Some deputies began to murmur to each other. One whispered, ‘Just listen to the pontiff!’ Another said sardonically that were it not for kind Monsieur de Robespierre they never would have known that there was a God or that the soul was meant to be immortal.
After Robespierre had finished speaking, he took a lighted torch that was offered to him and marched purposefully down towards the pyre. The evil effigies were satisfactorily consumed, but when the Goddess of Wisdom rose like a phoenix from their ashes to take their place her face was so blackened by soot that several spectators could not restrain their laughter.
Robespierre returned to his place where he delivered himself of a second speech after which the deputies at last moved off to the Champ de Mars, their irritation plain for all to see. Most of them pretended not to hear the orders of the ushers of the Convention who vainly endeavoured to get them to march in proper military fashion. Some walked arm in arm with their neighbours; others nodded significantly towards the neat figure of Robespierre who strode on, twenty paces ahead of the rest, a crown of feathers on his head.
In the middle of the Champ de Mars a tall tree spread its boughs over the summit of a mound covered with moss. The deputies sat down beneath the leaves of the tree surrounded by groups of little boys with garlands of violets on their heads, by young men with wreaths of myrtle, by older men wearing oak, ivy and olive leaves. Women, carrying baskets of flowers, held children by the hand. An orchestra began to play; the various groups began to sing; the young men drew swords and swore to their elders to defend the fatherland; the women lifted up their children in their arms; all raised their hands to heaven, paying homage to the Supreme Being. Robespierre made another speech. Then a barrage of artillery fire rent the air while the people cheered and hugged each other shouting, ‘Vive la République!’
For most of the spectators, if not for the deputies who had played their parts so resentfully, the festival had been an enjoyable one and had given them grounds for hope that the weeks of Terror and repression might be coming to an end – throughout the day the guillotine had been draped in velvet.
All citizens had been asked to decorate their houses with garlands and oak branches for the celebrations [the thirteen-year-old daughter of an architect told her father who had gone to design a theatre in the provinces]. We used all our artificial flowers. You may imagine that the previous night was an almost sleepless one for me because of the pleasures in store…I got up at six o’clock…and put on a lawn skirt, a tricolour sash round my waist and an embroidered fichu of red cotton…In our pockets we put some slices of bread and cooking chocolate…You cannot imagine what a sight the Champ de Mars presented. It looked as though someone had transported a huge cliff from the Pyrenees. On its peak was an obelisk surmounted by a statue representing the people of France holding aloft the statues of Liberty and Equality. It really seemed as though the French are fairies to have done such beautiful things in so short time…There were girls everywhere strewing flowers. My hair was simply full of them.
For Robespierre, however, the day which had begun so cheerfully in such auspicious sunshine, which should have been one of triumph, had ended in ultimate humiliation. He had overheard some of the remarks that the deputies had made, the references to the ‘proud affectation’ of ‘the tyrant’, to Brutus and Nemesis. He had been made well aware of the feelings amongst the sans-culottes, one of whom, standing near Vitale, had said, ‘The bastard isn’t satisfied with being the boss; he’s got to be God as well’. And he could not have failed to hear the caustic comment that greeted his observation that it was the Supreme Being who had placed in the heart of the oppressor the sensations of remorse and terror: ‘True, Robespierre, too true!’ He went home with presentiments of danger and death. ‘You will not see me much longer,’ he said morosely to the Duplays before going to bed.
For some time past he had been becoming increasingly isolated from his equally overworked and, in some cases, equally didactic and authoritarian colleagues who were constantly getting on each others’ nerves. After this festival, they felt more strongly than ever that he regarded himself as a dictator, while he in turn became more and more suspicious of them, particularly of Billaud-Varenne, the coarse Collot d’Herbois whom he suspected of conspiring against him, and of Carnot who always worked late in the Committee’s offices, and was supposed by one of Robespierre’s agents to do so in order to be the first ‘to open all the letters that arrive’. There had been a period, after the destruction of both Hébertists and Dantonists when, closely associated with his principal supporters, Saint-Just and Couthon, he had been in unquestioned control of the Committee of Public Safety and hence of the Government. Through Fouquier-Tinville and Fouquier’s associates he had controlled the Revolutionary Tribunal, and, through Hanriot, the National Guard. But always he had been as much feared and disliked as respected and revered. A revealing anecdote was related by Paul Barras, who said that a fellow-deputy awoke from a reverie with a cry of alarm when he realized that Robespierre’s greenish eyes were upon him. ‘He will now suppose,’ the frightened deputy said, ‘that I was thinking about something.’
‘Fear was on every side, in the creak of a door, an exclamation, a breath,’ wrote Louis Madelin of those early summer months when Robespierre had been in undisputed control of the government. ‘Drawing-rooms were empty, wine-shops deserted: even the courtesans stopped going to the Palais Royal where (extraordinary sight!) virtue reigned supreme. The dreary city waited, under the burning summer sun.’
Plays were censored; Molière was banned. A performance at the Comédie Française was interrupted by a Jacobin who stood up to object to the line, ‘les plus tolérants sont les pardonnables’. When the audience told him to be quiet he went off to the Jacobin Club to denounce the actors who were all arrested. Few people dared talk freely, for the Committee of Public Safety’s ubiquitous spies might well be listening. Even at the Fraternal Suppers, which were held in the streets outside houses whose owners were expected to cook and serve the food, conversation was guarded, while the quality of the meals provided was often governed by what interpretation might be placed upon it. Madame Rataud who kept a dress shop in the Rue des Petits-Champs commented upon the dilemma that faced her when a Fraternal Supper was held in her section: ‘If I prepare a dish of haricots the sans-culottes will throw it in my face, yet if I provide roast pheasant the Jacobins will say it is too high-class.’ In the event she cooked both and, after nervously waiting to see what her neighbours would provide before bringing out either, it seemed to her safe to produce them both. Other women wrote of the dangers to be encountered in the streets where spies watched out for ‘enemies of the nation’. Madame Amé who ran a dressmaker’s workshop in the Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré kept a tricolour cockade for the use of her apprentices and insisted that whenever one of the girls went out on an errand she must pin it prominently to her hat.
Yet the fears that undoubtedly pervaded the lives of many citizens during these months were not universal. Gaily painted carriages no longer thronged the tree-lined boulevards of Paris, but families still strolled in the evening air down the Boulevard de la Comédie Italienne, and young ladies still went to drawing classes and had piano lessons.
This is how we spend our days [runs the entry for 16 January 1794 in the diary of a young governess in a bourgeois family in the Rue Saint-Marc]. Citizeness Ziguette [the youngest daughter in the family] leaves at ten o’clock after having eaten a light breakfast and practised her pianoforte fairly conscientiously. She trips away with a clatter of sabots, hoisting up her blue skirt to expose white under-petticoats much shorter than they should be and running like a Red Indian pulling along Thérèse [the cook] by the arm. Thérèse carries her bouillon and bread soup in a tin container. They arrive at Citizen Chaudet’s. She draws, is complimented by her master. As soon as she comes home she gabbles what he has said to her…and as she reaches the top of the stairs I hear her shout, ‘Food! I’m starving to death!’ Quite alarmed by this ogrish hunger, we make haste to sit down to dinner where, over a good meal, we commend the merits of her sketches…Then there is pianoforte practice until lights are brought in, no longer wax but tallow candles, plain and simple. Then we read Ovid or Horace until about seven o’clock when we begin to read for instruction or entertainment such as learning by heart some lines from Racine or Anarcharsis.