The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Terror, he observed, was now the order of the day—although this was never formally decreed. The sansculottes appeared to have coerced the Convention for the second time in three months and to be set to dictate its policies without resistance. Over the next few weeks the legislature certainly committed itself to radical and energetic action on a scale not seen since the emergency of March. Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois were now added to the Committee of Public Safety, although Danton refused nomination. On 17 September a comprehensive Law of Suspects was passed, which empowered the watch committees set up the previous March to arrest anyone who ‘either by their conduct, their contacts, their words or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny, of federalism, or to be enemies of liberty’, as well as a number of more specific categories such as former nobles ‘who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.’4 Practically anybody might fall foul of such a sweeping law. In the weeks following even everyday speech acquired a sansculotte style. Those who refused to call each other ‘citizen’ rather than the deferential ‘Monsieur’, and to use the familiar form of address (tutoiement), fell under automatic suspicion. Then on 29 September the Convention passed a General Maximum Law which imposed price controls on a wide range of goods defined as of first necessity from food and drink to fuel, clothing, and even tobacco. Those who sold them above the maximum would be fined and placed on the list of suspects. The Revolutionary Army was at last set on foot, and command of it went not, as the Committee of Public Safety would have liked, to Hanriot, but to Ronsin, one of the fiercest allies of Hébert. Ever since June many sections had also been calling for the Girondins still in captivity to be put on trial, along with Marie-Antoinette. Such gestures were bloody (since acquittal was inconceivable) but empty, as Robespierre saw. He campaigned against them and sought to impede them as long as he could. But on 9 September news broke of a plot to free the former queen from the solitary confinement in which she was now kept, and after that her fate was inevitable. She was sent for trial on 3 October, the same day as the Girondins. All Robespierre could do was dissuade the Convention from the roll-call demanded by Billaud-Varenne to identify those favouring mercy for traitors.

  The first well-known victims of the reign of terror, however, came from the other end of the political spectrum. The radicals used their triumph to eliminate the rivals whose policies they had stolen. In the course of September the leading enragés were all arrested. Roux, first imprisoned as early as 22 August, then released, was rearrested on 5 September. Varlet, who with some prescience denounced Danton’s idea of payment for attendance at fixed weekly sectional meetings, followed Roux into custody on the eighteenth. Leclerc stopped publishing and disappeared. No more was now heard of the call, periodically taken up by the enragés, for the constitution to be brought into force, with all its democratic practices and implicit renewal of the national representation. Quite the reverse. On 10 October the Convention formally accepted that it was impossible to activate it as things were. At a time of emergency the processes it enshrined were too cumbersome and slow. ‘It is impossible’, declared Saint-Just in the name of the Committee of Public Safety,5 ‘for revolutionary laws to be executed if the government itself is not constituted in a revolutionary way.’ He therefore proposed that the Committee itself should take on the central direction of the entire state apparatus, subject only to the oversight of the Convention. Such ‘Revolutionary Government’ would be temporary; but the government of France was declared revolutionary until the peace.

  Thus began the most famous stage of the French Revolution, when in the course of nine months around 16,000 people perished under the blade of the guillotine. The cold, mechanical efficiency of the method had all Europe watching with fascinated horror. The Terror began—and ended far into 1794—with famous victims. Marie-Antoinette went to the scaffold, her defiant appearance in the tumbril memorably sketched by David, on 17 October. Two weeks later (31 October) 21 Girondins, including Brissot and Vergniaud, followed her, after a show trial cut short when the eloquence and debating skills of the accused threatened to prolong it indefinitely. They went to their deaths defiantly singing the ‘Marseillaise’. Those who had signed the secret protest against their purging in June were imprisoned as Girondins after its existence was revealed in the preparations for the trial; but Robespierre always blocked moves to have them too put on trial. Of those who had escaped in June, four went to the guillotine in Bordeaux, while Pétion and Buzot shot themselves. Their bodies were later found, half-eaten by wolves. Roland too committed suicide when he heard of his wife’s execution in November. November also saw the execution of Égalité, no Girondin, but a prince of royal blood with an émigré son, and suspect figures from the past like Barnave, arrested a year previously when his 1791 intrigues with the queen were revealed; and Bailly, still hated by the sansculottes for his part in the massacre of the Champ de Mars. For him a special guillotine was erected at the scene of his crime. The others all met their deaths where the guillotine now permanently stood, close to where Louis XVI’s head had fallen in the place de la Révolution.

  Even so, only 177 people were executed in Paris between October and the end of 1793. The pathetic spectacle of the once mighty and famous now brought low distracted attention from the thousands of less well-known provincials who made up the bulk of the Terror’s victims. Just as the show trials in Paris were beginning, Lyons finally surrendered to the besieging armies after two months of bombardment and resistance during which its defence was increasingly reliant on royalist volunteers commanded by a returned émigré. Hoping to be relieved by a Piedmontese invasion from the east, the starving city had held out over the summer. But when in the first few days of October the invaders were thrown back, defeat became inevitable and Lyons surrendered to the representative on mission Couthon. His inclination was to adopt the policy of conciliation and clemency that had worked so effectively in Caen over the summer. But Lyons was different. The country’s second city had defied the Convention for a third of the year, when the Republic was in mortal peril. It had murdered Chalier and not hesitated to make common cause with other rebels, not to mention royalists and foreign enemies. The city’s name was reviled in Paris far more than those of the other ‘Federalist’ centres, and the Committee of Public Safety was resolved to make Lyons an example. On receipt of the news of its fall, on 12 October, the Committee moved a decree that Lyons should be destroyed. Its very name was to disappear, except on a monument among the ruins which would proclaim ‘Lyons made war on Liberty. Lyons is no more’. ‘The collection of houses left standing’—for the destruction of the city was glossed later in the decree as the destruction of the houses of the rich—was to be renamed Freed-Town (Ville Affranchie). Couthon had no stomach for such comprehensive vengeance. He set up special courts and began to demolish some of the city’s richest dwellings, but at the same time he asked to be transferred elsewhere. He was replaced at the beginning of November by Collot d’Herbois and Fouché, the latter previously on mission in Nevers. They came determined to exact the exemplary vengeance decreed from Paris, and to help them they brought units of the Paris Revolutionary Army, now fully organized under the direct authority of the Committee of Public Safety. Thousands of suspects were imprisoned as parties of sansculottes swept the city with ‘domiciliary visits’, but by the end of November scarcely more than 200 ‘Federalists’ had been condemned by the special courts. Collot thought a mere twenty deaths a day not enough. On 27 November a special ‘Tribunal of Seven’ was established to speed matters up, and within days had handed down capital sentences on almost 300 convicted rebels. This was too much for the local guillotine: in the mitraillades of 4–8 December, the condemned were blown into open graves by cannon-fire and grape-shot. Even so executions continued into the spring. By April, 1,880 Lyonnais had been condemned. Arriving in the city with a detachment of the Paris Revolutionary Army on 22 January, a German adventurer who had joined them gazed in horror at:


  whole ranges of houses, always the most handsome, burnt. The churches, convents, and all the dwellings of the former patricians were in ruins. When I came to the guillotine, the blood of those who had been executed a few hours beforehand was still running in the street … I said to a group of sansculottes … that it would be decent to clear away all this human blood.—Why should it be cleared? one of them said to me. It’s the blood of aristocrats and rebels. The dogs should lick it up.6

  The troops who had taken Lyons had meanwhile moved on south to join the armies encircling Toulon. The coalition forces occupying the port were not reinforced, and so had done little to enlarge their bridgehead. But they could keep supplied from the sea so long as they occupied the heights around the harbour. Thus the siege of Toulon went on for 3½ months. But when, on 17 December, Captain Bonaparte’s gunners drove the British and Spanish troops from the key forts on those heights, Admiral Hood saw that he must evacuate the port immediately or have his fleet shot to matchwood. Perhaps 7,000 refugees crowded on to the warships which sailed out over the next three days under republican fire, including most of the leaders of Toulon’s original revolt. Nevertheless the Jacobins released from imprisonment were able to identify plenty of remaining rebels; 800 were shot without trial as French citizens caught in armed rebellion. A Revolutionary Commission set up by the representatives Barras (a former noble) and Fréron condemned 282 more to the guillotine over the next month for conniving at a revolt that had not only proclaimed Louis XVII, but also allowed the enemy to tow off or destroy over two-thirds of the French Mediterranean fleet as the occupation ended. ‘Mountain-Port’ (Port-de-la-Montagne), as it was now renamed, therefore suffered retribution second only to Lyons in the Terror which purged the centres of ‘Federalism’. Only its vital strategic importance as a naval base cushioned it from further reprisals.

  Repression at Marseilles and Bordeaux, in comparison, was relatively mild. Well controlled and formally meticulous, the Revolutionary Tribunal which sat at Marseilles between August 1793 and April 1794 tried 975 suspects and acquitted 476 of them. Of those convicted, 289 were executed—although of course many of the most guilty must have escaped to Toulon before Carteaux’s forces marched in. Even the attempt to give the city the new name of Nameless (Sansnom) was half-hearted. Bordeaux kept its own name throughout, although the Gironde department where it lay was redesignated Bec d’Ambès (from the point where Garonne and Dordogne meet). Despite bloodthirsty language from the representatives Tallien and Ysabeau, the Military Commission they established acquitted more suspects than it condemned, and between October 1793 and June 1794 only 104 were sentenced to the guillotine. So moderate had the repression been that the representatives themselves fell under suspicion. Ysabeau seemed too fond of the company of rich merchants, while Tallien was under the thumb of his beautiful, pleasure-loving mistress, Thérèse Cabarrus, the wife of a noble and herself daughter of a dubious Spanish financier. They were supplemented in June 1794 by a young, austere acolyte of Robespierre, Jullien, and in the two months of his rule 198 more heads rolled at Bordeaux. By then, the Terror was tailing off everywhere else except in Paris.

  Jullien was chosen to go to Bordeaux on the strength of his success in uncovering terroristic abuses in Nantes under Carrier, the representative sent there in October 1793. Nantes by then was the main centre of operations against the Vendée, and bursting with prisoners as the war began to turn against the rebels. After their failure to take the great port in the first days of July the ‘whites’ melted back into the countryside. A republican counter-offensive began, spearheaded by regular troops who had surrendered at Mainz and been repatriated by the coalition on condition of not being put back in the line. They, and a legion of sansculotte volunteers from Paris under Rossignol, now carried a deliberate policy of terror and devastation into the Vendéan heartland. The rebels rapidly abandoned Saumur and Angers, and their leaders fell to quarrelling about who should have overall command. Reactivated by messages from London that the British would send them aid if they could capture a port, they regrouped and defeated the Parisian army at Coron on 18 September and the Mainz veterans at Torfou the next day. But characteristically afterwards most of the rebels went home to sing Te Deums instead of pursuing their advantage. Early in October the Committee of Public Safety launched a new drive to crush the ‘inexplicable Vendée’, as Barère called it. Command of the various republican armies was unified, and by mid-October four columns were converging on the very headquarters of rebel territory, the bocage around Cholet. There, on 17 October, they defeated the rebels decisively and killed several of their leaders. Only now, pursued by triumphant republicans, did the Vendéans break out of their home country in a bold and desperate bid to link up with the British. They crossed the Loire and struck north under Stofflet, making for the nearest port to British territory, Granville, on the Cotentin peninsula opposite Jersey. As they went they were joined by chouans from the disaffected countryside of upper Brittany, and by the time they reached Granville on 14 November they may have been 60,000 strong. But the British were not there. There were plenty of troops and supplies in Jersey, but news of the march only reached their commander, via London, on 26 November, and even then he did not know that Granville was their destination. The port was well fortified and defended, whereas the Vendéans had no siege train. By the time British warships appeared off Granville on 2 December the rebel army was in retreat, far to the south. By the fourth they were once more at Angers, but this time the republican garrison held firm, and they were unable to get back across the Loire. They turned north again, and on 12 December republican forces at last caught up with them at Le Mans, where they were routed in a night battle fought in pouring winter rain. Many escaped, but in complete disorder. Westermann, in command of the blues pursuing them westwards back into Brittany, ordered no quarter to be given. ‘The road to Laval is strewn with corpses’, reported one of his men.7 ‘Women, priests, monks, children, all have been put to death. I have spared nobody.’ Perhaps 10,000 died during this retreat. On 23 December, finally, the remnant of the Catholic and royal army turned to face its pursuers at Savenay. Only 4,000 or 5,000 were left in any state to fight, although twice that number were crammed into the little town. Two-thirds of the fugitives were destroyed in the battle and the mass shootings which followed. The ‘Great War of the Vendée’ was over, but republican vengeance was not. In a macabre but untranslatable pun, the area was now to be called Vengé. Over the spring of 1794 general Turreau sent ‘infernal columns’ of blues to crisscross the heartland of rebellion, ravaging, destroying, and killing everything in their path. ‘Comrades,’ declared one of his subordinates to his men, ‘we are entering insurgent country. I order you to deliver to flames everything that can be burnt and to bayonet any locals whom you meet on your way. I know there might be a few patriots in this country; never mind, we must sacrifice them all.’8 Even republican troops sickened by scenes of gang rape and infanticide dared not protest. Historians are still arguing about how many people perished during the whole episode of the Vendée uprising, but a quarter of a million on the rebel side alone does not seem an overestimate. Certainly the population of the region did not recover to its 1790 levels until the 1820s.

  Alongside casualties on this scale, even the number of victims who perished in the judicial Terror of Nantes seems modest. Yet nowhere else was the Terror so destructive. Forty-two per cent of the 16,594 death sentences during the entire Terror were passed in the three departments most affected by the Vendée rebellion, and the various special courts established in the Loire-Inférieure, Nantes’s department, accounted for 3,548 capital sentences. Carrier, whose previous record at Rennes, dealing with mere Federalists, had been moderate and conciliatory, believed that fanatical royalist counter-revolutionaries deserved far harsher treatment. As at Lyons, the guillotine could scarcely cope with the flood of victims: yet the prisons were overflowing, ravaged by epidemics, and there was not enough food to feed innocent citizens, let al
one condemned traitors and rebels. These considerations led Carrier to approve perhaps the most notorious expedient of the whole Terror: the noyades. On 19 November some 90 priests were executed by sinking them, hog-tied, in a holed barge in the Loire. In the six weeks that followed six other batches of victims, many though not all of them non-juring priests convicted (or sometimes just suspected) of exciting the fanaticism of devout rebels, were disposed of in the same way. Perhaps 1,800 perished altogether in the noyades, and their bodies were washed up on the tidal banks of the Loire for weeks afterwards. But the citizens of Nantes, repeatedly threatened by insurgents who reputedly gave no quarter, raised little objection to such methods, or to the hundreds of shootings of disarmed rebels that Carrier also authorized. They believed they would have been massacred if the whites had triumphed: the Vendée rebellion had begun, after all, with massacres of good republicans. And hardly any Nantais were executed under Carrier. What brought him down, and precipitated his recall to Paris on 8 February, was rumours of the sheer scale of his operations in Nantes at a time when the Committee of Public Safety was beginning to wonder—however temporarily—whether ferocity was not now making the Republic more enemies than it eliminated. In this climate subordinate terrorists in Nantes were anxious to blame the representative on mission for as much excess as possible; and Jullien, as the confidant of the always-suspicious Robespierre, was a willing recipient of their denunciations. Repression under Carrier, Jullien reported, had been indiscriminate, and too often the letter of the law had been ignored. Official policy was now to set severe limits to the independent initiative of representatives on mission, and Carrier was the first, and most spectacular, casualty of the changed atmosphere.