Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (103 page)

“Heresy,” as in Inquisition times, was now firmly established. “Liberty” was menaced from both wings, one group of conspirateurs plotted counterrevolution under the mask of modérantisme tainted with Girondisme, the other feigned to be more patriotic than everyone else, promoting extremism again to subvert liberty.
¹³⁸
These warring factions were really the same thing, argued Robespierre, and were obviously manipulated by foreign powers. The strife between populist militants controlling the Cordeliers—Hébert, Ronsin, Vincent, and Momoro forming one leg of the regime and Dantonistes trying to rescue the revolutionary values of 1789–93—was clearly irresolvable and threatened to capsize the Committee of Public Safety, shattering Robespierre’s always fragile group
dictature.
On 10 January 1794, Robespierre spoke at the Jacobins in a manner hinting that he now counted Philippeaux and Desmoulins among his innumerable detractors. But he remained unpredictable and could turn on the Hébertistes at any moment.

What chiefly mattered to Robespierre was his own dominance and standing. Had not the vile Louvet labeled him, Robespierre, a “dictator”? Now, others too called him a “dictateur.” Well, he
was
a dictator, but a dictator for “the people.” “My dictatorship,” he exclaimed to frantic, thunderous applause, “is that of Lepeletier and Marat.” He, Robespierre, embodied Marat’s “dictatorship.” The true “martyr of the Revolution,” it was only he who was genuinely under threat, because he was the one thrusting the dagger at the throat of “tyrants.”
¹³⁹
Still, Robespierre hesitated. While Danton, Philippeaux, and Desmoulins pondered how to save themselves by countering the militant populists orchestrating the Cordeliers, from late December 1793 to March 1794, France’s self-confessed dictator brooded long and hard over whether to silence the threat from the streets first, the flatterers of the sansculottes, before crushing the Terror’s critics, or proceed vice versa. Despite a show of unity to mark the anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution, on 21 January, when the entire Convention marched to the Place de la Révolution singing republican hymns, murderous tension fed the underlying fratricidal struggle.

The Terror, meanwhile, ground on inexorably, bearing little apparent relation to the current tussle for power. Early in the new year, Lamourette, another leading democrat, and, in particular, leader with Grégoire and Fauchet of “la démocratie chrétienne,” followed Fauchet onto the scaffold. Where other condemned constitutional bishops, like Charles Benoît Roux, moderate royalist constitutional bishop of Bouches-du-Rhône, imprisoned at Marseille and liquidated there in April 1794, were tried in the provinces, and Loménie de Brienne, arrested in November, committed suicide at the seat of his bishopric, Sens, five days after Lamourette’s demise, the latter was sent from Lyon to face the Paris Tribunal Révolutionnaire. During his weeks at the Conciergerie, Lamourette behaved with exemplary dignity.
¹⁴⁰
His trial on 10 January pivoted on a celebrated address delivered in Lyon cathedral on 12 June 1793, ten days after the Robespierriste coup in Paris, eulogizing those who died in the anti-Montagnard Lyon insurrection of 29 May. In that discourse, he publicly condemned the Montagne,
glorifying the Lyon rebellion and extolling “the Twenty-Two [Brissotin]
conspirateurs
” as upholders of the “true and wise liberty,” the soul of the Revolution, claiming that the people were being “grossly misled.”
¹⁴¹
This guaranteed his death sentence. He went to the guillotine the next day. Most of the democratic Revolution’s principal men were now dead or behind bars. But reputations lived on and Brissot, Condorcet, Pétion, and Mirabeau continued to dominate the trials and terroriste rhetoric, remaining the key category-markers for repression through the rest of the Terror.

Figure 16. French School, portrait of Camille Desmoulins, 18th century, oil on canvas. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. © BeBa / Iberfoto / The Image Works.

If less than two hundred people had thus far been guillotined in Paris, arrests of opponents, especially with Brissotin, Feuillant, or royalist connections, accelerated over the winter. The total of political prisoners cramming Paris prisons rose spectacularly by 19 January to 5,073—a staggering figure compared with four months earlier. In late January, Jacobins implicated in the financial scandal surrounding Fabre joined the prison population. Yet the destabilizing deadlock paralyzing the Jacobins dragged on.
¹⁴²
Still no reckoning occurred with either rival coalition wing. Tense relations between the executive and sociétés populaires, between Robespierre and the streets, continued, as did wrangling over price controls, which again surged to the fore in late January under renewed pressure of rising prices, reinforced by Hébertiste complaints. Before anything else, the regime felt it needed to more fully bridle independent populism, vesting power in the sociétés populaires and sansculottes, and hence directly in the streets, though, as Danton agreed, this could not be done explicitly or too overtly. The masses cared little or nothing for the regime’s ideological obsessions and were only really concerned about bread supplies, price controls, and their vendetta against hoarders. Jacques Roux, apostle of economic equality, now an isolated figure whose influence was much reduced but still represented a residual threat from the streets, was hauled before the Tribunal Révolutionnaire on 25 January. He had publicly disparaged the Montagnard leadership, which meant he stood no chance of evading the death sentence, but his judges were prevented from implementing it: Roux ended his life sensationally, stabbing himself five times before his accusers, expiring on the spot amid torrents of blood.
¹⁴³

Frightful and appalling though the Terror was, until March 1794 its victims in Paris remained relatively few by the standards of Lyon, Nantes, Toulon, or the Vendée. A total of 177 were executed in the capital between October and the end of 1793. Overall, the Terror thus far was less a catalog of show trials and executions than a wave of general
repression, searches, imprisonment, xenophobia, and militant populism aimed at intimidating everyone from the sansculottes, shopkeepers, bakers, and prostitutes—and local Jacobin clubs—to artists’ salons, cafés, theaters, and opera houses. Execrable atrocities were committed in many places. But even if the true figure for victims who died in France during the Terror surpassed the official estimate of around thirty thousand deaths in ten months, the catastrophe must be considered in the light of the age’s other great atrocities.
¹⁴⁴
Compared with the numbers slaughtered in Frederick the Great’s battles, or the brutal suppression of the 1798 Irish rebellion (despite Ireland having barely one-sixth of France’s population), the mortality caused by the Terror remained comparatively modest.

Terror wielded by virtue, according to Robesierre, was the very pillar of liberty. Despite it all, remnants of the republican vanguard managed to survive precariously either in the Convention, in hiding, or in prison, including Bonneville (who had failed to get elected to the Convention but remained a prominent critic of Marat and Robespierre), Louvet, Isnard, Lanjuinais, Lanthenas, Boissy d’Anglas, Kervélégan, Paine, Roederer (who long disappeared from view), and the historian-archivist Pierre-Claude Daunou, constitutional priest and philosophy professor, deputy for the Pas-de-Calais, among the seventy-two protesters of June 1793, among the chief framers of the Constitution of 1795. After Thermidor, these men, battered and deeply traumatized though they were, slowly reemerged and, with growing resolution from early 1795, strove to piece together again the principles and the decimated but not altogether destroyed remnant of the democratic republican Left.

CHAPTER 20

The Terror’s Last Months

(M
ARCH
–J
ULY
1794)

Eliminating the Hébertistes

The Terror pervaded every aspect and dimension of society and life. “It was a real sickness,” recalled Roederer, who survived it in hiding, in which the “moral and physical constantly interacted; an extreme case suspending use of reason, and almost reason’s aberration. It concentrated everyone within himself, detaching him from everything but preservation, from the most important affairs, most intimate affections and most sacred duties, paralyzing arm and soul simultaneously.”
¹
The irrational and criminal character of the Terror seemed so obvious to so many that appalled onlookers in France, like the Bordeaux diarist Brochon, tended to assume that Jacobin conspirateurs deliberately sought to “deshonorer la Révolution” with slaughter and crime,
²
not realizing its aim was not to besmirch the Revolution in the interest of royalty and reaction but to reject the essential principles of the Revolution of 1788–93 in the name of a very different and antagonistic ideology.

The numbers alone prove the Terror affected all classes of the population, not only intellectuals, nobles, army officers, and clergy. Officially, under the Terror, the government’s Revolutionary Tribunals executed a total of 16,594 victims in France, without counting the thousands extrajudicially shot or drowned by Montagnard forces in Lyon, Toulon, Nantes, the Basque Country, and the Vendée. The approximately 17,000 judicially signed executions were certainly exceeded by the unauthorized killings, which amounted to perhaps around 23,000. Some estimates put the total of imprisoned
and
killed at more than 300,000. But all such estimates other than those for official executions are very vague. Some estimates for the number of people slaughtered during the repression in the Vendée go as high as 4 percent of the population—or
190,000—just for that region.
³
Of the approximately 17,000 officially executed, around 31 percent were artisans (democrats and royalists), and 28 percent peasants (often royalists). By contrast, smaller groups, 1,158, just over 8 percent, were nobles, counting both noblesse “of the sword” and “the robe” (parlementaires), and around 2 percent were priests. In Paris, 9,249 people were imprisoned for political reasons between August 1792 and July 1794, of whom 766, or well under a tenth, were nobles, male and female.
⁴

The psychological impact was vast and incalculable. Around 29,000 émigrés, a considerable but not immense number, had departed France down to January 1793. But under the Terror, the pace of emigration quickened dramatically. By July 1794, around 145,000 émigrés nobles, priests, and commoners had fled the country. The Terror of 1793–94, it is safe to say, was by far the chief cause of flight from the country during the Revolution, accounting for more than four-fifths of the total. The number of ex-patriot French nobles rose to 16,431, eventually reaching more than 12 percent of the entire French noblesse. Even so, the French clergy in exile became twice as numerous, representing a quarter of all French émigrés.
⁵
In proportionate terms, these privileged social strata could perhaps be said to have been especially targeted.

The paralyzing political crisis gripping France from December 1793 to mid-March 1794 was aggravated by Robespierre’s psychological sickness and his vacillation as to how to control the rival cliques underpinning the Montagnard tyranny. Both tendencies gravely threatened his position. Suffering from an acute form of nervous collapse, he remained physically absent from both Jacobins and the Convention throughout the critical period from 10 February to 13 March. Even to Danton, Hébert, Barère, and other prominent political insiders, it was far from obvious when Robespierre’s hand was firmly on the levers of power and when not. Compulsively suspicious and neurotically wary, he increasingly kept his distance from colleagues as well as the people. “The people” for him had always been an abstraction, not something that he had widely experienced or knew. First of the great modern populist dictators, he never received the sort of mass adulation Marat did and eventually grew remote and aloof. Until February 1794, he had kept his distance but without being actually enclosed and out of touch, showing himself around Paris frequently, fastidiously dressed, with elegant silk embroidered clothes and linen, hair dressed in neat, scrupulous fashion, all the time observing, cultivating contacts, and regularly conversing with other main figures, taking meticulous notes.
⁶
Now, more powerful
and autocratic than ever, but under intensifying nervous strain, he (like Danton), grew increasingly withdrawn.