by Will Durant
In slightly less communistic terms Jacques Hébert denounced the bourgeoisie as traitors to the Revolution, and urged the workers to seize power from a negligent or cowardly government. On August 30 a deputy pronounced the magic word: Let Terror be the order of the day.55 On September 5 a crowd from the sections, calling for “war on tyrants, hoarders, and aristocrats,” marched to the headquarters of the Commune in the Hôtel de Ville. The mayor, Jean-Guillaume Pache, and the city procurator, Pierre Chaumette, went with their delegation to the Convention and voiced their demand for a revolutionary army to tour France with a portable guillotine, arrest every Girondin, and compel every peasant to surrender his hoarded produce or be executed on the spot.56
It was in this atmosphere of foreign invasion, and of a revolution within the Revolution, that the Committee of Public Safety built and guided the armies that led France to victory, and the machinery of terror that forged a distraught nation into unity.
On August 23, on bold plans presented by Carnot and Barère, the Convention ordered a levy en masse unparalleled in French history:
From now until such time as its enemies have been driven out of the territory of the Republic, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for the service of the armies. The young shall go and fight, the married men shall forge weapons and transport food, the women shall make tents and clothes and serve in the hospitals, the old men shall have themselves carried into public places to rouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the nation.
All unmarried men from eighteen to twenty-five years of age were to be drafted into battalions under banners reading: “Le peuple français debout contre les tyrants!” (The French people standing up against the tyrants!).
Soon Paris was transformed into a throbbing arsenal. The gardens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg were covered with shops producing, among other matériel, some 650 muskets a day. Unemployment vanished. Privately owned weapons, metal, surplus clothing, were requisitioned; thousands of mills were taken over. Capital as well as labor was conscripted; a loan of a billion livres was squeezed from the well-to-do. Contractors were told what to produce; prices were fixed by the government. Overnight, France became a totalitarian state. Copper, iron, saltpeter, potash, soda, sulfur, formerly dependent in part on imports, had now to be found in, taken from, the soil of a France blockaded on every frontier and at every port. Luckily the great chemist Lavoisier (soon to be guillotined) had in 1775 improved the quality, and increased the production, of gunpowder; the French armies had better gunpowder than their enemies. Scientists like Monge, Berthollet, and Fourcroy were called upon to find supplies of needed materials, or to invent substitutes; they were at the head of their fields at the time, and served their country well.
By the end of September France had 500,000 men under arms. Their equipment was still inadequate, their discipline poor, their spirit hesitant; only saints can be enthusiastic about death. Now for the first time propaganda became a state industry, almost a monopoly; Jean-Baptiste Bourchotte, minister of war, paid newspapers to present the nation’s case, and saw to it that copies of these journals were circulated in the army camps, where there was little else to read. Members or representatives of the Committee went to the front to harangue the troops and keep an eye upon the generals. In the first important engagement of the new campaign—at Hondschoote September 6–8, against a force of British and Austrians—it was Debrel, a Committtee commissioner, who turned defeat into victory after General Houchard had proposed retreat. For this and other errors the old soldier was sent to the guillotine on November 14, 1793. Twenty-two other generals, nearly all of the Ancien Régime, were imprisoned for blunders, or apathy, or neglect of the Committee’s instructions. Younger men, brought up in revolution, took their places—men like Hoche, Pichegru, Jourdan, Moreau, who had the viscera to apply Carnot’s policy of persistent attack. At Wattignies, on October 16, when 50,000 French recruits faced 65,000 Austrians, the forty-year-old Carnot shouldered a musket and marched with Jourdan’s men into battle. The victory was not decisive, but it raised the morale of the Revolutionary armies and strengthened the authority of the Committee.
On September 17 the obedient Convention passed the Law of Suspects, empowering the Committee or its agents to arrest, without warning, any returned émigré, any relative of an émigré, any public official suspended and not reinstated, anyone who had given any sign of opposition to the Revolution or the war. It was a harsh law, which forced all but avowed revolutionists—therefore nearly all Catholics and bourgeois—to live in constant fear of arrest, even of death; the Committee justified it as needed to maintain at least an outward unity in a war for national survival. Some émigrés agreed with the Twelve that fear and terror were legitimate instruments of rule in critical situations. The Comte de Montmorin, former foreign minister under Louis XVI, wrote in 1792: “I believe it necessary to punish the Parisians by terrorism.” The Comte de Flachslander argued that French resistance to the Allies would “continue until the Convention has been massacred.” A secretary to the King of Prussia commented on the émigrés: “Their language is horrible. If we are prepared to abandon their fellow citizens to their vengeance, France would soon be no more than one monstrous cemetery.”57
The Convention faced a choice between terror and mercy in the case of the Queen. Putting aside her early extravagance, her intrusion into affairs of state, her known distaste for the populace of Paris (offenses that hardly deserved decapitation), there was no doubt that she had communicated with émigrés and foreign governments in an effort to halt the Revolution and restore the traditional powers of the French monarchy. In these operations she felt that she was using the human right of self-defense; her accusers considered that she had violated laws passed by the elected delegates of the nation, and had committed treason. Apparently she had revealed to the enemies of France the intimate deliberations of the royal Council, even the campaign plans of the Revolutionary armies.
She had borne four children to Louis XVI: a daughter, Marie-Thérèse, now fifteen; a son who had died in infancy; a second son, who had died in 1789; a third son, Louis-Charles, now eight, whom she considered to be Louis XVII. Helped by her daughter and her sister-in-law Élisabeth, she watched in anxiety and then despair as continued confinement broke the health and spirit of the boy. In March, 1793, she was offered a plan for her escape; she refused it because it required her to leave her children behind.58 When the government learned of the abandoned plot it removed the Dauphin from his mother despite her struggles, and kept him in isolation from his relatives. On August 2, 1793, after a year of imprisonment in the Temple, the Queen, her daughter, and her sister-in-law were removed to a room in the Conciergerie—that part of the Palais de Justice which had formerly been occupied by the superintendent of the building. There the “Widow Capet,” as she was called, was treated more kindly than before, even to having a priest come and say Mass in her cell. Later that month she consented to another attempt to escape; it failed; now she was transferred to another room and put under stricter guard.
On September 2 the Committee met to decide her fate. Some members were in favor of keeping her alive as a pawn to be surrendered to Austria in return for an acceptable peace. Barère and Saint-André called for her execution as a means of uniting the signers of the sentence with a bond of blood. Hébert, from the Commune, told the Twelve, “I have in your name promised the head of Antoinette to the sansculottes, who are clamoring for it, and without whose support you yourselves would cease to exist…. I will go and cut it off myself if I have to wait much longer for it.”59
On October 12 the Queen submitted to a long preliminary examination; and on October 14 and 15 she was tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal, with Fouquier-Tinville as chief prosecutor. She was questioned from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. and from 5 to 11 P.M. on the first day, and from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. on the next. She was accused of transferring millions of francs from the French Treasury to her brother Joseph II of Austria, and
with inviting alien forces to invade France; and it was suggested, for good measure, that she had tried to “corrupt” her son sexually. Only the last accusation unnerved her; she replied, “Nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a mother. I appeal to all mothers here.” The audience was moved by the sight of this woman, whose youthful beauty and gaiety had been the talk of Europe, now white-haired at thirty-eight, clad in mourning for her husband, fighting for her life with courage and dignity against men who were apparently resolved to break her spirit with a protracted ordeal merciless to both body and mind. When it was over she was blind with fatigue, and had to be helped to her cell. There she learned that the verdict was death.
Now in solitary confinement, she wrote a letter of farewell to Madame Élisabeth, asking her to transmit to her son and daughter the directions the King had left for them. “My son,” she wrote, “must never forget his father’s last words, which I expressly repeat to him: ‘Never seek to avenge my death.’ “60 The letter was not delivered to Madame Élisabeth; it was intercepted by Fouquier-Tinville, who gave it to Robespierre, among whose secret papers it was found after his death.
On the morning of October 16, 1793, the executioner, Henri Sanson, came to her cell, bound her hands behind her back, and cut off her hair at the neck. She was taken in a cart along a street lined with soldiers, past hostile, taunting crowds, to the Place de la Révolution. At noon Sanson held up her severed head to the multitude.
Having struck its stride, the Revolutionary Tribunal now issued death sentences at the rate of seven per day.61 All available aristocrats were seized, and many were executed. The twenty-one Girondins who had been under guard since June 2 were put on trial on October 24; the eloquence of Vergniaud and Brissot availed them not; all were granted a quick and early death. One of them, Valazé, stabbed himself as he left the court; his dead body was placed among the condemned and carted to the scaffold, where it took its turn under the indifferent blade. “The Revolution,” said Vergniaud, “is like Saturn, it is devouring its own children.”62
Consider the wrath and fear that these events must have brought to Manon Roland, now awaiting her fate in the Conciergerie, which had become a steppingstone to the guillotine. Her imprisonment had had some amenities; friends brought her books and flowers; she collected in her cell a little library centered around Plutarch and Tacitus. As a stronger anodyne she immersed herself in writing her recollections, terming them an Appel à l’impartiale postérité—as if posterity too would not be divided. As she described her youth the remembrance of tempi felici made bitterer her contemplation of present days. So she wrote, on August 28, 1793:
I feel my resolution to pursue these memories deserting me. The miseries of my country torment me; an involuntary gloom penetrates my soul, chilling my imagination. France has become a vast Golgotha of carnage, an arena of horrors, where her children tear and destroy one another…. Never can history paint these dreadful times, or the monsters that fill them with their barbarities…. What Rome or Babylon ever equaled Paris?63
Foreseeing that her turn would come soon, she wrote into her manuscript a word of farewell to her husband and to her lover, who had as yet escaped the snares prepared for them:
O my friends, may propitious fate conduct you to the United States, the sole asylum of freedom.*… And you, my spouse and companion, enfeebled by premature old age, eluding with difficulty the assassins, shall I be permitted to see you again? … How long must I remain a witness to the desolation of my native land, the degradation of my countrymen?64
Not long. On November 8, 1793, before the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was charged with complicity in Roland’s alleged misuse of public funds, and with having sent from her cell letters of encouragement to Barbaroux and Buzot, who were then inciting revolt against the Jacobin control over the Convention. When she spoke in her own defense the carefully selected spectators denounced her as a traitress. She was declared guilty and was guillotined on the same day in the Place de la Révolution. An uncertain tradition tells how, looking at the statue of Liberty that David had set up in the majestic square, she cried out, “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!”65
A procession of revolutionaries followed her. On November 10 came the mayor-astronomer Bailly, who had given the red cockade to the King, and had ordered the National Guard to fire upon the untimely petitioners on the Champ-de-Mars. On November 12 the guillotine caught up with Philippe Égalité; he could not make out why the Montagnards wished to dispatch so faithful an ally; but he had the blood of kings in his veins, and had itched for a throne; who could tell when that itch would frenzy him again? Then, on November 29, Antoine Barnave, who had tried to protect and guide the Queen. Then Generals Custine, Houchard, Biron …
Roland, having thanked the friends who had risked their lives to protect him, set out alone on a walk, November 16, sat down against a tree, and wrote a note of farewell: “Not fear but indignation made me quit my retreat, on learning that my wife had been murdered. I did not wish to remain longer on an earth polluted with crimes.”66 Then he forced his sword into his body. Condorcet, after writing a paean to progress, took poison (March 28, 1794). Barbaroux shot himself, survived, and was guillotined (June 15). Pétion and Buzot, pursued by agents of the government, killed themselves in a field near Bordeaux. Their bodies were found on June 18, half devoured by wolves.
2. The Terror in the Provinces
There were other Girondins, still wearing heads. In some towns, like Bordeaux and Lyons, they had gained the upper hand; they had to be wiped out, the Jacobins felt, if their moves toward provincial autonomy were to be overcome and France made one and Jacobin. For this and other purposes the Committee of Public Safety sent out over France its “representatives on mission,” and gave them, subject to itself, almost absolute authority in their allotted terrain. They might depose elected officials, appoint others, arrest suspects, draft men for the Army, levy taxes, enforce price controls, exact loans, requisition produce, clothing, or materials, and set up or confirm local committees of public safety to serve as agencies of the Great Committee in Paris. The representatives accomplished miracles of revolutionary and military organization, often amid a hostile or apathetic environment. They put down opposition without mercy, sometimes with enthusiastic excess.
The most successful of them was Saint-Just. On October 17, 1793, he and Joseph Lebas (who gladly let him take the lead) were dispatched to save Alsace from an Austrian invasion that was making rapid conquests in a territory congenitally German by language, literature, and ways. The French Army of the Rhine had been thrown back upon Strasbourg, and was in a mood of defeatism and mutiny. Saint-Just learned that the troops had been tyrannically treated, badly led, and perhaps betrayed, by officers inadequately enamored of the Revolution; he had seven of them executed before the assembled force. He listened to grievances, and remedied them with characteristic decisiveness. He requisitioned from the prosperous classes all surplus shoes, coats, overcoats, and hats, and from the 193 richest citizens he extracted nine million livres. Incompetent or apathetic officials were dismissed; convicted grafters were shot. When the French army met the Austrians again the invaders were driven out of Alsace, and the province was restored to French control. Saint-Just returned to Paris, eager for other tasks, and almost forgetting that he was engaged to the sister of Lebas.
Joseph Le Bon did not live up to his name as Committee representative. Warned by his employers to beware of “false and mistaken humanity,” the blue-eyed ex-curé thought to please them by “shortening” 150 Cambrai notables in six weeks, and 392 in Arras; his secretary reported that Le Bon killed “in a sort of fever” and, on reaching home, mimicked the facial contortions of the dying to amuse his wife.67 He himself was cut short in 1795.
In July, 1793, Jean-Baptiste Carrier was commissioned to suppress the Catholic revolt in the Vendée, and to make Nantes secure against further rebellion. Hérault de Séchelles, of the Committee, explained to him, “We can become
humane when we are certain of victory.”68 Carrier was inspired. In a moment of ecological enthusiasm he declared that France could not feed its rapidly growing population, and that it would be desirable to cure the excess by cutting down all nobles, priests, merchants, and magistrates. At Nantes he objected to trial as a waste of time; all these suspects (he commanded the judge) “must be eliminated in a couple of hours, or I will have you and your colleagues shot.”69 Since the prisons at Nantes were crowded almost to asphyxiation by those arrested and condemned, and there was a shortage of food, he ordered his aides to fill barges, rafts, and other craft with fifteen hundred men, women and children—giving priority to priests—and to have these vessels scuttled in the Loire. By this and other means he disposed of four thousand undesirables in four months.70 He justified himself by what seemed to him the laws of war; the Vendéans were in revolt, and every one of them would remain an enemy of the Revolution till death. “We will make France a graveyard,” he vowed, “rather than not regenerate it in our own way.”71 The Committee had to restrain his fervor by threatening to arrest him. He was not frightened; in any case, he said, “we shall all be guillotined, one after another.” In November, 1794, he was summoned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and on December 16 he illustrated his prophecy.