Le Vieux Cordelier No. 3
by Camille Desmoulins
Live free or die
Quintidi Frimaire, third week, the second year of the Republic, one and indivisible.
When those who govern are hated, their competitors will soon be admired.
(Machiavelli)
One difference between monarchy and republic, which alone should suffice to cause good people to reject monarchical government with horror and make them prefer a republic whatever the cost of establishing it, is that in a democracy, even if the people can be deceived, at least it is virtue that they love; it is merit that they believe in elevating; whereas dishonest people are the essence of a monarchy. The vices, concealments, and crimes which are the diseases of republics are the very health and existence of monarchies.
The Cardinal de Richelieu admits this in his political testament, where he lays down the principle that a king must avoid making use of honest people. Before him, Sallust said: “Kings cannot do without rogues; on the contrary, they must fear and distrust honesty.” It is thus only in a democracy that a good citizen can reasonably hope to see the triumph of intrigue and crime cease; and for this the people need only to be enlightened: This, that the reign of Astraea may return, is why I take up my pen again; I wish to help Le Père Duchesne enlighten my fellow citizens and spread the seeds of public happiness.
Monarchies and republics always have this one difference: The reigns of the most wicked emperors, Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, Caligula, Domitian, had happy beginnings. All kingdoms have a joyeuse entrée. The advantage of republics is that they improve themselves.
It is with these reflections that a patriot first responds to a royalist, laughing in his sleeve at the present state of France, as if this violent and terrible state were to continue; I hear you, messieurs les royalistes, taunting the founders of the Republic and comparing our time to the time of the Bastille. You count on the frankness of my pen and take malicious pleasure in following it, as it faithfully sketches the image of this last semester. But I know how to temper your joy and breathe new courage into our citizenry. Before leading the reader to Breteaux and the Place de la Révolution, and showing him there the rivers of blood that have flowed during these six months for the eternal emancipation of a people of twenty-five million men, not yet cleansed by liberty and public happiness, I will begin by turning the eyes of my fellow citizens onto the reigns of the Caesars, and onto that river of blood, that sewer of corruption and filth, flowing perpetually under the monarchy.
Equipped with this preliminary number, the subscriber, even if he is endowed with the greatest sensitivity, will easily support himself in the crossing he undertakes with me through this period of the Revolution. In the fight to the death between the Republic and the monarchy in our midst, and in the need for one or the other to win a bloody victory, who can lament the triumph of the Republic, after having seen the description that history has left us of the triumph of monarchy, after casting his eye on the rough and unpolished copy of the tableaus of Tacitus that I will present to my honorable circle of subscribers?
“After the siege of Perugia,” historians say, “despite the city’s surrender, the response of Augustus was: All shall perish. Three hundred of the principal citizens were led to the altar of Julius Caesar, and there slaughtered on the anniversary of the Ides of March, after which the rest of the inhabitants were delivered pell-mell to the blade of the sword, and the city, one of the fairest in Italy, reduced to ashes and as much effaced as Herculaneum from the face of the earth. There was once in Rome, says Tacitus, a law which specified crimes of the state and lèse-majesté and imposed upon them capital punishment. These crimes of lèse-majesté, under the Republic, were reduced to four kinds: if an army had been abandoned in an enemy country; if seditions had been stirred up; if members of the constituted bodies had maladministered affairs and public funds; if the majesty of the Roman people had been debased. The emperors needed only to add a few additional articles to this law to envelop both citizens and entire cities in its proscription. Augustus was the first to extend this law of lèse-majesté, through including writings he called counter-revolutionary.[1] Under his successors, the extensions soon lost all limits. As soon as remarks became crimes of the State, it was only a small step to transform into crimes simple glances, sadness, compassion, sighs, even silence.
“Soon a crime of lèse-majesté, or counter-revolution, was brought against the city of Nursia, for having erected a monument to its inhabitants who were killed in the siege of Modena while fighting under Augustus himself; but because Augustus had fought alongside Brutus at the time, Nursia met the same fate as Perugia.
“Crime of counter-revolution against Libon Drusus, for having asked fortune tellers if he would one day possess great wealth. Crime of counter-revolution against the journalist Cremutius Cordus, for having called Brutus and Cassius the last of the Romans. Crime of counter-revolution against one of the descendants of Cassius, for having a portrait of his great-grandfather in his home. Crime of counter-revolution against Mamercus Scaurus, for having written a tragedy containing a line that could have multiple meanings. Crime of counter-revolution against Torquatus Silanus, for having spent money. Crime of counter-revolution against Petreius, for having had a dream about Claudius. Crime of counter-revolution against Appius Silanus, because Claudius’ wife had had a dream about him. Crime of counter-revolution against Pomponius, because a friend of Sejanus had come to seek asylum in one of his country houses. Crime of counter-revolution to go to the garde-robe without having emptied one’s pockets and keeping in one’s waistcoat a coin with a royal face, which was a sign of lack of respect for the sacred figure of tyrants. Crime of counter-revolution to complain about the misfortunes of the time, because this was putting the government on trial. Crime of counter-revolution to not invoke the divine genius of Caligula. For having failed in this, a great number of citizens were torn to pieces, condemned to the mines or to beasts, some even were sawn apart through the middle of their bodies. Crime of counter-revolution against the mother of the consul Fusius Geminus, for having mourned the gruesome death of her son.
“It was necessary to show joy at the death of one’s friend, one’s relative, if one did not want to perish himself. Under Nero, many of those whose relatives he had killed went to give thanks to the Gods; they were illuminated.[*1] It was necessary to at least have an air of contentment, an air that was open and calm. It was feared that fear itself would render one culpable.
“Everything gave umbrage to the tyrant. Did a citizen have popularity? He was a rival to the prince, who could forment civil war. Studia civium in se verteret et si multi idem audeant, bellum esse. Suspect.
“On the contrary, did one flee popularity and stay by the fireside? This retired life made you stand out, made you worthy of consideration. Quanto metu occultior, tantò famæ adeptus. Suspect.
“Were you rich? There was imminent peril that the people would be corrupted by your largesse. Auri vim atque opes Plauti principi infensas. Suspect.
“Were you poor? Goodness! invincible Emperor, we must watch this man closely. There is no person so enterprising as he who has nothing. Sylla inopem, inde praecipuam audaciam. Suspect.
“Did you have a disposition that was somber, melancholy, or unkempt? You were in affliction because public affairs were going well. Hominem bonis publicis maestum. Suspect.
“If, on the contrary, a citizen had a good time and made himself sick, he was entertaining himself because the Emperor had had an attack of gout, which, happily, would be nothing; it was necessary to make him feel that his Majesty was still in the prime of life. Reddendam pro intempestiva licentia maestam et funebrem noctem qua sentiat vivere Vitellium et imperare. Suspect.
“Was one virtuous and austere in his morals? Well! a new Brutus, who aspires by his pallor and Jacobin wig to censure an amiable and well-curled court. Gliscere aemulos Brutorum vultus rigidi et tristis quo tibi lasciviam exprobrent. Suspect.
“Was one a philosopher, an orator, or a poet? It pleased him well to have more renown than those who governed! Could it be bearable that more attention should be paid to an author in the gallery than to the Emperor in his private box? Virginium et Rufum claritudo nominis. Suspect.
“Finally, had one acquired reputation in war? He was all the more dangerous because of his talent. There are some resources in an inept general. If he is a traitor, he will hardly be able to deliver an army to the enemy so effectively that no one returns. But if an officer of merit, a Corbulo or an Agricola, betrays, not a single man would flea. It was best to get rid of such generals: At least, Emperor, you must not fail to quickly remove him from the army. Multa militari famâ metum fecerat. Suspect.
“It can be supposed that it was still worse to be the grandson or ally of Augustus; you might one day make a claim to the throne. Nobilem et quod tunc spectaretur e Caesarum posteris! Suspect.
“And all of these suspects under the Emperors were not removed, as with us, to be taken to the Madelonnettes, to Irlandais, or to Sainte-Pélagie. The prince sent them an order to summon their doctor or apothecary, and to choose, within twenty-four hours, the sort of death they liked best. Missus centurio qui maturaret eum.
“Thus, it was not possible to have any quality, other than that which might be used as an instrument of tyranny, without awakening the despot’s jealousy and exposing oneself to certain death. It was a crime to hold a high post, or to tender one’s resignation; but the greatest crime of all was to be incorruptible. Nero had so utterly destroyed honest people that after he had rid himself of Thrasea and Soranus he boasted of having banished even the name of virtue from the face of the earth. After the Senate condemned these two men, the Emperor wrote it a letter of thanks for having slain an enemy of the Republic, just as Clodius the tribune could be seen erecting an altar to Liberty on the site of Cicero’s dismantled house, while the people shouted, ‘Vive la liberté.’
“One person was condemned because of his name or that of his ancestors; another, because he possessed a beautiful house at Alba; Valerius Asiaticus, because his gardens had taken the fancy of the Empress; Statilius, because his face had displeased her; and a multitude of others for no conceivable cause at all. Toranius, the tutor and old friend of Augustus, was proscribed by his pupil for no reason, except that he was an upright man and loved his country. Neither the praetorship nor his innocence could save Quintus Gellius from the bloody hands of the executioner: that Augustus, whose clemency has been so praised, tore out his eyes with his own hands. Men were betrayed and stabbed by their slaves or their enemies; and if they had no enemies, an assassin was found in a guest, a friend, or a son. In short, during these reigns the natural death of a celebrated man or even a man of high stature was so rare that it was put in the gazettes as an event and transmitted by the historian to the memory of the centuries. ‘Under this consulate,’ says our annalist, ‘there was a pontiff, Pisonius, who died in his bed: this was looked upon as a marvel.’
“The death of so many innocent and commendable citizens seems less a calamity than the insolence and outrageous fortune of their killers and denouncers. Every day, the sacred and inviolable informer made his triumphant entry into the house of the dead, reaping an impressive inheritance. All these denouncers adorned themselves with the best names, calling themselves Cotta, Scipion, Regulus, Cassius, Severus. Informing was the only way to succeed, and Regulus was named Consul three times for his denunciations. Thus, everyone threw themselves into a career whose dignities were so vast and yet so easy; to distinguish himself with an illustrious beginning and create his own caravans of informers, the Marquis Serenus brought an accusation of counter-revolution against his own aged father, already exiled; after this, he proudly called himself Brutus.
“As go accusers, so go judges. The courts, protectors of life and property, became butcheries where the names of punishment and confiscation came to mean only theft and murder.
“If there was no way of sending a man to the Tribunal, it was necessary to revert to assassination and poison. Celer, Œlius, the famous Locuste, and the doctor Anicet were the professional poisoners, licensed and traveling with the court as a sort of group of great officers to the throne. When these half-measures did not suffice, the tyrant resorted to a general proscription. This is how Caracalla, having murdered his brother Geta with his own hands, declared all Geta’s friends and partisans to be enemies of the Republic, twenty thousand of them; and Tiberius declared all the friends and partisans of Sejanus to be enemies of the Republic, thirty thousand people. This is also how Sylla, in just one day, barred fire and water from seventy thousand Romans. If a lion emperor had a court and a Praetorian Guard of tigers and panthers, they could not have torn as many people to pieces as the denunciators, freedmen, poisoners, and cut-throats of the Caesars; because the cruelty caused by hunger ends with hunger, but that caused by the fear, greed, and suspicion of tyrants knows no bounds at all. To what level of degradation and baseness can the human race not descend, when one considers that Rome suffered the government of a monster who complained that his reign had not been marked by some calamity, plague, famine, or earthquake, who envied Augustus the happiness of having had an army cut to pieces during his reign, Tiberius the Fidenae amphitheater disaster, in which fifty thousand people were killed, and, to put it briefly, who wished that the Roman people had but one head, so that it could be thrown en masse out of the window!”
Do not let royalists tell me that this description says nothing, and that the reign of Louis XVI did not resemble that of the Caesars. If they do not resemble each other, it was because among us, tyranny, asleep for so long in the bosom of pleasure and resting on the solidness of the chains that our fathers had worn for fifteen hundred years, believed that it no longer had need of terror – the only instrument of despots, as Machiavelli says, and an instrument with total power over base and fearful souls made for servitude. But now that the People have awakened and the sword of the Republic has been drawn against monarchy, let royalty set foot again in France; it is then that these engravings of tyranny so well struck by Tacitus that I have just placed before the eyes of my fellow citizens will become the living image of the evils they will have to suffer for fifty years.
And must we look so far for examples? The massacres of the Champ-de-Mars and Nancy, the events that Robespierre recounted at the Jacobins the other day, the horrors that the Austrians have committed on the frontiers, the English at Gênes, and the royalists at Fougères and in the Vendée, and the violence of the factions alone, suffice to show that despotism, having returned furious to its destroyed possessions, could only strengthen itself by reigning like the Octavians and Neros. In this dual between liberty and servitude, and in the cruel alternative of a defeat a thousand times bloodier than our victory, “exaggerating the Revolution had less peril and greater value than falling short,” as Danton said, and the most critical necessity has been that the Republic secure victory on the battlefield.
Indeed, everyone will agree on one truth. Although Pitt, feeling the necessity to which we were reduced, of being unable to conquer without great bloodshed, suddenly changed batteries, and, skillfully taking advantage of our situation, made every effort to give our freedom the attitude of tyranny and thus turn against us the reason and humanity of the eighteenth century — that is to say, the very weapons with which we had conquered despotism; although Pitt, since the great victory of the Montagne on January 20, feeling too weak to prevent liberty from being established in France by fighting it head-on, understood that the only means of defaming and destroying it was to adopt its own costume and language; although as a result of this plan he gave all of his agents, all the aristocrats, secret instruction to deck themselves out in a bonnet rouge, to change their tight culottes for trousers, and to make themselves out to be fanatical patriots; although the patriot Pitt, having become a Jacobin, in his order to the invisible army in his pay among us, has conjured it to demand, like the Marquis de Montaut, five hundred heads in the Convention, and that the Army of the Rhine shoot the garrison of Mayence; to ask, like a certain petition, that nine hundred thousand heads be cut off; like a certain indictment, that half the French people be imprisoned as suspects; and, like a certain motion, that barrels of powder be placed under these innumerable prisons and beside them a permanent fuse; athough the sans-culotte Pitt demanded that at least, by amendment, all these prisoners should be treated with the utmost rigor; that they be denied all the comforts of life and even the sight of their fathers, their wives, and their children, so as to deliver them and their families to terror and despair; although this skillful enemy has raised everywhere a swarm of rivals to the Convention, and there are today, in France, only the twelve hundred thousand soldiers of our armies, who, very fortunately, do not make laws, for the commissioners of the Convention make laws; the departments, the districts, the municipalities, the sections, the revolutionary committees make laws; and, God forgive me, I believe that fraternal societies do too: despite, I say, all the efforts Pitt has made to make our Republic odious to Europe; to give arms to the ministerial party against the opposition party at the return of parliament; in a word, to refute the sublime manifesto of Robespierre[2]. Despite so many guineas, can one cite to me, asked Danton, a single man, strongly pronounced in the Revolution and in favor of the Republic, who has been condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal? The revolutionary tribunal, of Paris at least, when it saw false witnesses slipping into its bosom and putting the innocent in danger hastened to subject them to the penalty of retribution. It is true that it has condemned persons for words and writings. But, to begin with, can one regard as mere words the cry of Vive le Roi, that provocative cry of sedition that even the ancient law of the Roman republic that I have quoted would have punished with death? Second, it is in the melee of a revolution that the tribunal has to judge political crimes; and even those who believe that it is not exempt from errors owe it this justice, that in matters of writing it is more attached to the intention than to the corpus delicti; and when it was not convinced that the intention was counter-revolutionary, it has never failed to set free not only one who had spoken words or published writings, but even one who had emigrated.
Those who judge the founders of the Republic so harshly do not put themselves in their place. See between what precipices we walk. On one side is the exaggeration of the moustaches, which does not care if, through its ultra-revolutionary measures, we should become the horror and the laughingstock of Europe; on the other side is moderation in mourning, which, seeing the old Cordeliers rowing towards common sense and trying to avoid the current of exaggeration, yesterday with an army of women laid siege to the Committee of General Security, and, taking me by the collar as I happened upon them by chance, intended that, during the day, the Convention open all the prisons, letting loose under our feet – along with a certain number, it is true, of good citizens – a multitude of counter-revolutionaries, enraged by their detention. Finally, there is a third conspiracy, which is not the least dangerous; it is what Marat would have called the conspiracy of dopes: I speak of those men who, with the best intentions in the world, are strangers to all political ideas, and, if I may express myself thus, are scoundrels of stupidity and pride, and, because they belong to such and such a committee or they occupy this or that eminent place, hardly suffer that one speaks to them; montagnards of industry, as d’Églantine so aptly calls them, or at least montagnards of recruits, of the third or fourth requisition, whose mortuary dares to treat veterans bleached in the armies of the Republic as bad citizens if they do not kneel before their opinion and whose patriotic ignorance does us even more harm than the counter-revolutionary skill of the Lafayettes and the Dumouriez. These are the three pitfalls which the enlightened Jacobins see their road strewn with unceasingly: but those who laid the first stone of the Republic must be determined to raise this new Capitol to its heights or bury themselves under its foundations.
As for me, I have regained all my courage; and as long as I live I will not allow my truthful and republican pen to be dishonored. After this third number of le Vieux Cordelier, let Pitt come and say now that I do not as much freedom to express my opinion as the Morning Chronicle! let him come and say that freedom of the press no longer exists in France, even for deputies to the Convention, after the letter full of dreadful truths that the courageous Philippeaux has just published – even though one can reproach him for having misunderstood the great services of the Committee of Public Safety. Since I read this truly salvatory writing, I have said to all the patriots I meet: Have you read Philippeaux? And I say it with as much enthusiasm as La Fontaine, when he asked: Have you read Baruch?
Yes, I hope that freedom of the press will be reborn in its entirety. The best minds of the Convention have been strangely deceived about the alleged dangers of this freedom. We want terror to be the order of the day, that is to say the terror of bad citizens: let us therefore have the freedom of the press included within it, for it is the terror of rogues and counter-revolutionaries.
Loustalot, who is too often forgotten and who, if he failed to share the divine honors of Marat, lacked only being assassinated two years later,[*2] never stopped repeating this maxim of an English writer: If freedom of the press existed in a country where the most absolute despotism unites all powers in a single hand, it alone would suffice to act as a counterweight. The experience of our Revolution has demonstrated the truth of this maxim.
Although the Constitution of ‘89 had surrounded the tyrant with all means of corruption; although the majority of the first two national assemblies, corrupted by its twenty-five millions and by the supplements of the civil list, conspired with Louis XVI and with all the cabinets of Europe to stifle our nascent freedom, all it took was a handful of courageous writers to put thousands of venal pens to flight, to foil all plots and bring about the day of August 10 and the Republic, almost without bloodshed, in comparison to what has flowed since. As long as unlimited freedom of the press has existed, it has been easy for us to foresee everything, to prevent everything. Freedom, truth, common sense have defeated slavery, stupidity, and lies, wherever they have found them.
But then came the virtuous Roland, who, by making the post offices into nets from Saint-Cloud that the minister alone had the right to raise and allowing only the writings of the Brissotins to pass through, was the first to attempt an attack on this flow of enlightenment, heaping on the South the darkness and clouds from which so many storms have come. The writings of Robespierre, Billaud-Varenne, etc., were intercepted. Thanks to the war that was declared, supposedly to finish the Revolution, we are already bearing the cost of the blood of a million men, according to the count of Père Duchesne in one of his last numbers; I, on the other hand, will die of the opinion that, to make France republican, happy, and flourishing, a little ink and a single guillotine would have sufficed.
No one can refute my arguments in favor of freedom of the press; and let no one say, for instance, that in this third number and in my translation of Tacitus malignity will find similarities between those deplorable times and our own. I know this well, and it is to put an end to these rapprochements, it is so that freedom does not resemble despotism, that I have armed myself with my pen. But, to prevent the royalists from drawing from this an argument against the Republic, is it not enough to describe, as I have done just now, our situation and the cruel alternative between which the friends of freedom of have found themselves reduced, in this fight to the death between the Republic and the monarchy?
Without doubt, the maxim of republics is that it is better not to punish several of the guilty than to strike a single innocent person. But is it not true that, in a time of revolution, this maxim full of reason and humanity serves to encourage traitors to the fatherland, because the clarity of evidence required by laws favorable to the innocent allows a cunning culprit to evade execution? Such is the encouragement that a free people gives against itself. It is a disease of republics, that comes, as we see, from a goodness of temperament. The maxim, on the contrary, of despotism is that it is better that several innocent people are executed than a single guilty person escapes. (It is this maxim, says Gordon’s On Tacitus, which forms the strength and the surety of kings.)
The Committee of Public Safety felt this; and it believed that to establish the Republic it needed for a time the jurisprudence of despots. It thought, with Machiavelli, that in cases of political conscience the greater good erased the lesser evil; it therefore veiled liberty’s statue for some time. But will this transparent veil of gauze be confused with the thick vellum of the Cloots, the Coupes, the Montauts, that funerary pall under which it is impossible recognize the principles in their casket? [*3] Will we confuse the Constitution, daughter of the Montagne, with the excesses of Pitt; the errors of patriotism with the crimes of the foreign party; the public prosecutor’s indictments on certificates of citizenship, on the closing of churches, and the definition of “suspect persons,” with the protective decrees of the Convention, which have maintained freedom of worship and principles?
I make no pretense of pointing out anyone in particular in this number. It would not be my fault if M. Vincent, the Pitt of George Bouchotte, saw fit to recognize himself in certain features; my dear and brave colleague Philippeaux did not take this many detours to send him far harsher truths. Let those men hasten to correct their conduct who, on reading these vivid depictions of tyranny, find in them some unfortunate resemblance to themselves; because it is impossible to persuade oneself that the portrait of a tyrant, drawn by the hand of the greatest artist of antiquity, by the historian of philosophers, can now have become the portrait, painted from life, of Cato or Brutus, and that that which Tacitus called despotism and the worst of governments seventeen centuries ago can today be called liberty and the best of all possible worlds.[*4]
[1] I warn that this issue is, from one end to the other, only a literal translation of historians. I thought it unnecessary to overload it with quotations. However, at the risk of sounding like a pedant, I will sometimes quote the text in order to remove any pretext for malignity to poison my sentences, as well as any claim that my translation of an author who died fifteen hundred years ago is a crime of counter-revolution. Here is the passage. Tacit. annales, liv. I, ch. 72. Legi majestatis nomen apud veteres idem sed alia in judicium veniebant. Si quis proditione exercitum plebem seditionibus deniquemale gestê republicâ majestatem populi. Romani imminuisset. Facta arguebantur. Dicta impune erant Primus Augustus cognitionem de famosis libellis specie legis ejus tractavit, etc
I add that Marat, whose authority is almost sacred according to the divine honors paid to his memory, thought exactly like Tacitus on this matter. Here is how Marat expressed himself at the tribune of the Convention, on the session of January 7, on the occasion of an indictment by Anaxagoras Chaumette, against some article by the late Charles Vilette, inserted in the Chronicle. To be summoned before a tribunal for an opinion is an injustice. A citizen can only be summoned, in such a case, before the public. And when such a summons is directed at a representative of the people, it is an infamous violation. I ask that the public prosecutor of the Commune be brought to the Bar for having attempted an attack on the freedom of the press, etc.
[2] It is with such writings that one would avenge the honor of the Republic and poach their peoples and their armies, with the despots soon reduced to the guard of nobles and priests, their natural satellites — if the ultras-revolutionaries and the bonnets rouges of Brissot and Dumouriez did not spoil such a fine cause and sadly furnish Pitt with facts with which to answer these fine words of Robespierre.
[*1] Translator’s note: The original word is illuminoient or illuminaient – literally, “they illuminated.”
[*2] Translator’s note: The original says: “et à qui il n’a manqué, pour partager les honneurs divins de Marat, que d’être assassiné deux ans plus tard.” Translated literally: “and who lacked only, to share the divine honors of Marat, being assassinated two years later.”
[*3] Translator’s note: Camille uses the word doublure – the thick inner lining of a book cover, which has no English equivalent in common usage. I have substituted with “vellum.”
[*4] Translator’s note: Several versions use douze – twelve centuries. This was presumably a clerical error. Tacitus’ dates were AD 56 to approximately 120.
Camille Desmoulins Database 