Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (85 page)

The first objective was to crush support in the Paris sections for the modérés and contre-révolutionnaires, as the Montagnards called their foes. A full-scale battle erupted in the Place du Carrousel outside the Convention where some two thousand pro-Brissotins fought the insurrectionists for a time. Groups of armed men roamed the streets. Once the streets were under Montagnard control, a purge of the Commune ensued to remove all residual dissent. One of the most effective measures taken by the planners of the uprising was the cutting of all communication between the Convention and the outside world so as to prevent letters reaching towns and departments around the capital
and sounding the alarm. The insurgents’ strategy was to prevent help from arriving before the Convention’s resistance could be broken by the misled crowds. By late morning, the Convention, in session from 6:00 am until 10:00 that evening, found itself cut off and completely surrounded by the multitude, headed by section assembly delegations. What “the people” demanded, the Convention was told, was for Marat and Robespierre to be empowered to lead the Revolution. However, for many hours, most centrist and Brissotin deputies refused to be intimidated.

The Brissotins’ frightful “crimes” were intoned to the crowds and the Convention by the section spokesmen: they were the true authors of the Vendée rebellion. For too long these “traitors flattering our enemies’ hopes and denouncing imaginary plots” in order to promote real ones had maligned “Paris” and maliciously deprived “the people” of the Constitution they so longed for.
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“Législateurs,” one orator, furiously applauded from the galleries, exhorted the floating center, “we must crush the designs of these vile plotters continually betraying the people.” “The people” refuse any longer to tolerate resistance to “their will.” Having overcome
le despotisme
on the immortal 10 August, “we shall fight the tyrants scheming to re-establish it to the last breath.” Hour after hour, the Convention deputies sat tight as Montagne deputies underscored this chorus, denouncing the “great conspiracy.” The Revolution, they insisted, could be saved only by the brave sansculottes guided by Robespierre, some speakers adding that workers “sacrificing their time for the Republic,” “defending” the Revolution so heroically, should be paid at the rate of 40 sous daily.
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As Michelet pointed out long ago,
⁹⁴
every one of the insurgents’ charges against the Gironde were as groundless and absurd as Hébert’s accusing the Brissotins of removing bread stocks from the bakeries at night, and deceitful as Marat’s claiming Pétion and Brissot were the true authors of the September atrocities. They had got just one word wrong in their script, retorted Guadet to the
petitionnaires
, against booing and yells of
“
calmoniateur!” from the galleries: instead of “
discovering
a great conspiracy,” they should say that they had come to “
implement
a great conspiracy.” It was plain enough who the conspirators were.
⁹⁵

The coup almost succeeded on 31 May. National Guard contingents appeared under Hanriot to tighten the siege of the Convention. A notorious ruffian with great personal prestige among the toughs of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, and soon among Robespierre’s most crucial aides, Hanriot played a pivotal part in directing the insurrection and
menacing the Assembly.
⁹⁶
Whether they wished to or not, the Convention must arrest the twenty-five traitors. All the Brissotin traitors threatening Paris with devastation must be detained. All were guilty of obstructing the Constitution. Their removal would be followed by the long-delayed Constitution swiftly being adopted.
⁹⁷
But the intimidation of 31 May failed in the end because the conspirators were unable to sustain the distinctly lukewarm sansculotte pressure long enough. By the time Robespierre rose to follow up on Hanriot and bring everything to a conclusion, demanding compliance with the section delegations’ demands, most of the crowd, thoroughly baffled and uninterested in Robespierre’s designs, were already drifting away.
⁹⁸

The 31 May rising failed after all, due to tepid sansculotte support. In Lyon, meanwhile, Chalier had silenced individual opponents but encountered serious trouble in the streets. Crisis erupted on 24 May when a crowd of hungry women ransacked a warehouse containing requisitioned army supplies. The Convention’s representatives on mission ordered troops from the southeastern front to Lyon, provoking the sections to rise against the Jacobin municipality. The Montagne tried to retain power in their usual manner, through brusque repression. The Lyon section assemblies were forbidden to convene, reported the Convention’s commissaires on 28 May, having been infiltrated by “suspect persons.”
⁹⁹
But on 29 May, as the Paris section managers plotted their uprising, a full-scale insurrection engulfed Lyon, and Chalier was overthrown, arrested, and imprisoned. (He was subsequently guillotined on 16 July.) Left republicans took over the municipality, while the Jacobins denounced as a “federalist” rising what in fact was a variegated, broad-based, anti-Montagnard movement of Brissotins, monarchists of various stripes, and the generally just disgruntled. The common thread was rejection of Chalier and populist tyranny.

Simultaneously, a genuinely “Catholic and royal army” of eight thousand, reportedly headed by fifty refractory priests inspired by the Vendée rebellion and commanded by the lawyer Marie-André Charrier (d. 1793), who in 1789 had been a deputy in the Estates-General, gathered in the countryside north of Montpellier. By 27 May, Charrier’s force had captured Mende, Randon, and Marvejols, everywhere tearing up tricolor flags, cutting down liberty trees, hauling up the white banner of royalism, restoring nuns to their convents, burning archives, and pointedly releasing political prisoners and replacing them with patriots.
¹⁰⁰
Charrier issued his orders in the name of “Louis-Stanislaw Xavier de France, regent of the kingdom” (the future Louis XVIII).

With both Lyon and Marseille lost to the Montagne, Robespierre and Marat, and their chief agents, as well as Hébert, Danton, Chaumette, and the Enragé leaders supporting them, were boxed in a tight corner: they had to try again without delay or risk losing all chance of exploiting popular discontent to break the Convention. With France in an uproar, over the next few days Robespierre’s cause was aided by news of further setbacks in the Vendée, the so-called royalist rising in Lyon, and the real royalist-Catholic insurgency in La Lozère and Ardèche. Yet again, Pache, Hanriot’s officers, and the section bosses pulled out all stops, launching their culminating effort on 2 June. Huge crowds, some said more than eighty thousand strong, poured into the streets, furious, but again, according to Picqué, Mme. Roland, Louvet, Fréron, and Mercier, only the poorest, most illiterate, and unaware fed the most self-contradictory nonsense with little grasp of what was happening, or how they were being used to gag the Convention and install a Montagnard dictatorship.
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Marat, Hanriot, Guzman, and the rest worked up the crowds, as did the butcher Louis Legendre, promising to annihilate “all the scoundrels.”
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As long as the
conspirateurs
controlled the Assembly, “we shall never have a free, republican Constitution.” This time, Hanriot brought up more of the National Guard and, for good measure, a battery of cannon, which enabled Robespierre finally to exert ruthless, undeviating, irresistible pressure.

Besieged for many hours, the Convention was eventually bludgeoned into submission, but not without a spirited, prolonged defiance. Most of the Convention staunchly resisted. Lanjuinais delivered a fiery speech denouncing the Commune as the
autorité usurpatrice
that planned and organized “the conspiracy.” To compel the Convention to surrender its authority, the Commune had systematically mobilized and deceived the
ignorants
of Paris. To stop him, Legendre threatened him physically, at which Lanjuinais defied his assailant to throw him off the podium. He and his colleagues were accused of calumniating Paris but this was utterly false: “Paris is good, only Paris is oppressed by tyrants thirsting for blood and domination.” Lanjuinais’s speech was finally drowned out by yells from the galleries, and Robespierre’s younger brother, Augustin Robespierre (1763–94), Drouet, Jullien, and other Robespierristes helping Legendre push him off the podium. An ultimatum from the Commune was read out: for four days the people of Paris had been in arms to rescue the flame of liberty and equality; for the last time the people’s delegates stood before the Assembly demanding immediate seizure of the Twenty-Two
factieux
. The people refused to
see “its happiness” thwarted by the “conspirators.” “The people” would stand for it no longer.
¹⁰³

Orator after orator demanded the immediate arrest of the Twenty-Two, the “treacherous” heads of France’s fédéralistes, modérés, aristocrates, royalistes, Rolandistes, and
liberticides
“betraying the Revolution.” Those to be detained (actually exceeding twenty-two) were “Gensonné, Guadet, Brissot, Gorsas, Pétion, Vergniaud, Salles, Barbaroux, Chambon, Buzot, Birotteau, Ducos, Isnard, Lanjuinais, Lidon, Rabaut, Lasource, Louvet, Boyer-Fonfrède, Lanthenas, Dusaulx, Fauchet, Grangeneuve, Lehardy [and] Lesage.”
¹⁰⁴
Tense hours passed. Deputies attempting to leave the building were forced back into the hall at gunpoint.
¹⁰⁵
Finally, exhausted, the Assembly majority, first with François Mallarmé, a Montagnard (with reservations about Robespierre), as “president” and afterward the more pliant Hérault de Séchelles replacing him, reluctantly submitted. The Convention’s motion to accept “the people’s demands” was proposed by Robespierre’s brother and seconded by Bazire and Couthon. Center deputies suggested that proscription of “the guilty” should begin by inviting the accused to resign voluntarily. This Isnard, Fauchet, and Lanthenas agreed to do, with Fauchet vowing to sacrifice himself “as a Christian” to save the Republic (though Lanjuinais objected to the term “sacrifice” to describe surrender to blackmail backed by cannon). With only three “voluntary” resignations forthcoming, the Assembly then ordered the arrest of the remaining “culprits” on the Montagnard list.

With Marat presiding, the Twenty-Two were seized one by one after some juggling with names, along with those members of the Commission of Twelve who were not among the Twenty-Two (including Kervélégan). Boyer-Fonfrède’s name was removed due to his having voted several times against the rest of the Commission de Douze. Jean-Joseph Dusaulx (1728–99), a radical enlightener for thirty years, translator of Juvenal, Mably admirer, and member of the Académie des Inscriptions, long a passionate revolutionary (praised by Diderot as the most truthful of men), was also crossed off. Now sixty-five, Dusaulx nevertheless volunteered for the “honor” of inclusion among those arrested, to which Marat angrily retorted that he was an “old imbecile incapable of leading anybody.”
¹⁰⁶
Lanthenas and Ducos were likewise exempted.
¹⁰⁷
The final total of Convention deputies detained by the coup leaders on 2 June, among them the foreign affairs minister Lebrun, actually came to thirty-four. But this number did not include several leading Left republicans the group dictatorship intended to seize, including Roland,
Carra, Manuel, Daunou, and Condorcet, who was absent. Roland’s arrest had been ordered by the Commune the day before, but he had already fled Paris. Mme. Roland, though,
had
now been arrested and locked up at the Abbaye.

By late evening of 2 June, Robespierre’s putsch was almost complete, except that even now, the official record reveals, “a large number of deputies” courageously stayed put in the Assembly hall, refusing to sign the Convention “edict” ordering the arrests.
¹⁰⁸
The coup d’état, even if not spontaneous or rooted in any impulse, was certainly “popular” in the sense that the common people—or at any rate the least educated—made it possible. Ordinary men’s ignorance, commented Picqué, enabled “this new Cromwell” to achieve as much as any Cromwell could by way of overthrowing all legality and the legislature, and eliminating the Convention’s leading deputies.
¹⁰⁹
The journée of 2 June, reported Toulouse’s deputies to their municipal council, hinged entirely on the “excessive credulity of a people easy to mislead.” Marat, Pache, Hanriot, and other leaders of the Paris city council, all men of consummate dishonesty, had gained the people’s confidence. They pronounced Legendre “even more of a butcher in character than by profession.” Robespierre they designated “the most unscrupulous schemer revolutionary upheaval has ever brought forth on the world stage.”
¹¹⁰

For the less unscrupulous Jacobin element, men like Levasseur, Jullien, and Romme, so much arm-twisting and deception needed justifying. Various theories were concocted. “A people is not truly regenerated,” explained Jean-Baptiste Lecarpentier (1759–1829) in January 1794, an avowed foe of féderalisme and the
réprésentant
who later purged Saint-Malo, “a people is not truly free, until its thinking is regenerated.” This necessarily involved expunging the Brissotins, “dangerous elements” who, after supporting the Revolution “of which they were, in truth, one of the motors, but not an integral or necessary component,” tried to preserve “some of the vices of the
ancien régime
in the new body politic.” Regenerating society is like the casting of metal: any alien alloy debases the outcome. Reason and “error” cannot subsist together; hence, “error” must be extirpated by “truth.” True popular republicanism, contended Lecarpentier, means rejection of the atheism, materialism, and determinism championed by the philosophes, men who disdained ordinary folk—the backbone of true Jacobinism—and overthrew every religious concept. He called their atheistic ideas “ce delire du philosophisme” (this madness of philosophisme), an edifice of philosophy, perfidy, and aversion to the common man.
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