The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  Well aware now that Menou was far from the kind of general they needed in such a crisis, and suspecting that he might well be in complicity with the rebels, the Convention dismissed him and appointed in his place Paul Barras, who had proved so energetic a leader during the journée of Thermidor. But Barras had never been a particularly successful commander of regular troops – his years in the army, spent mostly in India, had not been in the least distinguished – and it was considered essential that he should be given some more experienced assistants. One of these, introduced to him by Fréron, was the Corsican Brigadier Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Bonaparte, then aged twenty-six, had come to the notice of the Convention through his exceptional skill as an artillery officer during the siege of Toulon and had risen from the rank of captain to that of brigadier-general within the space of four months. Unlike several of his friends, including his closest, Alexandre des Mazis, who had chosen to emigrate, he had demonstrated his support of the Revolution from the beginning. While stationed at Valence as a subaltern he had been appointed secretary of the Society of Friends of the Constitution. He had publicly condemned the King’s flight to Varennes, and had made it known that he approved both of the sale of land confiscated from the Church and the nobility, and of the decree by which the clergy were to be elected by their congregations. Since the capture of Toulon, however, Bonaparte’s career had not prospered. He had become friendly with the sociable, gregarious Augustin Robespierre and, after the fall of the Robespierrists, had thus become suspect to the Thermidorians. For a time he was placed under house arrest. Then, after his release, he was transferred from the artillery to the infantry for having tried to rescind an order posting him to the Army of the West which was engaged in the unpleasant duty of fighting the Chouans. He applied for sick leave which he spent in Paris in a dreary hotel on the Left Bank, complaining of the shabby way he had been treated and even on occasion threatening suicide. He walked disconsolately about the city in his now frayed uniform, or in what Mme Junot described as ‘a grey greatcoat, very plainly made, buttoned up to his chin…and a black cravat very clumsily tied’, his long ill-combed hair falling over his collar. When his leave was over, he asked for a command in the field, but was given instead a staff appointment which he found so irksome that he decided to go to Constantinople to help reorganize the Turkish artillery. He had obtained his passport and was ready to leave when Fréron, whom he had met in the South while they were on duty together there, took him to Barras.

  ‘Will you serve me?’ Barras asked him abruptly. ‘You have three minutes to decide.’

  Bonaparte needed no time to consider the offer. He assented immediately, asking only where were the guns which would be needed if they were to repel the threatened attack by the rebels who outnumbered the Convention’s forces by about six to one. Joachim Murat, a handsome, swaggering cavalry officer, an innkeeper’s son who was one day to become King of Naples, was sent to fetch them from a camp, six miles to the south. A rebel force was already on its way to the camp, but, galloping at the head of 200 horsemen, Murat arrived there first and brought back forty guns with him to Paris. Eight of these were allocated to Bonaparte who was given the task of defending the Tuileries from any attack that might be made upon it from the north.

  The total number of men at the Convention’s disposal was about 8,000, of whom some 5,000 were regular troops of the line. Most of these were disposed so as to guard all approaches to the Tuileries in the Rue du Cul de Sac Dauphin, the Rue l’Échelle, the Rue Rohan and the Rue St Nicaise, on the Pont Neuf, the Pont Royal and the Pont Louis XVI, and around the Place de la Révolution and the Place Vendôme. The cavalry were held in reserve on the Carrousel and in the Tuileries gardens. An ammunition depot, a hospital and stores of provisions were established in the Tuileries itself. The heights of Meudon were occupied so that the Convention could retire there if compelled to retreat from their hall, and arms were sent to the radical Faubourg Saint-Antoine whose ‘attachment to the cause of liberty’ Barras – prepared to accept any allies so long as the emergency lasted – described as being well known and whose inhabitants Fréron was exhorting to come to the defence of the Revolution.

  While these preparations were being made, the insurrectionary committee, which had been set up in the section of Lepeletier, was also making its dispositions. It appointed as commander-in-chief of its forces General Danican, an officer from a poor noble family who had served against the Vendéens but had been dismissed on suspicion of being secretly a royalist. He had come to Paris, thoroughly disillusioned by the present Government, and prepared to assist in any plans for its subversion. The misconceived plan which the insurrectionaries adopted was to make a concerted attack upon the Tuileries. Instead of building barricades around it, encircling it with sharpshooters in the surrounding houses, and bringing about its downfall by a siege of attrition, they decided to storm the Tuileries with columns of troops marching upon it from the Odéon, from the streets that led down to it from the Rue Saint-Honoré, and from the Pont Neuf.

  The Convention’s forces waited all morning for the expected attack in a drizzling rain. The deputies sat in silence in their hall. Eight hundred muskets and cartouche boxes were stored in an anteroom, ready for their use should they have to defend themselves. Noon came and still there was no attack. Barras, on horseback, and Bonaparte on foot, waited in the courtyard of the Tuileries. Two eight-pounders, loaded with case-shot had been placed at the end of the Rue Neuve Saint-Roch, their barrels levelled at the church of Saint-Roch at the end of the street. After hours of silence, there came the sound of drums and musket fire. Bonaparte approached the guns and waited there for Barras’s orders.

  It was soon after three o’clock when the leading columns of the rebels appeared in the Rue Saint-Honoré. The Convention’s troops opened fire on them with their muskets, but they came on, returning the fire, into the Rue Neuve Saint-Roch. Barras gave Bonaparte the order to open up with his eight pounders. Immediately the gunners responded. The shots tore into the advancing ranks, mowing many of them down and blasting chunks of masonry from the walls of the church. The rebels faltered, then came on again, wavered as the shot tore into them and finally fell back as the guns were wheeled to the right and left and fired down the Rue Saint-Honoré from top to bottom. The sectionnaires, scattered now, fled backwards towards the Lepeletier.

  Here, in the convent of the Filles Saint Thomas, Danican and the insurrectionary committee decided upon another assault from the Faubourg Saint-Germain towards the Pont Neuf which was still occupied by men under the command of a young émigré named Lafond. Here they would be joined by a column under a Vendéen leader, the Comte de Maulevrier. The combined force would then advance along the Quai Voltaire to the Pont Royal. But once again the rebels could not withstand the barrage of artillery. A storm of grape-shot from the Pont Royal tore into their ranks from the front, while other guns opened up on them from the quai of the Tuileries. Lafond made a gallant effort to storm the bridge, but his men were driven back by the relentless fire of the Convention’s gunners. By six o’clock, when two to three hundred men had been killed or wounded on both sides, the fighting was over.

  After the journées of Vendémiaire there was to be no further threat from the royalists. With the influence of the Montagnards and the sans-culottes also destroyed, the largely well-to-do and conservative Thermidorians were now in control of the Revolution. But it was to prove an extremely unsteady and insecure control, maintained only by devious compromises, by successive purges, by hitting out alternately at reactionaries and radicals alike, and by an increasing reliance upon the army.

  EPILOGUE

  THE ADVENT OF BONAPARTE

  ‘It appears that France must soon be governed by a single despot…

  a dictator produced by the Revolution’

  GOUVERNEUR MORRIS

  On 3 November 1795, the day after their election, the Directors met in a small room in the gloomy deserted Luxembourg. Taking off their melodram
atically plumed hats, they sat round a rickety table on straw-bottomed chairs which the porter had brought into the otherwise unfurnished room together with some logs for the fire. Only one of them was well known and he not much respected. This was Paul Barras who, so a foreign Minister said, would have ‘thrown the Republic out of the window tomorrow if it did not pay for his dogs, his mistress, his food and his gambling’. The others, all of whom had voted for the King’s death, were Louis-Marie La Revellière-Lèpeaux, Jean-François Reubell and Étienne-François Letourneur. La Revellière, an anti-clerical former Girondin, was a hunchback with a huge head and thin legs who, it was said, had escaped the guillotine only because a Montagnard had scornfully complained of time being wasted on such a ‘paltry fellow as that’. Reubell, like La Revellière, had been a deputy in the Constituent Assembly but had sat as a Montagnard. An arrogant, red-faced lawyer he had also been on the Committee of Public Safety and had once been heard to declare that ‘any deputy who opposed the Revolution ought to be put in a sack and thrown into the river’. Letourneur, an officer in the Engineers, had been an unassertive member of the Plain. The fifth Director, Sieyès, was not there. He had refused to serve, and his place was subsequently taken by Carnot.

  Two days after this first meeting the Directors issued a statement proclaiming their intention of replacing ‘the chaos which always accompanies revolutions by a new social order’. They intended to ‘wage vigorous war on royalists, revive patriotism, sternly suppress all factions, extinguish party spirit, destroy all desire for vengeance…revive industry and commerce, stamp out speculation, revitalize the arts and sciences, re-establish public credit and restore plenty’.

  These were formidable tasks. For not only were the royalists ‘reviving their intrigues’, as the Directors themselves put it, not only were the Left also endeavouring to bring the Directory down, but the financial and economic plight of the country was disastrous. The value of the assignat had fallen so low that one hundred livres’ worth could now be exchanged for no more than fifteen sous; and when 2,400,000 livres of a new paper currency, mandats territoriaux, were issued, these depreciated in value so rapidly that by the beginning of 1797, when they were withdrawn, they were worth only one per cent of their face value. Beggars pushed them away when offered them. Peasants, too, only accepted metal currency for their produce, protesting that they would only take ‘the other stuff’ if their horses would eat it. And their produce was far from plentiful. The 1795 harvest was so poor, in fact, that the already meagre bread ration had to be severely curtailed and in certain places supplemented by rice which the poor could not cook because of the exorbitant prices demanded for fuel.

  The discontent of the poor was aggravated by the ever increasing flamboyance of the rich. ‘The thirst for pleasure,’ reported one newspaper, ‘the stream of fashion, a succession of dinners, the luxury of their splendid furniture and their mistresses, are the objects that chiefly employ the thoughts of the young men of Paris.’ New restaurants and dance-halls opened every week, the thirty-two theatres were crowded every night, and so were the gambling rooms in one of which the wife of a deputy ‘lost two millions on a single card’. There were firework displays at the Tivoli and the Pavilion de Hanovre, a new circus in the garden of the Capucines, lively entertainments in the gardens of Marboeuf, and daring tableaux vivants in the Jardins d’Idalie. Carriages once more bowled along to Longchamp, and at Frascati’s heads turned and men stood on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of the delicious young Madame Récamier, or of Madame Tallien in a gauze dress split down the side, with jewels in her black hair, bracelets round her ankles and rings on her painted toes.

  Fashions became more and more outré. There was a passion for pseudo-classical styles, for long diaphanous high-breasted robes, for ‘Athenian’ coiffeurs with triple rows of curls, for Grecian, bejewelled sandals and plumed and spangled fans, for dressing à la sauvage, ‘the arms and breasts bare, a gauze skirt with flesh coloured tights beneath it…and circlets set with diamonds round the legs and thighs’. ‘No one,’ wrote Mallet du Pan, ‘thinks of anything now but eating and drinking and pleasures.’

  There were millions, though, for whom there could be no pleasure, who were saved from starvation only by the free distribution of food requisitioned from the peasants, whose plight was cited by the Jacobins as further evidence of the Directory’s appalling incompetence. Initially the Directors had been tolerant towards the Left in their anxiety to bind all parties together in a stabilized regime. They had appointed Jacobins to various administrative posts, they had been indulgent towards the appearance of various radical clubs, including the Panthéon Club, and they had allowed freedom to the left-wing press. But they had soon felt obliged to reconsider their policy of toleration when there seemed a danger that the Jacobins might combine to overthrow them. They dismissed the most troublesome or suspect of them from the posts to which they had been appointed, they prosecuted left-wing journalists, they closed the Panthéon Club, and they issued a warrant for the arrest of François-Noël Babeuf, the tactless and obtuse journalist, who declared in his Tribun du peuple that the Revolution was being betrayed, that, ‘despite all obstacles and oppositions’, it had advanced up to 9 Thermidor but had been retreating ever since.

  Babeuf, who chose to call himself Gracchus, was born at Saint Quentin in November 1760, the son of a petty official and of an illiterate maidservant. He had worked as a young man for a land surveyor at Roye where his distaste for his ill-paid work and his sympathy for the unfortunate peasants living in the rural poverty of Picardy drew him to the career of political journalist. A compulsive, tedious writer, he was also resilient, indefatigable and persistent. The more often he was derided the more sure he was that his theories constituted the answer to the problems of mankind. In his earlier days as a political philosopher he had supported the idea of the loi agraire, but he had now come to the view that ‘perfect equality’ and ‘common happiness’ could only be achieved by the suppression of individual property and the private ownership of land. Men, working at their chosen occupations, should place the fruits of their labour into a common store, and there should be established ‘a simple administration for food supplies’ which would ‘take note of all individuals and all provisions and have the latter divided up according to the most scrupulous equality’. Babeuf had also come to the view that this form of communism could only be realized by violence. He and his fellow-conspirators therefore set up an insurrectionary committee and dispatched agents all over Paris to spread the word of their ‘Plebeians’ Manifesto’. But from the beginning Babeuf’s organization had been infiltrated by spies, and the Government were well informed as to his intentions, knowing the names of most of his confederates. Even so, the Directors were unsure how best to proceed against the so-called ‘Conspiracy of Equals’. Reubell feared that to take strong action might play into the hands of the royalists; La Revellière was more concerned with the activities of refractory priests; Barras, characteristically, waited until he was quite sure which way the wind was blowing. Carnot, however, insisted on firm repression. So, on 10 May 1796 Babeuf, a most incompetent conspirator, was arrested, and in August he and his fellow-conspirators were taken to trial in iron cages to Vendôme. On 26 May 1797 after an immensely long trial, he and one fellow-conspirator were condemned to death, the others being acquitted. He was guillotined the following day.

  Although joined by numerous former terrorists and financed by Jacobins bent upon the Directory’s destruction, Babeuf’s conspiracy had never presented a danger to the Government as had the royalists. Supported by hundreds of émigrés and non-juring priests now returning to France and supplied with money by the English Government through an agent in Switzerland, the royalist campaign was gathering strength week by week. In April 1797 the majority of the new members returned in the elections were constitutional monarchists; and had they been a united, well-led party, able to come to terms with the émigrés, they might well have overthrown the Directory, restored the throne a
nd made peace with France’s foreign enemies. But they were disunited, had no outstandingly capable leaders and were repeatedly rebuffed by the diehard émigrés. Moreover, there was strong feeling in France against a return of the monarchy. Those who owed their wealth and appointments to the Revolution were as anxious not to lose them as were the peasants who had acquired confiscated lands and been freed from seigneurial dues.

  Yet the Directors, discredited and financially inept, knew that they must take action against the royalists if they were to survive. The two convinced republicans, Reubell and La Revellière, even proposed annulling the elections. This, Carnot strongly resisted. But, after his usual hesitations, Barras threw in his lot with the republicans, and a coup d’état was decided upon. There could be no question, though, of a popular uprising. As on the journées of Vendémiaire, the army would have to be called in.

  The mood of the army was not as it had been at the time of Valmy. The tradition of antagonism towards King, priests and nobles was still strong, but spirits in the ranks were no longer kept up by enthusiastic support for the republican cause. Soldiers felt cut off from the Government at home; they took pride in their regiments and in French might rather than in the Revolution. It was their generals they looked to for leadership now, not the civilians at home, certainly not to the ‘army commissioners’ whom the Directors had appointed to succeed the Convention’s représentants en mission. Above all, they looked to Bonaparte who had promised them ‘rich provinces, great cities…honour, glory and wealth’.