The Gods Are Athirst — Chapter 20

Chapter 20 of 29 · Review of The Gods Are Athirst

During a long sitting of the Tribunal, Évariste Gamelin closes his eyes at his bench in the heated air and thinks:

“By forcing Marat to hide in holes, the wicked had made him a bird of night, the bird of Minerva, whose eye pierced the darkness in which conspirators concealed themselves. Now it is a blue, cold, tranquil gaze that penetrates the enemies of the State and denounces traitors with a subtlety unknown even to the Friend of the People, asleep for ever in the garden of the Cordeliers. The new saviour, as zealous as the first and more discerning, sees what no one had seen, and his uplifted finger spreads terror. He distinguishes the delicate, imperceptible shades separating evil from good, vice from virtue—shades which, without him, would have been confounded, to the injury of the fatherland and of liberty; before him he traces the fine, inflexible line beyond which, to right and left alike, lie nothing but error, crime, and villainy. The Incorruptible teaches how men serve the foreign enemy through excess and through weakness: by persecuting forms of worship in the name of reason, and by resisting the laws of the Republic in the name of religion. No less than the villains who sacrificed Le Peltier and Marat, those who award them divine honours in order to compromise their memory are serving the foreign enemy. An agent of the foreign enemy is anyone who rejects the counsels of order, wisdom, and expediency; an agent of the foreign enemy is anyone who outrages morals, offends virtue, and, in the disorder of his heart, denies God. Fanatical priests deserve death; but there is a counter-revolutionary way of combating fanaticism; there are criminal abjurations. Be moderate, and the Republic is lost; be violent, and it is lost.”

“Oh, the formidable duties of the judge, dictated by the wisest of men! No longer is it only the aristocrats, the federalists, the villains of the Orléans faction, the declared enemies of the fatherland, whom one must strike down. The conspirator, the agent of the foreign enemy, is a Proteus: he assumes every shape. He takes on the appearance of a patriot, a revolutionary, an enemy of kings; he affects the boldness of a heart that beats for liberty alone; he raises his voice and makes the enemies of the Republic tremble: he is Danton. His violence ill conceals his odious moderation, and at last his corruption stands revealed. The conspirator, the agent of the foreign enemy, is that eloquent stammerer who set the revolutionaries’ first cockade in his hat; he is that pamphleteer who, in his ironic and cruel civic zeal, styled himself ‘the prosecutor of the lamp-post’; he is Camille Desmoulins. He betrayed himself by defending traitorous generals and demanding the criminal measures of an untimely clemency. He is Philippeaux, he is Hérault, he is the contemptible Lacroix. The conspirator, the agent of the foreign enemy, is that Père Duchesne who debases liberty by his sordid demagoguery, and whose filthy calumnies made Antoinette herself an object of sympathy. He is Chaumette, though in the administration of the Paris Commune he had seemed gentle, popular, moderate, good-natured, and virtuous—but he was an atheist! The conspirators, the agents of the foreign enemy, are all those sans-culottes in red caps, carmagnole jackets, and wooden shoes, who madly sought to outdo the Jacobins in patriotism. The conspirator, the agent of the foreign enemy, is Anacharsis Cloots, the orator of mankind, condemned to death by every monarchy in the world; but everything was to be feared from him: he was Prussian.”

“Now, violent and moderate alike, all these wicked men, all these traitors—Danton, Desmoulins, Hébert, Chaumette—have perished beneath the axe. The Republic is saved; from every committee and every popular assembly a chorus of praise rises towards Maximilien and the Mountain. Good citizens cry: ‘Worthy representatives of a free people, in vain have the children of the Titans raised their haughty heads: beneficent Mountain, protecting Sinai, from your seething bosom has burst the salutary thunderbolt…’”

“In this chorus, the Tribunal receives its share of praise. How sweet it is to be virtuous, and how dear public gratitude is to the heart of an upright judge!”

“And yet, for a patriotic heart, what cause for amazement, what grounds for anxiety! What! To betray the people’s cause, were Mirabeau, La Fayette, Bailly, Piéton, and Brissot not enough? Must there also be those who denounced these traitors? What! Did all the men who made the Revolution make it only to destroy it? Were the great authors of its great days plotting with Pitt and Cobourg to establish the Orléans monarchy or the regency of Louis XVII? What! Danton was Monk! What! Chaumette and the Hébertists, more treacherous than the federalists whom they drove beneath the knife, had conspired to ruin the realm! But among those who send the treacherous Danton and the treacherous Chaumette hurtling to their deaths, will Robespierre’s blue eye not discover others still more treacherous tomorrow? Where will the execrable chain of traitors betrayed come to an end—and where the discernment of the Incorruptible?…”