NOT A PARTY MAN. 39 



Heberts. There is courage, Gentlemen, in coming for- 

 ward as the defenders of a man, who for nearly half a 

 century has been regarded as the symbol, the type, of 

 political cruelty. On this claim alone the new historians 

 hope to be listened to without prejudice : an honourable 

 character, joined to incontestable talent, gives them no 

 less a right to the serious attention of the public. For 

 my part, I have no business here to try to pierce those 

 thick clouds ; my subject does not require it ; I will ab- 

 solve Carnot from all participation in great crimes, 

 without examining whether they should be imputed to 

 Collot d'Herbois, or to Billaud-Varennes, rather than to 

 Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon. 



In no instance of his long political career, was Carnot 

 a party-man. Never was he found to try to bring for- 

 ward his opinions, his systems, his principles, by tortuous 

 ways that honour, that justice, that probity, could not 

 have acknowledged. 



In reporting on the 9th of June 1792, on the commis- 

 sion charged to propose some reparation in favour of the 

 families of Theobald Dillon and of Berthois, who were 

 massacred by their own troops before Lille, he does not 

 coquette with his rigorous duty. Any other man, in 

 such harassing times, might perhaps have thought it 

 requisite to consider the susceptibility of the army ; but 

 he seemed to think no words too severe to brand such 

 an odious act of wrong-headedness : he exclaimed, " I 

 will not remind yon of the circumstances of that atrocity. 

 Posterity, in reading our history, will deem it rather the 

 crime of a horde of cannibals, than that of a free people." 



In 1792, some National Guards, under the name of 

 confederates, assembled in great numbers at Soissons, 

 and already formed there the nucleus of an army of 



