Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (38 page)

THE HARVEST OF 1793 was good—it had been a very hot summer—but many of the water mills remained dry and by autumn the flour was still not ready to send to the bakers. Since June prices had risen dramatically. In Paris food was scarce, soap had tripled in price, and even Robespierre had difficulty obtaining the silk stockings he always wore (he never abandoned his knee breeches for the humbler costume of the sans-culottes). At the end of July, the Convention fixed the price of bread and other basic necessities and imposed the death penalty on anyone convicted of hoarding. To some extent, the Convention’s measures were intended to address the demands of the new best-selling newspaper, Jacques René Hébert’s foul-mouthed
Père Duchesne
, which had taken over as the voice of the Parisian poor from
L’ami du peuple
after Marat’s murder. Hébert was a leading figure in the Commune, the Jacobin Club, and the Cordelier Club. Robespierre already had reservations about him and was certainly not in favor of radical social leveling of the kind proposed by the
enragés
, who had been calling for price controls since the beginning of the year.

On 2 September, the first anniversary of the horrific prison massacres, news reached Paris that counterrevolutionary rebels had surrendered the great naval base at Toulon to the British. The enemy had penetrated France. Hungry, angry Parisians, impatient with the food lines that had become their way of life, panicked. The
enragés
took to the streets and another insurrection was under way. The city was completely out of control for several days. On 4 September Hébert and his allies in the Commune turned popular demands for better wages and more bread into a general strike and marched on the Convention the following day. The Jacobins were persuaded to join in, though Robespierre was reluctant. He knew that—as the current president of the Convention—he was going to have to placate the angry crowd when it burst into the debating chamber.

On 5 September, confronted once again by the mob, the Convention declared terror “the order of the day.” Even though Danton had been voted off the Committee of Public Safety, he was still powerful in the Convention. Here he faced down the
enragés
and carried a controversial decree to limit the city’s forty-eight sections to just two meetings per week. This ended their daily sessions (or so-called permanence) and curbed what, since 1789, had been prominent sites for popular protest. Danton also called for a “Revolutionary Army,” the ordinary people in arms to act not against food hoarders (as the
enragés
wanted) but against the foreign enemy. On the spot, the Convention allocated a hundred million livres (which it did not have) to provide a musket for every man in France. In this atmosphere of patriotic unity, the main instrument for enforcing the Terror on the home front was fortified: the Revolutionary Tribunal was expanded and divided into four concurrent chambers, so that it could more rapidly process a greater number of cases. Henceforth all judges and jurors were to be appointed either by the Committee of Public Safety or the larger Committee of General Security. Finally, on 17 September, the Convention passed the terrifying Law of Suspects: anyone could now be arrested and punished with death who “either by their conduct, their contacts, their words, or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny or of federalism or to be enemies of liberty.”
⁶⁰
Under the Law of Suspects everyone—not just foreigners, as had previously been the case—was obliged to carry a certificate of
civisme
, which was both an identity card and a stamp of civic virtue in one. Anyone without one of these cards could be arrested, and many thousands were.

After the declaration on 5 September, the Terror remained France’s official regime for nine months. During this time approximately sixteen thousand people were formally condemned to death, most of them in the provinces, and many more unofficial victims died in custody or were lynched without trial.
⁶¹
Nearly two thousand were executed in Lyon after the city fell to the revolutionaries. Over three and a half thousand were guillotined when the revolt in the Vendée was finally suppressed, after terrible loss of life on the battlefield and the murder of an estimated ten thousand rebels and civilians in retreat. The policy of repression worked. As autumn turned to winter, the republic’s armies were once again succeeding abroad and the federalist revolt unleashed by the fall of the Girondin faction was effectively over. In December Augustin Robespierre, still with the army in the south, sent news that the strategic port at Toulon had been recaptured at last. He was proud to tell his brother that he had gone into action with the troops and distinguished himself as a fighter.

BETWEEN OCTOBER AND the end of 1793, 177 people were guillotined in Paris after appearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal, now under the strict control of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. The trial of Marie Antoinette came early in the Terror. When the members of the royal family were first imprisoned in the Tower, Paris’s Insurrectionary Commune took responsibility for guarding them. It was the Commune that sent Robespierre to check that all was quiet there while the September Massacres were taking place. During the summer of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety intervened. Louis XVI’s son—Louis Capet, as the republic knew him—eight years old and ill, was separated from his mother, aunt, and sister on 9 July by the committee’s decree. Marie Antoinette resisted bodily, clinging to her child and the bedpost until someone threatened to call the guard and she understood it was hopeless. Summoning all her remaining strength, she said, “My child, we are about to part. Bear in mind all I have said to you of your duties…. Never forget God who thus tries you nor your mother who loves you. Be good, patient, and kind and your father will look down from heaven and bless you.”
⁶²
Her son was dragged from the room, one of his manhandlers declaring, “Don’t be uneasy—the nation, always great and generous, will take care of his education,” before the door slammed shut.
⁶³
In the garden where the prisoners were allowed to take exercise a new fence was erected to prevent Louis Capet from seeing his family. Marie Antoinette found a chink in it and surreptitiously glimpsed her son again three weeks after their separation. He was dressed as a miniature sans-culotte, with the red cap of liberty on his head, and accompanied by a rough, abrasive tutor, a man named Anthony Simon, who was Marat’s next-door neighbor.
⁶⁴
The murder of his friend and patron on 13 July, just days after he took on the role of tutor, did nothing to improve Simon’s treatment of his charge. Marie Antoinette was horrified. On 2 August she was taken to the Conciergerie in anticipation of her appearance before the Revolutionary Tribunal. That same day the Commune sent her son a toy guillotine.

The queen’s trial began on 14 October and lasted two days. During it, Hébert tried to prove that she had sexually abused her son. “Nature refuses to answer such a charge,” Marie Antoinette retorted, “but I appeal against it to the heart of every mother who hears me.”
⁶⁵
Robespierre was highly irritated. “That fool Hébert will make her an object of pity!” he complained.
⁶⁶
The prisoner did not want pity. She said, “I was a queen and you dethroned me. I was a wife, and you murdered my husband. I was a mother, and you have torn my children from me. I have nothing left but my blood—make haste to take it.” She was guillotined before noon on 16 October. Robespierre seems to have taken little interest in this gesture of bloody vengeance. When Louis XVI went past his door on the way to execution, Robespierre turned his back in awed silence. When Marie Antoinette went past, not in a closed carriage like her husband with a priest and prayer book but in an open tumbril exposed to the braying crowd, he scarcely noticed. His mind was already on the trial of the Girondin leaders, much more politically significant for him and the Revolution than the death of one distraught, grief-stricken woman who had lost everything except her Roman Catholic faith.

The trial of the Girondins opened on 24 October, eight days after the queen’s execution. Robespierre had already succeeded in opposing a vote in the Convention by
appel nominal
, which would have resembled the protracted vote over the king’s fate, with all the deputies individually stepping up to the tribune to deliver an opinion and verdict, some of them simply pronouncing the word
death
, others speaking interminably long into the night for exile, imprisonment, or acquittal. Even so, he did not have complete control of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which hesitated to condemn twenty-one Girondins brought before it, among them Brissot, so long the focus of Robespierre’s hatred. “I never liked Brissot as a politician,” one contemporary remembered, “no one was ever more intoxicated by passion: but that does not prevent me from doing justice to his virtues, to his private character, to his disinterestedness, to his social qualities as a husband, a father and a friend, and as the intrepid advocate of the wretched Negroes.”
⁶⁷
Why did Robespierre hate him so much? Both were idealists—supporters of the people and the oppressed everywhere. But they had disagreed bitterly over whether France should go to war in 1792, disagreed again over the fate of the king, and disagreed with yet more vehemence about whether the new republic should have a federal structure to counter the disproportionate influence of Paris. Unlike the Incorruptible, Brissot had political skeletons in his closet. He had had shadowy dealings with the police under the old regime, had traveled to Britain and the United States, had involved himself in schemes to resolve the debts that brought France to the precipice of revolution. Robespierre had tried to have Brissot arrested in the course of the September Massacres, so he might be disposed of without due process. The plan failed. Just over a year later, Robespierre was more desperate than ever to ensure the death of his long-standing enemy. Brissot would have felt the same if their situations had been reversed.

Brissot had been one of those fortunate enough to escape arrest on 2 June; Pétion was another. Brissot headed first for nearby Chartres, where he had grown up in his father’s inn. Then with a loyal friend, a false passport, minimal luggage, and a brace of pistols, he traveled south through Nevers, then on to Moulins, where he was caught and taken back to the capital. He was imprisoned in the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près like Mme Roland, to whom he had once written movingly of his romantic responses to books during childhood. Reading
Anson’s Voyage Round the World
, for example, he had seen himself “constructing log-huts in the happy isles of Juan Fernandez and Tinian.”
⁶⁸
He had always been a dreamer. From prison he wrote long letters to the Convention, comparing himself to Cicero, asking to be heard, for a chance to explain himself. It was no use. Brissot and twenty other Girondins were moved to the Conciergerie to await trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Those who still eluded arrest were declared outlaws and hunted down. Pétion’s body was found in a field, half eaten by wolves. To complete matters, Robespierre arranged to have the house of his former friend demolished.

The trial did not go well from Robespierre’s point of view. He had been reluctant to let it go ahead, probably because he knew there was still a great deal of public support for the Girondins, who were eloquent and sounded convincingly patriotic. After five days, during which the possibility of acquittal—politically disastrous for the Jacobins—gathered strength, steps were taken to ensure conviction. In the Convention a Jacobin named Osselin proposed a decree to end the trial. Robespierre stepped up to the tribune and said the proposal was too vague. In its place, he offered another to “reconcile the interests of the accused men with the safety of the country”:

But if they said yes, it was all over. Trial by conscience was something Robespierre had suggested before: it meant the jury’s decisions could be intuitive rather than reasonable and the accused could be convicted not only for their actions but also for their dispositions and attitudes. In that frightening room above the Conciergerie dungeons, where there was one chair for the ringleader and benches behind for those destined to share his or her fate, what was on trial was a frame of mind. Individuals were beside the point; what mattered was the triumph of the revolutionary mentality over anything that might oppose, challenge, or detract from it. “Whoever trembles is guilty,” Robespierre said darkly.

Guilty was the verdict on the twenty-one Girondins. When it was pronounced, one witness heard Camille Desmoulins exclaim in shock, “My God! My God! It is I who kills them.”
⁷⁰
He was referring to the part his newspaper had played in turning public opinion in Paris against the Girondins; Camille was sorry now, but it was too late. Another eyewitness recalled that Brissot “had scarcely heard the fatal word
death
when his arms fell to his side and his head dropped suddenly upon his breast.” He wrote to his wife, “Good-bye, my darling; dry your tears; mine are wetting the paper as I write. We shall be parted, but not eternally.” Like Robespierre he still believed in an afterlife. Like Robespierre, too, he had lived for ideas—progress, human rights, grand abstractions that seemed almost within reach in the middle of the Revolution. On their way to execution the Girondins sang the “Marseillaise.” They sang it over the body of one of their party, Valazé, who had snuck a knife into the courtroom and stabbed himself as soon as he heard the verdict. There was talk of decapitating his corpse, but in the end it was only dragged along in the tumbril to the foot of the guillotine where the lives of the others ended. One contemporary remarked, “In the Girondins Robespierre only killed a party; in Brissot he guillotined an idea.”
⁷¹
The idea in question might have been a federal French republic, on the American model that had so impressed Brissot during his transatlantic travels before 1789, or a new and original model of republican government that differed in crucial respects from Robespierre’s. It is true that Robespierre thoroughly disapproved of some of Brissot’s ideas, even while sharing others. But it is also indisputable that when Brissot died, Robespierre was at last rid of a thoroughly despised personal enemy. In this instance, guillotining the man meant as much to him as guillotining the ideas that menaced a republic “one and indivisible.” Mme Roland followed her Girondin friends to the guillotine in early November. Gesturing toward the statue of liberty that had recently been erected on the plinth of the demolished statue of Louis XIV in the renamed place de la Révolution, she said, “Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!”
⁷²
Her husband was in hiding in the countryside. When he heard of her death he walked straight out of the house and committed suicide in a ditch.