The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris

This is a remarkable, barnstorming doorstop of a book. It gives us a portrait of an astonishingly confused and dangerous day in the life of revolutionary Paris, spread across over 450 pages of lucid, attention-grabbing, present-tense prose. Carved up into short, and sometimes indeed fragmentary, half-page, sections, the narrative has a filmic quality, thrusting the reader into alternating shouting-matches at the centre of the action, and moments of calm or bewilderment in the presence of peripheral characters confronting the main events. Colin Jones also makes strategic use of the extended flashback, allowing him to expertly sketch in just enough of the vast context of prior revolutionary events for what is taking place to rise above incomprehensibility.

For, of course, much of what happened on 9 thermidor in the Year II was almost incomprehensible to anyone not soaked in the bitter stew of assumptions that formed the political culture of the French First Republic’s opening years; a period that Jones resolutely refuses to refer to as ‘the Terror’ because nobody had yet decided to call it that in late July 1794, but whose characterization as such has dominated all subsequent understandings, ever since the ‘Thermidorian’ survivors of what happened in 1793/94 began to explain and excuse their own behaviour, and seek scapegoats for what could not be excused.

Ultimately, ‘Thermidorian’ politics evolved into what can fairly be described as a social reaction, until by 1795, and ever after in memory, the confected image of the hairy-faced, foul-mouthed sans-culottes plebeian hero of 1792–4 was transmuted into an equally confected mythology of uncontrolled ‘popular’ invasion of the political space by ghastly ideas carried out by ghastly individuals. Against this, in the mid-twentieth century, the heroic narrative of George Rudé and Albert Soboul sought to revive the rectitude of the ‘crowd’ and the ‘popular movement’ as historical actors with laudable egalitarian, libertarian and fraternal goals. While many aspects of this idealization continue to be present in some accounts (alongside, for example, the far more subtle observations of Haïm Burstin), they had also been challenged within a decade of publication. The now-almost-forgotten work of Richard M. Andrews sought to demonstrate that successful sans-culottes leadership was a function of prior neighbourhood economic power, and that local authorities were dominated by men who might paint themselves in a formidably plebeian light, but were essentially cliques of local bosses who used subsistence politics to distract from issues of wages and working conditions. Richard Cobb, in an extensive series of books and essays, drew scholarly attention to the lives that Parisians and others lived through, between and underneath the political headlines—sometimes obliviously, sometimes traumatically, as compulsory political identifications crashed on their heads, creating enmities for the survivors that endured for decades.

Cobb’s most iconic discovery, the naive peasant girl Marguerite Barrois, seduced and abandoned by a local shop-boy on 9 thermidor itself, almost within hours of arrival in the capital, and left to record her déclaration de grossesse in the Year III (just as those in the same plight had done for decades), makes a guest appearance in Jones’ narrative. The book overall owes a great deal to what might be called the esprit de Cobb, notably in avoiding the temptation to heroize any of the participants. What took place on and around 9 thermidor was a black farce in which groups of politicians and political activists battled each other, all asserting that they were the true custodians of revolutionary republican rectitude, and that their opponents (who had been, until mere hours, minutes, or in a few cases seconds, before, loyal patriotic comrades) were evident counter-revolutionary conspirators.

Passages of the text invoke a spirit close to that of the grim comedy of the 2017 film The Death of Stalin. All of those involved in late July 1794 inhabited a system in which growing numbers of people were being judicially murdered on a daily basis (and almost in passing, the despatch of over forty more on this day is recorded). If the Girondin leadership guillotined in October 1793 had, indeed, fomented civil war, the Hébertist leadership despatched seven months later were in comparison mere inconvenient blowhards. Executing the Dantonists shortly after had been a decisive step to establishing that dissent itself was treason, and it was safer to affirm the existence of nonsensical prison-plots and sign off on executions by the dozen than to raise questions about the plausibility of the charges. On 9 thermidor itself, as both national and municipal politicians demanded and obtained the arrest of those who contested their assertions, they knew and intended such arrests to be death sentences.

Through this horror wandered some truly evocative characters. Christophe-Philippe Giot was adjutant for one of the Parisian National Guard’s six subordinate ‘legions’, and had been present at every major Parisian journée since the taking of the Bastille itself. He possessed a dramatically impressive set of facial hair, and in the chaotic conditions of the early evening of the 9th, some witnesses declared that it had been literally this which singled him out for an impromptu promotion to command of the whole Guard, in the absence of its arrested general Hanriot. Giot’s response to a friend’s congratulation was self-mocking: ‘Me? Me? Fucking Commander of Potatoes, more like!’ When Hanriot returned around 10 p.m., having been dramatically rescued in one of the pro-Robespierre forces’ few brief successes, he first roared at Giot that ‘the guillotine awaits you’ as a treacherous moderate, then minutes later restored him to his adjutant’s position and imposed new emergency duties on him. After further hours of chaos, Giot found himself in a command-post on the Île de la Cité, where subordinates apologetically announced that their detachments were heading for home: ‘You can do what you want. I haven’t got a head for any of this. I don’t know what it all means’.

Pity poor Giot, who does at least seem to have survived the immediate repressive aftermath of the day. We can in hindsight perhaps imagine pitying many of the participants, who reveal themselves through the narratives they offer, and which Jones has meticulously recovered from the archive, to be fundamentally limited in their understandings, when not simply terrified of a fatal mis-step, or drunk, literally and metaphorically, with the illusion of popular rectitude. All of the forces in play seem, on the overall account here, to have been haunted by the spectre of ‘the people’, a mythic, unified force that guaranteed that what they were doing was right—and which, of course, in that form simply did not exist (not least because the whole political constellation of Paris in July 1794 was the product of a top-down imposition of orthodoxy after the explicit silencing of independent sans-culottes voices the previous spring). Ironic testimony to the detachment of politics from real popular concerns is the repeated reference of actors to their fear of actual workers’ demonstrations against wage-cuts, looming in parallel with the attack on Robespierre. In some of his closing passages, Jones leans towards hearing the voice of ‘the people’ in the neighbourhood Section General Assemblies, convoked by the National Convention to resist the Robespierrist ‘conspirators’. Yet, if ‘the people’ spoke then, what it said was that constituted national authority should be obeyed, putting the final lid on any suggestion of mass resistance. In a time of rising and contested ‘populism’, the lesson of long-distant events such as these is, perhaps, that taking any lesson from them except that of great caution might be a dangerous mistake.