Place de la Révolution, Paris. July 17, 1793. 19°C. Condemned to death for murdering Jean–Paul Marat, Charlotte Corday goes to the guillotine. A carpenter working on the scaffold, believing consciousness may survive in a severed body part, grabs her head by its hair and slaps the cheeks. Witnesses gasp when the dead face, some swear, blushes and shows “unequivocal indignation.” Convicted of abusing a corpse, the carpenter spends three months in prison.
IT’S AN IRONY OF THE REPUBLICAN CALENDAR THAT BY THE TIME the average Frenchman became aware of it, Fabre d’Églantine, the man who helped create it and championed its use, was dead.
From June 1793 through July 1794, 16,594 people were executed by guillotine in France, 2,639 of them in Paris. On October 16, it was Marie Antoinette’s turn. Though she never denied leaking military secrets to her native country, Austria, the prosecutors added trumped–up charges that she had organized orgies at Versailles and even had sex with her young son.
Truth ceased to matter in that climate of suspicion and hatred. Inquisitors asked all suspects the same questions: “What were you worth before the revolution? What are you worth now?” Those who could not prove poverty were automatically condemned.
Robespierre led the witch hunt. “What we need is a single will,” he announced. “It must be either Republican or royalist. If it is to be Republican, we must have Republican ministers, Republican papers, Republican deputies, a Republican government.” It went without saying that the “single will” must be his.
When too few deputies sided with him, he accused his opponents of treason and had them condemned to death in what became known as the Terror. He explained his policy in terms of the seasons, a comparison the country would instinctively understand. “If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace,” he ranted, “the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.”
The Terror would forever stain the reputation of the revolution, threatening to overshadow its achievements. For the next two centuries, writers outside France—from Charles Dickens in his novel A Tale of Two Cities to Baroness Orczy in her stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel—demonized the revolutionaries and glamorized the aristocracy. Danton, the shady aspects of his character conveniently forgotten, emerged in the popular imagination as the people’s champion, betrayed and murdered by Robespierre and his young henchman Louis de Saint–Just.
Many who survived the Terror had stories that rivaled fiction. Thomas Paine, British–born author of Rights of Man, was imprisoned and condemned. When the guard who chalked the number of the guillotine to which a prisoner would be sent passed by, the door of Paine’s cell happened to be open. His number, written by chance on the inside, wasn’t visible with the door closed, so he survived.
The survival of the Marquis de Sade was even more miraculous. In 1789, he was already confined to the Bastille at the instigation of his mother–in–law, who persuaded the king to issue a lettre de cachet, a document whereby he could imprison someone indefinitely without trial. Released in 1790, when the Bastille was destroyed and lettres de cachet abolished, Sade sided with the revolution and, now calling himself Citizen Sade, even became a member of the Convention, meanwhile continuing his celebrations of sexual cruelty that inspired the word “sadist.” Finally convicted, he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions writing plays, which he staged with other inmates playing the roles. Some dealt with the revolution, most famously the murder of Marat.
The luck that saved Paine and Sade failed for Danton and his supporters. Fabre, as calculating and self–serving as Danton was visionary and patriotic, contributed to his mentor’s downfall. As news spread of the East India Company scandal and people called for the directors, including Fabre, to be executed out of hand, Danton went before the Convention to ask that the accused at least be given a fair trial. “Let them be judged before all the people,” he asked, “so that the people can know which of them still deserve their trust.” To his astonishment, he was shouted down. “You are Fabre’s dupe, Danton!” one member yelled. “He has sat by your side. He has cheated the most patriotic of us.”
Throughout the winter of 1793–94, Robespierre and Saint–Just picked off Danton’s associates. Hoping to retrieve his reputation, Danton supported the purges. In his final speech to the Convention, he drew on the common experience of country people, using wine as a metaphor for revolution. “Frenchmen! Do not take fright at the effervescence of this first stage of liberty,” he said. “It is like a strong new wine that ferments until purged of all its froth.”
But it was too late. In March 1794, Robespierre sprung his trap. The Committee of Public Safety swore out a warrant for Danton’s arrest and those of thirteen others, including Fabre. Danton pinned his hopes on a trial, at which he could employ his oratorical skill to exonerate himself and discredit his accusers. But Robespierre, fearing that Danton’s thundering baritone might sway the jury, invoked a new law allowing a court to exclude anyone, even the accused, if they threatened to disrupt the proceedings. As Danton fumed in prison, all fourteen were condemned to death.
To Camille Desmoulins, the rigged trial was symptomatic of everything that had gone wrong with the revolution. Execution had replaced reason and debate “I shall die in the belief,” he wrote to his wife from prison, “that, to make France free, republican and prosperous, a little ink would have sufficed, and only one guillotine.”
All fourteen died on April 5, 1794—Germinal 16 in the new calendar. (The plant chosen to signify that day was the lettuce.) Fabre d’Églantine remained theatrical to the last. As the tumbrel carried him to the Place de la Révolution, today’s Place de la Concorde, he is said to have scribbled poetry on pieces of paper and thrown them to the crowd.
Another anecdote has him singing “Il pleut, bergère” as he mounted the scaffold, and a third that he lamented the fact that he hadn’t finished the poem on which he was working. At this, Danton is supposed to have responded with a pun on the fact that vers could mean both “verse” and “worms.” “Don’t worry,” he said. “In a week, you’ll have vers by the thousands.” This story remains dubious, unlike Danton’s actual last words, which show his trademark braggadocio surviving to the end. “Hold up my head for everyone to see,” he ordered the executioner. “People will expect it.”
Had Danton lived, he could have taken bitter satisfaction in the downfall of Robespierre a few months later. By then, the remaining members of the Convention had realized that if as great a man as Danton could be so easily purged, their own lives were even more at risk. Increasingly embattled, Robespierre was repeatedly shouted down in the Convention. When he lost his voice, someone called, “Is it the blood of Danton that chokes you?” Robespierre responded sullenly, “If you wanted Danton, why didn’t you vote for him?” It was a question none of those who betrayed their former hero cared to address.
On July 28, as the National Guard arrived to arrest Robespierre and his followers, he tried to shoot himself but only shattered his jaw. A day later, he was guillotined without trial, as he had murdered so many. With its most charismatic figures dead, the revolution lost momentum, faltered, and came to a halt.