Liberty equality death
The French Revolution was motivated by the ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood, but would ultimately fall under the shadow of the guillotine. /CrisC|.inVQn traces the descent into terror
One fine day, late in 1790, a wedding was held at the church of SaintSulpice in the Parisian Latin Quarter. The groom, Camille Desmoulins, was a revolutionary journalist; his bride, Lucile Duplessis, a girl of 20 whom he had loved hopelessly for years, without prospect of having enough money to marry.
Among the 60 guests were many radical revolutionaries, all the groom’s friends. Desmoulins told his father how many guests wept with joy, declaring himself “the happiest of men who desires nothing more in the world”. Less than four years later, many of the people present at that wedding, including the bride and groom, had died under the guillotine, victims of a factional struggle that ripped through the leadership of a revolution that had begun in a spirit of liberty, equality – and fraternity.
The French Revolution began in June 1789, when the commoner deputies of the EstatesGeneral, summoned to help absolute monarch Louis XVI solve impending state bankruptcy, swore to give France a constitution and form a national representative assembly. Amid fears that the king intended to use troops to crush the revolution, people in the capital rushed to arm themselves.
Camille Desmoulins, then a penniless lawyer, leapt onto a table in the gardens of the Palais Royal, waving two pistols, defying arrest, and haranguing the crowd to arm themselves in defence of their revolution. His words poured out, with no sign of the debilitating stammer that usually afflicted him. Soon after, on 14 July 1789, people of Paris rose up to storm the Bastille, the moment that defined the revolution. Desmoulins never tired of taking the credit for starting it all.
That first summer brought heady expectations that a new and better world was dawning, one based on principles of equality of rights, individual liberty, and universal brotherhood. “How I thank heaven that I was born at the end of this century!” wrote Desmoulins, “with what giant steps we are going towards liberty!”
Among the deputies of the new National Assembly was Maximilien Robespierre, a former schoolfellow of Desmoulins, and one of the official witnesses at Desmoulins’ wedding. Like many revolutionaries, he had practised as a lawyer. He became known for his integrity and conviction; nicknamed “the Incorruptible”, because he would not take bribes. Robespierre was part of a radical group who wanted the principles of equality to extend to all – including the poor, religious minorities, and slaves in the colonies. In May 1791, he tried, without success, to get the death penalty abolished.
Many people, especially nobles and devout Catholics, objected to the way the revolution had overturned the old order. Some fled France to push for the revolution to be overturned by force. In June 1791, King Louis and his wife, Marie-Antoinette, fled Paris, attempting to join the foreign powers. The couple were intercepted near the border with the Austrian Netherlands and brought back to Paris where they were greeted in ominous silence by crowds who believed the king and queen were now enemies of the revolution.
The situation grew more volatile as people feared that a coalition of foreign powers, bitterly opposed to the revolution, would attack. Some demanded that France pre-empt the danger by declaring war. One of the chief spokesmen for the war lobby was JacquesPierre Brissot. He had been another friend to witness Desmoulins’ marriage contract. War, said Brissot, would flush out the hidden enemies of the revolution – by which he meant the monarchy – and enable France to wage a “crusade for liberty” abroad.
Robespierre opposed this proposal, which
A factional struggle ripped through the revolutionary leaders – condemning many of them to die under the guillotine
he argued would militarise the revolution and undermine it. He thought the idea that invading French soldiers would be welcomed by other countries was naïve. “No one welcomes armed missionaries,” he observed. Brissot retaliated, attacking Robespierre as “unpatriotic” for shirking war. This disagreement sowed the seeds of divisions that deepened as the revolution moved into crisis.
Most deputies agreed with Brissot, voting in favour of conflict. The declaration of war with Austria in April 1792 marked a downward spiral that escalated until France was at war with Prussia, Britain, Spain and the Dutch Republic. As Robespierre had predicted, the war went badly from the outset with French armies fighting defensively within France’s territory. Secretly the king and queen welcomed the war, hoping that the French armies would be defeated.
Factional divisions
Against the backdrop of fear and anger the monarchy was overthrown on 10 August 1792 in a pitched battle at the Tuileries. A new assembly, the National Convention, met for the first time. France was now a republic.
Within the convention factional divisions that had begun over the war debates deepened into bitter antagonism. Many of the men who had been united in friendship and political goals at Desmoulins’ wedding now took opposing sides. Ranged on one side were the Montagnards – including Robespierre, Desmoulins, and their mutual friend, Georges Danton, another lawyer. Opposed to
them were Brissot’s group, the Girondins. The Montagnards accused the Girondins of having sold out to obtain ministerial posts. The Girondins accused the Montagnards of siding with the Parisian militants, the sans-culottes, who had taken a prominent part in the overthrow of the monarchy and who were now calling for terror measures to fight the war, and a crack down against counter-revolutionaries, and bankers and speculators who were exploiting the poor. In continuing to side with Parisian militancy, the Montagnards were riding the tiger of popular democracy in a volatile situation.
The decision on the fate of the king was another pivotal moment. The 721 deputies of the convention acted as a law court. Louis was found guilty, but the question remained as to whether he should be put to death – the proscribed penalty for treason, especially in time of war. The alternative would be to keep him imprisoned, or to banish him. Robespierre argued that, while he still opposed the death penalty in principle, these were not normal circumstances. Louis’ existence was a danger to the republic, a rallying point for its enemies.
Voting continued through the night as spectators looked on, eating refreshments and drinking wine. One gravely ill deputy had himself carried in to vote. A deputy, Mercier (the third witness at Desmoulins’ wedding, but now distancing himself from the radicals) described the process: “Face after face passed by… In slow and sepulchral tones voices recorded the verdict, ‘Death!’’’
The execution of the king, in January 1793, was the first time the guillotine had been used to despatch someone convicted of treason. They botched the execution: Louis moved, and the blade hit his head. Future executions would be streamlined, with victims strapped to a tilting plank that slid under the guillotine, with a bracket to hold the head in place so that the descending blade sliced unerringly through the neck.
March 1793 saw the start of a major revolt in the Vendée in western France, and an attempt by General Charles-François Dumouriez to overthrow the convention. Dumouriez’s treason proved disastrous for the Girondins, who were tainted by association with him. The sans-culottes called for their arrest. The Girondins for their part attacked the Montagnards, attempting to have them sent before the new Revolutionary Tribunal, set up to judge political crimes.
Rough justice
For all the deputies, including the Montagnards, it was vital not to let people take matters into their own hands to dispense impromptu “justice” on the streets without legal process. This had happened the previous September, when bands of Paris militants entered the prisons, butchering prisoners they deemed to be counter-revolutionary.
It was to avoid a repetition of these scenes that Danton called for the setting up of the Tribunal: “Let us be terrible,” he said, “to spare the people from being so.” Terror, as implemented by the convention, was a legal process. It was not a unified system of government, but an improvised, sometimes chaotic, response to a series of crises. Even men who, like Robespierre, had been against the death penalty, accepted that the need to preserve the republic came first. They quoted Cicero: “Public safety is the highest law.”
Ironically, laws on terror weighed hard on
“Let us be terrible,” declared the leading revolutionary Georges Danton, “to spare the people from being so”
revolutionary leaders themselves. They were expected to give examples of integrity and public service and were judged ruthlessly if they were seen to fall short, in a context in which mutual fear and suspicion made factional disputes increasingly bitter. Against the backdrop of continuing military crisis, full-scale civil war in the Vendée, and unrest on the streets, divisions escalated into a terror that began to play out within the convention itself. On the proposal of a Girondin, a vote was taken to remove parliamentary immunity. From that point on, deputies were vulnerable to arrest for having “suspect” opinions. Factional tensions rose to knife-edge. There were scuffles, and some deputies took to carrying weapons.
Desmoulins joined in the denunciation of his former friends. His pamphlet Secret History of the Revolution purported to be an exposé of the real motives behind the words and actions of the Girondins, accusing them of engaging in a conspiracy with the royalists to overturn the revolution. Massed crowds armed with cannon demanded, and obtained, the arrest of many leading Girondins.
Despite pressure from the sans-culottes, the deputies remained reluctant to proceed against the Girondins, and they might well have been reinstated had it not been for two things. The first was that some Girondins escaped and began to foment uprisings against the convention. The other event that sealed their fate was when Charlotte Corday (a previously unknown Girondins-sympathiser) bluffed her way into the home of a leading Montagnard, Jean-Paul Marat, and stabbed him in his bath with a kitchen knife. The Montagnards assumed that leading Girondins were behind the assassination. Corday’s action had made deputies more fearful, and thus more ruthless.
Courtroom drama
That autumn the leading Girondins were indicted. As they were sentenced to death, one stabbed himself in the dock. Seven of the guests at Desmoulins’ wedding were among the condemned. Desmoulins collapsed in the public gallery, screaming that it was his own pamphlet that was killing them. Though both Desmoulins and Danton had been implicated in supporting terror, they now joined forces to push for clemency. Desmoulins started a newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier, in which he spoke up against the policy of terror: “You want to exterminate all your enemies by means of the guillotine! Has there ever been such great folly? Can you make a single man perish on the scaffold, without making 10 enemies for yourself from his family or his friends?”
Up to a point Robespierre seems to have sympathised, but he put the unity of revolutionary government before loyalty to his friends. He joined forces with the rest of the committee to have Danton, Desmoulins and others arrested and sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Desmoulins wrote a last letter to his wife. “I had dreamed of a republic that the whole world adored. I could not have believed that men were capable of being so ferocious and so unjust.” Lucile never received it. She was already under arrest herself for having tried to organise protests against her husband’s treatment.
Eighty-six deputies either died under the guillotine or killed themselves to pre-empt public execution. Nearly a third of deputies experienced arrest, sometimes for many months. One deputy recalled: “The terror was more deadly towards the friends of liberty than towards its enemies.”
Overall, just under 17,000 people were sentenced to death in what is now known as the Terror. The great majority of those executed were put to death under a law that called for those found guilty of taking up arms to fight against the revolution to be subject to death within 24 hours. They were condemned by military commissions or provincial tribunals that were most active in areas of conflict, in parts of western France, and on the frontiers where there was war with the foreign powers. Tens of thousands more died in the brutal civil war in the Vendée.
As for the Revolutionary Tribunal, it sent 2,639 defendants to the guillotine. In most cases brought before the tribunal, people had some chance to mount a legal defence. Overall, just over half the accused were condemned to death.
It took a French victory over a coalition army at the battle of Fleurus (in modern-day Belgium) in June 1794 for the arrests, the trials and the executions to relent. Terror was no longer viewed as a necessary tool to save France from foreign invasion.
But the killing wasn’t over quite yet.
In July 1794, Maximilien Robespierre was overthrown by fellow Montagnards terrified that he was seeking their arrest. He and 107 of his adherents went to the guillotine.
The men who contrived Robespierre’s fall wasted no time in falsely claiming that he and his supporters had been acting alone in “masterminding” terror. In doing so, they conveniently ignored the fact that the laws enabling terror had been voted for by the convention as a whole.
One of the last acts of the National Convention before it disbanded in October 1795 was to distance its members from the killings further still by offering them an amnesty for actions they had taken in a time of terror. And so Robespierre was forced to carry the can for the events of 1792–94. But he was far from the only one with blood on his hands.
Marisa Linton’s latest book, Terror: The French Revolution and its Demons, co-written with Michel Biard, will be published by Polity Press in November. She recently discussed the revolution on our podcast: historyextra.com/podcast
“The terror was more deadly towards the friends of liberty than towards its enemies,” recalled one deputy