The Terror: The Shadow of the Guillotine: France 1792--1794 - Hardcover

Fife, Graeme

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312352247 ISBN 13: 9780312352240

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2006

Synopsis

For the audience that made a major bestseller of Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution comes this exhaustively researched, character-driven chronicle of revolutionary terror, its victims, and the young men---energetic, idealistic, and sincere---who turned the French Republic into a slaughterhouse.

            1792 found the newborn Republic threatened from all sides: the British blockaded the coasts, Continental armies poured over the frontiers, and the provinces verged on open revolt. Paranoia simmering in the capital, the Revolution slipped under control of a powerful clique and its fanatical political organization, the Jacobin Club. For two years, this faction, obsessed with patriotism and purity---self-appointed to define both---inflicted on their countrymen a reign of terror unsurpassed until Stalin’s Russia. 

            It was the time dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat and Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (called “The Angel of Death”), when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette met their ends, when any hint of dissent was ruthlessly quashed by the State.  It was the time of the guillotine, neighborhood informants, and mob justice. 

            This extraordinary, bloodthirsty period comes vividly to life in Graeme Fife’s new book.  Drawing on contemporary police files, eyewitness accounts, directives from the sinister Committee for Public Safety, and heart-wrenching last letters from prisoners awaiting execution, the author brilliantly re-creates the psychotic atmosphere of that time.

About this title

About the Author:

Graeme Fife, one-time lecturer in Latin and Greek literature at the University of Reading, has written a vast number of stories, documentaries, features, talks and plays for BBC radio including Revolutionary Portraits (translated from contemporary documents of the French revolutionary period), A Breath of Fresh Air (a dramatized account of the death on the guillotine in May 1794 of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, justly known as the father of modern chemistry, who discovered the secret of combustion), and The Whisper of the Axe (a harrowing drama based on last letters written by prisoners during the Terror). He is the author of eight books, including Arthur the King: A Study of Mediaeval Legend in its Social, Historical and Literary Context (also published in United States of America) and two studies of professional cycle racing, Tour de France: The History, the Legend, the Riders and Inside the Peloton: Riding, Winning and Losing the Tour de France (also translated into Dutch). He has written articles on a wide variety of subjects for magazines and national newspapers and has broadcast on BBC Radio and the World Service.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One 
Rebellion
 
To prevent a Revolution, one must want a Revolution and set about making it oneself.
Le Comte de Rivarol
 
Georges Jacques Danton was born in 1759 at Arcis-sur-Aube, in the lush countryside of the Champagne region. He grew up a boisterous farm boy and remained a countryman at heart: sucking milk straight from the cow's udder, he was attacked, when he was two, by an irate bull who gashed his face with a horn - it gave Danton the pug face and lip carved into what looked like a permanent sneer. He played truant from school, swam in the river, ran wild in the fields, got a good education, came to love Latin and French literature. Of the great French tragedian whose lofty drama greatly inspired Charlotte Corday, Danton said: 'Corneille was a thoroughgoing republican.'
 
Danton, a man of bustling energy, high animal spirits and acute intelligence, typifies the kind of men who made the Revolution: a coalition of the educated and the ambitious, shunted into limited and trivial careers, their considerable gifts cheated of wider recognition by the exclusive protocols of old-regime France, the France of an absolute monarchy bolstered by intransigent belief in the divine right of kings.
 
Voltaire had cautioned against the injudicious franchise of those not equipped mentally or socially to cope with it. 'All is lost,' he wrote, 'once the people entangles itself in reasoning', but the indignant frustrations of men like Danton were, one might almost say, generic, a crucial spur to revolution. 'The old regime,' he said, 'made a crucial error. I was educated by it as an exhibitioner at the Collège du Plessis. I studied there with great nobles who . . . lived with me on equal terms. My studies over, I was left high and dry . . . my former schoolfellows turned their backs on me. The Revolution came: I and all those like me threw ourselves into it. The old regime drove us to it by giving us a good education without opening any opportunity for our talents.'
 
He studied law and was called to the Bar at Reims, where the necessary certificates were cheap to buy. After moving to Paris he drank and played dominoes at the Café du Parnasse, on the right bank by the Pont Neuf, and married Gabrielle Charpentier, the wealthy proprietor's daughter. With her dowry and loans, he bought the legal practice and entrée to the law courts of Maître ['Master', the honorific title of a lawyer] Huet and was launched.
 
He and Gabrielle lived in the Cour du Commerce, in the Latin Quarter, very near the old Franciscan convent, by then disused, in the rue des Cordeliers. In its large refectory took place the meetings and debates of one of the foremost political clubs in the city, the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Men and Citizens, attended by all the patriots of the district: the Cordeliers, after the nickname of the Franciscan friars. This district of Paris, just south of the river, part of the old medieval city, an ill-lit, poky labyrinth of narrow vennels and criss-cross streets no wider than alleys, was a known hotbed of anarchists, a nest of truculent revolutionaries, intransigently opposed to all authority.
 
The Cordeliers were predominantly publishers, journalists, writers, booksellers and people of the theatre, among their most outspoken partisans men who played a central role in the Revolution: Fabre d'Eglantine, playwright, author of the revolutionary calendar; Jean-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois, men of the theatre, both future members of the Committee for Public Safety; Jacques-René Hébert and the radical popular leader of the Commune Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette (who called himself Anaxagoras after the Greek philosopher who fell foul of the aristocratic faction in Athens in the fifth century BC); Jean-Paul Marat, 'the people's friend', author of a fescennine journal of that name; Louis Fréron, author, in the same vein, of another newspaper, Orator of the People; the printer-publisher Momoro, churning out political pamphlets; Elysée Loustalot his Revolutions of Paris; and Camille Desmoulins, the progressive journalist - he and his wife Lucile were particular friends of the Dantons.
 
The cafés, restaurants and taverns of the Cordeliers district, centred on the club, were alive with radical thinking, heated talk, revolutionary fervour, polemical writing, the doctrines of social and political change, fermented by a potent mixed society of convinced intellectuals and impatient artisans. Desmoulins, addressing his readers as 'my dear subscribers', encouraged the notion that the area was the true heart of the Revolution, the home of the honest men who worked actively for its integrity, its universal good, its protection, without fear or favour, of the rights of all men and women, in stark contrast with the finaglers, the shifty, self-seeking, self-serving men of both the royal government and the Commune, the municipal authority of Paris. In the Cordeliers district, the republic of ideas and ideals had been brought into being. Even when the city's 60 districts were reorganised into 48 sections, the Cordeliers remained the centre of political influence on the left bank.
 
Across the river, the Jacobin club, the Society of Friends of the Revolution, met in the former friary of the Dominican order, named Jacobins after the rue Saint Jacques, in which their parent house stood. Closer to the heart of government, they had a more prestigious membership - though Marat and Danton belonged there, too - and the rivalry between the two most powerful political clubs in Paris came, in part, to identify the war of factions within the Revolution.
 
One of the Jacobins was a lawyer from Arras, a small town near the Belgian border. Maximilien Robespierre was born on 6 May 1758. On 16 July 1764, when he was but six years old, his mother, who had been pregnant most of his short life with his younger brother Augustin and sisters Charlotte and Henriette, died having just given birth to a fifth child who did not survive. She was 28. Was it she who taught Maximilien how to make lace? His father did not attend her funeral and a few months later left the family home for good. The two boys were taken in by their maternal grandfather and Maximilien was soon packed off to the local Oratorian school, where he was taught that Man was made to adore God and that God, the central pivot of all Creation, did not exist to oblige or serve Man.
 
In 1769 young Robespierre enrolled at the Louis-le-Grand College in Paris, named after Louis XIV. Former students included Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade and among those there with Robespierre were Fréron, Desmoulins and Lebrun, who became minister of War after 10 August 1792. The daily routine had remained unchanged since the school was run by the Jesuits:
 
Morning                                               Afternoon, evening
5.30     Rise                                          1.15     Studies and class
6          Prayer                                      4.30     Snack and recreation
6.15     Study of holy scripture              5          Studies and class
7.15     Breakfast and recreation           7.15     Supper and recreation
8.15     Class and studies                      8.45     Prayer
10.30   Mass                                        9          Bed
11        Studies
Noon   Dinner and recreation
 
This was the pattern of his life for 11 years, until he left the college aged 23. He graduated in jurisprudence in 1780 and a year later was awarded a degree at the University of Paris. These qualifications permitted him to be enrolled on the register of lawyers attached to the Parlement of Paris. He returned to Arras and practised as a barrister, on one occasion delivering an impassioned panegyric on England in defence of an Englishwoman arrested on charges of debt; on another, denouncing arbitrary imprisonment by lettre de cachet (a sealed order guaranteed by the King's private stamp) in the case of one Dupond. Under the old regime, any noble could issue this arrest warrant for the confinement or exile of anyone he deemed to be a criminal or an inconvenience: families seeking to safeguard the honour of their name in preventing misalliance, a family member disgracing them with debauchery, inebriation, debts. Abuse was rife. Strong representation against them increased during the reign of Louis XVI. A report of 1770 castigated a penal caprice which made 'none so great as to be secure from the vindictiveness of a royal minister . . . none so small as not to incur that of a farm steward'. A lettre de cachet confined Voltaire in the Bastille for a short while.
 
In the peroration of his defence, Robespierre voiced the profound indignation which informed so much of his thinking: 'The infinite being, who has created man for sublime purposes and endowed him with faculties worthy of those purposes, has destined him for society only in that state most proper for the development of those precious faculties, whose perfection is at once the object of all his strivings and the pledge of the felicity to which his nature is susceptible.
 
'All forms of society, all types of government, under whatever name one designates them, are good, from the moment they can lead to this important principle, and are essentially vicious and worthless whenever they go contrary to it; thus this principle is the foundation of the social contract of which we speak, so much of which is not at all the work of a free and voluntary covenant on the part of men but a contract whose fundamental conditions, written in heaven, were for all time determined by the supreme legislator, the unique source of all order, of all happiness, of all justice.'
 
 
On the evening of 13 July 1789 a lawyer called Lavaux attended a meeting of the Cordeliers where a speaker harangued the audience from a table, telling them in a tone of high rage that the citizens must take up arms 'to repulse the 15,000 brigands mustered in Montmartre and an army of 30,000 which is preparing to pour into Paris, to loot and massacre'. His whole demeanour was fanatical and he ranted on and on until he was hoarse and spent. The man was an old friend of Lavaux - Danton, whom he had always taken to be a rather peaceable, jovial, carefree fellow, but the times were neither peaceable nor carefree.
 
In 1787 an Assembly of Notables, hand-picked to eliminate troublemakers, had brusquely dismissed plans for much-needed fiscal reform. This can be seen as the first salvo of the Revolution. Ever more insistent demands were made for a meeting of the Estates-General, a sort of parliament called at the king's bidding which had not met since 1614. This, said the marquis de Lafayette, was the only 'true national Assembly' and only such a body, representing the whole nation, could agree to wholesale changes in taxation.
 
The Estates-General comprised elected members of the Three Estates: the First, the clergy; the Second, the nobility; the Third, the commoners, who had always been denied partnership in the Parlements, the sovereign courts established to render justice in the last resort in the King's name. The Third Estate, which groaned under the heaviest weight of taxation yet ordinarily had no say, was demanding to be heard. Under Louis XIV, the saying went, no one dared speak. Under Louis XV, they whispered. Under Louis XVI, they talked aloud. A contemporary cartoon shows a female commoner carrying a nun and an elegantly dressed noblewoman on her back. The caption: 'Let's hope they play fair.' The Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, one of the leading theorists of revolutionary principles, put the point succinctly in his famous pamphlet What Is the Third Estate?, January 1789: 'What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until the present time? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.'
 
Marat reiterated much the same sentiments in his own pamphlet An Offering to the Nation.
 
Acceding to the pressure of calls for reform, the King formally summoned a meeting of the Estates-General in January 1789; elected deputies of all three Estates convened on 5 May. The debates and arguments foundered in the shoals of vagary, the indecision of the government and abject failure to agree on the way forward.
 
On 17 June the Third Estate, exasperated with the glaring insincerity of their partners in this supposed democracy, robustly declared that they alone embodied the true national Assembly and on 20 June swore an oath on the Tennis Court at Versailles to remain in session until a constitution had been established. The King reverted to type; such defiance could not go unchecked; he gave orders summoning an army of 30,000 to Paris and by 4 July the troops were encamped in the city and the surrounding area. It was neither a remedy nor an answer.
 
On Saturday 12 July barracking crowds invaded the theatres and forced them to close; dragoons tried to restore order; a mob occupied the Tuileries Palace. Paris was like a powder keg; one spark would set it off.
 
 
That same day Danton's friend Desmoulins addressed an 'expectant crowd in open-necked shirts' gathered outside the Café Foy in the Palais Royal, the gardens of which Philippe, duc d'Orléans, the King's cousin, had opened to the people of Paris, further making himself popular by periodic doles of bread. These gardens, enjoying Orléans' extra-legal status by proxy, were a sort of free enclave within Paris, flanked with cafés, haunted by prostitutes, rabble-rousers and intellectual agitators, seething with seditious talk.
 
Drawing on the text of a tract he had just published, Desmoulins bade his audience: 'Listen, listen to the voices of Paris and Lyon, of Rouen and Bordeaux, of Calais and Marseille. From end to end of the nation there is one united cry: ...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0312352247
• ISBN 13: 9780312352240
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448