A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin by Simon Jenkins

Author:Simon Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2018-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

The Revolution: from terror to collapse

Over the course of 1792 the assembly found it could unite against an outside enemy but only divide against itself. It fragmented. The Paris commune formed a ‘secret committee’ under Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Lafayette was disowned and a tribunal set up to try traitors. The assembly was replaced by a more radical ‘National Convention’, which declared the king dismissed and a republic established. It then debated Louis’s execution, with Robespierre, Danton and the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in full cry for the motion. When Robespierre was reminded of his earlier decision to abolish the death penalty, he replied, ‘Louis must die in order that France may live.’ In January 1793 the king went to the guillotine, his last words to the crowd drowned out by a drum roll.

The Revolution began to splinter. The National Convention was supplemented by a ‘committee of public safety’. The remaining Girondin moderates were arrested by a mob, and twenty-one of them marched to the guillotine. The committee, under Robespierre, now formally instigated ‘the Terror’, a specific policy, not a later description of anarchy. Robespierre said, ‘The foundations of popular government in a revolution are virtue and terror; terror without virtue is disastrous; virtue without terror is powerless. The Government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty over tyranny.’ The phraseology became the thinking of dictators down the ages.

The Terror was aimed partly at curbing chaos in Paris and partly at a counter-revolution in the Vendée region. This was suppressed with savage brutality and up to 400,000 deaths. The general in charge boasted that he had ‘crushed children under the hooves of horses, and massacred women so they breed no more brigands… We take no prisoners as it would be necessary to feed them with the bread of Liberty.’ In Paris, meetings of the committee of public safety took place to a background chorus of the mob, either in the street outside or camped in the Hôtel de Ville, ready to lynch anyone to whom it took a dislike. At one point it ‘liberated’ a prison and a convent, only to slaughter or rape the inmates in an orgy of violence. In October 1793, nine months after her husband’s execution, Marie Antoinette was tried and guillotined. Her infant son, briefly Louis XVII, was sent to die of disease with proletarian foster parents.

By the start of 1794, the Revolution was consuming its own. Danton and his associates were executed for ‘an excess of moderation’. Marat had been murdered by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer, while writing an article in his bath. David depicted the corpse, pen in hand, a painting that became an icon of the revolution. As for Robespierre, he was gradually losing his mind. He declared Notre-Dame a ‘Temple of Reason’ and initiated ‘a cult of the Supreme Being’, celebrated with a festival in the Tuileries garden glorifying the republic. Robespierre with torch aloft announced the death of Christianity and led a procession of thousands dancing with flowers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.