The Days of the French Revolution

10 THE DAYS OF GERMINAL, PRAIRIAL AND VENDÉMIAIRE 1 April, 20 May and 4–6 October 1795

The destruction of the Robespierrists and the wholesale purge of the Commune soon resulted in the Revolution’s lurching to the Right. But the change of direction was not immediately apparent. In the general rejection of the Terror that followed the journée of 9 Thermidor, several former Hébertists and the Enragés who had escaped the guillotine were released from prison. Such extreme sans-culotte leaders as Jean Varlet came into prominence once more and, in a number of provincial towns, radicals reassumed that importance in the comités revolutionnaires of which Robespierre’s recall of the représentants en mission had deprived them. But gradually the Plain began to assert itself as a more considerable body than it had ever done in the past. Some of its members, as well as some former Dantonists like Thuriot de la Rozère were elected to the Committee of Public Safety whose powers were severely reduced as were those of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Carnot and the time-serving Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac all left the Committee of Public Safety, and Fouquier-Tinville was removed from the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Moderates and Montagnards alike found it increasingly difficult to stem the rightward flow of the revolutionary tide. Robert Lindet proposed to the Convention that, while nobles and clergy should no longer be condemned merely because of their birth or calling, and while the Law of 22 Prairial against suspects which had been repealed should never be reintroduced, there should be no vendetta against those who had been responsible for the errors and violence of the past. But although the Convention voted unanimously in favour of this compromise, the revulsion against the Montagnards could not so easily be contained. Some of those who had once worked with Robespierre – and in the end had fallen foul of him, Fréron, Barras and Tallien amongst them – became positively reactionary as if to atone for the excesses of the Terror for which they had been responsible; and under their protection the jeunesse dorée, young men of mostly middle-class background, became as frightening a force as the sans-culottes had once been. These jeunesse dorée, who marched about the streets carrying short sticks weighted with lead, wore a kind of uniform of square-skirted coats and tight trousers, low boots and extremely high cravats. Their hair dangled in long locks over their ears and was plaited at the back of their heads. They constituted a dictatorship, so one of them boasted, ‘a dictatorship which nobody opposed because it filled everyone’s wish’. With their help the closure of the Jacobin Club was brought about, the red caps of liberty were banished from the streets and nearly all the Paris sections were taken over by the Right who, having stopped payments to workers for attending meetings, went further in keeping out unwanted sans-culottes by arranging to have the meetings held only in the middle of the day.

As the tide of reaction mounted, as pamphlets and newspapers attacked ‘Robespierre’s Tail’, as theatre audiences applauded anti-Jacobin plays and the actors of the Comédie Française were released from prison, the surviving Girondins were recalled to the Convention from which David’s paintings of the deaths of Marat and Lepeletier were removed. At the same time demands for the punishment of the men who had been responsible for the Terror grew louder. Jean Baptiste Carrier, the lawyer, who had supervised the cruelties of the Terror at Nantes was guillotined on 16 November. Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varenne, Barère and Vadier, were all brought to trial. So were Le Bon and Herman. Fouquier-Tinville and fifteen men who had served with him on the Revolutionary Tribunal were executed to the undisguised delight of those artisans and shopkeepers, domestic servants, journeymen and tradesmen whose families had provided the guillotine with most of its victims.

In many French provinces, also, reaction led to demands for the punishment of those who had carried out the bloody policies of the fallen régime and in some areas, particularly in the south, to outbreaks of what became known as the White Terror. Officials responsible for the former Terror were beaten, maimed, lynched and murdered by friends and relations of those who had suffered, by fanatical extremists of the Right as merciless as their victims, or by groups of assassins like that known as the Compagnie du Soleil. In several towns in Provence and Languedoc, in Ain and Gascony, in Marseilles and Lyons, Aix and Nîmes, in Tarascon and Lonsle – Saunier hundreds of prisoners were massacred in their cells or in the courtyard of the gaols in which they had been confined for offences committed in the time of Robespierre.

Elsewhere in France the change of government provoked less violence. In certain departments, indeed, there were no reprisals at all, in others no cause for them. At Rheims, for instance, the few ‘Terrorists’ brought to trial were all acquitted, while in Seine-et-Marne the Terror had not been accountable for a single death.

In other areas it proved impossible for the central Government to exercise any firm control over the local authorities. Lyons, though nominally supervised by moderate republicans, became once more a kind of royalist stronghold; while in the Vendée the rebels who had risen up against the Republic were able – by a series of armistices highly favourable to themselves – to exercise an authority which left them in virtual control not only of their own territory but also of large parts of the north-west.

Both in these areas and in most departments of France this was an even more unpleasant time than usual for the poor. The rate of inflation and the numbers of unemployed soared. Bread was rationed, fuel scarce. Brigandage was common in the countryside. And the winter of 1794–5 was an exceptionally severe one: first temperatures fell so low that many rivers, including the Seine, froze from bank to bank and starving wolves abandoning the snow-bound forests, invaded villages and towns, then a sudden thaw led to widespread floods. Spring came at last, but no end to the suffering. By April 1795 food prices in certain towns had doubled since the beginning of the year while bread, for instance, had risen to over forty-five sous the pound. Assignats were worth no more than eight per cent of their original value.

To the sans-culottes it seemed that the gap between rich and poor was becoming almost as wide as it had been before the Revolution. Sudden fortunes were being made by profiteers and speculators who spent money as rapidly as they made it. They and their women sped through the streets in ornately painted carriages to expensive restaurants where meals were devoured at prices that would have provided two month’s food for a worker’s family, to gambling dens, to theatres whose private rooms, in the words of a police report, were ‘absolute sewers of debauchery and vice’, and to dance halls which now sprang up all over Paris. Dandies known as incroyables, affecting lisps and dressed in the most outlandish fashions, with hair cut short in front and raised up by a comb at the back, appeared in the Tuileries gardens and were seen enjoying boating parties on the Seine accompanied by merveilleuses whose scanty, revealing clothes were equally exotic and whose wigs were marvels of the perruquier’s art. At bals des victimes, entertainments at once riotous and ghoulish, guests whose friends or relations had perished in the Terror wore hair arranged as though prepared for the blade of the guillotine and thin bands of red silk round their necks.

The sans-culottes grew more and more resentful, but they had no effective leaders now. They were not supported by the sections any more, nor, as they had been in the past, by a powerful Commune. An attempt was made to mount one of those revolutionary journées which had once been so successful: on 1 April (12 Germinal) demonstrators, women and men ‘with bare arms and chests’, marched upon the Convention demanding cheaper bread, the proscription of the jeunesse dorée and the resurrection of the Constitution which the Montagnards had framed in 1793. But the Convention, unlike that of June 1793, was not to be intimidated – the National Guard was on its side – and after a party of muscadins armed with whips and cudgels had been called in by Legendre, the demonstrators were thrown out with ease. Far from winning either sympathy or concessions the journée of 12 Germinal provoked repression. Some of the sans-culotte leaders were arrested, and many of their adherents, both in Paris and the provinces, were dismissed by their employers and refused passports which might have enabled them to go in search of other work. At the same time, the opportunity was taken to get rid of several Montagnards: eight of the most notable were arrested, and Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois and Barère were all sentenced to transportation, Billaud-Varenne and Collot to Guiana, Barère to the Isle of Oléron.

Undeterred by these punishments and angered by yet another cut in the bread ration, the Parisian sans-culottes made a further attempt a few weeks later to force the Convention to attend to their complaints. But, as in other towns where there were demonstrations and riots, and even cries of ‘Bread and a King’, the workers had no effective leadership.

Even so, the demonstration planned for 20 May (1 Prairial) threatened to be massive and intimidating. The night before, crowds of people, many of them women, could be seen rushing about the streets of the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin and throughout the Cité, urging people to join them next day in a march upon the Convention, to stick slogans in their hats reading ‘Bread and the Constitution of ’93’ and to let the women march in the front as the Government’s troops would never dare to open fire on them. They declared that the Convention had executed Robespierre and his friends only to take their place as tyrants, that the people were being deliberately starved, that avaricious shop-keepers were being encouraged to keep their prices at a level that no poor family could afford. The next morning, as church bells rang, as the tocsin was pealed, cannon fired and drums beaten, a vast crowd of people, accompanied by three battalions of National Guard, though not by their officers, marched towards the Tuileries, carrying placards, pikes and swords, some unarmed shouting, ‘This is the struggle of the black hands against the white.’ They arrived at the hall of the Assembly at about ten o’clock, closing all the roads that led towards it. Then, bursting through the doors, they shouted for food that they could afford. The President, Vernier, putting on his hat, called for silence and order; and, when his pleas were ignored, was replaced in the chair by the more authoritative André Dumont whose commands were no more successful. ‘No talk!’ the mob cried. ‘Bread!’ At length an army officer appeared with a party of fusiliers and a number of jeunesse dorée, equipped as before with cudgels and postboys’ whips. They slashed at the backs of the demonstrators, men and women alike, ‘who fled with tremendous screams, amidst the loud applause on the part of the spectators in the tribunes’.

Within a few minutes, however, there was a renewed assault upon the locked doors, one of which was forced off its hinges with a splintering of wood and a shower of plaster. Once more the mob rushed in as the deputies on the lower seats scrambled towards the upper benches, out of harm’s way. At this moment, men armed with muskets and bayonets from one of the sections loyal to the Convention, appeared on the scene and managed to drive the assailants back. But the crowd outside the hall was constantly growing until, shortly before three o’clock, though the men who had come to the Convention’s defence stood by the doors with crossed bayonets, the mob forced their way in yet again, those in front being pushed forward by the pressure of bodies behind. The deputies rose from their seats shouting ‘The Republic for ever!’ as shots were fired and musket balls ricochetted about the walls. One brave deputy, a young man from the valley of the Douro named Jean Féraud, came forward to face the invaders, throwing himself down in front of them, and crying out, ‘Kill me! You will have to pass over my body before you take another step.’ The invaders ignored him, trampling over him and, while some sat down in the seats vacated by the deputies who had moved to those higher up the hall, others advanced towards the President’s chair, now occupied by Boissy d’Anglas instead of the exhausted Dumont.

Seeing his new President thus threatened, the intrepid Féraud jumped to his feet, ran to protect him and was shot and killed in the ensuing scuffle. His body, kicked by wooden sabots, was dragged outside, decapitated by a tavern-keeper who ‘sliced off his head like a turnip’ and threw it back to the crowd. It was then taken back into the hall, impaled upon a pike, to intimidate the President. Boissy d’Anglas remained calm and collected, at first holding up his arm to screen his eyes from the horrible sight of Féraud’s dripping head, then bowing sadly and respectfully towards it. And while the crowd shouted, beat drums and rattled the staffs of their pikes on the floor, various deputies endeavoured to make themselves heard above the uproar, the Montagnards amongst them apparently ready to give way to some of the demonstrators’ demands. But exactly what these demands were it was difficult to determine. Some, amidst cries for bread and the 1793 Constitution, called for the release of all patriots, others for the re-establishment of the Commune. One man repeatedly shouted for the arrest of all émigrés, another for house to house searches for hidden food, and a third kept up for half an hour an insistent chant of ‘The arrest of all rogues and tyrants! The arrest of all rogues and tyrants!’ For two hours the wild confusion continued unabated until one of the leaders of the demonstrators, whose name was never discovered, proposed that the deputies should be brought down from the seats to which they had climbed for refuge, collected on the floor of the hall and forced to discuss the people’s plight. This was done, and there followed an inconclusive debate in which nothing of importance was decided and votes were registered in such a chaotic manner that it was impossible to determine who had voted for what. In any case the Government Committees had already decided that no measures which might be adopted under duress were to be considered binding.

The Committees had by now assembled sufficient forces to disperse the rioters, and at about half-past eleven the leading columns arrived at the Tuileries. Their commander, Danton’s friend, the butcher Legendre, who had become one of the principal proponents of reaction, mounted the rostrum and shouted above the din, ‘I exhort the Convention to stand firm. And, in the name of the law, I command the citizens who are here to withdraw.’

He was shouted down by the rioters, but, after a brief struggle in which a few men were wounded, the insurgents were at long last cleared out of the building. As they fled through the doors and jumped from the windows, a deputy stood up to speak. ‘So this assembly,’ he said, ‘the cradle of the Republic, has once more almost become its tomb. Fortunately the crimes of the conspirators have been averted. But, fellow-representatives, you would not be worthy of the nation if you were not to avenge them in a signal manner.’ Cheers and clapping greeted these words from all sides, and fourteen Montagnards who had spoken in defence of the demonstrators, or were believed to be in sympathy with them, were immediately arrested. The names of other Montagnards who had earned unfortunate reputations for themselves in the provinces were then called out and the arrest of these men, too, was demanded to enthusiastic shouts of ‘The Convention for ever!’

‘Let us have no more half measures,’ cried Tallien, whose behaviour at Bordeaux had for a time been far more merciless than that of any of the commissioners now denounced. ‘The aim of today’s violent demonstration was to re-establish the Commune and to restore the Jacobins to power. We must destroy all that remains of them…We must have vengeance…We must profit by the inefficiency of these men who fancy themselves the equals of those who overthrew the throne, who try to bring about revolutions and succeed only in provoking riots…We must lose no time in punishing them and putting an end to the Revolution.’

Tallien’s words also were loudly applauded. But when the session was closed and the deputies departed at three o’clock in the morning, the men whose condign punishment he had advocated were already planning another attempt to overawe the Convention. It was to take place that very day. Setting out from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine a large body of demonstrators, better armed and disciplined than those who had marched the day before, were to advance upon the Tuileries and to threaten the Convention with cannon. The march began as planned, and the deputies who had reassembled in their hall after only a few hours’ sleep were soon to learn that their own gunners had defected to the insurgents, taking their cannon with them. Legendre stood up in an attempt to reassure them. ‘Representatives,’ he said, ‘keep calm and remain at your posts…Good citizens are ready to defend you.’

The hall had, indeed, been surrounded by troops and by several units of the National Guard; yet the desertion of the artillery made it seem likely that, were fighting to break out, the forces at the Convention’s disposal might be unable to hold the assailants back. For several minutes conflict appeared imminent as the opposing forces faced each other, their muskets loaded. But then men from both sides began to protest at having to fight their fellow-citizens. Gradually they broke ranks and walked across to talk to each other, and eventually it was agreed that twelve members of the Convention should be invited to leave their hall and to come down to discuss the grievances of the hostile sections. Twelve deputies were accordingly selected and went to fraternize with the sans-culottes who, after prolonged negotiations, persuaded them to allow a deputation of demonstrators to present a petition to the Convention. Upon their appearance in the hall, where they reiterated their demands, there were loud shouts of ‘Down with the Jacobins!’ from the public galleries. The President called for silence, and, having imposed it, addressed a few mollifying remarks to the deputation whose colleagues in the streets outside were already beginning to abandon their posts and go home.

So the journée of I Prairial was no more successful than the far more violent one of 12 Germinal–yet the repression that followed it was even more severe. The immediate trial of all prisoners taken from among the rioters was ordered. The beating of the générale without proper authority was made a capital offence, and a military commission was set up to pass sentence upon everyone, left-wing deputies and sans-culotte leaders alike, who were held responsible for the disturbances. The first of the accused brought before this military commission was the assassin of Féraud who had only just been apprehended and who was sentenced to be guillotined that same day.

This man was actually on the scaffold when a mob stormed up the steps, knocked aside the gendarmes and executioners and bore him away into a warren of narrow streets in the middle of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The Convention responded to this new provocation with a prompt display of determined force. Almost 25,000 men, including nearly 4,000 regular soldiers, were called up to surround the faubourg into which about 1,200 excited jeunesse dorée dashed with bravado ahead of them. These young men were soon themselves surrounded by the angry inhabitants of the neighbourhood and might not have escaped with the beating to which several of them were subjected had not the Convention’s formidable army and its numerous cannon persuaded the sans-culotte leaders to agree to surrender their arms and to deliver up Féraud’s murderer when they had found him.

Having put down this latest popular revolt, the Convention’s agents turned with renewed vigour upon its promoters and upon the Montagnard deputies who were supposed to have looked upon it with indulgence. Well over 3,000 suspects were rounded up, and although most of these were later released, they were closely watched thereafter by the police and frequently re-arrested when further disturbances were threatened. Reports of an uprising at Toulon, which was, however, soon put down, increased the Convention’s determination to be ruthless. Former members of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security, whose services to the country had previously protected them from punishment, were no longer immune. Carnot was spared as the ‘organizer of military victory’, but David’s reputation as a distinguished artist could no longer save him and he was imprisoned. Robert Lindet, whose responsibility for food-supplies on the Committee of Public Safety had been discharged with tireless efficiency, was also arrested. Among the thirty-six men condemned to death were six Montagnard deputies. The wife of a young army officer, Laure Junot, described their end:

One day my brother returned home dreadfully agitated. He had witnessed an awful scene. Romme, Soubrany, Duroi, Duquesnoi, Goujon and Bourbette [the six deputies] exhibited the most admirable fortitude during their trial…When sentence was pronounced on them they looked at each other calmly; and, on descending the staircase, which was lined with spectators, Romme looked about as if seeking somebody…who did not appear. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘With a firm hand this will do, Vive la Liberté!’ Then drawing from his pocket a large penknife he plunged it into his heart, and, drawing it out again [fearing he had not struck hard enough, inflicted several more wounds on his chest, throat and face. He then] gave it Goujon who, in like manner, passed it to Duquesnoi. All three fell dead instantly without uttering a groan. The weapon, passed on to Soubrany by the trembling hand of Duquesnoi, found its way to the noble hearts of the rest; but they were not so fortunate as their three friends. Grievously wounded, yet alive, they fell at the foot of the scaffold which the executioner made them ascend, bleeding and mutilated as they were.

After their deaths and the final destruction of the Montagnards as a political force, the reaction continued apace. The sans-culottes, already virtually powerless, were further weakened by the reconstitution of the National Guard which became once more a largely bourgeois organization. The word ‘revolutionary’ was decreed as no longer applicable to institutions which had previously been thus described, a commemorative festival was instituted in honour of the Girondins, and an amnesty was offered to all those who had fled from France after the uprising of May 1793.

So fast was the tide of reaction flowing, indeed, that royalists began to hope for a restoration. The late King’s son, whom they recognized as Louis XVII, had contracted tuberculosis of the bones during his incarceration in the Temple and died there aged ten on 8 June 1795. But the Comte de Provence, who had been surrounded by the most intransigent counter-revolutionaries during his exile and was then living at Verona, proclaimed himself King Louis XVIII. He announced that on his return to the throne he would restore the traditional three orders in France, have those who had voted for the death of his brother brought to trial, and give back to the Church the power and prestige it had formerly enjoyed.

Already plans had been laid for a royalist restoration by force. It was intended that the Prince de Condé, father of the Duc de Bourbon, who had fought against the Revolution in conjunction with the Austrians, should advance with a royalist army from the east; that an insurrection should be simultaneously provoked in the south; that the extravagant and pleasure-loving General, Charles Pichegru, commander of the Rhine Army, should be suborned by huge bribes, by the promise of his promotion to marshal and the offer of the château and park of Chambord; and that an expeditionary force of émigrés, for which the English government were to provide money, naval support and uniforms, should be landed in the north-west to link up with the Chouans. But, as with so many other royalist plots, the execution bore little relation to the planning. General Pichegru proved an unreliable accomplice; the plans for the insurrection in the south were discovered and thwarted; the Breton Chouans of 1795 lacked the fervent courage of the earlier Vendéens; and in General Lazare Hoche, a former private in the Gardes-françaises, the republicans had a commander as skilful as he was decisive. When the émigré forces landed on the southern coast of Brittany on 27 June 1795, Hoche soon forced them to surrender, having pushed the Chouans who tried to come to their support back into the Quiberon peninsula. Over 700 prisoners, most of them nobles and many of them former naval officers, were shot in their English uniforms for high treason.

The immediate results of this dismal failure were a fresh outbreak of the cruel civil war in the north-west, where savage reprisals were taken against republican prisoners by the rebels, and a vigorous campaign by the Government against both royalists and the few surviving Montagnards. Several royalist journalists were arrested; so were some Montagnards, including that cunning intriguer, Fouché, while determined efforts were made to track down those of the jeunesse dorée to whose evasion of military service the authorities had hitherto turned a blind eye. At the same time the Convention debated the draft of a new constitution which was presented by Boissy d’Anglas.

In introducing this Constitution of the Year Three, Boissy d’Anglas, in a speech which might almost have been written by Vergniaud, declared:

Absolute equality is a chimera. If it existed one would have to assume complete equality in intelligence, virtue, physical strength, education and fortune in all men…We must be ruled by the best citizens. And the best are the most learned and the most concerned in the maintenance of law and order. Now, with very few exceptions, you will find such men only among those who own some property, and are thus attached to the land in which it lies, to the laws which protect it and to the public order which maintains it…You must, therefore, guarantee the political rights of the well-to-do…and [deny] unreserved political rights to men without property, for if such men ever find themselves seated among the legislators, then they will provoke agitations…without fearing their consequences…and in the end precipitate us into those violent convulsions from which we have scarcely yet emerged.

After two months’ debate the Constitution, which in effect returned the country’s political and economic leadership to men who were reasonably well off, was approved by the Convention. Legislative power was to be entrusted to two Councils, a Council of Five Hundred composed of men over thirty years of age who were to have the right to initiate laws, and a Council of Ancients of two hundred and fifty members, married men or widowers at least forty years old, who were to approve or veto the laws proposed. A third of the members of each Council were to be required to retire each year. Executive power was to be entrusted to a Directory of five members who were to be appointed by the Council of Five Hundred and who were to be given a magnificent uniform ‘as a protest’, so Boissy d’Anglas said, ‘against sans-culottism’.

Conscious that they commanded limited support in the country as a whole, the Thermidorians – as Boissy d’Anglas and his colleagues were called in allusion to the season in which the Robespierrists had been overthrown – decreed that two thirds of the new deputies should be chosen from amongst the members of the Convention. Both this Law of the Two-Thirds as it was known and the Constitution itself were submitted to a plebiscite; and, despite enormous numbers of abstentions, both were approved, the Constitution by a majority of over a million votes to less than 50,000, the Two-Thirds Law by about two to one.

The comparatively widespread opposition to this law, particularly in Paris, the South and the West, gave the royalists an opportunity to organize the last journée of the Revolution. Protesting that there had been fraud in the counting of votes, that the troops which had been brought into the capital had been called in for some sinister purpose, and that the Convention’s attempt to perpetuate itself was an affront to freedom, the royalist plotters were able to play on the people’s distress to win their support. For there was, indeed, much distress in France that summer and autumn of 1795. The bread ration fell as the price of meat rose, and wages could not keep up with the rising cost of everything else. Sugar soared from eleven to sixty-two livres a pound, firewood from 160 livres a wagon-load in May to 500 in September. The cost of living had by then risen almost thirty times higher than it had been in 1790. The police were accordingly not surprised when the annual celebrations commemorating the fall of the monarchy passed off in what they termed ‘a state of apathy’.

To the royalists and their fellow-conspirators the time, then, seemed ideal for an attack upon the Convention. They induced a number of Chouan leaders and émigrés to come to Paris, and went about the sections fostering the people’s inclination to blame their sufferings and misfortunes upon the Government, persuading them that they were threatened with a renewal of the Terror, inciting young men to march about the streets shouting ‘Down with the Two-Thirds’. In several sections there were serious riots in which musket shots were exchanged with the soldiers of the Convention.

The Convention responded to the danger from the royalists by turning to the staunchly republican sans-culottes, issuing arms to all citizens ‘faithful to the Revolution’ who applied for them, and by forming three battalions of ‘Patriots of ’89’. At least seven of the disaffected sections thereupon declared themselves in rebellion, beat the générale in defiance of the law and seized arms for the fight that now appeared inevitable. By the beginning of October, after news had reached Paris of the eruption and repression of royalist uprisings at Châteauneuf-en-Thimerais and Dreux, as many as 25,000 sectionnaires were under arms. The section of Lepeletier became the centre of the insurrectionary movement, and it was here that the Government’s first attempt to suppress it took place. General J. F. de Menou, commander of the Army of the Interior, was ordered to march into it with a strong force of infantry, cavalry and artillery to overawe the rebel sectionnaires and to insist that they deliver up their arms. Menou, a kind officer of a somewhat hesitant nature and moderate political opinions, accepted his orders with reluctance and carried them out both late and indecisively. He advanced towards the convent of the Filles St Thomas, where the leaders of the Lepeletier section were in session, with his troops in so close a formation that, had they been called upon to do so, they would have had little chance of conducting a successful engagement against the massed ranks of their armed opponents who filled the streets and looked down upon them from the roof tops. General Menou entered the convent, his cannon drawn up behind him and levelled at the door. He found the section’s committee armed and defiant. To his almost apologetic request that they hand over their weapons, they replied that they would do nothing of the sort, defying him to use force. So, having obtained an undertaking that the section would disperse its forces if he withdrew his, he led his columns out of the area while the men he had been sent to subdue fulfilled their promise, only to reassemble again immediately in more challenging mood than ever.

Well aware now that Menou was far from the kind of general they needed in such a crisis, and suspecting that he might well be in complicity with the rebels, the Convention dismissed him and appointed in his place Paul Barras, who had proved so energetic a leader during the journée of Thermidor. But Barras had never been a particularly successful commander of regular troops – his years in the army, spent mostly in India, had not been in the least distinguished – and it was considered essential that he should be given some more experienced assistants. One of these, introduced to him by Fréron, was the Corsican Brigadier Napoleon Bonaparte.

Bonaparte, then aged twenty-six, had come to the notice of the Convention through his exceptional skill as an artillery officer during the siege of Toulon and had risen from the rank of captain to that of brigadier-general within the space of four months. Unlike several of his friends, including his closest, Alexandre des Mazis, who had chosen to emigrate, he had demonstrated his support of the Revolution from the beginning. While stationed at Valence as a subaltern he had been appointed secretary of the Society of Friends of the Constitution. He had publicly condemned the King’s flight to Varennes, and had made it known that he approved both of the sale of land confiscated from the Church and the nobility, and of the decree by which the clergy were to be elected by their congregations. Since the capture of Toulon, however, Bonaparte’s career had not prospered. He had become friendly with the sociable, gregarious Augustin Robespierre and, after the fall of the Robespierrists, had thus become suspect to the Thermidorians. For a time he was placed under house arrest. Then, after his release, he was transferred from the artillery to the infantry for having tried to rescind an order posting him to the Army of the West which was engaged in the unpleasant duty of fighting the Chouans. He applied for sick leave which he spent in Paris in a dreary hotel on the Left Bank, complaining of the shabby way he had been treated and even on occasion threatening suicide. He walked disconsolately about the city in his now frayed uniform, or in what Mme Junot described as ‘a grey greatcoat, very plainly made, buttoned up to his chin…and a black cravat very clumsily tied’, his long ill-combed hair falling over his collar. When his leave was over, he asked for a command in the field, but was given instead a staff appointment which he found so irksome that he decided to go to Constantinople to help reorganize the Turkish artillery. He had obtained his passport and was ready to leave when Fréron, whom he had met in the South while they were on duty together there, took him to Barras.

‘Will you serve me?’ Barras asked him abruptly. ‘You have three minutes to decide.’

Bonaparte needed no time to consider the offer. He assented immediately, asking only where were the guns which would be needed if they were to repel the threatened attack by the rebels who outnumbered the Convention’s forces by about six to one. Joachim Murat, a handsome, swaggering cavalry officer, an innkeeper’s son who was one day to become King of Naples, was sent to fetch them from a camp, six miles to the south. A rebel force was already on its way to the camp, but, galloping at the head of 200 horsemen, Murat arrived there first and brought back forty guns with him to Paris. Eight of these were allocated to Bonaparte who was given the task of defending the Tuileries from any attack that might be made upon it from the north.

The total number of men at the Convention’s disposal was about 8,000, of whom some 5,000 were regular troops of the line. Most of these were disposed so as to guard all approaches to the Tuileries in the Rue du Cul de Sac Dauphin, the Rue l’Échelle, the Rue Rohan and the Rue St Nicaise, on the Pont Neuf, the Pont Royal and the Pont Louis XVI, and around the Place de la Révolution and the Place Vendôme. The cavalry were held in reserve on the Carrousel and in the Tuileries gardens. An ammunition depot, a hospital and stores of provisions were established in the Tuileries itself. The heights of Meudon were occupied so that the Convention could retire there if compelled to retreat from their hall, and arms were sent to the radical Faubourg Saint-Antoine whose ‘attachment to the cause of liberty’ Barras – prepared to accept any allies so long as the emergency lasted – described as being well known and whose inhabitants Fréron was exhorting to come to the defence of the Revolution.

While these preparations were being made, the insurrectionary committee, which had been set up in the section of Lepeletier, was also making its dispositions. It appointed as commander-in-chief of its forces General Danican, an officer from a poor noble family who had served against the Vendéens but had been dismissed on suspicion of being secretly a royalist. He had come to Paris, thoroughly disillusioned by the present Government, and prepared to assist in any plans for its subversion. The misconceived plan which the insurrectionaries adopted was to make a concerted attack upon the Tuileries. Instead of building barricades around it, encircling it with sharpshooters in the surrounding houses, and bringing about its downfall by a siege of attrition, they decided to storm the Tuileries with columns of troops marching upon it from the Odéon, from the streets that led down to it from the Rue Saint-Honoré, and from the Pont Neuf.

The Convention’s forces waited all morning for the expected attack in a drizzling rain. The deputies sat in silence in their hall. Eight hundred muskets and cartouche boxes were stored in an anteroom, ready for their use should they have to defend themselves. Noon came and still there was no attack. Barras, on horseback, and Bonaparte on foot, waited in the courtyard of the Tuileries. Two eight-pounders, loaded with case-shot had been placed at the end of the Rue Neuve Saint-Roch, their barrels levelled at the church of Saint-Roch at the end of the street. After hours of silence, there came the sound of drums and musket fire. Bonaparte approached the guns and waited there for Barras’s orders.

It was soon after three o’clock when the leading columns of the rebels appeared in the Rue Saint-Honoré. The Convention’s troops opened fire on them with their muskets, but they came on, returning the fire, into the Rue Neuve Saint-Roch. Barras gave Bonaparte the order to open up with his eight pounders. Immediately the gunners responded. The shots tore into the advancing ranks, mowing many of them down and blasting chunks of masonry from the walls of the church. The rebels faltered, then came on again, wavered as the shot tore into them and finally fell back as the guns were wheeled to the right and left and fired down the Rue Saint-Honoré from top to bottom. The sectionnaires, scattered now, fled backwards towards the Lepeletier.

Here, in the convent of the Filles Saint Thomas, Danican and the insurrectionary committee decided upon another assault from the Faubourg Saint-Germain towards the Pont Neuf which was still occupied by men under the command of a young émigré named Lafond. Here they would be joined by a column under a Vendéen leader, the Comte de Maulevrier. The combined force would then advance along the Quai Voltaire to the Pont Royal. But once again the rebels could not withstand the barrage of artillery. A storm of grape-shot from the Pont Royal tore into their ranks from the front, while other guns opened up on them from the quai of the Tuileries. Lafond made a gallant effort to storm the bridge, but his men were driven back by the relentless fire of the Convention’s gunners. By six o’clock, when two to three hundred men had been killed or wounded on both sides, the fighting was over.

After the journées of Vendémiaire there was to be no further threat from the royalists. With the influence of the Montagnards and the sans-culottes also destroyed, the largely well-to-do and conservative Thermidorians were now in control of the Revolution. But it was to prove an extremely unsteady and insecure control, maintained only by devious compromises, by successive purges, by hitting out alternately at reactionaries and radicals alike, and by an increasing reliance upon the army.