Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (89 page)

The 1793 Constitution remained a model, an ideal, for the rest of the Revolution, and continued to inspire democrats and remind everyone of the Revolution’s essential principles. Brissotin deputies still active in the chamber and not (yet) arrested, a remnant including La Révellière-Lépeaux, Claude-Romain Duperret (1747–93; until July), Carra (until August), Ducos (until October), and Boyer-Fonfrède (until October), accepted the Constitution and even wrought concrete amendments rendering certain clauses more democratic. Providing a crucial fig leaf of legitimacy, and the outward appearance of good faith, the Constitution reassured the public by encouraging sincere revolutionaries to acquiesce in the coup in good conscience. Deft handling of the festivities not only impressed the “troupe of dupes” deceived by Robespierre’s assurances, as Brissotins expressed it, but heavily sapped the main thrust of the anti-Montagnard offensive.
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The spectacle of the Constitution hailed everywhere, including in rebel cities and embraced by Brissotin deputies in Paris, even if many still preferred Condorcet’s February version, was heartening news indeed for Montagnards.

Yet the very success of the June Constitution in the summer of 1793 soon also thoroughly unnerved the Montagnard leadership. Embraced by the Convention on 24 June, and endorsed by general referendum amid great jubilation in August, the Constitution was bound to worry the Jacobin leadership as soon as talk started about the projected elections and composition of the new legislature. Brissotins, an anxious Chabot admonished the Jacobins in early August, spoke as if they would fill the new legislature with their supporters. If Lyon aristocrats and contre-révolutionnaires welcomed the Constitution, this could only mean they viewed it as a device to further divide and “federalize” the nation.
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The fact that the Constitution was enthusiastically embraced by their critics meant the Montagne could no longer support it, for should it take effect, the Constitution would end the emerging dictatorship. Robespierre needed to act quickly to suppress it to reassure his own following and secure his goals. In the two months since the Constitution’s inception, the anti-Montagnard risings had been successfully contained. He could now afford to announce—but not to delay—cancellation of the scheduled elections and suspension of the Constitution. He acted immediately following the 10 August celebrations. “Nothing can save the Republic,” he assured the Jacobins on
11 August, if the motion before the Club to dissolve the Convention and hold democratic elections for a new legislature was put into effect.
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Elections could only help the Brissotins. The Jacobins backed him unreservedly: democracy and the Constitution for the moment had to be replaced by dictatorial
gouvernement révolutionnaire
.

Thus, no sooner had much of the armed resistance folded than the Constitution was shelved indefinitely.
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Canceling the Constitution was followed by more arrests of Convention deputies and a ruthless assault on the last remnants of a free press. On 2 August, in a thunderously applauded Convention speech, Robespierre inveighed against Carra as a “conspirateur” and disguised royalist.
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Attempting to answer, Carra was shouted down, hounded from the Assembly, and, at the Jacobins, further denounced as a perpetrator of “
fédéraliste
conspiracy, a deputy and journalist
rolandisé
,
girondisé
and
brissotisé
.”
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He was arrested and imprisoned. Three days after suspending the Constitution, again speaking at the Jacobins, Robespierre delivered the coup de grâce to press liberty, mounting a devastating tirade against the “journalistes” whose “mercenary and murderous pens every day spew out the most seductive poison” and devote their existence to undermining the esprit public and calumniating patriots. He demanded a general clampdown on Carra, Louvet, Girey, and Gorsas, and all the “laches calomniateurs” of the people.
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Voted onto the Committee for Public Safety on 26 July, alongside Barère and other dependable supporters, Robespierre was close to consolidating his dictatorship. But still he had some distance to cover and, anyhow, never fully controlled this body on which several members remained unsympathetic toward him, including Lazare Carnot (1753–1823), a ruthless but competent officer elected to the committee for his military expertise soon after Robespierre, on 4 August. Robespierre’s position was chiefly complicated, though, by the fact that 2 June was a victory as much for Dantonistes, Hébertistes, and Enragés as his own immediate acolytes. The coalition that overthrew the Brissotins comprised four diverse factions highly unlikely to cooperate or tolerate one another once the Brissotin challenge receded. If Robespierre’s circle had no close bond with Danton’s, the Danton and Hébert groups were on still worse terms with each other. Ardent Jacobins and exponents of sansculottism, Hébert and his ally François-Nicolas Vincent (1767–94) specialized in deploying pressure from below to exert control, through the Jacobins and Cordeliers, over appointments to executive committees, ministries, and the government apparatus. As part of
this, Vincent especially began sniping at Danton and his friends. By late August, Hébert and Vincent were openly accusing Danton of corruption, which led to sharp exchanges between the two groups.
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Those marshaling support in the streets and poor quarters of Paris divided into two seriously divergent streams, one backing Marat, Hébert, and Vincent, closely tied to the Montagne and allied with Robespierre for the moment, and a much more independent, radical, and genuinely plebeian bloc, the Enragés supporting Roux, Leclerc, Fournier, and Varlet, whose chief forms of political expression were mass meetings and street agitation. On 5 August, Robespierre spoke at the Jacobins, defending Danton against Vincent while simultaneously inveighing against the fiery populist Jacques Roux (1752–94). The Enragés had emerged strongly in the February food riots, and since June had been vying for a bigger role in the political arena, challenging the Montagne and the Convention as a whole. A manifesto known as the
Manifeste des Enragés,
drawn up six weeks before on 21 June at the Cordeliers, with Roux and Varlet presiding, spelled out the Enragé aims. Despite Robespierre trying to prevent it, the manifesto was presented to the Convention on 25 June, in the name of the Gravilliers and Bonne Nouvelle sections, and the Cordeliers by a crowd of sansculottes with Roux as spokesman, and showed all too plainly that the hard-core sansculottes were no lackeys of the Montagne.
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Numerous petitions denouncing the heartless exactions of the “financier and merchant aristocracy” and requesting price controls on basic foodstuffs had been submitted previously, protested Roux, and a hundred times the deputies had promised to punish the bloodsuckers of the people. But what had the Convention actually done? “You have just finalized a new constitution. But has speculation in foodstuffs been prohibited? No! Has the Assembly imposed the death penalty on monopolists and hoarders? No!”
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Hence, the Convention failed to do what it should to promote the people’s happiness. Liberty is just a phantom when one class of men can with impunity starve another. Legality is just a figment when the rich man exercises the power of life and death over his equal by engrossing and monopolizing supplies. Roux demanded immediate relief for the people. The Montagne should take care. Friends of equality would not be the dupes of charlatans seeking to break them through hunger. Only by putting food on the table could the sansculottes be tied to the Revolution, and only when the government regulated trade, stopping the brigandage of big merchants, could there be truly free commerce.

The merchant “aristocracy” had proved even more rapacious than the old noble and priestly aristocracies. Instead of pampering the rich, the Convention should consider those outraged by the paper currency’s debasement. Workers’ wages, claimed advocates of free commerce, rise with food price increases and other basic costs. But while some workers’ wages had risen, many had fallen since the beginning of the Revolution.
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It was perhaps not always in the Montagne’s power “to do the good that was in its heart,” but now that the legislature was no longer hampered by Gorsas, Brissot, Pétion, and other partisans of the appel au peuple, traitors who “to escape the guillotine” now hid their “infamy in the departments they have fanaticized,” no excuse remained for the Convention not to curtail speculation and hoarding, and stop the ruining and starving of the citizenry. After four years of Revolution, it was an outrage that only the rich had gained any advantages. “Oh, shame of the century,” who would believe, persisted Roux, despite rising indignation on Montagnard faces and noisy interruptions, that the people’s representatives, declaring war on external tyrants, could be so base as not to crush those within? Roux was stopped from reading out the rest of his address.
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Robespierre was not prepared to tolerate anything like this. The sansculottes were clearly the Montagne’s weak point as much as their strength. High food prices from July onward meant the likelihood of serious social disorder persisted throughout the fraught summer.
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On 27 June, further disturbances shook Paris, starting with rumors that river barges leaving for Rouen formed part of a plot to empty the capital of provisions. The rioters were women, especially washerwomen who besides cheaper food demanded detergent at prices lower than storekeepers were selling it for. The
blanchisseuses
(laundresses) mostly neither knew nor cared about the main political struggle gripping the country: they wanted bread, candles, and soap. A delegation sent to the Convention complained of speculation and high prices. The deputies began discussing whether the thesis of the économistes, that basic commodity prices cannot be fixed by government, was actually correct. The Montagnard François Mallarmé from Lorraine (loathed by the Abbé Grégoire as a “brigand” and, later, architect of the Terror) affirmed, against the économistes, that basic commodity prices “can and should be fixed.” But the Montagne found themselves deeply and inconveniently divided over this issue. The Convention asked the Comité de Salut Public to consider whether the principle of imposed maxima, introduced by the 4 May law, fixing maximum prices for grain and bread, could be extended to other basic commodities and to confer over this with Mallarmé.

To hinder speculation in soap, candles, textiles, and other commodities, the Bourse (in the Rue Vivienne) was temporarily closed.
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Other measures adopted at this time included a draconian law making food hoarding a capital offense. However, Couthon and other hard-core Robespierristes were also gravely concerned lest pillaging of shops and barges be cited as evidence of “the anarchy” gripping Paris, and thus help the Brissotins and royalists. The latest Paris riots, some Montagnards suggested, formed part of a plot to obstruct the constitutional referendum on which hinged the entire Robespierriste strategy. Paris was the fortress of the Revolution, and it was necessary to use every means, argued Couthon, to “maintain order and tranquility there.” At Couthon’s and Billaud-Varenne’s urging, the Convention agreed to pursue the ringleaders behind the riots with unremitting severity.
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The Enragés had a good case, but seemed unable to distinguish between large-scale capitalist speculators and small shopkeepers who should be protected, not targeted. Roux and Varlet had connived at violence against small shopkeepers in the February riots and, more generally, seemed unwilling to acknowledge that war and disruption of transatlantic trade, rather than freedom of commerce, were the chief cause of the high prices, factors no government could do much to alleviate. Roux was uninterested in most of the Revolution’s goals. He and his allies were not primarily concerned with liquidating opponents and gaining power, though he too lambasted the Brissotins as “royalists wanting to save the tyrant [Louis XVI]” and as “accomplices of Dumouriez,” plotting civil war.
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He was not actually a freedom fighter. But in one respect this fiery Jacobin priest (and former seminary science teacher) represented a genuinely Leftist position against Robespierrisme: he really aspired to defend the poor from capitalist exactions, bankers, and big merchants, denouncing exploitation and failure to aid the poor.

To Robespierre and the Montagne, Roux and Varlet were basically just a nuisance, as they were mobilizing sansculottes for completely different purposes than theirs. The Jacobin response was to savage Roux in the populist press and every other way. Marat (despite the fact it was Roux who hid him in his lodgings when Lafayette’s men pursued him in 1791) denounced him in
L’Ami du peuple
as a fraud, liar, and immoral priest, monster of cupidity, and in his hometown, Angoulême, notorious as a criminal. Jacobins must expel him from their midst.
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Note, admonished Robespierre, resuming the attack in the Convention, how Roux attempts to wrest the people’s trust away from the true patriots, especially Robespierre himself, by perfidiously casting an implied
semblance of modérantisme over the Montagne!
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On 28 June Robespierre again lambasted Roux and the Enragés. Roux was unceremoniously ejected from the Jacobins and deprived of his job as a supervisor of street posters. Under Jacobin pressure, on 30 June, the Cordeliers too expelled him.
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