by Ruth Scurr
THE MORNING OF 13 Germinal (2 April) was warm for the time of year, so all the windows were open as the Revolutionary Tribunal assembled at ten to hear the Dantonists accused. They were charged with conspiring to overthrow the government (the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security, both still nominally responsible to the Convention). But these charges were farfetched and conflated with accusations of corruption arising from the East India Company scandal. The public crowded into the vast room, its beautiful gilt ceiling and marble floor resonant of the old regime. Soon there was no more space, but still the people came, lining the grand staircase, pressing up around the walls of the Palais de Justice on its small island at the heart of Paris. The crowd filled the streets and quays outside and stretched back across the span of the Pont Neuf to the left and right banks of the Seine. When he spoke, Danton’s deep, booming voice rang out through the open windows like the tocsin. It is said the crowd could hear him clearly across the river. He was asked for his name and address: “My abode will soon be nothingness. As for my name, you will find it in the pantheon of history.”109 When Camille was asked his age, he replied, “Thirty-three, same age as that sans-culotte Jesus Christ.”110 It was obvious that the Dantonists were going to be defiant to the end. To mitigate their effect on the jury, judges, and crowd, Danton and his five associates (including Camille and Fabre) were put on trial with a selection of ten other prisoners allegedly implicated in the East India Company scam. During the trial a couple more prisoners were added to further confuse matters. Everyone remembered that the Revolutionary Tribunal had acquitted Marat—the outcome here was not a foregone conclusion—and this may have been one of the reasons Robespierre was initially reluctant to agree to Danton’s arrest when it was first proposed in the Committee of Public Safety. On the second day the first witness, a man named Pierre Joseph Cambon, was called. Danton looked him in the eye and said, “Cambon, do you really believe we are conspirators?” Cambon could not suppress a smile. “Look, he’s laughing! Write down that he laughed!” shouted Danton, laughing himself.111 Then he began the defense that reverberated louder than the president’s bell:
You say that I have been paid, but I tell you, a man like me cannot be bought. Against your accusation—for which you cannot provide proof, not even the hint of a proof or the shadow of a witness—I pitch my entire revolutionary career. It was I who in the Jacobins kept Mirabeau from leaving Paris. I have served long enough, and my life is a burden to me, but I will defend myself by telling you what I have done. It was I who made the pikes rise suddenly on 20 June and prevented the king’s journey to Saint-Cloud. The day after the massacre of the Champ de Mars a warrant was out for my arrest. Men were sent to kill me at Arcis, but my people came and defended me. I had to flee to London, but I came back…. At the Jacobins, I demanded the republic. It was I who knew that the court was eager for war. It was I who denounced the policy of the war.112
Here he was interrupted by a question: “But what did you do against Brissot and his associates?” For it was well known that whereas Robespierre had hated Brissot ever since they disagreed over the war and had fought him to the guillotine, Danton had been less active in the fall of Brissot and his Girondin friends. “I told them that they were going to the scaffold,” Danton retorted. “When I was a minister [of justice] I said it to Brissot in front of the whole cabinet.” He resumed:
It was I who prepared 10 August. You say I went to Arcis. I admit it, and I am proud of it. I went there to pass three days, to say goodbye to my mother and to arrange my affairs because I was shortly to be in danger. I hardly slept that night. It was I who had Mandat killed [on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville] because he had given the order to fire on the people…. You reproach me for being friends with Fabre d’Églantine. He is still my friend, I still think he is a good citizen as he sits here with me…. With regard to those who were once my friends, I will tell you this: Marat had a volcanic character, Robespierre I have known as tenacious and firm, but I—I have served in my own way…. I would embrace my worst enemy for the sake of the country, and I will give her my body if she needs the sacrifice.113
Danton was turning the tide of the crowd—its currents responded to the pull of his powerful voice. It was exhausting work and he had to pause briefly to rest. But when he did so, the president of the tribunal, a friend of Robespierre’s named Martial Joseph Armand Herman, immediately called him to order and warned him to defend himself with proof, not rhetoric. More quietly, Danton replied:
That a man should be violent is wrong, I know, unless it is for the public good, and such violence has often been mine…. If I have been excessive here, it is because I have found myself accused with such intolerable injustice. [Raises his voice again.] As for you, Saint-Just, you will have to answer to posterity.114
Saint-Just was out of earshot. He was in the Convention preparing a motion even more stringent than the three-day rule that ended the trial of the Girondins. He proposed that “any prisoner who resists or insults national justice shall at once be debarred from pleading his case.”115 The intimidated deputies gave their consent. In addition to all their other anxieties they were frightened by a rumored revolt in the Luxembourg jail, where the Dantonists had been held after their arrest. Robespierre suggested that Saint-Just’s report, and the new decree, should be taken to the tribunal and read aloud to the audience there. On the last morning of the trial this was duly done, and the prisoners were prevented from finishing their defense. The trial was summarily closed. Danton roared, “We are going to be judged without being heard.”116 Camille tore to pieces the text of the speech he had intended to make, and to avoid further trouble the prisoners were hustled out of the court before they could hear the sentence—which was death.
Danton spent most of the last twenty-four hours of his life trying to calm Camille, who was crying like a distraught child and asking distractedly, “Will they kill my wife too?” She was only twenty-three. He wrote her a long final letter that ended:
Despite my torment, I believe that there is a God. My blood will efface my sins, my human weaknesses, and God will reward what is good in me—my virtues and my love of liberty. I will see you again one day, O Lucile!…Adieu, Lucile, my life, my soul, my divinity on this earth…. I feel the shore of life retreating before me. I still see, Lucile. I see you. My crossed arms grip you. My bound hands embrace you. My severed head rests upon you. I am going to die.117
Lucile never received the letter. She had already been arrested and accused of trying to incite the rumored revolt in the Luxembourg jail. A week later she did indeed follow her husband to the guillotine, as he had feared.
By the time the carts and an armed guard came for the Dantonists, late on the afternoon of 16 Germinal (5 April), Camille was more composed. The condemned saw the beauty of Paris for the last time: the soft golden light reflected from the tall windows of the houses on the right bank of the Seine, the lilac and cherry blossoms in the Tuileries gardens, the Café de l’Ecole, where Danton sat before the Revolution wooing his first wife and dreaming of life as a lawyer. Then they turned into the rue Saint-Honoré and there in the street was an artist, daring to draw the violence that was still in Danton’s face. Danton lost control of himself, ranting and raving violently, only when they came to No. 366, the Duplay household, shuttered tight against the crowd as it had been on the day Louis XVI went past on his way to execution. Somewhere inside—silent, alone—was Robespierre.
One eyewitness saw the prisoners passing along the rue Saint-Honoré and ran back afterward through the Tuileries gardens, to stand at the railings from where it was possible to get a good view over the place de la Révolution. There stood the guillotine, waiting for the prisoners beside the statue of liberty. By now it was nearly 6:00 p.m. and the sunset had turned the plaster statue red. Danton was the last to die. His shadow was immense. He told the executioner to be sure to show his head to the crowd, and he muttered, “I shall never see her again…no weakness.”118 He mig
ht have meant his new wife or some other woman who, for whatever reason, meant the world to him. More likely, he meant France, the country he loved passionately and had long been prepared to die for. He had already begged pardon of man and God for his part in establishing the Revolutionary Tribunal that sent him to his death. In the last few moments, another eyewitness, closer to the scene, saw him scan the crowd before lying down beneath the guillotine. She saw someone in that crowd catch his gaze, then a hand raised quickly in the priestly gesture of sacramental absolution.
10
Robespierre’s Red Summer
Robespierre now found himself deeply preoccupied with punishment.1 Within hours of Danton’s death he was back at the Jacobins, insisting they speak of nothing else that evening except conspiracy. “Let us now frighten aristocrats in such a way that they not only are afraid to attack us but do not even dare to try and deceive us,” he suggested to the applauding audience.2 He may have been instrumental in the immediate promotion of his friend Martial Herman from president of the Revolutionary Tribunal to the Commission for Civil Administration and Police. Like Saint-Just, Claude Payan at the Commune, and Robespierre himself, Herman was a stringent moralist.3 The son of the registrar of the old Estates of Artois and a fellow lawyer, he had almost certainly known Robespierre in Arras long before the Revolution. Herman was at the top of Robespierre’s list of patriots, “an enlightened and honest man capable of the highest employment,” the perfect person to put in charge of a commission that, among other far-reaching powers, oversaw the operation of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Ten days (one revolutionary week) after Danton’s death, Robespierre supported Saint-Just’s recommendations to the Convention to revise and tighten police laws. Foreigners and ex-nobles were to be expelled from Paris and from all strategic towns on the republic’s borders. All political trials would henceforth be held in Paris, so the punishment of counterrevolutionary suspects could be standardized. This centralization may have been an attempt to halt the atrocities of the Terror in the provinces, but it had severe implications for the capital. There were already nearly seven thousand people crammed into the prisons of Paris, and the new laws would greatly aggravate the crisis. Nonetheless, Robespierre was determined to implement the measures and spread the news of the changes. “The more rigorous the law, the greater the need for it to be known by all citizens.”4 And so, Augustin set off again to the army (this time taking along a mistress instead of the uncongenial Charlotte). His letters to his brother were full of disturbing news from the provinces: food shortages, hunger, corruption, soldiers wracked by venereal disease, anticlerical vandalism, counterrevolutionary plots. Meanwhile in the Vendée, the civil war still festered, with burning, pillage, massacre—scenes of apocalyptic horror that Robespierre himself never saw but had no difficulty at all imagining late at night in the rue Saint-Honoré.
After supporting the fierce new police laws, Robespierre was absent from the Jacobins and the Convention between 30 Germinal (19 April) and 18 Floréal (7 May). As always, it is possible he collapsed, the strain of condemning Danton taking its toll on his overworked mind and body. Yet rumor has it that he spent the day before his reappearance, his thirty-sixth birthday, celebrating out in the countryside with the Duplays and his dog, Brount, perhaps even visiting one of Rousseau’s renowned retreats at Montmorency. Robespierre, by this point, looked much older than his years. The contemporary pictures of him all show sunken, heavily lined cheeks around a grimly set mouth; his eyes were more variable—sometimes simply intense, at other times terrifyingly severe. According to another rumor, on his return to the Convention he stood at the tribune with a newfound calm and control; for the first time, there was none of the convulsive twitching, or the neurotic fiddling with his glasses, or the other agitated mannerisms of someone who, despite everything, still found it a challenge to raise his voice in public.
Robespierre’s speech on 18 Floréal addressed the relationship between republican principles, religion, and morality, consolidating the public professions of personal faith he had made in the past. There was, he had no doubt, a God and an afterlife for human souls. More than this, he attempted to show how the religion of patriotism that had been implicit in the Revolution ever since the great Festival of Federation on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille might now be developed, institutionalized, and used to secure the social foundations of the still very precarious Republic. Here it was, at last, Robespierre’s presentation of his most profound personal beliefs, his ardent faith in a public religion that he thought could save the Revolution, and the close—to some minds suspiciously close—connection between the two. Officially, he was representing the views of the Committee of Public Safety, but as so often, his approach was blazingly personal. He began with appropriate grandeur: “The world has changed. It must change again.”5 He listed evidence of man’s progress and mastery of the physical world: the development of languages, the advances of agriculture, the discovery of electricity (he had not forgotten his triumph in the lightning conductor case back in Arras), the construction of terrestial and celestial maps (he had not forgotten the Coronelli globes in the library at Louis-le-Grand either), the discoveries of Newton, the artistic achievements of his friend the revolutionary artist David. Everything had changed in the physical order, and now everything must change in the moral and political order, too. He compared man’s reason to the globe half in light and half in darkness; so far only the arts and sciences had been touched by enlightenment, but Robespierre wanted to venture further into the shadowy realms of morality. This was by no means an eccentric desire. The abbé Sieyès (temporarily retired from politics), the Marquis de Condorcet (dead in prison), and a fair number of the other revolutionaries Robespierre had met or known shared it, too. What made his vision distinctive was the peculiar coincidence of three major obsessions: his interest in moral development, his belief in God, and his passionate commitment to democracy. Addressing the Convention, especially those deputies inclined toward atheism, he demanded to know:
Who commissioned you to announce to the people that God does not exist? O you who are so passionate about this arid doctrine yet have no passion for your country! How does it help a man if you persuade him that blind force presides over his destiny and strikes at random, now at the virtuous, now at the criminal? Does it help him to believe that his soul is nothing but a thin vapor that is dissipated at the mouth of the tomb? Will the idea of annihilation inspire him with purer and higher sentiments than that of immortality? Will it give him more respect for himself and his fellow men, more devotion to his country, a braver face against tyranny, or a deeper disdain either for pleasure or for death? No…the dying breath of those poor people who die beneath the blows of an assassin is an appeal to eternal justice! The innocent on the scaffold make tyrants pale in their triumphal chariots: would they have such ascendancy if the tomb made the oppressor and the oppressed equals?…If the existence of God and the immortality of the soul were nothing but dreams, they would still be the most beautiful conceptions of the human spirit.6
No one could call Danton innocent—though he was not guilty of the crimes for which he was executed. No one knows if his last breath was an appeal to eternal justice—though this was certainly part of his rant outside Robespierre’s door on the way to the guillotine. How, in all seriousness, could Robespierre square his passionate belief in God and eternal justice with his part in a regime of terror that was claiming more and more lives by the day? He did it by convincing himself that not a single innocent person had been condemned. “And who says anyone innocent has perished?” he had asked Danton coldly at their last meeting. But it was increasingly difficult to maintain this contorted position. The strain became obvious when, in the middle of his speech proposing public worship of the Supreme Being, Robespierre suddenly lashed out at Danton’s ghost:
Danton, the most dangerous of all the enemies of the country if he had not been the most cowardly—Danton, temporizing with every crime
, connected to every plot, promising criminals his protection and patriots his loyalty, artful in giving his treasons the pretext of public good, in justifying his vices by his pretended faults. He contrived through his friends to have the conspirators, who were on the point of bringing about the ruin of the republic, accused in an insignificant or favorable manner, so that he might have an opportunity of defending them…and be the better able to rally all the enemies of liberty against the republican government.7
This defamation of a former friend, in the midst of a speech on patriotism and religion, may simply reflect Robespierre’s habitual impulse to suborn anything and everything fresh in the public’s mind to his current political purpose. Or perhaps it was a more personal exorcism of his confused regret at Danton’s death. Either way, it was a clear warning that the new progressive and democratic religion he envisaged was perfectly compatible with the continuation—perhaps even the intensification—of the Terror.
