The Unseen Terror
Page 4
e king had been given one and wore
it for a while on the afternoon of 20 June 1792 while he drank to the nation’s health in an attempt, under duress, to show solidarity with the Revolution after a crowd had burst into the Tuileries Palace. So, as was done in most villages, Bouquet put a cap of liberty and two tricolour fl ags fi xed on pikes up on the church tower in place of the weathercock, and ordered someone to paint the sides of the bell tower in the three national colours, with a representation of the sun which had risen in a new age replacing the symbols of the old order.
In the new circumstances, when the social and moral control exercised by the clergy had disappeared, secularists like Bouquet at every social level all over France came into their own. Th
ere was no one to teach the
church catechism after the curé of Rioux, Jean Bertry, and his vicaire, Pierre Guillemeteau, had gone into exile in Spain, and Bouquet took over the task of teaching Republican principles in his cadet force instead, denouncing what had been replaced as fanaticism.4
16 Th
e Unseen Terror
Bouquet led the Espérance Company the ten miles to Saintes in April 1793, marching the boys in parade order if they were tall and strong enough, and hiring a horse and cart for the youngest members of the company. He had borrowed four drums from the town in advance, and took the boys along at a pace regulated by old soldiers as far as Citizen Bernard’s front door. By this time Bernard was one of the Deputies for the Department in the National Convention and was eventually to become as great a protagonist of what could be called the new fanaticism on a national scale as Bouquet was on a local one.
Deputy Bernard was actually at his house in Saintes. He took Citizen Bouquet and his company to meet the Departmental Directors. Th ese
offi
cials admired Bouquet’s spirit because he was ‘virtuous for the public good’. Th
ey presented him with his own copy of a report of the occa-
sion which they had drawn up, in which it was said that the young patriots assured the Directors of ‘their regret that they had not risen to their courageous intentions only because of the weakness of their age’, and of
‘how much they looked forward to the time when they could spill their blood usefully for the Republic’.
Th
e residents of Rioux were repeatedly witnesses to the activities of Citizen Bouquet. He planted the village Tree of Liberty and concluded, on the morning when he found that ‘certain aristocrats or other wicked partisans had been throwing stones at it and intending to stop it growing, that they seemed to want to bring back despotism in preference to the sacred devotion of a good patriot which horrifi ed them. Th
ey will be denounced’, he said.
A dinner service for patriotic banquets was made, illustrated with his activities, and a signifi cant icon of the Revolution in the Charente-Inférieure remains from it in the form of a large serving plate bearing a picture of Bouquet arriving at Saintes with his company of cadets, made in the traditional blue and yellow on white faience typical of local production. He marches in front with drawn sword and points to the cathedral tower to say, ‘We will soon be there!’ He is presented as a dapper fi gure, strutting yet genial.
Th
e memoir includes a report of the speech he made at the fi rst anniversary of the king’s execution.
When Louis Capet, last king of France, was guillotined, the Republican Bouquet showed great enthusiasm and energy, and he made this speech to his cadets:
Ah! My dear children! Th
e perjurer Capet, the most infamous tyrant in
the universe, came to undergo the penalty which he so justly merited. Th is
Th
e Old Order Changes
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1. Th
e serving plate from Bouquet’s festival dinner service (reproduced by permission of the Musée Orbigny-Bernon at La Rochelle).
intriguer, who had sworn in the presence of the Convention to be faithful to us, only a little while after looked for a means of the greatest criminality to cut our throats. If the warm patriots and the warm partisans of virtue had not discovered his treason for us, eh! where should we be now? Let us cry out, my children, in the voice of the fatherland; let us swear a sacred oath again to be faithful to the law and to the nation, and to make war until no tyrant remains. I shall not be surprised if intrigues with the ci-devant 5
landowners and the priests plunge us into terror. O wise and sacred laws of the republic, who will be the partisan cowardly enough to regret pouring out his blood to the last drop to make you stronger! For me, all that I am able to expend upon it shall be devoted to it.
Afterwards he was promoted to the rank of Captain of the Espérance Company of Rioux by all the voters, so the more solid citizens who qualifi ed for their vote by the tax they paid appeared to have welcomed his infl uence. If Bouquet did all this, they would not have to do it themselves.
He thanked his fellow citizens in these words:
My brothers, you come to honour me with your confi dence in naming me your captain. I accept it, and promise to carry it out with all my power.
I swear to be faithful to the law and to the nation, and to die at my post, rather than abandon you.
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e Unseen Terror
When fi rearms were requisitioned to arm the defenders of the patrie, Bouquet handed over his own, and did not accept any payment for it. After the Popular Society of Rioux had been reformed and purged, as one of its members he provided ‘a large national fl ag in the three national colours to be on display in the meeting room, of his own good will and again at his own expense’. Furthermore, he embroidered with his own hands (he was a tailor, after all) the Rights of Man, Equality, Fraternity, and ‘other pictures of our most celebrated martyrs’, to be displayed in the Society.
At the time, the main national characteristic was fear: fear of denunciation, fear of arbitrary arrest and execution. Th
e executions at La Rochelle
and Rochefort of the opponents of the Revolution did not go unnoticed by villagers who went to those towns on market days to sell their produce or see their relations and friends. No one of the right age was exempt from military service. Parents of military heroes in both the foreign and the civil theatres of war were given rewards, but they were often the parents of a dead hero. Th ose
who had most grounds for fear were the ones who sheltered priests who refused to co-operate with the Revolution and the parents of nobles who had gone into exile in support of Louis XVI’s brothers. In fact, everyone who did not qualify for a certifi cate of civism – the Republican identity card – knew that to be under a cloud inevitably meant being rained upon if not actually struck by lightning. Confi scation of their property was often carried out.
When Maximilien Robespierre and other architects of the Jacobin Terror were themselves executed in July 1794, Citizen Bouquet made a special speech. He invited his fellow citizens to rejoice
at the death of their most perfi dious enemies who have paid on the scaff old the penalty they so justly deserved for their duplicity in preaching one thing and doing another. It would have been better to follow men who had remained faithful to the civic and fraternal oath that they made, obeyed all the laws of the republic and always encouraged those who were ignorant of them.
Th
e memoir says nothing about Bouquet’s attitude towards the Terror before this event. His general self-projection suggests that he would not have been opposed to it, especially since the local Jacobin, Bernard, was his patron. After the speech, he gave dinner to his Espérance Company, and they shouted their well-rehearsed slogan as usual in return .
Th
e account of Bouquet’s achievements in the memoir is breathless, art-less, and unsophisticated. It does not have an end. After recording the words painted on the fourth side of the church tower, ‘Th
anks to the Supreme
Th
&n
bsp; e Old Order Changes
19
Being, the republicans ought to be happy to have abolished tyranny and all seditious regimes’, it just stops. Other memories of Bouquet seem to have passed into the sand.
Th
e National Guard offi
cer’s uniform had taken the place of the priest’s
cassock in representing authority for training the outlook and aspirations of the young. Bouquet was the ideal local instrument for a nation at war with the kings of Europe and the royalist rebels. He had absorbed the principles of the Revolution: loyalty to the unifi ed nation and equality before the law, which went with respect for the law for its own sake and, in 1793–4, there was a lot more law than there had been before, because its source was an elected assembly at national level, even if that assembly, at the height of the Terror, delegated too much of its power to the members of the Committee of Public Safety, for which Robespierre was the front man.
Bouquet’s memoir placed great value upon ‘civism’ or ‘civic virtue’, which included honesty and trustworthiness. In his brief time of village power, Bouquet claimed to stand for that ideal, however rough-hewn his expression of it might be. Th
is memoir is the only monument Bouquet has: a dog-eared
few pages reproduced in small print in a specialist journal which took over a century to see the light of day and from which, its editor tells us, the front and back pages were missing when he picked it up. It is diffi
cult to accept the sug-
gestion made by its editor over a century later that the memoir is Bouquet’s own work. He obviously had his admirers among the cadets or they would soon have found ways of dodging the parades, and it may be that one of them wrote this as a tribute to him in all its down-to-earth single-mindedness.
Even so, if the lads in uniform meant it when they called out for Citizen Bouquet to live long, perhaps he really did represent the liberty which parents talked about at their kitchen tables in the presence of their teenage sons. Th
e darker side of that may be that they were too frightened of the new authority to say anything against it.
* * *
Th
ree infl uential men – the Marquis de Monconseil, the Comte de La Tour du Pin, and the Marquis de Reversaux – can be taken to represent the old order in the provinces of Aunis and Saintonge. Th
e fi rst stood for the type
of personal authority exercised by the nobility over the country areas of the two provinces as seigneur of Rioux (where Bouquet lived later), Tesson, Th
enac, Pradelle, and Courcoury, and he wielded great infl uence in Saintes.
Th
ere was a good deal of powerful networking by marriage alliances and
20 Th
e Unseen Terror
inheritance. Th
eir self-conscious domination of the area and their links with the court at Versailles meant none of them saw coming what happened in the years following the setting up of the National Assembly in 1789. Even if they had to take the wealthier sections of the third estate into partnership, they did not expect to lose power as utterly as they did when it happened.
Born in 1695, Etienne Guinot de Monconseil became a royal page and was soon commissioned into the Royal Household Troop of Musketeers.
An obsessive gambler for a time, he bought a regiment of soldiers for himself with his winnings. It was nicknamed the Royal Biribi Regiment, after the name of the card game in which he won the money, and he commanded it in the Wars of the Polish and the Austrian Succession. Th en he
was appointed Lieutenant-General of Haute-Alsace, but he soon left and came home to the Saintonge, where he became something of a philanthro-pist, creating the hospital in Saintes and a school of surgery backed up by a botanic garden off the rue Saint-Vivien to provide medicines. He set up a cotton mill where only very poor people would be taken in as workers, and a small hospice for the dying on his estate at Tesson. His control was exercised by benevolence, but patronage from the distant king or the nobles close at hand could never satisfy bourgeois dreams of liberty.
Th
e Hôtel de Monconseil in Saintes, built in 1738–9, off ers a fi ne example of private architecture from Louis XV’s reign. It dominates the Charente River and the water meadows on the other side and is his lasting memorial.6 It was built in the taste of the day, not a few years behind Paris as often happened with houses in the provinces, and refl ects the elegance of his lifestyle.7
In 1755, the marquis had made a promising marriage alliance for his eldest daughter, Cécile-Charlotte-Marquerite-Séraphine Guinot de Montconseil, with Jean-Frédéric de La Tour du Pin, a 28-year-old widower.
De La Tour du Pin was also a professional soldier who had received his commission as a youth and had served with distinction in the Seven Years’
War. His marriage made the Saintonge his personal centre of operations and Louis XVI appointed him military commandant.
Th
e nobility of Saintes elected de La Tour du Pin as one of their two deputies in the Estates-General, and he declared himself in favour of necessary change. He was one of the fi rst out of the small number of nobles who allied with the third estate. He kept a good table at Versailles, welcoming fellow deputies of all political colours to twice-weekly dinners. Maximilien Robespierre and Choderlos de Laclos8 were on his guest list.
As War Minister he did what he could to re-establish the army after its loss of nerve in 1789, adopting the tricolore as the military banner. He had
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e Old Order Changes
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2. Saintes: Hôtel de Monconseil.
worked towards the re-establishment of discipline, but this backfi red on him after troops mutinied at Nancy in August 1790 and punishments handed down were as harsh as they had ever been before the Revolution. Th is led
to his resignation after being denounced along with other ministers by sans-culottes in the streets of Paris and by Georges Danton in the Assembly.
De la Tour du Pin was in England when Louis XVI was put on trial, but came back to Paris to do as much as he could to preserve the idea of constitutional monarchy. When it became plain that there was nothing he could do, he retired to Auteuil, where he was arrested on 31 August 1793. He was brought from prison to be a witness at the queen’s trial and defended her courageously, continuing to give her the respect he saw due to her. He enraged Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, who presided at the trial, by persistently referring to Marie-Antoinette as ‘Th
e Queen’ or ‘Her Majesty’
and by refusing to call her ‘the widow Capet’ as her attackers wanted him to. His renewed imprisonment lasted nearly seven months and then, on 28
April 1794, he was condemned and executed on the same day.9
A third personality among old order fi gures typical of the Saintonge is the last Royal Intendant, Jacques-Philippe-Isaac Guéau de Gravelle, Marquis de Reversaux. He represented the royal control that lay behind the noble ascendancy in the two provinces, nominated to his offi ce by Louis
XVI in 1781. He planned and presided over the draining of a great deal of
22 Th
e Unseen Terror
marshland on the coast which involved digging a canal between Rochefort and Brouage. Th
e improvement of streets and drainage in Rochefort was
also carried out. Both of these developments raised antagonism towards him, because he used soldiers from several regiments to do the work and billeted them in the town while it was done.10
He saw to the construction of arterial roads, provided the quays on the Charente River at Saintes, and devised other projects that were implemented in the dignifi ed new main streets and buildings developed in the town 50 years later. His development programme in the years preceding the Revolution caused great hostility in Saintes. A royal edict for which he petitioned made it no longer necessary to maintain the medieval ramparts, and Reversaux used the money saved to improve the nar
row, muddy town streets fl anked by timber-framed buildings. Th
is involved taking
over properties and gardens in the town from their bourgeois proprietors, while he installed himself in the vacant Hôtel de Monconseil in 1788.11
His opponents later accused him of having criticized the raising of three hundred thousand soldiers to repel the invasion of France by the kings of Europe – he said that it would be better if the citizens were to stay at home
– and he went to the scaff old in February 1794.
* * *
Th
e inhabitants of the Aunis and the Saintonge welcomed events that occurred in Paris between 14 and 17 July 1789: the fall of the Bastille, the recall of Necker to offi
ce, and, above all, the visit of Louis XVI to the Hôtel
de Ville in Paris, where he put the tricolore cockade on his hat to reassure the population of his support for change. Th
e magistrates in Saintes ordered
Te Deum to be sung and bonfi res of joy to be lit.
Before the changes, France was a nation in which the king’s rule was personal and where all major decisions stemmed from ones already made by him on the advice of his ministers in ‘the upstairs council’ ( conseil en haut) at Versailles. Th
ose without privilege, however wealthy they were, did not have regular access to the king in the secluded wonderland of Versailles, where court ritual worked to numb the eff ect of the real world on the processes of government.12 Th
e king did not speak to individuals, only to corporate bodies.13
Th
e clergy and nobles stood a better chance of gaining access within the charmed circle of royal domination than anonymous members of the third estate. From the bird’s eye point of view of the royal audience chamber, shipowners and tenant farmers had virtually the same status. However, over the passage of nearly two centuries since the Estates-General had last met,
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e Old Order Changes
23
the third estate, in terms of wealth and potential for power, had changed from being nothing to being everything, as a secular-minded canon of Chartres cathedral called Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès had recently observed.