The Unseen Terror

by Richard Ballard

  e crowd set upon Latierce,

  injured him, and accused him of concealing the Constituent Assembly’s decree suppressing the maintained charges which Laplanche said had been issued seven months before. Several people tried to drag Countess Amelot’s pew out from the church, and proposed to take down the weathervanes from her château. In the evening, the maire denounced Laplanche and the leaders of the riot to the district offi

  cials, who were led

  by Claude- Alexandre Normand, a noble landowner at nearby Authon, instinctively opposed to Laplanche’s arguments. An order to arrest Laplanche was issued.

  So a company of regular soldiers arrived at Laplanche’s house. Armed tenants confronted them and the soldiers were ordered to fi re. Th ree women

  and a man fell dead, and four people lay bleeding in the street. Th e troops

  took Laplanche away to prison in Saint-Jean-d’Angély.

  Th

  e villagers locked up Maire Latierce. Th

  ey sent notes to neighbour-

  ing parishes to invite them to join an action on the following day. Th ese,

  preserved in the dossier of the insurgents’ subsequent trial, include dis-paraging phrases about Latierce. Councillors from Saint-Jean went on a deputation to Varaize, and reported back that the only way of saving Maire Latierce would be to set Laplanche free. During the night, some National Guard artillerymen went to Varaize from Saint-Jean to fraternize with the villagers and at least a dozen other villages sent armed men to support the protesters. Maire Valentin had previously sent the regular soldiers back to their quarters in Saint-Jean.

  On the morning of 22 October, nearly two thousand protest-

  ers advanced on Saint-Jean, bringing Maire Latierce with them. Th e

  National Guardsmen in the crowd were in uniform. A judge agreed to free Laplanche, who was greeted with great shouts of pleasure by the crowd as he left the jail.

  Some of the crowd started knocking Latierce about. Laplanche himself put his arms round Latierce in an attempt to shield him. Someone came up close and, while a scuffl

  e was going on around the two men, killed

  the maire of Varaize with a shot and several surgical knife–thrusts. Th en,

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  e Unseen Terror

  quickly, some of the rioters left the town, taking Laplanche with them, while the turmoil continued.

  Next day, two departmental offi

  cials brought troops and artillery pieces

  from Saintes, surrounded the villages that had rebelled, arrested a hundred suspects, searched houses, and confi scated weapons, while maires and curés came to Saint-Jean-d’Angély to hand over the principal rebels in person.

  Th

  e department’s commissioners made tenants pay all the maintained dues they owed. A Requiem Mass was arranged for Latierce. Seventy suspects were released after intervention by their village offi

  cials, but Laplanche was

  kept in prison at Rochefort.

  A report was made to the Constituent Assembly in Paris about the aff air of Varaize, and a decree signed by the king on 10 December ordered an enquiry. Th

  e trial of the leaders of the riot was transferred from Rochefort to La Rochelle, and their interrogation went on for over a month, until the court applied the law of 15 September 1790 giving an amnesty for ‘deeds relative to the Revolution’. All the accused, including Laplanche, were freed and Latierce’s wife received a government pension.

  Th

  e Legislative Assembly suppressed all feudal dues as one of its fi nal acts in September 1792, and the National Convention, abolishing any possible remaining feudal claims in July 1793, ordered seigneurial title deeds to be burnt in public all over the nation. Th

  e statement about equality before

  the law had been made irrevocably.40

  * * *

  Th

  e stabilization of the law and its availability to every citizen was a priority of the early phases of the Revolution. Th

  e control of law on a local scale

  by the seigneurs and the lawyers they appointed to their courts had been overthrown on the night of 4 August 1789 by the National Constituent Assembly at Versailles. Under the old order, the course of justice was slow, arbitrary, and often prolonged because the longer cases lasted the more fees the lawyers could command in civil disputes. When it came to criminal cases, serious crimes were frequently not brought to court because it cost the seigneurs too much to prosecute someone against whom an accusation had been made. Anthony Crubaugh cites a case of the murder of the 12-year-old son of a labourer at Tonnay-Boutonne in which the father of the boy had accepted damages and interest payments from the known perpetrators of it rather than involve himself in the expenses of offi

  cial judicial channels. He

  Elections, Grievances, and Feudal Dues

  39

  draws the conclusion that rural law enforcement in the seigneurial courts was too weak to make criminal justice possible in any reliable sense.41

  A revolutionary form of justice was implemented by laws passed in the Constituent Assembly on 16–24 August 1789 and on 19–22 July 1791. Th

  ese laws set up the post of justice of the peace ( juge de paix) in every canton42 so that law could be readily available at the local level of small disputes, and virtually free to plaintiff s.43 Th e law also provided for the justice of the peace to be supported by two non-specialist assessors.

  Th

  e active citizens were to elect the juge de paix on the basis of his local reputation for probity and integrity, and his task was seen as a mediat-ing one in civil disputes involving sums of money of less than 50 livres.

  He also had a paternalistic role in protecting the interests of minors. No professional counsel were to be involved in the cantonal court of the juge de paix: their role was confi ned to district and higher courts and, even in those, defendants could name their own defence counsel, who need not be a qualifi ed lawyer. Small legal actions could now be resolved in a period of weeks, sometimes a few days, as opposed to the years that some cases had taken before the Revolution to the fi nancial ruin of many involved, both innocent and guilty, with fi nes to be paid and costs to be settled amounting to several years’ income.

  Th

  is was an important radical change in rural areas, and it was expected that the justice of the peace would be an amateur.44 Th

  is was certainly the

  case at Jonzac, where a former serge manufacturer in the town called Jean Chauvreau was appointed to the offi

  ce in November 1792. His honesty

  and good will made him considered as the ideal candidate for the post in the exasperating conditions of a dispute between two rival factions in the municipality.45 Nevertheless, professionals were sometimes preferred by local electors, and Pierre Gallocheau was chosen as juge de paix for the canton of Port d’Envaux in February 1794, being required to fi ll his place

  ‘without partiality’ and to ‘contribute to the happiness and tranquillity of his fellow citizens’, as his letter of appointment says. Yet he was a career lawyer trained, like Jacques Garnier, in the présidial of Saintes before the Revolution,46 and men like him had no intention of relinquishing control of their revolution. Nevertheless, the assessors elected to assist him in his judgements had no specialist legal training. Th

  ey were called Couturier

  and Menet, and the latter was one of the village bakers in Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud.47

  40 Th

  e Unseen Terror

  3. Saintes: Th

  e Présidial.

  In spite of all we shall see happening during the Terror, with the Law of Suspects and revolutionary tribunals producing a new arbitrary justice in political cases, this system continued to work reasonably well as a measure of normality. It established and encouraged a novel civic spirit of mutual co-operation between free individuals all over the country, and is one of the lasting benefi cial featu
res of the Revolution of 1789. It meant that the law itself was the basis of justice, administered constructively by justices and assessors, rather than the self-interested arbitrariness off ered previously (or not) by lawyers retained in the seigneurial courts.

  Part II

  Revolution Becomes

  Terror

  chapter 3

  A Representative of the

  People

  As soon as the principle was established that power was gained by being elected, the new men who appeared sometimes turned out to be unscrupulous exploiters of it. Th

  e most conspicuous example

  of this sort of political animal to appear in Saintes was André-Antoine Bernard, who emerged into notoriety when he was representative on mission in the Haute-Saône and then the Côte d’Or in 1794, making full use of the revolutionary tribunal and the guillotine against those whom he decided were enemies of the people.

  He came from a village not far from Saintes called Corme-Royal, one of more than fi fty villages that had the abbess of the Abbaye aux Dames in the town as its seigneur. His legal training before the Revolution had been at the Présidial in Saintes and he hoped to make an impression by adopting the name Bernard de Jeuzines before the changes started that would give him power on a national level. Jeuzines was no more than an orchard on some land his family had in another village called Les Essards. Again, not very far from there is a hamlet called La Pommeraye, where his wife came from. Her family, who had aspirations to nobility, did not want Louise Frère de La Pommeraye to marry André-Antoine since he was not a noble at all, but the wedding took place on 3 August 1778.1 Seething about his in-laws might explain his hyperactive antagonism towards the nobility when they were being called aristocrats a dozen years later and regarded by the new powerful as pariahs to be exterminated. By then, Louise had died, leaving him with the care of their two young daughters.

  François-Guillaume Marillet’s rage against Bernard boiled over whenever he wrote about him. He tells us that André-Antoine Bernard and his rival Jacques Garnier were the two men of Saintes who took over local power as the Revolution gathered momentum, working together against 43

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  e Unseen Terror

  A.-G. Gaudriaud, who had been maire and deputy of the royal intendant for 32 years. Garnier was elected to replace Gaudriaud by acclamation of his fellow citizens, and Gaudriaud knew when he was beaten.2

  Saintes was full of commercial bustle, stolid administration, and a regard for law. Yet tension existed between those notables whose superiority was sustained by the monarchy and those whose acquisitiveness justifi ed their eagerness to grasp what the Revolution would off er them. Most had contact with the land around, as owners of fi elds, cattle, or vines, and there was only social distance between them and the tenant farmers who came into the town to sell their produce on market days. Saintes was a few sans-culottes short of a riot.

  Th

  e second half of July 1789 had been the time when rumours frightening to the bourgeoisie circulated everywhere. In Paris, the court at Versailles had seemed poised to order the army to take the city centre, so the solid citizens formed their citizens’ militia for their own protection, but were overtaken by the storming of the Bastille. In the Charente valley, the rumour that the nobles had organized 40,000 brigands to attack the towns caused the bourgeoisie in Saintes to organize.3

  After Garnier’s being chosen as maire, letters from Paris had been opened which told friends and family that Louis XVI had gone to the Hôtel de Ville in an attempt to calm the citizens who thought his troops would attack them. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, fi rst deputy for Paris in the Estates-General and then president of it, had given him the blue, white and red4 cockade which he had fi xed on his hat. Th

  e king confi rmed Bailly in the new post of maire

  of Paris. Saintes refl ected Paris when Bernard organized visits to the dean of the Cathedral, the president of the nobility, the colonel of the Royal Cavalry Regiment in the town garrison, the chief magistrate, and the chief of police, and gave them all revolutionary cockades to put in their hats. Even the priests and the monks wore them pinned to the front of their cassocks (Marillet says ‘on their hearts’), and the statue of the king was crowned with laurel.

  Th

  e euphoria evaporated on 29 July, when the comte de Jarnac asked for military help in defending Cognac against 2,000 imagined brigands. Th en

  there were riots at Baignes-Saint-Radégond and Sousmoulins in the south of the Saintonge in which the seigneurs were forced to abandon their feudal dues as we saw in the previous chapter. Since an attack on their town was expected very soon, the bourgeois militia in Saintes changed itself into the National Guard as happened everywhere else. Its strength rose to about fi ve

  A Representative of the People

  45

  or six hundred young men from the town and adjacent suburbs like Saint-Eutrope and Saint-Vivien. Even schoolboys were enrolled in the regiment.

  Th

  e head master of the college, M. de Rupt, was pressured into letting his boarders go out to join up. Marillet saw with sadness that his own son Léon was made a sergeant, but forgave him for being young and impulsive.5

  Th

  e new unit paraded at a fi eld called La Gaillarde to put on a show for Maire Garnier, who had greater local support than Bernard. Th en came a

  surprise. If Jacques Garnier could be the new maire after 32 years of apparent royalist misrule under Gaudriaud, then Bernard de Jeuzines could appoint himself Colonel of the National Guard unit and be accepted as such.6

  Th

  e regiment formed up into companies, elected its other offi cers, and

  chose its uniform: a red jacket with sky-blue lapels and a white collar. Th e

  newspaper proprietor Bourignan was elected lieutenant-colonel. Marillet said exactly what he thought about the headquarters staff : ‘a few drunkards and some headstrong customers’.7 Bernard went on parade and satisfi ed his autocratic tendencies.

  Since most of these offi

  cers could not aff ord their uniforms, Bernard was

  not embarrassed in the least to take over a sum of 2,400 livres recently raised for charity by the cathedral chapter, the sisters at the Abbaye aux Dames, and the congregations in other churches. Bernard took 900 livres, allotted 300 for distribution by the curés of the six parishes, put the remaining 1200 into the hands of the banker Faure, and soon forced him to hand over this sum to pay for the uniforms. ‘Th

  ere were many objections,’ Marillet

  says, ‘but protests were no more than timid . ’

  Bernard kept the National Guard’s regimental colours at his house instead of at the Hôtel de Ville. Th

  en he hurried to La Rochelle to take weapons

  from the armoury there on the pretext that Saintes was still in danger, and forced the artillery commander at Saint-Jean-d’Angély to provide him with a great deal of gunpowder. He stored all that at his own house too.

  When he was maire, Gaudriaud used to receive offi

  cial letters via the

  post offi

  ce in Saintes. Bernard ordered the postmaster not to open the council’s box unless he was present. He opened the former maire’s letters and searched the Hôtel de Ville and Gaudriaud’s house for papers that might have incriminated him. However, when Bernard’s interference was known about, Maire Garnier’s council ordered mounted gendarmes, independent of the National Guard, to move all the arms and powder to the Hôtel de Ville and prevent any more tampering with the post. Th

  e council resolu-

  tion was printed and pasted up, but Bernard produced another poster of

  46 Th

  e Unseen Terror

  his own in which he swore never to take up arms against his fellow citizens.

  Th

  e same evening, he insulted all the committee in a second poster and then, Marillet adds, went and had a drink in a bar . . . with Garnier.

 
Th

  e beginning of the Revolution was a jolly time in Saintes for those who could aff ord it. Patriotic banquets were arranged which turned into bacchanales. Th

  e puritanical Marillet says he disapproved of offi

  cers drink-

  ing with soldiers, and the men dancing with the women present. ‘Morals, to be precise,’ he complains, ‘ran to risky limits . ’ Th ere were ‘close hugs,

  frightened cries’, and the lunches went on until the August sunset. Th e most

  picturesque of these occasions was the one held in the garden of the priests’

  seminary, for which Bernard provided two barrels of wine and Bourignon gave two others. Th

  e seminary’s principal gave coal for the cooking, and

  the caterer, whose estimate of 900 livres for providing the meal had been accepted, served ‘bad, cold and unpalatable meat that had partly gone off ’.

  Th

  e next day his bill was cut down to 500 livres, but all who were there enjoyed themselves and thanked Bernard.

  Marillet commented that Messrs. Garnier and Bernard were doing just as they liked and demonstrates, in his journal which continues until 1795, that the background to this new-found enjoyment on the part of a few bourgeois was great misery for most people: the assignat used as paper money lost its value, the cost of white and black bread soared, ‘and the municipality bought up the wheat so no one else could have any . . .’

  Bernard extended his rampant power-seeking. A National Guard unit had been formed in Chaniers, upriver from Saintes, and François Augereau was elected its commander. On the day the regimental colours were dedicated, Bernard went over to Chaniers in his colonel’s uniform and demoted Augereau. He off ered him command of a company, but Augereau went home. Bernard sent fusiliers to arrest him and humiliated him by making him go on guard like a simple soldier.

  Bernard tried to deprive Garnier of power in Saintes after setting up an independent military company and parading them at the town bank in rue Saint-Maur during the grape-harvest in early October, when most members of the town council were out of town among their vines. He made his new company vote for the dissolution of the council, and the vote was accepted, which meant that Garnier had to resign as maire. Th e next day,