TEN
Amid all these pleasures, we were drawing near to the month of May 1789, laughing and dancing our way to the precipice. Thinking people were content to talk of abolishing all the abuses. France, they said, was about to be re-born. The word ‘revolution’ was never uttered . . . Had anyone dared to use it he would have been thought mad . . .
—Mémoires, Mme. de La Tour du Pin
“NEVER HAD PEOPLE BEEN SO PLEASURE-SEEKING as in the spring of 1789,” 1 wrote Mme. de La Tour du Pin, a woman of the nobility closely associated with the court of Louis XVI. “For the poor,” she went on to admit, “the winter had been very hard, but there was no concern for the misery of the people. There were races at Vincennes, where the horses of the Duc d’Orléans46 ran against those of the Comte d’Artois.”47 It was after the last of these races (in April), she added, “that we found ourselves in the midst of the first riot, the one which destroyed the worthy Réveillon’s wallpaper factory.”
The previous summer had been disastrous for the harvests, while the winter that followed had indeed been a particularly harsh one, where cold, hunger and discontent all linked hands against the government. Yet who could then have foretold what lay ahead for France, for Europe: the most devastating cataclysm in the whole of Europe’s past history; and, indeed, its future until the coming of the First World War in 1914 and Lenin in 1917? From the earthquake of the revolution (six years) through the tornado of Napoleon (another twenty) to the Restoration would embrace just the lifetime of one generation. A roué like the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) could easily have been born into the indulgent embrace of the ancien régime of Louis XV, and live almost to see out Napoleon; while another roué, but also a great and supple statesman like Talleyrand (1754–1838) would survive to witness the restoration of the Bourbons—and the bourgeois triumph of Louis-Philippe. But what events they saw! What a generation!
BY 1786 FRANCE’S COSTLY FOREIGN POLICY, particularly her support for the American War of Independence, had saddled an already shaky economy with ponderous debts. Some radical fiscal reforms were clearly essential. A new finance minister, Loménie de Brienne, aged fiftynine, former Archbishop of Toulouse and Marie-Antoinette’s man (as opposed to the King’s) replaced the unsuccessful Charles de Calonne. In August 1788, in an atmosphere of growing unrest among the nobles, Brienne agreed that there should be a crisis meeting of the Estates-General in order to examine the nation’s cahiers de doléances (literally, “lists of grievances” drawn up by local government bodies). They had not met since 1614 under Louis XIII, their first meeting having been in 1302 under Philippe le Bel. Brienne’s measures also failed to resuscitate the Treasury, now on the brink of bankruptcy, and he resigned—to be consoled with promotion to cardinal. In his place came Jacques Necker (1732–1804), a highly competent Swiss banker—and, surprisingly, a Protestant, the first to fill such a high post. In desperation the French Establishment sought him out for those solid Swiss Calvinist virtues.
The King had attempted to impose taxation, which was his prerogative, but had been overruled by both the Assembly of Notables (Nobles and Clergy) and the Parlement of Paris. He then abolished the Parlement and, the following January, the hard-pressed Necker, unable to cope with France’s unprecedented national debt of 1 billion livres, persuaded him to convoke a meeting of the Estates-General that May. Though it seemed the situation had been momentarily defused, the state was simply bankrupt. There were acute food shortages, accompanied by steep rises in the price of flour and bread. The age-old spectre of famine rose up in the hard-hit provinces, and there were riots in many areas. Peasant complaints included the poll tax, salt tax, the tithe—and, not least, the exclusive rights of the nobility to hunt rabbits and game, which destroyed their crops.
When the Estates-General met at Versailles on 5 May 1789, the signs were unpromising. The King insisted on the venue, partly so it could be under his wing, but also—like so many of his forebears—because he loved hunting and did not fancy having to travel far afield from the forest; in addition, Paris was considered too inflammable. But the proximity of court life was humiliating for humbler delegates of the Commons. Moreover, it was Versailles that had manifestly cut the monarchy off from the country. The deputies of the Commons were required to be clad in sombre black and penned together in a special enclosure, while the Nobles and Clergy wore their most ostentatiously extravagant and gaudy robes. The sovereign himself “wore the robes of the Order of the Holy Ghost . . . richly embroidered and very thickly encrusted with diamonds,” observed Mme. de La Tour du Pin, but he “was not dignified in appearance. He stood badly and walked with a waddle; his movements were abrupt and lacking in grace.”2 (One wonders, had he half the presence of le grand Louis, might he yet have carried it off?)
Despite fully sharing the prevailing sense of illusion, Louis “hoped that they were about to enter a Golden Age.” An observer like young Gouverneur Morris, arriving hot from the recent revolution in America, equally noted it as a “hopeful political moment.” At the inaugural procession of the Estates at Versailles, he was impressed how Louis was cheered enthusiastically (though the Queen not at all). Immediately, however, there were political problems with the constitution of the assembly. The Nobles numbered 285, the Clergy 308, and there were 621 for the “Third Estate,” or Commons. The first two Estates (representing perhaps jointly half-a-million men) insisted on voting weighted by order of rank; the more numerous Commons, representing 25 million “common people” and having, over the feverish campaigning of the previous six months, come to recognise itself as a significant political force, demanded that voting should be by head. But there was no discussion about the crucial issues of national solvency for which the gathering had been called; meanwhile in the nation at large there was mounting discontent in both town and country.
Disenchanted, if not outraged, on 17 June the deputies of the Commons proclaimed it the “National Assembly.” The King responded by locking them out, marching off at the head of the Nobles and Clergy. An alarming division had occurred, with the monarchy manifestly siding in defence of feudal privilege and against the people. “Never had a regime so speedily committed suicide,” remarks André Maurois. The Commons promptly set up shop in a nearby covered tennis court, the famous Jeu de Paume—a scene historically depicted by David. Here the deputies swore a solemn oath, or serment, not to separate until France had a constitution “established on solid foundations.” There was talk about a constitution based on English precedents, but few had any idea what this actually meant.
At their head emerged Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, a provençale noble who had changed sides, the most feared and powerful orator of his day. A huge shambling bear of a man, with an enormous head and face ravaged by smallpox, Mirabeau claimed, “My ugliness likewise is a power.” Like many ugly men through the ages, he had surprising success with women—and an appetite to match. Although he remarked with bitterness that “there is no one at the helm,” he believed in a constitutional monarchy, and in moderation to the last. But, as a courtier came with royal orders to clear the Jeu de Paume, Mirabeau declared in resounding words: “Sir, go tell your master that we are here by the will of the people and that we shall leave here only at the point of the bayonet!” He remained an optimist almost to the end, persuading himself that, although history had “too often recounted the actions of nothing more than wild animals . . . now we are allowed to hope that we are beginning the history of man.” This was, of course, to prove somewhat over-optimistic.
At this point the King still had both the power, and the legitimacy, to have his will carried out. It was still reform, not revolution, that the people of France wanted. Now, and at various subsequent points even after the storming of the Bastille, the cataclysm could have been avoided. History might have been different if Louis had asserted his authority with more conviction. But, indecisive as ever, wavering between his genuine humanitarian instincts and the Bourbon belief in the divine right of kings, and invariably choosing the wrong moment to act, he quailed. There was also something in him that seemed to gibe at a reform movement that he could not control. The aristocracy had lost its influence; the bourgeoisie now began to want something more than just reform— though what it did not quite know until the Jacobins led the way. On 11 July, the King sacked Necker, now regarded as the people’s champion, blaming him for the civil unrest. With Necker went the last best hope of reform. Fearing national bankruptcy, the Bourse closed its doors. An empty exchequer and republican sentiment now combined.
RELENTLESSLY, EVENT FOLLOWED UPON DISASTROUS EVENT of what Thomas Carlyle categorised as the “bestial dawning of the Age of Reason.” Inevitably, it was in turbulent Paris that the violence began. On 28 April the first shots in the overture to the revolution proper were fired in the wretched east end Faubourg Saint-Antoine—just where the final combats of the Frondes had taken place against young Louis XIV. Rumours ran round that a paper manufacturer called Réveillon (the very name, meaning a reawakening, had ominous undertones) was planning to cut his workers’ wages. A symbol of conspicuous consumerism of the times, the “worthy Réveillon,” as he was regarded by the bourgeoisie, was respected as a generous employer. It was he who had supplied the special paper for Pilâtre de Rozier’s first Montgolfier balloon, and it was from his garden that de Rozier had taken off, in the crowning achievement of Louis XVI’s reign. Réveillon’s intentions appear to have been simply to lower wages in line with the drop in the price of bread, which had been fixed by the government so as to ease social pressures. But his workers saw it otherwise and rioted. As Mme. de La Tour recorded, the factory was looted and burnt out; troops intervened and opened fire, killing thirty or more. Réveillon fled for his life into the great fortress that loomed over the district, the Bastille.
The Paris authorities should have seen what was in the wind. As July began, however, all seemed quiet again in Paris. On the 13th, Mme. de La Tour sent her horses off from her house at Versailles to the country, via Paris—an indication that “we had not the slightest presentiment of what was to happen in Paris the next day.”3 Nevertheless, fierce anger had smouldered since the demise of Necker. Rioting mobs destroyed the tollgates. In quest of arms for the new civic Garde Nationale, created to counter an impending coup, they invaded city arsenals. Then, on the morning of 14 July the Invalides was targeted, and cannon and muskets taken. Attention was next turned on that most formidable arsenal of all: the Bastille.
Mme. de La Tour’s first indication of the day’s events came when her frightened concierge babbled: “They have fired the cannon of the Bastille. There has been a massacre and it is impossible to leave the city . . . the Gardes Françaises have risen with the people.”4 The outrageous Marquis de Sade, though he narrowly missed being a witness to events, seems to have played his part in stirring up the mob on returning to custody in the Bastille. According to the Governor, de Launay, he had stood at his cell window, shouting “at the top of his lungs that the prisoners were being assassinated, their throats cut, and that they must be rescued.”5 He had even used part of his “urinary equipment,” a long metal funnel, bellowing down it as a loudspeaker to get his message across to the mob outside the Bastille. De Launay urged his minister (successfully) to have de Sade transferred to the lunatic asylum at Charenton, where he would be “less of a threat to public order.” But it was too late.
On 14 July insurgents from the turbulent faubourg of Saint-Antoine marched on the Bastille. In fact, it held no more than seven prisoners, one of whom had spent twenty-three years there, and—blinded by the sun—emerged into daylight wondering whether Louis XV was still on the throne. But the ancient fortress was regarded as a symbol of royal authority. De Launay only had a mixed bag of 110 troops, but thought he was under attack. Ninety-eight in the crowd were killed by fire from the Bastille; the mob went mad. The fortress was seized, the unfortunate Governor de Launay killed and his head stuck on a pike—and the Bastille demolished stone by stone.
The day before the storming of the Bastille, there had been a foretaste of these forces with the pointless sacking of the convent of Saint-Lazare. Formerly a hospital for lepers, the convent had since become renowned for its charity, but even the fruit trees in the convent orchard were chopped down, while ferocious women—forebears of the tricoteuses—killed and made off with all the chickens in its poultry farm. When the police arrived the following morning, they were just in time to rescue two old priests about to be hanged from nearby lamp-posts, while some of the mob had decapitated a marble statue of Saint Paul and stuck the head on a pike, and were parading it through the streets. It was an unpleasant harbinger of what revolution was about to bring.
After the seizure of the Bastille, Gouverneur Morris could still observe with sardonic mildness that “this day’s transactions will induce a conviction that all is not perfectly quiet.” Yet, a week later, having witnessed the cavalry pelted with stones on the Concorde, and two dignitaries hacked to death, he now saw a different face to the Paris mob: “Gracious God what a People!”6 A terrible wave of latent ferocity now surged through the city, which would not finally be quelled until the advent of Napoleon. All the impassioned hatreds that had been storing up in Paris since the Roi Soleil exploded. Returning that afternoon from his favourite pastime, la chasse, Louis XVI enquired, “Is this a rebellion?” “No, Sire,” came the reply. “It is a revolution.” 7
In the countryside, noble dwellings were sacked, feudal records destroyed, barns raided, tithes reclaimed. Feudal rights were abolished, with disastrous consequences for the incomes of good and bad landowners alike. On 26 August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, rapidly promulgated, became the foundation document of the revolution. Debates in quest of a constitution intensified, with Mirabeau playing a dominant part. With extraordinary speed, les aristos began to flee France—as many as 150,000, in three separate phases. They included many officers from the army; here was one very good reason why increasingly Louis could not depend on its loyalty, or efficacy.
ON 5 OCTOBER, an armed Paris mob, conspicuously led by a troop of enraged women, marched on Versailles. The previous day there was no bread in the bakeries of Paris; an angry crowd seized one unfortunate baker and hanged him on the spot. Virtually unopposed they now invaded both the Palace and the Assembly. As an unwilling witness, Mme. de La Tour du Pin watched the scene aghast as the mob surged into the sacred realm of the Roi Soleil. Feebly the royal Garde allowed itself be corralled, while one unfortunate soldier, abandoned by his fellows, was torn to pieces by the mob. The King attempted to escape, but the mob cut the traces of his horses and led them away.
In total humiliation the royal couple were now escorted back to Paris, accompanied by a jeering mob, carrying the bleeding heads of his murdered guards on pikes immediately in front of his carriage. There now entered on the scene the King’s turncoat cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, darling of the mob on account of his liberal sympathies, and greeted with cries of “Long live our King d’Orléans!” Following the royal family’s departure from Versailles—to be empty and untenanted for many a year—Mme. de La Tour du Pin recalled that “the only sound to be heard in the château was the fastening of doors and shutters which had not been closed since the time of Louis XIV.”8 Treated with utmost contempt, they were now herded back to the Tuileries. The following day, Louis under severe pressure agreed to reside in the capital henceforth. There they would remain as virtual prisoners of the newly formed Paris Commune for next three years.
Meanwhile the national debt, unchecked, had soared out of all control. In response to bankruptcy, on 3 November the Assembly decided to nationalise and sell off Church lands and property, potentially an immense source of wealth—and already a target under the assaults of the deistphilosophes. As the revolutionaries realised just how affluent the Church was, so their ferocity, and hatred, against it mounted. Possibly the greatest casualty of the revolution, the Church lost all its power and autonomy; monasteries and convents were dissolved, tithes payable to the Church were abolished, and Assignats against its property were issued—scraps of paper that were as worthless as the “Continentals” that been used to finance George Washington’s revolutionary armies a decade earlier. The Pope refused to recognise the Assembly’s action, threatening excommunication. The Assembly retaliated by enforcing on all clergy a separatist oath of obedience to “the King, the Law and the Nation.” Accordingly the Church of France found itself divided into “constitutionalists” and “dissidents,” a division that would be perpetuated in the Republican structure of the nation. The Church was already divided between the very many decent, but often extremely poor parish priests, barely scraping a living, and the rich reprobates like the Bishop of Autun, Talleyrand, who brought it a bad name by their shameless flouting of their priestly vows, and generally sacrilegious behaviour.
With attacks on Church property proliferating in the provinces, gradually a state of open civil war took hold. In Paris, however, a strange normalcy persisted through 1790. Brightly coloured posters filled public places, hawking the promises of various political factions. The first anniversary of 14 July, called Fête de la Fédération, was a bright and cheerful affair (except, no doubt, for relatives of the murdered guardians of the Bastille). The tea parties continued, in salons where the gossips prattled away. Smart women wore “liberty” hats and “constitution” jewellery. Beaumarchais was still all the rage—although his Figaro remained banned by Louis XVI, on account of its assault on authority. Strange people popped out of the woodwork, in unexpected places; the Marquis de Sade, liberated from his asylum, became a republican—plain Citizen Louis Sade. Excoriating his beloved King as “a traitor, a rascal,” he somehow found himself in charge of renaming streets in his elegant district of the premier (it must have afforded him particular pleasure to have Rue des Capucines renamed “Rue des Citoyennes Françaises”). He sat down to write Justine in his spare time, as a travail alimentaire or pot-boiler. Meanwhile, however, religious services continued to be well attended by the workers.
Following the huge financial losses suffered in 1789, Paris tradesmen were grievously affected by the disappearance of rich customers; sectors that flourished under the revolution were the doctors, scientists and schoolteachers—and, of course, the printing industry, working overtime to print pamphlets, tracts and windy speeches. Meanwhile, the work of the Constitutional Assembly lost none of its momentum; at that point it was still very much a body of the bourgeois, driven by Mirabeau. Ominously Mirabeau predicted, however: “When you undertake to run a revolution, the difficulty is not to make it go—it is to hold it in check.”
As 1790 began, the perceptive Gouverneur Morris foresaw that the “new order of things cannot endure . . . the present set [of leaders] must wear out in the course of the year.”9 In November 1790, Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the French Revolution. Given that he had been regarded as a “friend” of the revolution, his book came as a tremendous shock in France—particularly his dire warning that “in the groves” of revolution “at the end of every vista you see nothing but the gallows.” Thomas Paine, the Englishman turned passionate American revolutionary, responded to this claim in The Rights of Man: “Whom has the National Assembly brought to the scaffold? None.” It was not a good prophecy. Meanwhile, the émigré nobles abroad, notably across the Rhine, were busily plotting and planning the imminent overthrow of the revolution. Nothing was to prove more disastrous for the French monarchy.
IN FEBRUARY 1791, the Assembly debated a law that would regulate the movement in and out of France of suspected émigrés, and give itself powers to declare them outlaws. For opposing it, in the name of liberty, as “barbaric,” Mirabeau came under virulent personal attack which left him profoundly shaken. It was in fact, as Simon Schama notes,10 “the turning point of the French Revolution” when it “licensed itself as a police state.”
Just a month later, after spending a demanding night with two dancers from the opera, Mirabeau was struck with the most violent intestinal pains. On 2 April he announced calmly to his physician: “I will die today. When one has come to that, all one can do is be perfumed, crowned with flowers, enveloped in music and wait comfortably for the sleep from which one will never awake.” To Talleyrand he prophesied: “I carry away with me the last shreds of the monarchy.” He was shocked that he had achieved nothing except “that he had contributed only to a vast demolition.” It was true; it would not be the last time that sexual excess affected the course of French history, but with Mirabeau there expired France’s—and certainly the King’s—last best hope. Mirabeau had urged him to move out of Versailles and Paris to a reliable centre like Rouen; to rally the loyal, and summon the Assembly there; but he beseeched him not to consider crossing a national frontier, for “a king, who is the only safeguard of his people, does not flee before his people.”
Unfortunately, neither the King nor the Queen had trusted the physically unprepossessing Mirabeau. They put more faith in the aristocratic and dashing Lafayette who, still only thirty-two in 1789, had already helped bring revolution to the American colonies and chase out the British. Partly because of Lafayette’s extreme vanity (Mirabeau called him a “clowning Caesar”), the two had never been able to collaborate; working together, they might well have been able to govern France. Thus, not entirely through his own fault Louis lost what was probably his last chance. With the approach of Easter in 1791, Louis and Marie-Antoinette set off from the Tuileries for Saint-Cloud, in order to avoid having to receive communion from a “constitutional” priest. But just as the mob had forced them from Versailles that October 1789, it now compelled their return to the Tuileries. Lafayette proved powerless to dispel the mob with his own National Guard, over whose loyalties he now had little control, and he resigned in humiliation.
WITH MIRABEAU AND LAFAYETTE GONE, and the temperature of protest outside the Tuileries rising daily, sheer despair gripped the King. He now decided to escape from Paris, to join the émigré and coalition armies in Brussels that were mobilising against France, hoping to be helped by his wife’s Austrian relatives. Dressed as a lackey, he made a getaway on the night of 20 June 1791. It was organised with absurd incompetence by Count Fersen, allegedly the lover of Marie-Antoinette. Louis left behind him a proclamation that denounced all the concessions he had made since October 1789; with pathetic realism, he appended, “What remains to the King, except the empty sham of royalty?”
Just short of the border, the King’s coach was recognised and stopped in the “miserable little town” of Varennes in the Argonne, only a few miles from where his supporters were to meet him and convey the royal family to safety. In his diary Louis noted, laconically: “Left Paris at midnight, arrived and arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne at eleven in the evening.”11 A posse of 6000 armed peasants and National Guardsmen escorted the royal family back to Paris. At the Tuileries that night the perplexed and frightened little Dauphin, aged six, had a nightmare of being pursued by wolves and tigers about to devour him. Alone the Duc de Provence, Louis’ brother, the future Louis XVIII, managed to escape to Brussels, and thence to England. Varennes was the end of the line for Louis, though he would linger on as a prisoner in his own palace for over a year. To the Assembly, where ever more violent enemies of the monarchy replaced Mirabeau, by his attempted flight the King was seen as having gone to join the nation’s foreign enemies; even more unforgivably, the enemies of the revolution.
Yet Louis was not the first French king to have taken flight from his adversaries; Louis XIV with his mother had done so, and had survived and returned. Had his descendant succeeded, the royal family would have been spared the guillotine, but would the revolution have taken a less bloody course? Hearing of the flight a few days later, Gouverneur Morris noted in his diary: “This will produce some considerable Consequences. If they get off safe a War is inevitable, and if retaken it will probably suspend for some time all monarchical government in France.” That was something of an understatement.
FROM NOW ON THE PACE of France’s descent into the revolutionary abyss accelerated. In the political struggle to replace Mirabeau and his moderates, the Assembly became increasingly polarised. One faction was succeeded by another that was yet more extreme; monarchist Feuillants gave way to the Girondins (among them Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud, who, later to be guillotined, made his immortal remark about the revolution, like Saturn, devouring its own children). They in turn were swept aside by the radical Montagnards—seated in the highest section of the Chamber; then came the Jacobins, the Cordeliers—and ultimately the purveyors of the Terror. With ever-mounting radicalism, power had passed from the preponderantly conservative, and royalist, middle classes to the Parisians, notably to the sans-culottes, who wore their egalitarian, breechless garb as a sign of proletarian defiance.
On 14 September 1791, a powerless Louis signed a constitution which rode roughshod over many of the principles of liberty and equality (franchise, for instance, was limited; and there was public censorship). Its work complete, the Constitutional Assembly was replaced on 1 October by the even more radical Legislative Assembly, as fears grew that the European monarchies would shortly move to crush the revolution. Abandoning the initial prospect of a constitutional monarchy, it became progressively more bellicose, persuading itself that external war would solve all internal problems. France had been there before, under many a monarch.
In August 1791, the crowned heads of Austria and Prussia met at Pillnitz near Dresden, joined by the hardline Comte d’Artois and other leading émigrés, to discuss Marie-Antoinette’s appeal for intervention by her kinsmen and fellow sovereigns. The declaration they produced was extremely cautious; but the firebrands in the Assembly perceived their collaboration to be a clear threat. More aggressive was the alliance’s stance the following February, demanding that France restore the German territories of Alsace which le grand Louis had grabbed a hundred years earlier. On 20 April 1792, Louis was coerced into going to the Assembly and, with tears in his myopically peering eyes, declaring war on the Emperor of Austria—his wife’s nephew.48 It was accompanied with an ultimatum for the removal of the émigré forces mustering on the Rhine. In Paris there was ever-mounting rage and hatred against the autrichienne, Marie-Antoinette. The declaration of war marked the beginning of the Revolutionary Wars; these in turn would lead directly into the Napoleonic Wars.
TWO MONTHS LATER, let in by compliant National Guards, a hideous and enraged mob of evil-smelling sans-culottes invaded and pillaged the Tuileries. They carried with them a grisly doll hanging from a gibbet, labelled “Marie-Antoinette à la lanterne.” They placed a revolutionary’s red cap on the helpless King’s head, forcing him to drink with them. Over a torrid summer the quality of life of the royal prisoner deteriorated markedly. In July, Prussia’s Duke of Brunswick heaped fuel on the flames by threatening the “total destruction” of Paris if the royal family were to suffer “even the slightest violence.” The Assembly proclaimed “la patrie en danger” on 11 July, but the initiative now shifted to the insurrectionary Paris Commune. Throughout Paris, tables decked with the tricolour were set up to recruit a surge of volunteers. Then, in a fiercely hot August, the Tuileries were attacked again, this time much more violently. Forewarned, the royal family took refuge under the shelter of the Assembly, in its adjacent quarters. The Swiss Guards bravely defended the Palace, but were massacred to a man, their bodies stripped and mutilated. The Tuileries itself was reduced to a shambles of blood and smashed furniture, with drunken insurgents wiping bloody hands on velvet mantles they found in the King’s wardrobe. Some dressed themselves in the Queen’s finery. Guards were even murdered in the chapel where they had sought sanctuary. Clearly the King was no longer safe under the roof of the Assembly, so the Paris Commune, assuming the prerogatives of guardianship, transferred the royal family to the sombre Temple, in the Marais on the north-east fringes of Paris. This confinement truly marked the end of Louis’ reign.
Fresh revolutionary leaders, extremists like Danton, Marat and Robespierre, began to emerge in the panic that swept the capital, as serious reverses at Longwy and Verdun opened the road to Paris to the invading Austrians. These defeats led in turn to the most ferocious wave of promiscuous killings—the September Massacres in which more than 1200 inmates of the prisons of Paris, women and children included, were hacked to death. Even harmless prostitutes were caught up and butchered by the drunken mob, together with many priests. One of the most unspeakable atrocities was committed against the Princesse de Lamballe, Marie-Antoinette’s First Lady of the Bedchamber and close confidante. Handed over to the mob by the tribunal, her body was ripped open and her entrails mounted on a pike, her head on another. The mob then paraded the head outside the window where Marie-Antoinette was under house arrest.
THE CITY SEEMED SEIZED by a mindless and uncontrollable lust for blood. The Legislative Assembly dissolved itself on 21 September, giving way before the new National Convention, elected by universal (male) suffrage. Its seemingly hopeless task was to save the revolution. But that same day came the miraculous news that the newly raised Revolutionary Army, under Generals Dumouriez and Kellermann, had inflicted a decisive defeat on the Prussians at Valmy, not 150 miles east of Paris. The cannonade that enveloped the enemy from the rear was even heard, some claimed, in the city. Goethe, who watched the battle at Valmy, reckoned that he was witnessing the “beginning of a new era in history.” As the future of the revolution now seemed assured, so the bitter factions battled for leadership. None of the former members of the Assembly was permitted to take part in the new Convention: “A subject for contemplation that was sombre, lugubrious, frightening, but sublime, ” in the words of Victor Hugo. Inexperienced, there remained for it “only one great mistake to make,” declared the moderate, Pierre Malouet, “and we did not fail to make it.” It was the decision to execute the King.
On 18 January 1793 Louis XVI, under the common name of “Louis Capet,” was condemned to death, with no right of appeal. He was taken to the guillotine on the Concorde on 21 January 1793, a few yards from the empty pedestal where the fallen statue of his grandfather had once stood. After a terrible period of imprisonment in Philippe le Bel’s grim Conciergerie and a risible trial, Marie-Antoinette followed him to the scaffold on 16 October; 30,000 troops had to be deployed to keep order that day. Under mysterious circumstances never resolved, the little Dauphin, in effect Louis XVII, died in the Temple (possibly of tuberculosis) two years later.
WITH THE DEATH OF THE KING, the revolution found itself fighting a war on two fronts—England joined in the First Coalition (the first of many) against France, and the Vendée in the south-west erupted in open revolt. There was also, in reality, a third front—the internecine struggle between the revolutionaries themselves, as mutual suspicions of treason led one after the other to the guillotine. For the next three years—the most violent of the revolution—all central authority more or less ceased to exist. A month after the Tribunal sent for Marie-Antoinette, the turncoat Duc d’Orléans, “Philippe-Égalité,” himself was sentenced to death. And so it went on.
In the Vendée, loyalist, Catholic and counter-revolutionary forces rose up, and were crushed with great brutality—though resistance and repression was to continue into 1795. In March and April 1793, the dread Revolutionary Tribunal, under the frightening Fouquier-Tinville, with his pale lips and low forehead, and the Committee of Public Safety were introduced. In June a Revolutionary Army was dispatched to police the countryside, bringing with them portable guillotines. In hiding near Bordeaux, Mme. de La Tour du Pin recalled such brutal excesses as when a husband was guillotined, his wife lashed to a pillory facing the guillotine, with her two young sons on either side. “People’s Representatives” under twenty-six-year-old Tallien arrived from Paris with orders to impose taxes on produce of every kind. The penalty for refusing, death; the result, “an immediate breakdown in the supply of goods.” Many bakers refused and were executed. A harmless-sounding body called the Bordeaux Association of Young Men was rounded up—all were executed en masse, for implication with the royalists. In the churches of Bordeaux an insensate destruction of church ornaments was carried out. Mme. de La Tour also recorded an anti-religious parade “preceded by some horrible creature impersonating the Goddess of Reason,” and culminating with “an enormous pyre, which burned all that magnificent treasure.” Grim penalties were meted out to the peasantry for hiding aristos, as the guillotine made its “patriotic tours.” (Eventually, in March 1794, the height of the Terror, Mme. de La Tour managed to escape to Boston on a tiny boat, in the riskiest of sea-crossings. Her father was guillotined the following month.)
Probably the total number of killings carried out in the Vendée exceeded the victims of the guillotine in Paris (2800 to an estimated 14,000 for all the provinces). There was a similar “purging” of Lyons by Collot d’Herbois, at Toulon by Barras, and at Nantes by Carrier, and the anarchic, often repulsive, “dechristianisation” practised by the loathsome Fouché—himself an ex-priest, later to re-emerge as Napoleon’s Chief of Police. At Toulon in 1793, Fouché had gloated to a colleague in Paris, “Tonight we will execute 1213 insurgents. Adieu—tears of joy flow from my eyes.” During the massacres in Lyons he was alleged to have been seen carrying a pair of human ears dangling from either side of his hat.
IN THE WAR AGAINST THE EXTERNAL FOE, at first the revolutionary armies suffered serious defeats. Then, under the able direction of Lazare Carnot (whom even Napoleon was to rate “the organiser of victory”), the levée en masse turned things round—not the least spur to success being the threat of the guillotine for any general who lost a battle. It showed a remarkable aptitude for requisitioning, “living off the land,” unrealised by the posher, conventional monarchist armies of the Coalition. The winter of 1793–94 saw the enemy forced to retreat beyond the frontiers of France. Morale soared. When the French arrived in Antwerp, and in Holland, they aroused serious suspicions in London of a revival of the expansionist policies of Louis XIV. Soon it would be Germany and Italy under threat. As with Trotsky’s Russia in 1919, success at home urged them on to spread the message of revolution across Europe. What they achieved was to inseminate fears that bound together the First Coalition—funded as it was by “English Gold.”
Nevertheless, through 1793, economic crisis and the psychoses bred by the early defeats led to agitation for yet more repressive measures. The young Girondin supporter Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath and went to the guillotine. Marat’s assassination launched another wave of purges; the following month Robespierre, the fanatical “sea-green incorruptible,” a misogynist who dared to wear silk breeches, possessed of the fearful certitude of a man who believes himself to have a mission, assumed supreme power. In September the loi des suspects, ordering the arrest of anyone suspected of “disloyalty” to the revolution, was passed. It marked the beginning of the true Terror. “That which constitutes a republic,” declared Saint-Just, “is the destruction of everything which opposes it.”
The Republic Calendar, introduced on 5 October 1793 (but antedated to 22 September) was yet one more attempt by the revolutionaries to break with the past, and with Christian tradition. Twelve months named after seasons (Brumaire instead of November, month of mists; Germinal instead of April, month for sowing seeds) each had thirty days, divided into three décades—or weeks of ten days. The only thing it achieved was confusion, and it was repealed by Napoleon in 1806.
October saw the trial and execution of the moderate Girondin leaders. In March 1794, the extremist Hébert and his supporters, followed by the remaining “moderates”—Danton, Fabre d’Églantine and Camille Desmoulins—followed in the tumbrils as the wave of executions soared. The Concorde reeked of blood as the ferocious tricoteuses, true Parisiennes, howled for more. The anti-religious cult of the Supreme Being was instituted, but gradually opposition to the monstrous barrister Robespierre was mounting. Some witnesses testified to an extraordinary calmness of Paris during the Terror: “There are days when we do not seem at war any more than in the midst of a revolution.” The Tuileries gardens were well kept up, and elegant carriages still seen in the streets. But when Gouverneur Morris returned to America, he summed up to Washington his experiences before he left: “I saw misery and affliction every day and all around me without power to mitigate or means to relieve.”12
Abruptly the anti-religious orgies of destruction ground to a halt, just in time to save Notre-Dame from total destruction, though many of its medieval saints had been decapitated or mutilated, as had occurred throughout France. In a complete turnabout, Robespierre declared atheism to be “counter-revolutionary,” quoting Voltaire’s “If God did not exist, we would have to invent him.”
On 8 Thermidor in the Revolutionary Calendar, or 26 July 1794, Robespierre delivered a rambling speech calling for the punishment of more unspecified traitors. A point had been reached when even the most extreme of the Jacobin revolutionaries sickened of Robespierre’s obsession with counter-revolutionary corruption and conspiracy, and his peremptory denunciations of both personal and public enemies. Along with his murderous Jacobin followers, including Saint-Just, he was arrested and executed two days later. Tallien and Barras, who practised the Terror themselves, were hailed as its conquerors.
WITH THERMIDOR AND THE EXECUTION of Robespierre, the reign of terror reached its peak, and it subsided with extraordinary swiftness. Within a month the Convention had dismantled all its central institutions. November saw the closing down of the feared Club des Jacobins. TheMaximum (price fixing and food controls), that ultimate bastion of revolutionary government, was abolished on 24 December; laws against emigration were relaxed; and, symbolically, Marat’s body was removed from the Panthéon on 8 February 1795. Bribery became commonplace, as surviving Girondins crept out of hiding during the period known as la réaction thermidorienne, which lasted over the next fourteen months. Theatres staged anti-Jacobin plays; the salons returned. So too did some royalist elements; gilded youths appeared in Paris wearing the green collar of the Vendée, with their hair cut provocatively short à la victime—in emulation of those about to mount the scaffold; and there were the incroyables dandies sporting heavy sticks with which they beat surviving Jacobins, and scandalising the country with their profligate demeanour. Yet the Thermidor revolt was essentially of the petit bourgeois, the clerks, rather than of the nobles.
On 5 October 1795, there was a bloody uprising in Paris in protest against the continued existence of the Convention, which had proved itself a feeble and incompetent body. It had to be put down by a vigorous young general called Napoleon Bonaparte, who gave the citizens a “whiff of grapeshot.” This was the first time that the army had taken action against Paris since 1789. That month capital punishment was abolished, and a general amnesty declared for “anti-revolutionary acts.” The Place de la Révolution, which had seen so much blood flow, was renamed Place de la Concorde. But suffering was exacerbated by a severe winter, which was followed by another uprising on 1 April 1795, when the Convention was invaded by people shouting for bread, and a return to the more liberal constitution of year II. In the provinces there were outbreaks of royalist counter-terror (called “La Terreur Blanche”), in the Lyonnais, the Rhône valley and the south. A bicameral legislature was now introduced; the lower chamber (the Conseil des Cinq Cents) would initiate legislation, the upper (the Conseil des Anciens) would ratify or reject it. Executive power was vested in five directors of the Directoire, meant to protect the Republic from extremism. But they had little authority; that was soon shown to rest with the army.
With the removal of controls, the economy collapsed. The cost of living doubled; countless families died of cold. Speculation was rampant; fortunes were made and lost overnight. A class of new rich danced the Paris nights away, where only recently Madame Guillotine had provided the entertainment. The departure of Terror was replaced by corruption on a large scale, and runaway inflation. Shoes worth 5 livres in 1790 cost 200 in 1795, and 2000 in 1797. Politically, the country veered from left to right. A series of coups and counter-coups were instigated by the directors themselves—with Barras, the Directoire’s most corrupt and dissolute figure, emerging as its leader. There were royalist plots, and one abortive attempt at a working-class uprising in Paris. Its leader, François-Émile Babeuf, was sentenced to death, but committed suicide in 1797; thirty of his “Babouviste” followers were executed.
AFTER ALL THE KILLING, the destruction of the national heritage, all the misery, the Great Revolution had got rid of the ancien régime— temporarily; but would what replaced the monarchy rule France any better? And the aristos were soon to return. Perhaps the tricoteuses had executed the wrong king, in the wrong century? And what had actually been achieved? Liberté? Royal tyranny was at an end, but real freedom had already begun to look illusory. Revolution had improved the lives of the peasants; but wrecked agriculture. Égalité? The under-classes of Paris, who thought the revolution was their affair, ended up little better off than before. Only the bourgeois prospered. In the army, égalité, certainly, would make Napoleon’s rise possible and enable him to build up the most fearful military machine Europe had yet seen. Fraternité? But what did that really mean? Since the revolution the country had been riven by factionalism and civil strife. Did it not leave a terrible latent instinct for similar violence—to explode again in 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1944? What about education? Science? Literature? Few men of literary renown had emerged, and the revolution guillotined the greatest French poet of the eighteenth century, André de Chénier (1762–94), three days before the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror. Yet it had—in the heartland of the enemy—given birth to Wordsworth’s The Prelude (though he was soon to reverse his glowing sentiments about “the attraction of a country in romance!”). Music? Well, it did inspire what is still arguably the world’s greatest national anthem.
Did the revolution make the French happier? Questionable. More prosperous? No; prosperity in depth would only be achieved, late in the day, with the Industrial Revolution, after the defeat of Napoleon and kick-started by the victorious English. In the meantime, the fresh avalanche that Napoleon Bonaparte was about to bring down upon them left Frenchmen little time, or breath, to consider whether the Great Revolution had left them truly better off—or not.