The Terror in the French Revolution by Hugh Gough

Author:Hugh Gough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK

[i] Centralisation of power

The executions of Hébert and Danton snuffed out any hope of a challenge to the Committee of Public Safety’s power from the Convention. No deputy who had seen what happened to people of such prominence and popularity was going to risk his neck and follow in their shoes. So the Convention’s debates developed into a routine endorsement of the Committee of Public Safety’s activity and a celebration of government success. Debates were easy to control because during the summer all but one of the Convention’s presidents – the equivalent of a modern parliamentary speaker – was a member of the Committee of Public Safety or the Committee of General Security [101]. This left the Committee of Public Safety free to push through a carefully planned programme of centralisation and repression. On 1 April the Convention voted to abolish the existing six ministries, to prevent ministers or their staff challenging the Committee’s authority as the Ministry of War had done under Bouchotte and Vincent. In their place twelve executive commissions were set up, appointed by the Committee of Public Safety and reporting to it. The Paris revolutionary army, which had been packed with sans-culotte radicals since it had been set up the previous September, was disbanded. The Paris Commune, another centre of radical influence was purged and its national agent, Chaumette, who was a friend and ally of Hébert, was guillotined. Seven members of its police administration were also removed and the mayor, Pache, was arrested. The vacancies were filled by the Committee of Public Safety, without any question of an election, using a Convention decree of 23 ventôse (13 March) which authorised it to replace all suspended state officials. Robespierre then used the opportunity to put his own followers into key positions. Claude-François Payan, a former army officer from the south of France who worked in the offices of the Committee of Public Safety was made national agent and another Robespierre loyalist, Jean-Baptiste Lescot-Fleuriot, became mayor.

With its hold on central government and Paris secure, the Committee streamlined terrorist legislation. On 27 germinal (18 April) a ‘Law on General Police’ banned foreigners and former nobles from living in ports, garrison towns or Paris. It also authorised the Committee of Public Safety to set up a police bureau to monitor the activity of administrative officials. Administrative inefficiency had been one of the Committee’s recurrent concerns since the previous summer and the police bureau was initially designed to weed out corruption and counter-revolution within the bureaucracy. However, it rapidly broadened out into a political police force which shadowed the work of the police agents already reporting to the Committee of General Security. Within weeks it was ordering the arrest of suspects and sending them before the revolutionary tribunal on its own initiative [158]. Saint-Just ran it at first, but when he went on mission to the army of the North in early May, Robespierre took it over, working from spy reports and letters from informers in Paris and the provinces.

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