Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (86 page)

But if the foundations were laid, the dictatorship was not yet built. Robespierre’s putsch, after all, was the labor of four different factions—Robespierristes, Dantonistes, Hébertistes, and Enragés. Unsurprisingly, this coalition immediately began to unravel. The alliance between Robespierristes and authentic egalitarian sansculotte leaders, the Enragés, who did as much as anyone to unseat the Girondins, proved especially unsustainable, even for a few days,
¹¹²
for what the Montagne called the “revolution of 31 May” was devoid not only of legality, coherence, popular support, and any connection with the Revolution’s core values but also—and this is crucial—of a genuine commitment to working people or the poor. Authentic sansculottes championing the proletarian masses, like Varlet, Roux, and Jean Leclerc (1771, after 1804), son of a Protestant road engineer, were at once elbowed aside by Robespierre, who knew perfectly well they commanded a popular following in the streets of a kind he did not. Belatedly grasping the real character of the looming dictatorship and the vastness of Robespierre’s megalomania, paranoia, and vindictiveness, the Enragés rapidly became alienated.

CHAPTER 17

The Summer of 1793

O
VERTURNING THE
R
EVOLUTION’S
C
ORE
V
ALUES

It took time for the victors to consolidate their dictatorship. There could be no immediate imposition of repressive measures. At first, rather, there was widespread confusion. On 2 June, the Convention majority supported the democratic Left, not the Montagne.
¹
Most of France and even, the evidence suggests, most of Paris, opposed Robespierre. Many eyewitnesses agreed with Gensonné, whose manifesto, dashed off in haste prior to his arrest, dated three in the afternoon of 2 June, held that after “seducing a few,” the Montagne had captured the capital’s
comités révolutionnaires
by employing every variety of intimidation, manipulation, and bullying to cajole the sections.
²
Treated respectfully, and initially only loosely guarded, many “so-called friends of the laws [
amis des lois
],” as the Montagnards derisively termed the impeached deputies, contrived to escape. Brissot, Pétion, Barbaroux, Louvet, Gorsas, Buzot, Lanjuinais, and Guadet all slipped away from house arrest. Manuel, not indicted on 2 June but arrested shortly afterward, likewise eluded his captors but was caught at Fontainebleau and returned to Paris in early August, as were Pétion’s wife and children, seized at Honfleur.
³

Most of the Convention’s deputies had opposed the coup and actively or passively continued to do so. All nine Somme department deputies, including the fugitive Louvet, signed a manifesto, dated 5 June, in the
Mercure universel
, declaring 31 May and 2 June days of “mourning for all friends of liberty and the Republic.” The Convention, besieged by a huge but drastically manipulated crowd and surrounded with bayonets and cannon, had been harried and abused at gunpoint. The only really “guilty deputies” were those orchestrating the plot. For seven hours,
while the Assembly resisted proscription of the Twenty-Two and the Twelve, no deputy could leave the Convention hall unless escorted by armed conspirators, not even to satisfy the demands of nature, a truly humiliating indignity. The legislature had been violated “not by citizens or the Paris sections but certain men,” paid or misled.
⁴
Several of the signatories, including Louvet, survived the Terror and later resumed their efforts, from late 1794, to forge a democratic republic.

The municipal authorities at Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes, Toulon, Bayonne, and Montpellier all condemned the coup, as did much of provincial France outside the main cities. Many small towns also formally repudiated it. Pont-Audemer’s citizens, gathering in their main church, drew up a protest petition dated 4 June, indignantly deploring seizure of the Twenty-Two, whose only “crime” was to propose the appel au peuple, rendering “homage to the principle of sovereignty of the people.”
⁵
Saint-Quentin initially reacted similarly: one would need to be very blind not to see the perfidy of those who had usurped power by dissolving the Commission of Twelve and arresting the Twenty-Two without the slightest evidence to support their accusations. Power has been seized by an “impious faction supported by all that is most vile and corrupt in Paris.” “True republicans” were summoned to help restore genuine national representation, purge the “oppressors of the people and establish a fully republican constitution.”
⁶

An address from the conseil général of the Aisne department, centered on Saint-Quentin condemning the coup, was dated 4 June. Altogether, around forty-nine—more than half of all departments—officially declared against Robespierre and the Montagne after 2 June, with only thirty-two to thirty-four endorsing the Montagne’s seizure of power.
⁷
A general summons was issued for representatives from opposition departments to gather in Bourges to save the Republic, urging all France to join the struggle “against our new tyrants.” Brissotin leaders urging armed rebellion against the coup also joined Condorcet in condemning the June Constitution as a travesty of the more democratic February Constitution. To cap “their crimes,” declared the physician Salles, Robespierre’s acolytes devised a so-called constitution that was “a bundle of impracticable rules useless for impeding tyranny,” just a “ceaseless violation of principles” and “new method of spreading disorder, particularly harmful in organizing anarchy constitutionally.”
⁸
But the tally of departments officially opposed signified relatively little in itself, as most remained deeply divided. Vienne, for instance, a department concocted from fragments of Poitou, Touraine, and Berry,
sided with the Left republicans at departmental level but the société populaire of Poitiers, the only sizable city, backed the Montagne. More relevantly, relatively few large towns followed Poitiers and Dijon in proclaiming the Brissotins “aristocrates” plotting “un république anti-démocratique,” and in declaring for Robespierre, Danton, and Marat.
⁹

Tenacious opposition persisted also on the Convention floor itself, despite the detention or flight of most of the Brissotin leadership. There too, opponents tried to counter the enveloping tyranny with courageous speeches. On 4 June, the Abbé Grégoire and several others protested outright,
¹⁰
as did, on 5 June, the legal theorist and chemist Charles Dufrêche-Valazé (1751–93) and the Bordeaux deputy Jean-Baptiste Boyer-Fonfrède (1765–93), removed from the listed Twenty-Two at the last moment. Boyer-Fonfrède, a merchant and free press advocate, demanded the Committee of Public Safety’s report on the arrested deputies. Was the Montagne not afraid of provoking a general insurrection in the country?
¹¹
He was shouted down as an enemy of “la tranquilité publique.” On 6 June, the Calvados deputy Gustave Deulcet-Pontcoulent (1764–1853), once an aristocrat, asked for evidence of the guilt of the arrested deputies. He and several others joining him were shouted down.
¹²
Petitions composed shortly before 31 May were still being read to the Convention over the next few days, helping the backlash in the Convention. A missive from Angers, dated 30 May, endorsed by all the town’s section assemblies, accused the Montagne of suppressing the public’s “true voice” with acts of tyranny scarcely imaginable even under monarchy. If the “audacieuse et criminelle faction” blocking the Constitution did not desist, Angers would rise to arms. Its authors were duly dismissed as royalist calomniateurs maligning Paris. When Louis de La Réveillère-Lépeaux (1753–1824), a deputy from Angers and vocal anti-Montagnard, rose to contradict this, he too was brutally quelled.
¹³

But if most of France resisted Robespierre’s coup, coordinated opposition nationally lacked cohesion, direction, and unity. A joint meeting of Saint-Quentin’s three sections in the town’s main church on 9 June revealed a deep split, not between “true republicans” and Montagnards, for practically no one supported the coup, but between those calling for armed insurrection and those preferring to hold back and await the outcome rather than ignite civil war.
¹⁴
The next day the town sections reassembled in the main church and applauded the Angers address of 30 May, voting to print three thousand copies and circulate that rousing manifesto around the north. The société populaire of Saint-Omer,
addressing the Convention on 27 June after receiving contradictory accounts of the events of 31 May and 2 June, confessed that they hardly knew what to think or how to sift truth from lies.
¹⁵
It was the news, several weeks later, that the Convention had completed the Constitution that tilted the balance in favor of acquiescence in the coup. Across France, reaction to the June Constitution was predominantly positive. Finally, the Constitution had been achieved! A letter acquiescing in the coup from the “republicans of Reims,” dated 23 June, expressly cited “this divine Constitution so long awaited” as the factor deciding the city’s stance.
¹⁶

Gradually, the tyranny’s grip tightened. Fleeing via Chartres, Brissot was caught on 10 June while attempting to reach Caen, the focus of republican resistance in Normandy, where Barbaroux, Gorsas, Buzot, Guadet, and Louvet were organizing what became the headquarters of armed resistance to the Montagne in the north. From Caen, the Left democratic leadership strove to sway opinion by dispatching “commissaires” to neighboring departments and convening town meetings, urging “true republicans” and defenders of liberty to join their insurrection. Reaching Caen, Salles published his declaration decrying those “
factieux
dominating France today who had brought their crimes to a culminating point,” destroying the National Assembly, usurping the people’s sovereignty, and pillaging the public purse. Other opposition centers likewise dispatched commissaires to spread the armed revolt, the departmental council of Côte d’Or, for instance, to Haute-Vienne, l’Aisne, and La Sarthe.
¹⁷
In Paris, the Comité de Salut Public eventually answered with a publicity counteroffensive, issuing an address from the Convention, dated 26 June, denouncing the group of “conspirators” inciting the people to revolt and to march on Paris. The “traitors” misleading the
citoyens
amounted to just a tiny clique, only around thirty, wickedly beguiling the good, pure common folk with “their idolatry” of eminent persons and reputations, and prestige of their opinions. Brissotins pretend to abhor royalty and fédéralisme but their real goal was to divide France, encourage defiance of the (purged) Convention, and disseminate royalisme. How perfidious! Worryingly, the common man is all too easily misled. Fortunately, though, Robespierre assured his following, the “people is good everywhere,” the ordinary person always pure and honest, so that once it is clearly pointed out to them, all ordinary people shun “Brissotin depravity and error.”
¹⁸

In repelling the Left republican challenge, Robespierre’s chief assets were the prevailing confusion, and especially the universal desire for the
Constitution and fear of ruining the Revolution and ensuring defeat at enemy hands through internecine strife. The resulting vacillation produced frequent early shifts of position. Evreux’s citizenry, summoned by proclamation shouted out in the town’s public places and by ringing the cathedral bells, convened in emergency session on 14 June in the packed town cathedral. The people yelled their willingness to take up arms against the “bloody faction” of “tyrants” and “anarchistes” who bludgeoned the Convention into submission.
¹⁹
But only ten days later, this Norman town’s two sections withdrew their bellicose resolutions after being comprehensively assured they had been misled and “deceived.”
²⁰

With the armed rebellion spreading, the Comité de Sûreté Générale, through one of its most ruthless and unprincipled members (since 16 June), the Grenoble lawyer Amar, friend of the Caribbean slave-owners, requested the Convention, on 24 June, to impose emergency measures and, in particular, imprison under heavy guard those deputies thus far only under house arrest guarded by just one gendarme each. This vote passed amid a furious commotion, over the bitter protests of Ducos, Boyer-Fonfrède, and other republican stalwarts, but to thunderous applause from packed galleries.
²¹
Brissot, consequently, was now incarcerated along with a number of others, including the idealistic young educationalist Claude-Louis Mazuyer (1760–94), representative for Saône-et-Loire, who had been arrested for helping Pétion and Lanjuinais escape, and Vergniaud, who nevertheless managed to send a remarkable letter, dated 28 June, to two of Robespierre’s prime henchmen, Barère and Robert Lindet, reproaching them as “
imposteurs
and assassins” preferring popularity to their consciences.
²²