by Will Durant
Stanislas Fréron (son of Voltaire’s favorite enemy) and other agents of the Committee rouged the Rhone and the Var with the blood of the unconverted: 120 at Marseilles, 282 at Toulon, 332 at Orange.72 By contrast Georges Couthon was the quality of mercy on his mission to gather recruits for the Army in the department of Puy-de-Dôme. At Clermont-Ferrand he reorganized the industries into concentration on the production of matériel for the new regiments. When the citizens saw that he wielded his authority with justice and humanity they became so fond of him that they took turns in carrying him in his chair. During his mission not one person was executed by “revolutionary justice.”73
Joseph Fouché, once a professor of Latin and physics, was now thirty-four years old, not yet Balzac’s “ablest man I’ve ever met.”74 He seemed made for intrigue: lean, angular, tight-lipped, sharp of eye and nose, sober, secret, silent, tough; he was to rival Talleyrand in rapid transformations and devious survivals. To outward observances he was a dutiful family man, as modest in his habits as he was bold in his ideas. In 1792 he was elected to the Convention from Nantes. At first he sat and voted with the Gironde; then, foreseeing its fall and the supremacy of Paris, he moved up to the Mountain and issued a pamphlet calling upon the Revolution to pass from its bourgeois to a proletarian phase. To advance the war, he argued, the government should “take everything beyond what a citizen needs; for superfluity is an obvious and gratuitous violation of the rights of the people.” All gold and silver should be confiscated until the war ended. “We shall be harsh in the fullness of the authority delegated to us. The time for half-measures … is over…. Help us to strike hard blows.”75 As representative on mission in the department of Loire Inférieure, and especially in Nevers and Moulins, Fouché opened war on private property. By requisitioning money, precious metal, weapons, clothing, and food, he was able to equip the ten thousand recruits whom he had enlisted. He ransacked the churches of their gold and silver monstrances, vessels, candelabra, and sent these to the Convention. The Committee found it unprofitable to check his ardor, and judged him just the man to help Collot d’Herbois in restoring Lyons to the revolutionary faith.
Lyons was almost the capital of French capitalism. Among its 130,000 souls were financiers with connections all over France, merchants having outlets all over Europe, captains of industry controlling a hundred factories, and a large body of proletaires who heard with envy how their own class in Paris had almost captured the government. At the beginning of 1793, under the leadership of the ex-priest Marie-Joseph Chalier, they achieved a similar victory. But religion proved stronger than class. At least half the workers were still Catholic, and resented the anti-Christian turn of Jacobin policy; when the bourgeoisie mobilized its diverse forces against the proletarian dictatorship, the workers divided, and a coalition of businessmen, royalists, and Girondins expelled the radical government and put to death Chalier and two hundred of his followers (July 16, 1793). Thousands of workingmen left the city, settled in the environs, and waited for the next turn of the Revolutionary screw.
The Committee of Public Safety sent an army to overthrow the victorious capitalists. Couthon, legless, came from Clermont to lead it; on October 9 it forced its way in, and reestablished Jacobin rule. Couthon thought a policy of mercy advisable in a city whose population so largely depended upon continued operation of the factories and the shops, but the Paris Committee thought otherwise. On October 12 it put through the Convention, and sent to Couthon, a directive composed by Robespierre in a fury of revenge for Chalier and the two hundred executed radicals. It read in part: “The city of Lyons shall be destroyed. Every habitation of the rich shall be demolished…. The name of Lyons shall be effaced from the list of the Republic’s cities. The collection of houses left standing shall henceforth bear the name of Ville Affranchisée [the Liberated City]. On the ruins of Lyons shall be raised a column attesting to posterity the crimes and the punishment of the royalists.”76
Couthon did not relish the operation here assigned him. He condemned one of the more expensive dwellings to demolition, and then was borne off to more congenial labors at Clermont-Ferrand. He was replaced at Lyons (November 4) by Collot d’Herbois, who was soon joined by Fouché. They began with a mock-religious ceremony in commemoration of Chalier as the “savior-god who had died for the people”; leading the procession was a donkey garbed as a bishop bearing a miter on his head and dragging a crucifix and a Bible on his tail; in a public square the martyr was honored by eulogies, and a bonfire was made of the Bible, a missal, sacramental wafers, and wooden images of sundry saints.77 For the revolutionary purification of Lyons Collot and Fouché created a “Temporary Commission” of twenty members, and a tribunal of seven to try suspects. The commission issued a declaration of principles which has been called “the first communist manifesto” of modern times.78 It proposed to ally the Revolution with the “immense class of the poor”; it denounced nobility and bourgeoisie, and told the workers: “You have been oppressed; you must crush your oppressors!” All products of French soil belonged to France; all private wealth must be put at the service of the Republic; and as a first step toward social justice a tax of thirty thousand livres must be taken from anyone having an income of ten thousand per year. Large sums were raised by jailing nobles, priests, and others, and confiscating their property.
This declaration was not well received by the people of Lyons, a considerable minority of whom had risen into the middle class. On November 10 a petition signed by ten thousand women recommended mercy for the thousands of men and women who had been crowded into the jails. The commissioners replied sternly, “Shut yourselves up in the privacy of your household tasks…. Let us see no more of the tears that dishonor you.”79 On December 4, perhaps to make matters clear, sixty prisoners, condemned by the new tribunal, were marched out to an open space across the Rhone, were stationed between two trenches, and were buried by successive mitraillades—showers of slugs or grapeshot from a row of cannon. On the next day, at the same spot, 209 prisoners, tied together, were mowed down by a similar mitraillade; and on December 7 two hundred more. Thereafter the slaughter proceeded more leisurely by guillotine, yet so rapidly that the stench of the dead began to poison the city air. By March, 1794, the executions in Lyons had reached 1,667—two thirds of them of the middle or upper class.80 Hundreds of expensive homes were laboriously destroyed.81
On December 20, 1793, a deputation of citizens from Lyons appeared before the Convention to ask for an end to the vengeance; but Collot had beaten them to Paris, and successfully defended his policy. Fouché, left in charge of Lyons, continued the Terror. Learning that Toulon had been recaptured, he wrote to Collot: “We have only one way of celebrating victory. This evening we send 213 rebels under the fire of the lightning bolt.”82 On April 3, 1794, Fouché was recalled to give an account of himself before the Convention. He escaped punishment, but never forgave Robespierre for accusing him of barbarity; someday he would take his revenge.
The Committee of Public Safety slowly recognized that the provincial Terror had been carried to a costly excess. In this matter Robespierre was a moderating influence; he took the lead in recalling Carrier, Fréron, Tallien, and requiring an accounting of their operations. The provincial Terror ended in May, 1794, while it was being intensified in Paris. By the time Robespierre himself had become its victim (July 27–28, 1794) it had taken 2,700 lives in Paris, 18,000 in France;83 other guessers raise the total to 40,000.84 Those jailed as suspects amounted to some 300,000. As the property of the executed reverted to the state, it was a profitable Terror.
3. The War Against Religion
Now the deepest division was between those who treasured religious faith as their final support in a world otherwise unintelligible, meaningless, and tragic and those who had come to think of religion as a managed and costly superstition blocking the road to reason and liberty. This division was deepest in the Vendée—coastal France between the Loire and La Rochelle—where the dour weather, the rocky,
arid soil, the repetitious trajectory of births and deaths, left the population almost immune to the wit of Voltaire and the winds of the Enlightenment. Townsmen and peasants accepted the Revolution; but when the Constituent Assembly promulgated the Civil Constitution of the Clergy—confiscating the property of the Church, making all priests the employees of the state, and requiring them to swear fidelity to the regime that had shorn them—the peasants supported their priests in refusing assent. The call to their youth to volunteer, or be conscripted, for the Army set fire to the revolt; why should these boys gives their lives to protect an infidel government rather than their priests and altars and household gods?
So, on March 4, 1793, rioting broke out in the Vendée; nine days later it had spread throughout the region; by May 1 there were thirty thousand rebels under arms. Several royalist nobles joined the rural leaders in turning these recruits into disciplined troops; before the Convention realized their strength they had taken Thouars, Fontenay, Saumur, Angers. In August the Committee of Public Safety sent into the Vendée an army under General Kléber, with instructions to destroy the peasant forces and devastate all regions supporting them. Kléber defeated the Catholic army at Cholet on October 17, and crushed it at Savenay on December 23. Military commissions from Paris were set up in Angers, Nantes, Rennes, and Tours, with orders to put to death any Vendéan bearing arms; at or near Angers 463 men were shot in twenty days. Before the Vendéans were subdued by Marshal Hoche (July, 1796), half a million lives had been lost in this new religious war.
In Paris much of the population had become indifferent to religion. In this regard there had been a frail accord between the Mountain and the Gironde; they had joined in reducing the power of the clergy, and in establishing a pagan calendar. They had encouraged the marriage of priests, even to decreeing deportation for any bishop who had tried to prevent it. Under protection of the Revolution some two thousand priests and five hundred nuns took mates.85
The Committee’s representatives on mission usually made de-Christianization a special element in their procedure. One ordered a priest imprisoned until he married. At Nevers, Fouché issued rigorous rules for the clergy: they must marry, must live simply like the Apostles, must not wear clerical dress, or perform religious ceremonies, outside their churches; Christian funeral services were abolished, and cemeteries must display an inscription telling the public that “death is an eternal sleep.” He prevailed upon an archbishop and thirty priests to throw away their cowls and don the red cap of revolution. In Moulins he rode at the head of a procession in which he smashed all crosses, crucifixes, and religious images en route.86 In Clermont-Ferrand Couthon proclaimed that the religion of Christ had been turned into a financial imposture. By hiring a physician to make tests before the public, he showed that the “blood of Christ” in a miracle-producing phial was merely colored turpentine. He ended the state payment of priests, confiscated the gold and silver vessels of the churches, and announced that churches that could not be transformed into schools might with his approval be torn down to build houses for the poor. He proclaimed a new theology in which Nature would be God, and heaven would be an earthly utopia in which all men would be good.87
The leaders of the campaign against Christianity were Hébert of the Paris City Council and Chaumette of the Paris Commune. Warmed by Chaumette’s oratory and Hébert’s journalism, a crowd of sansculottes invaded the Abbey of St.-Denis on October 16, 1793, emptied the coffins of French royalty there entombed, and melted the metal for use in the war. On November 6 the Convention accorded the communes of France the right to officially renounce the Christian Church. On November 10 men and women from the working-class quarters and the ideological haunts of Paris paraded through the streets in mock religious dress and procession; they entered the hall of the Convention and prevailed upon the deputies to pledge attendance at that evening’s fete in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame—renamed the Temple of Reason. There a new sanctuary had been arranged, in which Mile. Candeille of the Opéra, robed in a tricolor flag and crowned with a red cap, stood as the Goddess of Liberty, attended by persuasive ladies who sang a “Hymn to Liberty” composed for the occasion by Marie-Joseph de Chénier. The worshipers danced and sang in the naves, while in the side chapels, said hostile reporters, profiteers of freedom celebrated the rites of love.88 On November 17 Jean-Baptiste Gobel, bishop of Paris, yielding to popular demand, appeared before the Convention, abjured his office, handed over to the president his episcopal crozier and ring, and donned the red cap of freedom.89 On November 23 the Commune ordered all Christian churches in Paris closed.90
The Convention, on second thought, wondered had it not overplayed its anti-Christian hand. The deputies were nearly all agnostics, pantheists, or atheists, but several of them questioned the wisdom of infuriating sincere Catholics, who were still in the majority, and many of them ready to take up arms against the Revolution. Some, like Robespierre and Carnot, felt that religion was the only force that could prevent repeated social upheavals against inequalities too deeply rooted in nature to be removed by legislation. Robespierre believed that Catholicism was an organized exploitation of superstition,91 but he rejected atheism as an immodest assumption of impossible knowledge. On May 8, 1793, he had condemned the philosophes as hypocrites who scorned the commonalty and angled for pensions from kings. On November 21, at the height of the de-Christianizing festivities, he told the Convention:
Every philosopher and every individual may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Anyone who wishes to make such an opinion a crime is absurd, but the public man or the legislator who should adopt such a system would be a hundred times more foolish still….
Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the idea of the people. This is the sentiment of Europe and the world; it is the sentiment of the French people. That notion is attached neither to priests nor to superstition nor to ceremonies; it is attached only to the idea of an incomprehensible Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfort of virtue.92
Danton here agreed with Robespierre: “We never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition in order to set up the reign of atheism…. I demand that there be an end of those antireligious masquerades in the Convention.”93
On December 6, 1793, the Convention reaffirmed freedom of worship, and guaranteed the protection of religious ceremonies conducted by loyal priests. Hébert protested that he too rejected atheism, but he joined the forces that aimed to reduce Robespierre’s popularity. Robespierre saw him now as a major enemy, and waited for a chance to destroy him.*
4. The Revolution Eats Its Children
Hébert’s strength lay in the sansculottes, who might be marshaled through the sections and the radical press to invade the Convention and restore the rule of Paris over France. Robespierre’s strength, formerly based in the Parisian populace, now lay in the Committee of Public Safety, which dominated the Convention through superior facilities for information, decision, and action.
In November, 1793, the Committee was at the peak of its repute, partly because of the successful levy en masse, but especially because of military triumphs on several fronts. The new generals—Jourdan, Kellermann, Kléber, Hoche, Pichegru—were sons of the Revolution, untrammeled by old rules and tactics or faded loyalties; they had under their command a million men still inadequately armed and trained but roused to valor by the thought of what might happen to them and their families if the enemy should break through the French lines. They were checked at Kaiserslautern, but they recovered and took Landau and Speyer. They drove the Spaniards back over the Pyrenees. And, with the help of the young Napoleon, they recaptured Toulon.
Since August 26 a motley force of English, Spanish, and Neapolitan troops, protected by an Anglo-Spanish fleet and abetted by local conservatives, had held that port and arsenal, strategically located on the Mediterranean. For three months a revolutionary army had laid siege to it, to no avail.
A promontory, Cap l’Aiguillette, divided the harbor and overlooked the arsenal; to gain that point would be to command the situation; but the British had blocked the land approach to the cape with a fort so strongly armed that they called it Little Gibraltar. Bonaparte, aged twenty-four, saw at once that if the hostile squadron could be forced to leave the harbor, the occupying garrison, losing supplies from the sea, would have to abandon the town. By resolute and risky reconnoitering he found, in the jungle, a place from which his artillery could with some safety bombard the bastion. When his cannon had demolished its walls a battalion of French troops stormed the fort, slew its defenders, captured or replaced its guns. These were brought into action upon the enemy fleet; Lord Hood ordered the garrison to abandon the city, and his ships to depart; and on December 19, 1793, the French Army restored Toulon to France. Augustin Robespierre, the local representative of the Committee, wrote to his brother praising the “transcendent merit” of the young artillery captain. A new epic began.
These victories, and those of Kléber in the Vendée, freed the Committee to deal with internal problems. There was an allegedly “foreign plot” to assassinate the revolutionary leaders, but no convincing evidence was found. Corruption was spreading in the production and delivery of army supplies; “in the Army of the South there are thirty thousand pairs of breeches wanting—a most scandalous want.”95 Speculation was helping market manipulation to run up the prices of goods. A governmental maximum had been set for the prices of important products, but producers complained that they could not keep to these prices if wages were not similarly controlled. Inflation was checked for a time, but peasants, manufacturers, and merchants cut down production, and unemployment increased while prices rose. As supplies ran low, housewives had to stand in one line after another for bread, milk, meat, butter, oil, soap, candles, and wood. Queues formed as early as midnight; men and women lay in doorways or on the pavement while waiting for the shop to open and the procession to move. Here and there hungry prostitutes offered their wares along the line.96 In many cases strong-arm groups invaded the stores and marched away with the goods. Municipal services broke down; crime flourished; police were scarce; uncollected refuse strewed and fouled the streets. Like conditions harassed Rouen, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux …