e Law.
It does not appear to be by oversight that Héard uses capital letters each time he mentions La Loi.
De La Rochefoucauld had been churning out texts advocating disobedience for the last four months. Héard says that these were all seditious and incendiary, and
capable of throwing the Catholics into the most lively alarm, to arm father against son, brother against sister, citizen against citizen, and to open a scene of blood and horror by his terrifying threats about the loss of eternal well-being. Th
is barbarous writing, as you know, Messieurs . . . has already produced the most alarming eff ects: the Catholics are already dividing, the feeble and timid souls no longer have the same temple or the same pastors as us, refractory priests are celebrating the sacrifi ce of the mass in secret, separate chapels. Th
e pale faces, the dumb silence of our fel-
low citizens forebodes trouble and fear in their uneasy consciences. Th e
tender father, as he sheds tears, rejects a cherished son from his bosom.
Th
e troubled wife repulses with horror the husband she used to idolize. Friends no longer have anything to do with each other, and fear to meet, even when such meetings had been very tender before. Th e bonds
of friendship, of blood and conjugal love are being broken by opposing views of belief and religion. Such are the cruel eff ects which the episcopal
Th
e End of the Bishop of Saintes
135
piety of M. de Larochefoucaud spreads with his warning and his ordinance. Is there, in fact, Messieurs, anything more frightening, anything more seditious than these texts? Cast an eye on points four, fi ve, six and eight of his ordinance, and you will see Monsieur Robinet, the bishop of the Department, expelled from the episcopal throne, without character, whose functions are so many crimes and profanities. You will see in these articles a command to all the curés, vicaires, priests who are either in religious orders or secular, not to recognize M. Robinet as bishop, and that they are not to receive any appointment from him. You will see the same refusal to allow the faithful to recognize as their pastors any curés nominated as their replacements for the ones that have broken Th e Law.
You will see the functions of these new curés in the sacred ministry as of no eff ect, and like so many sacrileges and profanations. Th e faithful are
forbidden to receive the sacraments from them, or to have anything to do with them, either by being present at Mass or the divine offi ces or in
any other way there might be. Th
ere is therefore one law for the Catholics
to communicate absolutely under pain of excommunication and of hell, over against [one for] the rebellious priests and the Nation. What is more likely to trouble consciences, the harmony of families and order in society? Hurry, Messieurs, to dissipate the factions which are tearing our town apart: a contagious teaching is making rapid progress, and patriotism is ready to succumb under the perfi dious traits of new sectarians.19
Héard gives no impression of being in the vanguard of the de-Christianizers led by Hébert on a national scale or Lequinio, who will later appear on the scene. He seems as fearful of a divided nation and a divided Church as de La Rochefoucauld is. Th
e charge he makes against the ci-devant bishop is
incitement against the Revolution.
At this early stage of the Revolution’s development, these lawyers had decided to institute a national church under the control of the National Assembly, which now regulated all other aspects of the nation’s activity. Th e
lawyers were in charge now. Th
ey were not going to let a clerical counter-
revolution stop the momentum of what they saw as necessary change.
After the Constituent Assembly wound itself up on 30 September 1791, and the new Legislative was closed to all who had already been deputies, de La Rochefoucauld, now aged 48, stayed in Paris, where he lived in the same ‘modest lodgings’ as his brother,20 near a printing works which brought out his sustained attacks on the new order. He did not realize that he was in very great danger.
De La Rochefoucauld, and people who thought like him, knew that their authority depended on the untrammelled power of the king. When the king had no authority at all after the 10 August 1792, he realized that
136 Th
e Unseen Terror
his colleague from La Rochelle was in a better position to continue resistance towards the revolutionaries as an exile in Spain than he was.
* * *
François-Guillaume Marillet in Saintes also opposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and was convinced that Crown and Altar stood or fell together. Marillet’s version of events between 10 August and 2 September 1792 begins on 13 August, when an extraordinary courier arrived at the department’s offi
ces in the Hôtel de Monconseil in Saintes at eight in the
morning, with a copy of the decree abolishing the monarchy. Th e department had it printed and copies were sent to all the districts. On 14 all the citizens of Saintes were summoned by a drum to Liberty Square to hear the decree read out. It was received with a great deal of applause, hats were raised on the end of bayonets and there were shouts of ‘Vive la Nation!’ Marillet says he was made to stand in the ranks of his company of the National Guard and listen to the insulting comments that the patriots made about the king ‘who was as unfortunate as he was worthy of respect’ (Marillet will waver in that opinion).
Th
e next day there were no newspapers and no mail was delivered.
Deputy Bernard’s 17-page letter arrived and told the members of the Club that newspapers had been suppressed so as not to alarm the provinces about what had happened in the Tuileries. Marillet goes on:
Th
e day when the assembly made this decree, the factious crowd showed how powerful they had become. Th
ey had gone into the Tuileries Palace to
seize the king and perhaps to assassinate him. Th
ey found a great number of
brave royalist people there, together with the Swiss Guards, ready to make a rampart of their bodies for their king . . . Th
e insurgents had fi red cannon
and thrown bombs at the palace and the king and queen and the royal family were saved as by a miracle. Th
ey had to walk over dead bodies and take
refuge in the National Assembly itself where they remained for about thirty hours in one of the desks with the ex-ministers.
Bernard had written that ‘the king came to take refuge in the Assembly and they were obliged to take in this vermin that they wanted to see crushed’.21
When it was over, 400 Swiss Guards and more than 600 nobles had been killed. Th
ere were 4,000 sans-culottes involved.
Marillet observes that 10 August was a fatal day for the kingdom
Th
e End of the Bishop of Saintes
137
because of the weakness and the cowardice of the king. If he had shown himself to be a purposeful and courageous man on that day, all would have been over, the revolution would have been at an end because the foreign troops who were on the plain of Chalons, thirty leagues away from Paris, would have retained the initiative. Th
e king had promised on 9th to put himself at
the head of his troops, and on the 8th he had reviewed them as they cried out, ‘Long live the King and Queen!’ and, when he passed along the ranks, he heard only these words: ‘Yes, sire, we are ready to go as far as the last drop of our blood for you’. But instead of replying to the soldiers in some honest and friendly way, he shut himself up in the Tuileries to drink and eat.
On 10th, instead of putting himself at the head of his brave and faithful citizens and subjects, he abandoned them at the fi rst sound of the cannon and rifl e shots, and went and shut himself in the oeil de boeuf. From there he ran to throw himself with the queen and his son into the National Assemb
ly.
Th
e queen did all she could to stop him, she told him he would dishonour himself, but he pushed her back and even turned her round, it was said.22
Th
is day has totally shamed the king and made him to be seen as a coward, an opinion which would not let him continue as king. On 9th all Paris carried him on their hands and on 10th there was not one citizen who had not favoured his dismissal. He is an automaton, a fat and thick machine who will surely not reign if things come back, for he is not made for reigning. Under the pretext of preserving the blood of his subjects, he has made a hundred times more of it spill than if he had decided to show himself just once on all the occasions that presented themselves. I love my country, I love my king: it is an inborn sentiment in the heart of all Frenchmen, but I have turned away on account of Louis 16. I would like another king of the same branch who would know how to govern his kingdom and support his subjects by protecting them. . .
and so on and so on.23
Marillet tells us that the deputies have reported to the Club that all the talk is of the sans-culottes. Th
e Paris hotel they stayed in ‘used to be
called Comte d’Artois,24 but the sign now says, Th
e Hotel of the Brave Sans-
Culottes. What do you want that is better, greater or more majestic for a free people?’25 Marillet the royalist has reported in his own way what he had heard from the Jacobin Bernard. He seems to have developed a very eff ective fi lter for what Bernard’s letters had said, and remains his own man as he writes all this down in his secret history.
Many refractory, and now unemployed, clergy had returned to Paris and were living in lodgings near the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, where they had been trained for ordination.26 Th
is was the Luxembourg Section, one of the
48 into which the capital was divided, and its committee was in perpetual
138 Th
e Unseen Terror
session in the seminary itself in the rue Vieux-Colombier, with the butcher Louis Legendre, Danton’s ally, as its president.
When the monarchy had fallen, the Paris Commune ordered the sections to arrest nobles and refractory priests as enemies of the people and hold them prisoner ‘until the soil of liberty could be purged of their presenc e’.
Wearing bits of uniform from the Swiss Guards and sometimes a royalist’s ear sewn on their hats, s ans-culottes went around the streets from the night of 11 August onwards to bring them to Saint-Sulpice. Th
ey arrested all who
admitted to being priests (distinctive clerical dress had been banned), fi nding Archbishop du Lau d’Allemans of Arles and 50 others, who went with their captors because they were told they would be protected from further actions like the one in the Palace the day before.
In the lecture-room of their youth, the clergy were confronted by a young man called Joachim Ceyrat, who was said also to have been a student in this very theological college himself. He ordered them to the church of the Carmelites in the rue de Vaugirard with no mattresses and only bread and water to eat and drink. Th
ey passed their bizarre fi rst night lying on chairs
or the marble fl oor, each with an individual guard and forbidden to speak to each other, in one of the most richly decorated churches in Paris.27
De La Rochefoucauld wrote to Taillet at Saintes again, on 13 August, and told him what had happened. Taillet says that this was the last letter he ever received from him after a thousand and more since their student days, and that it was the source of all his information. A few days later, Taillet himself was turned out of his lodgings near Saintes Cathedral, and had to look for shelter as an outlaw. He embarked for Spain on 2 September, only fi nding out about what had happened to his bishop after he had reached Bilbao.28
De La Rochefoucauld and his brother were arrested and taken to join the Archbishop of Arles. More clergy were arrested by the end of August, when there were a hundred and fi fty of them in the Carmelites. People who lived nearby heard they were there, and sent basic necessities in for them. A restaurateur came in to provide dinner and supper each day which anonymous sympathizers paid for. Th
e guards’ dirty fi ngers picked through
the dishes to see if any letters or small weapons were hidden in them. Th e
prisoners were allowed to walk beneath the lime trees in the large garden, and some took to meeting in the oratory there to say their offi ce. Th
ey were
even allowed to receive visitors.29
Th
e bishops and priests were locked up because the Paris Commune wanted them to disappear. A popular action had to be found to dress up what was about to happen. Th
e procurator of the commune, the eloquent,
Th
e End of the Bishop of Saintes
139
well-dressed, former private tutor, Pierre-Louis Manuel, arrived on 16
August to tell them that their papers had been looked at, they had nothing to fear, and they would soon be released. He came back several times during the remaining days, and on 27 read them the defi nitive decree just passed by the Convention that they had to leave France within 15 days.
Passports would be issued to them and their journey would be subsidized at three livres a day. If they did not accept this, they would be deported to Guyana.30 Th
e over-sixties and the infi rm would go to retirement homes set up in the departments they had come from, where they would live in common under the surveillance of the police. Manuel came back for the last time on 31 August to tell them that their aff airs had been regulated for 2 September. Most of the detainees seem to have been reassured by his unctuous comments.
By 1 September, the detainees were worried and heard each other’s confessions. Someone slipped into the church with a disguise for the bishop of Saintes to escape in, but he refused it since the man had not brought one for his brother. At dawn on 2 September, they heard drums in the streets, and cannon fi ring on the Pont-Neuf. Th
ey were given a better lunch
than usual, and some went to walk in the gardens after it. Others were still indoors when the massacre started.31
Taillet’s account had to rely on rumours in the absence of hard information, and there are diff erences in what he says,32 based on a few anecdotal reports, from a more objective account given by G. Lenotre in 1933 on the basis of a larger number of survivors’ accounts of what happened.
* * *
Marillet was not an eyewitness of half the things he talks about in his at times vituperative diary, and he admits to writing only what Bernard’s reporting had informed him of in his letters to ‘the Club’, as he calls the popular society. However, he holds up a mirror to how news reached the provinces from Paris and the eff ect it had once it had been received. In this instance, of course, the biased Jacobin anti-clerical’s report has passed through the crucible of the mind of a disillusioned royalist Catholic. Th is
is Marillet’s second-hand report of 2 September 1792, fi ltered out from Bernard’s letter:
Bernard wrote yesterday to the Club that in Paris there has been a bloody carnage of bishops, priests and other citizens that were taken to be suspects
140 Th
e Unseen Terror
because they did not think in the same way as the dominant party of the insurgents. He announced that M. de Larochfoucauld had had his throat cut, along with sixty others confi ned in the church of the Carmelites, and that from there they went to a place where there were another hundred and forty whose lives they also took, massacring them as well as in another where there were sixty three, and that brought the number of bishops, priests and nobles killed up to eight hundred. Th
ey also massacred Madame
the Princess of Lamballe, one of the most beautiful women in Paris and the queen’s intimate friend, and they wanted to make her see her head at the end of a pike, presenting it to her under her windows, but she did not appear. Although
Bernard has often given us false, sad news that he has later denied himself, this carnage has been more considerable than he says because one presumes that in the fi rst two or three days of this month more than eight thousand people have had their throats cut in this massacre of all ranks and all ages. Th
e prisons had been opened and a court set up by the
insurgents and sans-culottes to judge the criminals. Th
ey were making them
appear before the judges and asking: ‘Ought this man to be condemned?’
Th
e answer No was given and the man would be made to pass to one side and tapped on the shoulder. Th
is was the sign of death. When he had gone
through a doorway, he found men armed with sabres and hatchets who cut him in pieces . . . It was in this manner that all the seigneurs and the bishops, abbés and priests attached to the court or in the king’s party were destroyed.
It was only a hundred men who cut the throats of more than six thousand people33 during these three days . . . Th
ese hundred men were so tired out
from the carnage, from running about in the alleys in their fury to fi nd the designated victims in the prisons where they had been forced to stay, and from the three days the massacre had lasted.34
Th
e September Massacres that raged in the religious houses now used as prisons, the Abbaye, the Salpêtrière, the Carmelites, and in gaols like La Force, with the unresisted killing of so many opponents of the Revolution, have to be set in the context of the war with the kings of Europe. Th e Prussians had invaded France. Th
e towns of Longwy and Verdun had fallen to
them. Danton as minister of justice made his famous 'Daring' speech in the National Assembly,35 and volunteers from all over France arrived in Paris prior to defending the eastern departments of the patrie against the invaders. Before they left the capital, a rumour began to spread, fostered by Marat, that the moment the troops left for the front, the nobles and priests and other suspects in the prisons would break out and attack the soldiers’ families. Th e instinctive
The Unseen Terror Page 20