The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Another factor in arresting the decline of the assignat had been a forced loan on the rich. The principle was first adopted in response to sansculotte pressure on 20 May 1793 but, despite the urgings of the enragés, nothing was done to implement it until the crisis of September. On the third of that month, however, it was decreed that all income over 6,000 livres for the unmarried and 10,000 livres for families should be appropriated on a sliding scale which at the top end took everything. It looked punitive, but those subject to it were able to discharge their obligations in depreciated assignats, and millions therefore were taken out of circulation. In any case many local authorities were slow to identify those liable, although in the commercial centres of ‘Federalism’ terror against its now-vanquished paymasters produced substantial results. France’s wealthy were certainly to look back on the forced loan as one of the most shocking expedients of the year of terror, a time they would remember as one of vindictive class legislation. Another example was the decrees passed in the spring of 1794 on the disposal of lands confiscated from enemies of the Revolution, and known as the Laws of Ventôse. On 26 February (8 Ventôse) Saint-Just moved on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety that the goods of ‘persons recognized as enemies of the Revolution’ should be ‘sequestered’. On 3 March (13 Ventôse) he moved that watch committees should draw up lists of all those detained since 1 May 1789 with a view to their property being redistributed to approved ‘indigent patriots’. Ten days later a further decree established ‘popular commissions’ to decide which of those listed should be declared enemies of the Revolution and thus suffer confiscation and redistribution of their goods. In practice little was done to implement these decrees, and what was done was chaotic. Saint-Just himself seems not to have thought through the full implications of his proposals, and most of his colleagues on the governing committees were distinctly lukewarm. They supported such populist measures only in order to outbid the Parisian radicals in a new political crisis which reached its climax in this same revolutionary month of Ventôse.

  ‘Nobody’, recalled one deputy later,12 ‘had dreamed of establishing a system of terror. It established itself by force of circumstances.’ But that meant that nobody had control of it either, even among those with a vested interest in its continuance. And nobody, above all, seemed to have the power to end it, even when its purpose and achievements came to seem less and less self-evident. To criticize the Terror was to risk suspicion of sympathizing with its victims, and thereby become one of them. Yet many deputies, probably most, were deeply uneasy about terror as a basis for government from the start; and as soon as the emergency began to lift, with the first victories over the Austrians in October, the recovery of the centres of ‘Federalism’ in the weeks after that, and the defeat of the Vendéans, pressure began to mount for a less savage way of running the country.

  Among those sympathetic to this viewpoint was Robespierre, very conscious that needless excesses would discredit the Revolution at home and make enemies abroad more intransigent. His attempts to save the queen and the Girondins, his denunciation of dechristianization, and his strong support for extending the powers of central government in the Law of 14 Frimaire were all evidence of his concern. And in this he had the vocal support of Danton, who called on 22 November for less bloodshed, and played a constructive role in the elaboration of the 14 Frimaire Law. When attacked in the Jacobin Club for advocating moderation, he was vigorously defended by Robespierre. Two days later the friend of both, the veteran revolutionary journalist Desmoulins, launched a new paper with Robespierre’s blessing, the Vieux Cordelier. Its title proclaimed its approach, one critical of the new masters of the Cordeliers Club and leading advocates of continuing terror and dechristianization. By now Robespierre suspected that a number of Hébert’s allies, if not the man himself, might be more or less willing agents of Pitt, recruited to the counter-revolutionary cause by the notorious royalist intriguer the Baron de Batz. Their persistent attacks on Danton and his associates ever since the summer fell into place when it was suggested to Robespierre in mid-November by Chabot, ex-monk, ex-representative on mission, and ex-member of the Committee of General Security (until voted off late in September under Hébert’s pressure), that there existed a plot of breath-taking proportions to discredit the Revolution and set its supporters at each other’s throats. While a clutch of corrupt deputies had sought to make illicit profits by manipulating the winding-up of the former Indies Company, they had worked to entangle others, this time good patriots like (as he naturally claimed) Chabot himself, so that Hébert and his friends could then denounce them.

  It sounded less implausible to the suspicious mind of Robespierre than it does today. After all, Batz certainly existed, and his subversive activities were well known; and the allegations of shady dealing in Indies Company shares soon proved only too well founded. The Committee of General Security, suspecting that Chabot was only intent on saving his own corrupt skin, imprisoned him when he took his denunciation to them. Robespierre meanwhile continued to encourage Desmoulins in his attacks on terrorists and dechristianizers, and on 12 December stood by when an attempt was made to alter the membership of the Committee of Public Safety itself, seemingly designed to remove extremists like Billaud and Collot, and bring back Danton. Although it failed, the campaign went on. On 15 December the Vieux Cordelier compared conditions in France to the bloodiest times of imperial Rome, and made pointed allusions to the massacres at Lyons. On the twentieth Robespierre persuaded the Convention to establish a ‘committee of justice’ to investigate cases of wrongful arrest. By then, what Desmoulins and his friends considered some rightful arrests had been made: Ronsin, commander of the Paris Revolutionary Army, just back in the capital from Lyons, and Vincent, secretary general of the war ministry, who had been hinting at a new purge to silence the so-called ‘Indulgents’. Leading the attack on this occasion (17 December) was Danton’s friend the poet Fabre d’Eglantine.

  The so-called ‘Hébertists’ were at first too stunned to fight back. Those still at liberty were reduced to babbling protestations of innocence. What put new heart into them was the sudden appearance of Collot d’Herbois in the capital on 21 December. Alarmed by news of the arrest of Ronsin, his close collaborator in the repression at Lyons, Collot rushed back to Paris determined to vindicate their methods before he too came under attack. He did so by proceeding straight to the Jacobin Club, where he delivered a rousing defence of those arrested. Urged on by Hébert, the club rallied to him, and demanded that the accusers substantiate their charges. The effect of Collot’s intervention was to reinvigorate defenders of terror as an instrument of government and thereby to polarize politics in a way not seen since the purge of the Girondins. The polarization extended at first into the Committee of Public Safety itself, when Billaud and Collot were able, on 26 December, to have Robespierre’s committee of justice abolished. It might have continued had it not been for the revelation, during the first week in January, that Fabre d’Eglantine had been deeply involved in the Indies Company scandal. Robespierre was devastated. Desmoulins by now (in Vieux Cordelier, no. 5) was denouncing Hébert for corruption, yet here was the Indulgents’ main spokesman in the Convention himself deeply tainted by speculation and fraud. A bitter denunciation of Fabre at the Jacobin Club on 8 January marked the end of Robespierre’s flirtation with the Indulgents, and on 12 January Fabre was arrested. The only deputy to speak up for him was a personal friend, hitherto little involved in the factional strife of that winter: Danton.

  Uneasy calm now descended after six bitter and noisy weeks. Desmoulins abandoned the Vieux Cordelier, but in any case repression in the provinces had now passed its peak, renegade representatives on mission were being brought to heel under the Law of 14 Frimaire, and Jullien was investigating their more questionable previous activities on behalf of Robespierre. Leading figures were now denouncing the faction fighting between Indulgents and Hébertists as the greatest problem faced by the Republic; and when, on 1 February, Vin
cent and Ronsin were released by the Committee of General Security for lack of evidence of their alleged crimes, Danton applauded the move. But he also called for the release of Fabre as well, which cast doubt on his motives. Vincent and Ronsin were certainly unimpressed. They emerged from prison determined to revenge themselves on those who had put them there, and so the factional strife was rekindled. The committees did all they could to lower the temperature: Desmoulins claimed that he was prevented from bringing out further issues of the Vieux Cordelier. But their attempts to stifle dissension only turned the fury of the Hébertists against them as much as against the Indulgents, whom they were now accused of protecting. Urged on by returning provincial terrorists like Carrier and Javogues, who were anxious to deflect any punitive action from their own heads, they began to proclaim that a new insurrection was necessary to cleanse the Convention of what they called ‘the faction’. From their base in the Cordeliers Club they began to try to stir up the sansculottes, and by the end of February addresses were trickling in from sympathetic sectional societies denouncing ‘disloyal’ deputies. On 4 March the club resolved to launch a new popular journal, taking Marat’s old title L’Ami du peuple; and meanwhile it decreed that the Declaration of Rights displayed in its meeting hall should be draped in black until the ‘faction’ was destroyed. Hébert denounced Desmoulins as an enemy agent, accused him of misleading Robespierre himself, and joined in the cry for an insurrection, a ‘new 31 May’. On 6 March section Marat, where the Cordeliers were located, declared itself in a state of uprising (debout) ‘until the people’s murderers are exterminated’, and marched to the Hôtel de Ville to demand action. No other section followed its lead, and Chaumette accordingly received the demonstrators guardedly: but nobody mistook the echoes of the previous September.

  The committees, whose mandate was due for renewal the next week, were now thoroughly alarmed. Paris was restive under a malfunctioning maximum, and every market day saw scuffles around stalls selling basic commodities, while black marketeers flourished. ‘A fine liberty we have’, an unemployed labourer was arrested for yelling at a grocer on 19 March.13 ‘It’s all for the rich. The only war they’re fighting is against the poor.’ In such conditions calls for insurrection might be all too readily answered. The committees began to close ranks. Even Collot d’Herbois, having saved his own position, now began urging the Jacobins to rally to the established order and invite the Cordeliers to join them. In one of those curious, aberrant waves of fraternal emotion which sometimes carried away revolutionary assemblies even at the tensest times, they agreed, and sent the black veil from the Declaration as a token of their goodwill. But Vincent and Ronsin denounced the gesture, and kept on calling for purges. Hébert, somewhat more equivocally, supported them. The Committee of Public Safety waited until its renewal was safely past, on 11 March; then, stiffened by the return of Robespierre after a month’s illness, it struck. On 13 March Saint-Just on its behalf denounced a far-reaching plot by ‘factions of foreign inspiration’ to ‘destroy representative government by corruption, and to starve Paris’. Thousands of copies of his speech were promptly distributed in the capital. It contained much grandiloquent rhetoric in which factions were denounced as divisive of the national will, and insurrection condemned as resistance to the people themselves, who now held power. It contained no specific charges against anybody. But on the strength of it Hébert, Vincent, Ronsin, and a number of their followers or presumed sympathizers, twenty in all, were arrested on the fourteenth and during the days following and sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, was ordered by the Committee of Public Safety to secure a conviction at all costs in what would be a blatantly political trial. Accordingly, they were accused of fomenting insurrection, attempting to create an artificial famine by sabotaging food supplies, and plotting a prison massacre. The trial took place on 21–4 March, its result a foregone conclusion. Among those who went to the scaffold with Père Duchesne on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth were Vincent, Ronsin, and the leader of section Marat, Momoro. To substantiate the charge of a foreign plot, a clutch of colourful aliens perished with them too, including Clootz, who bade farewell to his beloved human race in front of the biggest crowd ever to surround the guillotine.

  It was a largely hostile crowd, too. In the end the sansculottes abandoned those who claimed to be their champions and most faithful spokesmen. Police reports make it clear that ordinary people in Paris were only too ready to believe the allegations cobbled together by Fouquier-Tinville. The Committee of Public Safety must have been relieved. The charge of trying to create famine, the simultaneous introduction of the Laws of Ventôse, and the wide distribution of Saint-Just’s speech of 13 March all showed how anxious it was to deprive the accused of popular support. So did a special grant made by the Subsistence Commission to steady the price of bread in the capital. But they need not have worried. The failure of the other 47 sections to follow the lead of Momoro’s section Marat on 6 March showed that those who had called so emotionally for insurrection two days before had taken no trouble to organize forces outside their own neighbourhood, any more than they had during their opportunistic triumph the previous September. And even if they had done so, it is by no means certain that their call would have evoked a response. After almost two years of revolutionary vigilance and tension, the sansculottes were showing signs of nervous exhaustion. Much of their programme had now been achieved—the law against hoarding, the levée en masse, the general maximum, a comprehensive policy on suspects, and a government prepared to enforce all these policies with terror. Patriots who had campaigned for all these things over the previous summer thought a government prepared to enforce them deserved support against factions of whatever sort. Many former ‘blood-drinkers’ were now in effect government employees in any case, as members of watch committees interning suspects and issuing civisme certificates, answerable ultimately to the Convention’s committees under the Law of 14 Frimaire; or simply as paid attenders at sectional meetings under Danton’s double-edged resolution of 4 September 1793. Purists might scoff at such ‘40-sou patriots’, who had given up the vital right to permanent sessions for a pittance; in many sections unofficial alternative assemblies, ‘sectional societies’, sprang up over the autumn. But the most energetic, practical, and experienced sansculottes had been creamed off into the state apparatus, and from that perspective were prepared to see Hébert and his friends as suspicious and ambitious trouble-makers, stabbing in the back a government which was winning the war both at home and abroad.

  Yet it proved the end of the sansculottes as a political force, and the end of the Paris commune as their independent mouthpiece. Chaumette, though not arrested with Hébert and the others, was picked up four days after their execution; and he and a group of presumed sympathizers, including ex-bishop Gobel, went to the guillotine in their turn on 13 April. The presumption of sympathy came from the fact that it had taken the commune almost a week to congratulate the Convention on thwarting the alleged Hébertist plot. On this pretext too the Convention decreed a general purge of the commune’s personnel which left it, by the end of April, the docile tool of the Committee of Public Safety. The same charge of guilt through silence condemned the stunned Revolutionary Army, which Ronsin was supposed to have been preparing to lend force to the alleged insurrection. On 27 March it was dissolved, to the general relief of the peasants, priests, and comfortably-off citizens it had so spectacularly terrorized. The end of the Terror, foisted on the country by the blood-thirsty militants of Paris, seemed to be at hand. Few foresaw how long it had to run; or that, firmly in the hands of the government rather than the sansculottes, in Paris at least it was destined to get worse before it got better.