The Last Revolutionaries by Laura Mason

Author:Laura Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-01T09:53:43+00:00

e l e v e n

Perfect Equality

In the early weeks of the trial, prosecutors and defendants kept their eyes

on the approaching legislative elections, the former believing a quick

courtroom victory would boost the Directory’s candidates and the latter

hoping for a democratic victory to discredit the proceedings. The elections

arrived well before the trial was done, bringing results no one expected.

After that, the prosecutors’ sense of urgency faded.1

They should have kept the pressure on, because the proceedings were ex-

hausting everyone.

Inside the abbey, inmates quarreled with guards who ransacked their

cells and seized personal items. They quarreled with one another, too, vent-

ing the frustrations of an inconceivably long trial and continuing confine-

ment in chilly, makeshift cells.2

Babeuf, in particular, was ailing. Always a man of extremes, he main-

tained an especially punishing regimen in Vendôme, working tirelessly on

a defense he did not believe in and petitioning to have his son imprisoned

with him so he could continue the boy’s education. Perhaps to ease the

memory of little Sophie’s starvation after Thermidor, he deprived himself of

food in order to share his prison rations with Marie-Anne and Émile. All of

it took a toll. He was irritable, exhausted, and often ill. His legs and ankles

sometimes swelled so badly that he had trouble walking and begged the

court to suspend sessions. When those requests were denied, he required

prison guards to carry him up several flights of stairs to the courtroom. It was

not clear how much longer he could go on.3

159

perfect equality

Outside the abbey, locals were divided between suspicion of the prison-

ers in their midst and irritation at the unruly troops reputedly offering safety.

Suspicion won out when prison guards seized a packet of smuggled letters

that hinted at the possibility of a Paris insurrection and advised on corrupt-

ing jurors. Rumors of these letters suggested that the soldiers might be worth

putting up with. More potently, the news fueled long-simmering impa-

tience to be done with proceedings that were entering their third month

and still far from over. The trial of the king himself had only taken six

weeks.4

None of this prevented Viellart and Bailly from delaying further. They

asked for a lengthy recess to prepare their closing statement and did not

emerge until late April.

Bailly delivered the summation to a packed house. Beginning much as

his colleague had at the trial’s opening, he argued that revolutionary up-

heaval produced this plot. However, more wary than Viellart of seeming to

condemn the entire revolution, he focused on the Terror. Good deputies

were frustrated by the “weak, fearful men” who capitulated to Robespierre,

he argued. “The helpless Convention [became] his slave . . . and we saw

that disastrous state known as revolutionary government flourish . . . History will scarcely believe the horrors imposed by that abhorrent regime: the

hundred thousand new Bastilles on French soil, the thousand scaffolds

placed permanently in public squares, the appalling number of victims they

consumed.”

Like Viellart, Bailly claimed that Robespierre’s heirs survived 9 Thermi-

dor. He charged them with exciting the bloody Prairial uprising, attacking

the constitution of 1795, and rallying others to their execrable “community

of goods.” Then, he continued, driven by greed, a mad desire for anarchy,

and loathing of “republic and government,” they organized the conspiracy

before the court now.

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