The Days of the French Revolution (18 page)

The doors of the Assembly were opened and the royal family walked inside. ‘I come,’ the King said to them, ‘to prevent a great crime, and I think, gentlemen, that I cannot be safer than in your midst.’ Vergniaud replied that he could rely on the protection of the National Assembly who had sworn to die in defence of the properly constituted authorities. The King then sat down beside the President; but, following the objections of François Chabot, a former friar who was one of the leaders of the Cordeliers Club, that his presence there would affect the freedom of debate, he and his family–‘their heads lowered like whipped dogs’, according to a deputy from the Aude – were removed to the shorthand-writers’ box, a small room scarcely ten feet square beneath the gallery and separated from the main hall of the Manège by an iron railing. This railing was removed so that they could more easily take shelter in the midst of the Assembly, should it be necessary for them to do so, the King himself pulling out several bars. They had not been in the box long when the sound of musketry and cannon fire could be heard from the direction of the palace and a few stray balls flew through the open windows of the hall. ‘I assure you,’ shouted the King, ‘that I have ordered the Swiss to be forbidden to fire.’ The sounds of firing grew louder, however, and a delegation of twenty deputies
was sent to try to stop the fighting. No sooner had they left on their vain mission than a band of armed citizens began battering on the doors of the hall, demanding admittance. ‘We are stormed!’ shouted one deputy as others rushed to hold the door; and the President, making the gesture which custom required of him on such occasions, put on his hat.

The door was soon forced and a crowd of
sans-culottes
stormed into the hall, demanding that the deputies ‘swear in the nation’s name to maintain liberty and equality’ with all their power or to die at their posts.

No one answered at first [reported one deputy, Michel Azéma, to friends in Carcassonne]. Then all the deputies…shouted…unanimously and simultaneously, ‘I do swear!’…The roll was called at once, and on the rostrum each in turn pronounced the…charming oath…indicated by the
sans-culottes…
Meanwhile, fierce fighting was going on at the Tuileries.

Here the
fédérés
from Marseilles and Finistère, at the head of the long column of demonstrators, had advanced towards the palace steps, calling out friendly greetings.

Every effort was made to persuade the Swiss to leave their position and join us [reported Pierre-François Desbouillons, a clerk from Brest who commanded the Finistère
fédérés
]. No one intended to do anything other than disarm them. But they steadfastly refused to give way to our urgent pleas to come over to our side. One of them decided to come over by himself to talk to the National Guard and was descending the steps when men who were no doubt paid to start the conflict tried to stab him. He rejoined his comrades at once. Everyone was still conferring. A musket shot had been fired but this had not yet started the fighting. The Swiss commanders persisted in saying they could not leave their posts without an order from the King. ‘Then you all want to die,’ someone said to them. ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘we shall all certainly die rather than abandon our posts without orders from me King.’

The area around the bottom of the steps was now filled with citizens, most of whom were armed only with sabres. In the milling about one of the Swiss commanders was slightly cut; and this immediately resulted in the citizens being fired on.

Crying out, ‘
Trahison! Trahison!
’ the citizens and
fédérés
fled in confusion while the Swiss came down the steps in good order, discharging their muskets, then running towards the cannon which had been negligently left in the courtyard and opening fire with shot. At this moment the King’s order not to fire reached them. They immediately abandoned the guns and marched off in the direction of the terrace of the Feuillants. Other companies of the Swiss were still in the palace, however. The King’s order did not reach them; and they were still there when the Marseillais, together with some Breton
fédérés
, rallied and renewed the attack, repeating their shouts of ‘
Trahison! Trahison! Mort aux traîtres!
’ Wild with fury, they dashed across the courtyard under heavy fire, reached the steps and, followed by crowds of
sans-culottes
, streamed into the palace. The Swiss, having almost exhausted their ammunition, surrendered, throwing down their arms, but they were shown no mercy. The mob poured into the palace, cutting down everyone they found, ushers, pages, doorkeepers, cooks, maidservants as well as soldiers, and the Dauphin’s sub-governor. They threw the bodies out of the windows, impaled heads on pikes, looted the rooms, smashed furniture and windows, pocketed jewellery and ornaments and scattered papers over the floors. Fugitives who tried to escape were struck down as they ran across the garden and hacked down under the trees and beside the fountains. Some clambered up the monuments but were prodded down with pikes and bayonets by the assailants who, forbearing to fire for fear lest they injure the marble, stabbed them as they fell at their feet. One witness saw ‘some very young boys playing with human heads’; another heard ‘an honest artisan’ remark, ‘Ah, Monsieur. Providence has been very good to me. I killed three of the Swiss with my own hands.’

I ran from place to place [recorded one of the royal servants], and finding the apartments and staircases already strewed with dead bodies, I took the resolution of jumping from one of the windows in the Queen’s room on to the terrace…I got to my feet and ran away to the Dauphin’s garden gate where some Marseillais, who had just butchered several of the Swiss, were stripping them. One of them came up to me with a bloody sword in his hand, saying, ‘Hello, citizen! Without arms! Here take this and help us to kill.’ But luckily another Marseillais seized it and, being
dressed in a plain coat, I managed to make my escape. Some of the Swiss who were pursued took refuge in an adjoining stable. I concealed myself in the same place. They were soon cut to pieces close to me. On hearing their cries the master of the house ran up and [he took me back to his house with him]…Presently a body of armed men came in to see if any of the Swiss were hiding there. After a fruitless search these men, their hands red with blood, stopped and calmly related to each other accounts of the murders which they had committed. I remained in the house until four o’clock in the afternoon, having before my eyes a view of all the horrors that were being perpetrated. Some of the men were still continuing the slaughter; others were cutting off the heads of those already slain; while the women, lost to all sense of shame, were committing the most indecent mutilations on the dead bodies from which they tore pieces of flesh and carried them off in triumph. Towards evening I took the road to Versailles and crossed the Pont Louis Seize which was covered with the naked carcasses of men already in a state of putrefaction from the intense heat of the weather.

Over 500 of the Swiss guards had been slaughtered in the grounds of the palace or on its steps, and a further sixty who were escorted under guard to the Insurrectionary Commune at the Hôtel de Ville were massacred when they got there. Of the besiegers about ninety
fédérés
and almost 300 citizens from the sections, three of them women, had also been killed.

At the Manège the King and the royal family were still in the shorthand-writers’ box listening to the agitated debate of those few deputies who had been courageous enough to be present that day. At nightfall they were all escorted to a convent where they were given beds. In the morning they were taken back to the box where all that day and the next they listened to the continuing debates of the Assembly which, ‘under the orders of the galleries’, as one contemporary put it, ‘feeling the eyes of the Insurrectionary Committee always upon them’, voted for the suspension of the King from his functions, the establishment of a provisional council of six Ministers, the imposition of all the decrees upon which the royal veto had been imposed, the summoning of a National Convention which was to be
elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, and the imprisonment of the King. The deputies at first decided that he should be held in the Luxembourg, the house from which the Comte de Provence had fled in June the year before, but it was later decreed, at the insistence of the Insurrectionary Commune, that he should be confined in the Temple which had formerly been occupied by the Comte d’Artois and which could be more securely guarded.

The atmosphere in Paris was now suddenly transformed as ambassadors were withdrawn by their governments, the salons closed their doors, and aristocrats, who, though stripped of their titles, had previously been left in peace provided they were not suspected of being counter-revolutionaries, thought it as well to leave their houses and go into hiding. Some tried to escape from Paris but found the gates shut and carriage-horses commandeered by the Insurrectionary Commune for the army. Several were arrested and, with their families and various conservative deputies, were thrown into prison where they waited apprehensively for the next stage in the Revolution’s development. And in prison they heard with alarm that, while five of the six Ministers appointed to the provincial government were Girondins, the Ministry of Justice had gone to an ugly, sensual lawyer of commanding personality who was more powerful than any of them, Georges Jacques Danton.

2–7 September 1792 and 21 January 1793

Like most of the other leading revolutionaries, Danton came from a respectable middle-class provincial family. His father, who died when he was three, was a lawyer; one of his uncles a canon at Troyes. He was born near Troyes, at the little town of Arcis-sur-Aube, on 28 October 1759, and from his earliest years his character seems to have been as carefree and lively as the sparkling wines of the district. His grandfather was a farmer and it was in the country where most of his days were spent and where the accidents, which marred his features for life, took place. His scarred and twisted lip, so it was said, was the result of his being gored by an angry bull when he was sucking the teat of a cow; his squashed nose was also the consequence of an encounter with a bull; the scars on his cheeks and eyelids were caused by the hooves of a herd of pigs. The skin around them was badly disfigured by smallpox.

Quite undeterred by these misfortunes and deformities, the young Danton continued to enjoy life, to make friends easily, to do well at his school at Troyes where his oratorian masters provided the lazy but clever boy with a wider and more liberal education than he could have expected at many another establishment. This enabled him to read and enjoy the English books which, as well as the classics of the Enlightenment, including scores of volumes of Voltaire and Rousseau, were to fill the shelves of his sitting-room in Paris.

He arrived in Paris when he was twenty-one to enter a lawyer’s office and, having obtained a legal degree from the University of Rheims and borrowed a good deal of money from, among others, the father of the girl he intended to marry – the daughter of a prosperous restaurateur – he bought the remunerative office of
avocat aux Conseils du Roi
. Thus, at the age of twenty-seven, he established himself in a far more promising position than so many of his impecunious contemporaries who, coming up from the provinces to swell the ranks of an overcrowded profession and finding success in it difficult to achieve without money, took to ill-paid journalism and other literary pursuits while idly hoping for, or actively working for, the overthrow of an order that so circumscribed their talents and ambition.

Danton, who at this time chose to call himself d’Anton, did not
share their disgruntlement, though he joined in their discussions at the Café Procope. He seems to have worked conscientiously, earning over 20,000
livres
a year according to a friend, and taking on any cases that came his way without too scrupulous a regard for the justice of his clients’ claims. While preparations were being made for the election of the Estates General in 1789, for example, d’Anton was busy defending a landowner who had arbitrarily enclosed an area of common land adjoining his estate. With a satisfactory income, and helped by the generous dowry of his attractive wife, he moved into a comfortable and well-furnished apartment in the Rue des Cordeliers. Here the d’Antons and their two sons were living contentedly when the Estates General met.

He had played no part in the selection of deputies, not having been chosen as an Elector of the Cordeliers District. But once it became clear that French society was, indeed, upon the verge of upheaval he realized that he must throw himself into the struggle if he were to survive as a successful lawyer. He did so with a fervour that astonished those who knew him at home in the Rue des Cordeliers, at the tables of the Café Procope and in the courts where he pleaded his cases.

I saw my colleague, Danton, whom I had always known as a man of sound judgement, gentle character, modest and silent [wrote a fellow lawyer who came across him in the Cordeliers District the day before the attack on the Bastille]. Imagine my surprise at seeing him standing on a table, declaiming wildly, calling the citizens to arms to repel 15,000 brigands assembled at Montmartre and an army of 30,000 poised to sack Paris and slaughter its inhabitants…I went up to him to ask what all the fuss was about as I had just come from Versailles and everything was perfectly calm and orderly there. He replied that I did not understand anything, that the people had risen against despotism. ‘Join us,’ he said. ‘The throne is overturned and your old position lost.’

If Danton had ever been the gentle, modest and silent man that this colleague of his describes, he was certainly not so now and was never to be again. His loud, harsh voice was to be heard everywhere in the District, and became as familiar as his bulky frame and his scarred and pock-marked face. He spoke with a controlled ve
hemence, a mastery of improvisation and a wonderful command of vivid language and dramatic gesture, the words tumbling out of his mouth so fast, and on occasions so ambiguously, that it was difficult to remember afterwards what he had said, or to gather exactly what he had meant. But it was impossible not to admire the skill of his passionate delivery. He soon became one of the leading figures among the revolutionaries of the troublesome Cordeliers District; and, though he preferred to work through others rather than to appear to have assumed such power within it, he gained a dominating influence over the Cordeliers Club. He was also appointed commander of the Cordeliers battalion of the National Guard.

In his attempts to gain recognition for his talents on a wider stage, however, Danton was not so successful. He was not elected to the Legislative Assembly, and it was not until the end of 1791 that, after repeated attempts, he managed to obtain a minor post as assistant
procureur
in the Paris Commune. The trouble was that his motives were frequently in question; he was accused at various times of working for the Duc d’Orléans, for Mirabeau, and – like Mirabeau – for the Court. It was even rumoured that he was deeply involved with a gang of forgers. Madame Roland, who did not like him and who evidently found his overt sexuality disturbing, said that he once boasted to her that, since the Revolution began, he had managed to acquire a fortune of one and a half million
livres
. And another witness recorded that at a dinner party Danton, who was drunk, had shocked his fellow-guests by declaring that the Revolution ought to be treated like a battle in which the victors shared the loot; that the time had come for them to enjoy splendid houses and fine food, ‘handsome clothes and the women of their dreams’. Certainly, in 1791 Danton, who loved the pleasures of life, began spending money on such a scale and buying land so extensively in Champagne that it was impossible to believe that his resources were derived, as he claimed they were, from the compensation he received for the loss of his office as
avocat aux Conseils du Roi
. It seems now more than likely that he was, indeed, like Mirabeau for a time in the pay of the Court; that – as Mirabeau had done – he made violently effective speeches on issues which were not fundamental to the royalist cause but which established his radical credentials; and that
he chose to attack Lafayette, for instance, in the way that he did because Lafayette was disliked by both the
sans-culottes
and by the Court. If the Revolution failed, he could then retire to a country life in Champagne with his pockets well lined; if it succeeded, he had not lost the opportunity of guiding its future and of establishing in France that more equitable society which it would be unjust to him to suppose he did not in his heart desire. On the eve of the attack on the Tuileries he went home to Arcis-sur-Aube to settle some private business and to arrange for pensions to be paid to his mother and his former nurse in case the attack led to his downfall. Soon afterwards his immediate fears were allayed. The
journée
of 10 August succeeded in its purpose, and Danton, recognized as a man with unique influence in the
sections
, became Minister of Justice.

He was, in fact, far more than that: he was ‘the vehement tribune of the people’, the ‘Mirabeau of the mob’, the ‘voice of the Revolution’, indispensable to the Girondins, as one of their supporters admitted, the one man whose oratory and intelligence could save them from their enemies. It was he alone among the new Ministers who exercised a commanding influence in the Insurrectionary Commune which was a far more powerful body than the Girondin Government itself; it was he who guided the policies of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of War as well as those of the Ministry of Justice; it was among his friends in the Cordeliers Club that were found many of the emissaries who were sent out into the provinces to reconcile the people to the new administration in Paris and to justify the events of 10 August.

In Paris there was widespread fear that royalist conspirators, ecclesiastical spies and other counter-revolutionaries might combine to ensure that the lives lost on that day would be sacrificed in vain. And there were insistent demands that the army must be purged of officers who might desert to the enemy – as Lafayette did on 17 August – and that all the other enemies of the Revolution must be rounded up and punished. Vigilance Committees were established in the
sections
; internal passports were suspended; hundreds of suspects, including many recalcitrant priests, were arrested and imprisoned. The call for more violent measures became irresistible when news reached Paris towards the end of the month that the
frontier fortress of Longwy had fallen after so weak and brief a resistance that treachery seemed unquestionable. With Verdun now in danger and with reports received of a conservative uprising in La Vendée, Danton insisted in the Assembly that the time had come ‘to tell the people that they must throw themselves upon their enemies
en masse
’. He proposed that all men fit for military service should be called up and sent to the front, that house to house searches should be carried out in a hunt for both arms and men in hiding. ‘The tocsin that will ring will be no mere signal for alarm; it will sound the charge against the enemies of the nation,’ he declared in the most passionate and most often quoted of all his speeches. ‘To deflect them, Messieurs, we need boldness, and again boldness and always boldness; and France will then be saved.’ As though echoing his words, recruiting posters appeared that day on the walls of the city under the call, ‘To arms, citizens! The enemy is at our gates.’

From those who feared that this might actually be so there were now repeated cries for the extermination of all those dangerous opponents of the Revolution within the gates as well as those outside them. In support of these demands, Marat in his
L’Ami du peuple
, Hébert in
Le Père Duchesne
, Louis Fréron in
L’Orateur du peuple
and other propagandists advocated in their newspapers an attack on the prisoners being held in the Paris gaols. These gaols were overcrowded; they were ill supervised by corrupt warders, nearly all of whom could be bribed; escapes from them were common; within their walls worked forgers producing those streams of false
assignats
which were held responsible for rising prices and soaring inflation. Through their unlocked doors, it was suggested, there would flood a horde of counter-revolutionaries, together with criminals in their pay, who would fall upon the families of volunteers once their homes had been left unprotected. ‘Let the blood of the traitors flow,’ cried Marat. ‘That is the only way to save the country.’

An organized attack upon the prisons had therefore been expected by the authorities for some time. The day after the march on the Tuileries two police officers warned Santerre as commander of the Paris National Guard that a plan was ‘afoot to enter all the prisons of Paris, take out all the prisoners and give them prompt
justice’. Since then several other warnings had been received, and the nervous, panicky atmosphere in Paris had been intensified by pamphlets, scattered all over the city, headed,
The Great Treason of Louis Capet
[the King], and revealing the ‘discovery of a plot for assassinating all good citizens during the night between the 2nd and 3rd of this month’. So neither the police nor the National Guard were much surprised when on the fine afternoon of Sunday, 2 September a party of recalcitrant priests who were being taken in six hackney coaches to the prison known as L’Abbaye by an escort of
fédérés
from Brittany, Avignon and Marseilles, were attacked by a mob between the Rue Dauphine and the Carrefour Bussy. The leader of the mob rushed up to one of the carriages and plunged his sabre twice through the open window. As the passers-by gasped in horror, he waved the reddened blade at them and shouted, ‘So, this frightens you, does it, you cowards? You must get used to the sight of death!’ He then slashed at the prisoners again, cutting open the face of one, the shoulder of another, and slicing off the hand of a fourth who endeavoured to protect his head. Others of the mob then joined in the attack, as did some of the
fédérés
; and soon blood was dripping from all the carriages as the horses dragged them on their way to the doors of the prison. Here another mob was waiting; and when those prisoners who had escaped unscathed or only slightly wounded tried to escape inside, nearly all of them were cut down and killed before they could reach safety.

The same afternoon another small gang of armed men burst into the garden of the Carmelite Convent off the Rue de Vaugirard where about 150 priests, who had been held prisoner for the past fortnight, were gathered under guard, several of them reading their office. The men advanced upon them, calling out for the Archbishop of Arles. One of the priests went forward to meet them, demanding a fair trial for himself and his fellow-prisoners. A shot was fired and his shoulder was smashed. The Archbishop, after praying for a moment on his knees, then went towards the men himself. ‘I am the man you are looking for,’ he said, and was immediately struck across the face with a sword. As he fell to the ground a pike was plunged through his chest. At that moment an officer of the National Guard appeared and managed to get the priests away
to the nearby church where they gave each other absolution. While they were saying prayers for the dying, the armed gang broke through the door and dragged the priests out in pairs to slaughter them in the garden. After several had been killed a man with an air of authority arrived at the church calling out, ‘Don’t kill them so quickly. We are meant to try them.’ Thereafter each priest was summoned before a makeshift tribunal before being executed. He was asked if he was now prepared to take the constitutional oath and when he said that he was not – as all of them did – he was taken away to be killed. Some bodies were removed in carts, the rest thrown down a well from which their broken skeletons were recovered seventy years later.