London, April to September 1822; Revised in December 1846
PARIS in 1792 no longer looked as it had in 1789 and 1790. This was no longer the Revolution in its infancy; it was a people marching drunkenly toward their destiny over the depths by twisted paths. The people themselves no longer seemed tumultuous, curious, reckless; they were outright menacing. The faces one encountered in the streets were invariably frightened or fierce: either men gliding along close to the houses to avoid being seen or men prowling openly in search of prey. They turned from you with a fearful gaze lowered, or they fixed their gaze on yours to scrutinize you and pin you.
The variety of fashions had ceased; the old world was being effaced: it had shouldered the uniform coat of the new world, a coat which was then merely the last garment of the convicts to come. The social license displayed during the rejuvenation of France, the newfound liberties of 1789—those whimsical and unregulated freedoms of an order of things that is being destroyed but that hasn’t yet fallen into anarchy—were already being flattened beneath the people’s scepter. One sensed the approach of a plebeian tyranny: a fecund tyranny, it’s true, and one filled with hope, but also formidable in a way altogether different from the lapsed despotism of the old monarchy. For the sovereign people are everywhere, and when they become tyrants, tyranny is everywhere; it is the universal presence of a universal Tiberius.
Into the Parisian population there began to mix an alien population of cutthroats from the South. This vanguard of the Marseillais, whom Danton would lure to Paris for the Tenth of August and the September Massacres, could be recognized by their ragged clothes, their bronzed skin, and their look of cowardice and crime, but of crime from under another sun: in vultu vitium, “with vice written on their faces.”
At the Legislative Assembly, I recognized no one. Mirabeau and the other early idols of our troubles were either dead or had lost their altars. To pick up the historical thread broken by my travels in America, it is necessary to trace things back a bit further.
A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW
The flight of the King on June 21, 1791, had forced the Revolution to take a gigantic step. Brought back to Paris on June 25, the King had been dethroned for the first time, and the National Assembly declared that its decrees would have the force of law, without any need of royal sanction or approval. A high court of justice, heralding the Revolutionary tribunal, was established in Orléans. It was at this time that Madame Roland demanded the Queen’s head, not long before the Revolution demanded hers. A mob gathered on the Champ-de-Mars to protest the decree which removed the King from his duties instead of putting him on trial. The ratification of the Constitution on September 14 settled nothing. There was then the question of deposing Louis XVI. If this deposition had taken place, the crimes of January 21 would never have been committed, and the position of the French people in relation to the monarchy and to posterity would have been completely different. The members of the Constituent Assembly who opposed the King’s deposition intended to save the crown, and they laid it to waste; those who intended to lay it to waste by demanding a deposition might have saved it. As it almost always is in politics, the result was contrary to predictions.
On the last day of September 1791, the Constituent Assembly held its final session. The impudent decree of the previous May 17, forbidding the reelection of outgoing members, had given rise to the Convention. Nothing is more dangerous, nothing more insufficient, nothing more unsuitable to public affairs than resolutions directed against individuals or bodies, even when these resolutions are honorable.
The decree of September 29, regarding the regulation of popular assemblies, only served to make these assemblies more violent. This was the final act of the Constituent Assembly. The next day it dispersed and left France to a revolution.
THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY—CLUBS
The Legislative Assembly, installed on October 1, 1791, tumbled along in the whirlwind that was about to sweep away the living and the dead. Disturbances bloodied the départements; in Caen, they had their fill of murders and ate the heart of M. de Belzunce.[9]
The King stamped his veto on the decree against the émigrés and on another that stripped the non-juring priests of their rights. These legal acts fomented public unrest. Pétion had meanwhile become Mayor of Paris. On January 1, 1792, the deputies passed a decree demanding the prosecution of the emigrated Princes; on January 2, they resolved that this same January 1 would thenceforth be known as Year IV of Liberty. Sometime around February 13, the red caps made their appearance in the streets of Paris and the municipality began manufacturing pikes. The Émigré Manifesto was issued on March 1, and Austria assembled its arms. Paris was divided into sections more or less hostile to one another. On March 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly adopted the sepulchral machine, without which the judgments of the Terror could never have been executed; it was first tried on corpses, so that it could learn its work. One really can speak of this machine as one speaks of an executioner, since some people, touched by its good services, donated sums of money for its upkeep. The invention of this murderous instrument, at the very moment it was needed by the spirit of crime, is memorable proof of the coordinating intelligence of events, or rather of the hidden workings of Providence, when she wishes to change the face of empires.
At the instigation of the Girondins, Roland was called to advise the King. On April 20, war was declared on the King of Hungary and Bohemia.[10] Marat went on publishing the Ami du Peuple despite the decree issued against him. The Royal German Guards and the Berchini Regiment deserted. Isnard spoke of treachery in the Court. Gensonné and Brissot denounced the Austrian Committee. An insurrection broke out over the Royal Guard, which was disbanded. On May 28, the Assembly proclaimed its sessions permanent. On June 20, the Tuileries Palace was stormed by crowds from the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau; the pretext was Louis XVI’s refusal to sanction the proscription of priests: in this, the King was running the risk of death. France was declared to be in danger. M. de Lafayette was burned in effigy. The confederates of the second Federation were arriving; the Marseillais, lured by Danton, were on the march. They entered Paris on July 30 and took up quarters in the Club des Cordeliers.
THE CORDELIERS
Together with the national tribunal, two other tribunals had simultaneously been established: that of the Jacobins and that of the Cordeliers, which was then the most formidable because it furnished members for the famous Paris Commune and gave this Commune the means to act. If the Commune had never been formed, Paris, for want of a point of concentration, would have been divided, and the different districts would have become rival powers.
The Club des Cordeliers was established in the Cordeliers Convent, which had been built in the year 1259, during the reign of Saint Louis, with money given in reparation for a murder;* in 1590, it became a safe haven for the most infamous of the Leaguers.
Some places seem to be laboratories of factionalism: “Notice was given to the Duc de Mayenne,” says L’Estoile (on July 12, 1593), “that two hundred friars were arriving in Paris, furnished with arms and in agreement with the Sixteen, who held their daily councils in the Cordeliers of Paris. . . . On that day the Sixteen, assembled in the Cordeliers, laid down their arms.” The fanatics of the Holy League had thus yielded the Cordeliers Convent, like a morgue, to the Revolutionary philosophers.
The pictures, the sculpted and painted images, the veils, and the curtains of the monastery had been pulled down. The basilica, gutted, was now nothing but bones and shredded sinew. In the apse of the church, where the wind and the rain poured in through the broken panes of the rose-windows, a carpenter’s workbench served as the President’s station whenever the tribunal was in session. The red caps were left on this bench, to be donned by each orator in turn before he mounted the rostrum: this rostrum consisted of four small beams nailed crosswise, with a plank laid across this X as on a scaffold. Behind the President, beside a statue of Liberty, one saw the old, so-called instruments of justice—those instruments that would be supplanted by a single, bloody machine, as complicated mechanisms have been replaced by the hydraulic ram. The Club des Jacobins, once it had been “purified,” borrowed a few of these arrangements from the Club des Cordeliers.
ORATORS
The orators, assembled for the sake of destruction, agreed neither on the leaders to be chosen nor the means to be employed. They accosted each other like beggars, crooks, pickpockets, thieves, and murderers, to the cacophony of whistles and shouts that came from their various diabolical groups. Their metaphors were taken from the material of murder, borrowed from the filthiest objects to be found on the garbage heap and the dunghill, or drawn from places dedicated to the prostitution of men and women alike. Gestures accentuated these figures of speech, and everything was called by its name, with the cynicism of dogs, in an impious and obscene series of oaths and blasphemies. Nothing could be gleaned from this savage argot but the stuff of destruction and production, death and generation. All the speechifiers, no matter how reedy or thunderous their voices, were disrupted by creatures other than their opponents: small black owls, who inhabited the belfry without bells in this monkless monastery, swooped through the broken windows in search of quarry. At first the birds were called to order by the tintinnabulation of a useless bell; but when they did not cease their screeching, they were silenced by rifle fire, and fell, quivering, wounded and fatidic, in the midst of this Pandemonium. The fallen ceiling beams, the broken benches, the dismantled stalls, and the shards of saints that had been rolled and pushed against the walls, formed terraces on which spectators squatted, caked in mud and dust, sweaty and drunk, wearing threadworn carmagnoles, with pikes on their shoulders, or with their bare arms crossed.
The most misshapen of this gang were the preferred speakers. All the infirmities of soul and body have played their part in our troubles: disappointed self-love has made some great revolutionaries.
MARAT AND HIS FRIENDS
Following the precedent of hideousness, a succession of Gorgon-like heads mixed with the spectral presence of the Sixteen.[11] The former physician to the bodyguard of the Comte d’Artois, the fetus-faced Swiss Marat, with his bare feet stuffed in wooden clogs or in shoes shod with iron, was the first to deliver his speech, by virtue of his incontestable rights. Awarded the office of fool in the Court of the People, he shouted through his flat-nosed physiognomy with the banal half-smile that the old order of politeness smeared on every face, “People, we are going to have cut off two hundred and seventy thousand heads!” This Caligula of the crossroads was followed by the atheist cobbler Chaumette. Next came Camille Desmoulins, the attorney-general of the lamppost, a stammering Cicero, a public counselor of murderers, always exhausted from his debauches, a lighthearted Republican full of bons mots and puns, a connoisseur of gallows humor who said of the September Massacres: everything was done in an orderly fashion. He consented to become a Spartan only so long as the recipe for the black broth was left to Méot, the restaurateur.
Fouché, who had rushed up from Juilly and Nantes, took lessons from these professors of disaster. In the circle of ferocious beasts that gathered round the base of the chair, he looked like a dressed-up hyena, panting for the impending effluvium of blood. He was already on the scent of the incense drifting from the processions of idiots and executioners, and waiting for the day when, driven from the Club des Jacobins as a thief, an atheist, and a murderer, he would be appointed a minister. When Marat stepped down from his plank, this Triboulet of the people became the plaything of his masters: they mocked him, trod on his toes, jostled him, and screamed in his face—none of which stopped him from becoming a leader of the multitude, mounting the tower of the Hôtel de Ville, sounding the tocsin of wholesale massacre, and triumphing over the Revolutionary tribunal.
Marat, like Milton’s Sin, was raped by Death:[12] Chénier wrote his apotheosis, David depicted him in his bloody bath, and he was many times compared to the divine author of the Gospels. A prayer was dedicated to him: “Heart of Jesus, Heart of Marat; O Sacred Heart of Jesus, O Sacred Heart of Marat!” This sacred heart had for its ciborium a precious pyxis taken from the storehouse. On a cenotaph of turf raised in the Place du Carrousel, one could visit the bust, the bathtub, the lamp, and the writing-case of this divinity. Then the winds changed, and the unclean thing, poured from its agate urn into another vase, was emptied into the gutter.[13]
*It was burned to the ground in 1580.