The Days of the French Revolution

6 THE DAYS OF THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES AND THE EXECUTION OF THE KING 2–7 September 1792 and 21 January 1793

Like most of the other leading revolutionaries, Danton came from a respectable middle-class provincial family. His father, who died when he was three, was a lawyer; one of his uncles a canon at Troyes. He was born near Troyes, at the little town of Arcis-sur-Aube, on 28 October 1759, and from his earliest years his character seems to have been as carefree and lively as the sparkling wines of the district. His grandfather was a farmer and it was in the country where most of his days were spent and where the accidents, which marred his features for life, took place. His scarred and twisted lip, so it was said, was the result of his being gored by an angry bull when he was sucking the teat of a cow; his squashed nose was also the consequence of an encounter with a bull; the scars on his cheeks and eyelids were caused by the hooves of a herd of pigs. The skin around them was badly disfigured by smallpox.

Quite undeterred by these misfortunes and deformities, the young Danton continued to enjoy life, to make friends easily, to do well at his school at Troyes where his oratorian masters provided the lazy but clever boy with a wider and more liberal education than he could have expected at many another establishment. This enabled him to read and enjoy the English books which, as well as the classics of the Enlightenment, including scores of volumes of Voltaire and Rousseau, were to fill the shelves of his sitting-room in Paris.

He arrived in Paris when he was twenty-one to enter a lawyer’s office and, having obtained a legal degree from the University of Rheims and borrowed a good deal of money from, among others, the father of the girl he intended to marry – the daughter of a prosperous restaurateur – he bought the remunerative office of avocat aux Conseils du Roi. Thus, at the age of twenty-seven, he established himself in a far more promising position than so many of his impecunious contemporaries who, coming up from the provinces to swell the ranks of an overcrowded profession and finding success in it difficult to achieve without money, took to ill-paid journalism and other literary pursuits while idly hoping for, or actively working for, the overthrow of an order that so circumscribed their talents and ambition.

Danton, who at this time chose to call himself d’Anton, did not share their disgruntlement, though he joined in their discussions at the Café Procope. He seems to have worked conscientiously, earning over 20,000 livres a year according to a friend, and taking on any cases that came his way without too scrupulous a regard for the justice of his clients’ claims. While preparations were being made for the election of the Estates General in 1789, for example, d’Anton was busy defending a landowner who had arbitrarily enclosed an area of common land adjoining his estate. With a satisfactory income, and helped by the generous dowry of his attractive wife, he moved into a comfortable and well-furnished apartment in the Rue des Cordeliers. Here the d’Antons and their two sons were living contentedly when the Estates General met.

He had played no part in the selection of deputies, not having been chosen as an Elector of the Cordeliers District. But once it became clear that French society was, indeed, upon the verge of upheaval he realized that he must throw himself into the struggle if he were to survive as a successful lawyer. He did so with a fervour that astonished those who knew him at home in the Rue des Cordeliers, at the tables of the Café Procope and in the courts where he pleaded his cases.

I saw my colleague, Danton, whom I had always known as a man of sound judgement, gentle character, modest and silent [wrote a fellow lawyer who came across him in the Cordeliers District the day before the attack on the Bastille]. Imagine my surprise at seeing him standing on a table, declaiming wildly, calling the citizens to arms to repel 15,000 brigands assembled at Montmartre and an army of 30,000 poised to sack Paris and slaughter its inhabitants…I went up to him to ask what all the fuss was about as I had just come from Versailles and everything was perfectly calm and orderly there. He replied that I did not understand anything, that the people had risen against despotism. ‘Join us,’ he said. ‘The throne is overturned and your old position lost.’

If Danton had ever been the gentle, modest and silent man that this colleague of his describes, he was certainly not so now and was never to be again. His loud, harsh voice was to be heard everywhere in the District, and became as familiar as his bulky frame and his scarred and pock-marked face. He spoke with a controlled vehemence, a mastery of improvisation and a wonderful command of vivid language and dramatic gesture, the words tumbling out of his mouth so fast, and on occasions so ambiguously, that it was difficult to remember afterwards what he had said, or to gather exactly what he had meant. But it was impossible not to admire the skill of his passionate delivery. He soon became one of the leading figures among the revolutionaries of the troublesome Cordeliers District; and, though he preferred to work through others rather than to appear to have assumed such power within it, he gained a dominating influence over the Cordeliers Club. He was also appointed commander of the Cordeliers battalion of the National Guard.

In his attempts to gain recognition for his talents on a wider stage, however, Danton was not so successful. He was not elected to the Legislative Assembly, and it was not until the end of 1791 that, after repeated attempts, he managed to obtain a minor post as assistant procureur in the Paris Commune. The trouble was that his motives were frequently in question; he was accused at various times of working for the Duc d’Orléans, for Mirabeau, and – like Mirabeau – for the Court. It was even rumoured that he was deeply involved with a gang of forgers. Madame Roland, who did not like him and who evidently found his overt sexuality disturbing, said that he once boasted to her that, since the Revolution began, he had managed to acquire a fortune of one and a half million livres. And another witness recorded that at a dinner party Danton, who was drunk, had shocked his fellow-guests by declaring that the Revolution ought to be treated like a battle in which the victors shared the loot; that the time had come for them to enjoy splendid houses and fine food, ‘handsome clothes and the women of their dreams’. Certainly, in 1791 Danton, who loved the pleasures of life, began spending money on such a scale and buying land so extensively in Champagne that it was impossible to believe that his resources were derived, as he claimed they were, from the compensation he received for the loss of his office as avocat aux Conseils du Roi. It seems now more than likely that he was, indeed, like Mirabeau for a time in the pay of the Court; that – as Mirabeau had done – he made violently effective speeches on issues which were not fundamental to the royalist cause but which established his radical credentials; and that he chose to attack Lafayette, for instance, in the way that he did because Lafayette was disliked by both the sans-culottes and by the Court. If the Revolution failed, he could then retire to a country life in Champagne with his pockets well lined; if it succeeded, he had not lost the opportunity of guiding its future and of establishing in France that more equitable society which it would be unjust to him to suppose he did not in his heart desire. On the eve of the attack on the Tuileries he went home to Arcis-sur-Aube to settle some private business and to arrange for pensions to be paid to his mother and his former nurse in case the attack led to his downfall. Soon afterwards his immediate fears were allayed. The journée of 10 August succeeded in its purpose, and Danton, recognized as a man with unique influence in the sections, became Minister of Justice.

He was, in fact, far more than that: he was ‘the vehement tribune of the people’, the ‘Mirabeau of the mob’, the ‘voice of the Revolution’, indispensable to the Girondins, as one of their supporters admitted, the one man whose oratory and intelligence could save them from their enemies. It was he alone among the new Ministers who exercised a commanding influence in the Insurrectionary Commune which was a far more powerful body than the Girondin Government itself; it was he who guided the policies of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of War as well as those of the Ministry of Justice; it was among his friends in the Cordeliers Club that were found many of the emissaries who were sent out into the provinces to reconcile the people to the new administration in Paris and to justify the events of 10 August.

In Paris there was widespread fear that royalist conspirators, ecclesiastical spies and other counter-revolutionaries might combine to ensure that the lives lost on that day would be sacrificed in vain. And there were insistent demands that the army must be purged of officers who might desert to the enemy – as Lafayette did on 17 August – and that all the other enemies of the Revolution must be rounded up and punished. Vigilance Committees were established in the sections; internal passports were suspended; hundreds of suspects, including many recalcitrant priests, were arrested and imprisoned. The call for more violent measures became irresistible when news reached Paris towards the end of the month that the frontier fortress of Longwy had fallen after so weak and brief a resistance that treachery seemed unquestionable. With Verdun now in danger and with reports received of a conservative uprising in La Vendée, Danton insisted in the Assembly that the time had come ‘to tell the people that they must throw themselves upon their enemies en masse’. He proposed that all men fit for military service should be called up and sent to the front, that house to house searches should be carried out in a hunt for both arms and men in hiding. ‘The tocsin that will ring will be no mere signal for alarm; it will sound the charge against the enemies of the nation,’ he declared in the most passionate and most often quoted of all his speeches. ‘To deflect them, Messieurs, we need boldness, and again boldness and always boldness; and France will then be saved.’ As though echoing his words, recruiting posters appeared that day on the walls of the city under the call, ‘To arms, citizens! The enemy is at our gates.’

From those who feared that this might actually be so there were now repeated cries for the extermination of all those dangerous opponents of the Revolution within the gates as well as those outside them. In support of these demands, Marat in his L’Ami du peuple, Hébert in Le Père Duchesne, Louis Fréron in L’Orateur du peuple and other propagandists advocated in their newspapers an attack on the prisoners being held in the Paris gaols. These gaols were overcrowded; they were ill supervised by corrupt warders, nearly all of whom could be bribed; escapes from them were common; within their walls worked forgers producing those streams of false assignats which were held responsible for rising prices and soaring inflation. Through their unlocked doors, it was suggested, there would flood a horde of counter-revolutionaries, together with criminals in their pay, who would fall upon the families of volunteers once their homes had been left unprotected. ‘Let the blood of the traitors flow,’ cried Marat. ‘That is the only way to save the country.’

An organized attack upon the prisons had therefore been expected by the authorities for some time. The day after the march on the Tuileries two police officers warned Santerre as commander of the Paris National Guard that a plan was ‘afoot to enter all the prisons of Paris, take out all the prisoners and give them prompt justice’. Since then several other warnings had been received, and the nervous, panicky atmosphere in Paris had been intensified by pamphlets, scattered all over the city, headed, The Great Treason of Louis Capet [the King], and revealing the ‘discovery of a plot for assassinating all good citizens during the night between the 2nd and 3rd of this month’. So neither the police nor the National Guard were much surprised when on the fine afternoon of Sunday, 2 September a party of recalcitrant priests who were being taken in six hackney coaches to the prison known as L’Abbaye by an escort of fédérés from Brittany, Avignon and Marseilles, were attacked by a mob between the Rue Dauphine and the Carrefour Bussy. The leader of the mob rushed up to one of the carriages and plunged his sabre twice through the open window. As the passers-by gasped in horror, he waved the reddened blade at them and shouted, ‘So, this frightens you, does it, you cowards? You must get used to the sight of death!’ He then slashed at the prisoners again, cutting open the face of one, the shoulder of another, and slicing off the hand of a fourth who endeavoured to protect his head. Others of the mob then joined in the attack, as did some of the fédérés; and soon blood was dripping from all the carriages as the horses dragged them on their way to the doors of the prison. Here another mob was waiting; and when those prisoners who had escaped unscathed or only slightly wounded tried to escape inside, nearly all of them were cut down and killed before they could reach safety.

The same afternoon another small gang of armed men burst into the garden of the Carmelite Convent off the Rue de Vaugirard where about 150 priests, who had been held prisoner for the past fortnight, were gathered under guard, several of them reading their office. The men advanced upon them, calling out for the Archbishop of Arles. One of the priests went forward to meet them, demanding a fair trial for himself and his fellow-prisoners. A shot was fired and his shoulder was smashed. The Archbishop, after praying for a moment on his knees, then went towards the men himself. ‘I am the man you are looking for,’ he said, and was immediately struck across the face with a sword. As he fell to the ground a pike was plunged through his chest. At that moment an officer of the National Guard appeared and managed to get the priests away to the nearby church where they gave each other absolution. While they were saying prayers for the dying, the armed gang broke through the door and dragged the priests out in pairs to slaughter them in the garden. After several had been killed a man with an air of authority arrived at the church calling out, ‘Don’t kill them so quickly. We are meant to try them.’ Thereafter each priest was summoned before a makeshift tribunal before being executed. He was asked if he was now prepared to take the constitutional oath and when he said that he was not – as all of them did – he was taken away to be killed. Some bodies were removed in carts, the rest thrown down a well from which their broken skeletons were recovered seventy years later.

These murders were the first of numerous other massacres which took place in the prisons of Paris over the next five days. At the seminary of St Firmin in the Rue Saint-Victor where other refractory priests were held; at La Grande and La Petite Force where men and women convicted of civil offences were incarcerated; at Les Bernardins whose prisoners were mainly men condemned to the galleys; at La Salpêtrière, a house of correction for female offenders; at Bicêtre, a prison hospital for the poor and the mad, as well as at Le Châtelet, the prison for common criminals – indeed in all the prisons of Paris except the Sainte-Pélagie, which was for debtors, and the Saint-Lazare, for prostitutes – gangs of citizens, later to be known as septembriseurs, broke in armed with swords, pikes, hatchets and iron bars and set about their work, resting from time to time to drink wine or eat the meals which their women brought to them ‘to sustain them, so they said, in their hard labours’.

A prisoner at the Abbaye, Jourgniac de Saint-Méard, recorded how those whose cells had not yet been broken into heard with horror the screams of the victims and waited in terror for their turn to come:

The most important matter that employed our thoughts was to consider what posture we should put ourselves into when dragged to the place of slaughter in order to suffer death with the least pain. Occasionally we asked some of our companions to go to the turret window to watch the attitude of the victims. They came back to say that those who tried to protect themselves with their hands suffered the longest as the blows of the blades were thus weakened before they reached the head; that some of the victims actually lost their hands and arms before their bodies fell; and that those who put their hands behind their backs obviously suffered less pain. We, therefore, recognized the advantages of this last posture and advised each other to adopt it when it came to be our turn to be butchered.

As at the Carmes most murders were preceded by a rough form of trial. The prisoners were dragged into rooms lit by torches and candles to face groups of judges sitting round tables littered with papers, prison registers, bottles, pipes and jars of tobacco. In one room the judges included men with bare arms covered in blood or tattooed with the symbols of their respective trades, men with swords at their sides, wearing red woollen caps and butchers’ aprons. In another several of the judges seemed drunk and the others half asleep. At the Abbaye the president of the self-styled court was that hero of the sans-culottes, Stanislas Maillard, who had played so prominent a rôle both in the storming of the Bastille and the women’s march on Versailles.

Jourgniac de Saint-Méard described how he was dragged into the corridor where Maillard held his court by three men, two of whom grabbed hold of his wrists, the other of his collar. An old man, whose trial had just ended, was being killed outside the door. Saint-Méard, warned that ‘one lie meant death’, was asked why he had been arrested. While replying, some of the people in the crowded room distracted the attention of the judges by pushing papers in front of them and whispering in their ears. Then, after he had produced written evidence in his defence, Saint-Méard’s trial was interrupted again by the appearance of a priest who, following the briefest interrogation, was taken away to be stabbed to death. There was a further interruption when a gaoler rushed into the room to say that a prisoner was trying to escape up a chimney. Maillard told the gaoler to fire shots up the chimney and that, if the prisoner got away, he himself would be killed in his place. When shots failed to dislodge the fugitive, a pile of straw was set alight beneath him and when the man fell down, almost suffocated by the smoke, he was killed as he lay on the hearth. Saint-Méard’s trial was once more resumed, and, to his astonishment, his honest plea that, although he had been a confirmed royalist until 10 August, he had never played any part in public affairs, was unanimously accepted by the tribunal and he was allowed to depart. Greeted by cries of ‘Vive la Nation!’ by the people outside, he was escorted to his home by men carrying torches who refused any payment for their services.

Saint-Méard’s experiences were not uncommon. Others described how men, who seemed quite prepared to murder them at one moment, were at the next hugging them enthusiastically and declining all rewards for seeing them safely home. One assassin, refusing an offer of recompense, wept with emotion as he restored a father to his children. ‘The nation pays us for killing,’ said another who also refused a reward, ‘but not for saving lives.’

Several prisoners were saved by compassionate men who risked their own lives to help them, as were both the Duchesse de Tourzel and her daughter. The Duchess herself recorded how kind were some of the people among the crowds who witnessed the massacres with apparent approval; how, when she was told to climb on to a pile of corpses to swear an oath of loyalty to the nation, several people came forward to protect her; and how, when asked to attend to a fellow-prisoner, the young wife of one of the King’s gentlemen of the bedchamber, an onlooker who supposed a medallion the girl wore round her neck was stamped with a portrait of the King or Queen, whispered to the Duchess to remove it and hide it in her pocket. Saint-Méard said that when he admitted during his trial that he had been an officer in the King’s army, someone gently trod on his toe as a warning not to say too much.

Yet most murders were committed with appalling ferocity. At the Conciergerie, which contained prisoners awaiting trial in the Palais de Justice, a gang of assassins, bursting into the courtyard which was separated from the Rue de la Barillerie by fine gilded wrought iron railings, battered down the doors behind which the prisoners had tried to barricade themselves and, sparing some, hacked others to pieces until the mangled remains of 378 of the 488 prisoners held there were piled up in heaps in the Cour du Mai. Having killed numerous prisoners in their cells, a party of assassins mounted the stairs to the courtroom where several Swiss Guards were on trial. At their approach the guards threw themselves under the benches while their commander, Major Bachmann, rose to his feet and marched forward resolutely to the bar. The presiding judge, formidable enough in his black robes and plumed hat, held up his hand to halt the intruders whom he commanded to ‘respect the law’. They obeyed him and retreated. Bachmann was then sentenced to death and that afternoon was carried away in one of the carts to execution.

One prisoner who did not escape the assassins’ blades was Marie Gredeler, a young woman who kept an umbrella and walking-stick depository in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. Charged with having mutilated her lover, she was herself mutilated, her breasts were cut off, her feet were nailed to the ground and a bonfire was set alight between her spreadeagled legs.

As the heaps of corpses mounted, carts drawn by horses from the King’s stables were obtained to take them away to the Montrouge quarries. Women helped to load them, breaking off occasionally to dance the Carmagnole, then stood laughing on the slippery flesh, ‘like washerwomen on their dirty linen’, some with ears pinned to their dresses.

The carts were full of men and women who had just been slaughtered and whose limbs were still flexible because they had not had time to grow cold, so that legs and arms and heads nodded and dangled on either side of the carts [wrote a working girl, Marie-Victoire Monnard, who watched them being dragged away]…I can still remember those drunken men and remember in particular one very skinny one, very pale with a sharp pointed nose. The monster went to speak to another man and said, ‘Do you see that rotten old priest on the pile over there?’ He then went and hauled the priest to his feet, but the body, still warm, could not stand up straight. The drunken man held it up, hitting it across the face and shouting, ‘I had enough trouble killing the old brute.’

Equally revolting scenes were enacted elsewhere; and, while some stories can be attributed to the propaganda of the Revolution’s enemies, others no less horrifying appear to be well attested. Men were reported by reliable witnesses to have been seen drinking, eating and smoking amidst the carnage, using for tables and chairs the naked bodies of their victims whose clothes had been removed as one of the recognized perquisites of the assassins.

‘They were out of breath,’ one observer reported, ‘and they asked for wine to drink: “Wine or death!” The Civil Commissioner of the section gave them vouchers for twenty-four pints addressed to a neighbouring wine merchant. These they soon drank, and contemplated with drunken satisfaction the corpses scattered in the court.’

‘Do you want to see the heart of an aristocrat?’ asked one assassin, opening up a corpse, tearing out the heart, squeezing some blood into a glass, drinking part, and offering the rest to those who would drink with him. ‘Drink this, if you want to save your father’s life,’ commanded another, handing a pot of ‘aristocrats’ blood’ to the daughter of a former Governor of the Invalides. She put it to her lips so that her father could be spared. Women were said to have drawn up benches to watch the murders in comfort and to have cheered and clapped as at a cock fight.

Another witness, a lawyer, saw ‘a group of butchers, tired out and no longer able to lift their arms’, drinking brandy with which gunpowder had been mixed ‘to aggravate their fury’. They were ‘sitting in a circle round the corpses’. ‘A woman with a basket full of bread rolls came past. They took them from her and soaked each piece in the blood of their quivering victims.’

The Queen’s emotional friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, who had been held in La Petite Force, was one of the most savagely treated victims. She had been stripped and raped; her breasts had been cut off; the rest of her body mutilated; and ‘exposed to the insults of the populace’. ‘In this state it remained more than two hours,’ one report records. ‘When any blood gushing from its wounds stained the skin, some men, placed there for the purpose, immediately washed it off, to make the spectators take more particular notice of its whiteness. I must not venture to describe the excesses of barbarity and lustful indecency with which this corpse was defiled. I shall only say that a cannon was charged with one of the legs.’ A man was later accused of having cut off her genitals which he impaled upon a pike and of having ripped out her heart which he ate ‘after having roasted it on a cooking-stove in a wineshop’. Her head was stuck on another pike and carried away to a nearby café where, placed upon a counter, the customers were asked to drink to the Princess’s death. It was then replaced upon the pike and, its blonde hair billowing around the neck, was paraded beneath the Queen’s window at the Temple. The head of the Comte de Montmorin, the King’s former Foreign Minister, was carried, similarly impaled, to the Assembly.

In all about 1,200 prisoners were massacred, almost half the entire prison population of Paris. Thirty-seven of them were women. Of the rest, less than a third were priests, nobles or political prisoners; most were ordinary criminals, thieves, vagrants and forgers. The assassins appear to have been relatively few in number, perhaps no more than 150 or 200 in all. Some were criminals themselves, but most appear to have been the kind of citizens, butchers, shopkeepers, artisans, gendarmes and young National Guardsmen from whom the radical sections drew their enthusiastic support. Many of them, returning to work when the massacres were over, seem to have considered that they had performed a necessary public service in saving the nation from its enemies, and that they were fully entitled to the payments of twenty-four livres which were made to them by agents, it was supposed, of the Commune. Such was the regard in which they were held, in fact, that men who claimed to be of their company displayed swords and axes, stained with blood, to groups of customers in their local wine-shops. Later, when septembriseur became an insulting rather than flattering epithet, these men excused themselves by explaining that they had dipped their weapons in butchers’ buckets and pretended to be assassins in order to make an impression upon their neighbours and girl-friends.

The authorities undoubtedly did little to prevent the massacres. Indeed, the septembriseurs were given some sort of sanction not only by Marat who advocated their actions but also by Jaen-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, a deputy-commissioner of the Commune, who made a tour of the prisons, encouraging the assassins by telling them, ‘You are slaying your enemies! You are doing your duty!’ And certainly, if not given active encouragement in their murders, the assassins were never forcefully ordered to put an end to them. When a party of them arrived at the Hôtel de Ville to tell the Mayor that they had ‘dispatched those rascals’ and to ask him what should be done with eighty more with whom they had not yet dealt, Pétion merely replied, ‘I am not the person to whom you should apply’, and then gave orders for wine to be offered them. Santerre, whose ambiguous orders to the National Guard were disregarded, was equally ineffective. So was the Assembly which did little more than make half-hearted attempts to limit the atrocities by sending various deputies to talk to the assassins. And after it was all over there were those, even among the moderates, who could find excuses for what had been done. Jean-Marie Roland, while admitting that the events were no doubt better hidden by a veil, added, ‘But I know that the People, terrible as its vengeance is, has yet tempered it with a kind of justice.’ Parisians as a whole were, perhaps, able to persuade themselves that, dreadful as the massacres were, they had been necessary.

Many of them were quite unaware that they were taking place, for in those days Parisians neither knew nor very much cared what was going on outside their own particular districts. And many of those who did discover what was happening seem to have been taken by surprise. One of these was Philippe Morice who was walking home from the theatre on the night of 2 September:

I had just reached the Rue de Seine when I noticed an unusual light and heard a great clamour which seemed to come from the direction of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite. I went up to a group of women gathered on the corner of the street and asked them what all the noise was about.

‘Where on earth does this bloke come from?’ one of the women asked, looking at her neighbour. ‘Do you mean to say you don’t know that they’re taking care of the goods in the prisons? Look! Look down mere in the gutter.’

The gutter ran with blood. They were butchering me poor creatures in me Abbaye. Their cries were mingled with the yells of the executioners, and the light which I had observed came from bonfires which the murderers had lit to illuminate their exploits.

Another man who heard the screams of the victims comforted his shocked wife in words quoted by Baron Thiébault: ‘This is a very terrible business. But they are our deadly enemies, and those who are delivering the country from them are saving your life and the lives of our dear children.’

Similar sentiments were expressed by a young apprentice sempstress:

Like everyone else, I was shaking with fear lest these royalists be allowed to escape from their prison and come and kill me because I had no holy pictures to show them…While shuddering with horror, we looked upon the action as almost justified; while it was going on, we went about our own affairs, just as on any ordinary day.

Such attitudes were encouraged by the Commune which sent out to all the départements of France a letter which read:

The Commune of Paris takes the first opportunity of informing its brethren of all me départements that some of the fierce conspirators detained in its prisons have been put to death by the people, who regarded this act of justice as indispensable, in order to restrain by intimidation the thousands of traitors hidden within its walls at the moment when it was marching against me enemy. And we do not doubt that the whole nation, after thee long sequence of treachery which has brought it to the edge of the abyss, will be anxious to adopt this most necessary method of public security; and that all Frenchmen will exclaim, with the people of Paris, ‘We are marching against the foe, but we will not leave these brigands behind us to cut the throats of our children and of our wives.’

Among the signatories of this letter, which led to massacres in several provincial prisons, including those at Meaux and Rheims, was Marat who, unlike most others who put their names to it, never disclaimed responsibility for what had happened in Paris when it became politic to do so.

Danton’s attitude to the massacre, however, was, as usual, ambiguous. Madame Roland, who said that the Revolution had now become ‘hideous’ to her, alleged that Danton answered the protests of a humane prison inspector with the impatient outburst, ‘I don’t give a damn for the prisoners. Let them look after themselves as best they can.’ Later, according to the Duc de Chartres, he claimed to have actually been responsible for organizing the murders which were intended to put a river of blood between the ‘youth of Paris’ and the émigrés. ‘It often happens,’ he added ‘especially in time of revolution, that one has to applaud actions that one would not have wanted or dared to perform one’s self.’ As always with Danton, though, one cannot be sure. He was preoccupied with the defence of France against the foreign enemy and may well have lamented the murders but have been reluctant to jeopardize his influence over the sans-culottes by making what may well have proved futile attempts to prevent them. Certainly he helped to protect certain men, including Charles Lameth and Duport, whom the more uncompromising of his colleagues wished to arrest or execute. And certainly, also, this violent, passionate, impulsive but never sustainedly cruel man did his best to prevent prisoners in gaols outside Paris being brought to the capital as long as the massacres lasted.

Within a fortnight of the murder of the last of the prisoners, Danton’s anxieties about the French army were for the moment dispelled. For on 20 September 1792 at Valmy in the Argonne the well-trained Prussian army of Frederick William II, officered by veterans of the King’s uncle, Frederick the Great, had faltered, halted, then turned aside, demoralized by the French artillery of the old order and the massed forces of the new. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had witnessed the engagement through the thin patches of a drifting mist and afterwards recorded how ‘the greatest consternation’ had spread throughout the German army:

In the morning we had been talking of roasting and eating the French…Now people avoided each other’s eyes and the only words uttered were curses. In the garnering darkness we sat in a circle. We did not even have a fire as we usually had. Almost everyone remained silent…then someone asked me what I thought of the events of the day…So I simply said, ‘At this place, on this day there has begun a new era in the history of the world; and you can all claim to Lave been present at its birth.’

‘You’ll see how these little cocks will strut now,’ wrote one dispirited Prussian after this devastating cannonade at Valmy. ‘We have lost more than a battle.’

While the French cannon were thundering at Valmy, the newly elected members of the National Convention assembled in the Manège in Paris. The delegates from the provinces, where, though the suffrage had been widened, voting had not been heavy, were for the most part the same kind of men who had been elected to previous assemblies. Among them were one or two workers; there were also a few former nobles, including the Duc d’Orléans who now chose to call himself Philippe Egalité, and nearly fifty clergy; but most of them were from middle-class backgrounds, lawyers as before predominating. They were inclined to support the Girondins and to deplore the septembriseurs.

In Paris, however, where the electoral assembly had been moved to the premises of the Jacobin Club, the mood of the electorate was more ardently revolutionary and care was taken to ensure that as many conservatives as possible were prevented from voting. All who had joined the Feuillant Club, for example, were deprived of the franchise, as were those who had inscribed their names upon the long petition that had been drawn up in June in protest against the invasion of the Tuileries. The result was that every Parisian candidate elected, with one single exception, was a supporter of the Jacobins.

The revolutionary atmosphere in Paris was maintained by admonitory posters and placards pasted to the walls of streets and squares, several of whose names had been changed in celebration of the death of the ancien régime; by the spread of tutoiement in conversation and the gradual abandonment of Monsieur in favour of Citoyen; by the professional classes’ widespread rejection of the elaborate clothes and powdered hair of the ancien régime for the simple carelessness of the artisan; by their disinclination to raise their hats in greeting any more and by their wives’ unwillingness to be seen wearing jewellery or using a fan which did not depict some hero or heroic event of the Revolution; by the choice of Christian names for babies which would reflect the radical nature of the age into which they had been born; and by the repudiation of surnames that carried with them regrettable echoes of the past.

One of the first acts of the Convention was to declare the monarchy abolished. This was followed by a decree that 22 September 1792 marked the beginning of Year I of the French Republic. But it soon became clear that the Convention would agree harmoniously on little else. The Girondins lost no time in mounting violent and repeated attacks on the Jacobins who, occupying the highest seats in the hall, became known as Montagnards or the Mountain. The Montagnards, deeply suspicious of the Girondins whom they believed capable of any political alliance to maintain their powerful but not impregnable position in the Convention and their control over the ministerial posts, responded no less abusively. Between them the independent members of what became known as the Plain sat, for much of the time, in brooding silence, watching and waiting.

The Girondins might well have maintained their supremacy had they taken more care to cultivate the Plain, had they not emphasized the political gulf that now separated Paris from the provinces, and had they not endeavoured to discredit the capital and its Commune in the eyes of the rest of the country. But, as it was, the Girondins succeeded only in alienating the Parisians when they might have profited by the revulsion that so many of them felt against the September Massacres – for which Vergniaud unreservedly blamed the Jacobins – and in antagonizing several members of the Plain as well as the followers of Danton whom Jean Roland, out of jealousy, and Manon Roland, from both distrust and personal distaste, vilified with increasing vehemence.

Discord in the Convention was deepened by the shadow of the King. The Girondins, who tried unsuccessfully to avert a judicial trial, would have chosen to spare him. So, it seems, would Danton who cautiously stated his belief that, without being convinced that the King was ‘entirely blameless’, it would be ‘useful to get him out of the situation’ in which he had placed himself. But, according to Théodore Lameth, who risked his life by returning to Paris from England in the hope of saving the King’s life, Danton added privately, ‘All the same, if I have to give up all hope for him, I warn you that, since I don’t want my head to fall with his, I shall join those who condemn him.’ And so in the end Danton did condemn him, declaring unequivocably, ‘The only place to strike Kings is on the head.’

Most of the Montagnards had voiced such sentiments from the beginning. Louis de Saint-Just, a hard, unsmiling, remorseless, dislikeable, clever young man from Blérancourt, spoke for many of them when, his long fair hair dancing on his shoulders, he demanded the trial and execution of the King as an enemy of the people. Such demands gathered even wider support when a large iron box, containing compromising documents, was discovered in the Tuileries. On II December Louis Capet as he was now generally called – though Capet, so he protested, was not his name: ‘it was the surname of one of my ancestors’–was sent for by the Convention to answer the charge of ‘having committed various crimes to re-establish tyranny on the ruins of liberty’.

The King and Queen and their children had now been incarcerated in the Temple, behind a succession of locked doors, for four months. The rooms, at first oppressively hot, had become cold and damp, and the wind, blowing down the antiquated chimneys, filled them with smoke. Most of the guards were unfriendly and sometimes rude, scrawling graffiti on the walls, rattling their keys ‘in a terrible manner’ and insolently puffing their pipes in their captives’ faces. One of them, Louis Turgy, a former kitchen-boy at Versailles, less hostile than the others, recorded the ‘extremely stringent’ precautions which were always observed at the Temple:

This is the way in which my service had to be carried on. Before dinner, as before every meal, I had to go to the Council Chamber and ask for two of the officers to come, who themselves laid the dishes, and tasted the food to make sure there was nothing hidden in it…They accompanied me to the dining-room, and only allowed me to lay the table when they had examined it above and below. I had to unfold the cloth and the napkins in front of them. They cut each roll of bread in half, and searched the inside with a fork, or even with their fingers.

The King rose at six o’clock, shaved, had his hair rolled and was helped to dress by his manservant, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, then, after saying his prayers on his knees for five or six minutes, he spent most of the morning reading or giving lessons to his son, getting him to colour maps or to recite passages from Corneille and Racine. Before dinner at two o’clock he was allowed out for a walk with his family during which, so Cléry said, ‘the artillerymen or guard danced and sang; their songs were always revolutionary, and sometimes also obscene’. After dinner the Dauphin and his sister went into an antechamber to play at battledore and shuttle-cock or a game with a board, a flattened bowl and wooden pins called Siam, while the King played piquet or tric-trac with his wife and sister before lying down for an hour or so on his bed, snoring loudly in his sleep.

On the King’s waking he would make me sit by him while I taught his son to write [Cléry recorded]. The copies I set were chosen by His Majesty from the works of Montesquieu and other celebrated authors…In the evening, the family sat round a table, while the Queen read to them from books of history, or other works proper to instruct and amuse her children…Madame Elisabeth took the book in her turn, and in this manner they read till eight o’clock. I then gave the Prince his supper in Madame Elisabeth’s chamber during which the family looked on, and the King took pleasure in diverting the children by making them guess riddles in a collection of the Mercures de France which he found in the library.

After the Dauphin had supped, I undressed him, and the Queen heard him say his prayers. He said one in particular for the Princesse de Lamballe, and in another he begged God to protect the life of his governess. When the Municipal Officers were too near, the Prince, of his own accord, had the precaution to say these two prayers in a low voice…After his own supper at nine o’clock the King went for a moment to the Queen’s chamber, shook hands with her and his sister for the night, and kissed his children. Then going to his own apartment he retired to the turret-room where he sat reading till midnight.

Nearly every week he read as many as twelve books, mostly history and travel and works of devotion, spending ‘four hours a day on Latin authors’. The time passed very slowly.

For the Queen, too, the days were long. She spent hours on end knitting, making tapestries or embroidering chair covers which she would put down from time to time to give a lesson to her daughter or play with the Scottish terrier that the Princesse de Lamballe had given her. She called the dog Odin, a name that Hans Axel Fersen had given to a dog of his. She was still a young woman – her thirty-seventh birthday had been spent within these grey stone walls – but she looked much older; she had become painfully thin and her hair was now quite grey and in places streaked with white.

She said goodbye to her husband, kissing him fondly, when he went to face his accusers in the Convention. He behaved there with dignity, answering the questions that were put to him with calm brevity. He was allowed counsel and chose the elderly Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a blunt though kind and generous-hearted lawyer who had once been Master of the Household and now bravely answered his former master’s call by returning from his retirement in Switzerland to defend him. ‘I have,’ Malesherbes said, ‘been twice before called to be counsel for him who was my master, in times when that duty was coveted by everyone. I owe him the same service now that it is a duty which many people deem dangerous.’ The King also asked to be defended by Gui-Jean-Baptiste Target, but Target excused himself on the grounds that he had not practised law since 1785 and that he was, in any case, far too fat; so the King’s defence was entrusted instead to François Tronchet and Romain de Sèze.

Few members of the Convention were prepared to listen sympathetically to propositions of the King’s innocence. But while leading Montagnards emphatically demanded the death penalty once the King’s guilt was shown, there were several Girondins who, for reasons of expediency, argued that his life should be spared. ‘No republican will ever be brought to believe that, in order to set twenty-five million men free, one man must die,’ protested Brissot, ‘that, in order to destroy the office of King, the man who fills it must be killed.’ Supporting Brissot, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, one of the Secretaries of the Convention, suggested that ‘Louis dead [would be] more dangerous to the people’s freedom than Louis living in prison.’ Such arguments, however, not shared by all the Gironde – which was never a homogeneous party – were derided by the sans-culottes in the streets of Paris where thousands of armed men marched intimidatingly past the houses and lodgings of the deputies, and where cheers went up for men like Saint-Just who demanded the execution of the King and of all men like him. ‘What charming freedom we now enjoy in Paris,’ commented Madame Roland caustically.

The verdict as to the King’s guilt was never in doubt; indeed, it was given unanimously. But the Girondins still hoped that they might save his life, first by proposing that the matter of his punishment should be referred for ratification to the people of France as a whole and, when this had been condemned by their opponents as a mere political manoeuvre, by recommending a stay of execution. All the devices of the Girondins were, however, in vain. They aroused suspicions that they were royalists at heart, and increased the dislike in which they were already held by the Parisian sans-culottes without saving the King. A majority of over fifty deputies voted for death, and a majority of more than seventy subsequently voted against a stay of execution. The sitting of the Convention, during which the first vote was taken, lasted seventy-two hours. The spectators, amongst whom could be seen various friends of the Duc d’Orléans, ‘ate ices and oranges and drank liqueurs’, so the deputy, Sébastien Mercier, recorded. ‘The uppermost galleries, kept open for the common people, were filled with foreigners and people from all walks of life. They drank wine and brandy as if they were in some low, smoke-filled tavern. At all the cafes in the neighbourhood bets were being laid on the outcome.’

Figures, rendered all the more sombre by the dim light, advanced one by one into the Tribune [Mercier continued his description of that nightlong session]. In slow and sepulchral tones voices recorded the verdict, ‘Death!’ Face after face passed by…Some men calculated whether they had time to have a meal before giving their vote. Others fell asleep and had to be woken up to give their opinion. Of all that I saw that night no idea can be given.

The King accepted the verdict calmly, and remained quite composed when he was aroused from his sleep before dawn on 20 January 1793 to be told that he was to be executed the next day. He said goodbye to his family that evening. They all cried so loudly that ‘their lamentations could be heard outside the tower’. He too wept, so his daughter recorded, ‘but not on account of his own death. He told my mother the story of his trial…Then he gave my brother some good religious advice and told him in particular to forgive the people who had ordered his execution. He gave his blessing to my brother and me. My mother was very anxious for us to spend the night with my father, but he did not want us to as he needed to be quiet. My mother asked if she could come back to him the next morning. He agreed to this at first, but after he had gone he asked the guards to take care we did not come down again as it upset him too much.’

He ate his supper alone. Then Cléry helped him to undress and was about to brush his hair when he said, ‘No, it’s not worth while.’

The next morning he was woken at five o’clock, and after attending Mass and receiving Communion, he heard the clatter of drums. The Irish-born priest, Henry Essex Edgeworth, Elisabeth’s former confessor whom he had asked to be with him at the end, said that his own blood froze in his veins at the sound of the hollow rhythmic tapping. But Louis retained his composure, remarking in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘I expect it’s the National Guard beginning to assemble.’ Soon afterwards a company of National Guardsmen arrived at the Temple, accompanied by Santerre, by commissioners from the Commune and by Jacques Roux, a man who had once been a priest and was now one of the leaders of the Enragés, the extremist faction which, well to the left of the Montagnards, demanded among other comprehensive reforms the common ownership of goods and the strictest economic controls.

The King, who had been sitting by the porcelain stove in his room to keep warm, opened the door to them, so Edgeworth wrote, ‘and they said that it was time to go. “I am occupied for a moment,” he said to them in an authoritative tone, “wait for me here; I shall be with you in a minute.” He shut the door, and coming to me knelt in front of me. “It is finished,” he said. “Give me your last blessing, and pray God that He will uphold me to the end.” In a moment or two he rose, and leaving the cabinet walked towards the group of men who were in the bedroom. Their faces showed the most complete assurance, and they all remained covered. Seeing this, the King asked for his hat. Cléry, with tears running down his face, hurried to look for it.’

Louis turned to Roux with a parcel containing a few personal belongings and his will which he asked him to give ‘to the Queen’. ‘To my wife,’ he added, hastily amending the words.

‘I have not come here to do your errands,’ Roux roughly replied. ‘I am here to take you to the scaffold.’

‘That is so,’ said Louis, offering the parcel to another man who accepted it.

Outside a light rain had begun to fall from a grey sky. There was a large green carriage waiting, and beyond it stretched line upon line of National Guardsmen and citizens with muskets and pikes on their shoulders. The King walked towards the carriage, ‘turning once or twice towards the tower, as if to say a last goodbye,’ so Edgeworth thought, ‘to all that he held dear in this world. His every movement showed that he was calling up all his reserves of strength and courage.’ The journey to the scaffold, which had been erected in the Place de Louis XV, renamed the Place de la Révolution and, since then, the Place de la Concorde, was a slow one. Edgeworth, the ‘Citizen Minister of Religion’, as the authorities referred to him, sat next to the King; two gendarmes sat opposite. Edgeworth offered Louis his breviary and at the King’s request pointed out to him the most suitable psalms which they recited alternately. In front of the carriage marched a number of drummers, in order, so Edgeworth supposed, to ‘prevent any shouts being heard that might be raised in the King’s favour’.

At about half-past nine the carriage arrived at the Place de la Révolution where Louis saw the platform which had been set up between the promenade of the Champs Élysées and the pedestal from which the statue of his grandfather, who had laid out the square, had been removed. On the platform stood Charles Sanson, the city’s executioner, whose father had preceded him in the office and whose son was to follow him. Above Sanson loomed the instrument of execution, the guillotine.

The guillotine took its name from Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1789. A kindly man, he had suggested that all those convicted of a capital offence should have the right to be decapitated, a privilege hitherto reserved for nobles, and that the method of decapitation should be a machine which would render the process as quick and painless as possible. Such a machine had been known in Germany and Italy, as well as in Yorkshire in England where it was known as the Halifax gibbet, and in Scotland where it was called ‘the Maiden’. In France it was adopted as the official method of execution by the penal code which became law in October 1791. Several machines were thereafter made for the various departments of France by a German contractor who produced them under the direction of the Secretary to the Academy of Surgeons. Those supplied to the department of Paris were tested on dead bodies from the hospital of Bicêtre. One of them was erected in the Place de Grève for the execution of the highwayman, Pelletier, and proved so efficacious that the people were ‘disappointed’, in the words of the Chronique de Paris. They had seen nothing. The whole thing was over too quickly. They went away complaining. The same machine was now to be used on the dethroned King.

Louis climbed down from the carriage. Three guards approached him and began to remove his clothes. He shook them off, undoing the buttons of his brown greatcoat himself, taking off his hat and removing his shirt and collar. The guards then pinioned his arms, and again Louis protested. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, quickly drawing his hands back. ‘Binding your hands,’ one of them answered. ‘Binding me!’ exclaimed the King indignantly, looking appealingly at Edgeworth. ‘Sire,’ Edgeworth said, ‘I see in this last outrage only one more resemblance between Your Majesty and the God who is about to be your recompense.’ So Louis submitted while the guards tied his arms behind his back and cut his hair, leaving the neck bare above his white waistcoat.

Having arrived at the top of the scaffold Louis walked across it with a firm step, making a sign to the drummers who for a moment stopped tapping while he addressed the crowd in a loud voice. ‘I forgive those who are guilty of my death, and I pray God that the blood which you are about to shed may never be required of France. I only sanctioned upon compulsion the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.’ But his next words were lost as an officer on horseback shouted a command to the fifteen drummers who immediately resumed the beating of their drums. Sanson and his assistants then guided Louis to the plank of the guillotine where he lay face downwards. Sanson pulled the rope. The blade rushed down between the upright posts. Cléry heard his master scream for ‘his head did not fall at the first stroke, his neck being so fat’.

When it had finally been severed, Edgeworth saw the youngest of the guards, who looked about eighteen, pick up the head by the roughly cut hair and walk about the scaffold showing it to the people, accompanying ‘this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures’. Edgeworth, who was on his knees on the platform, was spattered with blood before rising and hurrying off towards the crowd into which, since he was wearing the lay dress that all priests were by now required to adopt, he soon disappeared.

The people were silent for a moment, as though stunned by the shock of the spectacle. Then they began to cry, ‘Vive la Nation!’ ‘Vive la République!’ The voices multiplied, and soon ‘every hat was in the air’. The guard of cavalry waved their helmets on the points of their sabres and, so a doctor who was present said, crowds of people rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs or pieces of paper in the blood spilled on the scaffold ‘to have a reminder of this memorable event’. One of them put a drop of it to his lips, remarking to a companion that it tasted ‘shockingly bitter’.