Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (108 page)

In the Terror’s final weeks, repression both escalated dramatically in scale and became increasingly diffuse as the daily toll of executions in Paris rose to more than twice that of the spring. The prisons burst to the seams despite the accelerating execution rate. The prisoner total in Paris increased from 6,984 on 23 May to 7,528 by 10 July and 7,765 by 18 July.
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As against 1,251 persons executed in the capital between 1 March and 10 June, around a dozen a day, during the Terror’s last forty-seven days, from 10 June to 27 July, 1,376 were guillotined around thirty per day. In June 1794, 659 death sentences were passed in Paris, a record so far, though even more were passed, more than 900, in July.
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In a paroxysm of paranoia, surrounded by Brissotin conspiracy, extremism, modérantisme, corruption, aristocracy, atheistic philosophie, and assassination plots, Robespierre and the Comité de Sûreté Public introduced in the Convention the notorious law of 10 June (22 Prairial) “reforming” the Revolutionary Tribunal. Streamlining its procedures, insisted Couthon, was essential, as the “enemies of the people” were not being dealt with fast enough. The Revolutionary Tribunal should now consist of six benches of judges and juries functioning simultaneously. (Only one additional tribunal actually became operative.) Anyone charged with spreading false news, slandering patriotism, or echoing Brissotin, Hébertiste, or Dantoniste notions, could, with royalist conspirators, be sent directly before the Revolutionary Tribunal by the executive committees without preliminary hearings or even notifying the Convention.
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Material evidence of guilt was no longer needed: “moral proofs” sufficed. Denied legal counsel, defendants could be arrainged, tried, sentenced, and executed literally within hours. The law of 22 Prairial helped generate the Terror’s final dramatic spurt. This targeted no particular social class in the way historians, Marxist and non-Marxist, once believed, though ex-nobles became highly vulnerable. Many diverse groups were now targeted—army officers, wives of earlier victims,
ex-nobles, constitutional as well as refractory priests, former officeholders, alleged speculators, and former legal officers of the parlements. Targeted especially were individuals connected with those previously declared “enemies of the people,” an ideological catchall applied to just about anyone of prominence or standing. Logic, other than the twisted logic of the populist dictatorship, had little to do with it. On 22 April 1794, Le Chapelier, a pillar of Feuillant modérantisme, discovered in Rennes, was guillotined in Paris. The great chemist Levoisier was guillotined on 8 May. On 7 July, twenty-two former councillors of the Parlement of Toulouse, charged with colluding in the parlement’s defiance of 25 and 27 September 1790, were dispatched as “enemies of the people.”
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“My blood runs cold,” wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to Ruth Barlow the following day from Le Havre, “and I sicken at thoughts of a Revolution which costs so much blood and bitter tears.”
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Alexandre Beauharnais, the passionately pro-Revolution anticlerical republican noble (Josephine’s first husband), was guillotined in Paris on 23 July 1794, the poet André Chénier (1762–94) on 25 July, two days before Robespierre’s overthrow, for disparaging Marat and publishing constitutional monarchist articles in the
Journal de Paris
.

Unreasoning arbitrariness ruled. “The Terror was imposed by and for proletarians,” affirmed Roederer, “it affected all who were not such, and the higher the proportion of proletarians to property-owners within the same commune the more heavily their power bore down.”
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But the social categories targeted were scarcely at all defined by economic roles and status. The “people’s enemies” the regime attacked were those diverging from the ordinary, especially anyone suspected of voicing criticism of the tyranny. Immediately prior to Robespierre’s downfall, the famous playwright émigré Beaumarchais, author of the
Marriage of Figaro
, and early in the Revolution a national hero, as well as chief promotor of Voltaire’s reputation, found himself proscribed on “moral” grounds following Danton’s liquidation. Danton had signed papers authorizing him to be abroad on government business. In exile, at Hamburg, he received news that his wife, daughter, and sister had been taken to Paris’s Port-Libre prison, awaiting trial for their lives owing to their association with him. They were among the lucky ones not yet dispatched on 9 Thermidor (27 July).

After their destruction in October, the dead Brissotin leadership still played a key role in the Revolution, their shadow everywhere permeating the final speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just. These weeks also witnessed the liquidation of much of the Brissotin leadership’s remnants. After the Caen rising’s collapse, Pétion, Buzot, Barbaroux, Salles,
and Guadet had fled first to Quimper in Brittany, where they hid for a time, and then to the environs of Bordeaux. Guadet survived in hiding in his hometown, Saint-Émilion, together with Salles, until betrayed in mid-June. They were executed in Bordeaux on 17 June 1794, along with six members of Guadet’s family accused of hiding them. Pétion and Mme. Roland’s lover, Buzot, concealed in the same town, fled disguised into the fields on hearing of the arrests, but on finding all avenues of escape cut off by the Montagnard squad sent by the young Marc Jullien to hunt them down, on 17 June they shot themselves; their bodies, half-eaten by wolves, were found soon afterward.
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Barbaroux, hiding nearby, attempted suicide too but was found wounded and taken to Bordeaux, where he was guillotined on 25 June 1794.

Even during these last indiscriminate weeks of mass repression and slaughter, the special focus of Robespierre on eliminating critics and the revolutionary
hommes de lettres
continued. Besides André Chénier, among the last writer victims in early July were Coutouly, J. B. Duplain, and Antoine Tournon. On 13 July, it was the turn of Roch Marcandier (1767–94), among the Revolution’s most heroic journalists, guillotined together with his wife, more army officers (including the Scottish colonel C.E.F.H. Macdonat), a Protestant minister, and a member of the conseil-général of the department of Doubs. The twenty-seven-year-old Roch Marcandier (1767–94), Cordeliers member and former assistant (and friend) of Desmoulins, after 10 August 1792 had been an agent for Roland’s police, spying on the Cordeliers. He was among the few journalists valiant enough to continue denouncing the Montagne, and Robespierre and Danton in particular, through the summer of 1793. Between May and July 1793, he edited an anti-Maratiste paper, provocatively entitled the
Véritable Ami du Peuple
, satirizing Marat’s and Hébert’s denunciatory style, and lambasting them and Robespierre, the supreme hypocrite, the “cunning fox,” now “king” of the Jacobins. Marcandier persisted after 2 June 1793 clandestinely, hidden in an attic, posting up his newssheets in the streets at night, his underground paper labeling the Convention “a place of sedition, “conciliabule d’anarchistes,” a “monstrous assembly of men without character.” Malfunctioning machinery finally forced him to stop printing in July, but he remained concealed for nearly a year, trying to encourage resistance and exchanging letters with Desmoulins, until betrayed by Legendre, arrested, tried, and guillotined.
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Shortly before the crisis that toppled Robespierre, an intensified drive against the remnants of the Hébert circle seemed about to occur. Fresh evidence of conspiracy had been uncovered, announced a Jacobin
deputation to the Convention on 26 July. In his last issues Hébert had frequently remarked on what he saw as the need for a new 31 May 1793 insurrection to eliminate the remaining “enemies of the people.” What this meant, “explained” Barère, one of those on whom Robespierre now relied most, was that he planned to eliminate the “true friends of the people.” The sansculottes of several Paris sections, Barère also reminded everyone, seemed ready for a renewed upsurge of Hébertiste agitation. Hébert’s partisans abounded and his maxims echoed!
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Immediately after the Law of 10 June ensued a sudden resurgence of bitter friction and personal rivalries on both executive committees—and a rise in background opposition to the dictator—that left Robespierre and Saint-Just increasingly isolated. Ideologically, the Montagne had always been a minority faction, and within the ruling Montagnard coalition, Robespierre and Saint-Just represented a minority within a minority. Their values were directly antithetical to those of the Revolution in a way the rival ideologies of the Dantonistes and Hébertistes were not to the same degree. After April, most of the Comité de Surêté Public remained hostile or ironic about the Cult of the Supreme Being, which (like Danton) most considered absurd, like Robespierre’s and Saint-Just’s endless rhetoric of virtue and natural right.

The festivities surrounding the 14 July Bastille commemoration were doubtless more subdued than in earlier years. Even so, claimed one reporter, Paris was uplifted by a sight entirely satisfying for “true republicans”: all the inhabitants of particular quarters gathered in the evening with their families sitting at tables laid in the streets, each bringing their own suppers and all joining in the patriotic songs and toasts, all partaking of roughly the same sort of fare and acting truly as equals. These
repas civiques
were characterized by quiet, modest enjoyment of the kind the regime approved, entirely without drunkenness or misconduct. Everywhere, virtue was the theme of an evening capped by music and singing in the splendidly illumined gardens of the Tuileries. The music continued until late at night and included, sung by a huge choir, the “Hymne à l’Être Suprême,” “The Taking of the Bastille,” the “Marseillaise,” and the two most famous songs of the Revolution, “Ça Ira,” first sung in 1790, and “La Carmagnole,” besides other revolutionary anthems and marches.
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After Hébert’s and Danton’s elimination, it seemed clear that veteran Montagnards and Cordeliers were as much at risk as anyone else. This rendered the Robespierriste clique ever more isolated.
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The Law of 22 Prairial, unsurprisingly, shocked and frightened numerous members of
the executive committees. Although Robespierre denied it, a strong suspicion arose that Convention deputies could be seized and tried without the Assembly even being notified beforehand.
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A devastating mix of aversion, fear, and ridicule sapped the prestige and reputation of the “incorruptible.” When their authority within the Montagne was finally challenged in late July, comparatively few came to their defense. In its final hours, apart from Hanriot and a few directly self-interested National Guardsmen, nobody rushed to arms to support the collapsing dictatorship. Unlike the cult of Marat, Hébertisme, demand for the 1793 Constitution, or the legacy of the Enragés, by the summer of 1794 Robespierrisme proved practically inert and moribund. In ideological terms, nothing Robespierre stood for was subsequently exalted as something lost or valuable for the Revolution. His ideology was simply too threadbare and remote from the essential principles of the Revolution. Immediately after his downfall, neither the sansculottes nor anyone else seemed to regret his demise.
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CHAPTER 21

Thermidor

Robespierre’s Downfall

Increasingly irritable and in bad health, by late June Robespierre was manifestly losing his grip. The weeks immediately preceding the overthrow of his authoritarian, populist tyranny witnessed a receding of both his physical presence and prestige. He and Saint-Just sensed the growing hostility of several executive committee members. Yet another nervous breakdown kept Robespierre from executive meetings and the Convention for three crucial weeks, from 1 to 22 July, a critical absence that marked the beginning of the end.

Vadier, threatened by recent remarks of Robespierre relating to him, created a peculiarly unpleasant scene, with a Voltairean eye for the ridiculous, at a Comité de Sûreté Générale meeting on 15 June. The ruthless Vadier was literally a Voltairean as well as an atheist and materialist who posed as a friend of the poor; he talked a lot about philosophy, liked deriding religious belief, and was emphatically anti-Rousseauiste.
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On that occasion, he ridiculed Robespierre’s Supreme Being cult, which he thoroughly scorned by expatiating on the case of Catherine Théot (1716–94), an old woman known for her visions and a former nunnery domestic considered by her followers a prophetess, who was incarcerated in the Bastille before the Revolution for claiming to be the Holy Virgin reincarnate. She had been rearrested by the police in May 1794 for again professing to be the “mother of God,” pregnant with “the new messiah” who this time, she claimed, was “Robespierre.” She inspired mystic gatherings, presided over by her and the revolutionary priest Dom Gerle, who had caused such a stir in the National Assembly in April 1790, and who had also been arrested, imprisoned, and interrogated. According to reports used by Vadier and Amar, Dom Gerle—who was on excellent terms with Robespierre—embraced Catherine’s vision that Robespierre was the long-awaited messiah.
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Their imprisonment
and Vadier’s use of the affair placed the dictator, never deft in handling ridicule, in a highly embarrassing position.