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.
8
THE DAYS OF THE TERROR
October – December 1793 and March – July 1794
‘It is a falsehood to say that the Terror saved France, but it may be affirmed that it crippled the Revolution’
The Queen was one of the first to suffer. At the beginning of July she had been told that she was to be parted from her son.
My mother was horrified by this cruel order [her daughter recorded] and refused to give him up. She defended his bed against the men who had come to take him away. But they insisted on taking him and threatened to use force and to send for the guard…We got him up and when he was dressed my mother handed him over, crying over him, as if she knew she would never see him again. The poor little fellow kissed us all tenderly and departed in tears with the men…My mother felt she had reached the depths of misery now…and her misery was increased when she knew that the shoemaker [Antoine] Simon was in charge of him…He cried for two whole days inconsolably and begged to see us…We often went up into the tower. My brother went by every day and the only pleasure my mother had was to watch him pass by through a little window. Sometimes she waited there for hours to get a glimpse of her beloved child…Every day we heard him and Simon singing the Carmagnole, the Marseillaise and many other horrid songs. Simon made him wear a red bonnet and a carmagnole jacket and forced him to sing at the windows so as to be heard by the guard and to blaspheme God and curse his family and the aristocrats. My mother fortunately did not hear all these horrors as she had been taken away [to the Conciergerie prison on the Île Saint Louis].
At the Conciergerie the Queen was kept in a small, damp cell containing three beds, one for herself, another for a female attendant and the third for two gendarmes who, so Count Fersen recorded, ‘never left the cell even when the Queen had to satisfy the needs of nature’. She spent her time reading such books as A History of Famous Shipwrecks, crocheting pieces of thread which she picked from the cloth screens that lined the walls of the cell, or pacing about between the beds as she twisted the rings on her fingers. Towards the middle of September, after the failure of an attempt to release her, she was moved into an even smaller cell, a dark room, formerly the prison dispensary and still smelling of medicines, whose only light during the hours of darkness came from a lantern in the courtyard beyond the barred window. She spent three weeks here before being taken to her trial in the bare marble hall of the Paris parlement from which the tapestries and the carpet with its pattern of fleurs-de-lis had been removed. Here she was accused of a variety of crimes from conspiracy with her brother to incest with her son whom, it was alleged, she had taught to masturbate. When roughly called upon to answer these accusations, she replied, ‘If I give no answer it is because nature itself refuses to accept such an accusation brought against a mother. I appeal to all the mothers here present.’ There was an obvious wave of sympathy for her after this spirited response. But the President angrily threatened to clear the court; the processes of the trial were speeded up and she was found guilty and condemned to death. ‘Having heard the sentence pronounced’, the Moniteur reported, ‘she left the court without addressing a further word to the judges or the public, no trace of emotion appearing on her face.’
On the morning of 16 October she dressed herself for the last time in a white piqué dress, white bonnet, black stockings and red prunella high-heeled shoes. Charles Sanson’s son, Henri, came into the cell to tie her hands behind her back. Then, having removed her bonnet, he cut off her hair, which she had dressed with care for her trial the day before, and put it into his pocket. Outside, a tumbril was waiting. At the sight of it she began to tremble and had to have her hands untied so that she could relieve herself in a corner of the courtyard wall. But, once seated in the cart, she regained her composure. Pale and drawn, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes, ‘the widow Capet’, as the Moniteur referred to her, remained staring silently ahead of her throughout the long journey to the scaffold. Having climbed the steps she stumbled and trod on the executioner’s foot. ‘Monsieur,’ she apologized as he cried out in pain, ‘I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.’ They were the last words she spoke.
That same month Brissot, Vergniaud and nineteen other Girondin leaders were also put on trial. They defended themselves so skilfully that Hébert angrily complained, ‘Need there be so much ceremony about shortening the lives of wretches already condemned by the people?’ But they were, without exception, condemned to death. Four of them were in their twenties; their average age was forty. One of the older of them, Valazé, stabbed himself to death in court with a dagger which he had concealed under his coat; yet it was decreed that his corpse should nevertheless be carted next morning to the guillotine and there beheaded with the others.