The carts halted before the scaffold [recorded the Abbé who described the chief executioner as a short young man with a markedly dandyish air]. There was a large circle of spectators, most of them laughing, ‘There she is! Look at her! That’s the Marshal’s wife who used to have a grand carriage. Now she’s in a cart just like the others’…I saw the chief executioner and his two assistants…[one of them had his hair drawn back in a pigtail and chewed on the stem of a red rose]…I must admit that…the sufferings of the [forty-five] victims were much mitigated by their business-like methods, the way they got all the condemned down from the carts before the executioner started, and placed them with their backs to the scaffold so they would not see anything. I felt the executioners deserved some gratitude for this and for the decorum they observed and their serious expressions which contained no traces of mockery or insult…
I now found myself facing the steps to the scaffold against which a tall, old white-haired man was leaning. He was to be beheaded first. He had a kindly air…Near him stood a pious-looking lady whom I did not know; Mme de Noailles was immediately opposite me. She was dressed in black and sitting on a block of stone with wide staring eyes…[Her daughter] stood in a simple, noble, resigned attitude with her eyes closed, looking as she did when receiving Holy Communion…
The executioner and his assistants climb on the scaffold and arrange everything. The chief executioner puts on a blue-red overall…When all is ready the old man goes up the steps. The chief executioner takes him by the left arm, the big assistant by the right and the other by the legs. They lay him quickly on his face and his head is cut off and thrown, together with his body, into a great tumbril, where all the bodies swim in blood. And so it goes on. What a dreadful shambles it is! The Duchess is the third to go up. They have to make an opening in the top of her dress to uncover her neck. Her daughter-in-law is the tenth…The chief executioner tears off her bonnet. It is fastened by a pin so her hair is pulled violently upwards and she grimaces with pain. When the daughter-in-law is gone the grand-daughter replaces her. She is dressed all in white. She looks much younger than she really is…
Day after day the executions continued until by the end of July over 1,500 people had been beheaded within the previous eight weeks. But only a small proportion of them were aristocrats. Less than nine in a hundred of those guillotined in the Terror were of noble birth; about six per cent were clergy. The rest, eighty-five per cent, came from that class of the people once known as the Third Estate. Among them were ‘twenty peasant girls from Poitou’, so one contemporary recorded:
All of them were to be executed together. Exhausted by their long journey, they lay in the courtyard of the Conciergerie, asleep on the paving-stones. Their expression betrayed no understanding of their fate…They were all guillotined a few days after their arrival…From one of them a baby she was feeding was taken from her breast.
Robespierre witnessed none of the victims perish. He had once expressed the opinion that public executions coarsened and brutalized the character of the people. But he made no move to stop them. He had to stay in power for, incorruptible, more virtuous than other men, he alone could save the Revolution. In justification of the Terror he declared in the Convention, ‘At the point where we are now, if we stop too soon we will die. We have not been too severe…Without the revolutionary Government the Republic cannot be made stronger. If it is destroyed now, freedom will be extinguished tomorrow.’ Besides, his own life was in danger. He had always said that the daggers of murderers were directed at him, that it was only by chance that Marat had been struck down before him. Since then two people, one a nobleman’s former valet, the other an unbalanced girl of twenty who lamented the death of the King, had set out to kill him. He had cause to remember the words that Danton had shouted at the Revolutionary Tribunal and at the Duplays’ shuttered house as the tumbrils rumbled past it on their way to the guillotine: ‘You will follow us, Robespierre.’
9
THE DAYS OF THERMIDOR
22–28 July 1794
‘Robespierre never forgave men for the injustices which he had done them, nor for the kindnesses which he had received from them, nor for the talents which some of them possessed, and he did not have’
On 18 Floréal Year III, that is to say on 7 May 1794, Robespierre delivered to the Convention a long speech which had taken him three weeks to prepare. In the course of it, having blamed his fallen enemies for putting the Republic in danger and vilified Danton, ‘the most dangerous of the conspirators had he not been the most cowardly’, he turned upon the atheists who had survived the recent purges and who were now trying to ‘smother all the noble sentiments of nature’ by elevating ‘immorality into a cult’. Declaring that atheism was aristocratic, he propounded the necessity of a moral revolution to complete the work of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and proposed a decree which would announce unequivocally to the world the French people’s recognition of the ‘existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul’. To celebrate their acceptance of this new civic religion and their devotion to the principles and virtues of the Revolution, he then introduced a plan for a series of national festivals, the first of them to be held on Whit Sunday, 8 June, in honour of the Supreme Being.
On the morning of that day Robespierre dressed himself with even more than his accustomed care in a bright blue coat and buff cotton trousers. He left the house, without having had breakfast, carrying a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers and sheaves of corn. The sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky; the windows of the houses in the Rue Saint-Honoré were decorated with red roses; the pealing of church bells was punctuated by the boom of cannon and the tapping of drums. And to a young man, a ‘very refined little dandy’ named Vilate, a juryman on the Revolutionary Tribunal, who met him as he walked through the Tuileries gardens, Robespierre looked ‘radiantly happy – for the first time’. Vilate invited him up to his apartment in the Pavilion de Flore.
He accepted my invitation without hesitation [Vilate recalled]. He was astounded to see the immense crowds of people that thronged the gardens below my windows. The women added to the gaiety of the scene by the elegance of their dresses…Robespierre ate little. His glance was constantly directed towards the splendid spectacle below. He seemed to be intoxicated with enthusiasm. ‘Behold the most interesting part of humanity,’ he exclaimed. ‘Here is the universe assembled beneath us. Oh, Nature, how sublime, how delightful is thy power! How tyrants must turn pale at the idea of this Feast!’ That was the extent of his conversation.
On the terrace of the Palace the members of the Convention were waiting impatiently for him to appear and, as President of the Convention, to open the proceedings. The minutes passed and Robespierre did not come. The deputies looked alternately at their watches and at an amphitheatre which had been built in front of the terrace. Surmounting the amphitheatre was a pyre on which was to be burned an ugly effigy representing atheism together with others symbolizing discord and selfishness in accordance with a scenario prepared by David, the painter. The deputies, many of whom had already derided the whole conception of the festival in private, did not trouble to disguise their resentment at being kept waiting so long. They grew even more restive when the President at last arrived upon the scene and delivered himself of a long speech in which he claimed that the world which the Supreme Being had created had never offered Him ‘a spectacle so worthy of His sight’ as the festival that Paris was celebrating this day.