A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (39 page)

The 200 year litany of complaints about the executions of aristocrats and royalists must be put in perspective. Executions had been a continual occurrence under the old regime. Poor people could be hanged for stealing a piece of cloth. As Mark Twain once put it, ‘There were two reigns of terror: one lasted several months, the other 1,000 years.’ The army marching towards Paris from the north would have installed its own terror, much greater than that of the Jacobins, if it had been able to take the city, and it would have used the royalists and aristocrats to point out ‘ring leaders’ for instant execution. The ‘moderates’ and royalists who took over Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon established tribunals that ‘ordered patriots guillotined or hanged’. The results ‘were piteous’
³⁹
—the death toll in Lyons was said to be 800.
⁴⁰
In the Vendée a royalist priest reported that ‘each day was marked by bloody expeditions’ against republican sympathisers. Even to have attended a mass presided over by one of the clergy who accepted the republic was grounds ‘to be imprisoned and then murdered or shot under the pretext that the prisons were too full’.
⁴¹
At Machecoul 524 republicans were shot.
⁴²
On top of this, there was the enormous death toll in the battles on France’s northern borders, in a war begun by the monarchists and Girondins and joined with enthusiasm by all enemies of the revolution, at home and abroad—a war in which French officers sympathetic to the other side might deliberately send thousands of soldiers to their deaths.

The victims of the counter-revolution and the war do not figure in the horror stories about the revolution retailed by popular novelists, or even in Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
. For such writers, the death of a respectable gentleman or lady is a tragedy, that of a republican artisan or seamstress of no concern.

This was essentially the argument Robespierre put to the convention in late September 1793. He was justifying punitive measures against one of the republic’s generals, Houchard, for retreating unnecessarily and causing a military disaster. ‘In two years 100,000 men have been butchered because of treason and weakness,’ he said. ‘It is weakness for traitors which is destroying us’.
⁴³
It was an argument which won over many of the deputies who vacillated over whether to back Jacobin measures.

The worst bloodshed during the revolution did not take place in Paris, where the revolutionaries never lost control, but in fighting to reconquer regions held by its opponents. There were a handful of cases where the republican armies took bloody revenge: in Lyons a revolutionary commission passed 1,667 death sentences; in the Vendée rebels taken prisoner carrying weapons were summarily executed; in Nantes 2,000 to 3,000 supporters of the revolt were executed by drowning in the River Loire; in Toulon there were mass executions of those blamed for handing the city to the British.
⁴⁴

There is another aspect of the terror which has to be examined. This is the terror which the revolutionary leaders directed at each other in the course of 1793-94. It began with the antagonism between the Girondins and the Jacobins. The Girondins had shown in the charges they had laid against Marat their own willingness to resort to repression. Nevertheless, the first Girondin leaders arrested after the establishment of the Jacobin government had simply been placed under house arrest. By then leaving Paris to stir revolt in the provinces, they proved this was a disagreement which could not be settled by words alone. Robespierre and Danton came to feel that any Girondin left free would behave in the same way. Vigorous repression—and in conditions of civil war, that meant execution—was the only way to prevent them doing so.

But for the middle class Jacobins, the same logic which applied to the Girondins applied, in conditions of civil war, to certain other republicans. As far as Robespierre was concerned his own allies, the
sans-culottes
of Paris, were beginning to become a problem. They had done wonders in providing mass support for the revolution in the streets. But they were also antagonising the very social group from which Robespierre and other Jacobin leaders came—those people of property wavering over whether to fight for the republic. At the very moment he was adopting the
sans-culottes
’ call for terror, Robespierre began a crackdown on
sans-culottes
organisations—in mid-September Jacques Roux was arrested; in October Claire Lacombe’s Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was dissolved; and finally, in March, Hébert and several others were guillotined.

The ‘extremists’ who put forward demands that could only frighten the respectable, propertied middle class were not Robespierre’s only problem. He also feared the revolution could be destroyed by those who put personal interests and inclinations above the needs of the moment. This applied especially to some of the circle around Danton—a man capable of enormous revolutionary courage and enthusiasm, but also very attracted by the rewards available from mixing with dubious wealthy figures. It was no coincidence that his friends were involved in a major corruption case concerning the French East India Company. When Danton began to draw around him an informal ‘indulgent’ faction in January and February 1794, Robespierre began to fear he was following the path taken by the Girondins nine months earlier. Five days after the execution of Hébert, it was the turn of Danton, Desmoulins and others to be arrested, brought before the tribunal and executed.

Robespierre and his close allies felt beleaguered. Their own class was half attracted to the forces of counter-revolution. A class based on profit making, its members were continually subject to the temptation of bribery and corruption. Only fear of drastic measures could keep the middle class on the path to victory. Robespierre believed he stood for a new form of society in which the essential values of the middle class would be realised. He gave expression to this feeling by identifying his goal as ‘virtue’. But he could not achieve this without disciplining the middle class itself, and sometimes very harshly. As he put it in February 1794, ‘Without virtue terror is useless; without terror, virtue is powerless.’

What is more, the terror made the state the focus for revolutionary feeling and action. It served to divert the
sans-culottes
masses away from a path full of danger for the middle class—the path of increasingly taking direction of the revolution into lower class hands. It was much better for the middle class politicians if the
sans-culottes
were dancing the
Carmargnole
while watching the state’s guillotine at work than if they were arguing and acting on their own behalf. The terror came to function not only to defend the revolution, but also to symbolise the way in which the state was being centralised by a political group balancing between the masses and the conciliatory elements in the bourgeoisie.

By the spring of 1794 the Jacobins around Robespierre ruled alone, winding down the popular organisations in Paris—purging the commune, dissolving the
sections
, abolishing the commissioners who investigated food hoarding. Government power was centralised as never before in the hands of an apparently unified group of men, no longer beset by factions to the left and right. But such a centralised power could only get its way by resorting more than ever to repression. As Soboul explains:

The centralisation of the terror created a momentum of its own. The Jacobin core began to feel anyone not with them must be against them—and the feeling was, in part, justified. There was growing antagonism towards them among their own middle class as it chafed at the restraints on its freedoms, and there was antagonism from many of the
sans-culottes
followers of Roux and Hébert. Dealing with such antagonism by terror only served to increase the isolation of the Jacobin core still further. But calling off the terror threatened to give a free hand to those who wanted vengeance on the Jacobin core.

Robespierre vacillated over what to do. He tried to hold the terror in check in certain provinces—for instance, by recalling to Paris the man who had been responsible for the mass drownings in Nantes. But then he allowed the terror in Paris to escalate massively in May 1794, so that the next three months saw as many executions as the preceding year. For the first time, the accused were denied the right to a defence, juries could convict on nothing more than ‘moral guilt’, and people who might have no connection with one another were tried in groups on the grounds that they might have ‘conspired’ in the prisons. It was at this time that the great pamphleteer of the American Revolution and of British plebeian radicalism, Tom Paine, only narrowly avoided execution—his crime being that he was a ‘foreigner’ who had been friendly with some of the Girondins (as, of course, had most of the Jacobin leadership at some point in the past).

Thermidor and after

Jacobin methods succeeded as the Girondin ones had not in defending the revolutionary regime. By the summer of 1794 the revolutionary army was showing itself to be probably the best fighting force Europe had ever seen. The revolts in the provinces had been smashed, the French army was in occupation of Brussels and moving northwards, and the republic did indeed seem ‘one and indivisible’.

Yet these very successes created an insuperable problem for the Jacobins. They had been able to raise themselves up by balancing between left and right—and in the process take very harsh measures against sections of their own class—because large sections of the middle class had seen no alternative a few months before. This was why, month after month, the convention had voted to renew the powers of the Committee of Public Safety. But the victories led to a growing feeling that dictatorial rule was no longer necessary.

Robespierre had made many enemies in the previous months—‘indulgent’ sympathisers of Danton, emissaries who had been recalled from the provinces for carrying repression too far, former allies of Hébert, and those who had never really broken with the Girondins but were afraid to say so. On 27 July 1794 they united to ambush Robespierre in the midst of a debate in the Convention. A delegate moved that an arrest warrant be issued against him and his close allies, and the Convention voted unanimously in favour.

The Jacobins made a last attempt to save themselves by calling on the masses to rise in a revolutionary
journée
. But they themselves had dissolved the committees and banned the
sans-culottes
papers that could organise such a rising. They had lifted the ban on speculation in food and, only four days before, had published maximum wage rates which meant a cut in earnings for many artisans. Only 16 of the 48
sections
of Paris sent forces to join the attempted rising, and they were left standing around for hours without proper leadership before dispersing. Robespierre and 21 of his allies were executed on 28 July, followed by another 71 men the next day—the largest mass execution in the history of the revolution.

Robespierre had shouted out in the convention, ‘The republic is a lost cause. The brigands are now triumphant.’ He was right in the sense that the great movement of the last five years had come to an end. Thermidor, the name of the month in which Robespierre was overthrown in the republic’s revolutionary calendar, has ever since signified internal counter-revolution.

The allies who had overthrown him did not stay long in power. The months which followed saw those who hated the revolution gain a new confidence. Groups of rich young thugs, the
jeunesse dorée
(golden youth) began to take over the streets of Paris, attacking anyone who tried to defend the revolutionary ideals or who showed lack of respect for their ‘betters’. A mob of them forced the Jacobin club to close. A constitutional amendment brought in a new property qualification for the vote. A ‘white terror’ led to a wave of executions of former revolutionaries and the victimisation of very many others. Two brief
sans-culottes
risings in April and May 1795 showed that the poor, given a chance, were more than a match for the
jeunesse dorée
, but they were crushed by forces loyal to the Thermidorians. Émigrés began to return to the country and boast that the monarchy would soon be back. The pretender to the throne, the future Louis XVIII, insisted from exile that he wanted to bring back the old regime, complete with its three estates, and punish all those who had taken part in the revolution, including the Thermidorians. Then in October 1795 the royalists staged a rising of their own in Paris. The Thermidorians, terrified, began rearming Jacobins and calling on
sans-culottes
for help before the army—especially a rising officer, a one-time Jacobin called Napoleon Bonaparte—came to their assistance. Fearful of a full-blooded monarchic restoration, the Thermidorians agreed to concentrate power in the hands of a Directory of five men. For four years the Directory was pulled first in one direction then in another, all the time allowing more power to accede to Napoleon, whose base in the army provided a bastion against both the royalists and any rebirth of popular Jacobinism, until in 1799 Napoleon staged a coup which in effect gave him dictatorial power. In 1804 he had the pope crown him emperor, ruling with the support both of some former Jacobins and some of the aristocrats who had returned from exile. Finally, in 1814 and 1815, defeat for his armies allowed the other European powers to reinstitute the Bourbon monarchy. Robespierre’s final, desperate warning seemed vindicated.

Yet in two respects he was wrong. The revolution was over after Thermidor 1794, but many of the changes it had brought remained. Napoleon’s regime was built on consolidation of many of these changes: the ending of feudal dues; the creation of an independent peasantry; the ending of internal customs posts; the creation of a uniform national administration; above all, the determination of government policy in the light of bourgeois goals rather than dynastic or aristocratic ones. Napoleon’s army could conquer much of Europe for a period precisely because it was not the army of the old regime. It was an army organised and motivated in ways established during the revolution, particularly its Jacobin phase. Its best generals were men who had risen through the ranks on merit in the revolutionary period—Napoleon even relied on a former Jacobin ‘terrorist’ to run his police.