by Andrew Marr
Again, as with later revolutions, great faith was placed in the power of symbols. The French revolutionaries declared a new religion, the worship of a Supreme Being, and set up altars to ‘Reason’ in vandalized churches. They also ended the old system of counting money in twenties, tens and dozens (which survived in Britain until the 1970s) and created a decimal replacement. The same ‘rational’ reform was introduced for measurements of distance and, most radically, for a changed calendar. This had twelve months of thirty days each, named after the harvest, mist, frost, snow, rain, wind, seeds, flowers, haymaking, reaping, heat and fruits, and started a new count for the years: year one was 1792. Not only was the familiar world of kings, priests and landowners gone; so too were all the familiar landmarks in money, time and space. Not even Lenin went so far.
This guillotine blade, having severed past from present, ensured there could be no reconciliation. The Jacobins killed nothing like as many people as did later revolutionaries. It has been estimated that forty-five thousand people died in ‘the Terror’, by public execution or in mob violence; regional fighting beyond Paris saw roadside executions, summary hangings and mass drownings in hulks. The death toll runs into hundreds of thousands if civil war and famine are included right across France; but this was not the liquidation of an entire class, at least physically. At the time, France had around 250,000 male aristocrats: the carnage barely starts to compare to the millions killed by the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists.
Yet in the smaller world of eighteenth-century France the Terror was terrifying enough. Numbers are never the whole story; the details that stick in the imagination matter, too. Paris was by modern standards a small place, and the new killing-machine stood very publicly at its centre. More humane than botched hangings or hacking with an axe it may have been, but it offered a spectacularly bloody and public form of popular vengeance. Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin popularized and propagandized for the head-severing device; he did not actually invent it. Indeed, he was against capital punishment, and particularly against it being used as a public spectacle. (Nor, as many people suppose, did he die by means of the device himself; he lived on long after the revolution, and died of natural causes in 1814.)
Guillotin had wanted the device, versions of which had been used before in Scotland, England and Germany, to be seen as a modern and egalitarian way of dispatching serious criminals and the irreconcilable enemies of change. During the Terror, it became the symbol of the dictatorship’s paranoid determination to kill possible enemies with the least amount of due process, and provided a suitable reckoning for the once rich and powerful. Brochures were sold containing lists of those scheduled for execution, and mobs would gather to crow and mock. By the end, the slaughter had become routine enough to seem boring, and the crowds apparently thinned out. (It must have been especially galling to be transported on a tumbril for your final journey, only to find nobody was very much interested.)
Of all the tales of the Terror, the one that perhaps best reveals its ironies is that of Jean-Paul Marat, assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday in 1793. Marat was in flashes a brilliant man. From relatively humble origins he rose to be regarded as a serious scientist. He had worked in London’s Soho – where he seems to have formed an addiction to strong coffee – Newcastle and Switzerland before becoming a doctor famous for his cures in Paris, where he ministered to the court and aristocrats, charging high fees and affecting semi-aristocratic status himself. He had written political tracts too, including a shrewd analysis of the faults of the British constitution, which he nevertheless admired. He had argued for a more humane and fairer justice system, and while inveighing against tyranny during the early stages of the revolution he had insisted that Louis was essentially a good king, assisted by good ministers.
Yet Marat seems always to have been vain and had a thin skin, bringing out something close to paranoia in him. His writings on electricity, heat and optics were widely read. He was admired by Goethe and by Benjamin Franklin, yet he failed to be admitted to the (Royal) French Academy – and seethed with resentment. He was a man who picked arguments and had few friends. Once the revolution began and Marat turned to journalism and politics full time, he found that his real talent was for aggressive and provocative prose. Lashing out at moderates such as Lafayette, he called his newspaper L’Ami du Peuple and increasingly saw himself as the ultimate People’s Friend, the uncorrupted man of no party, roughly dressed, inspiring the poor to demand their economic rights as well as their political voice. Elected to the National Assembly, he became the voice of extremists and even faced trial for his violent incitements – a show trial in which the prime showman was the accused, Marat himself, triumphantly acquitted. Still, he had to escape briefly to exile in London, and when he returned he was often on the run, sometimes resorting to the Paris sewers.
Marat always insisted on his squeamishness and his dislike of violence. He hated even to see an insect hurt, he would say. Yet when he picked up his pen on behalf of a revolution beset by rural royalist rebellion and foreign armies, the demon of extremism took over. Early on, in December 1790 before the Terror had really begun, he wrote in L’Ami du Peuple that it was not on the battlefields but in the capital that the enemy must be attacked. There must be popular executions: ‘Six months ago, five or six hundred heads would have been enough to pull you back from the abyss. Today because you have stupidly let your implacable enemies conspire among themselves . . . perhaps we will have to cut off five or six thousand; but even if we must cut off 20,000, there can be no time for hesitation.’
Later, he casually upped the figure by ten times, then to half a million – the thinking of an embryonic Stalin or Mao. Vitriol poured from his pen, as he led the attacks on the more moderate Girondin faction who would soon be defeated by the Jacobins. Where did his anger come from? Physically ugly, suffering from a painful and unsightly skin disease, and coming from a family of religious and political exiles, he must have possessed elements of personal vengeance in his makeup. But he seems to have been genuinely terrified of a return of the royalists, who, he kept warning the revolutionaries, would slit their throats, rape their wives and disembowel their children in front of their eyes.
Marat was killed rather more briskly than that by a Girondin sympathizer, a woman from Normandy called Charlotte Corday. She bore some similarities to Marat. She too had had a tough early life – her mother had died young and she had been sent to a convent – and she too had been greatly influenced by Enlightenment thinking, particularly Rousseau and Voltaire. (The story of the female thinkers and agitators of the revolution is one that has begun to be addressed by historians only in the past decade or two.) She too was terrified of the prospect of France falling into civil war and had been especially horrified by the prison massacres of the previous September.
In July 1793 she arrived in Paris, bought a kitchen knife and talked her way into Marat’s house. By then his political power was on the wane, but he continued to work while sitting in a copper-lined bath, to soothe his diseased skin. There, Corday talked to him about the Girondin refugees and he promised that they would soon lose their heads. As soon as his wife had left, she stabbed him through the chest, severing his carotid artery, killing him quickly as he cried for help. Corday was of course guillotined herself, but before she died she explained that she blamed Marat for the wave of killings, and had killed one man to save a hundred thousand – just as Robespierre had justified the execution of the king.
Marat lived on as a symbol of the revolution, a martyr whose bust was placed in churches and schools, and whose death was memorialized by the greatest French revolutionary artist, Jacques-Louis David. The painting shows Marat, prone, his skin flawless, a letter still clutched in one hand. The pose strongly echoes paintings of Christ’s deposition, minus the angels or grieving Marys, and indeed Marat was compared to Christ in the purity of his love for the common man. The individual who made the comparison, in his eulogy of Marat, was his friend the Marquis d
e Sade. Something similar happened to those other gore-tainted extremists, Lenin and Trotsky, after their deaths. Anger and pitilessness morphed into love and pity, and a cult was erected. Meanwhile, the revolution degenerated into a slither of accusation and counter-accusation; group fell on group, and the streets ran with blood. Even Robespierre fell to the guillotine, screaming with pain and fear and horribly wounded after trying to shoot himself in the face.
Within a year of Marat’s death, the frenzy of revolutionary killing and idealistic extremism seemed to be burning itself out. Wars abroad took up more of the time and energy of the next phase’s rulers, those of the so-called Thermidorian Reaction. They in turn had to ask for military help against royalist rebellion, and so, from 1799 to 1802, the young Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte took control first as consul and then, in 1804, as emperor. He would cement some of the key reforms of the revolution, at least in principle, while instituting a military dictatorship that would drown half of Europe in blood while choking the other half with gunpowder smoke. Marat’s hatred of tyrants had helped elevate a new one.
The ‘Bolsheviks’ of the revolution had given way to a personality cult with secret police and wars to fight. Yet the original principles of the early stages of the revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity or, more prosaically, legal fairness and an end to the special privileges of monarchs and aristocrats – hugely influenced reform movements from Holland to Germany, England to Italy.
To start with, Napoleon’s apparently unbeatable armies seemed to be carrying revolutionary freedom with them. Napoleon’s greatest civil achievement was the French legal code, or Code Napoléon, a radical simplification and rationalization of old laws, producing a single coherent system; it reshaped France and was influential across the continent. At its height the Napoleonic Empire would reach as far as the Duchy of Warsaw, the tip of Italy and the Balkans, stripping away old aristocratic rights, ending religious discrimination – including against the Jews – and spreading its new laws and the metric system. Ludwig van Beethoven had originally called his third symphony The Bonaparte.
Beethoven is said, however, to have torn out the title page in protest when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, and retitled it the Eroica, dedicating it ‘to the memory of a great man’ – with the emphasis on memory. For although in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, the Napoleonic armies swept away old rulers and substituted new ones, they often turned out to be from amongst Napoleon’s own family or from his closest supporters. As the tottering Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns watched in horror, he seemed to be building something closer to a new family empire than a new political order; this was closer to the Sun King’s vision of a Europe dominated by French royalty than it was to the republicanism of Robespierre or Danton. Napoleon would eventually fall a victim to overreach, most famously in his attempt to subdue Russia, ending in a death march back through the snow; but also in his long and ineffective campaign against Spanish partisans, aided by the British under Wellington.
After the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, when Nelson’s fleet destroyed both the French and Spanish fleets after a spectacularly dangerous manoeuvre, costing the life of the famous admiral among many others, Napoleon had no hope of invading Britain itself. This led to a long stand-off between sea power and land power, during which the British blockaded continental ports but could not grapple effectively with ‘the Corsican tyrant’ himself, whose greatest victory came at the end of the same year, at Austerlitz, where he shattered the combined armies of the Austrians and Russians.
Until his Russian failure, Napoleon’s military genius had awed and confounded all other major European armies; it was only in 1813, at the battle of Leipzig – or ‘the Battle of the Nations’ – that they combined in big enough numbers to finally defeat him. Russians, Prussians, Austrians and Swedes, together hugely outnumbering the French, plus some Italian and Polish allies, fought what was, to that date, the largest land battle in European history, involving some six hundred thousand troops. Napoleon’s defeat led to the coalition armies seizing Paris and to a mutiny by his own senior generals; then his abdication, followed by exile on the island of Elba.
Napoleon’s return from Elba, and the immediate rallying of his soldiers to him, constitute one of the great adventures of nineteenth-century history. But it was only an adventure. The ‘hundred days’ of his final rule, when the fat Bourbon Louis XVIII fled Paris, ended at the battle of Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington’s combined army, aided by the Prussians arriving at the last minute, defeated the French. Napoleon’s last exile, to St Helena in the South Atlantic, put him far from reach, and he died there in 1821.
Napoleon had forced the other European powers to mobilize their troops and to learn to fight on a scale that would not be repeated until the First World War. And for a while he had threatened the rule of the monarchies that had dominated Europe for a thousand years. But wars of conquest and republicanism are mutually inimical, and his political legacy was surprisingly small.
This was not true of the revolution, whose final disarray had allowed him to rise in the first place. Europe would return to the old order, for a while; to a system of reactionary alliances dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the final glimmer of Bourbon France, and the grim shadow of Russian Czarist authority as ‘the policeman of Europe’. But France never quite healed. She remained radically divided between her old royalist, Catholic identity and her new republican, revolutionary ones, a division that would erupt in two further revolutions, tear French society apart in the Dreyfus affair, and continue to shake the country through the 1930s, culminating in the collaboration of the Vichy regime with Nazi Germany. Across the rest of Europe, the memory of the ‘Rights of Man’, of republican government and of just, modern law would animate radicals throughout the nineteenth century. The continent-wide revolts of 1848 showed that the new thinking, which had started in Paris two generations earlier, could not be forgotten.
The real conundrum is whether it is ever possible for a full-scale revolutionary upheaval not to progress to mass murder and eventually to military dictatorship. Does it make sense to compare the English Levellers, say, to French Jacobins, or to Russian Bolsheviks? Is it utterly unhistorical to compare Cromwell, Napoleon and Stalin? The situations were very different, and the main players thought of themselves in very different terms. But this much can be said. Once old authority – however intolerable, deaf to change, sclerotic and contemptible – has been toppled, there is rarely a new order waiting politely in the wings, more rational, more humane, more forward-looking.
Power maddens. Our enemies circle. Traitors are all around us. Emergency powers are needed. Severity now will lead to gentleness later. This is no time for squeamishness. And the caving-in of authority goes on, until so much misery has been caused that there is an exhausted acceptance of the mailed fist and the dictator’s first promise – which is law and order. Everyone claims to speak for the people, but of course the people – the actual majority of living adults – are voiceless. Monarchies and empires have their succession problems, as we have seen. These include palace coups, idiot children, war between siblings and the overthrow of one family by another. But the problems of moving from one system of government to an entirely different one seem bloodier still.
Black Jacobin
Today, Haiti is of one of the poorest, most desperate, blighted, corruptly run, environmentally degraded places on earth. Three hundred and fifty years ago, it was one of the richest. Then called SaintDomingue, it was the lush, rich-soiled western half of one of the Caribbean’s largest islands, whose mountains were clad in forests of hardwood, whose hills were planted with coffee, cocoa, mangoes and oranges, and whose plains glittered with the light from banana, tobacco and sugar plantations. A French colony, its wealth had built some of the grandest squares and mansions in Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille. It was considered the single most important island colony in the world. By the time of the French Revolution its ports welcomed more th
an 1,500 ships a year: France employed 750 huge vessels and 24,000 sailors just for the Saint-Domingue trade.
So why did such a lush, successful place become the nightmarish demonstration of all that can go worst in human public life? The answer is slavery, and what happened when slavery collided with the high ideals of French democracy. Saint-Domingue saw the first and only successful revolt by black slaves against their white oppressors. And though the eventual outcome was bleak for the people of Haiti, quickly forgotten when the white northern nations had moved beyond sugar plantations and slave ships, the uprising has at its heart one of the most inspiring leaders of the eighteenth century.
His name was Toussaint L’Ouverture. His father was an African chief who had been captured in war, sold as a slave and bought by a French planter. His son Toussaint, one of eight children born to the displaced chieftain and his Catholic wife, had a privileged upbringing compared with most slaves, learning a little French and Latin, and rising to become overseer of livestock on his master’s estate. Though he never suffered the tortures and regular whippings of most of the wretched sugar-plantation workers, he was nevertheless a slave until freed, aged thirty-three. By the time of the French Revolution, he was already in his forties and grey-haired, and known as ‘Old Toussaint’. His surname ‘L’Ouverture’ was a nickname referring either to his later ability as a military commander to find ‘openings’ in enemy ranks, or possibly to the gaps between his teeth.31 He was small, a superb horseman, and a man of charisma.
