CHAPTER 7

The Return of Vengeance: Terror in France, 1789–95

VENGEANCE played a significant role in the unfolding and escalation of the Red and White Terror in the French Revolution. To explore its course is to be attentive to (re)emergences during the radical breakdown of political and legal sovereignty. It is also to avoid exaggerating the role of ideology and of the great leader, or of the two combined. Vengeance has, of course, many faces, above all because it moves and tempts both the classes and masses. It is spontaneous and impulsive, as well as premeditated and theorized.

The bagarre or turbulence in Nîmes in June 1790 is emblematic of the vicious circle of vengeance and re-vengeance. In this southern city, premature counterrevolutionaries of ultra-Catholic persuasion denounced Protestants for taking the helm of the revolutionary vanguard with a view to avenging past persecutions. Following several assaults on them, Protestant militants, in their turn, gave two measures for one. They called for revenge despite admonitions from within the Protestant community that only authorized “public vengeance” could break the infernal cycle of reciprocal “hatred, vindictiveness, … [and] ressentiment” which was being fueled by “private acts of vengeance.” Certainly the mutual fear and denunciation driving this violence was well-grounded in local memories, beliefs, and class relations.¹

Like the contentious Oath of the Clergy of November 27, 1790, the ill-starred flight to Varennes of June 20–22, 1791, was a major defining event. By stoking the fires of mutual suspicion, it undermined the efforts of the moderate triumvirate of Barnave, Lameth, and Duport to save the Revolution from further excesses. On June 26, 1791, General Marquis François-Claude-Amour de Bouillé, supreme commander in the eastern departments and architect of the royal family’s escape, proposed to momentarily “suspend” the counterrevolution’s imperative vengeance so as to give France’s governors a chance to come to their senses. This respite was coupled with the warning that Europe’s sovereigns were primed to fight “the monster generated by the National Assembly,” which in the capital took the form of a “cannibalistic people drunk with crime, arrogance, resentment, and vice.” Bouillé forewarned that should the royal family, following its awkward return to Paris, suffer the slightest harm, “no stone of the city would be left standing” and the National Assembly would have to assume full responsibility for “such an exemplary punishment.” In closing, Bouillé noted that his admonition, which was not published at the time, prefigured a forthcoming “manifesto of Europe’s sovereigns who will notify [the usurpers in Paris] in even stronger terms what they must either do or fear.”2

And, indeed, in this dawn of a new and unfamiliar public diplomacy, and judging by the Padua Circular (July 10, 1791), Pillnitz Declaration (August 27, 1791), and Brunswick Manifesto (July 25, 1792), the rhetoric of the king-emperors became increasingly strident and threatening. The cry for vengeance was particularly fierce in court circles and among the émigrés. Count Armand Marc Montmorin, the foreign minister with close ties to Louis XVI, held that “inevitably a terror would be visited upon the population of Paris.”³ Among the émigrés, emotions ran so high that should the French people ever be given over to their vengeance, France “risked being turned into a wretched cemetery.”⁴ Several émigrés left their imprint on the letter and spirit of the Brunswick Manifesto, which threatened Paris and its citizens with “an exemplary, never to be forgotten vengeance: the city would be subjected to military punishment and total destruction,” and the national guardsmen and other frondeurs were warned to expect neither mercy nor pardon.⁵ The émigrés and their hoped-for foreign supporters saw themselves facing not military enemies but rebels, which meant that the laws of war need not be respected—a view shared, as noted above, by Edmund Burke.⁶ But the émigrés and their foreign sympathizers were not the fountainhead of the growing thirst for vengeance, which was located in the Tuileries. In any case, in France the avenging threats from abroad backfired. By arousing “anger” rather than “fear,” they gave the Revolution additional ground for deposing Louis XVI, not to say abolishing the monarchy.7

In the meantime, the abortive flight to Varennes, in addition to prodding the issue of dethronement at the top, roused the streets and the Commune of Paris from below. The reinstatement of Louis XVI on July 16, 1791, did much to trigger the mass rally of about 50,000 people in support of a petition opposing this move which, on July 17, 1791, culminated in the fusillade of the Champ de Mars. The National Guard units which fired the fatal volleys were under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette, and the two combined embodied the embryonic constitutional monarchy’s precarious hold on the legitimate use of violence. In many circles the massacre of some 50 peaceful demonstrators, followed by 200 arrests—without casualties among the men-at-arms—further delegitimated the contested regime; at the same time it sparked the slogan “dethronement or vengeance,” which caught fire in December, when Louis XVI vetoed decrees against émigrés and refractory priests.⁸

During the first half of 1792, with the king ever more distrusted for his alleged ties to European courts and the émigrés, the fast-rising military threat from abroad and war fever at home helped channel an increasingly restive popular movement, radicalized by worsening economic conditions, into the drive for dethronement. The declaration of war, the proclamation of the “country in danger,” and the Brunswick Manifesto were the backdrop for the investment of the Tuileries in the night of August 9, 1792. Although small by comparison with the mass demonstration on the Champ de Mars the year before, this organized show of popular force turned into by far the bloodiest journée of the Revolution to date. Besides, this time the profile of victims was radically different: about 600 of the 1,000 casualties belonged to the Swiss and Royal guards, who killed and wounded the allegedly regicidal protesters by gunshot. Incensed by this fusillade, unarmed members of the crowd and bystanders went on an avenging rampage. Not a few of the Swiss mercenaries and royal servants who were mauled and slain in this access of vindictive rage were mutilated, impaled, and dismembered. Characteristically the arrest and suspension of Louis XVI was tainted by this return of repressed personal and collective vengeance, foreshadowed by the lynching of several prominent old-regime officials in July 1789.9

Rather than quench the thirst for vengeance, the massacre of August 10 whetted it even further. Indeed, in the Paris Commune and in the sections, it touched off a loud cry for retaliation against the guards who had fired into the crowd, against the king’s acolytes who had ordered or countenanced the use of naked force, and against the refractory priests who were suspected of having warranted the repression.¹⁰

August 10 spelled the fall of the monarchy and heralded the rise of the Commune, whose relations with the Assembly became increasingly stormy.¹¹ Internally divided in what was an extremely fluid and explosive situation, the Commune neither opposed nor incited “the movement for vengeance” which Marat and others made their own. Presently the issue of vengeance became an important touchstone of revolutionary politics: a struggle between, on the one hand, the zealots of wild popular vengeance and, on the other, the advocates of legally grounded retribution, with the latter raising the specter of rampant avenging Furies to advance their position.

As if to calm the streets, on August 11 the Paris Commune called upon “the sovereign people to suspend … [their] vengeance” with the assurance that though through the ages justice had been trampled under foot, it was about to carry the day. That same night, in the Legislative Assembly, Danton, the Minister of Justice, backed a proposal to bring the captive Swiss Guards to trial before a court-martial or special tribunal. Although he sympathized with the seething popular rage, Danton sought to dampen and canalize it. Stressing that “popular vengeance ends where law begins,” he urged that “tribunals should begin to administer justice in order to disburden the people from having to do so.” Besides, there were few if any other “antidotes to vengeance.”¹² In this same spirit Condorcet, who had justified the massacre of August 10, argued that it behooved the Assembly to protect political prisoners from “illegal vengeance and to have them judged by the law.”¹³

Endorsing the Commune’s demand that the Assembly set up a special court, Robespierre proposed that its judges be chosen by popular election. But the Assembly hesitated to set up a tribunal that risked being swayed by avengers at a time that it resisted ceding additional ground to the militants outside its halls and in its corridors. The militants did not, however, relent, judging by a petition presented to the Assembly on August 17 calling for the establishment of a tribunal to judge political criminals, “with one judge from each section.” Although the enragés cried for a court of law, they intended and expected it to be an instrument of vengeance: “Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette having spilled [the people’s] blood, it was now their turn to watch their own followers get their just deserts.” Pierre Victorien Vergniaud, one of Danton’s associates, instantly retorted that this was a call for something very like “an inquisition, which he would fight to his last breath.”14

Even so, that very night the Assembly voted to institute an extraordinary tribunal. Elected indirectly, all the judges turned out to be highly professional lawyers and magistrates with Jacobin affinities. The charter set forth legal procedures which were sober by the standards of that time. Entailing traditional elements of sovereignty and spawning new ones, the court was to pioneer new ways of rendering justice as it set about judging and sentencing those accused of having ordered, executed, and brooked the violence of August 10.

Not surprisingly, this emergency tribunal got off to what was perceived to be a slow start: between August 21 and the end of the month it tried only six prominent royalists. All but one were sentenced to death and executed. Louis-David Collenot d’Angremont and Armand Laporte were the first two “political criminals” to be guillotined on the Place du Carrousel. Needless to say, the overheated atmosphere was scarcely conducive to mastering and exercising the due processes of an emergent law. After the Brunswick Manifesto, the Prussians crossed the border to capture Longwy on August 23 and advanced toward Verdun, whose fall seemed imminent. In the capital the air became increasingly thick with fear of foreign military intervention and suspicion of domestic treason.¹⁵

This tense atmosphere, charged with growing disquiet and unreason, weighed on the national day of lamentation for the victims of August 10, set for Sunday, August 26, and billed as a “day of vengeance.”¹⁶ The festivities were centered around “[a] pyramid raised over the ornamental pond of the Tuileries.” It was “draped with a black twill,” and engraved with the names of places “recalling massacres imputed to the royalists: Nancy, Nîmes, Montauban, Champ de Mars, etc.” Unlike the guillotine on the Place du Carrousel, which was designed to put to death in an instant and dispassionately, the pyramid “was virtually an incitement to [wild] slaughter.”

The day’s three-hour ceremonial cortege was headed by “the widows and orphans of the victims of August 10, dressed in white robes with black waistbands,” and carrying a receptacle containing “the petition of July 17, 1791, which had in vain called for a republic.” Next came the servants of the law, preceded by a huge male statue holding a symbolic sword, behind which marched the judges of all the emergency courts, including those of the embryonic revolutionary tribunal. The members of the “formidable Commune” fell in behind a statue of Liberty. Bringing up the rear, the deputies of the Assembly wore “civic head wreaths to honor and appease the dead.” The air was filled with “the severe chants of Chénier and the austere and fearsome music of Gossec,” which aimed to “lift the voice of vengeance to heaven and fill all hearts with deathly tremors and dark forebodings.” During the funeral ceremony, Charles-Philippe Ronsin, the main speaker, summoned one and all “to swear on the coffins of the harrowed bodies not to sheathe their swords … until France’s capital is purged of all the people’s oppressors.”17 On Monday a “furious crowd” carried the statue of Liberty to the Assembly “to ask for vengeance” before taking it, along with the Statue of the Law, to the Square of Louis XV for a “frenzied” celebration of both icons.¹⁸

What little remained of effective state authority had all but melted away. The Legislative Assembly having proclaimed its impending dissolution in favor of a soon to be elected constituent national convention, an interim executive council took the unsteady helm, with Danton at justice, Roland at interior, Clavière at finance, Servan at war, and Lebrun at foreign affairs. This provisional government reigned for forty days, until immediately after the military success at Valmy (September 20, 1792), which was a welcome but fleeting ray of hope in a perilous situation. The Commune of Paris and other municipalities of a radical cast kept pressing for ever greater iron resolve and will. The Assembly grudgingly authorized them to arrest suspects, inviting the establishment of local committees of surveillance.

Especially as seen from the capital, the situation seemed to be going from bad to worse. The Prussians kept advancing, and there were the first signs of peasant resistance in the lands of the future Vendée and Chouannerie. As was to be expected, all levels of political and civil society registered a fast-growing disposition to blame all reverses and perils on a sinister royalist or aristocratic plot. Forthwith several deputies attributed the “infamous capitulation” of Longwy and Verdun to the treacherous influence of local conspirators and threatened severe reprisals following liberation.19 In the meantime, on August 26, swept by fear and suspicion, the Assembly had issued a decree granting refractory priests two weeks to leave the country or face deportation. By the same token, two days later, at Danton’s urging, it ordered private homes to be searched for “suspects” and arms, above all in the capital. The prison population of Paris rose to about 2,800 by early September, of whom about 1,000 were arrested after August 10.

There is no denying the swelling fear behind the first terror, which was largely a panic terror. Brunswick’s warning of “an exemplary vengeance” from abroad was as real as the threat of rising resistance at home. Even Roland, less mercurial than Danton, hearkened to the “despair and indignation of a people trembling in the face of imminent peril and [fearing] the cruel vengeance [of] … savage counterrevolutionaries.”²⁰ He was joined by Brissot, Condorcet, Gorsas, and Louvet in publicly justifying popular violence against domestic enemies with a view to consolidating the Revolution and bolstering the influence of the Girondins. Their accent was on spontaneous violence, which they expected to be limited and relatively easy to contain.²¹

Of course, there were also proponents of preemptive vengeance. Marat repeatedly incited the petit peuple to again take matters in their own hands as the focus of the revolutionary animus shifted from the Tuileries to the prisons, which were packed with sworn enemies. He feared that “popular executions” were becoming a “cruel … necessity” for a people “reduced to despair” and running out of patience with a “willfully slow-moving justice.” As early as August 19, 1792, Marat declared that “the safest and wisest course” was for the people to go “fully armed” to the Abbaye prison to seize the traitors being held there and “put to the sword in particular the Swiss officers and their accomplices,” without benefit of a trial.²² In much the same way, Louis-Stanislas Fréron decried that even though the prisons were crammed with scoundrels and conspirators, so far the special tribunal, “instead of making a clean sweep,” had pronounced only “three death sentences.” Even Gorsas, a prominent Girondin zealot, warned that “should the sword of justice fail to strike, the people’s sword would have to do so.” Whereas heretofore the sacrifice of “a few drops of impure blood would have appeased the cry for a righteous vengeance” by now, with the people “driven to excesses,” very likely it would take a “torrent of blood.”23

This, then, was the context and ambience in which the prison massacres erupted and ran wild during the first week of September 1792. These massacres were the second saturnalia of bloodshed in less than a month and may be considered the culmination of the first, erratic terror of the French Revolution. There is considerable bafflement about their incidental and ultimate causes, the mix of spontaneity and predeliberation being particularly controversial. In terms of the dynamics of their escalation and contagion, the prison massacres might be considered the urban equivalent of the grande peur of 1789, which had been largely rural.

It all started early Sunday afternoon, September 2, with the slaying of about twenty refractory priests who, having refused to take the new oath to the republic, were being transferred to the Abbaye prison, pending deportation overseas. During the following five days, patriots driven by “rage and fear” invested nine of the capital’s eleven regular jails and improvised detention centers, determined to seize their inmates. About 1,100 of 2,800 prisoners were killed, or over two-fifths of the prison population. Three-quarters of the victims were conventional and nonpolitical inmates, with many thieves and prostitutes among them. The prey comprised about 200 priests, 80 Swiss guards, and 100 nobles. As the killing spread to provincial cities, most of the victims were political prisoners, notably nobles and priests.²⁴

If the number of victims did not rise any higher it was, in part, because self-appointed leaders among the vigilantes set up quasi tribunals inside the prisons to interrogate about 2,600 suspects, of whom 1,500 were acquitted. In the words of a member of the Commune, “the people dispensed justice at the same time that they wrought vengeance.” Overall, however, there was something distinctly wild and blind about the slaughter of defenseless prisoners who were presumed to embody a ubiquitous domestic enemy with close ties to the émigrés and European powers.25

Even more terrible than the scale of the killings were the furious and primitive ways in which they were carried out. For the septembriseurs the model spectacle of justice was centered around the legendary wheel on the Place de Grève, not around the new-built scaffold on the Place du Carrousel. During four days they “savored” inflicting upon some of their betters torments reminiscent of those suffered by Calas and Damiens.²⁶ It was not uncommon for prisoners to be cut to pieces “in order to prolong their agonies and amuse the spectators, delighted in the spectacle of the victims’ atrocious convulsions and wails of agony.”²⁷

Although the fate of Marie-Thérèse de Savoie-Carignan, or Princess de Lamballe, was not typical, it was paradigmatic. One of Marie Antoinette’s closest confidantes, she emigrated in mid-1791 but soon returned to join the royal family and was confined to the Petite-Force prison after August 10, 1792. On September 3, while being transferred to another jail after having been sentenced to death, a crowd fell upon her. Mme de Lamballe was brutally killed and decapitated: her head fixed on the point of a pike, it was carried, in ominous procession, to the Temple allegedly to force the king and queen to see with their own eyes “how the people wreak vengeance on their tyrants.” In the heat of the moment it was widely rumored that the princess had been stripped bare, dismembered, and eviscerated. In actual fact her calvary was comparable to that of de Launay, de Flesselles, and Bertier de Sauvigny in July 1789 which, as we saw, marked a resurgence of ancient rituals of avenging retribution.²⁸

Overall the profile of the several hundred deadly assailants was comparable to that of similar partisan, lynch, or pogrom gangs through the ages. Their ranks included “drunks, cowards, and simpletons” alongside respectable artisans, shopkeepers, and (ex-)soldiers. It is uncertain how many of them, if any, acted under the influence of the Jacobin or any other ideological belief system. There were, of course, many times more onlookers than killers. Most likely the former had altogether unexceptional motives for actively inciting or silently condoning the latter. By and large Paris “turned a deaf ear to the war cries of the killers and the wails of the victims,” as if “pity had been frozen” and “hearts turned to stone.”²⁹

Indeed, the absence of any effective restraining force goes far to explain the escalation of the assault on twenty defiant priests into a nearly weeklong and citywide prison massacre. What there was of sovereign power was tenuous and paralyzed. The ministers of the provisional government, most notably Danton and Roland, made little if any effort to intercede. As for the Assembly, it did not “adopt a single [monitory] resolution, directive, or decree”; and its normally “silver-tongued orators,” including Rabaut Saint-Etienne, “fell silent.”30 Besides, even if one of the leaders had risen to the occasion, he could not have mustered credible security forces.³¹ Although Jérôme Pétion, the mayor of Paris, and Louis Manuel, the procureur of the Paris Commune, were as powerless as the Assembly, they kept trying to mediate in the prisons, with modest results. Significantly, on September 7, when informing the Assembly that the situation was not yet entirely back to normal, Pétion noted that “fear … [and] terror” were subsiding along with the “return of the rule of law and the reorganization of the force publique.”³²

In the meantime, key officials were unnerved and helpless. On September 3 Roland, the interior minister, sent a letter to the Assembly suggesting that “perhaps yesterday’s events had best be hushed up.” In his judgment “scoundrels and traitors” were taking advantage of a justified popular rage and vengeance, aspiring after a measure of long overdue justice. Roland merely urged the Assembly to calm the waters by openly “conceding that the executive power had failed to foresee and prevent these excesses.”³³ Meanwhile the Assembly charged a commission to urge the sections to “stop the effusion of blood and channel the people’s fury from domestic vengeance into a more forceful and dignified drive against foreign enemies.” This commission promptly reported back that it was powerless “to bring the people to reason” and that the sections were waiting for the National Assembly “to take an energetic stand.”³⁴

Condorcet also avoided condemning the massacres. On September 4, after the Assembly had received details about the “bloody scenes in the prisons,” he wrote in his newspaper that “we are ringing down the curtain on events whose scale and consequences would be difficult to evaluate just now.” But in this same article, in which he noted that not a single prison had been spared, Condorcet was perplexed by the “unhappy and awful situation which forces a naturally good and generous people to wreak such vengeance.”35 On September 9, after Pétion, confident of the return of normalcy, asked the Assembly to forget all the “bloody scenes,” Condorcet insisted that these “dark and random crimes” were perpetrated not by the people but by “brigands.”³⁶ It took another ten days for him to assert that “popular vengeance … without legal sanction is murder.”³⁷ In the meantime Roland and Condorcet did nothing to distance themselves from leading Girondins who throughout the bloody week concurred that there was a clear and present danger of a prison conspiracy, with links to local traitors and the émigrés, which the people had done well to thwart in the interest of saving the Revolution.³⁸

While the master spirits of the Revolution hedged in public, in private not a few of them must have expressed their consternation about the wildfire of popular vengeance, which they were quick to blame on the dregs of society and the Mountain, or the extreme left. On September 5 Madame Roland, who moved in the inner circles of influence, noted that the Assembly and provisional government were being “cowed by Robespierre and Marat … [who] were stirring up the people” with the help of “a small gang cemented by loot stolen from castles and by contributions from Danton, the underhanded chief of this horde.” Four days later she told her correspondent, Bancal des Issarts, that in the “ghastly” furor “women were brutally raped before they were torn limb from limb, their insides eviscerated and cut into ribbons and their flesh eaten raw.” She closed with a wistful but also half-specious coda: “Now that the Revolution, which I embraced wholeheartedly from the start, has been tainted by these scoundrels and has turned ugly, it mortifies me.”³⁹ Condorcet’s wife similarly recorded that the avenging rage “deeply troubled all true patriots.”⁴⁰

Even the supporters and sympathizers of direct action were disturbed and mystified by the popular frenzy’s raw violence. In the weekly Les Révolutions de Paris, under the headline “the people’s justice,” Louis-Marie Prudhomme advanced an uneasy justification. Giving credence to the widely held conspiratorial view that “aristocrats” were about to break out of prison to join forces with other counterrevolutionaries, he claimed that it was not to whitewash the horrors of “the people’s vengeance” to forewarn of even greater horrors should the people “fall back under the aristocratic yoke.” But even Prudhomme could not hide his anguish about the mixture of “virtue and vengeance” which had left “a pool of blood and a heap of corpses” in front of the Palace of Justice. In a private letter Babeuf was no less torn. He approved “the people taking the law in their own hands,” all the more so since many of the victims were, in fact, guilty. Although he showed concern for the innocents who were murdered, Babeuf asked whether, in this critical pass, justice could have been other than “cruel.” Besides, there was the long memory of the old elites having used “the wheel, the stake, and the gibbet” to hold down the people. Indeed, instead of “improving the human condition, they had turned their subjects into barbarians by behaving like barbarians themselves.”41

Perhaps most unexpectedly, even Marat was disconcerted by the prison massacres. Ever since 1789 he had, of course, advocated spontaneous popular violence, starting with his justification of the initial assault on the Bastille. Marat saw the direct action of the petit peuple serving three purposes: remove the out-of-date rulers and their system of political oppression; secure greater equity for the lower and especially propertyless strata; and promote the lumières.⁴² In his argument, the common people patiently “endured enormous suffering before, finally, rising and wreaking a vengeance which is just in principle even if not always enlightened in its effects.”⁴³ Troubled by the intemperance of popular insurrection and justice, Marat envisaged the establishment of a community-based committee of “Avengers of the Law” to guide both the restless demos and rudderless justice.⁴⁴

In the fall of 1790, following the massacre of mutinous soldiers at Nancy, Marat denounced the vengeance of the aristocracy for being “barbarian” while hailing that of the people for being “terrifying.”⁴⁵ A few months later he vowed that he would never soften his “call for the ax of vengeance to be brought down” on counterrevolutionaries.⁴⁶ And after the bloodletting of August 10, 1792, he urged the people to visit their vengeance on the suspects in the Abbaye prison.

But then the unenlightened turn of the prison massacres attested to the hazards of rhetorical hyperbole. To be sure, on September 22 Marat played to the crowd when he refuted the charge that it was “a crime to incite the people to take revenge on traitors” and claimed that by listening to him the people had taken steps “to save the nation” and put power beyond the reach of conspirators.47 But a few weeks later, in October, Marat repeatedly deplored the “disastrous” massacres. He did not, however, disavow them, not least because political “rascals” were seizing upon them “to portray the Paris Commune as a horde of cannibals.” It is noteworthy, nonetheless, that at this juncture Marat not only responded “to the instinctive reprobation of compassionate souls” but also became “troubled” to the point of opening himself to the “universal disquiet of a common humanity.”⁴⁸

Robespierre’s position on violence and terror was not radically different from Marat’s, except that at the outset he counseled restraint. In late December 1791 he urged “waiting for the crimes of tyrants to incite an enraged people to wreak their justified vengeance,” which, to boot, would be “an expression of enlightenment.”⁴⁹ Robespierre was confident that eventually an “elemental sentiment … would drive the common people to reclaim their dignity by avenging the gross injustices they had suffered in times past.”⁵⁰

Robespierre also deplored the excesses of the prison massacres for which the Girondins deftly fixed the full responsibility on him and Marat. Like Marat he did so in heated debate with anyone proposing to exploit them politically. Robespierre conceded that it was natural “to weep for the victims, including those among them who were guilty.” But he also wanted France’s citizens “to save some tears for [the victims of] other, nay greater calamities,” particularly the countless millions who through the ages had suffered the torments of political and social oppression. As for the “pathetic descriptions of the misfortune of Madame de Lamballe and Count Montmorin,” they were of one piece with the Brunswick Manifesto. Clearly, with their “avenging” temper, the champions of despotism had appropriated much of the mourning, determined to “defame the infant republic … and dishonor the Revolution” which dared to defy Europe.⁵¹

According to Louis Blanc, looking back, the “contagious frenzy” of the September massacres was reminiscent of the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, which had seen “8,000 Frenchmen strangled within two hours,” and of the massacre of the Armagnacs in 1418, which had left the flagstone of Paris prisons “stained with blood.” In the past as in the present, there was “an excessive frenzy fueled by an inordinate sense of peril and rage,” though in 1792 there were two new elements: “a fiery patriotic élan … [and] a philosophy freighted with the fanaticism needed to better counter another fanaticism.” The result was that the different “centuries were reduced to wreaking vengeance on each other,” a case in point being the hectoring cry, “Remember Saint Bartholomew’s Day,” which was said to have been hurled at refractory priests as they were being massacred.52

The September massacres were the apogee of vengeful violence and terror from below. They were more an expression of fear and weakness than of confidence and strength. But then, unexpectedly, in late September 1792 the Revolution’s fortunes seemed to take a favorable turn. The victory at Valmy was followed by a successful drive into Savoy and occupation of Nice. These auspicious military developments coincided with the inauguration of the Convention, the abolition of the monarchy, and the proclamation of the Republic. There was nothing to suggest that this upturn would call forth a resumption of terror, or that the chaotic terror from below would be supplemented or replaced by a systematic terror from above.

Of course, to lance the abscess of alleged treason and conspiracy in the prisons without either tightly quarantining the king or somehow removing him from the scene was to leave a potentially dangerous focus and center of resistance. During the first two or three years of revolutionary turmoil the dethronement of Louis XVI, let alone the abolition of kingship, had been all but unthinkable, France having become a constitutional monarchy in practice if not in theory and pretense. It is certainly telling that even after his treacherous flight to Varennes, the king resumed—or was “forced” to resume—his throne, albeit with additional checks on his authority. All along Louis XVI and his camarilla showed an uncanny and cunning staying power. Despite his removal following the massacre of August 10, Louis was not hors de combat. Until September 20 he continued to have considerable use and exchange value for politicians at home and diplomats abroad, and he never failed to seize and create promising opportunities for his cause. Besides, his confinement to forced residence in the Temple left his personal future, and that of the monarchy, in abeyance. The discovery in the Tuileries, on November 20, of Louis’s strongbox containing incriminating correspondence with foreign courts and chancelleries confirmed the worst suspicions and brought the debate over king and kingship to a head. The call for regicide began to resonate.

Logically there were five options: continuing confinement; deportation and exile; unceremonious execution (in the manner of Tsar Nicholas II in 1918); legal trial; political trial. Realistically the time for unlimited imprisonment was passed, and neither banishment nor precipitate execution was under active consideration. As for a trial by a tribunal founded on law, in the conjuncture of events it was not really a live historical possibility. In effect, any trial was bound to be a political trial. On this score the Jacobins were by far the most open, not to say forthright.

As was to be expected, the “case” was brought before the National Convention, which constituted itself as a special court of justice: its members became at once prosecutors, jurors, and judges. Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes took in hand the defense of Louis XVI. To be sure, few deputies were convinced or plainspoken royalists or constitutional monarchists. Even so, the Convention was not a Star Chamber. Many of its members were moderate republicans and scrupulous lawyers. Though the Montagne was not a negligible faction, it was in no position to overwhelm the house, not even by playing to the enragés in the galleries, the clubs, and the streets. If the arguments of Saint-Just and Robespierre carried the weight they did, it was largely because in addition to being reasoned and pointed, even if extreme, they struck home in the runaway crisis of confidence in Louis XVI and the monarchy, particularly in the capital.

How to explain, otherwise, the apparent sway or purchase of the political pleadings of the regicides? When Saint-Just intervened in the debate on November 13, he was 25 years old and relatively unknown. With some exaggeration Michelet attributes his instant aura to circumstances having called for “a wholly new man to wield the glaive de justice,” or sword of justice: Saint-Just “set the tone for the whole trial” because of all the Montagnards, he was best suited to assume “the sinister role of personifying death and speaking on behalf of the people’s vengeances.”53 Indeed, Saint-Just argued that a regular trial of Louis XVI was out of the question, since history had already found him guilty for his part in the events of August 10. Louis was neither citizen nor king. Like any ruler he did not rule innocently, and he had on his head the blood spilled at “the Bastille, Nancy, the Champ de Mars, Tournai, and the Tuileries.” According to Saint-Just, there being no legal basis for arraigning and sentencing Louis Capet, his trial was bound to be the political act of men taking the responsibility for founding a republic. Since a law court and a political assembly operated on radically different principles, in the event the Convention, in its judicial guise, acquitted him, it would cease to be viable. In sum, Saint-Just “saw no middle ground: this man must either rule or die.”54

Saint-Just might have spoken to the winds, except that Robespierre, by then a vocal Montagnard tribune, echoed, indeed appropriated his principal arguments. He, too, contended that Louis was not a lawful king but a criminal tyrant who had “long since been judged” and dethroned by events, precluding any presumption of innocence.⁵⁵ Besides, the issue was not one of personal liability. Louis embodied the principle of divine right monarchy which, as an institution, had survived the abolition of the monarchy, and it was this principle which at the dawn of this epoch stood before the bar of history. Inevitably the trial would be political, not judicial: just as the king, in his person, was not the “accused,” so the members of the Convention were not his “judges.”⁵⁶

But Robespierre, even more than Saint-Just, pressed the deputies to consider the political stakes, defiantly asking whether they were prepared to settle for “a revolution without a revolution.”⁵⁷ It was as risky to allow the “dethroned king to rove around the Republic, or even to keep him in captivity” as it was to “absolve” him, thereby exposing the champions and soldiers of liberty “to the vengeance of despots and aristocrats.”⁵⁸ Robespierre concluded, “regretfully,” that “Louis XVI needed to die so that the patrie should be able to live.”⁵⁹ Although he claimed not to “breathe personal vengeance,” Robespierre called for retribution in the form of “the tyrant’s death, which would serve to cement both liberty and civil peace.” For such a judgment to “benefit the future” it would, however, have to “assume the solemnity of a public vengeance.”⁶⁰ In this spirit, after urging that Louis be charged with “treason against the French nation and crimes against humanity,” Robespierre specified two ways to implement this prescription: “Louis should suffer his punishment on the same square on which the martyrs of liberty had recently met their death [on August 10]; and a monument should be raised on the site of his execution to attest the people’s righteous vengeance and admonish future generations to hold tyrants in abomination.”61

The trial was, of course, a dramatic confrontation among the revolutionaries themselves, many of whom, including (or above all) the Girondins, stressed the drawbacks of pronouncing and executing the death sentence. Some of the moderates advocated continuing the king’s confinement until the end of hostilities, at which time he should be exiled. One of them backed this proposal with the argument that the course of man’s progress was paved with “moderation, humanity, and prudence” rather than with “grand executions, intense hatreds, and avenging passions,” and that a “holocaust of human blood” was an unlikely fount of liberty. Another opposed the “monstrous” suggestion to kill the king for being “informed by vengeance rather than wisdom.” Still another cautioned that “such an open act of vengeance would harm rather than help the French nation by giving Europe’s despots the perfect pretext to traduce” the Revolution.⁶² Ironically the Girondins, initially the foremost warmongers, made a special point of warning that to execute the king would be to inflame the “ressentiment, indignation, and horror … of all of Europe,” thereby feeding the fires of “universal war.” Besides, having decapitated “the man rather than the system, the King, dead in France, would be reborn among the émigrés in Koblenz.”⁶³

Abroad, the reaction was instant. On January 28, 1793, a week after the execution of Louis XVI, the Comte de Provence, speaking as regent, conjured all émigrés and Frenchmen to attest their “attachment to the religion of our fathers and to the sovereign we mourn by redoubling not only their devotion and loyalty to our young and hapless King [Louis XVII] but also their ardor to avenge the blood of his august father.” In another proclamation the future Louis XVIII, in his own name and in the name of the Comte d’Artois, his younger brother (the future Charles X), spoke in identically the same key. In a third manifesto, addressed to the French people, the Comte de Provence called for “the reestablishment of the monarchy … ; the restoration of religion … ; the reinstatement of Frenchmen of all estates in their legitimate rights and possession; and the severe and exemplary punishment of all crimes.”⁶⁴ Count Antoine François Claude Ferrand, one of his advisors, urged that this retribution run to “44,000 executions, or one in each commune.”⁶⁵ On June 17, 1793, at the Sacred College, Pius VI had no doubt that the “innocent blood of Louis XVI would rise to heaven … and provoke a divine fury,” reminding the people of France “that God, the just avenger of crimes, had often inflicted terrifying punishments for altogether lesser transgressions.”66

Though without a basis in law, the indictment, verdict, and sentence had considerable legitimacy, as did the execution. There was widespread agreement about the king’s culpability, even if the bill of indictment remained vague. The Convention was intensely divided; just over half of its members voted for the death penalty, the other half for various lesser punishments. The Girondins’ proposal to submit the matter to a popular referendum was defeated by a majority of 137, and so was the call for a stay of execution, by a majority of 70.

The trial, including the execution, was political in every sense of that term.⁶⁷ The regicide was intended to bring down a theologically sacralized king and political order. To this end Louis XVI became the sacrificial victim in an improvised rite of passage from the ancien régime to a new political and social order. His final stately and public calvary on the Place de la Révolution, witnessed by some 20,000 people, proved to be the founding act for an untried authority system and civil society whose secular liturgy, formulary, and icons were just then being invented and constructed, as well as contested. The solemn killing of the thaumaturgic king, as an act of founding violence, rallied true believers at the same time that it left a legacy of division among the revolutionaries and a reservoir of fear among enemies and neutrals. This irreversible and defining act could only intensify the friend-enemy polarization inherent to the escalating violence and vengeance attending the confrontation of revolution and counterrevolution at home and in Europe.

Although neither Michelet nor Quinet questioned the need to depose and punish Louis XVI and abolish the monarchy, both disapproved of the death sentence and its instant execution. They were above all discomforted by the archaic and magical aspects of the Jacobins’ rush to regicide. For them this regicide was a major step toward the Great Terror and provided the counterrevolution with a “royalist myth of the martyred king” who suffered, in Christ-like fashion, for the “redemption” of his nation and people. Curiously, Michelet and Quinet were relatively deaf to the “logic” of the avenging violence inherent to the foundation of a radically new regime whose profane polity and politics turned on the desacralization of king and monarchy.

Within weeks after the king’s execution on January 21, 1793, the general situation became as tense and perilous as in August–September 1792. The fledgling French Republic declared war on Great Britain and Holland on February 1, and on Spain five weeks later. An emergency levy of 300,000 men for the overstretched French army precipitated antirevolutionary resistance far and wide, but especially in the Vendée, at the same time that the growing war effort intensified social unrest among the hawkish enragés in Paris. On March 18 General Dumouriez, the victor of Valmy and Jemappes, was defeated at Neerwinden and evacuated Belgium. Not unlike six months earlier, following the fall of Longwy and Verdun, military confidence was shaken. Once again, the revolutionaries took fright and searched for traitors. In turn, anti- and counterrevolutionaries took heart. As if to head off and defuse an avenging fury reminiscent of the prison massacres, there was renewed pressure for the prompt establishment of a supreme revolutionary tribunal.

This time the initiative came from the Jacobin clubs. By early March 1793 there was a broad consensus among Montagnards and Communards that with the nation strained by war and patriots rushing to the front, the Convention should set up, in the words of Jean Bon Saint-André, “a special tribunal to secure the home front by punishing traitors, conspirators, and agitators.”68 As at the time of the creation of the now dormant tribunal of August 17, Robespierre endorsed this call for emergency justice, and once again, in the Convention, the Girondins opposed instituting what they feared might turn into “an inquisition infinitely worse than that of Venice.”⁶⁹

The Convention was still irresolute when in the evening of March 10 Danton stepped forward to openly “assume the historical responsibility for the creation of this terrifying but necessary tribunal.” Taking issue with the Girondins’ caution, he insisted that Dumouriez’s military reverses called for bold steps, to begin with “judicial measures to punish counterrevolutionaries.” Danton claimed that it was in the interest of the counterrevolutionaries “that a new-fledged judicial tribunal speaking the law take the place of the ascendant popular tribunal speaking the people’s vengeance.” Indeed, he told the members of the Convention that “all of humanity was looking to them to save the enemies of liberty from the jaws of popular vengeance.”70

At the words “popular vengeance,” a voice cried out the word “September,” a caustic interjection Danton could not ignore. But before joining issue, he conceded “that nothing was more difficult than to define a political crime.” In the present crisis, which called for “great efforts and terrible measures,” he saw “no middle ground between an ordinary law court and a revolutionary tribunal.” Having staked out an extreme and defiant position, and “haunted by the memory of September,” Danton addressed his captious critic: “since a member of this chamber dared call back the bloody days which every good citizen deplores,” he felt compelled to say that “had a tribunal been in place last fall the people, who are often maliciously blamed for them, certainly would not have stained themselves with blood.” Claiming, rather speciously, that in September it had been “humanly impossible to hold back the surge of national vengeance,” Danton exhorted “the members of the National Convention to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors … in the Legislative Assembly.” Specifically, he summoned them “to be terrifying themselves in order to spare the people from having to assume this awesome responsibility.” To this end the Convention should “charter a tribunal which, under the circumstances, might not be the best, but neither would it be the worst.”⁷¹ Robespierre and Marat were at one with Danton in demanding decisive measures which would at once “put in fear the counterrevolutionaries and save the people from the temptation of joining in wild murder.”⁷²

On March 10, 1793, the Convention voted to establish the Extraordinary Criminal Tribunal—soon known as the Revolutionary Tribunal.⁷³ It fixed the methods for the selection of the court’s five judges and twelve jurors, and spelled out its operating principles and procedures. Paradoxically, “the momentary triumvirate” of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton played a key role in “formulating the dualistic tenet of enforcement terror and revolutionary legality” as a prophylaxis to blunt and deflect popular vengeance on the order of the September massacres.⁷⁴

There was no foreseeing the calamitous course this tribunal would take, along with a panoply of emergency measures and institutions. Certainly the rush of circumstances, intensified by pressure from the streets, thwarted the efforts of the newly appointed judges to fit the tribunal with checks against its circumstantial defects. In particular, the exigencies of war impeded circumspection. Ironically, the war was being urged on by those very political forces which were most apprehensive about the de-democratization of the fledgling regime. Between Dumouriez’s first defeat at Neerwinden on March 18 and his defection to the enemy in early April, the Convention instituted a surveillance system, established the Committee of Public Safety, and proscribed the émigrés. Meanwhile the strains of war played havoc with food prices and supplies. To rein in social unrest, the government moved to fix the value of the assignat and to enforce the maximum. Simultaneously, it was confronted with the federalist rebellion of the major southern cities and the spread of the anti-revolution in the Vendée. This seamless crisis could not help but exacerbate the face-down between the Jacobins, pressed by the sansculottes and enragés, and the Girondins, who felt the mailed fist starting with the Parisian journées of May 31 to June 2. There seemed no escaping the emergence and hardening of what Lazare Carnot called a “dictature de détresse,” or emergency dictatorship, driven by the closely entwined failing foreign war and expanding civil conflict.75

Had it not been for this rising storm, the assassination of Marat, on July 13, 1793, the eve of the fourth anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, most likely would have been an isolated and harmless bolt of political lightning. But with the turbulent weather, Marie-Anne-Charlotte de Corday d’Armont’s fatal deed touched off a political firestorm. In death even more than in life, Marat lent himself to being at once apotheosized and demonized—as the incarnation of good or evil, light or darkness, virtue or vice, purity or impurity.

Disenchanted with the Revolution, Charlotte Corday claimed that by killing Marat she meant to “avenge untold innocent victims” as well as “save thousands of lives … and prevent many other disasters.” When the judges, before sentencing her to death, asked whether she “thought she had slain all the Marats,” she replied that with “this one dead, all the others will be put in fear.”76

Almost instantly Corday was both excoriated and extolled as the arch-avenger. One of the revolutionary papers reported that on hearing of Marat’s assassination, several women exclaimed that death by guillotine would be “too mild for such a heinous crime” and vowed to “cut up and devour the scoundrel who had deprived the people of their best friend.”⁷⁷ After noting in Père Duchesne that to curse Corday was to “fire the people’s vengeance,” Hébert likewise insisted that to “fit the crime” the punishment would have to be “more terrible and degrading than death by guillotine.”⁷⁸ As for Charlotte Corday, on being turned over to the Abbaye prison, she apparently feared “that the people would tear her limb from limb.” She did not breathe easier until she thought she stood fair to be “beheaded by the guillotine, which would be a gentle death.”⁷⁹

There was, indeed, considerable apprehension that an overwrought crowd would once again invest the Abbaye prison, this time to touch off an uncontrollable massacre with the vindictive slaying of Marat’s assassin. At the Convention several deputies, worried that a popular “clamor for vengeance” would set off “a terrible explosion,” urged citizens to remain both calm and vigilant at the same time that they reassured them that they “would be avenged.” Likewise François Hanriot, the hard-line commander of the capital’s national guard, simultaneously approved the cry for vengeance and stressed that “the best way to keep in check the aristocracy was to trust and support our courts of law.” Presently even the firebrand Hébert sought to calm the atmosphere, insisting that “the day of vengeance was not yet at hand” partly because Paris still needed to persuade the provinces that the capital was not “a city of cannibals.”⁸⁰

In the meantime, at the main Jacobin club there was a move to enshrine Marat, the martyr of liberty, in the Pantheon. But Robespierre objected, contending that by giving people a false sense of “redress,” such a spectacular homage would assuage their “thirst for vengeance.” On July 15 a delegation of the Society of the Men of August 10 came to the Convention to “demand that Marat be avenged” rather than given “the honors of the Pantheon,” not least because he was, in any case, assured of a “permanent Pantheon in everyone’s heart.”⁸¹

By this time several bards of the Revolution were entrusted with planning a solemn funeral rite for Marat. It stands to reason that the iconoclastic intelligentsia, including the unbound artists of the new order, should have turned to celebrating and commemorating the Revolution’s major events and heroic leaders or martyrs. In this way they hoped to challenge and replace the resplendent public ceremonials of the ancien régime. Jacques-Louis David is emblematic of these self-conscious activist illuminati who came forward to assist in laying the foundations for a future full of promise. An early partisan of reform, he was radicalized by the force of circumstance. With time he became a fervent champion of the nascent republic and Jacobin patriotism. David was elected one of the capital’s deputies in the National Convention and eventually served on its Committee of General Security. He had a sympathetic understanding for Robespierre and Marat, with whom he consorted off and on.

David emerged, of course, as not only the peerless painter-artist of the Revolution but also its master metteur en scène. Characteristically he idealized and ideologized one of the Revolution’s grand founding events in The Oath of the Tennis Court, his first and arguably one of his most compelling historical paintings, started in mid-1790. No less exemplary, David was the guiding spirit of the ceremonial transfer of Voltaire’s ashes to the Pantheon in June 1791. This sober and grandiose funeral procession, partly mimetic of yesterday’s religious prototype and featuring Greco-Roman imagery, was staged to symbolize and herald “the victory of reason over superstition, philosophy over theology, justice over tyranny, tolerance over fanaticism.” David was responsible for the overall “organization” and “decoration” of this and several later public rites, while François Gossec and Marie-Joseph Chénier provided, respectively, the music and lyrics.82

David does not seem to have had a hand in conceiving and staging the calvary of Louis XVI—procession, execution, burial—on January 21, 1793, which was designed to consummate the king’s profanation as a symbol of monarchy while diligently precluding his living on as a martyr. Indeed, David’s calling and vision was to construct, represent, and memorialize heroes, not anti-heroes; martyrs, not demons. Nowhere was his revolutionary commitment more intensely tested and expressed than in his orchestration of the funeral of Jean-Paul Marat and his martyr painting of this uncommon revolutionary. A few months earlier David had experimented with new techniques of funeral pageantry and iconography in rendering honor to Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau. As deputy from Yonne, this aristocrat had voted the death penalty for Louis XVI. In revenge for this apostasy, Lepeletier was mortally stabbed by a former royal bodyguard. David arranged for his semi-nude corpse, with its fatal wound unhidden, to lie in state on the Place Vendôme preceding a memorial service on the floor of the Convention. Shortly thereafter David captured the atmosphere and message of the ceremony in his painted exaltation of Lepeletier. In every respect, Lepeletier’s apotheosis prefigured Marat’s.83

Knowing Marat personally, David was all the more pained by his assassination and disposed to give his all to assure that Marat be given proper homage. Under his direction, by the evening of July 15 Marat’s embalmed body lay in state in the erstwhile church of the Cordelier monastery, the meeting place of the Jacobin club bearing that name.⁸⁴ The corps rested on a bier “lined with flowers and draped with the tricolor.” His head graced with an oak crown, Marat’s body was wrapped in a white sheet, giving bold relief to his red chest wound, which was in plain view. Two stones, presumably relics from the Bastille, were set at the base and front of the bier, carved with the rousing epitaph: “Marat, L’Ami du peuple, friend of the people, assassinated by the enemies of the people. Enemies of the people, temper your glee, for he will have his avengers.”⁸⁵ Dignified by the participation of the full body of the Convention, the funeral procession of July 16, likewise designed by David, was of a piece with the mood and purpose of this mise en scène. Marat’s body, with its prominently displayed stigma “pointing up the wound inflicted on the Republic,” focused the outcry against the Revolution’s “ubiquitous” domestic and foreign enemies at the same time that it provided an eloquent human relic on which to swear vengeance. Even if unintentionally, to instrumentalize the corps meurtri was to “generate emotions, designate enemies, feed vengeance, and exalt the martyr.”⁸⁶ The rite exorcised uncertainty and fear as much as it fired revolutionary zeal. In this way, the commemoration of the popular idol enabled the revolutionary elites to combine their spoken discourse with a language of images and gestures accessible to the lower orders who were remote from the high culture of oratory and letters.

This was the atmosphere in which David turned to paying pictorial homage to Marat as he had to Lepeletier. Indeed, he invested this second memorial portrait with the same rhetoric as the first. David executed the two paintings while intensely engaged in revolutionary politics on the Jacobin side. In both silent poems or painted sculptures “death and violence are … the spiritual center,” along with selfless “suffering” and unrequited “pity.”87 David exhibited the two paintings in his atelier until November 1793, when the Convention asked that they be hung on both sides of its presidential chair (which he himself eventually occupied briefly in January 1794): to the left Lepeletier, next to a tablet with the Constitution of 1793; to the right Marat, next to a tablet with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.⁸⁸ Two months earlier, when presenting The Death of Marat—probably his “masterwork” and possibly the “greatest political painting of all time”⁸⁹—to the Convention, David had told his fellow deputies that he had answered the people’s call to once again “take up [his] brush” and “avenge our friend, avenge Marat.”⁹⁰ He offered this “homage of his brush, … Marat’s livid and bloody features” serving to recall “his virtues … to [p]osterity, which will avenge him.”⁹¹

The purpose of Marat’s instant apotheosis was less “to establish a cult” than to forge a “rallying cry” to divert popular rage into government channels.⁹² There is a transparent connection between, on the one hand, the intensification of the push for vengeance by the spontaneous and calculated cathexis on Marat and, on the other, the clamor for an official policy of terror. Of course, the emergency regime kept hardening in the face of intractable domestic and foreign difficulties as well as under the pressure of true believers and militants. In July and August 1793 the antirevolution continued to spread in the Vendée and Lyons was swinging out of control. Although republican forces reclaimed Marseilles on August 25, British and Spanish troops entered Toulon with the help of a local fifth column on August 27–28. In the meantime, on August 1 Valenciennes had fallen to the Austrians. The adoption, on July 26, of capital punishment for hoarding was a sign that the economic and financial situation was still critical.

Although the Jacobins and sansculottes were equally disposed not only to exaggerate the scale and intensity of the emergency but also to blame it on traitors and conspirators, they differed in their prescriptions for dealing with it. The Jacobins, swearing by would-be representative institutions, proposed to give first priority to tightening political controls from above and the center; the sansculottes, standing on direct democracy, advocated pressing ahead with the radicalization of the Revolution from below. But at this crucial juncture both favored an emergency dictatorship, including a war economy. In any case, it is just as important not to overestimate the seriousness of this sectarian in-fighting as it is not to underestimate the gravity and urgency of the situation confronting a precarious and contested provisional government. Notwithstanding the adoption of the Constitution of June 24, 1793, the legitimacy of the infant revolutionary regime remained frail.

These were the defining circumstances for the partisan debates and struggles over tomorrow’s terror. Starting in early August, two converts from the priesthood to sansculottism were among the first to urge that terror be forged into an instrument of revolutionary policy. Jacques Roux, a self-appointed spokesman for the enragés, proposed to have the terror supported and energized by a levée en masse. Jean-Baptiste Royer, from Chalon-sur-Saône, argued along similar lines and in the second half of August became a leading advocate for a terror “in the context of a levée en masse.”93 On August 30, at the Jacobin club, Royer invoked Marat’s revolutionary precept and fate to legitimate his proposal to “placer la terreur à l’ordre du jour,” as the “only way to arouse the people and force them to save themselves.”⁹⁴ In the meantime, on August 23, the Convention had decreed the levée en masse.

All this time Robespierre and Danton, along with other leaders of the Mountain, sought to turn the incipient terror inward at the same time that they backed the levée en masse in support of the war effort along and beyond France’s uncertain frontiers. On August 2 Robespierre, by now a member of the Committee of Public Safety, told the Convention that “the terrifyingly swift sword of the law should hang over the heads of all conspirators, striking terror in the hearts of their accomplices and of all enemies of the patrie.” Speaking in this same vein, Danton once again commended “the sword of the law” as the best antidote to “popular vengeance,” insisting that for want of it the people would “take the law into their own hands.” Pierre-Marie-Augustin Guyomar, another Montagnard deputy, urged that timely measures be taken “to prevent the explosion of the sad but necessary vengeance of a people driven to despair.”95 On September 5, following another revolutionary journée in Paris, Bertrand Barère, for the Committee of Public Safety, moved a motion in the Convention to “placer la terreur à l’ordre du jour,” which was passed overwhelmingly. Barère credited the Paris Commune with having coined this “splendid phrase” and promised that the new policy would make it possible to “instantly eliminate all royalists and moderates along with the whole counterrevolutionary pack.” He stressed, however, that this repressive violence would be exercised by “special tribunals, not illegal vengeance.” Indeed, terror and revolutionary justice increasingly became inseparable. Speaking at the Paris Commune on September 15, Hébert agreed that “the day of vengeance was now at hand,” adding that “mercy” was a thing of the past. With the terror high on the agenda, not only “outright aristocrats will be arrested, but so will those failing to actively support liberty.”⁹⁶ Two days later, on September 17, the Convention adopted the Law of Suspects.

Whereas the Jacobins exploited the stirrings for vengeance mainly to serve their struggle against domestic enemies, the Girondins did so primarily with an eye to the conflict with the foreign powers. In October 1791, in one of his first speeches advocating war, Brissot, leader of the Girondins, had warned Europe’s crowned heads that although “the vengeance of a free people takes time to build up, once it does explode it will be fierce.”⁹⁷ He admonished them that their continuing support of the émigrés could not help but provoke “the vengeance of a free people.” In turn, Brissot told his countrymen, France “would become fair game for Europe’s contemptible tyrants unless it visited its timely vengeance on them.”⁹⁸ Shortly before the formation of the Girondin ministry on March 15, 1792, he criticized Jean-Marie Antoine Delessard, the foreign minister, for practicing a diplomacy of appeasement which “cooled the ardor of a French nation burning to avenge the insults being hurled from abroad.”⁹⁹ The Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria on April 20. While the French armies suffered their first reverses in the Low Countries, on April 25, in Strasbourg, Claude Rouget de Lisle wrote the Chant de Guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin, soon known as la Marseillaise; its final stanza thundered forth “Amour sacré de la patrie conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs.”100 Apparently the volunteer corps (les fédérés) from Marseilles sang what emerged as the Revolution’s emblematic anthem with ever more raging tempos and accents at Valmy and around the Tuileries on August 10.

At the same time, many soldiers of the Republic took to wearing a talisman engraved with the motto “le patriotisme vengé,” and in the Convention Pierre Joseph Cambon read out a declaration promising tomorrow’s liberated peoples that France would help them “drive out their tyrants and … protect them from their vengeance, subversion, and return.”¹⁰¹ But, of course, there were periodic setbacks, as in the summer and fall of 1793. On October 11, during the difficult battle of Flanders, the Committee of Public Safety issued a proclamation—signed by Hérault de Séchelles, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, Barère, Saint-Just, Robespierre—hailing the recapture of Lyons, where “traitors and rebels were being cut to pieces,” and exhorting France’s soldiers “to exterminate the lackeys of tyrants” who should not be spared “your righteous vengeance.” That very day the Imperial forces broke through the French lines at Wissembourg and threatened Alsace-Lorraine. The Committee sent Saint-Just and François-Joseph Lebas to the scene to shore up the morale of the soldiers of the Army of the Rhine. On October 24, from Strasbourg, these proconsuls proclaimed that they had brought them not only “the sword” with which to strike down all “traitors and even trimmers among them” but also the wherewithal to “avenge you and to secure victory.”¹⁰²

In the spring of 1793, at the same time that the provisional government faced increasing military difficulties along France’s borders, it was confronted with the rising defiance of the major cities of the Midi and of the villages and towns of the Vendée in the west. Eventually this challenge to central authority turned into all-out rebellion, giving rise to civil war fraught with the rhetoric and practice of vengeance—on both sides.

The federalist insurgence was essentially urban.103 Notwithstanding its indigenous reasons, in essence federalism was a struggle for control of local government which mirrored a similar struggle in the capital. In fact, the struggles at the center and in the periphery were symbiotically linked, with the chief actors in all quarters egregiously misperceiving and misrepresenting each other’s intentions. On June 2, 1793, with some 80,000 people in the streets, the Paris Commune, in league with the Montagnards, pressured the Convention to take a hard line: twenty-two deputies, including two ministers, were arrested to be tried by the revolutionary tribunal for supporting what was construed and portrayed as a separatist undertaking with links to the émigrés and foreign powers. In the spring of 1793, in Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Toulon moderates stood against the emergency measures adopted by the faraway Convention, while their counterparts in Paris remained under fire for continuing to contest the dictature de détresse. Presently, whereas the anti-Jacobins got the upper hand in the southern cities, they were decisively defeated in the capital, where they were soon reviled as Girondins.

The southern moderates, or future federalists, seized on the issue of the maximum and its latent threat to private property to incite the rising fear of ultra-Jacobinism, which was driven by local sansculottes hearkening to Paris. With time, and in keeping with the polarizing logic of civil war, they were supported by outright reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries. In turn, these collaborations allowed the radicals in Paris to characterize the federalists as sworn to not only the decentralization or breakup of France but also the royalist-directed counterrevolution for a full-blown restoration in league with the European courts.

It is important to note that support for the struggle of the moderates against radicals near and far was quickened by mounting economic stress, disenchantment with the Revolution, and consternation about the excesses of zealous revolutionaries, both indigenous and on mission from Paris. Even so, the restiveness of the southern cities escalated into open revolt mainly because the central government lacked adequate military force and administrative-legal leverage to contain it, leaving the federalists the beneficiaries of the collapse of sovereignty. If the center nevertheless eventually won out, it was largely because the rebel cities, besides going their separate ways, failed to raise credible military forces and rally the surrounding countryside.

Throughout the perilous summer of 1793, with the regime hardening in the face of rising resistances at home and threats from abroad, the Committee of Public Safety fastened on Lyons, France’s second city and manufacturing center, as the principal bastion and nerve center of the counterrevolution in the Midi. Not that the leaders in Paris made light of the sedition of Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Toulon, but just then they considered the situation of these port cities to be less threatening and urgent.

Lyons was very much at war with itself before it rose up against Paris.104 Pressed by their own enragés, the local Jacobins called for the city’s Girondin governors to establish an emergency regime to deal with, above all, the social question. Joseph Chalier, the most extreme of the radical patriots, came to symbolize and embody this challenge. Like Marat, he inspired either blind devotion or fierce hatred. Both were tribunes of and for the people, with a strong belief in the value of revolutionary violence and vengeance. Of the two, Chalier was less theoretical, coherent, and removed. Whereas Marat was “the last [emblem] of the old Revolution … [and] the man of civil war,” Chalier was the “first [emblem] of the new Revolution … [and], in Lyons, the man of the guerre sociale.”¹⁰⁵

In November 1792 the Jacobins managed to take control of the local government, with Chalier figuring as their chief. Modeling their rule after Paris, they tried but failed to arrest the deterioration of economic and social conditions. Partly out of frustration, and incensed by the systematically obstructive behavior of the city’s old ruling class, by early 1793 Chalier resorted to increasingly intemperate rhetoric. He vowed that in order to achieve “liberty and equality, as well as security for person and property,” he was prepared to “exterminate all that goes by the name of aristocrat, feuillant, moderate, egoist, royalist, agitator, hoarder, usurer, and the priestly caste.” Though Chalier praised “Jesus Christ for being a good man … preaching mercy and moderation,” he professed that his own “cry was for vengeance.”¹⁰⁶

On May 29 the anti-Jacobins seized power back again. Within twenty-four hours Chalier was “arrested, vilified, tied up, beaten, and thrown into Lyons’ darkest dungeon” pending trial.¹⁰⁷ Before being sentenced to death without appeal, he caustically told the members of the summary court that he expected “justice and leniency,” since they were “judges, [not executioners], and as such free of rancor, hatred, and vengeance.”108 While his trial for inflammatory speech was swift, his execution on July 16 was eerie. By reason of the guillotine never having been used in Lyons, the blade fell down three times without fully severing Chalier’s head. After finally detaching it with a knife, the executioner reached to hold the head up to the crowd, but “Chalier being bald, he had to grab it by one of his ears.” The ascendant moderates were cemented by their expiatory victim, their desire for vengeance momentarily satisfied. In turn, the defeated radicals had their martyr, who cried out to be avenged. In the meantime Lyons had consummated its break with the central dictatorship, a special commission having decided to disregard its decrees henceforth.¹⁰⁹

It took the Committee of Public Safety three months to dispatch sufficient troops to face down Lyons. After a short siege, the rebel city was brought under control on October 9. There was surprisingly little resistance. General Kellermann having balked at using repressive violence, General Dubois-Crancé was in command. A confirmed Dantonist, he readily collaborated with the representatives on mission whom the central authorities sent forth to direct the city’s pacification. The stage was set for a re-revenge. As his troops moved in, Dubois-Crancé issued a fiery proclamation, in a tenor reminiscent of the Brunswick Manifesto, vowing that Lyons was about to be “destroyed” for its transgression. In this same spirit, on October 12 the Convention changed the name of France’s second city to Ville-Affranchie and ordered that following the city’s annihilation a monitory memorial column be erected amid its ruins, with the inscription “Lyons waged war against liberty; Lyons has ceased to exist.”¹¹⁰ Two days later, at the Jacobin club, Robespierre held that Lyons’ traitors needed to be mercilessly “unmasked and executed” with an eye to “avenging the memory of their innocent victims.”

Paradoxically, Aristide Couthon, member of the Committee of Public Safety and proconsul in charge of political operations, including the épuration, was not an all-out avenger.¹¹¹ In no time he realized that the local Jacobins who had suffered under the federalist reign were driven by an avenging rage exceeding even that of the government and enragés in Paris. Indeed, the soldiers of the liberating army, who were not native to the region, “were less terrifying” than the local leaders of “[punitive] raids, who knew whom to blame and single out for reprisal.”112 To be sure, Couthon set in motion the arrest of thousands of suspects, the establishment of emergency tribunals, and the demolition of the houses of the well-to-do. Even so, Paris recalled him for being too lenient at a time when he himself, for his own reasons, asked to be relieved. On November 4 he was replaced by Collot d’Herbois, another member of the Committee, and Joseph Fouché, a representative on mission in the Nièvre, who arrived a few days later. Both men were breathing vengeance. They urged the tribunals to quicken their pace. When the prisons became overcrowded or the guillotine glutted, they ordered mass executions. In early December, in the plain of Brotteaux, between 350 and 400 “political” prisoners were put to death by grapeshot and musket fire, and then buried in mass graves that had been dug in advance. By the following April “almost two thousand persons had been put to death in Lyons.”¹¹³

To set the atmosphere and signal their ruthlessness, on taking charge Collot d’Herbois and Fouché conspicuously participated in a carefully staged glorification of Chalier.¹¹⁴ The night following Chalier’s execution, several men went to the cemetery to dig up his remains and make a plaster cast of his mangled head to serve as both relic and proof of fealty. Later that same night a woman votary and her son even went one step further: they took the mutilated head home in order to make an exact cast. Replicas of Chalier’s head began to figure in public processions and ceremonies beginning with the apotheosis of Chalier on Sunday, November 10. On the eve of this celebration Dorfeuille, the president of the new people’s court, pronounced a commemorative oration on the Place des Terreaux: he castigated Lyons as a “latter-day Sodom” and assured the new-born martyr that “we will avenge you … and cleanse [your] hallowed soul” with the “blood of the scoundrels.”

Starting at daybreak of the day after, the cortège set out from the Place Bellecour and moved along the banks of the Saône in the direction of the Place des Terreaux. A “gigantic statue carrying a large axe of the law on its half-naked shoulders” was in the lead. There followed “a group of sans-culottes armed with pikes and wearing Phrygian caps, as well as a bevy of young women dressed in white and crowned with flowers.” The focal point of the procession was a shrine supposed to contain Chalier’s ashes and topped by his bust, carried by Jacobins from Paris. All this time, “twenty thurifers burning incense” circled around this striking ensemble. Next came a “corps of musicians and singers” just ahead of “an ass wearing a miter, mantled by a bishop’s vestment, with a chalice around its neck and a missal attached to its tail.” The procession was closed by a mock muscadin “dragging a flag of fleur-de-lys through the mud.”

Collot d’Herbois and Fouché were the principal speakers at the closing ceremony in front of city hall on the Place des Terreaux, where the funeral urn, very like a relic, was displayed on a new-model, profane altar. In the name of a “prostrate nation” Collot d’Herbois asked God to forgive the slaying of “this most virtuous of men … [whose] suffering he swore to avenge.” In like manner, Fouché pledged to “avenge Chalier’s torment, using the blood of aristocrats as incense.” As an iconoclastic finale, the ass drank out of the chalice, the missal was burned, and the urn was taken to the nearby church of Saint-Nizier, to rest on the altar. Meanwhile a popular song, on the air of the Marseillaise, vowed to “avenge the honor and virtue” of Chalier, the “greatest of all genuine sans-culottes,” by “annihilating infamous Lyons.”115 That same evening Collot d’Herbois and Fouché wrote to the Convention that at Chalier’s stately apotheosis the cry for “‘vengeance!’ repeatedly interrupted the silence of grief,” and they assured their colleagues in Paris that they would heed this call.¹¹⁶

Though less widely known than Marat’s martyrdom, Chalier’s did reach beyond the Midi. In December 1793 a self-appointed delegation of incensed citizens of Ville-Affranchie traveled to Paris to appeal to the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety to put a stop to the fusillades and rein in the vindictive épuration. As soon as he heard about this subterfuge, Collot d’Herbois rushed to the capital to defend his policies and counter his critics. He considered it useful to take with him a cast of Chalier’s head as proof of his revolutionary bona fides. Shortly after his arrival, on December 21, he took the lead in a cortège of true believers who carried the relic from the Bastille to the Convention in an abortive effort to claim a place for Chalier in the Pantheon. Presently Collot d’Herbois rose to justify his actions for being in line with his original instructions drafted at a time when all deputies “thirsted for vengeance to be visited on Lyons’ infamous conspirators.”¹¹⁷

All told, during the six months following the recapture of the southern capital which, according to Dubois-Crancé, “claimed 1,500 rebel lives,” the various nonmilitary emergency tribunals pronounced and enforced about 2,000 death sentences, or more than 10 percent of all official executions during the Great Terror. The repression in Lyons was part of a nationwide system of legal revolutionary terror which, although it superseded yesterday’s spontaneous and wild vengefulness, was penetrated by a distinctly punitive and vengeful spirit. Even if, after the fact, the Committee of Public Safety and the Convention sought to distance themselves from the rage of retributive justice, almost from the start they had fired it with their incendiary rhetorical and symbolic ferocity: Lyons to be destroyed, to be renamed, to be mortified. Admittedly, much of this discourse was “full of sound and fury,” the bark being louder than the bite: the city “was not laid waste, … not all culprits perished or were executed, … and relatively few houses were demolished.” Still, under the circumstances the official declamations turned out to have been more than empty rhetoric. Besides, along with the vindictive repression, they left a legacy of divisive acrimony which seeded the soil for the intensely avenging White Terror after Thermidor.118

Quinet emphasized, as mentioned earlier, that since the punishment was inflicted after the Republic’s soldiers were in full control of Lyons, it was cruelly retributive, and also gratuitous.¹¹⁹ But mindful of Quinet’s precept to pay close attention to chronology, it is well to recall that so far the Republic had merely won a battle, not the war: the other southern cities and the Vendée remained to be reduced and pacified, and the war with the First Coalition was as yet very much in the balance. As a matter of course the officers and political emissaries of the liberating army were under orders to seize weapons and ammunition, raise manpower, and organize war production for the armée des Alpes, which promptly moved south.

The armée d’Italie reclaimed Marseilles on October 13, its internal war and rebellion having been similar but much less fierce than those of Lyons.¹²⁰ In their liberating proclamation Barras and Fréron, the people’s representatives, characterized the republican army’s “holy mission” to be to “save Marseilles and raze Toulon,” as part of a drive to eliminate “moderation and royalism.”¹²¹ In their report on the deliverance of France’s first commercial port, they told Paris that 13,000 young men from the Var were on their way to Toulon. Although the proconsuls changed the name of Marseilles to Ville-Sans-Nom (City Without Name), the Committee of Public Safety soon nullified this rechristening in a gesture of tactical appeasement. To justify this quick reversal, the Committee claimed that “timeless justice” demanded not only that outrages “against the nation … and patriotism be avenged,” but also that “patriots who had refused to participate in these crimes be spared punishment and infamy.”122

Bordeaux was retaken on October 21 by about 1,600 men with minimal casualties on either side, thus dramatizing the federalists’ military impotence. In the capital of the Gironde, which many Jacobins also perceived as a nerve center of the far-flung urban revolt, the severity of the retribution was somewhere between that of Lyons and Marseilles: of some 900 persons arrested throughout the department, some 300, or one-third, were sentenced to death and executed.¹²³ But again, the proconsuls assured Paris that they had armed three battalions and were sending “1,500 rifles to Toulouse for the army assigned to march against Toulon.”¹²⁴

Since the British had come ashore in late August in support of the rebellion in Toulon, the defection of this strategic port was held up as irrefutable proof of the interpenetration of internal and external counterrevolution. In any case, after a long siege Toulon’s recapture on December 19, 1793 was hailed as on a par with the recapture of Lyons two months earlier: Toulon was to be struck off the map and its name changed to Port-la-Montagne (Port of the Mountain).¹²⁵ About 300 counterrevolutionaries and suspects were executed during the first twenty-four hours and another 800 to 900 thereafter. In Toulon, as in Lyons, a popular song had the “terrifying” refrain: “Vengeance, Citizens, vengeance! Let us take to arms.”¹²⁶

Along with the federalist defiance and serious military setbacks on the frontiers, the Jacobin authorities also had to confront the revolt of the Vendée, whose military phase—the Vendée militaire—ran from March through December 1793. Although the civil war in the Vendée is discussed in detail in a separate chapter,¹²⁷ it calls for attention here by virtue of the prominence of the avenging Furies in what was the most taxing domestic challenge to the revolutionary regime in Paris.

Whereas the rebellion of the southern cities, especially Lyons, brought out in bold relief the resistance of urban France, the insurrection in the Vendée dramatized that of rural France. As Quinet saw it, for most of 1793 Paris faced two radically different types of insurgency: “the revolt of Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulon, which was purely political, and that of the Vendée, which was religious.” In the west, unlike in the southern cities, the civil war was “a war of religion,” with “two fanaticisms set against each other.”128

Of course, the Vendean imbroglio had no such explosive charge at the outset. It began as a territorial, popular, and spontaneous anti-revolution rooted in latent suspicion of the encroaching distant center, nearby city, and ubiquitous modernity. Between 1789 and 1792 this suspicion was rekindled by a string of intrusive anticlerical, fiscal, and economic measures, and it was brought to a boil in March 1793, by the conscription of local youths for military service far from home, along France’s distant frontiers. Presently, around March 20 near Chantonnay, the defeat of General Marcé’s regular military corps by a small horde of primitive rebels laid bare the atrophy of the center’s sovereign reach. This unexpected military outcome, egregiously misperceived by both sides in line with their respective worldviews, became a powerful catalyst for a friend-enemy dissociation. In sum, the escalation from a bottom-up anti-revolution to an organized counterrevolution battling a determined revolutionary regime with savageries and massacres on both sides was gradual as well as unintended by one and all. The Jacobin authorities in the capital and their proconsuls in the field contributed to the radicalization of the conflict by not only overestimating the ideological and political coherence as well as likely foreign support of the wild-growth soldiery, but also underestimating the military and political capabilities of the rebel peasants, priests, and nobles. This dual misperception had its counterpart in the opposing camp: particularly the White leaders became trapped in their own misconstructions, which were the reverse image of those of their foes.

Needless to say, the avenging Furies of the Whites, on the one side, and the Blues, or Reds, on the other, were radically different. Above all, even at the height of their strength and offensive, once the amorphous peasant bands had been forged into the “Catholic and Royal Army,” the Vendean leaders lacked the fixed chain and post of command indispensable for a systematic enforcement terror. Besides, except between March and July 1793, the rebel forces concentrated on outmaneuvering and eluding their superior foes; the cities, which were patriot strongholds, remained beyond their reach; and in the end they were defeated. Indeed, circumstances saved them from being tempted by the demon of collective vengeance. Still, when irregular peasant rebels rushed into the towns of Machecoul and Cholet at the very start of the rebellion, during the second week of March, they carried out large-scale massacres of patriots—public officials, national guardsmen, constitutional priests. Wild and savage, these atrocities of the first hour foreshadowed the naked brutality inherent in any full-fledged civil war. With the institutions and forces of law and order sapped, the furor of the “primitive rebels” was bound to be partly driven by old-fashioned vengeance and, to the extent that they were touched by the Catholic and royalist rhetoric of their leaders, by ideology as well. To repeat, violence and terror were peculiarly pervasive in the Vendée by reason of its civil war being a Glaubenskrieg in which both sides feared and fought for their core religious, social, and cultural values.

On the Jacobin side, the clamor for retribution against the Whites stoked the raging Furies of the Terror. On November 7, a month after Lyons was rebaptized Ville-Affranchie, the Convention with alacrity accepted the proposal of Merlin de Thionville to change the name of the rebellious province from Vendée to Département Vengé. Noirmoutier, the scene of a major massacre, was renamed Ile de la Montagne, and the neighboring region of Bouin Ile Marat. The site of the mass execution of some 700 rebel prisoners was called the “district of vengeance.”129 These neologisms expressed and sanctioned the ferocious spirit of the fighting and pacification of this fratricide. But above all, just as Collot d’Herbois and Fouché wrought their punitive reprisals after the recapture of Lyons, so Jean-Baptiste Carrier and Louis Marie Turreau wrought theirs after the defeat of the military Vendée. Precisely because in the Vendée this retribution was charged with the Furies characteristic of religious conflict, the noyades of Carrier and especially the twelve “infernal columns” of Turreau, which raged for four months, surpassed even the eruptions of vengeance in Lyons, Bordeaux, and Toulon. The Vendée-vengée bore the full brunt of personal revenge, revolutionary justice, and wanton massacre, aggravated by epidemic and famine.

While this repression was under way, leading Jacobins continued to declaim about the logic of vengeance. Evoking the sins of commission of the ancien régime, which the defunct power elite had never even bothered to justify, Saint-Just asserted that besides being far less cruel, the new republican regime “perhaps foolishly took pride in making known its principles with metaphysical luxury.” The monarchy having “bathed in the blood of thirty generations,” it was only fitting that the people should at last “take revenge for twelve hundred years of crimes against their forebears.” In Saint-Just’s telling phrase, “terror is a double-edged sword: some use it to avenge the people, others to serve tyranny.”130 While Saint-Just spoke of historical vengeance, Robespierre focused on the place of vengeance in the current ideological terror: “as long as the enemies of liberty persecute even a single person of virtue the republican government is duty-bound to rush to his side and avenge him publicly.” Robespierre was particularly caustic about moralists who sought to protect internal enemies “from the avenging sword of national justice,” insisting that by so doing they blunted “the bayonets of our soldiers” who were risking their lives fighting the armies of foreign tyrants.¹³¹

Especially in connection with the revolutionary violence and terror in the Vendée, but also with that in the southern cities, it is important—but also difficult—to distinguish the military casualties from the victims of political terror.¹³² Whereas in the west the number of military or indirect victims exceeded the number of nonmilitary or direct victims, in the south these proportions were reversed. Taking the terror as a whole, the vast majority of victims were convicted for sedition or treason, or over 90 percent of all indictments. Of course, by itself, and because of its polysemy and inconsistency, the charge of sedition or treason favoring internal or external enemies would not be a good measure of the motive and intention of the Terror. But there was a high correlation between the laying of such charges and the geographic incidence of the Terror: by far the greatest toll of victims was concentrated in the southern and western regions which were the prime theaters of civil war, and also in frontier departments. Furthermore, judging by the chronological chart of the trials and executions, they correspond with the flux and reflux of civil and foreign war, with the peak during the last two months of 1793 and the first two months of 1794. Indeed, terror “was used to crush rebellion and to quell opposition to the Revolution, the Republic, or the Mountain.”133 Of course the line between an internal enemy of, on the one hand, the Revolution and Republic, and the government of the day, on the other, was at once shifting and treacherous. Still, whatever its self-serving and despotic excesses, the Committee of Public Safety, France’s provisional government, sought to reestablish an undivided and centralized sovereignty involving a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence both at home and abroad. To the extent socioeconomic factors and conflicts bore upon this struggle, they were more pressing in the provinces, particularly in the southern cities, than in Paris. Among the nonrational reasons and mainsprings of terror, the ardor for vengeance is likely to have been at least as varied and consequential as the fire of utopian ideology and quasi-religious fanaticism, all the more so given, as noted, the high and critical correlation of terror and civil war.

Thermidor marks less a break than a bridge in the protean unfolding of the French Revolution. Certainly the deficit of political and legal sovereignty was neither eliminated nor reduced, with the result that the climate and terrain remained propitious for the avenging Furies to continue sowing death and chaos. Indeed, the polarizing struggle for power continued in both city and country. Away from Paris this struggle became particularly intense wherever the avenging Jacobin terror had been exceptionally fierce and devastating. The victors of the Year II well-nigh became the losers of the Years III and IV, and vice versa: whereas the Jacobins had eventually taken command of the Red Terror, the anti- and counter-Jacobins in time seized the initiative and secured the upper hand in the Thermidorean reaction and White Terror. Of course, during this great reversal of atmosphere, role, and purpose, the word-concept of terror lost its specificity to become a polemical term which one and all used to excoriate the “other’s” intentions and methods.¹³⁴ Indeed, there is no appreciating “the true nature of the Terror of 1793–94 without taking into account the Counter-Terror of the year III, … which was a sort of collective reprisal for the excesses, threats, brutalities, humiliations, and enthusiasms of the previous year.” The two Furies should be placed “back to back in order to bring out” basic similarities and contrasts in government policies and avenging strategems. Rather than consider the Year III as either “just an epilogue to the year II … or simply the year One After Robespierre,” the two years ask to be read in terms of each other.135

The White Terror lasted over a year, or about as long as the Red Terror. In fact, since it flared up intermittently during the Directory and Consulate, and was not unrelated to the earlier anti- and counterrevolutionary resistances, the life of the White Terror may be said to have been spread over more than a decade.¹³⁶ Compared to the Red Terror, it counted fewer victims and was less centrally directed. It also lacked a comprehensive logic such as the need to save the patrie and the republic, the more so since by this time the French armies were winning the day abroad. Qualitatively, however, there may be said to have been important family resemblances. In terms of sheer horror and arbitrariness, the two terrors were much the same. Being less top-down than the Great Terror, the White Terror had greater similarities with the bottom-up terror which had culminated in the prison massacres of September 1792, and as such had been disproportionately driven by vengeance, both personal and communal, both utterly wild and at best quasi-legal. For the victims there was little to choose between “the steely bureaucrats of robespierriste unanimity … [and] the vindictive judges and heartless bourgeois of the Thermidorean regime.”¹³⁷

The new phase in the dialectic of vengeance began immediately following the execution of Robespierre on 10 Thermidor of the Year II, or July 28, 1794. Before long the political world within and beyond the Convention divided along roughly three lines: those fixing the responsibility for the worst excesses on Robespierre and a few of his acolytes; those blaming them on the system of terror of which the Robespierrists were an integral part; and those denouncing Robespierre and the terror as the inevitable outgrowth of the Revolution, whose republican institutions they challenged. The three positions were tied to political agendas that were difficult to reconcile. But in the heat of the moment, with the air heavy with suspicion, hatred, and fear, one and all denounced yesterday’s miscreants, each seeking to embody them in a favorite demon.

To be sure, though divided, the Convention presided over the wholesale liberation of political prisoners and recalled not a few representatives on mission, preferring charges of terrorism against several of the hard-liners among them. At the same time, however, cries for reprisals and vengeance intensified not only in the Convention but in the press and the public, especially among those who had suffered personally or through relatives and friends under the Red Terror. Although there were voices calling for clemency and punishment by republican law rather than popular vengeance, they were well-nigh drowned out. The dominant tone was struck by the counterrevolutionary anthem, the Reveil du Peuple, composed as an anti-Marseillaise in January 1795: now that the “day of vengeance” had arrived, the chief culprits would be plucked from the “savage horde of … infamous assassins, … brigands … and bloodthirsty murderers” to be cast into a “hecatomb of yesterday’s executioners … and barbarous cannibals.”138

There was something inexorable about the crescendo of the vengeful White Terror. This was partly because the Convention adopted a set of decrees which half unintentionally fostered it, and also to some degree because it appointed representatives on mission who were as unsteadfast as the central authorities themselves. On January 10, 1795, (20 Nivôse, Year II) the deputies authorized the unconditional return of émigrés who had left France after May 31, 1793, thereby expanding the reservoir of potential avengers. A few weeks later, on February 21 (3 Ventôse), they promulgated the reopening of Catholic churches and the return to France of refractory priests conditional on their taking the loyalty oath of 1792. In nearly the same breath the Convention also passed “a sort of inverted law of suspects” ordering each commune to keep a close eye on all officials dismissed or suspended since 10 Thermidor, exposing to “public contempt and reprisal anyone who had played a role in the revolutionary government.”¹³⁹

But the situation was not brought to a head until early spring 1795. On April 1, or 12 Germinal, Paris was shaken by a Jacobin-inspired food riot. Although easily brought under control, it prompted the Convention, obsessed by the specter of the return of Jacobins and sansculottes, to order the disarmament of presumed left-wing terrorists. Loosely applied by hard-line local officials, this law of April 10 (21 Germinal) led to many thousands of suspects being arrested and jailed, so that once again overcrowded prisons became symbolically charged targets for the discharge of seething, politically freighted Furies. To boot, on April 11 the original decree on the qualified return of émigrés was superseded by a law removing all remaining restrictions and restoring all property and political rights. In sum, three major elements favoring collective vengeance came into play: the growth of the reserve army of avengers; the rising ire of the new representatives on mission and their local collaborators; and the convenient cathexis on the prisons.

In the meantime acts of personal retribution multiplied and unsettled the political and social landscape against a darkening economic horizon. The incidence of this private and anarchic vengeance was essentially local. Aggrieved individuals wrought their vengeance on suspects who were personally known to them and about whose wanton misdeeds of the previous year they had, or claimed to have, reliable information. Driven by family- and community-validated values and intentions, the avengers administered the full gamut of psychological, material, and physical punishments, more often than not unmindful of the limiting injunction of “an eye for an eye.”140

The fact that the local and central authorities lacked the political will and muscle to rein in this rash of personal and irregular violence encouraged wild but partly organized vigilantes and lynch gangs to unleash larger scale avenging Furies. Indeed, the White Terror “was a highly contradictory phenomenon, both anarchical and organized, both deliberate and accidental, both structured and random.”¹⁴¹

Although protracted, savage, and glaring, the White Terror did not befall the whole of France: the worst of the retributive violence was all but confined to the departments of the southeast. Centered in the lands stretching from the Rhône-et-Loire to the Bouches-du-Rhône, the geography of the fiercest White Terror matched that of the fiercest anti-federalist Red Terror, including its distinctly urban configuration. Of course, there were counter-terrorist outbreaks in the rural west as well. But in Brittany they were part and parcel of the chouans’ guerrilla warfare against the republican armies, giving this region’s White Terror a martial face.¹⁴²

During the first half of 1795 the worst of the anti-Jacobin White Terror, concentrated in the Midi, took the form of gory prison massacres. Counting the storming of the Bastille, this was the third time that evil-starred prisons became focal points of violent confrontation and polarizing consciousness. Due to the rash of post-Thermidorean arrests, the jails of many cities and towns were crammed not only with officials and collaborators of yesterday’s short-lived ultra-Jacobin reign but also with their suspected sympathizers and fellow travelers. To would-be avengers, incited by firebrands, these prisons appeared as simmering cauldrons of wild enragés on the verge of boiling over. This swelling agitation resembled that on the eve of the September prison massacres in Paris, except that the roles were reversed: in some places inmates were massacred while being transferred from one jail to another, with their escorts unwilling or unable to protect them; in others large crowds surged into the prisons to murder the inmates, here and there mutilating their bodies and throwing them into nearby rivers. As if reenacting its bagarre of 1790, Nîmes made a beginning with four victims on February 24. Lyons was next: with a death toll of between 100 and 120 on May 4 its massacre was, as we shall see, emblematic of the White Terror. In Marseilles two prison pogroms on May 11 and June 5 claimed a total of some 110 lives. In late spring prison massacres also caused about 10 deaths in Aix, 50 in Tarascon, and 90 in Toulon.

Easily the best part of the Thermidorean Convention’s deputies and representatives on mission either approved or vindicated the White Terror, including its witch-hunt, and some of them did so in the spirit in which Roland and Condorcet had sought to “veil” the prison massacres in September 1792. The bulk of its membership unchanged, the Convention was not a likely beacon of light, moderation, and justice. Its halting efforts at interposition were equivocal, many of its own members having supported the Terror of the Year II in the capital, in the southern cities, and in the Vendée. Besides, half of them had voted the death penalty for Louis XVI, and not a few feared that a runaway de-Jacobinization might provoke a reaction dangerous to themselves and the Republic. In any case, the Thermidoreans proposed to legitimate and focus the avenging Furies without devising political and legal checks and balances. This paradox marked the trial of Carrier, who paid with his life for brashly telling the members of the Convention that they were looking to salve their own consciences by indicting him for a course of action they themselves had charted and ratified.

Apostates from radical Jacobinism helped set the new political tone. Jean Lambert Tallien brazenly called on France’s citizens to take “prompt” revenge against all recent “assassins,” though he allowed that eventually “terror should give way to justice.” In like manner Philippe Auguste Merlin de Douai, one of the prime movers of the post-Thermidorean law of suspects, asserted that the “French people were crying to settle accounts” with the “monsters and assassins” who had “stained the soil of liberty,” and claimed that they would continue to do so “until the manes of all the victims were appeased.” Ominously, some of the new representatives on mission echoed this vindictive bluster. In Marseilles, Chambon insisted that with all the world “disheartened by the slow pace of the proceedings against [yesterday’s] scoundrels,” the only way to “head off a terrible reaction was to eliminate them from the territory of the Republic.” François Gamon warned that without the swift and drastic punishment “of the assassins of our parents, friends, and citizens no human force could stem the tide of personal reprisals.” In Aix-en-Provence, Henri Maximin Isnard incited avengers who lacked weapons to “dig up the bones of their fathers and use them to exterminate” their executioners.143

In time the avenging wildfire spread beyond the cities to the countryside. Even if not “every village imitated the city,” many of them did so, or else acted on their own initiative, which was more their style. Not propitious to “mass slayings,” the countryside witnessed “isolated killings in open fields as well as near and inside homes.” Many of these killings were rushed to keep defendants from being tried, even guillotined, since “true vengeance calls for personally killing one’s own enemy” and perhaps even mangling his corpse “beyond recognition.”¹⁴⁴ Even more than in the cities, in the countryside this popular vengeance was personalized, here and there resembling the blood feud. Often these pains and punishment were inflicted with crowds looking on and bearing witness, their members moved by a broad range of personal motives. The number of victims is impossible to estimate, but it was certainly considerable.¹⁴⁵

Of the “federalist” cities, Lyons bore the deepest wounds and darkest memories of the cruel and humiliating punishment for having rebelled against Paris. For the local anti- and counter-Jacobins, reinforced by returning émigrés, Thermidor provided the enabling conditions for revenge against the Mountain. Admittedly, at first the old moneyed elites and middle classes, having reclaimed their influence and power, advocated republican reconciliation, forbearance, and judicial punishment. Several local songs implored the champions of liberty to forget their “quarrels” and thank the Convention for saving them from the “bloody [Jacobin] hordes” by exorcising the “demon” of vengeance and “forswearing retribution in favor of the rule of law.”146

But these verses were drowned out by lyrics more in tune with the ascendance of an alliance in which republicans and moderate monarchists made common cause with émigrés, refractory priests, and army deserters eager for reprisals. One poem, claiming that the “blood … of Robespierre’s victims calls for vengeance,” urged that all “traitors … and cannibals” be given their deserts. Another thundered that the nation’s “bras vengeurs” should be armed to “punish the Jacobin Furies,” thereby “honoring” Lyons’ heroic victims, to be memorialized with a commemorative column to be “erected on the Brotteaux.” A local variant of the Réveil du Peuple hailed the Convention for “punishing the bloodthirsty villains who had sworn to exterminate us” and vowed “vengeance” for the wives whose “husbands were strangled.”¹⁴⁷ The tone was equally incendiary in the Journal de Lyon, whose epigraph—taken from Voltaire’s Mahomet—called for “the extermination … of all those who relish spilling human blood.”¹⁴⁸

Lyons’ failing economy provided a favorable environment for the agitation of impatient avengers among the classes and masses. One of the first public furors was highly symbolic: a crowd forcibly removed a bust of Chalier from the mairie to consign it to a nearby bonfire. The fate of Fernex, member of the revolutionary commission, turned out to be tone-setting: on February 14, after being wrested from fifty guards who were taking him to the Saint-Joseph prison, he was killed and dumped into the Rhône river. Within a month the murder of both prominent and ordinary Jacobin terrorists and their insolent anti-burial in the Rhône or Saône ceased to be out of the ordinary, no doubt because the authorities turned a blind eye.¹⁴⁹ Meanwhile the anti-Jacobin representatives on mission who succeeded Couthon, Collot d’Herbois, and Fouché helped give the Convention’s Thermidorean decrees an avenging color. As murderous personal vengeance increased without official reproof, vigilantes and untried constables searched homes and combed streets for proven or suspected Jacobin terrorists to be committed to Lyons’ prisons, pending trial by special courts. In an unsettled environment not unlike Paris in August 1792, restive crowds, incensed by the slow pace of legal retribution, surrounded the prisons which they suspected of being redoubts of enragés poised to erupt and savage the city. Finally, on May 4, confident of immunity, the counterparts of the septembriseurs rushed the Roanne prison and massacred about forty inmates, laying the dismembered corpses before the public. During the next few days roving bands took some sixty additional lives at the Recluses, Saint-Joseph, and Saint-Genis-Laval prisons.150

In the midst of this extended prison pogrom, the central government’s several local agents at once avowed and lamented their helplessness. On May 5 and 6 Boisset, a profoundly troubled proconsul, rushed alarming reports to the Committee of General Security. Estimating that to date there were sixty to seventy victims, he stressed that nothing short of an official constabulary could bring the excesses under control. Boisset warned that unless Paris promptly enacted “vigorous measures” and provided him with men-at-arms, “blood would continue to tarnish the Republic and his own presence [in Lyons] would be futile.” In point of fact, “without army units” there was no keeping apart “the partisans of the Terror and of the Monarchy,” since even the local “national guard units were breathing vengeance.”¹⁵¹

This confidential entreaty to the center was supplemented, on May 7, by a public “Proclamation to the French People and the National Convention” signed by local government delegates, commanders of the national guard, and judges. It claimed that “with human reason and the law helpless in the face of unbound natural convulsions,” the people were driven to visit “terrible acts of vengeance” on the “imprisoned monsters.”¹⁵²

The central authorities failed to intervene both because they were weak and for fear that by bearing hard on the Jacobins they risked encouraging royalists and counterrevolutionaries, who were not without weight in Lyons, even if the local Thermidoreans overestimated it. Significantly, the population of Lyons seems to have been as reluctant to take a stand as the Parisian and local agencies and agents. Indeed there was little public reprobation. Quinet even held that in Lyons the massacres were widely considered “a pale reprisal for the fusillades on the Brotteaux” and that in local theaters the “killers were showered with flowers and applause.”153

Not surprisingly, Quinet gives a heuristically powerful comparative reading of the White and Red Terrors. He claimed that at first sight—judging by the indifference of the Convention, the connivance of the proconsuls, the bloodthirsty speeches of right-wing enragés, and the inertia of the forces of order—“the system of extermination had changed hands essentially unchanged.” But a closer look convinced him that the anti-Montagnards “vastly surpassed” the Robespierrists in “the art of coldheartedly eliminating their adversaries.” According to Quinet, although the would-be moderates in Paris received “reports, letters, and official documents” about the ongoing atrocities from their local and regional agents, they kept insisting that they “were not well enough informed to intervene to stop them.” In actual fact their denial was a “masterpiece of vengeance” in that they “let others exterminate their enemies” without ever “wielding the ax themselves,” all the time affecting “airs of piety … and clemency.”¹⁵⁴

Besides, this Thermidorean “reaction was an anonymous enterprise,” inasmuch as its “horrors could neither be imputed … [nor] traced to particular individuals.” With time the counter-terror faded from memory by reason of having “succeeded” and because the modérés knew better than to “denounce” either themselves or each other. Furthermore, unlike the révolutionneurs of the Year II, who published the names, crimes, and last words of the victims of the guillotine in Le Glaive Vengeur, the réacteurs of the Years III and IV were not so “foolish as to publish lists of their victims.” By dispensing with bold justifications and “sham trials,” they covered their tracks and masked the scale of the avenging fury. Partly for that reason, the exact number and identities of the victims of “the Thermidorean reaction” in the southeast may never be known, though sound estimates put them at about 2,000, or roughly the same number “that perished [there] during the Terror of the Year II.” In any case, there was no terror-breathing and ideologically emblematic Robespierre for the “White Jacobins” to turn into a sacrificial example, and on whose head and memory to call down the curses. This quick forgetting was also helped by the widespread perception that the moderates were acting in accordance with the lex talionis, which tended to “legitimate” the Furies and to facilitate consigning both the victims and their tormentors to a memory gap.155

In any case, in spirit the Red Terror and White Terror were quite different. Whereas the “butcheries” committed by the Revolution, including those of September 1792, were “without merriment and song,” the ordeal inflicted by the “Reaction”, which was in the nature of a “protracted second September,” was marked by “levity and mockery.” In Quinet’s telling, the “respectable people (honnêtes gens) enjoyed and savored” the massacres. To further their cause they “killed with the diligence, elegance, or luxury characteristic of hunting parties” at the same time that they gave themselves “the pleasure of vengeance” by “sanctioning” the mistreatment of their victims.¹⁵⁶

Quinet is at his weakest in his discussion of the rank-and-file vigilantes of the terror of the Year III. Like Louis Blanc, he fails to explore their social profile, modus operandi, and leadership. He claims that the “spectacle was more or less the same” in all the cities of the Midi: “gangs of killers, regularly organized by the Compagnie de Jéhu [Jesus] and the Compagnie du Soleil, putting to death prisoners in plain daylight; populations indifferent to the torment of the victims; cutthroats doing their cruel work unhampered and leisurely, between meals accompanied by song; and officials arriving after everything was over and ordering the killing to stop only once there was no one left to save.”¹⁵⁷ Quinet overemphasizes the conterrevolutionary reason and control of the societies of Jesus and of the Sun, centered in and around Lyons and Marseilles, respectively, since their members seem to have been moved as much by personal vengeance as by ideological or political conviction and purpose.¹⁵⁸

For Quinet, the White Terror resumed the ways of Europe’s anciens régimes, which by virtue of neither divulging nor justifying their crimes against humanity were not inhibited by memory and moral principles. Unlike autocratic monarchies, however, struggling democracies can neither live with their misdeeds nor forget them. In all conscience they expose and denounce them. They also repent and forgive. But they do so at a heavy price. Quinet holds that while “the Terror seriously damaged the Republic, it was the trials of the Terror that dealt it a fatal blow,” the trial of Fouquier-Tinville “marking the Reaction’s triumph.” Ultimately, however, “not Carrier, Fouquier, and other agents were brought to the bar” but the Convention itself, and with it the Revolution, which was left looking “guilty, hideous, and horrifying.” The accused argued, and with reason, that they had merely carried out the policies which the Convention and its executive organs had “adopted, consecrated, and supervised.” Rather than assume personal responsibility for any of the excessive excesses, the defendants tried to hide behind the Convention which, in turn, sought to “shift the blame to committees and individuals.” This posture was characteristic of “the majority of the Convention which out of weakness first voted to use brute violence and then turned to decry and punish it.” Not unlike Robespierre, the members of the Convention “lacked the defiant courage and honor of the leaders of the Ancient World who had answered for the cruelties of their epoch or class.” The Convention had none of the Roman senate’s patrician resolve and conceit to “uphold” its own image and memory. Besides, it lacked the power to conceal its own transgressions.159

Jacob Burckhardt’s reading of the White Terror parallels Quinet’s, except that he placed greater stress on vengeance. He argued that particularly the Midi, including Lyons, “wanted vengeance, not justice, and knew how to wreak it without fear and trembling.” Convinced that the “counter-terror would go unpunished,” the south witnessed a wild retribution. Rather than wield the blade of the guillotine, the avengers “shot people whom they encountered, casually, ‘between two meals,’ ” as if driven to “assassinate for amusement.” As for the societies of Jesus and of the Sun, Burckhardt traced their origins and members to “relatives of victims and prisoners” of the Red Terror.¹⁶⁰

As a matter of course, the trope of vengeance gradually all but disappeared from the discourse and rhetoric of the time. It is inapposite and unreasonable in legal briefs and arguments of civil and political trials, be they authentic or spurious. In 1793–94 Danton and other Jacobins had been at once sensible and cunning to maintain that law courts, whether summary boards or formal revolutionary tribunals, were the best, if not the only, antidote to popular vengeance, and variants of this argument resurfaced during Thermidor. Indeed, the language and praxis of vengeance was a language and praxis of political combat under conditions of fractured sovereignty and judicial paralysis. It is, of course, carried by a broad range of impulses and mental predispositions. But it is also instrumentalized: explanation, representation, justification, exorcism, rallying cry, specter. Despite this heavy political charge, the Thermidorean Convention’s trials of the terrorists of the Great Terror were a reflection and accessory of the restoration of a single and structured sovereignty and judiciary, or the remarginalization of vengeance.

NOTES

1. Jacques-Antoine-Marie de Cazalès, constitutional monarchist speaking on the unrest in Nîmes in the Constituent Assembly on February 26, 1791, and cited in François Furet and Ran Halévi, eds., Orateurs de la Révolution française, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. 216–21 and 248–52. See chapter 13 below, for a detailed analysis of the bagarre in Nîmes.

2. Cited in Jean-Eugène Bimbenet, Fuite de Louis XVI à Varennes, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1868), pp. 251–55.

3. Cited in Luc Willette, Le tribunal révolutionnaire: Les erreurs judiciaires de l’histoire (Paris: Denoël, 1981), p. 16.

4. Jean-Guillaume Lombard, secretary of the King of Prussia, cited in Albert Mathiez, La Révolution française, vol. 3: La terreur (Paris: Denoël, 1985), p. 104.

5. Cited in John Hall Stewart, ed., A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 307–11. See also Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, vol. 2: La chute de la royauté (Paris, 1885), pp. 503–15; and H. A. Barton, “The Origins of the Brunswick Manifesto,” French Historical Studies 5:2 (Fall 1967), pp. 146–69; chapter 14 below.

6. Burke, “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly” (1791), in Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 294–335, esp. pp. 319–20.

7. Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1970), pp. 606–8.

8. See William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 152–54; Michel Vovelle, La chute de la monarchie, 1787–1792 (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 166–67; Donald M. G. Sutherland, France, 1789–1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 126–31.

9. See Doyle, History, pp. 189–90; and Sutherland, France, pp. 150–55.

10. See Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris: Laffont, 1979), vol. 1, p. 793.

11. The discussion of the avenging mood in the Commune in this paragraph and the next follows Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, pp. 784–95, 816–21; and Edgar Quinet, La Révolution (Paris: Belin, 1987), pp. 314–15.

12. Cited in Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 795 and p. 801.

13. Cited in Elisabeth and Robert Badinter, Condorcet, 1743–1794: Un intellectuel en politique (Paris: Fayard, 1988), p. 473.

14. See Willette, Le tribunal, p. 10 ff.; and Pierre Sipriot, Les cent vingt jours de Louis XVI, dit Louis Capet (Paris: Plon, 1993), pp. 35–39 and 183–86.

15. Willette, Le tribunal, p. 15; and Bernard Lerat, Le terrorisme révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1989), ch. 2, esp. pp. 94–95.

16. This paragraph and the next follow Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, pp. 802–3; and Julien Tiersot, Les fêtes et les chants de la Révolution française (Paris: Hachette, 1908), pp. 88–89.

17. Ronsin cited in Antoine de Baecque, Le corps de l’histoire: Métaphores et politique, 1770–1800 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993), p. 346.

18. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 803.

19. Sessions of August 31 and September 7, 1792, as reported in Chronique de Paris, no. 257 (September 2), p. 982, and n. 264 (September 9), p. 1009.

20. Roland cited in Lerat, Terrorisme, p. 97.

21. See Marcel Dorigny, “Violence et révolution: Les girondins et les massacres de septembre,” in Albert Soboul, ed., Girondins et Montagnards (Paris: Société des Etudes Robespierristes, 1980), pp. 103–20.

22. Marat cited in Frédéric Bluche, Septembre 1792: Logiques d’un massacre (Paris: Laffont, 1986), pp. 34–35.

23. See Bluche, Septembre 1792, pp. 36 ff. See also Marat, Ecrits, ed. by Michel Vovelle (Paris: Messidor/Editions Sociales, 1988), pp. 185–89.

24. Pierre Caron, Les massacres de septembre (Paris: Maison du Livre Français, 1935), pp 1–12, 76–102, 469–74; and Bluche, Septembre 1792, pp. 95–121.

25. Willette, Le tribunal, p. 18.

26. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, pp. 848–49; and Quinet, La Révolution, pp. 318–19.

27. Gustave Le Bon, The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980), p. 72.

28. Sipriot, Cent vingt jours, pp. 44–47; and de Baecque, La gloire et l’effroi: Sept morts sous la terreur (Paris: Grasset, 1997), pp. 77–106. Cf. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, pp. 853–56; and Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993), p. 69.

29. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 809 and p. 846; Quinet, La Révolution, pp. 319–21; Caron, Massacres, pp. 103–20.

30. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 319.

31. See Caron, Massacres, pp. 472–73.

32. Chronique de Paris, no. 263 (September 7, 1792), p. 1002.

33. Roland’s letter is cited in Chronique de Paris, no. 262 (September 7, 1792), p. 1002.

34. Chronique de Paris, no. 261 (September 6, 1792), p. 997.

35. Chronique de Paris, no. 259 (September 4, 1792), p. 990.

36. Chronique de Paris, no. 262 (September 7, 1792), pp. 1001–2; No. 264 (September 9, 1792), p. 1009.

37. Condorcet cited in Badinter, Condorcet, p. 475 and p. 585.

38. Dorigny, “Violence et révolution,” pp. 103–7, 110.

39. Madame Roland cited in ibid., pp. 103–4.

40. Cited in Badinter, Condorcet, p. 474.

41. Cited in Sipriot, Cent vingt jours, p. 48.

42. See Marat, Ecrits, passim.

43. Cited in ibid., p. 178.

44. Ibid., pp. 195–97.

45. Cited by Pierre Michel, “Barbarie, civilisation, vandalisme,” in Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt, eds., Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820, vol. 8 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), pp. 7–40, esp. p. 31.

46. Cited in Helmut Kessler, Terreur: Ideologie und Nomenklatur der revolutionären Gewaltanwendung in Frankreich von 1770 bis 1794 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1973), pp. 36–39.

47. Cited in Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 48.

48. Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1970), p. 107.

49. Cited in Marc Bouloiseau et al., eds., Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. 8 (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1953), p. 69.

50. Gustave Laurent, ed., Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. 5 (Paris: n. p., 1951), p. 19.

51. Bouloiseau et al., eds., Oeuvres de Robespierre, vol. 8, pp. 93–95.

52. Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution française, vol. 7 (Paris: 1864), ch. 2 (“Souviens-toi de la Saint-Barthélemy”), esp. p. 195.

53. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 176–78.

54. For Saint-Just’s speech of November 13, 1792, on the indictment of Louis XVI, see Michèle Duval, ed., Saint-Just: Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gérard Lebovici, 1984), pp. 376–81.

55. Robespierre, “Lettre à ses commettans,” no. 5, in Laurent, ed., Oeuvres, vol. 5, pp. 56–74, esp. p. 58, p. 60, and p. 64.

56. For Robespierre’s speech of December 3, 1792, on the indictment of Louis XVI, see Bouloiseau et al., eds., Oeuvres de Robespierre, vol. 9, pp. 121–34. See this same volume for his subsequent interventions in the king’s trial.

57. Ibid., p. 89.

58. Ibid., p. 191.

59. Ibid., p. 130 and p. 133.

60. Ibid., p. 133, p. 184, and p. 120.

61. Ibid., p. 130 and p. 136.

62. Cited in Henri Coston, ed., Procès de Louis XVI et de Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Henry Coston, 1981), pp. 443–45, 369, 425.

63. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 351 and p.354.

64. Etienne Léon Baron de Lamothe-Langon, ed., Mémoires de Louis XVIII, vol. 5 (n. p., 1832), pp. 249–53. See Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (New York: Oxford, 1997), ch. 31 (“How Dangerous It Is To Believe Exiles”).

65. Jacques Godechot, La Contre-Révolution, 1789–1804 (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1961), p. 183.

66. Cited in Abbé Isidore Bertrand, Le pontificat de Pie VI et l’athéisme révolutionnaire, vol. 2 (Paris, 1879), pp. 208–25.

67. For this paragraph and the next, see David P. Jordan, The King’s Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 208 ff.; Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); de Baecque, La gloire et l’effroi, pp. 107–48.

68. Cited in Jaurès, Histoire socialiste, vol. 5, p. 312.

69. Vergniaud cited in Willette, Le tribunal, p. 24.

70. Cited in Jaurès, Histoire socialiste, vol. 5, pp. 312–13.

71. Cited in ibid., vol. 5, pp. 313–14; and in Gérard Walter, ed., Actes du Tribunal révolutionnaire (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), p. xiv.

72. Jaurès, Histoire socialiste, vol. 5, p. 310.

73. For the text of the decree of March 10, 1793, see ibid., vol. 5, pp. 310–12; and Walter, ed., Actes, pp. xv–xvi.

74. Jaurès, Histoire socialiste, vol. 5, p. 316.

75. Cited in Mathiez, La Révolution, vol. 3, p. 22.

76. Corday cited in Henri Wallon, Histoire du Tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris, vol. 1 (Paris, 1880), ch. 7.

77. Cited by Jacques Guilhaumou, “La formation d’un mot d’ordre: Plaçons la terreur à l’ordre du jour,” in Bulletin du Centre d’analyse du discours, no. 5 (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1981), p. 153.

78. Père Duchesne (15 July 1793) cited in Raymond Postgate, ed., Revolution from 1789 to 1906 (London: Grant Richards, 1920), p. 50.

79. Guilhaumou, La mort de Marat (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1989), p. 31.

80. Cited in Guilhaumou, La mort, pp. 33–35, 43–44. See also Ulrich Gumbrecht, Funktionen parlamentarischer Rhetorik in der französischen Revolution (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1978), pp. 106–8.

81. Cited in Guilhaumou, La mort, pp. 38–40. See also Mathiez, La Révolution, vol. 3, pp. 23–24.

82. David Lloyd Dowd, Pageant-Master of the Republic: Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1948), pp. 52–54.

83. Dorothy Johnson, Jacques-Louis David: Art in Metamorphosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 95–99.

84. This discussion of Marat’s lying in state and funeral follows Guilhaumou, La mort, esp. pp. 51–60; de Baecque, Le corps, pp. 26–27; Mathiez, La Révolution, vol. 3, pp. 23–24.

85. Cited in Guilhaumou, La mort, p. 51.

86. De Baecque, Le corps, esp. p. 21.

87. Warren Roberts, Jacques-Louis David as Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and the French Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 81–82, 88. See also Johnson, Jacques-Louis David, pp. 106–8.

88. Roberts, Jacques-Louis David, pp. 80–81; Peter H. Feist, “Jacques-Louis Davids Gemälde ‘Der ermordete Marat’: Zum Realismusgehalt des revolutionären Klassizismus,” in Kurt Holzapfel and Matthias Middell, eds., Die Französische Revolution 1789: Geschichte und Wirkung, vol. 10 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1989), pp. 197–209; Jörg Traeger, Der Tod des Marat: Revolution des Menschenbildes (Munich: Prestel, 1986), passim, esp. p. 415.

89. Kenneth Clark and Antoine Schnapper, respectively, cited in Feist, “Jacques-Louis Davids Gemälde,” p. 197.

90. Cited in Dowd, Pageant-Master, p. 107.

91. Cited in Roberts, Jacques-Louis David, p. 83. Jacob Burckhardt considered that having “saturated the Revolution with his poison … the cult of Marat was a grim emetic.” Quite the contrary, by virtue of her heroic deed, as measured “by the standards of the Ancient World,” Charlotte Corday was “one of the most sublime figures of the revolutionary epoch.” Burckhardt, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalter (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1974), p. 263.

92. Guilhaumou, La mort, p. 91. See also de Baecque, Le corps, p. 40.

93. Guilhaumou, “La formation,” pp. 171–72, 176.

94. Cited in Guilhaumou, La mort, p. 94.

95. Cited in Guilhaumou, “La formation,” pp. 172–73, 191.

96. Cited in ibid., pp. 191–92.

97. Cited in Frank Attar, La Révolution française déclare la guerre à l’Europe: L’embrasement de l’Europe à la fin du XVIII siècle (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1992), p. 107.

98. Cited in Georges Michon, Robespierre et la guerre révolutionnaire, 1791–1792 (Paris: Rivière, 1937), p. 22 and p. 37.

99. Cited in Attar, La Révolution française, p. 115.

100. Cited in Michel Vovelle, “La Marseillaise: La guerre ou la paix,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, vol. l (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 85–136, esp. p. 93.

101. Cited in Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 86. See also Esteban Buch, La neuvième de Beethoven: Une histoire politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), ch. 2, esp. pp. 40–46.

102. Cited in Duval, ed., Saint-Just, p. 543.

103. See René Moulinas, “Le Sud-Est,” in Jean Tulard, ed., La Contre-révolution: Origines, histoire, postérité (Paris: Perrin, 1990), pp. 234–61; and Alan Forrest, “Regionalism and Counterrevolution in France,” in Colin Lucas, ed., Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 151–82.

104. For developments in Lyons, see W. D. Edmonds, Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon, 1789–1793 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); and Colin Lucas, The Structure of the Terror: The Example of Javogues and the Loire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), passim.

105. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 529–31.

106. Chalier cited in Georges Eynard, Joseph Chalier: Bourreau ou martyr, 1747–1793 (Lyon: Editions Lyonnaises d’art et d’histoire, 1987), p. 81 and pp. 94–95.

107. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 535.

108. Cited in Eynard, Chalier, p. 163.

109. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 537–38; and Eynard, Chalier, p. 169.

110. F.-A. (Alphonse) Aulard, ed., Recueil des actes du Comité de Salut Public avec la correspondence officielle des représentants en mission, vol. 7 (Paris, 1894), pp. 375–76.

111. For the Red Terror in Lyons, see Edmonds, Jacobinism, pp. 282–304.

112. Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies or the armées révolutionnaires: Instrument of the Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to Floréal Year II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 372.

113. R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 170. See also Sutherland, France, pp. 222–23; Doyle, History, p. 254; Paul Mansfield, “The Repression of Lyon, 1793–4: Origins, Responsibility, and Significance,” in French History 2:1 (1988): pp. 74–101.

114. This paragraph and the two following ones draw on Eynard, Chalier, pp. 171–72; G. Lenôtre [L. L. T. Gosselin], La Compagnie de Jéhu: Episodes de la réaction lyonnaise, 1794–1800 (Paris: Perrin, 1931), pp. 545–57; Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1903), p. 697. Carlyle gives the Moniteur (November 17, 1793) as a source for his reconstruction of the procession of November 10.

115. Cited in Anne-Marie Vurpas, Les chansons lyonnaises à l’époque révolutionnaire: Collection du bicentenaire de la Révolution française à Lyon (Lyon: Editions Lyonnaises d’art et d’histoire, 1987), p. 108.

116. Cited in Aulard, ed., Recueil, vol. 7, pp. 331–32.

117. Cited in Mathiez, La Révolution, vol. 3, p. 144.

118. Dubois-Crancé to the Convention (10 October 1793), in Aulard, ed., Recueil, vol. 7, p. 350; Palmer, Twelve, pp. 170–76; Sutherland, France, pp. 221–23.

119. See chapter 4 above.

120. For the Red Terror in Marseilles, see William Scott, Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles (London: Macmillan, 1973).

121. Barras and Fréron to the Committee of Public Safety (13 October 1793), in Aulard, ed., Recueil, vol. 7, pp. 404–5; Godechot, La Contre-Révolution, pp. 241–43; Sutherland, France, pp. 220–21.

122. Cited in Paul Gaffarel, “Marseilles sans nom (Nivôse–Pluviôse An II),” in La Révolution française 60 (1911): pp. 193–215, esp. pp. 211–12.

123. Alan Forrest, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), ch. 10, esp. pp. 235–38, and The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–1799 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), ch. 8, esp. pp. 235 ff.

124. Ysabeau and Tallien to the Committee of Public Safety (November 11, 1793) in Aulard, ed., Recueil, vol. 8, p. 345.

125. Malcolm Crook, Journées révolutionnaires à Toulon (Nîmes: Jacquelin Chambes, 1989), pp. 83–96; and Crook, Toulon in War and Revolution: From the Ancien Regime to the Restoration, 1750–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), ch. 6, esp. pp. 147–52.

126. Cited in Vurpas, Chansons, p. 117.

127. See chapter 9 below.

128. Quinet, La Révolution, pp. 401–3.

129. Elie Fournier, Turreau et les colonnes infernales: Ou l’échec de la violence (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985), pp. 35–36.

130. Duval, ed., Saint-Just, pp. 700–1, 706, 714.

131. Robespierre, “Discours sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans l’administration intérieure de la République” (17 pluviôse, an II, 4 February 1794), in Bouloiseau et al., eds., Oeuvres de Robespierre, vol. 10 (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1967), pp. 357–58.

132. This paragraph rests heavily on Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935); Richard Louie, “The Incidence of the Terror: A Critique of a Statistical Interpretation,” French Historical Studies 3 (1964): pp. 379–89; Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, “The Incidence of the Terror: Some Lessons for Quantitative History,” Journal of Social History 9:2 (Winter 1975): pp. 193–218.

133. Greer, Incidence, p. 124.

134. See Gerd van den Heuvel, “Terreur, Terroriste, Terrorisme,” in Reichardt and Schmitt, eds., Handbuch, vol. 3 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985), pp. 89–132, esp. pp. 119–23.

135. Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 196–97.

136. Mathiez, After Robespierre: The Thermidorean Reaction (New York: Knopf, 1931), p. 176; and Cobb, Reactions to the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 31.

137. Cobb, Police and the People, p. 20.

138. Cited in Vurpas, Chansons, pp. 167–68.

139. Mathiez, After Robespierre, p. 177.

140. Cobb, Reactions; Cobb, Police and the People; and Colin Lucas, “Themes in Southern Violence After 9 Thermidor,” in Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas, eds., Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 152–94.

141. Lucas, “Themes,” p. 153.

142. See P. M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 240–42.

143. Cited in Willette, Le tribunal, p. 44.

144. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 624.

145. See Colin Lucas, “The Problem of the Midi in the French Revolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (1978): pp. l-25, esp. p. 24; Lucas, “Themes,” p. 182; Cobb, Reactions, pp. 24–26.

146. Vurpas, Chansons, pp. 124–25, 176–77.

147. Ibid., p. 132, p. 137, and pp. 162–65.

148. Cited in Renée Fuoc, La réaction thermidorienne à Lyon (Lyon: Editions de Lyon, 1957), p. 40.

149. Fuoc, La réaction, pp. 76–79.

150. Ibid., pp. 130–31.

151. Cited in ibid., p. 136.

152. Cited in ibid., p. 137.

153. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 623.

154. Ibid., p. 624.

155. Ibid., p. 625.

156. Ibid., pp. 625–27.

157. Ibid., p. 623.

158. See Lenôtre, Compagnie de Jéhu, passim.

159. Quinet, La Révolution, pp. 628–31.

160. Burckhardt, Vorlesungen, pp. 297–98.