Robespierre: Virtue, Violence and Terror
Abstract
The Terror became the apotheosis of revolutionary desire for a radical utopian restructuring or renewal of society within the framework of war both within and without. Historians have split over the utilitarian necessity of the Terror insofar as how the implemented policies were actually mandatory to the survival of the state. Ultimately, Robespierre, both in his utopian obsession with societal virtue as well as with existential enemies, conflated violence with virtue. In doing so, he used the Terror to not only rid the radical revolutionary government of foreign and domestic enemies but also to remake or ‘regenerate’ society into a permanent virtuous revolution.
AnneMarie Dickey
The Reign of Terror is possibly the most discussed, most recognized and certainly the most mythologized period of the French Revolution. The duration was short; lasting only from September 5, 1793 to July 28, 1794. Nonetheless, it oversaw a wave of inquisitorial state spying, mass executions, genocidal warfare in the Vendee’ and a despotic, dictatorial executive committee that seems unthinkable in the context of a revolution ostensibly predicated on freedom from tyranny. The utopian and Manichean
Simon Schama, Citizens (New York: Knopf, 1989), 693. underpinnings of the revolution had been evident since the storming of the Bastille and the street executions of Foullon de Doué and Berthier de Sauvigny.
Ibid., 403-406. Extra-legal killings, especially gruesome street executions of this sort, became foundational to the pattern of virtuous violence that Robespierre came to defend as the Revolution proceeded apace. The release of prisoners and rebellion against the old social order provided the utopian promise of better things to come, while the gruesome extra-legal executions of “enemies of the people” defined the reaction of the revolution against enemies who would be given no quarter.
Historians tend to fall into two camps concerning the Terror. The first holds that if there had been no revolt from troublesome Catholic revanchists in the Vendee’, coupled with invasions of France by foreign armies during a constitutional crisis (which led to the execution of the King), then the Terror need never have occurred. The second, including Simon Schama and Francois Furet, see violence as an inherent aspect of the Revolution and ideology, particularly that of the Montagnards and the Herbertists, was a major causative factor in the evolution of the Terror.
Peter McPhee The French Revolution: 1789-1799 (NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), 99 In this view, the radical Jacobins substitute the Catholic religion associated with the Ancien Regime for something entirely of their own making and refuse to tolerate heresy or any deviation. Therefore, the Terror, and virtuous violence become a purifying and even edifying experience that will renew and strengthen the Republic by ridding the body politic of all enemies.
These explanations still do not entirely encompass the very personal motivations of the men who ran the retributive machinery of the Revolution and the Terror, nor those of the one man, Maximillian Robespierre, who became increasingly responsible for and associated with the policies of Terror during his tenure on the Committee of Public Safety. In the bloody radical coup of 10 August, 1792 as well as in the September Massacres that shortly followed, Robespierre consistently excused or minimized the bloodshed in terms of necessity under the control of the virtuous People who did as they must. In this light, the proximate causal justifications for the Terror as stated cannot account for policies of the Terror as they developed over the radical phase of the Revolution and then were actually implemented, especially when Robespierre’s record of conflating violence and virtue is examined.
Ultimately, Robespierre became consumed with utopian obsession of societal virtue as well as Manichean conflict between the ultimate good of the Revolution and the overwhelming evil of existential enemies engaged in conspiracies and plots. Robespierre’s career arc of violence and virtue demonstrates how he used the Revolution, the violence of the people and the Terror in particular to not only rid the radical revolutionary government of foreign and domestic enemies but also to remake or ‘regenerate’ society into a permanent virtuous revolution.
Robespierre and the Brissotins
Robespierre was a lawyer and one of the elected representatives to the Estates General. He was known for his classical education and a marked tendency to allude to classical history and philosophers in his speeches, freely mixing references to Scipio, Hannibal and Themistocles when it suited him.
Maximillian Robespierre, Robespierre, ed. George Rude’ (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967), 62. English observer John Moore described him as “A man of small size and disagreeable countenance, which announces more fire than understanding”.
John Moore, English Witnesses of the French Revolution, ed. J. M. Thompson (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1938), 206. Certainly, Robespierre could never be accused of a want of passion.
Spartan in taste and temperament and occupied with notions of virtue, Robespierre also had a tendency to conflate his own personal ambitions and mores to those of the people at large. Over time this became an abstraction that was both useful (when he claimed to speak for the people in opposing the war against Austria, he later seemed prescient
Robespierre, Robespierre, 35-39.) and dangerous (as time went on and the Terror continued, his claims to speak for the people became obviously unreliable). The people were presumed to be the “supreme source of legitimacy and the Revolution’s sole agent”.
Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 29. This need to establish legitimacy by presuming to speak for the people was not restricted to Robespierre by means, yet he mastered the art of combining prose and power in a fashion that his contemporaries never managed.
In pursuit of virtue, Robespierre claimed: “The whole foundation of civil society is morality! …Immorality is the basis of despotism, as virtue is the essence of the Republic…”
Robespierre, Robespierre, 70. In his final speech to the assembly before the events of Thermidor, he exulted “Virtue? It is a natural passion, without doubt…but it exists, this tender, imperious, irresistible passion, the torment and the delight of magnanimous souls…”
Ibid., 76. In defining the contrast between the Revolution and its enemies he maligned tyrants thusly: “Every vice is enlisted in their service; the Republic has only virtue on its side. Virtue is simple, modest, humble, often ignorant and sometimes boorish; it is the natural lot of the poor; the patrimony of the people.”
Ibid., 63. One unsympathetic Brissotin observer wrote: “He has all the characteristics, not of a religious leader, but of the leader of a religious sect; he has built up a reputation for austerity which borders on sainthood…”
Peter McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 138. Indeed, this ‘cult’ of virtue and austerity was Robespierre’s defining characteristic and he intended remake French society in his own image.
Robespierre’s predilection for virtue was shared by many in the Brissotin wing of the Jacobin Club, and they were eager to share that virtue with others by force if necessary. This was to become a familiar theme as the Revolution radicalized. By 1791, a “war crisis” had engulfed the Revolution as the Brissotins sought to export revolution outside French borders.
Schama, Citizens, 591. The newly adopted Declaration of the Rights of Man, a universal and utopian document that codified the rights and condition of every human, seemed to demand that anyone opposing it was not only an enemy of the Revolution but also an enemy of mankind.
Ibid., 592. The Manichean logic demanded action. In this way, war (virtuous violence) and the enforcement of virtue can already be seen as the logical conclusion of the Revolution. Helpfully, Brissotin leader Mme Roland explained that war would be “A school of virtue” and compared French Revolutionaries to Roman legionnaires.
Ibid., 595. By January, 1792, Brissotin speeches on the nobility of the free Frenchmen, exhorting what Simon Schama calls “the pledge of patriotic self-immolation” had carried the day.
Ibid., 595. France would export the Revolution.
Robespierre was the one voice in the wilderness speaking against the war. Obsessed with notions of conspiracy, Robespierre condemned the Brissotin wing for the war repeatedly and warned that “This is not the moment to declare war. Before all else, this is a moment to manufacture arms, in every place and at every hour; to arm the National Guards; to arm the people, if only with pikes; to adopt severe measures and not as have been adopted up to now…”.
Robespierre, Robespierre, 38. Robespierre found himself on the wrong side of public opinion in the matter and was dismissed and ridiculed. As he stated, the makeover of society, the hunt for internal enemies and the adoption of severe measures took precedence over foreign adventurism. He would develop this theme in the future after the sans-culottes uprising on August 10, 1792. Moreover, he dryly noted that “No one loves armed missionaries.”
Schama, Citizens, 595. However, as the Brissotin’s patriotic war became a disastrous fiasco, he found his power and influence rising as a result of the very war he had opposed from the beginning. Robespierre, even at this time of declaring himself against a foreign war, was not against violence by any means. He merely thought more of it needed to occur at home.
The Montagnards
Robespierre and the Montagnards, having been consigned to the political wilderness by refusing support for the Brissotin war against Austria, saw their fortunes on the rise as the war went badly. Robespierre would prove adept in his support of populist armed revolts that furthered his goals of advancing a rigorous standard of societal virtue on their own while also bringing him power to continue his agenda personally. For the time being, Montagnard support was unanimous, and Robespierre proved consistent in his praise of anarchic street violence performed by the sans-culottes as demonstrations of the public General Will.
By early August, the French forces continued to flounder against the professional Austrian army and rumors swirled that the King would deliver the Revolution over to murderous Austrian royalists. The radicals in the Jacobin Club saw their chance grab the reins of power from the Brissotins and on the night of August 9th to the 10th, the tocsin bells rang in the sections and the radical sans-culottes took to the streets. Outrage had been building over the king’s use of his veto power and his summary dismissal of several Revolutionary council members.
Ibid., 605. The assumption that he engaged in treason and was in league with the Austrians proved an easy sell to the public and bloody, virtuous public violence spilled over into the streets.
Although the uprising of August 10th was presented as a spontaneous populist revolt, it was carefully managed behind the scenes by Robespierre, Danton and Camille Desmoullins who had formed an “Insurrectionary Committee” and were giving orders to the National Guard.
Ibid., 613. When it was over, the King had been deposed, hundreds of Parisians lay dead and some 600 of the King’s Swiss Guard, assigned to protect the palace and the Royal family, had been massacred.
McPhee, Robespierre, 126.
The mob gave no quarter, and those unlucky enough to be taken alive were mercilessly bludgeoned and stabbed. Their bodies were hacked apart and fed to dogs. Robespierre declared it was “The most beautiful revolution that has ever honored humanity.”
Schama, Citizens, 615. English witness Thomas Blaike described sans-culottes returning from the palace: “Many of these anthrophages passed in the street and stopt to show us parts of the Suisses they had misacred some of whom I knew…every one seemed to glory in what he had done and to Show even their furrie upon the dead body by cutting them…this seemed as if the people were struck with a sort of madness.”
Thomas Blaikie, English Witnesses of the French Revolution, ed. J. M. Thompson (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1938), 172. The description of body parts hacked off and carried as trophies, as well as descriptions of the scale of the massacre of Swiss soldiers would have been public knowledge. The acts were committed in public view with considerable opportunity for discovery by members of the Assembly. Robespierre’s support remained unqualified.
True to his conviction that violence in the name of the General Will and carried out by the people was inherently just, Robespierre found no fault with the actions of 10 August. He proceeded merely five days later to complain of courts procedures “that put too great a restraint on the vengeance of the people, for the crimes go back much further.”
McPhee, Robespierre, 127 This conflation of violent vengeance, social virtue, and the governmental prerogative of justice becomes increasingly evident and problematic as the radical phase of the revolution came into fruition.
The September Massacres brought this trend into sharp focus. The fall of Verdun to the Austrians led to a new round of conspiracy theories that prisoners throughout the country might be set free by the Austrians to fight against the Revolution. Although violence and extra-judicial killing had been a part of the Revolution from the beginning, the massacres occurred on a scale not seen before, and targeted members of the royal household. Englishman Colonel George Monro personally witnessed some of the killing at Abbaye and wrote an extensive and detailed letter to Lord Grenville on what he witnessed, including a number of prisoners “precipitated by the door on a number of piques, and then among the savage cries of vive la nation, to be hacked to pieces by those that had swords and were ready to receive them.”
George Monro, English Witnesses of the French Revolution, ed. J. M. Thompson (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1938), 193. Colonel Monro also reported on the death of Princess Marie Louise of Savoy, the governess of Marie Antoinette’s children, who was hacked to death and decapitated. Her head was put on a pike for display while her body was dragged through various streets.
Ibid., 193. Some 1,400 people, including many priests, were killed in appalling fashion, often with hand held implements such as carpenter’s tools.
Schama, Citizens, 635. As before, these incidents were committed in public view and knowledge of them became widespread.
The horror of the September Massacres and revulsion towards the bloodshed threatened to derail Jacobin support as Brissotins (who shared much of the blame in fact) fixed responsibility for the deaths on Robespierre and Marat.
McPhee, Robespierre, 131. Marat in particular had been sanguinary in his earlier pronouncements that: “A year ago by cutting off five or six hundred heads you would have set yourself free and happy for ever more. Today it would take ten thousand; within a few months you will need to cut off a hundred thousand…”
Jean-Paul Marat, The Press in the French Revolution, ed. J. Gilchrist & W. J. Murray (NY: St Martin’s Press, 1971), 268. Robespierre had not been involved in the massacres and likely knew nothing about them at the time they occurred.
McPhee, Robespierre, 137. However, he was quick to excuse the bloodshed as he was elected vice president of the assembly, saying “Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution? …To make a crime of a few apparent or real misdemeanors, inevitable during such a great upheaval, would be to punish them for their devotion…”
Ibid., 137. As he had glossed over the anarchic bloodshed of August 10th as it had coincided with his goals, so he acted as an apologist for extra-legal mass murder committed in the name of the Revolution. The People, Robespierre’s abstraction of virtuous Revolutionary ideals, can do no wrong. Ergo, enemies of the People choose their fate and deserve what becomes of them. Virtuous violence became a permanent fixture of the Revolution, and Robespierre one of its most ardent supporters in word and later, in deed.
In a macabre finale, Louis XVI went to the guillotine himself in January of 1793. Robespierre argued in a speech before the Assembly that “It is with regret that I utter this baneful truth…But Louis must die in order that our country may live.”
Robespierre, Robespierre, 31. The utopian certainty of a better and more virtuous nation lies balanced against the Manichean certainty that opponents were not only evil but must perish in order for utopia to arrive. Louis XVI was only the first of many to come as the virtuous violence of the people became institutionalized.
The winter and spring of 1793 saw the French Revolution in dire peril from both within and without. Austrian troops were on French soil as a result of the Brissotin instigated war. Prussia and England entered the war following the execution of Louis XVI. A call for 300,000 conscripts on Feb 24th, 1793 to deal with the invaders only added to the woes of the young republic as it precipitated a particularly nasty rebellion/civil war in the Vendee’ region. Moreover, food shortages and rioting had broken out in that same winter of 1792 to 1793, leading Robespierre to charge that the shortages were part of an English and Royalist plot to punish the people and discredit the Revolution. He declared: “The people are still persecuted by the rich, who are what they always were: hard and merciless”. He concluded: “The people must, indeed, rise: not to seize sugar but to exterminate the brigands.”
Ibid., 47-48. The eliminationist rhetoric became a familiar and integral part of defining both the nature of the Revolutionary Republic as well as the opposition. As always, the People must take matters into their own hands and “exterminate” the enemies of the Revolution by dint of their innate virtue and capacity to violently solve problems.
By April, 1793, Revolutionary armies were dealt serious reversals in the Vendee’. Losses were high. Spanish troops moved into the Catalan region, and Corsica was in open revolt. The assembly placed executive power in the hands of a select Committee of Public Safety between March and May of 1793 to deal with these existential threats more efficiently and effectively. To thunderous applause in the assembly, Robespierre called for the death of the people of the Vendee’: “I declare that we must not only exterminate all the rebels in the Vendee’, but all the rebels against humankind and the French people…”
McPhee, Robespierre, 148. Again, the apocalyptic Manicheanism and eliminationism contained in the speech aptly defines Robespierre’s notions of Revolutionary legitimacy and the need to transform French society through Revolutionary action and the violence legitimized by virtue. In Robespierre’s world, enemies cannot be accommodated nor even merely defeated: they must be exterminated. Utopia cannot be reached without the bloodshed of traitors, tyrants and rebels.
Around mid-May of 1793, the battle between the Brissotins and the Montagnards reached its climax as the Brissotin (or Girondin as they increasingly became known as) assemblymen abortively indicted Marat for threatening violence against the assembly, using his own words taken from his newspaper.
Schama, Citizens, 718-719. It quickly became a fiasco as Marat was vindicated at trial. Meanwhile, populist Jacobin supporters such as Herbert had drawn up a list of 35 Girondins, to be expelled from the assembly in retaliation and called for action: “The audacity of the Brissotins has redoubled itself; the jackasses think that they are approaching the longed-for moment of the counter-revolution…Brave sans-culottes, your enemies are only audacious because you remain with your arms folded; wake up, damn it; get up, and you will see them at your feet.”
Jacques Herbert, The Press in the French Revolution, ed. J. Gilchrist & W. J. Murray (NY: St Martin’s Press, 1971), 190-191. Herbert’s calls for action through virtuous armed insurrection swiftly came about as 20,000 sans-culottes militia surrounded the assembly and arrested 29 Girondin representatives.
Schama, Citizens, 728. The purge, as it became known, ended the revolutionary experiment with representative government. The radical Montagnards now controlled the assembly, and Robespierre lost no time in getting to work.
On July 27, 1793, Robespierre accepted placement to the executive Committee for Public Safety.
McPhee, Robespierre, 161. With the immediate threat of Girondin/Federalist treason (and the assassination of Marat by Girondin supporter Charlotte Cordray), foreign invasion and Royalist counter revolutionary intrigue, Robespierre had a blank check to turn the Committee into a “stripped down…concentrated state machine”
Schama, Citizens, 755.that would enable his need to consummate a “complete regeneration, and if I may put it like this, to create a new people” which he had iterated in a proposal only days before on the afternoon that Marat had been assassinated.
McPhee, Robespierre, 162. Additionally, as President of the Assembly, Robespierre had the bully pulpit to expound his doctrines and the power to enact them.
Ibid., 167.
The Terror
Robespierre’s appointment to the Committee created a mirror image counterpoint to the Ancien Regime. Whereas King Louis XVI had subscribed to the traditional model of King and Kingdom indivisible creating one nation mandated by God, Robespierre’s assumption of unilateral assumption of power within the Committee created a similar, if opposed, unitary model of power derived from the Will of the People.
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 39. In this case, the paradox of individual sovereignty and the need for society and rule of law had not been solved by the Revolution, and the notion of balancing competing interests between society and the individual had been generally ignored.
Ibid., 30.As Robespierre had already assumed the mantle of speaking for the People, as well as encouraging populist violence from the people, he used his position on the committee to create a singular and unified government by the People’s Will. As embodiment of the General Will, Robespierre was empowered to carry out that will, however mythical or fallacious his understanding of the Will actually was. Ultimately, Robespierre’s singular drive for a virtuous revolutionary society and a permanent state of terror would break the Committee of Public Safety.
Robespierre was not alone in this. Louise-Antoine St-Just, just 28 years old by this point, had impressed Robespierre with his Spartan zeal and his oratory skills before the Assembly.
McPhee, Robespierre, 131. In the lead up to the King’s execution, it was St-Just who had initially declared in a speech to become legendary that Louis XVI was incompatible with the Republic simply by having been a king in the first place. Therefore, Louis had to die, as he could not help but be a tyrant by definition, thereby strengthening Robespierre’s position on the infallibility of the People in revolution.
Schama, Citizens, 651. Ergo, for the Republic to live, Louis had to be killed. No trial would be necessary.
Ibid., 651. This pronouncement put St-Just in good stead to become Robespierre’s top lieutenant in the Committee, St-Just having been appointed to the Committee on the 10th of July.
Henri Beraud, Twelve Portraits of the French Revolution (NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1928), 98. In the meantime, Robespierre immersed himself in the business of realizing his new order of Spartan virtue where people “in whatever circumstances they find themselves during their lives they will be used to being able to do without comforts and excess, and despise artificial needs.”
McPhee, Robespierre, 162-163. Virtue and Terror were now the order of the day.
On July 27th, the Committee of Public Safety was empowered to “strike terror into the hearts of counter-revolutionaries”.
McPhee, The French Revolution, 118. This included surveillance of citizens, detention without charge or trial, and suspension of civil liberties that had been guaranteed in the constitution that had been successfully voted into acceptance scarcely a month earlier.
Ibid., 118. The Constitution of 1793 that Robespierre had authored would have to wait until society was sufficiently virtuous to deserve having it. Instead, the Committee of Public Safety immediately began putting the Patrie on a war footing to deal with the numerous military foes on various fronts, including raising new units of National Guard, assuring adequate supplies and provisions for the military and preparing propaganda for domestic morale.
Ibid., 118.
On September 5th, emboldened sans-culottes stormed the assembly yet again and demanded radical military and economic measures in response to the endless rumors of conspiracies over counter-revolutionary food price manipulation.
Ibid., 119. The assembly enacted significant controls on prices and wages and distributed rural property to the poor. The “Law of Suspects” allowed detention and intimidation of political critics. Then in October, St-Just announced a “Revolutionary Government” with all government effects and the military being placed under control of the Committee.
Ibid., 119. He said: ”It is impossible for revolutionary laws to be executed unless the government itself is truly revolutionary…those who would make revolutions in the world, those who want to do good in the world must sleep only in the tomb.”
Schama, Citizens, 767. Representatives from the Committee, including St-Just, were sent to every district with the power to investigate and punish enemies of the state…often by the guillotine or firing squad.
McPhee, The French Revolution, 121. Robespierre’s singular vision of the General Will of the People married to the functions of government had been realized as the successive insurrections and use of extra-legal violence by the citizenry confirmed his notions of virtuous self-government by the people.
According to Albert Mathiez, the Terror was a sad, but necessary, reaction to the severe and even existential threats facing the young republic (although many of these woes were determinedly self-inflicted through needless antagonizing of foreign neighbors and internal populations). According to Mathiez, the Terror “…was much less the result of a well thought out ideology then of inescapable pressures brought on by civil and foreign war. The enemy had to be repulsed, the royalist and Girondin revolts crushed.”
Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations, ed. Frank A. Kafker et al (Malabar: Krieger Publishing, 2002), 189. The effectiveness of the Terror in accomplishing these goals is not in doubt, yet Mathiez ignores the voluminous evidence in Robespierre’s own words that he had planned to install a society of Spartan virtue all along, and his decision to suspend his own constitution until society was cleansed demonstrates his motivation.
The cleansing began in short order. The former Queen, Marie Antoinette, went to the scaffold on October 16th. Herbert, vulgar as ever, gloated as the frail, gaunt Marie was trundled to the “hot hand”, which was his current nickname for the guillotine, and complained that “The bitch was audacious and insolent right to the very end.”
Schama, Citizens, 800. Mme Roland, the Brissotin who had praised the virtue of war and had actually congratulated Robespierre’s accomplishments merely a year earlier, found herself before the blade on November 8th.
McPhee, Robespierre, 172. Other Brissotin/Gironde assembly members soon followed suit. The man who had administered the Tennis Court Oath, Bailly, took the tumbril ride on November 11th.
Ibid., 172. The bloody toll of Gironde “counter-revolutionaries” grew inexorably to the demands of violent virtue as interpreted by the Revolutionary Tribunal, The Committee of Public Safety and their notions of mythologized General Will.
Simultaneously, Robespierre’s long-time Jacobin ally Danton had set about defanging the sans-culottes and stopping the endless insurrections and tocsin alarms. Danton understood far better than Robespierre how waves of populist violence had successively brought their predecessors into power and then swept them out. He was determined that the Montagnards would be the final word in administration and would possess a monopoly on state sanctioned violence. He testified to the Convention: “Let us be terrible, so that the people will not have to be.”
Schama, Citizens, 707. Danton restricted local section meetings to twice a week and instituted a payment scheme to encourage additional (and less radical) people to show up, including spies for the Committee.
Ibid., 759. Danton encountered a far more intractable problem when he and Camille Desmoulins went head to head with Robespierre concerning the Terror.
By autumn of 1793, the enemies of the Republic had been reversed on all fronts. Lyon capitulated October 9th, and Revolutionary forces had crushed the Marseilles army earlier on August 25th. The British and Austrians had both been repulsed and the Vendean army was soundly thrashed on October 17th.
Ibid., 767. With victory in sight and the Revolution secure, the easing of the Regime of terror should have been evident if Mathiez is correct in his assertion that it was both temporary and necessary. On the contrary, the Terror, now the official manifestation of the People’s vengeance, continued apace with new arrests, closing of women’s clubs and a vast acceleration in executions.
McPhee, The French Revolution, 142-144. Between December of 1793 and January of 1794, nearly 7,000 people were executed by the tribunals.
Ibid., 144. Despite the misgivings of relatively moderate Jacobins left in the Convention who called for an end to the Terror in December of 1793, the radicals could always point to more foes to be overcome and new reasons to continue the violent repressions.
Ibid., 144.
Nevertheless, Desmoulins and Danton, both longtime friends and ideological comrades of Robespierre, made overtures of an Indulgent Policy to roll back the “institutional coercion of the Terror.”
Schama, Citizens, 767. Of course, this was distinctly at odds with what Robespierre had intended from the beginning, which was societal regeneration and recognition of the innate ability of the People to use violence for the common good. Even if the Patrie was out of immediate danger now, enemies abounded within and without and maximalist revolutionary movements must have maximalist eternal enemies to overcome.
Furet, Interpreting French Revolution, 54. This is something that Desmoulins and Danton never grasped about the nature of their revolution or indeed, that of their sometime friend and comrade.
The policies of the Terror continued to bear fruit by December, 1793 as the Revolt in the Vendee’ was crushed despite the initial heavy casualties and difficulties experienced by the Revolutionary armies in fighting counter-insurgency campaign against a foe that knew the terrain and refused to fight except on the most favorable circumstances.
General Turreau, The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook, ed. Phillip Dwyer & Peter McPhee (NY: Routledge, 2002), 99. General Turreau reported to the Minister of War that “My purpose is the burn everything” and that “All brigands caught bearing arms, or convicted of having taken up arms to revolt against their country, will be bayoneted. The same will apply to girls, women and children…”
Ibid., 101. In the end, he proved true to his word. The scale of bloodshed in the Vendee’ far exceeded anything that had been seen previously as the application of violence in the pursuit of virtuous social regeneration became coupled with the language of extermination.
After effect resistance had ended, the campaign was capped by 12 “infernal Columns” which engaged in mass killings of all humans found…including even loyalists as well as women and children…in 773 communities set aside for extermination.
Ibid., 102. Robespierre’s statement: “I declare that we must not only exterminate all the rebels in the Vendee’, but all the rebels against humankind and the French people…”
McPhee, Robespierre, 148. proved gruesomely prophetic. Death was carried out at bayonet point, with swords, firing squad or by the novel fashion of crowding people onto boats designed to be sunk and consigning them to mass drowning.
Turreau, French Revolution and Napoleon, 101-102. This was called “sending to the water tower” or “The Republican Bath”.
Ibid., 101-102. The policies of virtue, violence and extermination simply left no room for compromise, quarter or empathy, and death on a previously unimaginable scale was the logical result.
The bloodshed in Lyon was scarcely less robust as Committee representatives set about their business with bureaucratic efficiency. Joseph Fouche’, an acquaintance of Robespierre, and Collot d’Herbois, a sometime actor, enacted a grim repression that was only exceeded by the Vendean affair.
McPhee, Robespierre, 177. Homes were searched, decrees read and judgments pronounced. On one day, 32 heads were collected in only 25 minutes.
Schama, Citizens, 782. The drainage ditch leading from the scaffold overran with blood to the point that citizen complaints led to additional executions being carried out as in the Vendee’: by bayonet, musket fire and even groups chained together and obliterated by grapeshot from cannons.
Ibid., 783. Excusing this affair, as always, came easily to Robespierre: “No, their memory [of Jacobin representative Chalier and others arrested by the Federalists in Lyon] must be avenged and those monsters unmasked and exterminated.”
Ibid., 779. Maximalist language of extermination meant that the ‘normal’ rules of the conduct of warfare simply no longer applied, and that the need for social virtue and renewal dictated that the people and their representatives must use every tool at hand to cleanse away enemies.
Nearly 2,000 citizens of Lyons met their fate, and while many of them were from the upper classes, the poor and working classes, from book keepers and brewers to lemonade stand owners, all found their way to the scaffold, the bayonet or the end of a gun.
Ibid., 784. This number did not take into account those who had died during the siege of the city and the artillery bombardment. Word of massacres at Nantes, Arras and elsewhere filtered back to the Committee to add impetus to Danton’s and Desmoulins’s pleas for indulgency. However, the language of extermination remained ascendant.
McPhee, Robespierre, 177.
An additional link between the massacres of the Vendee’ and Lyon exists in the fate of physical structures for occupancy. As already seen in the Vendee’, General Turreau was on a mission to “burn everything” and that meant crops and buildings useful to the local inhabitants. This scorched earth policy continued after almost all resistance had ceased, and a similar pattern of structure demolition commenced in Lyon as workers by the hundreds became employed to destroy some sixteen hundred domestic structures. These actions went well beyond any immediate military or civil necessity, leading an incredulous Montagnard in the Convention to ask: “is it Republican to tear down houses?”
Schama, Citizens, 781. St-Just could almost have anticipated this very question when he remarked: “Republic consists in the extermination of everything that opposes it.”
Ibid., 787. Robespierre’s policy of cleansing the Republic and exterminating enemies could not be accomplished by merely killing people. All traces of their perfidy must be erased and their evil ripped out by the roots to allow wholesome Republican replacements to flourish.
Eventually, and almost inevitably, the Terror began to consume the practitioners. The executioner in Lyon was himself taken to the scaffold, and another executioner specially brought in to complete the task.
Ibid., 784. Herbert, locked in battle with the Indulgents and pressing for increasingly ultra-radical social and economic policies, attempted to rouse the sections in another insurrection on March 4th, 1794 and found that Danton’s policy of paying men to attend the section meetings had effectively filled them with informants to the Committee. The Ultra’s insurrection failed before it ever got started, and Herbert’s turn to “be shaved by the national razor” saw him display far less composure than had Marie Antoinette.
Ibid., 816.
Danton and Desmoulins were next. Danton was implicated in a tawdry financial scandal which fatally damaged the Indulgency arguments both he and Desmoulins had made.
Ibid., 817. Desmoulins continued to argue his points in print, which forced a very public showdown between the conscientious objector and the man who could not admit to division of opinion in the General Will of the People.
Ibid., 810-81. Neither Danton nor Desmoulins truly grasped what Robespierre intended the Terror to actually be or to accomplish, and this became their undoing. Danton and Desmoulins went to the scaffold with the same flair and composure they had displayed as Revolutionary leaders for years. Danton told the executioner: “Don’t forget to show my head to the people. It is well worth the trouble.”
Ibid., 820. Indeed, it likely was.
Shortly after the deaths of Danton and Desmoulins, the Convention passed what became known as simply the Prairial Law. It abolished what few defense resources accused persons could bring in a trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and it widely expanded the scope of who could be charged. “Henceforth, anyone denounced for ‘slandering patriotism, ‘seeking to inspire discouragement’, ‘spreading false news’, and ‘depraving morals…impairing the energy and purity of the Revolutionary Government’” could now be brought before the Tribunal. The only allowable outcomes were acquittal or death, and the accused could not produce witnesses nor would he or she have access to counsel, since the virtuous citizens of the Republic should be able to arrive at a fair conclusion on their own.
Ibid., 836.
The law was a response to panicked rumors of assassination or a Royalist uprising. Robespierre described the procedure in analytical terms: “A man is brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. If there are material proofs against him, he is condemned; if there are no material proofs, in this case, witnesses are called.”
David P. Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximillian Robespierre, (NY: The Free Press, 1985), 204. This became the advent of the Great Terror, which saw another 1,376 victims take the tumbril ride to the scaffold between June 10 and July 27.
Ibid., 204. Robespierre’s search for perfect Revolutionary justice in the hands of the virtuous citizens of the Republic had reached a final crescendo of vengeance and blood. Nothing stood in the way of his idealized Republic regenerated through the extermination of the impure by the righteous hands of the citizenry.
Robespierre’s final speech before the Convention on July 26th expounded the virtue he was so determined to impart to his fellow man: “Virtue? It is a natural passion, without doubt…but it exists, this tender, imperious, irresistible passion, the torment and the delight of magnanimous souls…this generous ambition to found on Earth the first Republic of the world…You feel it burning in your souls, just as I feel it in mine.”
McPhee, Robespierre, 76. Doubtless his critics in the Convention felt something as he proceeded to promise that additional “traitors” would be unmasked in the Convention. He then made the amazing utterance: “I was made to combat crime, not to control it.”
Ibid., 78. He had become the Will of the People made corporeal, exacting punishment and instilling social virtue in equal yet unlimited measure, yet his final promise of unmasking “traitors” in the convention proved that virtue has its limits. The Convention turned on Robespierre, St-Just and their supporters with ferocity born of fear and desperation. As the tumbril brought Robespierre, St-Just and other Committee members before the scaffold in turn, the People, had turned on him as they had on so very many others brought before him. As he was made by the General Will of the People, so was he un-made.
Conclusions
If some in the Convention had seen the Terror as a means to attain peace, Robespierre saw his creation in quite different terms. For him, the Revolution and the Terror in particular were a means to regenerate and remake society through violent action applied both by and on the behalf of the People. In short, virtue was the raison d’etre of the Revolution, and violence supplied by the People would bring it to fruition.
Crane Brinton explains this in religious terms where Robespierre and his followers had substituted the Catholic faith of the Ancien Regime for the modern, austere religion of reason and virtue.
Richard Cobb, The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations, ed. Frank A. Kafker et al (Malabar: Krieger Publishing, 2002), 208. They would remake society in their own image as “…men of character, incorruptible citizens” as described by Desmoulins in 1791.
Ibid., 208. This reliance on character and virtue was one of the major tenants of the Committee of Public Safety and the attendant tribunals for they relied on just this theory of incorruptible men who could dispense justice and defend the people until such time as the Constitution of 1793 could be implemented.
Brinton calls this utopian view of human nature “the religion of humanity” and describes the Jacobins as fanatical followers of the faith.
Cane Brinton, The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations, ed. Frank A. Kafker et al (Malabar: Krieger Publishing, 2002), 214. Augustine Cochin goes further by describing the Jacobins as a whole in terms of “A society of unpractical idealists, fanatics bent on imposing upon their fellows of the “grande ville” a rigid code quite inconsistent with normal human conduct as we know it from tradition and observation.”
Ibid., 214. Therefore, the model Jacobin has seized on the crisis of summer, 1793 as a means by which he could “realize his heaven here on earth.”
Ibid., 218.
Brinton may paint with too large a brush and with too much assuredness in the Utopianism of Robespierre and the Montagnard Jacobins. He strains credulity by describing partisan Jacobins such as “He has no ordinary, daily, selfish human interests.”
Ibid., 218. That manner of observation tends to buy into the very sort of impossible utopian caricature that Robespierre wanted to project. Francis Furet digs deeper when he acknowledges the initial utilitarian reason for the Terror at a moment of military crisis, and then proceeds to examine the ideological roots of the Terror that allowed it to flourish after all military pretense for it had vanished. He notes: “The Terror intensified with the improvement of the situation and the victories, starting in October.”
Francis Furet, The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations, ed. Frank A. Kafker et al (Malabar: Krieger Publishing, 2002), 222. This has been observed already. However, as the Terror began to consume the Herbertists and then the Indulgents, Furet concludes that: “It was less a part of the arsenal of victory then of an ambition for regeneration.”
Ibid., 223. What is left out of this interpretation is that virtue and desire for violent regeneration led to the crisis to begin with in the Brissotin led war against Austria, and which Robespierre had opposed only because of his desire to see ever increasing severe measures adopted at home.
Like Brinton, Furet holds that the ideology of the Terror predated the military justification for its use, although he acknowledges the role that circumstances played in developing the state apparatus Robespierre used to set the Terror into motion. Brinton and Furet both agree on the quasi-religious and utopian nature of the Jacobins as well as the use of the Terror for violent societal renewal. This is critical, since Robespierre argued that the regeneration of society was the central character of the Revolution. Ergo, “If the Republic of free citizens was not yet possible, it was because men, perverted by their past history, were wicked; by means of the Terror, the Revolution-a history without precedent, entirely new-would make a new man.”
Ibid., 224. In short, Robespierre would not let a good crisis go to waste. He would have his new society and his new man.
Contra Mathiez, it quickly became evident that the Terror was neither temporary nor merely incidental to the character of the radical phase of the Revolution. In particular, Robespierre stamped his own personality indelibly upon the Committee of Public Safety and the policies that lead to the events between August, 1793 and Thermidor, 1794. His legitimization of extra-legal violence ensured that it would remain a fixture in the Revolution. His language of extermination became pronounced policy in Lyon and the Vendee’. His conflation of good and evil with public policy sent Danton, Desmoulins and thousands of others to their deaths on the scaffold. His quest for virtue led him and the Revolution down a nightmarish path of institutionalized murder and suffering. It is unknowable (although highly unlikely) whether Robespierre and the Montagnards could have seized power without a serious military pretext. It is certain, however, that they used the September Massacres, the Vendee’, the Federalist Revolt and the foreign invasions to their own benefit to consummate their desire for the perfect society of virtue legitimized and obtained through bloodshed.
Bibliography:
Primary Sources:
Dwyer, Phillip G. & McPhee, Peter Eds., The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook; New York, Routledge, 2002
Gilchrist, J. & Murray, W.J. Eds., The Press in the French Revolution; New York, St Martin’s Press, 1971
George Rude’, Ed., Robespierre; Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1967
Thompson, J.M. Ed., English Witnesses of the French Revolution; New York, Kennikat Press, 1938
Secondary Sources:
Beraud, Henri, Twelve Portraits of the French Revolution; New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1928
Furet, Francois, Interpreting the French Revolution; New York, Cambridge University Press, 1978
Jordan, Davis, The Revolutionary Career of Maximillian Robespierre; New York, The Free Press, 1985
Kafker, Frank A., Ed., The French Revolution: Conflicting Interpretations; Malabar, Krieger Publishing, 2002
McPhee, Peter, The French Revolution: 1789-1700; New York, Oxford Press, 2002
McPhee, Peter, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life; New Haven, New Haven Press, 2012
Schama, Simon Citizens; New York, Knopf, 1989
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