‘Je m’arrète devant l’histoire. Songez qu’elle jugera votre jugement et que le sien sera celui des siècles.’
‘I conclude in full view of history. Remember that it will judge your verdict, and that its judgement will be that of the centuries.’
Raymond de Sèze (1748–1828), French lawyer, defending
Louis XVI before the Convention nationale
ON TUESDAY, 11 DECEMBER 1792, before Louis XVI (now known as Louis Capet, a name that referred back to the medieval royal family, of which the Bourbons were a branch) was summoned from his cell at the Temple prison, members of the Convention were allowed to suggest new accusations against him. These included ‘dictating laws to the nation’, ‘paying for scandal sheets, pamphlets and newspapers to pervert public opinion’ and ‘using [his] popularity as a means to enslave the people’. There were so many charges that even Marat called for restraint. Besides, he, like his more extreme colleagues, wanted to get on with condemning Louis to death.
When Citizen Capet was brought into the chamber, and allowed to sit down in the armchair from which he had given his speech ratifying the Constitution just over a year earlier, he was told that ‘the French people accuse you of committing a multitude of crimes to establish your tyranny, while destroying its freedom.’
Like many of the people who would later be brought before revolutionary tribunals, Louis stayed calm and rational in the face of often absurd charges. When accused of ‘marching an army against the people’ and only withdrawing it ‘when the storming of the Bastille and the general insurrection showed you that the people were victorious’, Louis replied: ‘At that time I was allowed to march troops where I wanted.’
Accused of allowing the tricolour cocarde to be ‘trampled … during orgies in your presence’, he simply stated that ‘it didn’t happen in my presence’.
For all the charges relating to the political decisions he had taken since late 1789, he rightly reminded his audience that they had been overseen by the Assemblée and that he had only been acting within the Constitution.
But when it came to the accusations of conspiring with counter-revolutionary armies and paying agents in France, Louis was on much shakier ground. He claimed that he had ‘disowned all the actions of [his] brothers’, that ‘all diplomatic correspondence went via ministers’, and that ‘the idea of counter-revolution never entered my head’, but the charges piled up, as did damning letters supposedly in his handwriting. One after the other, Louis maintained that he didn’t recognize the documents, but after a dozen or so, he finally lapsed into tired denials: ‘don’t recognize it’, ‘not at all’, ‘same as before’, ‘non’.
The onslaught only ended when Louis asked for a lawyer, and was allowed to withdraw. Three counsels were appointed, but Louis must have felt that they would have to be magicians to get him a reprieve.
On 26 December,fn1 Louis was brought back to the Convention to answer the charges. Faced with so much evidence, his lawyers seem to have decided that their only hope was to protest their client’s good character, claim a mistrial and plead for mercy.
After Louis announced simply that ‘my counsel will read my defence’, Raymond de Sèze, a count who had represented Marie-Antoinette in the necklace affair of 1785, gave a long, impassioned speech addressed diplomatically to the ‘citizen representatives of the nation’.
He argued that Louis was ‘only a man … he can no longer inspire any fear’, so that ‘this is the time when you owe him not only more justice but more, if I may say so, favour.’ In any case, the charges against him were misguided, because Louis had simply been the head of the regime in power at the time. As Sèze put it, ‘Nations are sovereign. They are free to give themselves the government that seems appropriate … But a great nation cannot exercise its own sovereignty. It has to delegate it, and this delegation leads it either to give itself a king or to create a republic.’ In short, Louis just happened to be that delegate, and was, in a way, the ultimate victim of the monarchy.
It was an ingenious intellectual argument, though not one likely to find favour with Robespierre, Marat and the like.
After refuting most of the charges on the grounds that Louis was only doing exactly what the Assemblée and the Constitution had empowered him to do, Sèze played his rhetorical trump card:
You want to decide the fate of Louis, but you yourselves are the accusers. You want to decide the fate of Louis, but you have already announced your decision. You want to decide the fate of Louis, but your opinions are already known all over Europe. Louis seems to be the only Frenchman for whom there is no law.
Next, Sèze launched into a long, detailed denial, charge by charge, letter by letter, of all the accusations against Louis, and reminded everyone that he had been trying to reduce taxes and improve democracy even before the États généraux, but this claim only produced ‘murmurs on the extreme left and in the public gallery’.
Louis was asked if he had anything to add and after saying, rather pointlessly, that his defence lawyer had been speaking the truth, he simply denied that he had ever wanted to ‘spill the people’s blood’.
As soon as the accused and his lawyers left the debating chamber, the Convention erupted into a violent argument as to whether the verdict should be pronounced immediately or not, with calls for moderates, including the president of the session, who was vainly trying to maintain order, to be sent ‘à l’Abbaye’ – to one of the prisons where inmates had been massacred. Finally, members voted to allow time for the speech for the defence to be printed, so that the public could read it.
On 14 January, the Convention returned to the ‘Louis Capet’ question, and would stick with it for the following three days, expending most of their energies on points of order. The majority of these concerned not what the verdict would be – that was a foregone conclusion – but how it should be pronounced, and whether parliament had the right to condemn a former king to death without consulting the people. Opinions were split along predictable political lines – in the eyes of Robespierre’s supporters, there was no need to prevaricate; they should start sharpening the blade. The moderates either wanted to give members the option to vote for imprisonment instead of the guillotine, or to allow an appeal process. Some in-betweeners argued in favour of delaying any execution until the verdict could be ratified by a referendum.
On 15 January, members were called out one by one to answer yes or no, whether Louis was guilty of ‘conspiring against public liberty and attacks on the security of the state’: 673 out of 718 said simply ‘oui’. The same process was used to decide whether a verdict should be ratified by the people: 423 voted ‘non’.
On 16 January, after hearing a complaint that a moderate, Charles de Villette, had received a death threat as he entered the chamber – ‘if he did not vote for the death of Louis, he would be massacred’ – members voted on the punishment that would be meted out to the former King.
Of 726 members of the Convention present, 387 voted for an immediate execution, 44 for a death sentence to be delayed until further debate had taken place, 290 for imprisonment and/or banishment, with five abstentions (Charles de Villette, by the way, voted for imprisonment).fn2 When a stay of execution was put to the vote, there was a majority of 60 against it.
Instead of a simple answer to the question about punishment, most speakers gave a short speech. Or, in Robespierre’s case, a long one, after he had insisted ‘I don’t like long speeches about obvious questions.’ He declared himself ‘inflexible towards tyrants because I am sympathetic towards the oppressed’, reminded everyone that ‘the people has ordered me to judge’, and voted for death.
Danton kept it short and sweet and voted ‘death for the tyrant’.
Marat said he was convinced that ‘Louis was the main author of … all the massacres that have sullied France since the start of the Revolution’ and voted for ‘death for the tyrant within 24 hours’.
Louis XVI’s own cousin, Louis Philippe, alias ‘Égalité (formerly d’Orléans)’ assured the house that: ‘Solely concerned with my duty, and convinced that all those who have attacked or will attack the sovereignty of the people deserve death, I vote for death.’ With family like that, Louis needed no enemies.
On the morning of Monday, 21 January 1793, security in Paris was at a maximum. The city gates were closed, and the streets were lined with some 80,000 soldiers and National Guards. Cannons were set up at key locations. All the shops were closed. Louis XVI was driven in a carriage (he was spared the usual indignity of riding, backwards, on an open cart) escorted by the commander of the National Guard, Santerre, the man implicated in the riots at Vincennes and the Champ-de-Mars, and 200 of his men. It took the carriage more than an hour to cover the three kilometres or so from the Temple prison to the place de la Révolution (formerly the place Louis XV, and today place de la Concorde), because the cortège took a long route along the wide boulevards, where there was more room for the military escort.
As his carriage entered the square, Louis broke off from reciting psalms and said, ‘We’ve arrived, if I’m not mistaken.’ Some 23 years earlier, this had been the site of a tragedy for Louis, when the firework display to celebrate his wedding had caused a stampede that killed more than 100 people. Now the crowd was much more orderly – mainly thanks to 20,000 armed men in tight ranks holding back a mass of mostly silent spectators.
After initially refusing to have his hands tied, Louis relented when one of the five executioners offered to bind them with his handkerchief rather than a rope. His hair was then quickly cut and the collar ripped from his shirt.
Up on the red-painted scaffold, Louis tried to make a speech to the crowd. Asking for the drums to be silenced, he walked to the edge of the platform and said something along the lines of: ‘I am innocent of all the crimes of which I am accused. I pray to God that the blood you are about to spill will never fall on France.’ He was interrupted as the drums started up again, and the executioners laid him on the bench and closed the wooden collar around his neck.
Louis struggled as the blade came down, and by all reports it did not sever his neck. It cut through the back of his skull and into his jaw. The technology clearly had not yet been perfected after all.
Even so, the guillotine had done its job, as had the Convention nationale. At the age of 39, the ‘tyrant’ was dead. These days, the execution of Louis XVI is seen as just one step in the Revolution, alongside the storming of the Bastille, the march to Versailles and the attack on the Tuileries. In revolutions, people die, and the winners take revenge on the losers.
In Louis XVI’s case, though, it seems valid to ask why he should have been executed. There was, of course, the danger of counter-revolution, but more than 300 members of the Convention had proposed a solution to this – lock him up, and if France is invaded again, put him to death. A royal hostage might have been a greater protection for France, unless Louis XVI’s brothers had decided that they preferred to get him out of the way so that they could claim the crown. But reading the minutes of the Convention’s debates, security wasn’t the issue – it was revenge for ‘despotism’, ‘tyranny’ and the suffering that the monarchy had imposed on ‘the people’.
The real question is: was this fair?
It is true that the aristocratic landowners, including the royal family, had taxed and worked generations of poor workers into early graves, while keeping non-aristocrats away from all the best-paid, most prestigious jobs in the land. For centuries, France had tolerated a monstrously unfair status quo.
However, as we have seen, almost as soon as he became king, and mature enough to see beyond his locksmithing and hunting, Louis XVI had set about changing this situation. Slowly and partially, it was true, but peacefully. And it was the aristocrats, not Louis himself, who had scuppered his attempts to make taxation fairer. After he commissioned the cahiers de doléances and convened the États généraux and inadvertently triggered the Revolution, he had played the game and worked with the new, more democratic, parliament to create a constitutional monarchy. Again, it was aristocrats within the Assemblée who watered down the reforms, causing the collapse of that regime. And it seems credible that it was only once Louis felt totally unsafe that he began communicating in earnest with the people, including foreign monarchs, who wanted to help save his life.
To use a modern analogy, imagine a vast company owned by a billionaire who inherited it from his father. He loves his luxury, spends too much time on his yacht, and his wife is famous for her obscenely expensive collection of shoes and diamonds. Even so, he decides that the company should pay decent wages to its rank and file. He also wants to get ordinary workers involved in the company’s decision-making process, because despite the company’s vast assets, its results are not looking healthy, and the owner realizes that new input is needed.
He invests in training, and opens a state-of the-art research-and-development department to guarantee the company’s long-term future. He reduces workers’ hours. He even proposes to cut directors’ salaries and pensions, including his own.
But every time he puts his plans to the board of directors, they vote him down. Understandably, perhaps, given what they stand to lose, but unforgivably. He tinkers with the details, makes compromises, but always gets the same answer: non. Even though the workers are calling for an all-out strike, and the company’s results are getting worse, the overpaid board members vote non.
The strike happens, and the owner decides to sit down with the workers. Together, they begin to hammer out a solution that hands most of the shares over to the rank and file, while keeping the owner on as honorary chairman. The negotiations are ponderous, and members of the board are constantly throwing spanners into the works, but the company truly is changing, and the workers’ voices are being heard.
The question is this: Why would the workers then kill the man who was trying to sort things out?
They almost certainly wouldn’t.
So the second question is: Who would want to kill the owner, along with anyone who dares to suggest that he is not such a bad guy despite what his family has been doing for generations?
The answer seems to be: People who do not want to see a peaceful, negotiated solution, and who desire violence because it suits their purpose, which is to grab the company for themselves. And for the most part, these people would not be ordinary workers – they would be political ideologists who have decided that their ideas are more important than the ultimate fate of the company they are claiming to save.
This analogy would explain the murderous round of accusations and killings that followed Louis XVI’s death. Instead of bringing closure to the Revolution, the King’s execution seems to have confirmed to the more ambitious politicians that no head was sacred, and that the guillotine knew no limits. A purge of all the non-radicals could begin.
The Convention nationale had always been split into factions. There were, of course, factions within factions, and political ‘clubs’ constantly breaking away from each other, but at the time of the vote on Louis XVI’s fate, the main divisions were these…
On the right of the house, literally and politically, were the so-called ‘Girondins’, a name inspired by the fact that many of them came from the Gironde region around Bordeaux in the southwest of France. They were mostly staunch believers in the Revolution, but wanted to limit dangerous confrontations. Many of them had tried to prop up the ailing constitutional monarchy, and believed in the rule of law. Most of them asked for Louis XVI’s death sentence to be delayed.
To the left, on the highest benches in parliament, sat the ‘Montagnards’, the ‘Mountainmen’, occupying the revolutionary high ground. They were mostly Parisians, and claimed to represent the radical spirit of the storming of the Bastille. They had opposed the Constitution, and had wanted to use any means possible to overthrow the moderate Assemblée and install what they saw as democracy – the rule of ‘the people’. It was the fire-brand speeches of Montagnards like Robespierre, Danton and Marat that whipped up the mobs to invade the Tuileries and put an end to the constitutional monarchy. They voted for immediate death for Louis XVI.
In the centre sat what became known as the ‘Plaine’, a group seen as flat and unimaginative by both sides. Many of them came from the wealthier bourgeois areas of Paris, and from financial and legal backgrounds. They believed in the Revolution, but wanted compromise, and did not see the point in trying and executing Louis XVI. Because they seemed to be bogged down in moderation, they were nicknamed the ‘Marais’, a reference to the flat area of central Paris, but which also meant marshland. One Montagnard called Pierre Joseph Duhem famously said that ‘the Marais toads are raising their heads. Good! They’ll be easier to cut off.’ The Plaine was in the majority in the Convention, but it wasn’t a unified group, and so did not vote en bloc for or against Louis XVI’s death.
After the King’s execution, using the favourite tactic of a dictatorship – ‘if you don’t agree with us, you’re a traitor’ – the Montagnards kept up the pace of their own revolution, aiming to oust all moderates from power. In March 1793, at Danton’s suggestion, the Tribunal revolutionnaire, originally set up in 1792, was made permanent and given sweeping powers to ‘uncover all counter-revolutionary enterprises, all attacks on liberty, equality, unity and the indivisibility of the republic, interior and exterior security, and all plots to re-establish the monarchy, or establish any authority that attacks liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people’. The tribunal’s decisions would be subject to no appeal, and one of the first was that anyone bearing arms against the republic or wearing the white royal rosette should be executed within 24 hours.
Political opposition was at an end.
Marat took up his poison pen against the moderates, publishing a paper urging his parliamentary colleagues to ‘arrest all the enemies of our Revolution and everyone suspect. Let us exterminate without pity all the conspirators if we are not to be exterminated ourselves.’ These conspirators were easy to find, he said:
Counter-revolution is in the government, in the Convention … Criminal delegates are pulling the strings of the plot that they have organized with the hordes of despots who are coming to cut our throats … All the disloyal members who neglected their duty by opposing the death of the tyrant … are traitors, royalists and incompetents.’
It was what has since become another classic dictatorial tactic – pointing at the enemy within.
When Marat’s tract was read out in full in parliament, about a hundred Montagnards stood up and pledged their support for it (including some who weren’t even members of the Convention but somehow got their names into the minutes). The Girondins managed to have Marat arrested for slander against parliamentarians, but he was found innocent by his allies on the Revolutionary Tribunal, and carried through the streets of Paris in triumph.
The moderates were broken, and all that was needed was a mob to do the mopping up. On 31 May 1793, after a day of unrest in Paris during which alarm bells had been rung as if to announce an invasion, the city’s sections sent deputations to the Convention to ask what they were going to do about the imminent danger. Danton greeted them by saying that the people ‘hate cowardly moderation that will bring back tyranny’ and, to cheers from the public gallery, announced: ‘The people will carry out a general insurrection to regain its liberty.’
The message was clear, and on 2 June, the Parisians returned to the Convention, this time with tens of thousands of National Guards (who, by surrounding parliament, were in theory themselves committing counter-revolution). The crowd demanded that 29 leaders of the Girondins be arrested. When the chairman of the session tried to evacuate the chamber, the National Guard threatened the members with cannons. The Girondins had no choice but to submit to house arrest.
None of these men were really counter-revolutionaries. Many were devout republicans and revolutionaries. They included Jacques Pierre Brissot, a veteran of the Bastille (both as a prisoner and a stormer), Jérôme Pétion, one of the two delegates sent to fetch the royal family after the escape to Varennes, and Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud, one of the men who had argued most strongly in favour of war against the potential Austrian invaders. Several of the Girondins managed to get out of Paris and take refuge in the provinces, but 21 of them would be dead within months, including the three men mentioned above.
This was also the ideal time to finish off the royal family. Philippe Égalité’s double-dealing days came to an end on the scaffold in November 1793 after his son, the future King Louis-Philippe, joined the émigré army; Louis XVI’s sister Élisabeth was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in March 1794, accused of being the ‘sister of a tyrant’. She replied: ‘If my brother had been a tyrant, you wouldn’t be where you are now.’ A week after her thirtieth birthday, she was taken to the guillotine and executed last in a batch of 25. It was only while standing in line that she learnt that her sister-in-law, Marie-Antoinette, had met the same fate a few months earlier, in October 1793.
Marie-Antoinette had always been the revolutionaries’ favourite enemy, the living symbol of everything that was wrong with the privileged society of the Ancien Régime. The Autrichienne must have known that her fate was sealed as soon as Louis XVI lost his head – after all, he had actually been popular with ordinary people. And when her time came, it was as an explicit move on the part of the radical members of the Convention to fire up public opinion. In March 1793, Robespierre told his colleagues that ‘the time has come for patriots to rekindle the vigorous and undying hatred that they have shown for the name of kings.’ After the punishment of one tyrant (Louis), he said:
Are we going to tolerate that another person, no less guilty, no less accused by the nation … should sit peacefully here? … A great republic, outraged by so much insolence … expects from you the initiative that will revive in all hearts a holy antipathy for royalty, and give new energy to public morale.
In short, executing Marie-Antoinette would make the politicians more popular.
Interrogated before her trial, she was asked such leading questions as: ‘Was it you who taught Louis Capet the art of profound duplicity with which he duped the good people of France for so long?’ (To which she defiantly replied that ‘the people have been duped, cruelly, but not by my husband or me.’) She was also accused of ‘dilapidating the wealth of France’ (which was true), encouraging Louis to veto laws (no doubt also true), and ‘wanting to destroy liberty by climbing back on to the throne over the corpses of patriots’ – to which she answered: ‘We didn’t need to climb back on to the throne because we were there already.’ This was clearly one defendant who knew she stood no chance of being found not guilty.
The trial itself on 14 October 1793 was even more surreal, and degenerated into a pure show of hatred. A former member of the Versailles National Guard gave descriptions of ‘orgies’ (meaning debauched feasts) at the palace that he had in fact not seen with his own eyes. Another witness testified to finding wine bottles under Marie-Antoinette’s bed in the Tuileries in August 1792, proving that she had got the Swiss Guards drunk so that they would commit a massacre. Hearing these accusations, she remained fairly impassive, shaking her white-haired head, or denying any knowledge of events.
She only lost her cool when more vicious allegations were made. Citing a list of pornographic pamphlets, the Convention member Jacques-René Hébert (who would himself be purged and guillotined five months later) accused Marie-Antoinette of putting her son to bed between herself and his aunt Élisabeth before indulging in ‘frenetic debauchery’. Marie-Antoinette’s horrified response has often been quoted: ‘J’en appelle à toutes les mères!’ – ‘I call all mothers as my witness!’ It earned her so many cheers of support from women in the public gallery that the proceedings had to be suspended. But only for a short while – in all, Marie-Antoinette spent more than 30 hours over two days, sitting on a wooden chair in her patched black widow’s dress, listening to a torrent of allegations. At the end of her hearing on 15 October she was asked if she had anything more to say and replied: ‘I was just the wife of Louis XVI.’ Which was, in truth, what the whole trial came down to.
After waiting in an anteroom until almost 4 a.m., she was called back into the courtroom to hear the guilty verdict. Some say that she expected to be banished. But the judge, Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, had known all along that he was going to pronounce the death penalty.fn3
Unlike Louis, on the morning of 16 October 1793 Marie-Antoinette had her hands tied behind her back as she was lifted on to the open cart that carried her the short drive across the river from the Conciergerie to the place de la Révolution. This time, only 30,000 soldiers were needed to line the route – no one expected an attempt to save her life. The crowd watching the Autrichienne was much more aggressive and disdainful than those who had seen Louis drive by ten months earlier. This was pure revenge.
By all accounts, Marie-Antoinette followed her husband to the guillotine resignedly, her last words being an apology when she stepped on the executioner’s foot as she climbed the steps to the scaffold: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t do it deliberately.’ If he forgave her, he was probably the only one in the whole square that day.
Her surviving son, the Dauphin Louis Charles, hailed by royalists as Louis XVII on the death of his father, was not put on trial. Separated from Marie-Antoinette in July 1793 to be educated as an ‘ordinary citizen’ (that is, by a semi-literate tutor), he was made to sign a statement alleging incest by his mother. After Marie-Antoinette’s execution he spent several months living in a dank, windowless cell where almost no one spoke to him and he contracted scabies and tuberculosis. He died in June 1795, aged ten.
His sister, Marie-Thérèse, was luckier. Kept as a potential hostage, in December 1795 she was exchanged for six French prisoners and sent to live with her mother’s family in Vienna. There, she was greeted as a heroine by French émigrés, including her uncles, but regarded them as traitors for failing to save her father. Napoleon Bonaparte would later call her ‘the only man in the Bourbon family’.
Meanwhile, the radicalized Convention was now spending much of its time discussing alleged plots instead of social progress. Parallel committees were formed – the Comité de salut public (public salvation), which oversaw all major domestic and foreign polices and would quickly be dominated by Robespierre and his allies; and the Comité de sûreté générale (general security), which already existed but was now turned into a sort of high-speed prosecution service, its dozen or so members able to issue arrest warrants from Paris for suspected traitors anywhere in France.
In September 1793, the loi des suspects was passed, listing the types of French people who should be considered possible enemies of the state. They included all citizens who ‘by their conduct, their contacts, their words or their writings, have shown themselves to be partisans of tyranny’. There were many specific categories, notably returning émigrés and their families, but the Paris Commune authorities came up with a neat generalization when they specified that they would be hunting down ‘all those who, having done nothing against liberty, have done nothing for it, either’. In other words, France had just invented the thought police.
Possible ‘enemies of liberty’ were either put on record as suspect and kept under surveillance (it is estimated that the list ran to some 300,000 names), or arrested and tried – the only two verdicts of a trial being either complete acquittal or execution. Almost everyone in France now went in fear of his or her life. This was la Terreur, or one of them, anyway.fn4
Because if that wasn’t terrifying enough, in June 1794 Robespierre and his allies passed another law making the accusation and execution process even more efficient. They felt that too many people were clogging up the prisons, many of them using this time to prepare their defence. From now on, the Revolutionary Tribunal would not need to hear the accused’s defence. According to the new law, known as the loi de prairial (after the revolutionary name for June), to be an ‘enemy of the people’, it was now enough to ‘disparage the Convention’, to ‘inspire discouragement’, ‘deprave morals or corrupt the public conscience’. Proof of these crimes could be ‘oral or written’, and ‘every citizen has the right to seize conspirators and counter-revolutionaries, and accuse them’.
From now on, a misplaced joke, a murmured complaint, or just annoying your neighbour could cost you your head. In the six weeks after the passing of this law, the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal was able to guillotine as many people – more than 1,200 – as it had in the previous 14 months.
While Robespierre was busy pruning away his political rivals, including those in the Convention more radical than he was (one of his sayings from this time was ‘all factions must die at the same stroke’),fn5 the Sûreté générale concentrated on eliminating all sources of dissent in the general population. If the guillotine wasn’t quick enough, there were other methods – in Lyon, for example, more than 1,800 people were blown to bits with cannons.
Estimates vary widely as to the number of people summarily executed during the Terreur – it is a very sensitive political subject in France, and many records were destroyed during the 1871 Commune in Paris (a sort of aftershock of the Revolution; see Chapter 22). However, it can be safely said that, not counting the deaths in the civil war in western France (see this chapter, section VIII), probably more than 40,000 people were put to death during the whole Revolution, the majority between 1793 and 1795, during the ‘second’, violent Revolution after the attempt at a constitutional monarchy had failed. Of those, about half were given a trial, and the rest were either lynched or executed on mere suspicion.
Many of those killed were not even political – during the Terreur, just being a common criminal was enough to make you a counter-revolutionary. At a time of war and potential famine, theft, forgery or fraud were capital crimes. It is thought that only about 20 per cent of the Terreur’s victims were aristocrats, returning émigrés or the political opponents of the radical republicans.
Amongst the more famous heads to be held up to the Paris crowds over the months following the purge of the Girondins were well-known founders of the Revolution such as Jean Sylvain Bailly, the first Mayor of Paris; Antoine Barnave, the second delegate sent to meet the Varennes fugitives; Camille Desmoulins, one of the first to call for Revolution in 1789 (his wife Lucille was also guillotined a week later); Madame du Barry, the last official mistress of Louis XV; the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who has gone down in scientific history for his discovery that matter conserves its mass when it changes state (but he had also once been a tax collector for Louis XVI); Chrétien de Malesherbes, a lawyer who had supported Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and tried to defend Louis XVI; and Olympe de Gouges, a female writer who dared to criticize the Terreur and who had provocatively penned a Declaration of Women’s Rights. (For more about women’s struggles during the Revolution see Chapter 21.)
Amongst those who escaped the guillotine was Jean-Joseph Mounier, one of the creators of France’s Declaration of Men’s and Citizens’ Rights. Still aged only 30, he fled to Switzerland after Louis XVI was taken to Paris in October 1789. There, he wrote a book condemning what he called the ‘populist tyranny’ wielded by the men who destroyed the constitutional monarchy. In Research into the Causes that Prevented the French People from Becoming Free, published in 1792, he told the populists that: ‘You have dishonoured the names of patriotism and liberty, using them as a pretext for the most terrible outrages.’ Wisely, he stayed out of France until 1801, and on his return Napoleon Bonaparte recognized his political talents and made him a Counsellor of State.
However, as Pierre Vergniaud (the man who had declared that ‘the homeland is in danger’) said, revolution ‘devours its children’, and the most famous advocates of death for traitors also met a bloody end.
Marat was spared a fatal encounter with the guillotine, but did not escape a blade. During the summer of 1793, he had become an absentee from the Convention, not out of weakening revolutionary fervour, but because the skin condition from which he suffered became so acute that he now spent most of his time in a copper bath full of sulphur water.fn6 It is probably going too far to say that his madly itching dermatitis was one of the things that made him so violently resentful towards everyone in France except the scrofulous poor, but, as we have seen, his voice had always been one of the loudest calling for blood to be spilt, and in July 1793, his words came back to bite him.
After the Girondins were forced out of the Convention in June 1793, and several of them executed, a group of them took refuge in Normandy, where they began to hold meetings denouncing the new radicalism in the Convention. One of them, Jean-Pascal Rouyer, is quoted as saying: ‘Cut off Marat’s head and the nation will be saved.’
In the audience at that meeting was a 24-year-old noblewoman called Marie-Anne-Charlotte de Corday d’Armont (usually abbreviated now as Charlotte Corday), who decided to go and save the nation herself – perhaps encouraged to do so by the Girondin fugitives. She went to Paris and, learning that Marat was shut away at home in his bathtub, sent him a note telling him that she wanted to ‘reveal secrets that are vital for the salvation of the Republic’.
Marat clearly couldn’t resist a young woman with traitors to denounce, and on the evening of 13 July 1793, she was let into his bathroom, where she pulled out a knife that she had hidden up her sleeve, and stabbed him in the chest.
She did not try to run away, and when searched, was found to be carrying a long political tract, which began by denouncing the Terreur: ‘There are factions breaking up everywhere, with the Montagnards winning thanks to crimes and oppression, and a few monsters soaked in our blood are organizing these detestable plots.’ The tract referred to Danton, Robespierre and Marat as ‘brigands sitting on a bloody throne’ and urged all citizens to rise up against them.
In the Convention the next day, a supporter of Marat demanded a law that would discourage any future murder attempts on politicians by sentencing the killers to ‘the most terrible suffering’ – they wanted a return to the days before Guillotin, before Louis XVI even, when murderers were publicly tortured. A committee was duly set up to define the new punishment. In terms of humanity, the Revolution was going backwards.
Four days later, Charlotte de Corday d’Armont was guillotined. According to eyewitnesses, when her head fell into the basket, one of the carpenters who had worked on the scaffold, a fan of Marat called Legros (Fat man), picked it up and slapped her face – causing her to blush. There was such an outcry from the spectators about this lack of respect that Legros was arrested and sentenced to three months in prison.
Today a heroic statue of Danton greets everyone who comes out of the Paris Métro at Odéon.fn7 On its base is an inscription: ‘Après le pain, l’éducation est le premier besoin du peuple’ (‘After bread, education is the most basic need of the people’). A noble phrase to be remembered by.
It is hardly surprising that the city of Paris, choosing an inscription when they erected the monument in 1891, didn’t select one of Danton’s less idealistic sayings, like: ‘What do I care if people call me a drinker of blood? Let’s drink the blood of the enemies of humanity!’ (He was referring to the Dutch and the British, as well as French ‘traitors’ who argued against war.) In his early career, he had been a staunch advocate of ‘chop off his head first, ask questions later’. According to Danton mark 1, blood was the people’s most basic need, not bread.
But in mid-1793, after so many fiery speeches at political meetings and in the Convention, he lost much of his radical ardour. The realities of government seemed to hit home. He tried to prevent the storming of the Convention by the Paris sections on 31 May 1793; he was said to have left some of the arrested Girondins loosely guarded so that they could escape; and as de facto head of the Comité de salut public he began secret negotiations with the Austrians to give them Marie-Antoinette and thereby make peace with one of the countries threatening to invade France. In short, Danton had mutated into something of a moderate – and it was at this time that he gave his idealistic speech demanding free education for all children.
After the death of his wife in the summer of 1793, he married their 16-year-old babysitter, and she seems to have drained him of all his remaining political energy. He even stopped going to the Convention, and asked to be excused from the Comité de salut public. He returned to the fray later, but only to speak out against the Terreur, telling the Convention: ‘I ask that we stop the blood-letting,’ while also opposing one of Robespierre’s purges of radicals in the parliament.
This mixture of weakness and opposition to Robespierre was fatal, and on 2 April 1794, Danton was accused of treason. When members of the Convention demanded that he be allowed to defend himself in the house, Robespierre objected, saying that he was an ‘idol that has been rotten for a long time’.
During his trial, Danton was apparently on great oratorial form again, and so effective that his speeches were expunged from the record. Nothing could be allowed to undermine the pre-decided guilty verdict.
On the evening of 5 April, Danton met the same fate as the King he had helped to condemn to death. By the time he climbed up to the guillotine, the scaffold was already soaked with the blood of his allies who had been put on trial at the same time. His last words were said to have been: ‘Don’t forget to show my head to the crowd. It is worth seeing.’
But the words he spoke as his cart passed Robespierre’s house in the rue Saint-Honoré, on its way to the place de la Révolution, were just as memorable. He shouted: ‘Robespierre, you’ll be following me! Your house will be demolished!’
The second part of his prediction was wrong, and the house can still be seen today (though Danton was certainly speaking metaphorically), but the first would come true within four months.
Robespierre finally became entangled in the web of his own conspiracies in July 1794 (or thermidor an II as it was now officially known). With various factions in the two main Comités (salut and sûreté) at loggerheads, he announced that he was going to overhaul them both and give salut authority over sûreté. His dictatorial attitude over this and other matters finally stirred the neutrals in the so-called ‘Plaine’ of the Convention into action, and when a member called Louis Louchet demanded his arrest, the house voted in favour.
Furious, Robespierre called the chairman of the session ‘president of the assassins’, but every time he tried to give a speech, he was prevented, with shouts of ‘Down with the tyrant!’ Finally, he and four other members, including his younger brother Augustin, were arrested, and taken away.
There had already been unrest in Paris over rumours that Robespierre, the representative of the sans-culottes, was at risk, and the Paris Commune immediately convened at the Hôtel de Ville and voted to organize a general insurrection. They sounded the alarm bells and forbade the governors of all Paris’s jails from locking up Robespierre and his colleagues.
The Commune asked Robespierre to lead their insurrection and promised to take the Convention by force. They had more than 2,000 men with cannons gathered outside the Hôtel de Ville. But, ever the politician, Robespierre refused to lead what was in effect a counter-revolutionary revolt, and instead agreed to set up an ‘executive committee’ in which he, wisely, would not take part in person.
Robespierre, his brother and their three arrested colleagues were holed up in the Hôtel de Ville, contemplating how best to grab power back without being accused of treason, when a force of National Guards and police loyal to the Convention stormed in – the 2,000 insurgents outside had since got bored or frightened and gone home.
Robespierre was in the process of signing an order to his Paris section, the piques, to help him ‘save the nation’, when he was interrupted – at the bottom of the page, one can see the partial signature ‘Ro’. As the Convention forces entered the building, Augustin threw himself out of a window and broke his leg, and Robespierre – depending on the account one believes – either shot himself in the mouth, or was hit by a gendarme’s bullet. In any case, he survived, with a broken jaw and a gaping hole in his cheek.
The next day, Robespierre and 21 of his closest political allies were guillotined, followed, over the next few days, by a further 83 supporters. To Robespierre, in terrible pain, unable to speak, the blade must have brought relief.
The Robespierriste faction that had sought to divide and rule was united in the communal grave at the cimetière des Errancis, in the northwest of Paris, alongside more than 1,000 other victims of the guillotine, including one of the most famous, Élisabeth, the sister of Louis XVI.
Sadly for France, the death of the main instigators of violence was by no means the end of the bloodshed.
The Chouans are usually dismissed these days as reactionary troublemakers. This was the collective name given to the people who rebelled against the revolutionary regime between 1792 and 1794, most of them in Brittany and the Vendée, just to the south of the Loire.
In the French collective imagination (except in Brittany and the Vendée), they are regarded as people who simply failed to understand progress, as if they had opposed the invention of the wheel or been scared of curdling milk into cheese. Either that, or as a bunch of bigots manipulated by the last remnants of the dying Church. On the other hand, the people who opposed – and eventually massacred – the Chouans are usually referred to as ‘patriots’.
The name itself – Chouans, a western French patois name for owls – comes from the nickname of a Breton salt smuggler called Jean Cottereau (under the monarchy, salt was subject to the gabelle tax, so was ripe for black-market trading). Jean and his two brothers were known to use an owl’s hoot as a signal during their illegal outings. Jean Cottereau is often said to have opposed the Revolution because the abolition of the gabelle robbed him of his smugging income. However, he also reacted to the botched selling-off of national assets, and allegedly tried to burn down the house of a wealthy mayor who had benefited from the scheme.
In any case, Jean ‘Chouan’ Cottereau was just one of hundreds of thousands of men across France who objected to the announcement in August 1792 that conscription was to be introduced, to replenish the armies resisting foreign and royalist invasion. Men like Cottereau refused to fight for a revolution they didn’t believe in, especially because high-ups in the revolutionary administration were going to be exempt from conscription – it was a case of everyone is égal, but some are more égalfn8 than others.
What was more, as we saw in Chapter 10, in 1789 the French were generally religious people. This was especially true of the massive peasant population. Even though they disapproved of the opulent lifestyles enjoyed by bishops and abbots, and didn’t want to pay the Church’s taxes, they were unhappy when their parish priests were threatened with imprisonment or violence if they refused to swear allegiance to the intellectuals in Paris – and some 80 per cent of the Breton clergy refused to take the oath.
In the summer of 1792, even before the introduction of conscription, there were minor rebellions all over western France, mainly by groups of peasants who marched into towns to attack National Guards or army garrisons. At this point, most of the uprisings were successfully put down by the better-armed revolutionary forces.
But as of February 1793, the rebels became more organized – sometimes, but not always, thanks to overtly royalist agitators – and conducted guerrilla operations during which they would storm a town jail to release prisoners, attack a small garrison of National Guards, or ambush the commissaires sent to impose conscription.
Attacks on large Breton towns like Nantes and Vannes failed, but further south in the Vendée, the rebel guerrillas combined to form an army of some 30,000 armed men, who were often accompanied by their whole family to avoid reprisals. They marched north to join the Bretons, and fought their way successfully as far as Granville, on the border with Normandy, and Le Mans, 200 kilometres west of Paris.
However, forced to be constantly on the move, carrying their wounded with them, suffering from waterborne diseases like dysentery and typhus, and provided with no reinforcements or supplies, by the end of 1793, the rebels were seriously weakened, with only 20,000 armed troops. It took just two defeats to finish them off.
On 10 December, the rebels captured Le Mans and moved into many of the houses, glad for the food and shelter. But within two days, three republican armies converged on them, and only half of the rebels were able to escape – the rest were trapped in the town, where they were wiped out by street fighting, cannon fire and summary justice. Republican troops chased the fleeing rebels westwards, killing anyone they caught. Somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 rebels died (according to reports on different sides), around half of them during the fighting in Le Mans and the rest afterwards. It is thought that about half of the dead were women and children. A revolutionary commissaire called Benaben described women and their daughters being raped and killed, their corpses being stripped naked and laid out with their legs spread.
The republican armies lost only a hundred or so men.
The final mopping-up operation came ten days later, near a town called Savenay, 30 kilometres west of Nantes, where 18,000 republicans trapped the 2,000 or so rebels who had not managed to cross the Loire to relative safety in the Vendée. As one of the republican generals, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, described it in his memoirs:
Each column went in a different direction to pursue the rebels. The carnage became horrible. Everywhere one saw only piles of bodies … Thousands of prisoners of all ages and sexes were captured and taken behind the lines. The representatives of the people tried them before the revolutionary tribunals, and France, indeed the whole of Europe, knows the atrocities committed against those poor people.
Less humanely, another general, François Joseph Westermann, wrote to Paris, boasting:
There are so many [bodies] that in several places, they form pyramids. We are shooting people endlessly at Savenay, because all the time brigands are arriving, claiming that they want to be taken prisoner … We don’t take prisoners, because we would have to give them the bread of liberty, and because pity is not revolutionary.
This was not entirely true: although 2,000 or so men were executed around Savenay, about 1,600 women and children were spared. Kléber, who had not taken part in Westermann’s activities, argued that they should be released, but he was ignored and the captives were marched to prison in Nantes.
The town on the Loire had already been set up as a sort of outpost of the Tribunal révolutionnaire. It was occupied by revolutionary police, and from November to mid-December 1793, 144 people were tried and guillotined for sympathizing with the rebels. As of late December the tribunal went into overdrive, and from 29 December to 25 January, more than 1,900 people were condemned to death.
By the time the 1,600 arrived from Savernay, Nantes was already overflowing with prisoners, most of them crowded into a coffee warehouse by the river that had been requisitioned and turned into a jail. In all, it housed about 9,000 inmates, of all ages and sexes. With no sanitary arrangements, typhus broke out, and prisoners began dying in droves. A resident of the town sent a letter to the town hall, complaining that ‘there is a smell so fetid that several of our brothers who were on guard there have died.’
Inside, it was much worse, and a certain Dr Thomas, who bravely ventured in, reported seeing ‘skeletons of children still clenched to the breasts of the skeletons that had been their mothers’. Even before the prisoners began dying of disease, hunger and cold had taken their toll.
The head of the revolutionary authorities in Nantes, a man called Jean-Baptiste Carrier, one of the more radical members of the Convention who had helped to set up the Tribunal révolutionnaire, ordered a clean-up – by the prisoners who were still able to stand. Bodies were gathered and carted off to a quarry. Straw in which people had been sleeping – and defecating – was burnt or doused with acid.
But there remained one more element of the clean-up to be completed – the prisoners themselves. Carrier ordered their elimination.
An estimated 2,000 men were taken in batches to the quarry where they had buried their comrades. There they were lined up and shot. Victims who did not die after the first bullet were either finished off with rifle butts or had to wait while a musket was reloaded.
A less noisy, and cheaper, method of extermination was decided upon for an estimated 4,000 or so more: drowning. The technique was first tried out on 25 October 1793, on 90 priests who had refused to take the oath of allegiance to the republic. They were herded on to a small sailing boat into which holes had been bored. It was towed out into the fast-flowing Loire, where it promptly sank. Three priests who were rescued by sailors on a passing ship were taken back into custody and drowned the next day.
Encouraged by the successful experiment, Carrier’s men applied the technique to non-clerical prisoners, who were tied up in pairs, often attached to a heavy stone, and herded on to holed boats. Sometimes the boats were intact, and were sailed out to an island where they were scuppered. Prisoners who didn’t drown quickly enough were stabbed or shot. Women were usually stripped naked before the execution, and some of them were tied to naked men, forming what was jokingly referred to as a ‘revolutionary wedding’. Everyone was robbed of their valuables.
On 26 December 1793, Commissaire Benaben wrote a report to the authorities saying that:
The brigands sometimes complained that they were starving to death, but they won’t be able to say they’re dying of thirst. Today we gave a drink to about 1,200. I don’t know who thought up this punishment, but it is much quicker than the guillotine, which now seems to be reserved for cutting off the heads of aristocrats, priests and those who, thanks to their former rank, had a great influence over the people.
The Assemblée’s democratic decree that everyone should suffer the same – humane – death penalty had been overturned. The new regime of fanatics had introduced a system of privilege in death, with cold-blooded brutal massacre the punishment for being ‘uninfluential’.
As with almost all statistics relating to the Revolution, and especially its bloodier aspects, estimates of the number of people drowned vary depending on whether the statistics come from revolutionary or royalist/Chouan sources. The likely figure was something like 4,000, though the numbers seem less important than the way in which one group of French people treated another, all – supposedly – in the name of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité. Nantes and Le Mans were not the only scenes of these massacres. In the Anjou region, another 7,000 or so people were shot or guillotined in the same period, while some 2,000 died in prison. An early-twentieth-century historian called Émile Gabory, who wrote seven books listing every battle, skirmish and heated argument during the Chouans’ uprising, even alleged that in the town of Angers, the skins of some rebels were cured and made into cavalrymen’s trousers. If this is true, France had descended into savagery bordering on genocide.
And in fact, the revolutionaries had more or less announced it as such. When the Vendéens first revolted in 1793, the Convention voted that ‘combustible materials should be sent into the Vendée so that forests, coppices and heathland can be burnt … Crops will be cut down … and livestock seized.’
At the end of that year, a general called Louis-Marie Turreau was sent to the Vendée to stifle all remaining elements of rebellion. He wrote to Paris asking for guidance: ‘You must decide in advance the fate of the women and children I encounter in this rebellious region. If I am to put them all to the sword, I cannot carry out such a measure without an order covering my responsibility.’ He received no reply, but the fact that he asked the question suggests what kind of informal instructions he had received.
So, as Turreau described in his memoirs, ‘taking instructions from several decrees by the Convention’, he issued orders to his men:
All brigands found carrying arms, or who have carried them to revolt against their country will be bayoneted. The same action will be taken against girls, women and children in the same situation. Those who are merely suspected will not be spared either … All villages, farms, woods, brushland, and anything that can be burnt will be set on fire, but only after any food there has been taken away.
He added that all orders to kill or burn should come from a general, but this part of his instructions seems to have been forgotten, and the armies invading the Vendée killed, raped and pillaged their way across the region, earning themselves the name ‘colonnes infernales’.
There was fierce resistance from guerrilla groups – Jean ‘Chouan’ Cottereau was killed during one such skirmish in July 1794, and one of his brothers shot himself while hiding in a church. But most of the deaths during this campaign happened outside combat. Of Cottereau’s immediate family, only one brother survived – his two sisters and one brother were guillotined.
As usual, estimates vary, but it is thought that in around four months, the colonnes infernales killed some 50,000 people. They also ‘requisitioned’ 45,000 animals, 1,800 barrels of wine, 12,000 tonnes of grain, 60 tonnes of iron, 40 tonnes of church bells, and – most bizarrely – about 400 kilos of metal stripped from tombs. By comparison, the English invaders during the Hundred Years War had been well-behaved tourists.
When the Convention overthrew Robespierre and put an end to the Terreur in 1794, it fudged the issue of these massacres. A few generals were replaced, a couple of them were briefly imprisoned, and perversely, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the Nantes mass-murderer, testified against General Turreau. Carrier was guillotined in December 1794, largely as a scapegoat, after some of his accomplices turned against him. Turreau, meanwhile, enjoyed a colourful career. He was made ambassador to the United States, and on returning to France, decided to support the restoration of the monarchy under Louis XVIII in 1814. After that, he had a change of heart and switched sides to back Napoleon Bonaparte. Not exactly a man of principle.
There are always sociopathic individuals who will take advantage of any conflict, but the carnage of 1793 and 1794, both the barbarous massacres and the clinical guillotinings, was inflicted by tens of thousands of French people on their fellow citizens. The conclusion when reading about all the sadism and bloodshed is simple: if the constitutional monarchy of 1789 had been preserved, almost none of these killings would have happened. Even if Louis XVI were held personally responsible for every single death from starvation, poverty and overwork during his whole regime, he would have been a less bloody tyrant than the men who engineered his final downfall and instigated the Terreur.
And the worst thing is that, when one looks closely at who was better off in France after the Terreur, it really seems as if, contrary to revolutionary myth, the killing was all for nothing. Not only was the country left permanently scarred by civil war, the old social divisions were as strong as ever.