Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution by Ruth Scurr

Author:Ruth Scurr [Scurr, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448129911
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-03-30T23:00:00+00:00

It was Danton who gave Paris the signal. First he went home to Arcis and settled money on his seventy-year-old mother in case he was killed. Then he came back and called together representatives of the city’s forty-eight sections. On the night of 9 August they formed the Insurrectionary Commune, planning to take over the municipal government (which Danton himself had belonged to in recent months). Danton briefly lay down to rest as his colleagues rang the tocsin in the tower of the Cordelier Church nearby. The tocsin echoed across the city, a call to arms resounding from the churches of central and eastern Paris. Robespierre heard it in the section of the Place Vendôme, where the lights in the houses had been lit again. He sat in the Duplays’ cellar, running up the narrow stairs to his bedroom from time to time, if his curiosity got the better of him and he wanted to look out of a first-floor window. According to Lucile Desmoulins, there had been a recent attempt to assassinate him, so he was even more nervous and suspicious than usual.65 The bell rang all night, like a troubled infant that cannot sleep – rhythmic, relentless, inconsolable – but it did not, at first, bring the people out into the streets.66 Perhaps it woke the Desmoulins’ baby, now nearly a year old – but too young still to know his godfather, Robespierre. Camille had gone out with a gun, and Lucile remembered how ‘The tocsin of the Cordeliers rang, it rang for a long time. Bathed in tears, kneeling at the window, my face hidden in a handkerchief, I listened to the sound of that fatal bell. People came to comfort me in vain. It seemed to me that the day which preceded this deadly one had been our last.’67 From 2 a.m. Danton was giving orders to the insurrectionists from the Hôtel de Ville. Eventually a crowd for the storming of the Tuileries assembled. Unlike the Bastille, the palace was properly defended, and there was likely to be considerable loss of life. Since 20 June the king had recalled his loyal Swiss Guard and his constitutional bodyguards. Several battalions of National Guards were on his side too, and Pierre-Louis Rœderer was there again, giving advice on behalf of the department of Paris, while pacing nervously round the Tuileries gardens. Louis XVI thought that Paris could be subdued; he regretted not having done it in 1789; he would do it now with belated help from Europe’s invading army, whose arrival in the capital was, surely, only weeks away.

At dawn, the king’s sister called the queen to the window to see the summer sun rise; allegedly, it was very red that day. The king, like Danton, had not slept, only lain down for a little in his violet breeches, flattening his curls and rubbing the powder from one side of his head. Still dishevelled, he heard of the arrival of an early-morning message from the Insurrectionary Commune, demanding

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.