Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (83 page)

Figure 11. Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845),
The Triumph of Marat, 24 April 1793
, oil on paper mounted on canvas. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library.

Impoverishment and unemployment blighted every aspect of plebeian life also in Marseille. Even so, in the great cities of southern France, the Montagne’s authoritarianism, coercive methods, and obsession with surveillance antagonized not only republican democrats and conservatives but also distressed plebeians. The Marseille sections witnessed a
vigorous upsurge of resistance to the vindictive, dictatorial methods of local Montagnards emulating their Parisian counterparts. Indeed, by the end of April the Montagne appeared to have already passed their zenith and begun to lose ground as more and more people saw through the charade. Earlier, in November 1792, Jacobin militants, led by Marie-Joseph Chalier (1747–93), a local manufacturer, destined to become one of the Montagne’s supreme national heroes, the so-called Marat Lyonnais, triumphantly captured control of the Lyon city government. Lyon’s Jacobins experienced no difficulty in converting their city into a redoubt for Marat and Robespierre, supported by the unemployed and poor. But it proved harder to keep the allegiance of sansculottes who had been promised cheaper food, especially as Chalier’s clique, unrivaled at invective, proved highly deficient, not only in respect for human rights but general competence.

Montagnards, whatever they promised, could do little to limit the impact of recruiting and requisitioning, or boost the flow of supplies to the city, anymore than they could prevent the drop in output during dry periods caused by slowing watermills. They could not control flour and bread prices. What they did instead was supress criticism and intimidate opponents. Chalier showed the Lyon public what Montagnard virtue really meant, leaving the young lawyer Claude Bazire (1764–94), agent of the Paris Comité de Sûreté Générale, and his fellow commissaires, to help prop up what by April 1793 had become a thoroughly unpopular as well as ruthless local despotism.
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The local democratic republican press, as everywhere in France, favored the Brissotins, not Chalier. The
Journal de Lyon
was owned by a certain Carrier who, from late 1792 onward had unceasingly satirized the
horde maratique
, lording it over Lyon. When they could, Chalier and Bazire decided to shut the paper down, seizing its archives and lists of subscribers, and arrested its editor, Fain. Carrier, then in Paris, was declared “dangerous” and his journal a cause of instability. He was only “dangerous,” protested Carrier to the Convention on 22 April, to ill-intentioned intriguers, royalists, and “all those” of whatever faction “attempting to usurp the power of the people” and replace it with dictatorship.
⁵⁶

Striving to fortify their ascendancy in Marseille following the arrival of Moise Bayle and Pierre Baille as representatives on mission in late March, the Robespierristes launched a sweep against their rivals there. The mayor, Mourraille, and other allies of Barbaroux, were arrested on 11 April. The Marseille Robespierristes seized their leading opponents, but, as in Lyon, encountered increasing difficulties in the sections where
populist intimidation failed to sway most working people. The Montagne’s problem in Marseille was that the sections took popular sovereignty seriously and refused to bow to Jacobin arm-twisting.
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On 25 April, twenty-two of the city’s twenty-four sections repudiated the Montagnard municipality, confronting Bayle with an ultimatum: the people demanded restoration of order, union, and their rights. Two days later, Bayle himself was arrested, followed by the overthrow of the entire “joug tyrannique du club” in Marseille. Little blood was spilled at the time, though thirty-six arrested Montagnards were executed later.
⁵⁸
On the night of the
sectionnaires
’s triumph over the Montagne, all Marseille celebrated, lit up with illuminations. The Brissotin
tribunal populaire
was restored to run the city. Democratic republicans boycotted the Marseille Jacobins. A few weeks later, on the same day as Robespierre’s putsch in Paris, 2 June, the Marseille Jacobin club was closed.
⁵⁹

At Nîmes, the Montagnard société populaire, denouncing the Société Républicaine as aristocrats and crypto-counterrevolutionaries, likewise lost their grip and were overthrown. Spurred by the city’s twelve sections, the municipality curtailed the société populaire’s activities. Robespierre supporters were likewise toppled at Aix-en-Provence. By 27 May, in the whole southeast, only Lyon, Toulon, Arles, and also Avignon, where the royalist and papalist underground were strong, remained in populist hands. By late April, Paris seethed with reports of the “revolution d’opinion” in the Midi and of other successful coups against the Montagne. According to Louvet, the Montagne sensed that they must launch their coup quickly or it would be too late. Robespierristes denounced the Marseille and Lyon insurrectionists as aristocratic, royalist, and counterrevolutionary, and from then on it became a routine Montagnard accusation that Marseille and Lyon had been taken over by “whites,” “royalists,” and clergy, even though, on 6 May, commissaires sent by the Marseille sections expressly denied this, and while at Lyon too royalists were undoubtedly a minority among the Montagne’s opponents.
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If Robespierre’s supporters were to succeed in aborting the Revolution of the republican democrats and Rights of Man, time indeed appeared to be running out.
⁶¹

In Paris, the Montagne’s chief difficulty was that of how to engineer much bigger turnouts in the streets than they had been able to achieve in February or March. For the Paris sections and Commune, it was easy to arrange small mobs of demonstrators. But that would not bring them to power. How could the Montagne martial large sansculotte crowds big enough to mount huge demonstrations? Their best chance lay in a
further savage surge in food prices, such as occurred in the later spring. Montagnards substantially widened their appeal at this critical juncture by aggressively backing calls to halt the rise in bread prices. Marat’s popularity in the Paris sansculotte quarters had grown in February through his openly inciting attacks on grocery stores and bakeries, criminal activity featuring in the formal charges against him in April.
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On 1 May, the outlook improved for the Montagne: several thousand peaceful demonstrators from the three poor Paris sections of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine besieged the Convention, demanding strict price controls on bread and asking that property-owners possessing incomes over 2,000 livres annually be required to pay half that surplus toward the cost of the war. Approved by eight to nine thousand protesters in their sections, this petition rebuked the Convention for promising much but delivering nothing, not even the promised Constitution. Prices of basic foodstuffs must be fixed below a maximum. The crowds threatened armed insurrection if the emergency measures demanded were not adopted. The Convention, far from intimidated, argued over this for four hours, some deputies urging that the leading petitioners be arrested for menacing the legislature and calling for its dissolution.

The sanculottes could be mobilized with talk of punitive measures against hoarders and the rich.
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On 2 and 3 May, while the Convention debated an emergency law fixing bread prices, food riots erupted in Rouen with sanscoulottes scouring the streets with knives and sticks. Many deputies sympathized with the hungry and cared about food prices, but they also saw the risk in attempting to impose prices at below market levels of driving supplies away and aggravating the shortages. Most were persuaded, not least by another powerful speech from Danton, to yield on this question nevertheless, to assuage popular anger. Exhorted by Couthon and other Robespierristes, on 4 May the Assembly fixed the Revolution’s first “maximum,” an emergency law stipulating limits on bread prices and obliging producers and grain merchants to declare their grain stocks and municipal authorities to verify the quantities declared, as well as impose the controversial forced war “loan.” To enforce these measures, the law conceded wide new powers of search and requisition to municipal authorities, in particular in Paris.
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A supplementary proposal by the Dantoniste Philippaux to compel bakers to bake only one kind of bread for all citizens, irrespective of whether they could pay for better-quality bread, was shelved for the moment.

The tussle in the Paris sections was crucial, these being the mainspring of Montagnard power. Trying to counteract the force of Marat’s,
Hébert’s, and Chabot’s torrent of rhetorical violence and Robespierre’s machinations, Pétion, as a former mayor, figured prominently alongside Louvet, Gorsas, Carra, and Prudhomme in local publicity clashes. Among anti-Montagnard pamphlets published on Gorsas’s presses during May was an open letter of Pétion to the Parisians. He still loved Paris, he reminded them, imploring the majority to rise from their lethargy and fight the repulsive bullies, capturing their city before it was too late. “How long will you put up with being governed by such a bunch? Have you overthrown royalty merely to place your necks under a still more loathsome tyranny? I observe Paris and I recognize her no longer.” How could ordinary Parisians let paid calomniateurs and the most contemptible types continually repeat the crassest impostures and lies, trampling on his and many other previously outstanding political reputations?
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To defend liberty and justice, Parisians must show the same resolve and courage they did in 1789, and again in August 1792.

Hébert, Chabot, and Marat doubtless had some success in persuading poor Parisians that Pétion had become an “enemy of the people.” But it is a mistake to label the Montagnards as the people’s representatives or a Left bourgeois faction aligning with the people. Most poor and unemployed, indeed most people generally, especially in provincial France but also Paris, undoubtedly preferred either one or the other form of anti-Montagnard politics, Brissotin, constitutional monarchist, or royalist. Only some of the most illiterate were attracted by Montagnard tactics, propaganda, and suppression of freedom of expression, and there were not enough of these to topple the Brissotins. Montagnards appealing to the sansculottes were in most cases, including obviously Chabot and Hébert, less genuine proletarian leaders than zealots for violent language and managers of aggressive intolerance and crushing dissent promoting dictatorship. There were, of course, also some authentic proletarian leaders more in tune with what is known of sansculotte political culture, which especially stressed what has been called the “continuous, direct exercise of popular sovereignty,” with the legislature’s deputies conceived as
mandataires
subject to prompt recall and dismissal for failing to carry out the people’s will.
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Their political culture was also much given to expressing hostility to the rich.
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Political leaders, sincere in championing this sansculotte political culture, were undoubtedly striving to improve conditions for the poor. Furthermore, public “preachings” of the capital’s Enragé street agitators, men like Jacques Roux and Jean Varlet, who denounced poverty and the oppression of the poor by the rich, were not expurgated from Montagnard
populist papers like Chabot’s
Journal populaire
and Hébert’s
Père Duchesne
until a later stage.

Varlet, a former postal worker among the capital’s most effective populist street orators, was a genuine exponent of direct democracy who regularly complained of the Convention’s “tyrannie législative.”
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Dismissed by Marat as a blockhead, he harangued sizable crowds of eager listeners in the streets for hours, denouncing speculation, engrossment, and hoarding. He possessed real empathy for the deprived experience of life among sansculottes in Bordeaux, Lyon, and Marseille, besides Paris, and firmly believed the sansculottes alone truly constituted “the people.” He ranged shopkeepers among their enemies. An extremist Enragé, he wanted to see all nobles in France purged from public and military positions. The problem for the Montagne was that he and his comrades were honest idealists at odds with Marat and Robespierre.
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Strongly motivated proletarian leaders, men like Roux, Varlet, Fournier, and Guzman, could be counted on to resist Robespierre and Marat. But they also blamed the Brissotins for the high food prices, and offered only a very narrowly framed political and social program. They were neither democrats nor republicans in any broad sense, but did speak for the sansculottes, showing that, in their majority, these were not under the thumb of the Montagne.