by Will Durant
About 2 P.M. Sunday, September 2, six carriages bearing nonjuring priests approached the Abbaye jail. A crowd hooted them; a man leaped upon the step of one carriage; a priest struck him with a cane; the crowd, cursing and multiplying, attacked the prisoners as they alighted at the gate; their guards joined in the attack upon them; all thirty were slain. Exalted by the sight of blood and the safe ecstasy of anonymous killing, the crowd rushed over to the Carmelite Convent and killed the priests who had been incarcerated there. In the evening, after a rest, the crowd, now enlarged by criminals and ruffians, and by lusty Fédérés troops from Marseilles, Avignon, and Brittany, returned to the Abbaye, forced all its prisoners to march out, sat in a rapid informal judgment upon them, and delivered the great majority of them—any Swiss or priest, or monarchist, or ex-servant of the King or Queen—to a gauntlet of men who dispatched them with swords, knives, pikes, and clubs.
At first the executioners were exemplary; there was no thievery—the valuables taken from the victims were transmitted to the Communal authorities; later the tired laborers kept such trophies as their due. Each received, for a day’s work, six francs, three meals, and all the wine he wanted. Some showed signs of tenderness; they congratulated those exonerated, and escorted the distinguished among them to their homes.37 Some were especially ferocious; they prolonged the sufferings of the condemned for the keener amusement of spectators; and one enthusiast, after withdrawing his sword from General Laleu’s breast, inserted his hand into the wound, tore out the heart, and put it to his mouth as if to eat it38—a custom once popular in savage days. Each killer, when tired, took a rest, drank, and soon resumed his labors, until all the prisoners in the Abbaye had passed through the street-side court to liberty or death.
On September 3 the judges and the executioners moved toward other prisons—La Force and the Conciergerie; there, with fresh workers and new victims, the holocaust went on. Here was a famous lady, the Princesse de Lamballe, once very rich and very beautiful, beloved of Marie Antoinette; she had shared in plots to save the royal family; now, forty-three years old, she was beheaded and mutilated; her heart was snatched out of her body, and was eaten by a fervent republican;39 her head was borne on a pike and paraded beneath a window of the Queen’s cell at the Temple.40
On September 4 the slaughter moved to the prisons of Tour St.-Bernard, St.-Firmin, the Châtelet, the Salpêtrière; there, in the case of young women, rape replaced murder. Among the inmates at Bicêtre, an insane asylum, were forty-three youths, from seventeen to nineteen years of age, most of them placed there by their parents for treatment; all were slain.41
For two days more the massacre continued in Paris, until its victims totaled between 1,24742 and 1,368.43 The people were divided in judgment on the event: Catholics and royalists were horrified, but revolutionists argued that the violent response was warranted by the threats of Brunswick and the exigencies of war. Pétion, the new mayor of Paris, received the executioners as hard-working patriots, and refreshed them with drink.44 The Legislative Assembly sent some members to the Abbaye scene to recommend due process of law; they returned to report that the massacre could not be stopped; finally the Assembly leaders—Girondins as well as Montagnards—agreed that the safest attitude was one of approval.45 The Commune sent representatives to share in the task of the extempore judges. Billaud-Varenne, deputy attorney for the Commune, joined the scene at the Abbaye, and congratulated the killers: “Fellow citizens, you are immolating your enemies; you are performing your duty.”46 Marat proudly took credit for the entire operation. At her trial a year later Charlotte Corday, asked why she had killed Marat, answered, “Because it was he who caused the massacres of September.” Challenged for proof, she replied, “I can give you no proof; it is the opinion of all France.”47
When Danton was asked to stop the slaughter he shrugged his shoulders; “it would be impossible,” he argued; and “why,” he asked, “should I disturb myself about those royalists and priests, who were only waiting the approach of foreigners to massacre us? … We must put our enemies in fear.”48 Secretly he withdrew from the prisons more than one of his friends, and even some of his personal enemies.49 When a fellow member of the Executive Council protested against the killings Danton told him, “Sit down. It was necessary.”50 And to a youth who had asked, “How can you help calling it horrible?” he answered, “You are too young to understand these matters…. A river of blood had to flow between the Parisians and the émigrés.”51 The Parisians, he thought, were now pledged to the Revolution. And those volunteers who were leaving to meet the invaders knew now that they could expect no mercy if they surrendered. They would in every sense be fighting for their lives.
September 2 was also the day on which the Legislative Assembly, feeling that the turn of events had made a ruin of the constitution which it had been chosen to implement, voted to call a national election for a Convention that would draw up a fresh constitution suited to the new condition of France and the rising demands of the war. And since peasants, proletaires, and bourgeois alike were being called to defend a country called theirs, it seemed intolerable that any of these, taxpayers or not, should be kept from the ballot box. So Robespierre won his first major victory: the Convention in which he was to be a major figure was chosen by manhood suffrage.
On September 20 the Legislative Assembly ended its last session, not knowing that on that day, at a village called Valmy, between Verdun and Paris, a French army under Dumouriez and François-Christophe Kellermann had met the professional troops of Prussia and Austria under the Duke of Brunswick, and had fought them to a draw—in effect a victory, since after the battle the King of Prussia ordered his battered regiments to retreat—abandoning Verdun and Longwy—from French territory. Frederick William II could not afford to be bothered with distant France now that he was competing with his neighbors Russia and Austria to see which would take the biggest bite in partitioning Poland; moreover, his soldiers were suffering disgracefully from diarrhea inflicted by the grapes of Champagne.52
It was at that battle that Goethe, present on the staff of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, made (we are told) a famous remark: “From today and from this place begins a new epoch in the history of the world.”53
CHAPTER IV
The Convention
September 21, 1792—October 26, 1795
I. THE NEW REPUBLIC
THE election to this third assembly, which was to see both the culmination and the decline of the Revolution, was even more subtly managed by the Jacobins than that of 1791. The process was carefully indirect: the voters chose electors, who met in electoral committee and chose the deputies to represent their district in the Convention. Both elections were by voice vote and in public; at each stage the voter risked injury if he offended the local leaders.1 In the cities conservatives refused to vote; “the number of abstentions was enormous”;2 of 7 million persons qualified to vote, 6.3 million stayed away.3 In Paris the voting began on September 2, and continued for several days while, at the prison gates, massacres sent out hints how to vote and survive. In many districts pious Catholics refrained from voting; hence the strongly royalist Vendée elected nine deputies of whom six would vote for the execution of the King.4 In Paris the electoral assembly met in the Jacobin Club, with the result that all twenty-four of the deputies chosen to represent the capital were convinced republicans and supporters of the Commune: Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Desmoulins, Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Fréron, David (the painter)…. In the provinces the Girondins did some rigging of their own; so Brissot, Roland, Condorcet, Pétion, Gaudet, Barbaroux, and Buzot earned the right to serve and die. Among the foreigners elected were Priestley, Cloots, and Paine. The Duc d’Orléans, renamed Citizen Philippe Égalité, was chosen to represent a radical section of Paris.
When the Convention convened in the Tuileries on September 21, 1792, it had 750 members. All but two were of the middle class; two were workingmen; nearly all were lawyers. The 180 Girondins, organized, educated
, and eloquent, took the lead in legislation. On the ground that there was no present danger of invasion, they secured a relaxation of the laws against suspects, émigrés, and priests, and of wartime control over the economy; free enterprise was restored; soon there were complaints of profiteering and price manipulation. To squelch a movement among radicals for the confiscation of large estates and their division among the people, the Gironde, on the first day of the Convention, carried a measure proclaiming the sanctity of private property. So appeased, the Gironde agreed with the Mountain and the Plain in declaring, on September 22, 1792, the First French Republic.
On the same day the Convention decreed that, after a year of readjustment, the Christian calendar should be replaced, in France and its possessions, by a Revolutionary Calendar, in which the years would be named I (from September 22, 1792, to September 21, 1793), II, III …, and the months would be named by their typical weather: Vendémiaire (vintage), Brumaire (mist), and Frimaire (frost), for autumn; Nivôse (snow), Pluviôse (rain), and Ventôse (wind), for winter; Germinal (budding), Floréal (flowering), and Prairial (meadows), for spring; and Messidor (harvest), Thermidor (warmth), and Fructidor (fruit), for summer. Each month was to be divided into three décades of ten days each; each décade was to end in a décadi, replacing Sunday as a day of rest. The five remaining days, called sans-culottides, were to be national festivals. The Convention hoped that this calendar would remind Frenchmen not of religious saints and seasons but of the earth and the tasks that made it fruitful; Nature would replace God. The new calendar came into use on November 24, 1793, and died at the end of Anno Domini 1805.
The Gironde and the Mountain agreed on private property, the republic, and the war upon Christianity; but on several other issues they differed to the point of death. The Girondins resented the geographically disproportionate influence of Paris—its deputies and its populace—on measures affecting all France; the Montagnards resented the influence of merchants and millionaires in determining the votes of the Girondins. Danton (whose section had given him 638 electoral votes out of a possible 700) resigned his place as minister of justice to undertake the task of uniting the Gironde and the Mountain in a policy of seeking peace with Prussia and Austria. But the Girondins distrusted him as the idol of radical Paris, and called for a record of his expenditures as minister; he could not account to their satisfaction for the sums he had laid out (he was a great believer in bribes), nor could he explain where he had found the money to buy three houses in or near Paris, and a large estate in the department of Aube; undeniably he had been living in a grand style. Calling his questioners ingrates, he gave up his labors for internal and external conciliation, and joined forces with Robespierre.
Though second only to Danton in popularity with the sections, Robespierre was as yet a secondary figure among the deputies. In their balloting for the presidency of the Convention he received six votes, Roland 235. To most of the deputies he was a dogmatist fertile in generalities and moral platitudes, a cautious opportunist who waited patiently for every opening to added power. An underlying consistency in his proposals had given him a slowly rising influence. He had kept from direct involvement in the attack upon the Tuileries or in the September Massacres, but he had accepted them as putting the fear of the people into the policies of the bourgeoisie. From the beginning he had advocated adult male suffrage—though in practice he had winked at keeping royalists and Catholics from the polls. He had defended the institution of private property, and had discouraged the appeal of a few impoverished souls for the confiscation and redistribution of possessions; however, he had proposed inheritance and other taxes that would “reduce by gentle but efficacious measures the extreme inequalities of wealth.”5 Meanwhile he bided his time, and allowed his rivals to wear themselves out with passion and extremes. He seemed convinced that someday he would rule—and predicted that someday he would be killed.6 “He knew, as all these men knew, that almost from hour to hour he carried his life in his hand.”7
It was neither Robespierre nor Danton but Marat who completely championed the proletariat. On September 25, to celebrate the new republic, he changed the name of his periodical to Journal de la République française. He was now forty-nine years old (Robespierre was thirty-four, Danton thirty-three); he had less than a year of life remaining to him, but he filled it with an uncompromising campaign against the Girondins as enemies of the people, agents of that rising commercial bourgeoisie which seemed resolved to make the Revolution the political arm of a “free enterprise” economy. His violent diatribes reverberated through Paris, stirring the sections to insurgency, and generating in the Convention an almost universal hostility. The Girondins denounced what they called the “triumvirate” of Danton, Robespierre, and Marat, but Danton disowned him and Robespierre avoided him; he sat with the Mountain, but usually friendless and alone. On September 25, 1792, Vergniaud and others read to the Convention documents indicating that Marat had called for a dictatorship and had evoked the massacres. When the ailing “tribune of the people” rose to defend himself he was assailed with cries of “Sit down!” “It seems,” he said, “that I have a great number of personal enemies in this assembly.” “All of us!” cried out the Girondins. Marat proceeded to repeat his demand for a dictatorship on the limited Roman style, and acknowledged his incitations to violence, but he exonerated Danton and Robespierre from any association with his plans. A deputy proposed that he be arrested and tried for treason; the motion was defeated. Marat took a pistol from his pocket, held it to his head, and announced, “If my indictment had been decreed, I would have blown my brains out at the foot of the tribune.”8
The Girondins—who had led France into war—were strengthened in these months by the victories of French troops and the extension of French power and revolutionary ideas. On September 21, 1792, General Anne-Pierre de Montesquiou-Fezensac led his forces to the easy conquest of Savoy (then part of the kingdom of Sardinia); “the progress of my army,” he reported to the Convention, “is a triumph; in both country and town the people come out to meet us; the tricolor cockade is worn on all sides.”9 On September 27 another French division entered Nice unopposed; on September 29 it took Villefranche. On November 27, at the request of local political leaders, Savoy was incorporated into France.
The conquest of the Rhineland was more difficult. On September 25 General Adam-Philippe de Custine led his volunteers to the capture of Speyer, taking three thousand prisoners; on October 5 he entered Worms; on October 19, Mainz; on October 21, Frankfurt-am-Main. To win Belgium (a dependency of Austria) to the Revolution, Dumouriez had to fight at Jemappes (November 6) one of the major battles of the war; the Austrians, after long resistance, retreated, leaving four thousand dead on the field. Brussels fell on November 14, Liège on the twenty-fourth, Antwerp on the thirtieth; in these cities the French were welcomed as liberators. Instead of obeying the Convention’s orders to move south and join his forces with Custine’s, Dumouriez dallied in Belgium and enriched himself in dealings with speculators in army supplies. Reprimanded, he threatened to resign. Danton was sent to appease him; he succeeded, but suffered guilt by association when (April 5, 1793) Dumouriez defected to the enemy.
Intoxicated with these victories, the Convention leaders adopted two complementary policies: to extend France to her “natural boundaries”—the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the seas—and to win the frontier populations by pledging them military aid in achieving economic and political freedom. Hence the bold decree of December 15, 1792:
From this moment the French nation proclaims the sovereignty of the people [in all cooperating regions], the suppression of all civil and military authorities which have hitherto governed you, and of all the taxes which you bear, under whatever form; the abolition of the tithe, of feudalism, … of serfdom …; it also proclaims the abolition among you of all noble and ecclesiastical corporations, and of all prerogatives and privileges as opposed to equality. You are, from this moment, brothers and friends, all are c
itizens, equal in rights, and all alike are called to govern, to serve, and to defend your country.10
This “Edict of Fraternity” brought a mess of problems upon the young republic. When the conquered (“liberated”) territories were taxed to support the French occupation, they complained that one master and his tax had been replaced by another. When the church hierarchy in Belgium, Liège, and the Rhineland, long accustomed to hold or share the ruling authority, saw itself challenged in both theology and power, it joined hands across frontiers and creeds, to repel, and if possible to destroy, the French Revolution. When, on November 16, 1792, to win the merchants of Antwerp to the French cause, the Convention decreed the opening of the River Scheldt to all navigation—whereas the Peace of Westphalia (1648) had closed it to all but the Dutch—Holland prepared to resist. The monarchs of Europe interpreted the Convention’s pledge as a declaration of war against all kings and feudal lords. The First Coalition against France began to take form.
The Convention decided to burn all bridges behind it by bringing Louis XVI to trial for treason. Since August 10 the Temple had given a semihumane imprisonment to most of the royal family: the King, thirty-eight; the Queen, thirty-seven; his sister, “Madame Élisabeth,” twenty-eight; his daughter, Marie-Thérèse (“Madame Royale”), fourteen; and his son, the Dauphin Louis-Charles, seven. The Girondins did all they could to delay the trial, for they knew that the evidence would compel conviction and execution, and that would intensify the attack of the Powers upon France. Danton agreed with them, but a new figure on the scene, Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, aged twenty-five, caught the attention of the Convention by his impassioned call for regicide: “Louis has combated the people and has been defeated. He is a barbarian, a foreign prisoner of war; you have seen his perfidious designs…. He is the murderer of the Bastille, of Nancy, of the Champ-de-Mars, … of the Tuileries. What enemy, what foreigner has done you more harm?”11 This attack might have made the judicious pause, but on November 20 an iron box discovered in a wall of the royal chambers in the Tuileries, and brought to the Convention by Roland, powerfully supported the charge of treason. It contained 625 secret documents, which revealed the King’s dealings with Lafayette, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Barnave, various émigrés and conservative journalists; clearly Louis, despite his affirmation of loyalty to the constitution, had plotted the defeat of the Revolution. The Convention ordered a veil to be thrown over the bust of Mirabeau; the Jacobins smashed a statue that had commemorated Mirabeau in their club. Barnave was arrested in Grenoble; Lafayette fled to his army; Talleyrand, as always, escaped. On December 2 some delegates from the sections appeared before the Convention and demanded immediate trial of the King; soon the Paris Commune sent strong recommendations to the same effect. On December 3 Robespierre joined in the cry. Marat carried a motion that all voting in the trial should be by voice and in public—which placed the hesitant Girondins at the mercy of the sansculottes in the galleries and in the streets.