Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer who led the extremists in the French National Assembly and Convention and initiated the Terror, which sent tens of thousands of innocents to the guillotine.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  Sixty years old and growing more deaf by the day, Beaumarchais had sought only to escape turmoil by retiring to the peace of his gardens at Saint-Antoine, but he knew that immediate arrest awaited anyone perceived as an enemy of the state, with entire families often left to rot in dungeons for the perceived misdeed of a single family member. “Regardless of his decision, he faced danger,” Gudin explained. “They would have made it a crime on his part to have refused to procure the muskets. … He had only a choice of dangers. He decided to expose himself to the danger of being useful to his country.”10

  Beaumarchais reported the offer to the minister of war, who arranged for a bank to transfer 500,000 francs to the playwright to purchase the guns, but insisted that Beaumarchais post a personal bond of 750,000 francs, refundable at the time he delivered the muskets to the French military. Beaumarchais did as he was told, then sent an agent to Holland to consummate the purchase.

  With the French economy in shambles and millions facing famine, the National Assembly acted to prevent mass uprisings and the spread of anarchy. On January 1, 1792, it proclaimed the beginning of the “Era of Liberty” by requiring everyone in France to carry a passport when traveling anywhere within the country — even down the street from one’s home. Assembly leaders channeled the resulting popular furor by accusing Europe’s monarchies of creating the famine in France and declaring “war as indispensable to the revolution.” Calling for worldwide revolution, they pledged, “We will not be satisfied until all Europe is afire. … All Europe, including Moscow, will become Gallicized, Jacobinized, communized.”11

  On April 28, 1792, the French government sent its armies pouring across northern, eastern, and southwestern borders to pillage rich agricultural lands in neighboring countries. Austria, Prussia, Denmark, Poland, and Spain declared war against France, but Holland desperately sought to remain neutral. To avoid antagonizing either side, the Dutch government created an impenetrable tangle of red tape that produced indefinite delays for Beaumarchais’s agent as he tried to purchase the arms. Beaumarchais tried asking the French minister of war for help but never could find one. As each new political faction seized power in the tumultuous National Assembly, a new minister of war appeared — only to disappear the following day when his government fell, forcing Beaumarchais to return and retell his story of the guns in Holland to new functionaries and apply for new import permits.

  As Beaumarchais stumbled down War Department corridors in Paris, the French army’s advance into Austria and Prussian territory came to a halt, and without a fresh supply of arms and ammunition, French troops were unable to prevent Austrian and Prussian armies from counterattacking. French troops and civilians alike grew enraged over the failure of the French government to supply the army with enough weapons. As the first enemy troops poured across the eastern French border, an enterprising bureaucrat in the War Department finally issued Beaumarchais a passport to go to Holland to fetch the muskets, but it was too late.

  Mobs blocked the streets, crying “Treason! Treason!” over the War Department’s failure to supply troops with arms. Radical revolutionaries seized control of the National Assembly and created a Criminal Tribunal to try everyone suspected of treason. Twenty-nine moderates in the assembly protested, and Robespierre sent a mob of thugs to surround the hall. They broke through the doors, sliced off the head of one of the recalcitrant assemblymen, and dragged the twenty-eight others off to prison.

  In the days that followed, the Criminal Tribunal immediately ordered 3,000 “suspects” arrested and imprisoned for antirevolutionary activities, while the assembly ordered the removal or destruction of all statues of kings, queens, and other aristocrats in Paris. It banned the use of aristocratic terms such as Monsieur (my sire) and Madame (my lady) in favor of citoyen and citoyenne — “citizen” and “citizeness.” With the end of aristocracy came a ban on the use of the prefix “de,” signifying manorial rights, and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais now became Citoyen Caron, with the same surname he had worked so hard to discard on his climb to fame and fortune.

  “What is to become of us, my dear?” he lamented to his wife. “Now, we are to lose all our dignities. What ruin! … what destruction! … The Revolution has had a great influence … but it must be confessed that, in trying to straighten our tree, we have made it bend in the opposite direction.”12

  A member of the invading mob waves the head of a victim at the president of the French National Assembly. The mob went on to drag twenty-eight assemblymen to prison, then slaughter 600 of the king’s guards and 200 servants at the Tuileries Palace.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  With Austrian and Prussian troops advancing toward Paris, Paris mobs and militiamen searched the city for rifles and muskets. Aware of Beaumarchais’s connection to the Holland guns deal, some mob leaders suggested that Beaumarchais had stored the guns in his house. As 30,000 rioters edged ever closer to his property, rumors multiplied and spread that Beaumarchais’s stone castle also held boundless stores of wheat and foodstuffs, as well as arms … and coins … and silver … and gold ingots. … “Il est riche!” went the cry — “He is rich!” As the mob grew, Beaumarchais decided to go to the gates to address it, but Gudin restrained him, arguing that someone would almost certainly assassinate him if he appeared. Beaumarchais returned to his bedroom, donned one of his many disguises, and fled by a side entrance.

  After he left, servants followed his parting instructions to open all gates and doors to prevent needless destruction and give the mob open access to his property. As the invaders surged into the gardens, the sheer magnificence of the landscape startled and enthralled them — many stopped in their tracks to gasp at its beauty. With most of the invaders slowing to a walk, only a handful actually approached the door of the playwright’s home and almost obsequiously asked permission to search for foodstuffs and weapons.

  “Whatever the reason,” Gudin recalled, “someone proposed to swear that they would destroy nothing. The crowd swore, and … after searching everywhere, the only arms that mob leaders found were Beaumarchais’s hunting rifle and sword, which they left untouched. … Truth here resembles fable.” Gudin called the mob’s behavior “the fruit of the benefits which he had lavished on the poor of his neighborhood. If he had not been loved, if he had not been dear to his domestics, all his goods would have been pillaged.”13

  Although all was intact when he returned home, Beaumarchais felt violated, and, as after his humiliating imprisonment in juvenile prison after the opening of Le Mariage, he could no longer find it in his soul “to laugh at everything” as Figaro had done. Beaumarchais could only weep. The aristocracy had violated him early in his life for rising above his station to champion commoner rights; now the commoners whose rights he had championed had violated him, and he realized that commoners were as capable of injustice, cruelty, and arrogance as the aristocrats they despised — no better, no worse. Power rendered them all the same.

  “What an incredible series of events!” Figaro cried out in despair. “How did it happen to me? I have seen everything, done everything, worn out everything. At last my illusion is shattered and I am wholly disabused … désabusé … désabusé … désabusé.”14

  On the August 23, 1792, Gudin awoke to find armed sentinels at the doors of the Beaumarchais mansion and beneath the windows. “I hastened to my friend’s apartment and found him surrounded by sinister men searching his papers and putting his effects under seal. … When they were through they took him with them, and I was left alone in that vast palace, guarded by sans culottes whose aspect made me doubt whether they were there to conserve the property or to pillage.”15

  His captors took Beaumarchais to police court, where he learned he had been “denounced” by an unkn
own enemy for having concealed the Dutch muskets at an undisclosed location — a crime punishable by death on the guillotine. Too deaf to understand the charges, he called up every bit of Figaro’s guile trying to understand his accusers. With no idea of what his accusers had said, he defended himself with such incongruous arguments that the court began to laugh at his nonsensical responses. Convinced that Beaumarchais, like Figaro, was mocking them, the court sent him off to prison to await a verdict in a common cell with a score of other nobles misérables. A week later, a guard opened the cell gate and called his name. “Your denouncer has been declared culpable. You are free to go.”16

  Unbeknownst to Beaumarchais, his young sometimes-mistress — Amélie Houret de La Marinière — was a regular guest in the public prosecutor’s bed and had pleaded successfully for the playwright’s release.

  On the day of Beaumarchais’s release, the Prussians laid siege to Verdun, 140 miles east of Paris. Convinced that every aristocrat was ready to welcome the foreign invaders, a mob broke into the prisons of Paris and massacred 3,000 prisoners, including those in the cell Beaumarchais had abandoned two days earlier. On September 21, 1792, the radical National Convention replaced the National Assembly and declared “royalty abolished in France.”

  With his release, however, Beaumarchais came under increased government pressure to consummate the purchase of the muskets in Holland, and until he fulfilled the commission, he remained under suspicion of obstructing the flow of arms to the French army — in effect, treason.

  Again, though, he needed a passport and waited interminably to see the new minister of war — only to learn that the minister had left town. Tired and disheveled, he stumbled to the office of the minister of foreign affairs. A caricature of his former self and of the dashing Figaro, he appeared with his ear trumpet, ill-kempt and unshaven, cackling incoherently, terror-stricken by the fate that might await him and his family if he failed in his mission. The minister had no idea what Beaumarchais was saying and ordered an aide to lead the old man to the street.

  Exhausted and confused, Beaumarchais — like King Lear on the heath — roamed the narrow streets of Paris at random, turning here, there, anywhere — often crying out in a rant, “Fi-garo! Fi-garo!”

  With echoes of bloodthirsty mobs resounding in every alley, he gasped for breath as he shuffled through the maze of dark passageways, in the grip of terror, dodging shadows of real and imaginary enemies until he found his own door. It was long after midnight. A week later, a mob massacred fifty-three aristocrats being transferred from Versailles to a Paris prison. Convinced the mob was on its way to seize him, Beaumarchais fled during the night into the nearby countryside, where he darted aimlessly down country lanes and across muddy fields and finally collapsed at the door of a farmhouse, all but insane from fear and fatigue. With little sympathy for city folk, the farmer and his wife sent the disheveled playwright to their barn for the night. Fearing assassination on the open road to Paris the next day, Beaumarchais traveled the narrow pathways across fields and forests to reach the edge of the city, where he shuddered among the echoes of the mob’s chants for blood:

  Oui, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!

  Les aristos à la lanterne,

  Oui, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!

  Les aristos, on les pendra!17

  Beaumarchais darted from corner to corner, along the darkest, narrowest alleys he could find, hugging walls as tightly as possible until he found his wall — the wall that surrounded his house. He sneaked into the garden, then into the house, where his friend Gudin awaited to embrace him and help restore his sanity.

  After Beaumarchais recovered from his ordeal in the wilderness, he spent two weeks pestering members of the Executive Committee, pleading obsequiously for a passport to go to Holland to secure the muskets for the army of the Revolution. Danton, at last, grew convinced of the playwright’s sincerity and talked committee members into signing an official appointment for Beaumarchais to go to Holland as a secret government agent.

  Knowing the Dutch opposed the sale of the muskets to France, Beaumarchais went to London and talked an English merchant into a scheme to convince the Dutch government he was buying the muskets for their ally Britain instead of the French government. The merchant advanced Beaumarchais enough funds for a deposit and signed a contract of intent to purchase, and Beaumarchais set off for Holland to retrieve the muskets. Once he was in Holland, however, Dutch authorities saw through the ruse, and when he returned to London, authorities arrested and imprisoned him, charging him with fraud.

  On January 15, 1793, the National Convention convicted King Louis XVI by a vote of 707 to 0 of conspiring to deprive the public of its liberties. Two days later, the Convention voted 361 to 360 to execute the king. To ensure the vote for execution, Robespierre imprisoned enough dissidents to ensure the monarch’s death — including America’s Tom Paine. With the crowd chanting madly, Ça ira, ça ira …, a wooden cart took King Louis XVI to the Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde) on the morning of January 21, and, at 10:22, the executioner released the guillotine blade that sliced off the royal head. The executioner reached into the basket and held the lifeless trophy above his own head to display it to the roaring crowd as royal blood dripped down his hand, wrist, arm, and grinning face.

  The beheading of the king outraged the civilized world but only excited the lust for blood among leaders of the French Revolution. Under orders from Danton to end the royal line, a gang of thugs burst into Queen Marie Antoinette’s prison cell a few months after her husband’s murder and tore her shrieking eight-year-old son — now the boy-king Louis XVII — from her arms. It was the last time his mother or anyone else other than his abductors would ever see him alive or dead. No trace of his body or documentary evidence regarding his fate has ever been found. An empty tomb awaits him still in the burial ground of French royals at St. Denis, outside Paris.

  The executioner displays King Louis XVI’s head from the scaffolding of the guillotine on the place de la Révolution, now the place de la Concorde, on January 21, 1793.

  RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX

  The monarchs of Europe acted in concert at the murder of one of their own. Britain and Holland declared war and joined the coalition against France, then Russia joined. The British government agreed to buy the 52,345 guns that Beaumarchais was to have bought in Holland and released Beaumarchais from his London prison to return to Paris. Accusations that he had negotiated the British arms purchase preceded him to Paris, however, and, with the guillotine awaiting the entire family of anyone who failed the French Revolution, the Executive Committee gave him what it called a simple way to prove his patriotism. It ordered him to return to Holland, outbid the British, and bring the guns to France.

  Beaumarchais went to Amsterdam, where officials refused to reopen the bidding. He then went to Hamburg, then Basel, trying to find intermediaries to act as agents in reopening the bidding. It proved an endless journey. To skirt various Dutch, Belgian, and German battlegrounds, he had to take circuitous routes through Germany and Switzerland, applying for and waiting an eternity for passports in every duchy and principality along the way. Months passed, and in January 1794 the Executive Committee determined that Beaumarchais had stayed out of the country too long and declared him an émigré and seized his home. Madame Beaumarchais protested, presenting documentary evidence of his having left the country on an official mission. She succeeded in recovering possession of her husband’s home, but after another six months without a word from her husband, government agents sealed his house, seized his bank accounts and other assets, and took his wife, daughter, and two sisters off to prison to await their inevitable encounters with the guillotine as the family of an émigré.

  By the end of July 1794, Robespierre’s paranoia had become too ghastly for even his most loyal supporters. After accusing members of the Convention of plotting against him, he ordered the arrest and execution of every deputy — the entire Convention. It was one demand too m
any. By then the number of women and children left widowed and orphaned by the guillotine had reached staggering proportions, and the adoring mob that had raised Robespierre to power suddenly turned against him, marching to the Convention and crying, À bas Robespierre — “Down with Robespierre.”

  Convention delegates demanded that he name those in the hall he suspected of treason. He refused, and the once-timid delegates joined arms and staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Executive Committee and ordering the arrest of Robespierre and his immediate confederates. That evening, July 23, 1794, a pistol shot blew off half his jaw; some said he had attempted suicide, but a guard claimed that he had shot Robespierre trying to escape. The source of the shot was immaterial. With his head swathed in blood-soaked bandages, Robespierre lay in agony for but one night; the guillotine put him out of his misery the following day — along with nineteen of his closest political allies, including his brother. While a mob watched in silent disbelief, seventy-one more Robespierristes followed him to the same fate the following day in a bloody finale to the Terror.

  The final toll of the Terror would remain unmatched in the civilized world until the twentieth century. In only two years, the French government sent 1 million of its citizens — men, women, and children — to prison. In a nation of 26 million souls, 200,000 are known to have died; untold thousands of others — many simply nameless, homeless, jobless peasants and workers — were summarily killed without knowing why and dumped into mass graves. Inspired by the American Revolution against tyranny, the French Revolution had simply replaced monarchic tyranny with mob tyranny. Only about 2 percent of those condemned to die on the guillotine were, in fact, aristocrats.