Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (97 page)

The popular societies’ watchdog committees looked out for and strove to repress “monarchists,” “aristocrats,” “moderates,” and “fédérés” while keeping an unfriendly eye on grocery and bakers’ stores, cafés, theaters, possible gambling locales, independent-minded women, and courtesans. The drive to lock up prostitutes and suppress prostitution commenced in earnest in late summer 1793 and soon extended to other great cities as the Montagne suppressed the Revolution’s essential principles there too. At Bordeaux, “les filles publiques,” remarked a local diarist after the Brissotin defeat there, were treated in the most outrageous fashion, as if the Montagnards wished to establish “spartan morals” throughout the whole of France. Once the Brissotins were beaten, a parallel crackdown occurred in Lyon. Though partly a reaction to the conspicuous increase in prostitution due to economic distress, Jacobin surveillance seemed anxious to strip away every pastime and pleasure, terrorize the girls, and proscribe the erotic and immorality itself. Prostitutes were deemed a corrupt vestige of the ancien régime, an affront to virtue, a symbol of everything virtue sought to eradicate, the very antithesis of the Rousseauiste ideal of womanhood.
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On 9 October, the publicly puritanical Chaumette—privately a highly active homosexual—assured the Convention that moral stringency was being imposed in Paris. He had just led a police swoop around the former Palais-Royal (now called the Palais Égalité) catching seven “girls.” In Paris, open soliciting had now been largely driven from sight. The police were learning how to deal with more concealed whoring, too, “and soon Paris will be purged.”
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The Convention endorsed his suggestion that girls caught soliciting should be shut up in public hospices and put to useful work. So obsessed was Chaumette with the alleged threat posed by prostitutes that by November he listed street whores among the chief agents and
recruiting grounds for contre-révolutionnaires, along with
devôt
women and priests.
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Two prostitutes, Catherine Alboury and Claire Servin, arrested in December in the Tuileries section for counterrevolutionary remarks, were afterward condemned and executed along with several other courtesans.
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Mostly, though, prostitutes were merely imprisoned. Not just sexual forwardness but indications of republican militancy and (as with Mme. Roland) learning and erudition were frowned on as unmistakable signs of a woman forgetting the “virtues pertaining to her sex,” in Jacobin parlance, something tied to being suspect and “whores.”
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There was no place for intellectually, politically, or sexually emancipated women in Robespierre’s France. Olympe de Gouges, vilified in the populist press as an immoral “virago” by Chaumette, was arrested on 23 July for violating the 20 March 1793 edict forbidding counterrevolutionary writings. Among other protests, she had posted up an affiche around Paris urging a general referendum enabling the people to choose between republican, federal, and constitutional monarchical government.
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Republican laws promised no illegal authority would oppress the citizenry, she berated her judges, “yet an arbitrary law worthy of the Inquisition, that even the
ancien régime
would have blushed to implement, imprisons the
esprit humain
and has wrested my liberty from me in the midst of a free people. Is not liberty of opinion and the press consecrated as the most precious patrimony of man in Article VII of the Constitution? Your [the regime’s] arbitrary acts and atrocities must be condemned before the whole world. Where Rome burned under only one Nero,
la France libre
today languishes under a hundred.”
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This was far too close to the mark. Besides, she had insulted Robespierre. Sentenced to death for “counterrevolutionary writings,” Gouges, guillotined on 3 November, reportedly met her end with impressive calmness.
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Olympe de Gouges, Mme. Roland, and Sophie Condorcet were not the only outstanding revolutionary women defying Montagnard tyranny. On 31 July 1793, Claire Lacombe, “president” of the Société des Femmes Révolutionaires, the activist society formed in May by her and Pauline Léon, the two legendary pike-bearing women’s leaders of the 10 August rising, acted as spokeswoman before the Convention for a female delegation from all forty-eight Paris sections, complaining about the Convention’s tardiness in erecting the obelisk commemorating Marat. Close to the Enragés, Lacombe aligned particularly with Jean-Théophile Leclerc, one of the Patriots expelled from Martinique by white monarchists in 1791, a revolutionary who vigorously championed
women’s, blacks’, and sansculotte rights, while loudly denouncing the shelving of the Constitution and muzzling of the section assemblies. Hostile to the Montagne, both he and his partner, Lacombe, spurred other sansculotte women to demonstrate while copiously pouring scorn on Chabot and Bazire as worthless hypocrites “oppressing the people.” On 16 September 1793, Chabot, Amar, and Claude Bazire (1761–94), key promoters of the Terror,
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initiated a wider Montagnard campaign against the republican women’s society, especially Lacombe herself, in the Jacobins. She and her circle were condemned outright and unreservedly since “these ladies spoke contemptuously of M. Robespierre” (after he called them contre-révolutionnaires). Following a scuffle in which she attempted to address the Jacobins from the galleries, Lacombe was overpowered and removed by women yelling “Down with the new Corday!”
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The Jacobins urged the Comité de Sûreté Générale to instruct the society of revolutionary women to purge their leadership and membership. The Convention decided to go even further. After a speech denouncing women’s influence in politics by the increasingly influential Amar—now one of Robespierre’s closest aides—the Convention dissolved all women’s associations “under whatever name they may exist” on 31 October. A wealthy, surpassingly unprincipled Grenoble lawyer co-opted onto the Comité de Sûreté Générale following the coup in June, a fiercely anti-intellectual Montagnard later to become a devout mystic, Amar was an unabashed misogynist as well as ally of Caribbean slave-owners.
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Republican women could henceforth only attend meetings of male sociétés populaires, though these too were now all tightly bridled to prevent expression of views like those of Lacombe, Leclerc, Roux, and Varlet.
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The mounting restrictions placed even the male sociétés populaires under unrelenting pressure to become ever more dependable watchdogs of society. In January 1794, Robespierre, still dissatisfied, criticized them for being insufficiently “patriotic,” too easily penetrated by undesirable elements, and unwitting tools of Brissotins and aristocrats.
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Executions were just the tip of the iceberg. In essence, the Terror was a general suppression of all the Revolution’s essential principles and philosophy, especially freedom to criticize and liberty of thought and expression generally. While Montagnard bridling of debate and opinion affected all of society, curbing protest in proletarian sections featuring among its chief concerns, the principal target always remained the main exponents of revolutionary core values: the radical gens de
lettres, philosophes, journalists, librarians, and intellectuals directing the Revolution. The intellectuals and philosophes had indeed initiated the Revolution, Robespierre admitted, but, according to him, they had afterward “dishonored themselves during the Revolution.” His denouncing the gens de lettres was in fact a “glorious compliment for all French writers,” suggested a Brissotin fugitive in a pamphlet appearing at Geneva in late August, since “not one was tarnished by having flattered this foe of the human race, a fact unparalleled in the history of conspiracy.”
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Indeed, no philosophes or significant publicists or writers did support Robespierre, although several prominent intellectual spokesmen for the Revolution, like Cloots, Romme, and Desmoulins, backed the Montagne despite despising Robespierre, believing alignment with sansculotte elements the only practicable way to salvage the Revolution.
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In major cities, arrests of “suspect persons” under the 17 September Law of Suspects, the main legal basis of the Terror that empowered local revolutionary committees to arrest any “enemy of liberty,” accelerated markedly during the autumn, as did compiling lists of
dénoncés—
and
dénonciateurs
.
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Suspects were arrested in their homes and on the streets merely because someone had informed local revolutionary committees that their speech or conduct suggested they were “unpatriotic,” “partisans of fédéralisme and enemies of liberty.” On 25 September, Robespierre delivered a key speech condemning political dissent and criticism, especially Convention resistance to suppressing Brissotins, justifying this and every further strengthening of the Committee of Public Security’s authority uncompromisingly. Nothing any longer stood between the regime and imprisonment and trial of opponents, critics, and dissenters of every description—whether Left republicans defending the Revolution, artisans deploring shortages, Catholics resisting Jacobin iconoclasm, or aristocrats. Without a certificate of civisme, issued by district surveillance committees, it became hard to travel, conduct business, or attend meetings.
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Anyone suspected of criticizing the regime, even the most eminent foreign visitors, were denounced and imprisoned. On 9 October, Helen Maria Williams, her mother, and her sister were arrested, as were Hurford Stone, president of the British Club in Paris, and his wife soon afterward.
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In the stunned atmosphere pervading France, everybody had to conform. Even lukewarmness in using the right phrases generated suspicion. Paris prisons, officially holding 1,640 prisoners on 4 September,
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and 1,860 by 10 September, contained no less than 2,365 prisoners by
3 October, 529 in La Force and 364 at the Conciergerie.
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The total reached 3,181 by 31 October and 4,603 by 29 December, with eighty more added in the next three days, bringing the total to 4,687 by 1 January 1794, held in twenty-one prisons.
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Of these, 579 were crowded into La Force, on the Right Bank, and 531 into the ancient Conciergerie, the central prison on the Seine, in the former medieval royal palace neighboring the Sainte-Chapelle. Other main prisons were the Abbaye and the Luxembourg on the Left Bank. While fugitive nobles and their wives, former officeholders, and refractory and constitutional priests figured prominently among those arrested—tried and executed during the Terror—the principal targets initially were not aristocrats, hoarders, ancien regime officeholders, or priests, but Left republicans and gens de lettres (writers), the enlightened intellectuals who made the Revolution.

The Trial and Execution of the Brissotin Leadership

Every critic and exponent of revolutionary core principles was in dire peril. The indictment facing the leading Brissotins was finally produced on 3 October when Amar, the Comité de Sûreté Générale’s spokesman, having ensured the Assembly’s doors were closed to prevent anyone leaving, submitted the charges to the Convention. Twenty deputies were already “outlawed” and under sentence of automatic execution on capture. These included Buzot, Barbaroux, Gorsas, Lanjuinais, Louvet, Pétion, Guadet, and Kervélégan, author of the inflammatory 1788 pamphlet
Reflexions d’un philosophe Breton
(discussed in
chapter 2
) who had been arrested in June but had escaped and was in hiding. Forty-one more Brissotin deputies were indicted at this point, together with Brissot. These “conspirators” were accused of subverting the Convention, conspiring against the Republic’s unity and indivisibility, assisting Lafayette, causing the Champ de Mars massacre, “ruining our colonies,” embroiling France with all the European powers to stifle French liberty, and plotting with Dumouriez to “conserve royalty.”
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Clavière and Lebrun, denounced by Billaud-Varenne in the Convention on 5 September, had also been arrested and tried for helping Brissot enbroil France with the European powers.
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Pétion was additionally charged with obstructing the 10 August 1792 insurrection. Those deputies who protested against the “tyranny” on 6 and 19 June, totaling another seventy-four deputies, were also purged from the Convention and stripped of
their representative status, but only their leaders, headed by Daunou, Dusaulx, Blaviel, Ferroux, and Mercier, were imprisoned. Encompassing practically all of the more articulate and enlightened deputies of the Convention, the complete list of deputies removed from the Convention for opposing Robespierre totaled 135, leaving the Convention completely emasculated.

The press was brutally silenced, the “tyrant” knowing his tyranny could not function while newspapers refusing to flatter him remained free.
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Gorsas in his
Courrier
, Brissot in his
Patriote français
, Condorcet in his
Chronique
, Rabaut in the
Moniteur
, and Louvet in his
Sentinelle
had all “perverted” l’esprit public. With searches for him proceeding in Normandy, Brittany, and at Bordeaux, his best chance of survival, Louvet surmised, lay in returning disguised to Paris; later he hid likewise under an assumed name in the Jura. Gorsas, on the run since June, also returned to Paris from Rennes by mail-coach, hoping to reach his hometown Limoges. Caught at the Palais-Royal on 6 October while attempting to escape through a back window of his mistress’s bookshop, he tried to speak out in the courtroom but was prevented. Already “outlawed,” he went to the guillotine the next day. Before the blade fell, surrounded by a large crowd jeering him for his “treachery,” he was again stopped from speaking or making any gesture.
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All he could do in his last moments was display impressive sangfroid, though even this contributed to an order from the Tribunal Révolutionnaire to the prison concierges (accustomed to selling liquor to the inmates) not to supply alcohol to prisoners less than twenty-four hours prior to execution, to prevent wine and brandy from causing “that apparent firmness and insolent air seemingly rendering condemned men insensible to their deaths.”
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