The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  The victors gave form to the new order by commissioning Hérault de Séchelles and Saint-Just to formulate the new constitution that had been ordered on October 11, 1792. It restored adult male suffrage, and added the right of every citizen to subsistence, education, and insurrection. It limited the rights of property by considerations of public interest. It proclaimed freedom of religious worship, graciously recognized a Supreme Being, and declared morality to be the indispensable faith of society. Carlyle, who could not stomach democracy, called this “the most democratic constitution ever committed to paper.”31 It was accepted by the Convention (June 4, 1793), and was ratified by a vote of one fourth of the electorate, 1,801,918 to 11,610. This Constitution of 1793 remained on paper only, for on July 10 the Convention renewed the Committee of Public Safety as a ruling power, superior to all constitutions, till peace should return.

  III. EXIT MARAT: JULY 13, 1793

  Three of the Girondin refugees—Pétion, Barbaroux, and Buzot—found protection in Caen, a northern stronghold of the “federalist” reaction against Parisian domination of the national government. They made speeches, denounced the sansculottes and especially Marat, organized parades of protest, and planned an army to march upon the capital.

  Charlotte Corday was among their most ardent auditors. Descendant of the dramatist Pierre Corneille, born of a titled, impoverished, strongly royalist family, she was educated in a convent and served two years as a nun. Somehow she found opportunity to read Plutarch, Rousseau, even Voltaire; she lost her faith and thrilled to the heroes of ancient Rome. She was shocked on hearing that the King had been guillotined, and she was roused to indignation by the fulminations of Marat against the Girondins. On June 20, 1793, she visited Barbaroux, then twenty-six and so handsome that Mme. Roland had likened him to the Emperor Hadrian’s inamorato Antinous. Charlotte was nearing her twenty-fifth birthday, but she had other things than love on her mind. All she asked was a letter of introduction to a deputy who might arrange her admission to a meeting of the Convention. Barbaroux gave her a note to Lauze Duperret. On July 9 she left by stagecoach for Paris. Arriving on July 11, she bought a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade. She planned to enter the Convention chamber and slay Marat in his seat, but she was informed that Marat was sick at home. She found his address, went there, but was refused admittance; Monsieur was in his bath. She returned to her room.

  The bath was now Marat’s favorite desk. His disease, apparently a form of scrofula, had worsened; he found relief from it by sitting immersed to the waist in warm water to which minerals and medicines had been added; a moist towel was thrown over his shoulders, and a bandana soaked in vinegar bound his head. On a board spanning the tub he kept paper, pen, and ink, and there, day after day, he wrote the material for his journal.32 He was cared for by his sister Albertine and, since 1790, by Simonne Evrard, who began as his servant and, in 1792, became his common-law wife. He married her without benefit of clergy, “before the Supreme Being, … in the vast temple of Nature.”33

  From her room Charlotte sent a note to Marat appealing for an audience. “I come from Caen. Your love for the nation ought to make you anxious to know the plots that are being laid there. I await your reply.”34 She could not wait. On the evening of July 13 she knocked again at his entrance door. Again she was denied entry, but Marat, hearing her voice, called to let her in. He received her courteously, and bade her be seated; she brought her chair up close to him. “What is going on at Caen?” he asked (or so she later reported their strange conversation). “Eighteen deputies from the Convention,” she answered, “rule there in collusion with the département” officials. “What are their names?” She gave them; he wrote them down, and passed sentence on them: “They will soon be guillotined.” At that point she drew her knife and drove it into his chest with such force that it penetrated the aorta; blood poured from the wound. He cried out to Simonne, “À moi, ma chère amie, à moi!—To me, my dear friend, to me!” Simonne came, and he died in her arms. Charlotte, rushing from the room, was intercepted by a man who beat down her resistance with a chair. Police were called, came, and took her away. “I have done my duty,” she said; “let them do theirs.”35

  Marat must have had some good qualities to have won the united love of two rival women. His sister dedicated her remaining years to sanctifying his memory. Once a prosperous physician, he left at his death nothing more than some scientific manuscripts and twenty-five sous.36 He had been a fanatic, but a man fanatically devoted to the masses whom nature and history had forgotten. The Cordeliers Club preserved his heart as a sacred relic, and thousands came to view it with “breathless adoration.”37 On July 16 all the remaining deputies, and many men and women from the revolutionary sections, followed his corpse to its burial in the gardens of the Cordeliers. His statue, carved by David, was set up in the hall of the Convention; and on September 21, 1794, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon.

  Charlotte’s trial was short. She acknowledged her deed, but no guilt; she said she had merely avenged the victims of the September Massacres, and other objects of Marat’s wrath; “I killed one man to save a hundred thousand.”38 In a letter to Barbaroux she frankly claimed that “the end justifies the means.”39 Within a few hours after her conviction she was executed on the Place de la Révolution. She received proudly the curses of the attending crowd, and rejected the offer of a priest to give her a religious end.40 She died before she could realize how fatal her deed would be to the Girondins whom she had thought to serve. Vergniaud, speaking for them, realized this, and forgave her: “She has killed us, but she has taught us how to die.”41

  IV. THE “GREAT COMMITTEE”: 1793

  The Convention had reserved the right to revise, monthly, the membership of the Committee of Public Safety. On July 10—his peace policy, foreign and domestic, having failed—it removed Danton; then on July 25, as if to show its continuing regard, it elected him its president for the customary fortnightly term. His first wife had died in February, leaving him with two young children; on June 17 he had married a girl of sixteen; by July 10 he was redomesticated.

  On July 27 Robespierre was appointed to the Committee. Danton had never cared for him; “that man,” he said, “has not wits enough to cook an egg.”42 Yet, on August 1, he urged the Convention to give the Committee absolute power. Perhaps in a reaction of regret for this advice he remarked to Desmoulins, as they saw a sunset inflaming the Seine, “the river is running blood.” On September 6 the Convention proposed to restore him to the Committee; he refused.43 Weary and ill, he left Paris on October 12, and sought rest in the home that he had bought in his native Arcis-sur-Aube, in the valley of the Marne. When he returned, on November 21, the Seine was running blood.

  During that summer the “Great Committee,” as it came to be called, took its historic form. Now it consisted of twelve men: all of the middle class, all with good education and incomes, all acquainted with the philosophes and Rousseau; eight of them lawyers, two engineers; only one of them, Collot d’Herbois, had ever worked with his hands; a proletarian dictatorship is never proletarian. We call the roll:

  1. Bertrand Barère, thirty-eight, added to divers duties the task of presenting and defending before the Convention the decisions reached by the Committee, and having them confirmed by decrees; amiable and persuasive, he turned death sentences into eloquence, and statistics into poetry. He made few surviving enemies, changed with the political tide, and lived to the age of eighty-six, long enough to learn the mortality of governments and ideas.

  2. Jean-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, thirty-seven, argued that the Catholic Church was the most dangerous enemy of the Revolution, and had to be destroyed. He kept in touch and tune with the sections and the Commune, and followed his uncompromising policies with a pertinacity that made even his fellow committeemen fear him. He took charge of correspondence and relations with the provinces, headed the new administrative machinery, and became for a time “the most powerful member of the Committee.”44


  3. Lazare Carnot, forty, already distinguished as a mathematician and military engineer, took charge of the French armies, mapped campaigns, instructed and disciplined generals, won universal respect for his ability and integrity. He alone of the Committee is honored throughout France today.

  4. Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, forty-three; formerly an actor, he had suffered the disabilities that oppressed the theatrical profession before the Revolution; he never forgave the bourgeoisie for closing its doors to him, or the Church for holding him, by his profession, excommunicate. He became the most severe of the Twelve in dealing with the “aristocracy of merchants,” and once proposed, as a measure of economy, that the Paris prisons —crowded with suspects, hoarders, and profiteers—should be blown up with mines.45

  5. Georges Couthon, thirty-eight, was so crippled by meningitis that he had to be carried in a chair wherever he went; he attributed the ailment to sexual excesses in his youth, but he was adored by his wife. He was a man of kind heart and iron will who distinguished himself by his humane administration of pivotal provinces during the Terror.

  6. Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles, thirty-four, seemed out of place and step among the Duodecemvirs; he was a noble of the robe, a wealthy lawyer, noted for his elegant manners and Voltairean wit. When he felt the revolutionary tide swelling under him he joined in the attack upon the Bastille, wrote most of the Constitution of 1793, and served as a rigorous executor of the Committee’s policies in Alsace. He lived comfortably, and kept a noble mistress, until the guillotine fell upon him on April 5, 1794.

  7. Robert Lindet, forty-seven, had charge of food production and distribution in the increasingly managed economy, and accomplished logistic wonders in feeding and clothing the armies.

  8. Claude-Antoine Prieur-Duvernois, called “Prieur of the Côte d’Or,” aged thirty, accomplished similar miracles in supplying the armies with munitions and matériel.

  9. Pierre-Louis “Prieur of the Marne,” thirty-seven, spent his rough energy trying to win Catholic and royalist Brittany to the Revolution.

  10. André-Jeanbon Saint-André, forty-four, of Protestant lineage and Jesuit education, became captain of a merchant vessel, then a Protestant minister; he took charge of the French Navy at Brest, and led it into battle with a British fleet.

  11. Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, twenty-six, was the youngest and strangest of the Twelve, the most dogmatic, indomitable, and intense, the enfant terrible of the Terror. Brought up in Picardy by his widowed mother, admired and indulged, he fell passionately in love with Saint-Just, rejected all rules, fled to Paris with his mother’s silver, spent it on prostitutes,46 was caught and briefly jailed, studied law, and wrote an erotic poem in twenty cantos, celebrating rape, especially of nuns, and extolling pleasure as a divine right.47 In the Revolution he found at first an apparent legitimation of his hedonism, but its ideals inspired him to exalt his individualism into a Roman virtus that would sacrifice everything to make those ideals come true.48 He transformed himself from an epicurean into a stoic, but remained a romantic to the end. “When the day comes,” he wrote, “which satisfies me that I cannot endow the French people with mild, vigorous, and rational ways, inflexible against tyranny and injustice, on that day I will stab myself.”49 In Republican Institutions (1791) he argued that the concentration of wealth made a mockery of political and legal equality and liberty. Private riches must be limited and spread; the government should be based upon peasant proprietors and independent artisans; universal education and relief must be provided by the state. Laws should be few, intelligible, and short; “long laws are public calamities.”50 After the age of five all boys should be brought up by the state in spartan simplicity, living on vegetables and trained for war. Democracy is good, but in wartime it should yield to dictatorship.51 Elected to the Committee on May 10, 1793, Saint-Just gave himself resolutely to hard work; he rebutted rumors of his having a mistress by claiming that he was too busy for such amusements. The willful and excitable youth became a stern disciplinarian, a capable organizer, a fearless and victorious general. Returning in triumph to Paris, he was chosen president of the Convention (February 19, 1794). Proud and confident, overbearing to others, he humbly accepted the leadership of Robespierre, defended him in his defeat, and—aged twenty-six years and eleven months—accompanied him to death.

  12. Robespierre did not quite replace Danton as the master mind or will of the Twelve; Carnot, Billaud, Collot were too tough to be ruled; Robespierre never became dictator. He worked by patient study and devious strategy rather than by open command. He maintained popularity with the sansculottes by living simply with plain folk, extolling the masses and defending their interests. On April 4, 1793, he had offered the Convention “A Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”:

  Society is obliged to provide for the subsistence of all its members, either by procuring work for them or by assuring the means of existence to those who are unable to work…. The aid indispensable to whoever lacks necessaries is a debt of whoever possesses a surplus…. To make resistance to oppression subject to legal forms is the last refinement of tyranny…. Every institution that does not assume that the people are good, and that the magistrates are corruptible, is vicious…. The men of all countries are brothers.52

  All in all these twelve men were not mere murderers, as superficial acquaintance might describe them. It is true that they followed too readily the tradition of violence that had come down to them from the wars of religion and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve (1572); most of them learned to execute their enemies without qualm, sometimes with virtuous satisfaction; but they claimed the needs and customs of war. They themselves were subject to these mishaps; any one of them could be challenged, deposed, and sent to the guillotine; several ended so. At any moment they were subject to insurrection by the Paris populace, or the National Guard, or an ambitious general; any major defeat on the front or in a rebellious province might topple them. Meanwhile they labored night and day on their various tasks: from eight in the morning till noon in their offices or subcommittees; from one to four in the afternoon in attending the Convention; from eight till late in the evening in consultation or debate around the green table in their conference room. When they took charge France was torn with civil war by emergent capitalism in Lyons, by Girondin uprisings in the south, by Catholic and royalist revolts in the west; it was threatened by foreign armies in the north-east, the east, and the southwest; it was suffering defeat on land and sea, and was blockaded in every port. When the Great Committee fell, France had been hammered into political unity by dictatorship and terror; a new breed of young generals, trained, and sometimes led into battle, by Carnot and Saint-Just, had thrown back the enemy in decisive victories; and France, alone against nearly all of Europe, had emerged triumphant against everything but herself.

  V. THE REIGN OF TERROR: SEPTEMBER 17, 1793 -JULY 28, 1794

  1. The Gods Are Athirst

  The Terror was a recurrent mood as well as a specific time. Strictly it should be dated from the Law of Suspects, September 17, 1793, to the execution of Robespierre, July 28, 1794. But there had been the September Terror of 1792; there was to be a “White Terror” in May, 1795; another terror would follow the fall of Napoleon.

  The causes of the famous Terror were external danger and internal disorder, leading to public fear and tumult, and begetting martial law. The First Coalition had retaken Mainz (July 23), had invaded Alsace, and had entered Valenciennes, a hundred miles from Paris; Spanish troops had captured Perpignan and Bayonne. French armies were in disarray, French generals were ignoring the orders of their government. On August 29 French royalists surrendered to the British a French fleet, and a precious naval base and arsenal at Toulon. Britannia ruled the waves, and could at leisure appropriate French colonies on three continents. The victorious Allies debated the dismemberment of France, and restored feudal rights as they advanced.53

  Internally the Revolution seemed to be breaking apart.
The Vendée was aflame with counterrevolutionary ardor; Catholic rebels had defeated the forces of the state at Vihiers (July 18). Aristocrats, at home or as émigrés, were confidently planning restoration. Lyons, Bourges, Nîmes, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes, Brest fell to the revolting Gironde. Class war was rising between rich and poor.

  The economy was itself a battlefield. The price controls established on May 4 and September 29 were being defeated by the ingenuity of greed. The urban poor approved the maxima; the peasants and the merchants opposed them, and increasingly refused to grow or distribute the price-limited foods; the city stores, receiving less and less produce from market or field, could satisfy only the foremost few in the queues that daily formed at their doors. Fear of famine ran through Paris and the towns. In Paris, Senlis, Amiens, Rouen the populace came near to overthrowing the government in protest against the shortage of food. On June 25 Jacques Roux led his band of Enragés to the Convention and demanded that all profiteers—among whom he included some deputies—be arrested and made to disgorge their new wealth.

  Yours is no democracy, for you permit riches. It is the rich who have reaped, in the last four years, the fruits of the Revolution; it is the merchant aristocracy, more terrible than the nobility, that oppresses us. We see no limit to their extortions, for the price of goods is growing alarmingly. It is time that the death struggle between the profiteers and the workers should come to an end…. Are the possessions of knaves to be more sacred than human life? The necessities of life should be available for distribution by administrative bodies, just as the armed forces are at their disposition. [Nor would it suffice to take a capital levy from the rich, so long as the system is unchanged, for] the capitalist and the merchant will the next day raise an equal sum from the sansculottes … if the monopolies and the power of extortion are not destroyed.54