Survival of the Revolution in France 465
opened at the Committee of Public Safety by Barère and Billaud- Varenne. They
seized on it as evidence to prove that Robespierre was conspiring with William
Pitt against the Republic.^26
The point at present, however, is that at the height of the Revolutionary Gov-
ernment, in the months between the trials of Germinal and the death of Robes-
pierre, during which the French armies resumed the offensive and again over-
flowed into adjoining countries, the mood was somewhat different from what it
had been during the abortive victories of Dumouriez a year and a half before. The
same cry was heard again: Guerre aux châteaux, paix aux chaumières! Its impact was
as revolutionary as ever. Governments and privileged classes might be under-
mined—not, however, as enemies of the human race, nor as enemies of their own
peoples, but because they were at war with the French Republic. The men ruling
France had no confidence, and little interest, in the potential revolutionaries of
foreign parts. Indeed their attitude was one of contempt.
The Committee of Public Safety had its representatives with all the armies, who
plied it with reports and questions. On the Italian front, the French occupied
Oneglia in the kingdom of Sardinia. Italian patriots flocked about the two Italian-
speaking French agents, Saliceti and Buonarroti. The Paris government cared
nothing about them.^27 At Geneva there was an entirely separate little disturbance
arising from indigenous causes; the Genevese, setting up a Revolutionary Tribunal
of their own, executed fourteen persons, in July 1794, who had been involved in
the Geneva counter- revolution of 1782. The French agent, observing it from
Grenoble, was extremely skeptical of this “hypocritical” revolution.^28 In Belgium, as
the French re- entered it, the French agent held aloof from the returning Belgian
refugees. They were concerned, he reported to Paris, only with their own interests
and their own vengeance.^29 The Dutch problem was more difficult, because the
Dutch revolutionary movement, since the early 1780’s, had been the strongest of
all those outside France itself. The French civilian representative attached to the
Army of the North was beset by Dutch patriots. The Dutch émigré general Dae-
ndels offered to make a secret trip to Amsterdam to produce revolution there at
once. The French agent asked for instructions. The Committee of Public Safety
gave Delphic answers. It would welcome a revolution in Holland, but not start
one. It might sponsor a Dutch revolution, or it might not. It must be remembered
that the Dutch revolutionaries were thinking only of their own country. And as
Carnot said, “We who are French must think of our own.”^30
26 Mathiez, “Robespierre et Benjamin Vaughan” in Annales révolutionnaires ( Jan. 1917), 1–11;
Vau gh a n , Letters on the Subject of the Concert of Princes and the Dismemberment of Poland and France
(London, 1793). Vaughan lived from 1796 to 1835 in the United States, where he received honorary
degrees from Harvard and Bowdoin, to both of which he left many books.
27 Aulard, Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public, avec la correspondance des représentants en mission
(Paris, 1899–1904), XII, XIII, XIV, XV, where the various reports of Saliceti and the younger Robes-
pierre make no mention of the Italian refugees or patriots, although corresponding reports from the
Armeé du Nord make frequent reference to the analogous Dutch patriots.
28 Ibid., XV, 433.
29 Ibid., XV, 295, 361, 386, 409.
30 Ibid., XIV, 712; XV, 292, 383. See also XV, 261–67, for a general memorandum of the Commit-
tee of Public Safety, dated July 18, 1794, on policies to be adopted in occupied territories. Also Lazare