But the real trigger for widespread counter-terror was the Law of 10 April, under which more zealous local authorities, themselves often nominated by resolutely Thermidorian representatives on mission, not only disarmed suspects but imprisoned them into the bargain. As many as 80,000 or 90,000 people may have spent several weeks or months in custody over the summer of 1795. In most parts of the country they emerged no later than the autumn relatively unscathed. But in the Rhône valley, Provence, and eastern Languedoc, where the Terror had been particularly bloody and traditions of vendetta flourished, the imprisonment of former terrorists proved an invitation to massacre them. Thus on 4 May in blood-drenched Lyons, the prisons were systematically attacked by huge crowds and between 100 and 120 of their inmates hacked to death. A week later 60 prisoners perished similarly in Aix, 24 in Tarascon on 25 May, and on 5 June a further 100 were dispatched in Marseilles, with the open connivance of a representative on mission. At Toulon, whose naval activity soon restored patriotic zeal after its recapture from the British, rumours of reactionary anarchy further west led the arsenal workers to organize a pro-Jacobin march on Marseilles to cries of Vive la Montagne! Thousands set out on 17 May, but a week later they were dispersed by a mixed force of regular troops and National Guards, and in addition to the 40 or 50 killed then another 52 were sent to the guillotine by a special military commission established to try those involved. And these were only the most spectacular incidents. Isolated murders, beatings, and other atrocities became commonplace throughout the south-east over the summer, perpetrated mostly by gangs of young men much like the Parisian Gilded Youth in their elaborate and ostentatious clothing, arrays of offensive weapons, and determination to evade conscription. Altogether they accounted for perhaps 2,000 victims throughout the south-east in 1795. Nor did their activities stop after the initial explosion of May. In June, in fact, they were spurred on by news of further upheavals in Paris.
Warned by the great demonstration in Germinal, the Convention decreed the supplementation of bread rations in Paris with rice and biscuits when it was deficient: but the still chronic shortage of fuel meant that rice remained uncookable, and meanwhile the bread shortage got worse. There were simply no untapped reserves of grain anywhere in France, and British control of the sea kept supplies from abroad completely uncertain. Thus rations in Paris continued to diminish in April and May, and only the weather improved. ‘All Paris’, noted a diarist on 22 April,13 ‘has been reduced today to a quarter pound of bread each. Never has Paris found itself in such distress’; but by the beginning of May it was down to two ounces. Populist gestures like the execution of Fouquier-Tinville and other personnel of the Revolutionary Tribunal on 7 May failed to divert the starving populace. As news came in of victorious peace signed with Holland, with Prussia, and with Spain all people asked was why the nation which could dictate to Europe was unable to feed its own citizens. Frantic women threw accusations of cowardice at their menfolk for not storming the Convention and insisting on more bread at whatever cost, while royalists continued to fish in these troubled waters by insinuating that only a king could restore abundance. As before the Germinal demonstration, however, it was the remnants of the sansculottes who were most listened to, and this time they began to organize themselves for a more effective journée. Sectional assemblies began to meet regularly, as in the old days, some declared themselves to be in permanent session, and by 15 May rumours were rife that a new explosion was imminent. On the nineteenth the signal was given by the publication of an anonymous pamphlet entitled People’s Insurrection to Obtain Bread and Recover our Rights, and the next morning the familiar sound of the tocsin was heard in the eastern working districts north and south of the river. In the revolutionary calendar it was 1 Prairial.
Urged on by frenzied women, men left their workshops and began marching on the Convention hall. ‘Everybody’, the same diarist noted,14 ‘was in a massacring mood’, and it was not improved when the first groups to arrive were driven out of the public galleries by attendants with whips. But by early afternoon the Convention was surrounded by armed National Guards from the Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel districts, and when the deputy Féraud and a group of colleagues tried to stop them entering the hall, he was shot. The crowd then hacked off his head and burst through the doors carrying it on a pike, to the sound of more shots and cries of Bread and the Constitution of 1793! And once inside, the insurgents demanded more: the release of imprisoned patriots, permanent sessions in the sections, reintegration of an independent Paris commune, compulsory food searches, the arrest of returned émigrés and of deputies who persecuted Jacobins. Vive la Montagne! they cried, and this time their force seemed so overwhelming that the deputies of the ‘Crest’, so far from asking them to leave, publicly took up their demands. But earlier in the day the governing committees had issued a general appeal for troops and armed citizens to come to the Convention’s rescue, and while excited Montagnards were compromising themselves inside the hall loyal forces were massing outside. When motions to remodel or disband the committees began to be put, these forces were called in, and around midnight they at last drove the sansculottes from the hall with some violence, although no further shots were fired. But the crisis was still far from over. Throughout the small hours the insurgents issued appeals for reinforcements to the sansculottes of Saint-Antoine, and the National Guards of the eastern sections responded by bringing out their artillery. By mid-afternoon on 21 May they were drawn up outside the Convention with a crowd of 20,000 in support. Perhaps twice that number confronted them, but they were not all reliable: at one point some of their gunners defected to the other side. Yet nobody was keen to open fire. Although there were plenty of regular troops on the Convention’s side, there were also thousands of ordinary citizens barely distinguishable from those who faced them, and just as hungry. So when the Convention declared itself willing to receive a petition the insurgents seized the opportunity with obvious relief. It asked once more for bread and the constitution of 1793, and the former at least was solemnly promised. The rebels dispersed.
They had lost the initiative, and they never regained it. The Convention had already shown in the early hours, once the hall had been cleared of intruders, what it really thought of the sansculottes’ demands by burning the record of all the votes taken under popular duress, and decreeing the arrest of the eleven Montagnard deputies who had moved them. Many thought (and some historians still think) that the governing committees deliberately allowed the Crest time to incriminate itself before unleashing their own forces. But once they had done so the Montagnards’ fate was certain. Accused not merely of taking advantage of the attempted insurrection but also (quite unjustifiably) of planning it, they were sent for trial before a special commission on 12 June. One of them killed himself beforehand, and his example gave the others a lead when the inevitable conviction was pronounced on 17 June. Six were condemned to death, but four cheated the guillotine by stabbing themselves as they were led from the court, in what they appear to have planned in advance as an ultimate act of exemplary patriotic defiance. By then, too, they knew about the vengeance visited on those they had sought to lead on 1 Prairial. The very day after the confrontation of 21 May, the Convention gave orders to surround the entire Saint-Antoine district. As regular troops moved slowly up, some sections hesitated to commit their National Guards to a plainly punitive action, especially in concert with jubilant Muscadins now massing outside the barricades thrown up by the district’s inhabitants. A first attempt by the Muscadins to invade the area was repulsed. But as the ring tightened, outside sections came into line behind the Convention’s demand that the murderers of Féraud should be given up, along with all arms. The next morning the three surrounded sections recognized that there could be no successful resistance. They surrendered, and within days Féraud’s assassins had been guillotined. Nor did repression end there. The commission which condemned the Montagnard deputies also executed 36 others, among them the gunners who had gone over to
the rebels on 21 May; perhaps 3,000 suspects were arrested by the Convention’s decree; and all the sections obediently disarmed or arrested dubious individuals whom they were invited to identify—almost another 3,000 persons in all. For years afterwards, whenever the political pendulum swung to the right, these same individuals would be rearrested as potentially dangerous characters. But most of them had only been dangerous in the context of an organized popular movement: and that, emasculated in 1794, was finally destroyed for ever by the failure of this last sansculotte insurrection in 1795.
Naturally there was no question now of implementing the constitution of 1793—if indeed there ever had been. Already in February leading deputies had agreed that it would be completely unworkable and needed total revision—and now it was also a standard of rebellion. Yet the Convention remained aware that, like the Constituent before it, its basic reason for existence was to present France with a constitution that would give stable and enduring expression to the Revolution’s ideals. But did that aspiration exclude monarchy? Reporting before the spring uprisings to the Emperor in Vienna, the well-informed Swiss journalist Mallet du Pan estimated that there was ‘no formed public opinion; neither monarchy, nor Republic; but everyone wants to establish a stable government, of whatever sort, that will end the Revolution. No uniform view on the nature of this government; the secret and most general wish is certainly in favour of royalty, but limited royalty, and undecided on which monarch to choose’.15 Monarchist sentiment clearly burgeoned during the economic distress of the spring, and some more conservative deputies seem to have hoped that Louis XVII, brought up by sound constitutionalists, might yet become an acceptable monarch. But on 8 June the 10-year-old orphan died of scrofula, the very disease so many in 1775 had still believed his father’s touch could cure. The Count de Provence, who ever since the execution of Louis XVI had styled himself regent of France, at once proclaimed himself Louis XVIII; and on 25 June, from his exile in Verona, he issued a declaration which completely destroyed any hope of agreement with the men who ruled the kingdom he claimed. In it he announced that once restored he would bring back the three orders in society, the Church, and in fact the whole old regime with the exception of certain unspecified ‘abuses’. There would be no taxation without the consent of the Estates-General, but he made no promises about how often they would meet. Nor did he mention the crucial issue of the national lands. He did offer an amnesty to his erring subjects, but not to regicide deputies. In short he did nothing to reassure anybody whose support would be essential for a successful restoration, and cut the ground even from under constitutional monarchists who hoped for a return to something like the constitution of 1791. He made a Bourbon restoration by agreement impossible. Yet in June 1795 that scarcely seemed to matter. Confident counter-revolutionaries were about to attempt it by force.
13
Counter-Revolution, 1789–1795
In its intransigence and blindness to political realities, even favourable ones, the Declaration of Verona typified the whole history of the counter-revolution. As a movement, counter-revolution began as soon as there was a revolution to counter. Once launched, of course, it sought and found justification from a wide range of conservative ideas current before 1789; but it took the creation of a new regime, itself appealing to new justifications, to focus these strains into a counter-revolutionary outlook. It was not, therefore, until the third week in June 1789, when the third estate and a few country priests had laid claim to sovereignty in the name of the Nation, that anything properly deserving the name of counter-revolution came into existence. The Royal Session of 23 June, when populist concessions devised by Necker were amended without his knowledge by the queen, Artois, and sympathetic fellow ministers, was the first serious attempt to halt the Revolution and reverse some of its achievements. The programme announced then by Louis XVI was not without concessions to the revolutionary spirit, in granting no taxation without consent, regular meetings of the Estates-General, abrogation of binding mandates, individual and press freedom, and a number of other fiscal, administrative, and legal reforms. But the smirks of the noble deputies as they heard these proposals expounded in the context of the continued separation of the three orders, maintenance of honorific privileges and feudal rights, and rejection of the momentous claims made over the preceding week by the third estate to national sovereignty showed clearly enough that they thought the revolutionary drift had been stemmed. For the rest of the revolutionary decade the programme of 23 June would represent the most that the princes who led the forces of counter-revolution were prepared to concede should they regain power. Many of their followers proved unwilling to go even that far, dreaming of a complete restoration of the old regime, and they in turn would bitterly resent the arrival in counter-revolutionary ranks of men whose break with the hated movement came later, sometimes much later, and who until the moment of defection had accepted its work or tried to arrest its course from within. From the start, counter-revolution was no more of a unity than the revolution it opposed.
Although defeated by the third estate’s defiance and the king’s weakness after the Royal Session, the party of the queen and Artois did not give up hope of recapturing control until after 14 July. Indeed, it was they who engineered the dismissal of Necker which triggered off the popular explosion culminating in the fall of the Bastille. But once that happened they saw no further hope of achieving their aims from within France. On the night of 17 July Artois and a handful of friends stole out of Versailles and made their way with the help of a royal passport to the Austrian Netherlands. They did not expect to be away long, although characteristically they do not seem to have thought at all clearly about what circumstances it might be acceptable to return in, or how they would be brought about. But their example proved infectious. By early August, many of the greater courtiers had also left the country, along with a number of lesser nobles alarmed by the castle-burning and threats of personal violence that marked those panic-stricken weeks in the countryside. The failure of the monarchiens to lay the foundations of a British-style constitution of checks and balances induced yet more to go; and the renewed popular violence of the October Days produced a massive surge in applications for passports. By then, committees of French émigrés were established just beyond the whole length of the French frontier—in Brussels, in Trier, in Mainz, in Basle, in Geneva, in Nice. Artois, finding the Austrian Netherlands scarcely less disturbed than France and his brother-in-law Joseph II less than warm about his presence there, made his way in September to Turin, where his wife’s father ruled. There he established a committee of great lords and other nobles to co-ordinate counter-revolutionary activity. At first it merely petitioned crowned heads for support, but was politely brushed off. Nobody had much experience of public or international affairs. But soon Artois secured the help of somebody who had: Calonne, who, after fleeing to England in 1787 to escape prosecution by the parlement of Paris, had married a rich heiress and was now prepared to put his wealth and expertise at the service of the monarchy he had vainly sought to save from the difficulties it was now in. After initial resistance from Victor Amadeus III, who feared French reprisals in the form of attacks on Savoy or Nice, Calonne was eventually brought to Turin in November 1790, having already advised the émigré princes and served as their plenipotentiary in London for the best part of a year.
By then the first signs of counter-revolution had begun to appear within France. In December 1789 the Marquis de Favras, a former soldier with no contacts in Turin but ambiguous links with Provence, the royal brother who had not emigrated, was arrested as he conspired to rescue Louis XVI from Paris with an armed band who would spirit him to the frontier. Favras was hanged for treason in February 1790—incidentally the first noble to suffer the commoners’ capital penalty. During the trial the king felt it prudent to make a public avowal before the Assembly of his loyalty to the constitution, much to the fury of the émigrés when they heard about it.
Although we had long been
prepared for it [wrote the Prince de Condé to Calonne] we were as sensitive as you may imagine to this excessive humiliation of the head of our house. A step such as this, whatever effort may be made to give it the appearance of a liberty which does not exist, manifests to such a degree a character of constraint, of prison, and consequently of nullity, that both our patriotism and our attachment to the king’s person engage us not to slacken our efforts, but on the contrary to redouble them, to preserve the kingdom from the annihilation of the monarch and the monarchy … 1
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 43