Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (53 page)

Figure 7. Jean-Louis Prieur the Young (1759–1795),
Journées de Septembre, massacre des prisonniers de l’Abbaye, nuit du 2 au 3 Septembre 1792
, drawing. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

While little documentary evidence survives proving the premeditated complicity of leading Montagnard politicians, and the subsequent widespread talk of their complicity may have been overstated, the atrocities were too organized and the proceedings at the various locations too much of a pattern to have resulted just from spontaneous “popular justice.” At the Conciergerie where around 300, the largest batch, were slaughtered, at the Abbey, the Châtelet, where around 220 died, at La Force, and elsewhere (except the Temple where the royal
family was confined), the outbreaks all happened in the same methodical fashion. Billaud-Varenne may not have literally paid cutthroats to dispatch listed victims at twenty-four livres each,
⁹¹
but lesser Commune officials were physically present at the larger prisons, acting as makeshift “judges” working from prisoner lists and notes. Sansculotte leaders, recorded Mandar, whose book
Des Insurrections
appeared a few months later (discreetly pointing to Robespierre’s guilt without naming him), became veritable local “dictateurs,” dragging out victims and pronouncing death sentences with unrelenting ferocity.
⁹²
Among those directly complicit were the Hébertiste Jean-Antoine Rossignol (1759–1802) at La Force; Stanislas Maillard (1763–94), who had led the march on Versailles in October 1789, now a Commune official; a “judge” at the Abbey; and Étienne-Jean Panis (1757–1833), prominent in the house searches (including that of Brissot’s house) and a member of the Commune’s vigilance committee who presided at the Châtelet.
⁹³

Marat and the Commune’s vigilance committee, on which Billaud-Varenne also sat, issued a sinister circular on 3 September to the departments, in the Commune’s name, a text apparently printed on Marat’s own press, summoning them to follow Paris’s example and slaughter their interned political prisoners.
⁹⁴
Attributing responsibility to the Montagne, especially the Commune’s vigilance committee, afterward regularly infused Brissotin polemic against the Montagnards. The taint of complicity, however, spread far. Danton, outraged but worried about compromising his favorable standing among the sansculottes in the section assemblies, signally failed to take the vigorous action Manuel, Mandar, and others urged to stop the atrocities.
⁹⁵
Robespierre, after agitating the people with ceaseless talk of treachery, did nothing at all to restrain the gangs’ fury (apart from visiting the Temple prison to ensure security around the royal family).
⁹⁶
The slaughter continued until 6 September. “All principles” were sacrificed on the night of 2 September 1792 and subsequent days, lamented Mandar, on the pretext of saving the country from the enemy. Silence was imposed on the sacred voice of justice and the cry of humanity. Among the few who made strenuous efforts to halt the atrocities, Mandar rushed to Danton when these began, pleading for immediate action. He found Danton gathered with Pétion, Robespierre, Desmoulins, Fabre d’Églantine, Manuel, and the presidents of the forty-eight sections, partly distracted by news just arrived of Verdun’s fall and the latest Prussian advance. Manuel, Brissot, Fauchet, Mandar, Pétion, and other leading revolutionaries tried to halt the killing. Pétion’s deputy, Louis-Pierre Manuel, visited the Abbey
twice with a Commune deputation, endeavoring to stop the violence. But the bands rebuffed him.
⁹⁷
The National Guard inexplicably remained inactive.

Brissot’s and Girey’s
Patriote français
was the only major paper to denounce the atrocities immediately and unreservedly. The rest of the pro-Revolution press did so only belatedly.
⁹⁸
Robespierre’s claim that the killings stemmed from “un mouvement populaire” and were not due to any organized sedition executed by elected officials, was thus initially shared also by non-Montagnards who construed the slaughter as an unfortunate but “necessary” act of popular justice. Prudhomme, Maréchal, Gorsas, Carra, and other anti-Robespierriste journalists admitted as much publicly after later substantially changing their initial view. Looking back in 1797, Prudhomme, as a former front-rank newspaper editor at the time, publicly apologized for and bitterly repented of having whitewashed the horrors of September 1792. He had been grievously at fault, together with Carra and Gorsas, in pronouncing the killings a necessary “act of justice,” rough justice executed by an angry, frustrated populace, against the Revolution’s enemies, whom lax magistrates were examining too slowly.
⁹⁹
By contrast, the Dantonist republican theorist Pierre-François Robert (1762–1826) remained adamant that the killing, though terrible, was indeed
nécessaire,
and that those who subsequently changed their tune were “Girondins” who perfidiously defamed Paris and the Revolution.
¹⁰⁰

The inclination to excuse the killings as a frantic, panicky response to the dire circumstances of September 1792 did not, however, alter the fact that the slaughter
was
instigated by one side in the political struggle and subsequently came under the formidable protective curtain of Robespierre’s political fiefdom. There can be no serious doubt that the September massacres were closely linked to an organized conspiracy, part of a quest for power, both condoned and organized by authoritarian, antidemocratic elements within the Commune. From October 1792 onward, the prison atrocities were regularly and combatively endorsed only by Marat’s and Robespierre’s adherents.
¹⁰¹
“The good” and the defensible in Robespierre’s discourse were defined exclusively by the
populaire
, even when no genuine popular movement was involved and the outcome was a horrific mass crime.

While the prison massacres continued, so did the process of “electing” Paris’s deputies for the Convention. First in his own section, Vendôme, and then in most sections, Robespierre organized an extremely stringent vetting procedure. Candidates were nominated by the
section assemblies’
électeurs
and then the candidates proposed were discussed in the assemblies prior to voting, with the Jacobins supervising the process. The sections accepted Robespierre’s propossal that broad categories of candidates would be declared “anti-civique” and disqualified as unsuitable via a double screening procedure both beforehand and after the voting. Officially, those deleted before voting began belonged to the Club Monarchique and Feuillants, but even if provisionally elected, in practice those disqualified included also all Brissotins. On 5 September, Robespierre himself triumphantly emerged as the first of Paris’s new deputies “elected.” Desmoulins was voted in next, but the third “winner,” Armand, Comte de Kersaint (1741–93), who also won a considerable vote, was immediately disqualified as a Brissotin (rather than as a noble), as were others afterward.
¹⁰²

Like so much in his career, Robespierre’s unabashed vote-rigging and manipulation of the electoral assemblies was, of course, angrily denounced by his opponents, Carra labeling it a “scandalous empire.” “Almost always at the moment despotism is overthrown,” held Louvet, “
agitateurs
appear fomenting anarchy to oppress and tyrannize in their turn.”
¹⁰³
Brissot and Pétion formally protested to the Commune. The sections, complained Brissot, were being obliged by the “charlatans manipulating the people by proclaiming popular sovereignty” to vet their choice of candidates rigorously prior to and subsequent to voting. Although the virulent feuding between Left republicans and démagoguistes had been obvious to seasoned observers for months, on the eve of these historic and crucial elections, most Parisians understood little of this. The fierce vilification of the still widely popular Pétion by self-styled Patriots, a campaign denounced by
La Sentinelle
as a “horrible manoeuvre,” seemed incomprehensible to most people.
¹⁰⁴

The vote-rigging was relentless. In a speech before the Paris electoral assembly on 9 September, Robespierre directed the “electeurs” to prefer Marat to the English philosopher Joseph Priestley, a candidate proposed by Brissot and Condorcet. “I know there exists a coalition of
philosophes
,” complained Robespierre, “I know that Messieurs Condorcet and Brissot seek to put
philosophes
in the Convention. But what need have we of these men who have done nothing but write books?” What was needed were pure, ordinary men, Patriots fighting despotism and thoroughly identifying with the people and understanding their needs.
¹⁰⁵
What could be meaner, more dishonest, or ridiculous, retorted Louvet, than claiming, without mentioning Priestley’s heroic commitment to democracy and free expression, his science and philosophy, or the riot
that demolished his home and laboratory in Birmingham, that the odious Marat, loathsomely hailed at the Jacobins by Chabot as a great man, was a worthier candidate than the Englishman?
¹⁰⁶
Priestley’s candidacy was backed by
La Sentinelle
, as were the candidacies of Bentham and the Manchester radical Cooper.
¹⁰⁷
The
Patriote français
urged Parisians to elect Sieyès, Condorcet, Kersaint, Dusaulx, Chamfort, Lanthenas, Louvet, and Gorsas, as well as Priestley, Bentham, and David Williams.
¹⁰⁸
But in Paris Robespierre’s insistence on “ordinary” men triumphed, and all Brissotin candidates were excluded.

The republican press repeatedly warned Parisians of the danger they incurred with their apathy and failure to attend section assemblies in adequate numbers. Dwindling attendances rendered chicanery and manipulation easy. The Paris electoral council, explained Pétion, worked from a fixed list adhered to “exactement,” ensuring only Marat’s and Robespierre’s partisans were elected. The point of the manipulation was to remove from Paris’s representation in the national legislature every independent-minded figure likely to back the republican democrats. Brissot, Pétion, Sieyès, Condorcet, Bonneville, Villette, Guadet, Paine, Priestley, and other prominent Left republicans accordingly all failed to secure Convention seats for Paris. Not one of the “excellent republicans” proposed by Brissotins was adopted. In the new legislature, all twenty-four deputies representing the capital firmly aligned with the Montagne, no less than fourteen, including Billaud-Varenne, Hébert, Chaumette, Fréron, Ronsin, Vincent, Legendre, Danton, Marat, and Desmoulins—all residents of just one section, the Cordeliers-controlled Théatre-Français, the most fertile in instigating insurrection. Sixteen of the new Paris deputies were simultaneously members also of the new Paris city council, with only Pétion and Manuel remaining from the former Commune.
¹⁰⁹
The resulting Montagnard team representing Paris in the legislature, or what Prudhomme termed “députation exécrable,” exuded unremitting consensus directed from the city hall.

Vote-rigging could not, however, prevent the distinguished candidates rejected in Paris from securing election as Convention deputies elsewhere, and most did.
¹¹⁰
Debarred in Paris, Sieyès was elected by three departments far from the capital; Pétion and Brissot were adopted by Eure et Loire, Cloots and Villette by L’Oise, Lanthenas by Haute-Loire and Rhône-et-Loire.
¹¹¹
Gorsas was elected by two departments, Priestley two, Paine by three, Condorcet five, and Carra, rejected in Paris but famous throughout France due to his paper, by no less than eight departments.
¹¹²
What the manipulation did achieve was a formidable
Parisian bloc in the Assembly, firmly under Robespierre’s thumb. It also generated a wholly artificial ostensible rift between “Paris” and the “Gironde,” loudly trumpeted by the Montagne but actually nothing of the kind. This bogus split between Paris and distant provinces worked well for the Montagne in publicity terms but had little to do with reality on the ground. Ironically, several of those around Brissot and Pétion (who both came from nearby Chartres, and had lived mostly in Paris), were, like Louvet, more authentically Parisian than Robespierre (who was from Arras), Marat (who was Swiss), or Billaud-Varenne (raised in La Rochelle). Among leading démagoguistes, only Collot d’Herbois could plausibly be termed “Parisian.”
¹¹³