But none of this meant much to the sansculottes who, with their Girondin enemies out of the way, were now preoccupied once more with the supply of foodstuffs and other basic commodities. By the second week in June Paris was full of complaints against butchers and the price of meat. By the third week there were renewed fears for the bread supply as rumours came in from Normandy that the rebels in the Calvados would attempt to blockade the Seine. Roux, Varlet, and the enragés, frustrated in their desire for a more radical purge on 2 June, now sought to capitalize on this continuing unrest. Roux proposed at the Cordeliers that the new constitution should include a mandatory death sentence for usurers and speculators. ‘Liberty’, he declared, ‘does not consist in starving your fellow men.’ On the twenty-fifth he led a deputation from the more radical sections to the Convention, where he denounced the deputies for their inaction on hoarding and speculation and suggested that they, and the Montagnards in particular, were scarcely better in such matters than the despots of old. The outraged deputies threw him out; but attacks by women that very day on soap suppliers, whose stocks they sold at their own prices, showed that he was articulating real grievances. The Montagnards made a determined attempt to break Roux and destroy his influence. They were able to dislodge him from office as editor of the commune’s news sheet, and engineer his expulsion from one of his power bases at the Cordeliers. Marat, the vehement friend of the people, though now debilitated by a skin disease only relieved by constant bathing, was persuaded to denounce the enragés and all they stood for. But such infighting among the victors of 2 June was brought to an abrupt halt in mid-July when ‘Federalism’ struck its first (and, as it turned out, only) blow in Paris. Rumours of tens of thousands of Marseillais, Lyonnais, and Bordelais marching on the capital had been current for weeks. But it was a single, determined emissary from Caen, acting on her own, who visited Girondin revenge on their most ferocious adversary. On the thirteenth, Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat to death in his bath.
Here was a new Montagnard martyr, and a much greater one than Le Peletier, or Chalier, news of whose grisly end came in from Lyons a few days later. For all his ferocity, Marat had only been influential since the previous summer, and thanks to his illness his great days were already over. But loss of his counterweight against the enragés seemed serious, even if the initial impact of his murder was to stun the sansculottes. It seems to have galvanized the Montagnards into more positive action. They made the most of their martyr, of course. On 8 August they even paraded his widow before the Convention to denounce the enragés as agents of Austria and England. But the realization was now dawning, as disaster upon disaster was reported from the war fronts and from rebel departments, that much more ruthless and determined action would be required if the crisis facing the Republic was to be overcome. Problems of government would have to be taken more seriously. Danton, suspected of excessive trimming, had already been voted off the Committee of Public Safety on 10 July. So had his right-hand man Delacroix. Two weeks later (26 July), convinced at last of its value, Robespierre accepted nomination to the Committee, noting to himself that its priorities must be ‘food supplies and popular laws’. A law against hoarding passed that very day, making it a capital offence, seemed just what was needed. The new constitution, too, appeared to have achieved its purpose. The primary assemblies endorsed it by an official 1,801,918 votes against 11,610. In fact the number voting for it was probably over two millions—a respectable enough turnout at a time of civil war, and an indication that the propitiatory gesture of national consultation had achieved some success. The promulgation ceremony on 10 August, therefore, went ahead as planned, with a huge procession wending its way through Paris to where eighty-three pikes, one brought from each department by a patriot ripe in years, were bound into a huge fasces symbolizing republican unity. The constitution itself was deposited in a cedar box and suspended from the roof of the Convention hall.
Theoretically, the Convention’s work was now done. Like the Constituent Assembly before it, it could dissolve itself and make way for regular, constitutional government. Delacroix proposed just this on the eleventh. That same night, however, Robespierre denounced a proposal which could only bring to power ‘the envoys of Pitt and Coburg’. The current emergency, when the very survival of the Republic was at stake, was not the time to increase political uncertainties. The constitution could not safely be brought into force in time of war. So long as the emergency lasted it would remain suspended, in every sense.
11
Government by Terror, 1793–1794
July 1793 was the low point in the Jacobin Republic’s struggle against its enemies. All the military news was bad. The forces of the coalition were established on French soil in Flanders and along the Pyrenees. Thousands of French troops surrendered when Mainz fell; while a British fleet cruised off Marseilles hoping to link up with the ‘Federalist’ rebels there. Nor was news from the interior much better. The Vendéans’ retreat from Nantes only seemed to consolidate their grip on the heartland of the rebellion. The only general successful against them, Biron, retook Saumur, but was dismissed on 12 July under suspicion as a former duke. He was replaced by his sansculotte deputy Rossignol, politically sound but a drunken incompetent. And whereas the Federalist revolt in Normandy rapidly collapsed after Brécourt, Lyons proclaimed its continued defiance with the execution of Chalier; and Toulon, hitherto loyal, became a new centre of resistance. Charlotte Corday was denounced as the agent of a far-flung Girondin plot; and after her execution on 17 July she was adopted as a martyr by a whole spectrum of anti-Montagnards from moderates to royalists. It was feared that she was one of thousands operating in the capital, suspicions fanned by political struggles in some of the sections. Not all of them were in the grip of solid sansculottes. Control of some at the western end of the city changed hands almost nightly, and when elections were held for the post of commander of the Paris National Guard, Hanriot was only confirmed after massive gerrymandering against a candidate who had fired on the republican petitioners in the Champ de Mars.
‘The evil which besets us’, declared Jeanbon Saint-André on 1 August,1 ‘is that we have no government.’ As a member of the Committee of Public Safety, he ought to have known. But when Danton proposed, in the same session, that the Committee be recognized formally as France’s provisional government, the Convention would not agree. The Committee seemed adequate for its purpose without taking new powers; and, with the addition to its ranks on 11 August of two experienced military technocrats, Carnot and Prieur de la Côte d’Or (the latter just released from Federalist clutches in Caen), it now set about vindicating the Convention’s confidence. It never did become the government, or enjoy undisputed executive authority. But in the course of the next twelve months it was to give the country the leadership to mobilize its resources with unprecedented assurance, and put the crisis of 1793 behind it.
The first step was to defeat the ‘Federalists’—or rather, those who were not already managing to defeat themselves. No further military operations were necessary in Calvados after Brécourt. The disgusted Bretons marched out of Caen on 25 July, along with the fugitive Girondin deputies, leaving the city to its fate. By 3 August a representative on mission and member of the Committee of Public Safety, Robert Lindet, was in control again. Nor did the Bretons hold out long. In mid-August they issued public retractions of their earlier defiant proclamations, and the fugitive deputies moved on again, making their way south to what they imagined would be the safety of Bordeaux. Bitter disappointment awaited them: resistance was collapsing in the Gironde, too. In the last week of July the Popular Commission still seemed very much in charge, seizing all the coinage in the local mint to defray its mounting expenses. Then, on 2 August, alarmed by threats of military vengeance issuing from Paris, and mounting problems of food supply, it abruptly dissolved itself and recalled its volunteer army. If it hoped to fend off Montagnard vengeance it was to be disappointed. Although none of the money was used, the raid on the
mint was viewed as theft of national property. Besides, ever since its establishment the Commission had been the source of much virulent anti-Parisian propaganda, and had dispatched emissaries to foment Federalism all over the south and west. Its contribution, in fact, to the national crisis was regarded as far more damaging than that of Caen or Rennes, and retribution was accordingly going to be far more drastic. On 6 August all members of the Popular Commission were declared traitors and outlawed. Representatives on mission arrived on 19 August, to restore legitimate authority, but they did not find the cowed and contrite city they expected. Jostled and threatened by ugly crowds of Muscadins, they felt safer withdrawing the next day to the republican safety of La Réole, 30 miles up river. From there they reported their reception to the Convention, and called for troops to accompany their next entry to the city. Not until 17 October did they feel secure enough to attempt it. By then Bordeaux had been bracing itself for several weeks. On 27 August the National Club reopened, and three weeks later a new Jacobin-dominated municipal council was elected. A festival in honour of Marat had even been held. But, remarked Tallien, the deputy now sent from the Vendée to deal with Bordeaux, ‘this is pure face-saving. Hunger and fear alone have brought the twenty-eight sections together for even a minute.’2
Similar pressures also precipitated the surrender of Marseilles. Detachments from the army in the Alps were ordered in July to march against both Marseilles and Lyons. By the beginning of August Lyons was surrounded but seemed bent on resistance. Marseilles, however, now cut off from sympathizers further up the Rhône, began to panic. The departmental army of the Bouches du Rhône withdrew from Avignon, pursued by regular troops under Carteaux. With the port blockaded and the new harvest not yet in, bread riots broke out in the city in the early days of August. The Popular Tribunal began to execute known Jacobins, and priests reappeared in public praying for divine aid to save the rebels. Finally, as Carteaux’s army closed in, the rebels appealed to the British admiral Hood to allow grain ships from Italy to pass his blockade. This was treason, and it proved too much for some of Marseilles’s sections to follow. Fighting broke out on 23 August between advocates of surrender to Carteaux and partisans of collaboration with the British. Two days later, Carteaux arrived. Those who could, made their escape to Toulon, where they had a dramatic effect on the situation. The Toulon Federalists had had no previous thoughts of collaboration with the enemy, even though they knew that if Carteaux took Marseilles their own turn must come. But, surprised by the approach from Marseilles, Hood concluded that Toulon might be ripe for negotiation, too. On 23 August, accordingly, he formally offered Toulon military protection if the port would proclaim Louis XVII. Many were outraged, but others were equally appalled by atrocity stories spread by refugees from Marseilles. After agonized debate, the sections decided to accept Hood’s offer. It took another three days to persuade the sailors of the Mediterranean fleet that resistance at this stage would be futile, but on 27 August the British fleet sailed into France’s Mediterranean naval base and coalition forces occupied the town. They met with no resistance.
The fall of Toulon to the British precipitated a new crisis in Paris. Ever since the death of Marat various factions in the capital had been jostling to appropriate his mantle and his following; hence the venom and persistence of the Montagnard attack on the enragés. But no sooner had Roux been dislodged from influence at the commune than others came forward to appropriate his programme. The new populists had until now been orthodox spokesmen for Montagnard policies in the commune (in the person of Chaumette, its procurator, and Hébert, his deputy) and at the war ministry. They also dominated the Cordeliers Club. Hébert’s Père Duchesne, written in the oath-strewn vernacular, became the undisputed best-selling paper in Paris once Marat was silenced. It also began, soon after that, to call for sterner measures against hoarders and speculators, the extension of the maximum to all goods of first necessity along with stricter enforcement, faster progress in the organization of the Revolutionary Armies decreed on 2 June, and greater efforts to marshal the people’s revolutionary enthusiasm through mass effort. These demands were barely distinguishable from those still being made by Roux and his journalist ally Leclerc, who had even given his own paper Marat’s old name of L’Ami du Peuple. Both groups believed that only ruthless use of the guillotine would eliminate traitors, backsliders, suspects, speculators, and ‘egoists’. The answer to the nation’s problems lay in Terror.
Even in the Convention this cry was increasingly being heard. Deputies like the ferocious Billaud-Varenne, who had moved the death penalty for hoarding, and his close ally Collot d’Herbois, former actor and already known as a ruthlessly efficient representative on mission, increasingly stood out from their fellow Montagnards in spurning caution and conciliation. And the Committee of Public Safety did authorize some popular gestures: the levée en masse proclaimed on 23 August was a response to a petitioning campaign from the sections. But stirringly as Carnot’s prose read and spectacularly effective as his implementation of the decree was to be, the conscription it authorized fell far short of the universal national enlistment dreamed of in the sections. The Nation’s resolve, Leclerc proclaimed, was being sapped by a ‘spirit of moderation’ in the Convention that needed to be expunged, if necessary, by the sort of popular action already seen on 2 June. Hébert, defeated to his great surprise in a bid to be elected minister of the interior on 20 August, seized on the same theme, and began to work the Jacobin Club up to accepting it. Economic circumstances favoured him. Over the summer the assignat had continued to decline, reaching a mere 22 per cent of its face value in August—a loss of 14 per cent since the purge of the Girondins alone. Weeks of hot weather had produced a good harvest, but many watermills were becalmed by drought, so flour remained scarce. All basic goods had risen in price since June, and some quite spectacularly: soap was up threefold. For all this moderates and dozers (endormeurs) in the Convention were blamed: and when on 2 September news arrived of the loss of Toulon it was easy to focus popular anger on them. Billaud-Varenne had already come close to condemning the incompetence of the Committee of Public Safety with a proposal for a new committee to supervise ministers.
So when what appears to have originated as a spontaneous demonstration by manual workers for higher wages and more bread broke out on 4 September, Hébert and his allies at the commune and in the clubs were quick to turn it to their advantage. Confronted by crowds in the place de Grève, they persuaded them to reassemble on the fifth for a march on the Convention. They used their official powers to close all workplaces the next day, and that evening they persuaded the Jacobins to back their initiative, brushing aside the temporizings of Robespierre, who as current president of the Convention would have the task of confronting the morning’s demonstration. There was certainly no hope of resisting it. Chaumette, at the head of thousands of sansculottes, denounced the shortages, the failure to implement existing laws to deal with them, and those who caused them: ‘Legislators, the immense gathering of citizens come together yesterday and this morning … has formed but one wish; brought to you by a deputation, it is this: Our subsistence, and to get it, apply the law!’3 That meant first of all organizing the Revolutionary Armies and launching them against the hoarders and greedy, unpatriotic inhabitants of the countryside. The Convention voted to do it on the spot—although it did not authorize the guillotines on wheels which Chaumette thought every detachment of the new force ought to have. The motion was moved by Billaud-Varenne and seconded by Danton. Danton also moved that arms production be stepped up until every patriot had a musket, that the Revolutionary Tribunal be divided so as to get through more business; and that, as he put it, to permit ‘hardworking men, who live by the price of their sweat’, to attend their sectional assemblies, these assemblies should take place twice weekly and attendance at them be paid at 40 sous a time. It was all carried by acclamation, amid scenes, in Barère’s words, of delirium.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 36