The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  None of these developments appear to have been unpopular. Police reports suggest a general approval in Paris for the closure of the Jacobins and the execution of Carrier. The main source of discontent in the capital during the second half of 1794 was economic. On 7 September, as the brief Jacobin revival was beginning, the Convention extended the Law of the Maximum for another year, signalling its intention of keeping the economy under control. But during the crisis of the summer the fall in the value of the assignat had once more accelerated: between August and December it fell from 34 to 20 per cent. Accordingly, although on 9 August the post-Robespierrist commune abandoned the draconian wage controls that had turned Paris against the ‘tyrant’, fixing far more generous rates, there was agitation for higher wages throughout the autumn. Government munitions workshops led the way; but, rather than yield to their demands, in January the Convention simply closed them down. Even more serious was the scarcity of basic commodities, which ensured that when available they sold at prices far higher than those authorized under the maximum. ‘Everything’, noted a police report in October,9 ‘is selling in the markets above the maximum’; adding, more surprisingly, that ‘the people are saying that this law is unenforceable, and that unlimited freedom of trade is the only remedy for its ills’. The deputies of the Convention, of course, had always believed this. They had only accepted the maximum under popular pressure, and their recognition that it had worked in the year since its imposition was never more than grudging. When they began to hear that, even among the populace, support for it was waning, they once more allowed their convictions to guide them. Price controls, they thought, had worsened the very scarcity and hoarding they had been intended to curtail. Only a free market would restore abundance, not to mention reanimating foreign trade, which had languished under a controlled economy. A report on the whole issue was commissioned, and early in December the result was a recommendation that the maximum should be abolished. On 24 December the recommendation was accepted.

  That night there was a savage frost. It marked the onset of a winter colder even than 1788; in fact, the worst of the whole century. And the conditions which permitted the Republic’s armies to swarm across the frozen Rhine into Holland brought acute hardship to its citizens remaining at home. Rivers froze and supplies of coal and firewood, already scarce over the autumn, were immobilized. The whole country was affected. In the south olive-trees just recovering after the disaster of 1788 were blighted again, and even the Rhône was full of ice. The harvest of 1794 had been indifferent, and the armies had had first claims on its product. Grain had been bought abroad, as far afield as the Baltic and North Africa, but on arrival it could be neither transported nor milled because of the ice, and the floods which followed when it thawed. Some cities, such as Lyons and Paris itself, supplemented grain supplies with rice, but there was often not enough fuel to cook it. Consequently by the spring bread was being rationed and its price subsidized by local authorities who borrowed heavily to do so. That still gave Parisians a pound of bread per day in the depth of the crisis, February and March 1795; but in the provinces the ration was often much less and not as frequent. Most other prices, meanwhile, rocketed once the maximum was abolished. Meat went up by 300 per cent between December and April in Paris; butter more than doubled. Hungry people froze to death in the streets in January 1795. Others killed themselves before it came to that: suicide rates rose markedly in Paris and other northern cities like Rouen and Le Havre. And to add to all this, the bottom finally fell out of the assignats. With the abolition of price controls, the government itself was forced to pay market prices for the massive supplies it still needed to sustain the war effort. Taxes came in sluggishly as the agencies of government were paralysed by political uncertainties and farmers’ incomes were shorn by harvest shortfalls. Nobody paid them in anything but assignats. The only way to meet the State’s commitments was to print yet more assignats, and in May 1795 the number in circulation was approaching double that of a year beforehand. By then their value had fallen to a mere 8 per cent.

  Against this background the anti-Jacobin campaign in Paris continued. Fréron’s Muscadins policed the theatres, wrecking performances they did not like by howling choruses of their new battle song, ‘The People’s Awakening’. They also tried to drown the ‘Marseillaise’ when it was sung, claiming that it was a mere Jacobin anthem. People in red caps were attacked, trees of liberty cut down, terroristic wall slogans painted out. And the first weeks of 1795 saw a sustained campaign against the cult of Marat. The plaster busts of the People’s Friend which had proliferated throughout 1793 and 1794 were systematically sought out and smashed. Various attempts were made to demolish a memorial erected to him outside the Convention hall, while the right-wing press began to call for the removal of his remains from the Pantheon. The remnants of the sansculotte movement bitterly resented these attacks on a figure who was a saint to circles far wider than paid-up Jacobins. In the handful of sections, mostly in the eastern districts of the city, which were still dominated by veterans of the year of terror, popular societies raised noisy protests. Their efforts were encouraged by a new journal, Le Tribun du peuple, published clandestinely by the hitherto obscure extreme democrat and former feudal lawyer Babeuf. At the end of January he called for a new popular insurrection to secure the introduction of the still suspended constitution of 1793, with all its democratic forms. As a rallying cry it proved completely counter-productive. A week later an intensive police search ended in Babeuf’s arrest, and the Convention ordered the closure of the popular societies. On 8 February, barely five months after placing him there, it yielded to the Muscadin campaign and decreed that Marat should be removed from the Pantheon. Nobody, it declared, should lie there until at least ten years after death. On this pretext, the bones of a number of other martyrs of the Year II were also ejected.

  By now, in fact, the tide of reaction was flowing too strongly for the Convention to make any further pretence of standing against it. December and January saw the first relaxation of the laws against emigration, with sailors, manual workers, and artisans being allowed to return to the country subject to certain provisos. On 11 April outlawed Federalists, too, were allowed to return. Meanwhile a commission was established to look into the charges still being persistently levelled at the former members of the governing committees, and on 2 March it reported against them. Barère, Billaud, and Collot were put under house arrest pending trial. Vadier, also indicted, was already in hiding. A week later occurred perhaps the most vivid sign of how far retreat from the Jacobin regime of the Year II had gone. Churches reopened for public worship. During its last, fleeting endorsement of Jacobinism, on 18 September 1794, the Convention had carried the drift of the Revolution since 1790 to a logical conclusion when it finally renounced the constitutional Church. The Republic, it decreed, would no longer pay the costs or wages of any cult—not that it had been paying them in practice for a considerable time already. It meant the end of state recognition for the Supreme Being, a cult too closely identified with Robespierre. But above all it marked the abandonment of the Revolution’s own creation, the constitutional Church. For the first time ever in France, Church and State were now formally separated. To some this decree looked like a return to dechristianization, and here and there in the provinces there were renewed bursts of persecution against refractories. But most read it, correctly, as an attempt to deflect the hostility of those still faithful to the Church from the Republic. The natural corollary came with the decree of 21 February 1795 which proclaimed the freedom of all cults to worship as they liked. The tone of the law was grudging, and it was introduced with much gratuitous denigration of priestcraft and superstition. Religion was defined as a private affair, and local authorities were forbidden to lend it any recognition or support. All outward signs of religious affiliation in the form of priestly dress, ceremonies, or church bells remained strictly forbidden. The faithful would have to buy or rent their own places of worship and pay their own priest
s or ministers. But they found them readily enough as soon as the decree was passed. ‘Today, Sunday 8 March 1795’, noted a Parisian in his diary,10 ‘they began to say mass publicly everywhere in Paris in rooms, in apartments, in halls and in some monastic chapels. Everybody everywhere went to hear it … There were places where masses were said from six in the morning until midday and where there are many people who took communion … Mass has not been said since Sunday 13 October 1793.’ A week earlier, in devout Brittany, a British prisoner was drawn by the sound of the organ into the devastated and pillaged cathedral of Quimper, where he found ‘rows of people on their knees’, while ‘a fine grey-headed, respectable-looking priest, habited in his pontificals, officiated at the altar.’11 The congregation were mostly ‘poor people from the country, with a few of the higher ranks, many more of whom, I was assured, would have been there, could they have believed themselves secure from reproach’.

  Much of the impetus for the new religious policy came from the deputies’ awareness of the need to bring permanent peace to the Vendée, where religious grievances had turned opponents of the Revolution royalist. Although the rebels’ defeat at Savenay in December 1793 had ended the ‘Great War’ of the Vendée, Turreau’s vicious reprisals of the following spring had done nothing to reconcile the remaining population to the republic. Their effect was to embitter the whole region yet more rather than to pacify it. Further north in Brittany, meanwhile, resolute enforcement of conscription had driven many more young men than previously into the arms of the chouans, and organized bands of some size began to appear under the co-ordination of regional leaders. By May there were perhaps 22,000 chouans operating throughout Brittany, although most were not armed; and before the summer was over they had reduced government outside the larger towns to chaos with murder, threats, disruption of communications, and attacks on constitutional priests and buyers of national lands. A new Breton Catholic and royal army was even announced in July 1794; and although this was wishful thinking on the part of its progenitor, the royalist adventurer Puisaye, the Convention was naturally alarmed. Rural insurgency had put much of the west beyond the Republic’s control, and only well-garrisoned ports seemed to be preventing the British from coming to help the rebels. So after Robespierre’s fall a new and more conciliatory policy began to emerge. Turreau had already been recalled before Thermidor, and was arrested in September 1794, though later acquitted of personal responsibility for the atrocities of the spring. Republican troops were ordered to cease provocative operations and withdraw from billets into camps, while peace feelers were sent out to identifiable guerrilla leaders—Stofflet and Charette in the Vendée, Puisaye in Brittany. General Hoche was brought back from the German front to take overall command of troops north of the Loire, and he proclaimed an amnesty and bounty for all rebels who handed in their arms. News of the trial of Carrier reassured the insurgents that the Republic had now renounced terror, and on 1 December the Convention itself decreed an amnesty for all who would surrender within a month. Many did so, and by January 1795 serious negotiations were under way for a general cease-fire. Early in February Charette, whose bands dominated the Vendée lowlands, concluded the pacification of Lajaunye, under which the rebels agreed to stop their operations in return for a guarantee of religious freedom, no reprisals, and exemption of the region from conscription laws. The Republic would return all confiscated private property, grant indemnities for losses, and allow the rebels to keep their arms and maintain law and order in their districts in the Republic’s name. All the Republic did not, and could not, concede to the rebels was the restoration of monarchy in the state within the state that it now recognized. No doubt the ‘blues’ believed that such generous terms were responsible for the previously intransigent Stofflet’s acceptance of similar ones for the Vendée bocage early in May, and their extension to the chouans of Brittany under the treaty of La Mabilais on 20 April. If so, they were seriously mistaken. Charette had signed only because he believed himself dangerously isolated; the other two armistices represented mere playing for time by the rebels, who by then had received secret assurances that Puisaye had persuaded the British to mount a major expedition against the Breton coast. When Charette was alerted, he assured the others that he, too, would co-operate with the expedition.

  Before that crisis broke, however, the Convention had to surmount a spectacular challenge on its own doorstep—the last attempt of the people of Paris to coerce the nation’s deputies in the now legendary manner of 1793. For ordinary Parisians, all that had made the terrible winter of 1795 endurable had been the regular bread ration which the Convention had been determined to maintain. But by the beginning of March its ability to guarantee even this was crumbling. With it crumbled the remarkable popular confidence which the deputies had been able to retain in the depth of the winter’s misery. Queues at bakers’ shops began to lengthen, rations were cut, and on some days some districts had no supplies of bread at all. For the first time since 1792 royalists began to come into the open to argue that the shortages showed that the Republic had failed. But the initial instinct of the women who were the first to experience empty food shops was not to dream of taking the sickly Louis XVII from his lonely confinement in the Temple and setting him on the throne. It was to remember the controlled economy of the Terror. ‘There is talk’, reported a police spy on 16 March,12 ‘of the regime of before 9 Thermidor, when goods were not as dear and money and assignats were worth the same.’ Talk began to be heard at the same time, especially in the city’s east end, of a new uprising. Yet at the same moment the Convention was reintegrating surviving Girondins now out of hiding, such as Lanjuinais, Isnard, and Louvet, who had made their names denouncing the sansculottes. It was also trying the leading survivors of the government of the Terror: the impeachment of Barère, Billaud, Collot, and Vadier opened on 22 March. And when bands of women petitioned the Convention for better bread supplies, they had to push their way through crowds of aggressive, smirking Muscadins who mocked their distress. Yet the deputies were not unconcerned. They voted to requisition two-thirds of available grain from normal supplying areas as a forced loan (24 March) and for bread rations to be delivered to the door to eliminate queueing (28 March). Meanwhile they had also taken steps to defend themselves by decreeing savage punishments for attacks on the Convention. Fréron began to organize his Gilded Youth into an informal legislative guard. He was not a moment too soon. On 27 and 28 March there were attempts to march on the Convention amid several days of bread riots in former radical sections like Gravilliers, Jacques Roux’s old centre of operations. Those involved had now taken up Babeuf’s cry for the constitution of 1793, which, whatever else it meant, would bring the end of the Convention and fresh elections. There was no organization such as had characterized sansculotte action in 1792 or 1793. The institutions necessary for that had been pulverized twelve months previously, and their lack would eventually doom the movement now gathering momentum. But on 1 April (12 Germinal) days of disturbance culminated in about 10,000 people, mostly from eastern Paris, marching on the Convention and swamping the Muscadins who had been assembled to stop them. They poured into the hall calling for bread and the constitution of 1793, milling about, and impeding all debate for about four hours. But they had no clearer programme of demands, they were not co-ordinated, and the deputies from whom they expected support, the handful of Montagnard remnants known now as the ‘Crest’, took the lead in urging them to leave. As National Guardsmen with Muscadin reinforcements began to arrive from western districts towards evening, the crowd melted away empty-handed. The Convention appointed General Pichegru, fresh from victories in the Netherlands, to co-ordinate all forces of law and order in the capital. Then, to emphasize its defiance and no doubt give vent to pent-up tensions, it delivered its verdict on the four impeached terrorists. By acclamation Barère, Billaud, and Collot (and Vadier in his absence) were condemned to deportation. At least they avoided Carrier’s fate; but not, their colleagues thought, for long. The pla
ce of their exile was to be Guiana, later to be known as Devil’s Island but in 1795 more familiarly (if inaccurately) called the ‘dry guillotine’.

  In the Parisian context the gesture was merely provocative, and over the next few days the city remained very unsettled, with talk of new marches and demonstrations. Pichegru’s response was to disperse large gatherings and order the arrest of anybody with a suspicious record. On 10 April the Convention backed him up by authorizing the disarmament of all those ‘known’ in their sections as activists during the Terror. Throughout Paris that meant 1,600 people were rendered officially defenceless against any sort of reprisals. By this time sixteen ex-Montagnard deputies had been placed under cautionary arrest, too. Those who had conducted and collaborated with revolutionary government in the Year II, most of whom by now no longer occupied any public office, were in effect identified by these measures as public enemies. Nor was their impact confined to Paris. In the provinces, as the spring weather thawed the paralysis of that ice-bound winter, the new measures proved the signal for an outburst of counter-terror.

  It was called ‘White’, implying that its inspiration was royalist. Some of it undoubtedly was: outside Paris, the disillusionment brought by the Convention’s inability to handle the famine conditions of the first half of 1795 produced a surge of nostalgic sentiment for days when kings had seen to their subjects’ basic needs. In the department of the Gard, around that original centre of counter-revolution Nîmes, ‘Companies of the Sun’ emerged to terrorize former terrorists under the direction of men who had never been anything but royalists and were in touch with agents of the Count d’Artois. The ‘Companies of Jesus’ in the Lyons area were similar. But mostly the White Terror was motivated by little more than vengeance for the cruelties and tragedies inflicted by its victims when they had been in power the year before. It was closer to the anarchic terror of 1793 than to the well-organized machine of the subsequent spring. Nor was the guillotine, that symbol of all the counter-terrorists abhorred in their enemies, a feature. White Terror operated through lynch mobs and murder gangs, abductions and ambushes. Its first manifestations predated the Germinal uprising and the crackdown which followed. The first victims at Nîmes, for example—former officers of the Terror butchered by National Guards supposedly escorting them to prison—died late in February. A former judge of the Popular Commission of Orange was lynched at Avignon around the same time.