Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!
Madame Roland, on the scaffold
THE DEATH OF the king did not mean the end of the French Revolution – far from it. Anyone settling down to study its history soon discovers that it was of a truly hideous complication – so hideous that a full account would demand a hundred pages or more and would throw the present modest volume utterly off balance. The last chapter was consequently a shameless oversimplification, and the present one will be another.
On 20 September 1792, the same day as the victory of Valmy, and while King Louis XVI was whiling away his last months in the Temple, the long-awaited National Convention was constituted. On the following day it was to declare the abolition of the monarchy. It was then unanimously agreed that 22 September should mark the beginning of Year I of the French Republic; but there was agreement on very little else. Hostility increased between the Girondins and the Jacobins, who had become more extremist than ever, and – occupying as they did the highest and most remote seats in the hall – became known as the Montagnards, or simply the Mountain. Over all fell the shadow of the king. The Girondins would have spared him if they could; so initially would Danton, at first one of their number though he soon changed his mind since, as he honestly admitted, ‘I did not want my head to fall with his.’ His place, he realised, was now with the Mountain, together with Camille Desmoulins and Pierre Philippeaux, who were his close friends and collaborators; with Maximilien Robespierre, whom he disliked but respected; and with Jean-Paul Marat, whose hysterical outpourings he despised.
He himself was bigger than all of them. In some ways he seemed another Mirabeau, with a huge head pitted by smallpox – his was additionally disfigured by several farmyard accidents in his youth – a magnificent voice and a quite extraordinary feeling for the French language. Like Mirabeau, too, he had a distinctly questionable reputation; he certainly lived on a scale wholly disproportionate to his apparent sources of income. Madame Roland, who had always distrusted him, claimed that he once boasted that since the start of the Revolution he had managed to amass no less than 1.5 million livres. Perhaps he had: but as the courts of Europe reacted to the news of the king’s execution and one by one severed their diplomatic relations, it was Danton’s voice that was heard above all the rest. ‘The kings in alliance try to intimidate us,’ he thundered. ‘We hurl at their feet, as a gage of battle, the head of the King of France.’ Since continental war was now inevitable, he ensured that the Convention should take the initiative: it declared war on England and Holland in February 1793, and on Spain early in March.
How, possibly, could the revolutionary armies hold their own against such opposition? Lately, it is true, they had been doing pretty well. After their triumph at Valmy they had occupied Savoy, which also included the city of Nice. Then Dumouriez had advanced into Belgium, defeated the Austrians at Jemappes and proceeded to Brussels, Liège and Antwerp. Meanwhile General Armand-Louis de Custine had entered Germany and threatened Frankfurt. But by now, with the war opening up on several new fronts, it was clear that the Convention had bitten off more than it could hope to chew. Custine was forced to retreat from the Rhineland while Dumouriez, a convinced Girondin, suffered two successive defeats at Neerwinden and Louvain; he then did his best to persuade his men to march on Paris to restore order and overthrow the revolutionary government. When they refused, he knew that he must choose between flight and capture, with an almost certain end on the scaffold. He defected, very sensibly, to the Austrians, taking the young Duke of Chartres – the future King Louis-Philippe – with him.
And worse was to come. In the Vendée* – a region on the west coast just south of Brittany – the peasantry rose in arms against the new order, massacred all the republicans and revolutionaries that they could find and advanced on Rochefort, which they threatened to open to a British invasion fleet. In Bordeaux, Nantes, Lyon and Marseille the situation was only a little better. Desperate to retain control, in March the Convention established first a Revolutionary Tribunal and shortly afterwards what was to be known as the Committee of Public Safety, its nine members headed by Danton, which was gradually to arrogate to itself absolute powers. It began by launching a campaign against the Girondins, who had been greatly embarrassed by the defection of Dumouriez, one of their most distinguished members. But the Girondins fought back, and in a surprise move arraigned Jean-Paul Marat, one of their bitterest enemies, before the Revolutionary Tribunal.
On hearing the news of his arrest, few members of the Convention could have felt deeply upset. Of them all, Marat was one of the most unpopular. Dr John Moore, an English visitor to Paris who heard him speak, left the following description:
He has a cadaverous complexion and a countenance exceedingly expressive of his disposition … So far from ever having the appearance of fear or deference, he seems to me always to contemplate the Assembly from the tribune either with eyes of menace or contempt. He speaks in a hollow, croaking voice, with affected solemnity … Marat has carried his calumnies to such a length that even the party which he wishes to support seems to be ashamed of him, and he is shunned and apparently detested by everyone else. When he enters the hall of the Assembly he is avoided on all sides, and when he takes his seat those near him generally rise and change their places.
The Girondins, none the less, had reason to regret their action. Marat may have been detested, but he too had his champions. He was instantly acquitted by the Tribunal and carried back in triumph to the Convention Hall.
Meanwhile the trouble in the provinces continued to spread. Some sixty departments were now affected. Normandy was in chaos; Lyon, Marseille and Toulon were in the throes of civil war. Everywhere, Paris was blamed – for virtually ignoring the situation elsewhere and by its shameless intimidation of an elected assembly. The Committee of Public Safety did what it could, but in the current confusion it was often powerless. And it was ever conscious of the increasing threat of foreign invasion. During the summer of 1793 the Austrians took the key frontier positions of Condé and Valenciennes; Custine was pressed back by the Prussians; Spanish armies were massing around the Pyrenees; Savoy and Nice were once again under threat; British forces were besieging Dunkirk; Toulon was about to surrender arsenal, town and fleet to Britain’s Admiral Lord Hood;* while in Lyon, France’s second city, the royalists had resumed control and were busy executing every republican in sight. And Danton, the one man who had seemed capable of taking over the government and somehow restoring order, had failed miserably. He and several others were voted off the Committee of Public Safety, and his place was now taken by possibly the ablest, certainly the most sinister of all the grisly figures with whom these chapters have had to deal: Maximilien Robespierre.
Maximilien Robespierre – his name was originally Derobespierre, but he shortened it in 1789 – was as unlike Mirabeau or Danton as it was possible to be. They were both hideous; he was a dandy, always immaculately dressed in clothes of a perfect cut, usually dark green – a colour which seemed to be reflected in his eyes and even in his sallow, pock-marked complexion. His hair was meticulously brushed and powdered. Small and thin, he made himself taller with high-heeled shoes, on which he walked very fast with short, nervous steps. He fully lived up to his nickname, ‘the sea-green incorruptible’; incorruptible he certainly was. He spent money on his wardrobe, but on remarkably little else. He had no close friends; women meant nothing to him, nor did food or drink. He lived mainly on bread, fruit and coffee. He was never heard to laugh, seldom seen to smile. There was an extraordinary intensity about him. ‘That man will go far,’ said Mirabeau shortly before he died, ‘he believes what he says.’
In March 1790 Robespierre was elected president of the Jacobin Club, and saw it through its most difficult days when many of its members left – in protest against the petition for the king’s dethronement – to form another more moderate club, the Feuillants; and his reputation was still further increased by the military disasters of 1792. He had always been against the war – according to his enemies, because he was entirely lacking in physical courage. Certainly he was never to be seen at popular demonstrations; in August, when the mob stormed the Tuileries, the Girondins accused him of hiding in a cellar. Marat, characteristically, did not mince his words. ‘Robespierre’, he said, ‘grows pale at the sight of a sabre.’ He may well have been right; but there could be no question that by the summer of 1793, as President of the Committee of Public Safety, Maximilien Robespierre was supreme.
So much blood had already been shed that it might have been thought that one more killing would have been hardly worthy of notice; but in that same summer a murder was committed that set all Paris alight: the killing, by a fanatical young Girondin named Charlotte Corday, of Jean-Paul Marat. Bursting into his apartment, she found him wrapped in towels, lying in a medicinal bath – the only relief he could find for the debilitating skin disease which made his life a misery – and handed him a letter which contained a list of those implicated in a planned uprising in her home city of Caen. Marat copied down the names, murmuring ‘they shall all be guillotined’ – at which she plunged a six-inch kitchen knife into his chest. He died instantly, she four days later on the scaffold, having succeeded only in making him a martyr – his bust on a pedestal in the Convention Hall, his ashes reverently laid in the Panthéon, streets and squares all over France renamed in his honour. The deed was also commemorated in several paintings, including the famous Marat assassiné* by Jacques-Louis David, himself a convinced Jacobin who had voted for the death of the king.
After the murder of Marat the Committee of Public Safety pursued its ends with ever-greater zeal. General Custine went to the guillotine, to be followed shortly by the Duc de Biron; a force was sent to the Vendée to put down the civil war there, at the cost of nearly a quarter of a million lives; finally, it was decided that the queen herself must go to trial. After the execution of the king his family had been moved to the Conciergerie on the Ile de la Cité. Originally a Merovingian palace, much of it had been a prison for the past four hundred years; infested with rats and smelling strongly of urine, it was a good deal grimmer than the Temple. The queen was obliged to share a cell with a female attendant and two gendarmes who, according to Count Fersen, ‘never left her side even when she had to satisfy the needs of nature’. Still worse for her, she had been parted from her son, whom she knew she would never see again.
Her trial, like her husband’s, was a formality. She was found guilty on various charges and condemned to death. According to the Moniteur Universel, ‘having heard the sentence pronounced she left the court without addressing a further word to the judges or the public, no trace of emotion appearing on her face’. The following morning, 16 October, her head was shaved. She climbed unassisted on to the tumbril. Mounting the steps to the scaffold, she stumbled and inadvertently trod on the foot of the executioner. ‘Monsieur, je vous demande pardon,’ she said, ‘je ne l’ai pas fait exprès.’* They were her last words.
By now the Revolution had begun to devour its own children. Before the month was over, twenty-one of the leading Girondins had lost their heads; in November they were followed by the former Duke of Orléans, Philippe Egalité – who asked only for a twenty-four-hour stay of execution in order to enjoy a last hearty meal – and Madame Roland. Even poor, feckless Madame du Barry, in floods of tears and screaming for mercy, was executed on 8 December. All that autumn and winter, the Terror continued; Paris saw nearly 3,000 executions; the provinces 14,000. Many of the charges verged on the grotesque. According to the Liste Générale des Condamnés, they included ‘Henriette Françoise de Marboeuf … convicted of having hoped for the arrival of the Austrians and Prussians’, ‘François Bertrand … convicted of having furnished to the defenders of the country sour wine injurious to health’, and ‘Marie Angélique Plaisant, sempstress at Douai, convicted of having exclaimed that she was an aristocrat and that she cared “not a fig for the nation” ’. All were ‘condemned to death in Paris and executed the same day’.
The new calendar had already been introduced, with the First Year of the Republic beginning on the day of the abolition of the monarchy, 22 September 1792. The details were put into the hands of a mildly ridiculous, unsuccessful actor, Philippe Fabre, who affected the name of Fabre d’Eglantine – together with a lorgnette, which drove Robespierre wild with irritation. It was he who proposed the idea that the year should be divided into twelve equal months, with the five days left at the end to be known as sans-culottides and celebrated as festivals. The months were to be subdivided into three ‘decades’ and renamed after the seasons: Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire for the autumn; Nivôse, Pluviôse and Ventôse for the winter; Germinal, Floréal and Prairial for the spring; Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor for the summer.* This proposal infuriated the working population, who now had to face a ten-day week, and deeply shocked the clergy, many of whom refused to recognise the new Sabbath.
Besides, they had enough problems of their own. The Revolution’s campaign against Christianity was steadily gathering momentum. Crucifixes and statues of the Virgin and saints were hacked to pieces (and even occasionally replaced by busts of Marat); services were suppressed; across the country, towns and villages, streets and squares changed their names wholesale; in Paris, Grand Festivals of Reason were held in Notre-Dame and Saint-Sulpice – for, said Danton, ‘the people will have festivals where they will offer up incense to the Supreme Being, Nature’s master; for it was never our intention to destroy religion so that atheism could take its place.’
But Danton’s days were numbered. He had been ill, and during a prolonged convalescence he had had second thoughts over the path that France was now taking. ‘Perhaps’, he declared to the Convention, ‘the Terror once served a useful purpose, but it should not hurt innocent people. No one wants to see a person treated as a criminal just because he happens not to have enough revolutionary enthusiasm.’ At once, Robespierre saw a red light. He had always been bitterly jealous of Danton, whom he suspected – with good reason – to be more intelligent than himself, besides being a far better speaker. Moreover – and this may have been another form of jealousy – he could never reconcile himself to Danton’s blatant and frequently coarse sexuality, which shocked and disturbed him. And now the man had identified himself with the Indulgents, the forgiving, and in Robespierre’s book the Indulgents were agents of counter-revolution.
It was on the evening of 30 March 1794, at a joint meeting of the committees of Public Safety and General Security, that Robespierre’s unsmiling lieutenant, Louis de Saint-Just, laid a warrant for Danton’s arrest on the table and invited those present to sign it. Two only refused. Three days later the trial began, with Camille Desmoulins, Fabre d’Eglantine and fifteen other Indulgents beside him in the dock. As always, Danton dominated the proceedings. He had no doubts as to the outcome, but he was determined to go down fighting. As that tremendous voice echoed across the courtroom, the president had the greatest difficulty in keeping order, ringing his bell in vain. ‘Did you not hear my bell?’ he asked. ‘Bell?’ thundered Danton. ‘A man who is fighting for his life pays no attention to bells!’ But it was no use: on 5 April the eighteen accused were loaded on to three red-painted tumbrils and taken to the guillotine.
Danton was the last to be executed. Looking down from the scaffold, he noticed the painter Jacques-Louis David – who, despite their former friendship, had voted for his death – sketching him from a nearby cafe, and shouted his final obscenity. After that his face clouded, and he was heard to murmur: ‘Oh my wife, my dear wife, shall I ever see you again?’ Then he pulled himself together: ‘Courage, Danton – pas de faiblesse!’* Those words have passed into history, as have the words to the executioner that followed: ‘Above all, don’t forget to show my head to the people. It’s well worth looking at.’
The steady rhythm of the guillotine continued until the end of July, at the rate of some thirty a day.† By now fewer than 10 per cent of the victims were aristocrats; another 6 per cent were clergy; the remainder – roughly 85 per cent – were members of what had been known as the third estate. Robespierre himself had witnessed not a single execution. In his own curious way he still claimed to deplore the practice, on the grounds that it brutalised the people. But the momentum could not be halted. ‘If we stop too soon,’ he declared, ‘we shall die. If the revolutionary government is destroyed now, freedom will be extinguished tomorrow.’ Nor could he forget the words that Danton had shouted – as only Danton could – as the tumbril passed the house where he himself lodged: ‘You will follow us, Robespierre!’
Danton had spoken no more than the truth: in the spring and early summer of 1794 Robespierre found the Revolution turning against him. He antagonised the many surviving secret supporters of Danton by reviling him in a public speech as ‘the most dangerous of the conspirators, had he not been the most cowardly’, while his increasing arrogance suggested that he now regarded himself as a dictator. On 8 June he organised and presided over a national festival in honour of the ‘Supreme Being’ that many people found perfectly ridiculous, and which did little good to his reputation. Though generally respected and even admired, he had never been a popular figure; now he was openly feared. Under him, France had become a police state. On 10 June, at his instigation, a new and terrifying piece of legislation was passed: the Law of 22 Prairial, which permitted executions on grounds of suspicion only. Defence lawyers and witnesses were dispensed with; so were interrogations of the defendants, which ‘merely confused the conscience of the judges’. It was no longer safe to discuss politics in public places. And, people began to ask, was all this really necessary? The danger of foreign invasion had now passed. On 26 June a French army had defeated the Austrians at Fleurus* in the Low Countries, and early in July had occupied Brussels, bringing about the extinction, after over two centuries, of the Dutch Republic. Toulon had been retaken from the British. Why then must France continue to suffer? Could not this relentless pressure now be relaxed?
And there was another question too: was Robespierre entirely sane? His friends were becoming uncertain. Two of them, Paul Barras and Louis Stanislas Fréron, called on him and found him in his dressing gown.
He did not reply to our greeting. He turned first towards a mirror that hung on the window, then to a smaller mirror, taking his toilet knife, scraping the powder that covered his face and minutely inspecting the arrangement of his hair. He then took off his dressing-gown, putting it on a chair near us so that we were dusted by the powder that flew off it. He did not apologise, nor show any sign that he had even noticed our presence. He washed himself in a bowl that he held in his hand, brushed his teeth, spat several times on the floor by our feet as though we had not been there … He remained standing … and still said nothing. I have seen no expression as impassive on the icy marble faces of statues or on those of corpses.
On 26 July (8 Thermidor) 1794, dressed in a sky-blue coat and nankeen breeches, Robespierre arrived to address the Convention. He spoke for over two hours, castigating most of the leaders and showing particular bitterness against those who had derided his Festival of the Supreme Being. He then turned his attention to the superintendent of finance, Pierre Joseph Cambon, whom he accused of destroying the economy and reducing the poor to near-starvation. This proved a mistake. Cambon leaped to his feet. ‘Before I am dishonoured,’ he declared, ‘I will speak to the French nation. It is time to tell the whole truth. One man alone is paralysing the will of the National Convention. And that man is Robespierre.’ The ice had been broken. One by one, other deputies rose to defend themselves and to denounce him. By the end of the session there could be little doubt that Robespierre was doomed.
The next day’s meeting brought confirmation. From the start tempers ran high; the president found it almost impossible to maintain order. Before the proceedings broke up in confusion, however, Robespierre’s immediate arrest was proposed, together with that of Saint-Just, and the proposal carried unanimously. The gendarmerie was summoned and the two were led away, together with several others including Augustin Robespierre, who had nobly insisted on sharing his brother’s fate. And that, one feels, should have settled the matter.
Alas, it did not. A new complication was introduced by the Paris Commune, which now met urgently in the Hôtel de Ville and resolved to defy the two committees and the Convention in protest against the arrests. It must have been astonished when shortly afterwards there arrived Robespierre himself. He had first been sent to the Luxembourg Palace – recently converted into an additional prison – but on orders from the Commune had been refused admittance; barred also from the Mairie, his captors had taken him in despair to the Hôtel de Ville, where he was warmly welcomed. Immediately he assumed control, ordering the Commune ‘to close the city gates, to shut down all newspapers, and to order the arrest of all journalists and traitorous deputies’.
It was in the early hours of the 28th – 10 Thermidor – that the Convention decided to act: its forces must go straight to the Hôtel de Ville and bring out Robespierre and his friends by force. If we are to believe the far from modest account of the unhappily named General of Gendarmerie Charles André Merda, he was one of the first into the building.
I saw about fifty people inside, in a state of great excitement … I recognised Robespierre in the middle. He was sitting in an armchair with his left elbow on his knee and his head supported by his left hand. I leapt at him, pointing my sword at his heart and crying ‘Surrender, you traitor!’ He raised his head and replied, ‘It is you who are the traitor. I shall have you shot.’ At these words I reached for one of my pistols … and fired. I meant to shoot him in the chest, but the ball struck his chin and smashed his lower jaw. He fell out of his chair.*
By now it was about three in the morning. Robespierre was carried to the offices of the Committee of Public Safety and lay there until six, when a surgeon arrived and dressed the wound with a bandage that covered all the lower part of his face and that was itself soon drenched in blood. A few hours later he, his brother, Saint-Just and twenty others were formally condemned to death and at five o’clock that afternoon carried off to the guillotine, which they reached soon after seven. Lifted down from the cart, Robespierre lay flat on the ground, apparently only semi-conscious; not till he felt himself being carried up to the scaffold did he open his eyes. The executioner then cruelly tore away the bandage and splint that held his upper and lower jaw together; the blood poured out in torrents and he let forth ‘a groan like a dying tiger, which was heard all over the square’.
Of all the leaders of the Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre is the most mysterious and the hardest to understand. Certainly, he was the most honest. He was deeply cultivated, an idealist and an eloquent champion of the poor and oppressed. He campaigned for universal male suffrage and the abolition of slavery in the colonies. He consistently opposed war, maintaining that ‘the most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician’s head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and constitution. No one loves armed missionaries.’ He was a passionate admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and kept a copy of Le Contrat Social beside his bed. And it was he who coined the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, which, until the coming of the euro, was inscribed on all French currency. He had voted for the execution of the king, but only as what he described as ‘a cruel exception to ordinary laws’.
How then does it happen that it is he, more than any other of the revolutionaries, whom we associate with the atrocities of the Terror? Probably because he was by this time quite seriously unbalanced, and genuinely paranoid about the future of the Revolution, which dominated his life and which he believed to be threatened. There was little enough foundation for this belief: no one could still seriously fear a foreign invasion, nor at that time was there any possibility of a re-establishment of the monarchy: the dauphin, Louis-Charles, was a child of nine, already suffering from tuberculosis of the bone. On his death in June 1795 his uncle, the Count of Provence – who was then living quietly at Verona – was to proclaim himself King Louis XVIII as he was honour-bound to do, but it was to be another nineteen years before he assumed the throne. The Revolution was almost over. True, it had not fulfilled all its promises; the economy was in a wretched state and the poor were still protesting over the price of food. Still, the king was dead, and France was now a republic.
Robespierre, however, would have none of it. For him the Revolution was still in progress, and such was his power and authority that he was easily able to persuade others. Whatever instincts he may have had to the contrary, he had convinced himself that the ends justified the means. As he told the Convention on 5 February 1794:
The basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than justice, prompt, severe and inflexible. It is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the motherland.
And so, despite everything, he stood for terror; indeed, he personified it. And when, finally, it was for him that the bell tolled, his death proved the most terrible of all.
*
It was inevitable that after the removal of Robespierre from the scene there should be a dramatic swing to the right. The Law of 22 Prairial was repealed; it was even proposed that nobles should no longer be condemned because of their birth, or the clergy for their calling. The Jacobin Club was closed; the red caps of liberty were no longer seen in the streets. Many others whose names had been associated with the Terror followed their leader to the scaffold. It was unfortunate only that the winter of 1794–5 should have been the coldest that anyone could remember: the Seine froze over, starving wolves appeared in the towns and villages, and at the first signs of spring a sudden thaw led to disastrous floods. For the sans-culottes, the situation was worse than it had been before the Revolution began. There were more revolts, more angry demonstrations, all of which were savagely put down. Before long the guillotine was as busy as it had ever been.
At this point, to the monarchists, a restoration seemed to be after all a possibility – but not for long. Plans for a rising in the south were discovered and quickly dealt with; and a force of émigrés, provided by the British government with money, uniforms and naval support, actually landed on the south coast of Brittany before being destroyed by the twenty-seven-year-old General Lazare Hoche. Over seven hundred of them, mostly members of the nobility, were shot, in their British uniforms, on the charge of high treason. In Paris, however, the spirit of reaction was as strong as ever. In introducing a new constitution, known as the Constitution of the Year III, in August 1795 François Antoine de Boissy d’Anglas spoke words which might cause comment even today:
Absolute equality is a chimera. If it existed one would have to assume complete equality in intelligence, virtue, physical strength, education and fortune in all men … We must be ruled by the best citizens. And the best are the most learned and the most concerned in the maintenance of law and order. Now, with very few exceptions, you will find such men only among those who own property and are thus attached to the land in which it lies, to the laws which protect it and to the public order by which it is maintained … You must therefore guarantee the political rights of the well-to-do … and [deny] unreservedly political rights to men without property, for if such men ever find themselves seated among the legislators, they will provoke agitations … and in the end precipitate us into those violent convulsions from which we have scarcely yet emerged.
Considering the events of the previous six years, the Constitution of the Year III was a remarkable document indeed. Not only did it include a comprehensive ban on slavery; it also established a liberal republic with the franchise based on the payment of taxes, a bicameral legislature and a five-man Directory, who were to wear a magnificent uniform ‘as a protest against sans-culottism’.
There was to be one final insurrection, engineered by the royalists, before the Revolution was genuinely over. They had no difficulty in drumming up popular support – in Paris the cost of living was about thirty times higher in 1795 than it had been in 1790 – and by the beginning of October the insurgents were some 25,000 strong. Whom, however, could the Convention trust to deal with them effectively? After an early disastrous choice it appointed Paul Barras, who had distinguished himself during the events of Thermidor; but Barras had little military experience and it was agreed that he should take on one or more experienced deputies to advise him. Unhesitatingly, he chose a twenty-six-year-old officer whom he had known during the royalist siege of Toulon in 1793 and who immediately swung into action. At 1 a.m. on 5 October – 13 Vendémiaire – this officer took over from Barras, who willingly surrendered his authority, and despatched a young lieutenant named Joachim Murat* to fetch forty cannon from the plain of Sablons – the modern Neuilly. Fortunately, these arrived before the expected royalist attack, and were strategically placed at key points around the Pont Neuf, the Pont Royal, the Place de la Révolution and the Place Vendôme. The major assault began at about ten in the morning. The forces of the Convention were outnumbered by about six to one, but the insurgents fell back when the cannon opened fire. This was what Thomas Carlyle was to describe as the ‘whiff of grapeshot … which blew into space the French Revolution’.
It also made a national hero of Napoleon Bonaparte.
* The Vendée revolt is the subject of Victor Hugo’s last novel, Quatrevingt-treize, and also forms the backdrop of Balzac’s Les Chouans.
* It eventually did so on 27 August.
* It now hangs in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels. The letter has survived, complete with bloodstains and marks of the bath water, and is now owned by the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres.
* ‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur, I did not do it on purpose.’
* Grape Harvest, Mist, Frost; Snow, Rain, Wind; Seeds, Flowers, Meadows; Harvest, Heat, Fruit. Or, as a contemporary English wit suggested, Wheezy, Sneezy, Freezy; Slippy, Drippy, Nippy; Showery, Flowery, Bowery; Hoppy, Croppy, Poppy.
* ‘Courage, Danton – no weakness!’
† The total number executed by the guillotine was 16,594 – 2,639 of them in Paris. Another 25,000 perished in summary executions across France; 96 per cent occurred in or after November 1793.
* The first battle in history in which reconnaissance aircraft – in this case balloons – were successfully used.
* It has been suggested, though on little evidence, that Merda was boasting, and that Robespierre fired the shot himself in an unsuccessful attempt at suicide.
* Later he was to marry Napoleon’s sister Caroline and to become King of Naples.