Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre by Jonathan Israel

Author:Jonathan Israel [Israel, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Europe, Revolutionary, Philosophy, Social, Modern, Political, France, 18th Century, History
ISBN: 9780691151724
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-08-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

The Summer of 1793

OVERTURNING THE REVOLUTION’S CORE VALUES

It took time for the victors to consolidate their dictatorship. There could be no immediate imposition of repressive measures. At first, rather, there was widespread confusion. On 2 June, the Convention majority supported the democratic Left, not the Montagne.1 Most of France and even, the evidence suggests, most of Paris, opposed Robespierre. Many eyewitnesses agreed with Gensonné, whose manifesto, dashed off in haste prior to his arrest, dated three in the afternoon of 2 June, held that after “seducing a few,” the Montagne had captured the capital’s comités révolutionnaires by employing every variety of intimidation, manipulation, and bullying to cajole the sections.2 Treated respectfully, and initially only loosely guarded, many “so-called friends of the laws [amis des lois],” as the Montagnards derisively termed the impeached deputies, contrived to escape. Brissot, Pétion, Barbaroux, Louvet, Gorsas, Buzot, Lanjuinais, and Guadet all slipped away from house arrest. Manuel, not indicted on 2 June but arrested shortly afterward, likewise eluded his captors but was caught at Fontainebleau and returned to Paris in early August, as were Pétion’s wife and children, seized at Honfleur.3

Most of the Convention’s deputies had opposed the coup and actively or passively continued to do so. All nine Somme department deputies, including the fugitive Louvet, signed a manifesto, dated 5 June, in the Mercure universel, declaring 31 May and 2 June days of “mourning for all friends of liberty and the Republic.” The Convention, besieged by a huge but drastically manipulated crowd and surrounded with bayonets and cannon, had been harried and abused at gunpoint. The only really “guilty deputies” were those orchestrating the plot. For seven hours, while the Assembly resisted proscription of the Twenty-Two and the Twelve, no deputy could leave the Convention hall unless escorted by armed conspirators, not even to satisfy the demands of nature, a truly humiliating indignity. The legislature had been violated “not by citizens or the Paris sections but certain men,” paid or misled.4 Several of the signatories, including Louvet, survived the Terror and later resumed their efforts, from late 1794, to forge a democratic republic.

The municipal authorities at Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes, Toulon, Bayonne, and Montpellier all condemned the coup, as did much of provincial France outside the main cities. Many small towns also formally repudiated it. Pont-Audemer’s citizens, gathering in their main church, drew up a protest petition dated 4 June, indignantly deploring seizure of the Twenty-Two, whose only “crime” was to propose the appel au peuple, rendering “homage to the principle of sovereignty of the people.”5 Saint-Quentin initially reacted similarly: one would need to be very blind not to see the perfidy of those who had usurped power by dissolving the Commission of Twelve and arresting the Twenty-Two without the slightest evidence to support their accusations. Power has been seized by an “impious faction supported by all that is most vile and corrupt in Paris.” “True republicans” were summoned to help restore genuine national representation, purge the “oppressors of the people and establish a fully republican constitution.

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