Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (90 page)

Marginalizing independent-minded sansculottes was essential to Montagnard strategy, but appropriating the world’s first democratic constitution, securing its endorsement by the people amid great fanfares, and then immediately suspending it, was unquestionably Robespierre’s masterstroke. From late June, opinion in the rebel zones increasingly divided between those for and those against a military offensive against Paris. Despite some defections, the army remained solid for the Montagne, while the columns of Normans, Bordelais, Marseillais, and Lyonnais, supposedly converging on the Convention, never materialized. Such disarray guaranteed steady erosion of the armed revolt over the ensuing weeks. In late July, Caen’s patriotic societies, followed by the rest in Calvados, repudiated the Brissotin revolt submitting to the Convention, claiming to have been misled.
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The Caen rising collapsed, partly through the lack of support in rural Normandy and partly through the leadership’s error in entrusting their armed force, around five thousand men, to General Felix Wimpfen and his deputy, the marquis de Puysaie, a former émigré commander soon suspected of royalism. (Puysaie afterward joined the Chouans in the West.) After remaining inactive for weeks, Wimpfen’s army simply melted away, obliging Barbaroux, Pétion, Buzot, Salles, and Girey-Dupré to flee as best they could toward Brittany. By August, the Brissotin revolt was visibly crumbling. The Convention summoned all Frenchmen to rally behind the nation. Anyone who had signed protests against the 2 June coup but retracted during these weeks could avoid being declared a traitor to the patrie.

Montpellier, having declined to resort to arms, was occupied and Durand and his comité central arrested. Accused of being among the “principaux moteurs et cooperateurs” of the Southern French “mouvements contre-révolutionnaires fédéralistes,” and becoming “dictator” of Montepellier, Durand was brought to Paris and incarcerated at La Force.
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If the Constitution, before its cancellation, did much of the work of undoing republican resistance, the main factor from August was the obvious truth of the Montagne’s claim that the rebellion was everywhere encouraging royalist resurgence. In Brittany, Calvados, and the south, armed opposition was evidently driven by royalism and religion as much as republican rejection of Montagnard revolutionary
ideology.
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Royalist reaction, vigorous in many regions, thus sapped the Brissotins and assisted the pro-Montagnard backlash, leaving the Brissotin movement pulverized between the Montagne and royalism. Many localities had little choice but to submit. Professing to be overcome with remorse, the Société des Amis de la République of Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, a small commune in rural Limousin, gateway to the southwest, abjectly apologized (for rejecting the regime’s authority since June) in an address read on 12 September. “Perfidious writings” had seduced them into adopting “des sentiments contraires” to the people’s.
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The Brissotin offensive disintegrated. But a single woman struck a resounding blow for the Revolution’s true conscience against Montagnard authoritarian populism. Setting out from Caen on 13 July, Charlotte Corday (1768–93), posing as a Jacobine, secured access to Marat, promising lists of prominent insurgents supporting the Normandy rebellion. She stabbed the “friend of the people” to death in his bath with a kitchen knife. The evil of the 2 June insurrection could perhaps somehow be partly expunged, she believed, by eradicating the perpetrator most responsible for verbally violating the Convention, Rights of Man, and democratic Revolution. Marat’s last vitriolic sally, savaging Carra, appeared in
L’Ami du peuple
that very day. Those aware knew, as well as Charlotte Corday, Adam Lux, or Tom Paine, that the murdered Jacobin was odious and despicable. Privately, even Robespierre scorned him. Yet, somehow, this shrill, unlovable militant came to be venerated by regime and people to an extent practically nobody else in history ever had. It was the world’s first example of an organized mass political cult transforming a nonentity worthy of nobody’s respect into a colossal “hero of the people,” infinitely beloved by the masses.

The Marat cult drew adoration bordering on fanaticism, but only in certain districts like the sections Droits-de-l’Homme, Sans-culottes, Théâtre-Français, and Fraternité. Within hours of the assassination, Hébert delivered a glowing eulogy demanding the “great hero’s apotheosization” by the Convention, a proposal warmly seconded by several sansculotte section assemblies. Marat was infinitely great, insisted Chabot, a mighty prophet who saved the people, recognizing before anyone else the perverse mischief of Mirabeau, Brissot, and other “traitors.” The Cordeliers district with its fifteen thousand inhabitants, chief focus of Dantonistes and Hébertistes alike, successively renamed the section Théâtre-Français, and then Marseille was redesignated “Marat.”
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Marat’s body, embalmed and on public display in the Cordeliers church near his home from 15 July, lay in state for weeks
on a special bed covered in flowers surrounded by candles, attired by the Revolution’s greatest artist, David, half uncovered to reveal his stab wounds and bloodied shirt, head topped with a crown of oak leaves. Vast crowds, predominantly women, effused inconsolable grief over the loss of their “martyr.”
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Many Montagnards had reservations about the Panthéon and installing Marat’s tomb there, but there was boundless enthusiasm for erecting a public obelisk in Paris honoring “the people’s friend,” to be paid for by public subscription. Raising the money was principally undertaken by the still active society of republican revolutionary women.
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David was commissioned to immortalize Marat’s “martyrdom,” converting his demise into an unforgettable national icon. Besides the famous painting (finished later), David organized the magnificent funeral procession, which followed further public exposure of the corpse for four days on a pedestal in the Place des Piques (Place Vendôme; until recently called the Place Louis-le-Grand and occupied by the equestrian statue of Louis XIV). The Paris Jacobins engaged six of their leadership—Robespierre, Desmoulins, and four others (one a brother of the murdered Lepeletier)—to compose an “Address to the French,” to be declaimed at the Club on 26 July, and afterward printed in immense quantity. Marat tirelessly served the people, intoned this address, always championing their rights. The woman who murdered him was the fanatical tool of the “Calvados conspirators,” an “impious faction basely calling the true patriots
désorganisateurs, anarchistes, septembriseurs
.”
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The new Marat section wanted him entombed in their section in an impressive shrine inscribed: “Here lies the friend of the people, assassinated by an enemy of the people.” Busts of Marat proliferated in section assembly halls and clubs across France. Once Paris had sufficiently mourned, one of Marat’s leading acolytes proposed to the Convention that the corpse should be displayed in all the departments of France. Indeed, the whole world should contemplate the remains of this “great man, this true republican.”
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Conveyed to the guillotine four days later, Charlotte went calmly to her death amid indescribable execration but with some of the crowd silently witnessing her last moments admiringly, among them Adam Lux (1765–93), the twenty-eight-year-old tutor who venerated democracy, freedom, and the Revolution even more than his mentor, Forster. Like Paine, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the principal emissary of the Rheinisch-Germanischer Nationalkonvent, Forster, stranded in Paris by the siege of Mainz, had become deeply depressed.
Though refraining from publicly condemning the Montagne (and later the Terror), by July Forster privately likened the Montagne to a “severe illness” of the body, struggling to expel an extraneous substance that poisons it. Demoralized, aggravated by a recurrent fever contracted in the Pacific decades before, he died in Paris in January 1794.
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With him in Paris since March 1793, Lux had spent his time in the Convention galleries and at the Jacobins, listening, obsessed and appalled. After the 2 June coup, he sank into despair, contemplating public suicide in central Paris, perhaps in the Convention assembly hall, as a means of displaying his despair to the world. His friends vainly tried to rouse him from his despondency: he had suffered “terriblement” since 31 May, he explained, and remained convinced his suicide would serve mankind more than his life.

He would first deliver a
Discours
before the Convention, he fantasized, a text he actually composed, denouncing the coup that blighted the hopes of millions and ignited civil war. His imagined farewell to the ruined Revolution, dated 6 June, ends with the “orator” requesting burial beside Jean-Jacques’s tomb under the Ermenonville oak overshadowing the “Temple of
la philosophie
,” marking Rousseau’s favorite spot.
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On 13 July, the day of Marat’s assassination, he clandestinely published an alternative pamphlet,
Avis aux citoyens français
, signed “Adam Lux, citoyen français,” denouncing the Montagne as the Revolution’s wreckers, criminal “septembriseurs,” and anarchistes, polluting everything valuable in it, even the names of the greatest men, “Rousseau, Brutus and other foes of oppression,” all of whom would be promptly guillotined were they so unfortunate as to fall into the Montagne’s abominable hands.
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Two days after Charlotte’s demise, Lux clandestinely issued a second pamphlet, this time recounting her execution, which he witnessed in person. From Germany he had come seeking “true liberty” but found only lies, crassness, and oppression, “le triomphe de l’ignorance et du crime.” Never did anyone display greater
courage extraordinaire
than this courageous lady, assassin of one of the worst of men; he would never forget her beautiful comportment—a woman of immortal memory, lovely eyes, gentle enough to move the rocks! He dreamed of raising a statue to her, inscribed, “plus grande que Brutus.”
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Searching for him, the police seized him four days later, incarcerating him at La Force.

Marat’s “martyrdom” and unparalleled “greatness” were trumpeted unremittingly for months. Nothing expressed the people’s “sublimity” more wonderfully, held enthusiasts, or was more truly “populaire.” During 1793–94, the Marat cult lent both unity and momentum to the Montagnard cause at a certain level. Ironically, the company printing mass-produced engravings of France’s greatest heroes, having latterly added Buffon, Helvétius, Raynal, and Montesquieu, in August brought out Diderot as its sixth hero, which meant that Diderot had to be followed closely by Marat.
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But the cult suffered an insuperable vulnerability. However “populaire,” none but the simplest could take it seriously. Like the June 1793 coup itself, the Marat cult fed principally on public gullibility. Even the Montagnard leadership, let alone his enemies, knew Marat was a murderous charlatan, so dishonest and criminal he blamed the September massacres on “aristocrates” after himself signing orders for the massacre of imprisoned
gens suspects
. Marat was “un grand homme,” insisted Robespierre and his colleagues, but this “mix of falsity and stupidity,” as one observer put it, was too blatant to be sustainable for long.
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Figure 12. Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845),
The Arrest of Charlotte Corday, Paris, 14 July 1793
, pen & ink and w/c on paper. Musée des Beaux Arts, Bordeaux, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library.

From August 1793, the hopes of the entire democratic republican Left withered. The tyranny’s consolidation dejected virtually all the
foreign revolutionaries congregating in Paris. As the Brissotin challenge crumbled, the regime tightened the pressure on remaining centers of resistance. Besieged from 8 August, Lyon was subjected to a relentless bombardment. Nevertheless, local sentiment in the main southern cities remained stubbornly anti-Montagnard. In early September, the mood in Bordeaux, complained Robespierre’s adherents, still remained “very bad” with only the three or four poorest sections controlled by sansculottes supporting the Montagne, and these all blockaded by fédéralistes, modérés, royalistes, émigrés, and refractory priests.
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Bordeaux itself, however, was ringed by Jacobin societies in numerous places elsewhere in the southwest from where the city obtained its essential supplies. A missive dated 28 August from the Société des Amis de la Liberté of Bergerac, a major grain and wine depot upriver in the Dordogne, rebuked Bordeaux for defying the people and being dupes of “perfidious men.” Noting the growing food shortages, Bergerac’s Jacobins urged Bordeaux’s sansculottes to rise and overpower the city’s Brissotin “membres grangénés.” Bergerac’s Jacobins wanted Bordeaux’s resistance to end soon and Bordeaux’s poor sansculotte sections Franklin, De la Liberté, and Rousseau to be the model for the future. Until the Brissotins
were
overthrown “all the granaries of the departments obeying the laws will remain closed to you.”
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