The Days of the French Revolution (31 page)

The Committees had by now assembled sufficient forces to disperse the rioters, and at about half-past eleven the leading columns arrived at the Tuileries. Their commander, Danton’s friend, the butcher Legendre, who had become one of the principal proponents of reaction, mounted the rostrum and shouted above the din, ‘I exhort the Convention to stand firm. And, in the name of the law, I command the citizens who are here to withdraw.’

He was shouted down by the rioters, but, after a brief struggle in which a few men were wounded, the insurgents were at long last cleared out of the building. As they fled through the doors and jumped from the windows, a deputy stood up to speak. ‘So this assembly,’ he said, ‘the cradle of the Republic, has once more almost become its tomb. Fortunately the crimes of the conspirators have been averted. But, fellow-representatives, you would not be worthy of the nation if you were not to avenge them in a signal manner.’ Cheers and clapping greeted these words from all sides, and fourteen Montagnards who had spoken in defence of the demonstrators, or were believed to be in sympathy with them, were immediately arrested. The names of other Montagnards who had earned unfortunate reputations for themselves in the provinces were then called out and the arrest of these men, too, was demanded to enthusiastic shouts of ‘The Convention for ever!’

‘Let us have no more half measures,’ cried Tallien, whose behaviour at Bordeaux had for a time been far more merciless than that of any of the commissioners now denounced. ‘The aim of today’s violent demonstration was to re-establish the Commune and to restore the Jacobins to power. We must destroy all that remains of them…We must have vengeance…We must profit by the inefficiency of these men who fancy themselves the equals of those who overthrew the throne, who try to bring about revolutions and suc
ceed only in provoking riots…We must lose no time in punishing them and putting an end to the Revolution.’

Tallien’s words also were loudly applauded. But when the session was closed and the deputies departed at three o’clock in the morning, the men whose condign punishment he had advocated were already planning another attempt to overawe the Convention. It was to take place that very day. Setting out from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine a large body of demonstrators, better armed and disciplined than those who had marched the day before, were to advance upon the Tuileries and to threaten the Convention with cannon. The march began as planned, and the deputies who had reassembled in their hall after only a few hours’ sleep were soon to learn that their own gunners had defected to the insurgents, taking their cannon with them. Legendre stood up in an attempt to reassure them. ‘Representatives,’ he said, ‘keep calm and remain at your posts…Good citizens are ready to defend you.’

The hall had, indeed, been surrounded by troops and by several units of the National Guard; yet the desertion of the artillery made it seem likely that, were fighting to break out, the forces at the Convention’s disposal might be unable to hold the assailants back. For several minutes conflict appeared imminent as the opposing forces faced each other, their muskets loaded. But then men from both sides began to protest at having to fight their fellow-citizens. Gradually they broke ranks and walked across to talk to each other, and eventually it was agreed that twelve members of the Convention should be invited to leave their hall and to come down to discuss the grievances of the hostile
sections
. Twelve deputies were accordingly selected and went to fraternize with the
sans-culottes
who, after prolonged negotiations, persuaded them to allow a deputation of demonstrators to present a petition to the Convention. Upon their appearance in the hall, where they reiterated their demands, there were loud shouts of ‘Down with the Jacobins!’ from the public galleries. The President called for silence, and, having imposed it, addressed a few mollifying remarks to the deputation whose colleagues in the streets outside were already beginning to abandon their posts and go home.

So the
journée
of I
Prairial
was no more successful than the far
more violent one of 12
Germinal
–yet the repression that followed it was even more severe. The immediate trial of all prisoners taken from among the rioters was ordered. The beating of the
générale
without proper authority was made a capital offence, and a military commission was set up to pass sentence upon everyone, left-wing deputies and
sans-culotte
leaders alike, who were held responsible for the disturbances. The first of the accused brought before this military commission was the assassin of Féraud who had only just been apprehended and who was sentenced to be guillotined that same day.

This man was actually on the scaffold when a mob stormed up the steps, knocked aside the gendarmes and executioners and bore him away into a warren of narrow streets in the middle of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The Convention responded to this new provocation with a prompt display of determined force. Almost 25,000 men, including nearly 4,000 regular soldiers, were called up to surround the faubourg into which about 1,200 excited
jeunesse dorée
dashed with bravado ahead of them. These young men were soon themselves surrounded by the angry inhabitants of the neighbourhood and might not have escaped with the beating to which several of them were subjected had not the Convention’s formidable army and its numerous cannon persuaded the
sans-culotte
leaders to agree to surrender their arms and to deliver up Féraud’s murderer when they had found him.

Having put down this latest popular revolt, the Convention’s agents turned with renewed vigour upon its promoters and upon the Montagnard deputies who were supposed to have looked upon it with indulgence. Well over 3,000 suspects were rounded up, and although most of these were later released, they were closely watched thereafter by the police and frequently re-arrested when further disturbances were threatened. Reports of an uprising at Toulon, which was, however, soon put down, increased the Convention’s determination to be ruthless. Former members of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security, whose services to the country had previously protected them from punishment, were no longer immune. Carnot was spared as the ‘organizer of military victory’, but David’s reputation as a distinguished artist
could no longer save him and he was imprisoned. Robert Lindet, whose responsibility for food-supplies on the Committee of Public Safety had been discharged with tireless efficiency, was also arrested. Among the thirty-six men condemned to death were six Montagnard deputies. The wife of a young army officer, Laure Junot, described their end:

One day my brother returned home dreadfully agitated. He had witnessed an awful scene. Romme, Soubrany, Duroi, Duquesnoi, Goujon and Bourbette [the six deputies] exhibited the most admirable fortitude during their trial…When sentence was pronounced on them they looked at each other calmly; and, on descending the staircase, which was lined with spectators, Romme looked about as if seeking somebody…who did not appear. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘With a firm hand this will do, Vive la
Liberté!
’ Then drawing from his pocket a large penknife he plunged it into his heart, and, drawing it out again [fearing he had not struck hard enough, inflicted several more wounds on his chest, throat and face. He then] gave it Goujon who, in like manner, passed it to Duquesnoi. All three fell dead instantly without uttering a groan. The weapon, passed on to Soubrany by the trembling hand of Duquesnoi, found its way to the noble hearts of the rest; but they were not so fortunate as their three friends. Grievously wounded, yet alive, they fell at the foot of the scaffold which the executioner made them ascend, bleeding and mutilated as they were.

After their deaths and the final destruction of the Montagnards as a political force, the reaction continued apace. The
sans-culottes
, already virtually powerless, were further weakened by the reconstitution of the National Guard which became once more a largely bourgeois organization. The word ‘revolutionary’ was decreed as no longer applicable to institutions which had previously been thus described, a commemorative festival was instituted in honour of the Girondins, and an amnesty was offered to all those who had fled from France after the uprising of May 1793.

So fast was the tide of reaction flowing, indeed, that royalists began to hope for a restoration. The late King’s son, whom they recognized as Louis XVII, had contracted tuberculosis of the bones during his incarceration in the Temple and died there aged ten on
8 June 1795. But the Comte de Provence, who had been surrounded by the most intransigent counter-revolutionaries during his exile and was then living at Verona, proclaimed himself King Louis XVIII. He announced that on his return to the throne he would restore the traditional three orders in France, have those who had voted for the death of his brother brought to trial, and give back to the Church the power and prestige it had formerly enjoyed.

Already plans had been laid for a royalist restoration by force. It was intended that the Prince de Condé, father of the Duc de Bourbon, who had fought against the Revolution in conjunction with the Austrians, should advance with a royalist army from the east; that an insurrection should be simultaneously provoked in the south; that the extravagant and pleasure-loving General, Charles Pichegru, commander of the Rhine Army, should be suborned by huge bribes, by the promise of his promotion to marshal and the offer of the château and park of Chambord; and that an expeditionary force of
émigrés
, for which the English government were to provide money, naval support and uniforms, should be landed in the north-west to link up with the
Chouans
. But, as with so many other royalist plots, the execution bore little relation to the planning. General Pichegru proved an unreliable accomplice; the plans for the insurrection in the south were discovered and thwarted; the Breton
Chouans
of 1795 lacked the fervent courage of the earlier
Vendéens
; and in General Lazare Hoche, a former private in the
Gardes-françaises
, the republicans had a commander as skilful as he was decisive. When the
émigré
forces landed on the southern coast of Brittany on 27 June 1795, Hoche soon forced them to surrender, having pushed the
Chouans
who tried to come to their support back into the Quiberon peninsula. Over 700 prisoners, most of them nobles and many of them former naval officers, were shot in their English uniforms for high treason.

The immediate results of this dismal failure were a fresh outbreak of the cruel civil war in the north-west, where savage reprisals were taken against republican prisoners by the rebels, and a vigorous campaign by the Government against both royalists and the few surviving Montagnards. Several royalist journalists were arrested; so were some Montagnards, including that cunning
intriguer, Fouché, while determined efforts were made to track down those of the
jeunesse dorée
to whose evasion of military service the authorities had hitherto turned a blind eye. At the same time the Convention debated the draft of a new constitution which was presented by Boissy d’Anglas.

In introducing this Constitution of the Year Three, Boissy d’Anglas, in a speech which might almost have been written by Vergniaud, declared:

Absolute equality is a chimera. If it existed one would have to assume complete equality in intelligence, virtue, physical strength, education and fortune in all men…We must be ruled by the best citizens. And the best are the most learned and the most concerned in the maintenance of law and order. Now, with very few exceptions, you will find such men only among those who own some property, and are thus attached to the land in which it lies, to the laws which protect it and to the public order which maintains it…You must, therefore, guarantee the political rights of the well-to-do…and [deny] unreserved political rights to men without property, for if such men ever find themselves seated among the legislators, then they will provoke agitations…without fearing their consequences…and in the end precipitate us into those violent convulsions from which we have scarcely yet emerged.

After two months’ debate the Constitution, which in effect returned the country’s political and economic leadership to men who were reasonably well off, was approved by the Convention. Legislative power was to be entrusted to two Councils, a Council of Five Hundred composed of men over thirty years of age who were to have the right to initiate laws, and a Council of Ancients of two hundred and fifty members, married men or widowers at least forty years old, who were to approve or veto the laws proposed. A third of the members of each Council were to be required to retire each year. Executive power was to be entrusted to a Directory of five members who were to be appointed by the Council of Five Hundred and who were to be given a magnificent uniform ‘as a protest’, so Boissy d’Anglas said, ‘against
sans-culottism
’.

Conscious that they commanded limited support in the country as a whole, the Thermidorians – as Boissy d’Anglas and his col
leagues were called in allusion to the season in which the Robespierrists had been overthrown – decreed that two thirds of the new deputies should be chosen from amongst the members of the Convention. Both this Law of the Two-Thirds as it was known and the Constitution itself were submitted to a plebiscite; and, despite enormous numbers of abstentions, both were approved, the Constitution by a majority of over a million votes to less than 50,000, the Two-Thirds Law by about two to one.

The comparatively widespread opposition to this law, particularly in Paris, the South and the West, gave the royalists an opportunity to organize the last
journée
of the Revolution. Protesting that there had been fraud in the counting of votes, that the troops which had been brought into the capital had been called in for some sinister purpose, and that the Convention’s attempt to perpetuate itself was an affront to freedom, the royalist plotters were able to play on the people’s distress to win their support. For there was, indeed, much distress in France that summer and autumn of 1795. The bread ration fell as the price of meat rose, and wages could not keep up with the rising cost of everything else. Sugar soared from eleven to sixty-two
livres
a pound, firewood from 160
livres
a wagon-load in May to 500 in September. The cost of living had by then risen almost thirty times higher than it had been in 1790. The police were accordingly not surprised when the annual celebrations commemorating the fall of the monarchy passed off in what they termed ‘a state of apathy’.