The Gods Will Have Blood

by Anatole France

  All his colleagues were of the same opinion: the old monarchical idea of reasons of State still inspired the Revolutionary Tribunal. Its judges were moulded by eight centuries of absolute power, and it was by the principle of divine right that the Tribunal even now tried and sentenced the enemies of Liberty.

  On the same day Évariste Gamelin presented himself before the Public Prosecutor, the Citizen Fouquier, who received him in his office where he worked with his clerk of the court. He was a strongly built man, with a loud voice and the eyes of a cat, who bore on his wide, pale, pock-marked face evidence of the ravages which a sedentary existence and an indoor life leave on a vigorous constitution made for the open air and strenuous exercise. Mountains of paper towered around him like the walls of a sepulchre, and he was obviously happily at home amid those piles of terrible documents which seemed prepared to bury him alive. His conversation was that of a hard-working magistrate, devoted to his duties, oblivious to everything beyond the circle of his official functions. His hot breath smelt of the spirits he took to keep him going but which did not seem to affect his head, so lucid were his completely commonplace remarks.

  He lived in a small apartment in the Palais de Justice with his young wife, who had given him twin boys. His wife, an aunt Henriette and the maid-servant Pélagie made up his entire household. He was kind and considerate to his womenfolk. Briefly, he was an excellent family man and an excellent Public Prosecutor, though without much initiative and completely lacking in imagination.

  Gamelin could not help noticing, not without some displeasure, how greatly these magistrates of the new order resembled those of the old régime. And that, in fact, was what they were: Herman had held office as Advocate-General to the Council of Artois; Fouquier was a former procureur at the Châtelet. They had retained their previous characteristics. But Gamelin believed in Revolutionary regeneration.

  Leaving the Public Prosecutor’s office, he went along the gallery of the Palais and stopped before the little shops where all sorts of objects were artistically displayed for sale. At the Citizeness Ténot’s stall he leafed through various historical, political and philosophical works: The Chains of Slavery; An Essay on Despotism; The Crimes of Queens. ‘Splendid!’ he thought. ‘These are true Republican books!’ And he asked the woman if she sold many of them. She shook her head:

  ‘People only buy songs and romances.’

  She took a duodecimo volume from a drawer.

  ‘Here’s something good,’ she said.

  Évariste read the title: The Undressed Nun.

  In front of the next stall he found Philippe Desmahis, flamboyantly magnificent amongst the Citizeness Saint- Jorre’s perfumes, powders and sachets, and assuring that beautiful tradeswoman that he loved her, that he would paint her portrait and that she must come to the Tuileries Gardens that evening to discuss it. He was very handsome. His words were as persuasive as his eyes. The Citizeness Saint-Jorre stood, her eyes lowered, listening in silence, only too prepared to believe him.

  In order to find out all he could about the terrible powers with which he had been invested, the new magistrate decided to attend a meeting of the Tribunal as an ordinary member of the public. He made his way up the staircase where a large crowd was seated as if in an amphitheatre and pushed his way through into the ancient hall of the Parliament of Paris.

  Everybody seemed prepared to suffocate just to watch the trial of some general or other. For, as Brotteaux was fond of saying: ‘The Convention follows the example of the King of England and puts defeated generals on trial, in the absence of traitorous generals who take good care to avoid being brought to trial. Which does not mean,’ Brotteaux used to add, ‘that a defeated general is necessarily a criminal, since there must be such a one in every battle. But there is nothing like condemning a general to death to encourage the others…’

  The Tribunal had already passed sentence on several: obstinate, empty-headed soldiers with the brains of sparrows in the skulls of oxen. The one now before the Tribunal scarcely knew more of the battles and sieges he had commanded than the magistrates who were questioning him: defence and prosecution were losing themselves in aims, objectives, munitions, attacks and counter-attacks. But the crowd of citizens trying to follow this obscure and interminable argument could only see behind this half-witted soldier the torn bleeding bodies of thousands of their fellow-countrymen who had died for the Republic; and, vocally, gesticulatingly, they were urging the magistrates, sitting quietly on their bench, to deliver their verdict like a hammer-blow against the enemies of the Republic.

  Évariste was convinced of one thing; what they had to attack in this miserable creature were those two dread monsters which were tearing the nation apart: revolt and defeat. What did it really matter whether this soldier was innocent or guilty! With the Vendée in open revolt, with Toulon surrendering to the enemy, with the Army of the Rhine retreating before the victors of Mayence, with the English and the Dutch now masters of Valenciennes and the Army of the North at their mercy, it was imperative to teach these generals of the Republic to conquer or to die. At the sight of this witless old nincompoop losing himself down there among his maps, just as he had done far away on the plains of Northern France, Gamelin, to prevent himself shouting out ‘Death I’ with the crowd, went out of the hall as quietly as he could.

  At the opening meeting of the reorganized Section, the new magistrate was complimented by President Olivier who made him swear on the old High Altar of the Barnabites, now the Altar of the Nation, to wipe from his heart, in the sacred name of humanity, every human weakness.

  Gamelin, his hand raised, invoked as witness of his oath the august spirit of Marat, whose bust had just been placed against a pillar of the former church, opposite the bust of Le Peltier.

  This was greeted by some applause, mixed with murmurs of protest. The assembly was in an excited mood. At the entrance to the nave some members of the Section armed with pikes began shouting.

  ‘It is anti-Republican,’ the President ruled, ‘to carry arms into a meeting of free citizens’.

  And he ordered all muskets and pikes to be deposited immediately in the erstwhile sacristy.

  A hunchback with staring eyes and snarling lips, the Citizen Beauvisage of the Committee of Vigilance, went up into the pulpit which had now become the speakers’ tribune and was surmounted by a red bonnet.

  ‘The generals are betraying us’ he said, ‘and are surrendering our armies to the enemy. The Imperialists are pushing forward their cavalry around Péronne and Saint-Quentin. Toulon has been handed over to the English who are landing fourteen thousand men there. The enemies of the Republic are at work in the very heart of the Convention itself. Here, in Paris, countless plots are being hatched to free the Austrian woman. Now, this very moment, while I am speaking, it is being rumoured that her son, the Capet brat, has escaped from the Temple and is being carried in triumph to Saint-Cloud by those who would like to put him on the throne of that tyrant his father. The high cost of food, the increasing worthlessness of assignats are the result of the machinations of agents of foreign powers, here in Paris, beneath our very eyes. I call upon our fellow citizen, the new magistrate, in the name of public safety, to show no mercy to conspirators and traitors.’

  As he stepped down from the tribune shouts arose in the audience of: ‘Down with the Revolutionary Tribunals. Down with the Moderates!’

  A stout, red-faced man, the Citizen Dupont aîné, a joiner living in the Place de Thionville, mounted the tribune and said he wished to ask the new magistrate a question. He demanded to know what attitude Gamelin intended to take up in the matter of the Brissotins and the Widow Capet.

  Gamelin was timid and unpractised in public speaking. But indignation aroused him to eloquence. His face gone pale, he rose and said in a voice of suppressed emotion:

  ‘I am a magistrate. I am responsible only to my conscience. Any undertaking I might give you would be against my duty, which is to speak in this court and hold my peace els
ewhere. From henceforth, I shall not know you. Judgment is mine, not yours. I know neither friends nor enemies.’

  The meeting, composed like all meetings of different types and subject to sudden and unforseen changes of mood, approved this declaration. But the Citizen Dupont returned to the charge; he had not forgiven Gamelin for obtaining a position he had coveted himself.

  ‘I understand,’ he went on, ‘I even approve the new magistrate’s scruples. It is said he is a patriot; it is for him to examine his conscience and decide whether it permits him to sit on this Tribunal which was intended to destroy the enemies of the Republic but which now appears resolved to spare them. These are circumstances with which any good citizen is bound to repudiate all complicity. Is it not now being asserted that several magistrates sitting on this Tribunal have allowed themselves to be bribed, and that the President Montané himself altered the rulings of the court to save the head of the woman Corday?’

  At these words the whole hall reverberated with loud applause. The vaults were still echoing with the noise when Fortuné Trubert mounted the tribune. He had become thinner than ever during the past few months. His face was white and his cheekbones seemed on the verge of piercing the skin; his eyes had a vacant look under their inflamed eyelids.

  ‘Citizens,’ he began, in a weak, breathless voice that yet had a strange penetrating quality, ‘we cannot accuse the Revolutionary Tribunal without at the same time accusing the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety from which it derives its powers. The Citizen Beauvisage has alarmed us by reminding us that the President Montané interfered with the course of justice in favour of a criminal. Why did he not add, to relieve our fears, that Montané has since, on the denunciation of the Public Prosecutor, been dismissed from his office and thrown into prison?… Is it impossible for us to watch over the public safety without casting suspicion upon everybody? Is there no wisdom, no integrity, left in the Convention? Are not Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just honest men? Have you not noticed the fact that the most violent language is used by those individuals who have never been known to fight for the Republic? Their words and their speeches do more harm than good. I say, citizens, less talk and more work. It is with cannon and gun, and not with shouting, that France will be saved. Half of the cellars of this Section have still not yet been dug up. Many citizens still possess considerable quantities of bronze. Need we remind those citizens who are more wealthy than most, that gifts are the best guarantee of their patriotism? Need we recommend to their generosity the wives and daughters of our soldiers who are covering themselves with glory? One of these soldiers, the Hussar Pommier (Augustin), formerly a wine merchant’s assistant in the Rue de Jérusalem, when he was watering his troop’s horses, just before Condé on the tenth of last month, was attacked by six Austrian cavalrymen. He killed two of them and took the other four prisoners. I ask this Section to put on record that Pommier (Augustin) has done and acted as a dutiful son of the Republic’.

  This speech was applauded and the members dispersed amidst cries of ‘Vive la République’.

  Left alone in the nave with Trubert, Gamelin shook his hand warmly. He thanked him for his speech and asked how he was keeping.

  ‘I? Oh, very well! Very well!’ Trubert replied, coughing and spitting blood into his handkerchief. ‘The Republic has many enemies within, as well as without, and there is a considerable number of them in our own Section. It is not with loud talk, but with laws and the power to enforce them that Empires are founded… Good-night, Gamelin… I have some letters to write.’

  And with his handkerchief pressed to his lips, he disappeared into the erstwhile sacristy.

  Overnight the Widow Gamelin had assumed a fine air of importance. From henceforth her cockade was always fastened securely on her hood, in keeping with her sudden adoption of Republican haughtiness and of the dignified bearing appropriate to the mother of a magistrate of the State.

  Her inborn veneration for the law, her child-like admiration for the judges gown and cassock, her awe for those to whom God delegates this divine right of life or death, all these feelings made her now regard her son, whom till yesterday she had thought of as little more than a child, as a worshipful, holy and august being. To her simple mind the continuity of the concept of justice through all the changes of the Revolution was a conviction as strong as the conviction of the legislators of the Convention regarding the continuity of the conception of the State under different systems of government, and so the Revolutionary Tribunal appeared to her every bit as majestic as any of the time-honoured jurisdictions she had been taught to revere.

  The attitude of the Citizen Brotteaux to the young magistrate was a mixture of surprised interest and reluctant deference. His views about the continuity of justice under successive governments were the same as the Widow Gamelin’s in that, in complete contradiction to that lady’s attitude, his scorn for Revolutionary Tribunals was equalled only by his contempt for the judicial courts of the old régime. Not daring to express his opinions openly yet unable to keep himself from saying nothing, he wove a knot of innuendoes which Gamelin unravelled sufficiently to suspect the lack of patriotism that lay behind them.

  ‘The noble Tribunal upon which you are soon to be seated,’ Brotteaux said to him on one occasion, ‘was instituted by the French Senate for the security of the Republic, and it was certainly a magnanimous gesture on the part of our lawmakers to set up such a court to try our enemies. I recognize its generosity, but doubt its wisdom. It seems to me they would have done better to have killed off quickly and secretly the more irreconcilable of their enemies and won over the others by gifts and promises. A Tribunal such as yours kills off people slowly and inspires too little fear to achieve any good. It has to consider its first duty to be to set an example. The harm it does is to unite all in whom it inspires fear, and makes out of a diverse crowd of contradictory interests and passions, a powerful party capable of effective, united action. You inspire terror, and it is terror more than courage that turns people into heroes. I pray, citizen, you may not one day see the terrible progeny of your Terror arrayed against you!’

  The engraver Desmahis found time, although occupied that week by an affair with a prostitute from the PalaisÉgalité, a brown-haired giantress named Flora, to congratulate his friend and to inform him that his appointment was a great compliment to the world of art.

  Élodie herself – who without realizing it detested everything revolutionary and dreaded official duties as the most dangerous of rivals – even the tender Élodie was impressed by the glamour attached to a magistrate whose word could mean life or death. In addition, her loving heart was filled with satisfaction by other fortunate results that followed upon Évariste’s promotion as a magistrate; her father, the Citizen Blaise, went out of his way to call at the studio in the Place de Thion-ville and embraced the young magistrate affectionately and respectfully.

  Like all the anti-revolutionaries, he had a great respect for the authorities established by the Republic, and ever since his being denounced for fraud in his supplies to the army, he had gone in wholesome fear of the Revolutionary Tribunal. He felt complete security was impossible for a man like himself, so much in the public eye and involved in so many business transactions. The Citizen Gamelin, therefore, appeared suddenly to be a friend worth cultivating. After all, they were both good citizens and on the side of justice.

  He shook the painter-magistrate’s hand warmly, declaring himself to be his true friend and a true patriot, a well-wisher of the arts and liberty. Gamelin pressed the hand now so generously offered.

  ‘Citizen Évariste Gamelin,’ the Citizen Blaise continued, ‘as my friend and as a talented artist, you must accompany me tomorrow on a couple of days’ excursion through the countryside. You can make some drawings and we can enjoy a good talk.’

  Several times a year the print-dealer was in the habit of making a two or three days’ excursion of this kind in the company of artists who made drawings, suggested by him, of landsc
apes and ruins. He had a quick sense of what would please the public, and these little expeditions always resulted in some picturesque sketches which were then finished off at home and cleverly engraved. Prints in red or colours were struck off from these, and resulted in a good profit for the Citizen Blaise. He had over-doors and panels executed from the same sketches and these sold as well or better than the decorative work of Hubert Robert.

  On this occasion he intended the Citizen Gamelin to make naturalistic sketches of buildings, so greatly had the magistrate’s office increased for him the young artist’s importance. Two other artists were to accompany the party: the engraver Desmahis, who drew well, and an almost unknown person named Philippe Dubois, who was an excellent designer in the style of Robert. As was the custom, the Citizeness Élodie and her friend the Citizeness Hasard accompanied the party. And, expert at combining pleasure with profit, Jean Blaise had also invited the Citizeness Thévenin, an actress at the Vaudeville, reputed to be on the friendliest terms with him.

  X

  CLAD in a black-cocked hat, scarlet waistcoat, doeskin breeches and yellow-topped boots, the Citizen Blaise rapped with the handle of his riding whip at Gamelin’s studio door at seven o’clock the following Saturday morning. The Citizeness Gamelin was in the studio making polite conversation with the Citizen Brotteaux, while he was standing knotting his high white cravate in front of a scrap of a mirror.