THE FIFTH DAY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY MONTH OF NIVÔSE YEAR II WAS December 25, 1793, Christmas Day, according to the old calendar. For the deputies of the National Convention it was an ordinary working day, notable only because Maximilien Robespierre delivered a speech laying out “the principles of revolutionary government.” Few considered Robespierre a spellbinding orator. Usually, when the members of the Committee of Public Safety had something to communicate to the Convention, Barère spoke for them: his highflown eloquence won him the nickname “the Anacreon of the guillotine,” a reference to a famous Greek poet. Robespierre did not have the powerful physical presence of Mirabeau or Danton. His voice was high-pitched and thin and he needed glasses to see his texts, which he read slowly and carefully, making sure the journalists in the hall had time to catch his words. He did not even look like a proper revolutionary. By the fall of 1793, most of the politicians affected the appearance and speech of the sans-culottes, letting their hair grow, wearing the clothes of the common people, and adopting the crude language of Hébert’s Père Duchêne. Robespierre continued to appear in a powdered wig and wore “a suit that came from an earlier time,” in the words of Jean-Victor Colchen, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “He called me Monsieur and not citizen, and refrained from using the familiar ‘you’ [tu],” Colchen reported.¹

Nevertheless, when Robespierre delivered one of his carefully thought-out speeches to the Convention or the Jacobin Club, his colleagues knew they needed to listen closely. In the four and a half years since he had arrived at the Estates General as a deputy for the provincial town of Arras, Robespierre had achieved a moral authority unmatched by any other revolutionary leader. Once he was appointed to the Committee of Public Safety, he emerged as a leader—not as a dictator, but as the figure best able to find the delicate balance that would preserve the authority of the government while satisfying public pressure for strong measures to protect the Revolution.

The moment Robespierre had chosen for his speech was a favorable one. Six days earlier, on December 19, the Convention’s forces had retaken Toulon, the naval port on the Mediterranean that had surrendered to the British at the end of August. The victory owed much to the energy of the twenty-four-year-old artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte, a bumptious young man who had not hesitated to write directly to the Committee of Public Safety to promote his plan for the campaign: he would drive the enemy fleet away by seizing a key promontory from which French cannon could dominate the harbor. Among those impressed with Bonaparte’s abilities was Robespierre’s younger brother Augustin, a deputy on mission, who told his older sibling that the young officer was a man of “transcendental merit.”²

Robespierre did not single out Napoleon Bonaparte or any other individual for praise in his speech, however. Instead, he used the “miracle of Toulon” to make an argument for the importance of the revolutionary government proclaimed by his fellow committee member Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just in October. He also laid out the path the committee intended to follow in using the powers it had been given by the decree of 14 frimaire Year II three weeks earlier. “The theory of revolutionary government is as new as the Revolution that created it,” Robespierre announced. The men of 1789 had had no inkling of the magnitude of the task on which they were embarking; they had thought that proclaiming the principles of liberty and equality would suffice to assure their triumph. By 1793, however, it had become clear that replacing one political and social order with another one based on different principles required a passage through the fires of revolution. “Revolution is the war waged by liberty against its enemies,” Robespierre proclaimed, and that war could not be limited by routine laws. The goal of revolutionary government was to render itself unnecessary by giving the nation a firm constitution, “that which crowns the edifice of freedom once victory has been won and the nation is at peace.” Robespierre’s vision of what a good society endowed with “civic liberty” would look like had not changed since 1789. “Under a constitutional government little more is required than to protect the individual against abuses by the state,” he insisted. But to get to that point, “revolutionary government is obliged to defend the state itself against the factions that assail it from every quarter. To good citizens revolutionary government owes the full protection of the state; to the enemies of the people it owes only death.”³

With the recent victories of the revolutionary armies at Hondschoote, Wattignies, and Toulon, had the moment to revert to constitutional government arrived? “The ship of the constitution was certainly not built to remain on the ways forever,” Robespierre admitted, “but should we launch it when the storm is at its height?” Only enemies of the Revolution, he claimed, wanted the constitution to be put into effect immediately. No one who understood the political situation in Paris could mistake the message of the rest of Robespierre’s speech, in which he outlined the policy that he and the Committee of Public Safety intended to follow. The revolutionary government, he promised, would permit neither “anarchy or disorder” nor “arbitrary rule.” Its challenge was to “sail between the twin reefs of weakness and temerity, moderatism and exaggeration: moderatism which is to moderation what impotence is to chastity, and exaggeration whose resemblance to energy is like that of dropsy to good health.” Sitting in the audience were men for whom Robespierre’s words sounded a warning: for more than a month, some deputies had been calling for an end to the harshest forms of the Terror, while others had been insisting that it needed to be made even more ferocious.

As he positioned himself and the Committee of Public Safety between the two extremes he condemned, Robespierre was haunted by another fear: two months earlier, in mid-October, Philippe Fabre d’Eglantine, the man who had given the revolutionary calendar its poetic sheen, had sought out Robespierre and Saint-Just. Swearing them to secrecy, Fabre, a friend of Danton’s, had accused a number of prominent figures in revolutionary politics of being part of a “foreign plot.” It was funded by the British and the Austrians, he said, and was designed to destroy the Revolution from within by putting forward ever more extreme measures and pitting good patriots against each other. Such accusations sometimes have real foundations, of course, as nations can find ingenious ways of meddling in each other’s politics. But Fabre’s allegations, for which he had no serious evidence, were calculated to take advantage of Robespierre’s weakness for conspiracy theories, sowing maximal confusion. He named the Prussian baron and Convention deputy Anacharsis Cloots and several other foreigners who had been active in the radical Cordeliers Club; they were considered supporters of Hébert, the “Père Duchêne.” He also threw suspicion on a member of the Committee of Public Safety itself, Hérault de Séchelles, the committee’s only ci-devant member from a noble family, who shared a house with an Austrian, Pierre-Jean Berthold Proli, who was on Fabre’s list.

Denouncing enemies of the Revolution was the duty of a good patriot, but Fabre’s motives were far from pure. He himself was at the center of a scheme to profit from the changes taking place in the nation during the Revolution: it involved selling off the assets of the chartered monopoly companies that had been set up under the monarchy. Fabre had personally forged a decree liquidating the India Company that Calonne had established in the mid-1780s, and it had enabled him to pocket thousands of livres. By inciting Robespierre and Saint-Just to start a hunt for conspirators in the ranks of revolutionary militants, he hoped to divert suspicion from himself.

Robespierre kept the details of Fabre’s allegations secret, but rumors about them made many politicians nervous. Among those who were worried was the deputy François Chabot, an ex-monk and former Cordeliers member who had attracted attention to himself by marrying a sister of the Frey brothers, wealthy Austrian Jewish bankers. In doing so, he had acquired an impressive dowry that many suspected was actually money gained through corruption. In an effort to protect himself, Chabot, like Fabre, also went to Robespierre with a tale of conspiracy: he exposed the plot to embezzle money from the India Company and blamed it on royalists working to discredit the Convention. Although there was more evidence to support Chabot’s denunciation than Fabre’s—he even showed Robespierre a bundle of assignats that he claimed had been given to him as a bribe—Chabot’s all-too-visible connection with wealthy foreigners worked against him. He was arrested, and the snowballing tangle of accusations poisoned the political atmosphere further. It was increasingly difficult for anyone to know whom they could trust.

Many of the men coming under suspicion were associates of the most prominent of the former Cordeliers in the Convention, Danton, whose own reputation was hardly spotless. Returning from a month-long visit to his rural hometown, Danton rallied a loose coalition of political figures who came to be known as the Indulgents, and they began to call for an end to the excesses committed in the aftermath of the journée of September 5. Robespierre shared some of the concerns of the Indulgents, and he was more closely linked through friendship with one of them, the former journalist and deputy Camille Desmoulins, than with any other leading political figure. Above all, Robespierre opposed the violent de-Christianization campaign, which reached its peak in early November. When he denounced the “extraordinary and sudden intensity, the exaggerated and overdone zeal” of the war on religion in a speech on November 21, Robespierre surely had in mind Fabre’s story about the foreign plot to destroy the Revolution by promoting extremism.⁴

For Camille Desmoulins, the Indulgents’ campaign was a chance to reclaim the spotlight he had occupied early in the Revolution. Although everyone remembered the young lawyer’s role in stirring up the crowd in July 1789, as well as the success of his Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Desmoulins had found himself treated as an immature lightweight in the Convention. Taking up his pen to launch a new periodical, the Vieux Cordelier (Old Cordelier), he thrust himself back into the center of attention by denouncing revolutionary extremists. Drawing parallels with Roman history, he argued that patriotic leaders trying to govern for the good of the people could easily be undermined by enemies who would answer each proposal with “one even more populistic, in order to thus kill principles and patriotism by pushing them to the point of extravagance.”⁵

Robespierre, Desmoulins’s friend since their schooldays, reviewed the content of the first two numbers of the Vieux Cordelier before they appeared and found nothing objectionable in them. But Desmoulins was not content to simply echo Robespierre’s attacks on the “Hébertistes” and the de-Christianization campaign. In his third issue, under the guise of describing how the Roman emperors had tyrannized their citizens by “changing simple glances, sadness, compassion, sighs, even silence, into crimes,” he strongly condemned the law of suspects; in his fourth, addressed explicitly to Robespierre, he called for a “clemency committee” to consider the release of “these two hundred thousand citizens whom you call suspects, since there is no detention for suspicion in the Declaration of Rights.” In its obsession with uncovering its enemies, he charged, the Revolution had forgotten its true purpose, the establishment of “liberty, which is happiness, which is reason, which is equality, which is justice.”⁶ This was too much for more orthodox members of the Jacobin Club: one of them warned Desmoulins that he had “been edging toward the guillotine for a long time.”⁷

Desmoulins’s calls for clemency coincided with the peak of the repression directed against the counterrevolutionary rebels of the Vendée and the Lyon federalists. Reports about the drowning of prisoners in Nantes and the mass execution of suspects in Lyon led to protests in Paris against the conduct of the deputy Jean-Baptiste Carrier and the commander of the revolutionary army, Charles-Philippe Ronsin. Sent to Lyon to ensure punishment for the rebels there, Ronsin issued a chilling proclamation: “We must make the bloody Rhône, on its way down to the sea, cast up on its banks the corpses of the cowards who have killed our brothers.”⁸ Swayed by pleas that too many innocent victims were being swept up in the mass killings, the Convention, on December 17, ordered the arrest of Ronsin and several of his associates. Ronsin and his vociferous defender, Hébert, still had strong support among the Paris sans-culottes, however, as police reports on street-corner conversations indicated. They also had influential allies in the Convention. The deputy Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, who had collaborated with Ronsin in organizing the executions in Lyon, rushed back to Paris to demand the general’s release. Collot protested to the Jacobins, “They want to moderate the revolutionary movement. Ah! Does one direct a tempest?” The Père Duchêne rejoiced: “The giant has appeared, and all the dwarfs who plagued the best patriots have returned a hundred feet underground.”⁹

Robespierre’s speech of December 25, delivered just two days after Collot d’Herbois’s intervention and on the same day as the release of Desmoulins’s fifth Vieux Cordelier, was thus an effort to ward off the contradictory pressures that the Indulgents and the Hébertistes were putting on the Committee of Public Safety. Behind the scenes, the members of that committee and their colleagues on the Committee of General Security continued frantically trying to make sense of the welter of accusations Fabre and Chabot had made. Ronsin and his colleagues from the revolutionary army were kept in jail while the committees pressed their police agents to let them know whether the Cordeliers Club might be plotting yet another sans-culotte uprising to support them.

When Desmoulins was called on the carpet by the Jacobins, Robespierre made an effort to protect his old friend, calling him “a thoughtless child… who has been led astray by bad company.” It would be sufficient punishment if the offending issues of the Vieux Cordelier were solemnly burned in the presence of the club members. Although he knew what he was risking, Desmoulins refused to accept such a humiliation. “Robespierre said my issues must be burned; I reply to him, in the words of Rousseau: Burning is not an answer!”¹⁰ He and Danton were in a perilous position: a few days later, on January 17, 1794, Fabre d’Eglantine’s forgeries caught up with him, and he, Chabot, and several others with links to the Indulgents were arrested. The Committee of Public Safety member Hérault de Séchelles shared their fate, a demonstration that no member of the Convention was immune to the forces that could precipitate a downfall. As the danger to the Indulgents mounted, the tide seemed to shift in favor of the Hébertistes, and on February 2, the Convention ordered Ronsin’s release.

In the midst of these tense maneuvers between the political factions, the colonial question and the issue of slavery, the greatest contradiction of the revolutionaries’ claim to be defending liberty, suddenly resurfaced. As we have seen, the news of the destruction of Cap Français had helped inspire the journée of September 5, 1793. The Convention had initially accepted the proslavery colonists’ version of that event, blaming Sonthonax and Polverel and their Girondin patrons. Robespierre himself had endorsed the white colonists’ accusations against Sonthonax and Polverel in a major speech laying out the Committee of Public Safety’s foreign policy on November 17, 1793. The Paris revolutionaries’ alliance with the slaveowners was threatened in late December, however, when word arrived that the remaining white colonists in Saint-Domingue had allowed British forces to occupy towns on the colony’s western coast. The colonists’ representatives in the capital persuaded the Montagnards to accept their argument that the whites were “forced to choose between death or subjection to the king of England.”¹¹ On January 23, 1794, the colonists were jolted by the news that three men from Saint-Domingue—a white ally of Sonthonax and Polverel, a black man, and a man of mixed race—had appeared in Paris with documents showing that they had been elected as the colony’s deputies to the Convention: their mission to get the assembly to endorse the emancipation of the slaves that Sonthonax and Polverel had carried out.

The white colonists managed to get their allies on the Committee of General Security to issue arrest warrants for the members of this “tricolor” delegation from Saint-Domingue, but before they could be imprisoned, the men met with several members of the Committee of Public Safety, which ordered their release. Barère, always a good judge of the way the wind was blowing in that committee, stunned the proslavery lobbyists by telling them that he now realized that “the whites are aristocrats in that colony and that the men of color and the Negroes are patriots.”

Having never previously shown much interest in the question of slavery, the embattled Dantonists suddenly embraced the cause and persuaded the Convention to accept the Saint-Domingue deputies’ credentials. The African-born Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former slave, and James Mills, a mixed-race planter, became the first black men to sit in the legislature of a European country, preceding by more than seventy years the black senators and representatives in the United States elected during Reconstruction. On February 4, one day after they had been admitted, Louis Dufay, the white member of the group, delivered a three-hour speech to the Convention. He justified the actions that Sonthonax and Polverel had taken after the sailors’ mutiny in Cap Français the previous June and promised that “your colony of Saint-Domingue, cultivated by free hands, will be more flourishing.… [I]t will soon dominate the entire archipelago of the Gulf of Mexico.”¹²

Dufay was careful to justify the measures Sonthonax and Polverel had taken as expedients to deal with a crisis, rather than casting them as the fulfillment of the Revolution’s principles of liberty and equality. He did not have the support of the Committee of Public Safety: although it had freed him and his colleagues from prison, none of the committee members were even present to hear his speech. Instead, they were holding an emergency meeting with the representatives of the white colonists, who pleaded with them to head off any attack on the slave system. As the lobbyists exited the meeting, they learned that it was too late. Fired with enthusiasm by Dufay’s words, the deputy René Levasseur immediately moved to “decree as of this moment that slavery is abolished throughout the territory of the Republic,” insisting that “I want all men to be free, without distinction of color.” The Dantonist Jean-François Delacroix told the assembly not to “dishonor itself with a longer discussion,” and in a matter of minutes, the institution that had been fundamental to the creation of France’s overseas empire was struck down.¹³

Not only were the blacks declared free, but they were immediately granted full rights as French citizens. A wave of emotion reminiscent of the night of August 4, 1789, when the National Assembly had declared the feudal system abolished, ran through the room: the deputies had finally faced up to the greatest contradiction of the principles of liberty and equality in the French Empire. The Convention’s president embraced the two black deputies as other members cheered.

Even longtime supporters of abolition were shocked by the suddenness of this shift. Grégoire, a consistent advocate of racial equality in the Revolution’s early years, feared that Levasseur’s motion would be “disastrous… the political equivalent of a volcano.” Perhaps aware of the unease many deputies felt about the radicalism of their action, Danton let his allies push the motion through before demonstrating, for one final time, his uncanny ability to combine daring and caution. He predicted that, thanks to the Convention’s actions, “as of today, England is dead”: the enslaved blacks in its colonies would surely rise in revolt and disrupt its economy. But he urged the deputies, some of whom wanted to send the news to the colonies immediately, to leave the decree’s implementation to the Committee of Public Safety.¹⁴ It was his last significant intervention in revolutionary politics before his arrest.

Perhaps Danton hoped the Committee would be grateful to him for upholding its authority. The committee did in fact decide against sending the decree to the French colonies in the Indian Ocean, fearing that the plantation owners there would simply turn the islands over to the British. And one prominent committee member remained unreconciled to the decision. A few weeks later, while debating what charges to bring against Danton at his trial, Robespierre tried unsuccessfully to have him specifically blamed for the passage of a decree “whose likely result was the loss of our colonies.”¹⁵ It was a measure of how thoroughly obsessed he was with the idea of a foreign conspiracy against French interests. Far different was the reaction of Toussaint Louverture, the black general who had rejected the offer of freedom from local revolutionary officials in Saint-Domingue in August 1793. When news of the Convention’s proclamation reached Saint-Domingue, he broke with the other leaders of the black movement and their Spanish backers and announced his conversion to the republican cause. His soldiers became the core of the French army that kept the colony from falling into the hands of the country’s enemies.

On the other side of the political spectrum from Danton, the Commune’s procureur, Chaumette, also seized on the abolition decree to stage his last significant political action. “This decree is not the work of men,” he told the Commune assembly on February 6. “It is more the work of the Eternal… who wants all men henceforth to be nothing more than a family of brothers.” On February 18, Chaumette presided over a great ceremony in Notre Dame to hail what he regarded as nothing less than a return to humanity’s original state of nature and the beginning of a new era in human history. Several other French cities staged their own celebrations. In the small Norman town of Bernay, “members of the popular society surrounded their new brothers, took them in their arms and put liberty caps on their heads; hymns and scenes of joy completed this touching tableau.”¹⁶

As they applauded the idealistic decree abolishing slavery, the revolutionaries were also mobilizing for a military effort on a scale never before seen in European history. By January 1794, some 670,000 men were in uniform, far surpassing the 400,000 that Louis XIV had commanded at the height of his wars a century earlier. The levée en masse decreed in August 1793 had swelled the army’s ranks, but it took time before the raw conscripts could be used on the battlefield. “Brave in combat, the volunteers did not yet understand the soldier’s trade,” the deputy Levasseur wrote. The new men had to be convinced that following orders was compatible with their status as free citizens. “When a soldier obeys his superior, it is certainly only the law and not the individual that he obeys,” one battalion commander explained. The relative lull in fighting after the victories in the fall provided valuable time to drill the new men and indoctrinate them with revolutionary values. “It is not by numbers and discipline alone that you should expect victory,” Saint-Just proclaimed in February 1794. “You will achieve it only as the republican spirit makes progress in the army.”¹⁷ Copies of the Père Duchêne and patriotic festivals in which soldiers and ordinary citizens proclaimed their shared values helped instill patriotic attitudes.

For some time, the Convention had been pressing the army to combine the remaining veterans from the prerevolutionary professional units with the patriotic volunteers from the National Guard who had been recruited in 1791 and 1792 as well as the newer recruits drafted in 1793. A Convention decree of January 10, 1794, made this amalgame (amalgamation) official policy: all existing units would be formed into demi-brigades, with one-third of their men coming from the old army and the remainder from the newer recruits. All would now wear the same uniforms and be paid at the same rate.

From the beginning of March, officers and men elected councils to decide on day-to-day matters affecting their units, a practice reflecting the democratic values of the volunteers. Most of the rank-and-file soldiers in the new combined army had joined after 1789, but the officer corps still consisted mainly of men whose careers had started before the Revolution. The massive emigration among nobles who opposed the Revolution opened opportunities for men such as Napoleon Bonaparte and for talented noncommissioned officers from the Third Estate. Aware that the soldiers lacked the discipline to execute the close-order maneuvers characteristic of traditional eighteenth-century warfare, Lazare Carnot, the Committee of Public Safety’s military expert, and the generals planned to rely on superiority in numbers and violent attacks with the bayonet. Lazare Hoche, one of the army’s young rising stars, tersely summarized the revolutionary army’s doctrine as “no maneuvers, no skill, steel, firepower and patriotism.”¹⁸ In the midst of the crises of 1793, there had been no time to think of an overall military plan. For 1794, Carnot was determined to concentrate as many forces as possible on the Belgian frontier, both to protect Paris and to defeat the Austrian army, the country’s most dangerous opponent.

As the soldiers prepared for the coming campaign, the entire country strained to provide them with the tools they would need. To supply muskets, rifles, and cannon, the government created a huge weapons workshop, the Manufacture d’armes de Paris (Arms Manufacture of Paris). Skilled workers were exempted from military service and promised pay above the rates of the maximum. To obtain adequate supplies of saltpeter, a crucial ingredient in gunpowder, municipal officials and even schoolchildren fanned out to find deposits in damp cellars, where it can form on walls when the potassium nitrate in brickwork reacts with moisture; they had the right to invade private property in their search. The Convention hosted a festival at which the Paris sections presented their saltpeter harvests, decorated with revolutionary symbols.¹⁹ The revolutionaries mobilized the country’s scientists to find new methods for refining the precious material into gunpowder. They also instructed the scientists to develop improved procedures for extracting bronze from church bells and royal statues to be used to forge cannon. The thousands of popular societies and clubs that now spanned the country gathered supplies for the soldiers; in an effort to build up the army’s mounted troops, the government encouraged each club to raise money to recruit and equip a cavalryman.

To promote the unity required to undergird the war effort, the Montagnard leaders announced a campaign against the regional languages spoken in some parts of the country. All citizens, Barère told the Convention, should be taught to speak “the most beautiful language of Europe, the first one that clearly consecrated the rights of man and citizen, the one that has the mission to transmit to the world the most sublime ideas of liberty.” The regions where non-French languages were common—Brittany, Alsace, Corsica, and the Basque country—were all, as he noted, peripheral parts of the country exposed to foreign invasion, and ensuring their loyalty was therefore especially important. “Federalism and superstition speak Breton,” he warned. “Emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counterrevolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.”²⁰ In addition to supplying the army with soldiers, the popular societies spread across the country were exhorted to find schoolteachers who could spread the national language. It was an ambitious program that would only be realized under France’s Third Republic a century later.

To justify the demands it was making, the revolutionary government needed to convince the general population and soldiers alike that they would benefit from military victory. Although it struggled to provide welfare benefits for needy civilians, the Convention made heroic efforts to ensure subventions for the families of soldiers and pensions for those who were wounded or for their widows. In the early days of the revolutionary month of ventôse, as the Committee of Public Safety prepared its move against the Hébertistes in Paris, who had tried to identify themselves with the cause of the common people, Saint-Just proposed a set of decrees to demonstrate the revolutionary government’s concern for the lower classes. Although the Convention had always hesitated to suggest a redistribution of property to benefit the poor, Saint-Just proposed a new principle: “Whoever has shown himself the enemy of his country cannot own property there.” It would be only just, he insisted, for the wealth of the people’s enemies to be given to poor citizens: “The properties of patriots are sacred, but the goods of conspirators are there for all those in need.” He promised that this measure would end begging, “which dishonors a free country,” and that it would transform society. “Happiness is a new idea in Europe,” he concluded.²¹

In the twentieth century, after the Russian revolutionaries attempted to create a communist society, Saint-Just’s ventôse decrees were often hailed as pioneering attempts to challenge the oppressive reign of private property. In reality, neither he nor any other member of the Convention imagined a socialist society with collective ownership of property. The idea of confiscating the property of opponents of the Revolution followed logically from the measures already taken against the Church and the émigrés. The promise to award confiscated property to poor deserving patriots, rather than putting it up for sale, was more radical, but the purpose was to create new small-scale property-owners who would be loyal to the republic rather than to undermine the principle of property itself.

In private jottings that were not published at the time, Saint-Just concluded that, to create a just society, “one must give everyone some land.” He added that “there should be neither rich nor poor,” but his main concern was to create what he called “institutions” or social practices that would promote virtue and loyalty to the republic. To that end, he wanted boys to be taken away from their families at age five and taught to be farmers and soldiers. Adults would be required to make an annual declaration of their friends, which meant not just posting their names publicly but accepting responsibility for their behavior: if a man committed a crime, his friends would be banished.²² In Saint-Just’s mind, the ventôse decrees were at best a first step toward the creation of such a moral republic. Even so, they would not have had much appeal to the urban sans-culottes, whose spokesmen the Committee of Public Safety was about to strike down: few Paris workers and artisans had any desire to become peasants.

Unaware of the danger he faced, Hébert took Saint-Just’s speeches as a signal to intensify his own campaign against the Indulgents. On the day after passage of the second ventôse decree, he led the Cordeliers Club in demanding the immediate trial of the seventy-three Convention deputies still being held in prison for signing a petition in favor of the Girondins in June 1793; he and the other Cordeliers also demanded the arrest of Desmoulins and his supporters. Carrier, the deputy who had overseen the mass drowning of prisoners in Nantes, roused the club members by exclaiming, “A holy insurrection, that’s how you should resist the scoundrels.” Hébert directly criticized Robespierre, and the group voted to drape a veil over the framed copy of the Declaration of Rights on their wall “until the people shall have recovered their sacred rights.”²³ The hotheaded speeches at the meeting gave the Convention’s committees the pretext they needed to start preparing for the arrest of the leading Cordeliers, but the Hébertistes, even though many of them were veterans of previous Paris journées, did nothing to actually plan an uprising. Collot d’Herbois, the Committee of Public Safety member who had defended terroristic policies in December, disappointed the Cordeliers by telling them to temper their demands. Hébert was personally embarrassed when an informer revealed that, in the midst of his denunciations of food hoarders, he had received a substantial package of salt pork at his home, which he claimed he planned to distribute to the poor.

On March 14, 1794, 24 ventôse Year II, the committees pounced, ordering the arrests of Hébert and Ronsin along with Ronsin’s second-in-command, François-Nicolas Vincent, and the president of the Cordeliers, Antoine-François Momoro, as participants in a foreign plot to overthrow the government. The Hébertistes, charged with plotting to starve the capital and massacre the deputies of the Convention, found themselves thrown together with several foreigners, notably the Prussian Anacharsis Cloots, the Austrian Proli, and other defendants who had nothing to do with the group. Meanwhile, the leading suspects in the India Company scandal were also arrested, a signal that the committees intended to pursue Danton’s associates from the other side of the political spectrum. On March 17, Chaumette, the dominant figure in the Paris Commune, was jailed to make sure the municipal government did not become a source of support for the Hébertistes. When they were brought to the Luxembourg prison, the Hébertistes were jeered by the other inmates, a group that included many men who had been arrested because of denunciations by sans-culotte militants. An elderly prisoner gave Chaumette a lesson in revolutionary grammar: “I am a suspect, you are a suspect, he is a suspect, we are suspects, you are suspects, they are all suspects.”²⁴

The remaining Cordeliers Club members rushed to separate themselves from their arrested comrades, putting an end to the organization’s status as a populist alternative to the Jacobins. Knowing what their employers wanted to hear, the police agents working for the Committee of General Security assured them that public opinion was overwhelmingly supportive of the arrests. Inadvertently, their reports revealed that the measures taken to bar women from politics had not been fully effective. “Women said that the more they had loved the Père Duchêne, the more they now despised him,” one policeman wrote, although he added that “a very few said that perhaps they weren’t guilty.” However, other women, “wives of good sans-culottes,” were disillusioned by the affair. “What is going to become of us, since we are so badly betrayed by so many men in whom we had the greatest confidence?” they asked.²⁵

The Hébertist defendants were initially confident that they would be released, and the Committee of Public Safety was correspondingly nervous about the potential public reaction to their arrests. Hébert was charged with trying to “destroy commerce in declaiming without distinction against all citizens engaged in it,” thereby exacerbating food shortages. Ronsin, who had been commander of the revolutionary army, was painted as a potential Cromwell who could have used his soldiers to break up the Convention. Hébert’s success in presenting himself as the voice of the sans-culottes had perhaps made him imagine that he was too popular to be treated the way so many of his past targets had been. A police observer commented that he hardly spoke in response to questions at the trial: “The contrast between the public indignation that overwhelms him now and the almost universal love of which he was the object… is well designed to reduce him to a kind of stupor.”²⁶ Unlike the other members of the group, he was unable to keep up a brave front as he was taken to the guillotine: whereas Ronsin faced his fate with courage, Hébert appeared completely shattered.

With the death of Hébert, “the Père Duchêne,” the overtly populist current of the Revolution lost the man who had known, better than anyone else, how to turn the blunt speech of the common people into a genuine political force. For the first time since 1789, a conflict between the leaders in power and a movement from below that wanted to push the Revolution in a more extreme direction ended with the decisive defeat of the radicals. The middle-class Jacobins who sent him to the guillotine were conscious of the danger that Hébert’s claim to speak to the common people in their own idiom created. The Journal de la Montagne, a semi-official paper, condemned him for making “a separate category of a more vulgar class of people, who spoke a more vulgar language,” insisting that “today, when equality has brought all men together, language should be the same for all.”²⁷ Forced to accept the language of the educated Jacobins, however, the readers who had recognized themselves in Hébert’s pages were bound to feel alienated from the Revolution.

No one had done more than the Père Duchêne to fan fears of counterrevolutionary conspiracies and betrayals by bourgeois politicians, or to encourage the punitive impulses that so often came to the surface during the Terror. What Hébert and the other populist agitators lacked was a coherent program. Demands for stricter price controls did not address the causes of the shortages plaguing the urban population; reiterated calls for insurrections and executions were not a convincing alternative to the policy being followed by the governing committees. The charges on which the Hébertistes were convicted were trumped up, but the overworked members of the Committee of Public Safety, straining to mobilize the country’s resources for war and to keep the economy from collapsing, had little tolerance for agitators who seemed to have no comprehension of the real problems facing the country. The dissolution of the revolutionary army, announced during the Hébertistes’ trial, was popular outside of Paris, and a wave of arrests of militants accused of sympathies with the “conspirators” extended the impact of the repression throughout the country.

Even before the Hébertistes had been dispatched to the guillotine, Robespierre warned that the governing committees had a second faction in their sights. The moderates gathered around Danton would not be allowed to profit from the defeat of their enemies. The committees were in agreement about putting Fabre and the other deputies involved in the India Company scandal on trial, as well as Hérault de Séchelles, who was embroiled in a separate affair of corruption, but they were deeply divided about whether to include Danton and Desmoulins as well. Saint-Just, an expert in such matters, drew up the indictment, but the question of whom to include was too sensitive for one person to decide. The more hotheaded committee members—Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne from the Committee of Public Safety and Amar and Jean-Henri Voulland of the Committee of General Security—insisted on the danger the Indulgents represented: their calls for clemency might persuade the deputies of the Plain, the silent backbenchers of the Convention, to turn against the Terror and the men who had conducted it. The more practical committee members, such as Lazare Carnot and Robert Lindet, thought arresting a revolutionary hero like Danton was too risky. “Think carefully, a head like Danton’s will cost many others,” Carnot warned.²⁸

The crucial vote was Robespierre’s. Despite their differences, he knew what Danton had done for the Revolution at many critical moments, and his personal friendship with Camille Desmoulins went back to their schooldays. Just days before the committees made their fateful decision to have Danton arrested, Robespierre agreed to attend a dinner with him organized by mutual friends who hoped to reconcile them. Accounts of the words exchanged between them are unverifiable, but Danton reportedly suggested that some of the politicians who had been sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal had been innocent, and Robespierre replied that by Danton’s standards, no conspirator would ever be found guilty.²⁹ The encounter convinced Robespierre that Danton would not abandon his criticism of the governing committees; he was also aware that Desmoulins had prepared a seventh issue of his Vieux Cordelier that contained such a stinging attack on the Committee of Public Safety that his printer had refused to publish it.

At the decisive meeting with the other members of the governing committees, Robespierre proposed letting Danton justify himself in front of the Convention before taking action. “You can run the risk of getting guillotined, if such is your will,” Marc-Guillaume Vadier of the Committee of General Security replied. “For myself, I prefer to avoid this risk, by getting them arrested at once.” Once he agreed to the decision, however, Robespierre combed through his memories of interactions with Danton from the start of the Revolution for evidence that could be twisted to justify an indictment. Danton had once urged him, when Barnave and Lameth were leading the Jacobins, to ease up on his criticism of them: proof of conspiratorial intentions. In another private conversation, Danton had mocked Robespierre’s obsession with virtue by remarking that he knew of no virtue greater than that “which he practiced every night with his wife”: evidence of the love of pleasure that would make a man susceptible to corruption.³⁰

In Robespierre’s view, the survival of the Revolution depended on maintaining the unity and authority of the committees. If Danton and Desmoulins could not be persuaded to end their agitation, they would have to be eliminated, regardless of his personal feelings for them. Desmoulins learned about the Incorruptible’s decision the hard way. “I am lost,” he told a friend. “I went to visit Robespierre, and he had me turned away from his door.” The arrest warrants for Danton, Desmoulins, and their allies were executed on the night of March 30, 1794 (10 germinal Year II). The news caused a sensation. “People are stunned and don’t know what to think,” a police agent reported. At the Convention, the deputy Louis Legendre, one of Danton’s closest associates, caused a commotion by reporting the news. Resolute after his initial hesitation, Robespierre denied the Dantonists any chance of defending themselves. “Pale with anger and seemingly impelled by the sense of a great danger,” according to one witness, he silenced opposition by announcing, “We shall see on this day if the Convention knows how to break a false idol.”³¹

Camille Desmoulins knew better than to expect a good outcome at his trial: when the prosecutor made him state his age, he replied that he was thirty-three, “the age of the sans-culotte Jesus” when he stood before Pilate. Danton, who claimed credit for establishing the Revolutionary Tribunal in March 1793, had ignored warnings of his impending arrest. “I was tipped off, and I couldn’t believe it,” he said when he found himself in prison. Told to give his name and address, he said, “I will soon be living nowhere; as for my name, you will find it in the pantheon of history.” He was nevertheless determined to put up a brave front. “Provided they let us speak at length,” he assured his colleagues, “I am sure of routing my accusers and if the French people is what it ought to be I shall have to ask it to pardon them!” Furnished with nothing but the vaguest accusations of conspiracy and corruption against the defendants, the prosecutor, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, found himself on the defensive: Danton took control of the courtroom, bellowing so loudly that his voice could be heard in the street outside. The officially published transcript of the proceedings made the reason for Fouquier’s difficulties clear: readers could imagine Danton roaring, “Is it from a revolutionary like me, so strongly committed, that you expect a cold defense? Men like me cannot be bought; on their brows are imprinted, in ineffaceable characters, the seal of liberty, the genius of republicanism; and I am accused of having crawled at the feet of vile despots!”³²

By the third day of the trial, Fouquier-Tinville had warned the Committee of Public Safety that he could not guarantee the outcome unless the defendants were silenced. Saint-Just rushed to the Convention to denounce the “revolt of the guilty” who were disrupting the courtroom: “They admit their crimes by resisting the laws,” he said. The deputies obediently voted a decree giving the prosecutor the right to remove such defendants from the courtroom, for anyone behaving in such a manner “resists or insults the justice of the nation.” Protesting that “we are going to be judged without being heard,” Danton and the others defiantly shouted “take us to the scaffold” as they were hustled away. As he awaited execution, Danton had a few choice words for the former colleagues responsible for his fate. Another prisoner heard him say, “If I left my balls to Robespierre and my legs to Couthon the Committee of Public Safety could last a bit longer.” Still in full possession of his sense for the theatrical as he mounted the scaffold the next day, Danton told the executioner, “Don’t forget to show my head to the people; it’s worth seeing.”³³

Following so quickly on the heels of the execution of the Hébertistes, the deaths of Danton and his colleagues showed that the governing committees would not tolerate any public criticism of their policies. No one, no matter how great their contributions to the Revolution, was safe. This warning struck home not only with the public at large but with the members of the Convention. Inside the Paris prisons, which had ironically become one of the few places where people could speak freely, inmates did not hesitate to predict the fate of the Committee of Public Safety itself. A prisoner in Saint-Lazare imagined Danton telling Charon, the boatman who collected coins from the dead to ferry them across the river Styx in Greek mythology, to keep the change: “I’ll pay for Couthon, Saint-Just and Robespierre.”³⁴ More than any other episode of the Revolution, the drama of Danton’s sudden fall from revolutionary hero to victim has had an irresistible attraction for creative artists. His conflict with Robespierre is the theme of Danton’s Death, a classic drama by the nineteenth-century German playwright Georg Buchner; of the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton, made in 1983; and of the British historical novelist Hilary Mantel’s first major work, A Place of Greater Safety, published in 1992.

Casting Danton’s death as the outcome of a duel with Robespierre is an effective dramatic device, but it distorts the historical significance of the crushing of the Indulgent faction. Robespierre was not the only member of the governing committees who saw Danton as a threat; indeed, Robespierre put himself at risk by his repeated efforts to defend Danton and Desmoulins while also trying to guide them back into the fold of orthodoxy. He and the other revolutionary leaders faced a real dilemma: to permit a reexamination of the premises of the Terror threatened to discredit the revolutionary movement as a whole. The fact that some of Danton’s supporters, particularly Fabre d’Eglantine, were truly guilty of crimes cast legitimate suspicion on Danton himself. At the moment when the Indulgents were sent to trial, the Vendée rebellion still smoldered, in spite of the ferocious measures taken to stamp it out, and the military campaign of 1794 that would drive foreign invaders off French soil had not yet begun. Having barely survived the rebellions, betrayals, and violent factional disputes of the previous twelve months, the members of the governing committees were more concerned about a resurgence of such conflicts than about the possible excesses to which their policies might lead.

The execution of the Dantonists sent a clear message: so long as the revolutionary government remained in power, no public challenge to its leadership would be allowed. To strengthen its authority, on 14 germinal Year II (April 3, 1794) the Convention abolished the ministries that had theoretically continued to direct government policies and put their officials directly under the control of the Committee of Public Safety. Among those affected by this change was Jean-Marie Goujon, rewarded for his consistent devotion to the revolutionary cause by being named as a minister just before the office was eliminated. Instead, he replaced the recently executed Hérault de Séchelles in the Convention, a remarkable achievement for a young man who, only four years earlier, had been just an anonymous participant in the Festival of the Federation. Goujon had always clung to the hope that the purity of the revolutionary cause would bring all its acolytes together, but the elimination of the Hébertistes and Dantonists only intensified the conflicts at the top of the movement. By late spring, Carnot later remembered, the Committee of Public Safety had to move its meetings to an isolated room, “so that the people would not be able to observe the storms that agitated us.”³⁵ Distrust between the members of that committee and their colleagues on the Committee of General Security was so strong that Robespierre and Saint-Just set up a parallel police network of their own. Many Convention deputies had been close to members of one or the other of the factions that were now eliminated, and they feared that they might find themselves following their former friends to the guillotine. For the moment, however, they did not dare to take any action against the seemingly all-powerful committees.

The newspapers, whose power to affect public opinion had been demonstrated so effectively by Hébert and Desmoulins, now offered readers only edifying stories about revolutionary soldiers’ heroism in battle, and about public ceremonies in which citizens and officials joined in proclaiming their support for the Convention and its policies. For writers and artists willing to support the government, Year II nevertheless offered opportunities. The output of revolutionary songs, poems, and plays reached a peak as publishers and theater managers tried to demonstrate their patriotism. Patriotic spectacles such as Sylvain Maréchal’s The Last Judgment of Kings, which portrayed monarchs from all over Europe being overthrown by their subjects, then shipped to a remote island and swallowed up by a volcano, and staged reenactments of glorious events, such as the recapture of Toulon, played to packed houses. Although the Jacobins had excluded women from politics and army service, playwrights often allowed them to demonstrate their national loyalty on stage. In one play about Toulon, a woman merchant sacrifices her wealth to serve as a spy against the British; in another, a republican mother disguises herself so she can avoid being recognized as she observes her son, who is a soldier, to make sure he is a good patriot. More than forty different versions of revolutionary playing cards were published in which the kings, queens, and jacks of traditional decks were replaced with allegorical figures representing different aspects of liberty and equality, or with pictures of revolutionary soldiers and sans-culottes. Even in their leisure-time activities, good patriots were supposed to constantly reaffirm their support for the Revolution.

From the daily police reports they received, the governing committees knew that this enthusiasm had its limits. Ordinary Parisians continued to complain about shortages of food and other necessities. A system of bread rationing assured the population of a minimum of calories, but many wanted to see meat and other commodities subjected to the same regime. When the rates of the maximum were revised in March 1794, “everyone said that [they were] very favorable to the people of the countryside and the merchants,” according to police reports. The authorities used the law’s restrictions on wages to deter workers from pushing for higher pay; strikers were punished for undermining the war effort. The requirement that everyone have a carte de civisme from their local surveillance committee in order to claim their bread ration or to travel made people dependent on overworked officials, who were accused of taking bribes to protect suspects, and of using their powers to harass their personal enemies. “Every day one hears it said that [the surveillance committees] are composed of intriguers who exploit the nation and oppress the citizens,” a police observer wrote.³⁶

Paradoxically, although in the middle months of Year II the revolutionary government’s control over the population reached its peak, this was also the moment when ordinary people played their greatest role in public life. The former nobles and prosperous lawyers who had dominated city governments at the outset of the Revolution were now replaced by men from more modest backgrounds. In Lorraine’s capital of Nancy, artisans and shopkeepers, 12 percent of the city council in 1790–1791, now made up 36 percent of its membership; in Bordeaux, merchants, 55 percent of the council in 1790–1791, saw their representation drop to 33 percent, barely ahead of the 32 percent of their colleagues who were artisans or shopkeepers.³⁷

Jacques Ménétra, who never could have dreamed of holding any politically significant office in the old regime, held so many different posts in his Paris section during the Terror that later he could not remember them all. He was a member of the surveillance committee, an assistant to the local justice of the peace, chair of the saltpeter commission, and a candidate for a seat in the Commune’s assembly.³⁸ In theory, every town and village was supposed to have both a council and a surveillance committee, and all but the smallest communities also had a popular society or political club, meaning that a substantial fraction of the male population had some kind of political responsibility. Despite the Convention’s ban on women’s participation in politics, they frequently attended meetings as spectators, keeping the men under observation and making sure they carried out their responsibilities. Charles Dickens’s character Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, a vengeful shopkeeper’s wife who takes her knitting and goes every day to jeer the defendants at the Revolutionary Tribunal, had her real-life equivalents, female militants who saw it as their patriotic duty to make sure the juries knew that the people wanted their enemies punished.

The thousands of citizens who found themselves occupying political positions in Year II had little chance to contest revolutionary orthodoxy, but they were often nearly overwhelmed with the tasks imposed on them. In addition to the traditional responsibilities of maintaining public order and collecting taxes, they were now expected to recruit soldiers for the army and to come up with the funds for their uniforms and weapons. Under the law of suspects, they not only had to identify potential enemies of the Revolution but also had to set up and administer prisons for those who were arrested. Saint-Just’s ventôse decrees obliged local governments to identify émigrés and others whose property might be confiscated, as well as deserving patriots who might receive a share of it. Few communes did much to implement that law. They were more active in carrying out a subsequent decree, one presented by Barère on 22 floréal (May 11). The measure provided funds to set up a comprehensive welfare system in rural areas. Village councils quickly prepared lists of peasants and artisans over the age of sixty who could no longer support themselves, as well as poor mothers with children; they were also obligated to recruit officiers de santé (health officers) to provide free medical care for the indigent. In addition, with churches across the country closed, local officials and popular societies were supposed to organize civic rituals to mark the décadi, or tenth day of the republican calendar, and to observe the national festivals decreed from Paris. From Paris, too, came an unprecedented flood of paperwork, putting a great strain on newly minted officials who often had only rudimentary writing abilities.

One challenge local officials were happy to accept was the Convention’s order that they prepare a special celebration for the 20th day of prairial Year II (June 8, 1794). For the first time, the entire population was mobilized to take part in a festival staged simultaneously throughout the country. The idea was a personal initiative of Robespierre’s; indeed, no other action taken during the year he served as a member of the Committee of Public Safety was so directly identified with him. Barely a month after the execution of the Dantonists, in what proved to be the last of his major speeches, the Incorruptible called for the inauguration of a “cult of the Supreme Being.” Three months earlier, in his speech on the principles of political morality, Robespierre had proclaimed the necessity of virtue as the basis for the republic and denounced the factions that he alleged were conspiring to undermine it. Now, with those factions defeated, he could make the triumph of virtue a lasting one. In messianic terms, Robespierre announced that “all has changed in the physical order; all must change in the moral and political order. One half of the world revolution is already achieved, the other half has yet to be accomplished.”³⁹

As he called for the recognition of what he labeled “the universal religion of nature,” Robespierre was careful to distinguish his proposed cult both from the fanatisme (fanaticism) of the radical atheists, who had shut down the churches during the de-Christianization campaign, and the “priest-made religions” that they had attacked. Robespierre had clearly been inspired by his cherished Rousseau’s concept of a civil religion that could bind society together. He hoped that a formal declaration that “the French people recognizes the existence of the Supreme Being, and the immortality of the soul,” and a list of moral duties—“to detest bad faith and despotism, to punish tyrants and traitors, to assist the unfortunate, to respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, to do all the good one can to one’s neighbor, and to behave with justice towards all men”—would unite all citizens and make it possible to end the conflicts that had racked the Revolution.⁴⁰

The artist and Convention deputy Jacques-Louis David, the republic’s designated “pageant master,” set to work to plan the 20 prairial “Festival of the Supreme Being” in the capital, and municipal governments throughout the country were told to imitate it as best they could. In Paris, it took four hours for the procession to make its way from the center of the Tuileries Gardens to the Champ de Mars on the other side of the Seine. Marchers watched as a papier-mâché figure of “Hideous Atheism” was set on fire, revealing a plaster statue of “Wisdom” concealed inside. On the Champ de Mars, David erected an artificial mountain, the symbol of the Jacobin Montagnards, with platforms on its sides to hold groups ranging from mothers with newborn babies to white-haired patriarchs. A choir sang hymns specially composed for the occasion, and an oxcart laden with freshly harvested crops stood nearby, representing the bounty of nature. As in the earlier festival marking the acceptance of the constitution, an oversized statue of Hercules, mounted on a column, symbolized the might of the people.

His colleagues elected Robespierre as president of the Convention for the occasion, giving him the right to march at the head of their group. As he led them in the procession, he held a sheaf of wheat to honor the products of agriculture. Behind him, deputies who resented his preeminence muttered words like “dictator” and “tyrant”; at least one of them later claimed he had intended to assassinate him if the opportunity had presented itself. Whatever the thoughts of the deputies, most of the participants entered into the spirit of the occasion. According to one witness, “the Festival of the Supreme Being was a total success. It was believed to be the prelude to a general amnesty.… The weather was beautiful. The crowds were so large that it seemed that Paris had risen from the dead, rejuvenated, busy and sparkling; the ladies dared once more to appear with their old finery and every face shone with friendliness.” Joachim Vilate, a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, claimed to have encountered Robespierre, “his face… transformed with joy,” as he watched the “glorious spectacle” he had called into being.⁴¹ The widespread expectation that the festival was a signal that the Terror was about to end encouraged even prisoners to demonstrate their patriotic loyalty: they staged their own versions of the event, building miniature mountains in the courtyards of their jails and chanting appropriate hymns. In some cases, their families were allowed to join them for the day, adding to their hope that they might soon be freed.

FESTIVAL OF THE SUPREME BEING: At the height of the Reign of Terror, the Festival of the Supreme Being offered the population a glimpse of the peaceful and prosperous future the Montagnards wanted to believe lay just over the horizon. This engraving shows David’s artificial mountain, the statue of Hercules, and the oxcart bearing nature’s bounty. Source: Library of Congress.

Robespierre’s mood of exaltation did not last. Just two days later, on 22 prairial Year II (June 10, 1794), his close ally Couthon presented the Convention not with a proposal for an amnesty, but with a decree intensifying the Terror. The law of 22 prairial drastically curtailed the rights of defendants tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal: they no longer had any right to counsel, death became the only penalty for all offenses, and the “conscience of the jurors, enlightened by the love of the Patrie [homeland],” was sufficient to determine a verdict. Up to this point, the Revolutionary Tribunal had often acquitted as many as half of the suspects brought before it; in the two months of its operation after the passage of the law of 22 prairial, the conviction rate rose to 80 percent.⁴² In the weeks that came to be known as la Grande Terreur (the Great Terror), the Paris tribunal sent over 1,300 people to the guillotine.

The reasons for this sudden escalation, so out of tune with the expectations raised by the Festival of the Supreme Being, are unclear. The difficulties the Revolutionary Tribunal had encountered during the Danton trial no doubt created pressure to simplify its procedures and reduce the ability of defendants to justify themselves. Pressures also came from some of the deputies on mission. The deputy Étienne Maignet, eager to speed up the punishment of counterrevolutionaries in the southern Rhône valley, received permission to set up a commission populaire (popular commission) in the town of Orange with authority to carry out executions. Having approved such measures for the Orange commission, which would order 332 executions during its own version of the Great Terror, the Committee of Public Safety may have thought that Paris should step up its executions as well. Two bungled assassination attempts against Robespierre and Collot d’Herbois at the beginning of the month of prairial reminded the Montagnard leaders of the fate of Marat. Robespierre seemed almost to look forward to sacrificing his life, writing privately that “surrounded by their assassins, I have already placed myself in the new order of things where they wish to send me.” Other revolutionaries wanted sterner actions to deter such attacks.⁴³

As dangerous as open resistance to the Committee of Public Safety had become, some Convention deputies understood the threat represented by the law of 22 prairial and tried to at least delay its approval, or to require that the Convention be given the right to approve the arrest of any of its members. Their efforts were the first sign of the opposition that would lead to Robespierre’s overthrow less than two months later. Robespierre reinforced their fears by openly painting his critics as men “who spoke continually, fearfully, and publicly of the guillotine, regarding it as something which had its eye on them for debasing and troubling the national convention.”⁴⁴

The officials of the Revolutionary Tribunal, overwhelmed by the number of inmates in the Paris prisons, immediately put the law’s expedited trial procedures to use. Martial Herman, a colleague of Fouquier-Tinville’s, demanded the committee’s authorization to “purge the prisons in a single blow and rid the soil of Liberty of this garbage, these dregs of humanity.” Prison informers, dubbed moutons (sheep) by the other inmates, furnished the prosecutors with lists of names that were used to make up ever-larger fournées (oven-loads) of men and women who were sentenced for imaginary conspiracies. Among the victims were distinguished public figures such as Malesherbes, who had volunteered to defend Louis XVI at his trial; intellectuals, including the chemist Antoine Lavoisier and the era’s leading poet, André Chénier, whose brother, the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier, sat in the Convention; clergy who had embraced the Revolution, such as the Paris archbishop Jean-Baptiste Gobel and the former deputy Adrien Lamourette; and ordinary men and women who had muttered too loudly about the price of bread. The guillotine was transferred to a location on the eastern edge of the city so that the spectacle of several dozen executions a day would not provoke a negative reaction. In private, the chronicler Ruault lamented that the revolutionary leaders, who had done great things to save the country, were making themselves “execrable now by the horror and the multiplication of unnecessary punishments.… No citizen is sure of being alive in two more days.”⁴⁵

The impression that the Terror had turned into an irrational and uncontrolled bloodbath was accompanied by an improvement in the military situation. The tide was clearly turning in the republic’s favor. In May, French forces won a decisive victory over the Spanish, securing the country’s southern border. On June 1, 1794, the French Atlantic fleet, its discipline restored by Committee of Public Safety member André Jeanbon Saint-André, confronted the British off Brittany in order to protect a convoy carrying a massive grain shipment from the United States. The British captured or sank a number of French warships, but the French crews performed bravely; they prevented the enemy from intercepting the merchant ships and their much-needed cargo. On land, the crucial encounter was the Battle of Fleurus, fought in Belgium on June 26. For the first time in the history of warfare, aviation was used for military purposes: the French put up a tethered hot-air balloon as an observation post, which “contributed a lot to the success of the day,” a French soldier later remembered.⁴⁶ As Carnot had hoped when he decided to deploy the bulk of French forces on the northern frontier, the Austrian army was forced to retreat, clearing the way for a renewed French occupation of Belgian territories that would last until Napoleon’s defeat in 1814.

The Austrian commanders were deeply discouraged by their situation. “How is it possible that a well-equipped, balanced, disciplined army had been defeated by an enemy with raw troops, lacking cavalry, and with inexperienced generals?” one asked. A young German officer who would, years later, help defeat Napoleon, offered an answer: “The terrible position the French found themselves in, surrounded by several armies which sought (or so they believed) to enslave them and condemn them to eternal misery, inspired the soldier with courage, induced the citizen to make voluntary sacrifices, gathered supplies for the army and attracted the civilian population to the colors.”⁴⁷ The Prussians withdrew from the fighting in order to concentrate their forces in Poland, where a revolutionary movement led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had been an officer in the American revolutionary army, broke out in March 1794. In an effort to free their country from foreign domination, the Polish revolutionaries went beyond the limited reform program proclaimed in 1791 and announced the abolition of personal serfdom and other reforms in favor of the peasants. The Polish “Jacobins” posed a more immediate threat to the country’s neighbors, all of them dependent on serfdom, than the events in France. A coalition of Russian, Prussian, and Austrian troops crushed Kościuszko’s movement, but the campaign in Poland diverted crucial resources from the war against France and led Prussia to begin secret negotiations with Paris.

For true believers in the Revolution, the daily executions in Paris and the good news from the armies proved that the movement’s conclusive success could not be disputed. Rosalie Jullien and her husband joined other Parisians in a “fraternal banquet” to celebrate the anniversary of July 14. Rich and poor came together to share a common meal at tables set up in the streets. “We drank to the health of the Republic, of the Convention, of the Mountain. It is such a simple joy, so decent in spite of the crowd and the mixture, that nothing equals these pleasures for propagating equality,” she wrote to her son. The increasingly suspicious Robespierre saw the banquets in a different light. He worried that they provided the wealthy with an opportunity to curry favor with the poor by plying them with food and drink. At his behest, Barère denounced them in the Convention: “Fraternity does not consist of meals in the streets; there can be nothing in common between the opulent egoist, who sighs for inequality and kings, and the sans-culotte, full of candor, who loves only the Republic and equality.”⁴⁸

The religious coloration of the Festival of the Supreme Being offered Robespierre’s enemies an opening to attack him. On 27 prairial Year II (June 15, 1794), Marc-Guillaume Vadier, a member of the Committee of General Security, delivered a long report on a supposed conspiracy centered around an elderly woman, Catherine Théot, who had proclaimed herself to be a religious prophetess, the “Mother of God.” Robespierre intervened to prevent the case from being sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal. His attitude allowed his colleagues to insinuate that he was protecting a cabal of religious fanatics and even that he saw himself as a messianic figure. After a furious quarrel with his committee colleagues, during which Robert Lindet shouted at him, “The nation is not only one man!” Robespierre stopped attending the group’s meetings; for nearly a month, he appeared in public only to attend a few sessions of the Jacobin Club.⁴⁹

Despite having spent his revolutionary career denouncing conspiracies, Robespierre failed to take any effective steps to counter the one forming against him. Several of his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, including both the radicals Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois and more moderate figures, such as Carnot and Barère, were ready to turn against him, and he had alienated most members of the Committee of General Security as well. Robespierre’s most dangerous enemies were men who had played a leading role in the Terror, notably Joseph Fouché, who had launched the de-Christianization campaign in the fall of 1793; Jean-Lambert Tallien, who had overseen the repression following the federalist uprising in Bordeaux; and Paul Barras, who had been on mission in Marseille. That Robespierre might turn against the more violent terrorists, and then fulfill his 1793 promise to reinstate constitutional protections, did not appear impossible, and indeed, many of his biographers have suggested as much.

If Robespierre had such an idea, he was singularly inept in pursuing it. When he denounced Fouché, whose commitment to de-Christianization had deeply offended him, and succeeded in having him expelled from the Jacobin Club, this merely drove Fouché to step up his plotting. Exploiting rumors that Robespierre had settled on the names of the opponents he planned to have arrested, Fouché warned other deputies, “You are on the list, you are on the list as well as myself, I am certain of it!”⁵⁰ While the plotters were reaching out to the members of the Plain, the men who had kept their heads down during the dangerous factional struggles of the previous two years, and to disaffected members of the government committees, the Incorruptible remained in isolation, meeting only with a few loyalists at his home. His opponents feared that he might find support from the Paris Commune, whose head official, Claude-François Payan, named to replace Chaumette after the latter’s arrest, was an unswerving follower of Robespierre. The sectional military battalions, whose intervention had forced the Convention to expel the Girondins on June 2, 1793, were still commanded by François Hanriot, another Robespierrist. Since the fall of the Hébertistes and Chaumette, however, the Commune had carried out policies imposed by the Committee of Public Safety that had alienated the working population whose support had made the journées of 1792 and 1793 successful. City officials rigorously suppressed workers’ protests about wages and working conditions, insisting that they disrupted the war effort, and on May 5, 1794, Payan banned the meetings of the sectional assemblies in which ordinary Parisians had been able to make their voices heard. The sans-culottes had little reason to listen to calls for support from men who had effectively silenced their movement.

During the critical weeks before the final crisis, Robespierre may have been ill or even suffering a kind of nervous breakdown; in any event, the keen political instincts that had propelled him to the center of the revolutionary stage had clearly deserted him. In the first days of that month, Barère, a moderate at heart but a man who had long been a faithful ally of Robespierre’s, made a final effort to avoid a confrontation. On 4 thermidor (July 22), the members of the two committees met without Robespierre. In exchange for promises that his ventôse decrees calling for the distribution of land to the poor would be implemented, Saint-Just promised to persuade Robespierre to put aside his differences with his colleagues. On the following day, Robespierre joined the group and reluctantly endorsed the agreement, but only after making personal attacks on several of his colleagues that raised doubts about his sincerity. He then disappeared again for two days, drafting a speech about whose content the others could only speculate.

On the morning of 8 thermidor (July 26), Robespierre made his long-awaited reappearance at the Convention. He had written out a lengthy speech, but it lacked his usual organization and clarity. He painted a grim picture of a revolution in greater danger than ever before from factions and unnamed conspirators in the pay of foreign interests. Anyone who hoped that Robespierre might advocate a tempering of the Terror must have shuddered when he called the revolutionary government’s policies “the thunderbolt of retribution launched by the hand of liberty against crime.” Above all, listeners were struck by the personal tone of the speech. Over and over again, he complained that he was being unjustly persecuted. “What… am I that they should accuse me? A slave of liberty—a living martyr of the Republic!” he protested. Even as Robespierre indignantly refuted the charge that he sought dictatorial power, it was clear that he had reached the point of considering every trace of opposition as evidence of conspiracy. That same evening, he appeared at the Jacobin Club. The divisions among the members of the Committee of Public Safety were on full display. When Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois tried to prevent Robespierre from speaking, he replied, “It is easy to see that factious persons among us fear to be unveiled in the presence of the people.” After he succeeded in delivering his oration, his opponents were shouted down with cries of “Conspirators to the guillotine!”⁵¹ The organizers of the movement against him realized that they had to act immediately, before Robespierre could strike.

According to the agreement made by the members of the two governing committees several days earlier, the Convention session on 9 thermidor (July 27) was supposed to open with a speech by Saint-Just. Before he had time to read more than a few lines, Tallien interrupted and began an all-out assault on Robespierre and his two main allies on the Committee of Public Safety, Saint-Just and Couthon. Robespierre tried to seize the podium but was silenced by roars of “Down with the tyrant!” and “It is Danton’s blood that is choking him!” The Convention voted to arrest Hanriot, the commander of the section battalions. Vadier brought up Robespierre’s defense of Catherine Théot; Tallien accused him of cowardice on August 10, 1792, when he had not appeared in public; and finally, several deputies took the decisive step of moving for his arrest. “Is one man to be the master of the Convention?” one of them demanded. Robespierre’s younger brother Augustin and his friend Philippe Le Bas showed their devotion by demanding to be arrested with him, and the Convention added the names of Saint-Just and Couthon to the decree. “They meant to form a triumvirate which recalls the bloody proscriptions of Sulla,” asserted the deputy Stanislas Fréron, who had once been a proponent of the most extreme terrorist measures.⁵²

The five arrested deputies initially submitted to the authority of the Convention, but the jailers at the prisons to which they were sent, all appointees of the pro-Robespierre city government regime, refused to take responsibility for incarcerating them. The National Guard commander, Hanriot, initially evaded arrest and dashed around the city, ordering the sections to send their battalions to the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the city government that had so often served as a counterweight to the national government during previous revolutionary journées. Instead of immediately launching an attack on the nearby Convention, however, the Commune’s loyalists remained at the Hôtel de Ville, losing their best opportunity to overwhelm their opponents. While news of the day’s confusing events circulated around the city, many citizens went about their ordinary routines; at the Place du Trône, the relatively isolated location to which the guillotine had been relocated, the executioner dispatched forty victims who might have survived a few days later.

As the sun set at 7:30 p.m., guardsmen from several of the sections gathered in the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, although many of them were still unsure of the nature of the crisis and undecided about whom to support. Listening to the alarm bells sounding across the city, prisoners in the Luxembourg were terrified: cut off from news, they feared a repetition of the 1792 September massacres. The Convention appointed the deputy Paul Barras to command the forces on its side. Informed of the arrested deputies’ escapes and of Hanriot’s activities, the assembly decreed that they were now “outside the law” and subject to immediate execution without a trial when they were captured. Most of the sections rallied to the Convention’s side, and some of them sent messages to their guard units, ordering them to return from the Hôtel de Ville. Inside the building, an insurrectionary committee was cobbled together, but no orders were given to the increasingly confused soldiers in the square outside. It was after 9:00 p.m. when the first of the outlawed deputies, Augustin Robespierre and Le Bas, reached the Hôtel de Ville. Maximilien Robespierre showed little enthusiasm for joining them; he had never actually taken a personal role in any of the Revolution’s insurrections. When he finally arrived, after 10:00 p.m., he avoided appearing in the Commune’s large meeting hall, which was filled with militants eager for leadership; instead he met only with the members of the insurrectionary committee, who “treated him as a brother, and told him they would protect him.”⁵³

Aware of the mortal danger facing them, Robespierre and his supporters debated how to phrase their call for support. Couthon wanted to denounce the Convention as a nest of conspirators, but Robespierre still insisted on respecting the assembly’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, the guardsmen who had assembled at the Place de Grève in front of the Hôtel de Ville began to drift away. Some returned to their sections; others joined the army that Barras was assembling. The blustering Hanriot, apparently unaware that his forces were dissolving, continued to issue orders. He told them, “If you see [Convention] deputies leading patrols to make proclamations, seize them.… Lots of energy, firmness, and the people’s cause will triumph!”⁵⁴ By the time the Convention’s forces arrived at the Hôtel de Ville prepared for a confrontation, around 1:00 a.m., they found the Place de Grève deserted. Entering the building, they discovered that the Robespierrists, recognizing that the population had not rallied to their cause, had already given up the fight. Le Bas shot himself; Augustin Robespierre and Hanriot were badly injured jumping out of windows. The paralyzed Couthon, who had only joined the group at the Hôtel de Ville a few minutes before the end, was dragged out of his wheelchair and beaten up. Maximilien Robespierre was bleeding badly from a pistol ball that had smashed his jaw and could not speak; he had apparently tried unsuccessfully to kill himself.

The prisoners were taken back to the offices of the Committee of Public Safety, where their wounds were treated, and then transferred to the Conciergerie prison while the guillotine was set up in the Place de la Concorde. Finally, at 7:30 p.m. on 10 thermidor (July 28), the beheadings commenced. As carts took the victims to their fate, “it was a holiday, all the elegant people were at their windows to see them pass; they applauded and clapped their hands all along the rue Saint-Honoré,” Nicolas Ruault wrote. Robespierre suffered a final indignity when the executioner ripped the bandage from his jaw, leaving him screaming in pain as the blade came down.

Over the next two days, more than a hundred of those who had rallied to his side on 9 thermidor (July 27) were also put to death. Hardly anyone dared to express any sympathy for the victims. Rosalie Jullien, whose son Marc-Antoine had been a favorite of the Incorruptible, was typical in the speed with which she accommodated herself to the new state of affairs. “The quickness of events is as miraculous as their importance,” she wrote to her son, “and six hours was perhaps the whole space that destiny used to carry out such extraordinary changes.” She regretted only that “the infamous Robespierre” had “dragged excellent patriots in his fall.”⁵⁵

The temptation to put all the blame for the violence and excesses of the Terror on Robespierre’s shoulders was understandable. But thousands had played a part in those events, including the remaining members of the Committee of Public Safety, who all kept their positions. Certainly Robespierre was no innocent. He never indulged in the open advocacy of bloodshed that had characterized Marat and Hébert, and he never personally participated in the streetfighting of the Paris journées, or the campaigns of repression that many of his Convention colleagues oversaw in the provinces. But he justified such violence as inevitable and necessary if the goals of the Revolution were to be achieved. Robespierre’s idealization of the people gained him a popular following that lasted well into the period of the Terror, even though he lacked the ability to deal with the common people that accounted for Danton’s success. But Robespierre was also, at least until the last months of his remarkably short public career—he was just thirty-six when he died—a gifted politician, capable of sizing up the forces at work in the complicated situations he confronted and taking effective steps to achieve his goals.

Robespierre’s greatest weakness was the counterpart of his total commitment to his principles: he could only think of those who did not share his convictions as people motivated by selfish interests, and therefore easily corruptible and liable to engage in conspiracies. Some of those he opposed were indeed either corrupt, or willing to use unconstitutional means to oppose the basic principles of the Revolution, or both, including Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, General Dumouriez, Fabre d’Eglantine, and the other participants in the India Company affair. After the war that he had opposed was under way, Robespierre was certainly justified in regarding foreign governments as dangerous foes. Increasingly, however, he came to lump all those who differed with him together with the Revolution’s genuine enemies and to support ever more violent measures against them.

Once Robespierre became convinced that all those who disagreed with him were tied to a foreign-backed plot that brought together federalists, de-Christianizers, Indulgents, and royalists, all of them capable of disguising themselves as good patriots, it became increasingly difficult for him to trust anyone. Despite his professed devotion to the people, he came to see even grumbling about food shortages and low wages as signs of conspiracy. The reluctance of many other revolutionaries to pay more than lip service to the moral principles incorporated in the cult of the Supreme Being added to his isolation. By the time of thermidor, the Incorruptible had become a potential threat to almost all of his colleagues: too strongly identified with the revolutionary government to be ignored, but too unpredictable to be trusted. By the same rules he had applied to the leaders of the other revolutionary factions he had helped to eliminate, he had to be destroyed. His death, however inevitable according to the logic of the political system he had done so much to create, nevertheless left a yawning void. Robespierre was the last figure who could truly claim to have embodied the vision of liberty and equality that had inspired so many participants in the Revolution. His execution meant the abandonment of the utopian hopes that had been expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, leaving his successors to struggle with the question of what values the revolutionary movement and the republic now stood for.

The events of 9 thermidor ended Robespierre’s career, but the way in which the day’s victors rushed the Robespierrists to the guillotine indicated that they were not yet ready to abandon the methods of the Terror. Many of those who soon came to be known as the “thermidorians” had been as responsible as Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon for its policies. The human cost of the period of revolutionary government was high, but it had successfully warded off the combined forces of the other European powers, as well as the royalist uprising in the west and the federalist revolts. With great difficulty, it had kept the urban population from facing actual starvation and had provided its armies with enough supplies to enable them to prevail. While its more extreme measures had alienated a good part of the population, the revolutionary government had also inspired real support from thousands of ordinary people, who served as local officials, engaged themselves as militants, participated in public festivals, and put up with the sacrifices demanded of them. No one could claim that the Terror had respected the ideals of liberty proclaimed in 1789, but it was not easy to completely dismiss the argument that Robespierre had made when he had insisted that ordinary rules could not be followed in an emergency situation as drastic as that facing the country in the Year II. Although the Terror restricted liberty, it continued to promote the other great revolutionary ideal of equality, embedding it deeply in the minds and daily habits of the population. Even in hindsight it is difficult to say that the basic achievements of the Revolution could have been preserved in 1793 and 1794 without something resembling a revolutionary dictatorship.

15

THE ARC OF TERROR

January–July 1794