XI. THE FÊTE OF THE SWISS OF CHATEAUVIEUX.

Dumouriez, at the beginning of his ministry, was still the slave of the Jacobins, his allies and protectors. His elevation to the ministry was in great part due to them, and even while despising them, he felt unable to shake off their yoke. Little by little, they inspired him with horror, and before many weeks were over, his only idea was to free himself from their control. But at first he treated them like a power with which he was obliged to reckon. What proves this is his passive attitude at the time of the celebrated fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The prologue of the bloody tragedies that were in course of preparation, this fête shows what headway the revolutionary ideas had made. The sinister days of the Convention were approaching, the Terror existed in germ, and already many representatives who, on a secret ballot, would have voted in accordance with right and honor, were cowardly enough to do so against their conscience when they had to answer to their names.

Things had travelled fast since the close of the Constituent Assembly. In 1790, that Assembly, as the faithful guardian of discipline, had congratulated the Marquis de Bouillé on the energy with which he repressed the military rebellion that broke out at Nancy, August 31. The soldiers garrisoned at this town were guilty of the greatest crimes. They pillaged the military chests, arrested the officers, and fired on the troops who remained faithful. M. Desilles, an officer of the King's regiment, conducted himself at the time in a heroic manner. When the insurgents were about to discharge the cannon opposite the Stainville gate, he sprang towards it, and covering it with his body, cried: "It is your friends, your brothers, who are coming! The National Assembly sends them. Do you mean to fire on them? Will you disgrace your flags?" It was useless to try to hold Desilles back. He broke away from his friends and threw himself again in front of the rebels, falling under four wounds at the moment when the fight began.

The Constituent Assembly passed a decree by which it thanked the Marquis de Bouillé and his troops "for having gloriously fulfilled their duty" in repressing the military insurrection of Nancy. Its president wrote an official letter to Desilles, soon to die in consequence of his wounds: "The National Assembly has learned with just admiration, mingled with profound sorrow, the danger to which your heroic devotion has exposed you; in trying to describe it, I should weaken the emotion by which the Assembly was penetrated. So sublime an example of courage and civic virtue is above all praise. It has secured you a sweeter recompense and one more worthy of you; you will find it in your own heart, and the eternal memory of the French people."

The Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux had taken part in the rebellion at Nancy. Switzerland had reserved, by treaty, its federal jurisdiction over such of its troops as had taken service under the King of France. By virtue of this special jurisdiction the soldiers of the regiment of Chateauvieux, taken arms in hand, were tried before a council of war composed of Swiss officers. Twenty-two were condemned to death and shot. Fifty were condemned to the galleys and sent to the convict prison at Brest. It was in vain that Louis XVI. attempted to negotiate their pardon with the Swiss Confederacy. It remained inflexible, and the guilty were still undergoing their penalty when the Jacobins resolved to release them from prison in defiance of the treaties uniting Switzerland and France. "To deliver these condemned prisoners," says Dumouriez in his Memoirs, "was to insult the Cantons, attack their treaty rights, and judge their criminals. We had enemies enough already without seeking new ones among an allied people who were behaving wisely towards us, especially a free and republican people." But revolutionary passions do not reason. Collot d'Herbois, a wretched actor who had passed from the theatrical stage to that of politics, and who, not content with having bored people, wished to terrorize them also, made himself the champion of the galley-slaves of the regiment of Chateauvieux. He was the principal impresario of the lugubrious fête which disgraced Paris on April 15, 1792.

The programme was not arranged without some opposition. Public opinion was not yet ripe for saturnalia. There were still a few honest and courageous publicists who, like André Chénier, boldly lifted their voices to stigmatize certain infamies. In the tribune of the Assembly some orators were to be found who expressed their minds freely and held their own against the tempests of demagogy. There were generals and soldiers in the army for whom discipline was not an idle word; and if the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux made the future Septembrists and furies of the guillotine utter shouts of joy, it drew from honest men a long cry of grief and indignation.

Intimidated by the menaces of the Jacobins, the Assembly voted the release of the Swiss incarcerated in the prison of Brest. But merely to deliver them was not enough: the Jacobins wanted to give them an ovation. Their march from Brest to Paris was a triumph, and Collot d'Herbois organized a gigantic fête in their honor.

André Chénier was at this time writing weekly letters for the Journal de Paris, in which he eloquently supported the principles of order and liberty. As M. de Lamartine has said, he was the Tyrtæus of good sense and moderation. He was indignant at the threatened scandal, and, in concert with his collaborator on the Journal de Paris, Roucher, the poet of Les Mois, he criticised in most energetic terms the revolutionary manifestation then organizing. At the Jacobin Club, on April 4, Collot d'Herbois freed his mind against him. "This is not Chénier-Gracchus," said the comedian; "it is another person, quite another." He spoke of André as a "sterile prose writer," and pointed him out to popular vengeance. The two brothers were in opposing camps. While André Chénier stigmatized the fête of anarchy, his brother Joseph was diligently manufacturing scraps of poetry, inscriptions, and devices which were to figure in the programme. "What!" cried André, "must we invent extravagances capable of destroying any form of government, recompense rebellion against the laws, and crown foreign satellites for having shot French citizens in a riot? People say that the statues will be veiled in every place through which this procession is to pass. Oh! if this odious orgy takes place, it will be well to veil the whole city; but it is not the images of despots that should be wrapt in funeral crape, but the faces of honest men. How is it that you do not blush when a turbulent handful, who seem numerous because they are united and make a noise, oblige you to do their will, telling you that it is your own, and amusing your childish curiosity meanwhile with unworthy spectacles? In a city which respected itself such a fête would meet nothing but solitude and silence." The controversy waxed furious. The walls were covered with posters for and against the fête. Roucher thus flagellated Collot d'Herbois: "This character out of a comic novel, who skipped from Polichinello's booth to the platform of the Jacobins, has sprung at me as if he were going to strike me with the oar the Swiss brought back from the galleys!"

Pétion, then mayor of Paris, far from opposing the fête, approved and encouraged it. "I think it my duty," he wrote, April 6, 1792, "to explain myself briefly concerning the fête which is being arranged to celebrate the arrival of the soldiers of Chateauvieux. Minds are heated, passions are in ferment, and citizens hold different opinions; everything seems to betoken disorder. It is sought to change a day of rejoicing into a day of mourning.... What is it all about? Some soldiers, leaders with the French guards, who have broken our chains and afterwards been overloaded with them, are about to enter within our walls; some citizens propose to meet and offer them a fraternal welcome; these citizens are obeying a natural impulse and using a right which belongs to all. The magistrates see nothing but what is simple and innocent in all this; they see certain citizens abandoning themselves to joy and mirth; every one is at liberty to participate or not to participate in the fête. Public spirit rises and assumes a new degree of energy amidst civic amusements." The municipality ordered this letter of Pétion's to be printed, posted on the walls, and sent to the forty-eight sectional committees and the sixty battalions of the National Guard.

Not all the members of the National Assembly shared the optimism of the mayor of Paris. The preparations for the fête, which was announced for April 15, occasioned, on the 9th, a session as affecting as it was stormy. The whole debate should be read in the Moniteur. The question was put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux, then waiting outside the doors, should be introduced and admitted to the honors of the session. M. de Gouvion, who had been major-general of the National Guard under Lafayette, gravely ascended the tribune. "Gentlemen," said he, "I had a brother, a good patriot, who, through the favorable opinion of your fellow-citizens, had been successively a commander of the National Guard and a member from the Department. Always ready to sacrifice himself for the Revolution and the law, it was in the name of the Revolution and the law that he was required to march to Nancy with the brave National Guards. There he fell, pierced by fifty bayonets in the hands of those who.... I ask if I am condemned to look on tranquilly while the assassins of my brother enter here?" A voice rising from the midst of the Assembly cried: "Very well, sir, go out!" The galleries applauded. Gouvion attempted to continue. The murmurs redoubled. Several persons in the galleries cried: "Down! down!"

The Assembly, revolutionary though it was, felt indignant at the scandal, and called the galleries to order. The president reiterated the injunction to keep silence. Gouvion began anew: "I treat with all the contempt he merits, and with ... I would say the word if I did not respect the Assembly—the coward who has been base enough to outrage a brother's grief." The question was then put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux should be admitted to the honors of the session. Out of 546 votes, 288 were in the affirmative, and 265 in the negative. Consequently, the president announced that the soldiers of Chateauvieux, who had asked to present themselves to the Assembly, should be admitted to the honors of the session. Gouvion went out by one door, indignant, and swearing that he would never re-enter an Assembly which received his brother's assassins as conquerors. By another door, Collot d'Herbois made his entry with his protêgês, the ex-galley slaves.

The party of the left and the spectators in the galleries burst into transports of joy, and gave three rounds of applause. The soldiers entered the hall to the beating of drums and cries of "Long live the nation!" They were followed by a large procession of men and women carrying pikes and banners. Collot d'Herbois, the showman of the Swiss, pronounced an emphatic address in praise of the pretended martyrs of liberty, which the Assembly ordered to be printed. One Goachon, speaking for the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and holding a pike ornamented with a red liberty cap, exclaimed: "The citizens of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the victors of the Bastille, the men of July 14, have charged me to warn you that they are going to make ten thousand more pikes after the model which you see."

The fête took place on Sunday, April 15. It was the triumph of anarchy, the glorification of indiscipline and revolt. On that day the galley slaves were treated like heroes. The emblems adopted were a colossal galley, ornamented with flowers, and the convicts' head gear, that hideous red bonnet in which Dumouriez had already played the buffoon, and which was presently to be set on the august head of Louis XVI. The soldier galley slaves, whose chains were kissed with transports by a swarm of harlots, came forward wearing civic crowns. What a difference between the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly! Under the one, a grand expiatory ceremony on the Champ-de-Mars had honored the soldiers slain at Nancy, and the National Guards had worn mourning for these martyrs of duty. Under the other, it was not the victims who were lauded, but their assassins. A goddess of Liberty in a Phrygian cap was borne in a state chariot. The procession halted at the Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Champ-de-Mars. The mayor and municipality of Paris were present in their official capacity. The Ça ira was sung in a frenzy of enthusiasm. Soldiers and public women embraced each other. It was David who had designed the costumes, planned the chariot, and organized the whole performance,—David, the revolutionary artist who was destined by a change of fortune to paint the portrait of a Pope and the coronation of an Emperor.

In 1791, André Chénier and David, then friends, and saluting together the dawn of the Revolution, had celebrated with lyre and pencil the "Serment du Jeu de Paumé"[1] Consecrating an ode to the painter's magnificent tableau, the poet exclaimed:—

Resume thy golden robe, bind on thy chaplet rich,
Divine and youthful Poesy!
To David's lips, King of the skilful brush,
Bear the ambrosial cup.

How he repented his enthusiasm now! What ill-will he bore the artist who placed his art, that sacred gift, at the service of anarchical passions! With what irony the same pen passed from dithyramb to satire!

Arts worthy of our eyes, pomp and magnificence
Worthy of our liberty,
Worthy of the vile tyrants who are devouring France,
Worthy of the atrocious dementia
Of that stupid David whom in other days I sang!

On the very day of the fête the young poet had the courage to publish in the Journal de Paris an avenging satire, which branded the shoulders of the ex-galley slaves as with a new hot iron. The sweet and pathetic elegiast, the Catullus, the Tibullus of France, added a bronze chord to his lyre:—

Hail, divine triumph! Enter within our walls!
Bring us these warriors so famed
For Desilles' blood, and for the obsequies
Of many Frenchmen massacred...
One day alone could win so much renown,
And this fair day will shine upon us soon!
When thou shalt lead Jourdan to our army,
And Lafayette to the scaffold!

Jourdan was the slaughterer, the headsman, the torturer of the Glacier of Avignon, who, coming under the provisions of the amnesty, had arrived to take part in the triumph of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The acclamations were lugubrious. The lanterns and torches shed a funereal glare. Nothing is more doleful than enthusiasm for ignominy. The applause accorded to disgrace and crime sounds like sinister derision. Outraged public conscience extinguishes the fires of apotheoses such as these. Madame Elisabeth, in a letter of April 18, speaks with a sort of pity of this odious but ridiculous fête: "The people have been to see Dame Liberty waggling about on her triumphal car, but they shrugged their shoulders. Three or four hundred sans-culottes followed, crying 'Long live the nation! Long live liberty! Long live the sans- culottes! to the devil with Lafayette!' All this was noisy but sad. The National Guards took no part in it; on the contrary, they were indignant, and Pétion, they say, is ashamed of his conduct. The next day a pike surmounted by a red bonnet was carried noiselessly through the garden, and did not remain there long." The Princess de Lamballe, who was living at the Tuileries in the Pavilion of Flora, could see the pike thus carried by a passer. It may, perhaps, have been that belonging to one of the Septembrists,—that on which her own head was to be placed.

The Moniteur, however, grew ecstatic over the fête. "There are plenty of others," it said, "who will describe the march of the triumphal cortège, the groups composing it, the car of Liberty, conducted by Fame, drawn by twenty superb horses, preceded by ravishing music which was sometimes listened to in religious silence and sometimes interrupted by wild, irregular dances whose very disorder was rendered more piquant by the fraternal union reigning in all hearts.... The people were there in all their might, and did not abuse it. There was not a weapon to repress excesses, and not an excess to be repressed." It concluded thus: "We say to the administration: Give such festivals as these often. Repeat this one every year on April 15; let the feast of Liberty be our spring festival; and let other civic solemnities signalize the return of the other seasons. In former days the people had none but those of their masters, and all that was accomplished by them was their depravity and abasement. Give them some that shall be their own, and that will elevate their souls, develop their sensibilities, and fortify their courage. They will create, or, better, they have already created, a new people. Popular festivals are the best education for the people."

Optimists, how will your illusions terminate? You who see nothing but an idyl in all this, can not you perceive that such ceremonies are the prelude to massacres, and that an odor of blood mingles with their perfumes? All who took part on either side of the heated controversy which preceded the ovation to the Swiss of Chateauvieux, will be pursued by fate. Gouvion, who had sworn never again to set foot within the precincts of the Assembly where the murderers of his brother triumphed, kept his word. On the very day of that shameful session he asked to be sent to the Army of the North, and three months later was to be carried off by a cannon-ball. Still more melancholy was to be the fate of Pétion, who showed such complaisance toward the Swiss on this occasion. He, once so popular that in 1791 he was asked to allow the ninth child, which a citizeness had just presented to her country, "to be baptized in his name, revered almost as much as that of the Divinity"; he of whom some one said at that time, "For the same reason which would have made Jesus a suitable mayor of Jerusalem, Pétion is a suitable mayor of Paris; there is too striking a resemblance between them to be overlooked," was sadly to exclaim some months later: "I am one of the most notable examples of popular inconsistency.... For a long time I have said to myself and to my friends: The people will hate me still more than they have loved me. I can no longer either enter or depart from the place where we hold our sessions without being exposed to the grossest insults and the most seditious threats. How often have I not heard them say as I was passing: 'Scoundrel! we will have your head!'"

Proscribed with the Girondins, May 31, 1793, he fled at first to Normandy, and afterwards into the Gironde, wandering from town to town, from field to field, and hiding for several months thirty feet under ground, in a sort of well; the poor people who showed him hospitality paid for it with their heads. Ah! how disenchanted he must have been with that revolutionary policy of which he had been the enthusiastic promoter! How sad was the farewell to life signed by him and Buzot: "Now that it has been demonstrated that liberty is hopelessly lost; that the principles of morality and justice are trodden under foot; that there is nothing to choose between two despotisms,—that of the brigands who are tearing the vitals of France and that of foreign powers; that the nation has lost all its energy; that it lies at the feet of the tyrants by whom it is oppressed; that we can render no further service to our country; that, far from being able to give happiness to the beings we hold most dear, we shall bring down hatred, vengeance, and misfortune upon them, so long as we live,—we have resolved to quit life and be no longer witnesses of the slavery which is about to desolate our unhappy country."

After ending with this cry of grief and indignation: "We devote the vile scoundrels who have destroyed liberty and plunged France into an abyss of evils to the scorn and indignation of all time," the two proscripts were found dead in a wheat-field about a league from Saint-Emilion. Their bodies were half devoured by wolves.

And how will André Chénier end? On the day of the Swiss fête, the city where such a scandal took place seemed to him insupportable. For several days he sought refuge in the country where he could breathe a purer air beneath the blossoming trees. But contemplation of nature did not soothe him. Running to meet danger, he returned and threw himself into the furnace, more ardent and indignant than before. With manly enthusiasm he exclaimed: "It is above all when the sacrifices which must be made to truth, liberty, and country are dangerous and difficult, that they are accompanied by inexpressible delights. It is in the midst of spying accusations, outrages, and proscriptions, it is in dungeons and on scaffolds, that virtue, probity, and constancy taste the pleasures of a proud and pure conscience." André had a presentiment of his fate.

He was to die on the same day and the same scaffold as his friend Roucher, a few hours earlier than the moment when Robespierre's condemnation would have saved them. It is thus that he was to pay with his life for his opposition to the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux, and Collot d'Herbois was avenged. But after the turn of the victims came that of the headsmen. The unlucky comedian who, pursuing even his comrades with his hatred, asked that "the head of the Comédie Française should be guillotined and the rest transported," the impresario of the fête of the Swiss galley slaves, the organizer of the Lyons massacres, Collot d'Herbois, cursed by friends and enemies, was transported to Guiana and died there in 1796, just as he had lived, in an access of burning fever.

[1] The oath taken by the deputies of the third estate in the tennis-court of Versailles, in 1789.