The Days of the French Revolution (25 page)

The worst excesses were committed in the provinces where – although most
représentants en mission
were more concerned with enlisting recruits and collecting supplies than with punishment – in several towns the guillotine was kept constantly at work and those convicted of crimes against the Revolution were slaughtered wholesale on the instructions of fanatical or savage representatives or of those who were frightened of being considered too weak. At Lyons where numerous rich men’s houses were blown up, including those in Mansart’s lovely Place Bellecour, Collot d’Herbois, who had been sent there as the Committee of Public Safety’s agent, and Joseph Fouché, a frail former teacher who had become one of the most dreaded of the Jacobins, decided that the guillotine was too slow an instrument for their purpose and had over three hundred of their victims mown down by cannon fire. ‘What a delicious moment!’ reported an approving witness to a friend in Paris. ‘How you would have enjoyed it!…What a sight! Worthy indeed of Liberty!…Wish
bon jour
to Robespierre.’

From Feurs, the representative himself reported, ‘The butchery has been good.’ At Toulon numerous victims were shot by order of Paul Barras, a tall, cunning former army officer of noble birth who was a cousin of the Marquis de Sade, and Louis Fréron, founder
of the inflammatory journal,
L’Orateur du peuple
. At Nantes, where the Committee’s agent was the thirty-six-year-old Jean-Baptiste Carrier, an obscure attorney before the Revolution, three thousand captives perished in an epidemic in the grossly overcrowded prisons and a further two thousand were towed out in barges into the middle of the Loire and drowned, some of them stripped naked and bound together in couples. The river became so choked with these barges that ships weighing anchor brought them up filled with the dead. Birds of prey hovered over the waters, gorging themselves with human flesh, and the fish became so contaminated that orders had to be given forbidding them to be caught. On occasions Carrier appeared to be insane as, raving endlessly about the need to ‘kill and kill’, and to ‘butcher children without hesitation’, he slashed at the air with his sword. Even in his calmer moments he was abusive and intolerant, answering all complaints and pleas for mercy with the threat that those who approached him would themselves be thrown into prison.

In the north the
représentant en mission
was Joseph le Bon, a former priest of twenty-nine, who fixed his headquarters at Arras. From Arras he travelled about the departments of the Somme and the Pas-de-Calais with his judges and guillotine, leaving a trail of blood in his wake, ‘in a kind of fever’, so his secretary reported, returning home to imitate the grimaces of the dying for the benefit of his wife. Assiduously attending all the executions he could, he addressed both victims and spectators from a nearby balcony, ordered bands to play the
Ça ira
as at a festival, and afterwards invited the executioner to dinner.

Under the direction of Jean Tallien, the son of the
maître d’hôtel
of the Marquis de Bercy, a young man of twenty-six who had worked as a lawyer’s clerk and in a printer’s office, even more cruel punishments were inflicted at Bordeaux.

The most terrible atrocities were committed there [according to the thin, little, awkward Girondin, Jean Baptiste Louvet]. A woman was charged with the heinous crime of having wept at the execution of her husband. She was consequently condemned to sit several hours under the suspended blade which shed upon her, drop by drop, the blood of the
deceased whose corpse was above her on the scaffold before she was released by death from her agony.

‘The time has come which was foretold,’ as Madame Roland had said, ‘when the people would ask for bread and be given corpses.’

In Paris thousands of people went out regularly to witness the operations of what the deputy, J. A. B. Amar, called the ‘red Mass’ performed on the ‘great altar’ of the ‘holy guillotine’. They took their seats around the scaffold with the
tricoteuses
, buying wine and biscuits from hawkers while they waited for the show to begin. They placed bets as to the order in which the
huissiers
from the Revolutionary Tribunal, who wore silver chains round their necks, would decide the prisoners were to mount the scaffold, anticipating those three thrilling sounds – the first thud as the victim was thrown on to the plank, the second thud as the neck clamp was thrown into place, and the swishing rattle as the heavy blade fell. Yet there were thousands more who, like Madame Roland, had become ‘sick of blood’. Shops were shut and windows closed in the Rue Saint-Honoré as the tumbrils passed by on their way to the Place de la Révolution, some by those who had grown tired of the spectacle, many by others who were disgusted by it. So, following complaints from the residents of the Rue Saint-Honoré that the smell of stale blood which rose from the stones of the nearby square was endangering their health and depreciating the value of their property, the guillotine was removed first to a site near the ruins of the Bastille, then to an open space near the Barrière du Trône Renversé, now the Place de la Nation. But the people in these districts were as unwilling to have the guillotine in their midst as were those of the Rue Saint-Honoré. The scaffold was therefore taken back once more to the Place de la Revolution where Louis XVI had died.

While prisoners captured in the civil wars, suspected federalist agents, counter-revolutionaries and those accused of currency manipulation or food hoarding were all dispatched in the ‘red Mass’, a
campaign was simultaneously mounted against Christianity. For some time now the more ardent revolutionaries had been encouraging anti-clerical feelings among the people and endeavouring to endow the Revolution itself with the aura of a religion. They had condemned the celibacy of the clergy. They had joined with the Montagnard, Delacroix, in denouncing the action of a bishop who had prevented one of his
curés
from marrying as a ‘blasphemy against the sovereignty of the people’. And they had even supported demands for the demolition of church belfries, ‘which by their height above other buildings seem to contradict the principles of equality’. They had also welcomed the custom of giving babies names untainted with Christian associations, and of changing the names of streets, which were called after saints or festivals of the Church, to those of heroes,
journées
or symbols of the Revolution.

This campaign was initiated in the Nièvre where Fouché was Commissioner of the Republic. In September Fouché had had a visit from Pierre Chaumette, a former medical student born at Nevers, a young man of a rather strait-laced disposition and homosexual inclinations who had been one of the most eloquent speakers at the Cordeliers Club and an outspoken opponent of the Girondins. Inspired or encouraged by Chaumette, Fouché immediately instituted a programme of de-Christianization in the district for which he was held responsible. On 22 September in the church of Saint-Cyr at Nevers he preached a sermon attacking ‘religious sophistry’ and unveiled a bust of Brutus. Later, in his avowed determination to substitute the ‘cult of the Republic’ for ‘the superstition and hypocrisy’ of Christianity, he had ecclesiastical vestments burned, crucifixes and crosses destroyed, church ornaments and vessels confiscated and notices posted outside cemeteries to the effect that, ‘Death is an eternal sleep.’ Denouncing the celibacy of priests, he ordered them all either to marry, to adopt a child or look after an elderly person. He eventually succeeded in obtaining the resignation of the Bishop of Allier and some thirty of the clergy in his diocese.

On his return to Paris at the end of the month, Chaumette, supported by Hébert, demanded a similar programme of de-Christianization in the capital. His demands, while making a strong appeal to the anti-clericalists in the radical
sections
, were not at first received
with much enthusiasm elsewhere. But the ground had to some extent been prepared for Chaumette’s campaign by the Convention’s resolve to replace the Gregorian calendar with one which would emphasize the Republic’s association with Nature and Reason rather than with traditional Christianity. The dawn of the new era, Year one of the Republic, had already been declared as having begun with the abolition of the monarchy on 22 September 1792. That year, and all subsequent years, were now to be divided into twelve months of thirty days each, with the five days left at the end of the year to be known as
sans-culottides
and to be celebrated as festivals. The task of compiling the new calendar was entrusted to Philippe Fabre, who called himself Fabre d’Églantine, a former actor and – like so many other revolutionary figures – a not very successful writer who had once been Danton’s secretary. He decided that the months, which were to be divided into three
décades
of ten days’ each, should be named after the seasons: the first three, as autumnal seasons, were to be known as
Vendémiaire, Brumaire
and
Frimaire;
the next three, those of winter, as
Nivôse, Pluviôse
and
Ventôse;
the three of spring, as
Germinal, Floréal
and
Prairial;
and the three of summer as
Messidor, Thermidor
and
Fructidor
. In addition, Fabre suggested the names of saints in the calendar should be replaced by those of fruits, plants and flowers. Since religious holidays were abolished and Sundays were no longer a day of rest, these changes were naturally displeasing to the clergy, many of whom refused to celebrate Mass on the new Sabbath, as well as to the devout members of their flocks. Nor were they universally popular with the workers who now had to make do with a holiday every ten days instead of every seven. Directed by Hébert and Chaumette, and supported outside the Commune by Fabre d’Églantine, whose disdainful manner and affectation of a lorgnette exasperated Robespierre, the de-Christianization campaign nevertheless soon gained momentum in Paris. Religious monuments outside churches were destroyed; various religious ceremonies were suppressed; ecclesiastical plate and other treasures were seized in the name of the people; images of the madonna were replaced by busts of Marat; surplices were cut up to make bandages and soldiers’ shirts; and it was henceforth forbidden to sell in the streets ‘any kinds of super
stitious jugglery such as holy napkins, St Veronica’s handkerchiefs, Ecce Homos, crosses, Agnus Deis, rings of St Hubert or any medicinal waters or other adulterated drugs’. Theatres began to offer such plays as
L’Inauguration du Temple de ìa Vérité
in which a parody of the High Mass was performed.

Jean-Baptiste Gobel, Archbishop of Paris since 1791, a weak, rather absurd figure who had achieved favour with the Hébertists and atheists by adopting the dress of the
sans-culottes
, expressing anti-clerical opinions and opposing the celibacy of the clergy, was intimidated into coming before the Convention with his mitre in his hand and a red cap on his head, declaring, ‘Born a man of the people,
curé
of Porentruy, sent by the clergy to the Estates General, then raised to the Archbishopric of Paris, I have never ceased to obey the people. I accepted the functions which the people formerly bestowed on me and now, in obedience to the wishes of the people, I have come here to resign them. I allowed myself to be made a bishop when the people wanted bishops. I cease to be one now when the people no longer want them.’

That same week, a few days before the Commune ordered the closure of all churches in the city, a grand Festival of Reason was celebrated in Nôtre Dame. A young actress was carried into the cathedral by four citizens to represent the Goddess of Reason. Clothed in white drapery with a blue cloak over her shoulders and a red cap of liberty crowning her long hair, she was accompanied by a troupe of girls also dressed in white with roses on their heads. She sat on an ivy-covered chair while speeches were made, songs were sung, and soldiers paraded about the aisles carrying busts of Marat, Lepeletier and other martyrs of the Revolution. Later another young woman, the wife of Momoro, a printer who was a prominent member of the Commune, played the principal part in a similar festival at Saint-Sulpice.

From Paris the de-Christianization movement spread all over France. Not only streets and squares but towns and villages confusingly changed their names. The bestowal on babies of revolutionary first names became more common in certain districts than those of saints. More and more cathedrals and churches were deprived of their ornaments, vessels and plate; some were converted
into Temples of Reason, others closed. Many clergy resigned and a number married. One even had himself ritually divorced from his breviary. The rites and processions in which the clergy had played their parts were parodied by local revolutionaries wearing vestments and mitres, employing croziers as drum-majors’ staffs, and making obeisances to the prettiest girl in the community who was paraded for the day as Goddess of Reason. In Paris people ‘danced before the sanctuary, howling the
carmagnole
,’ according to a contemporary witness, Séastien Mercier. ‘The men wore no breeches; and the necks and breasts of the women were bare. In their wild whirling they imitated those whirlwinds which, foreshadowing tempests, ravage and destroy all within their path. In the darkness of the sacristy they satisfied those abominable desires that had been aroused in them.’

A reaction, however, soon became apparent. Catholicism, deeply inbred, could not be eradicated. Priests who married were as likely to be scorned as those who had earlier taken the Constitutional oath. Numerous parishes demanded the reopening of their churches, the return of their bells and altar furniture, and the reintroduction of their festivals. Everywhere there were fears that local calamities were acts of God who was roused in anger by France’s blasphemy and atheism. At Coulanges-la-Vineuse in the Yonne a hailstorm that threatened crops induced the frightened peasants to enter the church which the revolutionaries had closed, to sing hymns, ring bells and pray for forgiveness and mercy.