The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  Robespierre had at last made up his mind to sign an appeal to arms. The pen had been in his hand. He had inscribed the first two letters of his name, Ro——-, but there the writing stops. The bottom of the document is marked with blood.

  Augustin Robespierre tried to escape by jumping out of a window, but he slipped and broke a leg. Couthon, helped to the top of a flight of stairs, fell to the bottom of them and cut open his forehead. Hanriot was hurled out of a window by Pierre Coffinhal, the immensely strong Vice-President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who was enraged by the so-called General’s incompetence; he fell on a dunghill from which he escaped to a builder’s yard thence to a sewer where ‘he was discovered by some soldiers who struck him with their bayonets and thrust out one of his eyes which then hung by the ligaments down his cheek’. Philippe Lebas shot himself. Saint-Just fingered a pistol as though toying with the idea of suicide himself but in the end he did not use it and quietly submitted to the gendarmes who escorted him with the other prisoners to the Convention. ‘The coward Robespierre is outside,’ Barras announced to the deputies. ‘Do you wish him to enter?’ ‘To bring a man covered with crime into our hall would be to diminish the glory of this great day,’ was the response. ‘The body of a tyrant can only bring contagion with it. The proper place for Robespierre and his accomplices is the Place de la Révolution.’

  Before being taken there Robespierre was carried on a plank to the offices of the Committee of Public Safety and dumped on a table in the green-painted anteroom, his head on a wooden ammunition box. For an hour he lay there without moving, his eyes closed, the blood still pouring from his shattered jaw. Then, at about four o’clock in the morning, he opened his eyes, and began quietly to wipe the clotted blood from his mouth with a pistol holster of soft white leather. One of the people who surrounded the table, looking down at him with more curiosity than pity, offered him a few pieces of paper which he used instead of the holster until they, too, were covered in blood. Some of the crowd in the room jeered at him: ‘Well, you do seem to have gone quiet all of a sudden!’ ‘Oh, Sire! Is your Majesty in pain?’

  At about six o’clock a surgeon came to stop him bleeding to death. He put a key in his mouth, pulled out two or three teeth together with some fragments of broken bone, and then dressed the wound with a bandage that covered the whole of the lower part of his face. During these operations Robespierre remained silent, showing scarcely a trace of the agony he must have endured. When the surgeon had finished he pulled up the stockings which had fallen down to his ankles, pushed himself off the table and went to sit in a chair where he looked at the people who still surrounded him, his face as white as his stockings, the bandages round his jaw now red with blood.

  At nine o’clock Couthon was brought into the room on a stretcher. Then Saint-Just and Dumas appeared. None of them spoke until Saint-Just, looking at the large placard proclaiming the Rights of Man that had been stuck on the wall, said, ‘Well, whatever you say, that is something we did.’ An hour later all the prisoners were taken to the Conciergerie where Robespierre indicated that he wanted pen and paper. ‘What for?’ the gaoler answered, refusing to bring them. ‘Do you want to write to your Supreme Being?’

  Arraigned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, Robespierre and his brother, together with Saint-Just, Couthon, Hanriot, Dumas, Fleuriot and sixteen other members of the conseil general of the Commune – a further seventy were to follow them – were condemned to death and taken by cart to the guillotine at five o’clock that afternoon. The crowds all along the route were immense and rowdy. They shouted insults and curses at the men in the carts, calling out ‘To the guillotine! Long live the Republic! Down with the tyrant!’ For a few moments the tumbrils stopped outside the Duplays’ house while women danced about them and a boy, who had fetched a bucket from a butcher’s shop, smeared the door with blood.

  Robespierre’s face was ‘wrapped in a bandage of dirty, bloodstained linen’, runs one report, ‘and, from what could be seen of it, was fearfully disfigured…His eyes were lowered and almost closed…Just before arriving at the place of execution…a woman forced her way through the crowd…and, grasping the railing of the cart with one hand, raised the other threateningly in his face. “You monster spewed out of hell,” she shouted at him. “Go down into your grave burdened with the curses of the wives and mothers of France…The thought of your execution makes me drunk with joy.”’

  Augustin Robespierre was also bandaged; so was Couthon; so also was Hanriot who, ‘drunk as usual’, presented a horrifying spectacle with his right eye still hanging from its socket. Saint-Just, who had once declared that the ship of the Revolution could arrive safely in port ‘only by ploughing its way boldly through a Red Sea of blood’, looked upon the crowd with stiff disdain, his pale brown breeches and white waistcoat still immaculate. They reached the Place de la Révolution at about half-past seven in the evening.

  As Hanriot was ‘about to ascend the scaffold, a bystander snatched out his loose eye’. Robespierre, who had to be lifted from the cart, lay flat on the ground, appearing to take no notice of what was happening. His eyes were closed and he did not open them until he felt himself being carried up on to the scaffold. The executioner threw off the coat which had been placed over his shoulders and then tore away the bandage and splint that the surgeon had applied to his wound. As his lower jaw fell from his upper, and the blood flew once more ‘in torrents’, he let forth ‘a groan like that of a dying tiger, which was heard all over the square’.

  ‘We are all throwing ourselves into each other’s arms,’ a newspaper reported the following day. ‘The tyrant is no more.’

  10

  THE DAYS OF GERMINAL, PRAIRIAL AND VENDÉMIAIRE

  1 April, 20 May and 4–6 October 1795

  ‘A burning fever is followed by

  complete prostration of strength’

  LA REVELLIÈRE-LÉPEAUX

  The destruction of the Robespierrists and the wholesale purge of the Commune soon resulted in the Revolution’s lurching to the Right. But the change of direction was not immediately apparent. In the general rejection of the Terror that followed the journée of 9 Thermidor, several former Hébertists and the Enragés who had escaped the guillotine were released from prison. Such extreme sans-culotte leaders as Jean Varlet came into prominence once more and, in a number of provincial towns, radicals reassumed that importance in the comités revolutionnaires of which Robespierre’s recall of the représentants en mission had deprived them. But gradually the Plain began to assert itself as a more considerable body than it had ever done in the past. Some of its members, as well as some former Dantonists like Thuriot de la Rozère were elected to the Committee of Public Safety whose powers were severely reduced as were those of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Carnot and the time-serving Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac all left the Committee of Public Safety, and Fouquier-Tinville was removed from the Revolutionary Tribunal.

  Moderates and Montagnards alike found it increasingly difficult to stem the rightward flow of the revolutionary tide. Robert Lindet proposed to the Convention that, while nobles and clergy should no longer be condemned merely because of their birth or calling, and while the Law of 22 Prairial against suspects which had been repealed should never be reintroduced, there should be no vendetta against those who had been responsible for the errors and violence of the past. But although the Convention voted unanimously in favour of this compromise, the revulsion against the Montagnards could not so easily be contained. Some of those who had once worked with Robespierre – and in the end had fallen foul of him, Fréron, Barras and Tallien amongst them – became positively reactionary as if to atone for the excesses of the Terror for which they had been responsible; and under their protection the jeunesse dorée, young men of mostly middle-class background, became as frightening a force as the sans-culottes had once been. These jeunesse dorée, who marched about the streets carrying short sticks weighted with lead, wore a kind of uniform
of square-skirted coats and tight trousers, low boots and extremely high cravats. Their hair dangled in long locks over their ears and was plaited at the back of their heads. They constituted a dictatorship, so one of them boasted, ‘a dictatorship which nobody opposed because it filled everyone’s wish’. With their help the closure of the Jacobin Club was brought about, the red caps of liberty were banished from the streets and nearly all the Paris sections were taken over by the Right who, having stopped payments to workers for attending meetings, went further in keeping out unwanted sans-culottes by arranging to have the meetings held only in the middle of the day.

  As the tide of reaction mounted, as pamphlets and newspapers attacked ‘Robespierre’s Tail’, as theatre audiences applauded anti-Jacobin plays and the actors of the Comédie Française were released from prison, the surviving Girondins were recalled to the Convention from which David’s paintings of the deaths of Marat and Lepeletier were removed. At the same time demands for the punishment of the men who had been responsible for the Terror grew louder. Jean Baptiste Carrier, the lawyer, who had supervised the cruelties of the Terror at Nantes was guillotined on 16 November. Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, Barère and Vadier, were all brought to trial. So were Le Bon and Herman. Fouquier-Tinville and fifteen men who had served with him on the Revolutionary Tribunal were executed to the undisguised delight of those artisans and shopkeepers, domestic servants, journeymen and tradesmen whose families had provided the guillotine with most of its victims.

  In many French provinces, also, reaction led to demands for the punishment of those who had carried out the bloody policies of the fallen régime and in some areas, particularly in the south, to outbreaks of what became known as the White Terror. Officials responsible for the former Terror were beaten, maimed, lynched and murdered by friends and relations of those who had suffered, by fanatical extremists of the Right as merciless as their victims, or by groups of assassins like that known as the Compagnie du Soleil. In several towns in Provence and Languedoc, in Ain and Gascony, in Marseilles and Lyons, Aix and Nîmes, in Tarascon and Lonsle – Saunier hundreds of prisoners were massacred in their cells or in the courtyard of the gaols in which they had been confined for offences committed in the time of Robespierre.

  Elsewhere in France the change of government provoked less violence. In certain departments, indeed, there were no reprisals at all, in others no cause for them. At Rheims, for instance, the few ‘Terrorists’ brought to trial were all acquitted, while in Seine-et-Marne the Terror had not been accountable for a single death.

  In other areas it proved impossible for the central Government to exercise any firm control over the local authorities. Lyons, though nominally supervised by moderate republicans, became once more a kind of royalist stronghold; while in the Vendée the rebels who had risen up against the Republic were able – by a series of armistices highly favourable to themselves – to exercise an authority which left them in virtual control not only of their own territory but also of large parts of the north-west.

  Both in these areas and in most departments of France this was an even more unpleasant time than usual for the poor. The rate of inflation and the numbers of unemployed soared. Bread was rationed, fuel scarce. Brigandage was common in the countryside. And the winter of 1794–5 was an exceptionally severe one: first temperatures fell so low that many rivers, including the Seine, froze from bank to bank and starving wolves abandoning the snow-bound forests, invaded villages and towns, then a sudden thaw led to widespread floods. Spring came at last, but no end to the suffering. By April 1795 food prices in certain towns had doubled since the beginning of the year while bread, for instance, had risen to over forty-five sous the pound. Assignats were worth no more than eight per cent of their original value.

  To the sans-culottes it seemed that the gap between rich and poor was becoming almost as wide as it had been before the Revolution. Sudden fortunes were being made by profiteers and speculators who spent money as rapidly as they made it. They and their women sped through the streets in ornately painted carriages to expensive restaurants where meals were devoured at prices that would have provided two month’s food for a worker’s family, to gambling dens, to theatres whose private rooms, in the words of a police report, were ‘absolute sewers of debauchery and vice’, and to dance halls which now sprang up all over Paris. Dandies known as incroyables, affecting lisps and dressed in the most outlandish fashions, with hair cut short in front and raised up by a comb at the back, appeared in the Tuileries gardens and were seen enjoying boating parties on the Seine accompanied by merveilleuses whose scanty, revealing clothes were equally exotic and whose wigs were marvels of the perruquier’s art. At bals des victimes, entertainments at once riotous and ghoulish, guests whose friends or relations had perished in the Terror wore hair arranged as though prepared for the blade of the guillotine and thin bands of red silk round their necks.

  The sans-culottes grew more and more resentful, but they had no effective leaders now. They were not supported by the sections any more, nor, as they had been in the past, by a powerful Commune. An attempt was made to mount one of those revolutionary journées which had once been so successful: on 1 April (12 Germinal) demonstrators, women and men ‘with bare arms and chests’, marched upon the Convention demanding cheaper bread, the proscription of the jeunesse dorée and the resurrection of the Constitution which the Montagnards had framed in 1793. But the Convention, unlike that of June 1793, was not to be intimidated – the National Guard was on its side – and after a party of muscadins armed with whips and cudgels had been called in by Legendre, the demonstrators were thrown out with ease. Far from winning either sympathy or concessions the journée of 12 Germinal provoked repression. Some of the sans-culotte leaders were arrested, and many of their adherents, both in Paris and the provinces, were dismissed by their employers and refused passports which might have enabled them to go in search of other work. At the same time, the opportunity was taken to get rid of several Montagnards: eight of the most notable were arrested, and Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois and Barère were all sentenced to transportation, Billaud-Varenne and Collot to Guiana, Barère to the Isle of Oléron.

  Undeterred by these punishments and angered by yet another cut in the bread ration, the Parisian sans-culottes made a further attempt a few weeks later to force the Convention to attend to their complaints. But, as in other towns where there were demonstrations and riots, and even cries of ‘Bread and a King’, the workers had no effective leadership.

  Even so, the demonstration planned for 20 May (1 Prairial) threatened to be massive and intimidating. The night before, crowds of people, many of them women, could be seen rushing about the streets of the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin and throughout the Cité, urging people to join them next day in a march upon the Convention, to stick slogans in their hats reading ‘Bread and the Constitution of ’93’ and to let the women march in the front as the Government’s troops would never dare to open fire on them. They declared that the Convention had executed Robespierre and his friends only to take their place as tyrants, that the people were being deliberately starved, that avaricious shop-keepers were being encouraged to keep their prices at a level that no poor family could afford. The next morning, as church bells rang, as the tocsin was pealed, cannon fired and drums beaten, a vast crowd of people, accompanied by three battalions of National Guard, though not by their officers, marched towards the Tuileries, carrying placards, pikes and swords, some unarmed shouting, ‘This is the struggle of the black hands against the white.’ They arrived at the hall of the Assembly at about ten o’clock, closing all the roads that led towards it. Then, bursting through the doors, they shouted for food that they could afford. The President, Vernier, putting on his hat, called for silence and order; and, when his pleas were ignored, was replaced in the chair by the more authoritative André Dumont whose commands were no more successful. ‘No talk!’ the mob cried. ‘Bread!’ At lengt
h an army officer appeared with a party of fusiliers and a number of jeunesse dorée, equipped as before with cudgels and postboys’ whips. They slashed at the backs of the demonstrators, men and women alike, ‘who fled with tremendous screams, amidst the loud applause on the part of the spectators in the tribunes’.

  Within a few minutes, however, there was a renewed assault upon the locked doors, one of which was forced off its hinges with a splintering of wood and a shower of plaster. Once more the mob rushed in as the deputies on the lower seats scrambled towards the upper benches, out of harm’s way. At this moment, men armed with muskets and bayonets from one of the sections loyal to the Convention, appeared on the scene and managed to drive the assailants back. But the crowd outside the hall was constantly growing until, shortly before three o’clock, though the men who had come to the Convention’s defence stood by the doors with crossed bayonets, the mob forced their way in yet again, those in front being pushed forward by the pressure of bodies behind. The deputies rose from their seats shouting ‘The Republic for ever!’ as shots were fired and musket balls ricochetted about the walls. One brave deputy, a young man from the valley of the Douro named Jean Féraud, came forward to face the invaders, throwing himself down in front of them, and crying out, ‘Kill me! You will have to pass over my body before you take another step.’ The invaders ignored him, trampling over him and, while some sat down in the seats vacated by the deputies who had moved to those higher up the hall, others advanced towards the President’s chair, now occupied by Boissy d’Anglas instead of the exhausted Dumont.