TALLIEN, JEAN-LAMBERT. 



TALLIEN, JEAN-LAMBERT. 



900 



speaking from a graven imago. Even in comparatively early life, his 

 power of banishing all expression from his countenance, and the soft 

 and heavy appearance of his features, were remarked as contrasting 

 startlingly with the manly energy indicated by his deep powerful 

 voice. Mirabeau in the beginning, Napoleon at the close of the Revo- 

 lution, threw him into the shade ; but he outlasted both. The secret 

 of his power was patience and pertinacity ; and his life has the 

 appearance of being preternaturally lengthened out, when we recollect 

 the immense number of widely-removed characters and events of 

 which he was the contemporary. It may be said on the one hand that 

 ho accomplished nothing which time did not in a manner bring about; 

 but on the other it may be said, with equal plausibility, that scarcely 

 any of the leading events which have occurred in France in his day 

 would have taken the exact shape they assumed had not his hand 

 interfered to give them somewhat of a bias or direction. Next to 

 Napoleon I., he certainly is the most extraordinary man the revolu- 

 tionary period of France has given birth to. 



TALLIEN, JEAN-LAMBERT, the leader of the coalition of parties 

 by whom Robespierre was overthrown, was the son of the house- 

 steward to the Marquis de Bercy, and was born in Paris in 1769. 

 Being a quick, sprightly lad, he was noticed by the marquis, who 

 undertook the charge of his education. Although he never deserved 

 the title of ' savant,' which he afterwards acquired, he obtained a gene- 

 ral smattering of knowledge, which, joined to great fluency of speech, 

 was mistaken for learning by the multitude. Before his patron's death 

 in 1790, he had spent somo time as a copying clerk in an attorney's 

 office, then in that of a notary; after which the deputy Broustaret 

 made him his amanuensis. He also held for several months the situa- 

 tion of reader and corrector in the printing-office of the ' Moniteur.' 



In August 1791, by the advice it is said of his friend Marat, he began 

 to make himself known by placarding the walls of Paris with a sheet 

 journal called ' L'Ami du Citoyen.' The object of this newspaper was 

 to excite the people against Louis XVI. and his court : a section of 

 the Jacobin Club defrayed its cost. Towards the end of 1791, Tallien 

 drew attention in that club by an address on the causes and effects of 

 the Revolution, which, being printed and circulated, rendered him 

 still more popular. His reputation as* a patriot now stood so high, 

 that on the 8th of July 1792 he was chosen by one of the sections as 

 their orator, and appeared at their head before the bar of the Assembly. 

 He "was connected with many of the powerful republicans, and was a 

 favourite with Danton, who constantly employed him as one of his 

 agents. At Danton's instigation he took a decided part on the 10th 

 of August ; immediately after which revolt he received the appoint- 

 ment of Secretaire- Greffier to the Commune. The self -elected members 

 .of this corporation, who soon became the rulers of France, took up 

 their quarters at the H6tel-de-Ville, and there a large proportion of 

 the intrigues and conspiracies, plots and massacres which followed 

 during many months were concocted. 



On the 26th of August Tallien again appeared at the bar of the 

 Assembly, to expostulate on the numerous applications for passports 

 then making by members of the Chamber, to leave the city. He 

 informed them that the Commune had refused to grant them. On the 

 30th he presented himself a third time, to remonstrate with the mem- 

 bers for having repealed the decree relating to the refusal of passports, 

 lauded his own services in arresting the conspirators and priests, and 

 concluded a most intemperate harangue by saying : " They are all 

 immured, and the soil of liberty shall soon be purged of their presence." 

 This was spoken only four days before the massacres began. The 

 part he played during those sanguinary days has since been disputed 

 by his apologists ; but the signature of Tallien still appears among the 

 public records to most of the warrants for arrest preceding the mas- 

 Bacres, and to the orders for payment given to the executioners and 

 assassins. The circular letter, summoning the confederates to the 

 slaughter, and signed by Tallien and Manuel, still exists. It was 

 Tallien who received the clothes, the watches, the jewels, the money, 

 brought to his office by the assassins who had stripped the killed. It 

 was he who issued, with the official stamp of the minister Danton, on 

 paper belonging to the government (all the addresses being written by 

 clerks in the public service) the infamous circular of the 3rd of 

 September, composed by Marat, and recommending the slaughter of 

 the prisoners in the provincial towns. The memoirs of Senart, one of 

 the secretaries of the Committee of Public Safety, throw much light 

 upon these events, and upon Tallien's share in them. Tallien is gene- 

 rally stated to have refrained from pillage during the Revolution ; but 

 Senart accuses him of having secreted the spoils of the victims, and of 

 having " locked them up in a chest of which he kept the key himself." 



In consequence of his exertions during these events, and supported 

 by the influence of Danton, still Minister of Justice, Tallien was 

 returned as deputy to the National Convention for the department of 

 Reine-et-Oiso. He was one of the most virulent persecutors of 

 Louis XVI. during the trial, and voted for his death without appeal. 

 On the 27th of February 1793 he defended Marat most earnestly in 

 the Convention, as he subsequently did on other occasions. 



^ In April 1793, he was sent as commissioner into the Western pro- 

 vinces, then in revolt against the republic ; but in this mission he 

 evinced unusual indulgence, and Senart charges him with having 

 spared several royalists, a course considered very criminal at that 

 period. To him at all events the credit is due of having induced the 



Convention to revoke the decree, placing the city of Orlean in a state 

 of eiege. Later in this year (1793), he was sent by the Convention 

 on that mission to Bordeaux, which was hardly less flagrantly cruel 

 than his conduct in September. The object of this mission was to 

 extirpate the surviving fragment of the Girondists, who had fled from 

 their sentence of execution, and sought refuge in that country. In 

 all the newspapers of the time, Tallien is described, during this pro- 

 consulship, as the worthy rival of Lebon and Carrier for his butcheries. 

 He fixed himself at first not at Bordeaux, but at a small town, some 

 30 miles distant, where having collected about him a set of savages, 

 thirsting for plunder, he converted them into a committee, a court of 

 justice, with judges and jurymen, and soldiery to execute his decrees. 

 The proscriptions issued from this office are almost incredible. For 

 several months Tallien and his colleague Isabeau, decimated the ill- 

 starred Bordalese with their sentences of death, and when their 

 ruthless tyranny had broken the spirit of the inhabitants, they made 

 a triumphal entrance into the devoted city, in imitation of the ancient 

 Romans. The youthful proconsul, then in his 25th year, fixed his 

 abode in the great square of Bordeaux, where the guillotine had been 

 erected, and was seen every day at the windows of his house, watching 

 and applauding the executions. The government being distressed for 

 money, he took advantage of the terror of the citizens to exact 

 enormous sums from the merchants and shopkeepers, sending all who 

 murmured or complained to the scaffold. The bankers, the fund- 

 holders, the rich farmers, the wine-growers were oppressed with the 

 same excessive extortions. Famine came at length to heighten the 

 public misery, but instead of seeing in this new calamity the natural 

 result of his misgovernment, Tallieu denounced the wretched inhabi- 

 tants as monopolisers, and the enemies of the state, lint in the 

 midst of his proscriptions, a sudden change was seen, when least 

 expected. Among the prisoners, awaiting their fate, was a young 

 Spanish lady of great beauty, afterwards celebrated as Madame de 

 Fontenay, who, having obtained an audience with Tallien, not only 

 received a full pardon, but became his mistress, and soon acquired 

 sufficient influence over his mind to procure the release of many 

 prisoners. Surprised by this relaxation in his conduct, the agents of his 

 recent cruelties suspected his motives, and denounced him and his 

 mistress to the Convention for trafficking in the sale of releases and 

 exemptions. In consequence of these reports, Tallien was recalled 

 from Bordeaux in April 1794, and Madame de Fontenay was sent to 

 prison at the same time. He met with a frigid reception from his 

 colleagues. Danton, Camille Desmoulins and many of the leaders of 

 his party had been sacrificed a few weeks before; his power was 

 broken, he felt himself at the mercy of Robespierre, then in the 

 height of his power. Thus reduced and embarrassed he played the 

 sycophant to Robespierre, resuming at the same time his former airs 

 of ultra-republicanism. He thus managed to regain some of his 

 credit, and was appointed first secretary, then president of the Con- 

 vention. Robespierre however suspected |him, and causing his steps 

 to be closely tracked by spies, discovered his connections, and gradually 

 detected his policy, which was to unite the fragments of the several 

 factions, and revolt against the thraldom imposed by their common 

 enemy. 



On the 12th of June 1794, Robespierre dealt the first blow by 

 denouncing Tallieu in the Convention as one who had insulted the 

 truest patriots by stigmatising them as spies, and when the accused 

 attempted an explanation, he loaded him with threats and opprobrious 

 insults. He attacked him likewise in the hall of the Jacobins, and 

 had his name struck off the list of members. Robespierre seemed to 

 be fully master of the emergency, but Tallien, at the suggestion of 

 Fouche" or some other confederate, conceived the idea of alarming the 

 Convention, by pretending that the approaching proscription was not 

 aimed at a party, but at the Convention itself. It was this subtle 

 insinuation which disturbed the security of Robespierre, and prepared 

 the success of the 9th Thermidor. The friends of Hebert, the sur- 

 viving Dantonists, the ultra- republicans in the committees, felt that 

 they were marked out for destruction, and resolving to try their 

 united strength against the dictator, held secret meetings, in order to 

 organise their plan of resistance. Robespierre, preparing for the con- 

 flict, summoned his younger brother and Saint-Just, who were absent 

 with the armies, to join him in the capital. At length the 9th Ther- 

 midor (July 27, 1794) came, Tallien denounced Robespierre as a public 

 enemy, the coalition was successful, and as already has been related 

 in the article ROBESPIERRE, the dictator and his party were crushed. 



Immediately after the 9th Thermidor, Tallien was created a member 

 of the committee of Public Safety, and re-elected to the Jacobin club. 

 In the reaction which followed Tallien used the influence he had acquired 

 on the side of mercy, aud it is said to have been owing to him that 

 the prisons were thrown open in every part of France, that the Revo- 

 lutionary Tribunal was dissolved, and that the ferocious commissioners 

 Carrier, Lebon and others were brought to trial. But these state 

 trials gave some of the prisoners fair opportunities to remind him of 

 the massacres of September and his atrocities at Bordeaux. On one 

 occasion Catnbon, the republican financier, accused him in the 

 National Convention, of having signed money orders to the amount of 

 1,500,000 francs, in favour of the September assassins. These tauuts 

 and accusations, and the constant attacks made upon him by the 

 newspaper press, once more brought his name into discredit; and 



