Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (41 page)

Eugène and Hortense, unable to visit their mother in Les Carmes, used to send her irascible pug, Fortuné, past the gaoler with notes for Rose tucked into his collar. Letters were smuggled into the cells hidden in pies or roast chickens, sewn into coat linings or scrunched around fruit and vegetables. One day towards the end of June, after she had been moved out of solitary confinement, a stone wrapped in paper fell at Thérésia’s feet. She picked it up and kissed it, knowing at once that it was from Tallien.

Théroigne de Méricourt and Pauline Léon were further victims of the atmosphere of intensifying crisis. Léon was arrested on 3 April 1794, less than six months after her marriage to Théophile Leclerc and the dissolution of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires. ‘A natural sentiment and an irresistible one for young married persons’ had led her to visit Leclerc at the front in March, where they were both arrested without charge and taken to the Luxembourg.

It is possible that Léon had gone to the front to fight alongside her husband, as she had always hoped to do. In 1793 the patriotic
Élisabeth Dubois, wife of Pierre Favre, was one of several women who testified to having joined the army where their husbands were serving. Her husband’s regiment of gunners granted her the rank and uniform of
capitaine en second
, the same as her husband, and she fought and was taken prisoner alongside him. When the Austrians discovered she was a woman her life was spared, although all her companions were slaughtered.

Also in the spring of 1794, Théroigne de Méricourt’s brother Joseph had written to his local ward informing them that she was in a ‘state of madness’ and requesting judicial intervention in her case. Since her beating at the hands of the républicaines-révolutionnaires in May 1793, The Éroigne had slipped from the official gaze but had been gradually descending into madness. Joseph’s attempts to forestall her arrest were unsuccessful, and, having been heard making ‘suspect remarks’, she was taken into custody on 27 June.

During her confinement in early July she wrote to Antoine Saint-Just, though she had apparently not met him, begging for his help. Her letter reveals her encroaching psychosis. ‘If you are unable to visit me where I am now, if you simply do not have the time, could I not arrange to be accompanied to your house?’ she wrote. ‘We must establish union.’ She needed money, light and paper, she told him, so that she could carry on her work. ‘I have great things to say…[but] I must be free in order to write.’ If she remained in prison, patriotism would be degraded, but if she were released she ‘could still put everything to rights, if you would second me’.

Young, handsome and famously chaste, Saint-Just was the perfect focus for Théroigne’s fantasies: powerful enough to help her and austere enough not to frighten her. But although her letter reached him, in the chaos of the first days of Thermidor, he did not even have time to open it. It was found among his papers, still sealed, after his death.

Saint-Just was Robespierre’s henchman in the fight to defend his vision of the revolution against an ever increasing party of opponents who knew that his triumph would mean their certain deaths. Robespierre’s enemies–many of whom had once been his friends and allies–were made up of several disparate groups, united by their resentment of his dictatorial pretensions and their concern about the direction in
which the revolution was heading: the few surviving
dantonistes
; members of the Committee of General Security, whose power Robespierre was seeking to undermine (he had stopped referring business to the Committee of General Security in June); rebel members of the Committee of Public Safety itself; and former
représentants en mission
who had been chastised by the Committee of Public Safety either for the repressive severity of their measures (like the atheist Joseph Fouché in Lyon) or for suspected corruption (like Tallien himself). According to Paul Barras, a former
représentant
accused of embezzlement and bribery, Robespierre had said he wanted to rid the revolution of men who were full of plunder and blood.

Several of his opponents approached Robespierre during this period, hoping to come to terms with him. Barras and Stanislas Fréron, two ex-
représentants
, paid him a surprise visit at his rooms in the rue Saint-Honoré, while he was undergoing his morning toilette. White with hair-powder, his lips tight-clamped together, Robespierre ignored his visitors; then brushed his teeth, washed his face and hands in a basin and finished dressing. He neither looked at Barras or Fréron nor addressed a word to them before they eventually left. As Barras commented, it could hardly be called an interview.

On 11 June, a week and a half after Thérésia’s arrest, Tallien had written to Robespierre, swearing that he had altered ‘neither in his principles nor in his conduct. Not for a moment have I ceased to be a true friend of justice, truth and liberty.’ He knew that the Committees saw him as an ‘immoral man’, he said, but if they could see him at home, with his aged, respectable mother, they would find that there luxury was banned. Tallien insisted that he had never profited from the revolution; everyone in Bordeaux would confirm that his actions there had been governed by energy, wisdom and justice. ‘These are my sentiments, Robespierre,’ he concluded, echoing the tone of virtuous self-justification that Robespierre himself employed. ‘They will never change. Living alone, I have few friends, but I will always be one of the true defenders of the rights of the people.’ Robespierre responded by banning Tallien from the Jacobin Club.

As the realization that he was the focus of an amorphous conspiracy grew upon him throughout June and July, Robespierre became more
paranoid, more controlling and more isolated. Robespierre ‘was the Terror itself’, Barras wrote later. As Germaine de Staël pointed out, the people had respected him because they believed him ‘incapable of personal views’: the ‘Incorruptible’ was their mouthpiece, the embodiment of their revolutionary will. But as soon as his impartiality was called into question, wrote Staël, ‘his power was at an end’.

Afterwards, Robespierre’s challengers would each try to claim the distinction of having formed the plot that brought him down. Fouché wrote: ‘Tallien contended for two lives, of which one was far dearer to him than his own: he therefore resolved upon assassinating the future dictator, even in the Convention itself’; he added that it was he who had persuaded Tallien to abandon this foolhardy idea and stand united with the others. Barras also claimed credit for telling his allies that they would all perish if Robespierre did not.

Thérésia believed that it was for her sake that Robespierre fell. On 25 July (7 Thermidor) she claimed to have smuggled a letter out of La Force to Tallien, with whom she had been in communication since her release from solitary confinement. She had just been told that she was to be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal the following morning, ‘that is to say to the scaffold’. It was so unlike the dream she had just had, she continued, in which Robespierre did not exist and the prison doors had been opened. ‘But, thanks to your great cowardice, there is no longer anyone capable of making my dream a reality.’ Tallien is said to have replied, ‘Madame, rest assured that I will have the courage; calm yourself.’ Another version has Thérésia sending her letter wrapped around a knife destined either for Robespierre’s heart or for Tallien’s, and ending dramatically, ‘I will go to my death despairing that I belonged to a coward like you.’

It is unlikely that either of these versions is scrupulously accurate. None of Thérésia’s correspondence to Tallien while she was in prison survives, and she was always happy to embroider the truth if it would make a better story. But it seems clear that she knew Tallien was the only person who could save her and that Tallien had, as Fouché observed, a double reason for desiring Robespierre’s end.

On 8 Thermidor Robespierre appeared at the National Convention, immaculate in the same sky-blue silk coat and daffodil-yellow breeches
he had worn at the Festival of the Supreme Being. He warned the deputies against tyrants and the enemies of the revolution, many of whom, he declared, were hidden among their number. The men he accused, whom he refused to name, knew exactly who they were. Jean Dyzez said two days later that on 9 Thermidor Tallien’s head was ‘almost touching the guillotine’.

Next day, Saint-Just took the tribune at the Convention and began to speak–‘I am from no faction. I will fight against them all’–but after only a few sentences he was interrupted by Tallien, who stood up to condemn Robespierre for making a speech in his own name the day before, rather than on behalf of the government. Others followed behind him. Robespierre tried to speak in his own defence, but was prevented from doing so by the session’s president Collot d’Herbois, one of the discontented members of the Committee of Public Safety, who rang his bell to drown out Robespierre’s voice. ‘
À bas le tyran!
’ shouted the deputies. One described him as the leader of a cult; another was heard to call, ‘It’s the blood of Danton that chokes him!’

‘Until now I have kept silent because I knew that the man who was close to becoming the tyrant of France had formed a list of proscribed persons…[but yesterday] I trembled for my country; I saw the army of the new Cromwell forming, and I armed myself with a dagger to pierce his breast if the National Convention should not have the courage to accuse him,’ cried Tallien, brandishing a knife, perhaps the one given to him by Thérésia. ‘I demand that we stay in session until the sword of the law has safeguarded the Revolution, and that we order the arrest of the traitors.’

Although the Commune made a half-hearted attempt to mobilize the wards in Robespierre’s defence, sounding the tocsin and marching a small force of National Guards to the Convention, for the first time since August 1792 they lacked momentum and support. Late that night, Barras led the troops under his control to the Hôtel de Ville, where Robespierre and his associates had fled earlier that afternoon.

As Barras and his men approached, it seems Robespierre and his friends resolved to kill themselves rather than be captured. Robespierre’s younger brother, Augustin, jumped from one of the hall’s windows, landing in front of the approaching force. Inside, the crippled
Georges Couthon was lying paralysed and bloody on the staircase; he had apparently thrown himself out of his wheelchair and down the stairs, but had not died. Joseph Lebas had been more successful–he had blown his brains out–but Robespierre had only managed to shatter his jaw. He was lying in agony on a council table. ‘Do you suffer, your majesty?’ asked the sans-culotte guards sardonically when they arrived. Saint-Just alone was unscathed, standing cool and defiant as he waited to be taken.

The next day, after a brief appearance before the Revolutionary Tribunal where they were formally identified (but not tried), Couthon, Saint-Just, Robespierre and nineteen others were bundled roughly into tumbrels and driven through the city to the Place de la Révolution. The route to the scaffold took them along the rue Saint-Honoré, past Robespierre’s lodgings, where the carts stopped. Dancing, clapping, singing, taunting crowds encircled them; strangers who the day before would not have dared look at one another in the streets kissed and embraced; oxblood was splattered on to the walls of Robespierre’s house.

Marxist historians believe that ‘when the Thermidorians killed Robespierre, they killed the revolution’, and even today many historians end their analysis of the revolution with Robespierre’s death. A more measured view is that held by François Furet, who views 9 Thermidor as the end of the revolution because it was the ‘victory of representative over revolutionary legitimacy’, but thinks we must neither detest Robespierre nor exalt him. He was as much victim as manipulator of his times. ‘Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the revolution for a few months,’ writes Furet, ‘but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse.’

He echoes Joseph Fouché, years after the fact, who said that although at the time he was ‘too near a spectator of events’ to appreciate them fully, he had since come to believe that seeing Robespierre as a dictator was doing him ‘too much honour; he had neither plan, nor
design; far from disposing of futurity, he was drawn along, and did but obey an impulse he could neither oppose nor govern’.

Robespierre’s contemporaries were generally less equivocal, removing from themselves any blame for their own complicity in the Terror by painting him as personally responsible for all its horrors. Very few regretted his demise, even those most closely associated with him. On 11 Thermidor, the day after Robespierre’s death, one theatre was playing
La Mort de César
and another
L’Hypocrite en révolution
. Newspaper editors informed their readers that ‘at last, France is free’; grisly prints depicting Robespierre squeezing blood from a heart into a cup from which he was about to drink went on sale in the stalls of the Palais Royal. All Paris erupted in a delirious outpouring of relief and joy. ‘To finish the revolution was an idea of all others the most soothing to the public mind,’ wrote Helen Williams.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whose political sympathies were Girondin, excoriated Tallien for not taking his victory further. ‘Tallien!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thou raised thyself as a cowardly sluggard rises at length when the fire reaches the mattress of his bed.’ But many more viewed Tallien as their saviour from the stench of death and daily fear that had become their lives. Mary Wollstonecraft, in Le Havre in August, wrote that she was ‘still pleased with the dignity of his conduct’, admiring his talents, his humanity and his ‘openness of heart’.

Tallien revelled in his triumph. In the days after 9 Thermidor he let it be known that he had acted from the purest and most impartial political motives as well as from the most ardently subjective ones. ‘I would prefer to save twenty aristocrats accidentally than to expose one patriot to unjust oppression,’ he declared before the Convention, saying that ‘Terror is the weapon of tyranny’ and arguing for liberties curtailed under the Jacobin regime such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech–even for former aristocrats–to be restored. ‘Terror is a pervasive involuntary trembling, an exterior tremor that affects the most hidden fibres, that degrades man and assimilates him to beast,’ he declared, undermining Robespierre’s concept of Terror as an instrument of social regeneration and justice. ‘It is a collapse of all physical strength, a concussion of all moral faculties; a disturbance of all ideas, an overthrow of all affections; it is a veritable disorganisation of the soul.’