Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (50 page)

All the Paris section assemblies, several demanding dismissal of the “executive power,” others demurring, went into permanent session in a frantic climax of debate and local wrangling. The Mauconseil section, after its 31 July meeting, reported in letters to other section assemblies and sociétés populaires that with the required number of more than six hundred of their section members present, they had agreed the nation could only surmount the “dangerous crisis in which it now finds itself ” by repudiating the present Constitution, since this no longer expressed la volonté générale. All Paris sections together, urged Mauconseil, must announce that “Louis XVI is no longer king of the French.”
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Marseille too was plunged into extreme ferment. A notably uncompromising republican speech was delivered there on 2 August by Moise Bayle,
procureur-général syndic
of the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, to which the city belonged. Representative government, held Bayle, should be in essence “la pure démocratie.” The king did not represent the supreme will of the nation, and the people should now choose between
executive power, like that exercised by Louis Capet (i.e., the king), and one elected by, and accountable only to, the people. No executive power should possess a veto over the national legislature’s decrees. “Kings are the curse of the earth.”
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As the German armies advanced, a missive from the Palatinate’s clandestine Society of the Rights of Man at Mannheim, dated 2 August 1792, was read to the Assembly on 9 August. Mannheim Jacobins applauded the French for their revolutionary courage and ardor while bitterly deploring the fatal rift in their midst threatening to wreck the Revolution by burying democratic principles under a deluge of acrimony and strife. They summoned the Assembly’s deputies to stop their bickering, end the stormy “convulsions” marring their debates, and “save France!” With France’s destiny in their hands and all Europe mobilizing against them, the French would lose their liberty and decimate the hopes of all freedom lovers in France, Germany, and everywhere if they failed to rally at the eleventh hour. If the Revolution was doomed, at least the Assembly should afford mankind the consolation of knowing they had done everything possible to repel the monster of monarchical despotism menacing them all with annihilation. Europe’s princes detested Feuillant constitutional monarchists no less than Jacobins, and, if victorious, would decimate all the revolutionary factions with equal fury, trampling liberty underfoot. Only moments remained if they were to save liberty and the Revolution. Was there any lovelier destiny on earth? Be the saviors of France and all Europe, the Mannheim society urged, “et faire triompher la philosophie.”
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“Faire triompher la philosophie,” Robespierre’s and Marat’s aversion notwithstanding, was indeed the essence of the Jacobin revolution of August 1792. “Among enlightened men attached to the public good,” exclaimed Condorcet in the
Chronique de Paris
on 5 August, “it is no longer Louis XVI’s treason (sufficiently demonstrated by his entire conduct), nor his deposition,” as the appropriate punishment, that “divides opinion, but rather the consequences of such a measure at a moment when the enemy is at the gates.” Insurrection, he averred, like Diderot and d’Holbach before him, “is the last resort of oppressed peoples.”
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If the Assembly fragmented, so did most Paris sections. Throughout the sweltering evening of 9 August, the furious struggle in the section assemblies intensified with insurrectionist democrats battling waverers and government supporters. In section Roi-de-Sicile, corresponding to what today is the Marais district on the Seine’s Right Bank, the conservative section president and his supporters withstood the insurrectionists.
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In the Lombards section, where the Left republican Louvet presided, anti-Robespierre Jacobins, backed by Condorcet and the
Chronique de Paris
, gained the upper hand.
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Elsewhere, Robespierristes predominated. But nowhere was there any clear-cut class or sociological differentiation lending a social base to republican insurrectionism: most Parisians remained both confused and inactive. While representatives from at least twenty-eight Paris sections participated in mobilizing the insurrection of 10 August, the basic impulse emanated from tightly organized committees concentrated in a few sections, chiefly on the Left Bank, especially the Cordeliers, where Danton, Chaumette, and Desmoulins presided, the Lombards, and Mauconseil, as well as among the fédérés, particularly the Marseillais contingent under Barbaroux.
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The highly disciplined and coordinated uprising, led by politicized commissaires of the democratic sections, commenced during the night of 9 August at three or four different locations—the Cordeliers; the barracks of the Marseillais, where Carra prominently participated; the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where the Alsatian officer, François-Joseph Westermann (d. 1794), a friend of Danton, commanded with Antoine-Joseph Santerre (1752–1809), another veteran of the faubourgs; and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, where furious locals eager to smash the busts of Lafayette and Bailly were aroused by Claude Fournier
l’Américain
, military veteran and long-standing rabble-rouser.
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Beginning in the early hours with alarm bells pealing, the new insurrection first engineered a coup in the Commune. “Commissaires” named by the insurrectionary sections converged, dissolved the old Commune, and formed a new city government to lead the uprising.
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Early on 10 August 1792, a few hours after the coup at the city hall, crowds of sansculottes led by the Marseillais initiated the second stage. At daybreak, contingents of armed men from the sections, with Desmoulins figuring prominently, marched in a swelling column via the Pont Royal toward the royal palace. Robespierre, by contrast, remained out of sight throughout the next twenty-four hours, inactive and wholly uninvolved, as in previous insurrections (though Marat and Danton were also not conspicuous).
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The crowds surged forward. But in directing this rising, what counted was the cadre of professional revolutionaries, a totally unrepresentative (as well as mostly non-Parisian) clique of mob organizers and section leaders. As Durozoy put it, they were all “republicans, Pétionistes,
novateurs
, Brissotins, and
philosophistes
,” the veteran “secte régicide.”
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Initially, armed troops of royalist contre-révolutionnaires also roamed
the streets. In fact, elements at court and of the Feuillants attempted a preemptive military strike to restore the monarchy’s authority. Paris’s royalist journalists, Suleau, Suard, and Rivarol, with many of their editorial and printing staff, rushed to arms to help defend the king.
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A royalist group headed by Lafayette tried to effect the king’s escape from Paris. But as the huge scale of the rising materialized, few royalists remained in arms in the streets; most, like the journalist Durozoy, hid, or, like Lafayette and Malouet, fled. The Feuillant club’s premises were ransacked. Several prominent monarchiens were killed, including Clermont-Tonnerre and Suleau, editor of the royalist
Journal de Suleau
(1791–92), who, having declined Desmoulins’s offer to shelter him in his apartment, was caught near the wrecked Feuillant club, beheaded, and had his head affixed to a pike.

A moderately large and noisy but organized mass of approximately twenty thousand, chanting the “Marseillaise,” surrounded and then entered the palace grounds, fairly peaceably at first. A coolheaded plan of Roederer to extricate the royal family and usher Louis, Marie Antoinette, and their children in among the deputies helped the Brissotins control a key strand of the drama. Many aristocrats and courtiers around the palace disappeared, while others donned the uniform of the Swiss and joined the guards. The waiting massed Swiss, after initially offering the crowds signs of an amicable reception in the main courtyard, suddenly delivered a withering fusillade, downing some four hundred
patriotes
and initially driving the invaders back. But their volleys so infuriated the demonstrators, especially the Marseille and Brest volunteers, that these launched a full-scale assault, employing cannon. There was an immense amount of firing in and around the Tuileries, some musket balls hitting the walls of the adjoining Assembly building. Finally, after a bitter fight, the insurgents stormed the palace and overwhelmed the guards, the battle ending in the massacre of those who had tried to slaughter the Patriots, around six hundred Swiss and courtiers. Those not shot dead were hacked to death with knives, hatchets, and pikes. Only a handful of Swiss survived, helped by Louvet, Brissot, and others to hide in the Assembly’s corridors.

By the late afternoon of 10 August the insurgents controlled the capital, having lost some ninety killed and around 300 wounded. Jacobins and Cordeliers, some carrying banners inscribed “Patrie, Liberté, Égalité,” held the city hall, all the capital’s sections, and the entire palace grounds. Blood and corpses lay strewn throughout the Tuileries courtyard, on the staircases, and in the galleries, chapel, and gardens. The
adjoining barracks of the Swiss guards were ablaze. Strikingly, there was practically no pillaging of the staggering quantity of valuables, jewelery, and art found scattered everywhere within the palace, most of these items being brought into the Assembly corridors and rooms by honest plebeians for safekeeping.
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The 10 August uprising was promptly sanctioned politically by the Assembly, now emptied of Feuillants and spurred by the Commune. In the late morning, with the fighting at the Tuileries continuing, an Assembly commission of twelve prepared a sensational emergency decree suspending the king from his constitutional duties, dissolving the ministry, and announcing there would shortly be elections for a new National Convention. A fresh executive ministry would be elected by the legislature that very day. The king was suspended “until the National Convention has pronounced on the measures it believes should be adopted to assure the people’s sovereignty and the reign of liberty and equality.” Placards were posted up in the streets on Assembly orders, summoning all citizens in the name of the nation, liberty, and equality to respect the Rights of Man and the liberty of others, an initial warning to the démagoguistes.
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At the same time, the Assembly’s sweeping law of 9 November 1791 proscribing aristocratic émigrés in arms against the Revolution, vetoed by the king and inoperative until now, was implemented with immediate effect.

The king and royal family were to remain the people’s “hostages,” guaranteeing there was no further treachery and that those vile “conspirators,” the Feuillants, could no longer undermine the “tranquilité publique” through intrigues with the king. Later, on 10 August, the Assembly proclaimed that France’s internal troubles since 1789 were due to the nation being continually betrayed by “the executive power,” especially a monarch feigning to uphold the Constitution while actually constantly scheming to subvert it. Louis had conspired with the aristocracy “contre la liberté publique” and hence lost all legitimacy. His “continual acts of counterrevolution” necessitated a new constitution, the chief task of the National Convention about to be elected. The royal family, meanwhile, would remain among the Assembly until calm was restored and subsequently be lodged, Brissot intended, under citizen guard in the Luxembourg. Louis was to be detained for as long as the European powers remained in arms fighting on his behalf, the queen and their family also remaining “pour la nation des otages de rigueur.” All court pensions were stopped forthwith, with a much-reduced provision of 100,000 francs monthly assigned for the royal family’s upkeep. A delegation of twelve informed the king of his family’s indefinite detention and reduced status and upkeep.
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Figure 6. French School,
Attack on the Tuileries, 10th August 1792
, 18th century, colored engraving. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library.

More important still, universal male suffrage was proclaimed the fundamental principle of the Revolution. For the first time anywhere in the modern transatlantic world, democracy was adopted as the basis of political legitimacy, a great landmark. All male citizens older than twenty-one, after swearing a civic oath to maintain everything in “the new French constitution that does not depart from the two basic principles of the Revolution, liberty and equality, or in any way infringe the Rights of Man,” would be entitled to vote.
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To ensure the elections’ integrity, each departmental primary assembly would send observers to follow proceedings in the others. Several additional revolutionary principles were also clarified on that day or soon afterward. At Brissot’s suggestion, before proceeding to elect the new ministry, the Assembly announced that the outgoing ministry “did not have the confidence of the nation,” and that formal accusations would be propounded in the
people’s name.
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Organizing the Assembly’s proceedings was vested, from 12 August, in a new steering committee of twenty-five chaired by Brissot. Proclaiming its own primacy as the voice of the “true sovereign,” on 13 August, the Assembly issued an official account of the dethronement, composed by Condorcet, deliberately minimizing the role of popular intervention in the outcome.