The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  He had played no part in the selection of deputies, not having been chosen as an Elector of the Cordeliers District. But once it became clear that French society was, indeed, upon the verge of upheaval he realized that he must throw himself into the struggle if he were to survive as a successful lawyer. He did so with a fervour that astonished those who knew him at home in the Rue des Cordeliers, at the tables of the Café Procope and in the courts where he pleaded his cases.

  I saw my colleague, Danton, whom I had always known as a man of sound judgement, gentle character, modest and silent [wrote a fellow lawyer who came across him in the Cordeliers District the day before the attack on the Bastille]. Imagine my surprise at seeing him standing on a table, declaiming wildly, calling the citizens to arms to repel 15,000 brigands assembled at Montmartre and an army of 30,000 poised to sack Paris and slaughter its inhabitants…I went up to him to ask what all the fuss was about as I had just come from Versailles and everything was perfectly calm and orderly there. He replied that I did not understand anything, that the people had risen against despotism. ‘Join us,’ he said. ‘The throne is overturned and your old position lost.’

  If Danton had ever been the gentle, modest and silent man that this colleague of his describes, he was certainly not so now and was never to be again. His loud, harsh voice was to be heard everywhere in the District, and became as familiar as his bulky frame and his scarred and pock-marked face. He spoke with a controlled vehemence, a mastery of improvisation and a wonderful command of vivid language and dramatic gesture, the words tumbling out of his mouth so fast, and on occasions so ambiguously, that it was difficult to remember afterwards what he had said, or to gather exactly what he had meant. But it was impossible not to admire the skill of his passionate delivery. He soon became one of the leading figures among the revolutionaries of the troublesome Cordeliers District; and, though he preferred to work through others rather than to appear to have assumed such power within it, he gained a dominating influence over the Cordeliers Club. He was also appointed commander of the Cordeliers battalion of the National Guard.

  In his attempts to gain recognition for his talents on a wider stage, however, Danton was not so successful. He was not elected to the Legislative Assembly, and it was not until the end of 1791 that, after repeated attempts, he managed to obtain a minor post as assistant procureur in the Paris Commune. The trouble was that his motives were frequently in question; he was accused at various times of working for the Duc d’Orléans, for Mirabeau, and – like Mirabeau – for the Court. It was even rumoured that he was deeply involved with a gang of forgers. Madame Roland, who did not like him and who evidently found his overt sexuality disturbing, said that he once boasted to her that, since the Revolution began, he had managed to acquire a fortune of one and a half million livres. And another witness recorded that at a dinner party Danton, who was drunk, had shocked his fellow-guests by declaring that the Revolution ought to be treated like a battle in which the victors shared the loot; that the time had come for them to enjoy splendid houses and fine food, ‘handsome clothes and the women of their dreams’. Certainly, in 1791 Danton, who loved the pleasures of life, began spending money on such a scale and buying land so extensively in Champagne that it was impossible to believe that his resources were derived, as he claimed they were, from the compensation he received for the loss of his office as avocat aux Conseils du Roi. It seems now more than likely that he was, indeed, like Mirabeau for a time in the pay of the Court; that – as Mirabeau had done – he made violently effective speeches on issues which were not fundamental to the royalist cause but which established his radical credentials; and that he chose to attack Lafayette, for instance, in the way that he did because Lafayette was disliked by both the sans-culottes and by the Court. If the Revolution failed, he could then retire to a country life in Champagne with his pockets well lined; if it succeeded, he had not lost the opportunity of guiding its future and of establishing in France that more equitable society which it would be unjust to him to suppose he did not in his heart desire. On the eve of the attack on the Tuileries he went home to Arcis-sur-Aube to settle some private business and to arrange for pensions to be paid to his mother and his former nurse in case the attack led to his downfall. Soon afterwards his immediate fears were allayed. The journée of 10 August succeeded in its purpose, and Danton, recognized as a man with unique influence in the sections, became Minister of Justice.

  He was, in fact, far more than that: he was ‘the vehement tribune of the people’, the ‘Mirabeau of the mob’, the ‘voice of the Revolution’, indispensable to the Girondins, as one of their supporters admitted, the one man whose oratory and intelligence could save them from their enemies. It was he alone among the new Ministers who exercised a commanding influence in the Insurrectionary Commune which was a far more powerful body than the Girondin Government itself; it was he who guided the policies of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of War as well as those of the Ministry of Justice; it was among his friends in the Cordeliers Club that were found many of the emissaries who were sent out into the provinces to reconcile the people to the new administration in Paris and to justify the events of 10 August.

  In Paris there was widespread fear that royalist conspirators, ecclesiastical spies and other counter-revolutionaries might combine to ensure that the lives lost on that day would be sacrificed in vain. And there were insistent demands that the army must be purged of officers who might desert to the enemy – as Lafayette did on 17 August – and that all the other enemies of the Revolution must be rounded up and punished. Vigilance Committees were established in the sections; internal passports were suspended; hundreds of suspects, including many recalcitrant priests, were arrested and imprisoned. The call for more violent measures became irresistible when news reached Paris towards the end of the month that the frontier fortress of Longwy had fallen after so weak and brief a resistance that treachery seemed unquestionable. With Verdun now in danger and with reports received of a conservative uprising in La Vendée, Danton insisted in the Assembly that the time had come ‘to tell the people that they must throw themselves upon their enemies en masse’. He proposed that all men fit for military service should be called up and sent to the front, that house to house searches should be carried out in a hunt for both arms and men in hiding. ‘The tocsin that will ring will be no mere signal for alarm; it will sound the charge against the enemies of the nation,’ he declared in the most passionate and most often quoted of all his speeches. ‘To deflect them, Messieurs, we need boldness, and again boldness and always boldness; and France will then be saved.’ As though echoing his words, recruiting posters appeared that day on the walls of the city under the call, ‘To arms, citizens! The enemy is at our gates.’

  From those who feared that this might actually be so there were now repeated cries for the extermination of all those dangerous opponents of the Revolution within the gates as well as those outside them. In support of these demands, Marat in his L’Ami du peuple, Hébert in Le Père Duchesne, Louis Fréron in L’Orateur du peuple and other propagandists advocated in their newspapers an attack on the prisoners being held in the Paris gaols. These gaols were overcrowded; they were ill supervised by corrupt warders, nearly all of whom could be bribed; escapes from them were common; within their walls worked forgers producing those streams of false assignats which were held responsible for rising prices and soaring inflation. Through their unlocked doors, it was suggested, there would flood a horde of counter-revolutionaries, together with criminals in their pay, who would fall upon the families of volunteers once their homes had been left unprotected. ‘Let the blood of the traitors flow,’ cried Marat. ‘That is the only way to save the country.’

  An organized attack upon the prisons had therefore been expected by the authorities for some time. The day after the march on the Tuileries two police officers warned Santerre as commander of the Paris National Guard that a plan was ‘afoot to enter all the prisons of Paris, take out all the pris
oners and give them prompt justice’. Since then several other warnings had been received, and the nervous, panicky atmosphere in Paris had been intensified by pamphlets, scattered all over the city, headed, The Great Treason of Louis Capet [the King], and revealing the ‘discovery of a plot for assassinating all good citizens during the night between the 2nd and 3rd of this month’. So neither the police nor the National Guard were much surprised when on the fine afternoon of Sunday, 2 September a party of recalcitrant priests who were being taken in six hackney coaches to the prison known as L’Abbaye by an escort of fédérés from Brittany, Avignon and Marseilles, were attacked by a mob between the Rue Dauphine and the Carrefour Bussy. The leader of the mob rushed up to one of the carriages and plunged his sabre twice through the open window. As the passers-by gasped in horror, he waved the reddened blade at them and shouted, ‘So, this frightens you, does it, you cowards? You must get used to the sight of death!’ He then slashed at the prisoners again, cutting open the face of one, the shoulder of another, and slicing off the hand of a fourth who endeavoured to protect his head. Others of the mob then joined in the attack, as did some of the fédérés; and soon blood was dripping from all the carriages as the horses dragged them on their way to the doors of the prison. Here another mob was waiting; and when those prisoners who had escaped unscathed or only slightly wounded tried to escape inside, nearly all of them were cut down and killed before they could reach safety.

  The same afternoon another small gang of armed men burst into the garden of the Carmelite Convent off the Rue de Vaugirard where about 150 priests, who had been held prisoner for the past fortnight, were gathered under guard, several of them reading their office. The men advanced upon them, calling out for the Archbishop of Arles. One of the priests went forward to meet them, demanding a fair trial for himself and his fellow-prisoners. A shot was fired and his shoulder was smashed. The Archbishop, after praying for a moment on his knees, then went towards the men himself. ‘I am the man you are looking for,’ he said, and was immediately struck across the face with a sword. As he fell to the ground a pike was plunged through his chest. At that moment an officer of the National Guard appeared and managed to get the priests away to the nearby church where they gave each other absolution. While they were saying prayers for the dying, the armed gang broke through the door and dragged the priests out in pairs to slaughter them in the garden. After several had been killed a man with an air of authority arrived at the church calling out, ‘Don’t kill them so quickly. We are meant to try them.’ Thereafter each priest was summoned before a makeshift tribunal before being executed. He was asked if he was now prepared to take the constitutional oath and when he said that he was not – as all of them did – he was taken away to be killed. Some bodies were removed in carts, the rest thrown down a well from which their broken skeletons were recovered seventy years later.

  These murders were the first of numerous other massacres which took place in the prisons of Paris over the next five days. At the seminary of St Firmin in the Rue Saint-Victor where other refractory priests were held; at La Grande and La Petite Force where men and women convicted of civil offences were incarcerated; at Les Bernardins whose prisoners were mainly men condemned to the galleys; at La Salpêtrière, a house of correction for female offenders; at Bicêtre, a prison hospital for the poor and the mad, as well as at Le Châtelet, the prison for common criminals – indeed in all the prisons of Paris except the Sainte-Pélagie, which was for debtors, and the Saint-Lazare, for prostitutes – gangs of citizens, later to be known as septembriseurs, broke in armed with swords, pikes, hatchets and iron bars and set about their work, resting from time to time to drink wine or eat the meals which their women brought to them ‘to sustain them, so they said, in their hard labours’.

  A prisoner at the Abbaye, Jourgniac de Saint-Méard, recorded how those whose cells had not yet been broken into heard with horror the screams of the victims and waited in terror for their turn to come:

  The most important matter that employed our thoughts was to consider what posture we should put ourselves into when dragged to the place of slaughter in order to suffer death with the least pain. Occasionally we asked some of our companions to go to the turret window to watch the attitude of the victims. They came back to say that those who tried to protect themselves with their hands suffered the longest as the blows of the blades were thus weakened before they reached the head; that some of the victims actually lost their hands and arms before their bodies fell; and that those who put their hands behind their backs obviously suffered less pain. We, therefore, recognized the advantages of this last posture and advised each other to adopt it when it came to be our turn to be butchered.

  As at the Carmes most murders were preceded by a rough form of trial. The prisoners were dragged into rooms lit by torches and candles to face groups of judges sitting round tables littered with papers, prison registers, bottles, pipes and jars of tobacco. In one room the judges included men with bare arms covered in blood or tattooed with the symbols of their respective trades, men with swords at their sides, wearing red woollen caps and butchers’ aprons. In another several of the judges seemed drunk and the others half asleep. At the Abbaye the president of the self-styled court was that hero of the sans-culottes, Stanislas Maillard, who had played so prominent a rôle both in the storming of the Bastille and the women’s march on Versailles.

  Jourgniac de Saint-Méard described how he was dragged into the corridor where Maillard held his court by three men, two of whom grabbed hold of his wrists, the other of his collar. An old man, whose trial had just ended, was being killed outside the door. Saint-Méard, warned that ‘one lie meant death’, was asked why he had been arrested. While replying, some of the people in the crowded room distracted the attention of the judges by pushing papers in front of them and whispering in their ears. Then, after he had produced written evidence in his defence, Saint-Méard’s trial was interrupted again by the appearance of a priest who, following the briefest interrogation, was taken away to be stabbed to death. There was a further interruption when a gaoler rushed into the room to say that a prisoner was trying to escape up a chimney. Maillard told the gaoler to fire shots up the chimney and that, if the prisoner got away, he himself would be killed in his place. When shots failed to dislodge the fugitive, a pile of straw was set alight beneath him and when the man fell down, almost suffocated by the smoke, he was killed as he lay on the hearth. Saint-Méard’s trial was once more resumed, and, to his astonishment, his honest plea that, although he had been a confirmed royalist until 10 August, he had never played any part in public affairs, was unanimously accepted by the tribunal and he was allowed to depart. Greeted by cries of ‘Vive la Nation!’ by the people outside, he was escorted to his home by men carrying torches who refused any payment for their services.

  Saint-Méard’s experiences were not uncommon. Others described how men, who seemed quite prepared to murder them at one moment, were at the next hugging them enthusiastically and declining all rewards for seeing them safely home. One assassin, refusing an offer of recompense, wept with emotion as he restored a father to his children. ‘The nation pays us for killing,’ said another who also refused a reward, ‘but not for saving lives.’

  Several prisoners were saved by compassionate men who risked their own lives to help them, as were both the Duchesse de Tourzel and her daughter. The Duchess herself recorded how kind were some of the people among the crowds who witnessed the massacres with apparent approval; how, when she was told to climb on to a pile of corpses to swear an oath of loyalty to the nation, several people came forward to protect her; and how, when asked to attend to a fellow-prisoner, the young wife of one of the King’s gentlemen of the bedchamber, an onlooker who supposed a medallion the girl wore round her neck was stamped with a portrait of the King or Queen, whispered to the Duchess to remove it and hide it in her pocket. Saint-Méard said that when he admitted during his trial that he had been an officer in the King’s army, someone gentl
y trod on his toe as a warning not to say too much.

  Yet most murders were committed with appalling ferocity. At the Conciergerie, which contained prisoners awaiting trial in the Palais de Justice, a gang of assassins, bursting into the courtyard which was separated from the Rue de la Barillerie by fine gilded wrought iron railings, battered down the doors behind which the prisoners had tried to barricade themselves and, sparing some, hacked others to pieces until the mangled remains of 378 of the 488 prisoners held there were piled up in heaps in the Cour du Mai. Having killed numerous prisoners in their cells, a party of assassins mounted the stairs to the courtroom where several Swiss Guards were on trial. At their approach the guards threw themselves under the benches while their commander, Major Bachmann, rose to his feet and marched forward resolutely to the bar. The presiding judge, formidable enough in his black robes and plumed hat, held up his hand to halt the intruders whom he commanded to ‘respect the law’. They obeyed him and retreated. Bachmann was then sentenced to death and that afternoon was carried away in one of the carts to execution.

  One prisoner who did not escape the assassins’ blades was Marie Gredeler, a young woman who kept an umbrella and walking-stick depository in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. Charged with having mutilated her lover, she was herself mutilated, her breasts were cut off, her feet were nailed to the ground and a bonfire was set alight between her spreadeagled legs.

  As the heaps of corpses mounted, carts drawn by horses from the King’s stables were obtained to take them away to the Montrouge quarries. Women helped to load them, breaking off occasionally to dance the Carmagnole, then stood laughing on the slippery flesh, ‘like washerwomen on their dirty linen’, some with ears pinned to their dresses.