The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  There were some protests in the Convention later that day when Danton’s arrest was announced but Robespierre, now committed to his downfall, turned angrily upon Legendre who had had the temerity to suggest that the accused was a victim of personal spite and that, having saved France in September 1792 ‘ought to be allowed to explain himself before the Convention’. No, objected Robespierre, he should not. ‘The question is not whether a man has performed any particular patriotic act, but what his whole career has been like…In what way is Danton superior to Lafayette, to Dumouriez, to Brissot, to Hébert? What is said of him that may not be said of them? And yet have you spared them?…Vulgar minds and guilty men are always afraid to see their fellows fall because, having no longer a barrier of culprits before them, they are left exposed to the light of truth. But if there exist vulgar spirits, there are also heroic spirits in this Assembly and they will know how to brave all false terrors. Besides, the number of guilty is not great. Crime has found but few culprits among us, and by striking off a few heads the country will be delivered…Whoever trembles at this moment is also guilty.’

  After this speech and another by Saint-Just who read the indictment in a dull, toneless voice – emphasizing his points, so a fellow-deputy recorded, with a threatening, chopping gesture of his outstretched hand, ‘a motion like that of the knife of the guillotine’–objectors were silenced and the trial of Danton, Desmoulins and the other accused was approved.

  It opened on 2 April. As Danton well knew, the verdict had already been decided upon, even though most of the charges seemed to be directed more at his character than at any provable crimes, and much of the rest of the indictment might as convincingly have been laid against his accusers. The Public Prosecutor was Antoine Fouquier-Tinville.

  Fouquier-Tinville was the son of a rich farmer from the Vermandois who had died when he was thirteen, leaving a widow extremely well provided for but disinclined to provide much financial assistance for her son whose early years were spent as an impoverished clerk in a procurator’s office in Paris. By the time he was twenty-seven, however, Fouquier-Tinville had been able to buy the practice of his employer and, as a clever, conscientious lawyer, was soon successfully established. Married to a cousin who brought him a respectable dowry, he became the tenant of a handsome apartment in the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve as well as of a country house at Charonne, the master of a cook and a valet de chambre, and the father of five children. Having given birth to these five children within seven years, his wife died young and, after only a few months, Fouquier-Tinville married again. His second wife provided him with an even more handsome dowry than the first, as well as three more children. But although he soon afterwards sold his practice for a large sum, by the time the Revolution came, he was, for some unknown reason – his enemies blamed his passion for courtesans and dancing-girls – as needy as he had been in his youth. Claiming to be related to Camille Desmoulins, who had become General Secretary to the Ministry of Justice, he applied to him for an appointment and was thankful to be offered one on the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris.

  Pale and rather stout, with thick black hair, thin lips, a pock-marked nose, jutting chin and small, glittering eyes, he had thus suddenly become a powerful and dreaded figure. Invariably dressed in black, he was known to be as incorruptible as Robespierre himself; but, provided the processes over which he presided were conducted in an orderly fashion and with a proper regard for a show of legality, he was perfectly willing, indeed eager, to carry out the wishes of the authorities without too close an inquiry into the conduct of those whom they wished to destroy, even when he had cause to be grateful to them for past favours.

  There were difficulties with Danton and Desmoulins, though. They both still enjoyed much popularity in the sections, and he had been given scarcely any time to prepare his case against them. Press censorship would ensure that the proceedings would be both briefly and tendentiously recorded, but the public would have to be admitted into the courtroom, as was customary, so that accounts of what passed there would spread rapidly throughout the city. Moreover, there could be no doubt, as Danton charged through the doors like an angry bull, that he was determined not to be a passive victim. He defended himself with such vehemence, indeed, that his bellowing voice could be heard through the open windows of the court on the far side of the Seine.

  It is clear from the fragmentary records of the proceedings that at the outset he had little hope of being acquitted. When asked for his address by the Tribunal he gave it as ‘soon in oblivion…in the future in history’s pantheon’. And later he said, ‘The court now knows Danton. Tomorrow he hopes to sleep in the bosom of glory. He has never asked for pardon and you will see him go to the scaffold with the calm of a clear conscience.’ There were times during the course of the trial when both the President, Nicolas-François-Joseph Herman, and the Prosecutor were obviously rattled. The jury seemed impressed by Danton’s loud defiance, and the spectators often cheered his stirring words. The President rang his bell in vain. ‘Do you not hear my bell?’ he asked. ‘Bell!’ Danton shouted back at him. ‘Bell! A man who is fighting for his life pays no attention to bells…My voice, which has often been heard speaking in the people’s name,’ he continued more calmly but no less loudly, ‘will have no difficulty in thrusting these vile charges aside. Will the cowards who have slandered me dare to meet me face to face? Let them show themselves and I will cover them with shame…I demand that the Convention establish a commission to hear my denunciation of the present dictatorship. Yes, I, Danton, will unmask the dictatorship which is now revealing itself in its true colours…You say I have sold myself. A man such as me has no price…Let the men who have proof step forward…Neither ambition nor greed has ever found a victim in me…I shall now speak to you about three plats-coquins [presumably Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois and Saint-Just] who have been the ruin of Robespierre…I have vital evidence to reveal. I demand an undisturbed hearing…’

  The President interrupted him again, furiously ringing his bell. But Danton’s voice boomed on while Fouquier-Tinville looked more and more alarmed, his countenance, in the words of his clerk ‘depicting both rage and terror’. He was passed a note from the President which read, ‘I am going to suspend Danton’s defence in half an hour.’ Yet even when he did so the prisoner refused to sit down until promised that he would be allowed to continue his speech the next day.

  Terrified that the jurors might be persuaded to deliver the wrong verdict, Herman and Fouquier-Tinville now decided to write to the Committee of Public Safety:

  A fearful storm has been raging since the session began. The accused are behaving like madmen and are frantically demanding the summoning of their witnesses. They are denouncing to the people what they say is the rejection of their demand. In spite of the firmness of the President and the entire court, their repeated requests are disrupting the session. They say that, short of a decree, they will not be quiet until their witnesses have been heard. We ask you what to do about their demands since our judicial powers give us no authority for rejecting it.

  Rather than read out this compromising letter to the Convention, Saint-Just gave the deputies a false version of it, and informed them that the prisoners were in revolt against the Tribunal. He then produced a letter, allegedly written by a prisoner at the Luxembourg, which ‘proved the existence’ of a plot organized by Lucille Desmoulins and an aristocratic friend, to rescue the accused and murder the entire Revolutionary Tribunal. ‘No further proofs are needed,’ Saint-Just declared. ‘The very resistance of these scoundrels proves their guilt.’ He demanded and obtained a decree that ‘every accused person who resisted or insulted the national justice should be forbidden to plead’.

  Amar of the Committee of General Security hurried over to the courtroom with this decree which he handed over to Fouquier-Tinville with the words, ‘This should make the job easier for you.’ Fouquier took it from him with a smile of relief. ‘Indeed we needed it,’ he said.

  ‘Y
ou are murderers,’ shouted Danton when the decree was read out. ‘Murderers! Look at them! They have hounded us to our deaths!…But the people will tear my enemies to pieces within three months.’

  The next day the trial was resumed an hour and a half earlier than usual, so few spectators were present to witness the final scenes. Fouquier-Tinville opened me proceedings by asking the jurors in an intimidating way if they had now heard enough against all the accused. They said they had and, on returning from their retirement, brought in the required verdicts.

  That same day eighteen condemned men – Danton, Desmoulins, Delacroix and Fabre d’Églantine among them, as well as Hérault de Séchelles, who had been falsely accused of passing secrets to me enemy – were transported in three red-painted tumbrils to the guillotine. As with the Girondins, they were nearly all young men. Fabre d’Églantine was forty-three; Danton and Hérault de Séchelles both thirty-four; Desmoulins was also thirty-four, though he told the Revolutionary Tribunal that he was thirty-three, ‘the same age as the sans-culotte, Jesus Christ, when He died’.

  Desmoulins who had to be dragged from the courtroom to prison screaming, ‘They are going to murder my wife’, became so agitated in the cart that, though his hands were bound, he managed to tear the clothes from his body in a frenzy of protest as he shouted at the spectators. Danton, who had comforted him tenderly in prison, now lost patience with him and said, ‘Be quiet! Leave the rabble alone.’ But Desmoulins continued to rage and he arrived at the scaffold with his chest and shoulders scratched and bare. The sight of the guillotine seemed to calm him though. He looked at it for a moment then turned away ‘with a contemplative expression on his face’. He waited for the end murmuring the name of Lucille.

  The others had been calm throughout the journey. Hérault, the handsome philanderer, had nodded to various acquaintances and smiled as he saw a woman friend waving him goodbye from a window of the Garde-Meuble. Fabre d’Églantine appeared preoccupied with the thought that Billaud-Varenne would steal the manuscript of one of his unpublished plays and have it performed as his own. ‘There are such beautiful verses in it,’ he said. ‘Beautiful vers, indeed,’ Danton mocked him sarcastically, making outrageous play with the word that means worms as well as verses. ‘You’ll be making some beautiful vers next week!’

  Danton’s ‘huge round head,’ so Frénilly said, ‘fixed its proud gaze on the crowds.’ He saw David, once his friend who had agitated for his death, calmly sketching him and the other prisoners from a café table, and shouted an insult at him. He had cursed and ranted a good deal in prison. ‘I’m leaving everything in a frightful mess,’ he had called to one of the other accused in the next cell. ‘There’s not a single one of them who knows the first thing about government…If I left my balls to that eunuch Robespierre and my legs to Couthon the Committee of Public Safety might last a bit longer. But…as it is…Robespierre is bound to follow me, dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than muck about with politics.’

  He was quite composed now, though. ‘Oh, my wife, my dear wife,’ he murmured. ‘Shall I ever see you again?’ But then he checked himself, stamping his foot as though in irritation at this outburst. ‘Come, Danton. Courage. No weakness.’ Hérault came up to kiss him goodbye. But the executioner separated them and pulled Hérault towards the steps. ‘Coquin!’ Danton shouted. ‘You’ll not be able to prevent our heads touching each other in the basket.’

  He was the last to be beheaded; and night was falling as he stepped up on to the platform, ‘soaked with the blood of his friends, as though emerging from the tomb instead of about to enter it’, so one observer recorded of a scene which time would never erase from his memory. ‘I recall the full force of my feelings at Danton’s last words which I did not hear myself but which were passed round with horror and admiration: “Above all, don’t forget to show my head to the people. It’s well worth having a look at.”’

  A week later more blood was shed. Chaumette was guillotined. So was Archbishop Gobel who, claimed by the Hébertists as one of their supporters, was condemned by Robespierre as an atheist. So was the widow of Hébert who was sentenced to death as an accomplice of her husband. And so was the pretty, twenty-three-year old widow of Camille Desmoulins, her one offence being a devoted attachment to her husband on whose behalf she had appealed in vain to Robespierre who was godfather to their baby son, Horace.

  It is not enough for you to have murdered your best friend [her mother wrote to Robespierre when judgement upon Lucille had been pronounced]. You must have his wife’s blood as well. Your monster, Fouquier-Tinville, has just ordered Lucille to be carried away to the scaffold. In less than two hours she will be dead…If Camille’s blood has not driven you mad, if you can still remember the happy evenings you once spent before our fire holding our little Horace, spare an innocent victim. If not, then make haste and take us all, Horace, me and my other daughter, Adèle. Hurry up and tear us apart with your claws that still drip with Camille’s blood…Hurry, hurry, so mat we can all rest in the same grave.

  The appeal went unanswered. Lucille Desmoulins prepared herself for death with a bravery which aroused the deepest admiration and sympathy even amongst her husband’s bitterest enemies. ‘I shall in a few hours again meet my husband,’ she had exclaimed to her accusers when sentence of death was pronounced. ‘In departing from this world, in which nothing now remains to engage my affections, I am far less the object of pity than you are.’ Dressed with ‘uncommon attention and taste’, she climbed the steps to the scaffold with what was described as ‘unaffected pleasure’ and ‘received the fatal blow without appearing to notice what the executioner was doing.’

  ‘In heaven’s name,’ asked one who saw her die, ‘when will all this bloodshed cease?’

  It was not to cease yet. In June 1794 the Committee of Public Safety passed a decree, known as the law of 22 Prairial, which both greatly increased the numbers of those who could be regarded as ‘public enemies’ and expedited the processes by which they could be condemned to death – the only punishment now to be inflicted – by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Defence lawyers were dispensed with; so were witnesses unless ‘the formality’ of calling them was considered ‘necessary to discover accomplices or for other important considerations of public interest’. The Tribunal was no longer required to interrogate the accused before their public trial, since this merely ‘confused the conscience of the judges’; now, in the absence of positive proof, juries must be satisfied with ‘moral proof’. ‘For a citizen to become suspect,’ said Georges Couthon who had been elected President of the Convention the previous December, ‘it is sufficient that rumour accuses him.’ After the law of 22 Prairial everything, indeed, went on much better, in the opinion of Fouquier-Tinville: heads fell ‘like tiles’. ‘Next week,’ he said one day, ‘I’ll be able to take the tops off three or four hundred.’

  In several provincial towns trials were conducted as expeditiously and summarily as they were in Paris. In Orange, for example, where one judge expressed his exasperation with another who had ‘to have proofs just like in the courts of the ancien régime,’ a commission established on 10 May had condemned 332 people to death by the end of July. It was in Paris, however, that most of the executions took place in that stiflingly hot summer. In an effort to centralize revolutionary justice, the Committee of Public Safety had suppressed various provincial courts and had brought those awaiting trial to the capital whose prisons were consequently crammed with ‘enemies of the Republic’ whom, so Couthon insisted, it was ‘less a question of punishing than of annihilating’.

  Many noblemen and noblewomen who had previously been spared were now brought to trial. One of them was the Princesse de Monaco who claimed to be with child since pregnant women were usually spared until their babies were born. While waiting for the prison doctor to examine her she cut off her hair which she succeeded in smuggling out of the prison for her children. She then wrote to Fouquier-Tinville: ‘I inform you, citizen, that I am n
ot pregnant. I did not tell this lie for fear of death…but because I wanted to secure a day’s grace so that I, rather than the executioner, could cut my hair. It is the only legacy that I can leave my children. It should at least be pure.’

  Another noblewoman who was guillotined at this time was the aged widow of Maréchal the Duc de Noailles, Marie Antoinette’s ‘Madame L’Étiquette’, whose senile eccentricity it had become to write long letters to the Virgin Mary on the subject of prudence and protocol in Heaven. They were answered by her confessor who signed himself Mary but who, on one occasion, committed on Her behalf some solecism which to led the Duchess to comment, ‘But then one ought not to expect too much of Her. She was after all only a bourgeoise from Nazareth. It was through marriage that she became a connection of the House of David. Her husband, Joseph, would have known better.’

  The old, demented Duchess was arrested in July with her daughter-in-law, the Duchesse d’Ayen, and her grand-daughter, the Vicomtesse de Noailles. They were taken to the guillotine watched by the Abbé Carichon who took advantage of a blinding rainstorm which slowed down the carts to give them absolution.

  The carts halted before the scaffold [recorded the Abbé who described the chief executioner as a short young man with a markedly dandyish air]. There was a large circle of spectators, most of them laughing, ‘There she is! Look at her! That’s the Marshal’s wife who used to have a grand carriage. Now she’s in a cart just like the others’…I saw the chief executioner and his two assistants…[one of them had his hair drawn back in a pigtail and chewed on the stem of a red rose]…I must admit that…the sufferings of the [forty-five] victims were much mitigated by their business-like methods, the way they got all the condemned down from the carts before the executioner started, and placed them with their backs to the scaffold so they would not see anything. I felt the executioners deserved some gratitude for this and for the decorum they observed and their serious expressions which contained no traces of mockery or insult…