The Unseen Terror
Page 3
Th
e economic interests of the department depended largely on the products of each area within it. Th
e coast saw salt production. Inland there was
grain and the raising of cattle and, further inland, the intense cultivation of vines feeding a major industry centred on Cognac in the next department.
All these enterprises were joined together by the system of transport for trade goods provided by the Charente River, navigable upstream beyond the border of the Charente-Inférieure as far as Angoulême, and downstream to the estuary at Rochefort. Th
e shipping on the river included gabares and
sloops built at such places as Saint-Savinien and Saintes. Th e cargoes were
barrels of wine, eau de vie, and cognac, building stone quarried at Crazannes and Saint-Savinien, timber for shipbuilding, military materiel for the navy at Rochefort, the ingredients for making ships’ rigging, fi rewood, and grain and fruit in season. Th
e sloops could, if required, go out to sea
and trade with Bordeaux or even English ports before war was declared.
Th
e way France was administered had been altered, and the offi cials in
the new départements did what the lawyers become politicians told them to. Th
ese offi
cials were lawyers too, and had the necessary experience for leadership as former administrators of noble estates and Church lands.
Offi
ce-holders were not appointed from Versailles any longer, but elected to administrative bodies in the departments, districts, and municipalities all over the nation by citizens with a recognizable level of wealth.
What was decreed in the capital was implemented in the Charente-In-férieure surprisingly quickly, after the three-day time-lag for correspondence to arrive in Saintes, and there were personalities active in the towns and villages who would refl ect the preoccupations of their rulers in the capital. Among many others, we shall see Jacques Garnier and André- Antoine Bernard both adding ‘de Saintes’ to their names, Charles- Jean-Marie Alquier active in the early days in La Rochelle, and Michel Regnaud emerging to prominence with Saint-Jean-d’Angély as his original power base. In Jonzac there will be Jacques-Alexis Messin, and in the little village of Saint-Th omas de Conac the
6 Th
e Unseen Terror
brief infl uence of Jacques Roux, the so-called ‘red priest’ who would soon emerge as the leader of the extreme left-wing Enragé faction in Paris.
Th
e growth of literacy and the educated discussion of public issues led to increased political strength of French public opinion represented in growing antagonism towards the Bourbon version of monarchy. Th
is meant that
wealthy members of the bourgeoisie would eventually challenge the hitherto unquestionable power of noble seigneurs in town and country. All over France, an anti-establishment undertow had already begun in the opinion of those who were neither noble nor active Catholics. Th
is tendency is re presented here
in the large, prosperous houses along the river near Saintes at Port d’Envaux belonging to the owners of the shipping on the Charente, evidence that there were people ready and able to replace the seigneurs in neighbouring châteaux like the Marquis de Grailly’s Panloy down the river, or the Duc de La Tremoille’s Taillebourg across it, when it came to power representing wealth.
Wills drawn up in solicitors’ offi
ces in and around Saintes between 1750
and the Revolution clearly show how social control by the monarchy, by the Catholic Church, and by the nobility had been seriously eroded by the 1780s: only a small mental step remained between the old order and the new. Many of the non-noble wealthy classes and of the artisans had ceased to endow requiem masses or make charitable bequests out of religious motives in their wills, as had been the case beforehand. Th
ese documents leave no doubt about the
unforced response in the Charente-Inférieure to trends being set in Paris and the national readiness for the surprises the Revolution off ered when it came.13
Words spoken in February 1790 by the man elected as the commandant of the National Guard unit in Port d’Envaux represent a responsible individual’s reaction to what was happening. When the members of the new municipality made their Oath to the Constitution at an open-air ceremony, Colonel Gallocheau told his village audience:
Frenchmen have broken their chains. Free from now on, and subject to the . . . law alone, we shall not see the scales of justice weighted in favour of the powerful man any more . . . Th
is immortal monument of reason and
human wisdom has been the work of enlightened legislators and a just and benefi cent monarch who has sworn solemnly to be its most fi rm support.
Th
e constitution ought to give happiness to all, since it off ers us, for the fi rst time,14 the inestimable enjoyment of liberty.15
Th
ree years later, this pristine system had been replaced by a climate of fear, with committees of surveillance, the same National Guard unit being ordered to check up on those who did not have candles in their windows
A Revolution Led by Lawyers
7
on the evenings of national festivals, the need for more prison cells than ever before, bonnets of liberty on the church towers, the guillotine permanently set up in La Rochelle and Rochefort (but not in Saintes), and corpses washed up on the beaches at the mouth of the Charente River.
Well-documented events in the towns and villages of department of the Charente-Inférieure were characteristic of the national reaction to all these developments, and they help us to understand what the Revolution meant to those who were not active in the capital. It took three days, riding to exhaust a chain of post-horses, before you could reach Saintes or La Rochelle from Paris, but what was happening here was every bit as real as what took place there. Making the connection between national and provincial power, once we have seen the political life of the nation extended into a secular state governed by impartial law and the principles of a new-found civisme, allows our appreciation of the revolutionary decade to take on greater depth. Th
e impartiality of the law and
civisme remain in being as the foundations of the French state, despite the different transient models of government that had their respective turns in the two centuries ‘up until our days’ ( jusqu’à nos jours) as French people tend to say.
Th
e fi rst part of this book opens with an account of a cadet force for the National Guard set up in the village of Rioux by a tailor who found he had a worthwhile position in local society such as had never been possible before. His story allows us to see the extent of the radical change which the Revolution had brought about in the countryside. Th
en we go back to what
historians call the pre-revolution for an account of seigneurial domination to set the scene for what happened in this unforeseen revolution.
Accounts from fi rst-hand sources present the drawing up of lists of complaints and election of deputies to the Estates-General during the provincial assembly in Saintes. Th
e body elected turned itself into the National
Assembly and divided France into 83 departments, all of equal size, with an administrative centre in each one accessible to all the inhabitants. Early developments in Saintes and Saint-Jean-d’Angély are examined upon the basis of information found readily to hand in primary sources.
Th
e second part concerns the development of the system of Terror in the area. Th
e new conditions in Saintes and other towns were dominated by the aspirations of unscrupulous new men like André-Antoine Bernard and Jacques Garnier, who had their revolutionary apprenticeships in Saintes before becoming national fi gures.
A picture of Terror and wartime conditions as they aff ected the citizens of Saintes is drawn from a diary kept in secret between 178
9 and 1795
8 Th
e Unseen Terror
by a lawyer called François-Guillaume Marillet, an informed opponent of the new conditions and of the personalities who had taken power. In La Rochelle, the Jacobin Terror was intense after February 1793 to prevent the southward spread of the royalist and Catholic rebellion in the Vendée, just north of there. Th
e British naval occupation of remote Toulon made for a
reaction equally severe in the military port of Rochefort.
If the lawyers’ revolution were to be successful, the intransigent opposition of nearly all the bishops and a great number of their clergy had to be overcome by making the Church redundant, and this is the subject of the third part. Th
e secular nation was invented by the lawyers during the Revolution as the remedy for what they called fanaticism. Th
e term ‘anti-clericalism’ was
not available until late in the nineteenth century in France,16 but the reality it came to convey had existed increasingly for a long time. Although it often appeared that one fanaticism was being replaced by another during the dismantling of the relations between the Church and the State and the increasing de-Christianization of the State, the subconscious echo of the Calas aff air17
infl uenced antagonism towards the Catholic Church in the decade of the Revolution, and showed that there was a wider issue involved: the freedom of individuals to make their own choices and, indeed, to be individuals.
Th
e bishop of Saintes was murdered in the September Massacres in Paris after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792. Many priests from the department accepted exile in Spain, as did the bishop of La Rochelle, but those who did not were executed or subjected to systematic brutality on decaying ships off the coast near Rochefort. Marillet again allows an appraisal of local reaction to the treatment of the clergy in the particular context of the town of Saintes after the survivors were brought ashore. It was not until after Bonaparte had taken over the Revolution by making himself First Consul that a new rapport with the Church was established.
Th
e minutes of the village council in Saint-Saturnin-de-Séchaud are the basis of the fourth part, which traces individuals and families from initial eager hope through the tensions of the Jacobin Republic to the anxious boredom of the Directory. Th
e way things worked out for the parish priest,
for his constitutional replacement, for suspects, for those who were elected to power, for ordinary people in the country are examined in the smallest unit of the new national administration, a typical, rural commune.
A concluding chapter traces continuity in the infl uential career of a lawyer with a moderate outlook from Saint-Jean-d’Angély, which spans the whole revolutionary period and carries on until the Battle of Waterloo.
A Revolution Led by Lawyers
9
What changed and what remained as it had been, who supported the Revolution and who opposed it, can be more fully understood when we move away from the National Assembly and the Convention and see where the deputies who made the decisions had come from while the lawyers’ Revolution span out into Terror and back again before it was taken over by a soldier’s Empire.
Part I
An Unforeseen
Revolution
chapter 1
The Old Order Changes
Citizen Jean Bouquet was a tailor in a village called Rioux. He made liveries for domestic servants in the châteaux roundabout, and his speciality was military uniforms. He made his own offi
cer’s uniform
for the National Guard, and wore it every day, claiming always to be ready to resist any attempt to restore the monarchy overthrown on 10 August 1792.
He expressed his new sense of liberty in his public speeches, and one he made in 1793 – then called ‘Year II of the Republic’ – included this paragraph: Th
ink how happy we are to be free after so many centuries of slavery under the tyranny of kings, seigneurs, priests, intendants and their lackeys! All those monsters have at last been dispossessed of the rights they took from the people by their craftiness or violence. We were like children before, but now we have come of age, and are masters of our own rights. What Republican would be such a coward as to regret shedding the last drop of his blood to uphold a cause so beautiful?1
Th
e Revolution made a local celebrity of him, which he could never have been in the old society. He took his place in the unit of the National Guard based in Saintes that was set up in the summer of 1789 when it was feared that the king’s courtiers were organizing an army of mercenaries to burn the harvest and starve the recently elected National Assembly and local authorities into submission. Th
e men moving about in the countryside were in reality unem-
ployed farmhands looking for work, and the fear soon passed. Th e National
Guard remained, however, and was manipulated by a lawyer called Bernard de Jeuzines, who seized command of it in Saintes. It gave a taste of village power to people like Bouquet, elected as the third of the offi
cers in the fi rst company
of the National Guard unit at Rioux with the rank of sous-lieutenant. Th at did
not fulfi l his potential in his own eyes, however, and this strutting innocent exploited an opportunity that arose to extend his infl uence.
When he saw lads who were not old enough to join the National Guard at a loose end outside his workshop, he asked them if they wanted to take 13
14 Th
e Unseen Terror
part in impressive parades and be ready to shed their last drop of blood for the Republic. When they said they did and would be, he asked for their parents’ permission to set up a cadet force about a hundred strong, and named it Hope ( Espérance). He provided each youth with a tricolour cockade, a pike, a Republican bonnet, a national fl ag, and a satchel, all at his own expense. He made uniforms for older members of his company after a few months, and the fi nal stage in their training was the handling of weapons.
A surviving memoir reproduces the speeches that he made. Th is extract
is typical of his style:
Th
ink what depression and misery your fathers and mothers and your grandparents lived in up to now under the most infamous tyrannies of . . .
the most insolent despotism. Forget the saints of stone and wood2 that your priests ordered you to adore and kiss. Honour your father and your mother; adore the Supreme Being in your hearts, and show the energy which belongs now to free men to fi ght and slash until the last of the tyrants is gone. Th ere
it is: your most sacred duty!
Jean Bouquet had married Marie Arrive in nearby Montpellier de Medillan 13 years before. So, in February 1793, when the Republic ordered every department in France to raise soldiers to defend the nation in the war against the kings of Europe, Citizen Bouquet, as a married man, was not required to serve. Th
is was a disappointment to him, and he found
a substitute in Pierre Bibard, who also lived in Rioux, made him a new uniform, paid for the equipment he needed for the army, and presented him to the authorities of the Department of the Charente-Inférieure at Saintes.3
Th
e offi
cials sent a report of this to the National Convention, making an honourable mention of Bouquet, with a copy to Bouquet himself. In reply, the National Convention sent the ‘generous citizen’ a letter of thanks.
Th
e memoir gives the impression that the Espérance Company was Bouquet’s own idea. Certainly the local initiative in Rioux was his but, in La Rochelle at the same time, boys too young to enlist for combat against the rebels in the Vendée joined a body called La Compagnie de l’Espérance de la patrie, a brainchild of the town’s Jacobins, which produced a genuine social mix. Th
eir talk of ‘shedding [our] blood to the last drop for the patrie’
was the same as Bouquet’s, and there were some who lied
about their age to join the desperate confl ict not very far from their own front doors in the Vendée. It may have been that the Rioux contingent of Espérance was part of a larger Jacobin creation, especially since Bernard de Saintes, Bouquet’s
Th
e Old Order Changes
15
patron, was a Jacobin, and Bouquet’s pronouncements were in tune with the Jacobin outlook.
He had a full-length portrait of himself in uniform painted and hung it in a gold-coloured frame in his workshop ‘so that his descendants might . . .
have him for an example of not attaching themselves to fortunes or riches which are often perishable, especially the ones acquired by fraud and trick-ery. Th
ey should observe’, he added, ‘that a good citizen ought not to keep the surplus that he has over from the rest of his income, but ought to sacrifi ce it entirely for the upkeep of the nation and the needy in the commune.’ He refused to accept payment for the duties he undertook as a junior offi cer in
the National Guard. He said, with generous naivety, that there were plenty of poor people about and, if he were paid for what he did, that would lessen the support available to them from the national treasury.
At parades of the Espérance Company, after the young citizens had marched round the Tree of Liberty and sung hymns in honour of the Republic, they always cried out ‘Long live the Republic. Long live the National Constitution. Long live Citizen Bouquet who gave us our pikes and our bonnets!’ Th
is hurrah punctuates everything in the memoir. As
soon as drill was fi nished, he took the cadets to the auberge and paid for several bottles of wine. Buying drinks for minors seems to have been an acceptable part of revolutionary culture.
Th
e most typical symbol of freedom for sans-culotte sympathizers was the Phrygian bonnet, or cap of liberty. It was bright red, and was supposed to have been worn by freed slaves in antiquity. Th