Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (105 page)

This show trial lasted four days (21–24 March 1794) during which the court interrogated more than two hundred witnesses. Excited discussion of the event pervaded nearby cafés and corners throughout that time, with dissidents openly voicing their hopes that another “trial of Marat” would occur, ending in triumphant acquittal and popular acclaim. But though disgruntled, and unwilling to credit the treason charges against Hébert (who did believe them?), the sansculottes were too cowed to demonstrate even remotely as much as the fervor displayed in support of Marat.
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Ten days after their arrest, the Hébertiste leaders, sentenced to death and confiscation of their property, were brought together by charette to the Place de la Révolution and guillotined. Three months and five days before Thermidor, Hébert, Vincent, Ronsin, De Kock, Proly, and Cloots, Hébert last, came under the blade. The large crowd of sansculotte onlookers was sullen, according to the subsequent police report, but caused no disturbance.
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All France was made aware of the dire “conspiracy” from which the Jacobins had saved the country, the Convention’s public proclamation “explaining” the affair, signed by Barère, being printed and circulated in 100,000 copies.

Eliminating the Dantonistes

Elimination of the Hébertistes left the way clear to finish with the weaker recalcitrant faction—Danton, Desmoulins, Philippeaux, Hérault, and Fabre. The Dantonistes, imagining they had triumphed, reminded the
Vieux Cordelier
’s readership that they had led the way in organizing
insurrection and building the Revolution. Loyal throughout to liberty and the Rights of Man, Danton’s bloc, had unremittingly combated “les Royalistes, les Feuillants, les Brissotins, [and] les Fédéralistes,” and now helped crush the Hébertistes.
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Foreign monarchs, perusing Hébert’s
Père Duchesne
, Desmoulins had pointed out, could claim Paris had become the world capital of barbarism and crassness. Proper Jacobins knew the sansculottes were not really so blind, unaware, and ignorant as Hébert wanted foreign observers to infer.
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Besides, Desmoulins had ferreted out treason unerringly long before it was officially “confirmed.” Time and again, his journalism had foreshadowed what then became official proceedings against “Bailly, Lafayette, Malouet, Mirabeau, les Lameth, Pétion, d’Orléans, Sillery, Brissot, and Dumouriez.”
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Furthermore, the Dantonistes had a stirring message: only with democracy and free expression can “the good citizen” expect to see baseness, intrigue, and crime cease, “et pour cela le peuple n’a besoin que d’être éclairé [and for that the people need only to become enlightened].” Without Enlightenment, there could be no democracy; and without democracy no cleansing of crime and insecurity. Danton, who helped shape Desmoulins’s last sallies in the
Vieux Cordelier
, was a true republican and democrat. Nothing could be less compatible with Robespierre’s and Saint-Just’s ideology. To affirm people are brought to embrace democracy and become free and happy through enlightenment and philosophy, as Desmoulins regularly did, was to contradict Robespierrisme in its essence. It was this tendency in Danton and Desmoulins that Saint-Just complained of most in his denunciation of them—conciliatoriness toward the Brissotins, stress on revolutionary unity, their opposition to 31 May journée. Desmoulins proclaimed the Rights of Man the cornerstone of republican liberty and the masterpiece of la philosophie. He and Danton had tirelessly reaffirmed the core values of republican freedom, rejecting Robespierriste views that equated equality and liberty with Spartan austerity, and refused individuals a reasonable degree of economic freedom. (Remarkably, Desmoulins included Brissot among revolutionary theorists advocating an excessively leveling, Spartan conception of economic equality.)
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Compared to Robespierre, the Dantonists
were
honest and enlightened.
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Danton once famously said that for making revolution, what is needed is “l’audace, de l’audace, et encore de l’audace.”
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Yet, this key Jacobin faction never really challenged Robespierre and his perversion of the Revolution’s ideals head-on at the Jacobins and in the Convention. Rather, little by little they crumbled. On Robespierre’s orders,
Hérault, chief codifier of the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, and friend of Proly and Danton, was incarcerated in the Luxembourg for betraying state secrets “to foreign powers” shortly after Hébert’s downfall on 15 March. Chaumette, in Robespierre’s eyes an atheist fanatic and tool of Cloots, was arrested on 17 March. Robespierre still hesitated to break finally with Danton, as Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, and other Montagnard stalwarts were urging. He had at least two final meetings with Danton before making up his mind and throwing his weight behind the calls for his arrest and indictment.
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But, finally, two and a half weeks after the downfall of the Hébertistes, having disastrously failed to gather support or slow the Terror, Danton, Desmoulins, Philippeaux, and another leading deputy and friend of Danton, Jean-François Delacroix (1753–94), accused of conspiring with Dumouriez and enriching himself in Belgium, were arrested on Robespierre’s orders on 31 March. For whatever reason, the fervent Belgian republican François Robert, earlier Danton’s secretary and a loyal Dantoniste, was spared.
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Their arrests occurred three days after Condorcet was finally caught in disguise, under a false name, still hoping the Revolution could be saved, at a restaurant eating an omelet in a southern Paris suburb. His arrest was certain to entail his prompt execution as an “outlaw.” Condorcet forestalled this outcome by poisoning himself on 29 March in his cell. Although his remains were buried in an unknown place, many realized at the time that his demise signally contributed to what Mme. de Staël called the “decimation of the glory of France.”
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Assessments of the great philosophe’s contribution to the Revolution varied widely but none was more negative than Robespierre’s, delivered in a speech a few weeks later. Robespierre both hated and scorned him. Rural laborers, spreading the “true light of philosophy” in the countryside possessed more sense than the supposedly “great mathematician” Condorcet, a figure “despised by all factions,” who worked indefatigably to obscure the light of philosophy with the trash of “ses rapsodies mercenaires.”
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Two days later, 31 March, Claire Lacombe, rescued from imprisonment in October 1793 by the Hébertistes, was rearrested. That same day, Robespierre came in person to the Jacobins to “explain” the latest “conspiracy” overshadowing the Revolution: devious factions plotting against the people had formed two separate but connected conspiracies. Where the Hébertistes sought to overthrow everything, the second bloc cunningly schemed to inculcate “principles of aristocracy and modérantisme.” Since the crushing of the Hébertistes, the modérés had stepped up their efforts and were now insidiously attempting to smear
“pure Patriots” (i.e., Robespierre and Saint-Just) as “Hébertistes.” Typical of their malevolence was their striving to discredit the “glorious” and upright Chalier (who had been guillotined by the Brissotins in Lyon three days after Marat’s assassination in Paris). “Pure Patriots” always venerated Chalier, just as they did Marat.
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About Danton himself Robespierre said little; but he denounced him too, soon after, as a “conspirator.” Danton, he disclosed, had tried to sabotage the 31 May rising by opposing the worthy Hanriot, and had even rebuked the latter and his armed force for “saving” the Convention from its foes.
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Saint-Just indicted Hérault before the Convention on 1 April, demanding his execution. Hérault was an accomplice of Dumouriez, Mirabeau, Brissot, and Hébert, who had behaved duplicitously during the 31 May and 2 June insurrections. He also denied divine Providence and had sought to forge “atheism into a cult more intolerant than superstition,” publicly denying immortality of the soul, “which consoled Socrates when he was dying.”
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Such views could not be tolerated. During the last months of his life, Saint-Just became almost as morbidly dogmatic about belief in the Supreme Being, immortality of the soul, and evils of atheism as Robespierre himself.
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On 2 April, in the Convention, Saint-Just assailed Danton, using notes supplied by Robespierre, accusing him of subservience to Mirabeau early in the Revolution and covert royalism and Brissotin sympathies later.
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Besides maintaining treasonable links with Dumouriez and trying to get the “worthy” Hanriot arrested, Danton had eyed the “revolution of 31 May” with distaste and been guilty of serious misconduct in Belgium.
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During the four-day trial of the Dantonistes, the regime introduced a new element to their judicial procedure: four members of the Comité de Surêté Générale sat in the trial room supervising the proceedings, among them one of the committee’s most ruthless figures, an implacable foe of the Brissotins, Marc-Guillaume Vadier (1736–1828), son of a church tax collector and former army officer. One of those behind the story about a plot to recruit assassins in the prisons, brutal and thoroughly dishonest, Vadier detested Danton, whose downfall he called “gutting the fat stuffed turbot.” Reusing the technique deployed so adroitly against the Hébertistes, Danton’s circle was arraigned alongside foreigners and wealthy speculators—the semi-Spaniard Guzmán, the Abbé Espagnac, and the brothers Siegmund (Junius) and Emanuel Frey, the Moravian Jewish army suppliers based earlier in Strasbourg (and linked to Fabre as well as Chabot), now formally charged with corruption.
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Marc René, Abbé Espagnac (1752–94), a professed
disciple of Voltaire accustomed long before 1789 to make outrageously irreligious remarks in public, was a wealthy, somewhat disreputable ex-churchman, already notorious at Versailles in the early 1780s. Failing to win a seat in the 1789 Estates-General, he made his mark during 1790–91 as an antiecclesiastical agitator, vociferously proposing seizure of church property in the Jacobins. Like Fabre, a prominent speculator in French East India Company shares, he suited the prosecution perfectly, having corrupt ties with several of the accused, besides links, through providing horses and other supplies to the army, with Dumouriez.

The atmosphere at the public hearings was electric. Hérault uttered ironic witticisms. Asked his name and age, Desmoulins replied that he was thirty-three (actually thirty-four) like the “s
ans-culotte
Jesus.” A furious Danton delivered a powerful speech, ridiculing the notion they were “conspirators,” insulting Robespierre and reaffirming his atheism, exerting such an impact within and outside the trial chamber that the committee became worried about the effect in the streets. Renewed murmuring against Robespierre’s “dictature” were heard. To forestall possible trouble, the proceedings were aborted in a scandalously arbitrary manner. Unreasoning arbitrariness, as Roederer stressed, was indeed the very quintessence of the Robespierre regime. Unsettled by signs of public sympathy for Danton, the Tribunal rushed its guilty verdict through, ordering immediate execution that very day, 5 April (24 Germinal).
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Desmoulins, Fabre, and Hérault were conveyed to the Place de la Révolution in the same charette as Danton. Danton towered over the crowds impassively. Desmoulins was forcibly dragged to the guillotine in a tragic, highly emotional scene. Bazire was guillotined with them, but Chabot had evaded the blade by committing suicide earlier, like Condorcet and the latter’s younger republican acolyte, Achille du Chastellet, using poison.
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Last but one under the guillotine, Hérault displayed his usual aristocratic poise. That evening, the Opéra performed a rousing
sans-culottide
entitled
La réunion de 10 aout ou l’Inauguration de la République française
.

A week later, on 13 April 1794, Chaumette, denounced for links with the Hébertistes, was guillotined together with Bishop Gobel, Hébert’s widow, and Desmoulins’s famously beautiful, brokenhearted wife. The two major political purges of March and April 1794, elimination of the Hébertistes silencing the Paris sections, and liquidation of Danton, Desmoulins, Hérault, and Philippeaux, extinguished the last vestiges of Jacobin adherence to both principle and the sansculottes. The purges were followed by a marked further concentration of power in the hands
of the Committee of Public Safety and Robespierre himself. Suppression of
Le Vieux Cordelier
put the seal on a scene of near total press and theater repression. “Tyranny cannot allow the justice of the courts to compete with arbitrariness,” commented Roederer later, “and neither can it allow public opinion any sway. If it did not completely crush freedom of the press and speech, this freedom would overthrow it.”
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The number of pamphlets published in France in 1792 had stood at 1,286. In 1793, that number had dropped to 663; in 1794, it fell to 601, under half the 1792 figure and under one-fifth of the level for 1789–90.
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Prudhomme had ceased publishing the
Révolutions de Paris
in February 1794 under plea of illness; he and his family left Paris.
⁴⁴
The last main royalist paper,
Quotidienne
, started in late 1792 with Alphonse Coutely as editor, was suppressed in October 1793 but was later resumed as the
Trois Décades
. After reprinting extracts from Demoulins’s
Vieux Cordelier
, it finally ceased in March 1794.
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