg. That man's tyrannical follies make everything that has been said of Caligula and Heliogabalus [cruel Roman emperors] credible; one can scarcely believe it, despite the evidence. He pushed his delirium to the point of commandeering women for his own use - we are told that he even employed that method in selecting a wife. Whence came this sudden swarm of foreigners, priests, noble, intriguer of all kinds, which at the same instant spread over the length and breadth of the Republic, seeking to execute, in the name of philosophy, a plan of counter-revolution which has only been stopped by the forceof public reason? Execrable conception, worthy of the genius of foreign courts leagued against liberty, and of the corruption of all the internal enemies of the Republic!…

In deceitful hands all the remedies for our ills turn into poisons. Everything you can do, everything you can say, they will turn against you, even the truths which we come here to present this very day.…

Such an internal situation ought to seem to you worthy of all your attention, above all if you reflect that at the same time you have the tyrants of Europe to combat, a million and two hundred thousand men under arms to maintain, and that the government is obliged continually to repair, with energy and vigilance, all the injuries which the innumerable multitude of our enemies has prepared for us during the course of five years.

What is the remedy for all these evils? We know no other than the development of that general motive force of the Republic –virtue.

Democracy perishes by two kinds of excess: either the aristocracy of those who govern, or else the popular scorn for the authorities whom the people themselves have established, scorn which makes each clique, each individual take unto himself the public power and bring the people through excessive disorders, to annihilation or to the power of one man.The double task of the moderates and the false revolutionaries is to toss us back and forth perpetually between these two perils.

But the people's representatives can avoid them both, because government is always the master at being just and wise; and, when it has that character, it is sure of the confidence of the people.

It is indeed true that the goal of all our enemies is to dissolve the Convention. It is true that the tyrant of Great Britain and his allies promise their parliament and subjects that they will deprive you of your energy and of the public confidence which you have merited; that is the fist instruction for all their agents.…

We are beginning a solemn debate upon all the objects of its [the Convention's] anxiety, and everything that can influence the progress of the revolution. We adjure it not to permit any particular hidden interest to usurp ascendancy here over the general will of the assembly and the indestructible power of reason.

On the Enemies of the Nation, Speech given from the tribune of the Convention 7 Prairial, Year II (May 26, 1794)

Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

Citizens:

It would be a beautiful subject for conversation for posterity; it’s already a spectacle worthy of heaven and Earth to see the Assembly of the people’s representatives placed upon the inexhaustible volcano of conspiracies bring to the feet of the EternalAuthor of all things the homage of a great people with one hand, and, with the other, with the lives and the wrath of tyrants gathered against it, found the first republic in the world and recall exiled freedom, justice and nature among mortals.

They will perish, all of the tyrants armed against the French people! They will perish, all the factions that rely upon their power in order to destroy our freedom. You will not make peace, but you will give it to the world, taking it from the hands of crime.

This approaching prospect offered itself to the sight of the frightened tyrants, and they decided with their accomplices that thetime had come to assassinate us; we, that is, the National Convention, for if they attack you now en masse and now individually you still recognize the same plan and the same enemies. Without a doubt they are not foolish enough to believe that the death of a few representatives can assure their triumph.

If they believed, in fact, that in order to destroy your energy, or to change your principles, it was enough to assassinate those to whom you have especially confided the care of overseeing the salvation of the republic; if they believed that in throwing us into the tomb the spirits of Brissot, Hebert and Danton would emerge triumphant to deliver you a second time to discord, to the empire of factions and to the mercy of traitors, they were wrong.

When we will have fallen under their blows, you would either complete your sublime enterprise or share our fate. Or rather, there is not one Frenchmen who would not want to stand over our bloody corpses to swear to exterminate the last of the enemies of the people.

Nevertheless, their impious delirium attests both to their hope and their despair.

They once hoped to succeed in starving the French people; the French people still lives and will survive all its enemies. Subsistence was assured, and nature, faithful to Liberty, already presents it abundance. What resource then remains to them?Assassination.

They hoped to exterminate the national representation by bribed revolt, and they so counted on the success of this attack thatthey didn’t blush to announce it in advance to the wrath of Europe and to confess it in the English parliament. This project failed. What remains to them? Assassination.

They thought they could overwhelm us by the efforts of their sacrilegious league, and especially by treason. The traitors tremble or perish, their artillery falls into our power, their satellites flee before us, but assassination remains to them.

They sought to dissolve the National Convention by degradation and corruption. The Convention punished their accomplices and rose triumphant on the ruins of factions and under the aegis of the French people. But assassination remains to them.

They attempted to deprave public morality and to extinguish the generous sentiments of which the love of freedom and of the fatherland are composed by banishing from the republic good sense, virtue and divinity. We proclaimed the divinity and the immortality of the soul; we commanded virtue in the name of the republic. Assassination remains to them.

Finally, slander, treason, arson, poisoning, atheism, corruption, famine, assassinations. They were lavish with these crimes: assassination and yet more assassination still remain to them.

Let us then rejoice and give thanks to heaven since we have so well served our country as to have been judged worthy of the daggers of tyranny.

We thus have glorious dangers to run! The city offers as many such dangers as the battlefield. We have nothing to envy our brave brothers in arms; we pay, in more than one way, our debt to the fatherland.

Oh kings and valets of kings! It is not we who will complain of the kind of war you make, and we recognize that it is worthy of your august prudence.

In fact, it is easier to take our lives than to triumph over our principles and our armies. England, Italy, Germany, and France itself will furnish you soldiers to execute these noble exploits. When the powers of the earth league together to kill a feeble individual he must not insist on living; it is thus that living a long time doesn’t enter into our calculations. It’s not in order to livethat we declare war on all tyrants and, what is even more dangerous, on all crimes.

What man on earth has ever defended the rights of humanity with impunity?

A few months ago I said to my colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety: “If the armies of the Republic are victorious, if we unmask the traitors, if we put down factions, they will assassinate us.” And I was not in the least astonished to see my prophecy realized. I myself find that the situation in which the enemies of the republic have placed me is not without its advantages, for the more uncertain and precarious are the lives of the defenders of the fatherland, the more independent theyare of men’s evil.

Surrounded by assassins I have already put myself in the new order of things where they want to send me. I only hold to fleeting life by the love of the fatherland and the thirst for justice and, separated more than ever from any personal considerations, I find myself better disposed to attack with energy the villains who conspire against us and humankind.

The more they hurry to terminate my career down here, the more I hasten to fulfill those actions useful to the happiness of my like.

At least I will leave a testament whose reading will make tyrants and their accomplices tremble. I will perhaps reveal redoubtable secrets that a pusillanimous prudence would have pushed me to hide.

I will tell what the salvation of my fatherland and the triumph of freedom depend upon. If the same perfidious ones who guide the rage of the assassins aren’t yet visible to all eyes, I will leave to time the task of lifting the veil that covers them, and I will restrict myself to recalling those truths that alone can save this Republic.

Yes, no matter what lack of seriousness with its lack of foresight might think, whatever perfidious counter-revolutionaries might say! The destiny of the republic is not yet fixed, and the vigilance of the people’s representatives is more than ever necessary.

It is not the pomp of denominations, not victory, nor riches nor fleeting enthusiasm that constitute the republic; it is the wisdom of laws and especially the goodness of mores; it is the purity and the stability of the maxims of government.

The laws are to be made, the maxims of government to be assured, and the mores to be regenerated. If one of these things ismissing there is in a state naught but errors, pride, passions, factions, ambitions and cupidity. Far from repressing vices the republic would then only allow them freer expansion, and vice necessarily returns us to tyranny.

Whoever is not master of himself is made to be the slave of others. This a truth that applies to peoples as well as individuals. Do you want to know who are the ambitious?

Examine who they are who protect the rogues who encourage counter-revolutionaries, who execute attacks, who hold virtue in contempt, who corrupt public morals: it was the march of the conspirators who fell under the mailed fist of the law.

To make war on crime is the path to the tomb and to immortality; to favor crime is the path to the throne and the scaffold.

Perverse beings managed to throw the Republic and human reason into chaos. It’s a matter now of pulling them from this in order to create the harmony of the moral and political worlds. The French people have two guarantors of the possibility of executing this heroic enterprise: the current principles of representation and its own virtues.

The moment in which we find ourselves is favorable, but it is perhaps unique. In the state of equilibrium in which things are it is easy to consolidate liberty, and it is easy to lose it. If France were to be governed for a few months by a corrupted legislature, freedom would be lost. Victory would fall to the factions and immorality.

Your concert and you energy have astonished and defeated Europe. If you come to know this as well as your enemies you willeasily triumph. I spoke of the virtue of the people. Attested to by the entire revolution, this virtue would not alone suffice to reassure us against the factions who attempt without cease to corrupt and tear apart the republic.

What is the reason for this? It’s that there are two peoples in France.

The one is the mass of citizens, pure, simple thirsting for justice and friends of liberty. It is this virtuous people that spills all its blood to found the republic that is imposing to internal enemies and shakes the thrones of tyrants.

The other is a mass of the ambitious and intriguers, it’s the chatting, charlatan, artificial people who show themselves everywhere, who persecute patriotism, who grab onto the tribunes and often the public functions; who abuse the learning thatthe advantages of the ancien regime gave them in order to fool public opinion. It’s this people of rogues, of foreigners, of hypocritical counter-revolutionaries who place themselves between the people and their representatives in order to fool the one and slander the other; to block their operations, to turn against the public good the most useful laws and the most salutary truths.

As long as this impure race exists the Republic will be unhappy and precarious. It’s up to you to deliver it by an imposing energy and an unalterable concert.

Those who seek to divide us, those who stop the march of the government, those who slander it every day among you by perfidious insinuations, those who seek to form against it a dangerous coalition of all the evil passions, of irascible pride, of allthe interests opposed to the public interest are your enemies and those of the fatherland. They are foreign agents.

They are the successors of Brissot, of Hebert, of Danton. If they were to reign one day the Fatherland would be lost.

In saying these things I sharpen daggers against myself, and it is precisely for this that I say them.

You will persevere in your principles and in your triumphal march. You will put down crime and you will save the fatherland...

I have lived long enough... I saw the French people rise up from degradation and servitude to the heights of Glory and Freedom. I saw the chains broken and the guilty thrones that weigh upon the earth near to being overthrown by triumphant hands.

I saw a yet more astonishing marvel, a marvel that monarchical corruption and the experience of the first period of our Revolution barely allowed to be seen as possible: an assembly invested with the strength of the French nation, marching with a rapid and firm step towards public happiness, devoted to the cause of the people and to the triumph of equality, worthy of giving to the world the signal of Liberty and the example of all the virtues.

Accomplish, Citizens, accomplish your sublime destiny. You have placed us in the vanguard to bear up under the first efforts of the enemies of Liberty; we will be worthy of this honor, and with our blood we will trace the route of immortality.

May you constantly deploy that unquenchable energy which you need to put down the monsters of the universe that conspire against you, and to then enjoy in peace the benedictions of the people and of the fruits of your virtues.