Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (100 page)

The Terror’s worst atrocities occurred at Lyon, Toulon, and Nantes. On 12 October the Committee of Public Safety voted to make an unforgettable example of the “rebellious city” that had defied the Montagne, executed Chalier, and resisted the people for five months. Renamed Ville-Affranchie by the Convention, old Lyon would be “effaced and demolished.” Over its ruins would tower a national monument, dated the 18th of the first month of Year II of the Republic, inscribed: “Lyon fit la guerre à la Liberté, Lyon n’est plus” (Lyon made war on Liberty, Lyon is no more). Demolition would be unsparing. Residences of the rich were to be torn down, with only those of the poor, whom the Montagne hoped to win over, left standing. Once the city fell in early October, more than four hundred “chefs conspirateurs” were executed within a month. But this was too few, complained the fresh commissaires, Collot d’Herbois and the ex-Oratorian Fouché, who arrived in November. A seven-member
commission révolutionnaire
was formed to dispatch the “guilty” faster. From November, men were slaughtered in batches, mowed down by cannon filled with grapeshot, those still breathing finished off with muskets and sabers. To avoid delays caused by grieving daughters, sisters, and wives, the commission kept the womenfolk well back from the butchery.

Henceforth, only Montagne supporters would be tolerated in positions of responsibility, and the Montagne would permit no dissent.
⁸³
But in Lyon this presented an insuperable difficulty, since practically nobody there supported the Montagne, a fact attested by the Jacobin commissaires themselves. Couthon and the first commission stated in their initial postvictory report to Paris dated 13 October that Montagnard supporters were “such a frighteningly small minority” in Lyon “that we despair of being able to revive it.” The only practicable way to mobilize support among Lyon’s large artisan class was to transplant “a colony of
patriotes
,” sturdy sansculottes (including at least “forty experienced administrators”) from elsewhere to direct and manage them.
⁸⁴
Collot d’Herbois (hissed off the stage in Lyon, only six years before) supervised most of the city’s demolition. But to Couthon belonged the honor of commencing destruction of the patrician residences around the Place Bellecour, “the sumptuous edifices belonging to the Lyonnais rebels,” and urging the watching crowds of Lyon’s poor (not very successfully) to assist. A partly paralyzed lawyer, close to Robespierre (since breaking with Roland in November 1792), Couthon was so anti-intellectual, remarked Mercier, that when one spoke to him about Rousseau’s ideas, he would just shrug his shoulders, saying he understood nothing about
it.
⁸⁵
Collot improved on Couthon by using troops, gunpowder explosions, and flames instead.

Figure 15. The siege and bombardment of Lyon (9 August to 9 October 1793). Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Only by blowing up and burning buildings, explained Collot on 23 November, could Lyon’s thoroughly merited chastisement be accomplished.
⁸⁶
While in Paris Jacobins debated whether the “glorious Chalier” should be entombed in the Panthéon, at Lyon, executions, numerous in October, accelerated, culminating in December.
⁸⁷
A petition from Ville-Affranchie, presented by a delegation of Lyon women, came before the Comité de Sûreté Générale in mid-December. Lyon
had
erred by opposing the 2 June coup, the women abjectly confessed, and deserved “the French people’s indignation,” but since the “traitors who misled us” were overthrown, Lyonnais repentence was “true, profound and unanimous.” Had the people understood the character of the Brissotins, “never, never would they have been instruments of their scheming.” In October the Montagne had assured the people that if they submitted, all would be “as peaceful and majestic as the law.” “Why has this beautiful spectacle not been realized?” Vengeance was due, but vengeance cannot continue unceasingly without destroying its own salutary effect. “Whoever is an
ultra-révolutionnaire
,” proclaimed the Montagne, “is as dangerous as a
contre-révolutionnaire
.” “
Législateurs
, you command us to abide by the sacred principles of ‘virtue,’ prevent republican vengeance from becoming a low and ferocious atrocity.”
⁸⁸
The petition was ignored.

Collot d’Herbois’s repression was relentless. By April 1794, 1,880 people had been executed in Lyon, and virtually all the city’s churches and better residences, around 1,600 stone houses, lay in ruins.
⁸⁹
His brutality was vigorously seconded by Charles-Philippe Ronsin (1751–94), artisan son of a barrel-maker, an unscrupulous, corrupt, and wealthy protégé of Pache who was merciless toward all fédérés and modérés, and deaf to all protests. Whispering critics dared accuse Collot and Ronsin of excessive harshness, of being men of blood, “anthropophages! Who are those who insolently slander us, crying over the corpses of liberty’s enemies?” It might appear on the surface, Collot warned the Convention on 24 December 1793, that unremitting Terror had crushed all resistance. Yet, in Lyon, as throughout the entire Midi, unrepentant counterrevolution seethed in the populace’s hearts and minds. Grieving womenfolk were a particular nuisance, the troops occupying the city being continually deflected from their duty by misplaced sympathy. Lyon’s despicable women “are all contre-révolutionnaires,” all admirers of Charlotte Corday. Amid the ruins of the city, these whores practiced
adultery unceasingly, luring Montagnard soldiers using all the attractions of their sex, married and unmarried women alike continually seducing the men.
⁹⁰

After securing Lyon, the army commanded by Barras undertook the three-and-a-half-month siege of Toulon. On 27 August, Toulon’s republicans had surrendered to the British, despite the announcement of Admiral Hood, the British commander, that he would protect only those “clearly and frankly pronouncing in favour of monarchy and raising the French royal standard.”
⁹¹
After Captain Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the officers to whom Barras entrusted the siege, expelled the British and Spanish contingents from the heights surrounding the town, in mid-December, however, Hood’s fleet was forced to evacuate under heavy fire. During the three-day evacuation, thousands of refugees departed with the British, but numerous others implicated in the four-month British-backed regime remained behind. Local Jacobins, released from prison, soon “identified” these “rebels” to Barras and his revolutionary commission, which included also Fréron, Salicetti, and Robespierre’s younger brother, Augustin. Within days, virtually without trial, 800 suspects were executed, mostly shot. Between December and March 1794, another 282 traitors went to the guillotine. Toulon, renamed now Port-la-Montagne, abounded in poor workingmen, yet, much as in Lyon, Barras and his team could find only an embarrasingly “small number of Patriots ready to support the Montagne.”
⁹²

Abominable excesses occurred likewise at Nantes and Rennes, as well as nearby places recaptured from the Vendéean royalists. After defeat at rebel hands in two battles in September, regular troops supplemented by sansculotte volunteers from Paris, crushed the royalists in the
bocage
around Cholet on 17 October. Recovering Saumur and Angers, the Montagne drove the “whites” deep into the Vendéean heartland. Large numbers of rural women were raped by republican soldiery, noted Lequinio, and often then bayoneted with their children afterward. By late October 1793, Nantes overflowed with prisoners. The rebel remnant crossed the Loire and, joining local Chouans, marched on Granville, on the Cotentin Peninsula opposite Jersey, hoping to link up with the British, but were forced back southward. The final battle in the west resounded on 12 December at night, in pouring rain in the picturesque ancient town of Le Mans. Hundreds of the Catholic royal army were slaughtered in the streets. Those who escaped, including many women and priests, were cut down during their retreat toward Brittany. After a last stand at Sauvenay, the Catholic-royalist army was wiped out.
⁹³

In Nantes, the probably mentally unstable representative on mission, Jean-Baptiste Carrier (1756–94), outdid Lebon in brutality and sadism, unleashing a ferocious repression. Entrusted with sweeping authority, having earlier ruthlessly purged the Cherbourg coast of Brissotins, this fanatical Montagnard found Nantes’ prisons crammed to overflowing. Eager to enforce the bread price maximum, and advance de-Christianization, he also faced severe food shortages and, as elsewhere, a divided, hesitant workforce. After guillotining dozens, he pronounced the guillotine too slow. To reduce the “rebels” on his hands, on 19 November 1793, he introduced his soon notorious
noyades
, commencing with ninety priests executed by drowning in the Loire estuary, bound together in a holed barge intended to sink quickly. Six other batches of victims, many refractory priests accused of inciting peasant fanaticism, were similarly dispatched over the next weeks. Around 1,800 rebels perished in these
noyades
and thousands more in massed shootings. Estimates put the total of Carrier’s victims at around 10,000. From the townspeople came little protest as the captured “whites,” they assumed, would have perpetrated frightful massacres had they seized Nantes or Rennes. Carrier, who liked indulging in nighttime orgies with female prisoners, was recalled in disgrace to Paris in February 1794, after Jullien denounced his excesses directly to Robespierre. He subsequently aligned with the Hébertistes.
⁹⁴

Compared to Lyon, Toulon, and Nantes, or Arras and Marseille, at Toulouse, Montpellier, and Bordeaux, as at Strasbourg and Nancy, the Terror proved comparatively mild. At Toulouse, once people’s representatives Marc-Antoine Rodeau and Chambon-Roux established their control, more than fifteen hundred suspects were imprisoned and several dozen sent to Paris where they were executed. But, as at Montpellier, few executions took place at Toulouse itself. Also at Bordeaux and most of the southwest, apart from the Basque Country, where there was a severe repression along the border with Spain, relative leniency prevailed initially. Most citizens’ attitudes were “excellent, pure and révolutionnaire,” reported envoy on mission Alexandre-Clément Ysabeau (1754–1831) on 12 March 1794. Ysabeau directed the repression there together with Tallien until shortly before Thermidor. The
beaux-esprits
,
orateurs
, and writers who had misled the local populace had all disappeared.
⁹⁵
Hymn-singing at the Temple of Reason the day before had been well attended. No former noble would be released even if he could prove his patriotisme. A constitutional priest, convicted of royalism, had been guillotined two days before, and that very day a nun would be
executed. In all, 104 victims were guillotined at Bordeaux between October 1793 and June 1794, a figure sufficiently modest to prompt high-level complaints. A final flurry of repression concluded the Bordeaux Terror in June and July 1794 after Robespierre’s acolyte, Marc-Antoine Jullien, was sent to repair the “negligence” of Tallien and Ysabeau; while there, he condemned 198 more victims to the guillotine.

Crushing Intellectual Dissent

On 3 October, on a motion of Billaud-Varenne, the Convention directed the Tribunal Révolutionnaire to try the “widow Capet.”
⁹⁶
Interrogated interminably, Marie Antoinette was accused of ordering the Swiss Guards to open fire on 10 August and much else. After a concluding all-night session on 16 October, the Tribunal pronounced her death sentence at five in the morning; she showed little emotion. Humbly attired all in white and followed by an immense crowd, at 11:00 am on the twenty-fifth day of the first month of Year II, the “new Agrippina” began her last journey (during which David made a sketch of her), her
charette
proceeding from the Conciergerie through a vast throng, her calm demeanor reportedly displaying neither regal pride nor
abattement
. After the blade fell, her head was presented to the crowds, which responded for “many minutes,” yelling, “Vive la nation! Vive la République!”
⁹⁷

Those witnessing the scene, however, were by no means all jubilant. So obvious was the disapproval of some that Hébert harangued the Jacobins the next day, demanding the arrest of journalists who reported her trial unenthusiastically or, as he expressed it, in “a false and perverse manner.”
⁹⁸
Despite the intensity of the repression, the press was still not entirely cowed. Addressing the Jacobins on 1 November, Chabot publicly discoursed on the sharp contrast between the Revolution’s basic values prior to June 1793 and the entirely different ideology championed by the Montagne. Between 1788 and 1793, the Revolution had embraced comprehensive individual liberty and freedom of the press; such liberty was essential to the Revolution then, because press freedom “was necessary against tyranny and at that time the people applauded such liberty.”