4

Gerbier receiving 300,000 francs for a single | manufactory of Réveillon, they saw the gates cause, and Duvaudier's exertions in securing guarded by soldiery, and were told that bea jointure, paid by an equipage and an annuity of 4000 francs for its support. He began early to emancipate himself from the procureur's, by obtaining a set of clients of his own. He succeeded first in becoming counsel to the eminent merchants constituting the India Company, in a cause which blasted many years; then in obtaining the conduct of a claim depending on an ancient pedigree, which appears to have remained undisposed of for more than twenty years; and lastly, in obtaining as his clients the two great ecclesiastical chapters of Brioude and Bourges. His marriage in January 1789 with Mademoiselle Gorneau, whose father, as Procureur aux Conseils, had for his clients the chief bankers and merchants of Paris, placed him at once in possession of the first mercantile practice. The heads of the great houses became his clients and his friends; and we may judge of the extent of litigation in which they were engaged, when we are told that one of them, M. Magon de la Balue, paid him a daily visit.*

62

It does not appear that, when he married, he was aware that a time was approaching when the bravest man might wish to have no safety to provide for but his own. He had, indeed, been somewhat surprised, but not disquieted, by the anti-monarchical spirit of the press, and had felt some alarm at the opposition of the parliaments to the court; but his fears did not exceed a vague uneasiness. He does not appear, indeed, to be more of a statesman than the Carlist deputy, his son. The extent of his political sagacity may be estimated by the three causes, to which even now, after fifty years' experience, he assigns the Revolution: namely, financial difficulties, which he thinks might have been got out of by economy; the contest between the parliaments and the crown; and the reduction of a portion of the household troops.

His fears, however, were soon to be awakened. On the evening of Sunday, the 12th of July, he was returning with his young wife from a country holiday-that day was, in fact, the last but one of the monarchy-but so little were they aware of the real nature of the events which had disturb ed the previous weeks, that they felt, as he tells us, perfect security. But at the Barrière du Trône, they heard of the sanguinary conflict between the Royal Allemand and the procession carrying the busts of Orleans and Necker; and as they passed the paper

* Vol. ii. p. 325. VOL. I. No. III. 29

hind them lay the bodies of those who had perished in the attack on the building. Two mornings after, M. Berryer was roused from his bed by the tocsin; he was summoned, by what authority he does not know, to a meeting of the inhabitants of his parish, in the church of St. Méry. He found there crowds as ignorant of the cause of their assembling as himself. For hours they wandered, without an object, up and down the aisles of the church. At length, some persons talked of organizing the parish as a municipal body. M. Berryer suggested the means to those about him; they carried him to the pulpit, and thence he proposed his plan, which was to divide the parish into quarters, or, as we should call them, wards; the inhabitants of each ward grouping themselves round a particular pillar; and then, that each ward should present a list of six persons, to constitute the bureau or common council of the parish-one being the president and another the secretary. His plan was adopted by acclamation; he refused the office of president, but accepted that of secretary. The bureau was elected, and directed to provide for the civil and military organization of the parish.

In the evening the bureau assembled; M. Berryer was quietly engaged in his duties as secretary; it was hot, and the windows were open, when some pikes, bearing bloody heads, were thrust in; and they were told that one was that of De Launay, and that the others were those of the Swiss massacred within the Bastile. This horrible incident influenced permanently the fortunes of M. Berryer. With his talents and his advantages, it was obvious that the highest professional honors were within his grasp. His advance had been checked by no difficulties, and, till then, seemed to be attended by no dangers. But the 14th of July dispelled his dream of safety. He saw the time coming when the servants of the public might have to choose between death and crime. He doubted how he might stand the trial, and he felt certain that no reward was worth the risk. He resolved, therefore, and he kept his resolution, to remain for life in a private station. His companions at the bar acted differently. Some perished for their virtues, some for their crimes, and

* M. Berryer's recollection has misled him as to these dates. He supposes the storming of the Basfore that Sunday was the 13th. But, in fact, Sunday tile to have taken place on the Monday, and therewas the 12th, and a day intervened between the riot of that day and the insurrection of the 14th.

some obtained and kept the most elevated civil dignities. But it was in vain that they pressed him to accompany them in their rise. He preserved his conscience, and perhaps his life, by the sacrifice of his ambition.

turned to his memory; and with great reason, for Coffinhal might have said, with Cæ sar, that it was much less trouble to him to destroy than to menace.

But these were preludes. Monarchical government was destroyed by the insurrection of the 10th August 1792; republican government by that of the 2d June, 1793. The strange sort of rule arose, which, for want of a more definite word, has been called the 'Reign of Terror;'-a mixture of anarchy and despotism, of democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, which combined all the worst faults of all the worst institutions. Two powers strove for mastery in this chaos, the Convention, and the Commune or municipal council of Paris, and each of these was subdivided into hostile factions. In all of them the objects of the leaders were power and safety; and in all of them the object of the subordinate members was safety. All joined in the endeavor to effect their purposes by the means resorted to in what has been called the state of nature ;-by the destruction or intimidation of those whose power or whose safety they thought inconsistent with their own. The ordinary instruments employed by each party were the loi des suspects, the revolutionary committees, and the revolutionary tribunal. The extraordinary instrument was the armed population of Paris, consisting of the National Guards, furnished by the forty-eight sections into which Paris was divided; a force generally called, in the histories of the times, by the somewhat puzzling name of the Sections.' whole body, if it could have been collected, amounted to above 80,000 men, some provided with guns, but many more with pikes; their principal arms consisted of some pieces of artillery attached to each section.

He soon found, however, that the humbler path of an advocate had its difficulties and its dangers. The order to which he belong. ed was abolished; in its room were substituted défenseurs officieux-a function which every one, whatever were his previous employments or his previous ignorance, was allowed to exercise. The great objects of his veneration, the parliaments, which, with a strange misconception of history, he describes as the supporters of pure monarchy, shared the fate of the bar. New tribunals were erected in their room, with inferior powers and a more limited jurisdiction. The greater part of the old bar refused to plead before them; and the character of the new judges, generally selected from among fierce political partisans, accounts for their refusal. As an illustration of their judicial conduct, M. Berryer relates the history of a cause tried before the Tribunal des Minimes, one of the new metropolitan courts, over which M. Le Roy Sermaise, a violent democrat, presided. The parties were two villagers from Montreuil; the matter in dispute a small estate. The plaintiff rested his claim on a deed of conveyance, which appeared on inspection to have nothing to do with the property; the defendant's case depended on uninterrupted possession. "How long," said M. Le Roy Sermaise, "has this possession lasted?" "Why, citizen president," replied the peasant, "it must be at least eighty or ninety years, taking in my greatgrandfather, my grandfather, my father, and myself." "Then," replied the judge, "you ought to be satisfied; every one in his turn; yours has lasted long enough, in all con- The forty-eight revolutionary committees science: now let your poor neighbor have of Paris were appointed by the inhabitants his." It must be added that the new dé-of the forty-eight sections, voting by uni fenseurs officieux, untrained in the conven-versal suffrage. Their duty, for which they tional hostility of the bar, sometimes resent-received a regular pay, was to inquire into ed opposition as a personal injury; and no all conduct which might affect the public one could tell, in such times, what might be safety, to give certificates of civisme-that the consequence of making an enemy of the is to say, of attachment to the Revolution most insignificant or the most worthless in--and to order the arrest of all suspected dividual. On one occasion, M. Berryer had persons. the misfortune of being opposed to Coffinhal, afterwards the sanguinary vice-president of the revolutionary tribunal; and he tells us that, after he had heard that Coffinhal had threatened to punish him, he shuddered with terror whenever the threat re

* Vol. i. p. 133,

The

The loi de suspects declared guilty of being suspected, and therefore subject to arrest, four principal classes:-1. All those who, by their connections, their conversation, their writings, or their conduct, ap peared to be opposed to liberty. 2. All those who could not prove their means of living, and of performing their civil duties.

3. All those who had been refused certifi- [utes, a man might be indicted, tried, concates of civisme. 4. All persons of noble victed, and sentenced, and an hour after birth, and all relations of emigrants, unless executed. they could prove their ardent devotion to the Revolution.

The revolutionary tribunal was a criminal court of equity; a court for the punishment of those who were unpunishable by law. It is a strong proof of the little progress which France has made towards real liberty, that M. Berryer approves of the principle of such an institution, and recommends its adoption as a restraint on the press.*

As the Convention possessed the power of appointing and removing the members of the revolutionary tribunal, and of selecting its victims, it was, while its orders were obeyed, despotic in Paris; and when two committees of the Convention, that of salut public and sûreté générale, could send before the tribunal-that is to say, could send to death-any members of the Convention, the two committees became despotic in the Convention.

It consisted of a public accuser, judges The inflicting death seems, like many and jurymen, all nominated by the Conven- other acts which are at first painful, to betion, restrained by no form of procedure come a passion. No other explanation can or rules of evidence, and authorized, on an be given of the condemnation by the revoapplication from the Convention, or from lutionary tribunal of many of the humblest one of its two committees of sûreté géné- and obscurest persons among the petty shoprale and salut public, to judge all conspira- keepers, and even workmen, of Paris. No tors and opposers of the Revolution; and other explanation can be given of some of all those whose conduct or whose expres- the capricious murders related by M. Bersion of opinion had a tendency to mislead ryer. We give one or two examples:-In the people. At first evidence was required, 1787, money had been borrowed in Paris on and the accused were allowed defenders; printed debentures for £100 each, signed but as the trials increased in number, these by the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, forms were found inconvenient; and, after and the Duke of Clarence. They went by all, they were mere forms, for the business the name of actions du Prince de Galles. of the tribunal was not to try but to con- The transaction was an unfortunate one; demn. They were therefore abolished, the debentures were refused payment, lost and the tribunal was required to decide without hearing any witnesses, if there were grounds, material or moral (such were the words of the decree), for believing the accused to be an enemy to the people. Lists were kept ready of persons accused, others of persons condemned, with the names left in blank. Every evening the list of the accused was prepared by Fouquier-Tinville, the public accuser, settled by the comité de salut public of the Convention, and sent round to the prisons; those named in it were taken to the Conciergerie; the next morning they were before their judges, and before the evening they had suffered. That there were grounds, material or moral, for conviction, was always assumed; no witnesses were examined; and the trial, if it could be called one, was generally merely identifying the pris- Another notary, M. Martin, a friend, like oner with one of the names on the list of M. Chaudot, of M. Berryer, met at his door, persons accused. Even this might be dis-on his return from a morning's walk, a genpensed with. When, as it sometimes happened, prisoners were brought to the bar whose names, in the hurry of business, had been left out of the list, the only result was that the public accuser immediately supplied the omission; and thus, in three min

* Vol. ii. p. 419.

their value, and disappeared. Six years afterwards, all persons concerned in their introduction into the Parisian market, or in their circulation, were accused as contrerévolutionaires, and enemies of the people. The Duc de St. Aignan, a former client of M. Berryer, on whom a money-lender had forced some of these debentures, and who had obliged him by law to take them back, was among the accused. So was his duchess, a young woman of fashion, whom no one could suppose to have been acquainted with her husband's transactions. So were even the notaries in whose hands they deposited, and their clerks: and even M. Chaudot, who had merely given a notarial attestation which he could not legally refuse. All were condemned, and all were executed.

darme, who required his immediate attendance before the revolutionary tribunal. He found there three persons accused of having signed a pedigree certificate, which had been deposited in his office. There was nothing objectionable in the certificate, but it was said that some ill use might be made of it. The public accuser simply asked

him if the paper had been placed with him; He and his wife were forced to bring their and on his admitting it, required the tribu- table into the street, and consume, in the nal to convict and sentence him to death, presence of the passers-by, "le diner pat together with those previously accused. riotique." His wife was sometimes forced The tribunal instantly complied; the four to attend at the baker's to inspect the sale prisoners were removed from the bar; room of bread, to see that no one was served be. was found for them in the carriages which fore his turn, and that no one was allowed were setting off for the guillotine; and to purchase beyond his strict wants. At within three hours M. Martin was an other times she had to head an address un-accused man, and an executed criminal!

from the women of the section to the Convention, deliver a patriotic speech, and receive the fraternal embrace of the Presi dent.

During the 'Reign of Terror' M. Berryer gave up the public exercise of his profession. No one could act as défenseur offi- Suddenly, however, he was roused to a cieux without a certificate of civisme from sense of imminent danger by an accidental the revolutionary committee of his section. visit to the Treasury offices of a M. L But he could not rely upon obtaining one one of his former brethren of the bar, now from the uneducated and violent persons- become a member of the Convention. The a brothel-keeper, a knife-grinder, a porter, visitor loudly expressed his astonishment and a shoe-cleaner-who were paid forty that an aristocrat, and a counter-revolutionsous a-day to administer the affairs of the ist, in whose house conspirators met every section. A person to whom such a certifi- evening, should fill a Government employcate had been refused, became, as we have ment. Such remarks were deadly. They seen, by express enactment suspected, and were sure to be whispered about, and to be certain, from the notoriety of the fact, to acted upon by some wretch anxious to pay be arrested the next day; and equally cer- court to the deputy. It was probable that, tain to be executed, as soon as the malice of in twenty-four hours, Mr. Berryer would an enemy, or the caprice of the public ac- be in one of the dungeons of the Abbaye, cuser, should call him forth. He at first and in a week afterwards in the Place de la proposed to shut himself up in his study, Guillotine; and there was no knowing how and act solely as a chamber counsel; but many of those who had favored his employhe was soon told that seclusion would inev- ment might accompany him. Fortunately itably attract suspicion, and that he must he had two friends in the Convention, find some mode of life which would not Charles Lacroix and Bourdon de l'Oise, bear the interpretation of fear. Fortunately both colleagues of M. L, and both he had been counsel, in happier times, for stanch members of the Montagne. He ran the National Treasury, and M. Turpin, the agent (a functionary corresponding, we believe, to our secretary), was his intimate friend. M. Turpin, indeed, was not safe; for, though intrusted with matters of the utmost confidence, and daily transacting business with the heads of the department, he was an object of such jealousy, that a gendarme watched all his proceedings, and, in fact, never quitted him by day or night. Notwithstanding the want of a certificate of civisme, the previous services and the reputation of M. Berryer, and the friendship of M. Turpin, effected his admission into the offices of the Treasury as subagent a favor great, not only from its importance to the person admitted, but from the danger to which it exposed them who admitted him.

to the chamber, and found Bourdon de l'Oise entering it, clattering, as he went, the huge sabre which he had carried in the storm of the Bastile. What were the persuasions applied by his two friends to their colleague, M. Berryer does not tell us, but they were sufficient. M. L returned to the Treasury, praised loudly the patriotism of M. Berryer, informed the hearers that the nightly visitors were inoffensive clients, and ended by stating that his remarks had been quite misunderstood, and in fact were meant for a different person.

But the danger had been averted, only to reappear in a form less direct, but more painful. Among M. Berryer's most honored clients were the great bankers of the Place Vendôme, MM. Magon de la Balue and Magon de la Blinais, MM. Laurent Le In this new post, his days were passed in Couteulx, and Le Couteulx Cautelen, and the office, and his evenings in transacting M. Pourrat. One Heron, a merchant of the legal business of his former clients; Marseilles, had become bankrupt, had fled and again he fancied himself safe. Some to South America, and returned in the bevexations, indeed, he was exposed to, but ginning of the Revolution with some bills they were almost ludicrous annoyances.- of the Spanish government of considerable

service; a solution, perhaps, as improbable as the imputation of any monstrous wickedness to a man of ordinary virtue.

nominal value. He offered them to the principal banking-houses, but could not get them discounted. This rankled in his mind, and as soon as the loi des suspects gave These dangers, however, were at length arms to malignity, he denounced all those to terminate. The party, of which Robeswho had refused him. MM. Laurent Le pierre and his immediate friends formed the Couteulx, and Le Couteulx Cautelen, were nucleus, had risen to power by a process of detained for eleven months in the Concier- constant contraction. Originally, it comgerie; saw it weekly emptied and weekly prised nearly the whole of the deputies of filled, but escaped at an enormous expense, the Tiers Etat, for who was there that reby bribing the clerks to place the papers re- fused the oath of the Tennis Court? First lating to them always at the bottom of the it threw off and destroyed the aristocratic bundles of accusations. M. Pourrat fell Royalists, then the Girondists, then the early a victim to his own precautions. He Hébertists, and at last even the Dantonists. became a member of the Jacobin club. At every change, while it destroyed a rival, The singularity of a banker in such a so- it deprived itself of a supporter. At first it ciety attracted attention, and he was arrest- spoke the voice of a nation, afterwards that ed on the benches of the club. MM. Ma- of an assembly; then that of a party, and gon de la Balue and Magon de la Blinais, at length that of a committee. But the both venerable men between eighty and committees of salut public, and sûreté généninety, were confined in the Maison de san- rale, were omnipotent. Fielding has reté de Belhomme; a place celebrated for hav-marked, that a man with a pistol may hold ing exhibited the last traces of the ancient at bay a multitude; for though he can aristocratic habits. There those who could shoot but one man, every one feels that the afford the expense of such a prison, spent first who attacks him will be that one. Nothe last weeks of their lives among the thing in the history of the Revolution is enjoyments and the forms to which they more striking than Thibaudeau's picture of had been accustomed. The roturiers and the submission of the fierce and violent the nobles, and among the nobles, those of Convention before the governing Committhe sword and those of the robe, kept their tee of Public Safety:-The object of every distinct circles. There were ceremonious member, from the instant that he entered visits, and full-dress evening parties, where the house, was to prevent his behavior there the younger portion of this short-lived so- from being a crime. Every movement, ciety amused themselves by rehearsing the every look, every murmur, every smile, trial and the execution. Passports signed was calculated. Those who ventured to by Robespierre, Couthon, Carnot, and Bar- have a place crowded to the Montagne (the rère, the four principal members of the rul- high benches of the left), as the republican ing committee of Public Safety, were ex- seats; or took refuge in the centre (anhibited to M. Berryer; and he was desired swering to our benches near the bar), as to offer to MM. Magon, for 300,000 francs, the seats which manifested no party feelliberty, and an escape across the frontiers. ing. Others wandered from bench to bench, They replied, that to fly from trial would be in the hope that they might be supposed to a confession of guilt-that their perfect in- be opposed to no party and to no opinion; nocence was a security-and refused. A but the more prudent never ventured to sit. week after, M. Berryer read in the papers They stood in groups at the bar, and slunk the conviction of the conspirators, Magon away whenever a vote was probable. The de la Blinais, Magon de la Balue, the wo- sittings, once so long and so violent, were man St. Perne, daughter, the woman Cor- cold and short. Trifling details were disnulier, grand-daughter of the latter, and the cussed until the Committee of Public Safety Sieur Coureur, his secretary. Mixed with appeared. The Committee, headed by their his regrets were his fears. He was known rapporteur (the member charged to anto have been their counsel. The fierce nounce their decisions), entered with the Dubarran, a member of the formidable air of masters. In their progress to the Comité de Sûreté générale, had already tribune they were preceded and followed by threatened him with the consequences of defending aristocrats and conspirators, and he knew that among their papers must be found whole bundles of his letters. He does not appear to be even now able to explain his escape, unless by imputing it to gratitude in Fouquier Tinville for an early

those who were striving to propitiate them by apparent devotion. There was deep silence until the rapporteur spoke: every one sought to read in his countenance whether he was to announce a victory or a proscription. His proposals, whatever they were, were servilely adopted, generally in