So the journée of I Prairial was no more successful than the far more violent one of 12 Germinal–yet the repression that followed it was even more severe. The immediate trial of all prisoners taken from among the rioters was ordered. The beating of the générale without proper authority was made a capital offence, and a military commission was set up to pass sentence upon everyone, left-wing deputies and sans-culotte leaders alike, who were held responsible for the disturbances. The first of the accused brought before this military commission was the assassin of Féraud who had only just been apprehended and who was sentenced to be guillotined that same day.
This man was actually on the scaffold when a mob stormed up the steps, knocked aside the gendarmes and executioners and bore him away into a warren of narrow streets in the middle of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The Convention responded to this new provocation with a prompt display of determined force. Almost 25,000 men, including nearly 4,000 regular soldiers, were called up to surround the faubourg into which about 1,200 excited jeunesse dorée dashed with bravado ahead of them. These young men were soon themselves surrounded by the angry inhabitants of the neighbourhood and might not have escaped with the beating to which several of them were subjected had not the Convention’s formidable army and its numerous cannon persuaded the sans-culotte leaders to agree to surrender their arms and to deliver up Féraud’s murderer when they had found him.
Having put down this latest popular revolt, the Convention’s agents turned with renewed vigour upon its promoters and upon the Montagnard deputies who were supposed to have looked upon it with indulgence. Well over 3,000 suspects were rounded up, and although most of these were later released, they were closely watched thereafter by the police and frequently re-arrested when further disturbances were threatened. Reports of an uprising at Toulon, which was, however, soon put down, increased the Convention’s determination to be ruthless. Former members of the Committees of Public Safety and General Security, whose services to the country had previously protected them from punishment, were no longer immune. Carnot was spared as the ‘organizer of military victory’, but David’s reputation as a distinguished artist could no longer save him and he was imprisoned. Robert Lindet, whose responsibility for food-supplies on the Committee of Public Safety had been discharged with tireless efficiency, was also arrested. Among the thirty-six men condemned to death were six Montagnard deputies. The wife of a young army officer, Laure Junot, described their end:
One day my brother returned home dreadfully agitated. He had witnessed an awful scene. Romme, Soubrany, Duroi, Duquesnoi, Goujon and Bourbette [the six deputies] exhibited the most admirable fortitude during their trial…When sentence was pronounced on them they looked at each other calmly; and, on descending the staircase, which was lined with spectators, Romme looked about as if seeking somebody…who did not appear. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘With a firm hand this will do, Vive la Liberté!’ Then drawing from his pocket a large penknife he plunged it into his heart, and, drawing it out again [fearing he had not struck hard enough, inflicted several more wounds on his chest, throat and face. He then] gave it Goujon who, in like manner, passed it to Duquesnoi. All three fell dead instantly without uttering a groan. The weapon, passed on to Soubrany by the trembling hand of Duquesnoi, found its way to the noble hearts of the rest; but they were not so fortunate as their three friends. Grievously wounded, yet alive, they fell at the foot of the scaffold which the executioner made them ascend, bleeding and mutilated as they were.
After their deaths and the final destruction of the Montagnards as a political force, the reaction continued apace. The sans-culottes, already virtually powerless, were further weakened by the reconstitution of the National Guard which became once more a largely bourgeois organization. The word ‘revolutionary’ was decreed as no longer applicable to institutions which had previously been thus described, a commemorative festival was instituted in honour of the Girondins, and an amnesty was offered to all those who had fled from France after the uprising of May 1793.
So fast was the tide of reaction flowing, indeed, that royalists began to hope for a restoration. The late King’s son, whom they recognized as Louis XVII, had contracted tuberculosis of the bones during his incarceration in the Temple and died there aged ten on 8 June 1795. But the Comte de Provence, who had been surrounded by the most intransigent counter-revolutionaries during his exile and was then living at Verona, proclaimed himself King Louis XVIII. He announced that on his return to the throne he would restore the traditional three orders in France, have those who had voted for the death of his brother brought to trial, and give back to the Church the power and prestige it had formerly enjoyed.
Already plans had been laid for a royalist restoration by force. It was intended that the Prince de Condé, father of the Duc de Bourbon, who had fought against the Revolution in conjunction with the Austrians, should advance with a royalist army from the east; that an insurrection should be simultaneously provoked in the south; that the extravagant and pleasure-loving General, Charles Pichegru, commander of the Rhine Army, should be suborned by huge bribes, by the promise of his promotion to marshal and the offer of the château and park of Chambord; and that an expeditionary force of émigrés, for which the English government were to provide money, naval support and uniforms, should be landed in the north-west to link up with the Chouans. But, as with so many other royalist plots, the execution bore little relation to the planning. General Pichegru proved an unreliable accomplice; the plans for the insurrection in the south were discovered and thwarted; the Breton Chouans of 1795 lacked the fervent courage of the earlier Vendéens; and in General Lazare Hoche, a former private in the Gardes-françaises, the republicans had a commander as skilful as he was decisive. When the émigré forces landed on the southern coast of Brittany on 27 June 1795, Hoche soon forced them to surrender, having pushed the Chouans who tried to come to their support back into the Quiberon peninsula. Over 700 prisoners, most of them nobles and many of them former naval officers, were shot in their English uniforms for high treason.
The immediate results of this dismal failure were a fresh outbreak of the cruel civil war in the north-west, where savage reprisals were taken against republican prisoners by the rebels, and a vigorous campaign by the Government against both royalists and the few surviving Montagnards. Several royalist journalists were arrested; so were some Montagnards, including that cunning intriguer, Fouché, while determined efforts were made to track down those of the jeunesse dorée to whose evasion of military service the authorities had hitherto turned a blind eye. At the same time the Convention debated the draft of a new constitution which was presented by Boissy d’Anglas.