I now found myself facing the steps to the scaffold against which a tall, old white-haired man was leaning. He was to be beheaded first. He had a kindly air…Near him stood a pious-looking lady whom I did not know; Mme de Noailles was immediately opposite me. She was dressed in black and sitting on a block of stone with wide staring eyes…[Her daughter] stood in a simple, noble, resigned attitude with her eyes closed, looking as she did when receiving Holy Communion…
The executioner and his assistants climb on the scaffold and arrange everything. The chief executioner puts on a blue-red overall…When all is ready the old man goes up the steps. The chief executioner takes him by the left arm, the big assistant by the right and the other by the legs. They lay him quickly on his face and his head is cut off and thrown, together with his body, into a great tumbril, where all the bodies swim in blood. And so it goes on. What a dreadful shambles it is! The Duchess is the third to go up. They have to make an opening in the top of her dress to uncover her neck. Her daughter-in-law is the tenth…The chief executioner tears off her bonnet. It is fastened by a pin so her hair is pulled violently upwards and she grimaces with pain. When the daughter-in-law is gone the grand-daughter replaces her. She is dressed all in white. She looks much younger than she really is…
Day after day the executions continued until by the end of July over 1,500 people had been beheaded within the previous eight weeks. But only a small proportion of them were aristocrats. Less than nine in a hundred of those guillotined in the Terror were of noble birth; about six per cent were clergy. The rest, eighty-five per cent, came from that class of the people once known as the Third Estate. Among them were ‘twenty peasant girls from Poitou’, so one contemporary recorded:
All of them were to be executed together. Exhausted by their long journey, they lay in the courtyard of the Conciergerie, asleep on the paving-stones. Their expression betrayed no understanding of their fate…They were all guillotined a few days after their arrival…From one of them a baby she was feeding was taken from her breast.
Robespierre witnessed none of the victims perish. He had once expressed the opinion that public executions coarsened and brutalized the character of the people. But he made no move to stop them. He had to stay in power for, incorruptible, more virtuous than other men, he alone could save the Revolution. In justification of the Terror he declared in the Convention, ‘At the point where we are now, if we stop too soon we will die. We have not been too severe…Without the revolutionary Government the Republic cannot be made stronger. If it is destroyed now, freedom will be extinguished tomorrow.’ Besides, his own life was in danger. He had always said that the daggers of murderers were directed at him, that it was only by chance that Marat had been struck down before him. Since then two people, one a nobleman’s former valet, the other an unbalanced girl of twenty who lamented the death of the King, had set out to kill him. He had cause to remember the words that Danton had shouted at the Revolutionary Tribunal and at the Duplays’ shuttered house as the tumbrils rumbled past it on their way to the guillotine: ‘You will follow us, Robespierre.’
9
THE DAYS OF THERMIDOR
22–28 July 1794
‘Robespierre never forgave men
for the injustices which he had done them,
nor for the kindnesses which he had received from them,
nor for the talents which some of them possessed,
and he did not have’
BUZOT
On 18 Floréal Year III, that is to say on 7 May 1794, Robespierre delivered to the Convention a long speech which had taken him three weeks to prepare. In the course of it, having blamed his fallen enemies for putting the Republic in danger and vilified Danton, ‘the most dangerous of the conspirators had he not been the most cowardly’, he turned upon the atheists who had survived the recent purges and who were now trying to ‘smother all the noble sentiments of nature’ by elevating ‘immorality into a cult’. Declaring that atheism was aristocratic, he propounded the necessity of a moral revolution to complete the work of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and proposed a decree which would announce unequivocally to the world the French people’s recognition of the ‘existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul’. To celebrate their acceptance of this new civic religion and their devotion to the principles and virtues of the Revolution, he then introduced a plan for a series of national festivals, the first of them to be held on Whit Sunday, 8 June, in honour of the Supreme Being.
On the morning of that day Robespierre dressed himself with even more than his accustomed care in a bright blue coat and buff cotton trousers. He left the house, without having had breakfast, carrying a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers and sheaves of corn. The sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky; the windows of the houses in the Rue Saint-Honoré were decorated with red roses; the pealing of church bells was punctuated by the boom of cannon and the tapping of drums. And to a young man, a ‘very refined little dandy’ named Vilate, a juryman on the Revolutionary Tribunal, who met him as he walked through the Tuileries gardens, Robespierre looked ‘radiantly happy – for the first time’. Vilate invited him up to his apartment in the Pavilion de Flore.
He accepted my invitation without hesitation [Vilate recalled]. He was astounded to see the immense crowds of people that thronged the gardens below my windows. The women added to the gaiety of the scene by the elegance of their dresses…Robespierre ate little. His glance was constantly directed towards the splendid spectacle below. He seemed to be intoxicated with enthusiasm. ‘Behold the most interesting part of humanity,’ he exclaimed. ‘Here is the universe assembled beneath us. Oh, Nature, how sublime, how delightful is thy power! How tyrants must turn pale at the idea of this Feast!’ That was the extent of his conversation.
On the terrace of the Palace the members of the Convention were waiting impatiently for him to appear and, as President of the Convention, to open the proceedings. The minutes passed and Robespierre did not come. The deputies looked alternately at their watches and at an amphitheatre which had been built in front of the terrace. Surmounting the amphitheatre was a pyre on which was to be burned an ugly effigy representing atheism together with others symbolizing discord and selfishness in accordance with a scenario prepared by David, the painter. The deputies, many of whom had already derided the whole conception of the festival in private, did not trouble to disguise their resentment at being kept waiting so long. They grew even more restive when the President at last arrived upon the scene and delivered himself of a long speech in which he claimed that the world which the Supreme Being had created had never offered Him ‘a spectacle so worthy of His sight’ as the festival that Paris was celebrating this day.
Some deputies began to murmur to each other. One whispered, ‘Just listen to the pontiff!’ Another said sardonically that were it not for kind Monsieur de Robespierre they never would have known that there was a God or that the soul was meant to be immortal.
After Robespierre had finished speaking, he took a lighted torch that was offered to him and marched purposefully down towards the pyre. The evil effigies were satisfactorily consumed, but when the Goddess of Wisdom rose like a phoenix from their ashes to take their place her face was so blackened by soot that several spectators could not restrain their laughter.
Robespierre returned to his place where he delivered himself of a second speech after which the deputies at last moved off to the Champ de Mars, their irritation plain for all to see. Most of them pretended not to hear the orders of the ushers of the Convention who vainly endeavoured to get them to march in proper military fashion. Some walked arm in arm with their neighbours; others nodded significantly towards the neat figure of Robespierre who strode on, twenty paces ahead of the rest, a crown of feathers on his head.
In the middle of the Champ de Mars a tall tree spread its boughs over the summit of a mound covered with moss. The deputies sat down beneath the leaves of the tree surrounded by grou
ps of little boys with garlands of violets on their heads, by young men with wreaths of myrtle, by older men wearing oak, ivy and olive leaves. Women, carrying baskets of flowers, held children by the hand. An orchestra began to play; the various groups began to sing; the young men drew swords and swore to their elders to defend the fatherland; the women lifted up their children in their arms; all raised their hands to heaven, paying homage to the Supreme Being. Robespierre made another speech. Then a barrage of artillery fire rent the air while the people cheered and hugged each other shouting, ‘Vive la République!’
For most of the spectators, if not for the deputies who had played their parts so resentfully, the festival had been an enjoyable one and had given them grounds for hope that the weeks of Terror and repression might be coming to an end – throughout the day the guillotine had been draped in velvet.
All citizens had been asked to decorate their houses with garlands and oak branches for the celebrations [the thirteen-year-old daughter of an architect told her father who had gone to design a theatre in the provinces]. We used all our artificial flowers. You may imagine that the previous night was an almost sleepless one for me because of the pleasures in store…I got up at six o’clock…and put on a lawn skirt, a tricolour sash round my waist and an embroidered fichu of red cotton…In our pockets we put some slices of bread and cooking chocolate…You cannot imagine what a sight the Champ de Mars presented. It looked as though someone had transported a huge cliff from the Pyrenees. On its peak was an obelisk surmounted by a statue representing the people of France holding aloft the statues of Liberty and Equality. It really seemed as though the French are fairies to have done such beautiful things in so short time…There were girls everywhere strewing flowers. My hair was simply full of them.
For Robespierre, however, the day which had begun so cheerfully in such auspicious sunshine, which should have been one of triumph, had ended in ultimate humiliation. He had overheard some of the remarks that the deputies had made, the references to the ‘proud affectation’ of ‘the tyrant’, to Brutus and Nemesis. He had been made well aware of the feelings amongst the sans-culottes, one of whom, standing near Vitale, had said, ‘The bastard isn’t satisfied with being the boss; he’s got to be God as well’. And he could not have failed to hear the caustic comment that greeted his observation that it was the Supreme Being who had placed in the heart of the oppressor the sensations of remorse and terror: ‘True, Robespierre, too true!’ He went home with presentiments of danger and death. ‘You will not see me much longer,’ he said morosely to the Duplays before going to bed.
For some time past he had been becoming increasingly isolated from his equally overworked and, in some cases, equally didactic and authoritarian colleagues who were constantly getting on each others’ nerves. After this festival, they felt more strongly than ever that he regarded himself as a dictator, while he in turn became more and more suspicious of them, particularly of Billaud-Varenne, the coarse Collot d’Herbois whom he suspected of conspiring against him, and of Carnot who always worked late in the Committee’s offices, and was supposed by one of Robespierre’s agents to do so in order to be the first ‘to open all the letters that arrive’. There had been a period, after the destruction of both Hébertists and Dantonists when, closely associated with his principal supporters, Saint-Just and Couthon, he had been in unquestioned control of the Committee of Public Safety and hence of the Government. Through Fouquier-Tinville and Fouquier’s associates he had controlled the Revolutionary Tribunal, and, through Hanriot, the National Guard. But always he had been as much feared and disliked as respected and revered. A revealing anecdote was related by Paul Barras, who said that a fellow-deputy awoke from a reverie with a cry of alarm when he realized that Robespierre’s greenish eyes were upon him. ‘He will now suppose,’ the frightened deputy said, ‘that I was thinking about something.’
‘Fear was on every side, in the creak of a door, an exclamation, a breath,’ wrote Louis Madelin of those early summer months when Robespierre had been in undisputed control of the government. ‘Drawing-rooms were empty, wine-shops deserted: even the courtesans stopped going to the Palais Royal where (extraordinary sight!) virtue reigned supreme. The dreary city waited, under the burning summer sun.’
Plays were censored; Molière was banned. A performance at the Comédie Française was interrupted by a Jacobin who stood up to object to the line, ‘les plus tolérants sont les pardonnables’. When the audience told him to be quiet he went off to the Jacobin Club to denounce the actors who were all arrested. Few people dared talk freely, for the Committee of Public Safety’s ubiquitous spies might well be listening. Even at the Fraternal Suppers, which were held in the streets outside houses whose owners were expected to cook and serve the food, conversation was guarded, while the quality of the meals provided was often governed by what interpretation might be placed upon it. Madame Rataud who kept a dress shop in the Rue des Petits-Champs commented upon the dilemma that faced her when a Fraternal Supper was held in her section: ‘If I prepare a dish of haricots the sans-culottes will throw it in my face, yet if I provide roast pheasant the Jacobins will say it is too high-class.’ In the event she cooked both and, after nervously waiting to see what her neighbours would provide before bringing out either, it seemed to her safe to produce them both. Other women wrote of the dangers to be encountered in the streets where spies watched out for ‘enemies of the nation’. Madame Amé who ran a dressmaker’s workshop in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré kept a tricolour cockade for the use of her apprentices and insisted that whenever one of the girls went out on an errand she must pin it prominently to her hat.
Yet the fears that undoubtedly pervaded the lives of many citizens during these months were not universal. Gaily painted carriages no longer thronged the tree-lined boulevards of Paris, but families still strolled in the evening air down the Boulevard de la Comédie Italienne, and young ladies still went to drawing classes and had piano lessons.
This is how we spend our days [runs the entry for 16 January 1794 in the diary of a young governess in a bourgeois family in the Rue Saint-Marc]. Citizeness Ziguette [the youngest daughter in the family] leaves at ten o’clock after having eaten a light breakfast and practised her pianoforte fairly conscientiously. She trips away with a clatter of sabots, hoisting up her blue skirt to expose white under-petticoats much shorter than they should be and running like a Red Indian pulling along Thérèse [the cook] by the arm. Thérèse carries her bouillon and bread soup in a tin container. They arrive at Citizen Chaudet’s. She draws, is complimented by her master. As soon as she comes home she gabbles what he has said to her…and as she reaches the top of the stairs I hear her shout, ‘Food! I’m starving to death!’ Quite alarmed by this ogrish hunger, we make haste to sit down to dinner where, over a good meal, we commend the merits of her sketches…Then there is pianoforte practice until lights are brought in, no longer wax but tallow candles, plain and simple. Then we read Ovid or Horace until about seven o’clock when we begin to read for instruction or entertainment such as learning by heart some lines from Racine or Anarcharsis.
If such bourgeois families as these had to make do with tallow rather than wax candles, they seem to have suffered few other deprivations. On the anniversary of the King’s death Ziguette and her mother went to dinner with a Madame Houzeaux. They had soup, cold beef with gherkin and beetroot salad, skate with browned butter, stewed mutton and potatoes, fried sole, cheese and fruit. After dinner they sat by the fire to talk about the latest fashions, and on their way home they went into a shop in the Rue du Bac and bought ‘a ravishing frock’ for twenty-two livres. For families such as this the Terror was not of overriding concern, nor was Robespierre mentioned much in conversation.
Those more intimately concerned with politics, however, knew that Robespierre was now having difficulties with his colleagues. Differences of opinion had arisen in the Committee of Public Safety over a project, favoured by Robespierre, for the free distribution to impov
erished patriots of estates confiscated from ‘suspects’, and over the speeding up of the procedures of the Revolutionary Tribunal, as well as over Robespierre’s devotion to the religious ideas of Rousseau as exemplified by his inauguration of festivals such as those of the Supreme Being. At the same time there was growing rivalry between the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. Robespierre, backed by Couthon and Saint-Just, had usurped many of the latter’s powers, particularly those concerning the police. This added to the numbers of Robespierre’s enemies among the members of the Committee of General Security without mollifying those who were jealous of his preeminence in the Committee of Public Safety. Even more dangerous for Robespierre was his gradual loss of control of the Convention. The radical members strongly disapproved of his recall to Paris of their representatives en mission in the provinces, while the more moderate members, still angry with the Jacobins for their destruction of the Girondins and appalled by the merciless manner in which the Revolutionary Tribunal had taken advantage of the law of 22 Prairial, had begun openly to condemn the continuance of the Terror at a time when the French armies’ victories were making it inexcusable. On 26 June General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, once a silk merchant’s apprentice in Lyons, overwhelmed the Austrians at Fleurus and a fortnight later Brussels was occupied. Toulon had already been retaken and some sort of order had at last been restored in the Vendée. There being no longer any danger of invasion by foreign troops or any serious threat from either federalists or royalists, the continued dictatorship of Robespierre and his associates became increasingly insupportable.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 26