Part V
9
NEWS OF LOUIS XVI’s execution spread like a stain across Europe. In England, Prime Minister Pitt pronounced it ‘The foulest and most atrocious deed which the history of the world has yet had occasion to attest.’1 In Russia Catherine the Great, shocked and grieving, took to her bed and decreed six weeks’ mourning for her whole court. Spain immediately recalled her ambassador. Public opinion in all these countries turned unremittingly against the Revolution. The reaction in America was more ambivalent: distant support for the embattled new republic, mingled with sorrow for its regal victim, who, in his time, had supported the colonists in their struggle to found their own modern republican government on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘As Americans we regret the loss of the life of the King,’ wrote the religious minister and diarist William Bentley, ‘but we remember the liberties of mankind are dearer than any life whatever.’2
The regicide transformed the war. By November 1792, after the battle of Valmy and one subsequent victory at Jemmappes, French forces had overrun the entire Austrian Netherlands. French armies in the south and on the Rhine were also advancing the new republic’s borders. Brissot’s vision of a proselytising war to consolidate the Revolution by carrying it abroad seemed realised, and the Convention promised to ‘accord fraternity and help to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty’.3 It also demanded that the territories it ‘liberated’ contribute to the cost of France’s conquests. Danton went on mission to the armies in the Austrian Netherlands in December 1792, and saw blood flowing freely at the front line. He declared that: ‘The limits of France are marked out by nature. We shall reach them at their four points; at the Ocean, at the Rhine, at the Alps, at the Pyrenees.’ This meant that Belgium would have to be incorporated into France.
Ten days after Louis XVI’s execution, the Convention declared war on England and the Dutch Republic. This was a pre-emptive strike, since Prime Minister Pitt had already cleared funds with parliament for war against a country prepared to murder its king, and the Dutch Republic, situated between France and the Rhine, was also preparing for war. In March war was declared on Spain also. Danton – who had rung the tocsin and roused the people to fight before Valmy – left again on mission to the army in the north, this time burdened by concern for his gravely ill wife Gabrielle, whom he had once wooed romantically in Italian and still deeply loved. He arrived in Belgium, demanding its annexation to France, on 3 February and began the return journey to Paris on the 15th. He got back to a cold, empty house: no fire, no children and no wife. In his absence, Gabrielle had died and the children had been taken to their grandmother. Danton went straight to the graveyard and dug Gabrielle’s coffin out of the dank earth in which she had been lying for four days. He prised off the lid to hold her and see her face one last time. He summoned a sculptor to the grisly scene and commissioned not a death mask but a bust of the lifeless woman. Then he went home to the letter from Robespierre that said, ‘I love you more than ever, I love you until death. At this moment, I am you.’4
His mind macabre and full of battlefields, his heart ravaged by grief, his eyes distracted by hungry, rioting, destitute Parisians, and his ears ringing with reports of the royalist and Catholic revolt in the provinces, Danton now did something for which a year later he would beg forgiveness at the foot of the guillotine. He persuaded the Convention to revive the Revolutionary Tribunal, with its extraordinary powers to condemn people to death (the Convention had disbanded the Revolution’s first extraordinary tribunal at the start of the king’s trial). Now Robespierre fully supported Danton’s call for its re-establishment and further proposed that capital punishment should be applied to counter-revolutionary acts of any kind directed ‘against the security of the state, or the liberty, equality, unity and indivisibility of the Republic’.5 A majority of the Convention deputies opposed the reconstitution of the Tribunal. After long debate, the project was nearly abandoned when, towards midnight, Danton hastened to the tribune. Speaking ominously in the candlelight, he warned his exhausted colleagues that there was no longer any alternative to the Tribunal, except a bloodbath in the streets. This was not a strong but a desperate argument. During its first incarnation, at Robespierre’s instigation after 10 August 1792, the Tribunal had done nothing to prevent the September massacres; what reason was there to believe it could – or would – prevent further bloodshed by resuming its summary powers over life and death? Danton saw the Tribunal as an overwhelmingly powerful weapon in the hands of the government, the last hope for restoring order in a starving, anarchic country rent by civil strife and foreign war. He never expected it would be used against himself, but on the scaffold before his execution he said: ‘This time twelve month I proposed that infamous Tribunal by which we die, and for which I beg pardon of God and man.’6
The Convention agreed to the Revolutionary Tribunal on 10 March. It consisted of twelve jurors, a public prosecutor (Antoine Fouquier-Tinville) and two substitutes; there could be no appeal against its judgements. By law the Paris sections should have elected the members of the Tribunal, who officiated wearing dark clothes and with black plumes in their hats, but this never happened. Instead, the Commune chose them.7 At Fouquier-Tinville’s own trial (in 1795, after the fall of Robespierre) it emerged that many of the jurors on the Tribunal had been unable to read or write, and were often drunk.
On the evening of 9 March, armed bands had marauded through Paris smashing the print shops that produced the Girondin journals.8 The Girondins were hated in Paris for trying to diminish the city’s role in the Revolution. The next day, the mob attempted to impose its will on the Convention through another insurrection. The city gates were closed. The tocsin was rung. Disaffected Parisians demanded the arrest of all suspect army generals and ministers, and all the leading Girondin deputies. Even more radical than the sans-culottes, these petitioners wanted a ‘maximum’ price imposed on basic commodities that were increasingly difficult to obtain due to the economic strains of war and rapid inflation. Conditions in Paris were deteriorating rapidly – recently there had been a wave of attacks on grocery shops and warehouses. The Girondins blamed Marat for inciting such violence, but the Jacobins and the Mountain deputies distanced themselves from it, referring to the radical petitioners as rabid enragés. There is no evidence that Robespierre wanted or approved of the new insurrection, and the Commune decided not to support it. The National Guard was instructed to maintain order, and the insurgent enragés failed in their objectives on 10 March.
Meanwhile, the news from the front line got worse. The French were struggling. The day after Danton left for Paris, the invasion of Holland began. At first all went according to plan, but then at the battle of Neerwinden on 18 March, French troops under the command of General Dumouriez, the hero of the battle of Valmy, were routed by the enemy and fled headlong from the field. Holland had not been conquered and now Belgium was almost lost. By this point, Dumouriez felt little more sympathy with the Girondin or Jacobin factions than General Lafayette had before him. Unlike Lafayette, Dumouriez had had allegiances with both factions in the past, and had accepted the destruction of the monarchy on 10 August. But he remained a royalist at heart, and threatened now to march back to the capital and preside over a regency for Louis XVI’s son, who was currently ailing in the Temple tower. Amid the panic in Paris, the Convention decided to set up surveillance committees (comités de surveillance) in every commune throughout the country to scrutinise the activities of foreigners and suspects.9
Soon after the fiasco of Neerwinden, Danton set off to the army for a third time, to meet with Dumouriez and attempt to reconcile him to the republican government. His mission was not successful and he was back in Paris when Dumouriez finally deserted to the Austrians at the beginning of April. The time had come to put the new weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal into hands capable of wielding it, and to this end Danton, again speaking dramatically by candlelight at midnight, urged the Convention to create the Committee of Public Safety – a provisional revolutionary government briefed to supervise and accelerate the exercise of ministerial power. When the Convention had first met in September 1792 it had established a Committee of General Security with extensive policing responsibilities. But now a smaller, more dynamic executive committee was called for, not to replace the Committee of General Security, but to work alongside it.10 Over time the relationship between the two committees, both of them formally responsible to the Convention, became extremely fraught. Nine of the deputies were chosen for the new Committee of Public Safety, whose members had to be re-elected every month. Danton was one of them. The others were: Bertrand Barère, Jean Delmas, Jean Bréard, Pierre Joseph Cambon, Louis Guyton, Jean-Baptiste Treilhad, Jean Delacroix and Jean Lindet. Significantly, none were Girondins, who opposed the creation of such a committee, fearing in advance that they would be excluded from it. And so the factional fight that had begun when Robespierre first opposed Brissot’s war policy at the end of 1791 entered its last phase with the Girondins at a serious disadvantage. They had failed to save the king, failed to prevent the resurrection of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and failed to avert the Committee of Public Safety. These three failures together were soon to lead to the deaths of Brissot, of twenty more of his colleagues in the Convention, and of Mme Roland, who once pored over a map of France imagining how it might be divided.
The new republic urgently needed a bigger army if it was going to recover from recent defeats and win the foreign war. To provide recruits the Convention resorted to conscription – the Levy of Three Hundred Thousand – and decreed a quota for each of the eighty-three departments: if there were not enough volunteers, unwilling men were to be drafted by drawing lots. At this, the discontent in the Vendée (an especially religious region south of Brittany) escalated into horrifying civil war. The practice of sending ‘representatives-on-mission’ had begun earlier in the year when the Convention had dispatched some of its members to visit and report on the provinces, but now, in the hands of the new Committee of Public Safety, and with the outbreak of civil war, these representatives were invested with new repressive powers. Personally entrusted with the exercise of sovereign authority, they were sent out in pairs to designated departments to oversee the levy, mandated to do whatever was necessary to ensure its success. In theory their purpose was to strengthen the republic’s centralised government, but in practice the Committee of Public Safety found it hard to control its own representatives who, in some cases, deviated sharply from official policies, imposing extraordinary taxes, raising private armies, and committing shameful acts of spoliation, violation and murder.11 Another emergency measure that would prove hard to control over time was Danton’s suggestion for a Revolutionary Army of sans-culottes to go out into the countryside and requisition grain and other food supplies.
At this time Robespierre was more publicly hysterical than ever, obsessed with death, convinced he was about to be assassinated, and constantly offering himself for martyrdom, as though that would resolve any of the Revolution’s problems. Fear most the enemy within, he warned the Jacobins again, the most dangerous traitors were not on the front line, but mingling in disguise among the patriots in Paris. The time had come to choose between slavery and death – ‘We know how to die, and we will all die,’ he announced triumphantly at the end of a speech on 13 March.12 ‘All! All!’ echoed voices round the hall. Then Marat stood up and said, ‘No! We are not going to die; we will give death to our enemies, we will erase them!’13 Two weeks later, Robespierre had imbibed some of Marat’s fighting spirit. Speaking again at the Jacobins on the dangers menacing France, and the vigorous measures required to combat them, he asked: ‘Must we despair of the safety of the Republic? No! Tyrants unmasked are nothing. The French people are only betrayed because they want to be; the French people are stronger than all their enemies. One republican who knows how to die can exterminate all the despots.’14 Such flamboyance went down well with his audience, who applauded vigorously, but in itself it hardly amounted to a strategy for saving the Revolution. Yet Robespierre had such a strategy: one that converged with Danton’s. He too wanted a strong government, an end to the separation of power between the legislature and the executive, in this time of crisis. But here even the Jacobins thought Robespierre had gone too far, while the Girondins accused him of aspiring to dictatorship. He retorted by denying even that he wanted to become a minister – at this someone in the Convention laughed openly.15
When news of Dumouriez’s treachery reached Paris, Robespierre seized on yet another weapon in the fight with the Girondins, and strove to implicate his former friends Brissot, Pétion and their associates in the general’s spectacular betrayal of France. His move was both aggressive and self-defensive. The Girondins would happily have held Dumouriez against Robespierre, Danton and the rest of the Jacobins if they could, and questions were already being asked as to why, when Danton went to the army a third time and met with Dumouriez, he had failed to denounce him as a traitor. Robespierre was exposed too, for just weeks earlier he had publicly expressed full confidence in Dumouriez and his command of the foreign war. Characteristically, he did not say he had been wrong. Instead he deftly reworked the reasons he had given for trusting Dumouriez so that, in retrospect, they sounded far more conditional and sceptical than they had at the time. Simultaneously he insisted, over and over again, that Dumouriez had been collaborating with Brissot – surely the time had come at last to take action against the man responsible for plunging the country into a disastrous war well over a year ago? ‘Dumouriez and Brissot were the first apostles of the war,’ he told the Convention, bending the facts to his advantage.16 As ever, he spoke of plots and hidden enemies. ‘If you wish, I will raise a corner of the veil,’ he tantalised his colleagues. ‘Raise it all!’ they pleaded.
This time the conspiracy Robespierre outlined had international components: it connected British Prime Minister Pitt with General Dumouriez, the Girondin faction, property-owners in France fearful for their assets, and the nobility hoping to recover their Old Regime privileges. Conspiracy on this scale was a figment of Robespierre’s fevered imagination. Yet he was absolutely correct to identify private property as the new focus of contention in the Revolution. The Girondins envisaged a republic with strong protection for private property and differences in the personal wealth of individual citizens. The Jacobins, led by Robespierre, distanced themselves from the radical demands of the enragés, but nevertheless proposed limits to private property in the interests of the people, the majority of whom were poor. Robespierre declared that:
All the ambitious persons who have appeared until now in the theatre of the Revolution, have had this in common: they defend the rights of the people for only as long as seems necessary. All have regarded them [the people] as a stupid flock, destined to be led by the most able or the strongest. All have regarded representative assemblies as bodies composed of men either greedy or credulous, who can be corrupted or tricked into serving their criminal projects.17
His fight against the Girondins here emerges as more than personal enmity for Brissot, who had successfully defeated his passionate crusade against the war. More too than hatred for Pétion, formerly his closest radical colleague, who had been – as Robespierre saw it – corrupted by power and public office. Beyond all such considerations lay Robespierre’s perception that the Girondins were not as sincerely, thoroughly, uncompromisingly for the people as he was himself. If he was deceived in this – and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he was not – the very least that can be said in his defence is that he genuinely believed he had committed himself to the people, the poor especially, and was acting accordingly to save their Revolution for them.
Disadvantaged as they now were, the Girondins nonetheless fought on. They turned on Marat, the most outspoken and provocative of all the Jacobins, whose newspaper was now emblazoned with the motto: ‘Let us tax the rich to subsidise the poor.’18 In early April, the Girondin Marguérite-Élie Guadet denounced Marat to his fellow deputies. He was arrested, pending an investigation into the charges against him. Robespierre, reporting these events to the Jacobins, claimed that the move against Marat was a further development in the insidious counter-revolutionary plot he had just unveiled. Guadet had ‘exhaled the poison of an impure soul’; he had called for the seizure of Jacobin and Cordelier newspapers and an end to the permanence of the Paris sections.19 But despite these attacks, Robespierre appealed for calm and cautioned the Jacobins against an uprising that would only play into their enemies’ hands and be held against them in the provinces, where the Girondins had formidable influence. He was far from calm himself, though. On 12 April he thundered from the tribune, ‘I demand censure of those who protect traitors.’20 ‘Bravo, bravo,’ shouted Marat. At this Pétion rose to speak, but before he could do so Robespierre added, ‘And their accomplices.’ Pétion retorted, ‘Yes, their accomplices, and you yourself. It is time at last to end all this infamy; it is time that traitors and perpetrators of calumny carried their heads to the scaffold; and here I take it upon myself to pursue them to death.’ ‘Stick to the facts,’ said Robespierre. ‘It is you whom I will pursue,’ returned Pétion (as though anyone were in doubt). At these open menaces there was uproar. Then the painter David ran into the middle of the hall, ripped open his shirt and pointing to his bare breast cried, ‘Strike here! I propose my own assassination! I too am a man of virtue! Liberty will win in the end!’21 Madness reigned in the Manège.
The next day, the deputies heard the report against Marat. It proposed his indictment for ‘pillage, murder and attempting to dissolve the Convention’.22 They voted 226 in favour of indictment and 93 against (forty-eight deputies were absent, three refused to vote and seven asked for an adjournment). The new Revolutionary Tribunal awaited Marat. It met inside the Palais de Justice above the Conciergerie dungeon on the small island in the Seine at the centre of Paris. It used the same great room that the Paris Parlement had used before 1789, but the tapestries had been stripped from the walls, the royal fleurs-de-lis carpet rolled up, and the king’s throne and Dürer’s painting of Christ removed. Instead there were wooden tables, chairs and platforms for the judges, jury, prisoners and members of the public. Prisoners were interrogated and allowed to prepare their defence. In Marat’s case this was hardly necessary. His Jacobin colleagues on the Tribunal not only acquitted him, but also crowned him with civic garlands. Marat was carried into the street on the shoulders of a jubilant crowd, who took him straight back to the Convention, where he mounted the tribune again. He was determined on revenge against the Girondins. ‘I propose that the Convention shall decree complete freedom in the expression of opinion, so that I may send to the scaffold the faction that voted for my impeachment,’ he said soon afterwards.23
The Paris sections, for their part, sought to avenge Marat by demanding that the Convention expel twenty-two of its leading Girondin deputies. When they presented their petition on 15 April, a Girondin named Boyer-Fonfrède, who had not been included among the twenty-two, rushed to the tribune asking to be added to the list. Cries of ‘Include us all! All! All!’ echoed round the volatile debating chamber, and a crowd of deputies grouped themselves round the twenty-two, bodily pledging solidarity with the Girondins.24Two weeks later, supporters of the Girondins took to the streets, marching and shouting, ‘Long live the law! Down with the Mountain!’ In the Convention the Girondins now attacked the Commune, hoping in this way to undermine the support it had provided for the Jacobins since the insurrection that brought down the monarchy. Robespierre retaliated by claiming that the Girondin supporters had actually cried, ‘Long live the King! Down with the Republic!’ The Girondin Maximin Isnard was moved to point out that the French words for law and king (loi and roi) could easily be mistaken for one another. Robespierre ignored this smart remark and went on to defend Paris against its critics in the Convention and the provinces. Reporting his own speech afterwards to the Jacobins he said:
I demanded that the factions in the Convention cease to slander the people of Paris, and that the journalists who pervert public opinion be reduced to silence … I demanded that the people make an effort to exterminate the aristocrats who are everywhere [loud applause] … I demanded the existence in the heart of Paris of an army, not that of Dumouriez, but a popular army composed of sans-culottes perpetually armed against Feuillants and moderates. I demand the allocation of sufficient funds to arm the artisans, all the good patriots … I demand that tomorrow forges be erected in all public squares to make weapons for arming the people … I demand that the constituted authorities oversee the execution of these measures, and not forget that they are the delegates of a city that is the boulevard of liberty whose existence renders the counter-revolution impossible.25
In quieter times Robespierre had stalwartly defended the freedom of the press, but no longer. Here he condoned the smashing of the Girondin print shops that more violent, less articulate men than himself had already undertaken in March. At the climax of his hour-long speech he told the Jacobins that in the current crisis only the most vigorous measures could save France. If they failed, virtue would vanish from the face of the earth. It was time to see if the Jacobins truly wanted to save the human race. The club leapt to its feet, waving hats in the air and crying, ‘Yes! Yes! We want to!’ Two days later, at the end of a shorter intervention, Robespierre confessed to extreme fatigue and ended with, ‘I have nothing more to say to you, and I have decided that, unless there is a revival of public spirit, unless the patriots make one last effort, I will wait in the chair of senatorial office, to which the people have raised me, for the daggers of the counter-revolution.’26
On 11 May, the sections of Paris petitioned the Convention again, still demanding the expulsion of the Girondin deputies. In reply, Isnard, a notorious hard drinker who may already have been intoxicated even though it was still early in the day, made an extremely impolitic speech:
If ever the Convention were insulted [interruptions] – if ever by one of those insurrections which since the 10 March have been so unceasingly repeated [violent interruptions] – if by these incessant insurrections – any attack should be made on the national representatives, I tell you, in the name of all France [loud negatives] – I tell you, I repeat, in the name of all France, that Paris would be annihilated [general tumult] – the traveller will seek along the shores of the Seine whether Paris had ever existed.27
The last person to utter a threat of this kind against Paris had been the Duke of Brunswick in his ill-judged manifesto of July 1792. Then the Jacobins had laughed. This time they knew at once that their lives were in danger: they had staked everything on Paris and entered a pact with the violence of its people. The suggestion that the city might be obliterated reinforced the call to arms Robespierre had recently uttered before collapsing exhausted into his chair.
The insurrection that Isnard had condemned in advance occurred on 31 May. A great crowd of Parisian petitioners arrived at the Convention, which had recently moved from the Manège to a new chamber in the revamped Tuileries palace. The crowd entered the chamber and took possession of the deputies’ seats. The Girondins protested and tried to end the session by leaving it. They returned when they saw their attempt had failed. Robespierre stepped up to the tribune and supported the petitioners’ demands. ‘Conclude then,’ shouted one of the Girondins impatiently. ‘Yes, I shall conclude, and do so against you,’ he replied bitterly:
against you who, after the revolution of 10 August wanted to bring to the scaffold those who had accomplished it; against you who have never ceased to provoke the destruction of Paris; against you who wanted to save the tyrant; against you who conspired with Dumouriez; against you who have rabidly pursued the same patriots whose heads Dumouriez demanded [the Jacobins]; against you whose criminal vengeance has provoked the same cries of indignation that you want to proscribe in those who are your victims. Ah yes! My conclusion is the decree of accusation against all the accomplices of Dumouriez and all those whom the petitioners have designated.28
His vehemence was vigorously applauded. But once again it had shattered him: ‘I am no longer capable of prescribing to the people the means of its salvation. It is a task beyond any single man’s powers – certainly beyond mine, exhausted as I am by four years of revolution, and by the heart-rending spectacle of the triumph of tyranny, and of all that is most vile and corrupt.’29 There followed two further days of insurrection, during which Robespierre probably collapsed in bed whilst Marat, despite his debilitating skin disease, climbed the tower of the Hôtel de Ville and rang the tocsin with his own hand. On 2 June the Girondin leaders who had not already fled were provisionally arrested. François Hanriot, a former customs clerk promoted to commander of the National Guard, played a crucial part in these events. He realised that control of Paris depended on street fighting, and to this end concentrated on deploying small four-pound-grapeshot-firing cannons, which he ordered to surround the Convention. In this way the intimidated deputies were forced to give in to the demands of the capital and expel the Girondins.
Mme Roland’s husband was one of the Girondins who was able to flee in time, but she herself had no intention of doing so. In the early evening she went to the Tuileries and was surprised to find that all the deputies had already gone home.
Imagine this! A day of insurrection, when the sound of the tocsin had scarcely ceased to rend the air, when two hours previously 40,000 armed men had surrounded the Convention and petitioners were threatening members at the bar of the house. Why was the Convention not in permanent session? Had it then been entirely subjugated and agreed to do all that it was told? Was the revolutionary power now so mighty that the Convention dare not oppose it? ‘Citizens.’ I said to a bunch of sans-culottes standing around a cannon, ‘did everything pass off well?’ ‘Marvellous well’, they replied.30
Later that night she was arrested and imprisoned in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près, the scene of the first of the September massacres, she grimly noted as she passed through the door.
In the midst of this intractable factional strife between the Jacobins and Girondins, the Convention tried to agree France’s new republican constitution. The Constitutional Committee that had been set up after the fall of the monarchy included the abbé Sieyès, still hoping to realise his elaborate theory of representative republican government, Condorcet, who had called openly for a republic in 1791, long before Robespierre dared to, and others who were loosely associated with the Girondins. On 15 April the Convention declared discussion of the constitution open and dedicated three days a week to it until it was completed. Robespierre at once intervened, insisting, against those who wanted to get on with designing the government straight away, that the constitution must begin with a new declaration of rights, which improved on both the American example and the flawed declaration of 1789. Abstract principles were his favourite subject and as usual he spoke at length, only breaking off to remark irritably, ‘It is impossible for me to speak in the middle of these interruptions and sarcastic remarks!’31 A few days later, when the discussion of specific rights began, he had this to say on the freedom of the press:
Revolutions are made to establish the rights of man. Therefore, in the interests of these rights, it is necessary to take all measures required for the success of such revolutions … the revolutionary interest might require the repression of a conspiracy founded on the liberty of the press … I declare that laws expressly made for the Revolution are necessary, even if they are contrary to the freedom of the press.32
Thus the very same rights sought and promised by the Revolution could also be suspended, if necessary, in the Revolution’s cause. Rather than hypocrisy, these views signalled a new and dangerous political pragmatism on Robespierre’s part.
When discussion turned to the right to property – which had been enshrined in the declaration of 1789 alongside life and liberty – Robespierre revealed the depth of his commitment to the poor. He was not a communist before his time. He did not oppose the very existence of private property, and he deliberately distanced himself from any suggestion that the Roman loi agraire might be revived in revolutionary France by placing the means of subsistence in the hands of the people. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t want to touch your treasures, however impure their source,’ he sneeringly reassured the rich.33 He thought making poverty honourable more important (and more practicable) than proscribing wealth. He did nevertheless go on to propose some very definite restrictions on the right to property: ‘The right to property is limited, like all others, by the obligation to respect the rights of others.’ Most significantly he called for progressive taxation, a policy that followed directly from Marat’s exhortation: ‘Let us tax the rich to subsidise the poor.’ It was for this that he was eviscerated in the hostile press. ‘Robespierre consecrated the principle of progressive taxation, an absurd tax, destructive of equality, a tax ruinous to industry, that would impede the sale of national property [confiscated from the Church and émigrés],’ complained the Girondin paper the Patriote français, still in circulation despite recent curbs on the freedom of the press and violence towards the Girondin print shops.34 While the Girondins envisaged a modern republic secured on free market economics, Robespierre urged redistributive measures that would make a real difference to the lives of the poor. After four years of revolutionary upheaval in a country that always had difficulty feeding itself, at a time when many in Paris and throughout the provinces were rioting for food, Robespierre’s policy had more appeal. As he put it, ‘The first social law is therefore that which guarantees the means of existence to all the members of society; all other [laws] are subordinate to this one; property is only instituted or guaranteed to affirm it … It is not true that property can ever be held in opposition to man’s subsistence:’35 In other words, if the people were starving they had a right to eat, regardless of who owned the food. This was a very old, respectable view, rooted in long traditions of political thought in Europe; in espousing it, Robespierre was drawing on the theoretical resources of his excellent education.36
Because the strife between the Jacobins and Girondins had entered so deeply into the Convention’s constitutional debates – delaying and distorting them – when the Jacobins finally triumphed at the beginning of June they appointed a new committee, including Robespierre’s close friends Saint-Just and Couthon, to redraft the republican constitution. This time the Convention set aside every afternoon to discuss it. France had been without a constitution for almost a year: people were becoming impatient with the protracted process of procuring one. With lightning speed, the Jacobins had a draft on 10 June. ‘The Constitution of 1793, like the world itself, was created in six days,’ scoffed the historian Michelet.37 It established universal male suffrage (which had seemed merely an eccentric political pipe dream when Robespierre demanded it three years earlier). The reworked Declaration of Rights made exciting new promises: welfare assistance for citizens in need and state education for all. (Robespierre had advocated both measures.) Although the new draft did not limit the right to property, Robespierre professed to be delighted: ‘All Europe will be constrained to admire this fine monument of human reason, and of the sovereignty of a great people.’38 Europe was not currently disposed to admire France. Yet it was true that this was the most democratic constitution the modern world had seen. It was duly ratified by referendum in primary assemblies throughout the country: 1,801,918 voted for it and only 11,610 against.39 The majority was overwhelming, but in this time of civil war the electoral turnout was low: only about a quarter of those qualified to vote cared to do so.
Meanwhile, the so-called ‘federalist’ revolt against the direction the Revolution had taken in Paris spread south through the country from the town of Caen in Calvados, to Bordeaux, Bourges, Lyon, Toulouse, Nîmes, Marseille and Toulon. By mid-June, sixty of France’s eighty-three departments were in open rebellion against Paris. No sooner did the new constitution come into existence than it had to be suspended. There were people in the capital who wanted – and needed – it out of the way. Saint-Just explained to the Convention:
Your Committee of Public Safety has weighed the causes of our public misfortunes, and found them in the weakness with which your decrees are executed, in the wastefulness of the administration, in the lack of consistent policy, and in the party passions that compete for influence over the government. It has therefore resolved to explain the state of affairs to you, and to submit the measures it thinks best fitted to establish the Revolution, to confound federalism, to support and to secure abundance for the people, to strengthen the armies and to cleanse the State of the conspiracies that are the plague of its life.40
The Convention, in agreement with the Committee of Public Safety, or perhaps cowed by it, agreed to the continuation of provisional revolutionary government until peace was achieved at home and abroad. Robespierre, along with Saint-Just, Danton and Marat, had long believed that terror was the only instrument capable of saving the Revolution. The Revolution was embattled and it needed a war government – strong, directive and fearsome. None of these Jacobin leaders had pretended otherwise since the fall of the monarchy. If the Girondins had triumphed in their place, they would have needed the same weapon to restore order. ‘This Committee [of Public Safety] is precisely what we want,’ Danton had said back in April, ‘a hand to grasp the weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal.’41 Three months later, after the arrest of the Girondins and the suspension of the new constitution, the path to exercising terror lay clear, demanding and austere before the exhausted Jacobins.
The Revolution was an extraordinary palimpsest. With each passing year its significant dates were overwritten by still more remarkable words and events. On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Bastille’s fall, when celebrations were set to be more muted than in previous years – given the wars and the food shortages – an unknown woman of twenty-five came from Caen to Paris and inscribed her own indelible mark. Caen had become the centre of Girondin resistance in the provinces. Some Girondin leaders like Pétion, and Louvet, who (on 29 October 1792) had risen like a spectre to accuse Robespierre in the Convention, had escaped arrest in the capital and reunited in Caen, from where they published a Girondin newspaper in direct defiance of the Committee of Public Safety. It was a call to rebellion; it vilified the Jacobins, and still singled out Marat as the least defensible, most odious and culpable of them all. Charlotte Corday read this paper in her home town and undertook a mission all her own. She travelled to Paris by coach, bought a long knife in the Palais Royal, and called on Marat that evening in the rue des Cordeliers. He was almost always at home. He left this record of his own daily regime:
I only give two hours out of the twenty-four to sleep, and one to meals, dressing and household affairs. Besides the hours that I consecrate to my duties as a deputy of the people, I always devote six to listening to the complaints of a crowd of unfortunate and oppressed people who regard me as their defender, to forwarding their claims by means of petitions or memoranda, to reading and answering a multitude of letters, to supervising the printing of an important work that I have in the press, to making notes on all the interesting events of the Revolution, and putting my observations on paper, to receiving denunciations, and checking their veracity, and lastly to editing my paper. This is how I spend my day. I don’t think I can be accused of laziness. I haven’t taken a quarter of an hour’s recreation for more than three years.42
No wonder he was ill, seeking a measure of relief from his debilitating skin disease in a medicinal bath when Charlotte Corday came to the door. He was writing in the bath; his days were so crammed, he had to. She gave him the names of the Girondins at Caen. He thanked her and noted them down. He was making a list when she plunged the knife straight into his heart. It was not so hard to kill him: small, frail, sick, naked, defenceless figure that he was.
Robespierre, characteristically, was jealous. For months he had spoken of plots against his own life, and volunteered flamboyantly for martyrdom, while taking care to keep close to his bodyguards.43 Now Marat was dead he hastened to remind his colleagues at the Jacobin Club that ‘Daggers are also marked for me.’44 He disapproved of all the interest in Marat – his poverty, his paper, his revolutionary contribution – that sprang up in the wake of his murder: ‘Eh! Of what importance to the Republic are the financial affairs of one of its founders?’45 Similarly, he was against honouring Marat’s remains by interring them in the Panthéon. ‘Is it next to Mirabeau that he will be placed? [Next to] that man who merits his reputation for profound villainy? Are these the honours solicited for the Friend of the People?’46 ‘Yes,’ interrupted a Jacobin named Bentabole, ‘and he shall have them despite those who are jealous of him!’ Ignoring the insult, Robespierre continued. This was not the time to be distracted by funeral celebrations: there was a war going on – Marat’s honours should wait until it had been won. What should not wait was vengeance. Marat’s assassin must be guillotined, along with all the other perpetrators of tyranny, all the infidel representatives of the people (the Girondins), who encouraged revolt and intended to kill the true patriots one by one. The blood of these monsters must be taken to avenge their victims, whose blood had been shed for liberty. But it was too soon to distract the Jacobins from memories of Marat. Alive, he had been a maverick in their camp, more often than not a serious embarrassment. Dead he became a hero. The next evening they voted to create a subcommittee of men of letters dedicated to keeping his spirit alive. Robespierre, meanwhile, limited himself to suggesting the Jacobin Club acquire Marat’s printing presses for its own purposes.47
Marat’s funeral became a public festival, in spite of Robespierre’s advice. On the day itself he was still feeling sour and so contrived to deliver an oration in Marat’s honour that pointedly avoided even mentioning his name. The artist David orchestrated the proceedings, decreeing that ‘Marat’s burial place will have the simplicity that befits an incorruptible republican dying in honourable poverty. It was from underground that he identified the people’s enemies and friends: let him rest underground in death.’48 He was interred in the garden of the Cordeliers Club. Young girls in white dresses and boys carrying branches of cypress surrounded his bier, followed by members of the Convention, the clubs and the general public. Representatives of each of the forty-eight Paris sections filed past his grave and spoke movingly of him. His heart was suspended in an urn from the ceiling of the Cordeliers’ meeting chamber – a secular relic in that requisitioned convent. In 1794, after Robespierre’s own death, Marat finally made it to the Panthéon. His remains were carried in as Mirabeau’s were removed, so the revolutionary and the royalist never had to lie side by side as Robespierre had feared.
Why was Robespierre so sour? Did he really begrudge the murdered Marat a day of pomp and ceremony? It is only fair to point out that Robespierre felt the same way when Mirabeau died, uneasy at the distraction from the business of revolution that a large public funeral occasioned. Back in 1791 he had been quick to remind the Jacobins that the focus of their preoccupations must remain the public interest – a grand abstraction from which personal feelings of bereavement, or regard for specific individuals whoever they were, must not detract. In 1793 too Robespierre wanted to get on with saving the Revolution. Now that it had occurred, Marat’s death might be turned to advantage in the fight against the Girondins, the rebellious departments and the counter-revolution. He may not have cared much one way or the other for Marat as a person – but he knew a political opportunity when he saw one. It is even possible that the oration in which he failed to mention the dead man’s name was itself intended to educate by example: beside the abstract principles of the Revolution mere individuals – their names, stories and careers – no longer mattered. This reserve in Robespierre was not new. He had long prided himself, and others had never ceased to congratulate him, on being able to set the public good over his own private advantage. Like Marat, he worked incredibly hard. He attended the Convention by day and the Jacobins by night, he too wrote speeches, letters and a weekly journal. There was precious little time for a private life, even if he had valued or wanted one. Nothing came between Robespierre and the Revolution – if it had, the history of each would have been entirely different.
Charlotte Corday was guillotined four days after her crime, with a beatific smile on her face. The executioner held her severed head up to the crowd and, in a fit of pro-Marat enthusiasm, slapped her cheek. Allegedly she blushed – both her slapped and unslapped cheeks reddened – and those who were watching gasped in amazement.49 Physiologists several years later were inspired by this story to speculate on whether human sensation ends instantly at decapitation. But at the time, political interests eclipsed scientific ones. From the execution of Charlotte Corday the Girondins acquired a secular saint of their own – the Jacobins had Marat, but they had a pure and beautiful young woman whose modesty did not desert her even in death. The fight between the two factions entered its final throes. It had long been a mortal combat. Now it was simply a question of how much more damage would be done to the Revolution – how much more bloodshed there would be in the provinces and at the frontier – before it was over. To try to assess the state of affairs, the Convention sent various deputies out on mission to the detachments of the army deployed on home soil. In August 1793 Lazare Carnot, a member of the Committee of Public Safety with special responsibility for the army, decreed that ‘the republic is a great city in a state of siege: France must become one vast camp, and Paris its arsenal’. He set out the war effort in graphic terms:
Every Frenchman is commandeered for the needs of the armies. Young men will go to the front, married men will forge arms and carry food, women will make tents and clothing, and work in hospitals, children will turn old linen into bandages, old men will be carried into the squares to rouse the courage of the combatants, and to teach hatred of kings, and republican unity.50
Robespierre himself could not be parted from Paris, but his brother Augustin left for the south, heading for Nice via Lyon and Marseille, to report on the extent of the support for the Girondins, who were now calling openly for a federalist revolt against the capital. When Charlotte Robespierre heard that Augustin was about to leave as a representative-on-mission together with Jean François Ricord (deputy to the Convention from Var), who was taking his wife, she demanded to be included in the party. Charlotte got her way and the four of them set off accompanied by only two soldiers.51 Lyon was in revolt, but when their coach pulled up outside the town hall, things seemed calm enough. The two women waited outside while Augustin and Ricord went in. A crowd began gathering around the stationary coach and the women were drawn into conversation. ‘We know that the Parisians say we are counter-revolutionaries,’ someone said, ‘but they are mistaken – look at our cockades.’52 Charlotte expressed suspicions, as her elder brother would have done; after all, counter-revolutionaries, indeed the king himself, had worn the tricolour cockade back in 1789. As the women’s exchange with the tense and increasingly angry crowd deteriorated, the two men were involved in a fierce altercation with municipal officers inside the town hall. It was apparent that sympathy with the Girondins was running very high in Lyon. Returning to the coach, Augustin and Ricord decided it was not safe to spend the night and they must press on to Nice. Since it was likely that news of their mission had gone before them – Charlotte’s conversation with the crowd was, in hindsight, very unwise – now they did not dare take the main road, but went cross-country via the small town of Manosque.
When they reached the bank of the river Durance, the guards who had gone ahead to check that it was safe to cross came rushing back warning that there were armed Marseillais with cannons on the other side. There was no choice but to turn back to Manosque. Here, trying to be helpful, the mayor offered the party an accompaniment of fifty local National Guards. Uncertain of the sympathies of these men, Augustin and Ricord politely refused. During their flight to Varennes the royal family had encountered the same problem: it was always difficult to know how battalions of National Guards would act, since they were just ordinary citizens in arms and not professional soldiers. So the party set off again for Nice unaccompanied. En route they received a message from the well-disposed mayor that the Marseille insurgents were in pursuit. At this, they abandoned the coach and fled on horseback into the mountains bordering the department of Vaucluse. Twelve local patriots went with them as guides – they had no choice but to trust them – and they journeyed all night through the difficult passes. By the following evening they had reached the old fortified village of Sault. Here they encountered a young doctor who had been elected to the new convention in exile that the Girondin leader Guadet was planning to convene as soon as possible at Bourges.
This doctor took Augustin and Ricord to the local Jacobin club, where they were enthusiastically received. Considerably cheered, the party then decided to return to Manosque, this time with a band of twenty or so patriots. Their two guards went ahead to prepare their arrival. To frighten the people who had been so unwelcoming before, the guards spread the rumour that the two deputies – one of them the brother of the famous Robespierre – were about to arrive with an army of six thousand. The town of Manosque would be razed to the ground and its inhabitants all slaughtered in punishment for their treatment of the national representatives. Wisely, the party moved on again before the emptiness of the rumour could become apparent. Half an hour later the men from Marseille arrived, searched everywhere for the Parisians, then fell upon their abandoned coach, dragging it off to their home town in triumph. Augustin and Ricord demanded the return of the coach and it was sent back, vandalised. Finally they got to Nice. Here, Charlotte recalled, ‘public spirit was no better’.53 But the presence of a detachment of professional soldiers from the French army, as opposed to unreliable battalions of local National Guards, meant that the party was at least safe from counter-revolutionary attacks. Indeed, under the protection of the army’s General Dumerbion, they even felt safe enough to attend the theatre. The third time they went they were pelted with rotten apples. Sympathy for the Revolution was dying in the provinces. Back in Paris, Robespierre himself described the situation in apocalyptic terms:
From the north to the Midi, from sunset to dawn, the land is strewn with corpses and the blood of patriots drenches the whole of France; the Midi revolts and joins our enemies in the north to forge chains for us; Marseille, hitherto the rampart of liberty, is today its tomb. The same fate awaits us if we do not display energy and if Paris does not rise as one to crush the hydras that are whistling in our ears.54
The members of the Committee of Public Safety were re-elected by the Convention every month, and Danton was voted off on 10 July. One of the reasons was his optimism in the face of the federalist revolt. Rejecting Robespierre’s apocalyptic vision, refusing to condone Jacobin threats of violent repression in Bordeaux and elsewhere, he acted as though effort and compromise might be enough to reunite the country. Danton, for all his ferocity in the streets, understood compromise. In June he had married the young woman his first wife had picked out for him and their two small children before she died. Noting this remarriage, only four months after the extraordinary scene in the graveyard over Gabrielle’s coffin, his critics conjectured that Danton was still unbalanced, distracted from public affairs, swept up in the solace of a new sexual liaison, no longer really in control of what he – still less the Revolution – was doing. Unlike Robespierre, Danton valued his private life. In a conversation between the two men, during which Robespierre was speaking, as he did so often, about the importance of virtue and its role in revolutionary politics, Danton quipped, ‘Virtue is what I do every night in bed with my wife.’55 Robespierre, not amused, jotted this down in his notebook for future reference.
Perhaps Danton did not mean it as a joke. In the circumstances in which he found himself, in the context of the life he had led since 1789 – all that bloodshed, all those shattered dreams, the revolutionary fight still so far from won – sex, love, intimacy may indeed have seemed to him the best there is for human beings to hope for. This was emphatically not Robespierre’s view. He may not have been as interested in sex as Danton was – he almost certainly had less experience of it. But such comparisons are elusive, even between the living, and between the dead they become ridiculous. Of much more importance than their relative sexual prowess is the fact that Danton and Robespierre, who had been such close revolutionary allies, clashed so spectacularly in their vision of the good life. When they were together in opposition to the Old Regime, the king, the Feuillants, the Girondins, their differences did not matter so much. Once the Jacobins came to power and had to decide what to do with it, they became enormously significant.
On 27 July, Robespierre was at last elected to the Committee of Public Safety. Now, though he had more power than ever before, he was only one of twelve trying to rule France. When Danton had established the Committee earlier that year, it had only nine members. Its personnel had changed over the intervening months, and three extra places had been added round the oval table at which it met in the Tuileries. There were four more changes of personnel soon after Robespierre joined, but then no more additions until after he fell.56 Some of his fellow members were close friends: Saint-Just, Couthon, who had to be carried in his wheelchair into meetings up what was once known as the queen’s staircase, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois. The others were Barère, the honey-tongued lawyer, Carnot, Hérault de Séchelles, Lindet, Saint-André and two unrelated men both with the surname Prieur. ‘Stranger set of cloud-compellers the earth never saw,’ Thomas Carlyle remarked of the twelve.57 In addition to internal clashes of vision and temperament, the Committee as a whole was thoroughly embattled: its power and legitimacy were disputed abroad and in the provinces. In Paris there were also clashes with the Commune, with some of the city’s forty-eight sections, with the clubs, the factions and the streets.
Robespierre began assiduously attending the Committee’s meetings, which were usually held in the evening, in a green-papered room inside the former palace. Elsewhere in the building the intimidated Convention still went through the motions of assembling during the day, even though the republican constitution it had been called to design was indefinitely suspended, filed away on a dusty shelf awaiting happier times. As the first anniversary of the monarchy’s end approached, hope, power and fear were focused on nocturnal debates behind closed doors. Paris celebrated the 10 August anniversary by smashing the royal tombs at Saint-Denis; the already meagre food rations for the surviving royal prisoners in the Temple were reduced further; Marie Antoinette was transferred to the Conciergerie, pending trial; Danton’s policy of conciliation in the provinces was replaced by one of repression – Lyon, where Robespierre’s siblings had recently been made so unwelcome, was under siege a week after he entered the Committee of Public Safety.
On the eve of his ascension to power, Robespierre had drafted a personal revolutionary catechism. It provides a window into his mind at this frenzied time:
What is our aim?
It is the use of the Constitution for the benefit of the people.
Who is likely to oppose us?
The rich and the corrupt.
What methods will they employ?
Slander and hypocrisy.
What factors will encourage the use of such means?
The ignorance of the sans-culottes.
The people must therefore be instructed.
What are the obstacles to their enlightenment?
The paid journalists who mislead the people every day by shameless distortions.
What conclusion follows?
That we ought to proscribe these writers as the most dangerous enemies of the country, and to circulate an abundance of good literature.
The people – what other obstacle is there to their instruction?
Its destitution.
When then will the people be educated?
When they have enough bread to eat, when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous pens and tongues to deceive them, and instead identify their own interests with those of the people.
When will this be?
Never.
What other obstacles are there to the achievement of freedom?
The war at home and abroad.
By what means can the foreign war be ended?
By placing republican generals at the head of our armies, and by punishing those who have betrayed us.
How can we end the civil war?
By punishing traitors and conspirators, especially those deputies and administrators who are to blame; by sending patriot troops under patriot leaders to reduce the aristocrats of Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, the Vendée, the Jura, and all other districts where the banner of royalism and rebellion has been raised; and by making a terrible example of all the criminals who have outraged liberty and spilt the blood of patriots.58
In Lyon and elsewhere there were plenty of terrible examples: horrific mass executions by grapeshot fired from cannons and group drownings in the Vendée – crimes against humanity that the revolutionaries would today be called to answer for under the European human rights legislation they themselves pioneered. Robespierre had argued consistently since 1789 that in a time of revolution the end justifies the means, and even his advocates have to acknowledge that he did not flinch from the bloodiest implications of his position. In 1792 the Commune of Paris had attempted to encourage France’s second largest city to imitate the Parisian September massacres. A friend of Robespierre named Joseph Chalier had been sent to Lyon as an emissary. Well received at the municipal level, Chalier met with resistance from the department and the National Guard. He asked for reinforcement from Paris and corresponded regularly with another close friend of Robespierre, Léopold Renaudin. When the counter-revolution finally triumphed in Lyon in May 1793, the members of Chalier’s circle were shattered to learn that he had been executed. Afterwards, Robespierre led the Committee of Public Safety’s policy of repression against the rebellious city. The siege of Lyon lasted until 6 October, and afterwards the Committee decreed mass executions and the destruction of all buildings, except the houses of the poor. ‘Lyon is no more,’ said Robespierre. His friend and colleague Collot d’Herbois admired his turn of phrase.59 Even so, Robespierre’s stance on Lyon was not the most extreme. When his fellow Committee members Couthon and Collot d’Herbois tried to convince him that there were sixty thousand individuals in Lyon who would never make good patriots unless they were forcibly resettled elsewhere in France, and even then ‘the generations born of them would never be entirely pure’, Robespierre resisted. He continued to insist that ordinary people – including the poor of Lyon – were intrinsically good. But to those deemed counter-revolutionary, he showed no mercy.
*
The harvest of 1793 was good – it had been a very hot summer – but many of the watermills remained dry and by autumn the flour was still not ready to send to the bakers. Since June prices had risen dramatically. In Paris food was scarce, soap had tripled in price, and even Robespierre had difficulty obtaining the silk stockings he always wore (he never abandoned his knee-breeches for the humbler costume of the sans-culottes). At the end of July, the Convention fixed the price of bread and other basic necessities and imposed the death penalty on anyone convicted of hoarding. To some extent the Convention’s measures were intended to address the demands of the new best-selling newspaper, Jacques-René Hébert’s foul-mouthed Le Père Duchesne, which had taken over as the voice of the Parisian poor from L’Ami du Peuple after Marat’s murder. Hébert was a leading figure in the Commune, the Jacobin Club and the Cordeliers Club. Robespierre already had reservations about him, and was certainly not in favour of radical social levelling of the kind proposed by the enragés, who had been calling for price controls since the beginning of the year.
On 2 September, the first anniversary of the horrific prison massacres, news reached Paris that counter-revolutionary rebels had surrendered the great naval base at Toulon to the British. The enemy had penetrated France. Hungry, angry Parisians, impatient with the food queues that had become their way of life, panicked. The enragés took to the streets and another insurrection was underway. The city was completely out of control for several days. On 4 September Hébert and his allies in the Commune turned popular demands for better wages and more bread into a general strike and the following day marched on the Convention. The Jacobins were persuaded to join in, even though Robespierre was reluctant because he knew that – as the current president of the Convention – he was going to have to placate the angry crowd when it burst into the debating chamber.
It was at this point, on 5 September, confronted once again by the mob, that the Convention declared terror ‘the order of the day’. Even though Danton had been voted off the Committee of Public Safety, he was still powerful in the Convention. Here he faced down the enragés and carried a controversial decree to limit the city’s forty-eight sections to just two meetings per week. This ended their daily sessions (or permanence) and curbed what, since 1789, had been prominent sites for popular protest. Danton also called for a ‘Revolutionary Army’, the ordinary people in arms to act, not against food-hoarders (as the enragés wanted), but against the foreign enemy. On the spot the Convention agreed funds of a hundred million livres (which it did not have) to provide a musket for every man in France. In this atmosphere of patriotic unity, the main instruments for enforcing the Terror on the home front were fortified: the Revolutionary Tribunal was expanded and divided into four concurrent chambers, so that it could more rapidly process a greater number of cases. Henceforth all judges and jurors were to be appointed either by the Committee of Public Safety or the larger Committee of General Security. Finally, on 17 September, the Convention passed the terrifying Law of Suspects: anyone could now be arrested and punished with death who ‘either by their conduct, their contacts, their words or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny, of federalism, or to be enemies of liberty’.60 Under the Law of Suspects everyone – not just foreigners, as had previously been the case – was obliged to carry a certificate of civisme, which was both an identity card and a stamp of civic virtue in one. Anyone without one of these cards could be arrested, and many thousands were.
After the declaration on 5 September, the Terror remained France’s official regime for nine months. During this time approximately sixteen thousand people were formally condemned to death, most of them in the provinces, and there were many more unofficial victims who died in custody or were lynched without trial.61 Nearly two thousand were executed in Lyon after the city fell to the revolutionaries. Over three and a half thousand were guillotined when the revolt in the Vendée was finally suppressed, after terrible loss of life on the battlefield and the murder of an estimated ten thousand rebels and civilians in retreat. The policy of inhumane repression worked. As autumn turned to winter, the Republic’s armies were once again succeeding abroad, and the federalist revolt unleashed by the fall of the Girondin faction was effectively over. In December Augustin Robespierre, still with the army in the south, sent news that the strategic port at Toulon had been recaptured at last. He was proud to tell his brother that he had gone into action with the troops and distinguished himself as a fighter.
Between October and the end of 1793, 177 people were guillotined in Paris after appearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal, now under the strict control of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. The trial of Marie Antoinette came early in the Terror. When the royal family were first imprisoned in the Temple tower, Paris’s Insurrectionary Commune took responsibility for guarding them. It was the Commune that sent Robespierre to check all was quiet there while the September massacres were taking place. During the summer of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety intervened. Louis XVI’s son, Louis Capet as the Republic knew him, eight years old and ill, was separated from his mother, aunt and sister on 9 July by the Committee’s decree. Marie Antoinette fought bodily against this, clinging to her child and the bedpost until someone threatened to call the guard and she understood it was hopeless. Then she summoned all her remaining strength and said, ‘My child, we are about to part. Bear in mind all I have said to you of your duties … Never forget God who thus tries you, nor your mother who loves you. Be good, patient and kind and your father will look down from heaven and bless you.’62 Her son was dragged from the room, one of his manhandlers declaring, ‘Don’t be uneasy – the nation, always great and generous, will take care of his education’ before the door slammed shut.63 In the garden where the prisoners were allowed to take exercise a new fence was erected to prevent Louis Capet from seeing his family. Marie Antoinette found a chink in it and surreptitiously glimpsed her son again three weeks after their separation. He was dressed as a miniature sans-culotte with the red cap of liberty on his head, and accompanied by a rough, abrasive tutor, a man named Anthony Simon who was Marat’s next-door neighbour.64 The murder of his friend and patron on 13 July, just days after he took on the role of tutor, did nothing to improve Simon’s treatment of his charge. Marie Antoinette was horrified. On 2 August she was taken to the Conciergerie, ready to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal. On the same day the Commune sent her son a toy guillotine.
The Queen’s trial began on 14 October and lasted two days. During it, Hébert tried to prove that she had sexually abused her son. ‘Nature refuses to answer such a charge,’ Marie Antoinette retorted, ‘but I appeal against it to the heart of every mother who hears me.’65 Robespierre was highly irritated. ‘That fool Hébert will make her an object of pity!’ he complained.66 The prisoner did not want pity. She said, ‘I was a queen and you dethroned me – I was a wife, and you murdered my husband – I was a mother, and you have torn my children from me – I have nothing left but my blood – make haste to take it.’ She was guillotined before noon on 16 October. Robespierre seems to have taken little interest in this gesture of bloody vengeance. When Louis XVI went past his door on the way to execution, Robespierre turned his back in awed silence. When Marie Antoinette went past, not in a closed carriage like her husband with a priest and prayer book, but in an open tumbril exposed to the braying crowd, he scarcely noticed. His mind was already on the trial of the Girondin leaders, much more politically significant for him and the Revolution than the death of one distraught, grief-stricken woman who had lost everything except her Roman Catholic faith.
The trial of the Girondins opened on 24 October, eight days after the queen’s execution. Robespierre had already succeeded in opposing a vote in the Convention by appel nominal, which would have resembled the protracted vote over the king’s fate with every deputy stepping up to the tribune to deliver an opinion and verdict, some of them simply pronouncing the word ‘death’, others speaking interminably long into the night for exile, imprisonment or acquittal. Even so, he did not have complete control of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which hesitated to condemn twenty-one Girondins brought before it, among them Brissot, so long the focus of Robespierre’s hatred. ‘I never liked Brissot as a politician,’ one contemporary remembered, ‘no one was ever more intoxicated by passion: but that does not prevent me from doing justice to his virtues, to his private character, to his disinterestedness, to his social qualities as a husband, a father and a friend, and as the intrepid advocate of the wretched Negroes.’67 Why did Robespierre hate him so much? Both were idealists – supporters of the people and the oppressed everywhere. But they had disagreed bitterly over whether France should go to war in 1792, disagreed again over the fate of the king, and disagreed with yet more vehemence about whether or not the new republic should have a federal structure to counter the disproportionate influence of Paris. Unlike the Incorruptible, Brissot had political skeletons in his closet. He had had shadowy dealings with the police under the Old Regime, he had travelled to Britain and the United States, involved himself in schemes to resolve the debts that brought France to the precipice of revolution. Robespierre had tried to have Brissot arrested in the course of the September massacres, so he might be disposed of without due process. The plan failed. Just over a year later, Robespierre was more desperate than ever to ensure the death of his long-standing enemy. Brissot would have felt the same if their situations had been reversed.
Brissot had been one of those fortunate enough to escape arrest on 2 June; Pétion was another. Brissot headed first for Chartres, only a short distance from Paris, where he had grown up in his father’s inn. Then with a loyal friend, a false passport, minimal luggage and a brace of pistols, he travelled south through Nevers, then on to Moulins, where he was caught and taken back to the capital. He was imprisoned in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près like Mme Roland, to whom he had once written movingly of his romantic responses to books during childhood. Reading Anson’sVoyage, for example, he had seen himself ‘constructing log-huts in the happy isles of Juan Fernandez and Tinian’.68 He had always been a dreamer. From prison he wrote long letters to the Convention, comparing himself to Cicero, asking to be heard, for a chance to explain himself. It was no use. Brissot and twenty other Girondins were moved to the Conciergerie to await trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Those who still eluded arrest were declared outlaws and hunted down. Pétion’s body was found in a field half-eaten by wolves. To complete matters, Robespierre arranged to have the house of his former friend demolished.
The trial did not go well, from Robespierre’s point of view. He had been reluctant to let it go ahead, probably because he knew there was still a great deal of public support for the Girondins, who were eloquent and sounded convincingly patriotic. After five days, during which the possibility of acquittal – politically disastrous for the Jacobins – gathered strength, steps were taken to ensure conviction. In the Convention a Jacobin named Osselin proposed a decree to end the trial. Robespierre stepped up to the tribune and said the proposal was too vague. In its place, he offered another to ‘reconcile the interests of the accused men with the safety of the country’: ‘I propose the decree that after three days’ hearing the President of the tribunal shall ask the jury whether they have enough evidence to satisfy their conscience: if they say no, the trial is to proceed until they are in a position to reach a verdict.’69 But if they said yes, it was all over. Trial by conscience was something Robespierre had suggested before: it meant the jury’s decisions could be intuitive rather than reasonable, and the accused could be convicted not only for their actions, but also for their dispositions and attitudes. In that frightening room above the Conciergerie dungeons, where there was one chair for the ringleader and benches behind for those destined to share his or her fate, what was on trial was a frame of mind. Individuals were beside the point; what mattered was the triumph of the revolutionary mentality over anything that might oppose, challenge or detract from it. ‘Whoever trembles is guilty,’ Robespierre said darkly.
Guilty was the verdict on the twenty-one Girondins. When it was pronounced, one witness heard Camille Desmoulins exclaim in shock, ‘My God! My God! It is I who kills them.’70 He was referring to the part his newspaper had played in turning public opinion in Paris against the Girondins; Camille was sorry for it now, but it was too late. Another eyewitness recalled that Brissot ‘had scarcely heard the fatal word “death” when his arms fell to his side, and his head dropped suddenly upon his breast’. He wrote to his wife, ‘Goodbye, my darling; dry your tears; mine are wetting the paper as I write. We shall be parted, but not eternally.’ Like Robespierre he still believed in an afterlife. Like Robespierre, too, he had lived for ideas – progress, human rights, grand abstractions that seemed almost within reach in the middle of the Revolution. On their way to execution the Girondins sang the rousing Marseillaise. They sang it over the body of one of their party, Valazé, who had secreted a knife into the courtroom and stabbed himself as soon as he heard the verdict. There was talk of decapitating his corpse, but in the end it was only dragged along in the tumbril to the foot of the guillotine where the lives of the others ended. One contemporary remarked, ‘In the Girondins Robespierre only killed a party; in Brissot he guillotined an idea.’71 The idea in question might have been a federal French republic on the American model that had so impressed Brissot during his transatlantic travels before 1789, or a new and original model of republican government that differed in crucial respects from Robespierre’s. It is true that Robespierre thoroughly disapproved of some of Brissot’s ideas, even while sharing others. But it is also indisputable that when Brissot died, Robespierre was at last rid of a thoroughly despised personal enemy. In this instance, guillotining the man meant as much to him as guillotining the ideas which menaced a republic ‘one and indivisible’.
Mme Roland followed her Girondin friends to the guillotine in early November. Gesturing towards the statue of liberty that had recently been erected on the plinth of the demolished statue of Louis XIV in the renamed Place de la Révolution, she said, ‘Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!’72 Her husband was in hiding in the countryside. When he heard of her death he walked straight out of the house and committed suicide in a ditch.
On 24 October, the same day that the trial of the Girondins began, the Convention heard the ex-actor and dramatist Fabre d’Églantine read his report on the new calendar it had requested for the new France: ‘We could not go on reckoning the years during which we were oppressed by kings as part of our lifetime. Every page of the old [Gregorian] calendar was soiled by the prejudices and falsehoods of the throne and the Church.’73 There is evidence that Robespierre opposed this confusing and anti-Christian innovation, since he wrote in his private notebook, ‘indefinite adjournment of the decree on the calendar’, but he did not get his way.74 Fabre was the spokesman for the special commission that the Convention had set up to design the new calendar. He remembered seeing during his childhood what Robespierre certainly saw year in, year out in Arras: the priests going out into the fields in May to bless the growing crops. For the benefit of his audience, Fabre put incriminating words into their mouths: ‘It is we, the priests, who have made this countryside green again; we who water these fields with so fair a hope … Believe in us, respect us, obey us, and make us rich: otherwise hail and thunder, which are at our command, will punish you for your lack of faith, docility, and obedience.’75 Now the people had arisen, the priests had fallen, and it was time for a revolutionary calendar. The new calendar was backdated to 22 September 1792, so that the day after the monarchy had been formally abolished became the first day of Year I of the Republic: a foundational event to rival the birth of Christ. On the new calendar, France now found herself already well into Year II of liberty:
When Robespierre was a schoolboy he used to undress in the evenings to a reading about the life of the saint whose feast fell on the following day. Now Fabre explained that in addition to renaming the months, the days of the new ten-day week (three to a month) would be named after the objects and animals used by agricultural labourers. Every tenth day would be a day of rest bearing the name of an implement that would be useful to labourers returning to work in the morning: plough-day, roller-day, spade-day, sickle-day, water-pot-day and so on. Other days were to be named after animals, vegetables, flowers or other natural phenomena, and the five (six in a leap year) extra days left over from standardising the number of days in a month were to be special ‘Sansculottides’, or without-breeches days, in honour of the nickname given to the working men of Paris without whom the Revolution would have ended long ago.
Whilst Fabre was deploying his poetic gifts in designing the new calendar, Robespierre was contemplating the wider problem of education. Back in July, soon after the enactment – and suspension – of the new republican constitution, he had presented a bill on education to the Convention, in which the formation of children’s moral character was given as much attention as the instruction of their minds. It proposed centralised compulsory state education of all girls aged 5 to 11 and all boys aged 5 to 12. Afterwards there was to be free secondary education for those who wanted it. The cost was to be met through progressive taxation. The bill was heavily criticised for being too interventionist and expensive. Robespierre remained determined:
For a long time we have been waiting for this: the opportunity to help a numerous and integral sector of society. The revolutions of the previous three years have done everything for the other classes of citizens, yet almost nothing for the most needy, for the proletarian citizens whose sole property is their labour … If you adopt the children of citizens without property, indigence will no longer exist for them. Adopt their children and you help them in the most precious part of their being. Those young trees will be transplanted into the national nursery, where the same soil will nurture them and a vigorous culture fashion them: pressed one against another, vivified by the rays of a benign star, they will grow, develop, shoot all together under the regard and gentle influence of the fatherland.76
Robespierre’s ideas on education were far in advance of his time and reflected his sense of the difference education had made to his own life, and his commitment to raising the standard of living for the poorest sector of society. But the Convention, unwilling to infringe parental opportunities to exploit child labour, or to incur the cost of the nationwide programme of education he outlined, approved only a modified system of primary education. Undeterred, Robespierre persevered with his theories of moral development and the strategic role it might play in regenerating the republic. In this he was helped and inspired by his friend Saint-Just, who was beginning to argue that the Revolution must reach far beyond politics, into the heart of civil society, and make war on all forms of moral perversity.77
Robespierre had made an implicit pact with street violence in order to destroy his Girondin enemies in the Convention. It had been the mob breaking into the Convention and surrounding it in June that had forced the expulsion of the Girondin deputies. But now they were gone he needed to restrain the violence that had helped him to power – he needed, in short, to govern. The Convention had begun the process of reasserting control over Paris on 5 September, when, at Danton’s suggestion, it limited the number of section meetings to two per week. However, it had given in to the demands for price regulation of basic commodities, which culminated in the General Maximum Law on 29 September. In a rare gesture of self-indulgence, Robespierre added his own items to the list of essential comestibles: coffee and sugar. Conceding that these were artificial, as opposed to natural, needs – human beings can survive well enough without them – he argued that these two products of colonialism were nevertheless addictive and the people would be deprived without them. Fabre d’Églantine backed him up, pointing out that sugar also had medicinal uses; and in the end Robespierre got his personal necessities on to the general list of price controls. His silk stockings were more of a problem. Robespierre’s friend Claude Gravier, a distiller whom he had promoted to the jury of the Revolutionary Tribunal, received a letter around this time from the postmaster-general of Lyon, explaining that he was having great difficulty procuring hosiery for the Incorruptible but was sending some ham and sausage instead.78
Once again the Jacobin Club was torn apart by factional strife. Danton was still a member, but increasingly critical of the regime of Terror. He had lost control of the Cordeliers Club, distanced himself from extreme sans-culottes and openly opposed the enragésand followers of Hébert, whose newspaper was still voicing violent popular demands. At the end of September Danton took his children and new wife to his country house in Arcis-sur-Aube, seemingly retiring from politics. Hébert, meanwhile, was prominent in the Commune, supported by the Cordeliers Club, and still attending Jacobin meetings. Robespierre was caught up in the strife between Jacobin followers of Danton and Jacobin followers of Hébert. He struggled to keep the club together, but his own attendance declined, perhaps through ill health, or because of his engrossing responsibilities on the Committee of Public Safety. When he did speak at the Jacobins, he addressed the subject of atheism, insisting that this was one of the most fearsome hidden enemies menacing the Revolution.
Robespierre had long opposed atheism and anti-clericalism. On the day that the National Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris in 1789, he had noticed with interest, and perhaps optimism, tricolour cockades on the cassocks of clergymen lining the route. Later, back in Arras on holiday in 1791, he was dismayed to realise that every parish priest was a potential agent of the counter-revolution. When a large number of recalcitrant priests were murdered during the September massacres of 1792, he showed no regret. But a year later he had had enough: ‘Whoever tries to stop the saying of Mass is a worse fanatic than the priest who says it,’ he told the surprised Jacobins on 21 November (1 Frimaire). Robespierre thought atheism in a public man or legislator nothing short of insanity. He quoted Voltaire: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’
It will be said, perhaps, that I am a narrow-minded man, a prejudiced person, a fanatic. As I have already said, I do not speak as a private individual, or as a systematic philosopher, but as a representative of the people. Atheism is aristocratic. The conception of a great Being who watches over oppressed innocence, and punishes successful crime, is democratic through and through … I have been a poor sort of Catholic ever since my College days; but I have never cooled in my friendship for, or failed in my championship of, my fellow men. Indeed, I have only grown more wedded to the moral and political ideas that I have expressed … The French people pins its faith, not on its priests, nor on any superstition, or any ceremony, but on worship as such – that is to say, upon the conception of an incomprehensible power, which is at once a source of confidence to the virtuous and of terror to the criminal.79
Robespierre reminded the Jacobins that he had raised his voice against atheism once before at their tribune. ‘There is nothing superstitious in using the name of the Deity. I believe, myself, in those eternal principles on which human weakness reposes, before it starts on the path of virtue,’ he had said in spring 1792.80 He regretted nothing. Now he returned to the topic from a position of much greater power.
Robespierre’s outburst was precipitated by the proselytising atheism of Hébert’s faction, especially that of the procurator of the Paris Commune, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette. A few weeks earlier, the Archbishop of Paris, an old man named Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel, had been persuaded to proceed to the Convention with an entourage of pro-revolutionary clergymen, and renounce his belief in God at the bar. To loud applause he laid his staff and Episcopal ring before the Convention and declared that he recognised no form of national worship, except that of liberty and equality. Soon afterwards Chaumette obtained a decree that closed all the churches of Paris and placed priests under stricter surveillance. These measures were widely imitated throughout France. Meanwhile Hébert set about organising a new kind of devotional ceremony. He was close to a printer named Antoine François Momoro, whose wife agreed to dress up provocatively as the Goddess of Reason. On 20 Brumaire (10 November), seated high on the altar of what had once been the Cathedral of Notre-Dame but was now the Temple of Reason, she received her worshippers with an intimate kiss. When he heard, Robespierre was disgusted. He considered the recent vogue for flamboyant de-Christianisation gratuitously offensive and was convinced it would both exacerbate the civil war and alienate neutral foreign powers. Astutely, he pointed out that atheism must not become a religion in itself and argued passionately for liberty of worship. He agreed that it was important to keep priests under surveillance and to appropriate Church wealth for the nation, but he wanted anti-Christian violence stigmatised, not encouraged by tasteless atheistic ceremonies. ‘Five years of Revolution directed against the priests has left them powerless,’ he assured the Jacobins.81 The real danger was no longer religious fanaticism, but political intrigue. The Girondin faction had been destroyed, but another had already replaced it. Robespierre turned on Hébert and his friends to unmask them: ‘They want our jobs … Fine, let them have them,’ he declared for rhetorical effect. Cries of ‘No! No! Stay where you are!’ echoed around him as he proceeded to question their dedication:
I should like to see them, [pointing at Hébert and his supporters] day and night probing the wounds of the state, studying the needs of the people, and devoting their whole life to the national welfare … It is not merely patriotism, or enthusiasm, or an ingrained love of freedom that sustains our efforts; it is reason, which will make the Republic immortal; where reason reigns, the people is sovereign; and such an empire is indestructible.82
One of the problems, one of the sources of his tremendous irritation with Hébert, was that Robespierre was planning to design some novel religious ceremonies for the new Republic. Hébert had stolen his thunder with a louche and ridiculous spectacle. Robespierre himself was hoping to achieve more pious and constructive effects: the worship of the Supreme Being – a vague but benign otherworldly presence – that would raise the level of human conduct and moral aspiration, not lower it to the level of an orgy. In his private life, Robespierre could certainly be priggish. But his views on religion are not an example of priggishness. He thought Hébert’s approach irresponsible because it squandered a valuable opportunity to institute a new system of theistic morality that would benefit the poor. Atheism, he argued, is the preserve of an elite: ‘when the conception of God comes to be attacked, the attack will not proceed from the popular instinct, but from the rich and the privileged’, he warned.83
The day that Robespierre lectured the Jacobins on God, 1 Frimaire (21 November), was also the day that Danton returned to Paris. No one knows exactly why: perhaps after five years at the centre of the Revolution he simply could not stay away, or maybe friends in Paris persuaded him to return. As soon as he entered the Jacobin Club, Hébert tried to have him expelled. When the Girondins had tried to do the same to Robespierre in 1792, Danton had leapt to his defence. Now Robespierre returned the favour. He did so in measured terms, so it was possible to hear notes of criticism within the overarching message of support. He made a point of mentioning that Danton had misjudged the treacherous General Dumouriez (so, at the time, had Robespierre himself, but this he omitted to mention). Danton had also been less than enthusiastic in pursuing Brissot and the other Girondins, his friend reminded the Jacobins, but he was definitely not a traitor. Without this carefully modulated defence, Danton might have been excluded from the Jacobins. But instead, when Robespierre concluded his speech, the president of the club embraced Danton and welcomed him back amid loud applause. After this slightly stilted scene of reconciliation, Danton, Robespierre and their old friend Camille Desmoulins joined forces against Hébert’s faction. The Girondins had not been dead two months, but the Jacobins had already found a new enemy to fight. This time they were fighting against, not with, the Commune and the mob. Marat’s heart was swinging in its urn above the hall of the Cordeliers; it is difficult to guess which side he would have been on had he lived to see the Cordeliers turn on Danton.
On 14 Frimaire (4 December) the Convention passed a law designed to further strengthen and centralise the revolutionary government.84 The new law made the Convention ‘the sole centre of the impulse of government’, and it brought public power throughout the country – departments, districts and local communes at the lowest level – under the direct control of the Committee of Public Safety; locally elected administrators now became ‘national agents’ and the militant surveillance committees that had sprung up nationwide to defend republican principles and enforce the Law of Suspects found themselves integrated into a newly hierarchical system of authority. The representatives-on-mission were systematically recalled and replaced with administrators rigorously vetted by the government. From this point no one, anywhere, was allowed to raise a private army, impose taxation, or deviate from national policy – the days when representatives-on-mission could act unchecked in the provinces were over. Meanwhile, popular assemblies in Paris’s forty-eight sections were suddenly answerable to the Convention over and above the municipal commune. In effect, the Law of 14 Frimaire was an iron-fisted clamp-down on all activism that was not directly sanctioned by the Committee of Public Safety.
Despite the draconian Law of Frimaire, Camille Desmoulins set off on a new course of activism. He started a newspaper called Le Vieux Cordelier (The Old Cordelier) in memory of the Cordeliers Club as it had been before Hébert and his ultra-revolutionists took it over. The paper was dedicated to both Robespierre and Danton, ‘two friends of the editors’. Robespierre read the proofs of the first issue, which appeared on 15 Frimaire (5 December). Camille’s paper was a call for clemency. Under the Law of Suspects, the prisons of Paris were crammed full of ordinary men and women. It was time, Camille announced in his paper, to open the prisons. Recent news from the front line was good, the Republic had repelled its foreign enemies, the Terror had served its purpose – let it end. Clemency got a rapturous response. The crowd grabbed copies of Le Vieux Cordelieras they came off the press. Camille, who had roused his audience in the Palais Royal gardens and defined for them the meaning of the revolutionary cockade in 1789, was working his magic again – this time to end the violence he had once incited so passionately. He had never been a cautious person. Feeling himself protected by both Robespierre and Danton, who strongly supported the move towards clemency, and emboldened by the public’s enthusiastic response to his paper, Camille went further: in issue three he dared to call the Revolutionary Tribunal into question, and to hope complete liberty of the press might soon be restored. This time Robespierre had not seen the proofs. Issue four, fifteen days, one and a half revolutionary weeks, later, was a direct appeal to him:
Oh! My dear Robespierre! It is you whom I address here … Oh, my old school friend, whose eloquent discourses posterity will read! Remind yourself of the lessons of history and philosophy: love is stronger, more lasting than fear; admiration and religion are born of generosity; acts of clemency are the ladder of pride by which members of the Committee of Public Safety can elevate themselves to the sky (the Roman Tertullian tells us this); they will never reach it through paths of blood.85
Not content with asking Robespierre to redirect the policy of the Committee of Public Safety – a dangerous and perhaps impossible undertaking – Camille went on to suggest that his friend had already publicly indicated willingness to do this. It would be wrong of him, Camille recklessly implied, to renege on such good intentions.
It is true that on 30 Frimaire (20 December) Robespierre had raised the possibility of forming a Committee of Justice to examine some of the more contentious arrests under the Law of Suspects. Camille seized on this and called for something more dramatic: a Committee of Clemency. Let the prisons open and the Terror resolve itself in love and reconciliation. He knew he would be accused of being reactionary (or excessively moderate), so he evoked Marat, arguing unconvincingly that at this point in the Revolution, his own extreme clemency was the equivalent of Marat’s extreme violence.86 Robespierre had already warned him obliquely to stop being ‘so versatile’. Robespierre’s friend the printer Léopold Nicolas had warned him too: ‘Camille, you seem very close to the guillotine.’87 But Camille quipped back, ‘Nicolas, you seem very close to a fortune. It is only a year since you dined on baked apples, but here you are printer to the State.’ He was a man of great boyish charm – seemingly still at school, wisecracking in the playground and showing off his knowledge of classical literature. His wife Lucile adored him: ‘Let him save the country in his own way,’ she said, covering the mouth of a friend who was counselling caution.88
In the Jacobin Club on 18 Nivôse (7 January), Robespierre finally lost his temper with Camille. The Jacobins, as expected, were critical of Camille’s moderation – it had nothing at all in common with Marat’s revolutionary extremism so far as they could see. Cheekily, Camille offered to burn issue three of Le Vieux Cordelier as long as his forthcoming number five was read. Robespierre apologised for him, telling the club to regard him as an unthinking child who had fallen into bad company, ‘There is no need to expel Camille. We will burn his pamphlet.’89 Camille, so fond of, and so good at, repartee, could not resist: ‘Burning is not an answer,’ he retorted. This, famously, was Rousseau’s response when the Parlement of Paris burnt his novel Émile. Camille knew exactly what Rousseau and his works meant to Robespierre. He had quoted Rousseau against his friend once before, when they had a public tiff in 1791. It was infinitely more dangerous to do so again now. Any trace of amusement left the Incorruptible’s lips; any glimmer of indulgence in his weak green eyes disappeared. He might not have been Camille’s equal at repartee, but he was so much better at anger: ‘What! You still try to justify your aristocratic works! Understand this, Camille, that were you not Camille, there would be no indulgence for you. You have bad intentions. Your citation: Burning is not an answer! Is it applicable here?’90
Even Camille could see he had gone too far. He started to panic. Falling back on their long-standing connection, he said to Robespierre: ‘You criticise me here, but was I not in your home? Did I not give you my proofs to read, and solicit your help and advice in the name of friendship?’91 This could only make things worse by putting Robespierre on the defensive in front of the Jacobins. ‘You did not show me all your proofs; I only saw the first two. Not wishing to be involved in a quarrel of any kind, I preferred not to read the rest. If I had read them, I would have been accused of dictating them.’ Danton intervened to try and limit the damage. He urged Camille to accept Robespierre’s chastisement, it was well meant. Danton may or may not have believed in Robespierre’s good intentions, but he wanted to close the damaging row. It was obvious that Robespierre genuinely cared for Camille; it was equally obvious that the Incorruptible might well pride himself on sacrificing a personal friend to the Revolution. Until now, Robespierre had only sacrificed his enemies. Perhaps Danton had some inkling that this was about to change.
The following evening Fabre d’Églantine was at the club when the discussion of Camille’s Le Vieux Cordelier resumed. Despite the success of his revolutionary calendar, Fabre was feeling very nervous because his involvement in a financial scandal concerning the colonial East India Company had recently become public. As Desmoulins again came under attack, Fabre got up to leave. Robespierre noticed and turned on him as well: ‘As for this fellow, who never appears without a lorgnette in his hand, and is so clever at expounding theatrical plots, let him explain himself here, and we will see how he comes out of it.’92 That lorgnette really irritated Robespierre. Fabre had an ostentatious habit of sitting in the Jacobins or the Convention and surveying the proceedings as though he was at the theatre. Perhaps he just wanted to remind everyone that he had once been an actor denied civil status under the Old Regime. Robespierre – egocentrically – had another explanation. He suspected that Fabre was parodying his own habit of fixing the audience through eyeglasses that he moved up and down on his forehead while speaking at the tribune. If this was what Fabre was doing, he must have been as foolish as he was foppish, since the time when it was safe to poke fun at Robespierre was gone. Stopped in his tracks skulking out of the club, Fabre heard cries of ‘Guillotine him!’ and fled as the Jacobins voted to strike his name off their register.
On 23 Nivôse (12 January) the Committee of Public Safety ordered Fabre’s arrest on charges of corruption and forgery in connection with the East India Company. The original French East India Company (Compagnie des Indes) went bankrupt in 1769 under the Old Regime. But it was relaunched under royal patronage in 1785 and enjoyed a lucrative trade monopoly. Early in the Revolution this monopoly was cancelled in the name of liberty, but the Company continued to thrive regardless. It even managed to evade the Legislative Assembly’s attempt to impose stringent taxation on transferable stock after the fall of the monarchy in 1792. In fact the Girondin ministers had connived in this evasion, believing as they did that prosperous foreign trade was essential to the modern republic they envisaged for France. However, with the proscription of the Girondin deputies in June 1793, the Company had lost its protection, and the Convention charged it with profiteering, sealed its warehouses and forced it into liquidation. Fabre was vocal in these debates and suggested that the Company’s attempts to evade taxation had been inspired by foreign enemies – Prime Minister Pitt in particular. Meanwhile a group of speculators bought up falling shares in the Company, anticipating that certain interested members of the Convention would force through a decree that would cause the share price to rise before the Company finally went into liquidation. Fabre managed to get himself tangled up in this scam. And through Fabre, Danton was possibly implicated.
Fabre was thrown out of the Jacobins on 19 Nivôse (8 January), and two days later Camille was struck off too. Robespierre, having convinced his fellow Jacobins to opt for censure, now supported Camille’s expulsion:
You can see in Camille’s writings revolutionary principles side by side with the maxims of a thoroughly pernicious reaction (or moderation). In one passage he raises the courage of patriots, in another he feeds the hopes of aristocrats … He is a fantastic mixture of truth and falsehood, of statesmanship and absurdity, of sensible ideas and of selfish chimerical designs. In my view, Camille and Hébert are equally wrong … I assure all faithful members of the Mountain [Robespierre’s Jacobin supporters] that victory lies within our grasp. There are only a few serpents left for us to crush [applause and cries of ‘we will crush them’]. Let us not trouble about this or that individual, but only about the country.93
There is no reason to think he spoke in bad faith. He thought the Terror was still needed to control the threat of counter-revolution. Against the violence of Hébert and the Commune, Camille and Danton had launched a cry for clemency. Robespierre thought treading the middle ground between these two extremes more prudent. He was irritable, tired and unwell – Camille and Fabre (for different reasons) had annoyed him – but he was capable of setting such personal feelings aside to concentrate on what he believed best for the Revolution. ‘Let us not trouble about this or that individual, but only about the country’ is a formula as admirable as it is chilling. Robespierre had no intention of defending Camille simply because he was an old school friend, which does not mean he felt easy at the looming sacrifice of his former friends. Soon after the public row with Camille, he collapsed, was ill intermittently for the rest of the month, and then between 22 Pluviôse (10 February) and 22 Ventôse (12 March) scarcely left the Duplay household. In this state of nervous strain he called Saint-Just back to Paris to help him. Saint-Just had gone on mission to the army, but Robespierre’s need took precedence.
Saint-Just, who loved the countryside, much preferred being sent out on mission to being cooped up in Paris pacing the short distance back and forth between the Jacobin Club and the Convention. He went in the month Nivôse to the Army of the Rhine, accompanied by his friend and fellow Jacobin Philippe Lebas, who had recently married Élisabeth Duplay. This small travelling party, like the one that had accompanied Augustin Robespierre earlier in the year, managed to combine business and pleasure. Saint-Just was a charming companion, reading aloud passages from Molière and Rabelais, singing Italian arias to pass the time, and fastidiously attentive to the needs of his friend’s new and pregnant wife when she was coach-sick. Arriving in Strasbourg, he set about punishing counter-revolutionary conspirators and taxing the rich to relieve the sufferings of the poor. The soldiers did not like him; they found him too severe, unwilling, as he was, to recognise any form of punishment short of death. Saint-Just’s second mission took him to Lille and its environs. Here he was even more severe, initiating draconian measures against all former nobles still living in the area. He was still away on 17 Pluviôse (5 February) when Robespierre, shortly before collapsing completely, delivered to the Convention one of the most important speeches of his life: Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans l’administration intérieure de la République (A Report on the Principles of Political Morality which should guide the Convention in the Interior Administration of the Republic).
In this speech Robespierre developed the personal revolutionary creed that he had privately professed on the eve of his election to the Committee of Public Safety. He asks, ‘What is our aim?’ and answers: ‘the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, and the reign of that eternal justice whose laws are engraved, not on marble or stone, but in the hearts of every man – of the slave who forgets them, and the tyrant who denies their truth’. Then he goes further, outlining the kind of morality that will obtain in his ideal republic:
In our country, we want to substitute morality for egoism, honesty for love of honour, principles for conventions, duties for decorum, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, the fear of vice for the dread of unimportance: we want to substitute pride for insolence, magnanimity for vanity, the love of glory for the love of gold: we want to replace good company by good character, intrigue by merit, wit by genius, brilliance by truth, dull debauchery by the charm of happiness. For the pettiness of the so-called great we would substitute the full stature of humanity; in place of an easy-going, frivolous and discontented people, we would create one that is happy, powerful and stout-hearted, and replace the vices and follies of the monarchy by the virtues and astounding achievements of the Republic.94
There it was, Robespierre’s vision of France, a prim society of patriotic, uncorrupted, serious equals. In his republic there would be only innocent pleasures, no frivolous distractions, no debauchery. No one would value money above honour, and honour itself would be defined as personal integrity, just as Rousseau said it should be long before 1789. The problem was that even after five tense and traumatic revolutionary years, Robespierre’s dream was still a very long way off. For this reason, he explained, the Terror must continue:
If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in a time of revolution is both virtue and terror – virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue has no power … Terror is merely justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue, and results from the application of democracy to the most pressing needs of the country.95
In the hands of despots, Robespierre argued, terror was a weapon of oppression. But terror wielded by virtue was the refuge of the poor. Back in 1792 he had advised the Jacobins not to sponsor the development of a new kind of musket that could fire twenty rounds a minute: what might happen if aristocrats got hold of it and turned it on the people? Now he made the opposite case, arguing that the weapons of tyranny must be appropriated by the people and used in their name. Specifically, the people, so long oppressed, must seize the weapon of terror and turn it against the Republic’s external and internal enemies. Robespierre had always been preoccupied by internal enemies: even before he left Arras in 1789 he had given one of his pamphlets the title Les ennemis de la patrie démasqués (Enemies of the Country Unmasked). Since the Revolution began, however, these internal enemies had multiplied dramatically. Disguised and insinuating, they were not always easy to recognise, but Robespierre had been quick to spot the most prominent: General Lafayette, Mirabeau, Brissot, General Dumouriez. Now he identified the two opposing factions – Hébert’s proponents of extreme violence, and Danton and Camille’s advocates of extreme indulgence – as the new internal enemies of the French people. Demanding a vote of confidence in the Convention for the Committee of Public Safety, doing its best to save the Revolution, he issued a double warning to its critics: those who thought the Committee too harsh, and those who thought it not nearly harsh enough.
Robespierre’s speech was interrupted throughout by loud applause. Afterwards it was printed and widely distributed by the Convention and the Jacobins. Three days later he retired from public view. A rumour went round that he had been poisoned. When he reappeared in March (Ventôse) he said: ‘Would to God that my physical strength were the equal of my moral fortitude! I might then, this very day, confound the traitors and call down national vengeance on every guilty head.’96 If his illness was genuine, if the Revolution had strained him to breaking point, his instinct was still to turn his suffering to political advantage. He was frailer than many of the other revolutionaries – a much less powerful speaker than Danton, slower than Camille Desmoulins, more circuitous than Saint-Just – but none of them had sharper political instincts. While Robespierre was ill, or possibly pretending to be ill, Saint-Just rushed back to Paris. He reiterated the message of his friend’s widely praised speech, but, unlike the Incorruptible, he was alarmingly succinct: ‘The republic is built on the ruins of everything anti-republican. There are three sins against the republic: one is to be sorry for State prisoners; another is to be opposed to the rule of virtue; and the third is to be opposed to the Terror.’97 By these criteria, the friends of Hébert and the friends of Danton were all republican sinners. As usual, Saint-Just thought there was only one appropriate punishment: death.
Robespierre had asked for a vote of confidence in the Committee of Public Safety to pursue the new enemies on his list. But the Committee’s members were far from agreed on how to save the Revolution. Collot d’Herbois, for example, thought Paris could be placated by an alliance between the Jacobins and the Cordeliers (now led by Hébert), if the Jacobins could be persuaded to abandon Robespierre’s censorious attitude to extreme violence at this point. Collot was even taking up the cause of the disgraced terrorist and ex-representative-on-mission Jean Baptiste Carrier. Carrier had been in charge of the repression in Lyon and Nantes. Among other atrocities, he had instituted a new version of republican marriage, which involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them. When he heard of this, Robespierre, appalled, insisted on recalling Carrier to the capital.
On 14 Ventôse (4 March) Carrier proposed, and Hébert seconded, a motion at the Cordeliers Club to declare a state of insurrection. The motion was carried and the club hung black crêpe over its copy of the Declaration of Rights. Plans were afoot to surround the Convention and demand the expulsion of Robespierre and his allies, a repetition of the insurrection that had brought down the Girondins on 2 June 1793. But Hébert’s insurrection never materialised: only two of the city’s forty-eight sections were prepared to rise. Nor did the Commune rise. There are many possible explanations. Hébert was not Danton – it is not a simple task to rouse and direct a violent crowd, even in a time of revolution. Danton had a special gift for it – something to do with his astoundingly deep, strong voice and the breadth of his physical frame. Moreover, many of the poor in Paris thought Robespierre and his allies could and would help them, which diminished the appeal of Hébert’s promises to intervene even more radically in the economy. Others were too jaded after five tumultuous years to take to the streets again. And some were too frightened of falling foul of the police in these brutal times – the centralising Law of Frimaire had done its work, and there were considerably more obstacles to insurrection now than there had been earlier in the Revolution.
Robespierre returned to work on 22 Ventôse (12 March), along with Couthon, who had also been ill. The next day the Jacobins gave them a rapturous welcome. Robespierre, seizing the moment, immediately denounced Hébert and his faction, who were arrested later that evening on the general charge of conspiracy. Twenty of them were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal seven days later and, by application of the three-day rule, which Hébert himself had supported when it was introduced to secure the conviction of the Girondins, all but one were found guilty and sent to the guillotine. In the short interval between the arrest and trial of the Hébertistes, a delegation arrived at the bar of the Convention, including someone who sang a song of congratulations to the deputies and their Committee of Public Safety. Danton objected – he proposed that no one should be allowed to sing songs in the Convention, such behaviour was disrespectful and inappropriate. No one knew it at the time, but this uncharacteristically prim intervention was destined to be Danton’s last. There were already some signals suggesting that, after the Hébertistes, his own faction might be next to fall. But Danton still believed that the Committee and Tribunal he had brought into being – not to mention the Convention that owed its existence to his part in the fall of the monarchy – would never dare strike at him.
Whatever his role in bringing about the downfall of the Hébertistes – his illness and absence from public life makes it impossible to tell precisely – Robespierre benefited enormously from their demise. Besides the Cordeliers Club, the War Ministry was the main source of Hébert’s support, and it had distributed his Le Père Duchesne to the troops, greatly boosting the newspaper’s circulation and influence. Robespierre’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, Carnot, had for months been working to erode the power of the War Ministry, but soon after the executions of the Hébertistes, all six of the ministries inherited from the failed constitutional monarchy were radically restructured, purged and downgraded to commissions. On 12 Germinal (1 April) the Convention, following the Committee’s recommendation, agreed to the formation of twelve new executive commissions, which Robespierre succeeded in staffing with personnel loyal to himself. There were only two exceptions: the Army Movement Commission, and the Finance Commission. The rest were effectively under Robespierre’s control. Once again he displayed his sharp political instincts, expanding his sphere of control through patronage. In this respect he far surpassed his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety. Where they tended to operate as isolated individuals, carving up the Committee’s great power among themselves, specialising and working alone, Robespierre – perhaps by instinct, perhaps as a result of his experience in the Jacobin Club – relied on a loyal entourage. To an outsider it looked like a faction. To him it was simply a network of like-minded people he could trust.
Another consequence of the downfall of the Hébertistes concerned the Commune. Hébert had been powerful within it, and after his execution his superior, the atheist Chaumette who had closed the Parisian churches, was arrested. At this point Robespierre moved to remodel the Commune, specifically by doing away with the municipal elections through which its delegates were chosen by the Paris sections. In the autumn of 1792, after the collapse of the constitutional monarchy, Robespierre had exerted a powerful influence in the Commune, and despite its recent domination by the Hébertistes he still had friends there. Some were representatives from his own Paris Section des Piques (Section of Pikes), one was a former priest, Jacques-Claude Bernard, whom the Commune had deputed to escort the king to the guillotine; others included a clock-maker, a bookseller and a manufacturer of coloured prints. Chaumette was replaced by a very close associate of Robespierre, Claude Payan, originally an artillery officer from Valence, who set about developing Robespierrist support inside the Commune. Payan and his brother had come to Robespierre’s attention during the federalist revolt, when they played a prominent role in rallying the Jacobins of the Midi in support of the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. Payan, like Saint-Just, was almost ten years younger than Robespierre. An ardent believer in the power of propaganda, he began a paper, the Antifédéraliste, which became the Committee of Public Safety’s official publication. An ardent moralist, as well, he hoped Robespierre would ‘centralise public opinion and make it uniform’.98
There were also changes to the National Guard that indirectly benefited Robespierre after the fall of the Hébertistes. The sans-culottes’ Revolutionary Army (one of the instruments of the Terror which Danton had first suggested in 1793) was disbanded on 7 Germinal (27 March) following the execution of its commander in chief as an Hébertiste. Its all-important artillery units, however, were kept intact and added to those already under the control of François Hanriot, head of the National Guard and Robespierre’s close friend. Hanriot had previously displayed his loyalty to the Jacobin faction in the Convention when he used his troops to surround the Tuileries and arrest the Girondin deputies back in June. Now with the artillery units under his command Hanriot had even more power at his disposal; he effectively controlled the armed forces of Paris.
*
On the evening of 2 Germinal (22 March), Robespierre retraced his steps to the Marais Quarter, where he had lived for his first two years in Paris. He went to a dinner at which Danton was also a guest. Robespierre seemed silent and agitated. Bold as ever, Danton asked him directly why there were still so many victims of the Terror: ‘Royalists and conspirators I can understand, but what about those who are innocent?’ ‘And who says anyone innocent has perished?’ Robespierre retorted coldly.99 Danton asked him if they could put aside their private differences and think instead of the future of France. He should have known that the Incorruptible already thought of nothing else. If the reports of what passed between them are accurate, Danton tried to talk to Robespierre man to man – tried, as he often did in both his personal and political life, to compromise. But Robespierre never favoured compromise. His principles were paramount; everything, even his conscience, had to be tailored to fit them. To him, the idea that he and Danton were similar kinds of men, who might mutually agree to set their differences aside, was anathema. ‘At this moment, I am you,’ Robespierre had written when Danton’s wife died. A little over a year later, there was no trace of identification left. ‘I suppose that a man of your moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment,’ he said sarcastically to Danton. ‘And I suppose that you would be annoyed if none did,’ came the cutting reply. Robespierre got up and left. Danton’s eyes filled with tears.100
Later that evening, Robespierre allowed the Committee to add Danton’s name to the list of the proscribed. Before, he had violently opposed it – now he agreed. His signature on the warrant for the arrest of Danton and his followers was tiny: eleven tight letters and half a neat line underlining them – emphatic, or perhaps just resigned. Robespierre could lose his temper. He had lost it with Camille and now he had lost it with Danton. But he was not the kind to send people to the guillotine because he had lost his temper. He had reached the firm conclusion that his vision of the Republic and the conditions for its survival had parted company with Danton’s. Soon afterwards, Camille went round to the Duplay household, but came back to the flat he and Lucile still lived in, upstairs from Danton, saying: ‘I am done for: I have been to call on Robespierre, and he has refused to see me.’101 There were still people loyal to Danton in the Convention and throughout the city. One of them came to tell him the warrant had been signed and he must flee to avoid arrest. Allegedly he refused, saying, ‘One does not take one’s country with one on the soles of one’s boots,’ a poignant remark from someone who had his own understanding of patriotism.102 Danton’s patriotism was every bit as passionate as Robespierre’s – but fatally different in other respects. He still kept saying over and over, ‘They will not touch me.’103
Danton was wrong. He was arrested in the middle of the night after a joint meeting of the Committee of Public Safety and the larger, but less powerful, Committee of General Security. Camille Desmoulins, Fabre and other close associates of Danton were also arrested. They were placed in solitary confinement in the Luxembourg gaol, very close to the Cordeliers Club and the building in which Danton and Camille had lived since 1789. As Danton arrived, another inmate, Thomas Paine, famous author of The Rights of Man, came up to greet him. Paine had made a distinguished contribution to both British politics and the American Revolution. He had come to Paris hoping for similar success, but after befriending the Girondins his hopes ended in imprisonment. Danton’s English was better than Paine’s French. He said, ‘Mr Paine, you have had the happiness of pleading in your country a cause which I shall no longer plead in mine.’
In the Convention the next morning, Saint-Just read a report against the Dantonists. He stood stiffly at the tribune, his text held motionless in one untrembling hand, while he used the other to emphasise his main points with a cutting gesture that reminded his audience of the guillotine: ‘If you save Danton you save a personality – someone you have known and admired; you pay respect to individual talent, but you ruin the attempt in which you have so nearly succeeded. For the sake of a man you will sacrifice all the new liberty that you are giving to the whole world.’104 He ended devastatingly with: ‘The words we have spoken will never be forgotten on earth.’ The Convention sat in stunned silence. Saint-Just’s speech drew on a series of hurried notes that Robespierre had jotted down for him: notes which still survive, and which show beyond any shadow of doubt the depth of the Incorruptible’s complicity in the attack on his former friends.105 In the wake of recent financial scandals, the evidence against Fabre was so strong that it hardly needed special corroboration. Nevertheless, Robespierre blamed Fabre for inspiring Camille Desmoulins to publish Le Vieux Cordelier, implicitly repudiated his own involvement with the paper, and suggested it had been part of a counter-revolutionary plot approved by Danton. Moving on to Camille, Robespierre noted his vanity and vibrant imagination, which equipped him well for being Fabre’s and Danton’s henchman. He hesitated to add more – and this in itself suggests that Robespierre’s notes were sincere, however distorted and fantastical; he believed what he was writing.
On Danton, he wrote much more. Danton had once been close to General Lafayette and to Mirabeau; he had associated with Barnave and the Lameth brothers (who sided with the Feuillant reactionaries when the Jacobins split after the king’s flight to Varennes); he had tried to save Brissot and the other Girondins; he had been friends with the treacherous General Dumouriez. All these liaisons looked much more suspicious in retrospect than they had at the time. But this was not the kind of distinction Robespierre’s fevered mind now made. The notes continued: Danton had set himself to imitate Fabre’s theatrical mannerisms and had made himself ridiculous by crying at the tribune and privately in Robespierre’s presence. It is true that at the end of their last meeting Danton’s eyes filled with tears: how haunted by those tears Robespierre must have been to explain them away in such an extraordinary manner. Moreover, Robespierre went on, Danton’s reputation for patriotism was unwarranted. He had played no part in the rising that ended the monarchy on 10 August 1792; he had left Paris for Arcis before it, and on the night itself had to be dragged from his bed to attend the meeting of his section. In fact, Danton had been in the street that night and had sanctioned murder on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville; afterwards he had been to the front line and seen blood flowing. Now Robespierre, who had never personally participated in revolutionary violence, reproached him with physical cowardice. He also accused him of being fat, lecherous and indolent. There was bile and a touch of madness in this document – even Saint-Just could see that only bits of it could be incorporated into the official report.
After Saint-Just’s speech, one of the deputies broke the silence in the Convention by proposing that Danton should be heard at the bar. Robespierre moved at once to prevent this, arguing that it would be tantamount to granting Danton a privilege because of who he was. The Revolution, Robespierre insisted, was not about men, it was about principles. Danton must be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal as an ordinary prisoner and not given a special opportunity to defend himself before the Convention: ‘No! We want no privileges! No! We want no idols!’
I must add here that a particular duty is imposed on me to defend the purity of principles against the designs of intrigue. For they have tried to frighten me as well: they wanted me to think that if Danton were in danger, the menace would reach me too. They represented him to me as a man to whom I ought to adhere – as a shield that could defend me, a rampart without which I would be exposed to the darts of my enemies. I have been written to – Danton’s friends have sent me letters, they have persecuted me with their speeches. They thought the memory of an old friendship, former faith in feigned virtues, would induce me to slacken my zeal and my passion for liberty. Well, I declare that not one of these motives has made an impression on me. I declare that, were it true that Danton’s dangers were to become my own, that if they were to cause the aristocracy to take another step towards seizing me, I would not look upon that circumstance as a public calamity. What are dangers to me? My life belongs to my country, my heart is free from fears, and if I died it would be without reproach and ignominy.106
Long and rapturous applause followed Robespierre’s intervention. His speech was masterful, preaching the rigid application of impersonal principles, but in the distinctively self-referential rhetorical style that he had refined to perfection over the last five years. No one else spoke so insistently, so predictably or so protractedly about himself in the Revolution. Yet no one else could have been relied upon to put their personal feelings aside with Robespierre’s relentless commitment to what he believed was the common good. No friendship, no bribe, no pleasure, no pain could deflect him from pursuing what he saw as the people’s cause. It is true that Danton’s friends had written to him. Lucile Desmoulins’ mother had even asked him to remember the joy he had felt holding his godson Horace on his knee.107 Surely Robespierre would intervene to save Danton and Camille so they could return to their families? But it was on his ability to scrupulously set aside such feelings that the Incorruptible prided himself. He could speak about himself so often because he identified so completely with the Revolution – the two were not separate in his mind. Even more peculiarly, he was surrounded by others who also believed in this coincidence of Robespierre and the Revolution. It helped that his incorruptibility was genuine, not a fraudulent façade. Had he been implicated in a financial scandal (like Danton or Fabre), taken a bribe, indulged a streak of personal perversity (as Carrier had in Nantes), or even just been spotted, like Mirabeau, with a couple of prostitutes in the Palais Royal gardens, Robespierre’s career would have disintegrated. The strange combination of his self-centred rhetoric, clean living, clear principles and passionate political commitment made him seem like the Revolution incarnate.
The morning of 13 Germinal (2 April) was warm for the time of year, so all the windows were open as the Revolutionary Tribunal assembled at 10 a.m. to hear the Dantonists accused. They were charged with conspiring to overthrow the government (the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security, both still nominally responsible to the Convention). But these charges were far-fetched and conflated with accusations of corruption arising from the East India Company scandal. The public crowded into the vast room, its beautiful gilt ceiling and marble floor resonant of the Old Regime. Soon there was no more space, but still the people came, lining the grand staircase, pressing up around the walls of the Palais du Justice on its small island at the heart of Paris. The crowd filled the streets and quays outside and stretched back across the bridge Pont Neuf to the left and right banks of the Seine. When he spoke, Danton’s deep, booming voice rang out through the open windows like the tocsin. It is said the crowd could hear him clearly across the river. He was asked for his name and address: ‘My abode will soon be nothingness. As for my name, you will find it in the Pantheon of history.’108 When Camille was asked his age, he replied: ‘Thirty-three, same age as that sansculotte Jesus Christ.’109 It was obvious that the Dantonists were going to be defiant to the end. To try and mitigate their effect on the jury, judges and crowd, Danton and his five associates (including Camille and Fabre) were put on trial with a selection of ten other prisoners allegedly implicated in the East India Company scam. During the trial a couple more prisoners were added to further confuse matters. Everyone remembered that the Tribunal had acquitted Marat – the outcome here was not a foregone conclusion – and this may have been one of the reasons Robespierre was initially reluctant to agree to Danton’s arrest when it was first proposed in the Committee of Public Safety.
On the second day the first witness, a man named Pierre Joseph Cambon, was called. Danton looked him in the eye and said, ‘Cambon, do you really believe we are conspirators?’ Cambon could not suppress a smile. ‘Look, he’s laughing! Write it down that he laughed!’ shouted Danton, laughing himself.110 Then he began the defence that reverberated louder than the president’s bell:
You say that I have been paid, but I tell you, a man like me cannot be bought. Against your accusation – for which you cannot provide proof, not even the hint of a proof or the shadow of a witness – I pitch my entire revolutionary career. It was I who in the Jacobins kept Mirabeau. from leaving Paris. I have served long enough, and my life is a burden to me, but I will defend myself by telling you what I have done. It was I who made the pikes rise suddenly on 20 June and prevented the King’s journey to St Cloud (in 1791). The day after the Massacre of the Champ de Mars a warrant was out for my arrest. Men were sent to kill me at Arcis, but my people came and defended me. I had to flee to London, but I came back … At the Jacobins, I demanded the Republic. It was I who knew that the court was eager for war. It was I who denounced the policy of the war.111
Here he was interrupted by the question: ‘But what did you do against Brissot and his associates?’ For it was well known that whereas Robespierre had hated Brissot ever since they disagreed over the war, and had fought him to the guillotine, Danton had been less active in the fall of Brissot and his Girondin friends. ‘I told them that they were going to the scaffold,’ Danton retorted, ‘when I was a minister [for Justice] I said it to Brissot in front of the whole cabinet.’ He resumed:
It was I who prepared 10 August. You say I went to Arcis. I admit it, and I am proud of it. I went there to pass three days, to say goodbye to my mother, and to arrange my affairs because I was shortly to be in danger. I hardly slept that night. It was I who had Mandat killed [on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville] because he had given the order to fire on the people … You reproach me for being friends with Fabre d’Églantine. He is still my friend, I still think he is a good citizen as he sits here with me … With regard to those who were once my friends, I will tell you this: Marat had a volcanic character; Robespierre I have known as tenacious and firm; but I – I have served in my own way … I would embrace my worst enemy for the sake of the country, and I will give her my body if she needs the sacrifice.112
Danton was turning the tide of the crowd – its currents responded to the pull of his powerful voice. It was exhausting work and he had to pause briefly to rest. But when he did so, the president of the Tribunal, a friend of Robespierre’s named Martial Joseph Armand Herman, immediately called him to order and warned him to defend himself with proof, not rhetoric. More quietly Danton replied: ‘That a man should be violent is wrong I know, unless it is for the public good, and such violence has often been mine … If I have been excessive here, it is because I have found myself accused with such intolerable injustice. [Then, raising his voice again] As for you Saint-Just, you will have to answer to posterity’.113
Saint-Just was out of earshot. He was in the Convention preparing a motion even more stringent than the three-day rule that ended the trial of the Girondins. He proposed that ‘any prisoner who resists or insults national justice shall at once be debarred from pleading his case’.114 The intimidated deputies gave their consent. In addition to all their other anxieties, they were frightened by a rumoured revolt in the Luxembourg gaol where the Dantonists had been held after their arrest. Robespierre suggested that Saint-Just’s report, and the new decree, should be taken to the Tribunal and read aloud to the audience there. On the last morning of the trial this was duly done, and the prisoners were prevented from finishing their defence. The trial was summarily closed. Danton roared, ‘We are going to be judged without being heard.’115 Camille tore to pieces the text of the speech he had intended to make; and to avoid further trouble the prisoners were hustled out of the court before they could hear the sentence – which was death.
Danton spent most of the last twenty-four hours of his life trying to calm Camille, who was crying like a distraught child and asking distractedly, ‘Will they kill my wife too?’ She was only twenty-three. He wrote her a final long letter that ended:
Despite my torment, I believe that there is a God. My blood will efface my sins, my human weaknesses, and God will reward what is good in me – my virtues and my love of liberty. I will see you again one day, oh Lucile! … Adieu, Lucile, my life, my soul, my divinity on this earth … I feel the shore of life retreating before me. I still see Lucile. I see you. My crossed arms grip you. My bound hands embrace you. My severed head rests upon you. I am going to die.116
Lucile never received this. She had already been arrested and accused of trying to incite the rumoured revolt in the Luxembourg gaol. A week later she did indeed follow her husband to the guillotine, as he had feared.
By the time the carts and an armed guard came for the Dantonists, late on the afternoon of 16 Germinal (5 April), Camille was more composed. The condemned saw the beauty of Paris for the last time: the soft golden light reflected from the tall windows of the houses on the right bank of the Seine; the lilac and the cherry blossoms in the Tuileries gardens; the Café de l’École where Danton had sat before the Revolution, wooing his first wife and dreaming of life as a lawyer. Then they turned into the rue Saint-Honoré, and there in the street was an artist, daring to draw the violence that was still in Danton’s face. Danton only lost control of himself, ranting and raving violently, when they came level with number 366, the Duplay household, shuttered tight against the crowd as it had been on the day Louis XVI went past on his way to execution. Somewhere inside – silent, alone – was Robespierre.
One eyewitness saw the prisoners passing along the rue Saint-Honoré, and ran back afterwards through the Tuileries gardens to stand at the railings, from where it was possible to get a good view over the Place de la Révolution. There stood the guillotine, waiting for the prisoners beside the statue of liberty. By now it was nearly 6 p.m. and the sunset had turned the plaster statue red. Danton was the last to die. His shadow was immense. He told the executioner to be sure to show his head to the crowd, and he muttered, ‘I shall never see her again … no weakness.’117 He might have meant his new wife, or some other woman who, for whatever reason, meant the world to him. More likely he meant France: the country he loved passionately and had long been prepared to die for. He had already begged pardon of man and God for his part in establishing the Revolutionary Tribunal that sent him to his death. And in the last few moments, another eyewitness, closer to the scene, saw him scan the crowd before lying down beneath the guillotine. She saw someone in that crowd catch his gaze, then a hand raised quickly in the priestly gesture of sacramental absolution.