The Days of the French Revolution (22 page)

The crowd went home dissatisfied and determined to make further protests. That day was a Friday and many of those who would have otherwise joined in the march on the Convention were unwilling to lose a day’s wages in order to do so. So the Insurrectionary Committee decided to march again on Sunday when all the workers would be free to come with them.

On that Sunday, 2 June, to the sound of drum beats, the roar of the alarm-gun, and the peal of the tocsin, which Marat had rung with his own hand in the tower of the Hotel de Ville the day before, the Convention was once again surrounded by shouting demonstrators, by tens of thousands of armed men from the
sections
and by the battalions of Hanriot’s National Guard supported by sixty cannon. A delegation of their leaders entered the theatre to ‘demand for the last time justice against the guilty’.

At these words Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, one of the Montagnards’ bravest and most outspoken opponents, a former professor of ecclesiastical law at Rennes, rose to protest against ‘this disgraceful intimidation of the country’s elected representatives’. To threats and catcalls from the galleries, to shouts of ‘Down! Down! He wants to start a civil war!’ from a group of Montagnards, Lanjuinais stood his ground, insisting, ‘So long as one is allowed to speak freely here, I will not let the character of representative of the people be degraded in my person! So far you have done nothing; you have permitted everything; you have given way to all that was required of you. An insurrectional committee meets. It prepares a revolt. It appoints commanders to lead it. And you do
nothing
to prevent it.’

Failing in their attempts to shout him down, several Montagnards rushed up to the rostrum and tried to drag Lanjuinais off it. But he
clung on tenaciously until, some semblance of order having at last been restored by the President, Lanjuinais brought his protests to an end by proposing that the revolutionary authorities which had illegally established themselves in Paris should be dissolved. While a deputy of the Left was asking just how he suggested that this should be done, the members of the Insurrectionary Committee again stormed into the theatre, repeating their demands more forcefully than ever.

One deputy now suggested, as a compromise, that the Girondins, whose arrest the armed crowds outside were demanding, should all voluntarily resign their functions. Some agreed to do so, but others, including Lanjuinais, refused. ‘If the Convention compels me to resign, I will submit,’ said Charles Barbaroux, a deputy from Marseilles, supporting Lanjuinais. ‘But how can I resign my powers when a great number of people write to me and assure me that I have used them well and press me to continue to use them? I have sworn to die at my post, and I will keep my oath.’

During the course of the debate a number of deputies had tried to leave the theatre, but had been prevented. Some had been roughly man-handled, and one of them had returned to display in indignation his torn clothes. It was then suggested that, to prove that they were still free, the entire Convention should leave the theatre in a body. The deputies of the Right and the Plain all stood up and began to file out of the doors led by their handsome, debonair President, Hérault de Séchelles, an elegant and independently minded man who derided the fashion for dressing carelessly and who, questioned about his political affiliations, replied that he belonged ‘to the party that snapped its fingers at the others’.

The Montagnards remained at first in their places but, reproached for not daring to share the common danger, they, too, rose to their feet and followed the others outside on to the Carrousel.

Here Hanriot, wearing a hat bedecked with plumes, was sitting in the saddle at the head of his National Guard. ‘What do the people want?’ Hérault de Séchelles asked him. ‘The Convention is concerned only with their welfare.’

‘Hérault,’ Hanriot replied brusquely, ‘the people have not come
here to listen to idle talk.’ They had come, he said, to demand that the guilty Girondins should be arrested.

‘Seize this rebel,’ Hérault de Séchelles commanded the National Guard, who merely looked at him as Hanriot backed his horse and bellowed at his artillerymen, ‘Gunners, to your cannon!’ The deputies quickly turned away. They tried to find some other avenue of escape, but the National Guard stood firm, some of them shouting, ‘Down with the Right! Long live the Montagnards! To the guillotine with the Girondins! Long live Marat!’

Marat himself, surrounded by a group of admiring boys, shouted to Hérault de Séchelles, ‘I can call on you and your followers to return to the posts which you have abandoned like cowards.’ Reluctant as he was to take Marat’s advice, the President realized that he really had no alternative but to retreat. So, while the crowds jeered and insulted them, he led the deputies back into the building where they continued to discuss the fate of the proscribed deputies. The Right refused to vote on the issue, protesting that they were no longer free agents, but the Montagnards ignored their protests. A decree was passed ordering the arrest of twenty-two leading Girondins. Their names, among them many of those who had dominated the earlier days of the Revolution, were read out by Marat, slowly and with evident relish.

By taking the initiative and running all the risks, the
Enragés
and
sans-culottes
had given the Jacobins the opportunity to assume control of Paris and vigorously to prosecute the war which the Girondins had provoked. But few of the demands of these forceful demonstrators from the Paris
sections
had yet been met, and the Jacobins on the Committee of Public Safety were now faced with the problem of restraining them as well as of suppressing the Insurrectionary Committee without arousing their enmity. The Committee of Public Safety had also now to find some way of preventing a reaction in favour of the Girondins – over seventy of whom had signed a protest against the Jacobin
coup d’état
–and of putting a stop to their campaign in the provinces where they were inciting people to
protest against this fresh proof of Parisian terrorism and urging them to rise up against the Jacobin dictators in the capital and to impose
fédéralisme
on France.

During the next few weeks the federalist revolt in the provinces continued to spread until no less than sixty
départements
were infected and the rebels were in possession of several towns in the Loire valley. General Paoli established control of Corsica; parts of Normandy were in uproar; and civil war, such as that fought in the Vendée, raged round Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon. Some of the movement’s leaders hoped to see France divided into a number of more or less independent republics bound together by not too restrictive federal ties. Others were merely anxious to regain for their communities the independence and privileges of which the Revolution had deprived them. But all were strong in their condemnation of the Parisians’ intimidation of an elected national assembly.

The Committee of Public Safety attempted to quieten the protests and subdue the uprisings by making various economic concessions to the peasants and by drawing up a new constitution which – though it never came into operation and was perhaps not intended to – would demonstrate the good intentions of the central government by establishing the principle of universal suffrage and proclaiming the duty of society to provide work for those who could work, help for those who could not, and education for all. The federalist revolt failed, however, not because of these palliatives but because it lacked both unity of direction and the fervour of its opponents, and because, so long as there was still a real threat of foreign invasion,
fédéralisme
seemed an issue that must give way to national salvation.

The war was, indeed, the issue upon which all others turned. The Austrians had followed up their victory over Dumouriez by advancing towards the frontier fortresses of Condé and Valenciennes, both of which fell that summer. Custine was retreating before the Prussians; Spanish armies were threatening to cross the western frontier both north and south of the Pyrenees; the Sardinians were poised to retake Savoy. British troops began to lay siege to Dunkirk. At Lyons, the second most important city in France, royalists had
assumed control and were busy executing the republicans whom they had displaced, and at Toulon counter-revolutionaries were soon to hand over arsenal, town and fleet to the British admiral, Lord Hood who, without the discharge of a single broadside, took under his command twenty-six of France’s sixty-one frigates.

The crisis appeared quite beyond the control of the original Committee of Public Safety, and Danton’s attempts to save France by diplomatic negotiations both with foreign powers and federalist leaders were by now utterly discredited. He and several others were thrown off the Committee; and on 27 July a new member joined it, a man who for long had played a dominant role in the affairs of the Jacobins and was now to dominate the Revolution itself.

Maximilien Robespierre was a small, thin, dogmatic man of thirty-two with thick, carefully brushed and powdered hair and a slightly pock-marked skin of a deathly greenish pallor. His grey eyes, too, had a greenish tint; and green was the shade he most often favoured in the choice of the clothes he wore with such attention to their immaculate neatness and precision of cut. He seemed extremely nervous and highly strung: he walked very fast on high-heeled shoes; a convulsive tic occasionally distorted the livid, pitted skin between his prominent cheekbones and the corners of his long thin lips; he bit his nails; he had a habit of sharply pushing his tinted spectacles up from his short-sighted eyes on to his bonily bulging brow. He rarely laughed and when he did so the sound seemed forced from him, hollow and dry. He appeared to be unremittingly conscious of his own virtues.

He came from Arras where he was born on 6 May 1758, the son of a lawyer who was himself the son and grandson of lawyers. In fact the Derobespierres, as their name was then written, had been well-known attorneys, notaries and barristers in north-eastern France for several generations, though Maximilien’s father had at first been intended for the Church. After spending some time as a novice at an abbey in Ponthieu, however, François Robespierre had decided that he had ‘no inclination for a religious life’ and, having studied law at Douai University, he joined his father’s practice. Un
fortunately he had little inclination for the respectable life of an Arras lawyer either. He shamed his family by falling in love with the daughter of a brewer and by marrying her when she discovered herself to be pregnant. Maximilien was the first of the five children of this marriage.

Maximilien’s early years were fairly happy ones. His mother was kind and gentle, and his father, whose restless, unhappy nature was soothed by her devotion, prospered as a barrister. But then the death of his fifth child was quickly followed by that of the mother, and his father, overwhelmed by grief, sank into what Maximilien’s sister called his ‘odd behaviour again’. He took to drink and neglected his practice. Eventually, abandoning the children to the care of his sisters and his father-in-law, he left Arras and not long afterwards died in Germany.

At the time of his father’s departure Maximilien was eight years old. The cheerful, carefree little boy had now become quiet and grave. When he heard his mother spoken of, tears came into his eyes. He spent much of his time making lace, a craft which his mother had taught him, constructing models of farms and houses and churches, collecting pictures, showing the fruit of his careful labours to his younger sisters, anxious for their approval and praise. He was kind to these sisters. But if he joined in their games it was usually to tell them how they ought to be played; and when they asked him for one of his pet pigeons he refused to give it to them for fear that they might not look after it properly. In the end he relented. They left its cage out in a storm one night and it died. Between his tears, so Charlotte said, he poured reproaches upon the culprits for their carelessness.

At school he was a model pupil, attentive, hard-working and intelligent. And at the age of eleven he was awarded a scholarship to the famous Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Before leaving he gave his sisters all his toys. He would not give them the pigeons, though, entrusting these to someone more responsible.

In Paris his own responsibility was never in doubt. He was not one of the university’s brightest students, but there was scarcely another more conscientious, more thorough, more determined to succeed, readier to return to subjects which he felt he had not fully
mastered or in which his examination results had proved disappointing.

He seems to have been a solitary student who made no intimate friends and was apparently content to spend most of his time alone in the private room with which his scholarship provided him. He was not much liked, his contemporaries resenting in particular his practice of reporting their misdemeanours to their masters. ‘He was a melancholy boy,’ one of them recalled. ‘I do not remember ever having seen him laugh.’ Even then he was excessively neat in his dress, and spent the little pocket money that was allowed him on lace cuffs and shoe buckles and on having his hair curled at the barbers.

No one who knew him then pictured him as a revolutionary. He professed – and for several years continued to profess – his belief in the King as a ‘young and wise monarch’, part of whose ‘august character’ was a ‘sacred passion for the happiness of the people’. And when the King and Queen passed by the gates of the Collège Louis-le-Grand in the summer of 1775 to be greeted by its masters and students, Maximilien Derobespierre was deputed to make the speech of welcome in Latin. He did so most respectfully, kneeling in the rain by the open door of the royal carriage while the King remained seated inside, shy and confused, not knowing what to say when the speech was finished, so saying nothing.

Yet the masters at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, who included Jean le Rond d’Alembert, a contributor to the
Encyclopédie
, were anxious to instil into their pupils not so much the glories of the Bourbon dynasty as the virtues of the Roman Republic and the principles of the
philosophes
. And Derobespierre was soon reading Rousseau’s
Social Contrat
with profound attention and respect. He did not care for the agnosticism of Voltaire and clung to his belief in God and the immortality of the soul. But his former observances as a good practising Catholic were now abandoned for ever.