Th
e remaining members of the Mountain who had supported terror made a last eff ort to defend themselves by unleashing the sans-culottes in the Prairial Coup against the Convention, which the National Guard and wealthy sons of the bourgeoisie, known as ‘Gilded Youth’ ( Jeunesse dorée), repulsed on 20 May 1795. Th
is reaction against what was left of the Mountain was
known as the Prairial Coup.34 As a result, the remaining Jacobins were put in prison. Bernard was put in the former College of the Four Nations, sharing a cell with Jacques-Louis David, who made an Indian ink portrait of him, in profi le, with his arms folded in petulant self-assertion.35
He was saved from any further action against himself because, before the National Convention gave way to the Directory under the new constitution, it drew a legal forgetfulness over all actions committed as a result of the Revolution. Th
e amnesty of 24 October 1795 meant that Bernard was
given back his incriminating papers and set free.36
He came back to Saintes to take part in municipal administration during 1796 and 1797 and enjoyed the results of his acquisitiveness as the proprietor of a good deal of national property here. He was on the General Council of the Charente-Inférieure from June 1800 to September 1804 and still held offi
ce as a judge during the Empire, while fulfi lling the
promise he had made never to act vindictively against his fellow citizens in Saintes. At the restoration of the monarchy, he was banished from
A Representative of the People
55
5. J.-L. David’s pen and ink portrait of Bernard de Saintes.
France with all surviving members of the Convention who had voted for the king’s death.37 Th
e ship on which he sailed was wrecked on the coast
of Madeira, but his life was saved and he remained in exile until he died on the island in 1819.38
Garnier was elected a deputy a year after Bernard, and a representative on mission at Le Mans, La Flèche, and then Bordeaux, where he had to restore confi dence after the brutal suppression of the anti-Republican revolt there. Garnier was as much a Republican as Bernard, pressing, as a member of the Council of Five Hundred in the time of the Directory, for the deportation of emigrés’ parents and the exclusion of nobles from public offi
ce. However, he was not disposed to carry his convictions as far beyond the law as Bernard had been, despite Marillet’s strictures. Like Bernard, he came back to Saintes with a post on the judiciary during the Empire.
56 Th
e Unseen Terror
Garnier was exiled by the 1816 exclusion too. He sailed to America.
Once there, he journeyed down the Ohio River, and the boat that he and his son were travelling on overturned, drowning them both.
Bernard’s revolutionary career has taken us to the other side of the hexagon and back again. Th
e story has let us see a politician with his
roots and formation (as French people say) in the Charente-Inférieure in a national setting as one of the phenomena of darker potential in the new society. His attitude as one of the protagonists in developments refl ects the negative as well as the positive tendencies of these years. Armand Lods defended Bernard a century after the Terror for adding Montbé-
liard to French territory, while fully presenting his fanatical excesses, but his value for us is in the shadows he cast while standing in the sunshine of the new liberty. He was the Robespierre of the Saintonge, being able all the same to protect himself until 1816 from the results of his self-centred excesses.
* * *
To conclude this chapter, we ought to notice that Bernard de Saintes was by no means unique as a seeker after power in the Charente-Inférieure during the revolutionary period. Jacques-Alexis Messin, who headed the Terror in the town of Jonzac, has a similar reputation.
Messin had been appointed vicaire of Jonzac long before the Revolution, in 1765. Jean-Pierre-François Flornoy, a member of a leading family in the town, had provided the young priest with lodgings under his roof, and Messin had seduced his wife. She was Marie-Marguerite Collet, formerly ward of court to her godfather, Jean-François Landreau, the seigneurial judge who was the representative of the absent comte de Jonzac, whose chateau dominates the town. Th
e marriage arranged between fi rst
cousins, after a church indulgence, had put a good deal of money and property into the Landreau–Flornoy families.
Scandal ensued. Messin was not unfrocked for his misdemeanour but moved to the little parish of Chaniers near Saintes. Flornoy went to Paris on business and died there, leaving his wife in possession of his extensive property. Local opinion blamed Messin for causing Flornoy to die of a broken heart. Advised by Messin, Marie-Marguerite threatened Landreau with legal action for having misappropriated her funds during her minority. Landreau settled out of court, thereby admitting his guilt, and he
A Representative of the People
57
was fi nished as a notable in the district. Marie-Marguerite made over the profi ts from her property at La Cheminaderie to Messin and made him rich. He took up residence there in 1771, spending his time between then and the Revolution in building up an extensive library of political thought and causing fi nancial ruin in court for anyone who crossed him as a landowner.39
Despite his unpopularity, Messin took charge of the process of drawing up the cahier de doléance in his village in February 1789, and associated himself in the compilation of the third estate cahier for Jonzac itself.
He tried to gain the post of maire by election but, when he failed, gained control of the National Guard in Jonzac through a political ally who became its colonel. He even visited Paris and sought the support of the Jacobins, whose cause he fostered in Jonzac as keenly as Bernard did in Saintes.
Messin became the ‘Marat of Jonzac’, associating himself with every nuance of the Parisian leader’s utterances. When the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was demanded by the National Assembly from all priests, Messin took it and was elected constitutional curé of the village where his property stood. He also cornered infl uence in the
‘Club’ at Jonzac and set up a local dictatorship during the Terror in association with Antoine Benoit, obtaining the arrest of 25 Jonzacais and the execution of 4 of them. When Robespierre fell, Messin was imprisoned for a while at Brouage and his town house was burnt down by a hostile mob. On his release, he came back to La Cheminarderie, abandoned his priesthood, married Marie-Marguerite, and adopted his godson Jacques-Alexis Leroy, who later inherited all their wealth and added La Cheminarderie to his name.
After 1809, Messin was a widower living alone. When he died in 1817, he appears to have been unceremoniously buried under a chestnut tree.
Th
e historian of Jonzac during the Revolution remarks, ‘Th
is peaceful
burial-place would not have displeased contemporaries like the Parisian romantics but, in this place, it was more likely the means of getting rid of the accursed remains of the man who had made Jonzac tremble’.40
chapter 4
The Terror in Saintes
François-Guillaume Marillet de la Couboisière began his diary there in early 1789 and kept it assiduously for 6 years to express his thoughts to himself in private.
My intention is certainly not to make my work public in my lifetime; that would not be prudent because it would expose me to the venom of others and their covert revenge; but it could come about that my descendants who read it would say that I was right. I have done nothing else but amuse myself and show to posterity what eff ect the meeting of the Estates-General had on opinion in our town. With all my heart, I do not want to be a prophet, but if these gentlemen are not stopped in their tracks, they will do plenty of evil.1
As time went on, he found he was not amusing himself, but often raging, denouncing. Increasingly, he found that the revolutionaries he criticized could not be stopp
ed and, eventually, made a personal compromise.
He had seen his inherited, contented way of life disappear. His grandfather had been procurator-fi scal at Taillebourg, and was agent for the property of the duc de La Tremoille, who was also Prince of Talmont and Benon, and whose terrace, with its balustrade designed by Le Notre in front of where his château was, still towers above the houses on the right bank of the Charente. Marillet’s father was a lawyer in the Parlement of Bordeaux, then in Saintes, and he collected fees for religious dispensations. François-Guillaume was himself a lawyer in Saintes, and inherited the post at the dispensations offi
ce. He had been on the town council since 1784, and was
very much an establishment fi gure.
He and his wife Françoise-Marguerite had six children. So when he found himself out of offi
ce and had to live on his capital of 6,000 livres and
an annuity of 70 livres, he was obliged to sell a property he had inherited at Annepont, a village up the road from Taillebourg. He off ered himself for the post of one of the judges at the Tribunal and received enough votes to be appointed as the fourth deputy, but he was never present at a session, and 58
Th
e Terror in Saintes
59
he soon resigned because he could not bring himself to sentence priests who were ipso facto criminals in the eyes of the law as it now stood.2 His wife died in December 1793, and two of his children were later separated from him, one in Saint-Domingue and another as a soldier in the Vendée.
Marillet saw no need for the new order. He detested André-Antoine Bernard, and was extremely critical of Jacques Garnier, as has been seen. He had respect for nobles, like Brémond d’Ars or Chenier du Chesne, and was completely in accord with the Catholic Church. He was devastated by what would happen to the bishop of Saintes and his clergy.3 Marillet had been a conformist with something to lose, and had lost it. Now he found conform-ing to the new order diffi
cult. Why should his son have to fi ght the Vendéans
who seemed to have values that he shared? Why should he have to stand in the ranks of the National Guard to hear the king denounced?
Marillet is eloquent enough to allow a present-day reader to follow what he says with appreciation, despite the archaic French. Sometimes he gives eyewitness reports as he does when he watches the suspected counter-revolutionaries from Saintes leaving the Abbaye aux Dames to be interned at Brouage in July 1793. At other times he reports what he has heard from others, without compromising his informers by naming them.
Th
e war with the Kings of Europe was uppermost in everyone’s minds. In his entry for 8 July 1794, Marillet writes to himself about the battle of Fleurus.
To commemorate the reported victory won on the plain of Fleurus by the patriotic armies against the Austrians and the Prussians, the administrative body decided to give the name Fleurus to the Place des Cordeliers which, last time they renamed it, was called Réunion.
He then tells us what the newspapers have said, but adds that he has become very sceptical about what he reads in them:
Th
e name Fleurus comes from the fi eld or plain where our Army of the Rhine composed of more than a hundred and fi fty thousand men had carried a brilliant victory over the Austrians, Prussians and English whose army of a hundred thousand men had gone to secure Charleroi taken previously by the patriots. Th
e coalition armies lost more than ten thousand men there.
Th
e date had got muddled, he says. Th
e inability to say accurately when it
happened cast doubt on the rest of the report. ‘We have celebrated this very questionable victory today, and the name Fleurus has been given to our square.’ In reality, it was the decisive battle that took the Austrians out of Belgium on 25 June 1794.
60 Th
e Unseen Terror
Jacques Garnier was in Saintes and made a speech in the Temple of Truth –
it used to be the cathedral – ‘in which he greatly boasted of the grandeur and the advantages of the victory over the slaves of tyrants’. Citizen Bouquet’s Espérance Company was on parade, ‘preceded by the administrative body, by women and girls in white with garlands and, at their head, drums and music’.
Th
ere were young people carrying a pyramid, and a citizen carrying ‘a fl ag calling itself Austrian’ reversed and trailing in the mud because it had rained before the parade and started again during it. Garnier spoke once more in the newly re-named square, a patriotic song was sung, and then they all trooped off to the military hospital, where Garnier gave the wounded soldiers their medals. Th
ey had not fi nished because they then had to go to the artifi cial mountain, where there were more songs and a salute of cannon. Bouquet’s cadet company escorted Garnier home, and the ceremony was over.4
Marillet describes the scarcity rations the people in Saintes were enduring. Th
e bread was ‘detestable’. Only the wounded in the military hospital, the administrators, and the people who lived on handouts had white bread now. A consignment of fl our did arrive from Rochefort, brought up in boats on the Charente, but no sacks were used to preserve it while it was in store –
it had been left on stone fl oors – so it was all mildewed. He complains,
‘We have sent them superb and good quality grain, but the stores must be emptied to fi ll them with new, and they make us eat the defective old stuff .’
As for meat, there was only one pound of veal per household every 8 or 15 days. Th
e citizens eked out their diet with artichokes and beans. Th ere
were mussels, and there was fi sh now and again, but they had to queue for it from four in the morning until ten, ‘for half a pound, and often nothing
. . . Our very great misfortune is not to know when all this will come to an end and that we foresee ourselves being worse off in the future’.
He expresses little hope for a good grain harvest because it had been so wet recently. He says that the people around Bordeaux have been living on boiled weeds and vine prunings for two months. All the wheat, the hay, and the wood have been requisitioned, and it is uncertain if the towns will be able to make provision for the army at the rate of one and a half pounds of grain a day for each soldier.
We have to feel and sense all this without saying anything or complaining, for they would soon put us in prison, declare us suspect, or take us to the guillotine . . . Th
ere was never among any people, even the most barbaric, a
revolution as bloody, an inquisition as terrifying [as this one], inasmuch as it reigns over our thoughts and tongues.
Th
e Terror in Saintes
61
Th
ere is no record of anyone being taken to the guillotine in Saintes for a lack of patriotism, but what Marillet wrote is a genuine indication of the climate of fear created as a result of Jacobin policy that revolutionary conditions should remain until victory. Fear created more fear. Marillet’s writing was an attempt made in private to control his.5
Th
ere is a similar story when he comes to the 1794 wine harvest – not a good year: ‘Th
e vines looked good before the fruit started to form, but
then storms reduced the yield. As soon as you touch them, they drop off the vine, especially the black and particularly the Quercy.’ It is quite likely that Marillet had a few vines himself somewhere.6
Famine conditions emerge when he talks about livestock7 and the products from it in the summer that saw the fall of Robespierre. Th ere is a
lengthy section under the heading ‘Situation of the minds in the town on 10th July 1794’. He tells us that all the citizens want peace, but they see it getting further away. Th
e Republic’s armies seem to totter between victory
and loss, and information is very scarce. He registers his wry reaction to the reports that say how few Frenchm
en have been lost compared with so many Austrians or Prussians, and says about the prisoners taken: ‘Th e enormous
numbers that we have of them would fi ll up all the towns of France. Th e
sadness is that, although the reports say that few men have been lost, more and more seem to be called up.’ Th
ere is a draft being considered as he
writes of all men between the ages of 25 and 40:
Th
e Municipality is always in pursuit of our poor children and cannot leave them in peace although they come home because of illness, and they harass them to rejoin. When they endeavour to save themselves from this cruel Vendée for several days, they worry their relatives to make them go back, and they threaten their fathers. Th
e administrative body will
sacrifi ce the whole generation to satisfy their greed and rage. One cannot understand at all what these infernal manœuvres and machinations are for; we don’t know what to think or what to say, so much so that we are assailed in every way, and judging by the way we are governed we can only wait for something better. If these demons from hell who have come to live in France don’t leave soon, the near future is very worrying indeed, since they are only concerned to strip us bare; today it’s one thing, and tomorrow another and, this winter, the demands will be repeated again by all appearances; the armies denude us of everything, and what can be done? We have no more income, very little capital, no resources in the way of savings which are used up every day, and everything costs extremely dear.8
62 Th
e Unseen Terror
He had been widowed for just over six months by then, was in denial about his envy of the freedom others had seized for themselves, and could not restrain his descent into self-righteousness.
Th
e girls and the women go to everything. Th
ey go to the theatre. Th
ey
dress themselves as men. Th
ey conduct themselves in the way men want
them to. Th
ey do all that decency forbids. Th
The Unseen Terror Page 9