Revolution! France – Chapter 14 – The Brick Chronicle

News of Louis XVI’s execution was met with outrage by Europe’s monarchs and plans were made for a coalition to destroy the revolution in France. But the revolutionaries were defiant. “The kings in alliance try to intimidate us,” announced Danton. “‘We hurl at their feet, as a gauntlet of battle, the French King’s head.” In February 1793, the National Convention declared war on Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, and, soon after, on Spain. Danton was sent to the front lines in Belgium where General Dumouriez shared with him his plans to invade Holland and petitioned the Convention for more troops and supplies. It was while visiting Dumouriez that Danton received a letter informing him that his wife had just died in premature childbirth. In reaction, Danton let out a howl of pain, frightening those around him.

Racing home to Paris, Danton learned from Camille Desmoulins that his beloved Gabrielle had already been buried two days before at her father’s bidding. Anguished and unwilling to let go, the next day Danton hired a sculptor and brought him to his wife’s gravesite. Borrowing a shovel from the gravekeeper, he dug up Gabrielle’s body a week after her death. After holding her, kissing her lifeless lips, and begging her forgiveness for traveling abroad while she was eight months pregnant, he gently lay her body on the lid of the coffin and had the sculptor create a likeness of her as a bust. Returning home, he found a letter of consolation from Robespierre that said: “I love you more than ever, I love you until death. At this moment, I am you. Do not close your heart against the words of a friendship that feels all your pain.”

It was the fear of such Parisian mobs that lead the Girondins to call for a special force of soldiers drawn exclusively from the provinces to be charged with protecting the Convention. This motion was denounced by the Jacobins, who called the Girondins cowards. Such infighting infuriated Danton. “All your arguing is miserable!” he shouted to his fellow delegates “You tire me fighting over details instead of fighting for the safety of the republic. You are all traitors to the nation! All of you!” Putting aside their differences, the Convention turned its attention to protecting France from its foreign enemies on all sides and approved a mass mobilization of three hundred thousand troops through volunteerism and conscription.

There had never been much enthusiasm for the revolution in the northwest Atlantic coast region of France known as the Vendée. Three quarters of the priests there had refused the oath of loyalty to the state, and the king’s recent execution was seen as an outrage by many. Now with recruiters sent into the region to draft men against their will into the revolutionary armies, violent revolts began. At Machecoul, with shouts of “Death to the Parisians!” a crowd of thousands of armed peasants attacked members of the National Guard and anyone associated with the newly established republic. A priest who had taken the oath to the state was dragged out of his church and stabbed in the face with a bayonet for ten minutes. More than forty people were killed and four hundred taken away as prisoners.

“They have killed our king; chased away our priests; sold the goods of our church; eaten everything we have and now they want to take our bodies?” said one Vendéan of the revolutionaries, adding: “No, they may not have them.” The prisoners from Machecoul were tied up together in rows, marched outside the town, forced to dig their own graves, and shot. Uprisings in other area villages killed dozens more. Those who supported the revolution fled to larger cities like Nantes. At La Rochelle, revolutionaries committed retaliatory atrocities—six refractory priests were butchered. Their heads and various other body parts were paraded through the city.

The various insurgent forces in the Vendée coalesced and dubbed themselves The Grand Royal and Catholic Army. They dressed themselves in white—the color of the monarchy—and recognized the imprisoned eight-year-old son of Marie Antoinette as King Louis XVII. Quickly taking hold of strategic positions in the region, they used superior knowledge of the territory and guerilla warfare tactics to fend off early attempts to quell the rebellion. When the Royal and Catholic Army handily won its first pitched battle against two thousand soldiers of the Revolutionary Army, the National Convention was forced to devote its attention to putting down counterrevolutionary forces within France.

Emergency measures were passed by the Convention in March. Surveillance committees were established in every town and city throughout the country to report on counterrevolutionary activities. Danton proposed the creation of a Revolutionary Tribunal to expedite sending enemies of the republic to the guillotine and, he argued, to keep mobs from taking justice into their own hands. “Let us be terrible,” Danton intoned to his fellow delegates, “to prevent the people from being terrible.” The motion was passed despite a warning from the Girondin moderate Pierre Vergniaud that the foundation was being laid for “an Inquisition a thousand times more fearful than that of Spain.”

The French army was repelled and suffered three thousand losses as it attempted to cross from Belgium into the Dutch Republic. After this defeat, General Dumouriez went into secret negotiations with the leader of the Austrian forces. An unrepentant royalist at heart, when he heard the latest reports from Paris, Dumouriez was convinced that the leaders of the revolution were bringing the nation to ruin. The Austrians agreed not to attack the retreating French army if Dumouriez could carry out his plans to march on Paris to restore order with a coup d’etat. But like Lafayette before him, Dumouriez found his soldiers unwilling to turn against their own people. When the Convention sent four of its delegates to the front to investigate Dumouriez’s rumored treason, the general had them arrested. On April 5, he and a select few of his highest officers defected to the enemy and turned the captured delegates over to the Austrians.

News of the treachery caused an uproar. Among those who had defected with Dumouriez was a son of Convention delegate Louis- Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. Cousin to Louis XVI, the duke had recently changed his name to the less aristocratic-sounding Citizen Philippe Égalité. Despite his outspoken liberal views, support for the revolution, and his vote for the king’s death, Égalité had long been suspected of biding his time until an opportune moment arrived for him to seize the monarchy for himself. The Convention now ordered the arrest of Égalité and all the remaining royal family members in Paris. To send him to trial, though, the Convention was forced to rescind a measure that protected delegates of the Convention from being brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal.

The factious Convention members then continued to attack each other for their associations with the disgraced general. “Dumouriez and Brissot were the first apostles of the war,” pointed out Jacobin leader Robespierre. Girondins countered by implicating Danton for failing to suss out Dumouriez’s treacherous intentions during his visit to Belgium. Although he had previously attempted to make peace between the two factions, Danton now let loose a tirade against the Girondin moderates. “I am now convinced that no truce is possible,” he announced, “between . . . the patriots who wanted the King’s death, and these cowards who slandered us throughout France in the hope of saving him . . . No more terms with them! I have returned to the fortress of Reason. I will have it armed with the artillery of Truth in order to blow these enemies to dust!”

But the Girondins were equally militant. Former Paris Mayor Pétion declared, “It is time at last to end all this infamy; it is time that traitors and perpetrators of slander carried their heads to the scaffold; and here I take it upon myself to pursue them to death.” To follow through on their threat, the Girondins picked a day when many Jacobins were not present at the Convention and managed to pass a motion to have Marat arrested and brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on charges of treason. They collected evidence from his newspaper The People’s Friend showing that he had repeatedly called on the people of Paris to commit acts of violence against fellow members of the Convention.

Their charges against Marat were well-founded. In his vitriolic writings, Marat had violently railed against so many different “enemies of the people” that he had no allies left in the Convention. But he remained beloved by the people of Paris, and it was the people’s judgment that the Revolutionary Tribunal had been established to dispense. Marat was acquitted on April 24 and paraded back to the Convention by a crowd of sans-culottes carrying their hero on their shoulders. “We bring you the worthy Marat,” announced a man holding an axe. “Marat has always been the friend of the people, and the people will always be the friends of Marat. If Marat’s head must fall, our heads will fall first.”

In May, the Girondins further made themselves detestable to the sans-culottes and enragés by insisting on the principles of free trade in their refusal to enact price controls on grain to help the masses of starving poor afford bread. At the Jacobin club, Robespierre’s younger brother—also a Convention delegate—urged the disaffected poor to petition the Convention and “force us to take action to put the unfaithful delegates under arrest.” At the end of the month, the masses took action. Summoned by a bell rung by Marat in the tower of City Hall, a mass of thousands of Parisians marched to surround the meeting hall of the Convention. They were backed by battalions of the National Guard led by François Hanriot with cavalry troops and sixty cannons. They demanded the arrest of twenty-two Girondin leaders.

“To the guillotine with the Girondins! Long live Marat!” came the calls from outside the hall, while inside, the Girondin delegate Jean-Denis Lanjuinais stood up to protest “this disgraceful intimidation of the country’s elected representatives.” With all the meeting hall’s exits blocked by the mob, the trapped delegates issued a decree ordering the National Guard to withdraw its troops. Notice of the order was brought outside to Hanriot who replied, “Tell your fucking president that he and his Convention can go fuck themselves, and that if he doesn’t deliver to me the Twenty-two within one hour, I’m going to blow up the whole building!” Cannons were then leveled at the Convention doors.

Inside, silence came over the Convention as the delegates realized the seriousness of the situation. The wheelchair-bound Georges Couthon, a Jacobin and close follower of Robespierre, was the first to speak, proposing the indictment of the Girondists be read and their arrest voted on to appease their captors so that the rest might be spared. Marat took a hand in revising the final list of proscribed delegates, which he read off slowly and with evident pleasure. They included some of the most influential names of the early revolution including Brissot, Pétion, the mathematician Condorcet, the eloquent moderate orator Vergniaud, and François Buzot, who had recently become the paramour of Manon Roland. While Jean Roland had fled Paris, his wife had stayed behind and was arrested that night at her home.

While the forced expulsion of the Girondins ended the crisis and was celebrated in Paris, news of it lead to the outbreak of anti-Jacobin revolts in Lyon and other major cities. The Convention, hoping to create a more efficient means of prosecuting the wars against multiple foreign powers and to suppress incipient civil wars, established a nine-member Committee of Public Safety with far-ranging powers over the government. Unlike the public meetings of the legislature, its near-constant meetings were conducted in private in a room that had acted as Louis XVI’s office at the Tuileries. Danton was the leading figure on the committee, whose mission was, as he saw it, to “vanquish our enemies, restore internal order, and make a good constitution.”

The committee quickly took on all executive powers of the government, issuing an average of thirty decrees per day, raising troops, ordering military equipment, dispatching Convention delegates to areas of revolt, and ensuring the availability of bread for the masses. Despite his intensely busy new schedule, Danton found time on June 12 to marry a new wife—the sixteen-year-old girl who had acted as a nanny to his two young children. At the father of the young bride’s insistence, the couple was married by a refractory priest who had survived the September Prison Massacres the year before. A brief ceremony was held in secret in an attic after which the priest went back into hiding.

Robespierre’s close allies Saint-Just and Couthon had joined the Committee of Public Safety at the start of June and, before the month’s end, had drafted a new constitution which went further than its 1791 predecessor by guaranteeing universal male suffrage, state-funded education for all, welfare for citizens in need, and an abolition of slavery. “All Europe,” said Robespierre, “will be constrained to admire this fine monument of human reason and of the sovereignty of a great people.” Yet almost as soon as it had been approved, ratified by the people, and enshrined under glass in the meeting hall of the Convention, the Constitution was declared suspended until the revolution was over and the country was at peace.

At the start of July, Louis XVI’s eight-year-old son Louis-Charles—who royalists now considered King Louis XVII—was forcibly taken from Marie Antoinette and kept in a separate area of the Temple fortress. Henceforth, his mother would only catch glimpses of him after waiting hours by a window that looked out on the courtyard. His new caretaker delighted in dressing Louis-Charles in the long trousers and red cap of a sans-culotte. He was given a toy guillotine to play with and taught to sing popular revolutionary songs like “Ça Ira” with lyrics such as “It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine / The aristocrats, we’ll hang them / And when we’ll have hung them all / We’ll stick a shovel up their ass!”

Marat’s worsening skin disease now kept him from attending the sessions of the Convention, but he attended to his duties as a delegate and kept up his writing for The People’s Friend from his residence where he spent most of his time soaking in a bathtub to relieve his pain. On one day in mid-July, a young woman named Charlotte Corday arrived at his residence to supply Marat with the names of several men from her hometown of Caen—a hotbed of Girondism—who, she said, were actively plotting against the Jacobins. Sitting in his makeshift combination tub and writing desk, Marat duly recorded the names of these men and then assured her, “Within a few days, I will have them all guillotined.”

At this, Corday removed a five-inch kitchen knife she had purchased the day before and plunged it into Marat’s chest, piercing his lung and aorta. Marat called out in vain for his mistress to come to his aid, but then with an agonized cry, he slumped over dead. His mistress rushed in and tried to staunch the bleeding, but it was too late. Corday walked calmly out of the room. Moments later, Marat’s assistant realized what happened and cried, “My God, he has been assassinated!” He picked up a chair and knocked Corday to the ground. “I don’t care,” she announced while being manhandled. “The deed is done. The monster is dead!”

The sans-culottes were livid about the murder of their hero, and Corday barely escaped their wrath as she was taken into custody. One woman shouted that she would dismember Corday and eat her filthy body piece by piece. Brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, Corday’s interrogators refused to believe that she had acted on her own volition and demanded to know with whom she had conspired. “I alone conceived the plan and executed it,” she maintained. “He was perverting France. I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand.” “Do you think you have killed all the Marats?” she was asked. “With this one dead,” she replied, “the others, perhaps, will be afraid.”

Four days after the assassination, on July 17, Corday was brought in a tumbril to the Place de la Révolution where, calmly accepting her fate, she ascended the scaffold, lay down, and was beheaded. The executioner’s assistant held her head up for the crowds to see and then slapped her across the face. According to witnesses, when her cheeks blushed in response, onlookers gasped in amazement. Still convinced that she must have conspired with a male Girondin—perhaps a lover?—Corday’s headless body was taken to a nearby hospital and examined by a Convention delegate and several medical students to determine whether her hymen remained intact.

Marat, “the people’s friend,” was mourned and celebrated as a martyr of the revolutionary cause by tens of thousands of Parisians who turned out for his funeral. A procession of young girls dressed in white tossed flowers onto Marat’s coffin as it was carried through the city. “Like Jesus, Marat loved the people ardently,” noted one eulogizer. “Like Jesus, Marat detested nobles, priests, the rich, the scoundrels. Like Jesus, he led a poor and frugal life.” Sensing the mood of the people, the Committee of Public Safety, at the behest of its newest member Robespierre, deemed it best to adopt some of the demands of Marat’s followers, and on July 27 mandated the death penalty to anyone caught hoarding foodstuffs or any other essential supplies.

In August, advances were being made by France’s enemies on all sides. Spanish armies crossed the Pyrenees in the south, Austrian armies retook German lands in the east, and British armies crossed into France on the border with Belgium. Though conscriptions had brought the number of Revolutionary forces to 645,000 men, the Committee of Public Safety now decreed that all citizens of France must join the war effort. All unmarried men would be sent into battle to save the republic. Married men would forge arms and other military supplies. Women would make tents and clothing for soldiers; children would turn old linens into bandages. The elderly and infirm were tasked with raising the spirits of the young soldiers by publicly preaching hatred of kings and love of the republic.

The uniting of Catholic fanaticism with counterrevolutionary zeal in the Vendée helped to further the growing anti-religious sentiment among radical revolutionaries. The Royal and Catholic Army had managed to fend off revolutionary forces sent against them for months, and they continued their persecution of supporters of the republic with threats of death, public abuse, and beatings. One man reported that he was made to climb the local church tower and cry “Long live Louis XVII!” Another woman was forced to kneel before an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Resolving to decisively crush all such threats to the revolution, the Convention adopted Bertrand Barère’s proposal to “exterminate this rebel race of Vendéans, to destroy their hiding places, to burn their forests, and to cut down their crops.”

Marat’s self-appointed successor as radical mouthpiece of the Parisian people was Jacques Hébert, a revolutionary journalist who had recently gained political power in the Paris municipal government and was now gaining sway at the Jacobin club. In his newspaper, he criticized the Committee of Public Safety for its restraint in carrying out vengeance against the enemies of the republic. He called for all royalists and hoarders to be roped together, locked in churches, and blasted with cannon fire until peace was achieved, adding “that’s the ‘public safety’ I want.” On September 5, Hébert incited another sans-culotte march against the Convention.

News had arrived in Paris that day of another egregious act of treachery. The important French Mediterranean naval base at Toulon had been handed over to the British by counterrevolutionaries. “No more quarter, no more mercy for traitors!” demanded the demonstrators. “The day of justice and wrath has arrived!” This time the crowds were welcomed into the meeting hall and they sat among the delegates as their grievances were heard. By the end of the session, their proposal was adopted by Danton, the Convention president, to “let terror be the order of the day.”

Opening Quote

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