Revolution! France – Chapter 13 – The Brick Chronicle

While the army was celebrating its first victory at Valmy, the newly elected members of the National Convention convened and officially abolished the monarchy, declaring France a republic. Though the provinces sent a fair number of moderates to the Convention, the Paris delegates were staunch radicals and included Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and Desmoulins. “It’s a fact that I have many personal enemies in this assembly,” noted Marat in his first speech before the Convention. He then took out a pistol and placed it to his head, saying, “If you have any accusation to make against me, I will blow my brains out here and now.”

From the start, the Convention was rife with factionalism. Jacques Brissot—who had championed the preemptive war on Austria—and his followers were known as the Girondins (after the region of Gironde in southwest France where several of their members were from). Hoping to rein in the excesses of violence and anarchy, they broke with the Jacobins in early 1792 to form their own club of moderate revolutionaries. They met and strategized in the parlor of Manon Roland, who took an active role in Girondist politics, often writing articles published under the name of her husband, Convention delegate Jean Roland.

In the wake of the September Prison Massacres, Manon Roland had remarked that the revolution had become “hideous” to her. In late October, her husband stood before the Convention and denounced all proponents of violence and put the blame for the prison massacres squarely on the Jacobins. Robespierre then demanded the right to speak. As was his wont, he spoke at length about his own personal virtue and zealous patriotism—his supporters had gone so far as to nickname him The Incorruptible. He derided the slander of the Girondists, asking rhetorically, “Who is there among you who dares to stand and accuse me to my face?” From the other side of the hall came a voice in response: “I do.”

“Yes, Robespierre, it is I who accuse you,” announced the editor of the Girondist newspaper The Sentinel, Jean-Baptiste Louvet, as he approached the rostrum. “I accuse you of having made yourself the object of popular idolatry, and of spreading rumors that you are the only man capable of saving the country. I accuse you . . . of having aimed at supreme power by slander, violence, and terror; and I demand that a Committee be appointed to examine your conduct.” Taken aback, Robespierre was speechless and the more eloquent Danton stepped in to defend him from the charges, categorically denying them all. It would be a week before Robespierre prepared his rebuttal.

“Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?” asked Robespierre, defending the Jacobins on November 5. Against those who had claimed the violent actions of sans-culottes had been illegal, Robespierre retorted, “The Revolution is illegal: the fall of the Bastille and of the monarchy were illegal—as illegal as liberty itself!” From the public gallery his arguments were met with loud cheers from the many women who had come to hear him speak. Later that week, a Girondist newspaper would write: “There are some who ask why there are always so many women around Robespierre . . . It is because this revolution of ours is a religion, and Robespierre is leading a sect therein. He is a priest at the head of his worshipers.”

Having driven out the Austrian and Prussian invaders, the French army went on the offensive in November. Under the command of the Girondin general Charles François Dumouriez, Belgium was captured from Austrian control. Though the French promised the Belgians liberty from “despotism and slavery,” what they got was a puppet regime, requisition of property and supplies and forced payment of indemnities. One resident of French-annexed lands noted that he and his fellow citizens would have been less deceived “if they had told us from the start, ‘We have come to take everything.’”

That same month, the Convention took up the matter of what to do with the king. While conservatives noted that the Constitution of 1791 specified that abdication of the throne was the only form of punishment the king could legally receive, Louis de Saint-Just, the youngest member of the Convention at age twenty-five, called for the king to be immediately executed. “I say that the King should be judged as an enemy; that we must not so much judge him as combat him,” he argued. “Someday men will be astonished that in the eighteenth century humanity was less advanced than in the time of Caesar. Then, a tyrant was slain in the midst of the Senate, with no formality but thirty dagger blows, with no law but the liberty of Rome.”

To further investigate what charges might be brought against the king, the Convention sent a committee headed by Jean Roland to the Tuileries in search of possible evidence among the boxes and sacks of royal paperwork the king had left behind. On November 20, a locked iron box was found, and upon its opening before the Convention, it revealed a cache of documents showing that the king had, for nearly a year, paid Mirabeau to convince the Assembly to restore his royal authority. In other discovered documents, the king referred to the Constitution as “absurd and detestable” and stated that he had only signed it under duress.

Outraged over the king’s exposed treachery and the Girondins’ delays in taking action, on December 3, Merlin de Thionville stood up at the Convention and said he wished he’d killed Louis himself back in August. Robespierre also said he failed to see the need for even holding a trial. “Louis cannot be judged. He has already been condemned,” he argued. “To suggest putting Louis on trial takes us back to royal and constitutional despotism. It is a counterrevolutionary notion because it puts the Revolution itself on trial. For if Louis can be put on trial, he can be acquitted . . . and if Louis is acquitted, what becomes of the revolution?”

At the Temple fortress, the king passed much of his time reading Roman histories, sermons, poetry, and devotional manuals, finishing as many as twelve books per week. During the early part of each day, he would give his eight-year-old son geography lessons and have him recite lines from French dramatists. He shared meals with his family in a room on which the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had been posted on the wall. In the afternoon, they were allowed a walk in the Temple garden. He was not allowed a razor, and rather than let his guard shave him, he defiantly grew out a beard until it was agreed that he could shave himself under close watch.

Despite the impassioned arguments of the Jacobins, the Convention delegates—more than half of whom worked in the legal profession—voted to bring Louis XVI to trial. At the king’s insistence, his defense team flatly denied he had done anything illegal. Against the accusation that Louis had his guards fire on the people at the Tuileries in August, his defense lawyer asked the Convention, “If at this very moment you were told that an excited and armed crowd were marching against you with no respect for your character as sacred legislators . . . what would you do?” The defense rested after one final caution: “History. Think how it will judge your judgement.”

The king was returned to the Temple and kept apart from his family. Saint- Just was the first to speak the following day. “Citizens, tyranny is like a reed that bends with the wind and which rises again,” he said. “The Revolution begins when the tyrant ends.” With that, the Jacobins pushed for an immediate vote on both verdict and sentence. The Girondins, sensing the likelihood of a death sentence to appease the Parisian mobs, countered by proposing a delay in judgment until a national referendum could be held. Giving the people of the provinces a voice in the matter, they hoped, would save the king’s life, diminish the influence of Paris over the course of the revolution, and weaken the Jacobins.

Robespierre convincingly argued, however, that the Convention must not shirk its duty as the people’s elected representatives by a cowardly passing of their responsibility onto the people. The referendum proposal was defeated by a vote of 424 to 283. On January 15, 1793, the Convention voted on the king’s guilt. At Marat’s insistence, it was conducted as an oral vote, with each delegate coming forward to pronounce his judgment. The result was unanimous: the king was guilty. The next day’s vote on sentencing was far more contentious. There were 319 votes for the king to be imprisoned until the end of the war, then exiled. Thomas Paine, who had been elected to the Convention despite not being a Frenchman, suggested sending the king to the United States where they would make a good citizen out of him.

Nonetheless, a death sentence for Louis XVI carried the day with 392 votes. One of the king’s former ministers, the seventy-one-year-old Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who had come out of retirement to join Louis XVI’s defense counsel, now came to the Temple to deliver the news of the verdict and sentencing to the king. In doing so, he broke down crying at the king’s feet such that Louis felt obliged to comfort him. He then dictated his will to Malesherbes, including advice to his son should he “have the misfortune to become king” that he ought to “devote himself entirely to the happiness of his fellow citizens; that he should forget all hatred and resentment and particularly in what relates to the misfortunes and vexations I have suffered.”

Days later, on January 20, Louis was told he would be executed the following morning. His request for a delay of three days was denied, but his request to be allowed to see his family was granted that evening. No one had informed Marie Antoinette or his children about the verdict and sentence, so the king broke the news himself. “Their lamentations could be heard outside the tower,” it was reported. They spent over an hour crying and consoling each other before Louis was led away, promising to see his family one last time at eight the next morning. “Why not seven?” asked the queen. “Of course, why not, seven,” replied the king. But Louis later asked his guards not to allow his family further access to him as it caused him too much anguish.

The king awoke at five o’clock in the morning and took communion from his priest. He then heard the drums signaling the arrival of the National Guard. Several of its members soon came for the king, accompanied by two representatives from the revolutionary Paris municipal government, including the priest-turned-extremist-revolutionary Jacques Roux. The king had put his wedding ring and a few other belongings in a box and asked that it be delivered to his wife. “I have not come here to do your errands,” replied Roux. “I am here to take you to the scaffold.” Rather than suffer the indignity of having the hair covering his neck cut off by the executioner, the king asked that his manservant be allowed to trim his hair. The request was denied.

Louis was led into a carriage surrounded by 1,200 soldiers, which made a slow procession through the city. Some five hundred men in Paris who had become suspected of planning some last minute attempt to save the king had been rounded up that morning or put under house arrest. So when the royalist former nobleman Baron de Batz emerged from the crowd on horseback, shouting, “Join with me, all who wish to save the King!” and charged toward the carriage, he found himself attacking alone. He was easily driven off, but managed to escape capture. It is unlikely he got close enough to the carriage that the king was even aware of the attempt.

At the request of his pregnant wife, Gabrielle, Danton did not join the crowd of eighty thousand at the Place de la Révolution that had gathered under a light rain to bear witness to the execution of the king. Neither did Robespierre, who was unmarried but lived in the care of the Duplay family—cabinet maker Maurice Duplay, his wife, Françoise-Éléonore, three daughters, and a son. That morning, Robespierre was sharing breakfast with them as usual when the youngest daughter, Elisabeth, asked him why such large crowds were gathered on the street so early in the morning. Robespierre told her that something was happening that day that she should not see, and he had the door of the house closed before the king’s carriage passed by.

The procession accompanying the king arrived at the guillotine at ten o’clock. At the base of the scaffold, Louis pushed away his guards and insisted on removing his own coat. When an attempt was made to tie his hands behind his back, Louis angrily recoiled his arms, asking, “What are you doing?” “Binding your hands,” came the answer. “Binding me!” exclaimed the king. His indignance was mollified by his priest who told him, “Sire, I see in this last outrage only one more resemblance between Your Majesty and the God who is about to be your reward.” Louis, submitted and then ascended to the scaffold where the hair at the back of his head was roughly shorn.

The thirty-eight-year-old king then motioned for the drummers to stop their drumming for a moment and, in a loud voice, he announced his last words to the people. “I die innocent of all the crimes with which I am charged,” he said. “I forgive those who are guilty of my death, and I pray to God that the blood which you are about to shed may never be visited on France—.” Here his speech was abruptly cut short as the fifteen drummers were ordered to resume their drumming. Louis was brought to the plank and laid face down, then slid forward so his head entered the enclosing brace.

The executioner pulled on the rope, and the twelve-inch blade fell. Instead of instantaneous death, there was an agonized scream, noted the king’s manservant, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, who witnessed the event and recorded “his head did not fall at the first stroke, his neck being so fat.” At 10:22 a.m., the severed head of Louis XVI, still spurting blood, was picked up out of the basket, held aloft, and shown to the crowd on all four sides of the scaffold. After a moment of stunned silence, the crowd broke into cheers. Schoolboys threw their hats into the air in celebration and shouts of “Long live the nation!” and “Long live the republic!” were heard.

People rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the deluge of blood and clotted gore that issued from the headless corpse and covered the scaffold. The executioner sold locks of the dead king’s hair and pieces of his clothing—a perk his profession was allowed. Louis’s head was then stuck between his legs in a basket and placed on a cart that was brought to the Madeleine cemetery. There it was placed in a grave and covered with quicklime to be dissolved. All of Louis’s personal items from the Temple were later burned to prevent any possibility of relics. The king and the monarchy had been decidedly extinguished.

Opening Quote

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