The Days of the French Revolution (20 page)

I had just reached the Rue de Seine when I noticed an unusual light and heard a great clamour which seemed to come from the direction of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite. I went up to a group of women gathered on the corner of the street and asked them what all the noise was about.

‘Where on earth
does
this bloke come from?’ one of the women asked, looking at her neighbour. ‘Do you mean to say you don’t know that they’re taking care of the goods in the prisons? Look! Look down mere in the gutter.’

The gutter ran with blood. They were butchering me poor creatures in me Abbaye. Their cries were mingled with the yells of the executioners, and the light which I had observed came from bonfires which the murderers had lit to illuminate their exploits.

Another man who heard the screams of the victims comforted his shocked wife in words quoted by Baron Thiébault: ‘This is a very terrible business. But they are our deadly enemies, and those who are delivering the country from them are saving your life and the lives of our dear children.’

Similar sentiments were expressed by a young apprentice sempstress:

Like everyone else, I was shaking with fear lest these royalists be allowed to escape from their prison and come and kill me because I had no holy pictures to show them…While shuddering with horror, we looked upon the action as almost justified; while it was going on, we went about our own affairs, just as on any ordinary day.

Such attitudes were encouraged by the Commune which sent out to all the
départements
of France a letter which read:

The Commune of Paris takes the first opportunity of informing its brethren of all me
départements
that some of the fierce conspirators detained in its prisons have been put to death by the people, who regarded this act of justice as indispensable, in order to restrain by intimidation the thousands of traitors hidden within its walls at the moment when it was marching against me enemy. And we do not doubt that the whole nation, after thee long sequence of treachery which has brought it to the edge of the abyss, will be anxious to adopt this most necessary method of public security; and that all Frenchmen will exclaim, with the people of Paris, ‘We are marching against the foe, but we will not leave these brigands behind us to cut the throats of our children and of our wives.’

Among the signatories of this letter, which led to massacres in several provincial prisons, including those at Meaux and Rheims, was Marat who, unlike most others who put their names to it, never disclaimed responsibility for what had happened in Paris when it became politic to do so.

Danton’s attitude to the massacre, however, was, as usual, ambiguous. Madame Roland, who said that the Revolution had now become ‘hideous’ to her, alleged that Danton answered the protests of a humane prison inspector with the impatient outburst, ‘I don’t give a damn for the prisoners. Let them look after themselves as best they can.’ Later, according to the Duc de Chartres, he claimed to have actually been responsible for organizing the murders which were intended to put a river of blood between the ‘youth of Paris’ and the
émigrés
. ‘It often happens,’ he added ‘especially in time of revolution, that one has to applaud actions that one would not have
wanted or dared to perform one’s self.’ As always with Danton, though, one cannot be sure. He was preoccupied with the defence of France against the foreign enemy and may well have lamented the murders but have been reluctant to jeopardize his influence over the
sans-culottes
by making what may well have proved futile attempts to prevent them. Certainly he helped to protect certain men, including Charles Lameth and Duport, whom the more uncompromising of his colleagues wished to arrest or execute. And certainly, also, this violent, passionate, impulsive but never sustainedly cruel man did his best to prevent prisoners in gaols outside Paris being brought to the capital as long as the massacres lasted.

Within a fortnight of the murder of the last of the prisoners, Danton’s anxieties about the French army were for the moment dispelled. For on 20 September 1792 at Valmy in the Argonne the well-trained Prussian army of Frederick William II, officered by veterans of the King’s uncle, Frederick the Great, had faltered, halted, then turned aside, demoralized by the French artillery of the old order and the massed forces of the new. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had witnessed the engagement through the thin patches of a drifting mist and afterwards recorded how ‘the greatest consternation’ had spread throughout the German army:

In the morning we had been talking of roasting and eating the French…Now people avoided each other’s eyes and the only words uttered were curses. In the garnering darkness we sat in a circle. We did not even have a fire as we usually had. Almost everyone remained silent…then someone asked me what I thought of the events of the day…So I simply said, ‘At this place, on this day there has begun a new era in the history of the world; and you can all claim to Lave been present at its birth.’

‘You’ll see how these little cocks will strut now,’ wrote one dispirited Prussian after this devastating cannonade at Valmy. ‘We have lost more than a battle.’

While the French cannon were thundering at Valmy, the newly elected members of the National Convention assembled in the Manège in Paris. The delegates from the provinces, where, though the suffrage had been widened, voting had not been heavy, were for the most part the same kind of men who had been elected to previous assemblies. Among them were one or two workers; there were also a few former nobles, including the Duc d’Orléans who now chose to call himself Philippe Egalité, and nearly fifty clergy; but most of them were from middle-class backgrounds, lawyers as before predominating. They were inclined to support the Girondins and to deplore the
septembriseurs
.

In Paris, however, where the electoral assembly had been moved to the premises of the Jacobin Club, the mood of the electorate was more ardently revolutionary and care was taken to ensure that as many conservatives as possible were prevented from voting. All who had joined the Feuillant Club, for example, were deprived of the franchise, as were those who had inscribed their names upon the long petition that had been drawn up in June in protest against the invasion of the Tuileries. The result was that every Parisian candidate elected, with one single exception, was a supporter of the Jacobins.

The revolutionary atmosphere in Paris was maintained by admonitory posters and placards pasted to the walls of streets and squares, several of whose names had been changed in celebration of the death of the
ancien régime
; by the spread of
tutoiement
in conversation and the gradual abandonment of
Monsieur
in favour of
Citoyen
; by the professional classes’ widespread rejection of the elaborate clothes and powdered hair of the
ancien régime
for the simple carelessness of the artisan; by their disinclination to raise their hats in greeting any more and by their wives’ unwillingness to be seen wearing jewellery or using a fan which did not depict some hero or heroic event of the Revolution; by the choice of Christian names for babies which would reflect the radical nature of the age into which they had been born; and by the repudiation of surnames that carried with them regrettable echoes of the past.

One of the first acts of the Convention was to declare the monarchy abolished. This was followed by a decree that 22 September
1792 marked the beginning of Year I of the French Republic. But it soon became clear that the Convention would agree harmoniously on little else. The Girondins lost no time in mounting violent and repeated attacks on the Jacobins who, occupying the highest seats in the hall, became known as Montagnards or the Mountain. The Montagnards, deeply suspicious of the Girondins whom they believed capable of any political alliance to maintain their powerful but not impregnable position in the Convention and their control over the ministerial posts, responded no less abusively. Between them the independent members of what became known as the Plain sat, for much of the time, in brooding silence, watching and waiting.

The Girondins might well have maintained their supremacy had they taken more care to cultivate the Plain, had they not emphasized the political gulf that now separated Paris from the provinces, and had they not endeavoured to discredit the capital and its Commune in the eyes of the rest of the country. But, as it was, the Girondins succeeded only in alienating the Parisians when they might have profited by the revulsion that so many of them felt against the September Massacres – for which Vergniaud unreservedly blamed the Jacobins – and in antagonizing several members of the Plain as well as the followers of Danton whom Jean Roland, out of jealousy, and Manon Roland, from both distrust and personal distaste, vilified with increasing vehemence.

Discord in the Convention was deepened by the shadow of the King. The Girondins, who tried unsuccessfully to avert a judicial trial, would have chosen to spare him. So, it seems, would Danton who cautiously stated his belief that, without being convinced that the King was ‘entirely blameless’, it would be ‘useful to get him out of the situation’ in which he had placed himself. But, according to Théodore Lameth, who risked his life by returning to Paris from England in the hope of saving the King’s life, Danton added privately, ‘All the same, if I have to give up all hope for him, I warn you that, since I don’t want my head to fall with his, I shall join those who condemn him.’ And so in the end Danton did condemn him, declaring unequivocably, ‘The only place to strike Kings is on the head.’

Most of the Montagnards had voiced such sentiments from the
beginning. Louis de Saint-Just, a hard, unsmiling, remorseless, dislikeable, clever young man from Blérancourt, spoke for many of them when, his long fair hair dancing on his shoulders, he demanded the trial and execution of the King as an enemy of the people. Such demands gathered even wider support when a large iron box, containing compromising documents, was discovered in the Tuileries. On II December Louis Capet as he was now generally called – though Capet, so he protested, was not his name: ‘it was the surname of one of my ancestors’–was sent for by the Convention to answer the charge of ‘having committed various crimes to re-establish tyranny on the ruins of liberty’.

The King and Queen and their children had now been incarcerated in the Temple, behind a succession of locked doors, for four months. The rooms, at first oppressively hot, had become cold and damp, and the wind, blowing down the antiquated chimneys, filled them with smoke. Most of the guards were unfriendly and sometimes rude, scrawling graffiti on the walls, rattling their keys ‘in a terrible manner’ and insolently puffing their pipes in their captives’ faces. One of them, Louis Turgy, a former kitchen-boy at Versailles, less hostile than the others, recorded the ‘extremely stringent’ precautions which were always observed at the Temple:

This is the way in which my service had to be carried on. Before dinner, as before every meal, I had to go to the Council Chamber and ask for two of the officers to come, who themselves laid the dishes, and tasted the food to make sure there was nothing hidden in it…They accompanied me to the dining-room, and only allowed me to lay the table when they had examined it above and below. I had to unfold the cloth and the napkins in front of them. They cut each roll of bread in half, and searched the inside with a fork, or even with their fingers.

The King rose at six o’clock, shaved, had his hair rolled and was helped to dress by his manservant, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, then, after saying his prayers on his knees for five or six minutes, he spent most of the morning reading or giving lessons to his son, getting him to colour maps or to recite passages from Corneille and Racine. Before
dinner at two o’clock he was allowed out for a walk with his family during which, so Cléry said, ‘the artillerymen or guard danced and sang; their songs were always revolutionary, and sometimes also obscene’. After dinner the Dauphin and his sister went into an antechamber to play at battledore and shuttle-cock or a game with a board, a flattened bowl and wooden pins called Siam, while the King played piquet or
tric-trac
with his wife and sister before lying down for an hour or so on his bed, snoring loudly in his sleep.

On the King’s waking he would make me sit by him while I taught his son to write [Cléry recorded]. The copies I set were chosen by His Majesty from the works of Montesquieu and other celebrated authors…In the evening, the family sat round a table, while the Queen read to them from books of history, or other works proper to instruct and amuse her children…Madame Elisabeth took the book in her turn, and in this manner they read till eight o’clock. I then gave the Prince his supper in Madame Elisabeth’s chamber during which the family looked on, and the King took pleasure in diverting the children by making them guess riddles in a collection of the
Mercures de France
which he found in the library.

After the Dauphin had supped, I undressed him, and the Queen heard him say his prayers. He said one in particular for the Princesse de Lamballe, and in another he begged God to protect the life of his governess. When the Municipal Officers were too near, the Prince, of his own accord, had the precaution to say these two prayers in a low voice…After his own supper at nine o’clock the King went for a moment to the Queen’s chamber, shook hands with her and his sister for the night, and kissed his children. Then going to his own apartment he retired to the turret-room where he sat reading till midnight.

Nearly every week he read as many as twelve books, mostly history and travel and works of devotion, spending ‘four hours a day on Latin authors’. The time passed very slowly.

For the Queen, too, the days were long. She spent hours on end knitting, making tapestries or embroidering chair covers which she would put down from time to time to give a lesson to her daughter or play with the Scottish terrier that the Princesse de Lamballe had given her. She called the dog Odin, a name that Hans Axel Fersen
had given to a dog of his. She was still a young woman – her thirty-seventh birthday had been spent within these grey stone walls – but she looked much older; she had become painfully thin and her hair was now quite grey and in places streaked with white.