The King rose at six o’clock, shaved, had his hair rolled and was helped to dress by his manservant, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, then, after saying his prayers on his knees for five or six minutes, he spent most of the morning reading or giving lessons to his son, getting him to colour maps or to recite passages from Corneille and Racine. Before dinner at two o’clock he was allowed out for a walk with his family during which, so Cléry said, ‘the artillerymen or guard danced and sang; their songs were always revolutionary, and sometimes also obscene’. After dinner the Dauphin and his sister went into an antechamber to play at battledore and shuttle-cock or a game with a board, a flattened bowl and wooden pins called Siam, while the King played piquet or tric-trac with his wife and sister before lying down for an hour or so on his bed, snoring loudly in his sleep.
On the King’s waking he would make me sit by him while I taught his son to write [Cléry recorded]. The copies I set were chosen by His Majesty from the works of Montesquieu and other celebrated authors…In the evening, the family sat round a table, while the Queen read to them from books of history, or other works proper to instruct and amuse her children…Madame Elisabeth took the book in her turn, and in this manner they read till eight o’clock. I then gave the Prince his supper in Madame Elisabeth’s chamber during which the family looked on, and the King took pleasure in diverting the children by making them guess riddles in a collection of the Mercures de France which he found in the library.
After the Dauphin had supped, I undressed him, and the Queen heard him say his prayers. He said one in particular for the Princesse de Lamballe, and in another he begged God to protect the life of his governess. When the Municipal Officers were too near, the Prince, of his own accord, had the precaution to say these two prayers in a low voice…After his own supper at nine o’clock the King went for a moment to the Queen’s chamber, shook hands with her and his sister for the night, and kissed his children. Then going to his own apartment he retired to the turret-room where he sat reading till midnight.
Nearly every week he read as many as twelve books, mostly history and travel and works of devotion, spending ‘four hours a day on Latin authors’. The time passed very slowly.
For the Queen, too, the days were long. She spent hours on end knitting, making tapestries or embroidering chair covers which she would put down from time to time to give a lesson to her daughter or play with the Scottish terrier that the Princesse de Lamballe had given her. She called the dog Odin, a name that Hans Axel Fersen had given to a dog of his. She was still a young woman – her thirty-seventh birthday had been spent within these grey stone walls – but she looked much older; she had become painfully thin and her hair was now quite grey and in places streaked with white.
She said goodbye to her husband, kissing him fondly, when he went to face his accusers in the Convention. He behaved there with dignity, answering the questions that were put to him with calm brevity. He was allowed counsel and chose the elderly Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a blunt though kind and generous-hearted lawyer who had once been Master of the Household and now bravely answered his former master’s call by returning from his retirement in Switzerland to defend him. ‘I have,’ Malesherbes said, ‘been twice before called to be counsel for him who was my master, in times when that duty was coveted by everyone. I owe him the same service now that it is a duty which many people deem dangerous.’ The King also asked to be defended by Gui-Jean-Baptiste Target, but Target excused himself on the grounds that he had not practised law since 1785 and that he was, in any case, far too fat; so the King’s defence was entrusted instead to François Tronchet and Romain de Sèze.
Few members of the Convention were prepared to listen sympathetically to propositions of the King’s innocence. But while leading Montagnards emphatically demanded the death penalty once the King’s guilt was shown, there were several Girondins who, for reasons of expediency, argued that his life should be spared. ‘No republican will ever be brought to believe that, in order to set twenty-five million men free, one man must die,’ protested Brissot, ‘that, in order to destroy the office of King, the man who fills it must be killed.’ Supporting Brissot, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, one of the Secretaries of the Convention, suggested that ‘Louis dead [would be] more dangerous to the people’s freedom than Louis living in prison.’ Such arguments, however, not shared by all the Gironde – which was never a homogeneous party – were derided by the sans-culottes in the streets of Paris where thousands of armed men marched intimidatingly past the houses and lodgings of the deputies, and where cheers went up for men like Saint-Just who demanded the execution of the King and of all men like him. ‘What charming freedom we now enjoy in Paris,’ commented Madame Roland caustically.
The verdict as to the King’s guilt was never in doubt; indeed, it was given unanimously. But the Girondins still hoped that they might save his life, first by proposing that the matter of his punishment should be referred for ratification to the people of France as a whole and, when this had been condemned by their opponents as a mere political manoeuvre, by recommending a stay of execution. All the devices of the Girondins were, however, in vain. They aroused suspicions that they were royalists at heart, and increased the dislike in which they were already held by the Parisian sans-culottes without saving the King. A majority of over fifty deputies voted for death, and a majority of more than seventy subsequently voted against a stay of execution. The sitting of the Convention, during which the first vote was taken, lasted seventy-two hours. The spectators, amongst whom could be seen various friends of the Duc d’Orléans, ‘ate ices and oranges and drank liqueurs’, so the deputy, Sébastien Mercier, recorded. ‘The uppermost galleries, kept open for the common people, were filled with foreigners and people from all walks of life. They drank wine and brandy as if they were in some low, smoke-filled tavern. At all the cafes in the neighbourhood bets were being laid on the outcome.’
Figures, rendered all the more sombre by the dim light, advanced one by one into the Tribune [Mercier continued his description of that nightlong session]. In slow and sepulchral tones voices recorded the verdict, ‘Death!’ Face after face passed by…Some men calculated whether they had time to have a meal before giving their vote. Others fell asleep and had to be woken up to give their opinion. Of all that I saw that night no idea can be given.
The King accepted the verdict calmly, and remained quite composed when he was aroused from his sleep before dawn on 20 January 1793 to be told that he was to be executed the next day. He said goodbye to his family that evening. They all cried so loudly that ‘their lamentations could be heard outside the tower’. He too wept, so his daughter recorded, ‘but not on account of his own death. He told my mother the story of his trial…Then he gave my brother some good religious advice and told him in particular to forgive the people who had ordered his execution. He gave his blessing to my brother and me. My mother was very anxious for us to spend the night with my father, but he did not want us to as he needed to be quiet. My mother asked if she could come back to him the next morning. He agreed to this at first, but after he had gone he asked the guards to take care we did not come down again as it upset him too much.’
He ate his supper alone. Then Cléry helped him to undress and was about to brush his hair when he said, ‘No, it’s not worth while.’
The next morning he was woken at five o’clock, and after attending Mass and receiving Communion, he heard the clatter of drums. The Irish-born priest, Henry Essex Edgeworth, Elisabeth’s former confessor whom he had asked to be with him at the end, said that his own blood froze in his veins at the sound of the hollow rhythmic tapping. But Louis retained his composure, remarking in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘I expect it’s the National Guard beginning to assemble.’ Soon afterwards a company of National Guardsmen arrived at the Temple, accompanied by Santerre, by commissioners from the Commune and by Jacques Roux, a man who had once been a priest and was now one of the leaders of the Enragés, the extremist faction which, well to the
left of the Montagnards, demanded among other comprehensive reforms the common ownership of goods and the strictest economic controls.
The King, who had been sitting by the porcelain stove in his room to keep warm, opened the door to them, so Edgeworth wrote, ‘and they said that it was time to go. “I am occupied for a moment,” he said to them in an authoritative tone, “wait for me here; I shall be with you in a minute.” He shut the door, and coming to me knelt in front of me. “It is finished,” he said. “Give me your last blessing, and pray God that He will uphold me to the end.” In a moment or two he rose, and leaving the cabinet walked towards the group of men who were in the bedroom. Their faces showed the most complete assurance, and they all remained covered. Seeing this, the King asked for his hat. Cléry, with tears running down his face, hurried to look for it.’
Louis turned to Roux with a parcel containing a few personal belongings and his will which he asked him to give ‘to the Queen’. ‘To my wife,’ he added, hastily amending the words.
‘I have not come here to do your errands,’ Roux roughly replied. ‘I am here to take you to the scaffold.’
‘That is so,’ said Louis, offering the parcel to another man who accepted it.
Outside a light rain had begun to fall from a grey sky. There was a large green carriage waiting, and beyond it stretched line upon line of National Guardsmen and citizens with muskets and pikes on their shoulders. The King walked towards the carriage, ‘turning once or twice towards the tower, as if to say a last goodbye,’ so Edgeworth thought, ‘to all that he held dear in this world. His every movement showed that he was calling up all his reserves of strength and courage.’ The journey to the scaffold, which had been erected in the Place de Louis XV, renamed the Place de la Révolution and, since then, the Place de la Concorde, was a slow one. Edgeworth, the ‘Citizen Minister of Religion’, as the authorities referred to him, sat next to the King; two gendarmes sat opposite. Edgeworth offered Louis his breviary and at the King’s request pointed out to him the most suitable psalms which they recited alternately. In front of the carriage marched a number of drummers, in order, so Edgeworth supposed, to ‘prevent any shouts being heard that might be raised in the King’s favour’.
At about half-past nine the carriage arrived at the Place de la Révolution where Louis saw the platform which had been set up between the promenade of the Champs Élysées and the pedestal from which the statue of his grandfather, who had laid out the square, had been removed. On the platform stood Charles Sanson, the city’s executioner, whose father had preceded him in the office and whose son was to follow him. Above Sanson loomed the instrument of execution, the guillotine.
The guillotine took its name from Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1789. A kindly man, he had suggested that all those convicted of a capital offence should have the right to be decapitated, a privilege hitherto reserved for nobles, and that the method of decapitation should be a machine which would render the process as quick and painless as possible. Such a machine had been known in Germany and Italy, as well as in Yorkshire in England where it was known as the Halifax gibbet, and in Scotland where it was called ‘the Maiden’. In France it was adopted as the official method of execution by the penal code which became law in October 1791. Several machines were thereafter made for the various departments of France by a German contractor who produced them under the direction of the Secretary to the Academy of Surgeons. Those supplied to the department of Paris were tested on dead bodies from the hospital of Bicêtre. One of them was erected in the Place de Grève for the execution of the highwayman, Pelletier, and proved so efficacious that the people were ‘disappointed’, in the words of the Chronique de Paris. They had seen nothing. The whole thing was over too quickly. They went away complaining. The same machine was now to be used on the dethroned King.
Louis climbed down from the carriage. Three guards approached him and began to remove his clothes. He shook them off, undoing the buttons of his brown greatcoat himself, taking off his hat and removing his shirt and collar. The guards then pinioned his arms, and again Louis protested. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, quickly drawing his hands back. ‘Binding your hands,’ one of them answered. ‘Binding me!’ exclaimed the King indignantly, looking appealingly at Edgeworth. ‘Sire,’ Edgeworth said, ‘I see in this last outrage only one more resemblance between Your Majesty and the God who is about to be your recompense.’ So Louis submitted while the guards tied his arms behind his back and cut his hair, leaving the neck bare above his white waistcoat.
Having arrived at the top of the scaffold Louis walked across it with a firm step, making a sign to the drummers who for a moment stopped tapping while he addressed the crowd in a loud voice. ‘I forgive those who are guilty of my death, and I pray God that the blood which you are about to shed may never be required of France. I only sanctioned upon compulsion the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.’ But his next words were lost as an officer on horseback shouted a command to the fifteen drummers who immediately resumed the beating of their drums. Sanson and his assistants then guided Louis to the plank of the guillotine where he lay face downwards. Sanson pulled the rope. The blade rushed down between the upright posts. Cléry heard his master scream for ‘his head did not fall at the first stroke, his neck being so fat’.
When it had finally been severed, Edgeworth saw the youngest of the guards, who looked about eighteen, pick up the head by the roughly cut hair and walk about the scaffold showing it to the people, accompanying ‘this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures’. Edgeworth, who was on his knees on the platform, was spattered with blood before rising and hurrying off towards the crowd into which, since he was wearing the lay dress that all priests were by now required to adopt, he soon disappeared.
The people were silent for a moment, as though stunned by the shock of the spectacle. Then they began to cry, ‘Vive la Nation!’ ‘Vive la République!’ The voices multiplied, and soon ‘every hat was in the air’. The guard of cavalry waved their helmets on the points of their sabres and, so a doctor who was present said, crowds of people rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs or pieces of paper in the blood spilled on the scaffold ‘to have a reminder of this memorable event’. One of them put a drop of it to his lips, remarking to a companion that it tasted ‘shockingly bitter’.
7
THE DAYS OF THE ENRAGÉS AND THE HÉBERTISTS
28 May–2 June and 4–5 September 1793
‘It is to be feared that the Revolution, like Saturn, will end
by devouring its own children’
VERGNIAUD
The courts of Europe reacted to Louis XVI’s execution with protestations of outrage. Already perturbed by the Convention’s announcement that military occupation would be followed by the sequestration of noble and ecclesiastical property, the abolition of feudalism and the introduction of French paper currency, they were now still more alarmed by Danton’s declaration of France’s right to expand to her ‘natural frontiers’–the sea, the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees. And, provoked by the ‘heinous crime’ of regicide, monarchial Europe coalesced to crush the Revolution. But, as diplomatic relations were severed, the French revolutionaries met protests with defiance. ‘The kings in alliance try to intimidate us,’ cried Danton challengingly. ‘We hurl at their feet, as a gage of battle, the French King’s head.’ Accepting the inevitability of conflict with the country’s traditional rival, the Convention declared war on England at the beginning of February; it also declared war on Holland, then on Spain, so that within a few weeks almost every major power in Europe was ranged against ‘the assassins of Paris’.
The Convention’s faith in the irresistibility of the Revolution’s forces did not at first seem misplaced. After that decisive day at Valmy, the French armies – living off the land and therefore moving fast – had occupied Savoy and Nice, possessions of the King of Sardinia. General Custine had penetrated into Germany as
far as Mainz and advanced towards Frankfurt. Dumouriez had entered Belgium, defeated the Austrians at Jemappes and advanced to Brussels, Liège and Antwerp. Encouraged by the disorganization of their enemies and by Russia’s preoccupation with the dismemberment of Poland, the Convention, decreeing ‘war on castles, peace for cottages’, had offered ‘fraternité et secours à tous les peuples qui voudront recouvrer leur liberté’.
Yet now that the enemies of France had increased, now that new frontiers and coasts had to be watched, and more money found, the deputies were faced with problems that dissipated their earlier confidence. And as their armies faltered, the sharply rising cost of living, the fall in the value of assignats and the shortages of food all caused unrest and disturbances at home. For a time the Montagnards and the more moderate Girondins came together to form a united front, not only against counter-revolutionaries but also against the violent sans-culottes and those extremists known as Enragés who were intent upon exploiting the discontent in order to impose upon the Convention a more radical programme, including the fixing of prices and the requisition of food supplies. Jacques Roux, the fiery ex-priest, played a leading part in these insurrectionary activities of the Enragés. So did Jean Varlet, a postal worker. And both of them planned a series of journées as the military situation worsened, as Custine fell back from the Rhineland and Dumouriez, abandoning plans for an invasion of Holland and retreating through the Austrian Netherlands, was defeated first at Neerwinden, then at Louvain. Having failed in an attempt to persuade his men to march on Paris to restore order and the monarchy, Dumouriez finally deserted to the Austrians, like Lafayette, taking with him the Duc d’Orléans’s son, the Duc de Chartres, and several officers of his staff.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 19