Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (81 page)

The show of unity, in fact, collapsed almost at once. In furious speeches at the Convention and Jacobins on 3, 10, and 18 April, Robespierre launched his culminating general denunciation of the “Girondins,” vilifying “Vergniaud, Guadet, Brissot, Gensonné and all the friends of Prussia and Austria,” and of Dumouriez.
¹¹
It was necessary
to finish with the “conspirators” in all the Paris sections where a fierce struggle was now in progress to disarm “all those who have given proofs of their
incivisme
,” to chase away “impitoyablement” all “citoyens douteux” tarred with modérantisme.
¹²
The Revolution’s misfortunes stemmed from defects of public spirit, lack of proper commitment, and excessive liberty of the press. The reverses stemmed from a blind eye being turned to “aristocratic intrigue” and painful indifference to persecution of everyone genuinely supporting liberty and the sansculottes. With the enemy at the door, within France “the people” were being “insulted.” The “veritables traîtres” were not being dealt with.
¹³
Masters of the government and all the administrative bodies, the agents of the
coalition hypocrite
headed by Brissot, Guadet, Vergniaux, and Gensonné, had devoted all their might to undermine the esprit public, revive royalisme, and resurrect aristocracy, rewarding incivisme and perfidy.
¹⁴
The Revolution could not prosper without government, laws, and a public spirit becoming populaire.
¹⁵
Only when the people rose en masse against their foes without and within would the Revolution triumph, something possible only when the people found leaders fully possessing their confidence.
¹⁶

Pressure exerted by the Paris sections for closer supervision of the army, and eradication of treason, intensified. The Republic was in direst danger, petitioned the Tuileries section, and yet, the Tribunal Révolutionnaire specially created to deal with the peril twenty days before still had not cut off any heads. Pouring vitriol on Dumouriez and Miranda, the Paris section Finistère demanded that the troops now elect their own commanders. On 28 March, section bosses sent a joint delegation to the Convention from all forty-eight Paris sections exhorting measures to alleviate the distress of the capital’s poor, including reform of poor relief commissioned two years earlier but subsequently shelved, and accelerate eradication of “traitors.”
¹⁷
With the enemy at the gates, the foe within was fomenting civil war—even in Paris. “Kings are loathsome,” but no king had harmed France, averred Hébert’s
Père Duchesne
on 8 April 1793, as much as “the villanous Brissotins.” This “infernal clique” would deliver France to Austria and England unless all true Patriots rose as one to annihilate them. Arrogantly disdaining the sansculottes of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Brissotins daily arranged for bread supplies to be bought up and hoarded by their valets in order to plunge the sansculottes deeper into misery. For unmasking their perfidy, Marat was pursued as if he, the people’s friend, was the people’s enemy! Marat—who sacrificed himself selflessly for the public good!
¹⁸

Denouncing Left republicans as traitors escalated as the situation on all war fronts deteriorated further, causing their very defense of the Rights of Man to count against them. Brissotin traitors were especially despicable since they had once been true patriots. Brissot, earlier the people’s hero, defending their rights, was now a proven impostor deceiving countless gullible “imbeciles” (who according to Hébert abounded everywhere and were the Revolution’s chief vulnerability), filling their heads with absurdities. Pétion, once venerated by ordinary Parisians as their “father,” wallowed in baseness and treachery; his being “the people’s implacable foe” was clearly proved by his backing Brissot “against the best citizens” during the 10 August insurrection and his perfidiously opposing Robespierre, the people’s “best friend”!
¹⁹
On 5 April Danton asked the Convention to empower the new special Tribunal to arrest and try suspects without prior formal indictment by the Convention. The Montagne wanted the Tribunal Révolutionnaire to have sweeping powers over the lives of individuals. The Brissotins demurred. Barbaroux, implacably opposed to Marat and Robespierre, urged his colleagues to stand firm against counterrevolution and royalism but not be executioners: “soyez législateurs, mais ne soyez pas assassins.”
²⁰
Such a measure, contended Lanjuinais, would violate “all the principles” of the Revolution. The Convention majority agreed, ruling that the
tribunal extraordinaire
could judge crimes of conspiracy and treason only after formal accusations were submitted to the Convention. The Brissotins had their way but at a cost, opponents styling them as waverers and prevaricators who were endangering the Revolution.

Dumouriez, having failed to persuade his men to march on Paris, on 5 April defected to the enemy instead. His departure unsettled Paris further, with exaggerated reports of the scale of the treachery, some ill-wishers estimating the number of deserters as high as twelve thousand. Only on 24 April did the Convention receive reliable news indicating that a mere handful of officers and men, six or seven hundred at the most, far less than defected with Lafayette, had betrayed the tricolor. This was greeted with rapturous applause in the Convention.
²¹
But there was little else to cheer: Valenciennes and Condé, where the garrisons had patriotically trampled Dumouriez’s manifesto underfoot, famously vowing to conquer or die for liberty, were now tightly besieged by the Austrians. Dumouriez’s defection, a severe setback for the Republic, was particularly disastrous for the Brissotins. When word reached Paris, uproar seized both Convention and the sections, the two sides heaping every insult on each other. Robespierre adroitly exploited
the opportunity further to tar Brissot and other opponents as “Dumouriez’s accomplices,” a witheringly effective smear, as it was the Brissotins who had chosen him and extolled the general while he was winning. Accusing the Brissotins of betraying France and liberty formed the basis of the charges in the proceedings initiated in the Paris sections at this point, at Robespierre’s fervent urging, and the surrounding publicity.
²²
A general indictment was drawn up against twenty-two leading Brissotin deputies, and on 15 April, barely three weeks after Danton’s speech of reconciliation, Pache delivered it in person to the Convention on behalf of the sections.

Amid the dismal catalog of reverses, Robespierre’s and the sections’ campaign to indict the Brissotins electrified Paris. Assuredly, not all Paris sections, much less all Parisians, backed the moves to bring the “traîtres” to trial. In around twenty sections, including Butte-des-Moulins, Mail, Lombards, Halle-aux-Bleds, Quatre-Nations, Champs-Élysées, Tuileries, Fraternité, Mont Blanc, Fontaine-Grenelle, Bon-Conseil, and Bonne-Nouvelle, local opinion predominantly condemned Montagnard “despotisme populaire,”
²³
withstanding the arm-twisting and chicanery. Still, some of these were among the thirty-five Paris sections eventually herded into backing the Montagne’s denunciation of the Brissotins, chiefly swayed by the ceaseless denunciation of the Brissotins as “enemies of Paris” and those principally responsible for the military setbacks, malignant men seeking to introduce all the horrors of
fédéralisme
.
²⁴
How long, protested the
Patriote français
, were Brissotins unjustly to be labeled “calomniateurs de Paris,” the city the Montagne dishonored? The real
calomniateurs
were those who ascribed the September massacres, February pillaging of grocery stores, and March “conspiracy” to the Parisian populace. Paris’s true friends were those who attributed these “crimes” to “brigands,” regarded with abhorrence by all decent Parisians.
²⁵

On 15 April, Pache and Hébert led a Commune general council deputation before the Convention on behalf of “a majority of the Paris sections,” accusing twenty-two Brissotin deputies of conspiring with Dumouriez to “federalize” France by granting excessive autonomy to departments. The traitors included Brissot, Guadet, Gorsas, Pétion, Gensonné, Vergniaud, Lanjuinais, Buzot, Salles, Lanthenas, Barbaroux, and Fauchet.
²⁶
Jean-Baptiste Salles (1760–94), a Third Estate deputy for Nancy in 1789, was a young physician, earlier a liberal monarchist and supporter of Lafayette, prominent among those who had called for Louis XVI’s fate to be decided by popular referendum. Earlier a
Feuillant, Salles was useful to the Montagne as a means of linking the other traitors with Lafayette, as well as Dumouriez. Pache’s presentation provoked uproar; the public galleries, packed with Montagnard supporters, wildly applauded the recital of charges, shouting “à la guillotine!”
²⁷
But nothing further resulted since the Convention contained only around fifty or sixty deputies, sufficiently inept, gullible, or dishonest to espouse such glaring untruths. Ominously, though, despite knowing this rigmarole was totally false, Danton made no move to disassociate his group from the charges.

Most of the Assembly indignantly rejected the absurd petition. There was “a conspiracy” sure enough, granted Buzot, over the yelling, but it was the Montagne not the Brissot circle that was conspiring. He would not rest, declared Pétion, until the villainous Robespierre either proved the ridiculous calumnies he “daily vomited forth” or was dragged to the guillotine as he deserved.
²⁸
Undaunted by the rebuff, the Commune printed the petition in twelve thousand copies and circulated it across France. Montagnard propaganda ceaselessly reiterated that if France was to be saved, “the Twenty-Two” must be arrested and punished. The drive to overthrow them was coordinated outside Paris by a five-member
comité de correspondance
of the Commune’s general council, which ensured copies of Pache’s indictment reached municipalities all across the country. “Twenty-Two” became a ritualized figure, carefully retained in subsequent petitions, despite changes in the actual names listed, some being removed to create room for others subsequently still more reviled.

Amid the general military collapse in March, the Montagne perceptibly gained ground, but Parisian opinion cannot be said to have run strongly in their favor. Robespierristes and Dantonistes enjoyed less support among Parisians than their own faction, both Louvet and Pétion maintained.
²⁹
Fauchet also judged Paris’s inhabitants “excellents” in their “immense majorité,” meaning unswayed by the Montagne, if too passive in resisting the “brigands and rascals” manipulating the inner sections through the Jacobins and Cordeliers.
³⁰
The Brissotins tried to counter Pache by filing formal charges against his obstreperous patron, Marat, their goal in pursuing Marat, according to Robespierre, being to provoke a movement that would furnish them with a pretext to “crush liberty.”
³¹
Marat’s arrest, along with that of the other calomniateurs destabilizing the Republic, was moved by Gensonné on 20 April, creating another huge tumult in the Convention. Of around 780 deputies, barely half were present for the ensuing Convention vote, the rest being
absent or away
en mission
(a level neither higher nor lower than usual at this critical time). Of those present, 222 deputies voted in favor of Marat’s impeachment, ninety-eight against, and fifty-five abstained.
³²
The Brissotins undeniably remained the larger bloc in the Convention itself, as well as in France (and even probably Paris). The Convention majority resolved that Marat should be detained in the Abbaye pending trial, but all efforts to find him failed. The Commune retorted by placing Marat under its protection.

The reliably committed Montagne was indeed strikingly small. In January 1793, the elder Marc-Antoine Jullien remarked that the true “spartans of the Mountain, or should I say those that fought at Thermopilae,” the deputies of “straightforward purpose and truly republican souls,” that is, hard-core Montagnards, were only “about twenty.”
³³
He was referring to the genuine egalitarians. Dependable, regular Montagnard support in the Convention at this time amounted, as in the Marat vote, to well over ninety in normal circumstances. Authoritarian populists backing Robespierre, despite their grip on the Paris Commune and most sections, nevertheless clearly remained the voice of a minority, lacking broad-based support across France. Their formidable strength derived, in Paris as in some provincial cities, from the crowds of militant but erratic sansculottes sporadically willing to support them en masse under direction of the committees of the inner-city sections. But the sansculottes, though a decisive force in the Revolution down to the summer of 1795, were also an anarchic, inconsistent ebbing and flowing element, with little cognizance of the general scenario, much under the thumb of their trusted local
dominateurs
, forceful men with scant concern for, or knowledge of, the overall political situation. This means the Montagne, as a force in the Revolution, were good at bludgeoning but poor at persuading, and not just considerably less representative of France as a whole than the Brissotins but also ideologically precarious, constituting in reality a loose coalition of highly unstable, centrifugal groups intermittently rallying behind Marat and Robespierre but mostly decidedly confused and readily led in divergent directions.
³⁴