Before being taken there Robespierre was carried on a plank to the offices of the Committee of Public Safety and dumped on a table in the green-painted anteroom, his head on a wooden ammunition box. For an hour he lay there without moving, his eyes closed, the blood still pouring from his shattered jaw. Then, at about four o’clock in the morning, he opened his eyes, and began quietly to wipe the clotted blood from his mouth with a pistol holster of soft white leather. One of the people who surrounded the table, looking down at him with more curiosity than pity, offered him a few pieces of paper which he used instead of the holster until they, too, were covered in blood. Some of the crowd in the room jeered at him: ‘Well, you do seem to have gone quiet all of a sudden!’ ‘Oh, Sire! Is your Majesty in pain?’
At about six o’clock a surgeon came to stop him bleeding to death. He put a key in his mouth, pulled out two or three teeth together with some fragments of broken bone, and then dressed the wound with a bandage that covered the whole of the lower part of his face. During these operations Robespierre remained silent, showing scarcely a trace of the agony he must have endured. When the surgeon had finished he pulled up the stockings which had fallen down to his ankles, pushed himself off the table and went to sit in a chair where he looked at the people who still surrounded him, his face as white as his stockings, the bandages round his jaw now red with blood.
At nine o’clock Couthon was brought into the room on a stretcher. Then Saint-Just and Dumas appeared. None of them spoke until Saint-Just, looking at the large placard proclaiming the Rights of Man that had been stuck on the wall, said, ‘Well, whatever you say, that is something we did.’ An hour later all the prisoners were taken to the Conciergerie where Robespierre indicated that he wanted pen and paper. ‘What for?’ the gaoler answered, refusing to bring them. ‘Do you want to write to your Supreme Being?’
Arraigned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, Robespierre and his brother, together with Saint-Just, Couthon, Hanriot, Dumas, Fleuriot and sixteen other members of the conseil general of the Commune – a further seventy were to follow them – were condemned to death and taken by cart to the guillotine at five o’clock that afternoon. The crowds all along the route were immense and rowdy. They shouted insults and curses at the men in the carts, calling out ‘To the guillotine! Long live the Republic! Down with the tyrant!’ For a few moments the tumbrils stopped outside the Duplays’ house while women danced about them and a boy, who had fetched a bucket from a butcher’s shop, smeared the door with blood.
Robespierre’s face was ‘wrapped in a bandage of dirty, bloodstained linen’, runs one report, ‘and, from what could be seen of it, was fearfully disfigured…His eyes were lowered and almost closed…Just before arriving at the place of execution…a woman forced her way through the crowd…and, grasping the railing of the cart with one hand, raised the other threateningly in his face. “You monster spewed out of hell,” she shouted at him. “Go down into your grave burdened with the curses of the wives and mothers of France…The thought of your execution makes me drunk with joy.”’
Augustin Robespierre was also bandaged; so was Couthon; so also was Hanriot who, ‘drunk as usual’, presented a horrifying spectacle with his right eye still hanging from its socket. Saint-Just, who had once declared that the ship of the Revolution could arrive safely in port ‘only by ploughing its way boldly through a Red Sea of blood’, looked upon the crowd with stiff disdain, his pale brown breeches and white waistcoat still immaculate. They reached the Place de la Révolution at about half-past seven in the evening.
As Hanriot was ‘about to ascend the scaffold, a bystander snatched out his loose eye’. Robespierre, who had to be lifted from the cart, lay flat on the ground, appearing to take no notice of what was happening. His eyes were closed and he did not open them until he felt himself being carried up on to the scaffold. The executioner threw off the coat which had been placed over his shoulders and then tore away the bandage and splint that the surgeon had applied to his wound. As his lower jaw fell from his upper, and the blood flew once more ‘in torrents’, he let forth ‘a groan like that of a dying tiger, which was heard all over the square’.
‘We are all throwing ourselves into each other’s arms,’ a newspaper reported the following day. ‘The tyrant is no more.’
10
THE DAYS OF GERMINAL, PRAIRIAL AND VENDÉMIAIRE
1 April, 20 May and 4–6 October 1795
‘A burning fever is followed by complete prostration of strength’
The destruction of the Robespierrists and the wholesale purge of the Commune soon resulted in the Revolution’s lurching to the Right. But the change of direction was not immediately apparent. In the general rejection of the Terror that followed the journée of 9 Thermidor, several former Hébertists and the Enragés who had escaped the guillotine were released from prison. Such extreme sans-culotte leaders as Jean Varlet came into prominence once more and, in a number of provincial towns, radicals reassumed that importance in the comités revolutionnaires of which Robespierre’s recall of the représentants en mission had deprived them. But gradually the Plain began to assert itself as a more considerable body than it had ever done in the past. Some of its members, as well as some former Dantonists like Thuriot de la Rozère were elected to the Committee of Public Safety whose powers were severely reduced as were those of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Billaud-Varenne, Collot d’Herbois, Carnot and the time-serving Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac all left the Committee of Public Safety, and Fouquier-Tinville was removed from the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Moderates and Montagnards alike found it increasingly difficult to stem the rightward flow of the revolutionary tide. Robert Lindet proposed to the Convention that, while nobles and clergy should no longer be condemned merely because of their birth or calling, and while the Law of 22 Prairial against suspects which had been repealed should never be reintroduced, there should be no vendetta against those who had been responsible for the errors and violence of the past. But although the Convention voted unanimously in favour of this compromise, the revulsion against the Montagnards could not so easily be contained. Some of those who had once worked with Robespierre – and in the end had fallen foul of him, Fréron, Barras and Tallien amongst them – became positively reactionary as if to atone for the excesses of the Terror for which they had been responsible; and under their protection the jeunesse dorée, young men of mostly middle-class background, became as frightening a force as the sans-culottes had once been. These jeunesse dorée, who marched about the streets carrying short sticks weighted with lead, wore a kind of uniform of square-skirted coats and tight trousers, low boots and extremely high cravats. Their hair dangled in long locks over their ears and was plaited at the back of their heads. They constituted a dictatorship, so one of them boasted, ‘a dictatorship which nobody opposed because it filled everyone’s wish’. With their help the closure of the Jacobin Club was brought about, the red caps of liberty were banished from the streets and nearly all the Paris sections were taken over by the Right who, having stopped payments to workers for attending meetings, went further in keeping out unwanted sans-culottes by arranging to have the meetings held only in the middle of the day.