French Revolution - continued

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Marat and the Paris Commune, led by Hébert, called for the removal of the Girondins from the Convention. The Girondins responded by arresting them. With the aid of the Paris Commune and the sans-culottes, Hébert was released three days later and the Girondins removed from the Convention, several of them being arrested. Marat was acquitted by the Revolutionary Tribunal, a judiciary body established (10 Mar 1793) with the aim of avoiding the errors and excesses of the September Massacre. This body commenced work with the execution of Girondin leaders. Roland de la Platière escaped but, on hearing of his wife's execution, committed suicide.

Popular perception of the country being run by an elite Parisian minority led to further tensions. A Norman girl, Marie Charlotte Corday, sought a meeting with Marat on the pretext of delivering a message (13 Jul 1793). Enraged by the Jacobin treatment of the Girondins, she stabbed him to death while he was taking a bath to relieve a painful skin condition, probably psoriatic arthritis. She was convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined. Marat was buried in the Pantheon, and his heart hung in the Paris Cordelier Club as an object of veneration.

The rapidly deteriorating state of the war reflected badly on Danton's former popularity and he was removed from the Committee, later becoming president of the Convention. In the meantime, Robespierre assumed leadership of the Committee. The Convention became virtually impotent, merely endorsing the decrees of the Committee. A new democratic constitution had been drafted, but remained permanently in abeyance.

With Robespierre effectively in control, the Reign of Terror began. He believed terror to be an effective means of enforcing correct behaviour, but before long the excesses of his fanatical followers resulted in wholesale mass executions at the guillotine. These executions, or "Red Masses', happened throughout France through the influential network of the Jacobin Clubs, and were the means of controlling provincial revolts. Jean-Baptiste Carrier massacred 16 000 Vendéan prisoners, mostly by drowning them in the R Loire.

One victim of this period was Queen Marie-Antoinette. Largely at the instigation of Hébert, agitating through his popular and scurrilous paper, Le Père Duchesne, she was moved from the Temple prison to solitary confinement, and charged with treason before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Despite the lack of specific evidence, public prosecutor Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville (1747--95) allowed Hébert's trumped-up testimony of circumstantial evidence alleging the Queen's incestuous relationship with her son, Louis XVII. Convicted by the Tribunal (16 Oct 1793), she was guillotined only a few hours later.

During the winter of 1793--4, further excesses were perpetrated by the sans-culottes, encouraged by the Paris Commune under Hébert and Pierre Gaspard Chaumette (1763--94). These included the banning of Christian worship, the stripping of all churches, shrines, and religious establishments, and the removal of all religious references in place names. Similar things happened throughout the provinces, and only ended when Hébert's outspoken criticisms of the Committee of Public Safety led to his prompt arrest and execution (Mar 1794). Danton led a move to end the Terror which he had earlier helped create. He failed and was guillotined along with his allies, Desmoulins, Delacroix, and Westermann (6 Apr 1794).

Robespierre finally incurred overwhelming opposition with his Decree of 22nd Prairial (10 Jun 1794), which heralded an intensification of the Terror. Under this law, drafted by Georges-Auguste Couthon, arrest could be made on virtually any pretext, no defence counsel was permitted, and the only possible sentence was death. Fearing for their own lives, his enemies from opposing factions made a temporary alliance. When Robespierre called for them to be purged, he was arrested. Released from prison by the Paris Commune, he was eventually recaptured by troops loyal to the Convention (27 Jul 1794) at the Hôtel de Ville, where he attempted to shoot himself in the head. With his shattered jaw bound up, Robespierre was guillotined the next day with 21 of his associates, and Carrier, St Just, and Couthon. During the following few days, 87 of the Paris Commune were guillotined.

Robespierre's execution left a political vacuum. The Convention closed the Jacobin Clubs, and repealed the Decree of 22 Prairial. The enforced austerity, inflationary prices, and desperate food shortages provoked serious civil unrest in Paris (the Prairial Insurrection, May 1795), and forced the Convention to produce a new constitution. Prominent in this period were the jeunesse dorée ("gilded youth') who fomented opposition to the Terror and its perpetrators by demonstrations in Paris and street battles with the sans-culottes. Having avoided conscription through well-placed relatives, these children of professional and business people enjoyed the tolerant acceptance of both political extremes in the Convention, and were directly responsible for the re-emergence of moderate royalist supporters.

In a further reaction to the earlier republican excesses, a so-called White Terror began when royalists in the W and SE of France organized massacres of former Jacobins. A royalist attempt to seize power in Paris (5 Oct 1795) was thwarted when the Convention, under the Montagnard deputy and Jacobin founder member, Paul, vicomte de Barras, used the army to suppress it. The army commander was General Napoleon Bonaparte. In gratitude for his services, Barras introduced to Napoleon his former mistress, Joséphine Beauharnais.

The new constitution (28 Oct 1795) limited suffrage to property owners, and established a system of government led by an executive Directory consisting of five members with control over a two-tier legislative body: the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred. This middle-class, bourgeois, republican regime lasted only four years, during which time Napoleon's great military successes contrasted sharply with internecine domestic squabbles between royalists and republicans. The Directory was threatened (Apr 1796) by a plot of François (Gracchus) Babeuf, a Jacobin extremist and prototype communist; he was guillotined in 1797. In a coup d'état on 18 Fructidor (4 Sep 1797), royalists were removed from the Directory and Councils, while a further coup on 18 Brumaire (9 Nov 1799) abolished the Directory itself.

The 18 Brumaire coup was engineered by Napoleon's brother and president of the Council of Five Hundred, Lucien, and the Abbé Sieyès. Each planned to use their new national hero to overthrow the regime for their own ends: Lucien to get Napoleon into supreme power; Sieyès to revise the constitution. Lucien was able to induce such mistrust between the Five Hundred and the Ancients that the latter passed a decree appointing Napoleon, Sieyès, and Pierre-Roger Ducos (nd) as a provisional government in the role of consuls. Further manoeuvring by Napoleon succeeded in replacing Sieyès and Ducos with figure-head consuls, Charles-François Lebrun (1739--1824) and Jean Jacques de Cambacérès, effectively giving Napoleon sole executive power. A new constitution, drawn up by Sieyès before his relegation, came into force on Christmas Day, 1799, but it failed to limit the power of the First Consul, Napoleon. Ironically, Napoleon had thus been granted more absolute powers than Louis XVI had enjoyed before the Revolution; and, secure in his new role, was now in a position to intensify the war with Europe.

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