A Year in Paris by John Baxter

Author:John Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

29

Exit Fabre

Place de la Révolution, Paris. July 17, 1793. 19°C. Condemned to death for murdering Jean–Paul Marat, Charlotte Corday goes to the guillotine. A carpenter working on the scaffold, believing consciousness may survive in a severed body part, grabs her head by its hair and slaps the cheeks. Witnesses gasp when the dead face, some swear, blushes and shows “unequivocal indignation.” Convicted of abusing a corpse, the carpenter spends three months in prison.

IT’S AN IRONY OF THE REPUBLICAN CALENDAR THAT BY THE TIME the average Frenchman became aware of it, Fabre d’Églantine, the man who helped create it and championed its use, was dead.

From June 1793 through July 1794, 16,594 people were executed by guillotine in France, 2,639 of them in Paris. On October 16, it was Marie Antoinette’s turn. Though she never denied leaking military secrets to her native country, Austria, the prosecutors added trumped–up charges that she had organized orgies at Versailles and even had sex with her young son.

Truth ceased to matter in that climate of suspicion and hatred. Inquisitors asked all suspects the same questions: “What were you worth before the revolution? What are you worth now?” Those who could not prove poverty were automatically condemned.

Robespierre led the witch hunt. “What we need is a single will,” he announced. “It must be either Republican or royalist. If it is to be Republican, we must have Republican ministers, Republican papers, Republican deputies, a Republican government.” It went without saying that the “single will” must be his.

When too few deputies sided with him, he accused his opponents of treason and had them condemned to death in what became known as the Terror. He explained his policy in terms of the seasons, a comparison the country would instinctively understand. “If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace,” he ranted, “the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.”

The Terror would forever stain the reputation of the revolution, threatening to overshadow its achievements. For the next two centuries, writers outside France—from Charles Dickens in his novel A Tale of Two Cities to Baroness Orczy in her stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel—demonized the revolutionaries and glamorized the aristocracy. Danton, the shady aspects of his character conveniently forgotten, emerged in the popular imagination as the people’s champion, betrayed and murdered by Robespierre and his young henchman Louis de Saint–Just.

Many who survived the Terror had stories that rivaled fiction. Thomas Paine, British–born author of Rights of Man, was imprisoned and condemned. When the guard who chalked the number of the guillotine to which a prisoner would be sent passed by, the door of Paine’s cell happened to be open. His number, written by chance on the inside, wasn’t visible with the door closed, so he survived.

The survival of the Marquis de Sade was even more miraculous. In 1789, he was already confined to the Bastille at the instigation of his mother–in–law, who

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