The War of Wars (9 page)

In prison he had met ‘Delfina’, the beautiful Marquise de Custine, whose husband, the famous general, was also in gaol. Miranda now embarked on a torrid affair with her – until he discovered she had also satisfied the lusts of Chateaubriand, Alexandre de Beauharnais, M. de Grouchy, Comte Louis de Ségur, Boissy d’Anglais and Dr Korev. Passionate and intelligent but undoubtedly a nymphomaniac, Delfina failed to win him back to her bed, but they continued to be seen together, and quarrelled with the intensity of lovers. Supposedly an illegitimate daughter of Louis XV, Delfina was the greatest French coquette of her time and, according to a contemporary wit, ‘loved everyone, even her husband’. She showered Miranda with letters, saw him frequently, and was his last companion when he left France.

Miranda’s sojourn in prison did not deter him from meddling in
revolutionary politics. Having twice escaped the guillotine he believed himself a charmed man, and now pursued his own moderate liberal agenda, which was anathema to extremists inside and outside the government. In particular, he showed an exemplary tolerance, in an anti-clerical age, of the more liberal-minded among the clergy; and (in spite of his youthful disdain of the man) he lauded the qualities of George Washington, who ‘had obtained the confidence of his fellow countrymen not from his brilliance, which he cloaks, but from the calmness of his spirit and uprightness of his intentions’. Miranda’s views on the direction of the French Revolution were succinctly expressed: ‘I love freedom, but not a freedom based on blood and pitiless towards sex or age, like that which has been the order of the day in this country until recently.’ He made no secret of the fact that he wanted to hold office in post-revolutionary France.

Miranda seems to have been sucked into an alliance between the moderates and the royalists as one of two possible leaders of a military coup. A prominent royalist remarked contemptuously that it would be astonishing if the King of France should be replaced ‘by a Spanish Creole, the lieutenant of a provincial regiment of his Catholic Majesty’s, and a total stranger in France where he has lived only a few years and where he has only been known since the Revolution’.

As the showdown between royalists and republicans approached, it is unclear whether Miranda sat on the fence or took part. When the government sent 1,500 troops to close down a radical ‘electoral body’ gathered in a French theatre at two in the morning on 4 October, revolutionary newspapers reported Miranda to have been in charge of the illicit proceedings.

Miranda went underground, was accused of being one of the principal conspirators, and then emerged to declare that he had taken no part in the parliament. Arrested and ordered out of the country, he secured a stay of execution of the order and continued to live in his usual style, but always followed by a gendarme. He managed to give him the slip one night and went into hiding, whence he bombarded the press with letters defending himself and attacking his enemies. He was eventually given official permission to stay, and continued to survive through the after-shocks of revolutionary France, always active
in half-plots, always preaching his own brand of liberal anti-monarchism and anti-extremism.

In September 1797 another alleged monarchist conspiracy was suppressed by the government, and again Miranda was named as one of the plotters. Once more he went underground, once more the police were ordered to hold the ‘Peruvian’ general if he had not, as was widely believed, escaped to Athens. In fact, at last wholly disillusioned with the French Revolution, fearing another long spell in prison and especially angry that France had formed an alliance with the Spain he so hated, he had resolved to go to Britain.

Passionately he kissed Delfina goodbye and, wearing a wig and green spectacles and passing as a minor businessman, took a coach to Calais, then embarked on a Danish boat, arriving in Dover in January 1798. A customs inspection there found that his case had a false bottom, filled with papers. After discussion, documents were furnished for him to travel to London, where he set about organizing his network of contacts and friends in South America and in Europe.

During Miranda’s first arrest and trial, Paris was reeling from the battle between Girondins and Jacobins which would eventually culminate in the climax of the Revolution – an orgy of blood. The Girondins still had a majority in the Convention. When news of Dumouriez’s plot leaked out, the Jacobins instantly accused the Girondins of being behind him. The Jacobins planned an ambush on the Assembly on 10 March 1793, and intended to seize many Girondin deputies by force.

Gaining intelligence of this, the Girondins launched a counterattack, passing a motion of censure on Marat, who had urged the people to rise against the Assembly. The radical leader was forced into hiding. The Girondins were determined to take the initiative against their conspiratorial rivals, but did not summon the courage to move the Assembly from Paris, the Jacobin stronghold.

The Jacobins now assembled a small, well-organized army of around 2,000 in the Champs Elysée in central Paris, accompanied by their Paris mob: this force had guns and howitzers and surrounded the unwary deputies. The leaders of the uncommitted deputies, ‘the Plain’, urged the Girondins to give themselves up.

When the Girondins asked to leave the Assembly, they were stopped by soldiers: ‘Return to your posts: the people denounce the traitors who are in the heart of your assembly and will not depart until their will is accomplished.’ Twenty-two Girondin leaders were arrested, being convicted of ‘royalism’. The Girondins were prevented from speaking in their own defence at the subsequent tribunal.

Some forty-two deputies were executed, committed suicide, or fled abroad. Brissot went wretchedly to his execution along with Vergniaud and the others, and even Velaze’s corpse – he had killed himself with a dagger when sentence was pronounced – was guillotined! The wife of Robert declared memorably on her way to the scaffold, as she passed the Statue of Liberty: ‘Ah, Liberty. What crimes are committed in your name.’

The Jacobins were left in undisputed control at the heart of central government, if not the country, a classic instance of a revolution devouring its children. The legal system was all but non-existent, religion outlawed, taxes uncollected and the assignat worthless currency. Revolutionary terror alone reigned, confiscating the necessary revenues, putting to death generals who did not achieve great victories, and some who did who were thought to pose a threat to the government. General Custine was condemned, remarking philosophically that ‘France is a woman and my hair is going grey’.

The new government was run by the ten to twelve-man Committee of Public Safety and the slightly less powerful Committee of Public Security. Husbands were compelled to pin outside their homes the names of all those inside, in a forerunner of modern totalitarian methods of state control. Some 300,000, at a conservative estimate, were armed as stormtroopers of the Revolution, a third of them women. A revolutionary Tribunal was set up, consisting of six judges, two public assistants and, as a formality, twelve jurymen.

The two Jacobin trump cards were a promise to suppress any discontent in the army by declaring it in a state of mutiny, which would condemn opponents to the guillotine; and an exhortation to the poor to declare war on the rich. In fact any external sign of wealth was regarded as sufficient grounds for condemnation.
Egalité
had replaced
Liberté
as the keyword of the Revolution.

The Jacobins had an extensive propaganda network throughout the country, as well as an enormous spy network. A decree of terror was issued by the Committee of Public Security to its angels of death:

Let your energy awaken anew as the term of your labour approaches. The Convention charges you to complete the purification
and reorganization of the constituted authorities with the least possible delay, and to report the conclusion of these two operations before the end of the next month. A simple measure may effect the desired purification. Convoke the people in the popular societies – Let the public functionaries appear before them – Interrogate the people on the subject of their conduct, and let their judgment dictate yours.

At Nantes whole families were put aboard boats in the Loire and the craft scuttled: this was labelled ‘republican baptism’. Men and women were stripped naked, bound together and killed: this was dubbed ‘republican marriage’. The revolutionary army enforced order when necessary.

The assassination of Marat in his bath by Charlotte Corday, whose mind was partly unhinged in a rather different manner to his own, left just Danton and Robespierre as the Revolution’s two consuls. The latter soon obtained evidence of Danton’s monumental corruption and threatened to expose this to force him into retirement. Meanwhile, in his paranoia, Robespierre sought to destroy also the government of Paris, whose men had been the means by which the Jacobins had seized power.

The Jacobins also made an extraordinary attack on organized religion, forcing the bishop of Paris to denounce Christianity as priestly superstition and to deny the existence of God. ‘The Goddess of Reason’ – in fact a dancing girl at the Opera – was welcomed into the Assembly (where it was said she was already familiar with several deputies). The Paris commune had church bells cast into cannon and confiscated all silver and gold. Hebert, the commune leader, was the guiding force behind this. Robespierre, however, saw the excesses of the commune as an excuse further to impose his own order and in March 1794 he had the commune leaders arrested on ludicrous charges of conspiring with the British government. The revolutionary army was also disbanded as being a Parisian rather than national force.

Danton at last decided that too much blood had been shed, and spoke out in favour of clemency and the defence of property. Robespierre moved more quickly and stealthily. On 31 March he
had his great rival, the most formidable orator in the Assembly and until recently the effective ruler of France, arrested. Danton went to his trial and execution with all the contempt that that formidable but deeply flawed figure was capable of. Of Robespierre he remarked: ‘The cowardly poltroon. I am the only person who could have commanded enough influence to save him.’ The words were prophetic: without Danton, Robespierre was merely an ideologue and police chief, with little power base. Danton, however unattractive, had been the true leader of the Revolution; Robespierre was a brittle, sarcastic little man who was at ease only in small gatherings and had few political skills. Yet he was a political thinker of note, and his influence on both the course of the Revolution and on one of his followers, the young Napoleon Bonaparte, was to be seminal.

The government of France was now under the control of the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety, whose most powerful personality was Robespierre. Others include Louis de Saint-Just, who believed in the ‘complete destruction of everything that is opposed to the committee’, Herault de Sechelles, a rake, Collot d’Herbois, a psychopathic former minor playwright, as well as, later, Louis David, a superb painter and a fanatic who declared ‘let us grind plenty of red’.

Robespierre, by contrast, was a brilliant political theoretician with a puritanical bent: his ideas in some ways were almost Marxist with their concept of the ‘general interest’. Wisdom, he asserted, ‘has disappeared in the individual and can only be found in the masses and the general interest’. For Robespierre this authoritarian view was an almost exact substitute for the old monarchical theory of personal supremacy: the People, in an abstract conception, had taken the place of the King. The movement was above the law, and was the law. The reason why the people had this power was because they had ‘virtue’, which equated with love of the fatherland – not obeisance to the King, as it had been up till then. For him the fatherland ‘was the country of which one is a citizen and a member of the sovereign state’.

With great insight he wrote in 1784 that England was really a republic and he was not opposed to constitutional monarchy in principle. He advocated universal male suffrage, along with a tiny
minority of deputies to the original Assembly, as early as 1789: he also fought for the right of excluded classes, such as the Jews, to the vote. Remarkably, he sought to extend political rights to the blacks in the West Indies. He argued that any government decree that used the word slave would only promote French dishonour. His concept of representative government was also advanced for the time: he espoused frequent direct elections, so that the General Will could prevail over the selfish individual wills of the members, public access to parliament, and publicity for the proceedings. He was also committed to economic equality in a way that none of his contemporaries were. He advocated the subordination of the executive power to the legislature.

All of these were extraordinarily advanced ideas for the time. However, he also believed in the absolute sovereignty of parliament, as advocated by the Jacobins, and apologized for popular violence: ‘If some disturbances have taken place, they should be pardoned after so many centuries of servitude and misery.’ Like Rousseau, Robespierre believed that most people were good by nature – but only in a democracy. ‘The people are just and in general their government . . . only strikes the guilty. When despots make revolutions against the people, their revolutionary masters, [they] are no more than instruments of cruelty and oppression; but when the people take action against despotism and the aristocracy, revolutionary measures are no more than healthy measures and acts of universal benevolence.’

He took this further. Although he defended the institution of property, he argued that the rich had taken it too far: he even argued against the bourgeoisie – by which he meant the wealthy middle-class: ‘To defeat the bourgeoisie, the people must be rallied.’ He favoured equality of inheritance to break down the big estates and progressive taxation. Robespierre advocated free trade, but only up to a point – he feared it could degenerate into greed and speculation under the
ancien régime
.