‘Ne pouvant fortifier la justice, ils ont justifié la force.’ ‘Unable to fortify justice, [men] have justified force.’
Blaise Pascal (1623–62), French philosopher, in his
Pensées, published posthumously in 1669
TODAY, IN THE château de Versailles, there is a head-and-shoulders marble bust of Louis XVI standing in the Œil de Bœuf,fn1 the anteroom to his apartments. This was where visitors would wait to be admitted to his presence. It is a spacious room decorated with a golden fresco of cavorting nymphs, presumably to keep people amused while they waited. The room has eight doors, showing that it was something of a crossroads at the heart of the palace. Today, the bust of Louis XVI stands by one of these doors, gazing genially at the herds of modern intruders who tramp through his former home, taking photos of themselves. He is smiling, his head slightly uplifted in a gesture of apparent optimism. On the base of the sculpture is a signature: ‘Loudon, 1790’.
Admittedly, the bust might well have been begun before the political upheavals of 1789, but the fact that it was completed, and then added to the royal collection, shows that Louis XVI still had reasons to be cheerful in 1790.
He wasn’t alone. The general ambience of optimism and contentment reigning in France at the end of 1790 – amongst those who weren’t plotting to spoil the mood, anyway – can be gauged from an almanac for 1791 published in Versailles. This was a town that had lost most of its status, and a large slice of its income, since October 1789, so one might expect its almanac to be a doom-laden catalogue of recriminations.
The publisher, a certain Blaizot, lists himself as a ‘bookseller to the King and Queen’, so we can assume that the Revolution had reduced his takings. He admits in his introduction that ‘the almanac we present to the public today can have nothing in common with its predecessors except the name.’ But he seems to have accepted his losses in surprisingly good heart. He writes that ‘today a new order of things calls all citizens to take part in the administration. Let each person become more interested in educating themselves, either to be more useful to society, or to manage their own affairs in a way beneficial to others.’
This, Blaizot says, is what he is doing with his almanac, which is a 260-page compendium of everything you need to know about the town of Versailles and its surroundings. It gives the names and job titles of all those elected to serve the new département of Seine-et-Oise and its capital, Versailles. The book also describes every major public building in the region (including the palace, inside and out), and provides lists of schools, churches, public baths, theatres and the like, the times of sunrise and sunset for every day of the year, and even the dates of eclipses of the sun and moon.
The palace is described as though the royal family still lived there (that section of the book was probably reprinted virtually as before), but elsewhere the Revolution has made its mark. We are told, for example, that it is impossible to name people serving in the royal households, because ‘Their Majesties are proposing to establish a new order in their houses.’ The same goes for the King’s secretaries of state, who are being replaced by elected officials.
The clearest sign that the author in no way resents the new status quo is a section at the end of the almanac called ‘An Idea of the New Constitution of the French Empire’. Here, Blaizot tells his readers that ‘we are already beginning to feel the benefits of the new order of things that promises France a solid and durable happiness.’
He explains exactly why, giving a potted history of the changeover from the three états to the Assemblée, and stressing that political decisions now rest in the hands of those elected by ‘the nation’. The King effectively has no more power – he cannot propose laws, cannot veto them, and even if he objects to an idea, the third time the Assemblée sends him a bill to be signed, it automatically becomes law.
Blaizot is scathing about the former system of monarchy: under the Sun King Louis XIV ‘the brilliance of royalty and literature covered the scars and concealed the bankruptcy of the French nation’, he says. And he has nothing but harsh words for the old elitism: ‘France … had a class of demi-gods and a mass of semi-savages. The aristocracy fed the arrogance of the former.’
Now, though, everything is unity: ‘France forms a single state, a single territory, a single everything, governed by the same principles and the same laws, by the King, supreme head of the Nation, imposed upon and governed by the legislative assembly that is the sovereign representative of the Nation.’ Blaizot concludes: ‘Who in France cannot love such a solid, happy order? Who in France will not play their part in making this order yet more solid and happy?’
It could be argued that this ‘bookseller to the King and Queen’ was a Versailles royalist pleading for Louis XVI to be left with at least some vestiges of power and status. But his criticisms of Louis XIV and the aristocratic elitists seem to rule this out, as does his tone of genuine excitement about the new democracy and what its elected officials are going to achieve. This 1791 yearbook for Versailles seems to be predicting a rosy future for the region’s citizens – albeit, of course, those who can read and afford a 260-odd page book.
However, behind the scenes, there was growing discontent on both sides of the political spectrum. Although many aristocrats were emigrating, plenty stayed on, often still in positions of power and influence, awaiting their chance to step in and give the plebs a kicking, either metaphorical or physical. Meanwhile, it was clear to the poorest members of French society that the Assemblée was not going far or fast enough with its reforms.
Take, for example, the confiscation of land and property from the Church, the nobility and the Crown. Louis XVI lost his châteaux at Marly, near Versailles, and La Muette on the western edge of Paris (which today houses the OECD) but he was spared homelessness. He got to keep most of his châteaux in and around Paris – Versailles, the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Rambouillet, Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Compiègne, as well as the attached hunting forests and farmland, a rich source of income. For symbolic reasons, the Assemblée could have gone further.
The mass confiscation of property was first voted in November 1789, and the new French state suddenly became the owner of churches, abbeys, convents, châteaux (and all the artworks inside them), as well as highly valuable fields, forests and urban land. A month later, it was decided that a large proportion of this would be sold to the people, to balance the national books. It was the kind of money tree that modern governments dream of, and should have helped to lift the rural poor clear of the danger of starvation.
Yet the sale was a total shambles. For a start, only the rich could hope to bid for a château or a productive farm. Furthermore, properties were auctioned off, which was fair enough, but purchases were to be paid for over 12 years, at a price fixed in a specially created revolutionary currency, the long since forgotten assignat. This was paper money backed by the value of the new national assets. The scheme was opposed by Jacques Necker, who was still nominally Louis XVI’s Finance Minister, but a powerless figure. Necker’s warnings were ignored by the Assemblée.
Unfortunately (though perhaps predictably), with the national assets about to be sold off, and the currency’s capital thereby depleted, the assignat lost 5 per cent of its value as soon as it was issued. When the Assemblée tried to shore things up by printing more assignats and using them to pay the nation’s bills, the new currency plummeted again, and by late 1791 had lost half its original worth. In 1793, refusal to accept payment in assignats was made punishable by the death penalty, but none of this did any good, and the currency eventually became totally valueless in early 1796.
At the time, patriots blamed foreign intervention – and it was true that forged banknotes were being made in Britain, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. But the fact is that the French state issued about 45 billion livres of assignats, whereas the total value of the confiscated assets backing up the currency was only about three billion. It was a bubble designed to burst.
The result of this debacle was that the privileged few who had bought the national assets at fixed assignat prices were gifted with bargains comparable to the oil refineries snapped up for a handful of dollars in post-Soviet Russia. The Revolution that was meant to eradicate privilege had dropped a windfall into the laps of the rich bourgeoisie and the remaining nobles. The wealth of the nation had been redistributed to the wealthy.
To cap it all, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1825, a law was passed – the so-called ‘loi du milliard’ or ‘billion law’ – giving compensation to all the aristocratic and royal émigrés who had lost property in the great confiscation. The money did not cover their true losses, but still cost the French state a billion francs. Amongst those who accepted payouts were the future King Louis-Philippe (the son of Louis XVI’s conspirator cousin), the Marquis de La Fayette and the aristocratic atheist Bishop Talleyrand.
The effect of this botched sell-off was all too visible to the poorer citizens who had hoped to receive their slice of the national pie. Many of the large buildings bought by speculators were pulled to pieces and sold as construction materials. This provided labouring work, but once the stone and the lead roofing was gone, little or nothing was left of an abbey or a château that would have been a source of longer-term employment. And all the profits had disappeared into the pocket of the new owner.
Modern France is still rich in historical buildings, but it could be vastly richer. Just like the dissolution of the English monasteries by Henry VIII, France’s property confiscation condemned some jewels of religious architecture to the scrap heap.
The abbey of Jumièges on the Seine in Normandy was a typical example. Its eleventh-century walls, a thirteenth-century choir, a honeycomb of Gothic cloisters and a seventeenth-century library were smashed down and sold off as builders’ supplies. Robbed of their valuable lead roof, medieval frescoes mouldered and disappeared in the rain.
Similarly, the thirteenth-century buildings of the abbey of Savigny, on the Brittany–Normandy border, were stripped of their artworks and decorations and then dynamited, the ancient stones sold as masonry. The lost treasures there included a 70-metre steeple and 76 ancient stained-glass windows. Almost pathetically, a surviving archway and a few fragments of wall were declared national monuments in 1924.
In Paris, the church of Saint-Paul-des-Champs, near the place des Vosges, was completely torn down. This was a fifteenth-century building with seventh-century foundations, where several kings of France had been baptized. The church and its cemetery were sold to speculators and wiped off the map.
Former royal homes didn’t fare much better. The château of Marly near Versailles, for example, was bought by an industrialist who turned it into a cotton mill. When he went bankrupt, Louis XIV’s former home was demolished for its stone and lead.
If all this destruction had in some way helped the poor, other than providing them with temporary labour, it would seem more excusable. In the event, though, what it boiled down to was national treasures being more or less given away to rich vandals.
At the same time, not everyone in the Assemblée or the nation at large was happy with the elitism evident in the ever-evolving Constitution. This was particularly true for the clauses about private property being ‘inviolable’, and ‘fair and pre-emptive compensation’ being paid for any further confiscations. The rich were locking down their strong boxes with the aid of the supposedly democratic state.
This Constitution also stated that the King’s person was ‘inviolable and sacred’ and that ‘royalty … is hereditary, and passed in the reigning race from male to male, by order of birth’.fn2 In other words, in many people’s eyes the Revolution had effectively come to a halt. It was just a matter of moving the chess pieces about the board; none could be taken off. Understandably, after the initial feeling in 1789 that anything was possible, some of the more republican Assemblée delegates were feeling increasingly frustrated.
Probably the man who was infuriating the radicals the most was the Marquis de La Fayette. After his dramatic performance at the fête de la Fédération in July 1790, the dashing young general (he was still only 32) began to cultivate his image as a kind of national protector, making public appearances and issuing declarations. On 9 October 1790, for example, he turned up with a delegation of his troops to congratulate the municipal council of Paris on its new permanent status – as if it needed his blessing. He had already made a famous speech to the Assemblée saying that: ‘For the Revolution, disorder was necessary, because the old order was nothing but servitude, and in that case, insurrection is the holiest of duties. But for the sake of the Constitution, the new order must become firmer, and laws must be respected.’ Now La Fayette urged the Assemblée to support martial law (imposed by him and his troops) to protect the monarchy, which felt to some veterans of 1789 like a return to the Ancien Régime.
La Fayette’s enemies resorted to the tactics that had been so successfully used against Marie-Antoinette – fake news. And to make it all credible, they linked his name with hers. One 16-page scandal sheet called La Confession de Marie-Antoinette depicted the Queen admitting that she was controlling the young general and that ‘it was necessary to use all the ruses that a woman, and especially a German woman, has at her disposal … As my official lover, he courts me continuously, he screws me morning and night, which only attaches him to me even more.’ Barely credible stuff, but damaging all the same, especially because the pamphlet boasted that it would reveal Marie-Antoinette’s ‘loves and intrigues with Monsieur de La Fayette and the principal members of the Assemblée nationale, and … her counter-revolutionary projects.’
Another, even longer, pamphlet involving these alleged lovers was called The Loving Evenings of General Motier [La Fayette’s common name as a citizen] and Beautiful Antoinette, by the Austrian’s Little Spaniel. Its 32 pages described intimate, treasonable conversations taking place over three evenings, the last of which is cut short because La Fayette becomes impotent.
Worse, though, were supposedly more credible sources such as the ‘newspaper’ L’Ami du peuple, which was regularly pasted up on the walls of Paris. More political in tone than the outright scandal sheets, it stated overtly that La Fayette was Marie-Antoinette’s lover and suggested that he was ‘in a plot with enemies of the Revolution’.
However, the reality was that Marie-Antoinette despised and distrusted La Fayette, blaming him at least in part for not preventing the attack on Versailles in October 1790, as well as her subsequent kidnap by the Parisians.
It was true that La Fayette was in close contact with royalist agitators, some of whom were still active in the supposedly revolutionary French army. In February 1791, he wrote a letter to a pro-royalist general, boasting that ‘I am violently attacked by all party leaders, who see me as an incorruptible, fearless obstacle, and the chief aim of any ill-intentioned project is to get rid of me.’ It was arrogant but true. As we shall see later, these attacks on La Fayette were not just barbs aimed at a conservative political figure, they were also designed to undermine the head of the National Guard, thereby opening the way for violence.
Bizarrely, one of La Fayette’s most virulent critics was a man whose ideas were very similar to his. Mirabeau, the highly vocal delegate of the Assemblée nationale, had first made his presence felt during the États généraux of May 1789. Although by birth a count, Mirabeau became a delegate in the tiers état, and quickly emerged as one of the nation’s greatest (and loudest) orators. One of the prime movers in the drafting of the Declaration of Men’s and Citizens’ Rights, he was also a proponent of the constitutional monarchy, and seems to have waged a campaign against La Fayette for purely personal reasons – it was impossible to have two national heroes. What’s more, La Fayette was handsome, slim and had fought battles, whereas Mirabeau was ugly and his main contact with soldiers had been while locked up in prison as a younger man for debts and adultery.
Mirabeau accused La Fayette (privately, at least), of wanting to become a kind of dictator – ‘the all-powerful intermediary between the monarch and his subjects’, whereas he, Mirabeau, swore ‘to maintain the monarchist government, and [saw] dictatorship under a king as a crime’. We know this because Mirabeau wrote it in one of the secret communiqués that he had begun to send to Louis XVI, keeping him informed of everything that was being said in Parisian political circles. Shockingly, despite his public role as the people’s champion, Mirabeau was a royal spy, and was receiving payment in gold for his services.
However, we also know from the papers discovered after his death that Mirabeau never promised to work for counter-revolution. He was trying to convince Louis to accept a British-style constitutional monarchy, and wrote that he wanted to be ‘the defender of monarchic power regulated by laws, and the apostle of liberty guaranteed by monarchic power’.
When Mirabeau died suddenly in April 1791, aged only 42, he was so popular with the people that some suspected that he had been poisoned by enemies of the Revolution. His body was ceremoniously entombed in the Panthéon, which was converted in his honour into the resting place of France’s heroes (and a small number of heroines), the role that it still plays today. However, when copies of his illicit correspondence with Louis XVI were found in November 1792, his remains were removed and reburied nearby. His sister then had them exhumed and taken to the cimetière de Clamart which was decommissioned soon afterwards, to make way rather aptly for Paris’s amphitheatre for anatomical dissection. Bodies that were not claimed by the families of the deceased were sent to the Paris catacombs, which is probably where Mirabeau’s bones now lie, amongst the anonymous piles of skulls, femurs and ribs that form one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions.
Somewhat mistakenly, the discovery of his letters to Louis XVI, many of them actually urging the King to continue working with the Assemblée, was seized upon by opponents of constitutional monarchy as evidence of Mirabeau’s involvement in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy.
Sadly for France, there were plenty of conspiracy theorists who were only too keen to misinterpret facts to whip up public paranoia and unleash the violence that had been kept – more or less – in check since October 1790.
The various factions at work during the ten or so years of the French Revolution seem to have divided and subdivided until they were as thinly sliced as a courgette in a Parisian kitchen. It was almost as though a new political movement emerged every time two or more politicians got together for a glass of wine. Reading histories of the Revolution, one comes across the Cordeliers, Girondins, Jacobins, Indulgents, Feuillants, Montagnards, Hébertistes, Fédérés, Exagérés, and Enragés, as well as the 48 sections révolutionnaires de Paris, the new neighbourhood committees who threw their weight behind one faction or another. The political arena was like a gladiatorial tournament, with everyone fighting each other.
It’s very similar in France today – fortunately without the guillotinings. After every election, some ambitious candidate declares that their party was at fault and forms a new one, based around guess-whom. President Macron was one of these break-away politicians – jumping ship from the Socialists in April 2016, he formed his party, La République en marche. He won the presidential election of May 2017, and by July some of the party members were already reported to be splitting off into a new faction, Démocratie en marche. In French politics, there seems to be no concept of broad consensus – if you don’t agree with every single word of your party’s creed, you just form a new party, with yourself as leader.
This process began during the Revolution, when political clubs and factions were jostling for power, usually as instruments of one man’s ego.fn3 Each one of these claimed to represent universal truth, and refused to recognize any plurality of opinion – all those who didn’t agree with them entirely were tarred with the same brush. Or, as it would eventually turn out, decapitated with the same guillotine.
This was why, to the more radical republicans, everyone with an ounce of sympathy for the King was branded an outright traitor. Those in favour of a constitutional monarchy were dubbed, scathingly, ‘monarchiens’ – an adjective that neatly combines ‘monarchie’ with ‘chien’ (dog). It was the same trick that people had used when they called Marie-Antoinette ‘l’Autrichienne’. And ‘monarchien’ is a label that is still used in modern French history books, despite its disparaging overtones, to describe the democrats like Bailly, Mounier, La Fayette and (posthumously) Mirabeau, even though they were supporting peaceful reform that might have avoided massacres and civil war.
At this point in the Revolution, when the monarchy was coming under its first concentrated attack, the most outspoken radicals were larger-than-life figures who have gone down in history because of their violent deaths – Marat, Danton and Robespierre, to name just the most famous.
Jean-Paul Marat was perhaps the most vitriolic critic of the monarchiens. He is best known for being murdered in his bathtub – and when one reads his writings, it seems fitting that he is remembered for his bloody demise.
Like Necker, Marat was Swiss, but shared none of his compatriot’s love of order and harmony. He was born in 1743, trained as a doctor, and in the early 1770s practised in Newcastle, England, taking on both human and animal patients to earn a living. At the same time he wrote philosophical treatises inspired by Rousseau, the main thrust of his thought being to attack anyone he didn’t agree with. In one of his essays Marat took a sideswipe at ‘the inconsequential Voltaire’, earning himself a stinging rebuke from the master. Voltaire wrote an article lambasting Marat’s lack of focus on his own ideas: ‘One should not, as you do, stray off one’s subject to go and provoke brawls in the street.’ A fitting remark given Marat’s later taste for stirring up riots.
In 1776 Marat moved to France and, thanks to a recommendation from one of his aristocratic patients, got a job as physician to the guards of Louis XVI’s brother Charles. This prestigious position attracted even more aristocratic patients, and soon Marat was a rich man. He spent some of his income on a physics laboratory where he conducted experiments on electricity, fire and light, publishing his ideas in a series of papers, one of which attempted (and, according to France’s Académie des sciences, failed) to disprove the theories of Newton. Marat’s wealth had done nothing to mellow his argumentative nature.
By the early 1780s, Marat was a comfortable member of France’s establishment – a wealthy doctor and self-appointed philosopher, participating (albeit inefficiently) in Louis XVI’s programme to develop the sciences, and profiting from the patronage of royals and aristocrats. According to some historians, he was even sleeping with the wife of his original aristocratic benefactor.
However, after he gave up his job with the royal guards to devote himself to science, Marat’s income seems to have plummeted, and in 1785 he got embroiled in a battle with the tax authorities. He wrote to them claiming that he should be exempt from capitation (poll tax) ‘because I am like all foreigners who travel and spend money to inform themselves’. He also complained about ‘the bad faith of people who have abused my trust and forced me to adopt the strictest frugality’. Resentment against the establishment was brewing. The answer came back from the royal taxman: pay up. It was enough to turn anyone against the monarchy.
In August 1789, Marat pitched into the revolutionary debate with a pamphlet entitled Le Moniteur patriote, a violent attack on the moderation shown by Assemblée delegates like Mounier who were looking for a way to ensure ‘the people’s happiness’. Pouring scorn on such woolly concepts as happiness, Marat said that the Assemblée’s draft Constitution contained ‘illusory, dangerous, shameful, alarming measures’ which meant that it should be ‘rejected with indignation by every true Frenchman’. These ‘worthy delegates’ were leaving power in the hands of the King, who would treat the people ‘like a herd of animals’. Marat reminded his readers that ‘the blood of traitors is still steaming’, while hinting that the Assemblée were ‘enemies of the state’ and ‘false patriots’. Polite debates about how best to manage the peaceful transition to democracy were clearly not Marat’s thing.
He followed this up with the regular publication of L’Ami du peuple, a sort of rabble-rousing tabloid newspaper that he wrote, financed and had pasted up on the walls of Paris. In these tracts he mixed truly democratic ideas like the need to abolish slavery in the colonies (Marat’s political ideas were egalitarian, even if his instincts were murderous) with attacks on anyone he perceived to be an ‘enemy of the Revolution’, calls for La Fayette’s heart to be ripped out, and accusations that Louis XVI had ‘caused 15 million people to die of poverty and starvation’ and ‘had the throats of thousands of defenders of the nation cut in order to re-establish depotism’. One of the most famous lines from L’Ami du peuple was Marat’s assertion that: ‘It is by violence that liberty must be established.’
With these bloodthirsty rants being posted all over Paris practically every day from September 1789 to September 1792, it is hardly surprising that the Assemblée and La Fayette’s National Guard had their work cut out keeping the peace.
Until 1787, Georges Jacques Danton was a relatively humble lawyer’s clerk from eastern France. Then he married the daughter of a rich Parisian café and cabaret owner – who was also a royal tax collector. This match brought a dowry of 20,000 livres with which the 27-year-old Danton bought a post as a lawyer.fn4 Like Marat, Danton was a beneficiary of the royal regime that he would later turn against.
When the Revolution began, Danton was living in the cour du Commerce Saint-André, a small passageway off the boulevard Saint-Germain. It is now full of tourist restaurants, but in 1789 it was a hotbed of revolutionary activity. Marat’s Ami du peuple was printed there, and, coincidentally or not, it was in a workshop in this passageway that the prototype of the guillotine would later be tested on sheep.
This neighbourhood of central Paris, where poor workers lived alongside petit bourgeois intellectuals like Danton, was one of the most active during the events of the early Revolution. This was when Danton seized his chance to gain prominence. He was by all accounts a natural orator, with a loud voice and commanding physical presence. Like Mirabeau, he possessed a gift for snappy phrases, sarcastic put-downs and dramatic gestures. Also like Mirabeau, he was a profoundly ugly man. As a baby, he had been gored by a bull, deforming his upper lip. He had also had his nose broken, and bore the scars of childhood smallpox. His grimacing face alone was almost enough to silence his opponents.
In early 1789 Danton began attending neighbourhood political meetings. These would later be formalized into the club des Cordeliers, which took its name from the nearby monastery of the same name, which had been requisitioned by revolutionaries. As its logo, the club chose an open eye, deeming itself ‘the wide-open eye of revolutionary vigilance’. As such, it issued statements, launched petitions and organized the occasional riot. It was overtly against the moderate Bailly’s mayorship of Paris and La Fayette’s rule of law.
Danton became the club’s natural leader, though he usually managed to stay out of the riots that his speeches incited – perhaps because of the bribes he was receiving from Mirabeau. For example, Danton took no part in the events of 14 July 1789, even though he had stood on a table at a meeting the previous day and given a rousing speech to a crowd of hungry, angry workers. He urged them to take up arms and ‘push back the 15,000 brigands amassed in Montmartre and the 30,000 men ready to descend upon Paris, pillage the city and cut its citizens’ throats’.
That day, 13 July 1789, as the cheers rang out and his audience went off to find weapons, a lawyer called Christophe Lavaux came over to speak to Danton. Lavaux was an old friend who had come to the Paris bar at the same time as Danton, but had known nothing about his political activities. In his memoirs, Lavaux wrote that Danton had previously possessed ‘a just mind, and a gentle, modest, silent character’, and that ambition must have transformed him.
Lavaux told Danton that he was wrong about the invading royal armies – he had just come from Versailles, and everything there was proceeding calmly. Danton replied furiously: ‘You don’t understand a thing. The people have risen up against despotism … The throne has been overturned, and your estate is finished.’ (Lavaux was an aristocrat.)
Lavaux warned Danton that his troublemaking would lead him to the scaffold. Danton dismissed this idea, but after that day, every time the two met, Danton would taunt Lavaux, telling him ‘you’ll be hanged’ or ‘you’ll be guillotined’. Lavaux always replied, ‘Not before you.’
In the end, Lavaux was right, and Danton would eventually fall victim to the reign of terror that he was to instigate, but not before thousands of others had been massacred with, at the very least, Danton’s tacit consent.
Danton’s great rival in the extreme republican ranks was a very different man – Maximilien de Robespierre.fn5 If Danton was a bellowing grizzly bear, Robespierre was a cat, which was how his contemporaries described him. He had a small, pleasant face, with a pointed nose and watchful eyes, and, like all felines, was capable of seeming sleek and imperturbable, only to lash out suddenly with deadly claws. In Robespierre’s case, these were verbal or political, and aimed straight at the throat.
Robespierre is probably the Revolution’s most controversial figure. He is viewed either as an idealist, the man who finally turned the woolly compromises of the Constitution into true revolution, or as a power-mad, guillotine-wielding dictator.
His supporters have plenty of exemplary quotations to choose from. Reading them, one would think that Robespierre had nothing but democratic ideals and the well-being of France at heart as he guillotined his way through his opponents. In his very last speech to parliament in July 1794, he said that: ‘The French Revolution is the first to be founded on theories of human rights and the principles of justice. Other revolutions required only ambition. Ours imposes virtue.’ Fine words, the only problem being that France at the time was in the grip of the Terreur imposed by an all-powerful state police, with thousands being executed after show trials, and the speech was given a day before Robespierre tried to organize the armed overthrow of the government by the Paris mob.
A biography, written in 1795 by a royalist clergyman called Liévin-Bonaventure Proyart, and called The Life and Crimes of Robespierre, Nicknamed the Tyrant, from His Birth to His Death – so we know where the author’s sympathies lie – begins by saying that Robespierre was someone whom ‘monsters, less monstrous than he, called the Tyrant’. Even his supporters were terrified of him.
Robespierre was born in Arras in northern France in 1758, the bastard son of a lawyer and a brewer’s daughter. His father abandoned his family when Maximilien was small and his mother died soon afterwards, leaving the boy to be raised by his maternal grandfather. A studious pupil, when he was ten he won a scholarship to go to the collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, one of the best schools in France, financed by the King. Here he gained a reputation as a brilliant student but a loner, often lost in his own musings.
Liévin-Bonaventure Proyart’s biography includes an eyewitness account of a ceremony held in Paris to greet Louis XVI shortly after his coronation, for which Robespierre was selected to read out a Latin verse written by one of his teachers. ‘I remember that the King looked down benevolently on the young Monster,’ Proyart wrote, ‘who, although raised in the King’s house, would one day strike him with the first dagger blow.’ After qualifying as a lawyer and returning to Arras, like Danton, Robespierre seized the opportunity to go into politics in 1789. He wrote the cahier de doléances for a local cobblers’ guild, and was elected a tiers état delegate.
He threw himself into the Assemblée’s debates, expressing some truly idealistic opinions – he spoke out in favour of universal suffrage (including for women), against slavery, and even against the death penalty that he would use so freely later. He was one of the delegates who accompanied Louis XVI into Paris on 17 July 1789.
It is no surprise that the young Robespierre features prominently in the painter Jacques-Louis David’s official depiction of the historic Jeu de paume oath of 20 June 1789, clasping his hands dramatically to his chest and gazing towards heaven (or the curved ceiling anyway). Typically, Robespierre stands alone in the drawing, while most of the other men are shaking hands, embracing or gesturing towards Bailly as he swears allegiance to the nation.
Robespierre did not content himself with being the MP for humble Arras. He was also busy manoeuvring himself to become the leader and spokesman of one of Paris’s influential political clubs, the Jacobins, named after the convent near the Tuileries palace where it met. Initially founded by a group of moderate Bretons, Robespierre brought in members from all over France, and turned it into a full-blown opposition party that held a sort of alternative Assemblée in the chapter house and library of the former convent.
Robespierre is often credited with inventing the slogan ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ during a speech in which he proposed sewing a motto on the uniforms of the National Guard. Originally, though, the full slogan was ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité ou la Mort’ – ‘or Death’, as though fraternity might be swapped for violence if the wearer of the badge felt like it. And once Robespierre rose to power, ‘Liberty, Equality, Death’ would become a tragically accurate slogan.
While republicans like Marat, Danton and Robespierre were sniping at the moderate constitutionalists, or monarchiens, from one side, equally ambitious royalists were doing so on the other flank.
Some of these were acting with the approval of the royal family, who were all getting increasingly nervous in their Parisian palace, surrounded by scheming politicians and disrespectful citizens. By the end of 1790, Louis himself was finally beginning to look for a way to escape – not necessarily from France, because he still felt the need to be the figurehead for ‘his’ people, but from Paris. As the endless debates about the Constitution dragged on, he was becoming convinced that the new mode of government could not survive, and that his only hope was to be ready to set up an alternative regime (preferably a return to his own benevolent rule, of course) before the republican hotheads could grab power.
Inevitably, Parisians got wind of the King’s wish to escape (Marat was constantly warning about it), and Louis was forbidden from returning to Saint-Cloud, even after he wrote a letter to the Assemblée promising them that the Constitution ‘made him happy’. Hemmed in by suspicious National Guards, Louis XVI was getting scared.
One of the King’s staunchest supporters, and a man who was proving that he knew how to quieten a mob, was a general with the quaint name François-Claude-Amour de Bouillé, the commander of the army guarding France’s eastern border, and its main garrison in Metz. Bouillé proved his mettle in August 1790 when soldiers in Nancy mutinied, having got it into their heads that their officers were stealing their pay. La Fayette, the man with nominal responsibility for law and order, sent a general to deal with the rebellion, but he was locked up by the mutineers. Bouillé then marched over from Metz with some 5,000 soldiers and fought his way into the town, a battle that caused around 300 dead and wounded. After a court martial, 72 men were jailed, 41 condemned to be galley slaves for 30 years (an effective death sentence) and 22 were hanged. One unfortunate soldier was broken on the wheel – by all accounts the last person to suffer this brutal punishment in mainland France before the more humane, though equally deadly, guillotine was introduced.
Bouillé’s intervention was the kind of firm action that royalists had been calling for since July 1789. Now, though, all it did was create martyrs. In Paris, Marat began writing about ‘the assassin Bouillé’ and the ‘killers of the garrison and citizens of Nancy’, as if the whole town had been massacred by royalist forces (a fate Marat was constantly predicting for Paris).
The Nancy affair also revealed the fatal divisions in the Assemblée. After offering Bouillé its congratulations in September 1790, a year later, delegates were hailing the Nancy mutineers as national heroes. It seemed that Louis was right to be losing confidence in the peaceful transition to democracy.
General Bouillé, meanwhile, kept his job, as well as a firm command over his army of loyal soldiers, and Louis XVI knew that he had a valuable – if inflammatory – supporter in the east of France, waiting to step in and clip revolutionary wings.
In theory, Louis XVI’s brothers and cousins were supposed to be organizing rescue parties, but in fact some of them were wondering how they could wangle their own way on to the throne. Not all of these supposed allies were hoping to protect Louis from the mob surrounding his palace.
Louis gave the job of attracting help from abroad to one of his closest political allies, Louis Charles Auguste Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, former ambassador to Russia, Sweden and Austria. Breteuil had very briefly served as Louis XVI’s Chief Minister in July 1789, but emigrated to Switzerland just after the storming of the Bastille. In November 1790, Louis managed to get a letter, written in his own hand, to Breteuil, asking him to plead his cause with Austria and all the German states. The letter gave Breteuil the power to ‘deal with foreign courts and propose in [Louis XVI’s] name all measures that might re-establish royal authority and the tranquillity of the Kingdom’.
However, Breteuil was a 60-year-old ambassador, and quickly discovered that he was competing for attention with younger men of action who were offering to fight.
As mentioned earlier, Louis XVI’s youngest brother, Charles, was amongst the first royalists to leave France. He escaped on 16 July 1789, and made his way to Turin, home of his wife’s father, the King of Sardinia (the Italian island was not at that time considered beautiful or sophisticated enough to warrant a royal palace). There, Charles set up a committee to plot counter-revolution, along with Louis Joseph, Prince de Condé, a grandson of Louis XIV who had seen military service in Germany as a younger man.
Back in France, Louis XVI heard that this Turin committee was planning to capture Alsace on the eastern border – and maybe grant the province independence. Louis got a letter to his brother explaining that rumours like this, whether true or not, did his cause no good at all. Whether Charles was deliberately putting his brother’s life at risk, or hoping to grab a chunk of France for himself, is not entirely clear.
In any case, Charles and Condé turned for help to Marie-Antoinette’s younger brother, Leopold,fn6 who was now Holy Roman Emperor. A conference was organized at Pillnitz in Saxony, with King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, an arch-conservative who was known to be against anything to do with modern Lumières-style thinking.
Charles and Condé did their best to convince the two monarchs to invade France, and smash what they predicted to be an unmotivated, ill-organized revolutionary army. The invasion plan had been drawn up by Bouillé, the man who broke the Nancy mutiny, and who had joined this ex-pat campaign to ‘liberate’ France.
However, Leopold told them that an invasion would put his sister’s life in danger – and that of Louis XVI of course. Leopold was also sure that Britain would not join a war against revolutionary France because the British were too happy to see chaos reigning on the other side of the Channel (and in fact, Leopold himself was not unhappy to see France’s military power diminished). Prussia, meanwhile, had recently got embroiled unprofitably in wars in Belgium and Russia, and Friedrich Wilhelm was not keen to start fighting again.
So all Charles and Condé obtained was a written warning to the French not to harm the royal family. Like most written warnings, it was decidedly unthreatening. ‘The situation in which His Majesty the King of France currently finds himself is a matter of common interest to all the sovereigns of Europe,’ Leopold and Friedrich Wilhelm declared. They called for the preservation of ‘a monarchist government that respects the rights of sovereigns and the well-being of the French’. And in case this did not happen, they would ‘give their troops orders to stay within range to take action’.
Predictably, this was a major disappointment to Charles, Condé and Bouillé, especially the last two who were hoping to ride away from Pillnitz to collect the Austrian and Prussian armies. Even so, despite its lack of truly threatening language, the so-called ‘Declaration of Pillnitz’ was seized upon by French republicans as yet another sign that the monarchy had to end.
All this convinced Marie-Antoinette that, whether an army came to rescue the family or not, they had to escape. While Louis XVI increasingly dithered and lamented the injustice of his fate, she worked with her close friend and alleged former lover, Fersen, on practical plans. The first of these was to order a six-seater carriage – a berline – complete with a larder, cooking utensils, a foldaway dining table and leather chamber pots. To disguise its true purpose, the carriage was ordered in the name of a German baroness, Theophila von Korff (usually called ‘de Korff’ in French sources), who ‘was planning to travel to Russia’.
As the carriage builders and leather workers got started on the commission, a showdown between the extreme republican and royalist factions in Paris made the need to escape even more urgent.