GRÉGOIRE. An early supporter of the Revolution, he later denounced Gobel’s apostasy and declared in the Convention that he would not abjure his faith nor resign as Bishop of Blois. He wore episcopal dress in Paris during the Terror and read Mass in his house, but resigned his bishopric in 1801 in protest against the concordat with Rome. He died in 1831.
GUADET. A warrant was issued for his arrest on the fall of the Girondins. He fled to Caen, then to his father’s house at Saint-Emilion, but he was discovered and guillotined at Bordeaux on 17 June 1794.
GUILLOTIN. Survived the punishment which his machine is often alleged to have inflicted on him and died in 1814.
HERMAN. Condemned to death on 7 May 1795 he displayed great contempt for his judges, throwing his hat at the man who occupied the seat from which he himself had pronounced sentence of death during the Terror.
HOCHE. Became Minister of War in 1797 but died at Wetzlar of consumption in September that same year at the age of twenty-nine.
ISNARD. One of the surviving Girondins who were recalled to the Convention after 9 Thermidor. He was elected to the Council of Five Hundred, but played little part in its deliberations and retired to Draguinan in 1797. Professing himself a convinced royalist he avoided proscription as a regicide and survived until 1825.
JOSEPHINE. Napoleon arranged for the nullification of their marriage in 1810 when he hoped to make a politically more advantageous match with Marie-Louise, daughter of the Emperor Francis I of Austria, and by her to have the son with whom Josephine could not provide him. She retired to her private house at Malmaison outside Paris where she lived and entertained as extravagantly as ever, and where she died in May 1814.
JOURDAN. Became a marshal of France in 1804 and, after submitting to the Bourbons, a peer of France in 1819. He lived until 1833.
LAFAYETTE. Denounced as a traitor by the Assembly in 1792, he spent five years in Austrian and German prisons. He returned to France in 1802 and, after a period of rustic retirement on his Lagrange estate during the First Empire, he was elected deputy for the Sarthe which he represented until 1824. He was placed in command of the National Guard in the 1830 revolution and died in 1834.
LALLY-TOLLENDAL. Emigrated to England in 1789. He offered to defend the King but was refused permission to return to Paris. Louis XVIII created him a peer of France. He died in 1830.
LAMETH, ALEXANDRE. Accused of treason in August 1792, he escaped abroad and was imprisoned by the Austrians. He returned at the time of the Consulate and became deputy for Seine-et-Oise after the Restoration. He died in 1829.
LAMETH, THÉODORE. Died at the age of ninety-eight in 1854.
LAMOIGNON. Committed suicide on 15 May 1789.
LANJUINAIS. Escaped to Rennes on the fall of the Girondins and remained in hiding until recalled to the Convention after 9 Thermidor. He died in Paris in 1827.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD-LIANCOURT. Emigrated to England in 1792 and went to the United States of America in 1794. He returned to France after 18 Brumaire and died in 1827.
LA TOUR DU PIN. She survived the Revolution, having moved to Bordeaux and then having escaped to the United States. She died at Pisa in 1853 at the age of eighty-three.
LAZOWSKI. A warrant was issued for his arrest in March 1793 but he escaped to Vaurigard where he died almost immediately of a fever following a drunken debauch. He was buried at the foot of the tree of liberty on the Place du Carrousel.
LEGENDRE. Elected a member of the Council of Ancients, he died in December 1797.
LETOURNEUR. Appointed Prefect of the Loire-Inférieure in 1800. Banished as a regicide in 1816, he died near Brussels the following year.
LINDET, ROBERT. Declined office under both the Consulate and the Empire. Left France in 1816 as a proscribed regicide, but returned shortly before his death in 1825.
LINDET, THOMAS. Elected to the Council of Ancients, he lived in obscurity under the Consulate and Empire. Banished as a regicide in 1816, he went to live in Italy, then Switzerland. Receiving permission to return to France, he died at Bernay in August 1825.
LINGUET. Moved into the country to escape the Terror, having written a defence of Louis XVI, but was discovered and brought back to Paris to be guillotined on 27 June 1794.
LOUSTALOT. Died of natural causes in October 1790.
LOUVET. Elected to the Council of Five Hundred, he retired in May 1797. In the royalist reaction of that summer the jeunesse dorée, who regarded him as a Jacobin, insulted him in the street and smashed his bookshop which he was compelled to move from the Palais Royal to the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He died in obscurity in August 1797 looking ‘like an old man at thirty-seven’.
MAILLARD. An agent of the Committee of General Security, he disappeared after 9 Thermidor. Still alive under an assumed name in the early years of the Empire, the date of his death is unknown.
MALLET DU PAN. Exiled to Berne for an attack on Bonaparte and the Directory, he went to London in 1798 and died at Richmond, Surrey, in 1800.
MALOUET. Emigrated to England in 1792. Appointed Minister of Marine by Louis XVIII. He died in 1814.
MANUEL. Refused to vote for the death of Louis XVI and retired to Montargis. He was arrested there and brought back to Paris to be guillotined in 1793.
MARAT, Albertine. The English historian, J. W. Croker, saw her in Paris, where she was still living in the late 1830s. Told that she was ‘as like her brother as one drop of water is like another’, he found her ‘very small, very ugly, very sharp and a great politician’. She died in 1841.
MARIE THÉRÈSE (MADAME ROYALE). Remained in prison throughout the Terror. She was released in December 1795 in exchange for some French prisoners held by the Austrians including Drouet. She married the eldest son of the Comte d’Artois, the Duc d’Angoulême, who renounced his rights to the throne in 1830 when his father abdicated.
MAURY. Emigrated in 1792. He returned in 1804 and became Archbishop of Paris in 1810, holding the office until 1814 despite the Pope’s prohibition. He died in 1817.
MERCY. Appointed Austrian Ambassador to the Court of St James’s in 1794 but died a few days after his arrival in London.
MERDA. For his services on 9 Thermidor the Convention recommended him to the notice of his superiors. He was promoted captain, colonel in 1807 and later brigadier-general. He died at Moscow in 1812. His account of Robespierre’s death has been discredited. Others claimed that Robespierre shot himself.
MOMORO. Arrested, brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on 22 March 1794 and condemned to death.
MONTESQUIOU. Accused of royalist sympathies, he escaped to Switzerland. He returned to Paris in 1795 and died there three years later.
MOREAU DE SAINT MÉRY. Arrested after 10 August 1792 but escaped to the United States and started a bookshop in Philadelphia. Returned to France in 1799 and became historiographer to the navy. A relative of the Empress Josephine, he was appointed administrator of the Duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla in 1802 but was dismissed in 1806. He died in 1819.
MOUNIER. Disapproving of the course of the Revolution after his proposal of the Tennis-Court Oath, he emigrated to Switzerland in 1790, returning in 1801 when Bonaparte appointed him prefect of the department of Îlle-et-Vilâine. He died in 1806.
MURAT. Married Napoleon’s sister, Caroline, after 18 Brumaire. Promoted marshal in 1804, he later succeeded Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, as King of Naples in 1808. Defeated by the Austrians at Tolentino, he escaped to Corsica. Taken prisoner in an attempt to recover his kingdom, he was shot on 13 October 1815.
NARBONNE. Emigrated in 1792. Returned in 1801 and was later appointed aide-de-camp to Napoleon. In 1813 he became French ambassador in Vienna. He died in 1813.
NECKER. Returned to Switzerland in 1792 and settled down on his estate near Geneva where he devoted himself to writing until his death in 1804. His wife, who had sorely missed her salon in Paris, had died ten years before.
PÉTION. After the fall of the Gironde, escaped to Caen thence to Saint-Émilion. Tracked d
own by police spies, he left the wigmaker’s house where he had been sheltered and on 18 June his body, with that of Buzot, was found on the outskirts of a wood partly eaten by animals.
PICHEGRU. Implicated in a plot to restore Louis XVIII, he offered his resignation to the Directory who accepted it. Arrested on 18 Fructidor, he was deported to Cayenne. He escaped to London and returned to Paris in 1803 to organize a royalist insurrection against Napoleon. He was betrayed, arrested, and on 15 April the following year he was found strangled in prison.
POLIGNAC, Gabrielle de. Emigrated in 1789 and died abroad shortly after the death of the Queen.
PROVENCE. Remained in England until 1814 when he returned to France as Louis XVIII. Obliged to leave Paris again on Napoleon’s escape from Elba, he returned to France after Waterloo and reigned until his death in 1824.
REUBELL. Retired from public life after 18 Brumaire and died at his birthplace, Colmar, in 1807.
REVELLIÈRE-LÉPEAUX. Forced to resign on 30 Prairial, he went to live in retirement in the country. He returned to Paris in 1809 but took no part in public affairs, dying in 1824.
RIVAROL. Emigrated in 1792 and lived at first in London, then in Hamburg and Berlin where he died in 1801.
ROCHAMBEAU. Arrested during the Terror but managed to escape execution. Pensioned by Bonaparte, he died at Thoré in 1807.
ROEDERER. Went into hiding after 10 August 1792. He appeared again after Thermidor and was appointed to a chair in political economy. Created a senator by Napoleon, he became Joseph Bonaparte’s Minister of Finance at Naples and a peer of France during the Hundred Days. He was deprived of his offices on the Restoration, but his title of peer of France was restored in 1832. He died three years later.
ROLAND. Went into hiding at Rouen but, on learning of his wife’s execution, he walked out into the countryside, pinned a paper to his coat declaring that since her murder he could ‘no longer remain in a world stained with enemies’, and stabbed himself to death with a swordstick.
ROSSIGNOL. Achieved high rank in the war against the Vendéens. Involved in the Babeuf conspiracy, he was tried and acquitted but exiled in 1800 to the Seychelles where he died two years later.
ROUGET DE LISLE. Although he wrote a few songs other than the Marseillaise, for which he composed the words and perhaps the music – though this has been disputed – none was to achieve much success. A less than ardent republican he was cashiered and imprisoned for a time. He died at Choisy-le-Roi in 1836, and his ashes were transported to the Panthéon.
ROUX. Condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal on 15 January 1794, he stabbed himself with a knife and was carried away to Bicêtre where he died.
SANSON, Charles. Remained the public executioner of Paris until 1795 when he handed over to his son, Henri, who died in 1840.
SANTERRE. Relieved of his command of the Paris National Guard in 1793, he was sent to command a force in the Vendée. Blamed for the failure of this expedition and accused of having written a prejudiced report upon it, he was sent to prison where he remained until Thermidor. He then resigned his command and returned to his business. The brewery, however, was not the prosperous concern it had been and he died in poverty in 1809.
SÈZE. Retired to a house he owned in the hamlet of Brevannes in the spring of 1793. Created a count by Louis XVIII, he lived on until 1828.
SIEYÈS. Lived in retirement during the Empire but prudently left France at the time of the Restoration. He returned after the 1830 revolution and died in Paris six years later.
TALLEYRAND. ‘Treason,’ said Talleyrand ‘is merely a matter of dates.’ Foreign Minister under the Directory and Napoleon, he also served Louis XVIII in that office. After representing France at the Congress of Vienna he became King Louis Philippe’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s. He died in Paris in 1838.
TALLIEN. He was elected to the Council of Five Hundred, but, distrusted by the moderates as a former terrorist and by the Left as a reactionary, he made little mark. He sailed to Egypt with Bonaparte in 1798 and edited the official journal, the Décade Egyptienne. He then became consul at Alicante. Having contracted yellow fever and lost the sight of an eye he returned to Paris where, having failed to obtain a pension, he died in poverty in 1820. He had married the fascinating Comtesse de Fontenay in 1794 but obtained a divorce from her in 1802. She married the Comte de Caraman, later Prince de Chimay, in 1805.
TARGET. Having disappeared from view during the Terror, he emerged to become a member of the Institute and of the Court of Cassation. He died in 1807.
THURIOT. After 18 Brumaire became juge au tribunal criminel of the département of the Seine. Replaced at the first Restoration, he took up his functions again during the Hundred Days. Banished as a regicide in 1816, he obtained permission to practice law in Liège where he died in 1829.
TOURZEL. When the royal family were imprisoned at the Conciergérie she asked to be taken there with them. This request and a subsequent one to share Madame Royale’s imprisonment were both refused. She was imprisoned for five months but survived the Terror and died at her château at Abondant in 1832 at the age of eighty-two.
TRONCHET. A deputy of the Council of the Ancients during the Directory and president of the Court of Cassation during the Consulate. He died in March 1806.
VADIER. Condemned to deportation under the Directory, he escaped and remained in hiding in Paris until May 1796. Tried with the Babeuf conspirators, he was acquitted but kept in prison for four years at Cherbourg. Released after 18 Brumaire, he went to live in Toulouse where he was kept under police surveillance. Exiled as a regicide in 1816, he died at Brussels in 1828.
VILATE. Executed 7 May 1795.
APPENDIX 2
Glossary
aides: excises on various goods such as wines, playing cards and soap.
ami du peuple, L’: founded by Marat in September 1789 and, like Le Père Duchesne, circulated widely among the people. Often suppressed, it changed its name to Publiciste de la République française in March 1793. The last issue appeared the day after Marat’s murder.
armée révolutionnaire: armed force of Jacobins and sans-culottes raised in several places in the late summer of 1793. Its principal purpose was to force farmers to release their stocks for Paris and other towns. It was disbanded after the execution of the Hébertists.
Assignats: interest-bearing bonds which – with a face value of 1,000 livres each – were intended to be used in payment for biens nationaux. Further issues were made from time to time to ensure a regular flow of money, and in this way France was given a new paper currency. Assignats stopped bearing interest in May 1791; and, by the time of the Directory, 100 livres in assignats were worth no more than fifteen sous.
banalités: the exclusive rights of a seigneur to maintain a mill, an oven or a winepress, often exacted by a fermier. They were renounced on the famous night of 4 August 1789 and declared subject to redemption.
barrières: customs posts surrounding Paris.
biens nationaux: ‘national lands’, the former properties of the Church.
bourgeoisie: generally used to define the fairly well-to-do urban middle class, the families of both professional and businessmen.
Brissotins: the name by which the Girondins were at first more usually known.
Brumaire: the second month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 22 October to 20 November, from brume, mist.
cahiers de doléances: lists of grievances drawn up by each of the three orders before the meeting of the Estates General in 1789. The clergy and nobility drew up their lists in assemblies in the towns which were the centres of their electoral districts. The more numerous Third Estate usually met in parish churches where preliminary cahiers were prepared and written down by some respected lawyer, schoolmaster or coq du village. Delegates were then selected; and the preliminary cahiers were absorbed into general cahiers at electoral assemblies. Model cahiers were circulated to suggest lists of grievances and how to frame
them.
ça ira!: Revolutionary song sung to the tune of a country dance by Bécourt, Le carillon national. First heard in Paris during the preparations for the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790. The refrain, which was said to have been written by a street-singer named Ladre, originally ran:
Ah! Ça ira, ça, ira, ça ira!
Le peuple, en ce jour, sans cesse répète:
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Malgré les mutins, tout réussira
The words were altered during the Terror to:
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Bonaparte prohibited the song when he became First Consul.
capitation: a kind of poll-tax levied in rough correspondence to income. Established in 1701, it was originally intended to be levied on all Frenchmen who were divided into twenty-two classes, the Dauphin, at at the top of the first class, being assessed at 2,000 livres, soldiers and day-labourers, at the bottom of the last class, at only one livre. The clergy bought themselves out in 1710 for 24,000,000 livres. The nobility had also become exempt by the time of the Revolution when the capitation, levied only on commoners, had become a supplement of the taille.
carmagnole: originally, perhaps, a short jacket with metal buttons introduced into France by workers from Carmagnola in Piedmont. It became popular in Marseilles and was brought to Paris by the Marseillais fédérés. Worn with black woollen trousers, red or tricolour waistcoats and red caps it was taken up by the Jacobins. It was also the name of a dance and of a popular Revolutionary song – the words of which were constantly being altered – that accompanied it. Like the Ça ira, it was banned by Bonaparte when he became First Consul.
certificats de civisme: documents issued during the Terror as proof of political orthodoxy by the vigilance committees of the sections. Passports could not be obtained without them.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 33