‘Le sang, même celui des coupables, versé avec cruauté et profusion, souille éternellement les révolutions.’
‘Blood, even that of the guilty, if shed cruelly and profusely, sullies revolutions for ever.’
Olympe de Gouges (1748–93), French writer who was
guillotined for demanding equal rights for women
TO STEP OUTSIDE the political turmoil for a moment, it is perhaps important to list a few French innovations of 1792. These give an idea of the spirit of change in the country. And at least two of them were to have fatal consequences for Louis XVI and many others.
The first, and quaintest, of these was the new calendar. As soon as the Convention nationale opened, it declared that from 21 September 1792 all official documents should be dated ‘Year One of the French Republic’. Until then, 1792 had been known in revolutionary circles as ‘Year Four of Liberty’, dating back to 1789, but now it was decided that ‘under the Constitution, the people did not have real liberty’. The calendar was therefore decreed to have restarted, and work began on freeing the days, years and months of their historical baggage. From September 1792 on, there would be no reference to Christianity or even Ancient Rome.
Three members of the Convention, headed by a man called Gilbert Romme (who would later be accused of treason and stab himself to death on the way to the scaffold), were commissioned to draw up the new calendar. This they did with the help of a poet called Philippe-François-Nazaire Fabre (later charged with fraud, and guillotined) and a former royal gardener called André Thouin, who miraculously survived into old age.
This poetic, rustic input was designed to instil citizens of the new Republic with a knowledge of Nature, and ‘to make the people love fields’.
The 12 months were therefore renamed to represent events of the farming year. Then, as now, in practical terms, the French year began in September, and the first month (22 September–21 October) was called vendémiaire, from vendanges, meaning grape harvest. Others were pluviôse, the month of rain in January and February, floréal for flowering in April and May, and thermidor, which sounds like the time for cooking lobsters but was in fact the month of summer heat.
Wishing to free themselves entirely from the past, and impose a new era of Lumières logic, the commission decided that each month should have only 30 days. This is why the above-mentioned sansculottides holidays were needed at the end of each year.
The most confusing elements of the calendar were the days of the week. For a start, there were ten of them, from primidi to decadi. The most obvious result of this was a ten-day week, a recipe for disaster with French people who are so fond of their weekends. This was no doubt the reason why the calendar would last less than 15 years.
In addition, each day had its own name, in a perverse and impossible-to-remember imitation of the old saints’ calendar. That former system had, the commission said, been ‘a catalogue of lies and dupery’. Instead, they gave each day a new rustic name. Pearls amongst these (and ‘Pearl’ wasn’t one of them, because mollusc farmers were excluded from the calendar) included Donkey (6 October), Celery (23 October), Spade (20 December), Dung (28 December), Broccoli (31 January), Tuna (15 March), Pitchfork (8 June), Watering Can (28 July), Lentil (10 August) and Basket (16 September). The list proves that it was quite difficult to find 360 recognizable terms related to food production, and that the commission was sometimes forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel – which, by the way, was 21 October.
As one can imagine, the calendar was rarely used except in the most official documents, and it was being ignored long before it was actually discontinued. No French builder ever told a customer: ‘There’s no way we can finish by Cucumber. But we should have it done by Artichoke. Bean at the very latest.’ And even revolutionary records never used the day’s names. The first year of the new calendar (22 September 1792) became known as 1 vendémiaire an I.
Despite the fact that ordinary people rarely if ever used it, the calendar was an indication of how keenly the new French government of September 1792 felt the need for complete change. And the ominous date in this new calendar that Louis XVI would have to beware of was Moss, in year two, otherwise known as 2 pluviôse an II. It was creeping ever closer.
The next innovation of 1792 was the national anthem. Unlike the calendar, this was not a celebration of France’s foodstuffs and farming implements. The ‘Marseillaise’ was a battle hymn that expressed the fears early in the year when, as the song says, everyone expected foreign royalist invaders to come and ‘cut the throats of [their] sons and companions’.fn1
It was written during the night of 25–26 April 1792 by a military engineer called Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, who was serving in Strasbourg, on the French–German border, a town that expected to be besieged by Austrian and Prussian armies at any moment. The Mayor of Strasbourg, a friend of de Lisle’s from the Freemasons who possessed a decent tenor voice, sang it at his house the following day, and the mayor’s sister thought it ‘catchy and with a certain originality’. She arranged it for voice and harpsichord and it quickly became a hit all over France, under the name of ‘War Song for the Rhine Army’.
The hymn got its modern name when the armed volunteers summoned by the Paris Commune arrived in the city in July 1792. The contingent from Marseille arrived singing the new song.
The words were perfectly suited to the job that the volunteers had been brought in to do – oversee the fall of the monarchy. The first verse, the only one usually sung, calls on the ‘children of the homeland’ to form an army and march against tyranny, so that ‘impure blood’ will run in the fields. The second begins by insulting the invading army: ‘What does this horde of slaves, traitors and conspiring kings want?’ and ends with the answer: ‘They dare to dream of throwing us back into our former slavery.’
Throughout seven verses (it was a productive night), Rouget de Lisle encouraged all patriotic citizens to repel the ‘bloody despots’, ‘accomplices of Bouillé’ (the royalist general who put down a mutiny in Nancy) and all traitors who, like ‘tigers, without pity, tear the breasts of their mothers’. He also suggested that the French, as ‘magnanimous warriors’, might ‘spare sad victims’, but that part of the song seems to have been forgotten.
Practically every verse drips with blood and vengeance, which was definitely the theme in France from the time the song was written until at least 1795, when it was officially adopted as the national anthem. This was not reassuring for Louis XVI and the royal family, or anyone who dared to utter opposition to the Convention’s more radical members.
Rouget de Lisle himself does not seem to have been anti-monarchist. On 10 August 1792, he was sacked from the army for expressing sympathy for the royal family, and was later imprisoned, before serving again to repel a counter-revolutionary army that invaded Brittany in 1795.
In the days before royalties, Rouget de Lisle never made a fortune for his song, and even spent some time in a debtors’ prison in his sixties. He wrote throughout his life, penning such ditties as ‘A Hymn to Reason’ and ‘The First Song of the Industrialists’, though none of these caught on like the ‘Marseillaise’.
Ironically, one of his later compositions was addressed to Louis XVI’s brother, Louis Stanislas, who came to the throne in 1814 as Louis XVIII when the monarchy was restored after the fall of Napoleon. This was called ‘Vive le Roi!’ – a war cry that Rouget de Lisle’s lyrics call:
Noble cri de la vieille France,
Cri d’espérance,
De bonheur, d’amour et de foi,
Trop longtemps étouffé par le crime…
(‘Noble cry of old France,
Cry of hope,
Of happiness, love and faith,
Too long suppressed by crime.’)
The song ends with a wish that ‘France and its king should be happy together, and from their shared happiness our own will be born.’
Unfortunately, even this obsequiousness did not find favour with Louis XVIII, and Rouget de Lisle was denied the rare distinction of writing two national anthems for opposing regimes. But it is amusing to think that the French Republic’s national anthem was in fact written by an apparently raving royalist. Not that this would have been much of a consolation for Louis XVI and moderate politicians back in 1792, trapped in the era when France was divided along the strict lines drawn out by the ‘Marseillaise’, between ‘traitors’ and vengeful ‘patriots’.
The third innovation from this period is one in which Louis XVI, who had always been fascinated by machines, played a part. It is the guillotine.
The contraption that would become a sad symbol of this period of the Revolution was not invented by the French. Decapitation machines had existed for centuries, with Halifax in northern England laying claim to Europe’s earliest mechanical gibbet, dating back to at least 1286.fn2
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a doctor from Saintes in the southwest of France, and a delegate at the first Assemblée nationale, probably knew nothing about Halifax when he first suggested a swift method of execution during a speech to parliament in October 1789. His was a humanitarian idea – previously, being beheaded by a drunken executioner wielding a heavy, often blunt axe was not a tidy process. Swords were lighter and more accurate but often broke. And those were the lucky victims. Beheading was reserved for the upper classes, whereas less privileged criminals would be broken on the wheel, burned, slowly hanged or dismembered. Guillotin’s idea was to extend the democratic ideals of the Revolution to execution – one punishment for all. He also proposed that the ignominy of the punishment should end with the victims’ death, and that bodies should be given to their families and buried without any mention of how they came to be in the grave. All in all, a thoughtful man.
Unfortunately Guillotin spoilt the effect of all this humanism with a joke. He promised the Assemblée that his idea would result in swift, efficient executions: ‘With my machine, I can cut off your head in the wink of an eye and you won’t feel a thing.’ He got a laugh, but his fellow delegates were so shocked by his levity that they called a halt to the debate.
When discussions resumed, Guillotin’s suggestion was accepted, and on 21 January 1790, Louis XVI signed the decree formalizing the use of a new execution machine. In a tragic coincidence (or a humorous one, depending on how much of a revolutionary you are), this was exactly three years before he would be guillotined.
Tests on sheep and human corpses were carried out, some of them in a workshop in the tiny alleyway where Marat was printing his exhortations to massacre and Danton was writing his inflammatory speeches. A melting pot of murderous thoughts.
It is said, though not attested, that in early March 1792, Louis XVI attended a meeting at the Tuileries to discuss the design of the guillotine, and actually helped to perfect it. At first, a scythe-like curved blade was envisaged, or a simple horizontal one. But Louis, the amateur engineer, apparently argued that an oblique cutting edge would be more efficient. If this story is true, it suggests that he had no inkling that he faced execution, and that he was much more scared of lynching by the mob. Either that, or he wanted to make sure that his eventual demise would be as painless as possible. In any case, on 25 March 1792, Louis XVI appended his signature to the Assemblée’s decree authorizing the creation of this new execution machine.
Exactly a month later, it claimed its first head, when a mugger called Nicolas Jacques Pelletier was executed on the place de Grève, outside the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. The large crowd, used to long, gruesome executions or mass lynchings, was apparently disappointed, and cries were heard of ‘give us back the gallows!’ Within months, the sheer number of prisoners lining up to take their turn on the ‘national razor’ would be enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty crowd.
When it was first used, the machine had no official name. Several people were vying for credit for its development. There was an architect called Pierre Giraud and a German harpsichord builder called Johann Tobias Schmidt (who made the prototype). For a while, it was known as the louisette, in honour of Antoine Louis, a surgeon who had had been involved in the project since it was first mooted. But Guillotin’s joke was apparently too good to be forgotten, and even inspired a song with the catchy title: ‘On the Inimitable Head-Cutting Machine of Doctor Guillotin Called the Guillotine’. The label stuck, and the humanitarian doctor was so horrified to hear his name attached to an engine of death that he more or less withdrew from political life, devoting the rest of his life to healing rather than beheading.
The only sign that Louis XVI felt at all uncomfortable about this technological innovation came in July 1792. Johann Tobias Schmidt sent a letter to the King on the fifth, requesting a royal patent for a machine à décapiter, along with a drawing of his design. However, his application was returned to him on the twenty-fourth with a handwritten note from Clément Félix Champion de Villeneuve, whom Louis XVI had just chosen as his Minister of the Interior. Villeneuve was no doubt expressing the King’s opinion when he wrote that ‘it is repugnant to humanity to grant a patent for a discovery of this type,’ and he advised Schmidt to ask the government instead. A sly hint, perhaps, at what Louis XVI thought of the government by that time, mere weeks before his palace was stormed and his reign was brought to a violent end.
Almost as soon as the guillotine was oiled and sharpened, political executions began.
In the wake of the riot at the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, amongst its other activities, the Paris Commune insurrectionnelle had decreed that its sections could set up a Revolutionary Tribunal with powers to arrest, condemn and execute anyone suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. As such, the existing legal system was completely bypassed.
Robespierre was by this time the head of the place de Vendôme section, which renamed itself ominously the section des piques in honour of the heads being toted around on pointed sticks. This was the neighbourhood just a stroll from the Tuileries palace and the Convention’s debating chamber, a highly convenient power base.
The self-appointed defenders of the nation at the new Tribunal révolutionnaire quickly began to arrest the men who would become the first purely political victims of the guillotine.
Louis Collenot d’Angremont had joined the royal court as language teacher to Marie-Antoinette, and written an English-teaching book and a French grammar while in her service. In 1789, he took on a very different job, as head of the bureau militaire of the National Guard.
It was in this capacity that Angremont was accused of managing a network of about 1,500 royal sympathizers who were paid to disrupt anti-royalist demonstrations. (If disruption really was the objective, he was certainly not very good at his job.) The key accusation was that Angremont’s men had actually instigated the violence that led to the deaths of several hundred rioters on 10 August. This was barely credible, but predictably, after a two-day trial, he was found guilty, and guillotined five hours after the verdict was pronounced, on the evening of 21 August.
Next up was one of his supposed accomplices, Arnaud de la Porte, a former Minister of the Navy and Minister of the King’s Household, who had been in charge of Louis XVI’s civil list income. He was accused of paying Angremont’s 1,500 sympathizers, at a cost of 200,000 livres per month, a shockingly large sum. He was also charged with financing royalist pamphlets – including some that had criticized Robespierre’s Jacobins club. The Jacobins were not forgiving enemies, and Arnaud de la Porte was found guilty and guillotined on 24 August.
The third victim of this new tribunal was perhaps the most indicative of the way France was now heading. Barnabé Farmian Durosoy had not been involved in paying conspirators or infiltrators. His only crime was to write and publish a newspaper, the Gazette de Paris, that supported the idea of constitutional monarchy.
It was true that seditious publications had been banned during Louis XVI’s reign, but as we saw earlier, his censors had been increasingly lax. Under the Assemblée, Marat had had to move his printing presses around the city to avoid confiscation, and had gone into hiding after some of his most bloodthirsty incitements to violence. But until 1792 there had been no suggestion that newspaper publishers should be executed for their opinions. Now, though, the crackdown on freedom of speech was beginning, engineered by politicians who were touting Liberté as one of their slogans.
Durosoy, who used the pen name of Du Rozoy, had written a scathing article after the 10 August storming of the Tuileries, condemning the mob and those who controlled it – ‘those who deliberate’ and ‘those who cut throats’. He described the politicians and agitators who ‘write, debate, slander, sharpen daggers, distribute bullets, give orders, meet, and increase the price paid for denouncements, crimes, scandal sheets and poisons’. This (largely accurate) conspiracy theory got him arrested by the Tribunal révolutionnaire, and executed on the evening of 25 August, three and a half hours after the end of his trial.
Large crowds gathered for these executions, to boo the ‘traitors’ and shout ‘Vive la nation!’ as the bloodied heads were held up for their approval. Just a few days into the campaign to stamp out freedom of thought, Paris was getting a taste for these public shows. Angremont’s execution was even given extra atmosphere, being held by torchlight.
However, as we saw in the previous chapter, even these swift trials did not satisfy the thirst for traitors’ blood, which was why the prison massacres happened. Then in November 1792 came the promise of a show trial to delight the most impatient revolutionary.
Ever since 1789, Louis XVI had been playing a dangerous game, performing his role in the constitutional monarchy while maintaining a constant correspondence with royalist émigrés. Although some of his letters had been pleas to tone down counter-revolutionary activity, merely staying in contact was tanta-mount to treason.
By autumn 1792, the counter-revolutionary armies had begun to retreat. After meeting some fierce resistance on the Belgian and German borders of France, the Prussians and Austrians had apparently decided that it was not going to be the walkover they had hoped for, and their monarchistic ardour cooled. French revolutionary troops even occupied parts of Belgium and the Rhineland. It looked as though the ‘Patrie’ was no longer ‘en danger’.
Louis XVI might have been able to breathe a sigh of relief, but then one of his old acquaintances came forward to drop a bombshell.
A locksmith called François Gamain revealed that he had installed a hidden safe in the Tuileries palace, behind some panelling in the corridor that led from Louis XVI’s apartment to his son’s room. According to Gamain, he didn’t know what the safe was for, but once the job was done, Louis gave him some poisoned wine in an attempt to protect the secret. Gamain swore in a statement that he had only survived by vomiting up everything he had eaten and drunk that day, but had since been so ill that there was ‘no hope that his health would ever recover sufficiently for him to go about his work and meet the needs of his family’.fn3
The poisoning story sounds highly implausible. For a start, Louis XVI was not in the habit of handing glasses of wine to anyone. They were usually handed to him. And if someone had to be poisoned, would the King really do it himself? Furthermore, the royal family was surrounded by faithful servants and advisors who knew a whole multitude of secrets, and the Gamains had been in their service for years. They had moved to Versailles while Louis XIV was still on the throne, and François Gamain’s father and uncles had all worked for the royal family. As a younger man, Louis XVI had studied locksmithing with François, and probably never dreamt that his old tutor would denounce him to his political enemies.
What Louis probably didn’t know was that since the royal family had been moved into Paris, François Gamain had been elected to the Versailles council, and had even joined the committee that was set up there to make sure that all royal statues and inscriptions were taken off public buildings. Out of touch with what was going on in his old home town, Louis had simply chosen the wrong locksmith for his secret job.
When the safe was unlocked, it was found to contain boxfuls of explosively compromising documents. Whether they were all genuine or not (and the authenticity of some or all of them has been disputed), the evidence that Louis XVI had had a secret communications network was enough to get him formally accused of treason.
It was always clear that the trial was going to be a foregone conclusion. On 3 December, Robespierre gave a famous speech at the Convention, reminding members of the execution of Charles I of England and stating that ‘the crimes of kings engender all other crimes’. According to Robespierre, France did not even have to try Louis, because ‘he is already condemned’. And anyway, a trial would be a political mistake: ‘If Louis can be presumed innocent, what is the Revolution?’ After a short hypocritical digression about how he personally opposed the death penalty, Robespierre came to his conclusion: this was not the time for the ‘peaceful people’ to be their generous selves, and ‘Louis must die so that the nation can live.’
On 6 December, the preparations for a guilty verdict continued. After debating why the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Marie Roland, was not making sure that Paris was amply supplied with food,fn4 the Convention turned to the subject of the King’s treachery.
Marat, who was now serving as a member of parliament, did not mince his words. First he played the ‘if you don’t agree with me, you’re a traitor’ card, warning his colleagues about ‘the formerly privileged class of ex-nobles, ex-financiers, ex-snobs, ex-bible-bashers, of whom some still sit amongst you’. He said that the easiest way ‘to identify the traitors in this assembly’ was for parliament to decree that ‘the death of the tyrant [Louis XVI] should be voted openly, and each person’s vote published’.
A member called Pierre Bourbottefn5 took up this call, and added that it was imperative to try the King and ‘pronounce the death sentence against him the next day’.
When Pierre-Louis Manuel, who had been imprisoned in the Bastille for seditious publications in 1786, and was no friend of the monarchy, objected that ‘you cannot pre-judge that Louis will be condemned to death’, he was shouted down,fn6 and it was decided that a commission of 21 members of the Convention would draft a list of Louis’s ‘crimes’, and that he would then be summoned to the debating chamber to answer the charges. The following day, each member would step forward and publicly pronounce a verdict.
At the end of the minutes of that day’s proceedings, a member called Nicolas-Marie Quinette (a baron turned republican) reminded the house that ‘the insurrection of 10 August overthrew the regime that was killing liberty. Louis XVI should have been killed at that time, on the wreckage of his throne.’
Things were not looking promising for Louis.