Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution

by R.R. Palmer

The period is known as the Reign of Terror because in the summer of 1793 revolutionary militants loudly insisted that “terror be placed on the order of the day.” Under duress, the Convention acceded to that demand and then suspended, “until the peace,” its newly enacted democratic constitution, all elections, and ordinary civil liberties—three defining elements of the Revolution in 1789.

Palmer understood that one problem underlay all the others—the need for a government sufficiently unified, powerful, and legitimate to master the crisis, whatever might have caused it in the first place. This stands as the leitmotif of the book.

It was the French Revolutionaries in 1793 and 1794 who first used the word democracy in a favorable sense to describe the kind of society that they wanted.

To be admitted to military school he had had to prove that his family for several generations had “lived nobly,” that is, had refrained from degrading commercial occupations.

None of our twelve was consciously revolutionary before 1789. There was no such thing as a professional revolutionist before the nineteenth century—before the French Revolution set the example. The old régime drifted to its Niagara without knowing it.

The Paris Commune comprised forty-eight sections, or what we should call wards. These sections were the very springs of revolution. Here met the true “sans-culottes,” the men who did not wear the knee-breeches of the upper classes. Direct popular government was the rule. Each section had an assembly in which its citizens (males over twenty-one) were supposed to deliberate and vote. Some three thousand citizens lived in each section on the average, but only a fraction ever attended the meetings. When the mayor of Paris was elected he received only 14,137 votes in a city of over six hundred thousand—somewhat less than an average of three hundred in each section assembly. Some members of the city council had been elected by as few as twenty votes. Hébert, assistant procurator of the Commune and the man whose name came to stand for the proletarian movement, held office by virtue of fifty-six votes in his section. Chaumette, the procurator and Hébert’s follower, received fifty-three.

So began the fatal process of purging the Convention that was to continue for more than a year. Indeed the same process, the periodic ousting of representatives of the people, went on spasmodically until 1799, when General Bonaparte, again with the connivance of politicians and the cooperation of soldiers, put an end to representative government.

It was a cardinal principle of the Mountaineers (and of the Girondists, too, who in their time had been Jacobins and were still Rousseauists) that the people, the real people, could not be divided in its will. The struggle, in their eyes, was between patriots and enemies of the public weal; between the people and various weak individuals, private interests and purveyors of false doctrine. But where Mountaineers saw the people, Girondists saw merely a faction; and the people whose goodness was touted by the Gironde seemed to the Mountain only a vast network of private schemers.

There was not in France in 1793 a true majority in favor of anything, except to drive out the foreigners, and no majority to agree on precisely how that could be done.

Danton had another and equally significant proposal. To prevent the section assemblies of Paris from falling under the control of aristocrats, and to encourage true sans-culottes to attend the meetings, he demanded that these meetings be limited to two a week, to take place on Thursdays and Sundays, and that those citizens who needed the money be reimbursed for each meeting by a payment of forty sous.

The truth is that there was very little patriotism in France in 1793, if by patriotism we mean a willingness to suspend party conflict in wholehearted support of the government against foreign foes. To many Frenchmen the government seemed to be the worst enemy. In supporting it they would only encourage a body of men whose principles they detested, men who had outraged their monarchist sentiments, persecuted their religion, disrupted their business and made their property insecure.

The French Republic, however, unlike the Continental Congress, was in reality very wealthy. It possessed lands and buildings valued at more than five billion livres, confiscated from the church and from the émigrés.

Where the Jacobins went astray was in believing that such plotters were the real cause of the disorders. This belief led to a fatal delusion—the idea that the country would be pacified if certain individuals, perhaps a few hundred or a few thousand, were put to death.

The doctrine of the Social Contract, with these moral overtones, became the theory of the Terror.

By the end of the year, according to the best figures, 4,554 persons had been put to death by revolutionary courts. Over 3,300 of these perished in December, for it was in December that rebellious Lyons was punished and the civil war in the Vendée put down.

It is difficult to imagine the effect produced in 1793 by the phrase “Representatives of the People.” Neither word today sends a thrill through anybody’s spine. Both words were then alive with the emotions of a new belief. A Representative of the People, for Frenchmen of the First Republic, was the most august being that could exist on earth.

The three men sent to Puy-de-Dôme had been specifically granted unlimited powers by the Convention. The 14th of Frimaire being still in the future, they could do as they saw fit. They could make arrests, create revolutionary courts, conduct trials, erect guillotines. They could nullify, extend or curtail the force of any law. They could issue decrees and proclamations on any subject. They could fix prices, requisition goods, confiscate property, collect taxes. They could purge any existing government body, or, if they chose, dissolve government bodies altogether, replacing them with committees of their own nomination. On their arrival, all authority returned to the people, whose direct and immediate agents the Representatives were.

Couthon was undoubtedly self-deceived. It was characteristic of the revolutionary leaders that, with palpable evidence to the contrary, they still believed the people enthusiastically behind them. They lived by faith and hope; they meant by the “people” something higher and nobler than the people that they saw; had they been more swayed by observable facts they would in all probability not have accomplished what they did. Consequently, on matters of public opinion, deputies on mission could rarely make an accurate report to their own government.

Since a republic of this kind was believed to be dictated by human nature, opposition to it was believed to come only from sinister vested interests, and in particular from the entrenched power of the clergy and of the rich.

Puy-de-Dôme was thus divided by a kind of class struggle, or, more exactly, by a struggle between the producers and the purchasers of food. The law worked out to the advantage of consumers, especially of poor consumers who were unable to pay what might be termed the bootleggers’ prices. The small bourgeois and hired laborers of the towns gave Couthon their support; landlords and merchants, and those peasants who owned or rented their farms, were thrown more definitely into the opposition.

To some extent the revolutionary tax was collected. With the methods of administration that were available, it could scarcely be distinguished from plunder. Requisitions were made also on the neighboring peasants. Collot observed that, in view of the competition for food among conflicting powers, the most successful operators were those who travelled with armed forces.

By April 1794 almost two thousand persons had been put to death at Lyons, more than a tenth of all those sentenced by revolutionary courts for all France during the whole period of the Terror.

This cryptic remark, written unthinkingly as the confused wording shows, is perhaps for that reason more psychologically revealing. Saint-Just was a political puritan. He could not willingly work with men of whom he morally disapproved. He judged men more by their motives than by the contributions they might make to a common achievement. He feared that the good cause would be tarnished if dubious characters were allowed to promote it. This was not practical politics. Nor was it practical politics,

governmental stability, which in the circumstances meant keeping Robespierre and the rest of the Committee of Public Safety in office. And in the low state of public cooperation, with the eternal tendency of the Mountain to split, a governing group, to remain stable or to execute any continuous policy, had to become smaller and smaller, purging and purifying itself of those on whom it could not rely.

The cult of Reason, for Saint-André, was indistinguishable from the cult of country. It was a religion of patriotism, but patriotism did not mean a narrowly national pride; it meant public spirit, good citizenship, social morality, or what Robespierre referred to as virtue; for the idea of country, la patrie, merged imperceptibly with the idea of society itself. The society of the Republic was a moral community, deeply committed to a gospel of its own, concerned for human dignity, competing actively with the Christian clergy for the uplifting of human souls. But it did not compete on equal terms. Convinced that the new gospel of country should be shared by all, that it was in the nature of man to be a “citizen” but that religious faith was a mere acquired and variable characteristic, the leaders of the Republic shut up the older religions behind closed doors, and for processions in the streets, for public ritual, for mass demonstrations, granted a monopoly to the civic cult.

Laignelot screamed out the famous words: “The peoples will not be truly free until the last king has been strangled in the bowels of the last priest!”

TWO ideas gave purpose to the struggles in France during the Revolution, the rights of the individual and the sovereignty of the nation. Revolutionary philosophers saw no conflict between them. Through the sovereignty of the nation the individual made his rights effective, freeing himself from the old restraints of customary law, monarchy, class, church, guild and corporation, as well as from domination by foreign powers. Individual liberty depended on national sovereignty. The balance of the two produced the liberal and democratic states whose ascendancy lasted until our own time. But the balance is not easy to achieve. It was never achieved during the Revolutionary generation in Europe.

By October, with the creation of a new Subsistence Commission much more powerful than the old, the Committee of Public Safety found itself conducting a planned economy more thoroughgoing than anything seen in Europe until the twentieth century.

About the same time the Convention decreed that all Englishmen living in France should be put under arrest. No allowance was made for English democrats or political refugees who had come voluntarily to the land of promise. Poor optimistic Tom Paine, scarcely more appreciated by Revolutionists than by Tories, busy composing his Age of Reason, was among those menaced by the law against Englishmen, though his membership in the Convention kept him out of prison until the end of the year.

Not all the extraordinary measures that the Committee of Public Safety adopted could remove the evils of scarcity. In principle the dictated economy foreshadowed the twentieth century. In practice it remained clumsy and erratic. The political disorder blocked the economic planning, which, however, as conceived by the Committee, would have been difficult to realize in the best ordered state of the time. Effective regulation was not easy with industry decentralized in hundreds of thousands of cottages, statistics undeveloped, reports brought in on horseback, computation all done mentally and all records laboriously kept in longhand.

To Robespierre it was unthinkable that after all the risk and the suffering, all the struggle and the eager anticipation, all the dreadful decisions already made, the responsibilities bravely assumed, the execution of the king and the queen, the proud challenge to the crowned heads of Europe, the shootings and guillotinings of men who after all were Frenchmen, and who if less obstinate could be brothers—that all this should issue in a world no better than the old, a Republic in which vice, hypocrisy, irreligion and egotism should be laughed at.

Dantonism had in it the seed of a parliamentary opposition, by which members of the Convention, without being treasonable to the Republic, might discuss and criticize the work of the government. That it never developed in this way was not entirely the fault of individuals. Organized parties were frowned upon by eighteenth century liberals, including the American Founding Fathers. The Jacobins in particular saw no need for political opposition. Criticism was often a cloak for intrigue. Discussion of policy almost always passed into denunciation of motives. The ablest men in the Convention were busy with executive work; the hall was usually filled with second-raters, vain in their majesty as Representatives of the People, restless under the leadership of their colleagues on the committees, inclined to magnify trifles because important decisions were no longer made on the floor of the house. In the Convention still survived the old claim of legislators to be more important than the executive, the old suspicion of liberals toward the power of government, the old dislike of revolutionists for persons in authority.

Robespierre believed in freedom of religion—so long as religion confined itself to another world, and did not affect political allegiance. He favored conversion by persuasion—though among means of persuasion he would include some fairly intensive propaganda.

The tragic misconception was Robespierre’s idea of the people, which he shared with certain philosophes who, living in calmer times, should have known better. The French people was nothing like what Robespierre imagined. It was not all compact of goodness; it was not peculiarly governable by reason; it was not even a unitary thing at all, for only a minority was even republican. Robespierre’s “people” was the people of his mind’s eye, the people as it was to be when felicity was established, and which he now, by a kind of bootstrap philosophy, made the actual and operative cause of what it was finally to become.

“The only citizens in the Republic are the republicans. Royalists and conspirators are foreigners, or rather enemies, in its eyes.” So the people in reality became the nucleus of the pure.

he would always be called back by his sense of duty; his imagination would go out to the people, by nature good, exploited by the rich and the ambitious, the people whom some honest man must lead into happiness.

laying down the principle that no enemy of the Republic could own property within it, and that no one had civil rights who had not helped to make France free.

The Mountaineers, who at a distance look so much alike, had so little general will even among themselves that critics of the government could not be distinguished from enemies of the state.

In short, so Saint-Just would have his hearers believe, every difficulty that France had faced during its Revolution was caused by treason, and all revolutionaries who had not anticipated the government doctrine of March 1794 were traitors.

To this outcome Saint-Just’s own generalities contributed. Saint-Just, like most other middle-class leaders of the Revolution, had almost no real knowledge of the problems of working-class people. He saw an undifferentiated mass of indigent patriots to whom it would be both humane and expedient to give land.

Of the four-fifths of the population who were peasants the problems were even less understood. Among all the reforming writers of the eighteenth century the peasants possessed no authentic spokesman, and nothing in the experience or education of the Revolutionary leaders could fill the gap. The idealism of the Revolution helped the peasants, removing their feudal burdens, granting them land on instalment payments, promising them education, taking steps to relieve their poverty, endowing them with rights of citizenship which they were not prepared to exercise. After these initial reforms the peasants’ economic demands went largely unheeded.

Prieur and Barère both held that a uniform people must have a uniform speech. They inveighed against the niceties of pronunciation by which aristocrats sought to distinguish themselves. They attacked four languages in the Republic that were not French: German, Breton, Basque and Italian. The existence of these languages, they pointed out, produced a linguistic federalism, a division in the community, for the people who spoke them could not understand public events.

The Committee of Public Safety took note of the ignorance in which young people were growing up. At the same time its members were convinced, as Barère said, that the Revolution was to the human mind as the sun of Africa to vegetation. They gave thought to founding a normal school for teachers, but a Hundred Days were too short—the École Normale dates from 1795.

The theory that the state should be indifferent to religion was remote from Revolutionary ideas, and in any case is perhaps not expedient in a country predominantly Catholic. Over against the hierarchy of Rome the Revolutionary Government would set up its own church to bring spiritual unity to Frenchmen, a church in which even Catholics might participate since the being it worshiped was divine, and in which the more advanced patriots who needed no superstitions might also find an outlet for their fervors.

The new law set up thirty-six festivals, one for each décadi, on each of which the citizen, in communion with his fellows, was to absorb the ideas on which the new order must be founded. The festivals would draw his thoughts, on successive décadis, to the Supreme Being and Nature, to the human race, to liberty and equality, to love of country, to hate of tyrants and traitors, to truth and justice, to various virtues, to youth and age, happiness and misfortune, agriculture and industry, ancestors and posterity.

The troops were armed, for in nothing had the Committee been more successful than in producing munitions.

A clear theory of dictatorship had been formulated by the Committee, but no member of that body, not even Saint-Just, considered dictatorship a permanent form of government, or desirable in itself. Most of the Committee (certainly Robespierre) honestly saw in the Convention the seat of national authority intermediate between themselves and the people. They did not consider themselves absolute in law, nor were they so in fact, for even after Ventôse they had difficulty in controlling subordinates. The Committee was not popular, having aroused as many grievances as it settled. Robespierrists wanted the dictatorship to last until democracy was secured, but most people considered its usefulness over when the Allies were defeated. The politically effective element was then chiefly the middle class, which had an interest in introducing liberal institutions.

Revolutionists had abandoned one sinking ship after another. After the Girondists fell, no one could safely admit any past connections with the Girondists; after Danton was executed, no one could openly say that he had befriended Danton. So, after Thermidor, men who had worked with Robespierre and agreed with him vociferously declared, to protect themselves, that they had always been his enemies, that they had secretly opposed his hypocritical projects, or that, in their patriotic innocence, they had been his dupes. Their account of men and events before Thermidor deserves no more belief than what Saint-Just said about Danton, or Jacobin orators about Louis XVI.

“Considered enemies of the people” were those who sought to reestablish monarchy, discredited the Convention, betrayed the Republic, communicated with the enemy, interfered with provisioning, sheltered conspirators, spoke ill of patriotism, corrupted officials, misled the people, gave out false news, outraged morality, depraved the public conscience, stole public property, abused public office, or worked against the liberty, unity and security of the state. For all these offenses the sole penalty was death.

To preach terrorism after Thermidor was to expose oneself to suspicions of Robespierrism, suspicions which above all others had to be avoided. Terrorists of the Year Two identified the Terror with one man, that they might themselves, by appearing peaceable and humane, win the confidence of the moderates.