Doom at Lyons
AT the village of Sainte-Foy, on October 2, a long expected coach arrived from Clermont-Ferrand. From it, with difficulty, helped by his wife, emerged the “nimble general,” as the paralyzed Couthon jokingly called himself. He was received by five representatives on mission, including Maignet and Chateauneuf-Randon, and by a staff of military officials, who had captured Sainte-Foy only three days before.
The army that he now joined was a large one, but heterogeneous and without unified leadership. It included the contingent from Puy-de-Dôme and other hastily assembled bands, raised by the strenuous exertions of representatives on mission. These raw conscripts, though their arrival had been dramatic, could contribute little in proportion to their numbers. The main operations were in the hands of experienced soldiers of the Army of the Alps, who had to be withheld from the frontier until the civil war could be ended.
The headquarters at Sainte-Foy stood on a hill that rose directly above the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. Below it was spread out the city of Lyons, built for the most part on a long tongue of land formed by the junction of the two rivers. It was the second city of France, and a population of 120,000 made it one of the principal cities of Europe. For two months it had lain under siege, holding out stubbornly, but the Jacobin army now pressed within gunshot of its last defenses.
Lyons was a great industrial center, known especially for its manufacture of silks. Double the size of Manchester, highly developed on capitalist principles, it was one of the places where the Revolution took on most clearly the aspect of a class struggle. Like Paris it had been shaken by a series of municipal upheavals. At the beginning of the year the Mountain had come into power, led by the local revolutionist Chalier, who drew support from the large wage-earning class. The industrial and merchant aristocracy resisted; and the violence of the Chalier régime, its subordination to the Mountain in Paris, plus the conservatism of a very old, very proud and very Catholic city, threw the bulk of the population into the hands of the upper bourgeoisie, with the result that, on May 29, a new group came into office, imprisoned Chalier, and threw off the authority of the National Convention. Lyons thus became a leader in the federalist rebellion. Chalier was eventually put to death. Thousands of refugees poured across the bridges, mostly silk-weavers and other working-class people. They settled in rude camps under the protection of the besieging army, supported partly by money sent by the government in Paris.
The tricolor of the Republic continued to float in the beleaguered city. The rebellion was predominantly Girondist; its leaders, at least at the beginning, had no wish to make common cause with the Bourbons or with foreign powers. But Girondinism was somewhat confused, a mixture of philosophic idealism with class prejudice and regional assertiveness, and the Girondists of Lyons, once they defied the Convention, found themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with counter-revolutionists. Royalists flocked in to give a knife thrust to the Republic. Enemy powers were encouraged. The English hoped to hold Toulon as long as Lyons, key to the Rhône valley, was in revolt. The Italians from Piedmont found invasion from the east much simplified, until they were thrown back about the first of October.
Couthon, on arriving, immediately summoned a council of war. Some of the representatives, pointing out that the city was on the brink of starvation, and hoping to spare the bitterness of armed conquest, advised waiting for a peaceable surrender. But the instructions from the Committee of Public Safety were explicit. Faced with the problem of revolt in other southern cities, and of driving the English from Toulon, the Committee demanded that Lyons be occupied without delay. It was probably on the day of Couthon’s arrival that the representatives received their orders. They were urged to lose no time. The message from Paris was a bad omen for the future of Lyons.
“Let them perish,” said the Committee, referring to the rebels, “let the national power, deploying in a terrible manner, wave over this criminal city the sword which too long has threatened guilty heads.”
Couthon therefore ordered an assault, though not without more delay, and not until the rebels had refused two ultimatums calling for surrender. On October 9, meeting with feeble resistance, the Jacobin army marched in—in time, fortunately, for the representatives to gratify the impatient Committee, which had meanwhile demanded news of the fall of Lyons by return of mail.
The city was in chaos. It was strewn with the wreckage of bombardment. Its provisions had disappeared. The shops were closed; some of the citizens were in hiding; many came out to receive food from the conquerors, or to cry “Vive la République” as Couthon’s carriage rolled by, partly because they believed in the Republic, partly to protect themselves from the wrath to come. Fugitive sans-culottes descended from the hills; prisoners of the late régime issued from the jails. City politics was turned upside down; the high became low, and the low high; the oppressed prepared to do vengeance upon the oppressors. The invading army, meanwhile, conducted itself with restraint and even generosity toward the half-starved and terrified inhabitants.
Lyons was a doomed city, but the horrors that it saw in the following weeks were not the work of the invading army, or of Couthon or the other commanders. The army moved southward in a few days. Couthon, though sufficiently “exalted,” was no worshiper of the guillotine.
Couthon on entering the city naturally ordered the inhabitants to disarm themselves. He gave instructions that the shops and factories should return to business, and he requisitioned food from the neighboring country. Hoping to check the excesses of local Jacobins, he forbade the section committees to meet; and when the section politicians began to make arrests and confiscations on their own initiative, he threatened them with imprisonment. He divided the rebels into three classes, those who still bore arms when captured, those who had held civil employment under the rebellious municipality, and those who had simply been “misled”—a category which might include almost everyone in Lyons. Revolutionary tribunals were set up, by which, after due conviction, culprits of the first class were to be guillotined, those of the second shot, and those of the third released after recanting their errors. No one meanwhile was to be imprisoned without examination.
Left to himself, Couthon, in all probability would have reduced punishments to a minimum, and tried to restore the second city to its usual place, an important one, in the economic life of the country. But he faced three kinds of pressure, all irresistible. The local Jacobins would not be stopped in their revenge; they therefore accused him of moderatism, a fatal charge of which he had to free himself at any cost. The clubs in Paris demanded drastic repression. And the Revolutionary Government, for reasons of state, was determined to make of Lyons a horrible example.
The responsibility for what followed lies largely with the Committee of Public Safety, so far as that body, dependent as it was, in October, on the support of the revolutionary elements in Paris, may be held responsible for anything it did.
A week after entering Lyons, on the day of the battle of Wattignies and of the death of Marie Antoinette, Couthon and his colleagues received from the Committee an extraordinary decree. They professed themselves “penetrated with admiration.” They wrote back in ironic language: all the wise measures enjoined upon them for disciplining the city had already been taken, except one—its total destruction.
The Committee of Public Safety had decided to blot the memory of Lyons from the French mind.
To achieve this end it passed through the Convention on October 12 one of the most remarkable documents of the Revolution. After articles one and two came the following:
3. The city of Lyons shall be destroyed. Every habitation of the rich shall be demolished; there shall remain only the homes of the poor, the houses of patriots who have been led astray or proscribed, the buildings employed in industry and the monuments devoted to humanity and public instruction.
4. The name of Lyons shall be effaced from the list of cities of the Republic. The collection of houses left standing shall henceforth bear the name of Ville-Affranchie—the Liberated City.
5. On the ruins of Lyons shall be raised a column attesting to posterity the crimes and the punishment of the royalists of the city, with this inscription:
Lyons made war on Liberty.
Lyons is no more.
18th day of the first month of the Year Two of the French Republic, One and Indivisible.
Barère, who presented the decree to the Convention, declared it necessary as a deterrent to other cities which might rebel.
Collot d’Herbois raged in the Jacobin club, lashing out against the Lyonnese bourgeoisie.
“Some men,” he said, “are disturbed when this or that other man disappears. ‘He gave a living to the poor,’ they say. Should any man who has his hands and his patriotism depend on another for his living? Does he need the existence of another man to support his own? The poor will do without the rich, and Lyons will flourish none the less.”
Collot, in being fiercely equalitarian, was not exactly socialist. In denouncing the rich he apparently had in mind, not a collective economy, but a country of equally small independent tradesmen, individualistic and free, to the point where one man’s existence did not depend on the existence of another. This was a dream. In the real France of 1793, even in the Revolutionary Republic, the slaughter of manufacturers in Lyons would deprive thousands of employment, whatever Collot said, and would certainly not remedy the desperate under-production from which the country already suffered.
It was Robespierre who penned the instructions that the Committee sent to Couthon. His view was less proletarian and more political than Collot’s. He reproved his absent colleague for yielding to a false humanity. A great danger remained, he said; rebels escaped from Lyons were carrying their poison to the other disaffected centers in the south. This belief was mistaken, for the escaped Girondists had fled to the east, and had been cut down almost to a man. But the Committee could not be sure, and the belief was some justification for its action.
“We will not congratulate you on your success,” Robespierre wrote to Couthon, “until you have done all that you owe to our country. Republics are exacting. …” He warned Couthon against being too trustful. Hypocrisy, as always, was to be feared. “Traitors must be unmasked and struck without pity. These principles, adopted by the National Convention, may alone save the country. They are also yours; follow them; listen only to the dictates of your own energy, and execute with an inexorable severity the salutary decree which we are addressing to you.” The decree was the order for the destruction of Lyons.
Couthon was undoubtedly embarrassed by this new word from Paris. It is not rare for the man on the spot to find himself given fantastic orders, or for men at the front to find those at home outdoing them in savagery of feeling. Couthon was not a weak man; he showed his determination both at Lyons and in Puy-de-Dôme. He was not a moderate man; in his political principles he was always in the forefront of the Mountain. Perplexed historians usually conclude that he had a divided nature. He lacked the absolute single-mindedness of the men who dominate revolutions. He was profoundly different from Robespierre. Humorous enough to jest about his own affliction, dependent upon friendship, a married man and a father, he did not make his political views the entire substance of his life, he was not consumed by suspicion, and he still believed, as Robespierre once had, that killing, whatever its purpose, is in itself an evil. Nor did he think, like Collot d’Herbois, that intimidation of others was a sign of strength.
Four days after receiving his new orders Couthon asked to be relieved of his mission at Lyons. He addressed the request, not directly to the Committee, or to Robespierre, but to Saint-Just. The letter is one of the few pieces of evidence that allow us to see the Committee of Public Safety as an association of human beings.
“You have not written me a line, my friend,” he said, “since we last saw each other. I am disappointed, because you had promised in case of absence to send me news. Hérault has done better than you have; I have received two of his letters.” Couthon did not know that Hérault, thanks to Fabre d’Eglantine’s “foreign plot,” was now on the black books of the Committee. “You know, my friend, that to console me in the troubles that beset me I need some expressions of interest from those whom I esteem. Tell me that you still exist, that you are well, that you haven’t forgotten me, and I shall be content. … Embrace Robespierre, Hérault and our other good friends for me. … My wife, Hippolyte [his son] and myself embrace you with all our heart.”
From glimpses such as this we may imagine the spirit of fellowship which, in the fall of 1793, held the Committee together.
The business part of the letter came between the expressions of friendship. The Lyonnese, said Couthon, would never be good patriots. Jacobins should be sent from Paris to regenerate them. Meanwhile, might he be transferred to Toulon? The southern air would improve his health. And lastly (as if to show the integrity expected by the Committee in its agents) might he keep for his own use a curious telescope that had belonged to a rebel leader?
Pending a reply from Paris, Couthon launched the new revolutionary courts, which, however, went into operation so slowly that relatively few executions took place before he left. He began also the process of demolition ordered from the capital. At half past seven in the morning, accompanied by a few soldiers and city officials, he drove into the Place Bellecour, one of the showplaces of Lyons, and after reading the decree of the Convention, solemnly struck three strokes with a hammer on one of the buildings, saying, “In the name of the Law I condemn you to be demolished.” The inhabitants had been given time to move, and the wreckers did not hurry with the work. Couthon would probably have been content with formalities. Even some Jacobins protested, declaring that a war against sticks and stones was absurd.
Couthon managed to escape from what he could not prevent, leaving Lyons before the real violence began, going, as we know, not to Toulon, but to Clermont. He did not wait to report to his successors.
These successors were two of the men from whom, in all France, the people of Lyons could expect the least indulgence, Collot d’Herbois and Joseph Fouché, sent with the confidence of the Committee, of which Collot d’Herbois was the most stormy member.
Two strange lives here came together for a few weeks. Collot was an ex-actor, Fouché a onetime professor of physics. Collot was a rake, Fouché a respectable family man. Collot was to die within a few years wretchedly in Guiana, Fouché to emerge from his radical phase as the magnificent Duke of Otranto. The ex-actor was inclined to rant; he was an expansive, vehement, emotional and vulgar man, craving the center of the stage, dramatizing and gesticulating and bellowing when excited. The ex-professor was more quiet; he was cold, intellectual, canny; he preferred to work behind the scenes, delighting in anonymous omnipotence; and his manners were carefully governed. Both, in 1793, were furious equalitarians, and both were unscrupulous.
Fouché had long served in various posts as representative on mission. In the Nièvre, where he was stationed at the time of his appointment to Lyons, his policies were much like those of Couthon in the Puy-de-Dôme. He was a little more harsh with people of wealth, a little more radical in Dechristianization. His main aim, like Couthon’s, was to mobilize the resources and control the public opinion of the department. He had set up no revolutionary courts, and no one was put to death in the Nièvre during his rule, though some were sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. By and large, only one charge led to many death sentences during the Terror—sedition. Even Fouché, who was rabid against both the bourgeoisie and the church, hardly used the guillotine except on those whom he thought to be traitors. The Terror did not kill people for religion, as had once been the practice in Europe, nor yet for their belonging to a class or race, as has since happened. It was primarily a weapon for enforcing political allegiance.
Collot d’Herbois had shown the bent of his mind in September, when he demanded death for those who gave out false news, and suggested that the Paris prisons, filled with suspects, should be blown up with mines. He especially detested the bourgeoisie of Lyons. Years before, as manager of the theater in that city, occupying a position that was then only partly respectable, he had seen the social pretensions and the snobbery of the moneyed classes. He had grudges and grievances and a sense of dramatic retribution. He was the only member of the Committee of Public Safety who did not come from a comfortable position in society. He was definitely a Hébertist, the chief author of the law against hoarding, and a consistent enemy of the “aristocracy of merchants.”
At Lyons the bourgeoisie had risen in political revolt. The disciplining of rebels, which in some parts of the country meant the repression of peasants, here meant the repression of middle and upper class people. The opportunity was one which Fouché and Collot both used and enjoyed.
Robespierre later condemned the activities of Collot and Fouché on their joint mission. In the end, the hostility of these two to Robespierre helped to bring about his fall. Even in October Robespierre probably had no respect for either man. Collot had been taken into the Committee of Public Safety merely for political reasons; Fouché showed the same violence against religion for which Robespierre had already rebuked André Dumont. Some writers therefore conclude that Robespierre and the Committee, under Hébertist pressure in Paris, consented unwillingly to send Collot and Fouché to Lyons. They would in effect transfer from Robespierrists to Hébertists the responsibility for the massacres that ensued.
COLLOT D’HERBOIS
It is easy to exaggerate this Hébertist pressure, because it is easy to call Hébertist a great many developments, such as the Maximum, the Levy in Mass, the war on the rich, the attacks on revealed religion, to which Mountaineers of many varieties at one time or another gave their enthusiastic assent. Vengeance upon Lyons was a Hébertist cry. It was also the policy of the government. The Committee had once tried conciliation. Robert Lindet had attempted in June to find a peaceable arrangement. He had failed; then came the siege, the long resistance, the hopes given to federalists, Vendéans, royalists and foreigners. Lyons became the symbol of obstruction. It was to be made, therefore, the symbol of Revolutionary justice. The word “city,” said Barère, cannot be applied to a nest of conspirators. Robespierre blamed Couthon for moderation. Carnot drew up the order for dispatching the dreaded Revolutionary Army to the scene.
The rulers in Paris sent Fouché because they thought that his ideas, though perhaps too advanced for a quiet region, were suited to a country in insurrection. They formally endorsed his services in the Nièvre when they transferred him to Ville-Affranchie. They sent Collot, not simply as a means of placating the Hébertists, but because they wanted a known terrorist and a member of the Committee on the spot. They did not foresee what their two agents would do. But they urged them to be severe.
“These monsters must be unmasked and exterminated, or I must perish!” This was Robespierre’s policy toward Lyons. Who were the monsters? How could one know? Enemies of the people were cunning in their disguise. They were often hypocrites. War, then, upon hypocrisy! But in a war on hypocrisy men may be accused of faults of which they give no sign, denounced for a word casually spoken, for an acquaintance that may be accidental, for an intention that may be only half conceived. The hunt for hypocrites is boundless, and can produce nothing but demoralization.
Collot reached Lyons on November 4. He immediately ordered a new “national tool, otherwise known as the holy guillotine.” Fouché arrived almost a week later. It is possible that, to protect himself against an unknown future, he purposely lagged behind, so that Collot might assume the initiative and appear as the senior partner.
Both men brought an entourage of Jacobins who joined forces with the native sans-culottes. One of the first acts was a ceremonial purification of the city. A festival was held to honor the martyred Chalier.
“To purge the earth and the place where the last remains of this great man were to repose, ten heads were immolated yesterday, and perhaps ten more will fall tomorrow.” The words are those of an eye-witness who glowed with satisfaction. Another described the event as follows in an ill-spelled report: “The most remarkable facts are first that an ass was dressed as a Monseigneur. A mitre and cross and all the finest pontifical garments were put on him. And church vases of gold and silver were carried before the ass. And along the way incense was burnt for him. And the said vases were broken on the tomb.”
These crude impieties, which were continued in a Festival of Reason two décades later, were in direct opposition to the wishes of the Committee of Public Safety. Collot d’Herbois did not have the excuse of Couthon, who was taking part in similar desecrations at this time at Clermont. Couthon perhaps did not know the views of the Committee. But Collot had just come from Paris. He had signed his name, on October 27, to Robespierre’s dispatch to André Dumont, instructing Dumont to respect the objects of Catholic worship. Since Lyons was full of Hébertists from Paris, who were supported by Fouché, Collot perhaps could not in any case have enforced the religious policy of the Committee. Certainly he did not try.
There is no reason to believe that Robespierre disapproved at the time of the rest of Collot’s program, so far as he understood it. Collot’s letters to Paris kept the Committee informed of his general plans. From the same letters we can see the ideas with which he entered upon his work.
He came to Lyons as a man bent on the annihilation of an accursed city. He interpreted the famous decree in a sweeping sense. The decree, after all, beneath the pompous phraseology, specified for destruction only the houses of the rich. Collot meant to go further. He thought that the demolitions under Couthon had been too slow. He prepared to smash the city with mines and artillery fire. “The explosion of mines, etc., the devouring activity of flame can alone express the omnipotence of the people; its will cannot be checked like that of tyrants; it must have the effect of thunder.” Collot might have recalled that thunder in itself is only a loud noise, which produces few effects except sometimes to turn milk sour.
Collot believed that there were virtually no reliable patriots in Lyons. He thought of his mission as a visitation of justice, in which men from one city came to work their will upon those of another. He saw nothing improper in giving free rein to the Jacobins and the Revolutionary Army that streamed in from Paris. These men he identified with the “entire people.” The inhabitants of Lyons, whose number he estimated at from 130,000 to 150,000, he regarded as “individuals.” Individuals, he thought, could be shown no mercy by the Revolution. He hoped, however, that some of the Lyonnese could be saved. It seemed to him that about 60,000 were of the working class. He recommended that these 60,000 (at first he said 100,000) should be uprooted from Lyons, distributed through patriotic parts of the country, and shaped into true republicans by their new environment. “Disseminated and watched, they will at least follow the lead of those who march beside them. Kept together, they would long be a dangerous nucleus, always favorable to enemies of true principles.” Collot thus anticipated the methods of mass transportation used by more recent dictators. “You are too philosophical,” he wrote to Robespierre, “to let this idea escape you.” It is to be remarked that mass transportation had already been used by the British in Acadia.
The rest of the city’s inhabitants Collot seems hardly to have considered among the population. “The population once evacuated,” he wrote to Couthon explaining the same idea, “it will be easy to make the city disappear, and to say with truth, ‘Lyons is no more.’ ” Even Collot d’Herbois can hardly have proposed to put to death the sixty-odd thousand whom he deemed unworthy to transport. What he thought, if he thought at all clearly on this point, is not known.
The new proconsul was impatient at the leisurely habits of Couthon’s courts. Where Couthon had meant to punish only active rebels, Collot held that no one was innocent who had not suffered from the preceding régime. “Indulgence is a dangerous weakness.” Scoundrels must perish to assure life to future generations. When he had been in Lyons a month he found that traitors were still not dying fast enough. Twenty executions a day, he said, were not sufficient to frighten the Lyonnese. “Kings punished slowly, because they were weak and cruel; the justice of the people must be as prompt as the expression of its will.” He therefore sought more dynamic methods.
To keep passions aroused, he sent on to the Convention a model of the head of Chalier, which had been badly mangled by the Girondist guillotine. It was to be used as a kind of holy relic. “When attempts are made to move your more tender feelings,” he wrote to the assembly, “uncover this bleeding head to the eyes of pusillanimous men who see only individuals.” To Duplay, Robespierre’s friend and landlord, he observed that the humane sentiments of rebels were mere pretense. “On that side are men who affect a false and barbarous sensibility. Our sensibility is entirely for our country.” So the line is drawn, the fatal antithesis, “we and they.” We represent totality, patriotism, sincerity, devotion; they represent mere individuals, treachery, hypocrisy, pig-headedness.
Collot d’Herbois thus becomes a political fanatic. His mind is turned by the fundamental idea of the Revolution, the transfer of sovereignty from king to people. In the name of the people he pushes the meaning of sovereignty to its most hideous extreme: absolute will; inhuman, unmoral, illimitable power. He has made himself a new God, the “people,” from which he sees his enemies hopelessly estranged. His “people” is omnipotent and wrathful. To glorify it he will blow up whole cities. Humanity, practical sense, even self-interest are forgotten, lost in the frenzy of good intentions, taut emotions and fixed ideas of which fanaticism is compounded.
A fanatic, however unreasoning, may serve an intelligible cause. The cause for which Collot d’Herbois labored was the struggle against the bourgeoisie. In his mind, more clearly than for most Jacobins, the people meant the proletariat. Fouché at this time was of much the same opinion. Lyons offered them a good field of operations, for at Lyons the lines of economic class were clear. The proconsuls had to admit that the masses in the city were not good Jacobins. They would have been embarrassed if asked to state an economic philosophy. They had no real program for the production of goods once the bourgeoisie should be liquidated. Their economic aims were confused by sentimentalism, political expediency and atheistical fervors. Their campaign was blind and spasmodic, but it was none the less a move in a class war.
To carry out their orders they created a Temporary Commission of twenty members. The obscure persons thus raised to power were not above a common frailty: they wished to be recognized. They adopted a uniform, though their office was a civil one, and even forbade the citizens of Lyons to wear their chosen color, blue. The Commissioners were apparently in need of clothing, and their wants were not modest. For each one, out of the public funds, were ordered, to be exact: a blue coat with red collar, blue trousers with leather between the legs, breeches of deerskin, an overcoat and leather suitcase, a cocked hat with tricolor plume, a black shoulder-belt, various medals, six shirts, twelve pocket handkerchiefs, muslin for six ordinary cravats, black taffeta for two dress cravats, a tricolored belt, six cotton nightcaps, six pairs of stockings, two pairs of shoes, kid gloves à l’espagnole, boots à l’américaine, bronzed spurs, saddle pistols and a hussar’s saber.
Thus outfitted, and supplied with suitable mounts, the Commission administered Revolutionary law in Lyons and the whole department of the Rhône. It drew up, with the knowledge of the representatives, an “Instruction to the Constituted Authorities,” which has been called the first communist manifesto of modern times. The Instruction laid down as a principle: “All is permitted to those who act in the Revolutionary direction.”
According to the Instruction the Revolution was especially made for the “immense class of the poor.” The authors found a “shocking disproportion” between toil and income. They assailed the bourgeoisie; and they cried to the working class somewhat in the manner of Marx: “You have been oppressed; you must crush your oppressors!”
Products of French soil were declared to belong to “France.” The farmer was to receive an “indemnity” in exchange for his goods. The wealth of the rich was put at the disposal of the Republic. Those who had an annual income of 10,000 livres were to pay a revolutionary tax of 30,000 livres. “There is no question here of mathematical exactness or timid scruples in the levying of public taxes.”
The Instruction provided death as the penalty even for those whose connection with the rebellion was indirect. It was strongly Dechristianizing. Declaring (somewhat inconsistently) that priests were the sole causes of the public misery, and that the relations of God and man were purely internal, it confiscated the precious objects in churches, and directed that public symbols of the cult should be destroyed.
To some extent the revolutionary tax was collected. With the methods of administration that were available, it could scarcely be distinguished from plunder. Requisitions were made also on the neighboring peasants. Collot observed that, in view of the competition for food among conflicting powers, the most successful operators were those who travelled with armed forces. The peasants tended to regard this procedure as nothing but rapine. As for lawyers, nobles and priests, they were jailed as suspects without more ado, and their property confiscated.
The machinery of repression was completed at the end of November. On the 25th the Revolutionary Army at last arrived, several hundred men with cannon, commanded by Ronsin, who like Collot d’Herbois was a playwright by profession. The “army” had seen service in the Vendée. It was now to combat a people already defeated. Theoretically composed of patriots who, by age or marriage, were exempt from service at the front, it had in its ranks a medley of draft evaders, drifters, adventurers and toughs, ready to do any strong-arm work that political leaders might require. Collot d’Herbois had impatiently awaited their arrival.
Ronsin had a very low opinion of Lyons, where, he said, there were not 1,500 patriots. He wrote to the Cordeliers club in Paris describing his entrance into the city:
“Terror was painted on every face. The deep silence that I took care to recommend to our brave troops made their march even more menacing and terrible. Most of the shops were closed. A few women stood along our way. In their faces could be read more indignation than fear. The men stayed hidden in those same dens from which, during the siege, they came out to murder the true friends of liberty. The guillotine and the fusillade have done justice to more than four hundred rebels. But a new revolutionary commission has just been established, composed of true sans-culottes. My colleague Parein is president, and in a few days grapeshot, launched by our cannoneers, will have delivered us in a single instant of more than four thousand conspirators. It is time to shorten the forms!”
The new commission to which Ronsin referred was the Tribunal of Seven, organized under the chairmanship of Parein by Collot and Fouché on November 27, and destined shortly to replace all the other revolutionary courts in the vicinity.
A few days later (it was the day of the Feast of Reason) the two proconsuls received a petition from the women of Lyons, said to bear more than 10,000 signatures. The petitioners remonstrated against having the destiny of a great city decided by seven judges. They implored mercy for the thousands of men crowded in the jails. They appealed to nature, humanity, posterity. The authorities remained unmoved. “The revolutionary march takes no holiday,” said Fouché, though not publicly. “It no more stops than does the will and the justice of the people.” The city officials were more direct. “Shut yourselves up in the privacy of your household tasks,” they announced to the women. “Let us see no more of the tears that dishonor you!” Jacobins would consider this answer truly Roman in its grandeur and virility.
So preparations went ahead. The people of Lyons were not yet sufficiently frightened. As Collot said, twenty deaths a day were not enough. As Ronsin said, the inhabitants were more indignant than afraid. As Parein said, it was absolutely essential “to impress terror on the brows of the rebels if we do not wish to run the risk of being assassinated ourselves.”
The climax came on December 4, the 14th of Frimaire, the day of the great law that made much of what was happening at Lyons illegal.
Sixty persons, condemned by the Tribunal of Seven, were marched out to the Broteaux, an open place across the Rhône from the city. They arrived singing the Girondist hymn, offering, like Jacobins, to die for their country. They were placed between open ditches intended for their graves. Three loaded cannon were directed on the spot. Near at hand stood dragoons with drawn sabers. The cannon fired; the victims crumpled; the dragoons scrambled over the ditches to put an end to the writhing and screaming mass. The process is said to have taken two hours, owing to the inexperience of the swordsmen. Even Collot admitted that it took too long. Two victims who managed to bolt were shot in flight.
On the next day about two hundred and nine were brought to the Broteaux. The exact number is not known, so hasty was the procedure; tradition says that two government employees who happened to be at the prison were herded in with the others despite their protestations. The condemned men were tied together and raked with grapeshot. One, formerly a member of the Constituent Assembly, set free when his hand was shot off, began to run. He was caught and dispatched by Ronsin’s men. The others, variously wounded, were killed and their bodies thrown into the ditches. The graves were so shallow that within a few weeks the municipality had to sprinkle them with quicklime to prevent pestilence.
Another hundred were similarly put to death after a pause of two days.
Wholesale execution at Lyons began in this gruesome manner. The guillotine presently resumed its old ascendancy as the means of death. Never again were two hundred massacred in one day. But the totals mounted. The stench and filth about the guillotine became a public problem, with which a special commission had to deal. Degradation reached the point where women and children, for souvenirs, snatched bloodsoaked garments from dead bodies. At this development even the man who had commanded at the massacres of Frimaire was revolted. He thought it “incompatible with republican austerity.”
By April 1794 almost two thousand persons had been put to death at Lyons, more than a tenth of all those sentenced by revolutionary courts for all France during the whole period of the Terror. Of the victims at Lyons 64 per cent came from the middle and upper classes. For France outside Lyons the figure for these classes was only 28 per cent. The Lyonnese bourgeoisie paid dearly for its rebellion.
The events of 14 and 15 Frimaire filled the harpies at the doomed city with great joy. The long promised thunder and lightning had at last struck. Presumably the people of Lyons would henceforth be sufficiently afraid.
“May this festival,” wrote the judge Dorfeuille to the president of the Convention, “forever impress terror upon the souls of rascals and confidence upon the hearts of republicans!” It was the ultimate fatuity of the Terrorists to believe that confidence could be created by intimidation. “I say festival, citizen president; yes, festival is the word. When crime descends to the grave humanity breathes again, and it is the festival of virtue.”
“Still the heads fall, heads every day!” read a letter to Paris written on 17 Frimaire by Achard, whom Robespierre carried on his lists of usable followers. “What delight you would have tasted if you had seen day before yesterday the national justice upon two hundred and nine scoundrels! What majesty! What imposing tone! It was all edifying. How many villains bit the dust in the arena of the Broteaux! What a cement for the Republic!” After a sentimental quiver at the thought of patriots whom the tribunal had acquitted, Achard estimated that at least another thousand heads would roll. “P. S. Greetings to Robespierre, Duplay and Nicolas.”
It is unnecessary to quote further from the tidings sent home by these apostles. It is only necessary to observe the combination of blood lust with the jargon of revolutionary idealism. It is necessary to realize that these men inflicted death with a holy glee.
What the Committee of Public Safety thought of the massacres will never be certainly known. Couthon, now back in Paris, must have been sickened. Nor could he have been the only one. To what extent the Committee was taken by surprise is also not quite clear. The procedure used in the Broteaux was exactly outlined by the Temporary Commission more than ten days in advance. It was common knowledge in the inner circle at Lyons. Ronsin predicted it when he wrote to the Cordeliers. But apparently his letter reached Paris at about the time of the massacre itself.
It is significant that Collot d’Herbois, reporting on 15 Frimaire, did not write either to the Committee or to Robespierre, though both were among his regular correspondents. He wrote to Duplay, his friend and Robespierre’s. He mentioned the massacres casually, as if they were nothing very unusual. He meant them to be unusual, however; their whole purpose was to frighten the Lyonnese by a spectacular and unparalleled act of justice. Had he believed that Robespierre and the Committee would be as enthusiastic as he was, he would probably have sent a more direct and more glowing account.
The Committee, moreover, it should be remembered, had long opposed the tendency of representatives on mission to become independent potentates. Billaud-Varenne kept the issue alive. He too was a Hébertist, admitted to the Committee along with Collot d’Herbois. The two men developed in opposite directions. Collot remained anarchical, wild; Billaud became the apostle of organization. Billaud tried on October 4, acting for the Committee, to curtail the powers of deputies on mission. The Convention demurred; and the Committee had to be content with what Saint-Just could get, the decree declaring the government revolutionary until the peace. But Billaud persisted. At the very time when Collot was planning his massacres, Billaud was urging upon the Convention the bill, prepared by himself and his colleagues, which became the law of 14 Frimaire. This law gave the Committee the right to appoint, control and recall the travelling representatives.
Clemency, to be sure, was not what Billaud or Robespierre wanted in the provinces, certainly not in the Girondist centers. But the Committee of Public Safety did want agents who would obey its orders. Collot d’Herbois had shown by his Dechristianizing fervors, if by nothing else, that he could not be trusted to carry out the policy of the government.
From the evidence, such as it is, a conclusion may be drawn. The Committee did not know of the massacres in advance (though perhaps some extremists in Paris did); and it did not much like them when they happened. Presented with the accomplished fact, it had to give its approval. No one in authority could afford to bear the stigma of moderatism. No one could seem to befriend enemies of the people. No one claiming to be true to the Revolution could safely seem less advanced than another who made the same claim. This was the reality in what has been called “Hébertist pressure.” Until extremists could be branded as traitors, extremism held a whip hand over more moderate counsels. So long as relatively moderate men might be accused of falling short of the aims which all acknowledged, the moderate men would have to accept, endorse and even glorify the acts of the more violent.
The Committee of Public Safety was caught in this predicament with respect to the slaughter at Lyons. Its members had stated their aims. They had used inflammatory language: the sword of the law must wave; monsters must be exterminated; a nest of conspirators is not a city; republics are exacting. They had declared, grandiosely, without meaning it (as the wording of the decree showed): “Lyons shall be destroyed.” They believed in the Terror, in creating confidence by fear, and purity by excision. They did not intend to have two thousand persons killed, or to have massacres theatrically staged to the taste of overheated playwrights, or to have a great city pillaged by unscrupulous intruders in the name of public duty. They were surprised when all this happened. Whether they should have been is another question. They were simply taken at their word, by men who shared their high-flown phrases but were their inferiors in practical sense and honesty of purpose. And the actions of these men, at least for the time being, had to be accepted and approved.
On December 20 a deputation of citizens of Lyons appeared in Paris at the bar of the Convention. They announced that the city was repentant, eager to enter again into fraternity with the Republic. But how could the raging fury of the terrorists lead to peace? The Convention, they pointed out, had never wished legal forms to be abolished or cruel and hideous forms of death inflicted. It had never authorized the inhumanity which its representatives were displaying. It had not wished to destroy, but to create a new, loyal, prosperous Lyons in place of the old. With this aim the petitioners professed themselves to be in complete agreement.
Doubtless the petitioners expressed more faith in the Jacobin Republic than they really felt, and in that sense were hypocrites of the kind that the Republican authorities were determined to root out. Nevertheless, there was weight in their plea, which the Convention turned over to the Committee of Public Safety for consideration.
Unfortunately for the Liberated City, Collot d’Herbois had already rushed back to Paris in self-defense. When the petition from Lyons reached the green table, there sat Collot with the others to receive it. What passed at the conference no one knows. But the decision was not favorable to the Lyonnese, for the Committee sent Collot to give its answer on the next day in the Convention. The Committee had to acknowledge Collot d’Herbois. Ronsin, a mere street radical, it could disown; it had arrested him a day or two before. The campaign against Hébertists, begun at the time of the Foreign Plot, was steadily progressing, though thus far no important figure had been touched.
Collot said nothing new in his speech to the Convention. He dwelt on his old idea of dispersing the population of Lyons. He deprecated that members should disturb themselves over the shootings in the Broteaux. He reasserted that the troubles of Ville-Affranchie came from the enslavement of the poor by the rich. He painted a dark picture of conspiracies in an unregenerate city, which only unremitting terrorization could keep down. He described with pleasure the speedy trials held out of doors, in the open fields, without stuffy formalities, “under the vault of nature.” And he reminded his hearers that those who died did not really form part of the people.
He succeeded in counteracting the effect of the petition. The Convention did nothing.
That night Collot went to the Jacobins. He passed with flying colors the “purifying scrutiny” which the society was holding. At Hébert’s invitation he described his work at Ville-Affranchie. “In my report to the Convention,” he admitted, “I was obliged to employ every circumlocution and every resource of art to justify my conduct, which facts alone ought to justify.” He reviled the people of the rebel city, especially the women, who he said were “plunged madly into adultery and prostitution.” He denounced the arrest of Ronsin, a worthy patriot who had aided in the good work. Collot thus defied Robespierre, allying himself openly with the ultras whom Robespierre was determined to master.
“Men speak of sensibility,” he concluded. “We too are men with sensibilities. The Jacobins have every virtue. They are compassionate, humane, generous; but they reserve all these feelings for the patriots who are their brothers, which aristocrats will never be.” We and they!
Meanwhile in Lyons, under Fouché, the butchery continued. Plausible reasons for ruthlessness had long since passed. There was no more the first impulse to revenge, for it was almost three months since the city had fallen. The leading rebels were no more to be feared; they had been among the first to die. The federalist movement had long since ebbed; Bordeaux and Marseilles were under control; so was the Vendée. Toulon was retaken from the English on December 19. The foreign menace was no longer alarming; the armies were in a state of semi-hibernation. Class hatred remained, but it was blind hatred, with no real program of economic reconstruction, only a program of plunder and revolutionary extortion. Political disaffection was still much alive, but there was no longer any disaffection at Lyons which endless intimidation would not make worse.
In short, the Terror, which in the preceding summer had had an object, was debased at Lyons in December to an outburst of vindictiveness and fanaticism. What at its best was a reasonable policy of government was here at its worst—a tyranny in the hands of irresponsible and uncontrollable extremists.
Fouché wrote to Collot almost immediately after Collot left for Paris. He had just received news of the capture of Toulon. “Farewell, my friend,” he said. “Tears of joy stream in my eyes and flood my soul. … P. S. We have only one way of celebrating victory. This evening we send two hundred and thirteen rebels under the fire of the lightning-bolt.”
And on the first day of the new year, 1794, the Convention received a hymn to the new era, a message from Fouché, who was fearful that the complaints against his rule might be too favorably heard. The old story was repeated: men who asked moderation were hypocrites and traitors.
“Yes, we dare to admit it, we are shedding much impure blood, but for humanity, and for duty. Representatives of the people, we will not betray the people’s will. …
“Our mission here is difficult and painful. Only an ardent love of country can console and reward the man who, renouncing all the affections which nature and gentle habits have made dear to his heart, surrendering his own sensibility and his own existence, thinks, acts and lives only in the people and with the people, and shutting his eyes to everything about him, sees nothing but the Republic that will rise in posterity on the graves of conspirators and the broken swords of tyranny.”
It is odd to find the Revolutionary faith so warmly expressed by Fouché, known as a cynic and double dealer, famous as minister of police under Napoleon. Was he sincere in 1793? Very likely he was. Perhaps the cynicism of his later years came from disillusionment in a faith once held with absolute firmness. Persons of many kinds saw a vision during the Revolution. Some were lovers of power, men of little scruple in ordinary dealings with others. Their vision was not for that reason less genuinely seen. They were not hypocrites. Fouché may have been one of these men. He was the same Fouché in 1793 and ten years later, a lover of power, a hunter of suspects and user of devious methods. But in 1793 he believed that he served a noble cause, that when he acted with unchecked violence he expressed the omnipotence of the people. Ten years later, like so many who begin by believing that the end justifies the means, he found that the means to which he had grown accustomed had become ends in themselves, good because they produced results; and so he pursued power and hunted suspects, no longer in the name of a humanitarian ideal, but to serve Bonaparte—and himself.
As for Lyons, we must note that the menaces and the maledictions had, after all, less effect than might have been expected. Lyons was not destroyed. Not all the guilty perished. The population was not transported. Relatively few buildings were demolished. In a year or two the city bore few external signs of the Jacobin visitation. But its citizens long nourished a sense of outrage, and thousands believed that members of their families had been brutally murdered. Memories created during the Terror dominated all the later history of France, and indeed of all Europe. We cannot understand that history or those memories without dwelling on events which many modern historians pass over as sensational. As if the sensational, for human beings, were unimportant.