Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (102 page)

Morris, who detested Paine, Barlow, and their democratic republicanism.
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Barlow visited Paine in prison frequently over the next months but, from March 1794, was denied further access.

Fissures within the Montagne

At Paris, executions ensued daily over the winter of 1793–94, the victims an increasingly bizarre mix of supposedly scheming “aristocrats,” counterrevolutionary priests, Brissotins, Feuillants, and associates of Mirabeau. The trial of Barnave, imprisoned in Grenoble since three days after the 10 August 1792 rising, but brought to Paris only in early November 1793, and Marguerite-Louis Duport-Dutertre (1754–93), Roland’s Feuillant predecessor as justice minister, concluded at midnight on 28 November. Complicit in the Champs de Mars and 10 August massacres, both went to the guillotine the next day—Barnave still only thirty-two—dispatched together with a condemned curé and the latter’s devout sister.
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On 4 December followed Convention deputy Armand Guy, Comte de Kersaint (1741–93), who had courageously opposed both the king’s execution and Montagnard tyranny. The next day it was the turn of Rabaut Saint-Étienne of the Commission of Twelve, recently found hiding in a friend’s house. Hearing he had been guillotined, his wife shot herself. On 8 December, the Genevan republican Clavière, seized in September, committed suicide, the day before he was to appear before the Tribunal Révolutionnaire, by plunging a dagger into his heart. Learning he was dead, his wife too shot herself.

On 26 December, a naval officer, Charles-August Prévost Lacroix, born at Louisbourg, in Nova Scotia, met his end for treading the tricolor cockade underfoot, together with a baker, Nicolas Gomot, executed for uttering counterrevolutionary remarks while selling bread of different qualities in defiance of the bread equality decree. Yet, overall, strikingly few bakers, grocers, shopkeepers, food retailers, or other businessmen accused of hoarding figured among those guillotined. Montagnard, and especially sansculotte rhetoric, loudly condemned hoarding of and profiteering in bread and other basic food supplies, and these were much resented by the populace,
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but the Terror never seriously concerned itself with retailers or merchants, or bankers or any variety of businessmen. In every French city, action against food hoarders and merchants remained strictly secondary. The principal target was not the rich, corrupt, financially active, or highborn, but always rather those
opposing or criticizing the dictatorship. On 29 December the former Strasbourg mayor, Pierre-Frédéric Dietrich (1748–93), a Feuillant considered by Robespierre an “homme dangereux,” the ex-noble in whose Strasbourg apartments in April 1792, with Mme. Dietrich accompanying at the harpsichord, the “Marseillaise” was first performed, was executed. With him was guillotined one of the the Revolution’s most outstanding republican democrats, Pierre Lebrun-Tondu (1754–93), former foreign minister, Belgian radical deputy, and editor of the
Journal général de l’Europe
. Arrested on 2 June 1793, he had escaped and gone into hiding. Recaptured and tried, he was condemned for “conspiring against liberty.” Lebrun reportedly strode to the guillotine with “assez de sang froid.”
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A new phase commenced in December with the onset of a bitter feud within the Jacobins and the Convention, with Robespierre mediating, between the populist faction around Hébert and the Cordeliers grouping behind Danton. According to Garat later, Danton tried to restrain the Terror and check Robespierre, Collot d’Herbois, and Billaud-Varenne, and outmaneuver the Hébertistes by building a majority against them in the Convention and Comité de Salut Public. He was backed by Desmoulins, who held no important post in the government but remained a famed revolutionary orator, journalist, and figurehead, and, prompted by Danton, at this point established
Le Vieux Cordelier
, a new revolutionary journal focusing attention on the contradiction between revolutionary core values—freedom of the press especially—and those of the regime. The title of Desmoulins’s paper implied that the Revolution’s authentic veterans were reawakening and mobilizing against usurpers and impostors, which was indeed the effect he tried to achieve. “La liberté politique,” he emphasized in the first issue, has no finer weapon than the press. He asked whether France should be allowed to fall behind England in this respect: “Should reason fear a duel with stupidity”? Philosophique reason and populist crassness, he reminded readers, were irreconcilable enemies, and press freedom the crux of the struggle.
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By mid-December, the rift within the revolutionary leadership could no longer be papered over. Only traitors and counterrevolutionaries, suggested Desmoulins, sought to constrain liberty of expression. A fierce public quarrel erupted at the Jacobins over the
Vieux Cordelier
’s third issue, where Desmoulins almost openly denounced the Terror, criticizing the Committee of Public Safety, and in particular Marat’s protégé François-Nicolas Vincent (1767–94), secretary-general of the
War Office, a Cordeliers firebrand at daggers drawn with another of Danton’s adherents, Pierre-Nicolas Philippeaux (1756–94), a judge from Le Mans and Convention deputy highly critical of the conduct of the Vendéean campaign. Desmoulins assailed Hébert’s allies Vincent, Ronsin, and Stanislas-Marie Maillard (1763–94), a leader of the movements of 5 October 1789 and 10 August 1792, a notorious bully, drunkard, and perpetrator of the September massacres.
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In a stormy Convention session on 17 December, Philippeaux and Fabre d’Églantine (defending himself, being mired in financial scandal, more than helping Desmoulins), joined in denouncing Vincent, Ronsin, and Maillard for “terrorist” excesses and excessive harshness in the Vendée. Hébert retaliated, accusing Fabre d’Églantine of publishing counterrevolutionary writings and being “a flatterer of the great.” The Dantonistes gained ground briefly, persuading the Assembly to detain Vincent and Ronsin in the Luxembourg.
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Appealing to the rump Convention, publicly declaring Desmoulins, Fabre, and Philippeaux ripe for liquidation, Hébert paid lavish tribute to Danton as well as Robespierre as the “two pillars of the Revolution.”
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Was it conceivable the Terror could be directed against true patriotes? “No—it is against aristocrats and perfidious agents alone that it is justly aimed.” The Hébertistes specifically denounced the Dantonistes criticizing the Terror as concealed allies of “the defeated faction” (the Brissotins), men sowing division in the Republic and maligning the best patriotes.
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The Brissotin leadership had deservedly suffered for “their crimes,” but “their agents and accomplices breathed still.” Death to the “modérés, comme celle des royalistes et des aristocrates,” intoned Hébert’s
Père Duchesne
, denouncing Desmoulins as a vile
intrigueur
who should be dragged to the guillotine without delay. Hébert, retorted Desmoulins in the
Vieux Cordelier
, was a total scoundrel, employing “ignorance” and “stupidity” as his tools.
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Returning from Lyon, Collot d’Herbois joined Hébert in accusing Desmoulins of “Brissotin” tendencies. Ronsin’s arrest, he complained, had ruinously discouraged the few “true Jacobins” fighting modérantisme in Lyon. The “new Brissotins” were trying to besmirch “the brave Ronsin,” known in Lyon only for unbending severity. By so doing, the Dantonists were giving comfort to all the Brissotins, modérés, and aristocrates dominating Lyonnais sentiment.
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Robespierre hesitated for many weeks to turn on those Hébert labeled “conspirators,” preferring to play the mediator, shielding them from expulsion from the Jacobins while continually issuing ominous
warnings. The clash ended for the moment in deadlock. Robespierre called for unity. Vincent and Ronsin were released. But on Christmas Day, in a speech in which he plied the Convention with some of his choicest maxims, Robespierre also set the scene for the soon-resumed internecine struggle that was to tear the Montagnard leadership to shreds. “The [correct] theory of revolutionary government” was as new as the Revolution itself, and it was useless searching for it, like Desmoulins, in books of political writers “who had not predicted this Revolution.”
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If the Revolution must choose between “an excess of patriotic fervour” and the “nothingness” of incivisme, there could be no hesitation: le modérantisme was the great enemy, le modérantisme “is to the Revolution what impotence is to chastity.” If vice served their enemies, he and his supporters had virtue on their side. The Revolution must liquidate all “enemies of the people.” Who they were was for him to specify.
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Robespierre at this point enunciated a doctrine as bizarre as any formulated during the Revolution: the Revolution was simultaneously menaced by
two
concealed enemies donning cunning masks: modérantisme and “fanaticism.” Superficially, these might appear quite different but actually were one and the same thing. When he and the comité attacked “fanatics,” critics complained they embraced modérantisme; when they assailed modérantisme, they were accused of “l’exagération” (extremism). Nothing more closely resembled an apostle of modérantisme than a republican extremist. Strangely enough, Robespierristes, Hébertistes, and Dantonistes all seemed convinced by early 1794 that insidious extremism was closely connected to modérantisme. Hérault de Sechelles, having supervised the Terror in Alsace from Strasbourg during the autumn, after reporting on his mission on 29 December before the Convention, came under Hébertiste criticism in connection with his ties with the Convention’s former commissaires in Belgium—Proly, Pereyra, and Dubuisson. These three eminently illustrated the new logic. Close to Danton, they were accused by Hébert’s faction of complicity in Dumouriez’s monarchist conspiracy while, rather paradoxically, simultaneously being ultra-révolutionnaires trying to split the Montagne by promoting democratic ideas too energetically.
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The Republic, agreed Desmoulins,
was
now caught in a perilous crosswind between modérantisme on one side, and, on the other, the heinous “error” of extremism; everything depended on applying these labels with undeviating precision.
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Furthermore, for Robespierre, the fact that modérantisme was linked to extremism proved it was tied also to la philosophie. The perfidious
“moderate,” Robespierre continuously assured both Convention and Jacobins, had everything in common with the materialist philosophe. Moderates and extremists understood each other only too well. What a diabolical strategy! All the
fanatiques
urging strict adherence to the Constitution, accusing the leadership of being “arbitrary or tyrannical,” were “sophistes stupides ou pervers,” obstructing the people’s will.
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The Convention must use only the most discriminating judgment. In early January 1794, with Hébert and Collot piling on their accusations—and the fifth issue of the
Vieux Cordelier
on 5 January mounting a further blistering attack on Hébert—Robespierre became increasingly suspicious of Danton’s motives, while the fiery Desmoulins, though aware he was losing Robespierre’s support, got into increasingly hot water. Fabre, denying contributing to Desmoulins’s recent writings, as his foes claimed, was publicly disgraced for financial corruption. At the Jacobins on 6 January, Collot d’Herbois also demanded Philippeaux’s expulsion. Finally, on 7 January, Robespierre himself denounced
Le Vieux Cordelier
at the Jacobins as a paper “for aristrocrates.”

Previously, the “Incorruptible” had defended his old friend Desmoulins but now changed his language. Camille had undertaken to abjure his “hérésies politiques,” the “errors” pervading his journal, but had lamentably failed to do so. A spoiled child, admiring Philippeaux like Demosthenes and Cicero, his writings were ill-advised and “dangerous.” In fact, the issues of the
Vieux Cordelier
, being undoubted “heresy,” should be burned on the floor of the Jacobins. “Well said, Robespierre,” answered Desmoulins, “but I reply like Rousseau: to burn is not to answer.”
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Desmoulins was perilously close to breaking with the only personage who could save him. On 8 January,
Le Vieux Cordelier
’s third and fourth issues were read out to the indignant Jacobins, after which Robespierre pronounced it “useless” to read out the (electrifyingly critical) fifth issue. In Desmoulins’s writings, he concluded, one finds pure revolutionary principles mixed with pernicious modérantisme. Desmoulins upheld patriotisme on the one hand and “aristocracy” on the other. What was Desmoulins’s true standpoint? Plainly, under the “torn banners” of Brissotisme, a new and insidious faction had arisen that was reviving Brissot’s principles. At bottom, the people’s new enemies were the same as before; the actors had changed and assumed a new mask, but the performance was still that of the Gironde.
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Absurdly illogical and paranoid on one level, there was nevertheless some logic to the new categorization and terminology: both Hébertistes and Dantonistes resented the excessive centralization of power in the two executive committees, and complaints about this echoed in the Jacobins, Cordeliers,
and Convention alike. Philippeaux, Fabre, and Desmoulins, voted the Cordeliers on 11 January, had “lost the society’s confidence,” a declaration read out at the Jacobins by Momoro the next day; Desmoulins, however, was a special case who could regain that confidence by disavowing all his “héresies révolutionnaires.”
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