The Days of the French Revolution

8 THE DAYS OF THE TERROR October – December 1793 and March – July 1794

The Queen was one of the first to suffer. At the beginning of July she had been told that she was to be parted from her son.

My mother was horrified by this cruel order [her daughter recorded] and refused to give him up. She defended his bed against the men who had come to take him away. But they insisted on taking him and threatened to use force and to send for the guard…We got him up and when he was dressed my mother handed him over, crying over him, as if she knew she would never see him again. The poor little fellow kissed us all tenderly and departed in tears with the men…My mother felt she had reached the depths of misery now…and her misery was increased when she knew that the shoemaker [Antoine] Simon was in charge of him…He cried for two whole days inconsolably and begged to see us…We often went up into the tower. My brother went by every day and the only pleasure my mother had was to watch him pass by through a little window. Sometimes she waited there for hours to get a glimpse of her beloved child…Every day we heard him and Simon singing the Carmagnole, the Marseillaise and many other horrid songs. Simon made him wear a red bonnet and a carmagnole jacket and forced him to sing at the windows so as to be heard by the guard and to blaspheme God and curse his family and the aristocrats. My mother fortunately did not hear all these horrors as she had been taken away [to the Conciergerie prison on the Île Saint Louis].

At the Conciergerie the Queen was kept in a small, damp cell containing three beds, one for herself, another for a female attendant and the third for two gendarmes who, so Count Fersen recorded, ‘never left the cell even when the Queen had to satisfy the needs of nature’. She spent her time reading such books as A History of Famous Shipwrecks, crocheting pieces of thread which she picked from the cloth screens that lined the walls of the cell, or pacing about between the beds as she twisted the rings on her fingers. Towards the middle of September, after the failure of an attempt to release her, she was moved into an even smaller cell, a dark room, formerly the prison dispensary and still smelling of medicines, whose only light during the hours of darkness came from a lantern in the courtyard beyond the barred window. She spent three weeks here before being taken to her trial in the bare marble hall of the Paris parlement from which the tapestries and the carpet with its pattern of fleurs-de-lis had been removed. Here she was accused of a variety of crimes from conspiracy with her brother to incest with her son whom, it was alleged, she had taught to masturbate. When roughly called upon to answer these accusations, 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.’ There was an obvious wave of sympathy for her after this spirited response. But the President angrily threatened to clear the court; the processes of the trial were speeded up and she was found guilty and condemned to death. ‘Having heard the sentence pronounced’, the Moniteur reported, ‘she left the court without addressing a further word to the judges or the public, no trace of emotion appearing on her face.’

On the morning of 16 October she dressed herself for the last time in a white piqué dress, white bonnet, black stockings and red prunella high-heeled shoes. Charles Sanson’s son, Henri, came into the cell to tie her hands behind her back. Then, having removed her bonnet, he cut off her hair, which she had dressed with care for her trial the day before, and put it into his pocket. Outside, a tumbril was waiting. At the sight of it she began to tremble and had to have her hands untied so that she could relieve herself in a corner of the courtyard wall. But, once seated in the cart, she regained her composure. Pale and drawn, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes, ‘the widow Capet’, as the Moniteur referred to her, remained staring silently ahead of her throughout the long journey to the scaffold. Having climbed the steps she stumbled and trod on the executioner’s foot. ‘Monsieur,’ she apologized as he cried out in pain, ‘I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.’ They were the last words she spoke.

That same month Brissot, Vergniaud and nineteen other Girondin leaders were also put on trial. They defended themselves so skilfully that Hébert angrily complained, ‘Need there be so much ceremony about shortening the lives of wretches already condemned by the people?’ But they were, without exception, condemned to death. Four of them were in their twenties; their average age was forty. One of the older of them, Valazé, stabbed himself to death in court with a dagger which he had concealed under his coat; yet it was decreed that his corpse should nevertheless be carted next morning to the guillotine and there beheaded with the others.

The morning was fine and an immense crowd collected to see them pass through the streets on their way to the Place de la Revolution. The houses on either side were decorated as if for a festival with tricolours flying from the windows and coloured placards bearing such inscriptions as ‘unity, liberty, equality, fraternity or death’, for it had become dangerous, so one Parisian said, ‘to be considered less revolutionary than your neighbour’. As the condemned men passed beneath these gaily decorated windows in the five slowly moving carts they sang the Marseillaise, so the chronicler of their careers, Alphonse de Lamartine, tells us; and, on reaching the scaffold, jumped out to embrace each other, shouting, ‘Vive la République!’ Sillery, the oldest of them, was the first to die. He mounted the steps, bowed to the spectators with grave courtesy, and walked steadily to the guillotine. The others, too, died bravely. Vergniaud, who had thrown away the poison with which he had been provided the night before so that he could die with his friends, was the last to climb the steps. His head was cut off precisely thirty-one minutes after Sillery’s.

During the next few weeks the blade of the guillotine fell and rose in what Thomas Carlyle was to call relentless systole-diastole. On 6 November, Philippe Egalité, the former Duc d’Orléans, who was brought back from Marseilles, was tried and condemned before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Accepting the verdict without protest, he merely asked for a stay of execution for twenty-four hours. The request was granted and ‘in the interval he had a repast prepared with care, on which he feasted with more than usual avidity’. Distrusted and unlamented, he died with a smile on his lips, displaying no sign of fear. On 8 November Madame Roland was also condemned to death. She had been arrested at home at the beginning of June, separated from her weeping daughter and lodged in the prison of the Abbaye from which she was released when Brissot was sent there, re-arrested immediately and taken to the Sainte-Pélagie and thence to the Conciergerie. Without news of her fugitive husband to whom, despite his recent cantankerous jealousy, she was deeply attached, or of François Buzot, the Girondin, with whom she had fallen passionately in love, constantly worried about her daughter and dismayed by the collapse of all that she had worked for, she nevertheless retained her spirit and dignity to the end, gaining the admiration of her captors as well as of her fellow-prisoners. At her trial she responded bravely to the inquisitors who bullied her unmercifully, who insisted that she reply yes or no to their questions, accused her of loquacity when she attempted a more detailed answer, and told her that she was ‘not there to be clever’. She sometimes wept when questions were asked about her private life and her relations with Girondins other than her husband, but she never broke down and refused to admit any guilt or to compromise her friends, declaring defiantly when sentence was passed upon her, ‘You judge me worthy to share the fate of the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall endeavour to carry to the scaffold the courage they displayed.’

She succeeded in doing so. While the mob surrounded the cart, shouting, ‘À la guillotine! À la guillotine!’, she tried to comfort a frightened forger who sat beside her. And on arrival at the scaffold she asked the executioner to behead him first so that he would be spared the spectacle of her death. The executioner declined: it was against the rules. But she pleaded with him, and he gave way. When it was time for her to be bound to the plank, she looked up at the statue of Liberty, which had been erected in the Place de la Revolution in commemoration of the events of 10 August, and uttered her famous apostrophe, ‘Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.’

Three days later the former Mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who had been arrested while staying with a friend at Melun, was escorted on foot to the Champ de Mars so that he might be executed on the spot of the massacre of 17 July 1791 for which he was held responsible. But on his arrival there a man, who had shaken a red flag in his face throughout the walk from the Conciergerie, shouted that the place which had been the scene of so many revolutionary celebrations should not be polluted by the former mayor’s blood. So, while Bailly walked about the Champ de Mars, insulted by people who threw mud at him, kicked him and struck him with sticks, the guillotine was dismantled and carried off to a dunghill by the banks of the Seine where, surrounded by a howling mob, he was beheaded in sight of the quarter of Chaillot where he had once lived.

Later that month Barnave, who had retired to his birthplace at Grenoble and been arrested there, was also brought back to Paris after ten months’ imprisonment for trial and execution. And so, day after day, the guillotinings continued. Unsuccessful generals suffered with fallen politicians, men convicted of publishing counter-revolutionary writings or of airing royalist opinions with deserters and traitors. Even the faded courtesan, Madame Du Barry, who had gone to live in the country with the Comte de Cossé-Brissac and had visited England in 1792 to try to raise money on her jewels, was dragged before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Accused of having dissipated the treasures of the state and worn ‘mourning for the tyrant’ in London, she was condemned and, screaming with fright, beheaded. She was followed to the scaffold by eight Carmelite nuns.

Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793 the Terror was maintained unabated. The Committee of Public Safety insisted that it was vitally necessary to stamp out the machinations of both royalists and federalists, hoping thereby to persuade the militant sons-culottes that they shared a common cause and the Convention that the omnipotence of the Committee was essential at a time of crisis in the Revolution’s course. Nearly 3,000 executions took place in Paris; about 14,000 in the provinces. Countless people lived in constant fear of death and went to bed dreading the sound of a knock on the door in the middle of the night when most arrests took place.

‘You have no more grounds for restraint against the enemies of the new order, and liberty must prevail at any price,’ cried Saint-Just, who, like Robespierre, ‘regarded all dissidents as criminals’. ‘We must rule by iron those who cannot be ruled by justice…You must punish not merely traitors but the indifferent as well.’ An even more violent Jacobin, Brichet, advised that the Law of Suspects should be interpreted so that all the well-to-do came within its scope: questions should be asked in every village about the means of the principal farmer; if he were rich he should be guillotined without further ado – he was ‘bound to be a food-hoarder’. But it was not only the rich, or even mainly the rich, who suffered. The poor were executed with the well-to-do, women with men, the young with the old, some accused of ‘starving the people’, others of ‘depraving public morals’, one witness for ‘not giving his testimony properly’. ‘The whole of the country seemed one vast conflagration of revolt and vengeance,’ wrote William Hazlitt in a passage characteristic of English writers of his time and temperament. ‘The shrieks of death were blended with the yell of the assassin and the laughter of buffoons. Never were the finest affections more warmly excited or pierced with more cruel wounds. Whole families were led to the scaffold for no other crime than their relationship; sisters for shedding tears over the death of their brothers in the emigrant armies; wives for lamenting the fate of their husbands; innocent peasant girls for dancing with the Prussian soldiers; and a woman giving suck, and whose milk spouted in the face of her executioner at the fatal stroke, for merely saying as a group were being conducted to slaughter, “Here is much blood shed for a trifling cause.”’

If such accounts must be considered overpitched, and if many families – in several parts of the country most families – lived through these months in undisturbed tranquillity, the Liste Générale des Condamnés provides numerous examples of the Terror’s merciless severity:

Jean Baptiste Henry, aged eighteen, journeyman tailor, convicted of having sawed down a tree of liberty, executed 6 September 1793…Jean Julien, waggoner, having been sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour, took it into his head to cry ‘Vive le Roi’, brought back to the Tribunal and condemned to death…Stephen Thomas Ogie Baulny, aged forty-six, convicted of having entrusted his son, aged fourteen, to a garde du corps in order that he might emigrate, condemned to death and executed the same day…Henriette Françoise de Marboeuf, aged fifty-five, widow of the ci-devant Marquis de Marboeuf, convicted of having hoped for the arrival of the Austrians and Prussians and of keeping provisions for them, condemned to death and executed the same day…François Bertrand, aged thirty-seven, publican at Leure in the department of the Côte-d’Or, convicted of having furnished to the defenders of the country sour wine injurious to health, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day…Marie Angelique Plaisant, sempstress at Douai, convicted of having exclaimed that she was an aristocrat and that she did not care ‘a fig for the nation’, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day.

Hundreds of innocent people suffered with those whom the Revolutionary Tribunal had some cause to consider guilty, some of them through clerical and administrative errors, or even because their accusers chose not to spare them. Others were sentenced on the strength of denunciations by jealous or vindictive neighbours. One victim was fetched from prison to face a charge which had been brought against another prisoner with a similar name. Her protests were silenced by the prosecutor who said casually, ‘Since she’s here, we might just as well take her.’ Another who had lost his temper while playing cards and, when reprimanded for behaving as no good patriot should, had shouted, ‘Fuck good patriots!’ was also brought before the Tribunal, condemned and executed.

The worst excesses were committed in the provinces where – although most représentants en mission were more concerned with enlisting recruits and collecting supplies than with punishment – in several towns the guillotine was kept constantly at work and those convicted of crimes against the Revolution were slaughtered wholesale on the instructions of fanatical or savage representatives or of those who were frightened of being considered too weak. At Lyons where numerous rich men’s houses were blown up, including those in Mansart’s lovely Place Bellecour, Collot d’Herbois, who had been sent there as the Committee of Public Safety’s agent, and Joseph Fouché, a frail former teacher who had become one of the most dreaded of the Jacobins, decided that the guillotine was too slow an instrument for their purpose and had over three hundred of their victims mown down by cannon fire. ‘What a delicious moment!’ reported an approving witness to a friend in Paris. ‘How you would have enjoyed it!…What a sight! Worthy indeed of Liberty!…Wish bon jour to Robespierre.’

From Feurs, the representative himself reported, ‘The butchery has been good.’ At Toulon numerous victims were shot by order of Paul Barras, a tall, cunning former army officer of noble birth who was a cousin of the Marquis de Sade, and Louis Fréron, founder of the inflammatory journal, L’Orateur du peuple. At Nantes, where the Committee’s agent was the thirty-six-year-old Jean-Baptiste Carrier, an obscure attorney before the Revolution, three thousand captives perished in an epidemic in the grossly overcrowded prisons and a further two thousand were towed out in barges into the middle of the Loire and drowned, some of them stripped naked and bound together in couples. The river became so choked with these barges that ships weighing anchor brought them up filled with the dead. Birds of prey hovered over the waters, gorging themselves with human flesh, and the fish became so contaminated that orders had to be given forbidding them to be caught. On occasions Carrier appeared to be insane as, raving endlessly about the need to ‘kill and kill’, and to ‘butcher children without hesitation’, he slashed at the air with his sword. Even in his calmer moments he was abusive and intolerant, answering all complaints and pleas for mercy with the threat that those who approached him would themselves be thrown into prison.

In the north the représentant en mission was Joseph le Bon, a former priest of twenty-nine, who fixed his headquarters at Arras. From Arras he travelled about the departments of the Somme and the Pas-de-Calais with his judges and guillotine, leaving a trail of blood in his wake, ‘in a kind of fever’, so his secretary reported, returning home to imitate the grimaces of the dying for the benefit of his wife. Assiduously attending all the executions he could, he addressed both victims and spectators from a nearby balcony, ordered bands to play the Ça ira as at a festival, and afterwards invited the executioner to dinner.

Under the direction of Jean Tallien, the son of the maître d’hôtel of the Marquis de Bercy, a young man of twenty-six who had worked as a lawyer’s clerk and in a printer’s office, even more cruel punishments were inflicted at Bordeaux.

The most terrible atrocities were committed there [according to the thin, little, awkward Girondin, Jean Baptiste Louvet]. A woman was charged with the heinous crime of having wept at the execution of her husband. She was consequently condemned to sit several hours under the suspended blade which shed upon her, drop by drop, the blood of the deceased whose corpse was above her on the scaffold before she was released by death from her agony.

‘The time has come which was foretold,’ as Madame Roland had said, ‘when the people would ask for bread and be given corpses.’

In Paris thousands of people went out regularly to witness the operations of what the deputy, J. A. B. Amar, called the ‘red Mass’ performed on the ‘great altar’ of the ‘holy guillotine’. They took their seats around the scaffold with the tricoteuses, buying wine and biscuits from hawkers while they waited for the show to begin. They placed bets as to the order in which the huissiers from the Revolutionary Tribunal, who wore silver chains round their necks, would decide the prisoners were to mount the scaffold, anticipating those three thrilling sounds – the first thud as the victim was thrown on to the plank, the second thud as the neck clamp was thrown into place, and the swishing rattle as the heavy blade fell. Yet there were thousands more who, like Madame Roland, had become ‘sick of blood’. Shops were shut and windows closed in the Rue Saint-Honoré as the tumbrils passed by on their way to the Place de la Révolution, some by those who had grown tired of the spectacle, many by others who were disgusted by it. So, following complaints from the residents of the Rue Saint-Honoré that the smell of stale blood which rose from the stones of the nearby square was endangering their health and depreciating the value of their property, the guillotine was removed first to a site near the ruins of the Bastille, then to an open space near the Barrière du Trône Renversé, now the Place de la Nation. But the people in these districts were as unwilling to have the guillotine in their midst as were those of the Rue Saint-Honoré. The scaffold was therefore taken back once more to the Place de la Revolution where Louis XVI had died.

While prisoners captured in the civil wars, suspected federalist agents, counter-revolutionaries and those accused of currency manipulation or food hoarding were all dispatched in the ‘red Mass’, a campaign was simultaneously mounted against Christianity. For some time now the more ardent revolutionaries had been encouraging anti-clerical feelings among the people and endeavouring to endow the Revolution itself with the aura of a religion. They had condemned the celibacy of the clergy. They had joined with the Montagnard, Delacroix, in denouncing the action of a bishop who had prevented one of his curés from marrying as a ‘blasphemy against the sovereignty of the people’. And they had even supported demands for the demolition of church belfries, ‘which by their height above other buildings seem to contradict the principles of equality’. They had also welcomed the custom of giving babies names untainted with Christian associations, and of changing the names of streets, which were called after saints or festivals of the Church, to those of heroes, journées or symbols of the Revolution.

This campaign was initiated in the Nièvre where Fouché was Commissioner of the Republic. In September Fouché had had a visit from Pierre Chaumette, a former medical student born at Nevers, a young man of a rather strait-laced disposition and homosexual inclinations who had been one of the most eloquent speakers at the Cordeliers Club and an outspoken opponent of the Girondins. Inspired or encouraged by Chaumette, Fouché immediately instituted a programme of de-Christianization in the district for which he was held responsible. On 22 September in the church of Saint-Cyr at Nevers he preached a sermon attacking ‘religious sophistry’ and unveiled a bust of Brutus. Later, in his avowed determination to substitute the ‘cult of the Republic’ for ‘the superstition and hypocrisy’ of Christianity, he had ecclesiastical vestments burned, crucifixes and crosses destroyed, church ornaments and vessels confiscated and notices posted outside cemeteries to the effect that, ‘Death is an eternal sleep.’ Denouncing the celibacy of priests, he ordered them all either to marry, to adopt a child or look after an elderly person. He eventually succeeded in obtaining the resignation of the Bishop of Allier and some thirty of the clergy in his diocese.

On his return to Paris at the end of the month, Chaumette, supported by Hébert, demanded a similar programme of de-Christianization in the capital. His demands, while making a strong appeal to the anti-clericalists in the radical sections, were not at first received with much enthusiasm elsewhere. But the ground had to some extent been prepared for Chaumette’s campaign by the Convention’s resolve to replace the Gregorian calendar with one which would emphasize the Republic’s association with Nature and Reason rather than with traditional Christianity. The dawn of the new era, Year one of the Republic, had already been declared as having begun with the abolition of the monarchy on 22 September 1792. That year, and all subsequent years, were now to be divided into twelve months of thirty days each, with the five days left at the end of the year to be known as sans-culottides and to be celebrated as festivals. The task of compiling the new calendar was entrusted to Philippe Fabre, who called himself Fabre d’Églantine, a former actor and – like so many other revolutionary figures – a not very successful writer who had once been Danton’s secretary. He decided that the months, which were to be divided into three décades of ten days’ each, should be named after the seasons: the first three, as autumnal seasons, were to be known as Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire; the next three, those of winter, as Nivôse, Pluviôse and Ventôse; the three of spring, as Germinal, Floréal and Prairial; and the three of summer as Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor. In addition, Fabre suggested the names of saints in the calendar should be replaced by those of fruits, plants and flowers. Since religious holidays were abolished and Sundays were no longer a day of rest, these changes were naturally displeasing to the clergy, many of whom refused to celebrate Mass on the new Sabbath, as well as to the devout members of their flocks. Nor were they universally popular with the workers who now had to make do with a holiday every ten days instead of every seven. Directed by Hébert and Chaumette, and supported outside the Commune by Fabre d’Églantine, whose disdainful manner and affectation of a lorgnette exasperated Robespierre, the de-Christianization campaign nevertheless soon gained momentum in Paris. Religious monuments outside churches were destroyed; various religious ceremonies were suppressed; ecclesiastical plate and other treasures were seized in the name of the people; images of the madonna were replaced by busts of Marat; surplices were cut up to make bandages and soldiers’ shirts; and it was henceforth forbidden to sell in the streets ‘any kinds of superstitious jugglery such as holy napkins, St Veronica’s handkerchiefs, Ecce Homos, crosses, Agnus Deis, rings of St Hubert or any medicinal waters or other adulterated drugs’. Theatres began to offer such plays as L’Inauguration du Temple de ìa Vérité in which a parody of the High Mass was performed.

Jean-Baptiste Gobel, Archbishop of Paris since 1791, a weak, rather absurd figure who had achieved favour with the Hébertists and atheists by adopting the dress of the sans-culottes, expressing anti-clerical opinions and opposing the celibacy of the clergy, was intimidated into coming before the Convention with his mitre in his hand and a red cap on his head, declaring, ‘Born a man of the people, curé of Porentruy, sent by the clergy to the Estates General, then raised to the Archbishopric of Paris, I have never ceased to obey the people. I accepted the functions which the people formerly bestowed on me and now, in obedience to the wishes of the people, I have come here to resign them. I allowed myself to be made a bishop when the people wanted bishops. I cease to be one now when the people no longer want them.’

That same week, a few days before the Commune ordered the closure of all churches in the city, a grand Festival of Reason was celebrated in Nôtre Dame. A young actress was carried into the cathedral by four citizens to represent the Goddess of Reason. Clothed in white drapery with a blue cloak over her shoulders and a red cap of liberty crowning her long hair, she was accompanied by a troupe of girls also dressed in white with roses on their heads. She sat on an ivy-covered chair while speeches were made, songs were sung, and soldiers paraded about the aisles carrying busts of Marat, Lepeletier and other martyrs of the Revolution. Later another young woman, the wife of Momoro, a printer who was a prominent member of the Commune, played the principal part in a similar festival at Saint-Sulpice.

From Paris the de-Christianization movement spread all over France. Not only streets and squares but towns and villages confusingly changed their names. The bestowal on babies of revolutionary first names became more common in certain districts than those of saints. More and more cathedrals and churches were deprived of their ornaments, vessels and plate; some were converted into Temples of Reason, others closed. Many clergy resigned and a number married. One even had himself ritually divorced from his breviary. The rites and processions in which the clergy had played their parts were parodied by local revolutionaries wearing vestments and mitres, employing croziers as drum-majors’ staffs, and making obeisances to the prettiest girl in the community who was paraded for the day as Goddess of Reason. In Paris people ‘danced before the sanctuary, howling the carmagnole,’ according to a contemporary witness, Séastien Mercier. ‘The men wore no breeches; and the necks and breasts of the women were bare. In their wild whirling they imitated those whirlwinds which, foreshadowing tempests, ravage and destroy all within their path. In the darkness of the sacristy they satisfied those abominable desires that had been aroused in them.’

A reaction, however, soon became apparent. Catholicism, deeply inbred, could not be eradicated. Priests who married were as likely to be scorned as those who had earlier taken the Constitutional oath. Numerous parishes demanded the reopening of their churches, the return of their bells and altar furniture, and the reintroduction of their festivals. Everywhere there were fears that local calamities were acts of God who was roused in anger by France’s blasphemy and atheism. At Coulanges-la-Vineuse in the Yonne a hailstorm that threatened crops induced the frightened peasants to enter the church which the revolutionaries had closed, to sing hymns, ring bells and pray for forgiveness and mercy.

Concerned by the unrest and dissension which the ruthless policies of de-Christianization were arousing in France, and anxious to reassert its central authority over the extremist deputies who were fanatically pursuing these policies in the provinces, the Committee of Public Safety now initiated a series of decrees intended to bring provincial agents more securely under its control. Several of these agents were recalled to Paris, while others returned of their own accord in order to defend themselves against the accusations of Robespierre who forcefully condemned their atheistic measures as liable to benefit the counter-revolutionaries. Danton also returned to Paris to lend his support to Robespierre.

For some weeks Danton, who had fallen ill in the summer, had been living quietly in the country at Arcis-sur-Aube where he had bought more land. Here, his convalescence complete and in one of his intermittent moods of indolence, he was enjoying the pleasures of country life, fishing in the Aube, going out shooting with the curé, relishing his food and wine and making love to the attractive, sixteen-year-old girl he had married as his second wife. He had been pleased to be out of Paris when Marie Antoinette and the Girondins had been executed, and had, it was said, reacted furiously when a neighbour passed on to him the ‘good news’ of the death of his ‘factious enemies’. ‘You wretch!’ he had exclaimed. ‘You call that good news!…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 the other.’ He returned to the capital with evident reluctance. It was no longer safe for him to stay away. He must be where he could exercise some influence over events in which, whether he liked it or not, he was bound to be implicated.

Ever since he had been away the political scene in Paris had been growing ever more confused and ever more embittered by rivalries and accusations of corruption, some invented, others true. One deputy, who had also been out of Paris that autumn, returned in the middle of November to find the Convention so changed that his ‘head swam’ and he could ‘scarcely recognize’ any of his colleagues. ‘In the place of the Mountain,’ he wrote, ‘I found a swarm of rival factions that dared not fight each other in the open but waged underground war.’

Danton immediately plunged into the war himself, counterattacking Hébert whose assaults on the Dantonists had been growing in intensity, allying himself with Robespierre in his offensive against the Enragés in the Jacobin Club and roundly condemning the outrages of the militant atheists as though speaking on behalf of the Oratorian fathers who had taught him as a boy, and of both his beloved and religious wives. In the Convention it might have been Robespierre speaking when Danton called for the introduction of national religious festivals. ‘If Greece had its Olympic Games,’ he said, ‘France too will celebrate its jours sans-culottides. The people will have festivals where they will offer up incense to the Supreme Being, Nature’s master, for it was never our intention to destroy religion so that atheism could take its place.’

Turning upon the Hébertists, he asked the Convention why they wasted their time on such creatures. ‘The people are sick to death of them…Perhaps the Terror once served a useful purpose, but it should not hurt innocent people. No one wants to see a person treated as a criminal just because he happens not to have enough revolutionary enthusiasm.’

Danton’s open advocacy of toleration in religion and moderation in politics, his declared belief that the time had come to be ‘sparing of human blood’, and his support of the Indulgents appeared at first to be decisive. By the middle of December the Convention was persuaded to establish a Committee of Clemency whose members were to examine the lists of suspects recently thrown into prison. But Hébert and his colleagues counter-attacked vigorously. Collot d’Herbois hurried home from Lyons to speak with passionate fervour in the Jacobin Club. Hébert and Billaud-Varenne joined him there to second his condemnation of the Dantonists. Their supporters in the Convention succeeded in suppressing the Committee of Clemency, and soon afterwards most of the Hébertists who had been arrested on 20 December were released. By then, however, Robespierre had become convinced that Danton’s reasons for supporting him in his quarrel with the Hébertists were not all that they seemed. Danton, he suspected, had wanted to exacerbate the quarrel so as to deprive the Committee of Public Safety of the support of the sons-culottes and thus, by dividing his enemies, to protect his friends and himself from their righteous animosity. Robespierre, therefore, determined to destroy both Hébertists and Dantonists alike.

The Hébertists were dealt with first. This did not prove difficult. Among their number were several men whose foreign origin enabled Robespierre to accuse them of complicity in a ‘foreign plot’; and when they planned to stage journiée on the lines of the Enragés’ demonstration outside the Convention in June 1793, they were able to enlist little enthusiasm in the sections and were deserted at the last moment by both Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne. The planned journée gave the Committee of Public Safety an excuse to act. On 14 March 1794 Hébert and his associates were all arrested, and less than a fortnight later eighteen of them were condemned to death. Hébert fainted repeatedly on his way to the guillotine.

By then the Committee of Public Safety had also decided to take action against the Indulgents among whom they included both Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Overcome by remorse at the part he had played in the downfall of the Girondins, Desmoulins had burst into tears when they were executed. He had since infuriated Robespierre by declaring in an obvious reference to him, ‘Love of country cannot exist when there is neither pity nor love for one’s fellow countrymen but only a soul dried up and withered by self-adulation.’ The Committee had already imprisoned Fabre d’Églantine who had become entangled in some corrupt financial transactions.

Robespierre, while persuaded that Fabre’s corruption was proof of his treason, would have chosen to spare Desmoulins of whom he was fond. He would also have spared Danton, but Danton had made dangerous enemies. Both Saint-Just and Billaud-Varenne constantly decried him as a traitor. ‘A man is guilty of a crime against the Republic,’ declared Saint-Just, ‘when he takes pity on prisoners. He is guilty because he has no desire for virtue. He is guilty because he is opposed to the Terror.’ At the same time, Marc-Guillaume Vadier, a vindictive lawyer, ardent Jacobin and influential member of the Committee of General Security which dealt with police matters, had boasted that his Committee would soon get that ‘fat stuffed turbot’, Danton. Hearing of Vadier’s threat, Danton had responded with characteristically scatological force: if his own life were threatened he would become ‘more cruel than any cannibal’; he would eat Vadier’s brains and ‘shit in his skull’. But Danton did not really believe that his life was in danger any more than he meant to be taken seriously when he threatened Vadier. He had always said that he was invulnerable, and, up till the very moment of his arrest, he supposed that Robespierre would stand by him and that Robespierre’s reputation would save him.

Yet Robespierre, reluctant as he was to sacrifice him and well aware that Danton’s death would leave him isolated, persuaded himself that the Indulgents were agents of counter-revolution and accepted the unwelcome fact that Danton would have to be arrested and tried with them. His attitude towards Danton had always been equivocal: there were times when he expressed his admiration for him and seemed even to like him. But Danton’s patent sexuality and coarse masculinity disturbed him – as it disturbed Madame Roland – and often shocked him. Once, during a heated discussion, Robespierre had exasperated Danton by his constant references to ‘Virtue’. ‘I’ll tell you what this Virtue you talk about really is,’ Danton said to him mockingly, ‘It’s what I do to my wife every night!’ The remark obviously rankled with Robespierre who recorded it in his notebook and afterwards commented, ‘Danton derides the word Virtue as though it were a joke. How can a man with so little conception of morality ever be a champion of freedom?’

On 22 March he met Danton for the last time at a dinner party. ‘Let us forget our private resentments,’ Danton said to him during the course of the evening, ‘and think only of the country, its needs and dangers.’ For a moment Robespierre did not reply. Then he asked sardonically, ‘I suppose a man of your moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment.’ ‘I suppose you would be annoyed,’ Danton riposted, ‘if none did.’ ‘Liberty,’ said Robespierre coldly, ‘cannot be secured unless criminals lose their heads.’ Despite this exchange, Danton made as if to embrace Robespierre when he left. But Robespierre pulled away from him in distaste.

A few days later they saw each other at the Théâtre Français.

Robespierre was in a box [an observer who was also in the audience that night recorded]. Danton was in the front stalls. When the words ‘Death to the tyrant!’ were declaimed on the stage [the play being performed was the tragedy, Epicharis and Nero] Danton’s friends burst into wild applause and standing up they turned towards Robespierre and shook their fists at him. Robespierre, pale and nervous, pushed his little clerk’s face forward and then pulled it back in the way a snake reacts. He waved his little hand in a gesture indicative of both fright and menace.

The decision to arrest Danton was taken at a joint meeting of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security on the night of 30 March after Robespierrists had been nominated to all the important posts in the Commune which had been vacated by the defeated Hébertists. Saint-Just, Robespierre’s pale, handsome, cold-blooded disciple, the ‘Angel of Death’–upon whose lucid brain and incisive pen his master had come to depend in times like these – produced a document denouncing Danton which he intended to read out in the Convention the next morning. It was objected that this was too risky a procedure, Danton being still so popular a character in the Convention, and that he and the other leading Indulgents would have to be arrested first, whereupon Saint-Just, displaying some emotion for once, petulantly tossed his hat into the fire. Robespierre agreed with Saint-Just that Danton ought to be denounced in the Convention before his arrest, but he did not press the point after Vadier said, ‘You can run the danger of being guillotined if you like, but I’m not going to.’

The warrant for Danton’s arrest was placed on the table and, one after the other, those present at the meeting took up a pen to sign it. Only two of them refused, Ruhl, an Alsatian who protested that he could not betray an old friendship, and Robert Lindet, the Committee of Public Safety’s hard-working administrator of food supplies, who bluntly said that his job was to ‘feed citizens not put patriots to death’. Carnot afterwards claimed that he warned his colleagues, ‘We must consider the consequences well before we do this. A head like Danton’s will drag down many others after it.’ But he signed the paper with the rest. And so, in the early hours of the following morning, warrants were issued for the arrest of Danton together with several of his associates and some foreigners whose financial crimes would conveniently serve to muddy the issues and discredit the political prisoners.

Warned of his impending arrest, Danton had sat up all night by the fire in his study on the first floor of his house in the Cour du Commerce. He had rejected all suggestions that he should try to escape abroad. ‘A man,’ he said, ‘cannot carry his country away with him on the soles of his shoes.’ Nor would he consider fighting back at his accusers: that would ‘only mean the shedding of more blood’ and there had been ‘far too much blood shed already’. He would ’rather be guillotined than guillotine’. Besides, he was ‘sick of men’, and had not himself been guiltless. ‘It was at this time of year,’ he lamented, ‘that I had the Revolutionary Tribunal set up. I pray to God and men to forgive me for it.’

So, when he heard the sounds of the patrol in the cobbled street outside he stood up with weary resignation and went to put his arms round his wife who was weeping helplessly. ‘They are coming to arrest me,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be frightened.’ He walked down into the street and was taken up the hill to the prison of the Luxembourg.

There were some protests in the Convention later that day when Danton’s arrest was announced but Robespierre, now committed to his downfall, turned angrily upon Legendre who had had the temerity to suggest that the accused was a victim of personal spite and that, having saved France in September 1792 ‘ought to be allowed to explain himself before the Convention’. No, objected Robespierre, he should not. ‘The question is not whether a man has performed any particular patriotic act, but what his whole career has been like…In what way is Danton superior to Lafayette, to Dumouriez, to Brissot, to Hébert? What is said of him that may not be said of them? And yet have you spared them?…Vulgar minds and guilty men are always afraid to see their fellows fall because, having no longer a barrier of culprits before them, they are left exposed to the light of truth. But if there exist vulgar spirits, there are also heroic spirits in this Assembly and they will know how to brave all false terrors. Besides, the number of guilty is not great. Crime has found but few culprits among us, and by striking off a few heads the country will be delivered…Whoever trembles at this moment is also guilty.’

After this speech and another by Saint-Just who read the indictment in a dull, toneless voice – emphasizing his points, so a fellow-deputy recorded, with a threatening, chopping gesture of his outstretched hand, ‘a motion like that of the knife of the guillotine’–objectors were silenced and the trial of Danton, Desmoulins and the other accused was approved.

It opened on 2 April. As Danton well knew, the verdict had already been decided upon, even though most of the charges seemed to be directed more at his character than at any provable crimes, and much of the rest of the indictment might as convincingly have been laid against his accusers. The Public Prosecutor was Antoine Fouquier-Tinville.

Fouquier-Tinville was the son of a rich farmer from the Vermandois who had died when he was thirteen, leaving a widow extremely well provided for but disinclined to provide much financial assistance for her son whose early years were spent as an impoverished clerk in a procurator’s office in Paris. By the time he was twenty-seven, however, Fouquier-Tinville had been able to buy the practice of his employer and, as a clever, conscientious lawyer, was soon successfully established. Married to a cousin who brought him a respectable dowry, he became the tenant of a handsome apartment in the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve as well as of a country house at Charonne, the master of a cook and a valet de chambre, and the father of five children. Having given birth to these five children within seven years, his wife died young and, after only a few months, Fouquier-Tinville married again. His second wife provided him with an even more handsome dowry than the first, as well as three more children. But although he soon afterwards sold his practice for a large sum, by the time the Revolution came, he was, for some unknown reason – his enemies blamed his passion for courtesans and dancing-girls – as needy as he had been in his youth. Claiming to be related to Camille Desmoulins, who had become General Secretary to the Ministry of Justice, he applied to him for an appointment and was thankful to be offered one on the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris.

Pale and rather stout, with thick black hair, thin lips, a pock-marked nose, jutting chin and small, glittering eyes, he had thus suddenly become a powerful and dreaded figure. Invariably dressed in black, he was known to be as incorruptible as Robespierre himself; but, provided the processes over which he presided were conducted in an orderly fashion and with a proper regard for a show of legality, he was perfectly willing, indeed eager, to carry out the wishes of the authorities without too close an inquiry into the conduct of those whom they wished to destroy, even when he had cause to be grateful to them for past favours.

There were difficulties with Danton and Desmoulins, though. They both still enjoyed much popularity in the sections, and he had been given scarcely any time to prepare his case against them. Press censorship would ensure that the proceedings would be both briefly and tendentiously recorded, but the public would have to be admitted into the courtroom, as was customary, so that accounts of what passed there would spread rapidly throughout the city. Moreover, there could be no doubt, as Danton charged through the doors like an angry bull, that he was determined not to be a passive victim. He defended himself with such vehemence, indeed, that his bellowing voice could be heard through the open windows of the court on the far side of the Seine.

It is clear from the fragmentary records of the proceedings that at the outset he had little hope of being acquitted. When asked for his address by the Tribunal he gave it as ‘soon in oblivion…in the future in history’s pantheon’. And later he said, ‘The court now knows Danton. Tomorrow he hopes to sleep in the bosom of glory. He has never asked for pardon and you will see him go to the scaffold with the calm of a clear conscience.’ There were times during the course of the trial when both the President, Nicolas-François-Joseph Herman, and the Prosecutor were obviously rattled. The jury seemed impressed by Danton’s loud defiance, and the spectators often cheered his stirring words. The President rang his bell in vain. ‘Do you not hear my bell?’ he asked. ‘Bell!’ Danton shouted back at him. ‘Bell! A man who is fighting for his life pays no attention to bells…My voice, which has often been heard speaking in the people’s name,’ he continued more calmly but no less loudly, ‘will have no difficulty in thrusting these vile charges aside. Will the cowards who have slandered me dare to meet me face to face? Let them show themselves and I will cover them with shame…I demand that the Convention establish a commission to hear my denunciation of the present dictatorship. Yes, I, Danton, will unmask the dictatorship which is now revealing itself in its true colours…You say I have sold myself. A man such as me has no price…Let the men who have proof step forward…Neither ambition nor greed has ever found a victim in me…I shall now speak to you about three plats-coquins [presumably Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois and Saint-Just] who have been the ruin of Robespierre…I have vital evidence to reveal. I demand an undisturbed hearing…’

The President interrupted him again, furiously ringing his bell. But Danton’s voice boomed on while Fouquier-Tinville looked more and more alarmed, his countenance, in the words of his clerk ‘depicting both rage and terror’. He was passed a note from the President which read, ‘I am going to suspend Danton’s defence in half an hour.’ Yet even when he did so the prisoner refused to sit down until promised that he would be allowed to continue his speech the next day.

Terrified that the jurors might be persuaded to deliver the wrong verdict, Herman and Fouquier-Tinville now decided to write to the Committee of Public Safety:

A fearful storm has been raging since the session began. The accused are behaving like madmen and are frantically demanding the summoning of their witnesses. They are denouncing to the people what they say is the rejection of their demand. In spite of the firmness of the President and the entire court, their repeated requests are disrupting the session. They say that, short of a decree, they will not be quiet until their witnesses have been heard. We ask you what to do about their demands since our judicial powers give us no authority for rejecting it.

Rather than read out this compromising letter to the Convention, Saint-Just gave the deputies a false version of it, and informed them that the prisoners were in revolt against the Tribunal. He then produced a letter, allegedly written by a prisoner at the Luxembourg, which ‘proved the existence’ of a plot organized by Lucille Desmoulins and an aristocratic friend, to rescue the accused and murder the entire Revolutionary Tribunal. ‘No further proofs are needed,’ Saint-Just declared. ‘The very resistance of these scoundrels proves their guilt.’ He demanded and obtained a decree that ‘every accused person who resisted or insulted the national justice should be forbidden to plead’.

Amar of the Committee of General Security hurried over to the courtroom with this decree which he handed over to Fouquier-Tinville with the words, ‘This should make the job easier for you.’ Fouquier took it from him with a smile of relief. ‘Indeed we needed it,’ he said.

‘You are murderers,’ shouted Danton when the decree was read out. ‘Murderers! Look at them! They have hounded us to our deaths!…But the people will tear my enemies to pieces within three months.’

The next day the trial was resumed an hour and a half earlier than usual, so few spectators were present to witness the final scenes. Fouquier-Tinville opened me proceedings by asking the jurors in an intimidating way if they had now heard enough against all the accused. They said they had and, on returning from their retirement, brought in the required verdicts.

That same day eighteen condemned men – Danton, Desmoulins, Delacroix and Fabre d’Églantine among them, as well as Hérault de Séchelles, who had been falsely accused of passing secrets to me enemy – were transported in three red-painted tumbrils to the guillotine. As with the Girondins, they were nearly all young men. Fabre d’Églantine was forty-three; Danton and Hérault de Séchelles both thirty-four; Desmoulins was also thirty-four, though he told the Revolutionary Tribunal that he was thirty-three, ‘the same age as the sans-culotte, Jesus Christ, when He died’.

Desmoulins who had to be dragged from the courtroom to prison screaming, ‘They are going to murder my wife’, became so agitated in the cart that, though his hands were bound, he managed to tear the clothes from his body in a frenzy of protest as he shouted at the spectators. Danton, who had comforted him tenderly in prison, now lost patience with him and said, ‘Be quiet! Leave the rabble alone.’ But Desmoulins continued to rage and he arrived at the scaffold with his chest and shoulders scratched and bare. The sight of the guillotine seemed to calm him though. He looked at it for a moment then turned away ‘with a contemplative expression on his face’. He waited for the end murmuring the name of Lucille.

The others had been calm throughout the journey. Hérault, the handsome philanderer, had nodded to various acquaintances and smiled as he saw a woman friend waving him goodbye from a window of the Garde-Meuble. Fabre d’Églantine appeared preoccupied with the thought that Billaud-Varenne would steal the manuscript of one of his unpublished plays and have it performed as his own. ‘There are such beautiful verses in it,’ he said. ‘Beautiful vers, indeed,’ Danton mocked him sarcastically, making outrageous play with the word that means worms as well as verses. ‘You’ll be making some beautiful vers next week!’

Danton’s ‘huge round head,’ so Frénilly said, ‘fixed its proud gaze on the crowds.’ He saw David, once his friend who had agitated for his death, calmly sketching him and the other prisoners from a café table, and shouted an insult at him. He had cursed and ranted a good deal in prison. ‘I’m leaving everything in a frightful mess,’ he had called to one of the other accused in the next cell. ‘There’s not a single one of them who knows the first thing about government…If I left my balls to that eunuch Robespierre and my legs to Couthon the Committee of Public Safety might last a bit longer. But…as it is…Robespierre is bound to follow me, dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than muck about with politics.’

He was quite composed now, though. ‘Oh, my wife, my dear wife,’ he murmured. ‘Shall I ever see you again?’ But then he checked himself, stamping his foot as though in irritation at this outburst. ‘Come, Danton. Courage. No weakness.’ Hérault came up to kiss him goodbye. But the executioner separated them and pulled Hérault towards the steps. ‘Coquin!’ Danton shouted. ‘You’ll not be able to prevent our heads touching each other in the basket.’

He was the last to be beheaded; and night was falling as he stepped up on to the platform, ‘soaked with the blood of his friends, as though emerging from the tomb instead of about to enter it’, so one observer recorded of a scene which time would never erase from his memory. ‘I recall the full force of my feelings at Danton’s last words which I did not hear myself but which were passed round with horror and admiration: “Above all, don’t forget to show my head to the people. It’s well worth having a look at.”’

A week later more blood was shed. Chaumette was guillotined. So was Archbishop Gobel who, claimed by the Hébertists as one of their supporters, was condemned by Robespierre as an atheist. So was the widow of Hébert who was sentenced to death as an accomplice of her husband. And so was the pretty, twenty-three-year old widow of Camille Desmoulins, her one offence being a devoted attachment to her husband on whose behalf she had appealed in vain to Robespierre who was godfather to their baby son, Horace.

It is not enough for you to have murdered your best friend [her mother wrote to Robespierre when judgement upon Lucille had been pronounced]. You must have his wife’s blood as well. Your monster, Fouquier-Tinville, has just ordered Lucille to be carried away to the scaffold. In less than two hours she will be dead…If Camille’s blood has not driven you mad, 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…Hurry, hurry, so mat we can all rest in the same grave.

The appeal went unanswered. Lucille Desmoulins prepared herself for death with a bravery which aroused the deepest admiration and sympathy even amongst her husband’s bitterest enemies. ‘I shall in a few hours again meet my husband,’ she had exclaimed to her accusers when sentence of death was pronounced. ‘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.’ Dressed with ‘uncommon attention and taste’, she climbed the steps to the scaffold with what was described as ‘unaffected pleasure’ and ‘received the fatal blow without appearing to notice what the executioner was doing.’

‘In heaven’s name,’ asked one who saw her die, ‘when will all this bloodshed cease?’

It was not to cease yet. In June 1794 the Committee of Public Safety passed a decree, known as the law of 22 Prairial, which both greatly increased the numbers of those who could be regarded as ‘public enemies’ and expedited the processes by which they could be condemned to death – the only punishment now to be inflicted – by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Defence lawyers were dispensed with; so were witnesses unless ‘the formality’ of calling them was considered ‘necessary to discover accomplices or for other important considerations of public interest’. The Tribunal was no longer required to interrogate the accused before their public trial, since this merely ‘confused the conscience of the judges’; now, in the absence of positive proof, juries must be satisfied with ‘moral proof’. ‘For a citizen to become suspect,’ said Georges Couthon who had been elected President of the Convention the previous December, ‘it is sufficient that rumour accuses him.’ After the law of 22 Prairial everything, indeed, went on much better, in the opinion of Fouquier-Tinville: heads fell ‘like tiles’. ‘Next week,’ he said one day, ‘I’ll be able to take the tops off three or four hundred.’

In several provincial towns trials were conducted as expeditiously and summarily as they were in Paris. In Orange, for example, where one judge expressed his exasperation with another who had ‘to have proofs just like in the courts of the ancien régime,’ a commission established on 10 May had condemned 332 people to death by the end of July. It was in Paris, however, that most of the executions took place in that stiflingly hot summer. In an effort to centralize revolutionary justice, the Committee of Public Safety had suppressed various provincial courts and had brought those awaiting trial to the capital whose prisons were consequently crammed with ‘enemies of the Republic’ whom, so Couthon insisted, it was ‘less a question of punishing than of annihilating’.

Many noblemen and noblewomen who had previously been spared were now brought to trial. One of them was the Princesse de Monaco who claimed to be with child since pregnant women were usually spared until their babies were born. While waiting for the prison doctor to examine her she cut off her hair which she succeeded in smuggling out of the prison for her children. She then wrote to Fouquier-Tinville: ‘I inform you, citizen, that I am not pregnant. I did not tell this lie for fear of death…but because I wanted to secure a day’s grace so that I, rather than the executioner, could cut my hair. It is the only legacy that I can leave my children. It should at least be pure.’

Another noblewoman who was guillotined at this time was the aged widow of Maréchal the Duc de Noailles, Marie Antoinette’s ‘Madame L’Étiquette’, whose senile eccentricity it had become to write long letters to the Virgin Mary on the subject of prudence and protocol in Heaven. They were answered by her confessor who signed himself Mary but who, on one occasion, committed on Her behalf some solecism which to led the Duchess to comment, ‘But then one ought not to expect too much of Her. She was after all only a bourgeoise from Nazareth. It was through marriage that she became a connection of the House of David. Her husband, Joseph, would have known better.’

The old, demented Duchess was arrested in July with her daughter-in-law, the Duchesse d’Ayen, and her grand-daughter, the Vicomtesse de Noailles. They were taken to the guillotine watched by the Abbé Carichon who took advantage of a blinding rainstorm which slowed down the carts to give them absolution.

The carts halted before the scaffold [recorded the Abbé who described the chief executioner as a short young man with a markedly dandyish air]. There was a large circle of spectators, most of them laughing, ‘There she is! Look at her! That’s the Marshal’s wife who used to have a grand carriage. Now she’s in a cart just like the others’…I saw the chief executioner and his two assistants…[one of them had his hair drawn back in a pigtail and chewed on the stem of a red rose]…I must admit that…the sufferings of the [forty-five] victims were much mitigated by their business-like methods, the way they got all the condemned down from the carts before the executioner started, and placed them with their backs to the scaffold so they would not see anything. I felt the executioners deserved some gratitude for this and for the decorum they observed and their serious expressions which contained no traces of mockery or insult…

I now found myself facing the steps to the scaffold against which a tall, old white-haired man was leaning. He was to be beheaded first. He had a kindly air…Near him stood a pious-looking lady whom I did not know; Mme de Noailles was immediately opposite me. She was dressed in black and sitting on a block of stone with wide staring eyes…[Her daughter] stood in a simple, noble, resigned attitude with her eyes closed, looking as she did when receiving Holy Communion…

The executioner and his assistants climb on the scaffold and arrange everything. The chief executioner puts on a blue-red overall…When all is ready the old man goes up the steps. The chief executioner takes him by the left arm, the big assistant by the right and the other by the legs. They lay him quickly on his face and his head is cut off and thrown, together with his body, into a great tumbril, where all the bodies swim in blood. And so it goes on. What a dreadful shambles it is! The Duchess is the third to go up. They have to make an opening in the top of her dress to uncover her neck. Her daughter-in-law is the tenth…The chief executioner tears off her bonnet. It is fastened by a pin so her hair is pulled violently upwards and she grimaces with pain. When the daughter-in-law is gone the grand-daughter replaces her. She is dressed all in white. She looks much younger than she really is…

Day after day the executions continued until by the end of July over 1,500 people had been beheaded within the previous eight weeks. But only a small proportion of them were aristocrats. Less than nine in a hundred of those guillotined in the Terror were of noble birth; about six per cent were clergy. The rest, eighty-five per cent, came from that class of the people once known as the Third Estate. Among them were ‘twenty peasant girls from Poitou’, so one contemporary recorded:

All of them were to be executed together. Exhausted by their long journey, they lay in the courtyard of the Conciergerie, asleep on the paving-stones. Their expression betrayed no understanding of their fate…They were all guillotined a few days after their arrival…From one of them a baby she was feeding was taken from her breast.

Robespierre witnessed none of the victims perish. He had once expressed the opinion that public executions coarsened and brutalized the character of the people. But he made no move to stop them. He had to stay in power for, incorruptible, more virtuous than other men, he alone could save the Revolution. In justification of the Terror he declared in the Convention, ‘At the point where we are now, if we stop too soon we will die. We have not been too severe…Without the revolutionary Government the Republic cannot be made stronger. If it is destroyed now, freedom will be extinguished tomorrow.’ Besides, his own life was in danger. He had always said that the daggers of murderers were directed at him, that it was only by chance that Marat had been struck down before him. Since then two people, one a nobleman’s former valet, the other an unbalanced girl of twenty who lamented the death of the King, had set out to kill him. He had cause to remember the words that Danton had shouted at the Revolutionary Tribunal and at the Duplays’ shuttered house as the tumbrils rumbled past it on their way to the guillotine: ‘You will follow us, Robespierre.’