by Will Durant
The Marseillese and several other delegations of Fédérés reached Paris after July 14, but were asked by the Commune of Paris to delay their return home; it might have need of them. The Commune—the central bureau of delegates from the forty-eight “sections” of the city—was now dominated by radical leaders, and was day by day, from its offices in the Hôtel de Ville, replacing the municipal officials as the government of the capital.
On July 28 the city was again shocked into fear and rage by learning of the manifesto issued by the Duke of Brunswick from Coblenz:
Their Majesties the Emperor and the King of Prussia having intrusted to me the command of the united armies which they had collected on the frontiers of France, I desire to announce, to the inhabitants of that kingdom, the motives which have determined the policy of the two sovereigns, and the purposes which they have in view.
After arbitrarily violating the rights of the German princes in Alsace Lorraine, disturbing and overthrowing good order and legitimate government in the interior of the realm, … those who have usurped the reins of government have at last completed their work by declaring an unjust war on his Majesty the Emperor, and attacking his provinces in the Low Countries….
To those important interests should be added another matter of solicitude, … namely, to put an end to the anarchy in the interior of France, to check the attacks upon the throne and the altar, to … restore to the King the security and the liberty of which he is now deprived, and to place him in a position to exercise once more the legitimate authority which properly belongs to him.
Convinced that the sane portion of the French nation abhors the excesses of the faction which dominates it, and that the majority of the people look forward with impatience to the time when they may declare themselves openly against the odious enterprises of their oppressors, his Majesty the Emperor and his Majesty the King of Prussia call upon them and invite them to return without delay to the path of reason, justice, and peace. In accordance with these views I … declare:
1. That … the two allied courts entertain no other object than the welfare of France, and have no intention of enriching themselves by conquests….
7. The inhabitants of the towns and villages who may dare to defend themselves against the troops of their Imperial and Royal Majesties and fire upon them … shall be punished immediately according to the most stringent laws of war, and their houses shall be … destroyed….
8. The city of Paris and all its inhabitants shall be required to submit at once and without delay to the King…. Their Majesties declare … that if the Château of the Tuileries is entered by force or attacked, if the least violence be offered to … the King, the Queen, and the royal family, and if their safety and liberty be not immediately assured, they will inflict an ever memorable vengeance by delivering over the city of Paris to military execution and complete destruction….
It is for these reasons that I call upon and exhort, in the most urgent manner, all the inhabitants of the kingdom not to oppose the movements and operations of the troops which I command, but rather, on the contrary, to grant them everywhere a free passage, and to assist … them with all good will….
Given at the headquarters at Coblenz, July 25, 1792.
CHARLES WILLIAM FERDINAND,
DUKE OF BRUNSWICK-LÜNEBURG16
That somber eighth paragraph (perhaps offered to the amiable Duke by vengeful émigrés17) was a challenge to the Assembly, the Commune, and the people of Paris to abandon the Revolution or to resist the invaders by whatever means and at whatever cost. On July 29 Robespierre, addressing the Jacobin Club, demanded, as a defiance to Brunswick, the immediate overthrow of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic with manhood suffrage for all. On July 30 the Marseillese Fédérés, still in Paris, joined other provincial detachments in pledging aid in deposing the King. On August 4 and the following days section after section of the city sent notice to the Assembly that it no longer acknowledged a king; and on August 6 a petition was presented to the deputies that Louis should be deposed. The Assembly took no action. On August 9 Marat published an appeal to the people to invade the Tuileries, arrest the King and his family, and all promonarchical officials, as “traitors whom the nation … ought first to sacrifice to the public welfare.”18 That night the Commune and the sections rang the tocsin calling for a massing of the people around the Tuileries the next morning.
Some came as early as 3 A.M.; by seven o’clock twenty-five sections had sent their quotas of men armed with muskets, pikes, and swords; some came with cannon; eight hundred Fédérés joined in; soon the crowd numbered nine thousand. The palace was defended by nine hundred Swiss and two hundred other guards. Hoping to discourage violence, Louis led his family from the royal chambers into the palace theater, where the Assembly was in chaotic session; “I come here,” he said, “to prevent a great crime.”19 The insurgents were allowed to enter the courtyard. At the foot of the stairs leading to the King’s bedroom the Swiss forbade further advance; the crowd pressed against them; the Swiss fired, killing a hundred or more men and women. The King sent orders to the Swiss to cease fire and withdraw; they did, but the crowd, led by the Marseillese, overwhelmed them; most of the Swiss were slain; many were arrested; fifty were taken to the Hôtel de Ville, where they were put to death.20 The servants, including the kitchen staff, were slaughtered in a mad festival of blood. The Marseillese sang “The Marseillaise” to the accompaniment of the Queen’s harpsichord; a tired prostitute rested on the Queen’s bed. The furniture was burned, the wine cellars were sacked and drained. In the nearby courts of the Carrousel the happy crowd set fire to nine hundred buildings, and shot at firemen who came to put out the flames.21 Some of the victors paraded with banners made from the red uniforms of the dead Swiss Guards—the first known instance of a red flag used as the symbol of revolution.22
The Assembly tried to save the royal family, but the murder of several deputies by the invading crowd persuaded the remainder to surrender the royal refugees to the disposition of the Commune. It locked them under strict guard in the Temple, an old fortified monastery of the Knights Templar. Louis yielded without resistance, grieving over his now white-haired wife and his ailing son, and waiting patiently for the end.
III. DANTON
During these convulsive weeks the deputies of the Right had almost all ceased attendance at the Assembly; after August 10 only 285 remained of the original 745 members. This rump legislature now voted to replace the King and his advisers with a provisional Executive Council; an overwhelming vote chose Georges Danton to head the Council as minister of justice, Roland to be minister of the interior, Joseph Servan to be minister of war. The choice of Danton was in part an attempt to quiet the Parisians, with whom he was very popular; besides, he was at that time the ablest and strongest character in the revolutionary movement.
He was thirty-three years old, and would die at thirty-five; revolution is a prerogative of youth. Born at Arcis-sur-Aube, in Champagne, he followed his father into law; he prospered as an attorney in Paris, but he chose to live in the same building with his friend Camille Desmoulins, in the Cordeliers working-class district; soon they became prominent in the Cordeliers Club. His lips and nose had been disfigured by a childhood accident, and his skin was potted with smallpox; but few remembered this when they confronted his tall figure and massive head, or felt the force of his perceptive and decisive thought, or heard his violent—often profane—speech rolling like thunder over a revolutionary assembly, a Jacobin club, or a proletarian crowd.
His character was not as brutal or domineering as his face or his voice. He could be rude and apparently unfeeling in his judgment—as in approving the September Massacres—but he had some tenderness latent in him, and no venom; he was ready to give and quick to forgive. Oftentimes his aides were surprised to find him countermanding his own Draconian orders, or protecting victims of his severe instructions; soon he was to lose his life because he dared to suggest that the Terror had gone too far
, and that a time for mercy had come. Unlike the sober Robespierre, he relished Rabelaisian humor, worldly pleasures, gambling, beautiful women. He made and borrowed money; bought a fine home in Arcis, and large parcels of church property. People wondered how he had come upon the necessary sums; many suspected him of having taken bribes to protect the King. The evidence against him is overwhelming;23 yet he committed himself to the most advanced measures of the Revolution, and seems never to have betrayed any of its vital interests. He took the King’s money and worked for the proletariat. Even so, he knew that a proletarian dictatorship is a contradiction in terms, and can be only a moment in political time.
He had too much education to be a utopian. His library (to which he hoped soon to retire) included 571 volumes in French, seventy-two in English, fifty-two in Italian; he could read English and Italian well. He had ninety-one volumes of Voltaire, sixteen of Rousseau, all of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.24 He was an atheist, but he had some sympathy for the considerations that religion offered to the poor. Hear him in 1790, sounding like Musset a generation later:25
For my part I admit I have known but one God—the God of all the world and of justice…. The man in the fields adds to this conception … because his youth, his manhood, and his old age owe to the priest their little moments of happiness…. Leave him his illusions. Teach him if you will, … but do not let the poor fear that they may lose the one thing that binds them to life.26
As a leader he sacrificed everything to the end of preserving the Revolution from foreign attack and internal chaos. For these purposes he was willing to cooperate with anyone—with Robespierre, Marat, the King, the Girondins; but Robespierre envied him, Marat denounced him, the King distrusted him, the Girondins were alarmed by his face and his voice, and shivered under his scorn. None of them could make him out: he organized war and negotiated for peace; he roared like a lion and talked of mercy; he fought for the Revolution and helped some royalists to escape from France.27
As minister of justice he labored to unite all revolutionary ranks in throwing back the invaders. He took responsibility for the uprising of the populace on August 10; the war needed the support of those wild spirits; they would make ardent soldiers. But he discouraged the premature attempts to support revolutions against foreign kings; this would unite all monarchs in hostility to France. He fought against the proposal of the Girondins to withdraw the government and the Assembly behind the Loire; such a retreat would shatter the morale of the people. The time had gone for discussion; it had come for action, for building new armies and fortifying them with spirit and confidence. On September 2, 1792, in a passionate speech, he uttered a phrase that roused France and rang through a tumultuous century. The Prussian-Austrian forces had entered France and were winning victory after victory. Paris hovered between resolute response and a demoralizing fear. Danton, speaking for the Executive Council, went before the Assembly to rouse them and the nation to courage and action:
It is a satisfaction for the minister of a free state to announce to them that their country is saved. All are stirred, all are enthusiastic, all burn to enter the contest…. One part of our people will guard our frontiers, another will dig and arm the entrenchments, the third, with pikes, will defend the interior of our cities…. We ask that anyone refusing to give personal service, or to furnish arms, shall meet the punishment of death….
The tocsin we shall sound is not the alarm signal of danger; it orders the charge on the enemies of France. To conquer we have to dare, to dare again, always to dare—and France is saved! [De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours l’audace—et la France est sauvée!]
It was a powerful historic speech, but on that same day the most tragic episode of the Revolution began.
IV. THE MASSACRE: SEPTEMBER 2–6, 1792
The emotional fever that came to its peak on September 2 took some remote sources of its heat from the swelling conflict between religion and the state, and the effort to make worship of the state a substitute for religion. The Constituent Assembly had accepted Catholicism as the official religion, and had undertaken to pay the priests as salaried employees of the state. But the dominant radicals in the Paris Commune saw no reason why the government should finance the propagation of what it looked upon as an Oriental myth so long allied with feudalism and monarchy. These views found acceptance in the clubs, and finally in the Legislative Assembly. The result was a series of measures that made the enmity of Church and state a recurrent threat to the Revolution.
A few hours after the dethronement of the King the Commune sent to the sections a list of priests suspected of antirevolutionary sentiments and aims; as many of these as could be apprehended were sent to various prisons, where they soon played a leading part in the massacres. On August 11 the Assembly ended all control of education by the Church. On August 12 the Commune forbade the public wearing of religious vestments. On August 18 the Assembly renewed a nationwide decree to the same effect, and suppressed all surviving religious orders. On August 28 it called for the deportation of all priests who had not sworn allegiance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; they were given a fortnight in which to leave France; some 25,000 priests fled to other lands, and reinforced there the propaganda of the émigrés. Since the clergy had heretofore kept parish registers of births, marriages, and deaths, the Assembly had to transfer this function to lay authorities. As most of the population insisted on solemnizing these events with sacraments, the attempt to discard the ancient ceremonies widened the breach between the piety of the people and the secularism of the state.28 The Commune, the Jacobins, the Girondins, and the Montagnards all concurred in hoping that devotion to the young republic would become the religion of the people; that Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity would replace God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and that the furtherance of the new Trinity could be made the overriding aim of social order and the final test of morality.
The official opening of the new republic was deferred to September 22, first day of the new year. Meanwhile some eager futurists petitioned the Assembly that, as a gesture toward the universal democracy of their dreams, “the title of French citizen should be granted to all foreign philosophers who have with courage upheld the cause of liberty and have deserved well of humanity.” On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.29 Alexander von Humboldt came to France, he said, “to breathe the air of liberty, and to assist at the obloquies of despotism.”30 The new religion seemed to be spreading its branches so soon after taking root.
On September 2 it put on its Sunday clothes, and expressed its devotion in diverse ways. Young and middle-aged men gathered at recruiting points to volunteer for service in the Army. Women lovingly sewed warm garments for them, and grimly prepared bandages for prospective wounds. Men, women, and children came to their section centers to offer weapons, jewelry, money for the war. Mothers adopted children dependent upon soldiers or nurses who were leaving for the front. Some men went to the prisons to kill priests and other enemies of the new faith.
Ever since the Duke of Brunswick’s manifesto (July 25, 1792) the revolutionary leaders had acted as men tend to act when their lives are threatened. On August 11 the public commissioners at the Hôtel de Ville sent a strange note to Antoine Santerre, then in military command of the sections: “We are informed that a plan is being formed for going round the prisons of Paris and carrying off all the prisoners, in order to execute prompt justice upon them. We beg you to extend your supervision to those of the Châtelet, the Conciergerie, and La Force”—three main centers of detention in Paris.31 We do not know how Santerre interpreted this message. On August 14 the Assembly appointed an “extraordinary tribunal” to try all enemies of the Revolution; but the sentences there decreed fell far short of satisfying Marat. In his Ami du Peuple of August 19 he told
his readers: “The wisest and best course to pursue is to go armed to the Abbaye [another prison], drag out the traitors, especially the Swiss officers [of the royal guard] and their accomplices, and put them to the sword. What folly it is to give them a trial!”32 Moved with this enthusiasm, the Commune made Marat its official editor, assigned him a place in its assembly room, and added him to its Comité de Surveillance.33
If the populace heard Marat, and obeyed him to the best of their ability, it was because they too were in a fury and tremor of hate and fear. On August 19 the Prussians had crossed the frontiers, led by King Frederick William II and the Duke of Brunswick, and accompanied by a small force of émigrés vowing vengeance upon all revolutionists. On August 23 the invaders captured the Fortress of Longwy, allegedly through connivance by its aristocratic officers; by September 2 they had reached Verdun, and a premature report reached Paris that morning that this supposedly impregnable bastion had fallen (it fell that afternoon); now the road to Paris was open to the enemy, for no French army was on that route to stop them. The capital seemed at their mercy; the Duke of Brunswick expected soon to dine in Paris.34
Meanwhile revolution against the Revolution had broken out in far separate regions of France—the Vendée and Dauphiné; and Paris itself harbored thousands of people who sympathized with the fallen King. Since September I a pamphlet had been circulating which warned that a plot existed to free the prisoners and lead them in a massacre of all revolutionists.35 The Assembly and the Commune were calling upon all able-bodied men to join the army that would march out to meet the advancing enemy; how could these men leave their women and children to the mercy of such an outpouring of royalists, priests, and habitual criminals from the prisons of Paris? Some sections voted a resolution that all priests and suspected persons should be put to death before the departure of the volunteers.36