Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (114 page)

Josephine Beauharnais, released from prison after Thermidor, Juliette Récamier, and Térésa Tallien (1773–1835) emerged as the most glamorous of the fashionable Parisian ladies leading the triumphant new trend in fashion—Greek Revival–style flimsy dresses with astoundingly low necklines flaunting the female bosom, plus jewelry.
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Térésa, a famous beauty, daughter of a Madrid banker and courtier of French origin, as the divorced former wife of a noble émigré, the last marquis of Fontenay, had been imprisoned at Bordeaux in October 1793 under the Law of Suspects. Struck by her beauty, Tallien, then
répresentant en mission
at Bordeaux, freed her and made her his mistress. Her moderating influence on him, and overtly anti-Jacobin style, caused Robespierre to have her rearrested in Paris through the Comité de Salut Public. Her imprisonment at La Force contributed to Tallien’s breaking with Robespierre in July 1794. Among the first freed after Robespierre’s overthrow, she then helped free others, earning her nickname “Notre Dame de Thermidor.” In December 1794, she and Tallien married amid general acclaim. “Une grande dame, célèbre par sa beauté, son esprit, et ses grâces,” her elegance, flimsy dresses, many love affairs, and reputation as one of the Terror’s fiercest opponents, made her a constant focus of attention.
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Barras was among her lovers.

The frantic partying of the winter of 1794–95, though, was just a palliative, not a sign of forgetting. The deep rift in the country and the chronic political difficulties it generated persisted unresolved. Rank-and-file republicans found it far easier to renounce Robespierriste austerity and Marat than to rehabilitate Brissotins or reject the Montagne’s view of the September massacres and the sansculottes’ role in 31 May and 2 June 1793. Only hesitantly and tentatively did the Old Jacobins, struggling to come to terms with the catastrophe, especially surviving
Dantonistes and Hébertistes, join with outcast Brissotins, apportioning blame, punishing the guilty, and ascertaining how far the Convention had erred. On 6 February erupted a particularly “violent discussion” in the Assembly over the case of the editor of the
Spectateur français
, Pierre-Firmin de Lacroix (1743–ca. 1827), a professor of public law who was considered a covert royalist and counterrevolutionary. Certain deputies wished to send the arrested man before the department of Paris’s “criminal tribunal” for trial as a counterrevolutionary, but this, objected others, contradicted “all principles of justice and legislation.” Press liberty must be restored. A war of words ensued. “Do you [the Thermidorians] think we are still at 22nd Prairial (10 June 1794),” demanded Jean Pelet de la Lozère (d. 1842), one day to be a leader of the Revolution of 1830, “when Robespierre labeled us ‘royalistes’ simply because we were not criminals? Royalists are insurgents aspiring to seize power, willing to murder, pillage, and lie. The people have been ceaselessly perplexed for five years [i.e., since the split between liberal monarchists and republicans in 1790] by denominations like
Fayettiste
,
clubiste
,
modéré
,
fédéraliste
,
Feuillant
,
royaliste
.” The people should hear the truth.
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Duhem, a leading member of the Comité de Sûreté Générale and implacable antagonist of libertarian journalists (and priests), led those defending Jacobin authoritarianism on this occasion. Under present laws a mandatory death sentence applied to anyone publicly propagating royalism, the grounds on which Lacroix was remanded. “Do you not understand,” Duhem urged the chamber, “that those demanding freedom of expression nurtured perfidious designs? Do you not know that rascals frequenting the Palais-Royal, the Gilded Youth, persecute and attack Patriotes? The
peuple doré
, the
brillante jeunesse
following Fréron make war on the Jacobins and
sans-culottes
. Royalism and aristocracy gain ground on all sides while the Convention stands idly by!” His unreformed Montagnard Jacobinism was greeted with cries of indignation, yells of “lock him up in the Abbaye!” The Assembly did actually vote for Duhem to cool off in the Abbaye for three days, despite another veteran Montagnard, Choudieu, protesting that he had not insulted the Convention but merely stated the truth. Choudieu was shouted down by members reminding him that he had been the accuser of the “virtuous Philippeaux,” whose reputation, along with those of Desmoulins and Danton, was now fully restored.

By February 1795, the Thermidorians had lost their grip, but it remained unclear what had replaced it.
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A besieged, discredited regime struggled to check the inevitable, growing surge of disorderly
opposition. A new revolutionary rationale was needed. Parisians witnessing the scandalous scene provoked by Duhem, affirmed Barras, will not again be the “dupes of villains” plotting civil strife: “we must make unremitting war on both
royalistes
and
terroristes
,” a summons loudly applauded. Lawyer Jean-François Reubell (1747–1807) heartily agreed, repeatedly equating “aristocracy” and
terrorisme
as the twin dangers facing the Revolution, justifying “putting them on the same line” because their aspirations and goals were similar—both vilifying and seeking to dissolve the Convention. Besides needing to confront resurgent monarchism and terrorisme simultaneously, the Convention felt bound to dismantle Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being while also curbing any remaining impulse behind coercive de-Christianization. Religion had been a chronic problem for the Revolution throughout. Most of the Convention deputies were deists, or at least deism was the creed most often admitted to in discussion among them.
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But few now doubted that the Republic had to jettison Robespierre’s much-ridiculed Cult of the Supreme Being without either embracing the decimated and discarded constitutional church or relaxing proscription of the refractory clergy.

Accordingly, the Convention entered upon an entirely new path, edging further toward secularization and democratic modernity. In September 1794, a degree of legal separation of religion and state was introduced, permitting the Catholic mass in private halls, apartments, and some monastic chapels, while large churches remained out of bounds to the pious. Complete separation ensued after a remarkable clash in the Convention on 21 February, initiated by the irreligious ex-Protestant Boissy d’Anglas. He loudly rejected both Catholic dominance of society and the de-Christianizing intolerance and dogmatism of Hébert and Chaumette. This momentous debate ended with the Convention dismantling whatever remained of the Montagne’s antireligious oppression and restoring full liberty of conscience and religious practice. But rather than revert to the 1790–93 pattern with the constitutional clergy maintained by state and society, formal separation of church and state—legally, financially, and ceremonially—followed. Under the decree of 21 February 1795, no one could be hindered from practicing the religion of his or her choice, nor compelled to contribute to any cult; the Republic would not pay the salaries of any clergy of whatever denomination.
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During March 1795, some larger churches were allowed to reopen for Catholic worship, albeit strictly on the basis that state and church were now wholly distinct and public displays of priestly
vestments, ceremonies in the streets and squares, and ringing church bells remained forbidden. Much of what remained of the constitutional clergy at this point abandoned the Abbé Grégoire and his colleagues, making their peace with orthodoxy.

A clear solution to the religious conflict was found. But how was the Convention to deal with its other difficulties? As the subsistence crisis deepened and the sansculotte mood grew uglier, the Convention adopted a riot-control act, proposed by Sieyès, on 21 March. On the 27 and 28 March 1795, fresh bread riots erupted in Paris, followed by attempts to march on the Convention, though this was nothing more than a prelude to major further unrest, culminating in the journée of 12 Germinal (1 April). This began with crowds mobbing the bakeries and with women fighting over loaves of bread but turned into an immense mass demonstration that besieged the Convention hall for many hours. Crowds of many thousands demanded bread, renewal of the Maximum, and the democratic Constitution of 1793. Section leaders used the opportunity to harangue the deputies for the release of hard-line Montagnards imprisoned after Thermidor, which placed the Convention’s Jacobin remnant in a peculiarly awkward position, caught between their agreement with sansculotte demands and their needing not to be seen fomenting a new wave of populist authoritarianism. Fobbed off with vague promises, the marchers were eventually persuaded to leave empty-handed. National Guard reinforcements under General Jean-Charles Pichegru (1761–1804), once a simple soldier, later president of the Jacobin society of Besançon and conqueror of Holland, energetically restored order.

Germinal, a rising widely attributed to neo-Jacobin intrigue, if not in its economic origins then in its direction and demands,
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had the opposite effect to that envisaged by the section organizers as far as the Montagne’s faltering grip on the Convention, and the imprisoned Montagnards, were concerned. Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Barère, and Vadier had already been detained pending trial on 2 March, following investigations by a special commission into their activities on the Robespierriste executive committees. Boosted by Germinal, proceedings against the terroristes accelerated. The Convention’s leadership, now decisively weighted against the Thermidorians, ordered a much broader crackdown on authoritarian populists. Amar, Duhem, Choudieu, Lecointre, Levasseur, Cambon, and Léonard Bourdon figured among protagonists of the Terror now arrested in Paris, and Bayle and Granet in Marseille. Numerous sansculotte activists were interned, and
the National Guard was reorganized to create a firmer barrier against popular insurrection.
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It was grimly ironic that Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Barère, and Vadier, tyrants who had massacred thousands, were now tried according to the strict letter of the law, under scrupulous new rules of procedure. All were pronounced guilty, but they were sentenced not to execution but deportation to the Guianas, causing immense chagrin to surviving widows and relatives intent on revenge, though deportation to Devil’s Island, off Cayenne, was supposedly a virtual death sentence, slow and uncomfortable. The four were transported to the Atlantic coast for embarkation, but Barére managed to get left behind, causing a Convention wit to remark that “it was the first time Barère had missed the wind”; in October, he escaped and subsequently remained in hiding at Bordeaux for the next four years. Vadier too escaped and successfully hid.
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Billaud-Varenne reached Cayenne but eventually also escaped, reaching Mexico under a false name where he joined a Dominican monastery; he later embarked on a new career as an official in Saint-Domingue, surviving until 1819. Only Collot d’Herbois obligingly expired in Cayenne in January 1796.

Fouquier-Tinville, on the other hand, following a thirty-nine-day meticulously correct trial for gross perversion of justice,
was
publicly executed in Paris, dispatched on 7 May, coldly arrogant to the last, answering jeers with defiant scowls, guillotined with fifteen other Tribunal Révolutionnaire judges to the joy of the crowds. From April 1795, a new large-scale, and now more general, roundup of former Montagnards implicated in the Terror proceeded throughout France (and also Belgium).
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In Toulon, the authorities arrested “partisans of Robespierre” while simultaneously also imprisoning royalists. In a huge sweep across France, many thousands of suspects were interned, though most were afterward released under the October amnesty. A minority were deported or sentenced to longer terms of imprisonment. In the southeast, reaction against the Thermidorians was particularly
revanchiste
and violent. Psychologically, Lyon, of course, represented a special case, owing to the city’s still severely traumatized condition and the unparalleled barbarity of the repression there during autumn 1793.

By April 1795, Joseph de Boisset (1748–1813), the Convention
répresentant
sent to Lyon to stabilize the city, faced an unruly, explosive situation permeated by revulsion against everything and everyone associated with Robespierre and the Terror. Republican, anti-Catholic, and antiroyalist, Boisset was one of the honest Montagnards and detractors
of Marat who found himself boxed more and more into an awkward corner the more conscious he became of the need to restore justice and make amends. The more he acknowledged the misdeeds of the Montagne, the more he exposed himself to accusations of encouraging overt anti-Jacobinism and royalist resurgence. His biggest problem was the secret “companies of Jesus” that began exacting vengeance on known Jacobins, initially with small bands pouncing on terroristes individually in the streets. Before long, Boisset faced a full-scale “White Terror” perpetrated by roaming “murder gangs” he proved powerless to halt. On 4 May 1795, major rioting erupted, with insurgents attacking the Lyon prisons to exact vengeance on the Montagnard internees. More than a hundred former terroristes were hacked to death.
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Amid the paroxysm of anti-Jacobin fervor, playing the “Marseillaise” ceased in Lyon for a time. Comparable outbreaks occurred at Marseille, Nîmes, and Aix-en-Provence. Many southeastern rural areas also suffered the sporadic violence of the White Terror, marauding gangs knifing or lynching victims, who besides known Jacobins, in several areas included Protestants and, around Carpentras, also Jews.
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But the violence provoked counterrisings by Jacobins deeming themselves victims of a vicious aristocratic-royalist crusade. Toulon’s arsenal workers rose in insurrection on 17 May, seized the arsenals and weapons supply, and marched on Marseille, intent on releasing the imprisoned Montagnards there, shouting “Vive la Montagne!” It required a week of operations by a force of regular troops and National Guard to disperse the insurgents. When this rising was suppressed, fifty-two insurgents were tried and guillotined by a special commission set up to identify those behind it.
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