Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (60 page)

Rejecting the referendum, Montagnards also repudiated the doctrine that popular sovereignty is expressed in votes and referenda. What Condorcet and his friends (including Paine) offered was a full-blown representative, democratic culture, with elections and assemblies on different
levels and just one legislative chamber at the apex, with an executive managed by the legislature. Montagnards, by contrast, with their very different ideology, preferred a strong executive and weak legislature, with less say for departments and municipalities. They propounded a more abstract view of popular sovereignty. But it was not this that enabled them to win the argument but rather invoking the likelihood of civil war. Closing the debate on 15 January, the Convention president announced that of 707 deputies present and voting, 424 rejected the appel as against with 283 in favor, a majority of 141.
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Losing this vote over the referendum placed the democratic republicans in a most awkward position, for this reverse obliged them to qualify their assent to the king’s execution in ways that supplied further pretexts for styling them modérantistes, crypto-royalists, and counterrevolutionaries.

Without a referendum, most of the Brissotin leadership hesitated to declare the death penalty legitimate; only Carra pronounced “our Revolution the product of the progress of reason” and urged prompt execution.
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Manuel and Villette proposed imprisonment until the war ended and, like Kersaint and Garran-Coulon, “perpetual banishment” thereafter.
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Manuel, opposing kings while the Constitution was monarchical, sneered
Le Père Duchesne
, now says “if we do not preserve Louis alive we shall soon have instead ‘king Marat’ or ‘king Robespierre.’ ”
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Pierre Daunou preferred permanent detention. Paine and Condorcet too rejected the death penalty, the latter suggesting the Convention should first pass sentence and then suspend it until the new Constitution was finalized; when the referendum was held asking the people to endorse the new Constitution, the king’s fate and other questions could be put to the primary assemblies at the same time.
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Pétion, Vergniaud, Guadet, and Gensonné all still supported the death sentence in principle but now wanted implementation postponed indefinitely. Louvet advised execution but only after endorsement of the new Constitution by referendum. Brissot had all along deemed Louis “guilty of treason,” he explained on 16 January, and deserving of execution, but implementing this sentence without consulting the people, he also thought, must create “de terribles inconvénients.” The real solution—submitting the matter to the nation’s judgment—the Assembly had resolved to dispense with. Whoever the evil genius behind this was, “he had prepared incalculable misfortunes for France.”
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With the appel dismissed, and no referendum, the Convention overwhelmingly found France’s monarch guilty of treason. The resolution to execute him, however, passed only narrowly, by 387 to 334 votes,
rendering his fate a fraught issue for weeks. While among the Brissotins only Buzot and Barbaroux voted unequivocally for death, all that faction was obliged to acquiesce, noted Hébert, in what they could not prevent.
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Louis XVI was guillotined on 21 January 1793, with an immense crowd looking on, in the former Place Louis XV, now renamed Place de Révolution (
figure 8
). Culturally and psychologically, this was a crucial landmark. But the January drama over the king’s fate actually made little difference to the basic rift determining the Revolution’s course, as the real divide separating the revolutionary Left from the authoritarian populists was scarcely affected by it.

Economic hardship also contributed to the Brissotin ascendancy’s gradual crumbling from January onward. With war burdens and exactions weighing heavily, a grave subsistence crisis developed in the main cities over the winter. The Brissotin regime’s approach was to combine economic freedom and free trade with aiding society’s weakest. Brissotins preferred not to infringe upon the basic principle of economic freedom by imposing sweeping price controls, or taking the draconian measures against hoarders and speculators urged by Marat and Hébert. The government attempted to assist particular groups with special needs. Under a decree of late December 1792, public assistance was made available to those wounded, and the wives, children, and elderly relatives of those killed, fighting at the front or participating in the 10 August insurrection. Everyone eligible for help under its terms was required to inscribe his name on official lists kept by the municipal sections and smaller municipalities. The wounded applying for aid had to submit certificates from physicians or other health functionaries providing details of their wounds, copies of their marriage certificates, and the birth certificates of their children, which enabled the sections to determine the sums each should receive from the public purse.
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But it was all too little.

In response to soaring prices, a peaceful mass demonstration by Parisian women demanding cheaper food and soap (essential to laundresses) occurred on 24 February 1793. This was followed by ugly rioting on 25 and 26 February, marked by assaults on food stores. A striking feature of this commotion was that shops belonging to known Jacobin supporters were spared while others, not owned by Jacobins, both small and large suppliers, were indiscriminately pillaged. Many grocers were ruined in the riots. But ordinary sansculottes were not those principally involved. Rather, the disturbances were fomented by organized gangs deliberately inciting violence. According to a shopkeepers’ delegation that afterward appealed to the Convention, presenting a detailed statistical table of cost prices verified by noninterested parties, the crisis stemmed not from hoarding or profiteering but from surges beyond their control in the basic prices of flour, sugar, soap, and other key items.
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An angry row ensued in the Convention between sympathizers, who argued that the grocers should be indemnified, and Montagnards, who demanded they be made to restitute “what they gained since the start of the Revolution by selling food too dearly.” The Montagnard stance elicited lively applause from the galleries but was condemned by Buzot, Boyer-Fonfrède, and other Brissotin deputies. Little doubt remained, retorted Buzot, provoking much indignant yelling from the galleries, that the rioters wrecking the shops had been incited to do so. The Convention could not condone organized violence perpetrated by “brigands,” nor allow the “morality of the people” to be “corrupted.”
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Figure 8. Execution of Louis XVI, Paris, 21 January 1793, in the Place de la Révolution (formerly the Place Louis XV, renamed in 1795 Place de la Concorde). Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Renewed rioting erupted on 9 and 10 March, this time in response to military defeat in Belgium. On 9 March, Marat’s
L’Ami du peuple
violently denounced the “great treason of the generals,” especially
Dumouriez and Miranda.
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At the Jacobins, Hébert likewise demanded the heads of the generals and ministers responsible. Armed bands of insurgents and Enragés, a few thousand strong, endeavoring (not very successfully) to provoke a wider insurrection and pouring abuse on Brissot, Pétion, Gorsas, Barbaroux, Vergniaud, and Roland, roamed the Paris streets, some yelling their undying veneration for the “great Marat” and their resolve to kill the “traitors” responsible for the military disaster. Several section bosses adroitly exploited the military reverses to inflate “the people’s” demand for a special tribunal révolutionnaire to execute “traitors” and “conspirators.” A tiny club of extremists, the Défenseurs de la République Une et Indivisible, headed by Hébert, Fournier, and several others of the unruliest sansculotte leaders—impatient with Robespierre’s preference for methods ostensibly legal—directed the most militant sections to call out the sansculottes and assail the print-shops “where the papers of Brissot, Gorsas and others of that nature are printed.”
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On the evening of 9 March, a troop of two to three hundred ruffians invaded the print-shops of Gorsas and Condorcet’s
Chronique de Paris
, smashing the presses, destroying the type, and wrecking much else. As armed rioters broke in, Gorsas, pistol in hand, escaped via a back window. Condorcet’s paper was now permanently disabled. Prudhomme and his friends, grabbing weapons, managed to drive off the gang before they could wreck his print-shop.
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This episode, about which Louvet published a damning account on 3 May, marked a major step toward both demolishing the revolutionary press and forcibly suppressing press freedom as such.

There was serious trouble also at Bordeaux. On 8 March, a furious crowd, mainly women, marched on Bordeaux’s majestic riverside city hall from the city center, smashing windows and throwing stones at the National Guard. A deliberately instigated, organized disturbance, eyewitnesses attested spotting male Jacobins, disguised as women, directing the crowd. The Guard halted the mob by firing in the air, albeit killing one protester.
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But however deadlocked the Convention and the whole country was, the 10 March journée proved that those demonstrating in the streets at this point comprised only a few unrepresentative and disparate groups orchestrated by disparate but highly organized political cliques. The two journées were scarcely a manifestation of popular sentiment in any genuine sense. In any case, helped by rain, the crowds were relatively easily dispersed.
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In Paris, a recently arrived battalion of four hundred volunteers from Brest, lodged in a suburb and mobilized by Goazre de Kervélégan, a Left republican deputy from Finisterre, quickly suppressed the main anti-Brissotin ferment.
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Only four section assemblies—Mauconseil, Bonne-Nouvelle, Lombards, and Théatre-Français—openly joined the attempted coup by labeling the Brissotins as traitors responsible for the Belgian debacle. Blaming the defeats on the Brissotins, not bread shortage, was clearly the demonstrations’ chief theme, even though these two chaotic days were the work of a typical mix of unruly elements—resentful and impoverished sansculottes, groups of disgruntled and angry soldiers and féderés embittered against their commanders, and gangs aiming to channel protest into targeted attacks on Brissotins. To evade the mobs, Left republican leaders kept away from both the Assembly and their homes, gathering, under Louvet’s lead, in locations unknown to the rioters. Consequently, none were caught. The Commune, Jacobins, and National Guard made no overt move, and the disturbances rapidly petered out.

The three most important features of the March 1793 riots are the very small number of people involved, the riots’ prearranged, manipulative character, and the growing tension they revealed—evident already in the February riots—between Marat’s followers and Enragé elements that resented the manipulation aimed at channeling sansculotte discontent and protest behind Marat, Robespierre, and Billaud-Varenne. The unrest proved for all to see that the main body of hard-core sansculotte activists was far from being firmly behind the Montagne and that there was a bitter struggle for the loyalty of the poor faubourgs. Anti-Montagnard posters had appeared denouncing Marat and Hébert, one signed by “Harrington,” urging “all republicans” to “unite with the worthy industrious people and the bourgeois” and wage “implacable war on the brigands seducing the ignorant” (into demanding the Brissotins’ arrest).
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The sansculotte group actively involved in the 9 and 10 March disturbances, called the Défenseurs de la République Une et Indivisible, a bunch of rowdies fond of publicly burning Brissotin literature, disrupting “unpatriotic” theater performances, and ejecting “undesirables” from Palais-Royal cafés, had among their leaders the notorious Claude Fournier
l’Américain
(1745–1825). Once a rum distiller in Saint-Domingue (hence his nickname), Fournier had been a leading agitator in all the great Parisian movements since July 1789, and was the street boss for whom Gracchus Babeuf, the future conspirator, was at this point acting as deputy. On 8 March Marat, angered by Fournier’s unwillingness to respect the Jacobin leadership, had launched a vitriolic attack on him in the Convention and, backed by Billaud-Varenne, tried to get him arrested. A leading rabble-rouser, Fournier retaliated by
denouncing his rival in the streets and afterward publishing a vitriolic printed attack on Marat, dated 14 March, that may have been penned by Babeuf. This pamphlet depicts Marat as utterly base and false, no “friend of the people,” someone condoning harassment of the “best patriots” like Fournier, and, unlike him (but like Robespierre), nowhere to be seen during the storming of the Bastille, the 5 October march on Versailles, the 17 July Champs de Mars journée, the 20 June 1792, or the 10 August insurrection. Marat and Fournier mutually accused the other of complicity in the September massacres.
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