The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  But events were now slipping beyond the deputies’ control, to the alarm of none more than those who had hoped to gain from the fateful demonstration of 20 June: the dismissed ministers and their supporters among the Brissotins and the eloquent deputies from the Gironde. They had hoped that popular discontent would force the king to restore them to power. They had not expected a movement to develop for his total overthrow. But when the Bordeaux deputies Vergniaud, Guadet, and Gensonné pressed the king to appoint ministers ‘among the firmest supporters of the Revolution’ they received no response. Desperate to impress him with their sincerity, by the first week in August they were openly denouncing calls for dethronement. All they achieved was to attract the suspicion of the sections and their fellow Jacobins, and make the insurrection, when it came, one as much against the Legislative Assembly as against the Crown.

  The final signal came when the deputies refused to indict Lafayette on the eighth. From this it was obvious that no clear decision on dethronement could be expected next day, and there was none. Both sides spent 9 August preparing for the long-awaited trial of strength, and the Assembly could only look on helplessly. The ringing of the tocsin, notoriously the call to insurrection since the memorable journées of 1789, marked the seizure of power in the small hours of the tenth by the central committee of the sections. Symbolically locking up Pétion, they proclaimed themselves an insurrectionary commune, and ordered the fédérés and the newly democratized National Guard of the capital to march on the Tuileries. When these forces arrived there at nine the next morning they found that the king and his family had already fled to the presumed safety of the Assembly across the road. But a garrison remained of 900 well-armed Swiss Guards, between 100 and 200 courtiers and former officers, and 2,000 National Guards. The latter at once defected to the commune’s side, which was perhaps 20,000 strong. Nevertheless it was the Swiss who opened fire, and that sealed their fate when the commune’s forces gained the upper hand after about an hour. Once the Swiss began to retreat, they were pursued by mobs of bystanders without firearms who hacked them to death with knives, pikes, and hatchets, and tore their uniforms to pieces to make trophies. Altogether 600 of them perished, some in supposed safe custody after the siege was over. Less than half that number fell among the besiegers, 90 of them fédérés, and the rest the same sort of shopkeepers, petty tradesmen, and artisans who had been so prominent in the 1789 journées and on 20 June. It was the bloodiest day of the Revolution so far. Observing it was the young Napoleon Bonaparte, who forever remembered the pile of Swiss corpses being mutilated by frenzied women as his first sight of real carnage. But the Revolution of 10 August was decisive. Though the king and his family remained unscathed, his authority fell with his palace. As crowds rampaged through Paris destroying all symbols and images of royalty down to the very word ‘king’ in street names, the Legislative Assembly declared the monarchy suspended until a national Convention had met to decide on the future form of government. Only the efforts of Vergniaud averted the abolition of monarchy there and then. But as the king was transferred, under close custody, to the keep of the Temple, a medieval fortress in the north-eastern suburbs, few believed that he would ever sit on the throne again unless with foreign aid.

  Power now lay not with the Assembly, but with the new Paris commune. The Assembly acted as if it was still in charge: for example it appointed a new team of ministers. The three who had fallen on 13 June were at last restored, tainted though they now were by association with the equivocating Brissotins. But the most sensational appointment was the new minister of justice, Danton, who had built a career entirely in the sectional politics of Paris since 1789, and was brought in explicitly to keep the sansculottes happy. The appointments were made by fewer than 300 deputies. The majority had simply gone to ground over the previous few weeks, thus further diminishing the Assembly’s authority. During the six weeks left to it, this rump did almost everything the commune wanted. Such efforts as it made to resist were contemptuously brushed aside.

  What the commune wanted most was vengeance—on those who had abetted the king, and those who had resisted the popular will before and during the uprising of 10 August, on refractory priests protected for too long by the deposed tyrant, and on Lafayette, the butcher of the Champ de Mars and would-be military dictator. He at least escaped: after toying briefly with marching his army on Paris, on 17 August, the day the council of ministers decided to dismiss him, he crossed the Prussian lines and gave himself up to the enemy. Even that brought him five years in Austrian prisons. On that same day a special tribunal was set up to try those accused of political crimes, such as the surviving defenders of the Tuileries. It worked slowly, but on the twenty-first the guillotine despatched its first political victim. Between the nineteenth and the twenty-sixth, the Assembly debated measures against refractories, which many local authorities were taking anyway on their own initiative. Eventually it decreed that all nonjurors were to quit the country within a fortnight, on pain of deportation to Guiana. But so deep had suspicion of priestcraft now gone, that even unbeneficed clergy not subject to the oaths were made liable to deportation on the demand of six citizens. Suspicion was the order of the day, and priests were being arrested by sansculotte vigilantes from 11 August onwards. Nobody was allowed to leave the capital without a passport, and none of these were delivered without certificats de civisme issued by sectional surveillance committees. The paranoid atmosphere only grew worse when it was learned that the Prussians had invaded French territory; and news arriving on the twenty-sixth of the fall of Longwy, with scarcely any resistance, seemed to confirm that traitors were everywhere. The response of Danton, who increasingly dominated his fellow ministers during these weeks, was to demand a general search of all dwellings in the capital for hidden arms and suspects. These ‘domiciliary visits’ took place on 30–31 August, resulting in 3,000 further arrests. The result was to cram the makeshift prisons of Paris to bursting-point with presumed traitors.

  After 10 August Marat, the self-styled friend of the people but hitherto too extreme and bloodthirsty in his opinions to command much support, came into his own. His solution to the crisis was massacre, both of the suspects herded together in the prisons and indeed of selected ministers and deputies. Many sections, and their representatives on the commune, thought the same, and were disgusted by the slow progress made by the 17 August tribunal. When Danton, in response to the fall of Longwy, called for 30,000 volunteers from the capital to go to the front, many sansculottes appeared ready to go, but were reluctant to leave their families at the mercy of a counter-revolutionary prison breakout. Nor were they reassured when, on 30 August, the Assembly attempted to shake off the commune’s control by decreeing new elections in Paris. The move was all too obviously inspired by Brissot and his friends, whom Robespierre was beginning to call ‘the faction of the Gironde’. It outraged those who regarded the commune as the saviour of the country. The commune refused to be disbanded and, after hints from Robespierre at the Jacobins, tried to have a number of hostile deputies and ministers arrested. It also defiantly drafted Marat on to its committee of surveillance, responsible for the prisons. The personal intervention of Danton prevented the arrests, and thereby probably saved the lives of those concerned. For if they had been in prison on 2 September, they would almost certainly have fallen victim to the September Massacres.

  The trigger was further bad news from the front. After Longwy, Verdun came under Prussian siege, and on 2 September news came that the enemy had passed it. There were no other fortresses on the road to Paris. Danton, in his most famous speech, urged his compatriots to defiance—‘If we are bold, bolder still, and forever bold, then France is saved!’—but the predominant mood in Paris was panic. That afternoon, a convoy of prisoners going from the Hôtel de Ville to the Abbaye prison was stopped and attacked by sansculottes. Seventeen of them were hacked to death. Soon afterwards, a temporary prison at the old Carmelite convent was attacked and there was more butchery, althou
gh most of it was now directed by a kangaroo court. By the end of the afternoon the commune had taken a hand, but only to co-ordinate the massacres, not to stop them. The next day it sent a circular to provincial centres hinting that they might like to follow the Parisian example. By then all except two of the capital’s prisons had been broken into, makeshift tribunals established claiming to dispense the people’s justice, and vengeance visited on all those deemed from the charges against them to be potential counter-revolutionaries. Extravagant celebrations and cheering marked each acquittal, and there were plenty of them. Even so, about half the prison population of Paris, between 1,100 and 1,400 people, were killed between 2 September and the last incidents on the seventh; and most of the victims were in no sense politically dangerous. Certainly, they included surviving Swiss defenders of the Tuileries, over 200 priests, and a number of prominent relics of the old order such as the former foreign minister Montmorin, or the queen’s notorious favourite the Princess de Lamballe. Forty-five political prisoners were also massacred at Versailles on the ninth, including Delessart. But most of those who died were common criminals, forging assignats being the nearest any of them came to subversive activity. Nevertheless suspicion bred credulity, and society’s reprobates could not be presumed unavailable for the purposes of prison plotters. The ordinary Parisian tradesmen and artisans who carried out the killings certainly thought their work both necessary and beneficial, and so did the commune, which voted to pay them for it. But this second great blood-letting within a month horrified most of those who witnessed it, and the lurid details were soon known throughout Europe. Nobody at the Assembly, or the Jacobin Club, was prepared openly to commend what had been done; but the political factions led by Brissot on one side and Robespierre on the other were quick to accuse each other of responsibility or complicity, and these charges and counter-charges would echo on for years. Septembriseur became a standard term of political abuse; and fear of a repetition stalked political life for months to come.

  Yet this purging of their enemies certainly seemed to reassure the sansculottes. With the threat to their families removed, the men of Paris began to volunteer in droves to go off and face the Prussians. Twenty thousand came forward during the first weeks of September. ‘The number of men, for I cannot call them troops’, wrote a British agent on 9 September,8 ‘that have left for the army is prodigious … and they are still enrolling … I have heard today that the multitude of people that are besides this either at or going to Chalons is beyond belief … The cause among the lower order of people is more popular than I imagined.’ And although he was ‘convinced as a military man that they must tend more to create confusion in a regular army than to be of any advantage to it’, nevertheless ‘I cannot … help thinking the Duke of Brunswick ought to get before Paris as quick as he can.’ We see here a dim awakening to the fact that the ordered practice of eighteenth-century warfare was perhaps not immutable. And proof positive came only ten days later. On 20 September, at Valmy, just east of Châlons, the French forces at last made a stand. Kellermann and Dumouriez had more men than the Prussians. They had fewer guns, but those they had were superior, and handled by graduates of the outstanding pre-revolutionary gunnery schools. So they outgunned the enemy, and when they followed up their advantage the French charged to cries of Vive la Nation! and the singing of ‘Ça ira’. They fought with an enthusiasm and determination not seen on European battlefields for generations, and they stopped the invaders in their tracks. Watching all this was Goethe, brought along by the Duke of Weimar to enliven the expected military promenade. In the stunned disappointment of the Prussian camp that damp night he offered Job’s comfort to his fellow invaders. ‘Here and today,’ he told them, ‘a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.’

  The Prussians, in fact, at once opened negotiations. King Frederick William was there to authorize them when Dumouriez, who had never believed in their commitment to the Austrian alliance, made the offer. The revolutionary war might almost have ended there and then. But on the day Valmy was fought the national Convention finally met in Paris, and its first act was to declare a republic. The Prussians promptly broke off negotiations and withdrew.

  The idea of a Convention predated the Revolution of 10 August. Radicals in the sections and at the Jacobin Club had been talking of the need to produce a new constitution throughout July. Thus on the afternoon of 10 August the Legislative Assembly had little alternative but to ‘invite’ the French people to form a convention ‘to assure the sovereignty of the people and the reign of liberty and equality’. The next day it decreed that the new assembly was to be elected by manhood suffrage, without distinction between citizens. Only servants and the unemployed had no vote. But at least the Legislative resisted the sections’ desire that election should be direct, stipulating a two-stage process; and it equally overrode Robespierre’s suggestion of another self-denying ordinance, seeing that it would let him in but keep all sitting deputies out. The primary elections took place on 27 August, the secondary on 2 September, at the very height of the national emergency. No doubt this helps to explain the fact that out of just under five million electors only fewer than 30 per cent turned up to vote in the primary assemblies. And the patchy and uncertain information that many of the departments had about the Revolution of 10 August and subsequent events in Paris no doubt indicates why no fewer than 200 of the 749 deputies returned were members of the Legislative and therefore already well known to those who elected them. They included Brissot and his circle and all the most prominent orators from the Gironde. Eighty-three members of the former Constituent Assembly also now reappeared on the national stage, including Orléans (proudly flaunting the new republican name of Philippe-Égalité), Pétion, and Robespierre, all three sitting for Paris. Danton’s election was a foregone conclusion, although it brought his resignation from the ministry. Journalistic notoriety secured almost equally inevitable seats for Marat and Clootz. Frenchmen also recognized their foreign friends by electing Tom Paine and Joseph Priestley. Socially, like its predecessors, the new assembly was dominated by lawyers, professional men, and property owners; and although mercantile, noble, and clerical numbers were smaller than ever, for the first time in the national representation there was a handful of assorted artisans. It was a young body, with two-thirds of deputies under 45. Above all, it brought together a wide range of political experience at both national and local level, experience scarred since the beginning of 1791 by the obstinate, treacherous behaviour of the king.

  There was, therefore, never any doubt that the Convention would depose him. Papers found in the Tuileries after 10 August only confirmed suspicions about his treachery. In any case, Paris clearly demanded a republic. And so on 21 September the foundation-stone of the new constitution was laid. Monarchy in France was abolished; and when a year later a new revolutionary calendar was introduced, it was calculated from 22 September 1792, the first day of Year 1 of the Republic. But to abolish the monarchy was one thing. To dispose of Louis XVI was quite another. Much of the autumn was spent deciding what to do with him.

  Brissot and the Girondins were attracted by the idea of doing nothing—keeping the king a hostage against future eventualities. Some suspected that, in the light of their equivocations during the fortnight before 10 August, they might even want to keep open the option of restoring him some day. The commune, and the Parisian deputies who sat together on the high benches to the left of the chair and were to become the kernel of a group known as the Mountain or the Montagnards, were determined to close off this option. When on 1 October the vigilance committee of the commune claimed it had evidence that some deputies had been paid collaborators of the fallen monarch, they demanded that he and they be put on trial. A commission was appointed to examine the evidence, which became stronger with the discovery during November of a strong-box (armoire de fer) at the Tuileries containing yet more incriminating documents. It was a nice point whether a king, i
nviolable under the constitution, could legitimately be tried at all, or at least by any court. In response to this some Montagnards began to argue, following the maiden speech of the hitherto unknown young deputy from the Aisne, Saint-Just, on 13 November, that the tyrant had already been tried, and found guilty, on 10 August by the people. All that was needed was to punish him. Robespierre, whom some were already accusing of aspiring to dictatorship, came out for this opinion on 3 December.