Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (109 page)

The sudden collapse in late July of a regime that had eliminated all organized opposition and saturated France with its ideology had its causes chiefly in the distinctly abstract character of, and reliance on, “the people.” Although it had overwhelming police, military, and bureaucratic force at its disposal, and had virtually liquidated all organized challenges, the group dictatorship was chronically lacking in genuine support in the cities and countryside. Despite eliminating Hébertistes and Dantonistes, the regime’s grip on the Jacobins, Cordeliers, and Paris sections became ever more precarious. Although substantial numbers of civic and police officials stayed loyal to Robespierre, committed backers and accomplices with a stake in the dictatorship’s survival proved too scarce in the clubs, Convention, National Guard, section assemblies, and army command to survive even a modest buffeting. The leadership had removed itself so far from the Revolution’s essential principles and Rights of Man that once directly challenged in a concerted way, and its chief men confronted, it collapsed precipitately and completely. Nothing proved flimsier than Robespierre’s rhetoric of “the people.”

Robespierre’s third prolonged withdrawal enabled his detractors on the executive committees to organize. They were headed by Vadier, Lazare Carnot (widely credited with the Republic’s recent military victories), Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Barras, and Jean-Lambert Tallien (who had presided over the Terror in Bordeaux). By the time Robespierre returned, at Saint-Just’s pleading, to reaffirm his authority, the regime found itself in deep trouble, with Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Vadier, and others actively conspiring to bring him down.
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Robespierre’s counteroffensive, beginning with a long, rambling speech on 8 Thermidor (26 July) at the Convention, where he had made no appearance for over a month, was a disaster. A bitter, paranoid complaint against those conspiring against “the Revolution,” it especially stressed the “malicious” innuendo labeling the regime “dictators ruling by Terror.” Robespierre’s detractors were trying to render him and
le gouvernement révolutionnaire
odious. Hidden opponents were calling the Tribunal Révolutionnaire a “tribunal of blood operated by Robespierre.” Who were these vile calomniateurs “who question immortality of the soul and call me a tyrant?” Undoubtedly those attacking “truth and the people” were preachers of “atheism and vice.” According to these malefactors, his “dictatorship” threatened liberty. “Who am I these
perverse men accuse?” A selfless slave of liberty, the living martyr of the Republic.
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Little had changed, Robespierre complained, since “the crimes” of Danton, Fabre, and Desmoulins, who had sought clemency for “the people’s enemies.” Hébert, Chaumette, and Ronsin had slighted and disparaged the revolutionary government, while Desmoulins assailed it with satirical writings and Danton conspired to defend him. The same pattern of subversion was recurring now. Danton’s and Hébert’s adherents, cowardly wretches styling him “a tyrant,” abounded on all sides. How perfidiously they abused his good faith! Praising him to his face “for the virtues of Cato,” behind his back they spoke of “a new Cataline”! Counterrevolutionaries instigating famine deliberately resorted to the methods of Hébert and Chabot. Others used Brissot’s strategems to stifle truth. Scoundrels in the Convention plotted with
deputés perfides
on the Comité de Sûreté Générale. The factions opposing virtue and the Revolution needed to be exterminated without delay.
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Robespierre defined the “seditious factions” accused of menacing the Revolution’s purity as the heirs of Danton, Desmoulins, Hébert, Chabot, and Chaumette. The conspirators combined the systems of Hébertisme and the Dantonistes, purposely obstructing and ridiculing his Festival of the Supreme Being. But he denounced his foes only in the vaguest terms, without actually naming anyone, so that the speech placed everybody in the Convention with whom he had reason for dissatisfaction at immediate risk, thereby unnecessarily panicking some frightened deputies who had no other reason for opposing him into the arms of Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, and Vadier. His real foes had been served notice that they must strike now or never. Robespierre’s rambling, vigorously applauded speech was, of course, unanimously approved. But when it was proposed that it be printed and circulated among all the communes of France, murmuring and then objections surfaced. Billaud-Varenne, Cambon, and some others advised against publication, and Étienne-Jean Panis (1757–1833), a Paris deputy prominent in the 20 June and 10 August risings, went so far as to remark that Robespierre had had worthy men expelled from the Jacobins merely for refusing to bend to his wishes, and even referred to “his dictatorship.” The scene was set for a murderous showdown.

That evening, a sharp tussle erupted at the Jacobins in which Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, and Robespierre all fought to speak first. Robespierre won the podium and repeated essentially the same paranoid tirade as in the Convention, lambasting his enemies, continually
invoking his struggle against atheism and his defense of the immortality of the soul, and being a “martyr to virtue.” Momentarily, he succeeded in cornering the “prédicateurs de l’athéisme et du vice,” supposedly emulating Brissot and following the path of Hébert, Desmoulins, Danton, and all his other predecessors. In principle, the Revolution was the first ever “founded on the theory of the rights of humanity and the principles of justice,” but in practice, all the Revolution’s leaders prior to him had without exception been worthless
fripons
. All betrayed the Revolution while their followers continually accused him—Robespierre!—the “martyr to virtue,” of being “a new Cataline,” of “dictatorship”!
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The Jacobins voted to expel everyone opposing publication of Robespierre’s speech.

Robespierre assumed too quickly that he had won the fight. Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois, knowing they would be denounced in the Convention the next day, had only hours to save themselves. Their backs to the wall, they spent the night appealing to every conceivable ally on the two executive committees, including the so far always-subservient Barère. Aghast at remarks indicating that Robespierre was dissatisfied with him too, Barère reluctantly turned against him at the last moment, while Carnot, Vadier, and Tallien secured all possible support among the terrified deputies.
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The culminating drama in the Convention began on the morning of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), with Collot d’Herbois presiding. Saint-Just had just begun his report on the “factions” imperiling the Revolution, remarking that on the executive committees “Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne have taken little part for some time,” appearing to “have abandoned themselves to particular interests and views,” when uproar ensued. In the fight to strengthen the Revolution and its moral conscience, Saint-Just was about to say, Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne insinuated that it was best not to highlight the Supreme Being and immortality of the soul. Opposing the proper shaping of the esprit public, they disdained talk of divine Providence, “the sole hope of the ordinary man who, surrounded by
sophismes
, implores Heaven for the wisdom and courage to fight for truth.”
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But just when Saint-Just began complaining that “traitors” were reviving philosophique attitudes, he was brusquely interrupted by Tallien calling out that a dangerous “conspiracy” had been unmasked that needed the Convention’s immediate attention.
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“The men who talk ceaslessly about virtue,” interjected Billaud-Varenne, “are the ones who trample it underfoot.” He then announced, with the concurrence of the chairman, Collot d’Herbois, that “conspirators” had
summoned an armed force commanded by Hanriot to implement their treachery.
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Demanding Hanriot’s immediate arrest and seizure of his principal National Guard officers, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois further proposed that another of Robespierre’s principal aides, the implacable lawyer René-François Dumas (1757–94), ruthless president of the Tribunal Révolutionnaire, be arrested too. When the uproar subsided sufficiently, the Convention ordered the arrests of Dumas, Hanriot, and two of Hanriot’s key officers, Boulanger and Lavalette. Several deputies then yelled that Robespierre headed “the conspiracy.” Leaping to the podium, Robespierre was shouted down: “à bas le roi, à bas le tyran, ce nouveau Cataline!” Tallien and Vadier fiercely denounced “the tyranny of this ambitious hypocrite,” this “nouveau Cromwell,” Tallien swearing he would personally stab in the chest any deputy lacking the courage to endorse “the tyrant’s arrest.” On Collot d’Herbois’s motion, amid swelling applause, Robespierre’s arrest was decreed, immediately followed by those of Couthon, Saint-Just, Augustin Robespierre, and Pierre Lebas (1765–94), another of the most despotic of the Comité de Sûreté Générale, a pitiless lawyer who had behaved abominably in Alsace and other regions, an intimate friend of both Robespierre and Saint-Just.

Thus began the coup of Thermidor—arising directly from a split among the most complicit in repression and the Terror.
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A principal charge, entirely characteristic of the ruthlessness of those who brought down the tyrant, was that over the winter of 1793–94, Robespierre had insidiously endeavored to save Chabot, Desmoulins, Bazire, and Lavalette from the guillotine.
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On being taken away, Robespierre had only moments to insult Collot d’Herbois, the president, and the entire legislature. But he was not finished yet. That afternoon, while the Convention drew up and printed their proclamation announcing the “dangerous conspiracy” and dispatched it to the Paris sections, communes, and armies of France, Robespierre’s supporters fought to raise the Commune, National Guard, Jacobins, and Paris sections, at first, with some success. The prisoners, instead of being secured in the Luxembourg, were wrested from their guards and brought under the Commune’s protection to the town hall, as was Augustin Robespierre, separately sent to Saint Lazaire. Pro-Robespierre elements retained the upper hand initially at the Jacobins, and decreed the expulsion of those deputies supporting Robespierre’s arrest.
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The tocsin was sounded to raise the sections and bring out the sansculottes.
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Hanriot, on horseback, at the head of his partisans, galloped through the streets yelling that the
Convention was trying to assassinate “the best Patriots” and mobilized some National Guard contingents.
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The Convention replied that evening by outlawing Hanriot, the mayor of Paris, and all members of the Commune’s general council joining the insurrection.
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A commission of twelve was appointed to oversee suppression of the revolt, and Paul-François Barras, a deputy for Var, veteran terroriste and leading Jacobin, and one of the few Thermidorians not to lose his nerve at this decisive moment, was named to command the Convention’s armed force. Measures were taken to fortify the Convention hall in the hope of repelling mobs raised against the deputies by the Commune.

Gathering in emergency session, the Paris section assemblies immediately split. This marked the climax of the struggle. The essence of Robespierrisme was the dragooning of misinformed artisans by manipulated section assemblies. Precisely this key mechanism of popular Jacobinism now fractured. Not enough of the least aware could be produced when it mattered most. After hours of wrangling, the revolutionary committees of eighteen sections refused to back Robespierre, sending deputations to the Convention, promising the deputies their support. The sansculottes of the Paris faubourgs were lukewarm even for Hanriot, previously a great favorite among them, and largely unwilling to back Robespierre.
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The Jacobins too divided, some aligning with Robespierre, others, eventually the majority, backing the Convention and insisting those opposing Hanriot’s insurrection were the “true Jacobins.” The supporters rallying to Robespierre proved less than fervent, moreover, and after a few critical hours the crowds that briefly rallied to the regime drifted away. By late evening of 9 Thermidor, the town hall square was reportedly empty. When, at two in the morning, Barras appeared with armed men loyal to the Convention, the town hall was found undefended and the indicted within wholly abandoned by their lukewarm adherents. There was a brief affray with pistols: Augustin Robespierre jumped from a window, severely injuring himself; Lebas shot himself; Hanriot escaped, but was captured later; the others, mostly wounded, were seized.
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Botching his effort to shoot himself, Robespierre was captured, bleeding profusely from the jaw. The following (beautifully sunny) day, 10 Thermidor, the Convention sat throughout the day, hearing numerous speakers condemning the “immorality and baseness of the modern Cromwell and his brother,” the latter charged with pilfering public funds. With indecorous haste, sentenced after a brief appearance before the Tribunal Révolutionnaire, Robespierre and twenty-two principal
supporters, including Saint-Just, Hanriot, Couthon, Augustin Robespierre, Payan, and Fleuriot-Lescot, were conveyed in carts to the Place de la Révolution, where crowds of women performed a joyous dance, yelling their delight at the prospect of the abominable tyrant’s pending descent into the “depths of Hell.”

Among the condemned figured a dozen Commune officials headed by the new mayor of Paris, Jean-Baptiste Fleuriot-Lescot (1761–94), and Claude-François Payan (1766–94), head of the correspondence office of the Comité de Salut Public and later, despite being a Dauphiné ex-noble,
agent national
of the Paris Commune, one of Robespierre’s principal spies on his colleagues, a ruthless member of the Tribunal Révolutionnaire handpicked by Robespierre. Fleuriot-Lescot was a Belgian member of the Tribunal Révolutionnaire and friend of Robespierre who (despite being a native of Brussels) had replaced Pache as mayor in the spring, due to the latter’s reluctance to proceed against Hébert. After Hanriot, Fleuriot-Lescot had been the most energetic backer mobilizing support against “the new conspirators” the previous afternoon. The executions took several hours before a largely enthusiastic crowd. When it came to his turn, the executioner first ripped off Robespierre’s bandages, eliciting a howl of rage from a horribly contorted face pouring blood. As the guillotine blade fell, thunderous mass applause erupted that, according to Mercier, lasted more than fifteen minutes.
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