On his return to Paris at the end of the month, Chaumette, supported by Hébert, demanded a similar programme of de-Christianization in the capital. His demands, while making a strong appeal to the anti-clericalists in the radical sections, were not at first received with much enthusiasm elsewhere. But the ground had to some extent been prepared for Chaumette’s campaign by the Convention’s resolve to replace the Gregorian calendar with one which would emphasize the Republic’s association with Nature and Reason rather than with traditional Christianity. The dawn of the new era, Year one of the Republic, had already been declared as having begun with the abolition of the monarchy on 22 September 1792. That year, and all subsequent years, were now to be divided into twelve months of thirty days each, with the five days left at the end of the year to be known as sans-culottides and to be celebrated as festivals. The task of compiling the new calendar was entrusted to Philippe Fabre, who called himself Fabre d’Églantine, a former actor and – like so many other revolutionary figures – a not very successful writer who had once been Danton’s secretary. He decided that the months, which were to be divided into three décades of ten days’ each, should be named after the seasons: the first three, as autumnal seasons, were to be known as Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire; the next three, those of winter, as Nivôse, Pluviôse and Ventôse; the three of spring, as Germinal, Floréal and Prairial; and the three of summer as Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor. In addition, Fabre suggested the names of saints in the calendar should be replaced by those of fruits, plants and flowers. Since religious holidays were abolished and Sundays were no longer a day of rest, these changes were naturally displeasing to the clergy, many of whom refused to celebrate Mass on the new Sabbath, as well as to the devout members of their flocks. Nor were they universally popular with the workers who now had to make do with a holiday every ten days instead of every seven. Directed by Hébert and Chaumette, and supported outside the Commune by Fabre d’Églantine, whose disdainful manner and affectation of a lorgnette exasperated Robespierre, the de-Christianization campaign nevertheless soon gained momentum in Paris. Religious monuments outside churches were destroyed; various religious ceremonies were suppressed; ecclesiastical plate and other treasures were seized in the name of the people; images of the madonna were replaced by busts of Marat; surplices were cut up to make bandages and soldiers’ shirts; and it was henceforth forbidden to sell in the streets ‘any kinds of superstitious jugglery such as holy napkins, St Veronica’s handkerchiefs, Ecce Homos, crosses, Agnus Deis, rings of St Hubert or any medicinal waters or other adulterated drugs’. Theatres began to offer such plays as L’Inauguration du Temple de ìa Vérité in which a parody of the High Mass was performed.
Jean-Baptiste Gobel, Archbishop of Paris since 1791, a weak, rather absurd figure who had achieved favour with the Hébertists and atheists by adopting the dress of the sans-culottes, expressing anti-clerical opinions and opposing the celibacy of the clergy, was intimidated into coming before the Convention with his mitre in his hand and a red cap on his head, declaring, ‘Born a man of the people, curé of Porentruy, sent by the clergy to the Estates General, then raised to the Archbishopric of Paris, I have never ceased to obey the people. I accepted the functions which the people formerly bestowed on me and now, in obedience to the wishes of the people, I have come here to resign them. I allowed myself to be made a bishop when the people wanted bishops. I cease to be one now when the people no longer want them.’
That same week, a few days before the Commune ordered the closure of all churches in the city, a grand Festival of Reason was celebrated in Nôtre Dame. A young actress was carried into the cathedral by four citizens to represent the Goddess of Reason. Clothed in white drapery with a blue cloak over her shoulders and a red cap of liberty crowning her long hair, she was accompanied by a troupe of girls also dressed in white with roses on their heads. She sat on an ivy-covered chair while speeches were made, songs were sung, and soldiers paraded about the aisles carrying busts of Marat, Lepeletier and other martyrs of the Revolution. Later another young woman, the wife of Momoro, a printer who was a prominent member of the Commune, played the principal part in a similar festival at Saint-Sulpice.
From Paris the de-Christianization movement spread all over France. Not only streets and squares but towns and villages confusingly changed their names. The bestowal on babies of revolutionary first names became more common in certain districts than those of saints. More and more cathedrals and churches were deprived of their ornaments, vessels and plate; some were converted into Temples of Reason, others closed. Many clergy resigned and a number married. One even had himself ritually divorced from his breviary. The rites and processions in which the clergy had played their parts were parodied by local revolutionaries wearing vestments and mitres, employing croziers as drum-majors’ staffs, and making obeisances to the prettiest girl in the community who was paraded for the day as Goddess of Reason. In Paris people ‘danced before the sanctuary, howling the carmagnole,’ according to a contemporary witness, Séastien Mercier. ‘The men wore no breeches; and the necks and breasts of the women were bare. In their wild whirling they imitated those whirlwinds which, foreshadowing tempests, ravage and destroy all within their path. In the darkness of the sacristy they satisfied those abominable desires that had been aroused in them.’
A reaction, however, soon became apparent. Catholicism, deeply inbred, could not be eradicated. Priests who married were as likely to be scorned as those who had earlier taken the Constitutional oath. Numerous parishes demanded the reopening of their churches, the return of their bells and altar furniture, and the reintroduction of their festivals. Everywhere there were fears that local calamities were acts of God who was roused in anger by France’s blasphemy and atheism. At Coulanges-la-Vineuse in the Yonne a hailstorm that threatened crops induced the frightened peasants to enter the church which the revolutionaries had closed, to sing hymns, ring bells and pray for forgiveness and mercy.
Concerned by the unrest and dissension which the ruthless policies of de-Christianization were arousing in France, and anxious to reassert its central authority over the extremist deputies who were fanatically pursuing these policies in the provinces, the Committee of Public Safety now initiated a series of decrees intended to bring provincial agents more securely under its control. Several of these agents were recalled to Paris, while others returned of their own accord in order to defend themselves against the accusations of Robespierre who forcefully condemned their atheistic measures as liable to benefit the counter-revolutionaries. Danton also returned to Paris to lend his support to Robespierre.
For some weeks Danton, who had fallen ill in the summer, had been living quietly in the country at Arcis-sur-Aube where he had bought more land. Here, his convalescence complete and in one of his intermittent moods of indolence, he was enjoying the pleasures of country life, fishing in the Aube, going out shooting with the curé, relishing his food and wine and making love to the attractive, sixteen-year-old girl he had married as his second wife. He had been pleased to be out of Paris when Marie Antoinette and the Girondins had been executed, and had, it was said, reacted furiously when a neighbour passed on to him the ‘good news’ of the death of his ‘factious enemies’. ‘You wretch!’ he had exclaimed. ‘You call that good news!…You call them factious! Aren’t we all? We deserve death as much as the Girondins and we shall suffer the same fate one after the other.’ He returned to the capital with evident reluctance. It was no longer safe for him to stay away. He must be where he could exercise some influence over events in which, whether he liked it or not, he was bound to be implicated.
Ever since he had been away the political scene in Paris had been growing ever more confused and ever more embittered by rivalries and accusations of corruption, some invented, others true. One deputy, who had also been out of Paris that autumn, returned in the middle of November to find the Convention so changed that his ‘head swam’ and he could ‘scarcely recognize’ any of his colleagues
. ‘In the place of the Mountain,’ he wrote, ‘I found a swarm of rival factions that dared not fight each other in the open but waged underground war.’
Danton immediately plunged into the war himself, counterattacking Hébert whose assaults on the Dantonists had been growing in intensity, allying himself with Robespierre in his offensive against the Enragés in the Jacobin Club and roundly condemning the outrages of the militant atheists as though speaking on behalf of the Oratorian fathers who had taught him as a boy, and of both his beloved and religious wives. In the Convention it might have been Robespierre speaking when Danton called for the introduction of national religious festivals. ‘If Greece had its Olympic Games,’ he said, ‘France too will celebrate its jours sans-culottides. The people will have festivals where they will offer up incense to the Supreme Being, Nature’s master, for it was never our intention to destroy religion so that atheism could take its place.’
Turning upon the Hébertists, he asked the Convention why they wasted their time on such creatures. ‘The people are sick to death of them…Perhaps the Terror once served a useful purpose, but it should not hurt innocent people. No one wants to see a person treated as a criminal just because he happens not to have enough revolutionary enthusiasm.’
Danton’s open advocacy of toleration in religion and moderation in politics, his declared belief that the time had come to be ‘sparing of human blood’, and his support of the Indulgents appeared at first to be decisive. By the middle of December the Convention was persuaded to establish a Committee of Clemency whose members were to examine the lists of suspects recently thrown into prison. But Hébert and his colleagues counter-attacked vigorously. Collot d’Herbois hurried home from Lyons to speak with passionate fervour in the Jacobin Club. Hébert and Billaud-Varenne joined him there to second his condemnation of the Dantonists. Their supporters in the Convention succeeded in suppressing the Committee of Clemency, and soon afterwards most of the Hébertists who had been arrested on 20 December were released. By then, however, Robespierre had become convinced that Danton’s reasons for supporting him in his quarrel with the Hébertists were not all that they seemed. Danton, he suspected, had wanted to exacerbate the quarrel so as to deprive the Committee of Public Safety of the support of the sons-culottes and thus, by dividing his enemies, to protect his friends and himself from their righteous animosity. Robespierre, therefore, determined to destroy both Hébertists and Dantonists alike.
The Hébertists were dealt with first. This did not prove difficult. Among their number were several men whose foreign origin enabled Robespierre to accuse them of complicity in a ‘foreign plot’; and when they planned to stage journiée on the lines of the Enragés’ demonstration outside the Convention in June 1793, they were able to enlist little enthusiasm in the sections and were deserted at the last moment by both Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne. The planned journée gave the Committee of Public Safety an excuse to act. On 14 March 1794 Hébert and his associates were all arrested, and less than a fortnight later eighteen of them were condemned to death. Hébert fainted repeatedly on his way to the guillotine.
By then the Committee of Public Safety had also decided to take action against the Indulgents among whom they included both Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Overcome by remorse at the part he had played in the downfall of the Girondins, Desmoulins had burst into tears when they were executed. He had since infuriated Robespierre by declaring in an obvious reference to him, ‘Love of country cannot exist when there is neither pity nor love for one’s fellow countrymen but only a soul dried up and withered by self-adulation.’ The Committee had already imprisoned Fabre d’Églantine who had become entangled in some corrupt financial transactions.
Robespierre, while persuaded that Fabre’s corruption was proof of his treason, would have chosen to spare Desmoulins of whom he was fond. He would also have spared Danton, but Danton had made dangerous enemies. Both Saint-Just and Billaud-Varenne constantly decried him as a traitor. ‘A man is guilty of a crime against the Republic,’ declared Saint-Just, ‘when he takes pity on prisoners. He is guilty because he has no desire for virtue. He is guilty because he is opposed to the Terror.’ At the same time, Marc-Guillaume Vadier, a vindictive lawyer, ardent Jacobin and influential member of the Committee of General Security which dealt with police matters, had boasted that his Committee would soon get that ‘fat stuffed turbot’, Danton. Hearing of Vadier’s threat, Danton had responded with characteristically scatological force: if his own life were threatened he would become ‘more cruel than any cannibal’; he would eat Vadier’s brains and ‘shit in his skull’. But Danton did not really believe that his life was in danger any more than he meant to be taken seriously when he threatened Vadier. He had always said that he was invulnerable, and, up till the very moment of his arrest, he supposed that Robespierre would stand by him and that Robespierre’s reputation would save him.
Yet Robespierre, reluctant as he was to sacrifice him and well aware that Danton’s death would leave him isolated, persuaded himself that the Indulgents were agents of counter-revolution and accepted the unwelcome fact that Danton would have to be arrested and tried with them. His attitude towards Danton had always been equivocal: there were times when he expressed his admiration for him and seemed even to like him. But Danton’s patent sexuality and coarse masculinity disturbed him – as it disturbed Madame Roland – and often shocked him. Once, during a heated discussion, Robespierre had exasperated Danton by his constant references to ‘Virtue’. ‘I’ll tell you what this Virtue you talk about really is,’ Danton said to him mockingly, ‘It’s what I do to my wife every night!’ The remark obviously rankled with Robespierre who recorded it in his notebook and afterwards commented, ‘Danton derides the word Virtue as though it were a joke. How can a man with so little conception of morality ever be a champion of freedom?’
On 22 March he met Danton for the last time at a dinner party. ‘Let us forget our private resentments,’ Danton said to him during the course of the evening, ‘and think only of the country, its needs and dangers.’ For a moment Robespierre did not reply. Then he asked sardonically, ‘I suppose a man of your moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment.’ ‘I suppose you would be annoyed,’ Danton riposted, ‘if none did.’ ‘Liberty,’ said Robespierre coldly, ‘cannot be secured unless criminals lose their heads.’ Despite this exchange, Danton made as if to embrace Robespierre when he left. But Robespierre pulled away from him in distaste.
A few days later they saw each other at the Théâtre Français.
Robespierre was in a box [an observer who was also in the audience that night recorded]. Danton was in the front stalls. When the words ‘Death to the tyrant!’ were declaimed on the stage [the play being performed was the tragedy, Epicharis and Nero] Danton’s friends burst into wild applause and standing up they turned towards Robespierre and shook their fists at him. Robespierre, pale and nervous, pushed his little clerk’s face forward and then pulled it back in the way a snake reacts. He waved his little hand in a gesture indicative of both fright and menace.
The decision to arrest Danton was taken at a joint meeting of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security on the night of 30 March after Robespierrists had been nominated to all the important posts in the Commune which had been vacated by the defeated Hébertists. Saint-Just, Robespierre’s pale, handsome, cold-blooded disciple, the ‘Angel of Death’–upon whose lucid brain and incisive pen his master had come to depend in times like these – produced a document denouncing Danton which he intended to read out in the Convention the next morning. It was objected that this was too risky a procedure, Danton being still so popular a character in the Convention, and that he and the other leading Indulgents would have to be arrested first, whereupon Saint-Just, displaying some emotion for once, petulantly tossed his hat into the fire. Robespierre agreed with Saint-Just that Danton ought to be denounced in the Convention before his arrest, but he did not press the point after Vadier said, ‘Y
ou can run the danger of being guillotined if you like, but I’m not going to.’
The warrant for Danton’s arrest was placed on the table and, one after the other, those present at the meeting took up a pen to sign it. Only two of them refused, Ruhl, an Alsatian who protested that he could not betray an old friendship, and Robert Lindet, the Committee of Public Safety’s hard-working administrator of food supplies, who bluntly said that his job was to ‘feed citizens not put patriots to death’. Carnot afterwards claimed that he warned his colleagues, ‘We must consider the consequences well before we do this. A head like Danton’s will drag down many others after it.’ But he signed the paper with the rest. And so, in the early hours of the following morning, warrants were issued for the arrest of Danton together with several of his associates and some foreigners whose financial crimes would conveniently serve to muddy the issues and discredit the political prisoners.
Warned of his impending arrest, Danton had sat up all night by the fire in his study on the first floor of his house in the Cour du Commerce. He had rejected all suggestions that he should try to escape abroad. ‘A man,’ he said, ‘cannot carry his country away with him on the soles of his shoes.’ Nor would he consider fighting back at his accusers: that would ‘only mean the shedding of more blood’ and there had been ‘far too much blood shed already’. He would ’rather be guillotined than guillotine’. Besides, he was ‘sick of men’, and had not himself been guiltless. ‘It was at this time of year,’ he lamented, ‘that I had the Revolutionary Tribunal set up. I pray to God and men to forgive me for it.’
So, when he heard the sounds of the patrol in the cobbled street outside he stood up with weary resignation and went to put his arms round his wife who was weeping helplessly. ‘They are coming to arrest me,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be frightened.’ He walked down into the street and was taken up the hill to the prison of the Luxembourg.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 24