Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (87 page)

Even formal imprisonment of a large part of the Brissotin leadership failed to halt protest in the Convention. How scandalous, declared Ducos, on 24 June, that more than three weeks after the arrests, no formal indictment detailing “the crimes” of the arrested deputies had emerged. He was heaped with opprobrium from both Montagne and galleries. Robespierre himself rose to answer. What! Are there still deputies feigning not to know what all France knows? With uprisings everywhere, the Vendée rebellion tearing France asunder, Ducos demands a report on the misdeeds of the Brissotin leaders! Ducos implies a bunch of “conspirators” represent the will of the Convention! This is the language of the Vendée and rebel departments! Inveighing against Ducos, Robespierre was interrupted by several opposition deputies, prompting the brutal Legendre to jump up and threaten the first “rebel to interrupt
the orator again” with detention in the Abbaye. Ducos defends Brissot, sneered Robespierre, “Brissot,” a former police spy, a miscreant “the people” had seized and denounced for his misdeeds. “Someone here pretends we need a report as if the crimes of the detained were not known! Besides conspiring with all the ‘tyrants of Europe’ and causing our setbacks, these men obstructed the Constitution, our holy Constitution now finished in the time since they are gone. The Constitution will rally all France around us despite the clamours of the malicious ‘factieux.’ Make no mistake! It is to the Constitution [he was shortly to suspend] that the French will rally to and not Brissot or Gensonné.”
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No speech better illustrates Robespierre’s adroitness and basic ideology—and dishonesty. The key to defeating the Brissotin insurgency, he knew, was to finalize the Constitution and convoke the nation’s primary assemblies to endorse it. Having discharged “its most sacred responsibility,” the Convention could label the schism splitting Convention and Republic as treasonable resistance to the people’s most sacred interests. It was not whole departments who resisted, he maintained, but only some departmental officials, obvious “conspirators.” What chiefly mattered, anyhow, was that “the people” supported the Montagne, “the people!” This was untrue like nearly everything else in his speech but could be made to look true. If more Frenchmen opposed than supported the coup, most proved too disconcerted and hesitant to make a stand. Could the accusations against the Brissotins conceivably be true? Was there really undisclosed evidence of treachery? If Brissotins charged the Montagne with deceiving the country, Robespierre’s supporters accused the rebel leadership of precisely the same. Undeniably, France did seethe with royalists, contre-révolutionnaires, and other conspirators exploiting the turmoil by first joining the “Brissotins” but eventually donning the white cockade.
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More and more suspects were rounded up. Over the summer, the numbers detained in Paris prisons climbed steadily to 1,347 by 24 June, including 319 in the Conciergerie and 295 in La Grande-Force, the two largest prisons, and no less than 2,300 by late September.
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Carefully crafted declarations and manifestos played a crucial role wherever serious opposition crystalized, for this was above all an ideological struggle. Toulouse’s sections rebuffed Robespierre at their general assembly of 17 June, their declaration, sent to all France’s departments, demanding Robespierre’s arrest, dissolution of the Paris Commune, abrogation of the 2 June decree against “the 28 members of the Convention,” and annulment of every Convention “decree” passed
since 2 June, since all were illicit.
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According to Marc-Antoine Baudot (1765–1837), Dantoniste deputy “en mission” in the Toulouse area together with Chabot, not only the southwest region’s hardened anti-Montagnards but practically everyone, including the bons citoyens, opposed the Montagne. The Montagne was ousted in Toulouse, reported Baudot, because “many citizens were deceived” by the torrent of Brissotin printed propaganda, Toulouse printers reissuing several well-known anti-Montagnard tracts, including “the discourse of Lanjuinais.”
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No sooner had news of the 31 May insurrection arrived than mayor and municipality, backed by the Toulouse section assemblies, repudiated the Montagne, circulating more printed manifestos among neighboring communes.

At Lyon and Marseille, the newly victorious democratic republican leadership, backed by the city’s artisan sections, raised their own departmental armed forces. On 7 June, Bordeaux proclaimed armed insurrection against the Convention (until the thirty-two proscribed deputies were reinstated) and formed a Bordeaux commission of public safety, or
commission populaire
, to organize the resistance. An army would be assembled to march on Paris and restore the Convention. Bordeaux’s National Club was suppressed. Despite being assaulted by the Vendéean rebels at the end of June, Nantes too resisted the Montagne. Stubbornly anti-Vendéean and antiroyalist, as well as anti-Montagnard, Nantes withstood the Vendéean attack, the Revolution’s first military success for many months. At Toulon, Maratiste populists retained control, but for all their incessant talk of “the people,” refused to convene the section assemblies, knowing perfectly well most Toulon workingmen, like those of Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, and Bordeaux, disliked Jacobin authoritarianism. In fact, Toulon’s six thousand dockworkers, hungry and bitter at the exceptionally high price of bread, divided broadly between Brissotins and royalists, with hardly anybody backing the Montagne. To prevent their municipality from endorsing Robespierre, Toulon’s artisans and laborers rose on 12–13 July, led by the section assemblies, and on 16 July, their general committee dissolved the municipality and suppressed the Jacobin Club.
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As at Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Lyon, a people’s tribunal was created and the militia purged; dozens of Robespierriste Jacobins were interned and death sentences passed on several Montagnard activists. Until late August, Toulon remained staunchly republican. Only when caught between surrendering to Robespierre or the British navy did the Toulonnais choose the latter and, hence, reimposition of monarchy and aristocracy.

Montpellier’s response was concerted by the city’s first democratically elected mayor, Jean-Jacques Durand (1760–94), a firm republican and founder of the local revolutionary club and National Guard, reelected mayor three times since January 1790. Durand moved to silence Robespierriste agitators already on 31 May, rallying the bons citoyens to purge the Jacobin Club and reorganize the militia. The departmental council, renamed the Comité Central de Salut Public of Hérault, convened in Montepellier on 11 June. Elected “president,” Durand urged the raising of an armed force to join Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, and Marseille, not against Paris but against the usurping clique. Besides disseminating the manifestos of Gensonné and Roland, Durand issued other “incendiary” tracts, one denouncing “the appalling Chabot.” On

13 June, Montpellier issued a general call for national resistance to the “vile
conspirateurs
” who were subverting France and clapping “all talent and virtue in irons.” The Montagne were a foe more ferocious than the Prussians, “nourished on our blood and gold,” hiding rapacious hands “under Diogenes’s mantle,” subverting the Revolution and reducing the people to abject submission. The people must save the Constitution and repel “the monsters dishonouring it” by resorting to arms.
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Delegates were dispatched to Caen to align with the insurrectionary north and measures taken against neighboring towns—Béziers, Avignon, and Arles—backing the Paris Jacobins.

Montpellier’s manifestos promised the people genuine equality, the equality of the new Declaration of Rights rather than just the equality of status before the law and freedom from oppression by courtiers, nobles, priests, magistrates, and parlementaires gained in 1789. The Republic’s purpose was to advance the people’s happiness by political means, securing the bonheur of all. According to (the affluent) Durand, the “happiness” of the people consists in economic well-being, education, and public esteem, together with eligibility for office. Under the democratic republicans, economic well-being (
l’aisance
) would, he maintained, become “general” by raising wages, promotion of industry, and via a more just relationship between the labor performed by some and produce of others, and a more just repartition of taxation, from which the poor will be exempt. The citizen with slight means will pay little, the main burden falling on those whose incomes can best sustain it. Well-being could also be spread more equally by ensuring equal inheritances among children and using laws to prevent fortunes from being bequeathed to collaterals intact. Education elevates human reason, as reason elevates man. Education would become universal. The children of every family
were the Republic’s children—all equal in its eyes. Education would teach the children their rights and how to exercise them, knowledge needed to participate in public affairs. Thus, men would increasingly become equalized in terms of legal status, economic standing, education, and public esteem.
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Montagnards accused Brissotin republicans of everywhere posting up anti-Montagnard manifestos, even in the tiniest villages, fomenting “treason,” armed resistance, and civil war.
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Pont l’Évêque was among the towns that summoned adjoining rural districts to rise against the dictatorship of those who had arrested “the most ardent defenders of true liberty.”
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One of the more awkward points the Montagne had to deal with was the constant citing of the September massacres. The directoire of the Pont l’Évêque district of Calvados, vowing to combat the “immoral faction seducing Parisians and assuming the mask of
patriotisme
,” claimed the people were being duped by those responsible for the “September massacres,” men who converted “crime into virtue and virtue into crime.”
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Allegedly, it typified the perfidy of those preaching “rebellion” against the “Convention” to harp on about the September massacres, which Manuel, Brissot, Condorcet, and Pétion, complained the Monagnard papers, did nothing to stop, and Gorsas basely first praised and then condemned. “For them, the bloody days of 2 and 3 September 1792” were just a pretext to “dishonour France in the eyes of other peoples.”
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The armed rebellion, insisted the populist press, was a vile plot against the people, concocted by a handful of traitors mascarading as patriots on what Montagnards called “the Right.” It was hard to explain, though, on this construction how, despite imprisoning or outlawing nearly forty Convention deputies, unyielding opposition continued even in the Convention, let alone the provinces. Chabot’s
Journal Populaire
, cast in dialogue form to be read aloud at meetings of sociétés populaires, lambasted Brissotin doggedness as the “revolting audacity” of the Convention’s “right wing” persisting even after removal of the Twenty-Two. Chabot explained such tenacious perversity in terms of corrupt morals. The Assembly had betrayed the people before August 1792, corrupted by the royal court. Later, many deputies continued betraying the people on behalf of the aristocracy. In fact, most of the new legislature elected in September 1792 had soon been corrupted by cash and opportunities, and sought to crush “Paris.” “Cupidity and the desire to dominate” inspired “the rebels.” Without the 31 May insurrection, “the brave Montagne” could not have saved “the people.”
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The armed “revolt” provided the grounds for putting the Brissotins on trial for their lives. Robespierre’s closest ally, Saint-Just, recently voted onto the Committee of Public Safety, was assigned the crucial task (for the Robespierristes) of drawing up the indictment against the arrested deputies. Since there were no crimes or “betrayal” prior to 2 June, and no “conspiracy,” Saint-Just had to focus on the rebellion itself, despite the snag that this failed to justify the risings of 31 May and 2 June. He read his indictment to the Convention on 8 July. The prisoners were being tried not for their opinions but “treason,” especially the heinous crime of “féderalisme”—seeking to divide the people, mobilizing feeling against Paris, and initiating civil war under the pretext of repressing “anarchy,” for pretending to be republicans while really being covert “royalists.” Buzot, Barbaroux, Gorsas, Lanjuinais, Salles, Louvet, and Pétion were “rebels” directly complicit in armed revolt, including even the Corsican rising. Gensonné, Guadet, Vergniaud, and several others were guilty more indirectly.
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By July the most heinous crime conceivable among the illiterate, ignorant, and unaware was “federalism,” something previously unknown but suddenly appalling beyond measure. Wherever Montagnard control was undisputed, often the case in small towns, the story that the Brissotins were “federalist traitors” was swallowed without question. Cognac, addressing the Convention on 25 June, warmly acclaimed “the glorious 31 May” for saving the people. Cambrai professed the deepest sentiments of horror at the upsurge of fédéralisme throughout the surrounding northeast. Happily, federalist “leprosy,” like that blighting nearby Saint Quentin, would “not infect our walls, we guarantee you that!” Only one viewpoint was permitted in loyal Jacobin Cambrai. Nobody was allowed to disagree. To make absolutely sure dissent was extirpated, the municipality had opened a register requiring citizens to sign within a fortnight, attesting their loyalty to the people and readiness to fight fédéralistes. “The names of those inscribed will constitute the list of all this town’s good citizens.” By ascertaining “those missing[,] we shall know who holds different opinions and is not a good citizen.”
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