Revolution! France – Chapter 15 – The Brick Chronicle

On September 17, 1793, the Convention passed The Law of Suspects, which gave the surveillance committees in neighborhoods throughout France leeway to arrest anyone who “by their behavior, their contacts, their words, or their writings” showed themselves to in some way be “enemies of the people.” In Paris, the municipal city government went farther, defining sedition so broadly as to include those who “having done nothing against liberty, have also done nothing for it.” Soon the prisons of Paris were overcrowded with thousands held in dismal rat-infested cells, living in the most squalid and unsanitary conditions. Among them was Marie Antoinette, who had now been held apart from her family at the Conciergerie prison since August, awaiting trial.

Calls for the former queen to be brought to justice were led by Hébert, who mercilessly defamed her in his newspaper and threatened to have her killed himself if action was not taken by the Convention. Finally, on October 15, Marie Antoinette was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Documents were produced showing that she had treasonously corresponded with the Austrian court just before the war started. But far more attention was given to a litany of accusations aimed at character assassination. She was accused of having influenced others into counterrevolutionary activities through a series of sexual liaisons with everyone from the king’s brother to Lafayette. Hébert himself then charged the former queen with having forced her son to commit incest with her.

Bullied by her prosecutors to respond to such indecent charges, she replied, “If I give no answer it is because nature itself refuses to accept such an accusation brought against a mother. I appeal to all the mothers here present.” Robespierre would later express his anger that the “imbecile Hébert” had allowed Marie Antoinette to become an object of sympathy at her trial. But she did not want pity and was resigned to her fate. In ending her defense, Marie Antoinette stated to her accusers, “I was a queen and you dethroned me. I was a wife, and you murdered my husband. I was a mother, and you have torn my children from me. I have nothing left but my blood—make haste to take it.”

Pronounced “the declared enemy of the French people,” she was sentenced to be executed the following morning. Spending her last night in her prison cell, at 4:30 a.m. she wrote: “I have nothing in my conscience to reproach me; I am calm. I deeply regret that I must abandon my children . . . My God, how terrible it is to leave them forever.” She was transported to the scaffold in an open tumbril, subject to the shouts and abuses of the people. Just before being laid upon the plank of the guillotine, she accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot and uttered her final words: “I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.” Hébert’s paper expressed delight at the demise of the “Austrian whore” and having witnessed her head “separated from her fucking tart’s neck.”

The next to be brought before the Tribunal were twenty-one of the Girondin moderates who had been purged from the Convention the previous spring. They were tried en masse on trumped up charges of—among other things—being counterrevolutionary agents of Britain and having schemed for the destruction of the Convention. Allowed to speak in their own defense, the spurious charges were systematically refuted and eloquent defenses were given by Brissot and Vergniaud. At Robespierre’s insistence, the Committee of Public Safety changed the rules of the Revolutionary Tribunal, effectively bringing the trial to an abrupt end after three days. When the inevitable death sentence was announced, one of the condemned Girondins, Charles Dufriche-Valazé, removed a knife he had hidden in his coat pocket and stabbed himself in the heart, dying moments later in a pool of blood.

Having ruthlessly attacked the Girondins in the months leading up to their downfall, Danton’s friend Camille Desmoulins was now overcome with remorse upon hearing the verdict and was heard to say, “My God! My God! It is I who kills them!” The next day, all twenty-one of the condemned sang patriotic revolutionary songs as they were brought to the guillotine in tumbrils. They were beheaded one after another in the span of thirty-six minutes—each laid out on a plank covered in the blood of those killed just before him. Even Valazé was not allowed to cheat the executioner, and his already-dead body was decapitated along with the others. A new record was set that day for the most beheadings in a single day—but it was not a record that would not endure for long.

The first week of November 1793 saw the executions of the king’s cousin Philippe Egalité, as well as two prominent female revolutionaries. In 1791, actress Olympe de Gouges had highlighted the revolutionary leaders’ failure to grant equal rights to half of France’s population with her boldly feminist work titled The Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. Her associations with the Girondins and her outspoken criticism of the king’s execution now brought her to the guillotine. Three days later, Manon Roland, whose salon had hosted the meetings of the leaders of the Girondins, was also brought from prison to the scaffold. Looking up at the statue of Lady Liberty that had recently been erected in the Place de Révolution in place of the toppled statue of Louis XV, she spoke her final words: “Ah, Liberty, what crimes are being committed in your name!”

Days later, former Paris mayor and astronomer Sylvain Bailly was brought to the site of the Champs de Mars massacre and made to stand in the freezing cold rain and endure the abuse of the crowds for hours before being guillotined atop a dung heap. Jean Roland, hearing of his wife’s execution, emerged from his place of hiding in Rouen, wrote a note stating, “I no longer wish to live in a world covered in crime,” and fatally ran himself through with a sword. Manon Roland’s lover, the Girondin leader François Buzot, and another former Paris mayor Jérôme Pétion had managed to escape their incarceration and join counterrevolutionary movements in the northwest. Mercilessly hunted down, these last remaining Girondin leaders committed suicide while on the run. Their bodies were found days later in a field, half-eaten by wolves.

Throughout the fall and winter of 1793, nearly three thousand people were executed in Paris and another fourteen thousand in the provinces. As one witness described, “Whole families were led to the scaffold for no other crime than their relationship; sisters for shedding tears over the death of their brothers . . . wives for lamenting the fate of their husbands.” Amid a climate of fear and vengeance, the word of a neighbor was all it took to seal one’s fate. A woman accused of having declared herself an aristocrat and who did not care “a fig for the nation” was arrested and executed the same day. A woman with a baby at her breast who, while watching a group being lead to the guillotine, was heard to say, “Here is much blood shed for a trifling cause,” quickly found herself arrested and forced to mount the scaffold as well.

Though denounced by some of the revolutionary leaders—notably Robespierre—a campaign to “dechristianize” France was gathering momentum in late 1793. Its main proponents included Convention member Joseph Fouché, who was determined to establish a Religion of Reason in place of “the superstition and hypocrisy” of Christianity. In the district under his control, he ordered the confiscation and destruction of all crosses and church ornaments. Priests were ordered to marry, adopt a child, or take into their care someone elderly. And at the gate of every cemetery he ordered there to be a sign reading: “Death Is But an Eternal Sleep.”

A new Republican calendar was adopted by the Convention to replace the traditional one that counted time since the birth of Christ and marked holy days and Sabbaths. Years would henceforth be counted from the abolition of the French monarchy, so that September 22, 1792 was now considered Day 1 of Year 1. Months were divided into three weeks of ten days and, at each year’s end, five days of Sansculottides would honor the revolutionary working man. Organized by Jacques Hébert and the Paris municipal government, a grand Festival of Reason was held on November 10 in which an actress portraying the Goddess of Reason was carried into the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame— now renamed The Temple of Reason. Speeches were made and songs sung amid busts of Marat and other martyrs of the revolution and a new altar bearing the words “To Philosophy.”

In fall of 1793, the massive influx of soldiers that universal conscription had brought to the Revolutionary Armies now turned the tide against the various counterrevolutionary uprisings throughout France. Following the surrender of the city of Lyon after a siege, the Committee of Public Safety sent Georges Couthon to oversee the city’s destruction. “May this terrible example strike fear into future generations,” he announced, “and teach the universe that just as the French nation, always great and just, knows how to reward virtue, so it also knows how to abhor crime and punish rebellion.” With that, all the residences in France’s second largest city except those of the poor were demolished and a sign raised over the rubble: “Lyon Made War on Liberty; Lyon Is No More.”

Unsatisfied with Couthon’s efficiency in bringing retribution to the rebellious population, the Committee replaced him with Convention delegates Fouché and Collot d’Herbois, the latter of whom had recently declared, “The rights of man are made not for counterrevolutionaries but only for sans-culottes.” Soon the guillotine at Lyon—now renamed Liberated Town—was executing up to thirty-two condemned rebels per day. When this was deemed too slow a means of dispensing justice, a new method of execution was tried. On December 4, 1793, sixty of the condemned inhabitants of the city were tied together and blasted with grapeshot from cannons. Those left merely mutilated and moaning but not dead had to be finished off with bayonets and sabers by soldiers who became physically ill in carrying out their grim task.

“What a delicious moment! How you would have enjoyed it!” wrote one local Jacobin to a friend in Paris, having witnessed these cannonade executions. “What a sight! Worthy indeed of Liberty! . . . Say hello for me to Robespierre.” For months on end, successive batches of bankers, scholars, aristocrats, priests, nuns, wealthy merchants, and their wives and children were brought out into fields each day, tied to stakes, and shot by firing squads or set upon by mobs allowed to butcher them. One group of working-class women slashed at the head of a twentysix- year-old nun with meat cleavers multiple times until her head was finally severed. She had been accused of refusing to stop praying to God when ordered to do so by “the people.”

December of 1793 also saw the defeat of the Royal and Catholic Army in the Vendée, where at the Battle of Savenay hundreds of rebels were shot or bayoneted after attempting to surrender, and no mercy was shown to their families traveling with them. “I have crushed children beneath my horses’ hooves, and massacred the women who thus will give birth to no more brigands,” boasted the victorious general of the Revolutionary Army. “We take no prisoners, they would need to be given the bread of liberty, and pity is not revolutionary.” Elsewhere in the Vendée, two hundred rebel prisoners were executed at Angers, two thousand at Saint-Florent, and another three to four thousand were systematically shot at Pont-de-Cé and Avrillé.

When the prisons of the nearby city of Nantes became dangerously overcrowded and disease-ridden, the Committee of Public Safety’s representative Jean-Baptiste Carrier implemented a new program to empty them. Prisoners were taken from the prisons at night, stripped, tied together in pairs, and brought out on specially modified barges to the middle of the Loire River where the water was icy cold and the current strong. Once there, hatches were opened in the bottoms of the barges, causing them to rapidly sink, and the terrified prisoners drowned together in pairs. The first of these mass drownings targeted hundreds of refractory priests. “What a revolutionary torrent the Loire is,” noted Carrier.

These mass drownings occurred over the course of three months. The bodies of the victims would wash up downstream and be eaten by wolves. Carrier had no qualms about drowning women or children and spoke of the need to “kill and kill” and to “butcher children without hesitation.” When a priest and a nun were stripped, tied together, and taken out on a barge to be drowned, the executioners nicknamed it a “republican wedding.” Throughout these atrocities, Carrier saw himself in the role of a hero. “It is on the principle of humanity,” he stated, “that I purge Liberty’s earth of these monsters.”

The revenge taken on the Vendéans went far beyond the massacre of prisoners. On the orders of the Committee of Public Safety, General Louis Turreau led so-called “infernal columns” of troops throughout the region with the orders that “all villages, settlements, heathlands and all that can burn are to be put to the flames.” Inhabitants were to be shown no mercy. “They must all be exterminated,” wrote Carrier. “Truly republican soldiers can never allow themselves to be swayed by pity; nothing is finer than to know how to sacrifice all human feeling to the national vengeance.” Noted Carrier’s associate, “The Vendée will be depopulated, but the Republic will be avenged and tranquil.”

On the Mediterranean coast, the city of Toulon was recaptured from the British and Spanish in December when the occupying forces were driven out by Major Napoleon Bonaparte with strategic long-range artillery fire. In distinguishing himself with tactical brilliance, the twenty-four-year-old was now promoted to the rank of brigadier general and dispatched to continue the war effort in Austrian-controlled Italy. Representatives from the Committee of Public Safety then arrived at Toulon to oversee the full suppression of counterrevolutionaries. Eight hundred inhabitants were taken outside the city walls and shot in batches, and another three hundred were executed over the following months.

Georges Danton had spent the fall of 1793 in the peaceful countryside away from Paris, recovering from a lingering illness. He passed the time fishing, hunting, and enjoying life with his new sixteen-yearold wife. When a messenger arrived one day bearing the “good news” about the death of Marie Antoinette and the “factious” Girondins, Danton’s expression soured. “You call that good news?” he exclaimed. “You call them factious? Aren’t we all? We deserve death as much as the Girondins and we shall suffer the same fate one after another.” Arriving back in Paris at the end of 1793, Danton convinced his friend Camille Desmoulins to publish a new newspaper that would attempt to popularize a call for an end to the policies of terror and dechristianization.

At the Jacobin club, Danton called for the introduction of national religious festivals, arguing against Hébert and his followers that “it was never our intention to destroy religion so that atheism could take its place.” He further argued for curbing the extremes of radical revolutionary justice, saying, “No one wants to see a person treated as a criminal just because he happens not to have enough revolutionary enthusiasm.” Robespierre was enough in agreement with Danton on the religious issue to join forces against Hébert, and on March 14, 1794, the leading members of the Hébertist faction were arrested. Eighteen of them were brought to the guillotine twenty days later. Hébert fainted multiple times on the way to the scaffold and screamed hysterically just before his death. His wife, an ex-nun named Marie François, was executed the following month.

For their advocacy of moderation, Danton and Desmoulins had been maligned by the Hébertists as “indulgents” and, on that matter, Robespierre was inclined to agree. At a dinner on March 22, Danton tried appealing to Robespierre directly, asking him how he justified the death of so many innocents along with the guilty. “And who says anyone innocent has perished?” Robespierre shot back before adding: “I suppose that a man of your moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment.” Taken aback, tears forming in his eyes, Danton responded, “And I suppose that you would be annoyed if none did.” That night, Robespierre added Danton’s name to a new list of Convention members who would have to be purged.

Danton, Desmoulins, and their closest associates were arrested in the night and brought before the Tribunal on April 3. Asked by the judge for their name and address, Danton replied, “My abode will soon be nothingness. As for my name, you will find it in the pantheon of history.” Desmoulins gave his age as “thirty-three, same age at death as that sans-culotte Jesus Christ.” With his commanding oratory, Danton overpowered the judge at his trial, reminding him, “‘I’m the one who created this tribunal, so I know something about it.” He demolished the litany of false charges brought against him. To prevent the possibility of an acquittal, Robespierre’s closest ally Saint- Just pushed through the Convention a motion that effectively ended the trial before Desmoulins even had a chance to speak.

The jury was bullied into delivering a guilty verdict on all the accused. Camille Desmoulins spent the last night of his life wailing over the fate he anticipated for his beloved Lucile, shouting, “They are going to murder my wife!” Taken to the scaffold on April 5, Danton attempted to give his friend, former Convention president Hérault de Séchelles, a goodbye kiss on the cheek before his death. Prevented from doing so by the executioner, Danton rebuked him, “Fool! You won’t be able to keep our heads from touching each other in the basket.” The last of the fifteen to be executed that day, Danton kept his composure to the end, remarking, “My only regret is that I am going before that rat Robespierre.” Turning to the man about to take his life, he spoke his final words: “Don’t forget to show my head to the people. It’s well worth having a look at.”

Just as Desmoulin had feared, his wife, Lucile, was soon arrested, leaving their infant Horace—Robespierre’s godson—in the care of Lucile’s mother, who appealed to Robespierre in writing: “If you can still remember the happy evenings you once spent before our fire holding our little Horace, spare an innocent victim. If not, then make haste and take us all, Horace, me and my other daughter, Adèle. Hurry up and tear us apart with your claws that still drip with Camille’s blood.” Her letter went unanswered, and twenty-three-year-old Lucile went to her death on April 13, having told the Tribunal, “‘In departing from this world, in which nothing now remains to engage my affections, I am far less the object of pity than you are.”

“In heaven’s name, when will all this bloodshed cease?” asked a witness to the execution of Lucile Desmoulins. But rather than let up, the Terror continued at a more rapid pace. “For a citizen to become suspect,” stated Convention President Georges Couthon, “it is sufficient that rumor accuses him.” In Paris alone, 1,500 people were executed by the guillotine within 8 weeks at the start of the summer of 1794. Victims included the “father of modern chemistry” Antoine Lavoisier—who had designed the hated customs posts surrounding Paris—and twenty peasant girls from Poitou, one of whom had a baby pulled from her breast just before her execution.

Chapter Title

Revolution!

France - Chapter 15

Terror Is Only Justice Made Prompt, Severe, And Inflexible

September 17, 1793 — April 19, 1794

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Chapter End

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