That same month Brissot, Vergniaud and nineteen other Girondin leaders were also put on trial. They defended themselves so skilfully that Hébert angrily complained, ‘Need there be so much ceremony about shortening the lives of wretches already condemned by the people?’ But they were, without exception, condemned to death. Four of them were in their twenties; their average age was forty. One of the older of them, Valazé, stabbed himself to death in court with a dagger which he had concealed under his coat; yet it was decreed that his corpse should nevertheless be carted next morning to the guillotine and there beheaded with the others.
The morning was fine and an immense crowd collected to see them pass through the streets on their way to the Place de la Revolution. The houses on either side were decorated as if for a festival with tricolours flying from the windows and coloured placards bearing such inscriptions as ‘unity, liberty, equality, fraternity or death’, for it had become dangerous, so one Parisian said, ‘to be considered less revolutionary than your neighbour’. As the condemned men passed beneath these gaily decorated windows in the five slowly moving carts they sang the Marseillaise, so the chronicler of their careers, Alphonse de Lamartine, tells us; and, on reaching the scaffold, jumped out to embrace each other, shouting, ‘Vive la République!’ Sillery, the oldest of them, was the first to die. He mounted the steps, bowed to the spectators with grave courtesy, and walked steadily to the guillotine. The others, too, died bravely. Vergniaud, who had thrown away the poison with which he had been provided the night before so that he could die with his friends, was the last to climb the steps. His head was cut off precisely thirty-one minutes after Sillery’s.
During the next few weeks the blade of the guillotine fell and rose in what Thomas Carlyle was to call relentless systole-diastole. On 6 November, Philippe Egalité, the former Duc d’Orléans, who was brought back from Marseilles, was tried and condemned before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Accepting the verdict without protest, he merely asked for a stay of execution for twenty-four hours. The request was granted and ‘in the interval he had a repast prepared with care, on which he feasted with more than usual avidity’. Distrusted and unlamented, he died with a smile on his lips, displaying no sign of fear. On 8 November Madame Roland was also condemned to death. She had been arrested at home at the beginning of June, separated from her weeping daughter and lodged in the prison of the Abbaye from which she was released when Brissot was sent there, re-arrested immediately and taken to the Sainte-Pélagie and thence to the Conciergerie. Without news of her fugitive husband to whom, despite his recent cantankerous jealousy, she was deeply attached, or of François Buzot, the Girondin, with whom she had fallen passionately in love, constantly worried about her daughter and dismayed by the collapse of all that she had worked for, she nevertheless retained her spirit and dignity to the end, gaining the admiration of her captors as well as of her fellow-prisoners. At her trial she responded bravely to the inquisitors who bullied her unmercifully, who insisted that she reply yes or no to their questions, accused her of loquacity when she attempted a more detailed answer, and told her that she was ‘not there to be clever’. She sometimes wept when questions were asked about her private life and her relations with Girondins other than her husband, but she never broke down and refused to admit any guilt or to compromise her friends, declaring defiantly when sentence was passed upon her, ‘You judge me worthy to share the fate of the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall endeavour to carry to the scaffold the courage they displayed.’
She succeeded in doing so. While the mob surrounded the cart, shouting, ‘À la guillotine! À la guillotine!’, she tried to comfort a frightened forger who sat beside her. And on arrival at the scaffold she asked the executioner to behead him first so that he would be spared the spectacle of her death. The executioner declined: it was against the rules. But she pleaded with him, and he gave way. When it was time for her to be bound to the plank, she looked up at the statue of Liberty, which had been erected in the Place de la Revolution in commemoration of the events of 10 August, and uttered her famous apostrophe, ‘Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.’
Three days later the former Mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who had been arrested while staying with a friend at Melun, was escorted on foot to the Champ de Mars so that he might be executed on the spot of the massacre of 17 July 1791 for which he was held responsible. But on his arrival there a man, who had shaken a red flag in his face throughout the walk from the Conciergerie, shouted that the place which had been the scene of so many revolutionary celebrations should not be polluted by the former mayor’s blood. So, while Bailly walked about the Champ de Mars, insulted by people who threw mud at him, kicked him and struck him with sticks, the guillotine was dismantled and carried off to a dunghill by the banks of the Seine where, surrounded by a howling mob, he was beheaded in sight of the quarter of Chaillot where he had once lived.
Later that month Barnave, who had retired to his birthplace at Grenoble and been arrested there, was also brought back to Paris after ten months’ imprisonment for trial and execution. And so, day after day, the guillotinings continued. Unsuccessful generals suffered with fallen politicians, men convicted of publishing counter-revolutionary writings or of airing royalist opinions with deserters and traitors. Even the faded courtesan, Madame Du Barry, who had gone to live in the country with the Comte de Cossé-Brissac and had visited England in 1792 to try to raise money on her jewels, was dragged before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Accused of having dissipated the treasures of the state and worn ‘mourning for the tyrant’ in London, she was condemned and, screaming with fright, beheaded. She was followed to the scaffold by eight Carmelite nuns.
Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793 the Terror was maintained unabated. The Committee of Public Safety insisted that it was vitally necessary to stamp out the machinations of both royalists and federalists, hoping thereby to persuade the militant sons-culottes that they shared a common cause and the Convention that the omnipotence of the Committee was essential at a time of crisis in the Revolution’s course. Nearly 3,000 executions took place in Paris; about 14,000 in the provinces. Countless people lived in constant fear of death and went to bed dreading the sound of a knock on the door in the middle of the night when most arrests took place.
‘You have no more grounds for restraint against the enemies of the new order, and liberty must prevail at any price,’ cried Saint-Just, who, like Robespierre, ‘regarded all dissidents as criminals’. ‘We must rule by iron those who cannot be ruled by justice…You must punish not merely traitors but the indifferent as well.’ An even more violent Jacobin, Brichet, advised that the Law of Suspects should be interpreted so that all the well-to-do came within its scope: questions should be asked in every village about the means of the principal farmer; if he were rich he should be guillotined without further ado – he was ‘bound to be a food-hoarder’. But it was not only the rich, or even mainly the rich, who suffered. The poor were executed with the well-to-do, women with men, the young with the old, some accused of ‘starving the people’, others of ‘depraving public morals’, one witness for ‘not giving his testimony properly’. ‘The whole of the country seemed one vast conflagration of revolt and vengeance,’ wrote William Hazlitt in a passage characteristic of English writers of his time and temperament. ‘The shrieks of death were blended with the yell of the assassin and the laughter of buffoons. Never were the finest affections more warmly excited or pierced with more cruel wounds. Whole families were led to the scaffold for no other crime than their relationship; sisters for shedding tears over the death of their brothers in the emigrant armies; wives for lamenting the fate of their husbands; innocent peasant girls for dancing with the Prussian soldiers; and a woman giving suck, and whose milk spouted in the face of her executioner at the fatal stroke, for merely saying as a group were being conducted to slaughter, “Here is much blood shed for a trifling cause.”’
If such accounts must be considered ove
rpitched, and if many families – in several parts of the country most families – lived through these months in undisturbed tranquillity, the Liste Générale des Condamnés provides numerous examples of the Terror’s merciless severity:
Jean Baptiste Henry, aged eighteen, journeyman tailor, convicted of having sawed down a tree of liberty, executed 6 September 1793…Jean Julien, waggoner, having been sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour, took it into his head to cry ‘Vive le Roi’, brought back to the Tribunal and condemned to death…Stephen Thomas Ogie Baulny, aged forty-six, convicted of having entrusted his son, aged fourteen, to a garde du corps in order that he might emigrate, condemned to death and executed the same day…Henriette Françoise de Marboeuf, aged fifty-five, widow of the ci-devant Marquis de Marboeuf, convicted of having hoped for the arrival of the Austrians and Prussians and of keeping provisions for them, condemned to death and executed the same day…François Bertrand, aged thirty-seven, publican at Leure in the department of the Côte-d’Or, convicted of having furnished to the defenders of the country sour wine injurious to health, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day…Marie Angelique Plaisant, sempstress at Douai, convicted of having exclaimed that she was an aristocrat and that she did not care ‘a fig for the nation’, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day.
Hundreds of innocent people suffered with those whom the Revolutionary Tribunal had some cause to consider guilty, some of them through clerical and administrative errors, or even because their accusers chose not to spare them. Others were sentenced on the strength of denunciations by jealous or vindictive neighbours. One victim was fetched from prison to face a charge which had been brought against another prisoner with a similar name. Her protests were silenced by the prosecutor who said casually, ‘Since she’s here, we might just as well take her.’ Another who had lost his temper while playing cards and, when reprimanded for behaving as no good patriot should, had shouted, ‘Fuck good patriots!’ was also brought before the Tribunal, condemned and executed.
The worst excesses were committed in the provinces where – although most représentants en mission were more concerned with enlisting recruits and collecting supplies than with punishment – in several towns the guillotine was kept constantly at work and those convicted of crimes against the Revolution were slaughtered wholesale on the instructions of fanatical or savage representatives or of those who were frightened of being considered too weak. At Lyons where numerous rich men’s houses were blown up, including those in Mansart’s lovely Place Bellecour, Collot d’Herbois, who had been sent there as the Committee of Public Safety’s agent, and Joseph Fouché, a frail former teacher who had become one of the most dreaded of the Jacobins, decided that the guillotine was too slow an instrument for their purpose and had over three hundred of their victims mown down by cannon fire. ‘What a delicious moment!’ reported an approving witness to a friend in Paris. ‘How you would have enjoyed it!…What a sight! Worthy indeed of Liberty!…Wish bon jour to Robespierre.’
From Feurs, the representative himself reported, ‘The butchery has been good.’ At Toulon numerous victims were shot by order of Paul Barras, a tall, cunning former army officer of noble birth who was a cousin of the Marquis de Sade, and Louis Fréron, founder of the inflammatory journal, L’Orateur du peuple. At Nantes, where the Committee’s agent was the thirty-six-year-old Jean-Baptiste Carrier, an obscure attorney before the Revolution, three thousand captives perished in an epidemic in the grossly overcrowded prisons and a further two thousand were towed out in barges into the middle of the Loire and drowned, some of them stripped naked and bound together in couples. The river became so choked with these barges that ships weighing anchor brought them up filled with the dead. Birds of prey hovered over the waters, gorging themselves with human flesh, and the fish became so contaminated that orders had to be given forbidding them to be caught. On occasions Carrier appeared to be insane as, raving endlessly about the need to ‘kill and kill’, and to ‘butcher children without hesitation’, he slashed at the air with his sword. Even in his calmer moments he was abusive and intolerant, answering all complaints and pleas for mercy with the threat that those who approached him would themselves be thrown into prison.
In the north the représentant en mission was Joseph le Bon, a former priest of twenty-nine, who fixed his headquarters at Arras. From Arras he travelled about the departments of the Somme and the Pas-de-Calais with his judges and guillotine, leaving a trail of blood in his wake, ‘in a kind of fever’, so his secretary reported, returning home to imitate the grimaces of the dying for the benefit of his wife. Assiduously attending all the executions he could, he addressed both victims and spectators from a nearby balcony, ordered bands to play the Ça ira as at a festival, and afterwards invited the executioner to dinner.
Under the direction of Jean Tallien, the son of the maître d’hôtel of the Marquis de Bercy, a young man of twenty-six who had worked as a lawyer’s clerk and in a printer’s office, even more cruel punishments were inflicted at Bordeaux.
The most terrible atrocities were committed there [according to the thin, little, awkward Girondin, Jean Baptiste Louvet]. A woman was charged with the heinous crime of having wept at the execution of her husband. She was consequently condemned to sit several hours under the suspended blade which shed upon her, drop by drop, the blood of the deceased whose corpse was above her on the scaffold before she was released by death from her agony.
‘The time has come which was foretold,’ as Madame Roland had said, ‘when the people would ask for bread and be given corpses.’
In Paris thousands of people went out regularly to witness the operations of what the deputy, J. A. B. Amar, called the ‘red Mass’ performed on the ‘great altar’ of the ‘holy guillotine’. They took their seats around the scaffold with the tricoteuses, buying wine and biscuits from hawkers while they waited for the show to begin. They placed bets as to the order in which the huissiers from the Revolutionary Tribunal, who wore silver chains round their necks, would decide the prisoners were to mount the scaffold, anticipating those three thrilling sounds – the first thud as the victim was thrown on to the plank, the second thud as the neck clamp was thrown into place, and the swishing rattle as the heavy blade fell. Yet there were thousands more who, like Madame Roland, had become ‘sick of blood’. Shops were shut and windows closed in the Rue Saint-Honoré as the tumbrils passed by on their way to the Place de la Révolution, some by those who had grown tired of the spectacle, many by others who were disgusted by it. So, following complaints from the residents of the Rue Saint-Honoré that the smell of stale blood which rose from the stones of the nearby square was endangering their health and depreciating the value of their property, the guillotine was removed first to a site near the ruins of the Bastille, then to an open space near the Barrière du Trône Renversé, now the Place de la Nation. But the people in these districts were as unwilling to have the guillotine in their midst as were those of the Rue Saint-Honoré. The scaffold was therefore taken back once more to the Place de la Revolution where Louis XVI had died.
While prisoners captured in the civil wars, suspected federalist agents, counter-revolutionaries and those accused of currency manipulation or food hoarding were all dispatched in the ‘red Mass’, a campaign was simultaneously mounted against Christianity. For some time now the more ardent revolutionaries had been encouraging anti-clerical feelings among the people and endeavouring to endow the Revolution itself with the aura of a religion. They had condemned the celibacy of the clergy. They had joined with the Montagnard, Delacroix, in denouncing the action of a bishop who had prevented one of his curés from marrying as a ‘blasphemy against the sovereignty of the people’. And they had even supported demands for the demolition of church belfries, ‘which by their height above other buildings seem to contradict the principles of equality’. They had also welcomed the custom of giving babies names untainted with Christian associations, and of changing the names of streets, which we
re called after saints or festivals of the Church, to those of heroes, journées or symbols of the Revolution.
This campaign was initiated in the Nièvre where Fouché was Commissioner of the Republic. In September Fouché had had a visit from Pierre Chaumette, a former medical student born at Nevers, a young man of a rather strait-laced disposition and homosexual inclinations who had been one of the most eloquent speakers at the Cordeliers Club and an outspoken opponent of the Girondins. Inspired or encouraged by Chaumette, Fouché immediately instituted a programme of de-Christianization in the district for which he was held responsible. On 22 September in the church of Saint-Cyr at Nevers he preached a sermon attacking ‘religious sophistry’ and unveiled a bust of Brutus. Later, in his avowed determination to substitute the ‘cult of the Republic’ for ‘the superstition and hypocrisy’ of Christianity, he had ecclesiastical vestments burned, crucifixes and crosses destroyed, church ornaments and vessels confiscated and notices posted outside cemeteries to the effect that, ‘Death is an eternal sleep.’ Denouncing the celibacy of priests, he ordered them all either to marry, to adopt a child or look after an elderly person. He eventually succeeded in obtaining the resignation of the Bishop of Allier and some thirty of the clergy in his diocese.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 23