The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  In mid-July one last attempt was made to restore unity, if not exactly harmony. Barère, always the trimmer, arranged a joint meeting of the governing committees on the twenty-second at which it was agreed to speed up the implementation of the Laws of Ventôse. The Convention and the Jacobin Club were assured afterwards that, notwithstanding previous appearances to the contrary, the republic still had a united government. But at another joint meeting the next day, Robespierre reappeared for the first time in almost a month and made bitter personal attacks on Billaud, Collot, Amar, and Vadier. He did endorse the new joint policies, but after his earlier outburst any truce could scarcely be expected to last. Deputies outside the committees were, however, terrified that the newly trumpeted unity might be real, and lead to a purge of those on Robespierre’s proscription list. Fouché and Tallien now launched themselves into feverish lobbying among the uncommitted deputies of what had once been known, in contradistinction to the Mountain, as the Plain, but whose inertia as the rhythm of the Terror in the capital increased again had won them the less flattering description of the ‘Marsh’. But Robespierre, too, thought he could swing the Convention, and on 26 July he reappeared there to deliver a long, rambling speech, naming few names but full of threats against seemingly everybody. After extolling his own probity and love of virtue in now characteristic fashion, he declared that there existed a ‘conspiracy against public liberty’ involving unspecified numbers of deputies, the Committee of General Security, and even some members of the Committee of Public Safety. These ‘traitors’ must be punished, their ‘factions’ crushed. Both committees must be purged, for ‘defenders of liberty will always be proscribed so long as power lies with a horde of knaves’.

  It was a declaration of war; and, realizing now that their lives might depend on a rapid counter-attack, Robespierre’s enemies took up the challenge. First there was a noisy debate over whether his speech should be printed, and if so in what quantity. Accusations of dictatorship were now renewed by those whom he had attacked, amid clear signs of sympathy from the deputies as a whole. That night Robespierre read his speech again to the Jacobins, who tumultuously refused to allow Billaud and Collot to reply to it. On Couthon’s motion they voted to expel all deputies who had been against printing the speech, and there was vague talk of a new purge of the Convention. Billaud and Collot, both shaking with fury, went straight to the committees, and they seem to have spent most of the night preparing for the inevitable confrontation next morning. Among deputies outside the committees, Tallien was doing the same, aware that Collot, currently president of the Convention, could choose who spoke and when. The strength of feeling became clear on the morning of 27 July—9 Thermidor—when Saint-Just, who had been little involved in the growing factionalism of the preceding weeks, unexpectedly came out for Robespierre. Billaud denounced him in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, and Tallien from the floor. They were cheered; but when Robespierre demanded the right to speak, he was drowned out by cries of Down with the tyrant! Collot consistently refused him the floor, while attack after attack whipped the deputies into a frenzy. Eventually his arrest was proposed. His brother Augustin demanded to be arrested with him, and the Convention obliged. Others proposed the arrest of Couthon, who had also stood by him, and Saint-Just. All were decreed. So was that of Hanriot, commander of the Paris National Guard.

  It was a parliamentary rout. Robespierre, shut away in his rue Saint-Honoré lodgings for most of the preceding month, had fatally overestimated his support among the deputies, while in his speech of 27 July he had attacked so many of them directly or indirectly that none could feel entirely safe. But repudiation by the Convention was not quite the end of Robespierre. The evening of the twenty-sixth had shown that he still commanded support from the Jacobin Club and its public galleries; and the commune, remodelled after the fall of the Hébertists, was largely packed by his nominees. There was still, therefore, a chance that Paris, where he had consistently relied on popular support since the spring of 1791, would rally to him. And initially the commune did not fail him. On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth it ordered all gaolers in the capital to refuse to accept the prisoners, and Hanriot was allowed to escape. While he tried to marshal his National Guards for an insurrection, the arrested deputies were taken into the commune’s protection at the Hôtel de Ville. But only 17 out of 48 sectional National Guard companies responded to Hanriot’s call and assembled on the place de Grève. Some of the others wavered, but when the Convention took decisive action they quickly accepted its authority. On the proposal of Barère, the prisoners, presumed to have escaped, were outlawed. Under a provision ironically first moved by Saint-Just, that meant they could be executed without trial. And forces loyal to the Convention were given a commander in Barras, who had distinguished himself at the siege of Toulon. Faced by such determination, and finding itself unable to arouse most of the sections from hostility or indifference, the commune hesitated. Over the evening, such forces as it had assembled made it clear that they would only now obey the Convention. So when Barras and his troops arrived at the Hôtel de Ville at two in the morning on 29 July, they encountered no defenders. In the confusion as they burst into the building Robespierre was shot, whether by his own hand or another’s is uncertain. But the bullet had only broken his jaw; and it was in this maimed state that he went to the guillotine, hurriedly moved back to the city centre for the occasion, the next afternoon. He died with a scream of agony as the executioner tore the bandage from his wound. But when his head fell, a bitter enemy later recalled, the spectators applauded for more than fifteen minutes.

  His brother, Couthon, Saint-Just, and eighty other ‘Robespierrists’ from the commune followed him over the next 24 hours. ‘About sixty persons’, noted the Irish political exile Hamilton Rowan,7 who watched the spectacle, ‘were guillotined in less than one hour and a half, in the Place de la Revolution; and though I was standing above a hundred paces from the place of execution, the blood of the victims streamed beneath my feet. What surprised me was, as each head fell into the basket, the cry of the people was no other than a repetition of “A bas le Maximum!”’ The new tariff for wages published earlier that week was certainly not the only reason why the sections did not respond to the commune’s insurrectionary call. The crisis had arisen too suddenly, and there had been no prior planning. And, told by the Convention that Robespierre had been aiming at tyranny and dictatorship, a populace that had meekly accepted what it had been told about the machinations of the Hébertists and Dantonists was unprepared to stir to save yet another idol shown to have feet of clay. Even so, the imposition of the wage maximum by the Robespierrist commune only a few days before the crisis broke alienated ordinary Parisians at a crucial moment, and their notorious taste for scapegoats was satisfied by the destruction of Robespierre and his municipal henchmen. As to Robespierre himself, he never was a dictator, and there is no reliable evidence to suggest that it was his aim. But he was suspicious by nature, and over the spring the stresses of government drove him to the verge of paranoia. Surrounded by rumours of plots, not to mention assassination attempts, yet completely sure of his own rectitude, he took contradiction for bad faith and independence for opportunism. In the end he seems to have concluded that hardly anybody in public life could be relied on, and by saying so openly he ensured that they could not. And by implying that those of whom he disapproved or with whom he disagreed deserved execution, he forced them into destroying him before he destroyed them. Men called him a dictator because they feared moral inflexibility in one who had power. After they had destroyed him they used the charge to justify what they had done. It also enabled them to blame him for acts they themselves had helped to commit, but which became increasingly a subject for shame, recrimination, and revenge during the months of retreat from terror and ruthless government which now began.

  The ninth of Thermidor marked not so much the overthrow of one man or group of men as the rejection of a form of government. Those who thought other
wise were swiftly disillusioned. When Barère, who tried on 29 July to dismiss the whole episode as ‘a disturbance which leaves the government unaffected’, proposed nominees to replace the three executed members of the Committee of Public Safety, his motion was defeated. Instead the Convention accepted Tallien’s proposal that a quarter of the Committee should retire every month, and not be eligible for immediate reelection. It did for the moment reject a motion to abolish the Revolutionary Tribunal, but that anybody should so much as dare to propose it showed how totally the atmosphere had changed. Soon all the Convention’s committees were subjected to the same renewal rule, and among the first new members of that of Public Safety was Tallien himself. Former friends of Danton joined him there, and on the Committee of General Security. On 1 August the remodelled committees carried the repeal of the Law of 22 Prairial, and on the tenth they purged the membership of the Revolutionary Tribunal, arresting Fouquier-Tinville. As a result the Terror collapsed. Only 6 people were guillotined in Paris in August, and only 40 more over the rest of the year. Counter-revolutionary intent now had to be proved to secure a conviction. The difficulties of that rendered superfluous much of the work and powers of the watch committees, which on 24 August were reduced from 48 to 12 in Paris, and one per district elsewhere. In all this the initiative increasingly came from the Convention floor, and on 11 August the Committee of Public Safety was deprived, against its own advice tendered by Barère, of its overall superintending role in government. All its duties except war and foreign relations were redistributed to other committees. Thus, within a month of Robespierre’s fall, the central institutions of Terror and Revolutionary Government had been dismantled by a Convention increasingly certain that they were no longer necessary.

  There was an outburst of relief throughout the country. The second anniversary of the revolution of 10 August was celebrated with now uncharacteristic abandon. But the most spectacular evidence of changed times, apart from the drop in executions, was the release of suspects from prison. From the start it was generally expected, and excited crowds gathered daily outside prison gates and the doors of the Committee of General Security. In Paris it began early in August, and by the end of the month 3,500 prisoners had been set free. They emerged from custody bitter and resentful against those who had put them there—for the most part fellow citizens on the watch committees, now stigmatized as terrorists. They wanted revenge. When on 31 August a gunpowder factory at Grenelle, in the south-western suburbs, blew up with around 400 casualties, nervous terrorists saw it as the first act of vengeance. It seems in fact to have been an accident. What was not accidental was the emergence around the same time of squads of anti-sansculotte vigilantes, the so-called ‘Gilded Youth’. Some were released prisoners themselves; some were draft-dodgers; many were clerks and petty bureaucrats, and all were looking for trouble. Affecting expensive clothes and hairstyles of a sort few would have dared to wear only a few weeks earlier, they came to number two or three thousand. They made it their business to harass known terrorists, disrupt their meetings, and break up public occasions of which they did not approve. One of the leading plotters against Robespierre, the ex-representative on mission at Toulon, Fréron, gave them open encouragement in his newspaper, L’Orateur du peuple, which began to appear early in September, and soon was co-ordinating the marauding of this private street army. But his was far from the only voice now denouncing the excesses of the Terror and those who had perpetrated them. A whole range of right-wing papers mushroomed in Paris throughout August and September, leading to calls in the Convention and the Jacobin Club for a curb on their incitements. The ‘Thermidorians’, as Tallien, Fréron, and the others who had triumphed in that revolutionary month were now coming to be known, responded with a loud defence of press freedom. Those wishing to limit it were, they said (in the title of a pamphlet published late in August), Robespierre’s Tail, blood-drinkers who wanted a return of government by terror. On 29 August an open attack was launched in the Convention on leading terrorists in the committees who had only turned against Robespierre at the last moment: the impeachment of Barère, Billaud, Collot, Vadier, Amar, and David was proposed. Once again this was going too far, too fast, for the Convention. It refused to indict them and, to demonstrate its continuing commitment to radicalism, it ordered the remains of Mirabeau to be removed from the Pantheon, and those of Marat to replace them. Rousseau’s body was also ordered to be exhumed and deposited there. Encouraged by these signs, the Jacobin Club took the offensive. On 4 September it expelled Tallien and Fréron. A few days later Tallien was attacked in the street.

  All this, the Thermidorians claimed, was the beginning of a return to terror. The Grenelle explosion was Jacobin work! Fréron now turned his gangs against the club, and for the first time in France (though not of course abroad) the term ‘Jacobin’ became one of general opprobrium, associated indelibly with terror and the ‘dictator’ who had so long dominated the club’s platform. Sectional assemblies which supported the Jacobin line were mobbed by well-dressed rowdies who roughed up their leaders. And at this point, if any reminder was needed of what terror had been like, a group of alleged Federalists from Nantes came before the Revolutionary Tribunal and were acquitted. During their examination lurid details of the drownings at Nantes under Carrier emerged, enough to indict the members of the Nantes revolutionary committee who had been his collaborators and induce the Convention to establish an investigation of Carrier himself—who, as a deputy, remained immune from arrest unless on the Convention’s explicit decree. Such developments were a godsend to the Thermidorians, who now stepped up their anti-Jacobin pressure. Early in October Tallien founded a paper of his own, L’Ami du citoyen, while in the Convention Legendre once more moved the impeachment of Barère, Billaud, and Collot. Again they were saved, this time by colleagues on the former Committee of Public Safety whom nobody yet wished to attack, including Carnot, who testified that all members had endorsed the reign of terror. But the pressure was working for all that. On 16 October it was decreed that all clubs and societies should publish lists of their members, and all correspondence between them was forbidden. Everybody knew that the measure was intended to destroy the national network of affiliates which gave the Jacobin Club such authority, and lists of members identified whom to attack. When early in November Billaud uttered threats against the club’s enemies from the rostrum where he and Robespierre had so often dictated national policy, a crowd of Muscadins marched from their usual meeting place at the Palais Égalité (formerly Royal) and broke every window of the building with showers of stones. Two day later (12 November) they returned in their hundreds, stormed the hall, and beat up both men and women they found inside. The Convention, which had just decreed Carrier’s arrest, was in no mood to sympathize. Instead of punishing the attackers, it ordered the closure of the Jacobin Club as an incitement to public disorder, and a potential rival to itself. But, in effect, street violence had triumphed. Within days, noted a police spy, it was ‘enough simply to have the look of a Jacobin to be called after, insulted and even beaten up’.8

  In the provinces reaction to the fall of Revolutionary Government was slower. Not all special courts disappeared when revolutionary justice was centralized in Paris. Some of the most notorious were set up after that, such as the Popular Commission at Orange, whose rules were the model for the Law of 22 Prairial, and which accounted for 332 victims between June and August. It and several others, notably in the west, continued to function for five or six weeks after 9 Thermidor and continued to hand down death sentences. But soon new representatives on mission were sent out to the departments to supervise the dismantling of the Terror, and with the decree of 24 August reducing the watch committees to one per district, thousands of provincial terrorists were thrust from public office. Soon afterwards those they had imprisoned began to be released. Many of them, or their friends or relatives, now took power in remodelled popular societies and municipal councils, and at once began to imprison their former persecutors
. By the first week in September, for instance, the members of the Orange Commission were behind bars. And when it became clear, during the autumn, that the tide in Paris had set against the former terrorists, provincials were quick enough to take the hint. Suddenly, noted a British prisoner aboard the warship Marat at Brest, early in December, the sailors had stopped shouting Vive la Montagne! and Vivent les Jacobins! That was now forbidden, a cabin-boy told him. Now they were to shout The Mountain to the devil! and Down with the Jacobins! But the ultimate symbol of reaction, for both capital and departments, was not so much the closure of the Jacobins as the fate of that supreme provincial terrorist, Carrier. On 23 November he was sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal, protesting to the last that he had only been obeying the Convention’s own orders at Nantes, and that the whole body was guilty ‘down to the president’s bell’. It availed him nothing. He was condemned and, on 16 December, guillotined. His defence was perhaps fair enough, and he was certainly not responsible for all the atrocities attributed to him. But in sacrificing him the Convention set an ominous example. A week before he died the 71 Girondin sympathizers saved by Robespierre from the guillotine in October 1793 (including the hapless Tom Paine) were reinstated as full members of the Convention. The political turnabout was now complete; but the return of the Girondins and the elimination of the most notorious of terrorists were not harbingers of a return to restraint and consensus. So far from reconciliation, 1795 was to be a year of revenge.