The Coming of the Reign of Terror
Part 2: The Revolution Devours its Children
6. France was now, technically, a constitutional monarchy. But many called for the king’s removal, and the establishment of a republic. While the Assembly procrastinated, local sections in Paris, dominated by republican militants, grew in power. Distrusting the Assembly as too conservative, the militants “concluded that they would have to remove the monarch themselves.” Local commissioners seized the royal arsenal and declared themselves an “Insurrectional Commune.” Was this legal? The Assembly’s own appeal to popular sovereignty had set a dangerous precedent, which the Paris Commune made use of:
when the people enter into a state of insurrection, they take back all power for themselves.
On August 10, 1792, militants approached the palace, intent on removing the king. The king escaped and took refuge, ironically, in the Assembly, as his palace guard opened fire on the militants. Fighting broke out throughout Paris, and while “the terrible civil war in the heart of Paris lasted little more than two hours...over a thousand people died.” The king was held responsible. Hatred for him spread, and “all the statues of the kings of France were pulled down, and those in bronze were sent to the foundry to be turned into cannons and cannonballs.”
7. The Paris Commune, competing for authority with the National Assembly, declared that the people had “recovered their rights for the second time.” In the coming weeks “France arguably came closer to anarchy, to the breakdown of law and order and the spread of uncontrolled violence, than at any other time in the Revolution.”
Royalists were arrested, and the people, wanting revenge, were frustrated by the slow pace of the courts. Exceptional tribunals were created, whose judgments could not be appealed, and whose death sentences would be carried out immediately. Even these were thought to move too slowly. Out of this frustration, militants stormed the prisons and killed those awaiting trial. The Commune issues a statement calling the executions
acts of justice that seem indispensable for halting through terror the legions of traitors hidden inside the walls.
8. A new Convention is elected, to write a new, republican, constitution. What should be done with the former king, waiting in prison? Under the just-jettisoned constitution, he was immune from prosecution. The radical Montagnards argued that no trial was necessary,
that the king had already been found guilty by the people and did not need to be judged.
They lost this argument; the king would be tried, under “natural laws” the transcended any human constitution. The Convention would serve as both judge and jury. At trial the king argued, plausibly, that he had broken no laws. He was convicted anyway, by unanimous vote, and then sentenced to death, by a one-vote majority.
As he was pulled down onto the cutting block, frustrated and no doubt terrified by his fate, “he uttered a frightful scream, that was stifled only with the fall of the blade.”
At first the crowd remained stunned and silent, but soon great cries arose of “Long live the nation! Long live the Republic.”
Some thought the king’s execution would be a uniting event, ending factionalism in French politics. It only made things worse:
If one could justify the killing of a father-king, could one not justify the killing of almost anyone whose evil intentions one had become convinced?
9. France has been at war with Austria and Prussia since 1792. For French citizens living far from the urban seats of the revolution, the government’s call for new recruits for its depleted military was the last straw:
In the eyes of many rural citizens, the decrees of the Revolution had taken away their priests, killed their king, and passed a variety of laws that scarcely diminished or even raised their taxes, laws that had often been enforced by rough and arrogant urban national guardsmen arriving from the towns. Now the Convention wanted to send them off to die for such a Revolution [in a far-away war].
Anti-revolutionary insurrection spread. The above list of grievances is long, but the
central factor uniting virtually all the rebels in the west was anger and indignation over the Revolution’s religious policies.
If the rebels wanted to reverse the revolution, they still argued in the revolution’s new idiom: they
were quick to claim the right of self-determination and to view their uprising as a form of revolution. “Your so-called republication government adopted the principle that sovereignty resides essentially in the people. Well! This sovereign people desires a king and the free exercise of their religion. They have all risen up to forcefully oppose tyranny.”
Meanwhile, the war was going badly. To deal with these crises, the Convention improvised emergency powers: a Revolutionary Tribunal to try cases without appeal (like the earlier one, which had been disbanded); the consolidation of executive power in a Committee of Public Safety, that met in secret and “eventually acquired nearly absolute power to prosecute war and pursue repression.” One Montagnard leader wrote,
Measures that would be political crimes under a peaceful and well-established government, now become indispensable.
10. The story now picks up pace. Under pressure from Paris militants, the government arrests a group of Girondin deputies. But they are lightly guarded, under house arrest, and many escape, flee to the provinces, and support provincial rebellions. Then, July 13th 1793, the Montagnard Jean-Paul Marat is assassinated in his bath. The assassin, Charlotte Corday, had claimed she had a message for him, and “pulled a dagger from her bosom and thrust it into his chest just above the heart.” “No single event more envenomed attitudes” toward the rebellions and the Girondins. Everyone now falsely believed that the Girondins had ordered the murder, and were conspiring against the revolution. Robespierre is elected to the Committee on Public Safety; “no one had more consistently proclaimed the existence of a grand conspiracy linked to the Girondins.” In his private notes he remarked on “the absolute necessity of creating a functional, centralized government—‘a single will’—that could save the Revolution.” This was the totalitarian strain in Rousseau’s Social Contract, put into practice. The Convention finishes writing a new constitution, and puts it to a vote of the people: an exercise of democracy without precedent. It passes. But Saint-Just demands
that the Committee [on Public Safety] be recognized as the executive authority of France and that the Constitution be set aside for the duration of the war: “The provisional government of France must be revolutionary until victory is achieved.”
The Constitutional Convention remained France’s legislative body, and the constitution (I mean the actual written document), in an act whose significance I still don’t understand, “was deposited in a cedar box and suspended from the roof of the Convention hall.”1
Responding to more public demonstrations, the Committee on Public Safety cries, “Let us make terror the order of the day!” The Convention passes the “law of suspects,” which includes
a series of elastic clauses, targeting all those who “have shown themselves to be the partisans of tyranny or federalism or are enemies of liberty” or who could not provide evidence of civisme—a term signifying “public spiritedness” but whose meaning was never itself clearly defined.
The Girondins who had been arrested are now put on trial—as a group. They are not permitted to call witnesses in their defense, and “at times the magistrates and the jurors spoke up and aggressively attacked” them. Some of them were, however, eloquent politicians, well-versed in moving audiences to their side. Radical newspapers, fearing a turn of public opinion, called for the trial to be cut short. It was decided that the trial “could be concluded as soon as the jury affirmed that their conscience was sufficiently enlightened.” They so-affirmed, and next day twenty men were sent to the guillotine, standing in line to lose their heads.
11. The template for the reign of terror was now set. It included “elastic” laws, under which almost anyone could be prosecuted: the Law of 22 Prairial criminalized being a “satellite of tyranny,” a status one could earn by, among other things, misleading “the people,” or speaking ill of patriotism. And, show trials: defense lawyers were banned, and the only verdicts allowed were acquittal and death; the acquittal rate fell to 20%. And, collective punishment:
Whole categories of individuals were sent to the guillotine, not apparently on the basis of any specific crimes committed but because of the positions they held under the Old Regime.
Whatever you may have said or done for the revolution, if you were from a noble family, you were in danger. Even being a past member of the Assembly, from the early days of the revolution, could get you killed: for that Assembly had supported a constitutional monarchy, not a republic.
There were so many executions that in mid-June [1794] municipal leaders moved the guillotine to the eastern edge of the city, allowing a more efficient cleanup of the blood and the bodies.
Some people were killed out of unjustified fear that they were part of a conspiracy against the state. But that’s not the worst of it. Tackett thinks there was another motive. Also at work was resentment, either long-held or newly-discovered, toward injustices in the Old Regime:
the executions were driven, at least in part, by hatred and a desire for revenge for wrongs perpetrated by the ruling class under the Old Regime.
One radical railed against
the black evil of the aristocrats, the bloody fanaticism of the priests, the atrocious pride of the nobles...All those who oppose the public good are, in my eyes, enemies and monsters.
12. Eventually, when even those closest to power fear they’ll be the next victims, it becomes worth the risk to openly attack those holding the terror’s reigns. Robespierre is arrested and purged, and the powers of the Committee on Public Safety greatly reduced. During his arrest Robespierre is shot in the face. Next day, at the guillotine, he “screamed in pain as the bandages holding his fractured jaw were ripped away by the executioner.”
13. Tackett asks, how did humanists become monsters? How could “the lamb and the tiger” inhabit the same men? He thinks that the thousand-degree fear and anxiety, caused by war and rebellion and anarchy, is a large part of the answer. But that claim helps little with the question most urgently pressed by the horrors he recounts, the question of whether, and if so how, any of it could have been avoided. Did the Forces of History make it all inevitable, once France was bankrupt and starving? What if the king had not been killed, what if the Revolution hadn’t taken on the Church, what if they’d all read more Locke and less Rousseau, what if George Washington had been in charge? Tackett only remarks that the “intense conviction that society must and can be changed” that is “integral to the phenomenon of revolution” can “easily breed impatience and intolerance with opposition.” But American revolutionaries weren’t above using mob violence to subvert due process and achieve political ends. Samuel Adams was a master of this art: in 1769 the British government regarded Massachusetts as “a Colony in which the exercise of all civil power and authority was suspended by the most daring Acts of force and violence.”2 Yet the American Revolution never turned to terror. Tackett denies that this is a counterexample: the Americans weren’t trying to remake society, they were just fighting for independence; the American Revolution wasn’t a revolution. This assertion is in a footnote, and a comparison to America is not the topic of Tackett’s book, though it surely is of others, as-yet unread by the present author. Among other differences that must matter are these: American factionalism could be moderated by an absolute need to focus on the external enemy, the thousands of British soldiers marching on American soil, and the untouchably far away king and parliament; the conservative ideology of the revolution, which often framed itself as defending existing (English) constitutional rights against Parliamentary over-reach; and the fact that independence did not create an anarchic power vacuum: democratic/representative government did not have to be conjured in emergency on the spot, it had existed in the colonies for generations, and continued to operate as usual during the crisis. The purpose of the new “central authority,” the Continental Congress, was to coordinate the efforts of these already established if now newly-sovereign states; it did not claim any (or very much) sovereign power of its own. But this is all context, these are all background conditions to the revolution; none of it points to things the French leaders or the French people could have done differently.
14. These speculations feel empty before the terror’s display of the evil in human nature. A “German adventurer” arriving in Paris in January 1794 wrote that he saw
whole ranges of houses...burnt. The churches, convents...were in ruins. When I came to the guillotine, the blood of those who had been executed a few hours beforehand was still running in the street...I said to a group of sanscoulottes...that it would be decent to clear away all this human blood—Why should it be cleared? one of them said to me. It’s the blood of aristocrats and rebels. The dogs should lick it up.3
Oxford History of the French Revolution.
Zobel, The Boston Massacre.
Oxford History of the French Revolution.