The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Throughout the autumn of 1793, however, representatives on mission had been free to interpret their role much as they wished. This phase of the Terror was anarchic, uncoordinated, and little subject to central direction. Its characteristic instruments were the Revolutionary Armies, which mushroomed throughout the provinces in imitation of that of Paris, and whose numbers may have reached 40,000 men at their height. Terroristic jacks-of-all-trades, their purpose was to intimidate and punish, arrest and repress, anyone suspected of activities that could be deemed hostile to the Revolution. Representatives arriving in districts suspected of disaffection tended to establish such forces as a matter of priority, as rallying-points for active and reliable patriots. Overwhelmingly they were recruited in towns, among married artisans, and they tended to operate locally: the Paris battalions sent to Lyons were exceptional. Local knowledge, in fact, was essential to their functioning. They knew who the suspects were, and where to find them; and, recruited as they were, it was not surprising that they spent much of their time foraging in surrounding countryside, hunting down hoarders and speculators whose greed threatened to starve hungry patriot families in the towns and flouted the Law of the Maximum. The same local knowledge underpinned the powers of the watch committees sitting in most localities since the spring. On to them devolved the responsibility of implementing the Law of Suspects passed in September, as well as a whole range of other duties such as issuing certificates of civisme—identity cards and testimonials of public reliability all in one, required since November 1792 of all candidates for public functions. Originally only foreigners had been required to carry these documents, but the Law of Suspects made the requirement general. Those without them were liable to arrest and imprisonment; and in fact up to half a million people may have been imprisoned as suspects of one sort or another during the Terror. Perhaps 10,000 may have died in custody, crowded into prisons never intended for such numbers, and more often into makeshift quarters no better equipped. These too, deserve to be numbered among the victims of the Terror, although not formally condemned. So do those who were murdered or lynched without trial or official record during the chaotic, violent autumn of 1793, when the supreme law of public safety seemed to override more conventional and cumbersome procedures. Altogether the true total of those who died under the Terror (excluding the Vendée) may have been twice the official figure—around 30,000 people in just under a year. Even so it was far from the bloodiest episode in a murderous decade for Europe: the same number died in a matter of weeks in Ireland in 1798, in a country with only one-sixth of France’s population; while two-thirds of that number may have been slaughtered in a single day in Warsaw on 4 November 1794. Nor is it true that most of those killed in the Terror were members of the former ‘privileged orders’, whatever the Revolution’s anti-aristocratic rhetoric might suggest. Of the official death sentences passed, fewer than 9 per cent fell upon nobles, and fewer than 7 per cent on the clergy. Disproportionately high as these figures may have been relative to the numbers of these groups in the population as a whole, they were not as high as the quarter of the Terror’s victims who came from the middle classes. And the vast majority of those who lost their lives in the proscriptions of 1793–4—two-thirds of those officially condemned and doubtless a far higher proportion of those who disappeared unofficially—were ordinary people caught up in tragic circumstances not of their own making, who made wrong choices in lethal times, when indifference itself counted as a crime. It is scarcely a coincidence that most death sentences were passed in areas of ‘Federalist’ or royalist rebellion, or in frontier districts where the repeated passage of opposed armies demanded rapid but ultimately unconvincing changes of allegiance from those who lived there.

  Other districts, meanwhile, particularly in the centre of the country, remained almost untouched by the Terror. Here even more than in disturbed areas the personal whims and idiosyncrasies of representatives on mission could be decisive. Sometimes they could even set an example that would be widely followed. The Nièvre, for example, deep in central France, had given the Convention no cause for worry. But the arrival there in September 1793 of the representative Fouché transformed it into a beacon of religious terror. Fouché, himself a former priest, came from the Vendée, where he had witnessed the ability of the clergy to inspire fanatical resistance to the Republic’s authority. Christianity, he concluded, could not coexist in any form with the Revolution and, brushing aside what was left of the ‘constitutional’ Church, he inaugurated a civic religion of his own devising with a ‘Feast of Brutus’ on 22 September at which he denounced ‘religious sophistry’. Fouché particularly deplored clerical celibacy: it set the clergy apart, and in any case made no contribution to society’s need for children. Clerics who refused to marry were ordered to adopt and support orphans or aged citizens. The French people, Fouché declared in a manifesto published on 10 October, recognized no other cult but that of universal morality; and although the exercise of all creeds was proclaimed as free and equal, none might henceforth be practised in public. Graveyards should exhibit no religious symbols, and at the gate of each would be an inscription proclaiming Death is an eternal sleep. Thus began the movement known as dechristianization. Soon afterwards Fouché moved on to Lyons; but during his weeks in Nevers his work had been watched by Chaumette, visiting his native town from Paris. He was to carry the idea back to the capital, where it was energetically taken up by his colleagues at the commune.

  Other representatives on mission, meanwhile, had also taken to attacking the outward manifestations of the Catholic religion. At Abbeville, on the edge of priest-ridden Flanders, Dumont favoured forced public abjuration of orders, preferably by constitutional clergy whose continued loyalty to the Revolution could only now be proved by such gestures. On 7 October in Rheims, Ruhl personally supervised the smashing of the phial holding the sacred oil of Clovis used to anoint French kings. None of this was authorized by the Convention; on the other hand the adoption on 5 October of a new republican calendar marked a further stage in the divorce between the French State and any sort of religion. Years would no longer be numbered from the birth of Christ, but from the inauguration of the French Republic on 22 September 1792. Thus it was already the Year II. There would be twelve thirty-day months with evocative, seasonal names; each month would have three ten-day weeks (décades) ending in a rest-day (décadi). Sundays therefore disappeared and could not be observed unless they coincided with the less-frequent décadis. The introduction of the system at this moment only encouraged representatives on mission to intensify their lead; and dechristianization became an important feature of the Terror in all the former centres of rebellion when they were brought to heel. Once launched it was eminently democratic. Anybody could join in smashing images, vandalizing churches (the very word ‘vandalism’ was coined to describe this outburst of iconoclasm), and theft of vestments to wear in blasphemous mock ceremonies. Those needing pretexts could preach national necessity when they tore down bells or walked off with plate that could be recast into guns or coinage. Such activities were particular favourites among the Revolutionary Armies. The Parisian detachments marching to Lyons left a trail of pillaged and closed churches, and smouldering bonfires of ornaments, vestments, and holy pictures all along their route. Other contributions took more organization, but Jacobin clubs and popular societies, not to mention local authorities, were quite happy to orchestrate festivals of reason, harmony, wisdom, and other such worthy attributes in former churches; and to recruit parties of priests who, at climactic moments in these ceremonies, would renounce their vows and declare themselves ready to marry. If their choice fell on a former nun, so much the better.

  When Chaumette returned from Nevers, the Paris Commune made dechristianization its official policy. On 23 October the images of kings on the front of Notre-Dame were ordered to be removed: the royal tombs at Saint-Denis had already been emptied and desecrated by order of the Convention in August. The word Saint began to be removed from stre
et names, and busts of Marat replaced religious statues. Again the Convention appeared to be encouraging the trend when it decreed, on 20 October, that any priest (constitutional or refractory) denounced for lack of civisme by six citizens would be subject to deportation, and any previously sentenced to deportation but found in France should be executed. Clerical dress was now forbidden in Paris; and on 7 November Gobel, the elected constitutional bishop, who had already sanctioned clerical marriage for his clergy, came with eleven of them to the Convention and ceremonially resigned his see. Removing the episcopal insignia, he put on a cap of liberty and declared that the only religion of a free people should be that of Liberty and Equality. In the next few days the handful of priests who were deputies followed his example. Soon Grégoire, constitutional bishop of Blois, was the only deputy left clinging to his priesthood and clerical dress. The sections meanwhile were passing anti-clerical motions, and on 12 November that of Gravilliers, whose idol had so recently been Jacques Roux, sent a deputation to the Convention draped in ‘ornaments from churches in their district, spoils taken from the superstitious credulity of our forefathers and repossessed by the reason of free men’9 to announce that all churches in the section had been closed. This display followed a great public ceremony held in Notre-Dame, or the ‘Temple of Reason’, as it was now redesignated, on the tenth. On this occasion relays of patriotic maidens in virginal white paraded reverently before a temple of philosophy erected where the high altar had stood. From it emerged, at the climax of the ceremony, a red-capped female figure representing Liberty. Appreciatively described by an official recorder of the scene as ‘a masterpiece of nature’, in daily life she was an actress; but in her symbolic role she led the officials of the commune to the Convention, where she received the fraternal embrace of the president and secretaries.

  However carefully choreographed, there was not much dignity about these posturings; and attacks on parish churches and their incumbents (who were mostly now popularly elected) risked making the Revolution more enemies than friends. Small-town anti-religious Jacobin zeal, for example, provoked a minor revolt in the Brie in the second week in December. To shouts of Long live the Catholic Religion, we want our priests, we want the Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, crowds of peasants sacked the local club. Several thousands took up arms and joined the movement, and only a force of National Guards and sansculottes from the Revolutionary Army restored order in a district whose tranquillity was vital to the regular passage of food supplies to the capital from southern Champagne. But even before this the Committee of Public Safety was growing anxious about the counter-productive effects of dechristianization. Robespierre in particular, who believed that religious faith was indispensable to orderly, civilized society, sounded the alarm. On 21 November he denounced anti-religious excesses at the Jacobin Club. They smacked of more fanaticism than they extinguished. The people believed in a Supreme Being, he warned, whereas atheism was aristocratic. At the same time he persuaded the Committee to circularize popular societies warning them not to fan superstition and fanaticism by persecution. On 6 December, finally, the Convention agreed to reiterate the principle of religious freedom in a decree which formally prohibited all violence or threats against the ‘liberty of cults’. But by then it was too late. The example of Paris had encouraged Jacobin zealots everywhere, and with the repression of revolt in full swing and the role of priests in the Vendée particularly notorious, the remaining trappings of religion were too tempting a target to ignore. The commune’s response to Robespierre on 23 November had been to decree the closing of all churches in the capital; and soon local authorities were shutting them wholesale throughout the country. By the spring, churches were open for public worship only in the remotest corners of France, such as the Jura mountains. By then, perhaps 20,000 priests had been bullied into giving up their status, and 6,000 had given their renunciation the ultimate confirmation by marrying. In some areas, such as Provence, dechristianization only reached its peak in March or April 1794. On the other hand it was scarcely a movement that could go on indefinitely. When most churches had been closed, and stripped of their furnishings and relics, and had no incumbents, what more could be done? All that remained was vigilance against continued religious practice behind closed doors; but the Committee of Public Safety, and the law itself as enunciated in the decree on the freedom of cults, were against such harassment; and the reach of both, from the end of 1793, was growing ever closer and more sure.

  The dangerous chaos of dechristianization, in fact, seems to have been one of the most important factors pushing the Committee of Public Safety towards taking a firmer grip on the government of the country. It was certainly when the anti-religious paroxysm was at its height in Paris that the ‘Revolutionary Government’ proclaimed in October was given a structure and a chain of authority under a ‘decree constituting Revolutionary Government’ first proposed on 18 November, passed on 4 December, and known, from the latter date under the republican calendar, as the Law of 14 Frimaire. The principle animating it was extreme centralization. Executive power, subject always to the overriding authority of the Convention, was vested in the Committee of Public Safety in matters of internal administration and police. An executive council of ministers was still formally maintained, although Billaud-Varenne in the course of debates on the proposal repeated Danton’s earlier call for its abolition; but it was now down-graded to a passive channel for transmitting the orders of the two committees. And all subordinate authorities, at whatever level, were expressly forbidden to alter, gloss, or interpret the law in any way. The obvious targets of this provision were the representatives on mission, who for much of 1793 had ruled their assigned territories subject to hardly any central control. They were, it is true, to be entrusted with the first application of the Law of 14 Frimaire, but it was to be their last great assignment. Subsequently, the execution of revolutionary laws at local level was to be the responsibility of district and commune councils, who would report directly, every ten days, to the governing committees. The departments, a consistently conservative force since their creation and motors of ‘Federalism’ in many areas since the spring, were bypassed for all except routine administrative functions such as tax-collection and public works. But to ensure that the districts and communes discharged their new and wider responsibilities properly, each was assigned a ‘national agent’ appointed by and reporting independently to the central committees.

  Meanwhile all unofficial local bodies set up in the course of the emergency since March, including any local Revolutionary Armies, were abolished as ‘subversive of the government’s unity of action, and tending to federalism’. Only the watch committees, established uniformly everywhere in March and now reporting to the Committee of General Security, retained a role, no doubt because the operation of the Law of Suspects depended on them. Plainly the committees were now aiming at uniform, obedient administration, responding rapidly to central initiatives, and incapable of resisting, adapting, or varying government policy in any substantial way. The spirit of the Law of 14 Frimaire was the very opposite of that aspired to by the constitution-makers of 1791, or even, in the main, that of the Convention’s own suspended constitution. But decentralization and separation of powers were ideals for calmer times, as Robespierre explained in moving a supplementary measure to reorganize the Revolutionary Tribunal on 25 December. ‘The goal of constitutional government’, he declared,10 ‘is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to found it. The revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies: the constitution is the regime of liberty victorious and peaceful. Revolutionary government requires extraordinary activity, precisely because it is at war.’

  Thus the Law of 14 Frimaire heralded the end of the anarchic Terror. It heralded the end of the depredations of the Revolutionary Armies, now reduced to a single force under close central supervision; and the end, by implication, of dechristianization. Above all it heralded the end of the proconsular autonomy hitherto enjoyed by
the representatives on mission. It established the first strong central government that France had enjoyed since 1787. But although it aimed at a regime of instant obedience, the new law certainly did not take instantaneous effect. It was some months before the last provincial Revolutionary Armies were wound up, or dechristianization began to flag. And this was above all because many representatives on mission found the trimming of their powers hard to accept. ‘Yes,’ declared Javogues,11 representative in the new department of the Loire, created to dismember the old Lyons-dominated Saône-et-Loire, ‘there exists a plan for Counter-Revolution in the Committee of Public Safety; I have seen signs of it developing wherever I have been. They have tried to turn the Revolution back by sending out men who paralysed vigorous measures.’ The Law of 14 Frimaire was not applicable, he argued, to a department like his, still in rebellion. Only after two months of defiance was he recalled. By then accusations of abuse of power and resistance to central authority by representatives had become a main plank in a campaign led by Danton and his friends to abandon government by terror. It was in this atmosphere that Robespierre sanctioned the missions of Jullien to Nantes and Bordeaux which led to the recall, in turn, of Carrier and Tallien. Ultimately, the Dantonists’ campaign for ‘indulgence’ failed. But by the time it was over the power once wielded by the representatives on mission had been broken.

  Yet the Law of 14 Frimaire was not the first attempt to impose uniform practice on the embattled Republic. The Law of the General Maximum had theoretically done so ever since 29 September 1793. It, too, had encountered initial difficulties. For most commodities the price it fixed was one-third above the local price of 1790, but in many cases that was more than the current price, and the days before the law took effect were marked by disorderly runs on shops stocking such goods. Local variations in price made supplies extremely uneven as producers preferred to sell their stocks where prices were higher. In any case it took far longer for local authorities, harassed by a myriad of other problems, to draw up comprehensive scales of prices than the week allowed between the promulgation of the decree and its implementation. Within a month the crude guideline of 1790 prices plus a third had had to be modified to take account of transport costs and reasonable levels of profit for those who handled the goods. And the provision of the Maximum Law which limited the level of wages was scarcely implemented at all; it would have required a whole extra apparatus of investigation and control, and in a place like Paris the commune knew that its power ultimately depended on the support of the wage-earners who made up the majority of the sansculottes, and that the wages many of them were earning were already in excess of the maximum laid down. Nevertheless by November district authorities were beginning to control prices, at least, over much of the country, and on 27 October supply of provisions on a national scale was placed under the supervision of a ‘Subsistence Commission’ answerable directly to the Committee of Public Safety, and more particularly to one of its longest-serving members, Robert Lindet. He soon became the Carnot of economic organization as the commission took powers to direct bulk purchases, distribute grants, and regulate exports and imports. Above all it addressed itself to establishing a nationwide schedule of maximum prices for necessities, which was promulgated on 21 February 1794. Despite the draconian penalties of the law against hoarding, the less severe but still serious ones laid down in the Maximum Law itself, and the informal terror exercised against rural producers over the autumn by the Revolutionary Armies, the black market flourished behind the spreading apparatus of economic controls. The market was also disrupted by bulk-purchasing for the armed forces, when payments were made in cash and if necessary at rates above the maximum. Nevertheless by the spring of 1794 France was obviously making substantial progress towards a controlled economy. The most vivid evidence came from the value of the assignats. Controlled prices diminished the demand for a paper currency which had been legal tender since April 1793. Consequently fewer need be printed. Standing at 22 per cent of their face value in August 1793, they rose to 33 per cent in November and 48 per cent in December. Although from then on they began to decline again, the fall was nothing like as steep as in the spring of 1793 until economic controls began once more to be abandoned in the autumn of 1794.