Revolution! France – Chapter 16 – The Brick Chronicle

On May 7, 1794, Robespierre made a passionate speech denouncing atheism and calling for the moral renewal of the nation with a proclamation of the republic’s belief in a benevolent creator and the immortality of the soul. To celebrate the launch of this new civic religion, on June 8, a Festival of the Supreme Being was held on the Champ de Mars where a Liberty Tree and a symbol of the French people as Hercules were placed atop an enormous artificial mountain. Robespierre led a procession up the mountain where he, as the new Convention president, delivered a speech that began, “French Republicans, it is for you to purify the earth which has been soiled, and to recall to the earth Justice which has been banished from it. Liberty and virtue spring from the breast of divinity—neither one can live without the other.”

At the conclusion of the speech delivered to a crowd of half a million citizens, an effigy of atheism was burned away to reveal underneath a statue of Wisdom. As an orchestra played and a choir sang a new hymn to the republic, Robespierre—looking as happy as anyone had ever remembered seeing him—descended from the mountain like a new Moses. The event was well-received overall, offering Parisians a glimmer of hope that the terrible months of Terror might be coming to a close. But some Convention members suppressed derisive snickers at the pomposity of the ceremony, and a friend of Danton was heard to mutter after Robespierre had passed by, “Look at him. The bastard isn’t satisfied with being the boss; he’s got to be God as well.”

With the internal uprisings now crushed and the Revolutionary Armies having defeated the Austrians and pushed into Italy and Spain, the justification for the extreme measures of the Terror were now being called into question behind the scenes by the Convention’s remaining moderates. At the same time, radicals who had carried out some of the worst atrocities in the provinces, like Fouché and Carrier, had been recalled by Robespierre to Paris and worried that they would be the next ones sent to the guillotine. Indeed, on July 26, Robespierre gave a two-hour speech before the Convention in which he railed against enemies and traitors within the Convention, implying another purge was at hand. Since he did not give the names of these traitors, everyone in the Convention had reason to fear they were the next intended targets.

A coalition of moderates and extremists quickly took action to launch a desperate preemptive strike at Robespierre and his closest allies. The next day at the Convention, Robespierre’s attempt to speak was shouted down with cries of “Down with the tyrant!” Unprepared for such a confrontation, Robespierre struggled for words. “Ah! Danton’s blood chokes you!” someone called out. His arrest was immediately voted on and approved, along with that of Saint-Just, Couthon, and fellow Jacobin Philippe Lebas. Augustin Robespierre insisted that he be arrested alongside his brother. They were escorted out of the Convention by soldiers, but Robespierre’s allies at the Paris municipal government had sent out word to the prisons not to allow them to be jailed. Hoping to foment an armed overthrow of the Convention, the outlawed Robespierrists gathered at City Hall to muster support.

Friend to Robespierre and commander of the National Guard, the drunken François Hanriot raced to City Hall shouting for his men to rally to him, but on arrival, an usher from the Convention announced that an arrest warrant had just been issued for Hanriot as well, and his troops abandoned him. A new commander loyal to the Convention was sent to surround City Hall with National Guardsmen. At 1:00 a.m., inside the building in a council chamber, Robespierre was issuing arrest warrants for his enemies at the Convention and was in the middle of signing his name to a call to arms when soldiers burst into the room. Lebas immediately drew two pistol from his pockets, handed one to Robespierre, and shot himself in the head. Witness reports are conflicting over whether Robespierre fired his own pistol or whether he was shot by a member of the Guard, but he was struck by a bullet that blew apart half his jaw.

Couthon got himself out of his wheelchair, but tumbled down a set of stairs, cutting open his head. Augustin escaped out a window and carefully moved himself along a ledge, but suddenly fell with a thud onto the steps below, his fall partly broken by a soldier’s bayonet. He was picked up only partly conscious. Hanriot was either pushed or jumped from a third-story window and landed in an open sewer below. Only Saint-Just, who had frozen in fear, managed to leave the room of his own ability. Robespierre was carried out on a plank and brought to the meeting room of the Committee of Public Safety. At 6:00 a.m., a surgeon was summoned who removed some of Robespierre’s teeth and bandaged up his shattered jaw. Hanriot was found several hours after his fall, unable to move, covered in excrement, with one of his eyes dangling from its socket. He begged to be put out of his misery.

Seventeen more of Robespierre’s supporters were arrested overnight and held in a prison cell at the Conciergerie. No one spoke until Saint-Just, gesturing up at a copy on the wall of the Rights of Man from the never-implemented Constitution of 1793, said, “Well, whatever else has happened, at least that is something we did.” When Robespierre indicated to a guard a request for pen and paper, he was mocked: “What for? Do you want to write to your Supreme Being?” A total of twenty-two men were carted in tumbrils to the Place de la Révolution on July 28, 1794. Along the way, a woman approached the carts and came face-to-face with the bandaged Robespierre. “Monster spewed up from hell,” she addressed him. “The thought of your punishment intoxicates me with joy. Go now, evil one, go down into your grave loaded with the curses of the wives and mothers of France.”

At the scaffold, it took fifteen minutes amid his cries of agony to place the partially-paralyzed Couthon on the plank on his side before beheading him. As Hanriot was lead from the tumbril, someone reached out and snatched his dangling eyeball from its socket. The second-to-last to be killed, Robespierre ascended the steps and looked out at the thousands who had come to witness his demise. “The Republic is lost. The brigands have won,” he had stated upon his arrest, but now he remained silent. Just before being laid on the plank, the executioner ripped off the bandage holding together his jaw. Blood gushed forth, his jaw dropped open, and Robespierre involuntarily let out a horrifying scream of pain. Moments later, he was dead, and his head and those of his closest allies were held aloft before the people.

In the months that followed, there was a reactionary swing to the right in the leadership of the Convention. The Jacobin club was closed, the Revolutionary Tribunal was dismantled, and the red caps of liberty were banished from the streets. Jean Baptiste Carrier, who had conducted the mass drownings at Nantes, was guillotined on November 16. In the south, many cities experienced what was called a White Terror, as republican officials who were held responsible for murdering people’s family members and friends were now beaten, maimed, or lynched. In several cities in the south, hundreds of Jacobins that had been arrested were slaughtered in prison courtyards in scenes of butchery reminiscent of the September Prison Massacres of 1792.

Throughout the revolution, the basic issues affecting the misery of the poor had never been solved, and in the spring of 1795, prices of basic necessities had again risen to levels the poor simply could not afford. With cries of “Bread and the Constitution of ’93!” and even some shouts of “Bread and a King!” another mob of Parisians invaded the Convention on May 20. When delegate Jean Féraud attempted to block their way, he was shot dead and decapitated—his head put on a pike and waved in front of the Convention president to intimidate him. The National Guard remained loyal to the Convention, however, and after a brief struggle, the demonstrators were cleared from the building and chased away. The remaining Jacobin members of the Convention were blamed for the disruption and arrested. “We must destroy all that remains of them,” noted one reactionary delegate. “We must lose no time in punishing them and putting an end to the Revolution.”

The Convention came to increasingly rely on the military to keep itself in power. Though Louis XVI’s ten-year-old son died of tuberculosis in prison on June 8, surviving royalists and nobles who had fled France returned to Paris in the fall of 1795, to rally the people to a restoration of the monarchy. Hoping to seize the moment, Louis XVI’s brother landed a force from England and marched to Paris. Realizing the imminent danger they were in, the Convention called upon Napoleon to quickly organize the defense of the Tuileries palace where the Convention now met. As royalist forces streamed into Paris and approached, Napoleon waited for them to get close and then repeatedly blasted their front lines with cannons loaded with grapeshot, killing and maiming hundreds until at last the royalist resolve was shattered and they fled.

Napoleon followed up his triumph in Paris by leading the French army as it crossed the Alps, and he conquered Lombardy, the Papal States, and Venice. Fresh victories brought optimism and a sense of honor to the long-suffering people of France. Looted treasures from defeated cities filled the treasuries of the government, which at the end of 1795 had composed a new constitution and reorganized itself with a bicameral legislative body and a Directory of five men as its executive branch. Without consulting this Directory, Napoleon took it upon himself to negotiate a peace treaty with Austria. He then lead a French army on an expedition into Egypt to counter British influence, and there he won a decisive victory over of the armies of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt at the Battle of the Pyramids.

By the end of the 1790s, France had seen a brief resurgence of Jacobinism and a return to power of one of the revolution’s earliest leaders, Abbé Sieyès. Once asked what he had done during the Terror, the one-time author of What Is The Third Estate? replied, “I survived.” After leading the French army to victory over the Ottoman Turks in Gaza, Jaffa, and Haifa, Napoleon returned to Paris where, on November 9, 1799, with the support of two members of the Directory—Sieyès and fellow Terror-survivor Joseph Fouché—he staged a bloodless coup d’etat that would see Napoleon go from military dictator to “Emperor of the French” when he was crowned by Pope Pius VII in 1804.

Although the mother, grandmother, and sister of Lafayette’s wife all fell victim to the guillotine during the Terror, Adrienne herself survived in prison, and her children survived in hiding. In January 1795, she was freed after the advocacy of both the United States minister to France and the wife of James Monroe. In September of that same year, Lafayette’s wife and daughters Anastasie and Virginie voluntarily chose to be incarcerated with Lafayette in the Austrian prison in which he was being held in dismal and unsanitary conditions. Lafayette was overwhelmed with emotion at their sacrifice. In 1797, they were finally released and returned to France, and a year later Lafayette’s son, Georges Washington, returned from the United States to complete the family reunion.

Under the leadership of Napoleon as Emperor, France reached its largest territorial boundaries, and by 1812, the country dominated most of continental Europe including Spain, Italy, Germany, and Poland. France’s military dominance remained unchecked until the disastrous attempt by Napoleon to invade Russia with a force of six hundred thousand men. The death toll from the Napoleonic wars of conquest was 6.5 million people. Defeated in 1814, Napoleon accepted exile to a small Mediterranean island. But he escaped the island in 1815 and returned to France to lead an army of two hundred thousand against the British and Prussians, only to be defeated a final time at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium in June 1815. He was then exiled to the mid-Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died on May 5, 1821.

James Monroe invited Lafayette to return to the United States in celebration of the nation’s fiftieth anniversary, and Lafayette happily complied, visiting all twenty-four states during his thirteen-month visit. He was in Boston for the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument. Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which had fallen into disrepair and disuse, was restored for his visit. In Virginia, Lafayette had a tearful reunion with his old friends Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison. At Washington City, the newly-elected President John Quincy Adams toasted him on his sixty-eighth birthday: “To the 22nd of February and the 6th of September, the birthday of Washington and the birthday of Lafayette,” to which Lafayette responded, “To the 4th of July, the birthday of liberty.”

Napoleon’s reign had brought with it a reconciliation with the Catholic Church and a restoration of the nobility in France. Upon his downfall, the British and Prussians installed Louis XVI’s brother, the count of Provence, as France’s King Louis XVIII in a reestablishment of the monarchy. Upon his death from gangrene in 1824, Louis XVI’s second brother, the count of Artois, became King Charles X. Charles’s attempts to restore absolute power to the monarchy and his suppression of the freedom of the press lead to the July Revolution of 1830, in which he was ousted by the National Guard under the leadership— once again—of Lafayette. The seventy-three-year-old champion of liberty declined an invitation by the leaders of the new revolution to become a national dictator. Aware that any move toward another republic might provoke war with the rest of Europe, he instead insisted on the crowning of Philippe Égalité’s son as Louis-Philippe I, the leader of a constitutional monarchy.

“There is the king we need,” Lafayette commented. “There is the most republican solution that we are able to find.” Andrew Jackson hailed the new revolution in France a triumph for American liberty. Lafayette was elected to the lower house of the legislature, where he spent his final years fighting for liberal causes like the worldwide abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press. After Lafayette’s death, the nephew of Napoleon came to power in a coup d’état in 1848, and eventually established himself as Emperor Napoleon III. A second French republic was established after his downfall, and on October 28, 1886, the colossal statue of Liberty Enlightening the World was given as a gift of the French people to the United States to honor the two nations’ mutual struggles toward creating a better world.

Opening Quote

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