The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  12

  Thermidor, 1794–1795

  It was only natural, as the architects and original advocates of terror were themselves destroyed by it, or reduced to silence or impotence, that people should begin to wonder what terror was for, and where the Revolution was going. ‘I don’t know’, a police spy heard someone say late in March 1794,1 ‘what it’s all coming to; people have railed against the revolutionary committees, and now we have come to think them suspect; they have railed against the revolutionary army, and now it’s been dissolved; there seems to be something against everything that carries the name revolutionary.’ But there was one powerful and eloquent voice who certainly did not agree: Robespierre. Throughout the autumn and early winter he too had agonized about the direction and meaning of the Revolution, as his flirtation with the Indulgents and their policies showed. But by February his vision was beginning to clear, and on the fifth of that month he came to the Convention to deliver a profession of revolutionary faith. ‘What’, he asked,2 ‘is the end towards which we are striving? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice whose laws are engraved, not on marble and on stone, but in the heart of all men … What sort of government can realise these prodigies? Only democratic or republican government: these two words are synonyms.’ But democracy was not, said Robespierre (implicitly rejecting the claims of the sansculottes to interfere in government), the sovereign people in constant action.

  Democracy is a state where the sovereign people, guided by laws which are its own work, does by itself all that it can do well, and by delegates all that it cannot do for itself. So it is in the principles of democratic government that you must look for the rules of your political conduct … What then is the fundamental principle of democratic or popular government, that is to say the essential underpinning which sustains it and makes it work? It is virtue … which is nothing other than the love of the land of your birth and its laws … this sublime sentiment supposes a preference for the public interests above all particular interests … The first rule of your political conduct must be to relate all you do to maintaining equality and developing virtue … In the system of the French Revolution, what is immoral is impolitic, and what corrupts is counter-revolutionary. Weakness, vices and prejudices are the high-road to monarchy.

  Coming from anyone else, these ideas would be one more example of the vapid rhetoric which the French Revolution produced so readily. Robespierre, however, was a figure of authority and power, and he took his own ideas extremely seriously. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1794 he became increasingly obsessed with cleansing the Republic of the corrupt and all who fell short of his exacting standard of virtue.

  The first casualty of his obsession was Fabre d’Eglantine, whom he denounced in bitter terms at the Jacobins on 8 January. But in Robespierre’s eyes Fabre’s greed, duplicity, and corruption threw suspicion on his known associates, including leading Indulgents like Desmoulins; and loud-mouthed trimmers like Danton, whose persistent defence of Fabre suggested that he put his friends before patriotic principles. Shortly after outlining his ideal republic of virtue, Robespierre was taken ill and did not reappear in public for almost a month. During this time Hébertist machinations dominated the political agenda; and Amar, the member of the Committee of General Security deputed to report on the Indies Company scandal so that the accused could be brought to trial, proved curiously dilatory in reporting his conclusions. It is possible that he was even involved himself. Under mounting pressure from his colleagues, eventually he did report on 16 March, indicting Fabre, Chabot, and a number of others. In the Convention he was openly denounced by Robespierre and Billaud-Varenne for over-concentrating on financial details to the exclusion of the alleged plot’s political ramifications. Widening his scope somewhat, Amar reported again on 19 March, and this time Fabre and his associates were sent for trial. As soon as the Hébertists were dispatched, the timing and preparation of this trial became the central preoccupation of the governing committees.

  It appears that both were split. Some, like Billaud-Varenne, seem to have thought that the Indulgents, having goaded the Hébertists into destroying themselves, now deserved to perish in their turn, whether involved in the Indies Company scandal or not. Vadier, of the Committee of General Security, was of the same opinion. The case offered a convenient pretext, since Fabre before his arrest had been a leading opponent of continuing terror. This would eliminate people like Desmoulins, and Danton, too, although he had played little role in the Indulgents’ campaign. His notorious opportunism made him too dangerous to leave at liberty while his friends stood trial. Other members thought widening a trial for corruption into a political showpiece was far too dangerous. The balance was held by Robespierre, and the thought of trying Danton put even his increasingly rigid political principles to the test. The first proposal to arrest Danton and the Indulgents appears to have come while the Hébertists were on trial, but Robespierre wavered for another week. It was not until 30 March, after two mysterious meetings with Danton, that Robespierre seems to have decided to abandon him. But when he did, he did so totally. No sooner was the arrest warrant issued that day than he began to assemble materials for Danton’s indictment. His notes form the basis of Saint-Just’s speech of the thirty-first in the Convention when, in the name of both committees, he announced the arrests of ‘the last partisans of royalism, who, for five years, have served factions, and have only followed liberty as a tiger follows its prey’.3 He called for them to be put on trial. The motion, perhaps because Saint-Just emphasized that this was likely to be a final cleansing of the body politic, passed virtually unopposed.

  The vagueness of Saint-Just’s denunciation was echoed in the charges made between 2 and 5 April when the East Indies conspirators, plus Desmoulins, Danton, and others—sixteen in all, including nine deputies—came on trial. Danton himself was not even accused of corruption, which would have been very easy. The charges against him were all generalities based on his political record since 1789. Through sheer eloquence, he was soon dominating the courtroom, to Fouquier-Tinville’s alarm. Only when the Convention, acting on a deliberately misleading report that the prisoners were in revolt against the Revolutionary Tribunal, decreed that the trial should continue in their absence, could a verdict of guilty be secured. Their ‘revolt’ had merely been a noisy demand that witnesses be called—but now they were deemed superfluous. On 5 April Danton, Desmoulins, Fabre, Chabot, and the others went to the guillotine.

  Few episodes in the Revolution are harder to interpret than the fall of Danton and Desmoulins, for reliable evidence about the motivation of those involved is almost completely lacking. At least Hébert and his associates had been openly calling for an insurrection. Desmoulins had merely been advocating (and by now he had stopped) a less bloody regime; and Danton had not been calling with any vehemence or consistency for anything. It seems that they were struck down more for what they might do than for what they had done. Their execution, in fact, marked the beginning of a new phase in the Terror, when some people would die for their potential as much as for specific crimes, and sometimes merely for their failure to match some ideal moral standard. ‘The word virtue made Danton laugh,’ Robespierre grimly noted.4 ‘How could a man, to whom all idea of morality was foreign, be the defender of liberty?’ Danton’s death marked the inauguration, in the mind of Robespierre at least, of a Republic of Virtue.

  Meanwhile there was continued concentration of power at the centre. On 1 April the council of ministers was at last abolished. Departments of state were all put into commission, each one supervised by a member of the governing committees. Two weeks later (16 April) it was decreed that all conspiracy cases should henceforth be tried only by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, and over the ensuing weeks most of the various special courts which had enforced the Terror in the provinces were closed down. The effect was to cram the often makeshift prisons of the capital with suspects, and to cope with them the procedure
of the tribunal was simplified and speeded up. By the Law of 22 Prairial (10 June) the number of judges and jurors was increased, witnesses were virtually dispensed with, and accused persons were deprived of defending counsel. The purpose of the tribunal was redefined as the punishment of enemies of the people, and the only penalty it was allowed to impose was death. But enemies of the people were so widely defined that, as with the Law of Suspects, almost anybody was vulnerable to the charge. The cumulative effect on the character of the Terror was immediate. Executions, which had declined sharply between January and March, and risen again in April with a new burst of repression in the Vendée, fell back somewhat in May; but from early June began to climb markedly once more. Most of the victims of the renewed rise perished in Paris. Of the 2,639 people guillotined there between March 1793 and August 1794, over half, 1,515, died during June and July 1794. A far higher proportion of them, too, were from the upper ranks of society than in the Terror as a whole: 38 per cent of its noble victims and 26 per cent of its clerical ones were dispatched during this short phase, and almost half of those from the richer bourgeoisie. Never did the Terror seem closer to an instrument of social discrimination rather than the punishment of specific counter-revolutionary acts than in these months; and although most of those who died were doubtless as guilty as many another of subversive or traitorous activity, the abrupt change in the Terror’s pattern suggests that some at least of those it now struck down died as much for what they were (or had been before 1789) as for what they had done.

  The dead Hébertists might have approved of such a policy: but little else the governing committees did once they were gone would have pleased them. After the fall of Chaumette, for example, the Paris commune was placed under the direct authority of the Committee of Public Safety, and its membership remodelled to produce a majority that could be relied upon to take its orders from above rather than below. At once it turned its attention to the maximum—but to the aspect which the Hébertists had deliberately neglected: wage control. It took some months to gather the material and draw up the tables they had always refused to contemplate, but wage-earners meanwhile were given plenty of warning of what was coming. In April the Le Chapelier Law was invoked to punish the ringleaders of tobacco workers who had petitioned for a wage rise. Other groups were threatened with conscription as war-workers, subject to military discipline, if they pressed such demands; but the very occurrence of these incidents showed that inflationary pressures were far from contained. Yet the new rates, when they were finally published on 23 July, imposed substantial cuts in the earnings of most workers. During the early 1790s many had seen their wages double or treble as the value of the assignat plummeted, and the 50 per cent above 1790 levels permitted under the maximum fell far short of what they were now making. Nor did they have any effective vehicles of protest by then. The sections had been absorbed into the governmental machine, and throughout April and May the commune had harried the popular societies into oblivion. By the beginning of June most had announced their own dissolution.

  Even dechristianization was now being reversed. There seems to have been general agreement in the governing committees that it had been a disaster, and on 7 April Couthon announced that new proposals would shortly be brought forward for channelling the spiritual leanings of the nation in more patriotic directions. The result was the cult of the Supreme Being, launched by a speech from Robespierre to the Convention on 7 May. Designed as the first of a series of republican festivals to be held on each official rest-day (décadi), it would proclaim that the French people recognized the existence of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. These principles, declared Robespierre to applause, were a continual reminder of justice, and were therefore social and republican. While denouncing priestcraft, he recurred to his heartfelt theme that the purpose of the Republic was to promote virtue, he deplored the excesses (though not in so many words) of dechristianization, and sang the praises of Rousseau, himself the architect of a civic religion. On 20 Prairial (8 June), he moved, the nation should celebrate the Supreme Being. Thus every locality was given a month to make its preparations. The fact that 8 June was also Whit Sunday may or may not have been a coincidence; if not, it could have been conceived either as a challenge or as an olive branch to Christianity. In the event little direction was given to the localities on how to organize the festival. Some adapted the props of all-too-recent festivals of reason, merely painting out old slogans with new ones. Others used the opportunity to allow mass to be said publicly for the first time in months. Surprisingly, in fact, the festival proved quite popular, seemingly because of a widespread expectation that the end of dechristianization would mark the end of Terror itself. In Paris the organization of the occasion was entrusted to the experienced hands of the painter David, himself a member of the Committee of General Security. He built an artificial mountain in the Champ de Mars, surmounted by a tree of liberty, and thither a mass procession made its way from the Tuileries. At its head marched the members of the Convention, led by their president, who happened that week to be Robespierre. He used the opportunity to deliver two more eulogies of virtue and republican religion, pointedly ignoring, though not failing to notice, the smirks of some of his fellow deputies at the posturings of this pseudo-Pope. Others found it no laughing matter. ‘Look at the bugger,’ muttered Thuriot, an old associate of Danton.5 ‘It’s not enough for him to be master, he has to be God.’

  It was a feeling that increasing numbers of deputies, and members of the governing committees too, were coming to share. Ever since the autumn of 1792 Robespierre had been subject to periodic charges of aspiring to personal dictatorship, but now it seemed more credible than ever. He seemed to be speaking for the Committee of Public Safety more and more, and was certainly better known in the country at large than any of his colleagues. At Orléans, as well as in Paris, the Festival of the Supreme Being took place to cries of Vive Robespierre. Two weeks beforehand he had been pursued by two would-be assassins. One of them eventually attacked Collot d’Herbois, but the other got as far as the door of the man she called a tyrant. Both were executed, along with 52 others suspected of involvement in the machinations of Batz, dressed in red, the colour of parricide. The law under which they died was that of 22 Prairial, whose provisions Robespierre largely drafted and, with Couthon, sprang upon an unsuspecting Committee of Public Safety with no prior consultation. Yet the fact that they chose to do it in this way reflected uncertainty about this support. Ever since April, indeed, the Committee had been the scene of increasingly heated quarrels setting Robespierre, Saint-Just, and to a lesser extent Couthon against the rest. At one point they threatened Carnot, who riposted that they were ‘ridiculous dictators’. Yet when on 16 April a special ‘Bureau of General Police’ was established within the Committee to supervise the conduct of public officials, the three were appointed to it—perhaps in the hope of sidelining them. They threw themselves into their new task with characteristic zeal, however, and this served to alarm the Committee of General Security, which regarded the Bureau as trespassing on its own territory, already seriously infringed since the show trials of the spring. All this multiplied Robespierre’s enemies, and the Law of 22 Prairial added even more. Many deputies in the Convention, not to mention members of the two committees, were alarmed by its sweeping terms. They were not reassured when in the debate on the law, Robespierre denounced those who sought to sow division. Remembering how the Dantonists had been arrested without a prior decree from the Convention, they were particularly frightened by a clause overriding all conflicting legislation: they were afraid it might destroy their normal immunity from arrest. Accordingly, on 23 Prairial, a number of those who had scoffed at Robespierre’s prominence at the Festival of the Supreme Being moved a specific guarantee of deputies’ immunity under the new law. It was carried. From that moment onwards, the anti-Robespierre forces began to coalesce.

  He was well aware of what was happening, although he was at a loss to understand it. ‘W
hy come to me?’, he asked one of the petitioners who were always at his door these days.6 ‘Why not apply to the Comité? Every one applies to me, as if I had omnipotent power.’ He concluded, like the good disciple of Rousseau he was, that the purity and rectitude of his intentions were being deliberately vilified and obstructed by a corrupt faction of unpatriotic intriguers. Among them were deputies recalled from provincial missions on account of their excesses—men like Fouché and Tallien—and Dantonists like Thuriot and the ex-butcher Legendre. But when the Committee of Public Safety refused, on 12 June, to be browbeaten into giving him the ‘nine heads’ he believed to be at the heart of the conspiracy against him, he ceased to attend their meetings, confining his public appearances increasingly to the one forum where he knew he could always command support, the Jacobin Club. But the Jacobins were not the power they had been. To take a stand there and not in the Convention was to provoke suspicions of insurrectionary intentions. Suspicion, in fact, suffused the whole of public life during these terrible weeks when there were executions by twenties and thirties almost daily. As many as sixty deputies, it was said, were afraid to sleep in their own beds at night. And yet it was becoming increasingly clear that terror was no longer necessary in order to win the war. The British had failed on 1 June to prevent a major grain convey from arriving from America, and the sinking of the ship of the line Vengeur was turned, in the report made on it to the Convention by Barère, into an epic of republican heroism and defiance. Even more important, on 26 June came the great victory of Fleurus, which opened the way for a renewed invasion of Belgium and removed the last threat from the Austrians. After that everybody was longing to breathe more easily; and so aware were the governing committees of how constant bloodshed in the heart of the city was sickening its inhabitants, that on 14 June the guillotine was moved to the eastern outskirts, where sansculotte hearts were presumed to be harder. Yet with the committees torn apart by mutual suspicions, and dark hints and threats being thrown out by all sides, nobody knew how to end the slaughter, except by annihilating their opponents before they were themselves destroyed.