II
This commission, Sir, there have been two centuries of exhaustive efforts to understand the reason for it. It is a political commission, that goes without saying: so let us lower ourselves for a moment and talk politics. Let us get that old theater of shadows moving once more.
This period, which is a kind of climax of History and which, consequently, is justly called the Terror, one late winter, one spring, and one early summer, from the snows of Nivôse to the hot hand of Thermidor, is made of tight knots impossible to untangle, short-lived enthusiasms, reversals, wild fluctuations more uncontrollable than a seismograph needle when a volcano erupts; or if you prefer animal life to geology, it is like a rabbit hole when the ferret is released, except that here, all are both ferret and rabbit for all the others. The brothers, accomplices in the killing of Capet le Père, the orphans who no longer slept after the father’s death, were killing one another through the increasing force of momentum, mechanically and machinelike — and that is why the great cutting machine located on the Place de la Révolution, the guillotine, is such a perfect emblem of that time, in our dreams as in reality. With the Royalists fallen, the Feuillants fallen, the Girondists fallen, there were no more truly divergent opinions within the triumphant Montagne; as Michelet said so clearly, as you read in the antechamber, the brothers, the killers, who were still trying to distinguish themselves from one another since distinction is in man’s nature, all the brothers could find to put between them was the distinction of death. These men have excuses, Sir, and deserve our admiration on more than one account: they slept three hours a night for four years, like sleepwalkers they worked for the happiness of humankind, they throbbed in the hands of the living God. All that, the single distinction of death, the terrible hand of the living God, the ferrets in the hole, you have read between the lines in the notes in the little antechamber, even if it is not written there in black and white; in black and white it is written that there were, broadly speaking, three clear-cut partis, the orthodox under Robespierre, the moderates under Danton, the extremists under Hébert, and it is written that Robespierre thought this, Danton thought that, Hébert thought something else again; but you, Sir, who will not be taken in, who can read between the lines, you have read and read clearly that, with only the slightest nuances, Robespierre, the good Danton, and the bad Hébert wanted the same thing, that is, a more or less just Republic and within that Republic, power, but that death in them (exhaustion and death, the living God and death) wanted the big knife of distinction.
Thus the three partis, the trinity, you could say, a split trinity with its three great roles: Robespierre who was, in person, the Rights of Man; Danton who no longer disputed that title, who was the most weary, who put on a show of slowing the momentum but whose heavy bulk was sliding faster and faster toward the blade; Hébert and his masses, extremists, populists, or Bolsheviks, I do not know or want to know which, whom rightly or wrongly we have come to consider the dregs of the earth, and who still hoped to challenge Robespierre. This trinity is the cliché: there were multitudes of other parties, just as real but less spectacular, that grafted themselves to this trinity by playing this or that hypostasis against the other two, to save their own power or skin, which was, at that time, the same thing. Among these more diffuse clans there were clubs, the Jacobins who belonged to Robespierre, the Cordeliers who belonged to Hébert one day, to Danton the next; the newspapers, from which Hébert drew most of his power, as Marat in his lifetime had done before him. The social classes were also parties, you could say: what remained of the aristocrats, in hiding or active; the greater and lesser bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, that is, the Limousins, all these blew with the wind from one party to another; and on top of all that, pulling in every direction and disorienting everyone, the other Limousin contingent, the mother of monsters, the packs of misfortune, the shrews of both sexes, the oil on the fire, the salt in the wound — the complaining, murdering packs of the eternal, barking plebeians: and through all that barking, no one heard anything anymore.
Finally, there were the great institutions of year II, which were then parties as well, but definable ones and very localized, limited in number, that gesticulated and prophesied under the narrow vaults of consecrated places. Those venerable vaults under which the erstwhile writers switched register and stage, appeared on the political scene without even having to change costume, were the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries, and at the end of the Louvre adjoining the Tuileries, the Flore pavilion.
In the Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, the Commune de Paris, which had been carried there by the district sections, the Limousins with their great pikes, the People, you could say, vociferated, which had had a great audience but now had hardly any, which was hungry and weary and whose wings were being clipped by the bureaucrats of the committees; deliberating and decreeing in the Salle des Machines of the Tuileries was the Convention, the true nominal power, the elected and all-powerful assembly, all-powerful and terrorized, which had no power other than to obey the Committee, which nevertheless issued from it and could theoretically be dismissed by it, but which it renewed each month without Robespierre even needing to raise a finger — the Convention, for which the only way out appeared to be the hand of Providence, a kind of miracle, a deus ex machina of the fifth act, which it had not yet learned to call Thermidor. In two lower halls and communicating by the Queen’s Stairway to the Flore pavilion, then called the pavillon de l’Égalité, in that Flore pavilion at the very end of the Bord-de-l’Eau gallery in the Louvre, under our feet, under The Eleven, the two committees made up another party, the Committee of General Security, shadow and executant, standard-bearer for the other, the true one, the Committee of Public Safety, which had to retain absolute power or die — the tightrope-walking party, which subjugated the people through the Convention and the Convention through the people. And please note, Sir, that this power was a phantom power, that, in fact, did not exist, because the executive position that it held at the top of the pyramid of power no longer existed, had been abolished as something left over from the execrable position of the tyrant — this power did not exist, but nevertheless with its phantom voice it demanded, obtained, and severed forty heads a day. Within the Committee itself there were parties, perhaps eleven parties, which history and the little notes have reduced to three, because three is a good number that works for all occasions: first, Robespierre and the Robespierrots, two of them, Saint-Just and Couthon, so three with Robespierre; second, the scientists, engineers and lawyers, captains, excelling in the liberal as well as mechanical arts, who constructed canons out of the ruins of bells and fashioned decrees in the fine rhetoric of year II out of the ruins of the fine rhetoric of theology, empty rhetoric that, to render to Caesar what was his, had actually been invented by Robespierre’s Saint-Just: these good scholars with dirty hands were Carnot, Barère, the Prieurs, Jean Bon, Lindet, six men of science. And finally, two independents, Billaud and Collot, impassioned and unpredictable. The one principal point all these men had in common, these eleven writers, as I have told you, was affixing their eleven signatures to the bottom of various decrees where it was a question of canons, of grain, of requisition, of execution, of the guillotine.
What has this to do with the painting? First of alclass="underline" these “parties,” Sir, what I have called parties, in this period of theatrical crescendo, of the ultimate round when each player only raised his voice to outbid his rival, to drown him out and finally toss the talking head into the basket, these parties were only roles now. It was no longer a matter of opinions, but of theater; this often happens in politics; and it always happens in painting when politics are represented in the very simple form of men: because opinions cannot be painted, but roles can be.