‘Louis XVI va livrer nos cités aux fers ensanglantés des despotes de l’Europe.’ ‘Louis XVI is going to hand over our towns to the bloody blades of the despots of Europe.’
From a petition delivered to the Assemblée législative on
31 July 1792 by the revolutionary committee of the
neighbourhood of Mauconseil in Paris
LOUIS XVI HAS always been accused of hypocrisy. His die-hard opponents say that he never wanted any democratization of France, and that he was only ever paying lip service to reform, while waiting for the chance to escape and join up with a counter-revolutionary army. As we have seen, this is largely untrue. Or rather, it was untrue until 1791. After Varennes, fearing more than ever for his safety and that of his family, Louis seems to have started playing at Monsieur Deux-Visages.
There is a letter from Louis XVI to King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia that bears no date. Some historians claim it was written in December 1790, before the fuite de Varennes. If this is true, it proves that Louis was being totally two-faced long before he tried to escape, which strengthens the republicans’ argument – he was, they can say, always unworthy of the Assemblée’s trust. However, it is also argued (more convincingly)fn1 that the letter was written in December 1791, when Louis had given up any real hope of a workable constitutional regime and lasting peace in France.
In the letter, Louis complains that ‘despite my acceptance of the new Constitution, agitators are openly plotting to destroy all vestiges of the monarchy’. He reveals that he has written to Russia, Spain and Sweden, to suggest ‘a congress of the principal powers of Europe, supported by an army, as the best means of stopping the agitators here, providing the means to establish a more desirable order, and preventing the evil that afflicts us here from spreading to the other European states’.
He doesn’t say that he wants to reverse all the democratic reforms in the Constitution or overthrow the Assemblée, but it is an open call to invade France. By the end of 1791, his two brothers were putting together an army in Koblenz, on the Rhine, which was ruled over by an uncle of theirs, Clemens Wenzeslaus von Sachsen (the brother-in-law of one of Louis XV’s sons). In Turin, meanwhile, their cousin Louis Joseph de Condé was doing the same. Some 140,000 French citizens had emigrated since the beginning of the Revolution, many of them aristocrats who had served in the army or were now willing to fight; there were also whole regiments of soldiers still loyal to the King.
In November 1791, the new Assemblée législative voted in favour of drastic punitive action against anyone who proved their treachery by staying out of the country after the end of the year. Those who did so would be under sentence of death and dispossession if they returned to France.
In December, Louis XVI paid lip service to this new law by warning Clemens Wenzeslaus von Sachsen that: ‘If by 15 January, he [Clemens] does not prevent all gatherings and all hostile actions by French citizens who have taken refuge in his dominions, then I will regard him as an enemy of France.’ Louis promised the Assemblée that: ‘I will make a similar declaration to all those who favour gatherings that threaten the tranquillity of the Kingdom.’
The delegates naturally assumed that last sentence referred to the Austrians and Prussians, though in Louis XVI’s mind, it must have applied more to the Parisians. In any case, he was now telling the Assemblée one thing while plotting the opposite with his supporters abroad.
By now, the French political and military establishment was one huge knot of interwoven conspiracies.
Although logic dictated that France had to repel the counter-revolutionaries, Marat and the extreme republicans opposed military action. Marat’s line was simple: if the King and the monarchiens were in favour of war, even a defensive one, it had to be part of a counter-revolutionary plot. In this, he wasn’t entirely wrong, but he went further and depicted Louis XVI as a bloodthirsty warmonger. Rather unconvincingly, he wrote that the King’s passion for hunting revealed a murderous streak: ‘His fiery temperament has always guided him towards violent measures.’
Meanwhile, the political opponents of the Constitution fought for supremacy by bombarding their political clubs with speeches. One of the chief warmongers was the Assemblée delegate Jacques Pierre Brissot, a former secretary to Louis XVI’s cousin Louis Philippe, who was at the storming of the Bastille, and who had written the petition calling for Louis XVI’s abdication after the Champ-de-Mars massacres. He now called war a ‘crusade for universal liberty’ that would encourage the subjects of other monarchies to revolt.
Robespierre poured scorn on this idea: ‘You will lead our triumphant army into all our neighbouring countries, you will set up municipalities, councils, national assemblies everywhere … Under your leadership, our generals will be missionaries of the Constitution … No one likes armed missionaries.’fn2
Of course the battle of words was not just about war: it was about who could be the ‘purest’ republican, and who could best represent what le peuple wanted. Then, as now, the politicians were all lecturing the people on what they wanted, as were Ami du peuple-style newspapers with names like L’Orateur du peuple, Le Réveil du peuple (The People’s Wake-up Call), Le Tribun du peuple and Le Journal de la vérité (The Newspaper of Truth, the ancestor of Pravda). And, of course, they were all debating about who would succeed the King and the pro-Constitution Assemblée when the reactionary duo were inevitably overthrown.
France declared war on 20 April 1792 – though only on the Austrians, who were now led by Marie-Antoinette’s nephew, Franz II, after the death of her brother Leopold in March 1792. An outright war against all France’s monarchist neighbours was thought too ambitious.
The Austrians controlled the Low Countries, and it was here that the French revolutionary army proved how low the country’s morale had fallen, and how undisciplined its people had become.
On 29 April, a French general called Théodore Dillon was patrolling on the Belgian border near Lille when he met an Austrian army. There was a brief skirmish, but Dillon was under orders to avoid an outright battle, so he ordered his men to retreat. However, they panicked and stampeded. When Dillon tried to restore order, one of his own men shot him in the shoulder. The fleeing soldiers finally arrived back within the safety of Lille, only to see Dillon being brought in, wounded. Accusing him of treason for ordering the retreat, the soldiers shot and bayoneted him to death, before dragging his body to the central square and throwing it on a bonfire. They also hanged his second-in-command and cut the throats of several prisoners.
If the French troops were meant to be ‘armed missionaries’, it was for the church of mob rule.
La Fayette, meanwhile, had been recalled from his short exile. He was put in charge of the 25,000 better-disciplined troops based in Metz, but he fared little better than Dillon. Like the murdered general, La Fayette was patrolling the Belgian border when he was twice surprised by smaller but more efficient Austrian forces. He quickly decided that this war was a losing game, and that he would do better to join the web of conspiracies in Paris on the side of the constitutional monarchy (and, of course, on his own side, too).
On 16 June 1792, he wrote an open letter to the Assemblée, with a copy to Louis XVI, effectively presenting himself (supported by his army) as a national saviour, as if France didn’t already have enough of those. ‘France is threatened from without, and agitated within,’ La Fayette wrote perceptively. ‘Enemies within, drunk with fanaticism and pride, promise false hopes and fatigue us with their insolent malevolence. You must repress them.’ This was where he (and his army) came in.
I can reply to those who pretend to suspect me: ‘… Let us see in this moment of crisis who is the most inflexible in their principles, the most stubborn in their resistance, and who will confront most bravely the obstacles and dangers that traitors are hiding from their country.’ … How could I wait any longer before fulfilling this duty?
La Fayette’s letter showed that he understood the need for stability to be re-established, but it was an open threat to impose personal martial law, and as such it infuriated the Assemblée, as well as playing right into the hands of the republicans, who could point yet again to the danger of monarchist tyranny.
Predictably, the letter was immediately seized upon as an excuse for a mob to attack the royal palace at the Tuileries.
This was not entirely La Fayette’s fault. Louis XVI was refusing to sign a new law establishing a force of 20,000 armed volunteers who were to be recruited in the provinces and brought to Paris as additional protection against riots and/or a foreign invasion. This measure was unpopular with almost everyone – monarchists thought it was an excuse to increase the size of the mobs, while republicans condemned it as a new monarchist army. However, as soon as Louis XVI vetoed the law, it suddenly became popular with the republicans. It was more proof that neither he nor the Assemblée could do anything right, in republican eyes at least.
On 20 June 1792, around 10,000 Parisians forced their way into the palais des Tuileries, enraged (or so we are told) about this veto and La Fayette’s letter. The mob got into the palace without any opposition because the National Guard was under the command of Antoine Joseph Santerre, one of the men implicated in the rioting at Vincennes in February 1791, who now effectively gave the demonstrators an armed escort into the King’s apartments.
It was exactly what the royal family had been afraid of – a horde of pike-wielding Parisians rampaging into their home, one of them carrying an effigy of Marie-Antionette hanging from a lamp post. According to one account, the invaders were so unwashed that the royals smelt them coming. The Queen wisely crept out of the palace via a side entrance while intruders tried to smash down the door to her son’s bedroom with axes.
It was Louis XVI, wearing an extra-thick waistcoat in case he was stabbed, who confronted the mob, sitting impassively as a pike was thrust towards him. On its blade was a red revolutionary bonnet. Even though it was too small, he perched it on top of his powdered head.
A butcher-turned-revolutionary called Louis Legendre, who had taken part in the October 1789 march to Versailles, yelled at the King: ‘Monsieur, you are treacherous! You have always lied to us, and you are lying to us now!’
Louis was apparently taken aback by the use of ‘Monsieur’ instead of ‘Votre Majesté’ or ‘Sire’, but kept his calm and agreed to drink a toast to the nation. He also explained to the intruders that his veto of the law on priests was within the Constitution, which he was upholding as he had promised to do. His impassive demeanour and willingness to talk quietened the crowds, especially after a soldier performed a primitive lie-detector test, putting his hand over the King’s heart to see whether it was beating abnormally fast – it wasn’t.
Louis had to put up with this treatment for two hours before help arrived, in the shape of the Mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, a republican who had in fact been one of the instigators of the riot, and some National Guards who were actually willing to clear the palace of intruders. If Pétion had hoped to arrive too late to stop a royal lynching, he was disappointed. Almost every door in the palace had been smashed in, but the Queen had escaped with her children and the King was engaged in calm debate with the rioters, a revolutionary bonnet on his (as yet) still-attached head.
Louis XVI had saved the monarchy, but only for a few weeks.
La Fayette’s offer of help turned out to be a damp squib – most of his army refused to march from Metz to the capital, and he arrived in Compiègne, to the north of Paris, with just a small force of loyal troops. When he offered to smuggle the royal family out to Compiègne and thence to safety, Louis XVI didn’t believe he was capable of pulling it off.
As summer set in, the royals feared the worst. Louis XVI began reading the life story of King Charles I of England, who had lost his head in 1649. Readers of France’s many newspapers were force-fed a diet of unsettling news – shortages of coffee, sugar and soap had provoked a renewal of the attacks on shops, while out in the country, gangs of so-called ‘taxateurs’ (‘taxers’) were grabbing grain from markets and warehouses. All over France, châteaux were burning again.
The political agitators were constantly fanning the flames of discontent, with Marat warning that: ‘The atrocious Assemblée, free of all reins, will carry on its machinations in the dark and march with giant steps towards the fatal time when it will declare the counter-revolution.’ He was losing patience with relatively moderate republicans like Robespierre who were waiting for the right time to bring down the pro-monarchy Assemblée. For Marat, the solution was quick and simple:
After the massacre at the Champ-de-Mars, if I had found 2,000 men boiling with the same rage that was tearing my breast, I would have led them to stab the general [La Fayette] amongst his battalions of brigands, burn the despot [Louis XVI] in his palace and impale our atrocious representatives [the Assemblée] in their seats.
In the end, despite such bloody threats being pasted up on the walls of Paris, the death knell for the monarchy came not from France but from the émigrés in Germany.
In May 1792, Louis XVI had sent a writer called Jacques Mallet du Pan, a Protestant pastor’s son and advocate of the constitutional monarchy, to Koblenz to meet the French counter-revolutionaries gathered there, and put together some kind of manifesto of their intentions. As a moderate, Mallet du Pan was no doubt chosen because he was likely to produce something fairly diplomatic that expressed a desire to restore law and order while upholding the constitutional monarchy – nothing that would put Louis XVI’s life and status at risk.
Unfortunately, Mallet du Pan’s mission was hijacked by an arch-royalist called Jérôme-Joseph Geoffroy de Limon and a French diplomat by the name of Jean-Joachim Pellenc, who was an agent in the pay of the Austrians. Together these two conjured up what has become known as the Brunswick Manifesto, an open letter to the people of France so inflammatory that it was almost guaranteed to rouse the Parisian mob to hysteria – and, of course, get Marat, Robespierre et al. dancing for joy.
After calling on all French soldiers to ‘return to their former loyalty and submit immediately to the King, their legitimate sovereign’, the Manifesto ordered the people of Paris to do the same, and warned the Assemblée and all other elected representatives in France that they would be ‘judged militarily, without hope of pardon’ if they failed to show the royal family due respect. On top of this:
If the Tuileries palace is entered or insulted, or the slightest violence or insult is committed against Their Majesties … exemplary, unforgettable vengeance will be exacted, and the city of Paris will be subjected to military action and total subversion, and those guilty of revolt given the punishments they deserve.
Signed Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, the head of the Prussian army, it was published in Koblenz on 25 July 1792, and appeared in France’s official government newspaper the Moniteur universel on 3 August.
It was exactly what Louis XVI’s enemies had been waiting for.
Calls to put the monarchy out of its misery had been coming thick and fast. In early July the Assemblée had drawn up the measures to be taken in case a warning had to be issued: ‘Citoyens, la Patrie est en danger’ (‘Citizens, the homeland is in danger’). One of these measures was that ‘all citizens able to carry weapons … should be permanently on duty’. In Paris, they didn’t need to be asked twice. Also, after the warning, wearing any colours except the tricolour cocarde would be punishable by death. Political opposition, even symbolic, would be over.
On 11 July, as Austrian troops marauded on the Franco-Belgian border, the warning was given, and the streets of Paris were suddenly full of armed men and women. That same day, Robespierre gave a speech to the club des Jacobins, denouncing the ‘enemies who guide us’ (Louis XVI and the Assemblée), explaining that ‘the tyrants have only pretended to declare war on their accomplices and allies’ and accusing ‘the men who are so-called representatives of the people’ of being ‘wholly occupied with impoverishing them and cutting their throats’. This was a message to be sent out to the provinces, summoning the army of volunteers that Louis XVI had tried to veto. Robespierre had now openly elected himself head of the mob.
Soon, large groups of volunteers from Brittany and Marseille appeared in the city. Officially, they were invited to the third anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, but everyone knew what their real purpose was. Louis XVI attended the commemoration, and gave the oath to the nation, but unlike 1790, there were few if any shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ and Marie-Antoinette stayed away.
The Assemblée was trying to prove that it had the national crisis in hand, but power was being snatched away every day. On 29 July, Robespierre gave a speech demanding its dissolution, on the grounds that it had betrayed France. On 31 July, 47 out of the 48 sections (neighbourhood revolutionary committees) of Paris sent a petition to the Assemblée demanding an end to the monarchy. The Mauconseilfn3 section added its powerful warning that: ‘Louis XVI is going to hand over our towns to the bloody blades of the despots of Europe.’
With rumours flying around that the Tuileries were about to be attacked again, on 9 August, the Parisian republicans made their move and formed the Commune insurrectionnelle, a self-appointed group of committees replacing the elected Paris council. Many of the members had belonged to the official council, but they now gave themselves new powers, and appointed the chief intruder of 20 June, Santerre, as head of the city’s National Guard, after the previous incumbent had been ‘unfortunately’ shot and killed leaving a meeting with the Commune insurrectionnelle. Robespierre, who would soon emerge as head of one of the Commune’s committees, wrote to a friend saying that ‘the Revolution is about to pick up speed.’
At midnight on 9 August, the Quinze-Vingts section of Paris, to the southeast of the Bastille, sounded its bells, the signal to gather for the final attack on the monarchy. Crowds began to muster around the Tuileries, as about 1,000 members of Louis XVI’s loyal Swiss Guards and 300 armed aristocrats took up defensive positions in and around the palace. National Guards were also on duty there, but their allegiance was made clear when Louis went out to speak to them, and was jeered and insulted.
By 5 a.m., some 20,000 armed insurgents were at the palace gates, some of them manning cannons, and the people inside were panicking. Marie-Antoinette was arguing in favour of a pitched battle, which would almost certainly have resulted in mass slaughter of the defenders and their royal charges. In the end, Louis agreed to take refuge in the nearby Assemblée, where delegates had gone into emergency session. Announcing his departure from the palace, he said: ‘Marchons’ (‘Let’s walk/march’), inadvertently – or maybe ironically – quoting the chorus of a new song that was becoming popular amongst the republicans, the ‘Marseillaise’ (see next chapter).
After crossing the Tuileries garden, a dangerous ordeal because insurgents were now everywhere, and the sun was rising, the royal family arrived in the Assemblée chamber, and Louis informed the delegates that: ‘I have come here to avoid a great crime, and I shall always believe myself safe with my family amongst the representatives of the nation.’ As the Constitution forbade debates in the presence of the King, the refugees were then put inside a small area reserved for the logotachygraphe (stenographer) behind the president of the Assemblée’s seat. They stayed there all day, listening to musket and cannon fire outside, and frantic decision-making in the chamber, with many of the republican delegates taking the opportunity to insult the royal family.
Time and again throughout the morning, ‘citizens’ came in to address the Assemblée, and were allowed to interrupt proceedings. One of these deputations informed the delegates that they, the citizens, were ‘the new magistrates of the people’ and that, as legislators, ‘it is now up to us to support the people’. They were in effect announcing that the Assemblée had been deposed. Finally, Pierre Vergniaud, its president, yielded to the obvious and declared that there had arisen in the nation ‘a wish for the revocation of the authority delegated to Louis XVI’, so that he was ‘suspended from his functions’.
Louis XVI was now jobless.
He was also homeless, because outside the overheated (literally and metaphorically) debating chamber, the Tuileries palace was being ransacked.fn4
The Swiss Guards shot about 200 of the intruders before they were overwhelmed, and about 300 of them died in battle or were stabbed and beaten to death after surrendering. Around 60 of the Swiss were taken into custody and marched to the Hôtel de Ville, where they were killed. Very quickly, heads and body parts began appearing on pikes in the streets of Paris.
Of the armed aristocrats who had come to protect the King, around 100 died, but 200 or so managed to slip away unharmed in their civilian clothes. The royal family, meanwhile, were taken to the nearby couvent des Feuillants, effectively under arrest. Three days later they would be transferred to Temple prison.
As the blood began to sink into the carpets and wallpapers of the Tuileries, one optimistic Assemblée delegate gave a speech, saying, ‘The people are not bloodthirsty. Not only will it be possible, it will be easy to bring the citizens who are now massing back to law, justice and reason.’
He could not have been more wrong.
Since the Assemblée did not have the right to rule alone, it was announced that a new parliament would be elected, called the Convention nationale (the name that Robespierre had been using). The Convention would decide on the measures necessary to ‘assure the sovereignty of the people’. It was not hard to guess that those would exclude any form of monarchy.
This new parliament was touted as the first truly democratic government of France. Gone were the vestiges of the three estates, gone were the monarchists, gone was the Constitution that had preserved old privileges. The partial revolution was over. At last, real democracy had been achieved, and the people would be governed by 749 men who represented their real interests – because this, everyone was told, was a parliament elected by universal suffrage.
However, to vote in the 1792 elections, one had to be male, aged over 21, living at the same address for a year, and ‘not in a state of servitude’. This meant that servants, valets, maids or anyone whose job was lowly enough for them to accept accommodation and food in lieu of part of their wages, including many farm workers, were denied the vote. So much for democracy.
In addition to this, the final turnout was less than 12 per cent of the electorate. So much for a mandate. What was more, in the light of recent events, almost none of the candidates were moderates – they were mostly the ‘patriots’ who had been most outspoken against the Assemblée.
Interestingly, one of the few former Assemblée delegates elected to the Convention was a citizen called Philippe Égalité – this was Louis XVI’s cousin Louis Philippe, who had ‘gone on a diplomatic mission to London’ after the Versailles march of October 1789, but was now back in Paris, and had been keeping his head down, awaiting political developments. He adopted his new egalitarian name, and was elected as the Convention nationale’s representative for the Seine, choosing to sit with the extreme republicans like Robespierre and Danton. Though as we shall see, this show of revolutionary fervour would not spare him from the guillotine.
The key question about this second Revolution is: did the events of 10 August 1792, when the people took power away from the ‘treacherous despots’ who had supposedly invited foreign armies to invade the country and cut citizens’ throats, finally introduce true Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité?
The answer is: No, and it wasn’t really intended to. This seems to be where the Revolution went definitively wrong.
Before 10 August 1792, its leaders had been aiming – in theory at least – to make the country a fairer place, mostly via polite, interminable debates. In the eighteenth century even more than now, the French loved an intellectual discussion, so it was a very gradual process. Open debate usually leads to compromise, which meant that their initial ideals had been watered down considerably by pressure from the more privileged members of the Assemblée. This explained why the first, imperfect Constitution had taken so long to complete.
But overall, the elected members of the Assemblée nationale constituante and its successor the Assemblée législative had come close to achieving the impossible – combining the more benevolent aspects of the monarchy with the demands of the poor, underpaid, overtaxed masses. The constitutional monarchy had been plodding slowly along a path of peaceful reform, with the King accepting his reduced powers. Even if he was only paying lip service to these changes, this was all that mattered. He could complain all he wanted in private, but he was publicly respecting the new regime, and helping to make it work.
Now, though, as of August 1792, French politics had been hijacked by political animals with very different ideals. Shouting, ‘We are the people!’ what these politicians really wanted was a violent uprising that would deliver absolute power into their hands. There were some (mainly non-Parisian) members of the new Convention nationale who thought that economic reforms were more important than social revenge, but they would soon be ousted. Very quickly, the reins of power would be seized by the Parisian agitators.
The Commune insurrectionnelle’s decision to invite armed volunteers into Paris, and to allow all Parisians to bear arms, was not taken so that the new regime would organize colourful parades. Appointing a known troublemaker like Santerre to lead the Paris National Guard was a guarantee of indiscipline and violence. In early September, Paris even named Marat one of the administrators of its police force, which was like choosing an arsonist to guard a gunpowder factory.
With Marat’s newspaper L’Ami du peuple telling everyone that ‘all the heads of the great must be felled’, and one of the Paris sections (Poissonnière, to the north of the city centre) announcing openly that it was necessary to ‘bring prompt justice to all the wrong-doers and conspirators held in the prisons’, the new regime was definitely not going to be about tolerance and forgiveness.
Parisian politicians like Robespierre and Danton, who had kept their heads down during the uprising of 10 August – no doubt to avoid charges that they had sanctioned violent rebellion and massacres – now assumed office. Both of them were elected to the new Convention, and Danton, who until now had been little more than a rabblerouser in the political clubs, was made Minister of Justice. On 25 August, he gave a speech saying that ‘No nation on earth obtains freedom without combat. You have traitors among you. Oh, without them, the combat would be over.’ He also suggested that house-to-house searches should be made, to look for hidden weapons and arrest ‘suspects’. The call to violent oppression could not have been clearer.
At the same time, coincidentally or not, rumours began to circulate about royalist prisoners plotting counter-revolution in their Parisian cells.
On 2 September, the killing of political opponents began.
In Paris, the first victims were a group of 19 priests who had refused to take the oath of allegiance to the (now defunct) Constitution. Tried by a ‘people’s commission’, one after the other they received the verdict ‘à la Force’, meaning that they should be taken to the Force prison (ironically, one of those recently modernized and made more comfortable by Louis XVI). However, as soon as each priest was taken away by his guards, he was piked and bayonetted to death in the street.
In the couvent des Carmes, a convent in the southwest of Paris that had been converted into a prison, a three-day killing spree began, during which 115 priests were taken into the convent gardens and shot, stabbed or beaten to death. Amongst these were an archbishop, two bishops, and one priest called Guillaume-Antoine Delfaud who had been a delegate at the États généraux and supported the tiers état’s call for a democratic government.
On that same day, around 1,500 armed men from the Paris sections marched into Bicêtre prison hospital, just outside southern Paris, where many of the patients were vagrants, sufferers from advanced syphilis, homosexuals and children convicted of petty street crimes. It was rumoured that a large stock of counter-revolutionary weapons was hidden there. None were found, but the invaders clubbed about a hundred prisoners to death, many of them children.
Similar scenes were enacted across Paris, in the Conciergerie and Grand Châtelet prisons, either with or without kangaroo courts.
On the evening of 2 September, the populist politicians seem to have decided that they needed to take credit for this sudden increase in judicial efficiency. A ‘comité de surveillance’ (‘surveillance committee’), set up at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris to make sure that the city was behaving with enough revolutionary fervour, published a circular addressed to their ‘brothers in all the departments of France’. It revealed ‘a terrible plot, organized by the royal court, to cut the throats of all French patriots, a plot in which a large number of members of the Assemblée nationale are implicated’, and announced that ‘a large number of ferocious conspirators held in the prisons have been put to death by the people, acts of justice which seemed indispensable.’ The circular then suggested that ‘the nation … will no doubt adopt this useful and necessary method at once.’ The document was signed, amongst others, by Marat and later countersigned by Danton, the Minister of Justice.
Unsurprisingly, the massacres continued.
On 3 September, a group of men who had perpetrated the Bicêtre killings the day before arrived at the Salpêtrière prison hospital on the right bank of the Seine, which held 186 women, most of them prostitutes or wives accused of adultery. Two men from the revolutionary committee of the Finistère section of Paris, which included Salpêtrière, came and gave the order for the women to be removed from their cells and taken into the large courtyard (which can still be visited today). Then while their names were read out from the prison register, about 130 of the women were brought forward to be bludgeoned, hacked and stabbed to death. One can only conclude that sex outside marriage was proof of counter-revolutionary sympathies, although if that was true, it is hard to explain why about 30 of the women were raped before being killed.
At the Force prison in the Marais, hearings continued for several days, with over 160 prisoners receiving instantly executed death penalties. One of these was Marie-Antoinette’s close friend, Marie-Thérèse, Princesse de Lamballe. Ordered to reveal details of the royal couple’s dealings with foreign powers, she refused, and was ‘released’ into the street. There, she was bludgeoned to the ground, stabbed and beaten to death, and then her body was stripped naked. Her head was sawn off, and her heart ripped out, and they were paraded through the streets, along with the rest of her corpse. The head made its way on a pike through the Marais as far as the Temple prison, where Marie-Antoinette was in custody with her family. There, the severed head was held up to the windows, while members of the mob ordered the Queen to kiss her alleged lesbian lover. The shutters were closed, and Marie-Antoinette never saw her friend’s remains, but she fainted all the same.
Interestingly, at one point, Lamballe’s head was given to a sculptress to make a wax effigy. Marie Grosholtz was a young artist who would later make the death masks of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and Robespierre,fn5 before going to London and opening a waxworks museum, under her married name, Madame Tussaud. The museum would include a ‘Chamber of Horrors’ depicting the violence of the Revolution.
Either spontaneously or in reaction to the comité de surveillance’s circular, massacres spread all across France, and wherever aristocrats, recalcitrant priests, former royal soldiers or unpopular prisoners of some other sort could be found, they were put to death. Perhaps appropriately, the biggest massacre outside Paris (for the moment, at least) took place in Versailles, where on 9 September 1792 a group of 50 prisoners were on their way from Orléans to Paris, under escort by the National Guard. Alerted about their arrival, in all likelihood by Danton himself, an armed Parisian mob was waiting for them at a crossroads. The escort miraculously disappeared and 43 of the prisoners were hacked to death, among them a former Minister of War, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, the ex-royal governor of Paris and a bishop. Nine men managed to escape, but a further 13 prisoners being held in the Queen’s former stables were not so lucky.
By the end of the day, the railings outside the château de Versailles were host to an exhibition of severed heads.
It is almost impossible to know how many prisoners were killed by mobs during September 1792, but most current estimates put the number at about 1,200 in Paris and around 150 in the provinces. Approximately half of these were inmates being held for non-revolutionary crimes. On top of the prison massacres, there were also plenty of random lynchings and disappearances, and of course the sheer terror that must have been felt by every prisoner in almost every jail, waiting to hear the mob arrive to do their ‘revolutionary duty’.
There has been a great deal of soul-searching in France about who exactly carried out these massacres. Individual names of the men who chaired the kangaroo courts, led the mobs or severed the heads have been bandied about, as if to contradict the idea that large numbers of the French – and especially Parisian – population were psychopaths. But as we have seen, in the late 1780s and early 1790s it was not difficult to find people willing to murder anyone who looked too rich or wore the wrong uniform. It was a class war, and the formerly down-trodden masses had been provided with weapons and told to fight it.
As with all groups and factions involved in the French Revolution, the killers have been given a name – the septembriseurs (briser meaning to smash). Among them, the subgroup who preferred to bludgeon rather than stab or shoot their victims are known as bûcheurs, a pun on boucher (butcher) adapted from bûche, the word for a log.
Their numbers are impossible to calculate, because there were often several thousand people gathered outside a prison, either taking part in the killing and mutilation, or just watching. Many of them were in uniform, either as National Guards or armed volunteers. In any case, most of the people wielding their weapons, or cheering on the killers, would have argued that they were helping to save the nation. Some actually went and demanded payment from the Parisian authorities for their work. A political ally of Robespierre’s called Jacques-Nicolas Baillaud-Varenne, a member of the Paris Commune insurrectionnelle, gave a speech calling the killers his ouvriers (labourers).
Most accounts of mob violence in Paris refer to the famous ‘sans-culottes’ (‘without breeches’), so called not because they were so poor that they went around bare-buttocked, but because they wore long, loose trousers rather than the tighter knee breeches and stockings favoured by the middle and upper classes. Wearing these long trousers, often accessorized with a tricolour cocarde, red bonnet and long, pointed pike, provided a sort of mass anonymity. They were ‘le peuple’, the group that politicians portrayed as the innocent, spontaneously reacting tools of public opinion – or what the politicians wanted public opinion to be. As one Assembléefn6 delegate said after going to the Abbaye prison to try and pacify the mob, ‘The people are over-excited to the point where they will listen to no one.’ This was not quite true – they were listening to the politicians who were stirring up their paranoia.
Whoever did the actual killing in September 1792, the blame has to be laid at the feet of these politicians who were now playing a vicious game of ‘more populist than thou’.
In the Assemblée, the delegates seemed to be falling over themselves to be understanding about the massacres. Even before the more radical Convention nationale took over, the new extreme republican sympathies in parliament were already making themselves felt.
As early as the night of 2 September, a delegate reported to a late-night sitting that he wanted to stress…
… an important fact in defence of the honour of the people. In the prisons, the people organized tribunals of twelve persons … After asking each prisoner several questions, the judges put their hands on his head and asked, ‘Do you believe that in our conscience we can free this gentleman?’ If the answer was yes, the accused was released, and went out to meet the pikes.
According to the delegate, this apparently constituted an ‘honourable’ trial.
On 3 September, the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Marie Roland, spoke at great length about the events, and seemed to announce a shameless cover-up:
Yesterday was a day over which it is probably best to draw a veil. I know that the people, terrible in their justice, have carried out a sort of justice. They do not attack everything that attracts their fury; they direct it towards those whom they believe to have avoided for too long the sword of the law, and who, because of the present dangers, must be sacrificed without delay.
He talked about ‘justified anger’ and ‘indignation taken to its extreme’. The implication was that populist massacres were all right.
There were a few dissenting voices. On 3 September, Armand de Kersaint, the member for Seine-et-Oise, spoke out against this populism. He harangued the Assemblée:
Public disorder is the fruit of errors, and you know how avidly your enemies have seized this means of misleading the people. It is up to you to tell them the truth. At this very moment, the public is probably being fed exaggerated news, and it must be contradicted. By this means, hopefully we can stop the civic unrest in Paris.
Kersaint was much too forthright to last – he would be guillotined the following year.
Not surprisingly, in their tower at the Temple prison, the royal family were in constant fear for their lives, and it is said that Louis XVI turned pale and started trembling as soon as he heard cannon fire on the night of 2 September. When the mob arrived with the Princesse de Lamballe’s severed head, they tried to enter the Temple and were only turned back by a brave commissaire, a representative of Paris’s Bondy section called François Daujon, who told the crowd that Marie-Antoinette’s head ‘did not belong to them’. (He could have added ‘yet’.)
The September massacre season ended a few days after it began, but then the new Convention nationale was sworn in, its first act to declare the end of the monarchy and the beginning of a new ‘era of the French’. In true populist fashion, it announced that the last five days of the year (or six in a leap year) would henceforth be holidays known as the jours sansculottides.
Sadly for Louis XVI, with the sans-culottes needing some positive news amidst setbacks in the war against Prussians and the Austrians, the new masters of the nation chose him as the next target in their populist agenda.