Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (110 page)

When word arrived that “the tyrant” was dead, there was great jubilation in the Convention too. The next day, seventy more hard-core Robespierristes, mostly municipal and National Guard officers, were guillotined. On 12 Thermidor (30 July), a third batch, police administrators and Commune officials, including the vice president of the conseil-général, followed.
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At no point was there any popular protest. Fouquier-Tinville, the notorious chief public prosecutor, proved as coldly methodical and cynical in dispatching Robespierre and his entourage as he had Marie Antoinette and the Brissotins.

A Stunned Nation

Over the next days and weeks large numbers of club leaders, officeholders, and army officers associated or reputedly associated with Robespierre were arrested all over France, some briefly, some for longer spells. To his shocked amazement, Fouquier-Tinville himself was arrested and
imprisoned on 1 August; the rest of the Tribunal Révolutionnaire was purged on 10 August. Many arrests were motivated at least partly by thirst for personal vengeance. Jullien the Younger, gaoled on returning to Paris from Bordeaux two weeks after Thermidor in early August, had indeed been close to Robespierre but was imprisoned mainly owing to fierce denunciation by his Jacobin rivals and detractors Tallien and Carrier; like many others, Jullien remained behind bars until October 1795.
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A leader of the Metz Jacobins, J. B. Trotebas, a music teacher falsely reported to be a Robespierre underling, was locked up and remained behind bars until August 1795.
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Napoleon, close to Robespierre’s brother while at Toulon and Nice, figured among those incarcerated briefly (at Nice), though he subsequently also suffered temporary demotion.
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Also gaoled, along with his brushes and easel, was Jacques-Louis David who had reportedly embraced Robespierre after his last speech at the Paris Jacobins, saying, “if you drink the hemlock, I will drink it too.”
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David might well have been guillotined with the hard-core Robespierristes were he not so esteemed as an artist. Arrested too, following Robespierre’s downfall, were Louis-Julien Héron (1746–96) and Joseph Lebon (the “butcher of Arras”); after many weeks of imprisonment, Lebon was eventually guillotined at Arras on 16 October 1795.
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Héron, the Comité de Sûreté Générale’s executive agent, was a Jacobin leader, wounded during the journée of 10 August 1792, who had assisted Marat’s triumph in April 1793. Exempted by Robespierre from the purge of Hébertistes in March 1794, he had later become one of the most brutal Paris police chiefs, employed, among other things, in keeping the tyrant’s executive committee colleagues under surveillance. As hundreds of fresh prisoners were hauled into the prisons, they switched places with other hundreds being released.

Once Robespierre fell, virtually nobody resisted or protested, so begrudged was “the new Cataline’s” person, and tyranny.
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More than eight hundred addresses acclaiming the tyrant’s overthrow poured in congratulating the Convention from communities all across France. Ironically, a simultaneous stream of pre-Thermidor petitions were still arriving, expressing fury that Robespierre’s “sacred” person and leadership were under dire threat. Popularity in politics, commented François Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf (1760–97), one of the Revolution’s most ardent egalitarians, in late September 1794, is “a sort of nothingness.” Of 100, 000 Parisians yelling “Vive Robespierre!” before 9 Thermidor, none would admit to having done so a day or two later. Of the
100,000 Frenchmen stamping on busts of Marat in autumn 1794, most had venerated him fervently when he was “canonized.” In 1790, had not vast crowds adored Lafayette posing on his white horse on the Champ de Mars, while nobody praised him following his defection? More than 30,000 furious Parisians had yelled “Pétion or death,” before deserting their once-popular mayor just months later. Since the common people possessed little understanding of what was happening, how could the Jacobin Revolution be saved and consolidated? In September 1794, painfully few declared themselves publicly, like Fréron and Babeuf, demanding freedom of thought and the press. The task now, urged Babeuf, an ardent disciple of the “honest and unfortunate Camille Desmoulins,” was to restore Jacobinism’s reputation by mobilizing all the lethargic and diffident citizens of France, silently appalled by the great miscreant, for a much wider and more energetic sweep against Robespierrisme.
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Numerous victims, facing execution, owed their survival to Robespierre’s overthrow. Volney, missed by officers sent to fetch him shortly before Thermidor, outlived the tyrant only due to a Commune official (subsequently himself guillotined) transferring him to another prison just before his scheduled execution. Destutt de Tracy, detained at the Abbaye for eight months, survived by a two-day margin, only because his trial was fixed for 11 Thermidor. However, narrowly escaping the guillotine was not the same as regaining one’s liberty. If hundreds, including Garat, Sonthonax, Antonelle, Mme. Helvétius, Sophie de Condorcet, Helen Maria Williams, Ginguiné, and others of the Condorcet and Mme. Roland circles were released within days, hundreds more stayed in prison for many more weeks and months. By the time Volney was relased on 16 September, he had been held (in three different prisons) for ten months.
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Destutt de Tracy was released and allowed to return to Auteil only on 5 October, ten weeks after Thermidor, and he was among the lucky ones.
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Paine and many others languished behind bars much longer. Though seriously ill, Paine was held until, belatedly, the new United States envoy, James Monroe, effected his release on 6 November, by which time Paine too had been detained for more than ten months. The mulatto fighter for the civil rights of free blacks, Julien Raimond, imprisoned on 26 September 1793, was also released on 6 November.
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Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, remained incarcerated until January 1795, Claire Lacombe until August 1795.

But in place of the ruthless men Robespierre had selected with an eye to their usefulness to himself, the Thermidorians substituted only
other proven terroristes scarcely less tyrannical, dishonest, and demagogic. Their sole qualification for replacing their predecessors was having had less proximity to Robespierre. Ideologically, and in terms of revolutionary ideals and principles, this left everything unresolved. If the repressive Law of 10 June was abrogated the day following Robespierre’s overthrow, most Montagnards had disliked it anyway. The Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793, the true legal basis of the Terror, for the moment remained firmly in place.
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Following noisy scenes in the Paris sections, the first major clash in the Convention after Thermidor occurred on 13 August, the day James Monroe was received as United States ambassador. The Convention agreed to place the United States flag in the Assembly hall beside the tricolor, signaling an “eternal alliance” between the world’s two premier republics, and Geneva’s alongside those of France and the United States, in recognition of Geneva’s new democratic constitution and being Rousseau’s birthplace—but not on much else. While numerous speakers denounced Robespierre, the prolonged debate about the new situation provoked a bitter row over whether to continue the repression or drastically curtail the executive committees’ powers and more comprehensively denounce the Terror. Many deputies were more troubled by resurgent monarchism, aristocracy, and counterrevolution than the travesty of justice burying the Revolution’s basic principles. Consequently, the Montagne contrived precariously to retain power for more than six months more. The so-called Thermidorian reaction focused only on eradicating Robespierre’s following, the Thermidorians being helped in this by the fact that most genuine libertarians and democratic republicans prominent earlier in the Revolution were now either dead, in hiding, or, like Daunou, Garat, Volney, and Paine, still in prison. During August, Daunou, the distinguished constitutional and educational reformer and Pas-de-Calais deputy, while still behind bars, composed a text proclaiming a reformed education system, the sole effective antidote to Montagnard repression and authoritarianism.
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Thermidor, accordingly, ushered in only a very limited restoration of suppressed liberties. In the autumn of 1794, there seemed little likelihood of soon restoring the Revolution’s core values. In and outside Paris, assiduous care was taken not to step beyond a cautious easing of the repression. If many hard-core Robespierristes had been eliminated or imprisoned, thousands of other active agents of the Terror—deputies, officials, and police officers—remained in post. By linking the Terror to just Robespierre’s accomplices, provincial agents of the Terror
sought to cover their tracks and reemerge, despite their crimes, as respected representatives of a wronged people.

The sociétés populaires congratulated the Convention, therefore, not on halting the repression or Terror, or demolishing the ideology of virtue vitiating the Revolution, but merely for removing the “nouveau Cromwell,” the would-be “king,” “the monster” perverting the Convention. Certainly, a real change ensued in the country’s power structure. The Thermidorians moved quickly to suspend the Tribunal Révolutionnaire, reorganize the National Guard, purge the executive committees, and replace key military and administrative officials. On 24 August, the Committee of Public Safety had its powers drastically clipped, subsequently being largely confined to military and foreign affairs. On 1 September, Vadier, who was being increasingly denounced as a hypocrite who in 1790–91 had supported Bailly and Lafayette, and with having rejected and reviled “le systeme républicain” even more than had Robespierre,
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was purged from the Comité de Sûreté Générale. Even if limping excruciatingly slowly psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually from the terrible trauma, a change in atmosphere quickly became palpable. The shadow of Terror itself ended. The Convention was back in charge. Within weeks, several papers, muzzled or suppressed during the Terror, reappeared, all now vehemently condemning the excesses of Robespierre’s tyranny, notably Tallien’s
L’Ami du citoyen
, the
Décade philosophique,
and Fréron’s
L’Orateur du peuple
, the last from 12 September.

The press could now attack Robespierre’s tyranny without inhibition, but not the Montagne or Thermidorians. Authors venturing further still risked paying a stiff price. Jean Varlet, “orator” of the poor faubourgs, a sansculotte leader execrating not just Robespierre but the entire clique now ensconced in power, published an incisive pamphlet,
L’explosion
, dated 1 October 1794, condemning in particular Barère, Vadier, Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Amar, Carrier, and the physician Pierre-Joseph Duhem (1769–1807), a Montagnard stalwart from Lille. In June 1793, Varlet reminded readers, he had been pushed aside almost immediately after the Brissotin overthrow by individuals he had only belatedly recognized as scoundrels betraying the sansculottes and the Revolution, those who engineered the Montagne’s “horrible dictature.” He had refused to have any further truck with what struck him as the gross deceit perpetrated by the Montagne. Arrested in the autumn of 1793, he had then been released shortly afterward. In his pamphlet of September 1794, Varlet claimed the only way to save the
Revolution was to eradicate abuse of power and return to the Revolution’s core principles, which in his eyes meant restoring an ample share of direct democracy to the sections. “Républicains! Vous dormez! La République est dans les fers” (Republicans! You are asleep! The Republic is in chains).
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He was perfectly correct: the Thermidorian regime now rearrested him. He remained behind bars until October 1795.

The press remained partly shackled. Protest remained muted. Thermidor thus marked a total rejection of Robespierre’s person and dictatorship, liquidating and imprisoning hundreds, yet a purge carried out by many of the worst and most unscrupulous terroristes on a totally bogus premise. They created a wholly false and artificial wall between themselves and Robespierre’s accomplices, pursuing former colleagues on grounds without any moral or ideological force whatever. At Marseille, where Granet and Moise Bayle took charge, and other principal cities, the same tyrannical scene prevailed as in Paris.
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At Metz, Merlin de Thionville, whose dishonesty had so shocked Forster at Mainz, combined continuing gross financial corruption with particularly malevolent pursuit of his former Jacobin allies. Denouncing Robespierre after Thermidor—a chorus in which David emphatically joined—was hence not remotely a wholehearted disavowal of the Montagne, debased Rousseausime, authoritarianism, or the Terror. While the Terror slowed drastically, the ascendancy of Barras, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, Vadier, Amar, Merlin de Thionville, and other leading terroristes ensured that for the moment power remained not just in Montagnard hands but hands no less compromised and unscrupulous than those responsible before Thermidor.
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The new Montagnard leaders controlling the executive committees included, besides those already named, Treilhard, Dumont, and Jacques-Alexandre Thuriot (d. 1829), former member of the Comité de Sûreté Générale, once a Brissotin, later a Montagnard leader of the Terror, but one who broke with Robespierre shortly before Thermidor, having been expelled from the Jacobins as a concealed “moderate” and “Brissotin.” André Dumont (1764–1836), by any reckoning a veteran terroriste, had been among the most fanatical persecutors of priests in Northern France. After Thermidor, these men joined Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, Amar, and Barère in resisting more fundamental changes and denouncing modérantisme as the chief “passport” of counterrevolutionaries.