The Days of the French Revolution

9 THE DAYS OF THERMIDOR 22–28 July 1794

On 18 Floréal Year III, that is to say on 7 May 1794, Robespierre delivered to the Convention a long speech which had taken him three weeks to prepare. In the course of it, having blamed his fallen enemies for putting the Republic in danger and vilified Danton, ‘the most dangerous of the conspirators had he not been the most cowardly’, he turned upon the atheists who had survived the recent purges and who were now trying to ‘smother all the noble sentiments of nature’ by elevating ‘immorality into a cult’. Declaring that atheism was aristocratic, he propounded the necessity of a moral revolution to complete the work of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and proposed a decree which would announce unequivocally to the world the French people’s recognition of the ‘existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul’. To celebrate their acceptance of this new civic religion and their devotion to the principles and virtues of the Revolution, he then introduced a plan for a series of national festivals, the first of them to be held on Whit Sunday, 8 June, in honour of the Supreme Being.

On the morning of that day Robespierre dressed himself with even more than his accustomed care in a bright blue coat and buff cotton trousers. He left the house, without having had breakfast, carrying a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers and sheaves of corn. The sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky; the windows of the houses in the Rue Saint-Honoré were decorated with red roses; the pealing of church bells was punctuated by the boom of cannon and the tapping of drums. And to a young man, a ‘very refined little dandy’ named Vilate, a juryman on the Revolutionary Tribunal, who met him as he walked through the Tuileries gardens, Robespierre looked ‘radiantly happy – for the first time’. Vilate invited him up to his apartment in the Pavilion de Flore.

He accepted my invitation without hesitation [Vilate recalled]. He was astounded to see the immense crowds of people that thronged the gardens below my windows. The women added to the gaiety of the scene by the elegance of their dresses…Robespierre ate little. His glance was constantly directed towards the splendid spectacle below. He seemed to be intoxicated with enthusiasm. ‘Behold the most interesting part of humanity,’ he exclaimed. ‘Here is the universe assembled beneath us. Oh, Nature, how sublime, how delightful is thy power! How tyrants must turn pale at the idea of this Feast!’ That was the extent of his conversation.

On the terrace of the Palace the members of the Convention were waiting impatiently for him to appear and, as President of the Convention, to open the proceedings. The minutes passed and Robespierre did not come. The deputies looked alternately at their watches and at an amphitheatre which had been built in front of the terrace. Surmounting the amphitheatre was a pyre on which was to be burned an ugly effigy representing atheism together with others symbolizing discord and selfishness in accordance with a scenario prepared by David, the painter. The deputies, many of whom had already derided the whole conception of the festival in private, did not trouble to disguise their resentment at being kept waiting so long. They grew even more restive when the President at last arrived upon the scene and delivered himself of a long speech in which he claimed that the world which the Supreme Being had created had never offered Him ‘a spectacle so worthy of His sight’ as the festival that Paris was celebrating this day.

Some deputies began to murmur to each other. One whispered, ‘Just listen to the pontiff!’ Another said sardonically that were it not for kind Monsieur de Robespierre they never would have known that there was a God or that the soul was meant to be immortal.

After Robespierre had finished speaking, he took a lighted torch that was offered to him and marched purposefully down towards the pyre. The evil effigies were satisfactorily consumed, but when the Goddess of Wisdom rose like a phoenix from their ashes to take their place her face was so blackened by soot that several spectators could not restrain their laughter.

Robespierre returned to his place where he delivered himself of a second speech after which the deputies at last moved off to the Champ de Mars, their irritation plain for all to see. Most of them pretended not to hear the orders of the ushers of the Convention who vainly endeavoured to get them to march in proper military fashion. Some walked arm in arm with their neighbours; others nodded significantly towards the neat figure of Robespierre who strode on, twenty paces ahead of the rest, a crown of feathers on his head.

In the middle of the Champ de Mars a tall tree spread its boughs over the summit of a mound covered with moss. The deputies sat down beneath the leaves of the tree surrounded by groups of little boys with garlands of violets on their heads, by young men with wreaths of myrtle, by older men wearing oak, ivy and olive leaves. Women, carrying baskets of flowers, held children by the hand. An orchestra began to play; the various groups began to sing; the young men drew swords and swore to their elders to defend the fatherland; the women lifted up their children in their arms; all raised their hands to heaven, paying homage to the Supreme Being. Robespierre made another speech. Then a barrage of artillery fire rent the air while the people cheered and hugged each other shouting, ‘Vive la République!’

For most of the spectators, if not for the deputies who had played their parts so resentfully, the festival had been an enjoyable one and had given them grounds for hope that the weeks of Terror and repression might be coming to an end – throughout the day the guillotine had been draped in velvet.

All citizens had been asked to decorate their houses with garlands and oak branches for the celebrations [the thirteen-year-old daughter of an architect told her father who had gone to design a theatre in the provinces]. We used all our artificial flowers. You may imagine that the previous night was an almost sleepless one for me because of the pleasures in store…I got up at six o’clock…and put on a lawn skirt, a tricolour sash round my waist and an embroidered fichu of red cotton…In our pockets we put some slices of bread and cooking chocolate…You cannot imagine what a sight the Champ de Mars presented. It looked as though someone had transported a huge cliff from the Pyrenees. On its peak was an obelisk surmounted by a statue representing the people of France holding aloft the statues of Liberty and Equality. It really seemed as though the French are fairies to have done such beautiful things in so short time…There were girls everywhere strewing flowers. My hair was simply full of them.

For Robespierre, however, the day which had begun so cheerfully in such auspicious sunshine, which should have been one of triumph, had ended in ultimate humiliation. He had overheard some of the remarks that the deputies had made, the references to the ‘proud affectation’ of ‘the tyrant’, to Brutus and Nemesis. He had been made well aware of the feelings amongst the sans-culottes, one of whom, standing near Vitale, had said, ‘The bastard isn’t satisfied with being the boss; he’s got to be God as well’. And he could not have failed to hear the caustic comment that greeted his observation that it was the Supreme Being who had placed in the heart of the oppressor the sensations of remorse and terror: ‘True, Robespierre, too true!’ He went home with presentiments of danger and death. ‘You will not see me much longer,’ he said morosely to the Duplays before going to bed.

For some time past he had been becoming increasingly isolated from his equally overworked and, in some cases, equally didactic and authoritarian colleagues who were constantly getting on each others’ nerves. After this festival, they felt more strongly than ever that he regarded himself as a dictator, while he in turn became more and more suspicious of them, particularly of Billaud-Varenne, the coarse Collot d’Herbois whom he suspected of conspiring against him, and of Carnot who always worked late in the Committee’s offices, and was supposed by one of Robespierre’s agents to do so in order to be the first ‘to open all the letters that arrive’. There had been a period, after the destruction of both Hébertists and Dantonists when, closely associated with his principal supporters, Saint-Just and Couthon, he had been in unquestioned control of the Committee of Public Safety and hence of the Government. Through Fouquier-Tinville and Fouquier’s associates he had controlled the Revolutionary Tribunal, and, through Hanriot, the National Guard. But always he had been as much feared and disliked as respected and revered. A revealing anecdote was related by Paul Barras, who said that a fellow-deputy awoke from a reverie with a cry of alarm when he realized that Robespierre’s greenish eyes were upon him. ‘He will now suppose,’ the frightened deputy said, ‘that I was thinking about something.’

‘Fear was on every side, in the creak of a door, an exclamation, a breath,’ wrote Louis Madelin of those early summer months when Robespierre had been in undisputed control of the government. ‘Drawing-rooms were empty, wine-shops deserted: even the courtesans stopped going to the Palais Royal where (extraordinary sight!) virtue reigned supreme. The dreary city waited, under the burning summer sun.’

Plays were censored; Molière was banned. A performance at the Comédie Française was interrupted by a Jacobin who stood up to object to the line, ‘les plus tolérants sont les pardonnables’. When the audience told him to be quiet he went off to the Jacobin Club to denounce the actors who were all arrested. Few people dared talk freely, for the Committee of Public Safety’s ubiquitous spies might well be listening. Even at the Fraternal Suppers, which were held in the streets outside houses whose owners were expected to cook and serve the food, conversation was guarded, while the quality of the meals provided was often governed by what interpretation might be placed upon it. Madame Rataud who kept a dress shop in the Rue des Petits-Champs commented upon the dilemma that faced her when a Fraternal Supper was held in her section: ‘If I prepare a dish of haricots the sans-culottes will throw it in my face, yet if I provide roast pheasant the Jacobins will say it is too high-class.’ In the event she cooked both and, after nervously waiting to see what her neighbours would provide before bringing out either, it seemed to her safe to produce them both. Other women wrote of the dangers to be encountered in the streets where spies watched out for ‘enemies of the nation’. Madame Amé who ran a dressmaker’s workshop in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré kept a tricolour cockade for the use of her apprentices and insisted that whenever one of the girls went out on an errand she must pin it prominently to her hat.

Yet the fears that undoubtedly pervaded the lives of many citizens during these months were not universal. Gaily painted carriages no longer thronged the tree-lined boulevards of Paris, but families still strolled in the evening air down the Boulevard de la Comédie Italienne, and young ladies still went to drawing classes and had piano lessons.

This is how we spend our days [runs the entry for 16 January 1794 in the diary of a young governess in a bourgeois family in the Rue Saint-Marc]. Citizeness Ziguette [the youngest daughter in the family] leaves at ten o’clock after having eaten a light breakfast and practised her pianoforte fairly conscientiously. She trips away with a clatter of sabots, hoisting up her blue skirt to expose white under-petticoats much shorter than they should be and running like a Red Indian pulling along Thérèse [the cook] by the arm. Thérèse carries her bouillon and bread soup in a tin container. They arrive at Citizen Chaudet’s. She draws, is complimented by her master. As soon as she comes home she gabbles what he has said to her…and as she reaches the top of the stairs I hear her shout, ‘Food! I’m starving to death!’ Quite alarmed by this ogrish hunger, we make haste to sit down to dinner where, over a good meal, we commend the merits of her sketches…Then there is pianoforte practice until lights are brought in, no longer wax but tallow candles, plain and simple. Then we read Ovid or Horace until about seven o’clock when we begin to read for instruction or entertainment such as learning by heart some lines from Racine or Anarcharsis.

If such bourgeois families as these had to make do with tallow rather than wax candles, they seem to have suffered few other deprivations. On the anniversary of the King’s death Ziguette and her mother went to dinner with a Madame Houzeaux. They had soup, cold beef with gherkin and beetroot salad, skate with browned butter, stewed mutton and potatoes, fried sole, cheese and fruit. After dinner they sat by the fire to talk about the latest fashions, and on their way home they went into a shop in the Rue du Bac and bought ‘a ravishing frock’ for twenty-two livres. For families such as this the Terror was not of overriding concern, nor was Robespierre mentioned much in conversation.

Those more intimately concerned with politics, however, knew that Robespierre was now having difficulties with his colleagues. Differences of opinion had arisen in the Committee of Public Safety over a project, favoured by Robespierre, for the free distribution to impoverished patriots of estates confiscated from ‘suspects’, and over the speeding up of the procedures of the Revolutionary Tribunal, as well as over Robespierre’s devotion to the religious ideas of Rousseau as exemplified by his inauguration of festivals such as those of the Supreme Being. At the same time there was growing rivalry between the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. Robespierre, backed by Couthon and Saint-Just, had usurped many of the latter’s powers, particularly those concerning the police. This added to the numbers of Robespierre’s enemies among the members of the Committee of General Security without mollifying those who were jealous of his preeminence in the Committee of Public Safety. Even more dangerous for Robespierre was his gradual loss of control of the Convention. The radical members strongly disapproved of his recall to Paris of their representatives en mission in the provinces, while the more moderate members, still angry with the Jacobins for their destruction of the Girondins and appalled by the merciless manner in which the Revolutionary Tribunal had taken advantage of the law of 22 Prairial, had begun openly to condemn the continuance of the Terror at a time when the French armies’ victories were making it inexcusable. On 26 June General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, once a silk merchant’s apprentice in Lyons, overwhelmed the Austrians at Fleurus and a fortnight later Brussels was occupied. Toulon had already been retaken and some sort of order had at last been restored in the Vendée. There being no longer any danger of invasion by foreign troops or any serious threat from either federalists or royalists, the continued dictatorship of Robespierre and his associates became increasingly insupportable.

For his part, Robespierre seems to have had little doubt that, with the help of the Commune and of the faithful members of the Jacobin Club, he could survive all attempts to defeat him. By carrying out further purges not only of the Convention but also of both Committees he could ensure himself of sufficient support in all of them. His confidence evidently restored after the doubts that had assailed him on the evening of the Festival of the Supreme Being, he quarrelled with Carnot, with Vadier and with Billaud-Varenne. After one particularly violent altercation with Billaud-Varenne, who described the dictatorship of Couthon, Saint-Just and himself as ‘grotesque’, he stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him and shouting, ‘All right then, save the country without me.’ Thereafter he stopped attending Comittee meetings.

Some of his critics, more cautious than their colleagues and afraid of losing their lives if they failed to overthrow him, attempted to bring about a reconciliation. Paul Barras and Louis Stanislas Fréron who had been jointly responsible for the excesses of the Terror at Toulon and had been recalled to Paris at Robespierre’s instigation, called upon him at the Rue Saint-Honoré. Fréron had been at school with him, and hoped that, at least ‘for old times’s sake’, Robespierre would receive them sympathetically.

Having passed through ‘a long alley which led to an inner yard full of planks, the owner’s stock in trade’, they found Robespierre in his dressing-gown just returned from one of his regular visits to his hairdresser.

He was not wearing his spectacles and his eyes turned on us with a fixed look [Barras recorded]. He seemed quite amazed at our appearance…and did not reply to our greeting. He turned first towards a mirror that hung on the window, then to a smaller mirror, taking his toilet knife, scraping the powder that covered his face and minutely inspecting the arrangement of his hair. He then took off his dressing-gown, putting it on to a chair near us so that we were dusted with the powder that flew off it. He did not apologize, nor show any sign that he had even noticed our presence. He washed himself in a bowl that he held in his hand, brushed his teeth, spat several times on the floor by our feet as though we had not been there…Thinking that he detected a frown on Robespierre’s face and that his continued silence might be due to our use of the revolutionary tu, Fréron substituted vous in the hope of appeasing this haughty and touchy man. But Robespierre’s expression did not alter. He remained standing…and still said nothing. I have seen no expression as impassive on the icy marble faces of statues or on those of corpses.

Fouché, who had also been recalled to Paris on Robespierre’s orders and knew that he too stood in the shadow of the guillotine, went to see Robespierre and was rebuffed in a different way. His overtures were, it seems, furiously rejected; his activities at Lyons were violently condemned; he was then abruptly told to leave the house. For a time Fouché went into hiding, emerging occasionally to spread rumours about Robespierre, persuading other members of the Convention that their lives were in as much danger as his own, uniting rivals by a common fear. Robespierre would have had him arrested, but the wily Fouché–like Talleyrand, a born trimmer and survivor – could not be found, and Robespierre had for the moment to be content with using his influence with the Jacobins to have him expelled from the Club.

Elsewhere Robespierre’s influence was waning fast. The moderates in the Convention were growing daily more outspoken in their condemnation of the continuing Terror, no longer justified by the war; and towards the middle of July plans were laid for Robespierre’s overthrow.

On 22 July (4 Thermidor) he was persuaded to attend a joint meeting of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security. He appeared there in a far from repentant or conciliatory mood, pacing about the room as he charged both Committees with all manner of misdemeanours and betrayals of the trust that the people reposed in them. After he had left, the Committees agreed to Saint-Just’s issuing a statement indicating that some sort of understanding with Robespierre had been reached and that, as Couthon assured the Jacobin Club, while there might be differences of personality there was ‘none of principle’. But, if Couthon and Saint-Just were prepared to compromise with their colleagues, Robespierre was not. He declined ‘to adjust his principles for the sake of the Committees’ and he refused to discuss them privately with the leaders of the Plain. He made up his mind to deliver a speech to the Convention in which he would clearly set forth his views and denounce all his enemies, all those ‘perfidious rogues’ who were responsible for the ills of the nation. He did not discuss his speech with either Couthon or Saint-Just. In long and solitary walks through the woods at Ville d’Avray and in contemplation, sometimes in tears, of the tomb of Rousseau, whose Contrat social was always by his bedside, he composed his stinging indictment. And on 26 July (8 Thermidor) he marched in to confront the deputies resplendent in nankeen silk breeches, white cotton stockings and the sky-blue coat which he had worn for the Festival of the Supreme Being six weeks before. He mounted the rostrum and remained there speaking for over two hours. Without actually naming any of them except Pierre Joseph Cambon, the Superintendent of Finance, he characterized and anathematized his opponents on the Committees, referring in particular and unmistakably to Billaud-Varenne and Carnot. He attacked Fouché, Collot d’Herbois and Vadier as well as Jean Lambert Tallien, who, while representative en mission at Bordeaux, had fallen in love with one of his prisoners, the divorced wife of the Comte de Fontenay, and who was consequently, despite his protestations of revolutionary zeal, suspected of having come under her moderating influence. Robespierre castigated Tallien with particular vehemence before turning upon all the deputies who had derided the Festival of the Supreme Being. He spoke darkly of purifying the Committee of Public Safety and dismissing the members of the Committee of General Security. He accused those responsible for military affairs of having dealings with the enemy, and Cambon of ruining the poor, depriving the people of national assets and disrupting the economy. He described himself, as he so often did when elaborating upon his own virtues, as ‘a slave of freedom, a living martyr to the Republic, the victim as well as the enemy of crime’. ‘Every scoundrel insults me,’ he cried in growing indignation and sequential confusion. ‘Let them prepare hemlock for me. I will wait for it on these sacred seats. I have promised to leave a formidable testament to the oppressors of the people. I bequeath to them truth…and death.’

His words, which had been listened to in silence, were at first greeted with that applause to which he had long been accustomed. But then Cambon, a brave as well as scrupulous man, infuriated by the unjust accusations made against him, strode to the rostrum to declare, ‘Before I am dishonoured, I will speak to the French nation. It is time to tell the whole truth. One man alone is paralysing the will of the National Convention. And that man is Robespierre.’

Obviously taken aback by this furious counter-attack and the enthusiasm with which it was welcomed, Robespierre became apologetic rather than assertive. Encouraged by his faltering, other deputies, including Billaud-Varenne, rose to defend themselves vigorously and to assail Robespierre as heatedly as he had assailed them. ‘The mask must be torn away,’ Billaud-Varenne shouted. ‘I would rather my corpse served as the throne of an ambitious man than that by my silence I should become the accomplice of his crimes.’ Other deputies, fearing that their names were on the list of men whom Robespierre was condemning by implication, demanded that the names be announced. ‘The list! The list!’ numerous voices shouted. But Robespierre refused to divulge it. The time was not ripe, he said, thus alarming those who felt they might perhaps be on it as much as those who were sure they were and bringing them all in closer opposition to him. When the session was brought to a noisy conclusion it was clear that Robespierre’s fall was imminent.

He himself still did not believe it so. That evening he went to the Jacobin Club of whose support he felt confident. Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois were already there, demanding to be allowed to speak first. But most members refused to listen to them and to cries of ‘À la guillotine!’ they were both expelled from the hall. As they passed through the door the red-haired and red-faced René Dumas, now President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, shouted at their retreating backs that he would be waiting for them to appear before him next morning. To loud cheers Robespierre then rose to deliver the speech he had made in the Convention that afternoon, ending with the promise that, if they supported him, the ‘new traitors’ would share the fate of the old, but if they deserted him he would take hemlock and die with calm resignation. ‘If you drink it I will drink it, too,’ promised David, close to hysteria. ‘Yes, yes,’ others protested, they would all drink it; they swore to do so.

‘What’s new at the Jacobin Club, then?’ asked Saint-Just tauntingly when Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois, his clothes torn and face scratched, returned to the offices of the Committee of Public Safety.

‘How dare you ask that?’ Collot yelled at him. ‘You should know bloody well. You and Robespierre and Couthon are planning to have us guillotined. Why, you’re drawing up an accusation against us now.’

‘You may be right,’ said Saint-Just who had, in fact, been doing so. He turned to Carnot who was also in the room and added, ‘I shan’t forget you, either. I’ve dealt with you in a masterly way.’

Collot then threw himself upon Saint-Just, grabbing him by the throat. Carnot pushed the two men apart, and Saint-Just, his normally icy composure evidently ruffled by Collot’s fury, agreed not to deliver his report to the Convention until he had read it to the other members of the Committee. He was then left alone to complete it in the heat of the sultry night.

The atmosphere next day in the Convention was quite as emotional as it had been at the Jacobin Club and in the offices of the Committee of Public Safety the night before. Saint-Just, having broken his promise to return to the Committee first, rose to name the people that Robespierre had attacked by implication in his long speech the previous afternoon. But Tallien rushed up to the rostrum to interrupt him, to accuse both him and Robespierre of aggravating the ills of the nation. Tallien was followed by Billaud-Varenne, still enraged by Robespierre’s remarks and by his expulsion from the Jacobin Club ‘at the instigation of its most disreputable members’ who planned ‘to slaughter the Convention’ and who ‘spat out the vilest calumnies against men who had never once deviated from the true path of the Revolution’.

Robespierre attempted to reply, but his words were lost in the clangour of the President’s bell. As he rushed to the rostrum, there were howls of protest and shouts of ‘Down with the tyrant! À la guillotine!’ Tallien, waving a dagger above his head, threatened to kill him if the Convention did not order his arrest. Refused permission to speak, Robespierre was compelled to listen while Vadier accused him of having hidden himself on the great journée of 10 August and of having deserted the Committee of Public Safety, by whose efforts the country was saved, at a time when the French armies were in danger of defeat.

As though driven frantic by these words, Robespierre rushed from side to side beneath the rostrum, and up and down the steps, shouting, ‘Death! Death!’ Pointing at Thuriot who was now in the President’s chair repeatedly ringing his bell, he yelled ‘For the last time will you give me permission to speak, President of murderers!’ Then, in attempting to make further accusations, his voice failed him. ‘Ah!’ someone called out with satisfaction, ‘Danton’s blood chokes you.’ ‘President,’ another voice shouted. ‘Is this man to be master of the Convention a moment longer?’ Robespierre was about to sit down in exhaustion when he was violently pushed away, ‘Monster! How dare you! That was Vergniaud’s seat.’ He found another place and slumped down with a gesture of helpless defeat.

His arrest was proposed, immediately seconded and voted without a dissentient voice. His brother, Augustin, a handsome, pleasure-loving man whose tastes and temperament were so unlike his, courageously insisted on being arrested too. So did the Duplays’ son-in-law, Philippe Lebas, when the Convention also decreed the arrest of his friend, Saint-Just, and that of Couthon. An usher, too frightened to hand the decree directly to Robespierre, placed it on the seat next to him. Robespierre ignored it. Eventually he and Saint-Just were escorted from the Convention by a party of gendarmes, one of whom carried the crippled Couthon on his shoulders.

As the prisoners were being marched away to the offices of the Committee of General Security a meeting of the Commune was urgently called at the Hôtel de Ville. It was agreed at this meeting that the Commune should declare itself in a state of revolt against both Committees and the Convention in protest against the arrest of the Robespierrists, and orders were issued calling upon the National Guard to muster on the Place de Grève. Less than half the Guard obeyed the summons. And when Hanriot, their commander, followed by a few of his men, drunkenly rode his horse through the streets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, brandishing a sword and calling out ‘To arms! To arms!’, his pleas were ignored. A man out walking with his wife heard Hanriot’s loud, slurred shouts: ‘Today must be another 31 May. Three hundred bastards sitting in the Convention must be exterminated!’ ‘You aren’t a general anymore, Hanriot,’ the man called back. ‘You’re a brigand. Don’t listen to him. He’s under arrest.’

At this moment [recorded Charles-André Merda, one of Hanriot’s men] the General’s aide-de-camp struck the citizen a blow with his sabre, ordering him to be taken to the guard-room of the Commune. And we pursued our course at the gallop [to the Committee of General Security]…knocking down a lot of citizens with our horses…and spreading terror around us…Hanriot rode into the courtyard and, dismounting with his aides-de-camp, advanced towards the offices. The guards refused to let us in; and so he marched up to us in a fury, shouting ‘Dismount! Come on! Help me release the patriots from these fucking bastards.’…Six or seven of us followed the General. The guards crossed their bayonets in front of us; and a fight was on the point of breaking out when an usher from the Convention threw himself in front of us and said, ‘Stop! He’s no longer your General. He’s under arrest. Here is the law. Obey it.’ These words brought Hanriot to a halt.

To thwart any further attempts to rescue the prisoners they were now sent to separate prisons in different parts of Paris, Robespierre to the Luxembourg. But the gate-keeper there, in obedience to an order from the Commune, refused to admit him, and he sought refuge instead at the Mairie on the Quai des Orfèvres; but, at the insistence of his former henchman, Jean-Baptiste Lescot-Fleuriot, the Mayor, who did not want the responsibility of dealing with the situation himself, he was taken instead to the Hôtel de Ville. By now all was confusion. No one was sure who was in authority, who were considered traitors, who patriots. Robespierre’s colleagues who had been taken to prison were released by order of the Commune and taken to Robespierre at the Hôtel de Ville. From there Robespierre himself, apparently confident that the Convention’s vote against him would be reversed and that he would soon be called upon once more to guide the Revolution, sent a series of notes to the Commune urging them to close ‘the city gates, to shut down all newspapers, to order the arrest of all journalists and traitorous deputies’. Couthon, carried to the Hôtel from the Port-Libre, advised an appeal to the army. Saint-Just spoke of a new dictatorship. Lescot-Fleuriot, exasperated by Robespierre’s ‘splitting hairs at such a time about small details of phraseology’, boldly wrote out and signed a decree, outlawing Collot d’Herbois, Carnot, Fréron, Tallien, Fouché and other ‘enemies of the people’, which Robespierre could not bring himself to promulgate.

Meanwhile Hanriot and his men surrounded the Convention where Collot d’Herbois cried out dramatically, ‘This is the time to die at our posts!’ But Hanriot, unsure of his authority and too drunk to concentrate, refused to enter the building without specific orders and so the opportunity to occupy it was lost. Inside the hall arguments raged as to the best course to adopt Fréron advised conferring the military command upon Barras who would be able to muster almost as many men from sections loyal to the Convention as Hanriot could from those supporting the Commune. Barras accepted the command and proposed to defend the Tuileries against possible assault. Billaud-Varenne argued that it was a time for attack not defence: the Convention’s forces should advance upon the Hôtel de Ville and bring out Robespierre and his friends by force. ‘The Hôtel de Ville must be surrounded at once,’ he urged. ‘We can’t give Robespierre and the Commune an opportunity to murder us all.’

This suggestion was finally adopted in the early hours of the following morning. Two columns accordingly marched towards the Place de Grève, one of them led by Barras, the other by Léonard Bourdon, a leading Montagnard deputy and former Hébertist Bourdon’s column arrived first at the Place de Grève which they found deserted: Hanriot’s men, having grown tired of waiting about in the now pouring rain and discouraged by reports that most sections had declared their support of the Convention, had gone home to bed.

Charles-André Merda, according to his own vainglorious account which has been largely discredited but not entirely disproved, was one of the first to enter the building:

The staircase was filled with supporters of the conspirators. We could hardly get by, marching three abreast. I was very excited…The conspirators were in the secretariat to which all the approaches were closed. I got into the council chamber on the pretext that I was an orderly with secret despatches. I then took the passage to the left…and reached the door of the secretariat…Eventually the door was opened. I saw about fifty people inside in a state of great excitement…I recognized Robespierre in the middle. He was sitting in an armchair with his left elbow on his knee and his head supported by his left hand. I leapt at him pointing my sword at his heart and crying, ‘Surrender, you traitor!’ He raised his head and replied, ‘It is you who are the traitor. I shall have you shot’ At these words I reached for one of my pistols…and fired. I meant to shoot him in the chest but the ball struck his chin and smashed his lower jaw. He fell out of his chair.

Robespierre had at last made up his mind to sign an appeal to arms. The pen had been in his hand. He had inscribed the first two letters of his name, Ro——-, but there the writing stops. The bottom of the document is marked with blood.

Augustin Robespierre tried to escape by jumping out of a window, but he slipped and broke a leg. Couthon, helped to the top of a flight of stairs, fell to the bottom of them and cut open his forehead. Hanriot was hurled out of a window by Pierre Coffinhal, the immensely strong Vice-President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who was enraged by the so-called General’s incompetence; he fell on a dunghill from which he escaped to a builder’s yard thence to a sewer where ‘he was discovered by some soldiers who struck him with their bayonets and thrust out one of his eyes which then hung by the ligaments down his cheek’. Philippe Lebas shot himself. Saint-Just fingered a pistol as though toying with the idea of suicide himself but in the end he did not use it and quietly submitted to the gendarmes who escorted him with the other prisoners to the Convention. ‘The coward Robespierre is outside,’ Barras announced to the deputies. ‘Do you wish him to enter?’ ‘To bring a man covered with crime into our hall would be to diminish the glory of this great day,’ was the response. ‘The body of a tyrant can only bring contagion with it. The proper place for Robespierre and his accomplices is the Place de la Révolution.’

Before being taken there Robespierre was carried on a plank to the offices of the Committee of Public Safety and dumped on a table in the green-painted anteroom, his head on a wooden ammunition box. For an hour he lay there without moving, his eyes closed, the blood still pouring from his shattered jaw. Then, at about four o’clock in the morning, he opened his eyes, and began quietly to wipe the clotted blood from his mouth with a pistol holster of soft white leather. One of the people who surrounded the table, looking down at him with more curiosity than pity, offered him a few pieces of paper which he used instead of the holster until they, too, were covered in blood. Some of the crowd in the room jeered at him: ‘Well, you do seem to have gone quiet all of a sudden!’ ‘Oh, Sire! Is your Majesty in pain?’

At about six o’clock a surgeon came to stop him bleeding to death. He put a key in his mouth, pulled out two or three teeth together with some fragments of broken bone, and then dressed the wound with a bandage that covered the whole of the lower part of his face. During these operations Robespierre remained silent, showing scarcely a trace of the agony he must have endured. When the surgeon had finished he pulled up the stockings which had fallen down to his ankles, pushed himself off the table and went to sit in a chair where he looked at the people who still surrounded him, his face as white as his stockings, the bandages round his jaw now red with blood.

At nine o’clock Couthon was brought into the room on a stretcher. Then Saint-Just and Dumas appeared. None of them spoke until Saint-Just, looking at the large placard proclaiming the Rights of Man that had been stuck on the wall, said, ‘Well, whatever you say, that is something we did.’ An hour later all the prisoners were taken to the Conciergerie where Robespierre indicated that he wanted pen and paper. ‘What for?’ the gaoler answered, refusing to bring them. ‘Do you want to write to your Supreme Being?’

Arraigned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, Robespierre and his brother, together with Saint-Just, Couthon, Hanriot, Dumas, Fleuriot and sixteen other members of the conseil general of the Commune – a further seventy were to follow them – were condemned to death and taken by cart to the guillotine at five o’clock that afternoon. The crowds all along the route were immense and rowdy. They shouted insults and curses at the men in the carts, calling out ‘To the guillotine! Long live the Republic! Down with the tyrant!’ For a few moments the tumbrils stopped outside the Duplays’ house while women danced about them and a boy, who had fetched a bucket from a butcher’s shop, smeared the door with blood.

Robespierre’s face was ‘wrapped in a bandage of dirty, bloodstained linen’, runs one report, ‘and, from what could be seen of it, was fearfully disfigured…His eyes were lowered and almost closed…Just before arriving at the place of execution…a woman forced her way through the crowd…and, grasping the railing of the cart with one hand, raised the other threateningly in his face. “You monster spewed out of hell,” she shouted at him. “Go down into your grave burdened with the curses of the wives and mothers of France…The thought of your execution makes me drunk with joy.”’

Augustin Robespierre was also bandaged; so was Couthon; so also was Hanriot who, ‘drunk as usual’, presented a horrifying spectacle with his right eye still hanging from its socket. Saint-Just, who had once declared that the ship of the Revolution could arrive safely in port ‘only by ploughing its way boldly through a Red Sea of blood’, looked upon the crowd with stiff disdain, his pale brown breeches and white waistcoat still immaculate. They reached the Place de la Révolution at about half-past seven in the evening.

As Hanriot was ‘about to ascend the scaffold, a bystander snatched out his loose eye’. Robespierre, who had to be lifted from the cart, lay flat on the ground, appearing to take no notice of what was happening. His eyes were closed and he did not open them until he felt himself being carried up on to the scaffold. The executioner threw off the coat which had been placed over his shoulders and then tore away the bandage and splint that the surgeon had applied to his wound. As his lower jaw fell from his upper, and the blood flew once more ‘in torrents’, he let forth ‘a groan like that of a dying tiger, which was heard all over the square’.

‘We are all throwing ourselves into each other’s arms,’ a newspaper reported the following day. ‘The tyrant is no more.’