The Fall of Robespierre by Jones Colin

Author:Jones, Colin [Jones, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191025044
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7.00 p.m.

Maison Commune

Numbers of General Council members reporting for duty have gone up quite sharply; nearly one hundred are present, representing a good turnout. They even feel in a strong enough position to turn away Jean Guyot, the Police Administrator shunned by his colleagues at the Mairie, telling him to come back only when he is sporting his official tricolour municipal sash. With numbers also swelling nicely outside, the General Council makes a big decision. They will send an expedition to the Tuileries palace drawn from the forces on the Place de la Maison Commune and led by Louvet and Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal. Vice-president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Coffinhal is blessed with a towering physique and a booming voice to which it is easy to defer. Their aim will be to free Robespierre, Couthon, Hanriot, and the others.

Coffinhal joins mayor Fleuriot in going down onto the Place to whip up enthusiasm among the crowds of guardsman and civilians for this key mission. Coffinhal harangues the crowd:

- The fatherland is in danger, the best patriots have been imprisoned as well the Paris NG’s General Staff. Members of the CPS and CGS have turned traitor. We must punish them. We must obey Hanriot and no other!

Fleuriot, in full municipal regalia, makes a beeline for the artillery companies of the famously radical Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and speaks to the gunners of the Popincourt section:

- Would the men of 14 July, 10 August and 31 May lose from sight the fact that 9 Thermidor is necessary to save their country and the Republic? That it is necessary that the people rise en masse? The people are being oppressed…What do you want: freedom or tyranny?

Fleuriot does not quite get the answer he expects. The men cry out ‘Vive the Republic!’ But then, ‘Vive the Convention!’ The Commune message has not fully got through.

There is similar uncertainty within the Commune hall. The municipal councillors hover around the entrance to the building, awaiting men from their section who are delegates from the Revolutionary and Civil Committees or else NG battalion commanders so that they can confront them straight away with taking the oath and adding their names to the list of the attendees. This is a way of cementing the support of all present. Yet in the haste to enrol support, little care is taken to ensure that the men know what they are signing up for. Many are new to a General Council meeting and assume that this is a routine signing-in procedure. With the ambient noise and excitement levels they don’t all fully grasp what is going on. They don’t all see their own presence as signifying hostility towards the Convention.

Worryingly for the Commune’s cause, however, some do detect the intentions of the Commune leaders, and do their best to get away and run back to their sections with the news. Others are more circumspect. Surgeon-midwife Jean-Antoine-Gaspard Forestier is only too willing to accept a call to go out and deliver a couple of babies, for example, and then see what happens from outside.

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