A People’s History of the World
Page 37
But in the early summer of 1793 they could see that the alternative to the revolution going forward was a carnival of reaction which neither they nor the gains of the previous four years would survive. They could also see the only way to push the revolution forward was to ally with the Parisian masses once more and make concessions to the peasantry, even if that meant taking measures which clashed with bourgeois interests. Robespierre wrote in his diary, ‘The dangers come from the middle classes, and to defeat them we must rally the people’. 37 In other words, the radical bourgeoisie in the Jacobin club had to unite with the revolutionary sans-culottes of the Parisian sections against the moderate Girondin bourgeoisie. The revolution’s third great turning point had arrived.
On 26 May 1793 Robespierre issued a call for the people to revolt. On 29 May, 33 of the Parisian sections met together and chose an insurrectionary committee of nine members to organise a journée – a new uprising. On 31 May and 2 June the ringing of the tocsin (alarm) bell and the firing of cannon summoned the masses onto the streets. They surrounded the Convention with 80,000 armed people and compelled it to issue orders for the arrest of 29 Girondin deputies. The Parisian sections were now the centre of power in the capital and the Jacobin leadership was, in effect, the government of France.
The defeated Girondins fled the city to stir up revolt in the provinces. They had friends in the officer corps of the army, allies among the big merchants, sympathy from middle-class landowners afraid of the rural revolt, the allegiance of all those who saw any ‘mob’ as a threat – and, of course, support from an aristocracy which would rejoice in a victory against the revolution. Within weeks, much of the south and west of the country was in Girondin hands. The Vendée was held by royalists, the anti-Jacobins had handed the southern port of Toulon and ships of the Mediterranean navy over to the British, and foreign armies were still marching towards Paris. The counterrevolution had even shown it could strike in the capital when a young woman from the Girondin town of Caen, Charlotte Corday, gained access to Marat by claiming she needed his help, and stabbed him to death as he sat in his bath.
The Parisian sans-culottes masses urged the Jacobin leaders to take further revolutionary measures to stop the rot, and that leadership soon saw it had no choice. A Committee of Public Safety – which reported at least once a week to the Convention and was subject to re-election each month – was empowered to take whatever emergency measures were appropriate. A ‘law of the maximum’ imposed price controls on bread, and speculation in people’s hunger became a capital crime. There was a forced loan on the rich to pay for the war and a progressive tax, starting at 10 per cent and rising to 50 per cent, on all income over the minimum needed to keep a family. 38 The economy became increasingly subject to central direction, with an important nationalised sector producing war supplies. The land seized from émigrés and the church was divided into small plots to placate peasant anger. The volunteer revolutionary units and the old army units were merged at the front, so that the volunteers could enthuse the regulars while learning military skills from them, and they jointly elected their officers. Suspect officials were purged from government departments. Revolutionary commissioners were sent with full power to put down the counter-revolutionary risings in the countryside. All single men between the ages of 18 and 25 were required to do military service, without the old exemptions which allowed the well-to-do to pay substitutes to take their place. Finally, after further journées in September, the convention and the Committee of Public Safety agreed to a policy of severe repression – terror.
The Jacobins and the Terror
The impetus for the Terror came from below – from people who had suffered under the old regime, who knew they would suffer even more if it came back and whose friends and relatives were already dying daily at the front as a result of betrayal and corrupt profiteering. It combined the emotional desire for vengeance with the rational understanding that, under conditions of civil war, opponents of the revolutionary regime would seize every opportunity to do it damage. Prison would not deter them, since they would expect to be released once their plots were successful. People like Hébert on the ‘terrorist’ fringe of the Jacobins fanned these feelings. But the main Jacobin leaders were slow to embrace the call. Far from being the ‘callous butcher’ of legend, Robespierre had been almost alone in calling for the abolition of the death penalty in the early days of the revolution. By contrast, the Girondins supported its use for ordinary ‘criminals’ from the lower classes but had qualms when it came to the king.
Only 66, or one-quarter, of the 260 people brought before the revolutionary tribunal before September 1793 had been condemned to death. From October the pace accelerated. The execution of the queen, Marie Antoinette, was followed by the condemnation of the Girondins and the Duke of Orleans (who had tried to advance his own cause by parading as a Jacobin). In the last three months of 1793, 177 out of 395 defendants were sentenced to death, and by December the number of people in Paris prisons had risen to 4,525 – from 1,500 in August. Nevertheless, the number of executions at this stage was much smaller than might be believed from popular accounts in novels and films which suggest scores going to the guillotine every day.
The 200-year litany of complaints about the executions of aristocrats and royalists must be put in perspective. Executions had been a continual occurrence under the old regime. Poor people could be hanged for stealing a piece of cloth. As Mark Twain once put it, ‘There were two reigns of terror: one lasted several months, the other 1,000 years.’ The army marching towards Paris from the north would have installed its own terror, much greater than that of the Jacobins, if it had been able to take the city, and it would have used the royalists and aristocrats to point out ‘ring leaders’ for instant execution. The ‘moderates’ and royalists who took over Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon established tribunals that ‘ordered patriots guillotined or hanged’. The results ‘were piteous’ 39 – the death toll in Lyons was said to be 800. 40 In the Vendée a royalist priest reported that ‘each day was marked by bloody expeditions’ against republican sympathisers. Even to have attended a mass presided over by one of the clergy who accepted the republic was grounds ‘to be imprisoned and then murdered or shot under the pretext that the prisons were too full’. 41 At Machecoul 524 republicans were shot. 42 On top of this, there was the enormous death toll in the battles on France’s northern borders, in a war begun by the monarchists and Girondins and joined with enthusiasm by all enemies of the revolution, at home and abroad – a war in which French officers sympathetic to the other side might deliberately send thousands of soldiers to their deaths.
The victims of the counter-revolution and the war do not figure in the horror stories about the revolution retailed by popular novelists, or even in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities . For such writers, the death of a respectable gentleman or lady is a tragedy, that of a republican artisan or seamstress of no concern.
This was essentially the argument Robespierre put to the Convention in late September 1793. He was justifying punitive measures against one of the republic’s generals, Houchard, for retreating unnecessarily and causing a military disaster. ‘In two years 100,000 men have been butchered because of treason and weakness,’ he said. ‘It is weakness for traitors which is destroying us’. 43 It was an argument which won over many of the deputies who vacillated over whether to back Jacobin measures.
The worst bloodshed during the revolution did not take place in Paris, where the revolutionaries never lost control, but in fighting to reconquer regions held by its opponents. There were a handful of cases where the republican armies took bloody revenge: in Lyons a revolutionary commission passed 1,667 death sentences; in the Vendée rebels taken prisoner carrying weapons were summarily executed; in Nantes 2,000 to 3,000 supporters of the revolt were executed by drowning in the River Loire; in Toulon there were mass executions of those blamed for handing the city to the British. 44
There is another aspect of the Terror whi
ch has to be examined. This is the Terror which the revolutionary leaders directed at each other in the course of 1793–94. It began with the antagonism between the Girondins and the Jacobins. The Girondins had shown in the charges they laid against Marat their own willingness to resort to repression. Nevertheless, the first Girondin leaders arrested after the establishment of the Jacobin government had simply been placed under house arrest. By then leaving Paris to stir revolt in the provinces, they proved this was a disagreement which could not be settled by words alone. Robespierre and Danton came to feel that any Girondin left free would behave in the same way. Vigorous repression – and in conditions of civil war, that meant execution – was the only way to prevent them doing so.
But for the middle-class Jacobins, the same logic which applied to the Girondins applied, in conditions of civil war, to certain other republicans. As far as Robespierre was concerned his own allies, the sans-culottes of Paris, were beginning to become a problem. They had done wonders in providing mass support for the revolution in the streets. But they were also antagonising the very social group from which Robespierre and other Jacobin leaders came – those people of property wavering over whether to fight for the republic. At the very moment he was adopting the sans-culottes ’ call for Terror, Robespierre began a crackdown on sans-culottes organisations – in mid-September Jacques Roux was arrested; in October Claire Lacombe’s Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was dissolved; and finally, in March, Hébert and several others were guillotined.
The ‘extremists’ who put forward demands that could only frighten the respectable, propertied middle class were not Robespierre’s only problem. He also feared the revolution could be destroyed by those who put personal interests and inclinations above the needs of the moment. This applied especially to some of the circle around Danton – a man capable of enormous revolutionary courage and enthusiasm, but also very attracted by the rewards available from mixing with dubious wealthy figures. It was no coincidence that his friends were involved in a major corruption case concerning the French East India Company. When Danton began to draw around him an informal ‘indulgent’ faction in January and February 1794, Robespierre began to fear he was following the path taken by the Girondins nine months earlier. Five days after the execution of Hébert, it was the turn of Danton, Desmoulins and others to be arrested, brought before the tribunal and executed.
Robespierre and his close allies felt beleaguered. Their own class was half attracted to the forces of counter-revolution. A class based on profit making, its members were continually subject to the temptation of bribery and corruption. Only fear of drastic measures could keep the middle class on the path to victory. Robespierre believed he stood for a new form of society in which the essential values of the middle class would be realised. He gave expression to this feeling by identifying his goal as ‘virtue’. But he could not achieve this without disciplining the middle class itself, and sometimes very harshly. As he put it in February 1794, ‘Without virtue terror is useless; without terror, virtue is powerless.’
What is more, the Terror made the state the focus for revolutionary feeling and action. It served to divert the sans-culottes masses away from a path full of danger for the middle class – the path of increasingly taking direction of the revolution into lower-class hands. It was much better for the middle-class politicians if the sans-culottes were dancing the Carmargnole while watching the state’s guillotine at work than if they were arguing and acting on their own behalf. The Terror came to function not only to defend the revolution, but also to symbolise the way in which the state was being centralised by a political group balancing between the masses and the conciliatory elements in the bourgeoisie.
By the spring of 1794 the Jacobins around Robespierre ruled alone, winding down the popular organisations in Paris – purging the commune, dissolving the sections , abolishing the commissioners who investigated food hoarding. Government power was centralised as never before in the hands of an apparently unified group of men, no longer beset by factions to the left and right. But such a centralised power could only get its way by resorting more than ever to repression. As Soboul explains:
Hitherto the terror … had been directed against the enemies of the revolution. But now it was extended to include those who opposed the government committees. In this way the committees used the terror to tighten their grip on political life. 45
The centralisation of the Terror created a momentum of its own. The Jacobin core began to feel anyone not with them must be against them – and the feeling was, in part, justified. There was growing antagonism towards them among their own middle class as it chafed at the restraints on its freedoms, and there was antagonism from many of the sans-culottes followers of Roux and Hébert. Dealing with such antagonism by terror only served to increase the isolation of the Jacobin core still further. But calling off the Terror threatened to give a free hand to those who wanted vengeance on the Jacobin core.
Robespierre vacillated over what to do. He tried to hold the Terror in check in certain provinces – for instance, by recalling to Paris the man who had been responsible for the mass drownings in Nantes. But then he allowed the Terror in Paris to escalate massively in May 1794, so that the next three months saw as many executions as the preceding year. For the first time, the accused were denied the right to a defence, juries could convict on nothing more than ‘moral guilt’, and people who might have no connection with one another were tried in groups on the grounds that they might have ‘conspired’ in the prisons. It was at this time that the great pamphleteer of the American Revolution and of British plebeian radicalism, Tom Paine, only narrowly avoided execution – his crime being that he was a ‘foreigner’ who had been friendly with some of the Girondins (as, of course, had most of the Jacobin leadership at some point in the past).
Thermidor and after
Jacobin methods succeeded as the Girondin ones had not in defending the revolutionary regime. By the summer of 1794 the revolutionary army was showing itself to be probably the best fighting force Europe had ever seen. The revolts in the provinces had been smashed, the French army was in occupation of Brussels and moving northwards, and the republic did indeed seem ‘one and indivisible’.
Yet these very successes created an insuperable problem for the Jacobins. They had been able to raise themselves up by balancing between left and right – and in the process taking very harsh measures against sections of their own class – because large sections of the middle class had seen no alternative a few months before. This was why, month after month, the Convention had voted to renew the powers of the Committee of Public Safety. But the victories led to a growing feeling that dictatorial rule was no longer necessary.
Robespierre had made many enemies in the previous months – ‘indulgent’ sympathisers of Danton, emissaries who had been recalled from the provinces for carrying repression too far, former allies of Hébert, and those who had never really broken with the Girondins but were afraid to say so. On 27 July 1794 they united to ambush Robespierre in the midst of a debate in the Convention. A delegate moved that an arrest warrant be issued against him and his close allies, and the Convention voted unanimously in favour.
The Jacobins made a last attempt to save themselves by calling on the masses to rise in a revolutionary journée . But they themselves had dissolved the committees and banned the sans-culottes papers that could organise such a rising. They had lifted the ban on speculation in food and, only four days before, had published maximum wage rates which meant a cut in earnings for many artisans. Only 16 of the 48 sections of Paris sent forces to join the attempted rising, and they were left standing around for hours without proper leadership before dispersing. Robespierre and 21 of his allies were executed on 28 July, followed by another 71 men the next day – the largest mass execution in the history of the revolution.
Robespierre had shouted out in the Convention, ‘The republic is a lost cause. The brigands are now triumphant.’ He was right in the s
ense that the great movement of the last five years had come to an end. Thermidor, the name of the month in which Robespierre was overthrown in the republic’s revolutionary calendar, has ever since signified internal counter-revolution.
The allies who had overthrown him did not stay long in power. The months which followed saw those who hated the revolution gain a new confidence. Groups of rich young thugs, the jeunesse dorée (golden youth), began to take over the streets of Paris, attacking anyone who tried to defend the revolutionary ideals or who showed lack of respect for their ‘betters’. A mob of them forced the Jacobin club to close. A constitutional amendment brought in a new property qualification for the vote. A ‘white terror’ led to a wave of executions of former revolutionaries and the victimisation of very many others. Two brief sans-culottes risings in April and May 1795 showed that the poor, given a chance, were more than a match for the jeunesse dorée , but they were crushed by forces loyal to the Thermidorians. Émigrés began to return to the country and boast that the monarchy would soon be back. The pretender to the throne, the future Louis XVIII, insisted from exile that he wanted to bring back the old regime, complete with its three estates, and punish all those who had taken part in the revolution, including the Thermidorians. Then in October 1795 the royalists staged a rising of their own in Paris. The Thermidorians, terrified, began rearming Jacobins and calling on sans-culottes for help before the army – especially a rising officer, a one-time Jacobin called Napoleon Bonaparte – came to their assistance. Fearful of a full-blooded monarchic restoration, the Thermidorians agreed to concentrate power in the hands of a Directory of five men. For four years the Directory was pulled first in one direction then in another, all the time allowing more power to accrue to Napoleon, whose base in the army provided a bastion against both the royalists and any rebirth of popular Jacobinism, until in 1799 Napoleon staged a coup which in effect gave him dictatorial power. In 1804 he had the pope crown him emperor, ruling with the support both of some former Jacobins and some of the aristocrats who had returned from exile. Finally, in 1814 and 1815, defeat for his armies allowed the other European powers to reinstitute the Bourbon monarchy. Robespierre’s final, desperate warning seemed vindicated.