The Unseen Terror
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however, the dismissed council regained its mutual confi dence and recalled Garnier, who reached a compromise by re-establishing the council under the control of several military members loyal to Colonel Bernard.
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47
One of the most characteristic episodes of Bernard’s political apprenticeship in Saintes arose over the National Guard’s intention to hold a memorial service in the cathedral on 27 August 1790 for soldiers who had died as a punishment for the mutiny of the Swiss Châteauvieux Regiment against poor wages at Nancy in August 1790. Th
e mutiny had been suppressed
with great severity: 1 mutineer was broken on the wheel, 20 were hanged, and 41 sent to the galleys for life.
Th
e mutiny was in all likelihood fermented by Nancy’s Jacobin Club, and Bernard, as a Jacobin sympathizer, put himself at the head of a local committee of commanders of National Guard units in the Charente- Inférieure to organize the ceremony, but the dean and chapter refused to have the cathedral bells rung for it.
So Bernard had an altar set up on the fl ood plain of the Charente called La Pallu, with decorations in the taste of the revolutionary years, poplar and cypress branches, any number of lighted candles, and a great picture representing the Patrie in tears. He had persuaded the prior of the Jacobins8
to celebrate a Mass in the open-air, to which the vicars-general of the absent Bishop de La Rochefoucauld objected. When no departmental offi cials had
arrived by the time the ceremony was due to start, Bernard sent a deputation to the Hôtel de Monconseil, where the Departmental Directory was in session, to persuade them to come. A lively discussion went on beyond the time that Bernard expected them to arrive, so he left the altar and hurried in person to speed up the decision.
Bourignon, present as Bernard’s second-in-command, also gave his account of this in his newspaper. He says that the administrators were watching what was happening on the Pallu through the windows of their fi rst-fl oor meeting room9 and that, although not agreeing to come to the ceremony while Bernard was still with them, once they were on their own, they changed their minds and were present at it. He was becoming an expert in getting his own way.
Bernard was elected the principal judge of the municipality on 4
November 1790 and, at the end of a dinner to celebrate his appointment, he proposed the creation of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution,10
with a membership of a hundred and fi fty under the presidency of his associate Gout, and controlled by others from among his friends. Its purpose was, he said, ‘to denounce citizens who maintained contacts with the enemies of the Revolution’. Churchmen and nobles were excluded from the outset.
48 Th
e Unseen Terror
Anti-clericalism was becoming intense among those who were running Saintes. In December 1790, when the clergy were required by law to take the Oath to the Civil Constitution or be assumed to have resigned their parishes, Marillet wrote a page which could be seen as prophetic unless he altered it in the light of the way things actually turned out later: Th
ere is an inconceivable relentlessness against the priests. Th e king has
just vetoed a decree which obliges them to take an oath which will perhaps make martyrs, many renegades, a great number without bread, and will bring about a schism in France . . . It is to be presumed that half of the diocese will take it because self-interest, vile self-interest, is the great mover.
Th
e Club fulfi lled Bernard’s expectations. Its fi rst denunciation was of the bishop of Saintes, de La Rochefoucauld, who was declared an enemy of the nation because he had forbidden his clergy to take the oath.
Th
e Club was enlarged to 400 members, as many women as men, much to Marillet’s disgust. It took on more importance each day and regulated the town’s business more and more. Marillet raged against Bernard, ‘governor of the town who came to the conclusion of all his enterprises. Th
ere was not found a citizen
fi rm enough to punish him by hitting him on the head for all his infamy’.11
* * *
Th
e news that Louis XVI had been arrested at Varennes, after his attempt to escape the control of the National Assembly and the Parisians, reached Saintes during the night of 23 and 24 June 1791 in a garbled form. Th e Departmental Directory called the district and municipality offi cials and notables
together to renew their Oath to the Constitution. Th
e National Guard
paraded at four in the morning in the place de Belair. Th e municipality
made an inventory of gunpowder and lead shot in the grocers’ shops, forbade their sale without authorization, and sent for some more from Saint-Jean-d’Angély. No one was allowed to leave the town. Th
e public thought
the Departmental Directory had got it wrong. Bernard’s contribution to the reaction was to call for unity.12
Marillet’s idiosyncratic refl ection was as follows:
It was an unhappy event which could have obtained peace (that is to say if the king had succeeded in getting away), but all went to show that the plan for his departure was known about by the National Assembly and that his
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49
arrest was manifest treason on the part of the factious. Th e Assembly knew
the king’s intentions, had favoured his escape, and knew that on such a day, in such a place, and at such a time the king had to pass by Varennes and be arrested there. Everyone looks at himself and asks when we shall see the end.
Th
e arrest of the king and queen will speed up the entry of troops into France who are 50,000 in number, it is said, as well as French refugees ( sic), princes, nobles, and parlementaires, Prussians, Germans, Swedes, Poles, Spaniards, Swiss and Savoyards . . . such is the situation in France between the hands of the factious who want to destroy this empire and make mankind unhappy.13
Bernard was elected as a deputy in the new Legislative Assembly. Lemercier, one of the original deputies, elected in 1789 and not permitted to stand again, came to brief him before he left. Marillet reports that Bernard went from Saintes on 5 October 1791, which would make his arrival in Paris at least a week late for the opening, and makes this private character study of him as the next phase of his career begins:
M. Bernard de Jeuzines with much spirit, much recognition of his status as judge, much resource and much competence – in his own imagination –
with a great facility for self-publicity without being an orator, and being the brothel of all the vices, without religion, without manners, without delicacy of sentiments, giving free rein to all his passions, is villainous, vile, base. Th
rough all the evil he has done, and much more which he has done through his agents, he has proved that the Constitution is bad because it needs equally bad men to support it . . . He has been a man of all offi ces.
He has kept them . . . even if that were incompatible with the law. It is all the same: the decrees were not made for him. He mocked them and played with them. He is administrator, colonel, president of the Club, and president of the judges of the district. He was a governor of the college and of the hospital. He was everywhere, he dominated everywhere.
. . . Vice rises up on the deeds of glory. And was he satisfi ed? No. Perhaps, he dreams of some eminent position at the end of his time in the legislature . . .
He has a honeyed tone, a hypocritical air, the bearing of a factious man.
He has a base mind, and has no courage. Many people have provoked him but he has never responded. It is said that, when he is no longer here, it will be noticed because so much evil will have stopped. He is the sort of man who would stir up an insurrection in this town through decrees or letters from Paris to prove that he is a peacemaker. It is true that he leaves behind him some good disciples whom he has imbued with his principles and who would be
able to follow his direction, but they will be more diffi cult to
discover because they do not have anything like his energy.14
50 Th
e Unseen Terror
4. Two Views of Saintes showing the Newly Built Quays: Prints from 1791.
* * *
Once he had been elected as a deputy for Saintes in the National Assembly, an orchard called Jeuzines was no longer conspicuous enough to give him a name.
So he became Bernard de Saintes instead.15 He went quiet during his early months as a deputy in Paris but, after the overthrow of the monarchy on 10
August 1792, became prominent in the newly elected National Convention.
Th
e deputies’ seats on the left of the tribune in Louis XV’s riding school were higher than any others, so those who sat there became known as the Mountain. Th
ey were mostly members of the Jacobin Club, who also
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met in the former convent of the Jacobins in the rue Saint-Honoré. Th eir
name distinguished them from the other major revolutionary faction, the Girondins. Bernard and, later, Garnier sat with the Jacobins.
On 13 April 1792, Bernard had written to tell the club in Saintes about the suppression of the distinctive dress of the clergy, and Marillet commented,
‘We have reached total destruction of the priestly function. And we can say no more than R.I.P.’16 Bernard’s departure could give no comfort to poor Marillet. When the Terror arose, Marillet saw himself twice on the point of being imprisoned. He was left at liberty but he does not explain why.17
* * *
Th
e Convention declared that France was a Republic and put Louis XVI on trial,18 and when the Girondins had sponsored the idea of a referendum to confi rm the verdict if the Convention found him guilty of conspiracy against the nation, Jacques Garnier cut his political teeth as a deputy by opposing the suggestion. He is recorded as saying that
Civil war threatens us. An external war is exhausting us. We are without government and without laws and, disengaging ourselves from the duty we are obliged to perform, we discuss whether w e should send back the exercise of it to the people who called us here to accomplish it. Citizens, think hard: security and liberty depend upon the resolution that you are about to take. Do not say any more that you will judge Louis, for you are not judges. Say that in the name of the people you will decide in a revolutionary manner on his fortune. Have you drawn up a procedure for ordering the banishment and death of forty thousand French emigrés, for declaring the deportation of twenty thousand anarchic priests? Have you come to the idea of having those decrees confi rmed by the people? Have there been complaints about what you have not done? You are statesmen.
You are not judges. All measures about general security are your responsibility. Th
ey are delegated to you. To send back to the people what the people have entrusted to you is to send them your responsibility and your resignation. From that moment you would be characterless, the legislative body would have perished, and you would have to leave this arena, because you would lose the right to fulfi l the functions which you would have abandoned in it . . .’
Having repeated the text of Garnier’s speech, the early-twentieth-century senator Reveillaud ironically comments on the ‘implacable logic’.19
52 Th
e Unseen Terror
Garnier added an unscientifi c postscript after the king had gone to the scaff old. On 11 February 1793, he said, ‘Like the Divinity in his wrath, the people, when they are betrayed, do not pass judgement on their enemies: they hurl lightning and exterminate them.’20
Th
e deputies decided that the vote about the king’s death should be made by each deputy individually going to the tribune to make his public declaration on 15 January 1793. Garnier voted for execution, and was rebuked for a public dispute with another deputy. Bernard was never one to be upstaged, and he seems to have made the most of his statement. Th e
fi rst question each deputy had to answer was, ‘Is Louis Capet, former king of the French, guilty of conspiracy against public liberty and against the general security of the state?’ Bernard formulated his vote like this: When the law has spoken I know only how to obey. It has ordered me to judge Louis, to declare whether I think him guilty. However I am regarded, since I am certain that the character of a man of good intention will never be taken from me, I reply, Yes.
Th
e Popular Society in Rochefort (the equivalent of ‘Th
e Club’ in Saintes),
under the control of Joseph Niou, the Convention’s representative on mission there, echoed all this.21 Th
e deputies had to answer a third question:
‘What sentence should Louis Capet, former king of the French, receive?’
Of the eight representatives from the Charente-Inférieure, seven voted for death. Only Dechézeaux from the île de Ré voted for an appeal to the people.22 Bernard found yet more eloquence in voting for the death sentence: As I do not believe that the preservation of an ex-king is in keeping with making his royal status forgotten, and as I am deeply convinced that the greatest service that can be rendered to the human race is to rid the earth of the monsters that devour it, I vote for the death of the tyrant with the shortest delay.23
After the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention with sans-culotte support at the beginning of June 1793, several large provincial cities declared their opposition to centralized rule because the Paris Commune appeared to have more power than the elected Convention. Th e
Convention itself had excluded elected members and so, in the eyes of its opponents, did not represent the whole nation. Th
e Jacobins called this
tendency ‘federalism’ and intensifi ed the use of representatives on mission from the Convention to control the departments. From July onwards, the
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53
orders of these representatives were given the status of provisional laws, which meant that they had a totally free hand in their direction of local conditions.24 Bernard de Saintes was chosen to be one of them and applied a violent, populist view of the Revolution which the Jacobin faction cultivated. His nineteenth-century French biographer called him a proconsul.25
In the Haute-Saône and in the Cote d’Or, he showed uncompromising vindictiveness towards what remained of the old order. He added Montbéliard, a former territory of the Duke of Wurttemburg, to the French Republic, confi scating all its goods and assets. He even turned the corpses of former rulers out of their coffi
ns in the castle crypt in person, so as to
re-use the metal for cannon.26 He falsely accused town council members at Vesoul of federalism, and had them imprisoned on the sole grounds of his own suspicion of them.27 He was responsible for the judicial murder in Dijon of Micault de Courbeton28 after his intimidating behaviour towards the judiciary there.29
Bernard had made so many enemies in eastern France and Burgundy that he sought defi ant refuge by returning to Paris while the Jacobin faction was still in charge in April 1794. He spoke unashamedly in the Convention’s debates and was appointed secretary of it on 25 May. He kept out of sight, however, while the Th
ermidor coup d’état executed Robespierre and his close circle of associates at the end of July. He emerged a few weeks later with his own ideas unchanged, making a point of being in the Pantheon when Marat’s ashes replaced Mirabeau’s at the end of August. He was president of the Convention for three weeks in September 1794.30
Th
en the citizens of Dijon publicly denounced Bernard, and memoirs by a friend of Micault de Courbeton were published.31 Th
e residents of Vesoul
added their denunciation of him. Th
e Convention ordered the printing
of a denunciation of seven members of the former Committees of Public Safety and General S
ecurity, which contained a recital of the damage done by Bernard at Montbéliard.32 When other representatives on mission, like Carrier, who had put down the last of the Vendéan rebels with such great brutality, were on trial for their lives, Bernard himself was protected as a member of the Committee of General Security.
On 10 October 1794, Gaudriaud, the maire whom Bernard and Garnier had overthrown fi ve years earlier, appealed to the Committee of General Security to be released from internment as a suspect at Brouage. His appeal was upheld after Bernard’s intervention, and he went home to Fontcouverte, a village near Saintes. ‘Th
is work of Bernard’, says Marillet, ‘. . . is
inconceivable. Nevertheless, what he did gives great honour to Bernard.’
54 Th
e Unseen Terror
Charles Dangibeau, a respected scholar in Saintes and a descendant of one of the participants in the Revolution in the town, understood Marillet’s disillusioned conservatism, which worsened after Bernard left Saintes, and he also understood Bernard. He supplied something of a corrective. Here is his comment on Bernard’s part in the freeing of Gaudriaud:
Th
e gesture, even towards an old man of 78 years rapidly becoming more and more feeble, coming from a man of the stamp of this one, is assuredly astonishing, but it is not ‘inconceivable’ . . . Bernard always conformed to the movement of the day. Ambition and pride drove him towards the Revolution in 1789, to being violent in 1793 along with other violent men, and in 1794 he became less wild, even clement, because he sensed that the Jacobin fury would calm down. Th e follow-ers of Robespierre were no longer in charge, the drinkers of blood were satiated, and a certain type of aristocracy began to be reborn. In the end, he remembered that at the outset of his political career he had sworn to the Saintais never to take up arms against them. Gaudriaud’s crimes, which in 1789–90 had motivated his anger, seemed to him later to be very inoff ensive.33