Jean Baptiste Henry, aged eighteen, journeyman tailor, convicted of having sawed down a tree of liberty, executed 6 September 1793…Jean Julien, waggoner, having been sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour, took it into his head to cry ‘Vive le Roi’, brought back to the Tribunal and condemned to death…Stephen Thomas Ogie Baulny, aged forty-six, convicted of having entrusted his son, aged fourteen, to a garde du corps in order that he might emigrate, condemned to death and executed the same day…Henriette Françoise de Marboeuf, aged fifty-five, widow of the ci-devant Marquis de Marboeuf, convicted of having hoped for the arrival of the Austrians and Prussians and of keeping provisions for them, condemned to death and executed the same day…François Bertrand, aged thirty-seven, publican at Leure in the department of the Côte-d’Or, convicted of having furnished to the defenders of the country sour wine injurious to health, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day…Marie Angelique Plaisant, sempstress at Douai, convicted of having exclaimed that she was an aristocrat and that she did not care ‘a fig for the nation’, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day.
Hundreds of innocent people suffered with those whom the Revolutionary Tribunal had some cause to consider guilty, some of them through clerical and administrative errors, or even because their accusers chose not to spare them. Others were sentenced on the strength of denunciations by jealous or vindictive neighbours. One victim was fetched from prison to face a charge which had been brought against another prisoner with a similar name. Her protests were silenced by the prosecutor who said casually, ‘Since she’s here, we might just as well take her.’ Another who had lost his temper while playing cards and, when reprimanded for behaving as no good patriot should, had shouted, ‘Fuck good patriots!’ was also brought before the Tribunal, condemned and executed.
The worst excesses were committed in the provinces where – although most représentants en mission were more concerned with enlisting recruits and collecting supplies than with punishment – in several towns the guillotine was kept constantly at work and those convicted of crimes against the Revolution were slaughtered wholesale on the instructions of fanatical or savage representatives or of those who were frightened of being considered too weak. At Lyons where numerous rich men’s houses were blown up, including those in Mansart’s lovely Place Bellecour, Collot d’Herbois, who had been sent there as the Committee of Public Safety’s agent, and Joseph Fouché, a frail former teacher who had become one of the most dreaded of the Jacobins, decided that the guillotine was too slow an instrument for their purpose and had over three hundred of their victims mown down by cannon fire. ‘What a delicious moment!’ reported an approving witness to a friend in Paris. ‘How you would have enjoyed it!…What a sight! Worthy indeed of Liberty!…Wish bon jour to Robespierre.’
From Feurs, the representative himself reported, ‘The butchery has been good.’ At Toulon numerous victims were shot by order of Paul Barras, a tall, cunning former army officer of noble birth who was a cousin of the Marquis de Sade, and Louis Fréron, founder of the inflammatory journal, L’Orateur du peuple. At Nantes, where the Committee’s agent was the thirty-six-year-old Jean-Baptiste Carrier, an obscure attorney before the Revolution, three thousand captives perished in an epidemic in the grossly overcrowded prisons and a further two thousand were towed out in barges into the middle of the Loire and drowned, some of them stripped naked and bound together in couples. The river became so choked with these barges that ships weighing anchor brought them up filled with the dead. Birds of prey hovered over the waters, gorging themselves with human flesh, and the fish became so contaminated that orders had to be given forbidding them to be caught. On occasions Carrier appeared to be insane as, raving endlessly about the need to ‘kill and kill’, and to ‘butcher children without hesitation’, he slashed at the air with his sword. Even in his calmer moments he was abusive and intolerant, answering all complaints and pleas for mercy with the threat that those who approached him would themselves be thrown into prison.
In the north the représentant en mission was Joseph le Bon, a former priest of twenty-nine, who fixed his headquarters at Arras. From Arras he travelled about the departments of the Somme and the Pas-de-Calais with his judges and guillotine, leaving a trail of blood in his wake, ‘in a kind of fever’, so his secretary reported, returning home to imitate the grimaces of the dying for the benefit of his wife. Assiduously attending all the executions he could, he addressed both victims and spectators from a nearby balcony, ordered bands to play the Ça ira as at a festival, and afterwards invited the executioner to dinner.
Under the direction of Jean Tallien, the son of the maître d’hôtel of the Marquis de Bercy, a young man of twenty-six who had worked as a lawyer’s clerk and in a printer’s office, even more cruel punishments were inflicted at Bordeaux.
The most terrible atrocities were committed there [according to the thin, little, awkward Girondin, Jean Baptiste Louvet]. A woman was charged with the heinous crime of having wept at the execution of her husband. She was consequently condemned to sit several hours under the suspended blade which shed upon her, drop by drop, the blood of the deceased whose corpse was above her on the scaffold before she was released by death from her agony.
‘The time has come which was foretold,’ as Madame Roland had said, ‘when the people would ask for bread and be given corpses.’
In Paris thousands of people went out regularly to witness the operations of what the deputy, J. A. B. Amar, called the ‘red Mass’ performed on the ‘great altar’ of the ‘holy guillotine’. They took their seats around the scaffold with the tricoteuses, buying wine and biscuits from hawkers while they waited for the show to begin. They placed bets as to the order in which the huissiers from the Revolutionary Tribunal, who wore silver chains round their necks, would decide the prisoners were to mount the scaffold, anticipating those three thrilling sounds – the first thud as the victim was thrown on to the plank, the second thud as the neck clamp was thrown into place, and the swishing rattle as the heavy blade fell. Yet there were thousands more who, like Madame Roland, had become ‘sick of blood’. Shops were shut and windows closed in the Rue Saint-Honoré as the tumbrils passed by on their way to the Place de la Révolution, some by those who had grown tired of the spectacle, many by others who were disgusted by it. So, following complaints from the residents of the Rue Saint-Honoré that the smell of stale blood which rose from the stones of the nearby square was endangering their health and depreciating the value of their property, the guillotine was removed first to a site near the ruins of the Bastille, then to an open space near the Barrière du Trône Renversé, now the Place de la Nation. But the people in these districts were as unwilling to have the guillotine in their midst as were those of the Rue Saint-Honoré. The scaffold was therefore taken back once more to the Place de la Revolution where Louis XVI had died.
While prisoners captured in the civil wars, suspected federalist agents, counter-revolutionaries and those accused of currency manipulation or food hoarding were all dispatched in the ‘red Mass’, a campaign was simultaneously mounted against Christianity. For some time now the more ardent revolutionaries had been encouraging anti-clerical feelings among the people and endeavouring to endow the Revolution itself with the aura of a religion. They had condemned the celibacy of the clergy. They had joined with the Montagnard, Delacroix, in denouncing the action of a bishop who had prevented one of his curés from marrying as a ‘blasphemy against the sovereignty of the people’. And they had even supported demands for the demolition of church belfries, ‘which by their height above other buildings seem to contradict the principles of equality’. They had also welcomed the custom of giving babies names untainted with Christian associations, and of changing the names of streets, which were called after saints or festivals of the Church, to those of heroes, journées or symbols of the Revolution.