“Oh liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” -Madame Roland, on the scaffold
The following is an overly simplified survey of key events that took place during the French Revolution, but I suppose that even the world itself could not contain all the books that could be written about this monumental season in human history. Picking up right where we left off, shortly before King Louis XVI was executed, the National Convention in Paris was instituted. The monarchy was officially abolished, and it was agreed that the date September 22, 1792 was to be Year I of the new French Republic. However, there was still little agreement within the Convention, meetings often devolved into battles between the Girandins and the Jacobins, the more radical members who occupied the highest seats in the hall (thus they were known as the Montagnards, or simply “The Mountain”). Many Montagnards, like the imposing orator Georges Danton, voted to execute the king out of fear that if he voted against it, he too might lose his head. In the Montagnards, he was joined together with friends, Camille Desmoulins and Pierre Phillipeaux, as well as his rival Maximilien Robespierre (whom he disliked but respected), and the fanatical writings of Jean-Paul Marat, which he despised.
One by one, the kingdoms of Europe soon severed relations with France over its unthinkable regicide, fearing the radicalism would spread to other nations. War was inevitable. In fact, France declared war on England and Holland in February 1793, and then on Spain in early March 1793. It was to spark a maddeningly violent epoch on the continent –amazingly, the revolutionary armies saw an early victory at Valmy, and subsequent occupations of Savoy and Nice, but with new fronts opening in Germany and Austria, the Convention had quickly bitten off more than it could chew. There was the defection of General Armand Louis de Custine (a Girondin) who suffered two successive defeats and fled to Austria with the young Duke of Chartres (the future King Louis-Philippe) when he proved unable to persuade his men to march on Paris and restore order (had he remained; he surely would have faced the guillotine). Domestically, there was a counter-revolutionary peasant uprising in the Vendée region, in which republicans and revolutionaries were massacred en masse and the peasants threatened to invite the invasion of a British fleet at Rochefort. Unrest spread to Bordeaux, Lyon, and Marseille. Watching all of this unfold, and in a desperate response to stop the chaos, the Convention established the first Revolutionary Tribunal, as well as the nine-member Committee of Public Safety headed by Danton. However, as the Committee began calling figures forward like Marat for show-trials before the Tribunal, trouble only continued to spread in the provinces –Normandy, Lyon, Marseille, and Toulon. “Everywhere, Paris was blamed –for virtually ignoring the situation elsewhere and by its shameless intimidation of an elected assembly. The Committee of Public Safety did what it could, but in the current confusion it was often powerless. And it was ever conscious of the increasing threat of foreign invasion” (215). The Austrians and Prussians were gaining ground, Spain amassed armies around the Pyrenees, British forces besieged Dunkirk, Toulon surrendered its arsenal to British Admiral Lord Hood, and Lyon was taken over by royalists who promptly executed every republican in sight. It was clear that the Committee of Public Safety was failing –Danton was voted out and he was replaced by the ablest leader among the Jacobins, Maximilien Robespierre, “certainly the most sinister of all the grisly figures with whom these chapters have had to deal.”
Maximilien Robespierre was originally named Derobespierre but he shortened it in 1789 and raised his public profile. Whereas his predecessors Mirabeau and Danton both had disfigured faces, Robespierre was a dandy, always immaculately dressed with perfectly cut hair, and often seen donning a crisp green suit. Small and thin, he wore high-heeled shoes to appear taller. His nickname was ‘the sea-green incorruptible’ –indeed he was incorruptible. He had few close friends, little interest in women, and he hardly ate or drank. Robespierre was an incredibly intense and austere man and he was serious about his Jacobin convictions –he was rarely known to smile or laugh.
The summer of 1793 set Paris alight all over again when a fanatical young Girondin named Charlotte Corday burst into the apartment of Jean-Paul Marat where she found the propagandist lying in towels in his medicinal bath (the only relief he would get from his debilitating skin disease). She handed him a list of names that were planning an uprising in her home town of Caen, but as copied down the names, he muttered that they all would be guillotined as she suddenly plunged a six-inch knife deep into Marat’s chest, killing him instantly (as depicted in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting). She was executed four days later on the scaffold, while Marat was made a martyr in Paris, a bust of his head was placed in the Convention Hall, his ashes laid in the Pantheon, while streets and squares all over the city were renamed in his honor. This also gave the Committee of Public Safety greater license to start killing more prominent individuals, like General Custine and the Duc de Biron, before they turned their ire once again toward the Queen, who had been separated from her son and imprisoned in the old Merovingian castle the Conciergerie on the Île de la Cité, a stench-filled, rat-infested place where she was left under round-the-clock surveillance. She was quickly given a show-trial and urgently sentenced to death, a toll which she took in stride without showing any trace of emotion. On October 16, 1793 her head was shaved and she was paraded out to the scaffold in the middle of Place de la Révolution (the present-day Place de la Concorde). When she climbed the wooden stairs, she accidentally stepped on the foot of the executioner, apologizing as she said: “I beg your pardon, Monsieur, I did not do it on purpose.” These were the last words of Marie Antionette before her severed head was lifted before the mob and her body tossed into an unmarked grave.
“By now the Revolution had begun to devour its own children” (217).
Twenty-one leaders of the Girondins also lost their heads, as did the former Duke of Orleans, Philippe Egalite and Madame Roland, as well as a tearful Madame du Barry who screamed for mercy as she was beheaded in December 1793. All through the Autumn and Winter, the Terror continued onward –there were nearly 3,000 executions in Paris and 14,000 in the provinces. The charges were often ludicrous –a Henriette Francois de Marboeuf was executed for ‘hoping for the arrival of the Austrians and Prussians,’ a Francois Bertrand was executed for ‘furnishing sour wine injurious to the health’ of the revolutionaries, a Marie Angelique Plaisant was executed for allegedly stating she ‘cared not a fig for the nation.’ The ire of Robespierre was then turned on Danton for his alliance with the Indulgents (the forgiving) when he dared to remark: “Perhaps the Terror once served a useful purpose, but it should not hurt innocent people. No one wants to see a person treated as a criminal just because he happens not to have enough revolutionary enthusiasm.” For this, he too was summarily executed in 1794 along with seventeen other Indulgents. Danton, the last of his cohort to face the guillotine, looked down from the scaffold and saw his old friend, the painter Jacques-Louis David, sketching the scene from a nearby cafe (David had voted for Danton’s execution). Danton shouted an obscenity at his former friend and then cried out: “Oh my wife, my dear wife, shall I ever see you again? Courage, Danton – pas de faiblesse!” (or “Courage, Danton – no weakness!”). As he laid his head down, he remarked to the executioner: “Above all, don’t forget to show my head to the people. It’s well worth looking at.”
The new calendar began on September 22, 1792, the first year of the republic. The details were crafted by a “mildly ridiculous, unsuccessful actor” named Philippe Fabre. He proposed the calendar be divided into twelve equal months, with five days left at the end for celebrating festivals, and the months were to be divided into three ‘decades’ which were named after the seasons. But this huge change angered the working population who now had to face a ten-day work-week. It also angered the clergy, as the new Sabbath bordered on blasphemy. Indeed, Christianity was regularly attacked by the revolutionaries –crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary were hacked to pieces and sometimes replaced by busts of Marat, church services were suppressed, and Grand Festivals of Reason were held in Paris. And the guillotine could not be stopped, with overwhelming numbers of executions coming for the Third Estate, rather than either the clergy or the aristocracy. Robespierre famously never attended an execution, privately claiming to abhor the practice, but he knew that stopping too soon would obstruct his ambitions, and almost assuredly end his own life. He was, no doubt, haunted by the echoing words of Danton before he was led away to the scaffold: “You will follow us, Robespierre!”
After the death of Danton, Robespierre’s reputation speedily declined. He antagonized the supporters of Danton and took on more dictatorial moves, growing increasingly arrogant as he presided over a perfectly ridiculous religious ceremony dedicated to the ‘Supreme Being.’ He was feared for the sprawling police state he oversaw, and he was not particularly well-liked. Even his friends privately worried for his sanity when he barely seemed to register their presence in his apartment. On June 10, 1794, a terrifying new piece of legislation was passed, the Law of 22 Prairial, which permitted execution on the grounds of mere suspicion alone. It was no longer safe to even whisper opinions about politics in public. But the threat of external invasion had passed as the French Army defeated the Austrians at Fleurus (incidentally, the first battle to use reconnaissance aircraft, in this case balloons), and France occupied Brussels, which brought about the end of the two-century-lasting Dutch Republic. Many began to ask: was such authoritarianism still necessary? Robespierre’s ministers quickly began to turn on him. Then came the establishment of “The Paris Commune” which Robespierre transformed into his own political arm, ordering the Commune gendarmes to close the city gates, shut down all newspapers, and begin arresting journalists and suspected traitors. There came a violent confrontation between the forces of the Committee who stormed into the Hotel de Ville where the Commune was meeting. In the chaos, either a soldier named Charles-André Méda shot Robespierre in the jaw, or Robespierre had attempted suicide himself, but regardless the shot was not fatal, it merely shattered Robespierre’s jaw. He was tended to by a physician and wrapped in a bandage but taken to the scaffold along with twenty-one other allies. In his final moments, a semi-conscious Robespierre opened his eyes on the scaffold to find himself surrounded by an angry mob. He was the tenth man to be killed. The executioner ripped off the bandage holding Robespierre’s jaw together which elicited a deafening groan of anguish from the dying man which echoed around the square as he was promptly beheaded amidst a fifteen-minute chorus of applause from the surrounding crowd.
“Of all the leaders of the Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre is the most mysterious and the hardest to understand. Certainly, he was the most honest. He was deeply cultivated, an idealist and an eloquent champion for the poor and oppressed. He campaigned for universal male suffrage and the abolition of slavery in the colonies. He consistently opposed war, maintaining that ‘the most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician’s head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and constitution. No one loves armed missionaries.’ He was a passionate admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and kept a copy of Le Comtrat Social beside his bed. And it was he who coined the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité, which, until the coming of the euro, was inscribed on all French currency. He had voted for the execution of the king, but only as what he described as ‘a cruel exception to ordinary laws.’… How then does it happen that it is he, more than any other of the revolutionaries, whom we associate with the atrocities of the Terror? Probably because he was by this time quite seriously unbalanced, and genuinely paranoid about the future of the Revolution, which dominated his life and which he believed to be threatened. There was little enough foundation for this belief: no one could still seriously fear a foreign invasion, nor at that time was there any possibility of a re-establishment of the monarchy: the dauphin, Louis-Charles, was a child of nine, already suffering from tuberculosis of the bone. On his death in June 1795 his uncle, Count of Provence – who was then living quietly at Verona – was to proclaim himself King Louis XVIII as he was honour-bound to do, but it was to be another nineteen years before he assumed the throne. The Revolution was almost over. True, it had not fulfilled all its promises; the economy was in a wretched state and the poor were still protesting over the price of food. Still, the king was dead, and France was now a Republic… despite everything, he [Robespierre] stood for terror; indeed, he personified it. And when, finally, it was for him that the bell tolled, his death proved the most terrible of all” (224).
After Robespierre’s death, the political shift was immediate. The Law of Prairial was repealed, and neither the nobles nor clergy were to be condemned simply for their birth or calling. The Jacobin Club was closed, the red caps of liberty were no longer worn out in the streets, and the remaining associates of Robespierre were all put to death. Then a frigid winter led to terrible flooding and starving wolves roaming the countryside, the lack of food came with revolts (the cost of living was by now thirty times higher in 1795 than it was 1790) and more executions followed at the guillotine, as well as an attempted British invasion at Brittany (the British nobles were all executed by firing squad in their uniforms). A new Constitution of Year III was established, creating a liberal republic, complete with a ban on slavery, enfranchisement based on tax payments, a bicameral legislature, and a five-man Directory. The last gasp of royalist insurrection came in 1795 when 25,000 strong rose up in opposition. The Convention placed the military command in the hands of Paul Barras, but he had little experience and so he selected a twenty-six-year-old officer whom he had known during the siege of Toulon in 1793, a fiery military genius who quickly sprang into action to meet the moment, sending the royalist forces (who outnumbered the Convention troops six to one) retreating after carefully placing cannons which fired upon the rebels. Dubbed the “the whiff of grapeshot” by Thomas Carlyle, the victory made the young Napoleon Bonaparte a national hero.
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s A History of France (2018), one of his final books before his death.