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The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution

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The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution THE COMING OF THE TERROR IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution Timothy Tackett The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, En gland 2015 Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Tackett, Timothy, 1945– Th e coming of the terror in the French Revolution / Timothy Tackett. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 73655- 9 (alk. paper) 1. France— History—Reign of Terror, 1793– 1794. 2. France— History—Revolution, 1789– 1799. I. Title. DC183.T26 2015 944.04—dc23 2014023992 Contents List of Illustrations vii List of Maps ix Introduction: Th e Revolutionary Pro cess 1 1 Th e Revolutionaries and Th eir World in 1789 13 2 Th e Spirit of ’89 39 3 Th e Breakdown of Authority 70 4 Th e Menace of Counterrevolution 96 5 Between Hope and Fear 121 6 Th e Factionalization of France 142 7 Fall of the Monarchy 172 8 Th e First Terror 192 9 Th e Convention and the Trial of the King 217 10 Th e Crisis of ’93 245 11 Revolution and Terror until Victory 280 12 Th e Year II and the Great Terror 312 Conclusion: Becoming a Terrorist 340 Abbreviations 351 Notes 353 Sources and Bibliography 419 A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s 447 Index 449 Illustrations Th e Tennis Court Oath 50 Attack on the Bastille 56 Market women leave Paris en route to Versailles 67 Federation Ball 93 Confrontation between Catholics and Protestants in Montauban 106 Th e king’s fl ight halted by the national guard in Varennes 115 Maximilien Robespierre 156 Jacques-Pierre Brissot 157 Storming of the Tuileries Palace 189 A pro-Montagnard image of the people entering the Legislative Assembly 194 Memorial ser vice for the patriots killed in the attack on the Tuileries 201 Enrollment of volunteers in Paris 218 Trial of Louis XVI 237 Th e representative on mission, Jean-Baptiste Milhaud 266 A surveillance committee during the Terror 269 Assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday 290 Brissot and the Girondins sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal 310 Festival of the Supreme Being 318 Nine emigrants are guillotined after they had returned to France 331 9 Th ermidor Year II in the Convention 337 Maps France in 1789 14 Revolutionary France in 1791 15 Paris in 1792 143 What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp When the stars threw down their spears, And water’d heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee? William Blake, “Th e Tyger” (1794) It is not power that corrupts but fear. Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) Introduction Th e Revolutionary Pro cess For the French men and women who lived through it, the period from 1793 to 1794 was a deeply troubling and frightening time. Only four years earlier they had witnessed the beginning of an extraordinary Revolution that utterly transformed the state and the relationship of the government to its citizens. A National Assembly, created in the name of pop u lar sover- eignty, abolished a “feudal system” that had held sway in France for a thou- sand years. It also proclaimed a series of basic “human rights”: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, religious tolerance, careers determined by talent rather than by blood, and equal justice before the law. It then proceeded to draft Eu rope’s fi rst written constitution. Fueled by an ever- expanding conception of liberty and equality, the Revolutionaries would subsequently broaden individual rights to include universal male suff rage, greatly ex- panded rights for women, the abolition of slavery, and the goals of uni- versal education and social welfare. By the middle of 1793, however, a darker side of the Revolution had emerged. An increasingly dictatorial government was promoting denunciation and repression, while surveillance commit- tees were everywhere rooting out “suspects” and purported traitors. Th ou- sands of citizens were arrested, and hundreds of others, tried before “Rev- olutionary Tribunals” without appeal, were executed. Th e king himself and several major po litical leaders, whom people once thought they could trust, had been accused of treason and sent to the guillotine. Tragically some of those subjected to capital punishment were men and women who still claimed to be fervent supporters of the Revolution. No less than eighty- two deputies to the National Convention—over 10 percent of the total—would Th e Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution be executed or die in prison through 1794.1 As the contemporary phrase would have it, terror had become “the order of the day.” How had this happened? How had the high ideals of 1789 turned to the violence and terror of 1793? “Future centuries,” wrote the deputy and min- ister Dominique Garat, “will be astonished by the horrors that we com- mitted; they will also be astonished by our virtues. What will always remain incomprehensible is the incredible contrast between our principles and our follies.”2 For well over 200 years, historians have struggled to un- derstand this strange bipolarism of the Revolution. How can one explain the swing toward state-sponsored intolerance and repression? How was it that the Revolutionaries began killing one another? Of all the issues con- cerning the period, the origins of the Terror is perhaps the most diffi cult, the most mysterious. Th roughout the nineteenth century both historians and many French po liti cal fi gures attempted to come to terms with their nation’s violent past. François Guizot, Adolphe Th iers, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexis de Toc- queville, Edgar Quinet, Victor Hugo, Jean Jaurès— all wrote extensively on the Revolution. In the twentieth century three generations of excep- tionally talented historians—from Alphonse Aulard, Albert Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre through Albert Soboul and Michel Vovelle— explained the Terror by emphasizing the powerful contingencies of foreign invasion and counterrevolution that Revolutionary leaders were compelled to con- front.3 Th e assumption was that the Terror was a rationally calculated op- tion, that it was always conceived as provisional, that the liberal achieve- ments of the early Revolution were temporarily and self- consciously set aside— until threats to the new regime’s very survival could be beaten back and overcome. But another group of historians, more conservative in their orientation— from Hippolyte Taine and Augustin Cochin through Fran- çois Furet— would explain Revolutionary violence and terror in terms of internal politics and above all ideology. Deeply immersed in the philos- ophy of the Enlightenment, so the argument went, the patriots of 1789 na- ively adopted a utopian plan to remake society from top to bottom on the basis of reason. Deprived of any direct experience in the exercise of power, they had “nothing to fall back on but fi rst principles,” and above all on the po liti cal theories of Jean- Jacques Rousseau.4 Of par tic u lar infl uence was Rousseau’s theory of the “general will,” according to which any variation from that will, any politi cal opposition, any concept of po liti cal pluralism could be viewed as intrinsically pernicious and counterrevolutionary. In 2 Introduction this sense the violence of 1793 was already inherent in the ideology of 1789. Th e National Assembly of that year, in Norman Hampson’s phrase, was but the “prelude to Terror.”5 At the turn of the twenty- fi rst century a number of historians attempted to move away from the stark dichotomy between “circumstances” and “ide- ology.” Arno Mayer, David Andress, Jean-Clément Martin, Donald Suther- land, Dan Edelstein, and Marisa Linton— among others— have written probing and complex analyses of the Terror and the events leading up to it.6 Building on the work of such scholars and taking into account a con- siderable amount of new documentation, the present study seeks to entirely reexamine the question. Although “the Terror” can be defi ned in many ways, here it refers above all to state policy during the period 1793– 1794 that used institutionalized violence and the threat of violence— primarily executions— both to punish and intimidate the purported enemies of the nation.7 While the book is conceived as a general interpretation of events in France from the onset of the Revolution through the fall of Robe- spierre, it focuses above all on the development of a po liti cal culture of violence among the leadership, on the attitude or mentalité, it will be argued, that preceded the Terror and made the option of “state- sponsored violence on an unpre ce dented scale” seem almost inevitable and necessary.8 In some respects, the book might be seen as a continuation of general refl ections on the course of the French Revolution. Whereas an earlier study exam- ined how the French became Revolutionaries, this work seeks to understand how they became terrorists.9 Th ree aspects of the book’s approach to the subject need to be under- lined from the outset. First, in the exploration of the origins of a po liti cal culture of violence, considerable emphasis is placed on the pro cess of the Revolution. Part of the diffi culty in understanding the Revolutionaries is that theirs was a moving reality in which values, perceptions, and ideolo- gies were continually developing and transforming, often in a quite un- predictable manner.
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