Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (98 page)

Crushing the Convention democrats produced no sign of disaffection in the capital. Rather, with the section assemblies firmly muzzled, these draconian measures were “generally applauded,” people either expressing gratitude that they had been rescued from the horrors of fédéralisme or remaining sullenly silent.
⁴²
In recently subdued Marseille, the situation on 6 October was likewise reported entirely quiet.
⁴³
Documentary “proof ” of the deputies’ “treason” was circulated to all France’s municipalities. The principal men accused and behind bars, but not yet “outlawed”—many remained at large—were transferred on 6 October from the Luxembourg, La Force, the Abbaye, and other Paris prisons to the Conciergerie, the central prison where the Tribunal Révolutionnaire sat in judgment. Brissot, lacking funds to purchase
better accommodation, was packed into an ordinary, overcrowded cell. Hearing of this, his colleagues collected between themselves the thirty-three livres needed for a more dignified confinement where he could be alone.

The show trials themselves began on 15 October. Presented as a monster of betrayal, Brissot had wanted Louis XVI held in the Luxembourg after 10 August instead of the Temple where the Montagne confined him, as part of his alleged plot to help the royal family escape.
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Equally solid evidence “proved” he had “prostituted” his following to Lafayette; led the people into a trap, enabling Lafayette to massacre them at the Champ de Mars; plotted against the sociétés populaires; incited the Vendée and Marseille to revolt; engineered Lyon’s disaffection; ruined the French colonies under guise of promoting black emancipation; and betrayed Toulon to the British (besides helping arrange Marat’s assassination).
⁴⁵
Conspiring with Condorcet and the Convention Girondins, Brissot had provoked war with all Europe so as to stifle national liberty.
⁴⁶
The key “witnesses” produced by Amar attesting to all this—Pache, Hébert, Chabot, and Chaumette—comprised the régime’s choicest scoundrels and fanatics. More honest Montagnards like Baudot, in his
Notes historiques,
afterward recognized that Brissot was actually an unusually “honest man” “horriblement calomnié par Robespierre.”
⁴⁷

To begin with, the “evidence” was “examined” and the defendants allowed to reply, a procedure that dragged the hearings out for two weeks,
⁴⁸
but soon prompted the regime, following complaints at the Jacobins, to curtail the proceedings. All pretense of a defense ceased.
⁴⁹
The “trial” ended on 30 October. All the indicted were pronounced guilty of conspiring against liberty and sentenced to death. Among the principal defendants was Carra, deputy for Saône-et-Loire, designated in the Tribunal Révolutionnaire’s judgment as an “homme de lettres” and Bibliothèque Nationale employee.
⁵⁰
Ducos, removed from the original list of Twenty-Two by Marat on 2 June, but later put back in the condemned group for leading the courageous June protests in the Convention hall, was likewise designated by the Tribunal Révolutionnaire as an “homme de lettres.” On being sentenced, all the accused proclaimed their innocence, shouting “Vive la République!” Much to the court’s consternation, Charles Valazé (1751–93), legal theorist and agriculturalist, then melodramatically stabbed himself through the heart with a concealed knife, expiring on the spot, blood spurting on all sides.

The night before their execution, the condemned, headed by Brissot, Gensonné, Vergniaud, Ducos, Fauchet, Boyer-Fonfrède, Carra, and
the physician Pierre Lehardy, participated in a last supper together in the prison chapel. The next morning, 31 October, they were conveyed by the now usual route, in three
charettes
, to the guillotine. Hampered by vast crowds, the procession took two hours to reach the Place de la Révolution. Only Fauchet and the former noble, (the Comte de) Sillery, desiring confessors, affirmed religious faith in the last cart, all the rest preferring to sing the “Marseillaise,” altering some words to mention the “bloody blade” of tyranny and shouting “Vive la République!” Facing the crowd’s jeering, they reportedly displayed stirring courage, Ducos (singing) and Vergniaud showing particular defiance. It took forty minutes to guillotine the twenty victims plus Valazé’s corpse; Brissot was seventh or eighth in line. Missives read out to the Convention over the next days from provincial Jacobin societies fervently congratulated the Convention, urging it to remain undeviating in implementing the promised “Terror” and crushing the “enemies of liberty.”
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It was the first time ever, noted several observers, that an entire batch of any major nation’s most eminent and distinguished men was publicly executed together as a group.

Danton would have wished to curb the Terror but, boxed in, was powerless to deflect the widening repression. Distressed at seeing he could do nothing to save the Brissotins, before long he was being continually assailed himself in the Jacobins and in Hébert’s
Père Duchesne
.
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Two days before the executions of the Brissot circle, Hébert delivered a key speech at the Jacobins, reminding the Montagne that those facing execution represented only a fraction of the “conspiracy.” Why was retribution proceeding so slowly? Brissot, Ducos, and many of the worst were being liquidated, but what of the remaining “conspirators” “Bailly, Barnave, Manuel, Lafayette, etc. etc.” and the despicable Mme. Roland, who “had directed everything”?
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Were all these “enemies” of the Revolution to escape retribution? “No, no,” yelled the Jacobins and the galleries! Crushing the Revolution’s “enemies” must proceed and accelerate!

Mme. Roland, after five months of imprisonment, was moved to the Conciergerie shortly after the execution of Brissot and his colleagues. A true
femme d’état
, about whom Marat, Hébert, and others had made so many ungentlemanly allusions, and yet so superior to them in mind, the lady whose crime was “directing” others, her salon uniting the Brissotin faction, was intensively interrogated. No one said anything on her behalf. Condemned, she was guillotined on 8 November, aged only thirty-eight, without a single paper, a friend noted, uttering one word of criticism. Rather, in recent days the worthy Tribunal Révolutionnaire, commented
Le Moniteur
afterward, had given “un grand example” to
women that they should not forget—the execution in rapid succession of Olympe de Gouges, Marie Antoinette, and that contemptible
monstre
and “queen of a moment” surrounded by mercenary writers to whom she fed sumptuous suppers, Mme. Roland, France’s “philosophe à petits billets.”
⁵⁴
Later that month, Roland himself, hiding in rural Normandy, hearing of his wife’s execution, committed suicide. (His brother was guillotined in Lyon in December.)

Figure 14. (a) Olympe de Gouges, (b) Madame Roland, (c) Helen Maria Williams, (d) Charlotte Corday.

(a) Pierre Vidal, portrait of Olympe de Gouges, engraving, 1760. © Roger-Viollet / The Image Works. (b) Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (ca. 1749–1803),
Portrait of a Woman
, ca. 1787, oil on canvas. Musée des Beaux Arts, Quimper, France / The Bridgeman Art Library. (c) Helen Maria Williams published by Dean & Munday, after unknown artist. © National Portrait Gallery, London. (d) Jean-Jacques Hauer (1751–1829), portrait of Charlotte Corday, painting preserved in the Museum of Versailles and Trianon, ca. 1920–1930. © Alinari Archives / The Image Works.

Theater and the Arts under the Terror

The Terror, eliminating all dissent, every publication diffusing democratic republican principles, concomitantly suppressed the free French theater and sought to discipline artists. While the Jacobins promoted the arts, after June their leadership politicized and popularized painting, architecture, and the theater, disallowing, unlike the Brissotin Jacobins earlier, every discordant note.
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For the Montagne, the arts were primarily mechanisms of political propaganda and discipline. From the autumn of 1793, undesirable themes and attitudes were ruthlessly expunged. Following denunciation by Collot d’Herbois, the entire Comédie-Française theater troupe was arrested on 2 September for performing an adaptation of Goldoni’s
Pamela
, written by the noted deputy, writer, agronomist, and former Caribbean official François de Neufchâteau: they had pronounced lines about persecution that could readily be construed as criticism of the regime. Neufchâteau was imprisoned with the actors; he remained behind bars until after Thermidor.
⁵⁶
On 27 September, Pierre-Yves Barré, one of those responsible for staging
La Chaste Suzanne
at the Vaudeville, and several leading actors at that theater, were imprisoned for staging plays filled with “perfidious allusions.”
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Likewise at Bordeaux and other major regional centers, strict surveillance now became the rule, not just regarding content but equally audiences’ and the actors’ behavior.
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Robespierre’s foremost detractor in the theater world, Laya, was unremittingly hunted but survived in hiding.

Theater censorship in Robespierriste France was not just a matter of banning plays and selecting others. It enforced a pervasive self-censorship of guarded comment, manipulative editing, audience submission, and altering the text of plays. On 5 October, under pressure from Chaumette, the now aged Palissot, a playwright celebrated for the furor over
The
Philosophes
, a satirical comedy first performed
amid much controversy in 1760 and often since, found himself obliged to issue a public denial in the Paris journals that the contemptible valet it featured was not “Rousseau” as theatergoers assumed (even though he plainly
was
“Rousseau”). This wretch “is no more Rousseau,” he announced, “than a monkey is a man.”
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The theater becomes “every day more a school for
patriotisme
,” commented the
Journal de Perlet
on 28 November, reporting that Voltaire’s
La Mort de César
(1733), revived at the Théâtre de la République two evenings before, now had a different ending—not that written by Voltaire but “a better one” by citizen Louis-Jérôme Gohier (1746–1830), the Breton deputy who replaced Garat as justice minister and a staunch proponent of Terror. The changes were not ones the original author would have repudiated, the journal assured readers: the worthy Gohier (a lawyer known for pursuing Brissotins), besides other “happy alterations,” had “improved” Voltaire by deleting completely Anthony’s long “and servile” closing harangue.
⁶⁰

Throughout France, repertoires changed abruptly during the autumn of 1793, and the theaters assumed new names. Every theater now had to be uniformly “populaire” and noncritical. Running at a loss, but thanks to the theater-loving Danton receiving government aid since September 1792, the Paris Théâtre Molière became the Théâtre des Sans-Culottes; the Théâtre-Français, after refurbishment, reopened under the Commune’s supervision renamed (by the Comité de Salut Public) Théâtre du Peuple. At Rouen, the two main theaters—the Théâtre de Rouen now renamed the Théâtre de la Montagne—were sternly supervised by a civic cultural commission that both controlled the repertoire and distributed thousands of free tickets to workers, the infirm, and the elderly.
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At Bordeaux, classical republican and de-Christianizing plays became the rule. Tours, reported the representatives on mission there on 22 November, contained numerous suspect types, several of whom had provoked an incident in the town’s theater, shouting “à bas le bonnet rouge,” compelling two worthy republicans wearing the republican bonnet to remove this “symbol so dear to all good Frenchmen.” To teach Tours theatergoers a lesson, the theater was shut down for a time and the actors dispersed.
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