xviii Th
e Unseen Terror
together, and it was left to be decided when the Estates-General had met whether the three estates should vote as separate bodies or meet together so that every individual should exercise a personal vote. Th
e third estate depu-
ties adopted the title National Assembly in June after their ‘Tennis Court Oath’ not to disperse until they were accepted by the king as such.
Th
e Constituent Assembly. After the king had directed the nobility and the remaining clergy to join the third estate and those clergy who had already associated themselves with it, in June 1789, the Estates-General deputies took on this new name. When the deputies followed the king from Versailles to Paris in October they held their meetings in the former riding school ( Manège) at the Tuileries Palace.
Th
e Constituent was replaced in October 1791 by the Legislative Assembly.
New elections were necessary after the decree devised by
Maximilien
Robespierre which excluded all members of the Constituent from off ering themselves for election. A good many second estate deputies left France to become emigrés at that time.
Th
e National Convention. After the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, the Legislative Assembly changed its name to this because it was both the legislative and the executive of the new Republic. Its task was to draw up a new constitution, which it did without adopting it, and the Convention remained in power until the creation of the Directory. It delegated responsibilities to 21 committees, of which the Committees of Public Safety (for executive decisions and policy forming) and of General Security (for internal policing) were the most prominent. After the fall of Robespierre in July 1794, commentators speak of the Th
ermidorean Convention, which lasted
until its replacement by the National Directory.
Th
e constitutional arrangement adopted six months after the execution of Robespierre and the dismantling of the Terror had fi ve Directors as the corporate head of state, and there were two councils: one of the Elders ( anciens), who elected the Directors, and the other called the Council of Five Hundred, elected by means of a complicated franchise. Th is lasted
from October 1795 until it was pushed aside by Bonaparte’s coup d’état of brumaire in November 1799, which established the Consulate.
Jacobins and Girondins. With the nationalization of monastic houses in Paris, there were substantial buildings available for the new political clubs that had sprung up around the Estates-General and the National Assembly, fi rst in Versailles and then in Paris. What became the Jacobin Club began
Notes on Money and Government
xix
life in Versailles as the Breton Club. Th
e former convent of the Jacobins in
the rue Saint-Honoré became its meeting place. Its members in the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention sat together on the higher seats to the left of the tribune, and were also called the Mountain. Th ere were
250–300 Montagnards, the most conspicuous of them being Maximilien Robespierre. Bernard de Saintes was one of them.
Th
e group clustering around Brissot, Deputy for the Eure-et-Loir, Vergniaud, and Roland were known as the Gironde (from the department re presented by Vergniaud). Th
ey were about 180 in number (60 or so loosely
joined political associates, plus those who supported them). Finally, there were 250–300 deputies of the Plain or the Marsh who avoided involvement in these factions. Formal party organization was unknown, and patterns of loyalty took time to develop.
Th
e Jacobins included some radicals in their number, but in social background and attitudes they were very similar to the Girondins. Th e quarrel
between the two groups, whatever its origins, was political. Th e leading
Girondins were in many ways no less radical than the Mountain, but they bitterly distrusted the Paris Commune, which seemed very close to Jacobin politics, and feared that there were plans for a dictatorship based in Paris.
Th
e Girondins favoured the National Convention as the ultimate authority in the nation, based on elections in the French provinces. Th e Jacobins in
the Convention insisted on maintaining the One and Indivisible Republic by means of centralized control and using the Terror to enforce it.
During Louis XVI’s trial, the Girondins proposed to counterbalance Parisian infl uence by deciding on a sentence appropriate for him through a national referendum. Th
is move was discredited when it was rumoured,
with some justifi cation, that Vergniaud had written to the king asking to be a minister. Th
e Jacobins, with the help of the politicized artisans in Paris and elsewhere (known as sans-culottes because they wore trousers not breeches and hose), intimidated the uncommitted deputies to bring about the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention between 31 May and 2 June 1793, leaving France governed, in the opinion of many, by an unelected
‘rump’ dominated by Jacobins. Th
is was the inspiration for rebellions in
places like Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, and Toulon. After that, the Jacobins in the Convention and on the Committees tended to work through trusted representatives on mission like Carrier, Tallien, Collot-d’Herbois, Fouché, Lequinio, and Bernard de Saintes to overcome any tendencies towards what they called federalism.
Map of the Charente-Inférieure
Reproduced by permission of the Director of the Departmental Archives of the Charente–Maritime at La Rochelle
xx
Preface
We had to remain in Paris, so to speak, during lessons about the French Revolution in an English sixth form because all the big names and the signifi cant places were there: Danton, Marat, or the incorruptible Robespierre, the Bastille, the Tuileries Palace, or the Jacobins. Th ere were a few days
out: to Nantes to be horrifi ed at Vendéan suspects being tied together and drowned in the Loire, or to Toulon to see young Captain Bonaparte laying his guns above the harbour to frighten Admiral Lord Hood’s fl eet away but, even so, nothing explained why people in small towns accepted the changes, and why the Terror was possible even in country hamlets.
Coming to live in south-western France helped me to reply to those questions, and putting yet another book on the shelf marked French Revolution in English is justifi ed by my having been given access to a contemporary diary kept in the town of Saintes by a lawyer made redundant when the changes were made.1 Th
e banks of the Seine were refl ected in the Charente,
which had its own big names, its own signifi cant places, and its own reasons for embracing the new order of things.
xxi
Introduction
A Revolution Led by Lawyers
Je défi nis la Révolution, l’avènement de la Loi, la resurrection du Droit, la réaction de la Justice.
Jules Michelet 1847. 1
Louis XVI had not personally been a tyrant before 1789, but the system over which he presided had become despotic in the eyes of many Frenchmen long before he inherited the throne from his grandfather in 1774.2 He and Marie-Antoinette saw the candle in Louis XV’s window blown out at the moment of his death. Th
ey heard all the courtiers running
through the corridors towards their own apartments in the palace of Versailles to kneel before them. Th
ose who told the story gave them awesome
words to say: ‘God protect us! We are too young to reign.’3
Public awareness of the fi nancial crisis 15 years later in the spring of 1789
was the immediate cause of the king’s ordering every province in France to hold an assembly to elect deputies to meet him at Versailles to discuss ways and means of revitalizing the nation. On the surface, this could be seen as democratic because the qualifi cation to vote in t
he election of a deputy to the provincial assembly was to be male, over 21 and having your name on the list of taxpayers. We shall see how the provincial assembly at Saintes rushed to participate in the apparent novelties of government.
Th
is development, in the wake of the failure of the king and his council to arrive at any solution for the crisis by themselves, and their being incapable of ensuring the loyalty of the army while food prices peaked in the capital on 14 July, turned into the Revolution. After the citizens had taken the Bastille to seize gunpowder to defend themselves against probable royal reprisals, neither the king nor his surviving ministers, after he had dismissed the popular Jacques Necker as fi nancial controller, could be confi dent of maintaining control in Paris. All Louis could do was reinstate Necker and go the 12 miles to Paris in person to put a tricolour cockade on his hat and demonstrate the reality that he and his courtiers had lost the political initiative. Th e fumbled
1
2 Th
e Unseen Terror
experiment in constitutional monarchy had begun in June when the king had accepted the reality of the situation and ordered the clergy and nobility to join the deputies of the third estate in a National Assembly.4
Th
e Great Fear5 came at the end of July, when rumours fl ew all over provincial France saying that nobles at court were hiring brigands to make reprisals against the changes made so far by destroying the grain harvest.
Ill-informed panic led tenant farmers to attack their seigneurs to seize and destroy title deeds that showed what dues they had to pay them. Eventually it was discovered that the gangs of men roaming the countryside were unemployed farmhands desperately looking for lodgings and work.
As all that came to a close, nobles and senior clergy in the National Assembly at Versailles orchestrated a feverish renunciation of their privileges on the night of 4 August. One of the richest seigneurs in the kingdom, the duc d’Aiguillon, proposed the complete abolition of all feudal dues and, when the bishop of Chartres went to the tribunal to call for seigneurial hunting rights to be taken away and for country people to be allowed to eat pigeons and rabbits caught on noblemen’s estates, the duc du Châtelet made a counter-proposal to remove the tithe that was the only source of income for the parish clergy. Th en yet
more nobles and churchmen got to their feet to vie with each other to defuse the national crisis without putting increased military or police powers into the king’s hands. ‘Th
is great clearance sale’,6 as Jean-Christian Petitfi ls7 has called it, ended at three in the morning, and Louis XVI was associated in all this unexpected change by being proclaimed as ‘the restorer of French liberty’.
Th
e bizarre night was followed by intense days spent in the National Assembly transforming what had been decided into new laws that deprived the nobility of their local administrative control and judiciary authority throughout France. Th
e Rights of Man and of the Citizen were subsequently declared, seeming to establish freedom of thought, speech, belief, assembly, and the press. In the excitement of this fi rst fl ush of change, it could have been – and was – argued that the nation was at one with itself. Even so, Artois, the king’s infl uential younger brother had left the country, followed immediately by a fi rst emigration of nobles who could not accept the crumbling of their alliance with the monarchy. Moreover, a politicized movement emerged among urban artisans who could no longer aff ord to feed their families and were not satisfi ed with promises of theoretical change held over for some vague future.
Th
e market women of Paris, attended by the Marquis de Lafayette in command of the Parisian National Guard, marched in the rain to Versailles, where, after a night of threatened and real violence, the king acquiesced in their demand that he come to live in Paris. Next day, they brought ‘the baker,
A Revolution Led by Lawyers
3
the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy’ back to their city, eff ectively to be prisoners in the Tuileries Palace, which had been empty for a century after Louis XIV had moved out. All the fl our stored in Versailles came too, and the royal house-move was followed in a few days by the arrival of the deputies in the National Assembly who set up shop in the disused riding school close by.
Th
en the essential division in French society was revealed by the secularization of it. Th
e drawing up of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790 by the National Constituent Assembly, and making it into law, along with the requirement that the bishops and clergy take an oath to maintain it, meant that those who welcomed change found themselves cut off from the others who did not.8 Th
ose who looked to the king and the traditional Church for
their personal security were, from now on, separated from those whose hopes were in the hands of the governing body elected by the wealthier taxpayers.
Th
e new rulers and the ruled alike were dominated by men with a legal training. Th
e king’s temporary veto had to be recognized as incoherent: the king could not support the clergy who were loyal to him, and was not even allowed to receive his Easter communion at the hands of one of them in 1791.
It was hoped to re-fl oat the national economy by the nationalization and sale of the lands and property of the Catholic Church, an action which could work eff ectively only if there were no expenses of major warfare for a long time. Wealthy members of the third estate eagerly used the new bonds called assignats to buy this national property. Th
e design was doomed, how-
ever, when the French nation declared war on the kings of Europe in less than 18 months, and its eastern territory was invaded by the forces of Austria and Prussia amid rumours that the queen was secretly communicating French military intentions to her brother, the Austrian Emperor.
Louis XVI was temperamentally unable to remodel himself as a constitutional monarch, and attempted to get away from Paris altogether in June 1791, so as to make for the eastern frontier at Montmédy and declare himself free from the National Assembly’s control. Th
e king and queen and their children
were brought back to Paris after being captured at Varennes, to be received by the citizens in complete silence as they, and the two Republican lawyers sent to collect them, trundled back in their carriage to the Tuileries Palace.
Fourteen months later, the elected members of the National Legislative Assembly abolished the institution of monarchy altogether on the morning of 10 August 1792. Politicized and armed workers9 invaded the Palace on the initiative of the Paris Commune at the Hôtel de Ville, which had ordered the popular assemblies in each section of the city to remain in perpetual session. Th
e king fl ed with his family to seek safety in the National
4 Th
e Unseen Terror
Assembly. Th
e Swiss Guards who had tried to protect him were slaughtered in great numbers. Th
e Republic was declared as the king sat silently by.
His trial and execution followed in January 1793. Members of the Jacobin Club, working in association with the Paris Commune, asserted their political supremacy, excluding opponents who were no less revolutionary but who favoured a degree of regional autonomy in France. Th
e means of enforcing
the authority of the so-called Montagnards was the Terror, with the setting up of Revolutionary Tribunals all over the country and the systematic threat of execution by means of the guillotine for the gainsayers, regardless of whether they were class opponents or recently seen as sympathizers.
During the period of the Offi
cial Terror, from the spring of 1793 to the
summer of 1794, lawyers created a structure through which the National Convention’s representatives on mission controlled local
government.
Maximilien Robespierre emerged as leading personality in the National Convention’s Committee of
Public Safety,10 and was regarded by many all over France as the head of the ruling faction until he was overthrown and executed himself in July 1794 by the coup d’état known as Th ermidor (the
name of that month in the recently adopted revolutionary calendar). By that time, any local resistance had been overcome with consistent severity.
Th
e extreme situation was the rebellion in the so-called ‘Military Vendée’, extending north from La Rochelle as far as the Loire River, continued into Brittany by the movement known as the Chouannerie. Th is
triggered extreme retributive violence which has given rise in recent years to a debate among historians about whether the action taken by the Republic was the fi rst example of systematic genocide in modern history.11
After the Terror had been gradually but certainly dismantled in Paris and the provinces, the fi ve members of the Directory replaced the National Convention with an Assembly of Elders and a Council of Five Hundred in 1795. Uncertainty and fear for the nation’s security still remained. Th e
lawyers were still in charge, however, and when General Bonaparte seized power in France at the end of 1799, they were among his backers, acquiesc-ing in his authority which took nothing away from theirs.12
We shall be concerned in this study with the evolution of the new political and social order in one clearly defi ned area of south-western France in 1789 and the subsequent decade. Th
e geographical rationalization of
France into 83 departments decreed on 26 February 1790 created the Charente-Inférieure out of part of the former provinces of Aunis and the Angoumois, and of all the province of the Saintonge. Th
ere were signifi -
A Revolution Led by Lawyers
5
cant towns in the predominantly rural department. La Rochelle had gained prosperity from Atlantic and Caribbean trade. Rochefort was an artifi cial implant from Colbert’s time, built as a centre for the king’s navy. Saintes was accepted as the administrative and legal centre ( chef-lieu) because it met the criterion of being accessible in one day’s journey from every commune in the department. Four other towns – Saint-Jean-d’Angély, Marennes, Pons, and Monlieu – were to become heads of new districts together with La Rochelle, Rochefort and Saintes.
The Unseen Terror Page 2