The Unseen Terror

by Richard Ballard

  omas Section, Regnaud protected

  the queen from the rioters threatening to kill her. When the Maire of Paris, Pétion, arrived to call the riot off , the king asked him, ‘What kept you so long?’11

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  e Unseen Terror

  Th

  e order was given that on 15 July 1792 troops of the line were to leave Paris for the eastern border to resist the invasion that was gaining momentum, and the National Guard would take their place. Maire Pétion ordered the mobilization of the capital’s sections, like the one at the Luxembourg, which would soon order the imprisonment of the de La Rochefoucauld brothers. Th e

  Jacobins accused the Girondins of using civil list money from the time when some of them were ministers. Th

  e sections, dominated by the sans-culottes in

  many places, had a great deal of power. Pétion was a Republican and drew up a petition of section members calling for the removal of the king who had lost the confi dence of the nation. Volunteers from the provinces arrived on 29 July also intending to help overthrow the monarchy.

  Supporters of constitutional monarchy took up arms on the evening of 9 August. Regnaud was involved in a project, desperately formed at Mme de Staël’s house with Knights of Malta funds, to take Louis XVI away secretly from Paris on 13 August and make him independent of the National Assembly – a second attempt to achieve what had failed 14 months before at Varennes. Th

  e duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

  would wait for the royal family at Rouen, a place within the distance the King was in theory allowed to travel outside Paris.

  Money from former Finance Minister Necker, Mme de Staël’s father, and from the duc du Chatelet, was being used to try to persuade Assembly members not to suppress the monarchy before 13 August but, on 10 August, the street made its response to all these manoeuvres, and no opportunity remained for the king to leave Paris.12

  On the fateful morning of 10 August Regnaud was with his battalion from the prosperous Filles Saint-Th

  omas Section in hopes of turning away

  the mass of assailants from the suburbs coming to invade the Tuileries. He drew his sword along with his friend, the courtier Pierre-Louis Roederer, to protect the queen’s way from the palace to the former riding school where the Legislative Assembly was in session. Th

  is was regarded by the Repub-

  licans as a criminal act. Th

  e rioters with their female leader, Th

  éroigne de

  Méricourt, clamoured for Regnaud’s death. Th

  e bourgeois section of Filles

  de Saint-Th

  omas was targeted by the sans-culottes and notably by the patriots from Marseilles. Under Antoine-Joseph Santerre, a wealthy brewer from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine who took the side of the sans-culottes, they set upon Regnaud’s troops. Although in his uniform, Regnaud managed to escape lynching, unlike several good friends who were with him.13 He escaped from the palace in the confusion.

  An Eye to the Future

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  Th

  e Convention ordered Régnaud’s arrest and that of André Chenier.

  He was followed into the streets of the Mont Saint-Géneviéve quarter, and only just escaped by jumping over a garden wall where a girl found him. He explained his danger to her. She was the 14-year-old Mlle de Lestapie, who would be Marshal Saint-Arnaud’s mother,14 and she hid him for long enough for the immediate danger to pass.

  Regnaud was put on the wanted list. On 11 August, a murder squad thought they saw him in the Place Vendôme. It was Suleau, a royalist journalist, and they cut his throat. Th

  e offi

  ces of the Journal de Paris were ransacked and Arnault de Laporte arrested and executed on 28 August. Regnaud hid under the roof tiles above his apartment in the rue Taitbout in section Mirabeau, now re-named Mont-Blanc. A search was made of the apartment and seals put in place. He came down from the attic and had the seals removed. He was assumed to be clean by the offi

  cers of the section who were closet royalists.

  In April 1793, Regnaud was suspected of sympathizing with Orléanists or Girondins or Dumouriez by the Republicans. He was back openly in the rue Taitbout under surveillance. June 2 saw the Girondins expelled from the Convention and those who had not fl ed to Normandy were arrested.

  Regnaud was questioned at Douai whether he was involved with a company that supplied the Army of the North. Claude Basire, an unlikely defender as he was from the Jacobins and a member of the Committee of General Security, kept him safe by distorting evidence of his whereabouts.15

  In September 1793, he started to use the name Desrichards, taken from his childhood home at Mazeray. He hid in rue Neuve-Saint-Marc at the home of Jacques-Toussaint Chénié, whose daughter, Louise-Augustine, was an aspiring actress at a theatre called l’Ambigu-comique. He had a complete incognito thanks to them at 110, rue du Bac, and he intended to marry Augustine. Th

  ree days after the fall of Robespierre she gave birth to their son, Auguste Desrichards, in the Hospice d’enclos du Temple de la Raison (known before and since as the Hôtel-Dieu). Th

  e police began a search for

  the baby’s father. Poor Augustine died. Regnaud acknowledged his son and moved him to 113, rue de la Montagne Saint-Géneviève, with a nurse. He was a businessman now and moved about freely.

  Th

  en he met Louise de Bonneuil and her daughter, another Augustine but known as Laure. He managed to escape the Vendémiare coup organized by the Director Barras, during which Bonaparte fi red his famous

  ‘whiff of grapeshot’ at royalists at the church of Saint-Roch and, when the Directory voted an amnesty on 4 brumaire an IV, the search for him as

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  e Unseen Terror

  a defender of the queen was abandoned. Now wealthy, he rented a large town house in the Marais, 8, rue Charlot. He and Laure married, and she adopted Auguste, the future Second Empire Marshal of France, as her own son. Th

  e family emerged from the shadows and Regnaud used his real name once more.

  Regnaud had friends in the upper reaches of the Directory which followed the Convention, and a post was found for him in hospital administration for Bonaparte’s Army of Italy. He moved with his wife to Milan, where he became an associate of the general and his staff . He wrote articles for the French-sponsored Journal of Milan, and his rapport with Bonaparte grew. So much so that, when the Egyptian expedition was planned, Regnaud was included in the headquarters staff , and he was left as administrator of the Island of Malta until the British took it back again.16 Once more in France, Regnaud worked with Talleyrand to prepare the way for Napoleon’s coup d’etat of November 1799 and, after its success, the proximity to Napoleon was re-established so that the fi ne-tuning of the Civil Code became Regnaud’s task as a lawyer to complete. He became a count of the Empire, and a member of the Council of State. When Tsar Alexander’s forces had taken Paris in 1814

  and Napoleon had been beaten, it was Regnaud who advised him to abdicate in favour of Napoleon II rather than wait to be deposed.17 Having supported Napoleon again during the Hundred Days, and despite his personal defence of the queen in 1792, he was not allowed to return to France until he was given specifi c permission in 1819. Before he could act upon it, he died.

  * * *

  Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély’s story has been used to conclude this book because he stands out as a moderate at a time when extremists were in the ascendant, and remained consistent when he was himself a civil administrator in the Empire. It is as a moderate that he helps us towards a view of post-revolutionary society in France. We have looked at a good number of horror stories in the course of this study, and we have seen contentious offi cials making misery for their opponents. Th

  e offi

  cial Terror, expressed in the attempt

  to make the Catholic clergy disappear and the frenzied totalitarianism of the representatives on mission, was such a vio
lent episode that outsiders could be pardoned for thinking that the Revolution was essentially violent and that its sole purpose was to create a climate of fear and suspicion. Yet, whatever judgement may be made on the aggressive and dictatorial nature of the

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  227

  revolutionary decade and the Napoleonic era, Regnaud takes a part in the whole period, from the election of deputies to sit in the Estates-General in 1789 until Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, as one who stood consistently for stability based upon an eff ective legal system. Like the Abbé Sieyès, he ‘survived’, but in more than merely not being guillotined. He had to go to earth when the Convention was hunting him for defending Marie-Antoinette and while royalists were still offi

  cially proscribed, but his usefulness was clearly

  apparent to the Emperor whose usual question about men to be appointed as generals was ‘Is he lucky?’ Regnaud was not a general, but he was recognized as having the ability to make things work.

  Th

  e respect felt for him at Saint-Jean-d’Angély and in the Charente-Inférieure was genuine. Th

  e law-books piled at his feet on his statue in the

  Square in Saint-Jean-d’Angély are incongruous with his military uniform only if we do not recognize the context of the Empire, which justifi ed its existence by winning victories. Even when the Emperor had lost his fi nal battle and gone to serve his protracted death sentence on Saint Helena, the restored monarchy under Louis XVIII and Charles X maintained the Civil Code. Th

  e lawyers had not deprived themselves of an occupation, but had insisted that the law exists in principle as the same for all French men and women. Th

  at is the principal legacy of these years of tribulation.

  A lawyers’ revolution had led to wider respect for the rule of law. It has been observed that two-thirds of the deputies from the third estate in the Estates-General, and half of the members of the National Convention, were from the legal profession.18 Although that profession was changed at the Revolution, with counsels for the defence being reduced to amateur status in lower courts, the appearance in the middle of the revolutionary decade of civic professionalism – and of professional training establishments – was of the greatest importance for the return of public confi dence. Th

  is was true not only in law, but also in medicine, in the state bureaucracy and in the army.

  Th

  ere was, of course, no lasting political settlement for 90 years after the new men took over. France remained a society in tension, but civic responsibility ( civisme) had become a valued concept once the Terror was withdrawn, and the parallel concept of taxable wealth giving access to political power appeared as more acceptable than that of privilege stemming from absolute monarchy.

  Despotism had brought one sort of tribulation, and hatred of it brought another. Th

  e confl ict between stability and revolution went on in fi ts and

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  e Unseen Terror

  starts for the best part of a century. Napoleon I took over the French Revolution, claiming fi rst that the Republic needed a Consul and then that it needed an Emperor. After him there was a modifi ed restoration of the monarchy under Louis XVI’s two brothers, Louis XVIII and then Charles X, followed in turn by Louis-Philippe from the Orleanist line of the royal family, after another revolution in 1830. A further revolution in 1848 set up the Second Republic, to be taken over in its turn by Napoleon III’s Second Empire until the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1870–1, followed by the setting up of the Th

  ird Republic. During those

  years, republicanism, Bonapartism, royalism in its legitimist and Orleanist forms, with the addition of socialism, were all present in French society as ideological strands, in contention with each other.

  Adolphe Th

  iers, a politician involved in several political U-turns over nearly 50 years, prominent in the reign of Louis Philippe, besides being an historian of the Revolution and Empire himself, observed in 1850 that ‘the Republic is the form of government that divides us least’.19 Nine years after the fall of Napoleon III, President Jules Grévy, along with the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, took the same route from Versailles to Paris as King Louis XVI and the deputies of the previous century, the Marseillaise was fi nally accepted as the national anthem, and 14 July became the national holiday. So the Th

  ird Republic, as has been claimed by François Furet, was

  the true inheritor of the benefi ts of the fi rst ten years of antagonistic struggle.20 Th

  e tensions that exist within French politics and society in our time are more easily understood if we are aware of their origin in those years.

  If the function of political life is to give balance to all the elements of a just society, then the tendencies which create imbalance have to be held in check. Th

  ese tendencies in the revolutionary years were represented

  by the Jacobin Terror and economic rigidity, along with what could be called the new fanaticism in response to royalist rebellion in the Vendée and federalism in urban centres other than Paris. Th

  e rule of law and civic

  responsibility emerged together from the lawyers’ revolution and justifi ed the learning curve which the negative aspects of the decade brought into being. Even François-Guillaume Marillet, once he had been elected as a judge, was forced to accept the principle that public law must always take precedence over private judgement, despite his vehement denunciation of the revolutionaries in secret until then.

  Notes

  Preface

  1 François-Guillaume Marillet, Histoire Secrete des évènements de la ville de Saintes d’après les infl uences directes et indirectes de l’Assemblée nationale qui a commencé au moment de l’assurance nous avons eue de la ditte Assemblée. Four manuscript volumes, unpublished, 1789–95, Médiathèque municipale François-Mitterand de Saintes, Fonds Ancien et Régional.

  Introduction A Revolution Led by Lawyers

  1 Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française, Tome 1 (Paris, 1868), p. 49.

  2 François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880, ET Antonia Nevill (Oxford, 1988), p. 16.

  3 Jean-Christian Petitfi ls , Louis XVI (Paris, 2005), p. 91.

  4 Th

  e Estates-General at its last meeting in 1614 had been made up of deputies from the three orders (or estates) of the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else, whether wealthy shipowners in La Rochelle or tenant farmers on noble seigneurs’ estates. Th is

  last body was known as the third estate. Jacques Necker doubled the number of its deputies in advance of this meeting to prevent it being inevitably outvoted by the other two orders, but all three orders arrived at Versailles expecting not to vote in common as a single assembly.

  5 Georges Lefebvre, Th

  e Great Fear of 1789, ET Joan White (New York, 1989).

  6 ‘Cette grande braderie’.

  7 Petitfi ls, Louis XVI, p. 706. See also Furet: Revolutionary France 1770–1880, pp. 70ff ; and Simon Schama, Citizens (London, 1989), pp. 437ff .

  8

  Since tithe had been abolished and the Church was to be controlled by the nation, the parish clergy would become salaried state functionaries. Th ey would have to take

  the oath to qualify for their 1200 livres a year – for many of them a huge increase – or be regarded as having resigned their livings.

  9 Th

  ey were always known in Paris and other large centres of population as sans-culottes because they did not wear breeches and hose like the professional classes and nobles, but trousers. Th

  ey were skilled men and their wives, people with something to lose rather than men and women in hopeless poverty as James Gillray depicted them in his hostile British cartoons.

  10 Ruth

  Scurr,

  Fatal Purity, Robespierre and the French Revolution (London, 2006), p. 254.

  11 Reynald

  Sec
her,

  A French Genocide: Th

  e Vendée, ET George Holoch (Notre Dame,

  IN, 2003), fi rst published in French in 1986 with the title Le Génocide franco-français.

  229

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  e Unseen Terror

  12 Th

  e president of the Council of the Elders on the day of the coup was Louis-Nicolas Lemercier, a lawyer from Saintes, whom Napoleon made a count of the Empire in 1808. He had been elected fi rst deputy for the sénéschausée of Saintes in March 1789

  and became a member of the Feuillants Club in Paris. He returned to practise law in Saintes in 1791, but was elected to the Elders in 1798. He became a senator in the Empire, before he was a count, and seemed a convinced Bonapartist, but he was not a regicide, nor did he rally to Napoleon in the hundred days, so was acceptable to Louis XVIII as a peer of the realm in 1814. He even voted for sacrilege becoming a crime punishable by death in 1828, and opposed the trial of Charles X’s ministers in the early months of the July Monarchy. Frédéric Morin, in F. Julien-Labruyère (ed.), Dictionnaire Biographique des Charentais (Paris, 2005), p. 812.

  13 Jacques Buisson, ‘Les mentalités religieuses à Saintes et dans sa proche campagne 1750–1800’, RSA XX (1994), pp. 68–88.

  14 Author’s

  emphasis.

  15

  Quaeorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud pendant la période révolutionnaire, le 31 janvier 1790–30 prairial an VIII’, RSA XXVI (1906), pp. 323–5.

  16 Owen

  Chadwick,

  Th

  e Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century (Cambridge, 1975), p. 115.

  17

  In October 1761, Calas’s son, Marc-Antoine, brought up as a Protestant, embraced the Catholic religion in order to obtain the required certifi cate to qualify as a lawyer, and committed suicide during a subsequent crisis of conscience. Th e elderly father

  was charged before the Toulouse parlement with murdering his son, and was tortured and broken on the wheel by the public executioner. After the case had been given international proportions by Voltaire, Calas was posthumously reinstated by Louis XV, and compensation paid to his widow.