THE MAN-EATER OF THE TERROR

LORD ACTON: Lectures on the French Revolution. London,

1910.

A. AULARD: The French Revolution. 4 vols. London, 1910. PRINCE KROPOTKIN: The Great French Revolution.

London,

Cambridge Modern History.

Vol. VIII. Cambridge, 1907.

DES ÉCHEROLLES: Side Lights on the Reign of Terror. London, 1900.

J. G. ALGER: Paris in 1789-94. London, 1902.

G. LENÔTRE: The Tribunal of the Terror. London, 1909. ALPHONSE DUNOYER: The Public Prosecutor of the Terror. London, 1914.

In the history of the French Revolution there are curious instances of sudden elevation to fame or notoriety. Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville stands eminent-if not pre-eminent-among the insignificant creatures dedicated by the Reign of Terror" to the most frightful of reputations." For Fouquier is in himself "the Tribunal of the Terror." The very mainspring of that vast machine of murder is Fouquier-Carlyle's "rateyed Incarnation of Attorneyism."

Sixteen months he was at it-the sixteen most bloody months of the Reign of Terror, and of

this reign his name for long remained the symbol. At the least, he shares this dreadful fame with Robespierre, who, in one of Lord Acton's memorable phrases, "remains the most hateful character in the forefront of history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men.” What documents did Fouquier not falsify to the injury of the accused! What cunning did he not use to embarrass or stifle their defence ! What a restless energy did he not employ in fulfilling the orders of his masters of the revolutionary tribunal, behind whose authority he sought at his own trial to find shelter! He denounced, when the denunciation amounted to no more than a desperate plea for himself, the savage law of Prairial, which practically denied to all prisoners at the revolutionary bar the right to state their case to the court. When Fouquier was making his last throw for life, he referred to "this atrocious law." It was, of course, the easiest retort on the part of his accusers that under this atrocious law he had continued to serve the Republic in his office of public prosecutor. He might have resigned. Had he done so he would undoubtedly have gone to the scaffold somewhat earlier than he did-but history would not then have had to call him infamous. Had he done so, death itself

had been easier for him.

Fouquier-Tinville was forty-six years of age

when, in 1792, he came to the front under the Commune. Some nine or ten years earlier he had been in pretty good practice as a lawyer in Paris, drawing his clients chiefly from the lower middle classes. He sold his business, for reasons unknown, and when appointed Public Prosecutor "he was engaged in doubtful affairs, leading a submerged existence in Paris." M. Dunoyer describes him as “a robust and strapping Picard, with large and strongly moulded neck and shoulders. His hair was dark and smooth, his forehead high, his face full and pitted with smallpox. He had a Roman nose and extremely arched and elevated eyebrows. His glance was keen, searching, disquieting, and very restless. Contemporaries, who witnessed his trial, said that he was moody, but a good fellow. Many agreed in declaring that he was of a terribly violent and passionate, even brutal, character— a true despot.'

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When the Revolution broke, Fouquier himself was all but a broken man. There were employments that clean men of the new order shrank from undertaking, so it came to pass that the pariah Fouquier-banned apparently by the members of his own profession-was one day pitchforked into the place of Public Prosecutor. In this office he was, in Danton's dreadful words, to drink the blood of aristocrats; to him in this office were delivered over the destinies of France;

for him was created in this office a perpetual crown of infamy.

From the opening of the year II (1793) the prisons and special prisons of Paris-there were at one time about forty of them-began to be filled with suspects of all degrees. Any private citizen could lodge an information, and the Public Prosecutor had authority to arrest, imprison, and bring to trial the accused. During the first period of his magistracy, says M. Dunoyer, Fouquier drew up his indictments conscientiously enough; but "his pleadings for the prosecution fell upon the accused like the blows of a club. Moreover, he struck without discrimination all those who were pointed out to him, whatever the social class to which they belonged, and whatever their position, their origin, or their opinions."

Upon some of his indictments he expended both his fancy and his style. Marie Antoinette is compared with "the Messalinas, Brunehaut, Frédégonde, and Médicis, who were formerly described as Queens of France, and whose eternally odious names will not be effaced from the annals of history." Madame du Barry is

this Lais, famed for the licentiousness of her morals, the publicity and the display of her debauchery."

But Fouquier's powers increased; he grew fiercer in the discharge of them, more hasty and

less scrupulous in the preparation of his cases. He came, 66 quite naturally and by an implacable interpretation of the revolutionary laws, to symbolise Terror and Dismay, at first almost insensibly, and then in crescendo to the final butchery. We must not forget that if in thirteen months (from April 1793 to the 22nd Prairial in the year II) 1,259 victims mounted the scaffold; during the last forty-nine days of the Terror (from the 22nd Prairial to the 9th of Thermidor) 1,366 persons were guillotined as conspirators."

At the opening trial, that of Naulans, a Poitiers nobleman, who had simply attempted to emigrate, the spectators, not yet apprenticed to the methods of the new tribunal, were unable to imagine that a man who had harmed nobody would be punished by death; and when, on Fouquier's demand, sentence was pronounced, a wail went through the court, followed by sobs. Gradually, however, the audience grew harder.

Young Charlotte Corday was brought, fresh from her assassination of Marat. Some of the spectators had looked for a defiant aristocrat ; they beheld a simple countrified girl, "stupendously calm," who almost insisted upon being condemned to death. The beautiful Queen came there, Marie Antoinette, in her widow's weeds, grown grey during her months of anguish. One of the little packages found on her at the Con