The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  What foundation is there for this odious system of terror and slander? To whom must we show ourselves terrible? … Is it tyrants and rascals who fear us, or men of good will and patriots? … Do we strike terror into the National Convention? But what are we without the National Convention?—we who have defended the Convention at the peril of our lives, who have devoted ourselves to its preservation while detestable factions plot its ruin for all men to see? … For whom were the first blows of the conspirators intended? … It is we whom they seek to assassinate, it is we whom they call the scourge of France…. Some time ago they declared war on certain members of the Committee of Public Safety. Finally they seemed to aim at destroying one man…. They call me tyrant…. They were particularly anxious to prove that the Revolutionary Tribunal was a tribunal of blood, created by me alone, and which I dominate absolutely for the purpose of beheading all men of good will….

  I dare not name [these accusers] here and now. I cannot bring myself to tear away completely the veil that covers this profound mystery of crimes. But this I affirm positively: that among the authors of this plot are the agents of that system of venality intended by foreigners to destroy the Republic…. The traitors, hidden here under false exteriors, will accuse their accusers, and will multiply all stratagems … to stifle the truth. Such is part of the conspiracy.

  I will conclude that … tyranny reigns among us; but not that I must keep silence. How can one reproach a man who has truth on his side, and who knows how to die for his country?117

  There were some blunders in this historic speech—surprisingly many for one who had heretofore picked his way with caution amid the pitfalls of politics; power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action. The tone of the speech—the proud presumption not only of innocence but of “a man who has the truth on his side”—could be judicious only in a Socrates already half inclined to death. It was hardly wise to incite and infuriate his enemies by threatening them with exposure—that is, with death. It was unwise to affirm that the Convention was free from fear of the Terror, when it knew that it was not. Worst of all, by refusing to name the men he proposed to indict, he multiplied those deputies who might consider themselves future victims of his wrath. The Convention received his appeal coldly, and defeated a motion to print it. Robespierre repeated the speech that evening at the Jacobin Club, to great applause; and there he added an open attack upon Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois, who were present. They went from the club to the rooms of the Committee, where they found Saint-Just writing what he too boldly told them was to be their indictment.118

  The next morning, July 27 (the 9th of Thermidor), Saint-Just rose to present that indictment to a Convention dark with hostility and tense with fear. Robespierre sat directly before the rostrum. His devoted host, Duplay, had warned him to expect trouble, but Robespierre had confidently reassured the soothsayer, “The Convention is in the main honest; all large masses of men are honest.”119 Unluckily the presiding officer on that day was one of his sworn foes—Collot d’Herbois. When Saint-Just began to read his bill of accusation, Tallien, expecting to be included, sprang to the platform, pushed the young orator aside, and cried out, “I ask that the curtain be torn away!” Joseph Lebas, loyal to Saint-Just, tried to come to his aid, but his words were drowned out by a hundred voices. Robespierre demanded a chance to be heard, but he too was shouted down. Tallien raised aloft the weapon that had been sent him, and declared, “I have armed myself with a dagger, which shall pierce his breast if the Convention has not the courage to decree his accusation.”120

  Collot yielded the chair to Thuriot, who had been an ally of Danton. Robespierre approached the podium shouting; Thuriot’s bell outrang most of Robespierre’s words, but some of them surmounted the tumult: “For the last time, President of Assassins, will you give me leave to speak?” The Convention roared its disapproval of this form of address, and one deputy uttered the fatal words: “I demand the arrest of Robespierre.” Augustin Robespierre spoke up like a Roman: “I am as guilty as my brother; I share his virtues; I ask that my arrest be decreed with his.” Lebas begged and received the same privilege. The decree was voted. Police took the two Robespierres, Saint-Just, Lebas, and Couthon, and hurried them to the Luxembourg jail.

  Fleuriot-Lescot, then mayor of Paris, ordered the prisoners transferred to the Hôtel de Ville, where he received them as honored guests, and offered them his protection. The heads of the Commune bade Hanriot, head of the National Guard in the capital, to take soldiers and guns to the Tuileries, and hold the Convention captive until it revoked its decree of arrest; but Hanriot was too drunk to carry out his mission. The deputies appointed Paul Barras to raise a force of gendarmes, go to the Hôtel de Ville, and rearrest the prisoners. The mayor again appealed to Hanriot, who, unable to reassemble the Paris National Guard, gathered an impromptu collection of sansculottes instead; but they had now little love for the man who had lowered their wages and killed Hébert and Chaumette, Danton and Desmoulins; besides, rain began to fall, and they melted away to their work or their homes. Barras and his gendarmes easily seized control in the Hôtel de Ville. Seeing them, Robespierre tried suicide, but the shot triggered by his unsteady hand passed through his cheek and only shattered his jaw.121 Lebas, steadier, blew his own brains out. Augustin Robespierre broke a leg in a useless leap from a window. Couthon, with lifeless legs, was thrown downstairs, and lay there helpless till the gendarmes carried him to jail with the two Robespierres and Saint-Just.

  The following afternoon (July 28, 1794) four tumbrils conveyed these four, with Fleuriot, Hanriot (still drunk), and sixteen others to the guillotine in what we now admire as (pro tempore) the Place de la Concorde. En route they heard from the onlookers divers cries, among them “Down with the maximum!”122 They found a fashionable audience awaiting them: windows overlooking the square had been rented at fancy prices; ladies came arrayed as for a festival. When Robespierre’s head was held up to the crowd a shout of satisfaction rose. One more death might mean little, but this one, Paris felt, meant that the Terror had come to an end.

  VI. THE THERMIDOREANS: JULY 29, 1794 -OCTOBER 26, 1795

  On July 29 the victors of the 9th Thermidor sent seventy members of the Paris Commune to death; thereafter the Commune was subject to the Convention. The tyrannical Law of 22 Prairial was revoked (August 1); imprisoned opponents of Robespierre were released; some of his followers took their places.123 The Revolutionary Tribunal was reformed to allow fair trials; Fouquier-Tinville was called upon to defend his record, but his ingenuity preserved his head till May 7, 1795. The Committees of Public Safety and General Security survived, but their claws were clipped. Conservative periodicals bloomed; radical journals died through lack of public support. Tallien, Fouché, and Fréron found that they could share in the new leadership only by getting the Convention to ignore their roles in the Terror. The Jacobin clubs were closed throughout France (November 12). The long-intimidated deputies of the “Plain” moved to the right; the “Mountain” fell from power; and on December 8 seventy-three surviving Girondin delegates were restored to their seats. The bourgeoisie recaptured the Revolution.

  The relaxation of government allowed the revival of religion. Aside from that small minority which had received a college education, and that upper middle class which had been touched by the Enlightenment, most Frenchmen, and nearly all Frenchwomen, preferred the saints and ceremonies of the Catholic calendar to the rootless festivals and formless Supreme Being of Robespierre. On February 15, 1795, a treaty of peace was signed with the Vendée rebels, guaranteeing them freedom of worship; a week later this was extended to all France; and the government pledged the separation of Church and state.

  More difficult was the problem of simultaneously satisfying those perennial enemies: producers and consumers. The producers clamored for repeal of the maximum on prices; consumers demanded an end to the maximum on wages. The Convention, now controlled by enthusiastic belie
vers in freedom of enterprise, competition, and trade, heard the conflicting appeals, and abolished the maxima (December 24, 1794); now the workers were free to seek higher wages, the peasants and merchants were free to charge all that the traffic would bear. Prices rose on the wings of greed. The government issued new assignats as paper money, but their value fell even more rapidly than before: a bushel of flour that had cost the Parisians two assignats in 1790 cost them 225 in 1795; a pair of shoes rose from five to two hundred, a dozen eggs from sixty-seven to 2,500.124

  On April 1, 1795, several localities in Paris broke out once more in riots over the price of bread. An unarmed crowd invaded the Convention, demanding food and an end to the persecution of radicals; several deputies from the melting Mountain supported them. The Convention promised immediate relief, but it summoned the National Guard to disperse the rioters. That night it decreed the deportation of radical leaders—Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Barère, Vadier—to Guiana. Barère and Vadier evaded arrest; Billaud and Collot were carried off to a hard life in the South American colony. There the two anticlericals fell sick, and were cared for by nuns. Collot succumbed. Billaud survived, took a mulatto slave as a wife, became a contented farmer, and died in Haiti in 1819.125

  Public protest became violent. Placards appeared calling for insurrection. On May 20 a throng of women and armed men invaded the Convention, crying out for bread, for the liberation of arrested radicals, and finally for the abdication of the government. One deputy was killed by a pistol shot; his severed head, raised on a pike, was presented before the Convention president, Boissy d’Anglas, who gave it a formal salute; then troops and rain drove the petitioners to their homes. On May 22 soldiers under General Pichegru surrounded the working-class Faubourg St.-Antoine and forced the remaining armed rebels to surrender. Eleven Montagnard deputies were arrested, charged with complicity in the uprising; two escaped, four killed themselves, five, dying of self-inflicted wounds, were hurried to the guillotine. A royalist deputy urged the arrest of Carnot; a voice protested, “He organized our victories,” and Carnot survived.

  Now—May and June, 1795—a “White Terror” raged in which Jacobins were victims and the judges were bourgeois “Moderates” allied with religious bands: “Companies of Jesus,” “Companies of Jehu,” “Companies of the Sun.” At Lyons (May 5) ninety-seven former Terrorists were massacred in prison; at Aix-en-Provence (May 17) thirty more were butchered “with refinements of barbarity”; similar ceremonies took place at Aries, Avignon, and Marseilles. At Tarascon (May 25) two hundred masked men seized the fortress, bound the prisoners, and flung them into the Rhone. At Toulon the workers rose against the new Terror; Isnard, one of the restored Girondins, led troops against them and exterminated them (May 31).126 The Terror had not ended; it had changed hands.

  The victorious bourgeoisie no longer needed proletarian allies, for it had won the support of the generals, and these were winning victories that raised their prestige even with the sansculottes. On January 19, 1795, Pichegru took Amsterdam; Stadtholder William IV fled to England; Holland, for a decade, became the “Batavian Republic” under French tutelage. Other French armies recaptured and held the left bank of the Rhine. The Allies, defeated and quarreling, left France for easier prey in Poland. Prussia, absorbed in preventing Russia from taking everything in the Third Partition (1795), sent emissaries to Paris, then to Basel, to negotiate a separate peace with France. The Convention could afford to be demanding, for it looked with trepidation toward a peace that would bring to Paris or elsewhere thousands of half-brutalized troops who had been living at the expense of conquered lands but would now add to crime, disease, and tumult in cities already crying for work and bread. And the restless generals, swollen with victory—Pichegru, Jourdan, Hoche, Moreau—would they resist the temptation to seize the government through a military coup d’état? So the Convention sent to Basel Marquis François de Barthélemy, with instructions to hold out for French possession of the left bank of the Rhine. Prussia protested and yielded; Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse-Cassel followed suit; and on June 22 Spain ceded to France the eastern part (Santo Domingo) of the island of Hispaniola. War with Austria and England continued—just enough to keep French soldiers at the fronts.

  On June 27, thirty-six hundred émigrés, brought over from Portsmouth in British ships, landed on the promontory of Quiberon in Brittany, and joined up with royalist “Chouan” bands in an effort to revive the Vendée revolt. Hoche in a brilliant campaign defeated them (July 21), and on a motion by Tallien the Convention had 748 captured émigrés put to death.

  On June 8, 1795, the ten-year-old Dauphin died in prison, not demonstrably the result of ill usage, but probably from scrofula and despondency. The royalists thereupon acknowledged the older of Louis XVI’s two surviving brothers, the émigré Comte de Provence, as Louis XVIII, and swore to place him on the throne of France. This unreformed Bourbon announced (July 1, 1795) that if restored he would re-establish the Ancien Régime intact, with absolute monarchy and feudal rights. Hence the united support that the French bourgeoisie, peasantry, and sansculottes gave to Napoleon through a dozen wars.

  Nevertheless France was weary of revolution, and began to tolerate monarchist sentiments that were appearing in some journals, salons, and prosperous homes: only a king legitimized by heredity and tradition could bring order and security back to a people fearful and unhappy after three years of political and economic disruption, religious division, constant war, and uncertainty of work, food, and life. Half or more of southern France was deeply alienated from Paris and its politicians. In Paris the section assemblies, once dominated by sansculottes, were now increasingly controlled by businessmen, and some of them had been captured by royalists. At the theaters those lines that spoke of the “good old days” before 1789 were openly applauded. Youngsters, constitutionally rebellious, were now rebelling against revolution; they organized themselves in bands called Jeunesse Dorée (Gilded Youth), Merveilleux (Freaks), or Muscadins (Fruits); proud of their rich or bizarre dress, their long or curly hair, they walked the streets wielding dangerous clubs and boldly proclaiming royalist sentiments. It had become so unfashionable to support the revolutionary government that when a premature report went the rounds that the Convention was breaking up, the news was greeted with joy, and some Parisians danced in the streets.

  But the Convention took its time dying. In June, 1795, it began to draw up another constitution, far different from the democratic and never practiced Constitution of 1793. Now it adopted a bicameral legislature, in which the consent of an upper chamber of older and experienced deputies would be required for the enactment of any measure adopted by a lower chamber more directly open to popular movements and new ideas. The people, said Boissy d’Anglas, are not wise or stable enough to determine the policy of a state.127 So this “Constitution of the Year III” (i.e., the year beginning September 22, 1794) revised the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) to check popular delusions of virtue and power; it omitted the proposition that “men are born, and remain, free and equal in rights,” and explained that equality meant merely that “the law is the same for all men.” Election was to be indirect: the voters would choose delegates to the “electoral college” of their department, and these electors would choose the members of the national legislature, the judiciary, and the administrative agencies. Eligibility to the electoral colleges was so limited to owners of property that only thirty thousand Frenchmen chose the national government. Woman suffrage was proposed to the Convention by one deputy, but was disposed of by another deputy’s question “Where is the good wife who dares maintain that the wish of her husband is not her own?”128 State control of the economy was rejected as impractical, as stifling invention and enterprise, and as slowing the growth of national wealth.

  This constitution contained some liberal elements: it affirmed religious liberty and, within “safe limits,” the freedom of the press (then largely controlled by the middle class).*Furthermore, the ratification
of the constitution was to be left to adult male suffrage, with a surprising proviso: two thirds of the deputies to the new assemblies must be members of the existing Convention, and if that number should not be chosen the re-elected members were to fill the two thirds by cooptation of additional present deputies; this, argued the endangered delegates, was necessary for the continuity of experience and policy. The voters were docile: of 958,226 ballots cast, 941,853 accepted the constitution; and of 263,131 votes on the two-thirds requirement, 167,758 approved.129 On September 23, 1795, the Convention made the new constitution the law of France, and prepared to retire in good order.

  It could claim some achievements despite its months of disorder and Terror, of subservience to its committees, of frightened purging of its membership at the command of the sansculottes. It had maintained some rule of law in a city where law had lost its aura and its roots. It had consolidated the empowerment of the bourgeoisie, but it had tried to control the greed of merchants sufficiently to keep a turbulent populace just above starvation. It had organized and trained armies, had raised able and devoted generals, had repelled a powerful coalition, and had won a peace that left France protected by natural frontiers of the Rhine, the Alps and Pyrenees, and the seas. Amid all these consuming efforts it had established the metric system, it had founded or restored the Museum of Natural History, the École Polytechnique, and the School of Medicine; it had inaugurated the Institute of France. It felt that now, after three years of miraculous survival, it deserved a peaceful death and two thirds of a resurrection.

  But it was to be a bloody death, in the manner of the time. The plutocrats and royalists, who had captured the Lepeletière section of Paris around the stock exchange, rose in revolt against that legislated rebirth. Other sections, for their own diverse reasons, joined them. Together they improvised a force of 25,000 men, who advanced to positions that commanded the Tuileries and therefore the Convention (13 Vendémiaire, October 5, 1795). The frightened deputies appointed Barras to extemporize a defense. He commissioned the twenty-six-year-old Bonaparte, then idle in Paris, to gather men, supplies, and, above all, artillery. The hero of Toulon knew where the cannon were housed, sent Murat and a force to secure them; they were brought to him, and were placed at points overlooking the advancing insurgents. A command to disperse was broadcast; it was disdained. Napoleon ordered his artillery to fire; between two and three hundred of the besiegers fell; the rest fled. The Convention had survived its last ordeal, and Napoleon, decisive and ruthless, entered upon the most spectacular career in modern history.