by Will Durant
Arguing that the Committee had mismanaged the economy, and that profiteers had seized the ship of state, the sansculottes of Paris, who had been the mainstay of Robespierre, transferred their support to Hébert and Chaumette, and listened avidly to proposals for the nationalization of all property, all wealth, or at least all land. One section leader proposed to cure economic distress by putting all rich people to death.97 By 1794 it was a common complaint, among workingmen, that the bourgeoisie had walked off with the Revolution.
Toward the end of ’93 new challenges to the Committee came from a powerful revolutionary leader and a brilliant journalist. Despite the pretended ferocity of Danton there was in him an amiable streak that winced at the execution of the Queen and the violence of the Terror. On his return from Arcis he judged that the expulsion of invaders from the soil of France and the execution of the most active enemies of the Revolution left little reason for continued terror or war. When Britain offered peace he advised acceptance. Robespierre refused, and intensified the Terror on the ground that the government was still beset by disloyalty, conspiracy, and corruption. Camille Desmoulins, once secretary to Danton, long his admiring friend, and, like him, enjoying a happy marriage, made his journal, Le Vieux Cordelier, the mouthpiece of the “Indulgents,” or pacifiers, and called for an end to the Terror.
Liberty is no nymph of the opera, nor a red cap, nor a dirty shirt and rags. Liberty is happiness, reason, equality, justice, the Declaration of Rights, your sublime Constitution [still hibernating].
Would you have me recognize this liberty, have me fall at her feet, and shed all my blood for her? Then open the prison doors to the 200,000 citizens whom you call suspects…. Do not think that such a measure would be fatal to the public. It would, on the contrary, be the most revolutionary that you could adopt. You would exterminate all your enemies by the guillotine? But was there ever greater madness? Can you destroy one enemy on the scaffold without making two others among his family and friends?
I am of a very different opinion from those who claim that it is necessary to leave the Terror the order of the day. I am confident that liberty will be assured, and Europe conquered, as soon as you have a Committee of Clemency.98
Robespierre, heretofore friendly to Desmoulins, was alarmed by this appeal to open the prisons. Those aristocrats, priests, speculators, and swelling bourgeois—would they not, if released, resume all the more confidently their schemes to exploit or destroy the Republic? He was convinced that the fear of arrest, speedy condemnation, and a ghastly death was the only force that would keep the enemies of the Revolution from plotting its fall. He suspected that Danton’s sudden quality of mercy was a ruse to save from the guillotine some associates lately arrested for malfeasance, and to protect Danton himself from exposure of his relations with these men. Some of them—Fabre d’Églantine and François Chabot—were tried on January 17, 1794, and were found guilty. Robespierre concluded that Danton and Desmoulins were bent on unseating and putting an end to the Committee. He concluded that he would never be safe as long as these old friends of his were alive.
He kept his foes disunited, and played their opposed factions against each other; he encouraged the attacks of Danton and Desmoulins upon Hébert, and welcomed their aid in opposing the war against religion. Hébert countered by supporting the riots of townspeople against the cost and scarcity of food; he condemned both the government and the Indulgents; on March 4, 1794, he denounced Robespierre by name, and on March 11 his followers at the Cordeliers Club openly threatened insurrection. A majority of the Committee agreed with Robespierre that the time had come to act. Hébert, Cloots, and several others were arrested, and were tried on a charge of malfeasance in the distribution of provisions to the people. It was a subtle accusation, for it left the sansculottes doubtful of their new leaders; and before they could decide upon revolt the men were condemned, and were quickly led to the guillotine (March 24). Hébert broke down and wept; Cloots, Teutonically calm as he waited for his turn to die, called to the crowd, “My friends, don’t confuse me with these rascals.”99
Danton must have realized that he had been used as a tool against Hébert, and was now of little value to the Committee. Even so he continued to alienate the Committee by advocating mercy and peace—policies requiring the members to repudiate the Terror that had preserved them and the war that had excused their dictatorship. He urged an end to the killing; “Let us,” he said, “leave something to the guillotine of opinion.” He still planned educational projects and judiciary reforms. And he remained defiant. Someone told him that Robespierre was planning his arrest; “If I thought he had even the idea of it,” he answered, “I would eat his heart out.”100 In the almost “state of nature” to which the Terror had reduced France many men felt that they had to eat or be eaten. His friends urged him to take the initiative and attack the Committee before the Convention. But he was too tired in nerve and will to follow his own historic summons to audacity; he was exhausted by breasting, through four years, the waves of the Revolution, and now he let the undertow carry him away unresisting. “I would rather be guillotined than guillotine others,” he said (it had not always been so); “and, besides, I am sick of the human race.”101
It was apparently Billaud-Varenne who took the initiative in recommending death for Danton. Many members of the Committee agreed with him that to allow the campaign of the Indulgents to go on was to surrender the Revolution to its enemies at home and abroad. Robespierre was for a time reluctant to conclude that the life of Danton should be summarily shortened. He shared with the other members of the Committee the belief that Danton had allowed some moneys of the state to stick to his fingers, but he recognized the services that Danton had rendered to the Revolution, and he feared that a sentence of death for one of its greatest figures would lead to insurrection in the sections and the National Guard.
During this period of Robespierre’s hesitation Danton visited him two or three times, not only to defend his financial record but to convert the somber patriot to the policy of ending the Terror and seeking peace. Robespierre remained unconvinced, and grew more hostile. He helped Saint-Just (whom Danton had often ridiculed) to prepare the case against his greatest rival. On March 30 he joined the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security in their united resolve to secure from the Revolutionary Tribunal a sentence of death for Danton, Desmoulins, and twelve men lately convicted of embezzlement. A friend of “the Titan” rushed the news to him and urged him to leave Paris and hide himself in the provinces. He refused. The next morning the police arrested him and Desmoulins, who lived on the floor above him. Imprisoned in the Conciergerie, he remarked, “On a day like this I organized the Revolutionary Tribunal…. I ask pardon for it of God and man…. In revolutions authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.”102
On April 1, Louis Legendre, recently a representative on mission, proposed to the deputies that Danton be sent for from prison and allowed to defend himself before the Convention. Robespierre stopped him with an ominous glare. “Danton,” he cried, “is not privileged…. We shall see this day whether the Convention will be able to destroy a pretended idol long since rotted away.”103 Then Saint-Just read the bill of charges that he had prepared. The deputies, each mindful of his own safety, ordered that Danton and Desmoulins be brought immediately to trial.
On April 2 they were led before the Tribunal. Perhaps to confuse the issues, they were made part of a batch of men including Fabre d’Églantine, other “conspirators” or embezzlers, and—to the general surprise as well as his own—Hérault de Séchelles, suave member of the Committee, now accused of association with the Hébertists and the foreign plot. Danton defended himself with force and satirical wit, which made such an impression on the jury and spectators104 that Fouquier-Tinville dispatched an appeal to the Committee for a decree that would silence the defense. The Committee obliged by sending to the Convention a charge that the followers of Danton and Desmoulins were, with their knowledg
e, plotting to rescue them by force; on this basis the Convention declared the two men to be outlaws—which meant that, being “outside the (protection of the) law,” they might now be killed without due process of law. On receiving this decree the jurymen announced that they had received sufficient testimony, and were ready to render a verdict. The prisoners were returned to their cells; the spectators were dismissed. On April 5 the unanimous verdict was announced: death for all the accused. Hearing it, Danton predicted, “Before these months are out the people will tear my enemies to pieces.”105 And again: “Vile Robespierre! The scaffold claims you too. You will follow me.”106 From his cell Desmoulins wrote to his wife: “My beloved Lucile! I was born to make verses and to defend the unfortunate…. My darling, care for your little one; live for my Horace; speak to him of me…. My bound hands embrace you.”107
On the afternoon of April 5 the condemned men were carted to the Place de la Révolution. En route Danton prophesied again: “I leave it all in a frightful welter. Not a man of them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he is dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the governing of men.”108 On the scaffold Desmoulins, near the breaking point of his nerves, was third in the line to death, Danton was the last. He too thought of his young wife, and murmured some words for her, then caught himself: “Come, Danton, no weakness.” As he approached the knife he told the executioner, “Show my head to the people; it is worth it.”109 He was thirty-four years old, Desmoulins too; but they had lived many lives since that July day when Camille called upon the Parisians to take the Bastille. Eight days after their death Lucile Desmoulins, along with Hébert’s widow and Chaumette, followed them to the guillotine.
The slate seemed clear; all the groups that had challenged the Committee of Public Safety had been eliminated or suppressed. The Girondins were dead or dispersed; the sansculottes had been divided and silenced; the clubs—excepting the Jacobin—had been closed; the press and the theater were under strict censorship; the Convention, cowed, left all major decisions to the Committee. Under that tutelage, and instructed by its other committees, the Convention passed laws against hoarders and speculators, proclaimed free, universal primary education, abolished slavery in the French colonies, and established a welfare state with social security, unemployment benefits, medical aid for the poor, and relief for the old. These measures were in large part frustrated by war and chaos, but they remained as ideas to inspire succeeding generations.
Robespierre, his hands incarnadined but free, now attended to restoring God to France. The attempt to replace Christianity with rationalism was turning the country against the Revolution. In Paris the Catholics were rebelling against the closing of the churches and the harassment of priests; more and more of the lower and middle classes were going to Sunday Mass. In one of his eloquent addresses (May 7, 1794) Robespierre argued that the time had come to reunite the Revolution with its spiritual progenitor Rousseau (whose remains had been transferred to the Panthéon on April 14); the state should support a pure and simple religion—essentially that of the Savoyard Vicar in Emile—based upon belief in God and an afterlife, and preaching civic and social virtue as the necessary foundation of a republic. The Convention agreed, hoping that this move would appease the pious and mitigate the Terror; and on June 4 it made Robespierre its president.
In this official capacity, on June 8, 1794, he presided over a “Feast of the Supreme Being,” before 100,000 men, women, and children assembled in the Champ-de-Mars. At the head of a long procession of skeptical deputies the Incorruptible walked with flowers and wheat ears in his hand, to the accompaniment of music and choral song. A great car drawn by milk-white oxen carried sheaves of golden corn; behind it came shepherds and shepherdesses representing Nature (in her fairer moods) as one form and voice of God. On one of the basins that adorned the Field of Mars, David, the leading French artist of the age, had carved in wood a statue of Atheism supported by sculptured vices and crowned with Madness; over against these he had raised a figure of Wisdom triumphant over all. Robespierre, embodiment of virtue, applied a torch to Atheism, but an ill wind diverted the blaze to Wisdom. A magnanimous overall inscription announced: “The French people recognizes the Supreme Being, and the immortality of the soul.”110 Similar ceremonies were held throughout France. Robespierre was happy, but Billaud-Varenne told him, “You begin to bore me with your Supreme Being.”
Two days later Robespierre induced the Convention to decree an astonishing reinforcement of the Terror; it was as if he was answering and defying Danton as, with the Feast, he had rebuked Hébert. The Law of 22 Prairial (June 10, 1794) established the death penalty for advocating monarchy or calumniating the republic; for outraging morality; for giving out false news; for stealing public property; for profiteering or embezzling; for impeding the transport of food; for interfering in any way with the prosecution of the war. Furthermore the decree empowered the courts to decide whether the accused should be allowed counsel, what witnesses should be heard, when the taking of evidence should end.111 “As for myself,” said one juryman, “I am always convinced. In a revolution all who appear before this Tribunal ought to be condemned.”112
Some excuses were given for this intensification of the Terror. On May 22 an attempt had been made on the life of Collot d’Herbois; on May 23 a young man was intercepted in an apparent attempt to assassinate Robespierre. Belief in a foreign plot to kill the leaders of the Revolution led the Convention to decree that no quarter should be given to British or Hanoverian prisoners of war. The prisons of Paris held some eight thousand suspects who might revolt and escape; they had to be immobilized by fear.
So began the especially “Great Terror,” lasting from June 10 to July 27, 1794. In not quite seven weeks 1,376 men and women were guillotined—155 more than in the sixty-one weeks between March, 1793, and June 10, 1794.113 Fouquier-Tinville remarked that heads were falling “like slates from a roof.”114 The people no longer went to executions, these had become so common; rather they stayed home, and watched every word they spoke. Social life nearly ceased; the taverns and brothels were almost empty. The Convention itself was reduced to a skeleton; out of its original 750 deputies only 117 now attended, and many of these abstained from voting lest they compromise themselves. Even Committee members lived in fear that they would fall under the axe of the new triumvirate—Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just.
Probably it was the war that led powerful individuals to submit to so irritating a concentration of authority. In April, 1794, the Prince of Saxe-Coburg had led another army into France, and any defeat of the French defenders could lead to a chaos of fear in Paris. The British blockade was trying to keep American provisions from France, and only the defeat of a British fleet by a French convoy (June 1) enabled precious cargoes to reach Brest. Then a French army threw back the invaders near Charleroi (June 25), and a day later Saint-Just led a French force to a decisive victory at Fleurus. Coburg withdrew from France, and on July 27 Jourdan and Pichegru crossed the frontier to establish French authority in Antwerp and Liège.
This triumphant repulse of the princely incursion may have shared in destroying Robespierre; his multiplying enemies could feel that the country and the Army would survive the shock of an open conflict to the death at the heart of the government. The Committee of General Security was at odds with that of Public Safety over the policing power, and within the latter body Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, and Carnot were in rising revolt against Robespierre and Saint-Just. Feeling their hostility, Robespierre avoided Committee meetings between July 1 and 23, hoping that this would cool their resentment of his leadership; but it gave them more opportunity to plan his fall. Moreover, his strategy faltered: on July 23 he made enemies of former supporters by yielding to the plaints of businessmen and signing a decree establishing maximum wages for labor; in effect, because of depreciated currency, the decree lowered some wages to half of what they had been before.115
It was the ter
rorists returned from the provinces—Fouché, Fréron, Tallien, Carrier—who decided that their lives depended on the elimination of Robespierre. It was he who had recalled them to Paris and had demanded of them an account of their missions. “Come, tell us, Fouché,” he asked, “who deputed you to tell the people that there is no God?”116 At the Jacobin Club he proposed that Fouché submit to interrogation about his operations in Toulon and Lyons, or be struck from membership. Fouché refused to submit to such an examination, and retaliated by circulating a list of men who, he claimed, were among Robespierre’s new candidates for the guillotine. As for Tallien, he needed no such instigation; his charming mistress, Thérésa Cabarrus, had been arrested on May 22, allegedly on Robespierre’s orders; rumor said she had sent Tallien a dagger. Tallien swore to free her at whatever cost.
On July 26 Robespierre made his last speech before the Convention. The deputies were hostile, for many of them had reacted against the hasty execution of Danton, and many more blamed Robespierre for having reduced the Convention to impotence. He tried to answer these charges:
Citizens: … I need to open my heart, and you need to hear the truth…. I have come here to dispel cruel errors. I have come to stifle the horrible oaths of discord with which certain men want to fill this temple of liberty….
