The Missions to Brittany
MOVING out from the green room in the Tuileries where the Twelve had their headquarters, we have travelled north with Carnot to Flanders, east with Saint-Just and Hérault to Alsace, south with Couthon and Collot d’Herbois to Clermont and to Lyons. In the west also, in Brittany, two members of the great Committee were at work. We must round out the circle before returning to Paris. And we must begin again with the troubled month of September 1793.
It was in September that the Twelve came together in the Committee of Public Safety. In September the Republic passed the turning point from anarchy toward dictatorial rule. September saw the organization of the Levy in Mass, the proclaiming of terror the order of the day, the passage of the Law of Suspects, the adoption of the General Maximum for the control of prices. With the Hébertist uprising of September 5 the Committee of Public Safety was pushed to the left, and from the crisis in the Convention on September 25 it emerged more closely knit, as a kind of cabinet with a prospect of continued power. In these weeks the Committee was already working toward the restoration of central authority made official two months later in the Law of 14 Frimaire. In September also occurred the battle of Hondschoote, which marked the beginning of victory over the Allies.
Since no one at the time knew that September was a turning point, the atmosphere of the month was scarcely one of triumph. The revolutionary leaders viewed each other with fear and suspicion. The foreign enemy was still on French soil. With its internal enemies the Republic was fighting civil war. The country was threatened by famine; farmers and merchants were opposed to the government; the restless masses in the cities, especially Paris, were exploited by agitators of both left and right. The army was in appalling condition, with the officers either untrustworthy or untried, and the troops demoralized, turbulent, unarmed, ragged and barefoot.
In September also the navy fell to pieces. The fleet which had long rivalled the English, which only fifteen years before had helped to break up the British Empire, landing an expeditionary force three thousand miles away in the War of American Independence, was now not even protecting the coast of France.
It was in the first days of September that Paris heard the news from Toulon. There the royalists had thrown open the port to the British, and the French Mediterranean fleet had given itself up to Admiral Hood. Only the Atlantic fleet remained. It was assigned to guarding the western coast. But the sailors aboard certain ships mutinied in Quiberon bay; the officers yielded to prevent armed rebellion; and the squadron, at the demand of the insurgents, sailed back to its headquarters at Brest. So the sea was left open to the British.
The governing Committee acted with its usual speed, and with something more than its usual audacity. It decreed on September 22 that 100,000 men should be made ready for an invasion of England. On the same day, to make feasible this idea, which in the circumstances was fantastic, it selected two of its members, Jeanbon Saint-André and Prieur of the Marne, to restore order in the Atlantic fleet. Not till October 1 could the two commissioners depart. Then six days in a lumbering carriage brought them finally to Brest.
There in the great harbor took place a memorable scene. Twenty-two ships of the line rode at anchor, intermixed with frigates and lesser vessels. The Representatives of the People, accompanied by a party of admirals and civilian authorities, made a systematic inspection. The most mutinous crews were visited first. They saw emerge from the mists of a dismal morning, as from a remote world which they had incautiously forgotten, the brass buttons and red sashes that betokened supreme power in the Republic; the voice of Paris spoke on the decks, answering the sullenness of the seamen with cold phrases of authority, questioning officers and men, ordering punishment for the guilty. The next day was clear, and in radiant sunshine the representatives boarded the ships whose spirit was more sound, leaving the most loyal to the end. Ships of the line became temples of patriotism; the representatives delivered lay sermons on the gains of the Revolution, whereby the lowest seaman could aspire to the rank of admiral; everyone joined in singing the “Marseillaise,” representatives, officers and men, on the decks, on the masts and spars and on neighboring ships, until the harbor rang; and at the last couplet, “O holy love of fatherland,” hats came off and all went down reverently on their knees.
Was Saint-André reminded of his past? It was thus that the French Protestants had worshiped when they were outlawed, meeting outdoors, hearing sermons, singing hymns, kneeling and praying in the fields. Now, in October 1793, in the Republic which was itself a church with a new message of salvation, among a forest of masts and ropes filled with men cheering and waving their caps, Saint-André and his companions were rowed back to the dock in a tumult which, as one of the party wrote, did homage to “the divine character of the French which will soon be that of the world.”
To inspect the ships and revive the spirit of the seamen was only the first step. With the first shouting over, Saint-André and Prieur began to face the real difficulties of their task. They began also to disagree. Saint-André objected to Prieur’s using convicts from the hulks as witnesses for the government. The two men were of different types both of which contributed to the Revolution. Both believed in equality as proclaimed by the Republic. But Prieur was a firebrand, little governed by policy, trusting to the strength of feelings. Saint-André was a man of affairs, a lover of order and efficiency, born with the gifts of the administrator, which he had shown before the Revolution and was to show when the Revolution was over. They did not clash seriously, for on October 20 Prieur went off to Vannes to prepare for operations against the Vendée. Saint-André remained at Brest to reorganize the fleet.
Even after separating, and though engaged in very different work, Saint-André and Prieur, along with a dozen other representatives on mission, were attacking the same general problem, the total situation in the west of which the naval situation was a part.
This total situation had very deep roots. Brittany was a long peninsula, with poor roads, not strongly attached to the rest of France. It had enjoyed certain provincial liberties under the kings; its clergy and nobility were therefore influential; the peasants were not used to central government, and looked for leadership to their gentlemen and their priests. The same was true in lesser measure in the adjoining department of the Vendée. When the Revolution came the plain country people objected to the new demands of central government, to its taxes, its religious policy, its conscription of soldiers. Their stubborn displeasure turned into fanaticism, until the country teemed with secret messengers, nocturnal councils, inflammatory sermons, visions, martyrdoms and holy apparitions. In this atmosphere grew up, in the Vendée, the Catholic and Royal Army, a host of peasants fighting to preserve their old way of life, which meant also the old way of life of the king, the nobility and the church.
All around the French coast from Cherbourg to Nantes it was only in some of the seaboard cities that the Republicans had any hold, and even here they were usually federalist and Girondist. Saint-André at Brest, Prieur at Vannes, Carrier at Nantes, were almost like men stationed in a foreign country. For a Republican naval base there could hardly be a worse location than at Brest, at the extreme tip of Brittany, shut off by days of travel from a reliable hinterland, with provisions hard to obtain among a disaffected peasantry, and seamen largely recruited from this same insurgent region.
On October 17 the Vendéans began to cross the Loire and move into Brittany. Some eighty thousand in number, half of them women and children, fleeing before the Republican troops, they spread out formlessly for miles, ravaging and foraging as they went, committing atrocities which were repaid in kind, an anarchic horde without purpose or destination.
The British government had for some time considered assistance to these insurgents. Downing Street was importuned by French émigrés, beset by agents of the counts of Artois and Provence, Louis XVI’s brothers. The royal princes wished to restore the absolute rule of the Bourbon house, the refugee French nobles to regain their privileges and their estates. Artois declared with great fanfare that he longed only to set foot on the Vendéan coast, to share in the heroic miseries of his loyal subjects; the émigrés raised the cry for a holy war against atheism and anarchy. But Artois expected to be transported and maintained by His Majesty’s Government in a manner befitting a royal highness, and the émigrés in London, when asked to form an army, were noticeably backward in volunteering. All were dependent on the British, whom they repelled by their voluble lightheadedness. The British government had no interest in restoring either absolutism or feudalism in France, but wished to end the war, defeat the revolutionary régime, preserve the old balance of power on the Continent, and win territory in the colonies. Finally, after much bickering and negotiation, George III on October 29 issued a manifesto to the French people. Realistic in recognizing certain facts of the Revolution, it promised that purchasers of confiscated property should not be disturbed, and that the French people might select their own form of government, though “moderate” monarchy was strongly recommended. At the same time the British promised aid to the Vendéans, and asked them to seize a port at which an expeditionary force could be landed.
If, however, by British help, the émigrés and the Bourbons were to triumph in France, nothing would remain of the Revolution, however much the British may have wished to check the excesses of reaction.
The Committee of Public Safety, though without knowledge of details, was aware of the relations among the Vendéans, the royal princes, the émigrés, and the British. They knew that the insurgent west gave allegiance to men outside the Republic. They believed, however, that England also suffered from internal divisions. Believing that peoples everywhere were waiting to be freed from tyrants, they thought that if French forces could invade England, English sans-culottes would rise to support them. Both governments were counting on what would later be called fifth columns.
The Committee demanded therefore, for both offensive and defensive reasons, that the fleet at Brest be made ready to go to sea. There was also another reason. France faced a shortage of food. To bring the needed imports a flotilla of merchantmen was assembling in Chesapeake Bay. The French fleet had the responsibility of convoying these ships through the British blockade. As the months went on, and the scarcity in France became more acute, the safety of the convoy from America became the chief concern of French naval operations.
First of all, before the ships could return to sea, the dissensions among the officers had to be quieted. These dissensions showed the difficulty of reconciling moderate methods with revolutionary aims. The revolutionary authorities, since 1789, knowing that naval officers could not be easily improvised, had refrained from violent purges of the naval commands. At the same time, to assert the new principle of equality in careers, and to fill in the many gaps left by emigration, they had given commissions in the navy to officers of the merchant marine. These men were experienced seamen, for no such tyros could command a frigate as might successfully lead a battalion. But the new officers were the social inferiors of the old. They lacked the prestige of a fighting tradition; their manners were often rough; their attitude toward their men and toward politics was not that of aristocrats. Old and new officers did not mix; cliques and coteries were formed, so that any issue however trifling might split the staff of any ship; and some of the new officers, to heighten their influence, encouraged personal followings among the seamen.
For this situation the only cure was to make the corps of officers more homogeneous, which, in a Republic, meant the dismissal of some of the nobly born. Considering the clamor of denunciation and backbiting in which he worked, Saint-André proceeded with as much prudence, though not with as much brilliant success, as Carnot and Bouchotte in the matter of army appointments. Saint-André found no Bonaparte, though some of the men he promoted came to hold important positions under the Empire. He retained as vice-admiral in command at Brest a commoner, Thévenard, who had risen by exceptional talents to high rank under the old régime; and as vice-admiral in command at sea he kept an ex-nobleman, Villaret-Joyeuse, in spite of Jacobin outcries. Five new rear-admirals were created, all commoners, all captains at the time of promotion, all trained both in the merchant marine and in inferior posts in the old navy, and all, unlike most Republican generals, over forty years old. Of the captains a number of the incumbents were carried over; the new ones were advanced in regular fashion from the ranks below. Dash and untutored genius were not sufficient for a naval officer. There were no cases like that of Jourdan, who became a general in chief in three years.
To strengthen morale Saint-André used much the same methods as Saint-Just with the Army of the Rhine. Like Saint-Just he insisted on discipline, “by which alone armed forces are invincible,” but a republican discipline, firm without harshness, respecting the dignity of the common seamen. Officers were told to set an example of ready obedience. They were deprived of traditional luxuries; no longer were French naval officers to enjoy dainty pastries at sea; the special cooks and special ovens came off the ships. Packets of Jacobin newspapers went aboard. So did a small army of schoolmasters to teach the sailors to read and write and to conduct republican propaganda. For the newcomers raised by the Levy in Mass instruction in seamanship was given on the ships; men of promise were enabled to study technical subjects and so put themselves in line for promotion. The teachers, Saint-André fondly imagined, would replace the Catholic chaplains who had been abolished by the Convention, and whose absence made the crews extremely restless.
Brest and its environs underwent a drastic purging to prevent a repetition of what had happened at Toulon. The Jacobin society and the constituted authorities were purified of all but unswerving Mountaineers. In the arsenals and shipyards a strict military rule was introduced. Even in normal times the city existed largely by the navy. It now became an industrial machine organized totally for war.
Day and night shifts relieved each other in the workshops. Holidays were done away with. Workmen began and ended their labors by a common signal, a cannon shot in the harbor. All production was managed by public officials, for private enterprise in the circumstances either would not or could not act. Saint-André had to agree to a higher wage level than the Maximum allowed, but all wages, hours and prices, together with the distribution of food, raw materials and finished products, were dictated by administrative decree. The life of the inhabitants was taken over completely by the Republic, not only their working hours, but their hours of leisure, which were spent in political meetings and demonstrations, or in seeing patriotic plays at the theater, reading patriotic news in the newspapers, or engaging in patriotic conversation, carefully spied upon, in the cafés.
“To work in the manner of despots does not suit republicans,” said Saint-André; “the negligence of a sleepy tyrant or of somnolent ministers does not agree with our principles.” So the easygoing habits of the old régime gave way to modern efficiency. Mass enthusiasm, ungrudging sacrifice, hard work, coordination of effort, enforced moral unity—a combination of faith and dictatorship, in short—were the means by which European nations were henceforth most successfully to exert their power. The French Revolution established its doctrines because it tapped sources of national energy never used by the old monarchies. With the First Republic emerged the lineaments of a modern state at war. Nowhere were they more clear than at Brest under Saint-André.
All resources, human and natural, were drawn on. It happened that at Brest lived the foremost naval architect of the day, Sané, builder of a remarkable ship of one hundred and thirty guns, once known as the Estates of Brittany, now called the Mountain and serving as flagship for Villaret-Joyeuse. Sané was put in charge of construction and repairs. The drydocks were never empty; within six weeks twelve ships of the line, three frigates and five corvettes were reconditioned. New keels were laid down. Rope works, sail factories, munitions plants were taken over by the state. Muskets and pistols of private persons were commandeered, and food requisitioned from the peasants. Bronze for cannon was extracted from church bells, saltpeter gathered by a special commission, lead mined in eastern Brittany, and a newly found deposit of coal surveyed by Saint-André’s order.
Gradually and cautiously the Republic began to assert itself on the sea. Fast ships went out singly, to raid British commerce and keep a lookout for the expected invasion. Six ships of the line issued forth under one of the new rear-admirals, Van Stabel, who, however, was soon driven back to port by the superior force of Lord Howe. The prospect was not very encouraging. The officers were untried in war, the crews were often clumsy, collisions took place in the harbor, the Convention bumping the Mountain, to the distraction of Villaret-Joyeuse; and so scanty was the supply of telescopes that they had to be divided up, one to each ship.
In this uncertain state of naval affairs Saint-André was called away, ordered by the Committee of Public Safety to go to Cherbourg and the Cotentin peninsula, near which, it now appeared, the Vendéans and the British would effect their junction. He left Brest on November 13.
Meanwhile Prieur of the Marne was busy in the towns along the south coast of Brittany, in the department of Morbihan, discharging the usual functions of a representative on mission, arresting suspects, purging the local authorities, purifying and invigorating the popular clubs, making speeches, presiding at festivals, raising troops and levying supplies. His work was like that of dozens of representatives elsewhere. In the Morbihan, however, about the only partisans of the Jacobin government were some of the working people in the maritime cities of Lorient and Vannes. The peasants were generally royalist, the commercial and professional men generally Girondist. Class antagonisms were plain, and Prieur acted accordingly.
Prieur was at first agreeably surprised by what he found, no doubt because it was the Jacobins who came out to greet him on his arrival. He was soon disillusioned. Within a week he discovered that, at Vannes, “the people show no favorable attitude to the Revolution,” that “in a city of 12,000 only 200 accepted the constitution,” that “the countryside is given over to fanaticism,” that “the poor hide themselves to shed their tears,” and that “the despotism of wealth and rank still presents the hideous image of the old régime.” He therefore proclaimed terror the order of the day, surrounded the city with troops, and by house-to-house searches began to track down the aristocrats in their lairs.
He appealed for popular support in a Feast of Regeneration held at Vannes on November 3. The celebration began with a salvo of cannon, at which the Representative of the People left his house and marched to the public square, flanked by files of soldiers bearing a tricolor. In the square, to the sound of the second salvo, he set fire to a heap of legal documents, “the titles and registers of feudal rights and other marks of the old régime.” The crowd, led by Prieur, then moved on to a statue of a sans-culotte, where, to a third blast of artillery, Prieur presented to the throng a mother of four children whose father had died for liberty. From this demonstration the sans-culottes profited little. The documents which Prieur burned were mere symbols, since feudal payments had already been abolished by law. We hear nothing of any such real transfer of wealth as Saint-Just, Couthon and Collot d’Herbois attempted on their missions. Indeed, the very workmen who labored to make the ceremonies possible did not receive their wages, for the Jacobin municipality had no funds.
Prieur, though a whole book has been written to prove him a wildman, did not really do anything very violent in the Morbihan. He was more adept at arousing revolutionary feelings than at satisfying them, more interested in hunting suspects than in taking their property, more alert in filling the jails than in providing victims for the guillotine. Others of the Committee of Public Safety exceeded him both in organizing ability and in their concern for the lowest classes. Prieur was an average representative on mission, an average republican, vehemently hostile to kings, nobles and priests, concerned more with a political than with an economic redistribution of advantages.
He loved stirring music, oratory and symbolism, and it was by these means that he was most effective. Fascinated by martial airs, he made a specialty of furnishing the troops with bands. He delighted in forcing nuns to sew for the patriotic cause. “How they will cross themselves over the pants of a sans-culotte!” The chagrin of the nuns seems to have pleased him more than the gain of the trousers. It symbolized the triumph of reason over fanaticism, of the nation over the church.
One step taken by Prieur was exceptional among the republican missions, and prophetic as only the twentieth century can know. He organized a Republican Youth. Boys between nine and sixteen were grouped in battalions, armed with “muskets and pikes proportioned to their size and the strength of their years,” drilled by citizen soldiers, and given a flag inscribed “Hope of the Fatherland.” The boys of one of these battalions, on a certain civic occasion, placed their hands in Prieur’s and swore to emulate their fathers in the service of their country.
In a speech to the Jacobins of Lorient, Prieur lashed out against the English, not without reason in view of the imminence of an English landing in the west, but in language that anticipated both Napoleon and Adolf Hitler. The theme was the conflict of manly virtue with the money power.
“London must be destroyed, and London shall be destroyed! Let us rid the globe of this new Carthage. There we shall have peace, there we shall be masters; no, not masters, but avengers of a world oppressed. We shall chase from the Indies and from Bengal these ferocious English, so insatiable for gold that, in selling necessities to the people of those countries, they demand such high prices that a mother has often been seen to give up her child for a handful of rice. …” Prieur noted with indignation that the Americans and the Dutch sympathized with Britain. “Everywhere in short is the triumph of Pitt’s despotism and of gold. Very well, we will make a triumph of courage and of iron. Soon, next spring I hope, for all arrangements for the project are ready, we shall go to visit the banks of the Thames. Those who wish to be in the expedition must ask priority of inscription. Meanwhile let us show Pitt how a free people deliberates. I move that a sentence to the guillotine be dispatched to Pitt.” The Jacobins of Lorient passed this resolution with shouts of joy.
Tangible results of Prieur’s passage appeared in the Morbihan contingent of the Levy in Mass. Yet even this body was more a symbol than a reality. Nothing could overcome the obstinacy of the Breton peasants. The troops were miserably equipped. “We have neither shoes nor stockings nor bread nor guns,” cried Prieur. The recruits were so unreliable that service against the Vendéans was out of the question, and they were sent instead to the far-off Army of the North. Of 2,879 who departed three hundred were missing at Dol, twelve hundred at Tours, and still others deserted in Flanders. Some of these desertions, it is true, were simply the undisciplined wanderings of men who presently returned.
Prieur bade farewell to the Morbihan on the day of Saint-André’s departure from Brest, November 13, without prearrangement with his colleague, and anticipating instructions from Paris by several days. The approaching crisis with the itinerant Vendéans was apparent. Men many miles apart came to the same decisions to meet it. For Prieur the Morbihan was henceforth a minor worry, although it relapsed into counter-revolution as soon as he left it, so that troops had to be detached from the campaign against the Vendéans to guard Republican authority at Vannes.
No one knew which way the nomad insurrection would spread, least of all for a long time its own chiefs. The Republican armies, badly led, were repeatedly worsted early in November. But what could the rebels do with their victories? Some advised moving further into Brittany to rouse the peasants there, some preferred Normandy, many longed for their homes south of the Loire, some talked of threatening Paris, a few bold strategists suggested marching to Flanders to catch the Army of the North in the rear. Then on November 10 came a bit of drama. Two royalists disguised as peasants slipped into the Vendéan camp, and produced from a hollow stick the manifesto of his Britannic Majesty, countersigned by Pitt, promising the long awaited support, and asking for the seizure of a port on the Channel.
So the Vendéans flocked down to the sea and attacked Granville, at the corner of the coastline near the border of Brittany and Normandy. Granville, republicanized and defended by the representative Le Carpentier, withstood the onslaughts, to the dismay of the Catholic and Royal Army, which imagined that the citizens would rally joyfully to the cause of the throne and the altar. There was no sign of English sails—why should there be, since the Vendéans, too eager, had left no time to communicate with their allies, or to tell them which city they proposed to capture? Perplexed, isolated, long preyed upon by deceptive hopes, too unstable to contemplate an extended siege, the peasants, and their aristocratic leaders as well, were demoralized by the resistance of Granville, and on the very day after their arrival in high enthusiasm at the Channel, they turned inland and flung themselves in a vast confusion toward the Loire. This retreat began on November 15.
On the same day Jeanbon Saint-André and Prieur of the Marne, hurrying to the scene, met at Dinan. The rout of the Vendéans had taken place without them. But the elements of the problem still remained. It was still impossible to tell which way the “brigands” were moving, nor could the representatives know to what a wretched state they had sunk. The vagabond Vendée had still to be reckoned with. And the British were still planning a descent. After a conference, Prieur went to Rennes to take charge of military operations, and Saint-André proceeded with his tour of the coastal towns, heading for Cherbourg. As he moved along the shore on land, British vessels did the same at sea, vainly signalling to their allies, at first not knowing of the reverse of the Vendéans at Granville, then hoping to find them elsewhere along the coast.
As a matter of fact, if the Vendéans lost their chance by acting too soon, the British blundered in acting too late. The expeditionary force, delayed by the haggling of British statesmen with the count of Artois, held back by difficulties in assembling the Frenchmen and Hessians who were its chief components, and who in the end numbered only half the total planned, did not leave Portsmouth until December 1, more than two weeks after the repulse of the Vendéans at Granville, and more than a month after the decision to send an expedition had been made. The squadron, commanded by Lord Moira, when it reached the Norman and Breton coasts, found therefore only blank inattention (or was it Republican laughter?) when it signalled.
The Republic had in western Normandy a small force known as the Army of the Côtes de Cherbourg. Saint-André put an end to its separate existence, joining it with the other Republican troops in the west under Rossignol. Here again he came independently to a decision made a few days later by the Committee of Public Safety—a sure sign that in his mission the Committee was well represented. There was, however, a difference of opinion on the important matter of the qualifications of Rossignol. Saint-André believed him incompetent; Prieur defended him as “the eldest son of the Committee of Public Safety.” Both men were right: Rossignol was a political appointee, unfit to command an army, but backed by the Hébertists in Paris, and favored by the Committee as a radical Republican useful in fighting Vendéan brigands and fanatics. The resulting disorganization of the Republican troops in the west was the main reason why the Vendéans roamed at will, continuing to win victories even after the defeat at Granville.
Cherbourg at that time was not yet a developed seaport, only a bleak town at the end of the Cotentin peninsula. Saint-André found it almost stripped of defenses, though Moira’s squadron had been sighted off the coast. If the Vendéans, after Granville, had entered the peninsula, running the risk of being caught in a cul-de-sac, and if communication between them and the English had been established, the Republic might have faced in this corner of Normandy what Napoleon was to face in Spain—a “peninsular war” against the combined forces of insurrection and foreign intervention.
As it was, the main significance of Saint-André’s stay at Cherbourg was political. He arrived early in December, when the Hébertist movement was running at full tide over France. So thoroughly had Cherbourg been purged by preceding representatives on mission that only a handful of extremists remained in power. Entrenched in the Jacobin club and controlling a force of cannoneers, they dictated to the helpless local authorities, denounced all their opponents as suspects, and pushed a rabid program of Dechristianization.
Saint-André was a Christian minister by vocation. But he was a very modern minister, who, even before the Revolution, valued little in religion except its teachings of social morality. He favored in principle the Hébertist cult of Reason. He approved of Dechristianization in the long run; he objected to the means used by Dechristianizers, the violence, vandalism and vulgarity which disgraced the Republic in the eyes of a people still Christian at heart. Like Robespierre, he wanted toleration of religious beliefs; but, like Robespierre and most members of the Convention, Saint-André believed that such toleration would be only an interim measure, necessary and just for the time being, until the Republic should bring its mission of enlightenment to completion.
His actions at Cherbourg were therefore ambiguous. He joined in the cult of Reason, but tried nevertheless to enforce the program of the Committee of Public Safety. He wrote a proclamation to the citizens of Cherbourg, which was circulated as a pamphlet.
Here, in eight printed pages, was reflected most of the progressive thought of Europe since the Middle Ages. Religions, so the argument ran, were merely relative and concerned with unintelligible matters; they were by rights only private and internal persuasions, and as such would be tolerated; but believers who tried to apply their religion to public affairs would be disciplined, for their differences of opinion, in themselves of no importance, would, by causing discord over useless questions, break up the unity of the state, which had the true care over man, and the mission of emancipating his human faculties. What religion a man professed was of importance to no one but himself, but it was vital to the community that everyone should be “faithful to the Republic.” The pamphlet concluded with a number of ordinances, outlawing violence against religion, requiring religious services to be held indoors, forbidding priests to appear on the streets in clerical costume, providing a means of civil burial without Christian forms. Lastly it enjoined upon good citizens “to develop the principles of social morality whenever they find occasion, so as to prepare the triumph which it deserves.”
The cult of Reason, for Saint-André, was indistinguishable from the cult of country. It was a religion of patriotism, but patriotism did not mean a narrowly national pride; it meant public spirit, good citizenship, social morality, or what Robespierre referred to as virtue; for the idea of country, la patrie, merged imperceptibly with the idea of society itself. The society of the Republic was a moral community, deeply committed to a gospel of its own, concerned for human dignity, competing actively with the Christian clergy for the uplifting of human souls. But it did not compete on equal terms. Convinced that the new gospel of country should be shared by all, that it was in the nature of man to be a “citizen” but that religious faith was a mere acquired and variable characteristic, the leaders of the Republic shut up the older religions behind closed doors, and for processions in the streets, for public ritual, for mass demonstrations, granted a monopoly to the civic cult.
These high-minded and philosophical conceptions were beyond the interests of the average man. Saint-André was no more successful in establishing them at Cherbourg than Couthon was in the Puy-de-Dôme. The average peasant continued to be more impressed by what his priest told him than by the language of strangers from Paris. The average man in the towns might be a vehement revolutionist; reading Saint-André’s own words, he would gather that the religion of Rome was error, fanaticism, superstition, lies, a mere crutch for feeble minds; he would then wonder why such an obvious evil should not be immediately uprooted. Some Hébertists, moreover, were men of the anti-social and even criminal types which in settled societies do not usually wield power.
Saint-André therefore found himself, like Saint-Just in Alsace, acting as a defender of the Catholicism which he scorned. He had to save the organ in the church at Cherbourg from being wrecked for cannon shot, and the confessionals from being transformed into sentry boxes. And since, moreover, rejecting the flattery of the local Jacobins, he tried to break the hold of the club over matters of provision and defense, the upshot of his visit to Cherbourg was that he pleased no one, for the reactionaries were antagonized beyond conciliation, and the revolutionary vanguard complained that he was a moderate.
At Brest, when he returned there in mid-December, Saint-André found the same situation. These were the days when Collot d’Herbois was abetting the radicals at Lyons and Saint-Just suppressing them at Strasbourg, and when both policies, as we have seen, received the endorsement of the Committee of Public Safety. The stand taken by the Committee toward the outbursts in Brittany was similarly equivocal. Saint-André opposed violence at Brest; but at Nantes, at the same time, the representative Carrier, not without official encouragement, drowned thousands of victims in the Loire.
It was the same story reenacted in a hundred places. The Representatives of the People, after silencing federalists and other laggards, everywhere risked falling into the hands of implacable and imprudent zealots. At Brest, while Saint-André was away, the representative Bréard, left in charge and fearing to lose control, yielded to the demands of his ungovernable followers. He authorized a revolutionary tribunal against the known wishes of Saint-André. He allowed the local Jacobin society to force incompetent small politicians into responsible offices. And he dispatched parties of agitators into the neighboring districts to preach republicanism as they understood it.
One of these is a good example of what is meant by an extremist. His name was Dagorne, and he held the office of inspector of the national domain, in which his corruption was no secret. Sent with two others to revolutionize Quimper, he threw the town authorities into jail, replaced them with persons as shady as himself, looted the churches and smashed the images of the saints. Selecting a market day when the peasants were in town in great numbers, he stationed himself in the marketplace, and there, surrounded by loaded cannon pointed toward the onlookers, subjected certain holy vases to an act described as “the most obscene and most disgusting profanation.” The spectators stood in helpless horror, hardly able to believe their eyes, and took back into their homes a loathing of republicanism which the next hundred years could hardly overcome.
Saint-André, back in Brest, lost no time in committing Dagorne to prison. He forbade the functioning of the revolutionary tribunal that had been extorted from Bréard. And somehow while stemming the torrents of radicalism he found time to resume his constructive work, building lighthouses, arranging for the faster transport of timber for shipbuilding, tightening the regulations by which the criminals in the galleys at Brest were kept in order. Finding graft in the supply of food he instituted at this time a simple system of which no one had thought before: the amount of supplies taken from the stores on land was to be counterchecked against the amount received on board ship. So, in all the confusion, the progress of efficiency continued.
But the war played into the hands of the terrorists. The Committee of Public Safety clung to its project of attacking England. By the end of 1793, with the continental enemies driven from France, French strategy was passing from a defensive to an offensive phase. On January 2 the Committee wrote a significant letter to Saint-André: France must have dominion of the oceans, “France which alone of all European states can and should be a power on both land and sea.” The modern Carthage remained the true enemy of mankind, and especially of Frenchmen. France through all its avatars, Bourbon monarchy, revolutionary Republic, military empire, carried on its modern Hundred Years War with the nation of shopkeepers. This resolve to take the offensive at sea, according to M. Lévy-Schneider, the authority on the naval affairs of the Revolution, was a main reason why the Committee of Public Safety, at the beginning of 1794, made its fateful decision not to mitigate the Terror.
The Committee in January transferred to Brest a representative on mission, Laignelot, who had distinguished himself elsewhere for vigorous methods. Laignelot insisted on setting up a revolutionary tribunal at Brest. Saint-André objected. Laignelot brought with him cannoneers from the Commune of Paris. Saint-André disapproved. At the Jacobins of Brest, waving a naked sword, Laignelot screamed out the famous words: “The peoples will not be truly free until the last king has been strangled in the bowels of the last priest!”
Saint-André was now in the position of Couthon two months before at Lyons. He solved his difficulty in the same way. Unable to prevent this new outbreak of terrorism, and unwilling to seem to approve of it by his presence, he simply departed. On January 25, the 6th of Pluviôse, he was back in Paris at his old place in the counsels of the Committee. What protests he may have made there no one can say. Nor can it be said exactly what his influence was in the determination of naval policy. During Pluviôse, however, the Committee shifted its attention from the idea of invading England to the more manageable enterprise of an assault on the Channel Islands. French warships, previously kept together in view of the projected invasion, dispersed to prey upon British commerce. And a squadron was dispatched to meet Van Stabel, who, sent ahead in December with a few speedy vessels, was to escort back to France the great convoy from America.
Laignelot’s revolutionary tribunal, as it turned out, was not particularly bloodthirsty. The Terror at Brest remained relatively mild. By the end of February Saint-André was back at Brest continuing his work; and Laignelot, at Saint-André’s express demand, was gone.
But elsewhere in Brittany repression raged with a fury equalled nowhere in France, not even at Lyons. As the Vendéans grew more desperate their treatment of captured Republicans became more atrocious, and as the war prolonged itself seemingly without end the Revolutionists abandoned their last scruples. The battle of Savenay, on December 23, finally broke up the Vendéans as an organized force. Unknown numbers were executed on the spot for bearing arms against the government. Thousands were sent to the prisons, which already bulged with federalists, aristocrats, priests, dismissed officials, rich merchants and other suspects. It was unsafe to send the captured rebels back to their homes, for they could not be trusted to refrain from further violence against the state, especially with a network of secret organizers still active throughout the west, and the possibility of British assistance not yet ended.
The Committee of Public Safety resorted to methods which less revolutionary governments have used in similar circumstances. To Prieur of the Marne went an unenviable distinction. He set up a special court for dealing with the rebels, the Commission militaire Bignon (named after Bignon, its president), which, first following the army, then sitting at Nantes, pronounced death sentences upon 2,905 persons, more than any other revolutionary court in the whole country, not excepting the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris. Other agencies of revenge and prevention were at work at the same time. Into the Vendée poured the “infernal columns” of Turreau, who, by order of the Committee of Public Safety, systematically devastated that breeding place of insurrection. Great numbers of Vendéan peasants, some months later, were resettled in more soundly republican regions.
The most notorious of all aberrations of the Terror took place at Nantes, in the famous noyades or wholesale drownings conducted by the representative Carrier. Over these affairs much learned controversy has spent itself, Carrier being depicted as a monster by reactionary and humanitarian writers, condemned even by historians most partial to the Revolution, and yet subject to attempts at rehabilitation, on the whole not very successful. Carrier, it may safely be said, was a normal man with average sensibilities, with no unusual intelligence or strength of character, driven wild by opposition, turning ruthless because ruthlessness seemed to be the easiest way of solving a difficult problem.
Our concern is with the relation of the Committee of Public Safety to the drownings. On September 29 Hérault-Séchelles read aloud to the Committee a letter from Carrier, who, writing from Rennes, declared, after recounting his other operations: “I propose at the same time to make up some cargoes of unsworn priests now piled up in the prisons, and to give control of them to a mariner from Saint-Servan known for his patriotism.” The Committee heard Carrier’s letter “with a lively satisfaction,” according to Hérault, who wrote back to Carrier on the same day. Hérault praised Carrier in the name of the Committee, observed that “we can be humane when we are assured of being victorious,” and said that the representatives on mission should leave the responsibility for their acts to the subordinates charged with execution.
Later events made Carrier’s reference to cargoes of priests seem very ominous. Whatever may have been in Carrier’s mind, the phrase itself, vague at best and lost in a lengthy communication, could convey little to the men in Paris. Possibly Carrier only meant that he intended to transfer priests to prison ships in the river at Nantes, though why he should need a “mariner” for this purpose is not clear. In any case, Hérault’s advice that responsibility should be transferred to others may have impelled the unsteady Carrier to extremes. Carrier, however, subsequently denied having received Hérault’s dispatch.
A few days later Carrier conferred with Saint-André and Prieur of the Marne as they passed through Rennes on their way to Brest. They found him a patriotic and reliable representative. Moving on to Nantes Carrier met Prieur of the Côte-d’Or, who took back to Paris an account of Carrier’s views. Carrier himself reported to the Committee, on October 7, that the prisons at Nantes were full of partisans of the Vendée. “Instead of amusing myself by giving them a trial, I shall send them to their places of residence to be shot. These terrible examples will intimidate the evil wishers. …” The Committee, in reply, urged Carrier to “purge the body politic of the bad humors that circulate in it.”
In the following weeks the Vendéans, retreating from Granville, moved back toward the Loire and toward Nantes. The Revolutionists in the city fell a prey to hysteria. Horrible congestion reigned in the prisons, from which it was feared that the enraged inmates would break out. The prisons were full of fever and disease; it seemed that the hated aristocrats would culminate their evil influence by bringing pestilence to the city.
Carrier bethought himself of his idea of dealing with counter-revolutionists in “cargoes.” Accepting the proposal of two local Revolutionists, who showed how boats could be equipped with removable hatches, Carrier proceeded to clear the prisons, without formalities of trial, by drowning their occupants in the Loire. The number of noyades, or boatloads of prisoners scuttled, was estimated by an overwrought “witness” (there were few witnesses to these nocturnal performances) at twenty-three; exact historical study can prove the occurrence of only four, but since they were carried on in an atmosphere of secrecy it is entirely possible that their number was greater. The drowning of children is well established, and also the sadistic cruelty of one of the men engaged in the work, who hacked off the arms of victims struggling to leave the boats.
The Committee of Public Safety knew before the end of November that ninety priests had been drowned at Nantes. Carrier, in his reports to Paris, alluded with brutal sarcasm to the repeated “miracles” in the Loire. He gave no details, however, and it was only when the noyades were over, at the end of December, that the authorities in the capital were informed of the ingenuity and deliberate planning by which they were accomplished. No one knew then, and no one knows now, the number of the victims. It may have approached two thousand. Most of them were captives from the Vendéan army.
The Committee at first did nothing. That some of its members were shocked we can well imagine; Couthon, in particular, is known to have raised his voice at the green table in favor of pardoning the rank and file of Vendéans who had been “misled.” But the full horror of what had happened in Brittany was not soon realized in Paris; horror, like terror, was pretty much the order of the day; the noyades at Nantes, like the fusillades at Lyons, seemed in the circumstances hardly more than incidental. In any case, at the turn of the year, the Committee was counting on the support of the Revolutionary vanguard; and so, though a few Hébertist representatives were recalled in December, others, including Fouché and Carrier, were left for a while in office.
But the Committee had a special agent in the west, Marc-Antoine Julien, a youngster only eighteen years old. Some have regarded him as a mere spy for Robespierre; actually he represented the Revolutionary Government, corresponded not only with Robespierre but with Barère and the Committee as a whole, and in his tour of the war-torn area worked in close cooperation with Prieur of the Marne. He reported on the conduct of the generals and the representatives on mission, dissolved illicit Revolutionary Armies, gave instructions to local administrators, tried to combine the worship of Reason with a measure of decorum and toleration. In short, his assignment was to coordinate revolutionary energies in the west, and to keep them within the bounds prescribed by his superiors.
Young Julien began to complain of Carrier’s actions on December 19. Writing from Vannes, fifty miles from Nantes, he either did not know of the noyades or thought them of slight importance. His objection was only to certain of Carrier’s satellites, who he said were terrorizing true patriots. He was willing to believe that Carrier had simply misjudged his men. But on the 1st of January he wrote urgently to Barère and to Robespierre demanding Carrier’s immediate recall. By this time details on the noyades were known in Paris. Still there was no mention of them in Julien’s dispatches. The issue raised was the old question of conflicting authority: Carrier refused to recognize another representative on mission; his agents were factious and violent; they “pillaged, killed and burned” without restraint, and were stubbornly defended by their master.
A month later, now much excited, Julien again wrote to both Barère and Robespierre. He had been to Nantes and seen Carrier, against whom the charges were now infinitely multiplied. The Vendée was rising again; Carrier and the generals showed gross unconcern; they wished to prolong the crisis; Carrier was a satrap, a despot who killed liberty; he kept aloof from good Republicans, abandoned in private orgies; his secretaries were haughty and inaccessible; real patriots could do nothing. Yet Julien tried to be fair, admitting that Carrier had been of great service, before he went astray, in crushing the influence of the wealthy businessmen at Nantes.
Now, on February 3, Julien at last said a word in passing on the noyades.
“I am assured,” he wrote to Robespierre, “that he had all those who filled the prisons at Nantes taken out indiscriminately, put on boats, and sunk in the Loire. He told me to my face that that was the only way to run a revolution, and he called Prieur of the Marne a fool for thinking of nothing to do with suspects except confine them.”
A few days later the Committee of Public Safety recalled Carrier to Paris. Was the recall due to Julien’s news of the drownings? Hardly. The drownings were not news in Paris. There was little pity for the victims, who, after all, were mostly “brigands” and “fanatics.” Julien himself gave the matter no special emphasis. The drift of thought, both in Julien’s mind and in the decision of the Committee, was only incidentally humanitarian. Carrier had called a member of the ruling Committee a fool. He was hounding as counter-revolutionaries men whom the Committee classified as patriots, and defending as patriots men whom the Committee considered, and who often were, the dregs of society, rascals with criminal records, or brutal and unprincipled rowdies with no aim except to perpetuate confusion. Carrier was not cooperating with the government. He was discrediting and crippling the Republic. By revolution he meant lawlessness; he would not recognize that, since 14 Frimaire, even the Reign of Terror had an explicit constitution.
In February, therefore, Carrier returned to Paris, where he was soon joined by Fouché and other disgruntled representatives on mission, who in their disgrace formed a subtle menace to the Revolutionary Government. Robespierre, the political strategist, carried on his campaign against the “factions,” which meant, in effect, a campaign to bring unity of purpose and acceptance of authority to men schooled in five years of revolution. Young Julien continued on his travels in the west. Jeanbon Saint-André went back to Brest to rule the navy. Nantes was turned over to the man whom Carrier had derided, a man not noted for mildness, but who at least could act in harmony with the national government—Prieur of the Marne.