More or less indifferent to politics, the members of the Plain were chiefly anxious that no one should pay particular attention to them.Shut up in their committees, they showed themselves as little as possible in the Assembly, which explains why the sessions of the Convention contained barely a third of the deputies.
Unhappily, as often happens, these intelligent and honest men were completely devoid of character, and the fear which always dominated them made them vote for the worst of the measures introduced by their dreaded masters.
The men of the Plain voted for everything they were ordered to vote for--the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Terror, &c.It was with their assistance that the Mountain crushed the Gironde, and Robespierre destroyed the Hebertists and Dantonists.Like all weak people, they followed the strong.The gentle philanthropists who composed the Plain, and constituted the majority of the Assembly, contributed, by their pusillanimity, to bring about the frightful excesses of the Convention.
The psychological note always prevailing in the Convention was a horrible fear.It was more especially through fear that men cut off one another's heads, in the doubtful hope of keeping their own on their shoulders.
Such a fear was, of course, very comprehensible.The unhappy deputies deliberated amid the hootings and vociferations of the tribunes.At every moment veritable savages, armed with pikes, invaded the Assembly, and the majority of the members no longer dared to attend the sessions.When by chance they did go it was only to vote in silence according to the orders of the Mountain, which was only a third as numerous.
The fear which dominated the latter, although less visible, was just as profound.Men destroyed their enemies, not only because they were shallow fanatics, but because they were convinced that their own existence was threatened.The judges of the revolutionary Tribunals trembled no less.They would have willingly acquitted Danton, and the widow of Camille Desmoulins, and many others.They dared not.
But it was above all when Robespierre became the sole master that the phantom of fear oppressed the Assembly.It has truly been said that a glance from the master made his colleagues shrink with fear.On their faces one read ``the pallor of fear and the abandon of despair.''
All feared Robespierre and Robespierre feared all.It was because he feared conspiracies against him that he cut off men's heads, and it was also through fear that others allowed him to do so.
The memoirs of members of the Convention show plainly what a horrible memory they retained of this gloomy period.Questioned twenty years later, says Taine, on the true aim and the intimate thoughts of the Committee of Public Safety, Barrere replied:--``We had only one feeling, that of self-preservation; only one desire, that of preserving our lives, which each of us believed to be threatened.You had your neighbour's head cut off so that your neighbour should not have you yourself guillotined.''
The history of the Convention constitutes one of the most striking examples that could be given of the influence of leaders and of fear upon an assembly.
