The Days of the French Revolution

7 THE DAYS OF THE ENRAGÉS AND THE HÉBERTISTS 28 May–2 June and 4–5 September 1793

The courts of Europe reacted to Louis XVI’s execution with protestations of outrage. Already perturbed by the Convention’s announcement that military occupation would be followed by the sequestration of noble and ecclesiastical property, the abolition of feudalism and the introduction of French paper currency, they were now still more alarmed by Danton’s declaration of France’s right to expand to her ‘natural frontiers’–the sea, the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees. And, provoked by the ‘heinous crime’ of regicide, monarchial Europe coalesced to crush the Revolution. But, as diplomatic relations were severed, the French revolutionaries met protests with defiance. ‘The kings in alliance try to intimidate us,’ cried Danton challengingly. ‘We hurl at their feet, as a gage of battle, the French King’s head.’ Accepting the inevitability of conflict with the country’s traditional rival, the Convention declared war on England at the beginning of February; it also declared war on Holland, then on Spain, so that within a few weeks almost every major power in Europe was ranged against ‘the assassins of Paris’.

The Convention’s faith in the irresistibility of the Revolution’s forces did not at first seem misplaced. After that decisive day at Valmy, the French armies – living off the land and therefore moving fast – had occupied Savoy and Nice, possessions of the King of Sardinia. General Custine had penetrated into Germany as far as Mainz and advanced towards Frankfurt. Dumouriez had entered Belgium, defeated the Austrians at Jemappes and advanced to Brussels, Liège and Antwerp. Encouraged by the disorganization of their enemies and by Russia’s preoccupation with the dismemberment of Poland, the Convention, decreeing ‘war on castles, peace for cottages’, had offered ‘fraternité et secours à tous les peuples qui voudront recouvrer leur liberté’.

Yet now that the enemies of France had increased, now that new frontiers and coasts had to be watched, and more money found, the deputies were faced with problems that dissipated their earlier confidence. And as their armies faltered, the sharply rising cost of living, the fall in the value of assignats and the shortages of food all caused unrest and disturbances at home. For a time the Montagnards and the more moderate Girondins came together to form a united front, not only against counter-revolutionaries but also against the violent sans-culottes and those extremists known as Enragés who were intent upon exploiting the discontent in order to impose upon the Convention a more radical programme, including the fixing of prices and the requisition of food supplies. Jacques Roux, the fiery ex-priest, played a leading part in these insurrectionary activities of the Enragés. So did Jean Varlet, a postal worker. And both of them planned a series of journées as the military situation worsened, as Custine fell back from the Rhineland and Dumouriez, abandoning plans for an invasion of Holland and retreating through the Austrian Netherlands, was defeated first at Neerwinden, then at Louvain. Having failed in an attempt to persuade his men to march on Paris to restore order and the monarchy, Dumouriez finally deserted to the Austrians, like Lafayette, taking with him the Duc d’Orléans’s son, the Duc de Chartres, and several officers of his staff.

The problems of the Convention were now exacerbated by the spread of the ferocious civil war in the Vendée where tens of thousands of peasants, having risen in arms against mobilization and the new revolutionary order, massacred republicans, scattered the forces of the National Guard and advanced on Rochefort with the declared intention of opening it to a British invasion fleet. Elsewhere in France, also, peasants were protesting violently against mobilization, refusing to comply with the Convention’s decrees, harbouring recalcitrant priests and attacking republican municipalities. Troops had to be dispatched to Brittany; while in Bordeaux and Nantes, Lyons and Marseilles there were furious quarrels and outbreaks of fighting between different groups of revolutionaries, which led many to wish that there had been no Revolution at all.

The Convention responded to the crises by issuing a series of emergency decrees designed to shore up the crumbling edifice of the executive government. Rebels captured bearing arms were to be executed; so were émigrés who returned to France. Foreigners were to be closely watched by new comités de surveillance; priests denounced by six citizens were to be deported. And in early March the establishment of a Revolutionary Tribunal was proposed to deal judicially with those whom the Enragés and the sans-culottes might otherwise have persecuted arbitrarily. This proposal aroused murmurs of protest from various moderates in the Convention, one of whom was brave enough to shout the word, ‘Septembre.’ At this Danton, already profoundly distressed by the recent death of his wife over whose grave he had bellowed in unbearable grief, turned upon the man who had spoken and in ‘thunderous tones’ rebuked him: ‘Since someone here has dared to recall those bloody days…I say that if a Revolutionary Tribunal had then existed, the people who have been so cruelly reproached for them would not have stained them with blood. Let us profit by the mistakes of our predecessors. Let us be terrible so that we can prevent the people from being terrible.’

So, despite the objections of Vergniaud, who said that they would be ‘laying the foundations of an Inquisition a thousand times more fearful than that of Spain’, the deputies agreed to the creation of a Revolutionary Tribunal, before which so many of them were later to appear. A month later, as the news from the front grew more alarming and the threat to France of being overrun by foreign troops was added to that of the spread of civil war, the Convention also set up a Committee of Public Safety which, with Danton, at first the most powerful of its nine members, was gradually to arrogate to itself the authority of a supremely omnipotent cabinet.

In Paris there were increasingly insistent demands from the Left to punish the Girondin leaders whose reputation had been tarnished by the treachery of their supporter, General Dumouriez, and by their campaign to gain control of provincial municipalities and to turn them against the political dominance of Paris. The Committee of Public Safety responded to these demands by ordering the seizure of the Rolands’ papers; and, when these were found to contain little of a compromising nature, Camille Desmoulins produced a pamphlet, L’histoire des Brissotins, which, having listed various concocted charges, called upon the Convention to ‘vomit the Girondins from its belly’. But the Girondins refused to be intimidated, seeming to Danton to be ‘bent on their own destruction’. Danton, the one man who could have saved them, went to see some of their leaders with an offer of compromise. ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ he said to them, only too well aware that his own friendly relations with Dumouriez laid himself open to just such attacks as were being made upon them and that he might need their support as much as they needed his.

‘Let it be war,’ retorted Guadet challengingly, brushing Danton’s overtures aside, ‘and let one side perish!’

‘You want war, then, Guadet, do you?’ Danton answered, provoked into fury. ‘Then you shall have death.’

Soon afterwards in the Convention both he and the Girondins came under open attack for their association with Dumouriez. ‘His lips were curled in that expression of contempt which was peculiar to him. He inspired a sort of terror. His glance expressed both disdain and rage.’ Suddenly he leaped to his feet to deflect attention from himself and Dumouriez by turning furiously on the Girondins.

‘Citizens of the Mountain,’ Danton exclaimed, waving a fist which the Abbé Kerenavent described as resembling ‘that of a street porter’, ‘I must begin by paying you homage. You are the true friends of the welfare of the people. Your judgement has been clearer than mine…I was wrong. I now abandon moderation because prudence has its limits…I am now convinced that no truce is possible between the Mountain, the patriots who wanted the King’s death, and these cowards who slandered us throughout France in the hope of saving him…No more terms with them! I have returned to the fortress of Reason. I will have it armed with the artillery of Truth in order to blow these enemies to dust!’

He continued for some time in the same vein, his great voice resounding round the walls, while the Montagnards cheered and Marat shouted his encouragement.

Yet the Girondins still refused to compromise and responded to the attacks made upon them by the Left by arraigning Marat, now President of the Jacobin Club, before the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Ever since his election to the Convention as one of the deputies for Paris, Marat had been one of the Girondins’ most persistent critics. An English visitor to Paris, Dr John Moore, who listened to him speaking, described how the ‘little man’ appeared to be both detested and feared not only by them but also by most of the Montagnards:

He has a cadaverous complexion and a countenance exceedingly expressive of his disposition…The man’s audacity is equal to anything, but what I thought full as wonderful was the degree of patience, and even approbation, with which he was heard…So far from ever having the appearance of fear or of deference, he seems to me always to contemplate the Assembly from the tribune either with eyes of menace or contempt. He speaks in a hollow, croaking voice, with affected solemnity…Marat has carried his calumnies to such a length that even the party which he wishes to support seem to be ashamed of him, and he is shunned and apparently detested by everyone else. When he enters the hall of the Assembly he is avoided on all sides, and when he seats himself those near him generally rise and change their places. He stood a considerable time yesterday near the tribune, watching an opportunity to speak. I saw him at one time address himself to Louvet and in doing so he attempted to lay his hand on Louvet’s shoulder. Louvet instantly started back with looks of aversion, as one would do from the touch of a noxious reptile, exclaiming, ‘Ne me touchez pas.’

Yet, while shunned in the Convention, Marat was highly regarded by the extremists outside it; and, as the Girondins might have foreseen, he was immediately acquitted upon his appearance before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was carried back in triumph by a mob of cheering women and sans-culottes to the Convention whose meeting hall had by now been transferred from the Manège to the Court’s former theatre at the Tuileries. The doors burst open and Marat, smiling sardonically, a wreath of oak leaves round his forehead, was borne shoulder high before the deputies. ‘Citizen President,’ announced a man with an axe, ‘we bring you the worthy Marat. Marat has always been the friend of the people, and the people will always be the friends of Marat. If Marat’s head must fall, our heads will fall first.’ As the people in the public galleries roared their approval and several deputies left their seats in disgust, permission was sought for Marat’s escort to parade him about the theatre. ‘I will consult the Assembly,’ the President replied. But not waiting for him to do so, the mob rushed in shouting Marat’s name, milling about the floor and occupying the vacated seats. Marat was returned to his place with the Montagnards; then, mounting the rostrum, he made a speech, praising his own pure heart and vilifying his accusers, before being borne off again in triumph to the Jacobin Club.

The Girondins now compounded their mistake in having Marat summoned before the Revolutionary Tribunal by dismissing the popular demands for the control of corn prices – thus allowing the Jacobins, who endorsed the demands, to gain further favour with the sans-culottes. They then attempted to overthrow the Commune by issuing orders for the arrests of Hébert – now its deputy procureur–of the Enragé, Varlet and of four others of the Girondins’ most vexatious opponents. ‘I declare to you, in the name of the whole of France,’ threatened Maximin Isnard when the Commune protested against this Girondin counter-attack, ‘that if these extremists are allowed to have their way and the principle of national representation suffers, Paris will be annihilated; and men will soon be searching the banks of the Seine to see if the city had ever existed.’

The Enragés and sans-culottes in the Paris sections, with the rather nervous complaisance of most of the Jacobins and with the active help of some of them, now decided to take action to destroy the Girondins once and for all. On 27 May a mob burst through the doors of the Convention, demanded and obtained the release of Hébert, Varlet and the other prisoners, as well as the abolition of a Girondin-dominated Commission of Twelve which had recently been established to investigate the behaviour of the Commune and the troublesome sections. The next day the Commission of Twelve was re-established by the Girondins, but the prisoners remained free and the sans-culottes prepared another journée.

On the evening of that day, 28 May, a new Insurrectionary Committee was formed with Varlet one of its members. A militia of 30,000 sans-culottes was raised; a petition was prepared demanding the permanent abolition of the Commission of Twelve and the arrest of the Girondin leaders. Command of the National Guard was entrusted to François Hanriot, a former clerk, beadle, footman and brandy seller, one of the sans-culottes who took part in the assault on the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, ‘a coarse and irascible man who never opened his lips without bawling,’ according to a police report, ‘and remarkable for a harsh and grimacing countenance.’

Danton and the Committee of Public Safety did not intervene, but the Convention as a whole, even a majority of its Jacobin members, were reluctant to accede to the Insurrectionary Committee’s demands for the arrest of the Girondins, fearing that this might result in the collapse of the entire Convention. When, therefore, the petition was presented on 31 May, the demonstrators were told that the Commission of Twelve would be abolished, as they had demanded, but that the proposed arrest of the Girondins would be referred to the Committee of Public Safety.

The crowd went home dissatisfied and determined to make further protests. That day was a Friday and many of those who would have otherwise joined in the march on the Convention were unwilling to lose a day’s wages in order to do so. So the Insurrectionary Committee decided to march again on Sunday when all the workers would be free to come with them.

On that Sunday, 2 June, to the sound of drum beats, the roar of the alarm-gun, and the peal of the tocsin, which Marat had rung with his own hand in the tower of the Hotel de Ville the day before, the Convention was once again surrounded by shouting demonstrators, by tens of thousands of armed men from the sections and by the battalions of Hanriot’s National Guard supported by sixty cannon. A delegation of their leaders entered the theatre to ‘demand for the last time justice against the guilty’.

At these words Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, one of the Montagnards’ bravest and most outspoken opponents, a former professor of ecclesiastical law at Rennes, rose to protest against ‘this disgraceful intimidation of the country’s elected representatives’. To threats and catcalls from the galleries, to shouts of ‘Down! Down! He wants to start a civil war!’ from a group of Montagnards, Lanjuinais stood his ground, insisting, ‘So long as one is allowed to speak freely here, I will not let the character of representative of the people be degraded in my person! So far you have done nothing; you have permitted everything; you have given way to all that was required of you. An insurrectional committee meets. It prepares a revolt. It appoints commanders to lead it. And you do nothing to prevent it.’

Failing in their attempts to shout him down, several Montagnards rushed up to the rostrum and tried to drag Lanjuinais off it. But he clung on tenaciously until, some semblance of order having at last been restored by the President, Lanjuinais brought his protests to an end by proposing that the revolutionary authorities which had illegally established themselves in Paris should be dissolved. While a deputy of the Left was asking just how he suggested that this should be done, the members of the Insurrectionary Committee again stormed into the theatre, repeating their demands more forcefully than ever.

One deputy now suggested, as a compromise, that the Girondins, whose arrest the armed crowds outside were demanding, should all voluntarily resign their functions. Some agreed to do so, but others, including Lanjuinais, refused. ‘If the Convention compels me to resign, I will submit,’ said Charles Barbaroux, a deputy from Marseilles, supporting Lanjuinais. ‘But how can I resign my powers when a great number of people write to me and assure me that I have used them well and press me to continue to use them? I have sworn to die at my post, and I will keep my oath.’

During the course of the debate a number of deputies had tried to leave the theatre, but had been prevented. Some had been roughly man-handled, and one of them had returned to display in indignation his torn clothes. It was then suggested that, to prove that they were still free, the entire Convention should leave the theatre in a body. The deputies of the Right and the Plain all stood up and began to file out of the doors led by their handsome, debonair President, Hérault de Séchelles, an elegant and independently minded man who derided the fashion for dressing carelessly and who, questioned about his political affiliations, replied that he belonged ‘to the party that snapped its fingers at the others’.

The Montagnards remained at first in their places but, reproached for not daring to share the common danger, they, too, rose to their feet and followed the others outside on to the Carrousel.

Here Hanriot, wearing a hat bedecked with plumes, was sitting in the saddle at the head of his National Guard. ‘What do the people want?’ Hérault de Séchelles asked him. ‘The Convention is concerned only with their welfare.’

‘Hérault,’ Hanriot replied brusquely, ‘the people have not come here to listen to idle talk.’ They had come, he said, to demand that the guilty Girondins should be arrested.

‘Seize this rebel,’ Hérault de Séchelles commanded the National Guard, who merely looked at him as Hanriot backed his horse and bellowed at his artillerymen, ‘Gunners, to your cannon!’ The deputies quickly turned away. They tried to find some other avenue of escape, but the National Guard stood firm, some of them shouting, ‘Down with the Right! Long live the Montagnards! To the guillotine with the Girondins! Long live Marat!’

Marat himself, surrounded by a group of admiring boys, shouted to Hérault de Séchelles, ‘I can call on you and your followers to return to the posts which you have abandoned like cowards.’ Reluctant as he was to take Marat’s advice, the President realized that he really had no alternative but to retreat. So, while the crowds jeered and insulted them, he led the deputies back into the building where they continued to discuss the fate of the proscribed deputies. The Right refused to vote on the issue, protesting that they were no longer free agents, but the Montagnards ignored their protests. A decree was passed ordering the arrest of twenty-two leading Girondins. Their names, among them many of those who had dominated the earlier days of the Revolution, were read out by Marat, slowly and with evident relish.

By taking the initiative and running all the risks, the Enragés and sans-culottes had given the Jacobins the opportunity to assume control of Paris and vigorously to prosecute the war which the Girondins had provoked. But few of the demands of these forceful demonstrators from the Paris sections had yet been met, and the Jacobins on the Committee of Public Safety were now faced with the problem of restraining them as well as of suppressing the Insurrectionary Committee without arousing their enmity. The Committee of Public Safety had also now to find some way of preventing a reaction in favour of the Girondins – over seventy of whom had signed a protest against the Jacobin coup d’état–and of putting a stop to their campaign in the provinces where they were inciting people to protest against this fresh proof of Parisian terrorism and urging them to rise up against the Jacobin dictators in the capital and to impose fédéralisme on France.

During the next few weeks the federalist revolt in the provinces continued to spread until no less than sixty départements were infected and the rebels were in possession of several towns in the Loire valley. General Paoli established control of Corsica; parts of Normandy were in uproar; and civil war, such as that fought in the Vendée, raged round Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon. Some of the movement’s leaders hoped to see France divided into a number of more or less independent republics bound together by not too restrictive federal ties. Others were merely anxious to regain for their communities the independence and privileges of which the Revolution had deprived them. But all were strong in their condemnation of the Parisians’ intimidation of an elected national assembly.

The Committee of Public Safety attempted to quieten the protests and subdue the uprisings by making various economic concessions to the peasants and by drawing up a new constitution which – though it never came into operation and was perhaps not intended to – would demonstrate the good intentions of the central government by establishing the principle of universal suffrage and proclaiming the duty of society to provide work for those who could work, help for those who could not, and education for all. The federalist revolt failed, however, not because of these palliatives but because it lacked both unity of direction and the fervour of its opponents, and because, so long as there was still a real threat of foreign invasion, fédéralisme seemed an issue that must give way to national salvation.

The war was, indeed, the issue upon which all others turned. The Austrians had followed up their victory over Dumouriez by advancing towards the frontier fortresses of Condé and Valenciennes, both of which fell that summer. Custine was retreating before the Prussians; Spanish armies were threatening to cross the western frontier both north and south of the Pyrenees; the Sardinians were poised to retake Savoy. British troops began to lay siege to Dunkirk. At Lyons, the second most important city in France, royalists had assumed control and were busy executing the republicans whom they had displaced, and at Toulon counter-revolutionaries were soon to hand over arsenal, town and fleet to the British admiral, Lord Hood who, without the discharge of a single broadside, took under his command twenty-six of France’s sixty-one frigates.

The crisis appeared quite beyond the control of the original Committee of Public Safety, and Danton’s attempts to save France by diplomatic negotiations both with foreign powers and federalist leaders were by now utterly discredited. He and several others were thrown off the Committee; and on 27 July a new member joined it, a man who for long had played a dominant role in the affairs of the Jacobins and was now to dominate the Revolution itself.

Maximilien Robespierre was a small, thin, dogmatic man of thirty-two with thick, carefully brushed and powdered hair and a slightly pock-marked skin of a deathly greenish pallor. His grey eyes, too, had a greenish tint; and green was the shade he most often favoured in the choice of the clothes he wore with such attention to their immaculate neatness and precision of cut. He seemed extremely nervous and highly strung: he walked very fast on high-heeled shoes; a convulsive tic occasionally distorted the livid, pitted skin between his prominent cheekbones and the corners of his long thin lips; he bit his nails; he had a habit of sharply pushing his tinted spectacles up from his short-sighted eyes on to his bonily bulging brow. He rarely laughed and when he did so the sound seemed forced from him, hollow and dry. He appeared to be unremittingly conscious of his own virtues.

He came from Arras where he was born on 6 May 1758, the son of a lawyer who was himself the son and grandson of lawyers. In fact the Derobespierres, as their name was then written, had been well-known attorneys, notaries and barristers in north-eastern France for several generations, though Maximilien’s father had at first been intended for the Church. After spending some time as a novice at an abbey in Ponthieu, however, François Robespierre had decided that he had ‘no inclination for a religious life’ and, having studied law at Douai University, he joined his father’s practice. Unfortunately he had little inclination for the respectable life of an Arras lawyer either. He shamed his family by falling in love with the daughter of a brewer and by marrying her when she discovered herself to be pregnant. Maximilien was the first of the five children of this marriage.

Maximilien’s early years were fairly happy ones. His mother was kind and gentle, and his father, whose restless, unhappy nature was soothed by her devotion, prospered as a barrister. But then the death of his fifth child was quickly followed by that of the mother, and his father, overwhelmed by grief, sank into what Maximilien’s sister called his ‘odd behaviour again’. He took to drink and neglected his practice. Eventually, abandoning the children to the care of his sisters and his father-in-law, he left Arras and not long afterwards died in Germany.

At the time of his father’s departure Maximilien was eight years old. The cheerful, carefree little boy had now become quiet and grave. When he heard his mother spoken of, tears came into his eyes. He spent much of his time making lace, a craft which his mother had taught him, constructing models of farms and houses and churches, collecting pictures, showing the fruit of his careful labours to his younger sisters, anxious for their approval and praise. He was kind to these sisters. But if he joined in their games it was usually to tell them how they ought to be played; and when they asked him for one of his pet pigeons he refused to give it to them for fear that they might not look after it properly. In the end he relented. They left its cage out in a storm one night and it died. Between his tears, so Charlotte said, he poured reproaches upon the culprits for their carelessness.

At school he was a model pupil, attentive, hard-working and intelligent. And at the age of eleven he was awarded a scholarship to the famous Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Before leaving he gave his sisters all his toys. He would not give them the pigeons, though, entrusting these to someone more responsible.

In Paris his own responsibility was never in doubt. He was not one of the university’s brightest students, but there was scarcely another more conscientious, more thorough, more determined to succeed, readier to return to subjects which he felt he had not fully mastered or in which his examination results had proved disappointing.

He seems to have been a solitary student who made no intimate friends and was apparently content to spend most of his time alone in the private room with which his scholarship provided him. He was not much liked, his contemporaries resenting in particular his practice of reporting their misdemeanours to their masters. ‘He was a melancholy boy,’ one of them recalled. ‘I do not remember ever having seen him laugh.’ Even then he was excessively neat in his dress, and spent the little pocket money that was allowed him on lace cuffs and shoe buckles and on having his hair curled at the barbers.

No one who knew him then pictured him as a revolutionary. He professed – and for several years continued to profess – his belief in the King as a ‘young and wise monarch’, part of whose ‘august character’ was a ‘sacred passion for the happiness of the people’. And when the King and Queen passed by the gates of the Collège Louis-le-Grand in the summer of 1775 to be greeted by its masters and students, Maximilien Derobespierre was deputed to make the speech of welcome in Latin. He did so most respectfully, kneeling in the rain by the open door of the royal carriage while the King remained seated inside, shy and confused, not knowing what to say when the speech was finished, so saying nothing.

Yet the masters at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, who included Jean le Rond d’Alembert, a contributor to the Encyclopédie, were anxious to instil into their pupils not so much the glories of the Bourbon dynasty as the virtues of the Roman Republic and the principles of the philosophes. And Derobespierre was soon reading Rousseau’s Social Contrat with profound attention and respect. He did not care for the agnosticism of Voltaire and clung to his belief in God and the immortality of the soul. But his former observances as a good practising Catholic were now abandoned for ever.

After nine years at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, Derobespierre began to specialize in legal studies, and in June 1780, at the age of twenty-three, he received his degree. He was awarded a leaving prize of 600 livres, the highest sum ever given to a graduate of Louis-le-Grand, and with this he endeavoured to establish himself practice in Paris. But the weeks passed; no clients came to him; and within four months he was back in Arras. He rented a small house which he shared with his sister, the pretty and possessive Charlotte, and, like his father and grandfather before him, was admitted as a barrister to the Superior Council of Artois. Helped by a friend of the family who brought him his first brief, he soon established a reputation for himself as a clever, honest, fastidious young man, never greedy for large fees, anxious always to do his best for his clients, and, unlike Danton, avoiding cases in which he might be expected to propound or defend an unworthy cause.

But if he was recognized as a man who was not set upon making money, everyone who knew him realized how determined he was to make himself famous. Having won one well-publicized case, he persuaded his client to pay for the cost of having his pleadings printed. Reluctantly the client agreed, and the printed copies went off to professional colleagues, to relations and acquaintances, and to celebrated men he did not know, including Benjamin Franklin whom he addressed in his covering letter as ‘the most brilliant scholar in the universe’.

It was, however, admiration for his gifts as a writer rather than for his skill as an advocate which he principally desired. And it was in the Academy of Arras, to which he was elected in 1783, that he sought to shine even more than in the courts of law. This Academy, like similar establishments in other provincial cities, was a kind of literary and scientific club whose members read papers to each other, debated the important questions of the day, and held intellectual competitions for the winners of which occasional prizes were awarded. Derobespierre soon made himself a leading member, and within three years of his election he was appointed its director with the responsibility of presiding over meetings and making official speeches on its behalf.

By this time he had seen his work in print once more. The Academy of Metz had offered prizes for the best essays submitted on the theme of whether or not a criminal’s family should share his shame. Derobespierre had immediately put his eager mind to work, and had submitted an entry which had been awarded the second prize. He had spent the money he won in having an extended version of his essay printed and distributed in a booklet of sixty pages. He had also submitted an entry for a competition later set by the Academy of Amiens. This did not win a prize, but its author had had it printed and circulated all the same.

During his time as director of the Academy of Arras, when he was one of the three judges appointed to consider the entries, no prizes were awarded to any of the essays submitted in its competitions. They were, indeed, more likely to be rejected with some severe strictures upon their merits by the Academy director who, jealous as always of those whom he considered his rivals, pronounced upon one essay that it was as ill-organized as it was undeveloped; that it put forward nothing either new or useful; that it was ‘badly written and badly presented’; that its only merit was that it was short.

Derobespierre’s sister, Charlotte, described her brother’s daily life and habits at this time in a light which softens the rather harsh and disagreeable portrait others have drawn of the dapper, little, ambitious, pushing lawyer, marching so quickly and so purposefully through the cobbled streets of Arras. According to Charlotte, he woke up early and was out of bed by seven o’clock, sometimes by six. He worked for an hour or two before getting dressed, an operation which was performed with the utmost care and attention. Before putting on his coat his hair was brushed, dressed and powdered by the barber who now came to the house every morning for this purpose. After a meagre breakfast of bread and milk, he set off for the law courts, returning in time for an almost equally meagre evening meal with which he drank a little wine, and that much watered. He seems to have been almost completely uninterested in food, living mainly on bread, fruit and coffee. He had a passion for pastry, but as this gave him indigestion he could not indulge himself, and he never appeared to enjoy anything else. A fellow-guest at a dinner party said that when eating he looked like a cat lapping vinegar. Whenever Charlotte asked him what he would like for a meal he replied that he did not care.

Still, she did not find him either difficult or morose. Admittedly he was usually reserved and quiet, withdrawing to an armchair in a corner whenever other people in the room began to gossip about their neighbours or produced a pack of cards. Charlotte remembered one evening when she and her brother had been out visiting friends. On the way home he started walking at an even faster pace than usual, leaving her trailing far behind him. By the time he arrived home he had forgotten that she had been with him. He let himself into the house and settled down to work in his study. ‘I went into his study,’ Charlotte said, ‘and found him already in his dressing-gown, working very hard. He asked me with a look of some surprise where I had been to arrive back so late.’

In 1789 Robespierre, as he was beginning to call himself, was elected to the Estates General as one of the deputies for Artois. Although he was eventually to speak more than five hundred times during the life of the National Assembly and to gain wide respect as one of the shrewdest and most incorruptible men of the Left, he found it difficult at first to obtain a hearing. His voice was weak; his views unacceptable to most of his fellow-deputies; his rather self-righteous manner irritating; his habit of blinking his eyes and never looking directly at those to whom he spoke, disconcerting; his self-confidence not proof against the rowdy interruptions and catcalls with which speakers in those early days of the Assembly had to contend. ‘Monsieur de Robespierre took the floor,’ runs an account in the Courrier of one of his failures, ‘but the Assembly having shown its impatience, the honourable member withdrew with tears in his eyes.’ ‘He was interrupted again,’ according to another account describing a different occasion, ‘and, at last…he left the rostrum. The President remonstrated with the Assembly that this conduct was not fair. Monsieur de Robespierre was invited to take the rostrum once more. He did so. But whatever excellent things he might have had to say, the rude opposition he had experienced had put him off his stroke.’

When the Assembly moved to Paris, however, Robespierre’s voice was heard with greater respect and his sincerity unquestioningly admitted. ‘That man will go far,’ Mirabeau said of him. ‘He believes what he says.’ The public, too, admired him and listened to him attentively, and it was to them that his speeches were principally addressed. ‘I was always looking beyond the narrow confines of the house of legislation,’ he confessed. ‘When I spoke to the body of representatives, my aim was above all to be heard by the nation and by humanity. I wanted to arouse, and to arouse for ever in the hearts of citizens the feeling of the dignity of man.’ His only regret was that the Manège was not bigger; he would have preferred a debating chamber ‘open to twelve thousand spectators’. For, ‘under the eyes of so many witnesses neither corruption, intrigue nor perfidy would dare show themselves. Only the general will would be consulted. The voice of the nation alone would be heard’.

Robespierre’s new fame and influence in the Assembly and at the Jacobin Club made no alteration in the extreme – it seemed to some ostentatious – simplicity of his life. He still dressed with excessive neatness and was often to be seen in a smart green striped nankeen coat, a blue striped waistcoat and a crisp cravat of red and white stripes. His hair seemed more neatly brushed and carefully powdered than ever. But once his appearance had been attended to, he seemed to have little use for the generous allowance of eighteen livres a day which the deputies had voted for themselves. He shared a small third-floor apartment in the Rue Saintonge with another bachelor, and appeared to take no respite from his work except for an occasional walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, where he fed the sparrows, or a visit to the theatre where – fortunately for him since there were so many of them – he ‘liked declamatory tragedies’.

After the day of the Champ de Mars, when warrants had been issued for the arrest of several left-wing leaders, and various members of the Jacobin Club had gone into hiding, a master joiner, Maurice Duplay, who belonged to the Club, suggested that Robespierre would be safer with him than living so far away in the Rue Saintonge. So, after trying life with the Duplays for a few weeks, he moved his belongings and his beloved dog, Brount, from his apartment and settled in at 398 Rue Saint-Honoré with the Duplays who treated him as an honoured guest. Both the father and mother, as well as the three daughters who lived at home with them, tried ‘to detect in Robespierre’s eyes all his wishes,’ so one visitor thought, ‘in order to anticipate them immediately’. According to his sister, Robespierre was ‘extremely sensitive to all this kind of thing’; and it was certainly obvious to everyone who came to the house and found the Duplays’ distinguished guest sitting at the dining-table at which it was his practice always to say grace, that he greatly enjoyed the fussy attentions which were paid to him and that he was not in the least averse to having pictures of himself displayed in every room. One of the girls, Eleonore, a fat, plain girl of twenty-four, was particularly attentive. It was rumoured that they were engaged to be married, but his sister doubted this: ‘Overwhelmed with business and work as my brother was, and entirely taken up with his career,’ she asked, ‘how could he think of love or marriage?’ Indeed, Robespierre seemed to have as little interest in women as in food: some said he hated women.

There was certainly no doubt that he was preoccupied with his career. At the end of March 1790 he was elected President of the Jacobin Club and thereafter he was recognized as potentially its most influential member. He was largely instrumental in keeping it alive when so many of its members left to form the rival and more moderate Feuillant Club in protest against the petition for the King’s dethronement. And he received further acclaim both inside and outside the Jacobin Club when the military disasters of 1792 seemed to justify his early opposition to the war in which, he predicted, France would ‘be betrayed, thus defeated’. His strictures upon Brissot and the Girondins carried all the more weight because of these prescient warnings, and now that new military campaigns had to be fought and Danton appeared to be lost in his web of ineffective diplomacy, Robespierre came forward as the man of the hour. He possessed a truly Machiavellian skill, so one of his rivals said, ‘in dividing men and sowing differences between them, of enticing others to test the ground for him and then either abandoning them or supporting them as prudence or ambition dictated’. Some held it against him that he was never to be seen when the Revolution needed journée and men and women took to the streets. The Girondins, taking note of the fact that he played no part in that momentous day of 10 August when the sans-culottes attacked the Tuileries, accused him of having hidden in a cellar. And it was also remarked that on the day the King was guillotined he remained in his sparsely furnished room in the Rue Saint-Honoré; that he asked the Duplays to close the shutters and the gates; and that he replied, when asked by the daughters why he required this to be done, ‘Because there is something that is going to take place today that it is not seemly that you should see.’ As Marat observed, ‘Robespierre avoids any group where there is unrest. He grows pale at the sight of a sabre.’ All the same, in the summer of 1793 he was recognized as being the potential saviour of revolutionary France. He was still an uninspiring orator, but there was something in his feline presence which commanded respect and defied inattention.

Robespierre came slowly forward [recorded a man who heard him speak at the Jacobin Club that year]. He was one of the few men who still wore the clothes that had been in fashion before the Revolution. He resembled a tailor of the ancien régime more man anything else…His delivery was slow and measured. His sentences were so long that every time he stopped to raise his spectacles one supposed that he had finished, but after looking slowly and intently over the audience in every part of the room he would readjust his spectacles and then add some more phrases to those sentences which were already of inordinate length…It was difficult to take one’s own eyes off him.

Under Robespierre’s persuasive leadership the Committee of Public Safety began to prosecute the war against foreign enemies and native rebels with effective vigour, but his Government had to contend with powerful opponents inside Paris as well as beyond its walls. The Insurrectionary Committee which had organized the journées of 29 May to 2 June had been successfully dissolved as a condition of the Government’s offer to honour a promise of forty sous a day as compensation for the sans-culottes’ loss of wages during the demonstrations. The Enragés who had been the guiding force behind the Insurrectionary Committee were, however, still a troublesome group. Both Varlet and Roux continued to castigate the Government for its failure to attend to the needs of the poor, for not stamping out speculation, and for declining to decree the death penalty for hoarding.

‘Why have you not climbed from the third to the ninth floor of the houses of this revolutionary city?’ Roux demanded, as he harangued the Convention. ‘You would have been moved by the tears and sighs of an immense population without food and clothing, brought to such distress and misery by speculation and hoarding, because the laws have been cruel to the poor, because they have been made only by the rich and for the rich…You must not be afraid of the hatred of the rich – in other words, of the wicked. You must not be afraid to sacrifice political principle for the salvation of the people, which is the supreme law.’

Encouraged by the Enragés, crowds of people took the law into their own hands, protesting that while wages had increased, the cost of living had outpaced them, demanding cheaper wine, and a reduction in the cost of butter, which had more than doubled in price since 1790 and of soap, the price of which had almost quintupled. Grocers’ and chandlers’ shops were invaded and their owners forced to sell goods at what was considered a fair price. Worried by the spreading incidence of this taxation populaire, the Committee of Public Safety took action against Roux who was expelled from the Cordeliers Club, repeatedly mauled in the Jacobin press, and eventually disowned by his section. Yet, while Roux was successfully discredited and his influence irreparably damaged, other Enragés continued to attack the Committee of Public Safety, to demand price controls and more severe punishments for hoarders and counter-revolutionary suspects. Their influence was much increased after 13 July when a devoted adherent of the Girondins committed a murder.

This was Charlotte Corday, a tall, strong, mystical yet practical young woman from a noble but poor Norman family, a descendant of the dramatist, Corneille. She had been educated at a convent at Caen and had then gone to live with an aunt in whose house she studied Voltaire and Plutarch and those other authors whose works had exercised so profound an influence on the young Manon Roland. When, after the fall of the Girondins, several of their leaders fled to Normandy to advocate fédéralisme, she attended their meetings, fell under their influence, undertook to work for them in Paris and, without their knowledge, took it into her head to assassinate the man she held principally responsible for their fall, Jean Paul Marat.

On her arrival in Paris she took a room in the Hôtel de la Providence in the Rue des Vieux Augustins and wrote a letter to Marat: ‘Citizen, I have just arrived from Caen. Your love for your native place doubtless makes you desirous of learning the events which have occurred in that part of the republic. I shall call at your house in about an hour. Have the goodness to receive me and give me a brief interview. I will put you in a condition to render great service to France.’

Marat refused to see her both on that occasion and when she called a second time with a promise to reveal important secrets and presenting herself as a victim of counter-revolutionary plots. But she persisted, calling for the third time at 30 Rue des Cordeliers on 13 July. She was ‘dressed in a spotted négligé costume and wore a high hat with a black cockade and three rows of black braid,’ according to Laurent Bas, who worked on L’Ami du peuple and was in Marat’s office folding copies of the newspaper at the time. ‘She descended from a hackney cab and asked to speak to Citizen Marat. She was carrying a fan in her hand. The concierge replied that he was not available at the moment. She said that this was the third time she had called and that it was most tiresome not to be admitted to him…Citizeness Marat then went to ask her brother if the person was to be admitted and Citizen Marat said she was.’

She came into the room with a sharp dinner-knife which she had bought the day before for two francs concealed in the bodice of her dress together with her baptismal certificate and a paper entitled ‘Adresse aux Français’ which explained the political motives behind her intended deed. She found Marat lying in a high-walled copper bath wrapped in towels, for he could now only thus find relief from the pain and irritation of the skin disease which was slowly putrefying his flesh. She told him what was happening at Caen, giving him the names of men she said were working there against the Jacobins. He picked up a pen from the board upon which he had been writing and copied the names down, commenting, ‘They shall soon all be guillotined.’ At these words, Charlotte Corday took out her knife and plunged it into his chest, piercing the left lung and the aorta. At his cry of ‘À moi, ma chère amie!’ his distraught mistress, Simone Évrard, rushed into the room and seeing the blood pouring from the wound, put her hand over it in an attempt to stop the flow. But Marat was already dead. His murderess calmly walked out of the room and, although she seems to have had no intention of escape, Bas seized a chair and with it knocked her to the ground. She got up and he ‘clutched her by the breasts, threw her down and struck her’. ‘Je m’en fous!’ she cried. ‘The deed is done; the monster is dead!’

To the jealous Robespierre’s disgust, Marat was now the heroic martyr of the extreme Left. His coffin was followed by young girls in white dresses who strewed flowers upon it, by boys carrying branches of cypress, by deputations from the sections, and by Montagnards who displayed or affected the deepest sorrow. Some members of the Jacobin Club had his bust placed on a pedestal in the Convention; his heart was suspended in a porphry urn from the ceiling of the Cordeliers Club; his ashes were later given a place of honour in the Pantheon; his mistress, ‘the widow Marat’, was granted a pension. Streets, squares and no less than thirty-seven towns in various parts of France were renamed after him; poems and hymns were composed in his honour; in some schools children were told to make the sign of the cross when his name was mentioned. His portrait, ‘Marat Assassinated’, by a fellow-Montagnard, the ugly Jacques Louis David – who had voted for the death of the King, his former patron – was acknowledged to be one of the great masterpieces of the Revolution. The Enragés claimed him as their patron saint, founded newspapers with the titles which he had chosen for his own, and invoked his name in pressing their demands upon the government. And the Committee of Public Safety deemed it prudent to give way to some of these demands by introducing the death penalty for hoarders, allocating a large sum of money for the purchase of grain, and establishing warehouses in various parts of Paris for its storage.

The Enragés were not the only influential critics of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee also had to contend with the followers of Danton, who, far from being a spent political force, had been elected President of the Convention a fortnight after losing his seat on the Committee of Public Safety. Perhaps in the hope that Robespierre would show himself incapable of exercising such a burdensome responsibility, Danton proposed that the Committee should now be given the omnipotence of a provisional Government of France backed by a grant of a hundred million livres. This proposal was rejected, but it was clear that the Dantonists were a strong and devious group whose activities could not be ignored.

Nor could the activities of another group which became known as the Hébertists after the editor of that extremist newspaper, Le Père Duchesne, which defamed the Queen and Madame Roland be ignored. Hébert, who considered himself ill-used by the Jacobin leadership which had failed to reward him for his help in the overthrow of the Girondins, presented himself to the Paris sections as the most eloquent supporter of radical proposals for the exemplary punishment of speculators, the round-up of suspects, stricter price controls, the purge of all noble officers still remaining in the army, and the trial of the Girondins and of the Queen.

Prodded and harassed by both Dantonists and Hébertists, the Committee of Public Safety became more zealous than ever in their conduct of the war against both foreign enemies and provincial rebels. General Custine was dismissed from his command, arraigned before the Revolutionary Tribunal and accused of having pitied Louis XVI, prevented the circulation of Le Père Duchesne in the army, denigrated Robespierre and Marat, ‘surrounded himself with aristocratic officers and never had good republicans at his table’. He was sentenced to death and guillotined. General de Biron was also executed, while Pitt was execrated as ‘the enemy of the human race’. The devastation of the Vendeé was authorized; the federalist leaders were denounced as traitors, negotiations with them being abruptly terminated; troops were ordered to overthrow the royalist counter-revolutionaries in Lyons; the trial of the Queen was authorized; so was the arrest of all enemy aliens not resident in France on 14 July 1789. Then, following the election of Lazare Carnot to the Committee of Public Safety, the Convention called out the entire population of the country to fight for the Revolution in a levée en masse.

Carnot, the practical, unflaggingly energetic organizer of the Revolution’s victory, had been a captain in the Engineers when elected to the National Assembly as a deputy for the Pas-de-Calais. Frequently employed as a military commissioner, he had displayed a remarkable talent for organization, exposition and detecting talent. Although still only a captain at forty, he was recognized as a brilliant soldier, capable of building an army of conscripts that could overcome the more carefully drilled and far more experienced forces of the old European powers. Carnot, of course, was well aware that general and total mobilization was not immediately practicable for it would be impossible either to train or equip so vast a host. The decree enforcing it was largely propagandist in intent. For the moment, therefore, only unmarried men and childless widowers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were recruited into the army. But the rest of the population, both male and female, were liable to be called up for any kind of work which was held to be conducive to the war effort, and funds were provided for the construction of armaments factories. A target was set for the manufacture of a thousand muskets a day.

From this moment until mat when the enemy shall be driven from the territory of the French republic [ran a decree of 23 August], all the French people shall be in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. The young men will go forth to fight. The married men will forge the arms and transport the supplies. The women will make tents and clothes and act as nurses in the hospitals. The children will make lint from rags. The old men will be carried to the public places to excite the courage of the warriors, to preach hatred of kings and love of the republic.

Yet, vigorous and determined as Carnot, Robespierre and the other members of the Committee of Public Safety were now proving themselves to be, the Dantonists and Hébertists still loudly voiced the popular complaints which were exacerbated in the late summer by another bread shortage caused by a severe and lengthy drought. And at the beginning of September a march upon the Hôtel de Ville of workers demanding bread and higher wages was seized upon by Hébert as an opportunity to bring pressure to bear upon the Committee. He asked the workers to gather together the next day, 5 September, to march to the Convention.

The march took place as planned. Hundreds of demonstrators invaded the Convention, milling around the table upon which the stillborn Constitution lay enshrined in a case and gazing up at the canvases on either side of the President’s seat which depicted the murders of Marat and of Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, an enormously rich former President of the Convention whose assassination had also been portrayed by David.

Demonstrators and Jacobin deputies vied with each other in the advocacy of radical policies and the expression of sans-culotte sentiments. A representative of the Commune, crying, ‘No more quarter, no more mercy for traitors…the day of justice and wrath has arrived’, called for the immediate creation of a revolutionary army. Danton, endorsing a decree already passed for the arrest of suspects and the intensification of repression, aroused loud cheers as he paid ‘homage’ to the ‘sublime people’ and demanded that every citizen should be given a musket, that a minimum of a hundred million livres should be voted for the manufacture of armaments and that working men who could not afford to attend the meeting of their sections should be compensated for their loss of wages whenever they did so. A delegation from the Jacobin Club, in which Hébertists were now dominant, proposed that ‘Terreur be the order of the day’.

The Convention gave way to nearly all of the Hébertists’ demands. On 6 September the extremist deputies, Billaud-Varenne and the equally ruthless Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, an actor and playwright, were both admitted to the Committee of Public Safety. Soon afterwards prices were fixed by the maximum général. And by the middle of the month arrangements had been made for the arrest of all ‘suspects’ by a law which at last established their identity and included among their number even those who were no more than passively opposed to the Revolution, or who had not been able to obtain ‘certificates of good citizenship’ from the notoriously prejudiced and corrupt Vigilance Committees of their sections. The guillotine was soon given much more work to do.