Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (82 page)

The Austrians and Prussians advanced while the Vendéean revolt grew in strength and extent, culminating during the very month of the Brissotin overthrow, June 1793, with the capture of Saumur and Angers (24 June). Returning from Corsica in late February 1793, Volney was among the “commissaires observateurs” dispatched westward as the Vendéean insurgency escalated. Appalled by the embattled state of the
country, he strove with undiminished zeal to support the Brissotin executive, including his friend Garat, interior minister since 19 March. Reporting a catastrophe of major proportions from Nantes, he tried to analyze what had gone wrong in relations between the Revolution and the zone of chronic unrest, now provoked into a religious rebellion of astounding ferocity.
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He could not help being afraid, he admitted to a friend, writing in June, lest “I, who have cursed the Koran” be captured by the “musulmans” (Vendéean insurgents).
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Simultaneously, he was menaced from Paris by Marat’s circle, who denounced him too as a traitor linked to Dumouriez. The fall of strongly defended Saumur, after a fierce battle, was yet another a shattering blow to the Revolution, the rebels capturing thousands of muskets, vast stores of munitions, eighty cannon, and eleven thousand prisoners.

The Vendéean uprising hugely encouraged the émigrés and exiled réfractaires abroad. By April, whole groups of refractory priests and monks converged on Western France from neighboring countries, making their way to the rebel areas, fomenting the flames of rebellion. Priests and monks reportedly labored to “fanaticize” the people by assuring them that heaven wished them to rise and fight the “impious horde” they proclaimed enemies of God, priests, and kings. It was decreed on 22 April 1793 that priests who had been deported, or who had voluntarily gone into exile and were already under the Convention’s ban, if caught in France would receive the same penalty as insurgent aristocratic émigrés (i.e., execution). Refractory priests not previously proscribed but testified against by six registered citizens for inciting rebellion faced deportation to Guiana.
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A few counterrevolutionaries began to be summarily sentenced to death by revolutionary courts for the first time in the Revolution. On 21 April, two men—one of Dumouriez’s colonels and the former prior of the Abbey of the Trinity at Clisson, André-Jean Saint-André—were publicly guillotined in Paris, the latter for penning a brochure that summoned the people to revolt and to restore royalty, the manuscript of which he had delivered personally to the wife of a Paris bookseller with payment for its printing.
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The Convention’s Comité de Sûreté Générale meanwhile received numerous warnings from commissaires in the provinces about the growing obstruction to army recruitment and to requisitioning, as well as a wave of royalist propaganda exhorting Frenchmen to rise and deliver the “young monarch and his august family from captivity.” Paris allegedly teemed with subversives diffusing brochures and sowing sedition in public places, “principally the cafés.”
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Copies of some thirty different
monarchist publications were seized from two clandestine Paris bookstores raided in late March. Royalist publications had a thoroughly undesirable impact even on republicans, it was believed, by grossly exaggerating the scale of the insurgency and exulting over military defeats. On 29 March, the Convention passed a draconian press-restraining decree aimed ostensibly just at the royalist press.
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Anyone printing texts “calling for the re-establishment of royalty” or any other authority detracting from the people’s sovereignty, or demanding the Convention’s dissolution, would be brought before the Tribunal Révolutionnaire and sentenced to death. Distributors, street-vendors, and colporteurs selling such texts faced three months’ imprisonment if willing to confess the names of the authors, printers, and persons from whom they received them, and two years if not.
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Thus ended, after four years, the virtually complete press freedom introduced by the Revolution.
Liberté de la presse
was replaced, observed the
Journal de Perlet
on 31 March, by a system of prohibition, limits, and license. Freedom of expression in engraving and political prints was likewise ended to prevent affixing to walls of portrait prints of royalty (and dissemination of pornography). It was forbidden to exhibit portraits of “Louis Capet” and his family, or offer erotic prints for sale.
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But royalist publications, it soon emerged, were only one target of the efforts to muzzle the press. Furious at the Brissotin papers’ disparagement of Marat and Robespierre, Montagnard deputies began using the new emergency decrees to curb the democratic Left republican press as well, where they could.
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In rural areas and small towns, the press war was often the Revolution’s central political arena, journals being the sole means of garnering details about political developments outside the immediate locality. Even the smallest local popular societies received at least one national paper regularly, and large ones sometimes more than twenty. The societies’ reading and debating rooms, where the papers were digested, formed a projection of the wider battle. With the vicissitudes of the power struggle, papers were continually added to, or struck off, subscription lists.

In late April, a furor flared in Indre-et-Loire department, carved from parts of the former province of Touraine in the Loire valley. The representative on mission there, Jean-Lambert Tallien (1769–1820), backing Robespierre, and the departmental conseil général at Tours, controlled by Montagnards, set out to quash both the royalist papers and the Brissotin press. The town of Loches complained to the Convention that the local Montagne had banned no fewer than fifteen newspapers in the
department, including the
Patriote français
and Gorsas’s
Courrier des 85 departements
. Tallien was apparently also trying to ban Carra’s
Annales patriotiques
, the
Courrier de l’Égalité
, the
Gazette nationale, ou le Moniteur universel
, and the
Journal des débats et des décrets.
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A similar fight erupted in the Loiret department with Orléans as its center, local Montagnards endeavoring to suppress every anti-Montagnard paper they could. If freedom of thought is “the most sacred of all the rights of most sacred liberty,” commented the
Journal de Perlet
, only enemies of enlightenment and allies of intellectual blindness stifle this primary freedom. But it was exactly this that the Robespierriste bloc strove its utmost to accomplish.
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The theater remained a key arena of struggle. Latest in the sensational series of theater scandals to shake the capital during the Revolution was that of late March, at the Théâtre Montansier, a playhouse with a Bayonne-born female director, Marguerite Brunet (1730–1820). A former high-class courtisane, later entrusted with organizing entertainments at Versailles from October 1789, Brunet, now called Mlle. Montansier, emerged as one of Paris’s leading pro-Revolution theater directors. Over the winter of 1792–93, authorized by Lebrun-Tondu and helped by a grant from the Republic’s treasury, she introduced republican theater to French-occupied Brussels, performing Chénier’s
Charles IX
and Voltaire’s
Brutus
there through January and February 1793.The performances were, apparently, watched mainly by off-duty French soldiers since locals displayed only indifference or overt aversion. With the March military debacle, she returned to Paris and prepared a fresh staging of Voltaire’s
Mérope
(1743), a play set in antiquity but topically concerned with tyranny, oppression, and civil war. Whether or not her views were influenced by Vonckist democrat and libertarian Lebrun (one of the Montagne’s chief targets), she fell foul of a Commune directive of 31 March that added theater restrictions to the curbs on press freedom. As theater performances had “a powerful influence on the morale of peoples, they needed to be incorporated into the scheme of public instruction,” that is, be more strictly controlled. Only plays promoting Montagnard virtue were henceforth permissible. Kings could no longer be represented except as loathsome tyrants. Among the first plays forbidden as “harmful,” were Laya’s
L’Amis des Lois
and Voltaire’s
Mérope
. Voltaire’s
Mérope
, explained the Montagnard deputy Charles-François Génissieux (1740–1804), needed banning because audiences would inevitably discover in it allusions relevant to current
circumstances, thereby harming l’esprit public. The Convention could no longer obstruct the Commune’s efforts to ban plays.
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Few if any, we have seen, among the better informed were likely to believe the Montagne’s accusations against the Left democrats. Practically none of the highly motivated ex-patriot republicans in Paris did. Paine, Helen Maria Williams, David Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Barlow, Forster, and Lux all loathed the Montagne. The foremost Greek enlightener of the age, Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), who lived in Paris through the entire Revolution and witnessed the fall of the Bastille, Mirabeau’s funeral, and much besides, keeping careful notes, considered Robespierre a “monster” and Marat the worst of men.
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A bizarre incident, occurring in the spring, only deepened the gloom enveloping the ex-patriot community—the attempted “suicide” of one of Paine’s circle, a young surgeon from Derby named Johnson. In mid-April, Johnson stabbed himself with a knife in the apartment block where Paine lodged, and announced he was dying, entrusting his will, papers, and watch to Paine. His will contained the stirring words, “I came to France to enjoy liberty, but Marat has murdered it. I cannot endure the grievous spectacle of the triumph of imbecility and inhumanity over talent and virtue.” Paine passed the text to Brissot for publication in the
Patriote français
before, however, checking that Johnson was actually dead. When it was found that Johnson was wounded but alive, the whole business was converted by the Montagne into yet another example of Brissotin “fraud” and “perfidy.”
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Paine wrote to Danton on 6 May, expressing profound dismay at the situation:

When I left America in the year 1787, it was my intention to return the year following, but the French Revolution, and the prospect it afforded of extending the principles of liberty and fraternity through the greater part of Europe … induced me to prolong my stay upwards of six years. I now despair of seeing the great object of European liberty accomplished, and my despair arises not from the combined foreign powers, nor from the intrigues of aristocracy and priestcraft, but from the tumultuous misconduct with which the internal affairs of the present Revolution are conducted.
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Danton, Paine realized, pursued a difficult, risky course, attempting to ease the Brissotin-Montagnard rift and check Marat and Robespierre, while simultaneously finessing the sansculottes and sympathizing
with their economic woes. Even so, Paine believed, he was doing too little too late to save the Revolution.

On 24 April, Marat’s trial began at nine in the morning; Marat himself, recently in hiding, suddenly resurfaced to answer the charges. The hearings, in which Paine and the
Patriote français
’s managing editor since October 1791, Girey-Dupré, figured among those attesting his unscrupulous activities, proved distressingly short.
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No less than thirty-three Paris sections sprang vigorously to Marat’s defense, calling for the extirpation of Brissot and his allies. So overwhelming and uncompromising was the sansculotte chorus that the divided tribunal judged it politic in the circumstances to terminate the proceedings briskly. After only six hours, at three in the afternoon, Marat was acquitted to tumultuous applause. His head crowned in a wreath of roses, the people’s hero “was carried in triumph from the courtroom” by crowds of ecstatic sansculottes yelling, “Vive Marat! Vive la Montagne!” The euphoria was boundless. Returning to the Convention, Marat delivered a jubilant victory speech before being carried through the streets to the Jacobins, where such a throng surged in to cheer that the galleries collapsed, injuring five.

To help boost the public’s adulation, a play entitled
Le triomphe de Marat, ou les Conspirateurs
was staged at the Théâtre de l’Estrapade two weeks later.
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The Marat personality cult reached such dimensions, becoming so adulatory and aggressively populaire, it bothered others besides the Brissotins. To preclude automatic transfer of his body, after his death, to the Panthéon, as many were proposing, Danton (who had long distrusted Marat), joined with the Brissotins in early May to pass a resolution declaring that no Frenchman, whatever “services” he had rendered, could be buried in the Panthéon until minimally twenty years after death. Psychologically and politically, Marat’s acquittal proved a turning point, decisively bolstering authoritarian populism. Not only had the Montagne consolidated their grip over most Paris sections, but they appeared to be extending it on all sides, aborting freedom of the press and suppressing basic human rights wherever they seized control, most flagrantly thus far in Marseille and Lyon but increasingly also in smaller towns.

Defeated militarily, the Revolution also faced a grim economic crisis. Conscripting vast numbers of men from the countryside, requisitioning supplies in the northeast and southeast for the war fronts, and serious disruption in the west, as well as the steadily falling value of printed money (
assignats
), combined to create chronic shortages. In Lyon, bread prices, as in other southeastern cities, broke records exceeding—by over a third—those in Paris. At Grenoble, by early April 1793, bread prices had more than doubled compared to the previous year’s levels.
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At Montauban, bread prices rose by a quarter during the spring of 1793.
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Everywhere, profiteering became a serious problem, making it easy for the uninformed to embrace Robespierre’s accusation that the Brissotins were encouraging hoarding and deliberately supporting the interests of the rich against the poor.
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Government efforts to restrain bread prices while upholding free trade policies, combined with assistance to those most deserving support, proved unavailing. In Paris, sansculotte indignation boiled over.