Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (104 page)

His absence enabled Saint-Just, Barère, and Hanriot, to expand their power as Robespierre’s immediate subordinates and active proxies, certainly, but also encouraged other advocates of Terror to extend and fortify their spheres. An able administrator and military commissaire, Saint-Just was also absent for much of December and January, at the front, supervising the military effort together with other Convention representatives in the field. Unbending dogmatist of virtue, he flexibly adjusted to every shift in Robespierre’s stance, always promptly and efficiently seconding and reinforcing his every move. In Alsace, Saint-Just had offered no objection to the de-Christianization process there. But once Robespierre began assailing de-Christianizers as “conspirators,” aiming to provoke a popular backlash against the Montagne, he immediately adopted this line too, denouncing de-Christianizers as counterrevolutionaries in disguise. Like Robespierre, Saint-Just urged the most inflexible harshness toward critics and dissenters as the surest way to Montagnard goals. He was acutely conscious that those criticizing the Terror were endeavoring to undermine the regime.

While the public saw only the steady expansion of the Terror, a swelling stream of arrests and executions through spring and summer 1794, the country’s leadership remained locked, unperceived by most, in murderous fratricidal strife. Sporadic relaxation of Robespierre’s personal grip only aggravated the pent-up accumulation of tension within ruling Montagnard circles, and further fragmented the precarious tyranny’s political base. Eventually, Robespierre was compelled to act decisively by the spiraling ferment in the Cordeliers, a series of rowdy gatherings presided over by Hébert, Momoro, Vincent, and Carrier, the “butcher” of Nantes. Since his recall by Robespierre in February, Carrier had become an undeclared opponent. At a packed meeting at the Cordeliers on 4 March 1794, the tablet of the Rights of Man was ceremonially veiled, and Vincent and Carrier loudly criticized prominent figures who pretended to sit with the Montagne while actually, in their view, undermining “liberty”—namely, Desmoulins, Fabre, Philippeaux, and also Chabot (arrested on 17 November with his friend Bazire and charged with corruption). These personages, allegedly, were the new standard-bearers of Brissot’s principles, of the modérantisme menacing France. At the Cordeliers, Vincent and Hébert called for the remaining “Brissotins” in detention to be swiftly liquidated, along with the other pernicious modérés (the Dantonistes).
⁷
Emboldened by massive applause,
the Hébertistes began to speak openly of the need for a fresh sansculotte insurrection.

Collot d’Herbois, deploring these raucous proceedings, responded on 6 March at the Jacobins, urging the sister club to purge itself of those who were irresponsibly stirring the sansculottes. There was no immediate threat of a new insurrection, replied Momoro and Carrier, but the threat to the patriotes and true revolutionary virtue, they insisted, was extreme. At issue were not the sansculottes or anyone stirring their anger, but modérantisme, irresponsible negligence, and counterrevolutionary scheming. On 7 March, Collot d’Herbois headed a Jacobin delegation to the Cordeliers, demanding union and harmony between the two mother political clubs. Hébert and Momoro agreed that solidarity was essential. They spoke reassuringly and unveiled the table of rights; many present loudly cheered. But some frustrated and disgruntled sansculottes at the club ventured to publicly rebuke Robespierre for being too soft on “Brissotins” and modérantisme. In closing, Vincent even dared to publicly criticize Robespierre, if only obliquely, decrying (Robespierre’s) usage of the term “ultra-révolutionnaire” as a sinister ploy for disabling the avant-guarde and allowing modérés to oppress loyal Patriots.
⁸
The deadlock continued unresolved until mid-March. As tension mounted, the Jacobins mostly rallied to Robespierre and the executive committees, while the Hébert-Vincent bloc turned to the sansculottes, redoubling their efforts to subvert Robespierre’s standing in the streets.
⁹

The gravity of the crisis could no longer be papered over. Even abroad, discerning observers noticed a massive new eruption brewing. Observing from Berne, the exiled royalist journalist Mallet du Pan confidently predicted a fresh “revolution” at Paris. Among the émigrés, morale rose as word spread that the Montagne was publicly split. Only with Robespierre’s visible personal return to the helm on 13 March could the dictatorship fully coordinate and concentrate its energies to face the double Hébertiste-Dantoniste challenge. Whether or not the strategy Robespierre and Saint-Just followed was consciously devised as the best way to outmaneuver both rival factions, it proved devastatingly effective. Saint-Just initiated the new coup a few days before Robespierre’s return, strongly denouncing modérantisme but for the moment ignoring what Robespierre had termed the
ultra-révolutionaire
threat. The Revolution’s most uncompromising adversary of Left democratic republicanism, aside from Robespierre himself, he was no street agitator but a populist administrator and ideologue, propagating simplistic Rousseauist notions of the sort favored by Marat. He ardently extolled
Marat and, unlike Robespierre (personally always jealous of others), remained a tireless enthusiast for the Marat cult.

As devoted to Spartan austerity as Robespierre or Chaumette, Saint-Just helped bring the obsession with revolutionary virtue to its peak, tying Jacobin intolerance to fresh laws aimed at alleviation of hardship and enforcing price controls. While announcing in the Convention that trials of modérés were to be sharply stepped up, at the same time he introduced a set of measures known as the Ventôse decrees (of 26 February and 3 March) that looked harshly punitive and consonant with the demands of the Hébertistes. These initiated the mass expropriation of property belonging to the now well over 100,000 émigrés, and required the country’s communes to draw up lists of deserving poor to whom payments from the confiscated assets should be distributed.
¹⁰
For some months the poorer Paris sections had been debating the feasibility of assigning annuities to the poor from a public domain consisting of the confiscated property of conspirators. Hence, the proposals looked like a shift of policy in the direction of the sansculottes and Hébertistes.

On the night of 10 March, the Comité de Sûreté Public, acting through Saint-Just (presumably, on Robespierre’s orders, though this is unclear), secretly instructed the Revolutionary Tribunal’s public prosecutor, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville (1746–95)—a minor official promoted to his key position in August 1792 by Danton and Desmoulins—to prepare general indictments against Hébert, Vincent, Ronsin, Carrier, Momoro, and the other Cordeliers leaders for “conspiracy” and incitement to insurrection. Romme, a prominent voice on the Comité d’Instruction Publique, and another leader of the drive against food hoarders, despite having joined the Hébertistes in combating Desmoulins in December, and no friend of Robespierre, was left aside. Immediately after Robespierre’s return, to the stupefaction of all Paris (including the victims, who had no inkling of what was to happen and had taken no prior precautions), on the evening of 14 March, Hébert and his Cordeliers colleagues were suddenly dramatically denounced by Saint-Just in the Convention as conspirateurs, arrested on the spot, and escorted to the Conciergerie.

At an emergency session of the Jacobins that same evening, Billaud-Varenne explained to his stunned audience that it had been discovered just in time that Hébert, Vincent, Ronsin, and Momoro were “agents of foreign powers” who were betraying France. They had forged an “atrocious conspiracy” aimed at massacring the worthy Jacobins and the Convention’s deputies and sowing anarchy in the country, and to
this end had plotted to arm the worst cutthroats from the prisons.
¹¹
Rising after Billaud to elaborate, Robespierre suddenly felt ill, “his physical strength,” states the Jacobins’ record, “not allowing him to continue.”
¹²
Collot concluded for him. Most Jacobins backed the regime and turned on the Cordeliers, though it remained doubtful whether this sufficed to silence Hébert’s real stronghold, the outraged sections, and keep the sansculottes’ heroes behind bars. That evening, the Cordeliers Club, convening leaderless and dazed, failed to react with any vigor.
¹³

The prospect of a mass sansculotte uprising lingered for days. Copies of a recent defiant speech by Ronsin appeared posted up across the city while, at the Cordeliers, orators spoke openly of the need for an insurrection to liquidate “the traitors,” “dominateurs,” and “Cromwellistes.” Opposition to Robespierre’s dictatorship in the sections was undoubtedly widespread and overt. The feuding within the section assemblies turned ferocious. More of Hébert’s allies were arrested, especially section commissaires and artisans from his own section, Bonne-Nouvelle, where the police reported more than three thousand loyal Hébertiste adherents. Rumors that Hébert had been corruptly profiteering in pork were deliberately spread to dampen sansculotte sympathy for the arrested men. By 20 March, sections Lombards, Contrat Social, Champs-Élysées, Guillaume Tell, Fraternité, and Chalier had all rallied to Robespierre. Finally, the demonstrations subsided, the summons to topple the “dominateurs,” who were blind to the people’s needs, petered out, though some sections—République and, as usual, Marat (Momoro’s section)—remained sullen and restless.
¹⁴

Incarcerated together in the Conciergerie, Hébert and eighteen codefendants were charged with being “ultra-révolutionnaires,” which, according to Saint-Just and Robespierre, was the same as being covert royalistes. Their plan was to dissolve the Convention and murder the “true Patriots.” Briefly, their arrests seemed to relieve the pressure on Danton, Phillipeaux, and Desmoulins. The latter could now proclaim they had been right all along. Had they not been the first to warn the Jacobins of the peril of insidious “extremism” masquerading as patriotism?
¹⁵
But there was also worrying news for the Danton circle. On 18 March, Amar finally produced his “evidence” against Chabot, Bazire, and also Fabre, the last one of Danton’s closest associates. Mired in financial corruption, with ties to the Alsatian Jewish Frey brothers, arrested earlier as suspected Austrian spies, Chabot had now languished behind bars, denying all charges against him, for four months. A leading Jacobin and advocate of the Terror, Chabot lacked close ties to any
main clique apart from Bazire. Even if in Vienna they had had their assets confiscated as “Jacobins” and were being “burnt in effigy,” his Frey brothers-in-law had profiteered and had, he admitted, given their sister, Leopoldine, to him in marriage (sweetened with a handsome dowry) only to gain a “reputation for patriotism.”
¹⁶

A new massive state show trial was prepared in which Saint-Just, Barère, and Amar were especially instrumental. Their elaborate spectacle ingeniously combined charges of insurrection with fiercely xenophobic denunciations of foreigners, corrupt paymasters, and spies, all linked by revelations of corruption at the war ministry. In this way, a group of key sansculotte leaders, the Hébertistes, long voicing sansculotte discontent and demanding justice for the poor, were tried for “treason” shoulder to shoulder with the wealthy Baron Cloots, against whom a whole batch of absurd charges were leveled; the Dutch Patriot financier Johannes Conradus de Kock (1756–94), a thirty-eight-year-old from Heusden, close to Dumouriez; Pereyra, the Jewish tobacco manufacturer and supplier of war materials; Pierre-Ulric Dubuisson, a Belgian radical democrat; and another Belgian, Pierre-Joseph Proly (1752–94). The tangle of conspiracy charges sounded plausible enough to some, as they had already been previously suggested by Fabre and had appeared in Desmoulins’s
Le Vieux Cordelier
.

As an accomplished journal editor and exponent of representative democracy, connected with the war ministry and technically a “subordinate” of Vincent,
¹⁷
from the standpoint of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Barère, and Amar, Proly was the choicest of targets. A native of the Austrian Netherlands based in Paris, descended from an Antwerp financial dynasty of Italian origin who had aligned with the democratic Vonckists during the Brabant Revolution, and a sophisticated economic theorist, outside France he, like Cloots, ranked socially as a “baron.” He had founded his Paris journal,
Le Cosmopolite
, in December 1791, using its pages to criticize the rival ideals of cosmopolitanism and universalism propagated by Cloots, reject the belligerent policies of the Brissotins, urge peace not war with Austria, and condemn the annexation of Belgium as a disastrous, reprehensible blunder. He had drawn some Frenchmen and many Belgian and Dutch revolutionists in France into his vehemently anti-Catholic, democratic circle, detested by Robespierre for its undisguised philosophisme, cosmopolitanism, and atheism. Proly’s death sentence was a foregone conclusion, for he had criticized Robespierre. Specifically denounced by Robespierre, Proly’s condemnation cemented the regime’s “case” against the Hébertistes and the discrediting of the déchristianisateurs.
¹⁸

De Kock, leader of the Dutch revolutionary committee in Paris, renowned for revolutionary gestures and financial contributions, including one for the Vendée campaign, was also a choice target. A long-standing intimate of Dumouriez, he was close to Hébert and the latter’s wife, and in addition, according to
Le Vieux Cordelier
, was an agent of the British premier, Pitt. Hébert had stayed repeatedly at De Kock’s residence at Passy where he and his wife drank “le vin de Pitt,” allegedly toasting the ruin of the “fondateurs de la liberté.”
¹⁹
Proly, Pereyra, and several others incarcerated with Hébert, ominously for Hérault de Séchelles, happened also to be intimate friends of his.
²⁰
Cloots was accused with the others of scheming to slaughter the Jacobins, beginning with Robespierre, as part of his plan to establish “une république universelle.” But really only Hébert, Vincent, and Ronsin, among those on trial, interested opinion in the streets.