Recognised as an instigator, Valady was said to have been arrested and condemned to a private death by the King. But he escaped and, apparently with the help of his father-in-law, was helped onto a ship at Nantes bound for America. Contrary winds kept the ship in port long enough for Valady to hear news of the taking of the Bastille. He raced back to Paris and was cheered by the Gardes Françaises and elected as their leader. Vaudreuil wrote to Valady’s father bewailing the latest twist in Valady’s career and remarking remorsefully that ‘It would be much better that he had gone to America for your tranquillity and ours.’
Hailed as a hero of the Revolution in Paris, Valady’s fame spread back to his home town where, on 2 September, a prominent band of bourgeoisie and thirty other armed youths visited Valady’s father, offering to march with the flag of national liberty to congratulate Valady on ‘his talents, his virtues and his devout patriotism’ and even to join this ‘hero of National Liberty … if the case requires it’. With insurrection spreading through the country, however, in January 1790 the peasants of Golinhac and of Vernhettes stormed his chateau and were only quelled when Valady himself appeared to settle the situation.
Valady spent most of 1790 and 1791 stoking revolutionary sentiment in Villefranche, preparing his candidature for the next national election. In the first months of 1792 he was back in Paris, where, despite his ‘sobriety, wisdom, philosophy, economy, simplicity’, the debts he incurred for his own upkeep and in arming the Revolution became overwhelming. His clothes had become shabby, and he sported scruffy cropped hair and a long beard. Under financial duress, to his lasting shame, he sold the birthright to his mother’s family home, Montjésieu, for 30,000 livres.
In 1792 his friends were startled to find that Valady was building an arsenal in his Parisian lodgings, apparently to support the seizure of the royal family, which occurred on 10 August, forcing the Legislative Assembly to suspend the monarchy and dissolve itself in favour of a new ‘National Convention’, to which Valady was elected deputy for Aveyron. Republican though he was, Valady was not in favour of executing the King, and in January 1793 sided with many of the Girondins. He proposed that Louis should be kept in honourable confinement until the end of the war currently raging against the Queen’s nephew and his Austrian and Prussian army, and afterwards to banish the royal family with a large pension.53
Hostility between Brissot’s Girondins and Robespierre’s Jacobins descended into violence, and Valady helped to instigate the Girondins’ practice of carrying pistols into the hall of the Convention: on 20 January 1793, the day before the execution, it was said that Valady sent a note around declaring: ‘Tomorrow in arms to the Convention – he is a coward who does not appear there.’54 But the execution went ahead; on 1 February France declared war on Britain and Holland; and in March the sans-culottes rioted against the Girondins; by May it was rumoured that the Girondins were part of a nationwide royalist conspiracy. Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, one of the prominent Girondins, recommended fleeing to the Girondist provinces and leading an army against Robespierre’s Paris-based Jacobins. Others, balking at the prospect of civil war, placed their confidence in the new democratic institutions.
On 31 May Robespierre helped to gather an 80,000-strong armed mob baying for the blood of the Girondins who were, they believed, trying to fragment the unity of the republic into a federal state; on 2 June they surrounded the National Convention claiming that they – rather than the elected representatives – were the voice of the people. They demanded, among other things, that the twenty-two Girondin deputies who had become the focus of their ire – Valady among them – be handed over. When the President of the Convention demanded respect from the mob, their leader François Hanriot replied: ‘Tell your fucking President that he and his Assembly can go fuck themselves, and if within one hour the Twenty-two are not delivered, we will blow them all up.’55 Cannon were aimed at the doors of the assembly hall; deputies tried to escape through the perimeter fence in the garden but were thwarted; the mob invaded the hall waving pikes, shouting and sitting on the benches with the Jacobin deputies. Faced with the prospect of another bloody massacre, the Convention succumbed, obeyed the mob, and the unfortunate twenty-two were offered up to the hungry fury of post-revolutionary dissatisfaction: they were all put under house arrest to await condemnation.
This was the beginning of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and there followed a purge of moderate voices from the National Convention. On 28 July the twenty-two were pronounced outlaws and traitors ‘to be led to the scaffold without trial as soon as they can be got hold of’.56 Brissot was pained, in the months before his inevitable execution, to think of ‘the young and unfortunate Valady, who shares today the proscription of the most virtuous and the most faithful friends of the motherland’.57 After the fugitive ex-minister Jean-Marie Roland committed suicide on hearing that his wife had been guillotined, a number of others took their own lives to deprive the Jacobins of their bloodthirsty satisfaction. And yet, on 31 October the full original quota of twenty-two men were guillotined with a flourish of sacrificial finality in the chillingly efficient time of thirty-six minutes. But the completeness of this iconic sacrifice – as the purge’s only survivor Louvet de Couvray pointed out – was a sham, for, apart from the suicides, several of the original twenty-two had already escaped Paris and were fleeing across France.58
Valady had managed to get through the city gates incognito with a friend, and joined up with Louvet, Barbaroux and four others. With the help of loyal supporters they fled to Normandy and tried to raise an army; but Jacobin propaganda preceded them everywhere and whole towns were on the lookout for strangers. Protected for a while in Caen, they eventually broke cover and headed for the coast, marching in disguise in a regiment of Bretons who had been fighting against the royalists in La Vendée. They reached a ship to take them to Bordeaux – the heartland of the Girondins – and after several narrow escapes chanced upon the house of a sympathetic curate who gave them shelter. Valady’s friend departed to find relatives near Périgueux, but was immediately caught and executed on the following day. A search party was sent out and Valady, Barbaroux and Louvet had to move to a hay barn. Hungry, exhausted and despairing, Valady’s friends raised pistols to each other’s heads in a suicide bid; the crisis was only averted by Valady’s pleas and the moment of tension dissolved into tears. The Revolution, the ideal for which they had risked their lives and engaged all their passions, had now turned on them like a ferocious beast. These men, shattered by hardship and persecution, receiving news every day of new horrors – friends executed and imprisoned, massacres in the fighting at La Vendée, military losses in the war against Prussia and Austria – could do nothing but listen as they heard their hopes crashing to the ground under the ascendance of Robespierre. Having fought for freedom each of them faced the bleak realisation, in Louvet’s words, that they ‘could no longer doubt the enslavement of his country’.
That night they heard the voice of their provider calling them to come down. Fearing they had been discovered, Barbaroux and Louvet prepared to fight to the last, while Valady in terror refused to believe that their captors would kill them in cold blood. It turned out to be a false alarm, but they were turned out into the rain until they were installed in an underground hideout with their comrades Jérôme Pétion, Louvet’s childhood friend, and François Buzot, both of whom later committed suicide. As suspicion in the area grew, the friends were forced to disband. ‘What a look did he give us when we quitted him!’ recalled Louvet – perhaps the last sympathetic face Valady saw – ‘Never shall I lose the sad remembrance of it; he had death in his eye.’59
In a desperate attempt to pass through Périgueux, Valady was recognised on 5 December ‘by the ferocious agents of Robespierre’ and arrested at Rivaux, near Montpon.60 He was briefly tried before a criminal tribunal; as an outlaw he stood no chance and he was immediately sentenced to death. In the official report sent to the National Convention, the officer, Roux-Fazi
llac, was frustrated to confess that ‘I saw with regret, on the occasion of this judgement, that the republican spirit is not as strengthened in this district as I had convinced myself. Even though the conspirator had demonstrated great weakness in his interrogation, he nevertheless moved the spectators, and even some of his judges shed tears.’61
In the few days before his execution, Valady poured out his ‘derniers sentiments’ in a string of breathtaking letters to his family. Like a true martyr, Valady steadfastly reconciled himself to dying for a cause in which he passionately believed. ‘I loved the people like you taught me to,’ he told his aunt, ‘I threw myself headlong into the Revolution which I regarded as a necessary remedy, directed by Providence against the excessive ills of the people and the oppression of a corrupt government.’ If he had lived, he could have fulfilled even more of his patriotic dreams and consummated ‘my true vocation, that of letters and moral philosophy’. The noble circumstances of his death, he reassured her, should be a consolation for ‘the blow which is going to strike you’. His brave example, he said, ought to provide inspiration for his young nephews whom he hoped would be brought up according to his vegetarian principles.
But alongside his valour, Valady also had aching regrets. Abandoning his wife stung him with remorse; his loss of faith in God now filled him with sorrow; his unpaid debts lacerated his pride; and worst of all he had sold his mother’s home. Addressing his father (who at that time was imprisoned in the citadel of Montpellier) as ‘citizen Izarn-Valady’, he begged forgiveness for being a recalcitrant son and, in true filial style, asked him to settle his debts; and in a message directed to Boudon-Laroquette, to whom he had sold his birthright, he begged him ‘in the name of friendship, to sell back to my sister the natal home that I turned her out of’ and the ‘maternal bed where we were all born’.
Finally, at the thought of his beloved grandfather, Valady burst into words of weeping sorrow: ‘Alas! If I had adhered to his repeated demands to live near him with my wife to be the staff of his old age, I would be living unknown but tranquil, and I would have fulfilled my domestic duties.’62 So, on 11 December, with pangs of remorse mixed with steadfast pride in the noble-mindedness of his deeds, Valady ascended the scaffold. Placing his head in the neck-shaped groove of the guillotine, he sent a last prayer to ‘his God’, heard the command to release, the sound of the blade hurtling down towards him, the whistle of the ascending rope, and felt the impact before his head thudded, bloodily, to the ground.
* * *
*See chapter 15.
*Oswald was, of course, Scottish.
*Duc D’Orléans, nicknamed ‘Philippe Egalite’ for his leading role in the Revolution.
TWENTY-THREE
Bloodless Brothers
In France the vegetarian radicals came close to the centre ground of revolutionary politics. In Britain the authorities – horrified by the scenes of decapitation and civil war over the Channel – were determined to stamp out the rebels before it was too late. Many radicals were fomenting revolution in Britain, the monarchy of George III was in almost perpetual crisis, and by the time of Valady’s execution the thought police were poised for a vigorous crackdown. The British revolutionaries – with a thriving network of vegetarians among them – had become a force to be reckoned with.
Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the French revolutionary leader who patronised Oswald and Valady, regularly visited London to cultivate political alliances. As a frequent guest at the London household of ‘the Pythagorean Pigott’, Brissot became friends with several others who extended their ‘fraternity’ to animals, and he made detailed comments about them in his Mémoires. Prominent among these was the Welsh druid-priest David Williams, notorious for disseminating his pagan-influenced pantheism from the Temple of Nature in Cavendish Square. Influential in Bonneville and Oswald’s Masonic Social Circle, Williams agitated in France and England and he set up a Literary Fund which subsidised Oswald’s activities.1 His Lectures on Education revived the principles of Rousseau’s Émile, including the Pythagorean attention to dietary temperance, and Brissot referred to Williams cordially as an ‘apostle’ of vegetarianism.2
Williams in fact ended up turning against vegetarianism, but his Utilitarian argument proving ‘the false humanity of the Pythagorean system’ was nevertheless emphatically animal-friendly – like the arguments of Francis Hutcheson and William King on which it was based.3 If farm animals were made happy through careful husbandry, he explained in his Lectures on the Universal Principles and Duties of Religion and Morality (1789), then cultivating as many animals as possible for human consumption would create more happy creatures than if we all just ate vegetables. Thus, he concluded, ‘humanity pleads in conjunction with reason; and thereby encreasing the general sum of happiness in the world, it is reconciled to what at first appears inhuman, submitting the life of one animal to another.’ Vegetarianism, he explained, was one of those ‘excesses of tender passions, [which] delight and fascinate, while they mislead and injure us’. Without these reasons, he insisted, ‘I should certainly have continued, what I once was, a thorough Pythagorean.’ Despite his apostasy from vegetarianism, however, Williams held on to his conviction that evil could be eradicated on earth if everyone emulated the Hindus in exercising compassion to ‘all living creatures’, and this helped many radicals to see why the ‘social circle’ should be widened beyond the confines of the human race.4
At Pigott’s London house, Brissot also became closely acquainted with the arch-quack James Graham (1745–94), ‘so famous for his electric bed, his earth baths, his Pythagoreanism,’ commented Brissot, ‘and by twenty other systems not less bizarre that he had preached in the American continent’.5 At his incredibly well-frequented Temple of Health in London’s Adelphi and the Temple of Hymen in Pall Mall, Graham hired out his notorious electro-magnetic bed which purportedly enhanced sexual vigour by stimulating the nervous impulses in the body, and he counted the likes of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, among his patients. Like Lord Monboddo and John Stewart, Graham was convinced that humanity’s sexual capacity was being eroded by decadent lifestyles, and he sought to remedy this with a holistic treatment of raw food (rather than cooked ‘dead’ food), plenty of fresh air, hard beds, early hours, and puritanical washing of the body, especially the genitalia – ideally in one of his special mud baths.6
Graham peddled an extraordinary brand of physical and spiritual regeneration which would, he claimed, ensure ‘felicity in the eternal spiritual worlds’ and help to bring about a millenarian ‘New Jerusalem’ of perfection. This revival of millenarianism was typical of extremists at the end of the eighteenth century, who fused their hopes of democratic reform with the expectation of a utopian future.
Sympathy and sensibility lay at the heart of Graham’s philosophy. When residing in America he followed Benjamin Franklin in backing the rebels, and he called for the extension of ‘universal benevolence’ to the victims of war, colonialism and slavery.7 To animals also, Graham stretched the circle of sympathy: ‘your bounties and benevolences,’ he told his readers, ‘must not be confined to your own family and friends, nor even to your own species; – no, you must … shew mercy to all the dumb animals, or brute creation (as they are called) about you.’8
Graham was an avid reader of Thomas Tryon, and he revived many maxims from that seventeenth-century brahminical prophet of prelapsarian purity. In works with titles borrowed from Tryon, such as The Guardian of Health, Long-Life, and Happiness, Graham adopted Tryon’s belief in karmic resonance: ‘Nourish, protect, and cultivate a friendship as it were, with every fowl, beast, and fish that belongs to you, or that you come near: Those poor, sweet, innocent, and wonderfully intelligent creatures will all as it were, bless you with their whole hearts, and they will implore and draw down blessings on you and yours, from the common father of the Universe!’9
Although Graham kept the temple of his own body pure from the taint of dead animals, he was not such a fool as to think he could convinc
e everyone else to do the same; and in most of his works he did not actually insist on vegetarianism. Instead, like Tryon and George Cheyne, he explained how to minimise the deadly effects of meat – by avoiding battery-farmed animals fed on unnatural food and those suffering torturous deaths:
If you must eat flesh, let it be that of the clean, young animals … Do not degrade and bestialize your body, by making it a church-yard, or burial-place for the corpses of vile unclean animals … In regard to myself; if foul and filthy animals must be murdered and put out of the way, for fear, as is pretended, that they should be too numerous, I beg that some other executioner than me may be found to butcher them, and some other burying places for their inflamed, maddened, and mangled corpses to rot in than in my body.10
The Bloodless Revolution Page 42
