The Days of the French Revolution (24 page)

Encouraged by the
Enragés
, crowds of people took the law into their own hands, protesting that while wages had increased, the cost of living had outpaced them, demanding cheaper wine, and a reduction in the cost of butter, which had more than doubled in price since 1790 and of soap, the price of which had almost quintupled. Grocers’ and chandlers’ shops were invaded and their owners forced to sell goods at what was considered a fair price. Worried by the spreading incidence of this
taxation populaire
, the Committee of Public Safety took action against Roux who was expelled from the Cordeliers Club, repeatedly mauled in the Jacobin press, and eventually disowned by his
section
. Yet, while Roux was successfully discredited and his influence irreparably damaged, other
Enragés
continued to attack the Committee of Public Safety, to demand price controls and more severe punishments for hoarders and counter-revolutionary suspects. Their influence was much increased after 13 July when a devoted adherent of the Girondins committed a murder.

This was Charlotte Corday, a tall, strong, mystical yet practical young woman from a noble but poor Norman family, a descendant of the dramatist, Corneille. She had been educated at a convent at Caen and had then gone to live with an aunt in whose house she studied Voltaire and Plutarch and those other authors whose works had exercised so profound an influence on the young Manon Roland. When, after the fall of the Girondins, several of their leaders fled to Normandy to advocate
fédéralisme
, she attended their meetings, fell under their influence, undertook to work for them in Paris and, without their knowledge, took it into her head to assassinate the man she held principally responsible for their fall, Jean Paul Marat.

On her arrival in Paris she took a room in the Hôtel de la Providence in the Rue des Vieux Augustins and wrote a letter to Marat: ‘Citizen, I have just arrived from Caen. Your love for your native
place doubtless makes you desirous of learning the events which have occurred in that part of the republic. I shall call at your house in about an hour. Have the goodness to receive me and give me a brief interview. I will put you in a condition to render great service to France.’

Marat refused to see her both on that occasion and when she called a second time with a promise to reveal important secrets and presenting herself as a victim of counter-revolutionary plots. But she persisted, calling for the third time at 30 Rue des Cordeliers on 13 July. She was ‘dressed in a spotted négligé costume and wore a high hat with a black cockade and three rows of black braid,’ according to Laurent Bas, who worked on
L’Ami du peuple
and was in Marat’s office folding copies of the newspaper at the time. ‘She descended from a hackney cab and asked to speak to Citizen Marat. She was carrying a fan in her hand. The
concierge
replied that he was not available at the moment. She said that this was the third time she had called and that it was most tiresome not to be admitted to him…Citizeness Marat then went to ask her brother if the person was to be admitted and Citizen Marat said she was.’

She came into the room with a sharp dinner-knife which she had bought the day before for two francs concealed in the bodice of her dress together with her baptismal certificate and a paper entitled ‘
Adresse aux Français
’ which explained the political motives behind her intended deed. She found Marat lying in a high-walled copper bath wrapped in towels, for he could now only thus find relief from the pain and irritation of the skin disease which was slowly putrefying his flesh. She told him what was happening at Caen, giving him the names of men she said were working there against the Jacobins. He picked up a pen from the board upon which he had been writing and copied the names down, commenting, ‘They shall soon all be guillotined.’ At these words, Charlotte Corday took out her knife and plunged it into his chest, piercing the left lung and the aorta. At his cry of ‘
À moi, ma chère amie!
’ his distraught mistress, Simone Évrard, rushed into the room and seeing the blood pouring from the wound, put her hand over it in an attempt to stop the flow. But Marat was already dead. His murderess calmly walked out of the room and, although she seems to have had no intention of escape,
Bas seized a chair and with it knocked her to the ground. She got up and he ‘clutched her by the breasts, threw her down and struck her’. ‘
Je m’en fous!
’ she cried. ‘The deed is done; the monster is dead!’

To the jealous Robespierre’s disgust, Marat was now the heroic martyr of the extreme Left. His coffin was followed by young girls in white dresses who strewed flowers upon it, by boys carrying branches of cypress, by deputations from the
sections
, and by Montagnards who displayed or affected the deepest sorrow. Some members of the Jacobin Club had his bust placed on a pedestal in the Convention; his heart was suspended in a porphry urn from the ceiling of the Cordeliers Club; his ashes were later given a place of honour in the Pantheon; his mistress, ‘the widow Marat’, was granted a pension. Streets, squares and no less than thirty-seven towns in various parts of France were renamed after him; poems and hymns were composed in his honour; in some schools children were told to make the sign of the cross when his name was mentioned. His portrait, ‘Marat Assassinated’, by a fellow-Montagnard, the ugly Jacques Louis David – who had voted for the death of the King, his former patron – was acknowledged to be one of the great masterpieces of the Revolution. The
Enragés
claimed him as their patron saint, founded newspapers with the titles which he had chosen for his own, and invoked his name in pressing their demands upon the government. And the Committee of Public Safety deemed it prudent to give way to some of these demands by introducing the death penalty for hoarders, allocating a large sum of money for the purchase of grain, and establishing warehouses in various parts of Paris for its storage.

The
Enragés
were not the only influential critics of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee also had to contend with the followers of Danton, who, far from being a spent political force, had been elected President of the Convention a fortnight after losing his seat on the Committee of Public Safety. Perhaps in the hope that Robespierre would show himself incapable of exercising such a burdensome responsibility, Danton proposed that the Committee should now be given the omnipotence of a provisional Government of France backed by a grant of a hundred million
livres
. This pro
posal was rejected, but it was clear that the Dantonists were a strong and devious group whose activities could not be ignored.

Nor could the activities of another group which became known as the Hébertists after the editor of that extremist newspaper,
Le Père Duchesne
, which defamed the Queen and Madame Roland be ignored. Hébert, who considered himself ill-used by the Jacobin leadership which had failed to reward him for his help in the overthrow of the Girondins, presented himself to the Paris
sections
as the most eloquent supporter of radical proposals for the exemplary punishment of speculators, the round-up of suspects, stricter price controls, the purge of all noble officers still remaining in the army, and the trial of the Girondins and of the Queen.

Prodded and harassed by both Dantonists and Hébertists, the Committee of Public Safety became more zealous than ever in their conduct of the war against both foreign enemies and provincial rebels. General Custine was dismissed from his command, arraigned before the Revolutionary Tribunal and accused of having pitied Louis XVI, prevented the circulation of
Le Père Duchesne
in the army, denigrated Robespierre and Marat, ‘surrounded himself with aristocratic officers and never had good republicans at his table’. He was sentenced to death and guillotined. General de Biron was also executed, while Pitt was execrated as ‘the enemy of the human race’. The devastation of the Vendeé was authorized; the federalist leaders were denounced as traitors, negotiations with them being abruptly terminated; troops were ordered to overthrow the royalist counter-revolutionaries in Lyons; the trial of the Queen was authorized; so was the arrest of all enemy aliens not resident in France on 14 July 1789. Then, following the election of Lazare Carnot to the Committee of Public Safety, the Convention called out the entire population of the country to fight for the Revolution in a
levée en masse
.

Carnot, the practical, unflaggingly energetic organizer of the Revolution’s victory, had been a captain in the Engineers when elected to the National Assembly as a deputy for the Pas-de-Calais. Frequently employed as a military commissioner, he had displayed a remarkable talent for organization, exposition and detecting talent. Although still only a captain at forty, he was recognized as a
brilliant soldier, capable of building an army of conscripts that could overcome the more carefully drilled and far more experienced forces of the old European powers. Carnot, of course, was well aware that general and total mobilization was not immediately practicable for it would be impossible either to train or equip so vast a host. The decree enforcing it was largely propagandist in intent. For the moment, therefore, only unmarried men and childless widowers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were recruited into the army. But the rest of the population, both male and female, were liable to be called up for any kind of work which was held to be conducive to the war effort, and funds were provided for the construction of armaments factories. A target was set for the manufacture of a thousand muskets a day.

From this moment until mat when the enemy shall be driven from the territory of the French republic [ran a decree of 23 August], all the French people shall be in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. The young men will go forth to fight. The married men will forge the arms and transport the supplies. The women will make tents and clothes and act as nurses in the hospitals. The children will make lint from rags. The old men will be carried to the public places to excite the courage of the warriors, to preach hatred of kings and love of the republic.

Yet, vigorous and determined as Carnot, Robespierre and the other members of the Committee of Public Safety were now proving themselves to be, the Dantonists and Hébertists still loudly voiced the popular complaints which were exacerbated in the late summer by another bread shortage caused by a severe and lengthy drought. And at the beginning of September a march upon the Hôtel de Ville of workers demanding bread and higher wages was seized upon by Hébert as an opportunity to bring pressure to bear upon the Committee. He asked the workers to gather together the next day, 5 September, to march to the Convention.

The march took place as planned. Hundreds of demonstrators invaded the Convention, milling around the table upon which the stillborn Constitution lay enshrined in a case and gazing up at the canvases on either side of the President’s seat which depicted the murders of Marat and of Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, an enormously
rich former President of the Convention whose assassination had also been portrayed by David.

Demonstrators and Jacobin deputies vied with each other in the advocacy of radical policies and the expression of
sans-culotte
sentiments. A representative of the Commune, crying, ‘No more quarter, no more mercy for traitors…the day of justice and wrath has arrived’, called for the immediate creation of a revolutionary army. Danton, endorsing a decree already passed for the arrest of suspects and the intensification of repression, aroused loud cheers as he paid ‘homage’ to the ‘sublime people’ and demanded that every citizen should be given a musket, that a minimum of a hundred million
livres
should be voted for the manufacture of armaments and that working men who could not afford to attend the meeting of their
sections
should be compensated for their loss of wages whenever they did so. A delegation from the Jacobin Club, in which Hébertists were now dominant, proposed that ‘
Terreur
be the order of the day’.

The Convention gave way to nearly all of the Hébertists’ demands. On 6 September the extremist deputies, Billaud-Varenne and the equally ruthless Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, an actor and playwright, were both admitted to the Committee of Public Safety. Soon afterwards prices were fixed by the
maximum général
. And by the middle of the month arrangements had been made for the arrest of all ‘suspects’ by a law which at last established their identity and included among their number even those who were no more than passively opposed to the Revolution, or who had not been able to obtain ‘certificates of good citizenship’ from the notoriously prejudiced and corrupt Vigilance Committees of their
sections
. The guillotine was soon given much more work to do.

October – December 1793 and March – July 1794

The Queen was one of the first to suffer. At the beginning of July she had been told that she was to be parted from her son.

My mother was horrified by this cruel order [her daughter recorded] and refused to give him up. She defended his bed against the men who had come to take him away. But they insisted on taking him and threatened to use force and to send for the guard…We got him up and when he was dressed my mother handed him over, crying over him, as if she knew she would never see him again. The poor little fellow kissed us all tenderly and departed in tears with the men…My mother felt she had reached the depths of misery now…and her misery was increased when she knew that the shoemaker [Antoine] Simon was in charge of him…He cried for two whole days inconsolably and begged to see us…We often went up into the tower. My brother went by every day and the only pleasure my mother had was to watch him pass by through a little window. Sometimes she waited there for hours to get a glimpse of her beloved child…Every day we heard him and Simon singing the Carmagnole, the Marseillaise and many other horrid songs. Simon made him wear a red bonnet and a carmagnole jacket and forced him to sing at the windows so as to be heard by the guard and to blaspheme God and curse his family and the aristocrats. My mother fortunately did not hear all these horrors as she had been taken away [to the Conciergerie prison on the Île Saint Louis].

At the Conciergerie the Queen was kept in a small, damp cell containing three beds, one for herself, another for a female attendant and the third for two gendarmes who, so Count Fersen recorded, ‘never left the cell even when the Queen had to satisfy the needs of nature’. She spent her time reading such books as
A History of Famous Shipwrecks
, crocheting pieces of thread which she picked from the cloth screens that lined the walls of the cell, or pacing about between the beds as she twisted the rings on her fingers. Towards the middle of September, after the failure of an attempt to release her, she was moved into an even smaller cell, a dark room, formerly the prison dispensary and still smelling of medicines, whose only light during the hours of darkness came from a lantern in the courtyard beyond the barred window. She spent three weeks here before being taken to her trial in the bare marble hall of the Paris
parlement
from which the tapestries and the carpet with its pattern of fleurs-de-lis had been removed. Here she was accused of a variety of
crimes from conspiracy with her brother to incest with her son whom, it was alleged, she had taught to masturbate. When roughly called upon to answer these accusations, she replied, ‘If I give no answer it is because nature itself refuses to accept such an accusation brought against a mother. I appeal to all the mothers here present.’ There was an obvious wave of sympathy for her after this spirited response. But the President angrily threatened to clear the court; the processes of the trial were speeded up and she was found guilty and condemned to death. ‘Having heard the sentence pronounced’, the
Moniteur
reported, ‘she left the court without addressing a further word to the judges or the public, no trace of emotion appearing on her face.’

On the morning of 16 October she dressed herself for the last time in a white piqué dress, white bonnet, black stockings and red prunella high-heeled shoes. Charles Sanson’s son, Henri, came into the cell to tie her hands behind her back. Then, having removed her bonnet, he cut off her hair, which she had dressed with care for her trial the day before, and put it into his pocket. Outside, a tumbril was waiting. At the sight of it she began to tremble and had to have her hands untied so that she could relieve herself in a corner of the courtyard wall. But, once seated in the cart, she regained her composure. Pale and drawn, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes, ‘the widow Capet’, as the
Moniteur
referred to her, remained staring silently ahead of her throughout the long journey to the scaffold. Having climbed the steps she stumbled and trod on the executioner’s foot. ‘Monsieur,’ she apologized as he cried out in pain, ‘I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.’ They were the last words she spoke.

That same month Brissot, Vergniaud and nineteen other Girondin leaders were also put on trial. They defended themselves so skilfully that Hébert angrily complained, ‘Need there be so much ceremony about shortening the lives of wretches already condemned by the people?’ But they were, without exception, condemned to death. Four of them were in their twenties; their average age was forty. One of the older of them, Valazé, stabbed himself to death in court with a dagger which he had concealed under his coat; yet it was
decreed that his corpse should nevertheless be carted next morning to the guillotine and there beheaded with the others.

The morning was fine and an immense crowd collected to see them pass through the streets on their way to the Place de la Revolution. The houses on either side were decorated as if for a festival with tricolours flying from the windows and coloured placards bearing such inscriptions as ‘unity, liberty, equality, fraternity or death’, for it had become dangerous, so one Parisian said, ‘to be considered less revolutionary than your neighbour’. As the condemned men passed beneath these gaily decorated windows in the five slowly moving carts they sang the Marseillaise, so the chronicler of their careers, Alphonse de Lamartine, tells us; and, on reaching the scaffold, jumped out to embrace each other, shouting, ‘
Vive la République!
’ Sillery, the oldest of them, was the first to die. He mounted the steps, bowed to the spectators with grave courtesy, and walked steadily to the guillotine. The others, too, died bravely. Vergniaud, who had thrown away the poison with which he had been provided the night before so that he could die with his friends, was the last to climb the steps. His head was cut off precisely thirty-one minutes after Sillery’s.

During the next few weeks the blade of the guillotine fell and rose in what Thomas Carlyle was to call relentless systole-diastole. On 6 November, Philippe Egalité, the former Duc d’Orléans, who was brought back from Marseilles, was tried and condemned before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Accepting the verdict without protest, he merely asked for a stay of execution for twenty-four hours. The request was granted and ‘in the interval he had a repast prepared with care, on which he feasted with more than usual avidity’. Distrusted and unlamented, he died with a smile on his lips, displaying no sign of fear. On 8 November Madame Roland was also condemned to death. She had been arrested at home at the beginning of June, separated from her weeping daughter and lodged in the prison of the Abbaye from which she was released when Brissot was sent there, re-arrested immediately and taken to the Sainte-Pélagie and thence to the Conciergerie. Without news of her fugitive husband to whom, despite his recent cantankerous jealousy, she was
deeply attached, or of François Buzot, the Girondin, with whom she had fallen passionately in love, constantly worried about her daughter and dismayed by the collapse of all that she had worked for, she nevertheless retained her spirit and dignity to the end, gaining the admiration of her captors as well as of her fellow-prisoners. At her trial she responded bravely to the inquisitors who bullied her unmercifully, who insisted that she reply yes or no to their questions, accused her of loquacity when she attempted a more detailed answer, and told her that she was ‘not there to be clever’. She sometimes wept when questions were asked about her private life and her relations with Girondins other than her husband, but she never broke down and refused to admit any guilt or to compromise her friends, declaring defiantly when sentence was passed upon her, ‘You judge me worthy to share the fate of the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall endeavour to carry to the scaffold the courage they displayed.’

She succeeded in doing so. While the mob surrounded the cart, shouting, ‘À la guillotine! À la guillotine!’, she tried to comfort a frightened forger who sat beside her. And on arrival at the scaffold she asked the executioner to behead him first so that he would be spared the spectacle of her death. The executioner declined: it was against the rules. But she pleaded with him, and he gave way. When it was time for her to be bound to the plank, she looked up at the statue of Liberty, which had been erected in the Place de la Revolution in commemoration of the events of 10 August, and uttered her famous apostrophe, ‘Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.’

Three days later the former Mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who had been arrested while staying with a friend at Melun, was escorted on foot to the Champ de Mars so that he might be executed on the spot of the massacre of 17 July 1791 for which he was held responsible. But on his arrival there a man, who had shaken a red flag in his face throughout the walk from the Conciergerie, shouted that the place which had been the scene of so many revolutionary celebrations should not be polluted by the former mayor’s blood. So, while Bailly walked about the Champ de Mars, insulted by people who threw mud at him, kicked him and struck him with
sticks, the guillotine was dismantled and carried off to a dunghill by the banks of the Seine where, surrounded by a howling mob, he was beheaded in sight of the quarter of Chaillot where he had once lived.

Later that month Barnave, who had retired to his birthplace at Grenoble and been arrested there, was also brought back to Paris after ten months’ imprisonment for trial and execution. And so, day after day, the guillotinings continued. Unsuccessful generals suffered with fallen politicians, men convicted of publishing counter-revolutionary writings or of airing royalist opinions with deserters and traitors. Even the faded courtesan, Madame Du Barry, who had gone to live in the country with the Comte de Cossé-Brissac and had visited England in 1792 to try to raise money on her jewels, was dragged before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Accused of having dissipated the treasures of the state and worn ‘mourning for the tyrant’ in London, she was condemned and, screaming with fright, beheaded. She was followed to the scaffold by eight Carmelite nuns.

Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793 the Terror was maintained unabated. The Committee of Public Safety insisted that it was vitally necessary to stamp out the machinations of both royalists and federalists, hoping thereby to persuade the militant
sons-culottes
that they shared a common cause and the Convention that the omnipotence of the Committee was essential at a time of crisis in the Revolution’s course. Nearly 3,000 executions took place in Paris; about 14,000 in the provinces. Countless people lived in constant fear of death and went to bed dreading the sound of a knock on the door in the middle of the night when most arrests took place.

‘You have no more grounds for restraint against the enemies of the new order, and liberty must prevail at any price,’ cried Saint-Just, who, like Robespierre, ‘regarded all dissidents as criminals’. ‘We must rule by iron those who cannot be ruled by justice…You must punish not merely traitors but the indifferent as well.’ An even more violent Jacobin, Brichet, advised that the Law of Suspects should be interpreted so that all the well-to-do came within its scope: questions should be asked in every village about the means of the principal farmer; if he were rich he should be guillotined without further ado – he was ‘bound to be a food-hoarder’. But it was not
only the rich, or even mainly the rich, who suffered. The poor were executed with the well-to-do, women with men, the young with the old, some accused of ‘starving the people’, others of ‘depraving public morals’, one witness for ‘not giving his testimony properly’. ‘The whole of the country seemed one vast conflagration of revolt and vengeance,’ wrote William Hazlitt in a passage characteristic of English writers of his time and temperament. ‘The shrieks of death were blended with the yell of the assassin and the laughter of buffoons. Never were the finest affections more warmly excited or pierced with more cruel wounds. Whole families were led to the scaffold for no other crime than their relationship; sisters for shedding tears over the death of their brothers in the emigrant armies; wives for lamenting the fate of their husbands; innocent peasant girls for dancing with the Prussian soldiers; and a woman giving suck, and whose milk spouted in the face of her executioner at the fatal stroke, for merely saying as a group were being conducted to slaughter, “Here is much blood shed for a trifling cause.”’

If such accounts must be considered overpitched, and if many families – in several parts of the country most families – lived through these months in undisturbed tranquillity, the
Liste Générale des Condamnés
provides numerous examples of the Terror’s merciless severity:

Jean Baptiste Henry, aged eighteen, journeyman tailor, convicted of having sawed down a tree of liberty, executed 6 September 1793…Jean Julien, waggoner, having been sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour, took it into his head to cry ‘
Vive le Roi
’, brought back to the Tribunal and condemned to death…Stephen Thomas Ogie Baulny, aged forty-six, convicted of having entrusted his son, aged fourteen, to a
garde du corps
in order that he might emigrate, condemned to death and executed the same day…Henriette Françoise de Marboeuf, aged fifty-five, widow of the
ci-devant
Marquis de Marboeuf, convicted of having hoped for the arrival of the Austrians and Prussians and of keeping provisions for them, condemned to death and executed the same day…François Bertrand, aged thirty-seven, publican at Leure in the department of the Côte-d’Or, convicted of having furnished to the defenders of the country sour wine injurious to health, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day…Marie Angelique Plaisant, sempstress at Douai, convicted of
having exclaimed that she was an aristocrat and that she did not care ‘a fig for the nation’, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day.

Hundreds of innocent people suffered with those whom the Revolutionary Tribunal had some cause to consider guilty, some of them through clerical and administrative errors, or even because their accusers chose not to spare them. Others were sentenced on the strength of denunciations by jealous or vindictive neighbours. One victim was fetched from prison to face a charge which had been brought against another prisoner with a similar name. Her protests were silenced by the prosecutor who said casually, ‘Since she’s here, we might just as well take her.’ Another who had lost his temper while playing cards and, when reprimanded for behaving as no good patriot should, had shouted, ‘Fuck good patriots!’ was also brought before the Tribunal, condemned and executed.