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The Carmagnoles, as the revolutionary volunteers were called, flocked, indeed, readily to the frontier from every department when the war was proclaimed, and the fierce leaders of the Jacobins shouted that the country was in danger.
As a sketch of the Convention, the scene of its sittings, the stormful dramas that were enacted there one after another for month after month, the singular men who one after another rode triumphant upon the whirlwind for a little space, and were then mercilessly in an instant swept into outer darkness, the commoner men who cowered before the fury of the storm, and were like "smoke driven hither and thither by the wind," and laboured hard upon a thousand schemes for human improvement, some admirable, others mere frenzy, while mobs filed in and danced mad carmagnoles before them all this is a magnificent masterpiece of accurate, full, and vivid description.
The Jacobins, like the Cordeliers, and the Feuillants, had appropriated the premises and taken the name of the dispossessed monks. Gamelin, once a regular attendant at the sittings of the Cordeliers, did not find at the Jacobins the familiar sabots, carmagnoles and rallying cries of the Dantonists. In Robespierre's club administrative reserve and bourgeois gravity were the order of the day.
When the fit was over, he was considered as what he really was, a man of quick apprehension and fluent elocution, with no originality, with little information, and with a taste as bad as his heart. His Reports were popularly called Carmagnoles.
Bonfires of feudality; Goddesses of Liberty in plaster; trees of liberty planted in every square; altars de la patrie; huge rag-dolls representing Anarchy and Discord; Cleobis and Biton dragging their revered parents through the streets; bonnets rouges, banderolles, ca iras, carmagnoles, fraternisations, accolades; the properties, as well as the text of the plays, borrowed from Ancient Greece or Rome.
Whether this composition, if it had then appeared, would have stopped the English and Prussian armies, is a question respecting which we are left to conjecture. The Chamber refused to adopt this last of the Carmagnoles. The Emperor had abdicated. The Bourbons returned.
Was it possible that the member of the Committee of Public Safety, the king-killer, the queen-killer, could in earnest mean to deliver his old confederates, his bosom friends, to the executioner, solely because they had planned an act which, if there were any truth in his own Carmagnoles, was in the highest degree virtuous and glorious?
His bulletins, his general orders, and his proclamations, are sometimes, it is true, masterpieces in their kind; but we too often detect, even in his best writing, traces of Fingal, and of the Carmagnoles. It is not strange, therefore, that he should have been desirous to secure the aid of Barère's pen.
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