Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (96 page)

CHAPTER 19

“The Terror”

(S
EPTEMBER
1793–M
ARCH
1794)

Suppressing Freedom of Expression

By August 1793, with the Brissotin challenge faltering and the Constitution indefinitely suspended, revolutionary France had become a dictatorship. All genuine political debate was suppressed. Ending freedom of expression and initiating the trials and executions of the Brissotins effectively stripped the Convention and its thirty committees of all real participation in government, reducing the legislature to a mere cipher approving decisions of the Comité de Salut Publique. This committee, overseeing also the Comité de Sûreté Générale, was dominated by Robespierre (helped by Saint-Just and Barère), its eight other members more often seeming like Robespierre’s “secretaries” than colleagues.
¹
With this, the essential principles of the Revolution were aborted. Robespierre, the stubbornly reluctant republican of 1791–93, became the great antirepublican of 1793–94.

By late 1793, Robespierre wielded increasingly dictatorial power assisted by close aides, among whom Saint-Just, Couthon, Barère, Hanriot, and his brother figured prominently. But his circle was not yet the sole locus of power. A harsh tyranny subjecting all classes of the population to its sway, Montagnard rule proved extremely repressive and ruthless from the outset but for the moment remained a group dictatorship politically and institutionally fragile due to its dependence on several vying constituent factions. Considerable leverage, consequently, remained vested in the Jacobins and Cordeliers where, until April 1794, Robespierre had little choice but to share the stage with the competing populist groupings around Hébert and Danton.

As the summer of 1793 wore on, pressure for a vigorous crackdown on every category of critic and dissenter criticizing Montagnard repression grew intense. The Dantonistes, the only Montagnard faction
disturbed by the September massacres, worried by the repression and inclined to defend the Revolution’s core values, were to an extent marginalized at the outset. Too conciliatory toward the Brissotins, Danton was voted off the Committee of Public Safety on 10 July, shortly before Robespierre’s elevation, marking a significant shift of power within the Jacobins. From July 1793, Danton found himself indeed in a distinctly awkward position, needing to flatter the sansculottes and keep up his pleas for unity, which left little scope for criticizing his rivals. Suspected of trying to soften the assault on the Brissotins, he could not do much to shield them and soon himself became a target. Hébert attacked him with well-founded accusations of graft and corruption. Rebutting Hébert’s charges, on 26 August, first at the Jacobins and then the Convention, Danton effusively lauded the people for their revolutionary élan, proposing a revolutionary army to eliminate internal enemies, repress hoarders, and improve security.
²
His proposal that Jacobin workingmen be paid to attend sectional assemblies went down especially well.

Hébert launched his hue and cry against former nobles entrenched in the military and civil administration at the Cordeliers on 21 July, beginning with a ferocious attack on Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine (1740–93), the commander who overran the Rhineland for the Revolution in November 1792 but who had recently lost Mainz and allegedly “conspired” against the Republic.
³
Tried for “treason,” Custine was executed on 27 August. Through August and September, however, executions remained sparse. A refrain continually heard in the clubs and populist press during these months was that liquidation of “suspect persons” was, as Chaumette expressed it at the Jacobins on 23 August, deplorably
insuffisante
.
⁴
The call for “more Terror” and tougher methods emanated especially from the tightly controlled “revolutionary committees” of the poorer Paris sections, spurred by Marat’s acolytes, the Hébertistes,
who
continually incited popular indignation against fédéralistes, modérés, Brissotins, ministers, deputies, generals, hoarders, counterrevolutionaries, aristocrats, and other traitors of every description. Besides Hébert, Chaumette, and Chabot, among the most vocal insisting on “more Terror,” were Collot d’Herbois, Amar, Bazire, and Billaud-Varenne, who was particularly keen on enforcing the death penalty for hoarding (with scant success).

Conspirateurs endangering “liberty” supposedly needed to be dealt with much faster.
⁵
An additional factor driving the onset of the Terror in the autumn of 1793 was chronic food shortage. By 3 September, several
voices in the Convention, Danton’s especially, warned of the immediate danger of massive insurrection in the capital against shopkeepers and the rich, apt to be exploited by undesirable elements if the
maximum
for bread was not more stringently imposed.
⁶
He was well informed. Early in the morning of 4 September, a massive demonstration began by disaffected construction workers and other sansculottes unsettled by surging food prices and increased recruitment for the army. Mobs, including many munitions workers demanding cheaper bread and the
maximum
, filled the streets, the unrest emboldening Roux, Varlet, and Théophile Leclerc (1771–?), who led the only group in Paris still strong enough to criticize the tyranny openly to try to channel sansculotte dissatisfaction into a sustained, organized political force.
⁷
On 4 September, Roux, Varlet, and their following, including Claire Lacombe, leader of the Société des Femmes Révolutionaires,
⁸
organized a raucous mass workingmen’s and women’s march of protest on the Convention, demanding action against “the rich,” that was effectively a challenge to the Montagne. The deputies received the crowds cordially enough, seemingly acquiescing in their demands, but once the demonstrations dispersed, the leadership moved decisively to dismantle sansculottism as an active force within the Revolution.
⁹

The Montagnard coup not only lacked broad support in the country, it plainly lacked the steady and consistent backing of the sansculottes. Danton urged the Assembly “to profit from the energy of the people” and tackle the shortages, punish hoarders, and suppress counterrevolutionaries by establishing an internal roving
armée révolutionnaire
directed against internal subversives and contre-révolutionnaires. Proposals to expand the revolutionary armies for internal as well as external use and boost arms production to equip them with muskets, moved by Billaud-Varenne and Danton, were adopted but were chiefly aimed at reinforcing the regime by curbing sansculotte unruliness, independent-mindedness, and sporadic anti-Montagnard street activity. Among measures aired in the Convention in response to the recent disturbances was a plan, advocated by Billaud-Varenne, Bazire, Léonard Bourdon, and, doubtless, Robespierre, to purge the section assemblies as soon as practicable, weakening them to dampen sansculotte energies, activities, and fervor.
¹⁰

Leaders of the Paris sansculottes divided at this point between those focused principally on stirring agitation for better conditions, the authentic Enragés, and those headed by Hébert and Ronsin, more authoritarian, inquisitorial, and politically motivated, aligning (for the
moment) with Robespierre. Briefly arrested in late August, Roux was rearrested on 5 September. He was condemned at the Jacobins, Cordeliers, and Commune alike as a “rebel” against the Revolution, barely less perfidious than the rebel priests of the Vendée. Purges of section committees began. The Convention issued a decree restricting the Paris section assemblies to a maximum of two meetings weekly. From early October, meetings were further restricted to two every ten days, on the fifth and tenth of each decade.
¹¹
The sansculotte sections vociferously protested, organizing a delegation, headed by Varlet, to the Convention on 17 September. They denounced the decree that curtailed their independence and right to meet and the attempt to prevent the common people from exercising a proper surveillance over the regime. What conceivable justification had the Convention for limiting the rights of “the sovereign,” subordinating the people’s assemblies, and determining when they could meet? Did anyone doubt their patriotism? The edict, complained the sections (with every justification), violated both the Constitution and Rights of Man. Varlet, chief spokesman of
sectionnaire
autonomy and direct democracy, was arrested with other Enragé leaders the next day.
¹²

The dictatorship’s strategy, it emerged, was to stifle all dissent, relegate the campaign to curb food prices and punish hoarders to largely symbolic status, suppress the Constitution (that some Jacobins and Enragés greatly prized), and transfer effective power from the sections and sociétés populaires, now placed under the surveillance of the
comités révolutionnaires
, to the executive apparatus.
¹³
Enemies of the Republic, insisted the Montagne, were plotting behind a duplicitous mask of ultrapatriotism to undermine the Convention’s authority. After the Brissotin overthrow, the main social and political force powering the insurrections of 31 May and 2 June, sansculottism, was thus the very first social and political category shackled by the Robespierre regime, the very agent that had overwhelmed the Brissotins and, from June to September 1793, had remained the sole force in the capital still capable of offsetting the committees of Public Safety and General Security. For the present, imprisoning the Enragé leaders ended the authentic sansculotte movement organized in and by sociétés populaires.

The regime sporadically attempted to ease discontent, chronic poverty, and food shortage by denouncing hoarding and forcing subventions from the rich. In late November, the Paris Commune decreed that sick, elderly, orphaned, and other impoverished citizens unable to maintain themselves should be housed, fed, and clothed at the expense
“of the rich” of their respective sections. Pressure on the bakers increased, and the proposal discarded in the spring, to allow only one kind of bread in main cities, was taken up again. Since “wealth and poverty were equally disappearing under the regime of equality,” declared the November edict on bread, bakers must no longer offer different categories—one kind of bread from wheat for “the rich” and another, from rough outer cereal husks, for the poor. Paris bakers and those of Nantes and other cities, under pain of imprisonment, could now sell only one type of bread, dubbed “le pain d’égalité.”
¹⁴
While the regime’s sympathy for plebeian economic distress did not, in general, stretch far, the Montagne included an energetic, idealistic segment who took the social crusade, the task of redistributing wealth, more seriously. Zealots for social egalitarianism included Romme and those “spartans of the Montagne,” the Julliens, father and son. “I preach everywhere,” reported Marc-Antoine Jullien to Robespierre from Saint-Malo on 1 October 1793, that the popular societies should “occupy themselves with the people’s instruction, surveillance of the people’s foes, the merchants, Muscadins and rich people, priesthood and notables favoring aristocracy. I work to raise up the people, show the Revolution is made for them, that it is time for the poor and the
sans-culottes
to prevail as they are the majority on this earth and the majority should dominate; that the general will is the exclusive source of law, and the good of the greatest number the purpose of the social contract.” Deliberate “misleading of the public spirit,” added Jullien, accounted for the troublingly conspicuous lack of support for the Montagne in Norman towns like Caen, and was “the primary and almost sole cause of resistance.”
¹⁵

With its slender support base outside Paris, the Robespierriste leadership needed the Terror to retain its grip on power. There was no other way such a tyranny, obsessively antimonarchist, antirepublican (without admitting it), and in practice even antisansculotte, could survive. Equally, the dictatorship required its powerfully leveling ideology of equality to provide a rationale for the Terror and ferocious crackdown on all opposition and dissent. New “revolutionary committees” in the sections and sociétés populaires emerged as watchdogs—often less over food prices than the activities of the sections’ citizenry and shopkeepers—imposing “patriotic” values with an unrelenting hand. The Société Populaire et Républicaine of the Paris section Droits-de-l’Homme, for example, inaugurated by some thirty activists on 20 September with the installation of a bust of Marat in its hall, met daily to review matters of local concern and make sure no one in the area
stepped out of line. It met in the same hall used by the section assembly (now only twice monthly) and was handpicked. While its meetings were open to the public, including women, it carefully vetted candidates for membership; those accepted had to pass scrutiny by a committee of seven, the Comité de Présentation. Through a system of instruction and denunciation backed by hearings, it rigidly imposed “patriotic” behavior and “correct” attitudes, enforcing “patriotic” values throughout the quarter. “Patriotic” became a code word for popular, anti-élitist, antiphilosophique, and committed to a highly intolerant conception of virtue. Everyone denounced received a hearing before the full body of members.