Category: French Revolution

By 1794, Maximilien Robespierre appeared to have achieved what the revolutionary government had spent the previous year trying to accomplish. France had survived. The foreign armies that had threatened the Republic had been pushed back. The Vendée had been largely crushed, although at enormous cost. The government had imposed economic controls and the worst of the food crisis had begun to ease. The revolutionary armies were becoming increasingly successful. Yet this created a problem for Robespierre. The policies that had helped him survive the crisis were becoming harder to justify now that the crisis was beginning to recede. The Terror had been introduced as an emergency measure. What happened when the emergency appeared to be ending?

The revolutionary government had always presented its violence as necessary. France was fighting foreign monarchies. Royalists were conspiring against the Republic. Rebellions were threatening the country from within. Food shortages were causing unrest. Generals had defected to the enemy. In this environment, Robespierre and his allies argued that extraordinary measures were necessary to save the Revolution. The Committee of Public Safety became the centre of this system.

The result was devastating. Thousands of people were executed during the Terror, while many more died in prison or in the civil wars and repression taking place across France. The revolutionary government had created a political system in which suspicion itself could become grounds for arrest. But by the beginning of 1794, the situation was changing. French armies were achieving major victories. The Republic was no longer on the verge of immediate military destruction. For many politicians, this raised an uncomfortable question: If France was winning, why did the Terror need to continue?

One of the first major revolutionary leaders to openly challenge the continuation of the Terror was Georges Danton. Danton had been one of the most important figures of the Revolution from its earliest radical phase. He had helped establish the Cordeliers Club, served as Minister of Justice and played a crucial role during the overthrow of the monarchy. He had also been one of Robespierre’s political allies. But by 1794, Danton had become increasingly critical of revolutionary violence. Together with journalists and politicians sometimes described as the Indulgents, Danton called for a reduction in the executions and a return towards normal government. He also wanted France to move towards peace. To Danton, the Revolution had survived its most dangerous period. It was time to stop treating every political disagreement as treason.

Robespierre disagreed. The two men had once stood on the same side of the Revolution. Now they represented two increasingly different visions of its future. Danton wanted the Revolution to survive by becoming more moderate. Robespierre believed that abandoning revolutionary virtue and vigilance too soon could allow its enemies to return. The Committee of Public Safety therefore turned against Danton. In March 1794, Danton and his allies were arrested. They were accused of corruption and conspiracy against the Republic.

On April 5th, Danton was taken to the guillotine. His execution shocked even some of the revolutionaries who had supported the Terror. One of the Revolution’s most famous leaders had been destroyed by the same machinery of political justice that he had helped create. Robespierre had eliminated a potential rival. But he had also sent a warning to everyone else. Nobody was safe.

Danton’s execution was followed by further purges. Robespierre’s government increasingly attacked factions on both sides of the political spectrum. The Hébertists, representing a more radical and militant revolutionary current, had already been executed in March. The Indulgents, associated with Danton, followed them. The message was becoming increasingly clear. There was apparently no acceptable position between radicalism and counter-revolution. The Revolution was consuming its own children. This atmosphere of suspicion was intensified by the Law of 22 Prairial, passed in June 1794. The law dramatically weakened the protections available to defendants before the Revolutionary Tribunal. It restricted conventional legal procedures and made convictions easier to obtain.

The Terror accelerated. In Paris, executions reached their highest levels during what became known as the Great Terror. And this time, the justification was becoming increasingly difficult to explain. France was winning the war. The foreign armies were being pushed back. The revolutionary government was becoming stronger. Yet more people were being sent to the guillotine. The Terror was no longer simply defending the Republic from an obvious military emergency. It was increasingly becoming a mechanism for political control.

At the same time, Robespierre was attempting to define what kind of society the Revolution was supposed to create. The radical revolutionaries had launched a campaign of dechristianisation, attacking the Catholic Church and replacing traditional religious practices with revolutionary alternatives. Robespierre did not entirely support this approach. He was a deist and believed that religion could serve a moral and social purpose. He therefore promoted the idea of the Cult of the Supreme Being. The Supreme Being was not supposed to be Robespierre himself. It was a deistic conception of God, intended to provide the Republic with a moral foundation while rejecting the authority of the Catholic Church.

On June 8th 1794, the revolutionary government held the Festival of the Supreme Being in Paris. Robespierre personally presided over the ceremony. He dressed in a sky-blue coat and carried flowers, walking at the head of the procession. To his enemies, the spectacle was deeply unsettling. Robespierre appeared to be placing himself at the centre of a new revolutionary civic religion. His growing prominence led some contemporaries to accuse him of seeking personal power. The ceremony reinforced the impression that he wanted to become the moral authority of the Republic. His political opponents began to fear what he might do next.

The most important factor in Robespierre’s downfall was not simply that he was unpopular. It was that his colleagues had begun to fear that they might be next. The Terror had already destroyed the Girondins, the Hébertists and the Dantonists. The Law of 22 Prairial made it easier to condemn people before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Robespierre himself increasingly withdrew from ordinary political activity and became suspicious of those around him. He believed that corruption and conspiracy were still widespread. But the more enemies he identified, the more potential enemies his colleagues saw in him. The question inside the Convention was no longer: “Who is Robespierre going to execute?” It was: “Will I be next?” This was the fatal weakness of revolutionary terror. Once nobody could be certain that they were safe, even politicians who had previously supported the Terror had an incentive to unite against its principal architect.

On July 26th 1794, Robespierre returned to the National Convention and delivered a speech warning of conspiracies within the government. But he refused to name the people he believed were responsible. This frightened his opponents even further. If Robespierre had a list of traitors but would not reveal their names, almost anyone could imagine themselves appearing on it. The following day, 9 Thermidor Year II in the revolutionary calendar, the Convention turned against him. Robespierre attempted to speak but was repeatedly interrupted. His supporters were increasingly isolated. Eventually, the Convention ordered his arrest. Robespierre and several of his allies were taken into custody. But the crisis was not yet over.

Robespierre was freed by supporters and taken to the Hôtel de Ville, where some of his remaining allies gathered. For several hours, it appeared that another Parisian insurrection might take place. But Robespierre hesitated. The exact reasons remain debated, but he did not successfully organise his supporters into a decisive counter-attack. The Convention declared Robespierre and his allies outlaws. Government troops eventually stormed the Hôtel de Ville. Robespierre was captured. During the confrontation, he suffered a severe gunshot wound to the jaw. Whether he attempted suicide or was shot by a gendarme remains disputed. Either way, the man who had dominated revolutionary France was now a prisoner.

On July 28th 1794, Robespierre was taken to the guillotine. There would be no elaborate trial. The Convention had already declared him an outlaw, allowing his execution without the normal judicial process. He was placed on the same machine that had claimed so many of his political enemies. The executioner removed the bandage covering his injured jaw. Robespierre screamed in pain. Then the blade fell. He was dead. Twenty-one of his closest supporters were executed alongside him that day, followed by dozens more in the days that followed. The man who had become the principal symbol of the Terror had been destroyed by the very system he had helped create.

Robespierre’s death did not end the Revolution. It ended one particular phase of it. The Thermidorian Reaction began almost immediately. The Committee of Public Safety was weakened. The machinery of the Terror was dismantled. Political prisoners were released, and the influence of the Jacobins declined. France began moving away from the radical political culture of 1793–94. The Revolution had survived. But it had changed. The Terror had been justified as a temporary necessity: a way of protecting the Republic until its enemies were defeated.

By the summer of 1794, France’s military position had dramatically improved. The paradox was that this success helped destroy Robespierre. The emergency that had justified extraordinary government was disappearing, while the extraordinary government itself remained. Robespierre had helped create a system in which political enemies could be imprisoned and executed in the name of revolutionary virtue. Eventually, his fellow politicians realised that they could not know whether they would be classified as enemies tomorrow. So they acted first. The Revolution had begun by overthrowing a king. It had executed the king. It had executed the queen. It had executed moderates, radicals, royalists, priests and revolutionaries. And now it had executed the man who had become its most famous defender. Robespierre had spent months arguing that terror was necessary to preserve the Republic. In the end, the Republic preserved itself by destroying him.

By the summer of 1793, the French Revolution had entered its most violent phase. France was fighting almost every major European power. The Republic faced rebellions in the Vendée and elsewhere, the economy was struggling, and political divisions in Paris had become increasingly vicious. The execution of Louis XVI had destroyed the possibility of an easy restoration of the monarchy, while the murder of Jean-Paul Marat demonstrated how political violence could be directed at even the most prominent revolutionaries. The revolutionary government responded by increasingly treating political opposition as a matter of national survival. At the centre of this transformation was Maximilien Robespierre.

Robespierre and his allies believed that the Republic was surrounded by enemies. Some were foreign monarchies attempting to destroy the Revolution. Others were royalists, counter-revolutionaries and refractory priests. But the definition of an enemy could become increasingly broad. The Committee of Public Safety became the central instrument of revolutionary government. The Revolutionary Tribunal, established earlier in 1793, was strengthened, allowing suspected enemies of the Revolution to be tried and condemned with extraordinary speed. The revolutionary government increasingly argued that extraordinary circumstances required extraordinary measures. The result became known as the Reign of Terror.

The Law of Suspects allowed revolutionary authorities to arrest people considered potential enemies of liberty. In June 1794, the Law of 22 Prairial further restricted the rights of defendants before the Revolutionary Tribunal and accelerated the process of condemnation. The guillotine became the most recognisable symbol of this period. Thousands were executed during the Terror, alongside thousands more who died through imprisonment, civil war and other forms of revolutionary repression. Estimates vary, but roughly 16,000 people were officially sentenced to death by revolutionary tribunals, while the total number killed through the wider Terror and associated repression was considerably higher.

Among those awaiting their fate was the woman who had once been the Queen of France: Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette had already endured extraordinary personal tragedy: her husband had been executed in January; her children had been separated from her; her daughter, Marie-Thérèse, remained imprisoned. Her young son, Louis-Charles, had been removed from his mother’s care and placed under the supervision of revolutionary authorities. The former Queen herself had initially been held in the Temple with her family before being transferred to the Conciergerie in August 1793.

The conditions were harsh. She was no longer treated as a queen. She was a prisoner of the Republic. For years, Marie Antoinette had been one of the most hated figures in revolutionary propaganda. She had been portrayed as extravagant, immoral and sympathetic to France’s enemies. The infamous phrase supposedly attributed to her – “Let them eat cake” – had become one of the most enduring pieces of anti-royalist propaganda, despite there being no reliable evidence that she ever said it. More damaging were the genuine political accusations against her. She had opposed aspects of the Revolution, maintained contacts with foreign courts and attempted to influence French and foreign political affairs. Revolutionary leaders increasingly portrayed her as an enemy of the nation rather than simply a former queen. Her trial would therefore be about more than her personal conduct. It would be about what she represented.

On October 14th 1793, Marie Antoinette was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. The prosecution accused her of conspiring against the security of the state and maintaining relationships with France’s enemies. The trial was heavily political. The prosecution portrayed Marie Antoinette as an enemy of the Revolution who had used her position to undermine France. Some of the accusations were based upon her genuine political correspondence and activities; others were sensational or poorly supported. One particularly notorious allegation concerned sexual abuse involving her young son. The accusation shocked even Marie Antoinette. She initially remained silent. Then a woman in the public gallery reportedly shouted an accusation against her. Marie Antoinette responded by appealing to the mothers present in the courtroom. She asked whether a mother could really be capable of such an act. The courtroom reportedly reacted with sympathy. Even her opponents could recognise the extraordinary cruelty of the accusation. But sympathy would not save her.

The Revolutionary Tribunal found Marie Antoinette guilty. She was sentenced to death. The former Queen of France would be executed the following day. Marie Antoinette spent her final hours in prison. Unlike her husband, she would not receive a royal carriage. There would be no ceremony appropriate to a queen. She was taken from the Conciergerie and placed onto a simple open wooden cart used to transport ordinary prisoners to the scaffold. The transformation was deliberate. The Revolution was not merely executing Marie Antoinette. It was stripping away every remaining symbol of her former status. She was dressed in white, her hair was cut short in preparation for the guillotine, and her hands were tied behind her back. Then the cart began its journey through Paris.

The route to the Place de la Révolution took her through streets crowded with spectators. Some jeered. Others watched in silence. The woman who had once arrived in France as a teenage Austrian archduchess, married the heir to the French throne and eventually become Queen was now being transported through Paris as an ordinary condemned prisoner. Marie Antoinette reached the Place de la Révolution shortly after noon. She climbed the scaffold. The executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, prepared her for the guillotine. Then, as she approached the blade, she accidentally stepped on his foot. She immediately apologised.

Monsieur, I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.

The last words of Marie Antoinette

It was an almost absurdly ordinary thing to say at such a moment. A woman who had once been among the most powerful people in Europe was apologising for accidentally stepping on another person’s foot. Seconds later, the blade fell. Marie Antoinette was dead. It was approximately 12:15 pm on October 16th 1793. She was thirty-seven years old.

Marie Antoinette’s execution represented the final destruction of the French royal family as a political institution. Louis XVI was already dead. Marie Antoinette was now dead. Their son, Louis-Charles, remained imprisoned and would die in captivity in 1795 at the age of ten. Their daughter, Marie-Thérèse, would eventually survive the Revolution and leave France. The monarchy had been reduced from one of Europe’s oldest institutions to a memory. But Marie Antoinette’s death also demonstrated something darker about the Revolution. The revolutionaries had originally demanded equality before the law. Now the former Queen had been deliberately stripped of every privilege associated with her birth and status before being executed as a citizen of the Republic.

To her enemies, this was justice. To her supporters, it was regicide and martyrdom. To later generations, her death became one of the defining images of the French Revolution. The white dress. The wooden cart. The jeering crowd. The guillotine. And the final apology to her executioner. The Queen who had once lived at Versailles had been reduced to a prisoner travelling through the streets of Paris towards her death. Yet there was an irony in the attempt to erase her. The Revolution wanted Marie Antoinette to become simply another enemy of the Republic. Instead, her execution helped transform her into one of the Revolution’s most enduring symbols. The woman who had once been portrayed as the embodiment of royal excess became, in death, the tragic face of the old regime. And the Revolution continued.

The guillotine would claim thousands more lives before the Terror itself finally turned upon its architects. Eventually, even Robespierre would discover that the machine of revolutionary justice could not distinguish between the enemies he wanted to destroy and the revolutionaries who operated it. But on 16 October 1793, it was Marie Antoinette who stood beneath the blade. The Queen was dead. The Republic lived on.

By 1793, the French Revolution was no longer simply a struggle between the supporters of the old monarchy and those who wanted a republic. The Revolution was beginning to consume itself. France was at war with much of Europe. The monarchy had been abolished and Louis XVI executed. The economy remained unstable, food prices were high and political factions were increasingly turning against one another. In the countryside, resistance to the Revolution was growing, while in Paris the radical sans-culottes demanded increasingly extreme measures against anyone suspected of opposing the Republic. One of the loudest voices demanding that the Revolution go further was Jean-Paul Marat. And before the year was over, he would be dead.

The early months of the Republic had initially brought military success. French armies had defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Valmy in September 1792 and pushed the Coalition forces out of much of French territory. Revolutionary armies subsequently occupied Belgium and other territories. But these victories alarmed Europe’s monarchies.

Britain, Spain, the Dutch Republic and other European powers joined Austria and Prussia in the war against revolutionary France. France was increasingly surrounded by enemies, while the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 convinced many European governments that the Revolution could not simply be contained. By the spring, the military situation had deteriorated badly. French forces suffered defeats, including the disastrous campaign of General Dumouriez in the Austrian Netherlands. Dumouriez eventually attempted to negotiate with the Austrians and considered using his army to restore the monarchy. His defection reinforced the revolutionary belief that traitors were everywhere.

The government responded with increasingly radical measures. In February 1793, the Convention introduced a levy of 300,000 men. Later that year, as the military crisis became more severe, the government introduced the levée en masse, effectively placing the resources of the nation at the disposal of the war effort. But conscription created another problem. The Revolution was increasingly trying to impose itself upon parts of France that had never embraced it with the same enthusiasm as Paris.

In western France, particularly in the Vendée, resistance to the Republic exploded. The countryside was deeply Catholic and had strong connections to the traditional social order. Revolutionary attacks on the privileges of the Church had already caused resentment. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy had divided communities between priests who accepted the Revolution and those who refused to swear the required oath. Now young men were being called upon to fight for the Republic. In March 1793, resistance to the conscription programme helped trigger a massive uprising.

The resulting War in the Vendée became one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Revolution. Royalists, Catholic rebels and republican forces fought one another in a vicious civil war. The revolutionary government responded with extraordinary brutality. In Nantes, the representative-on-mission Jean-Baptiste Carrier became notorious for the so-called Noyades. Prisoners, including priests and suspected royalists, were loaded onto boats, taken onto the Loire and drowned by deliberately sinking the vessels. Thousands died in the repression carried out under Carrier’s authority. The violence demonstrated the increasingly dangerous logic of revolutionary government. France was fighting foreign armies at its borders while simultaneously fighting a civil war within its own territory. The Republic was beginning to treat opposition not simply as political disagreement, but as a threat to national survival.

The political struggle in Paris was becoming just as intense. The National Convention was divided principally between the Girondins, who represented a more moderate republican position, and the Montagnards, the radical deputies associated with figures such as Robespierre, Danton and Marat. The Girondins supported the Republic but were increasingly hostile to the radical Parisian popular movement. The Montagnards, meanwhile, depended heavily upon the sans-culottes and argued that the Republic could survive only by destroying its enemies.

Marat was among the most uncompromising voices in this struggle. His newspaper, L’Ami du peuple (The Friend of the People) had made him one of the most recognisable political journalists of the Revolution. He presented himself as the defender of ordinary Parisians against corrupt politicians, aristocrats and moderates. His rhetoric was frequently extreme. Marat repeatedly demanded the removal of political opponents and argued that those he regarded as enemies of the Revolution deserved severe punishment. His influence made him deeply feared by the Girondins.

The struggle eventually became physical. On June 2nd 1793, armed sans-culottes surrounded the National Convention. Under pressure from the revolutionary crowd, the Convention ordered the arrest of leading Girondin deputies. The moderates had been defeated. The Montagnards and their allies now dominated the revolutionary government. But rather than ending the political violence, their victory intensified it. The Girondins were now portrayed as enemies of the Republic. And Marat had become one of the most recognisable symbols of the radical movement.

Far from Paris, a young woman was watching these events with horror. Her name was Charlotte Corday. Corday came from Normandy and was associated with a family of minor aristocratic background. She had become sympathetic to the Girondins, whose leaders had fled Paris following their expulsion from the Convention. From her perspective, the Revolution that had once promised liberty had descended into political murder. She became convinced that one man in particular was responsible. Jean-Paul Marat. Corday believed that killing him could stop the violence and perhaps save France from further civil war. Her reasoning was tragically mistaken. But she was determined.

She travelled from Normandy to Paris in July 1793 carrying a knife. Her intention was to assassinate Marat. At first, she intended to kill him publicly, apparently hoping to make the act a dramatic political statement. But circumstances forced her to change her plan. Marat was suffering from a debilitating skin condition that required him to spend considerable amounts of time in a medicinal bath. He continued working from there, using the bath almost as a makeshift office.

Corday managed to gain access to him. She told him that she had information about Girondin conspirators in Normandy. Marat questioned her about their identities. He began writing down their names. Then Corday pulled out a knife. On July 13th 1793, Charlotte Corday stabbed Jean-Paul Marat in the chest while he sat in his bath. The wound was fatal. Marat died almost immediately. Corday did not attempt to escape. She remained at the scene and was arrested by Marat’s associates and guards. Her assassination had achieved exactly the opposite of what she intended. She had wanted to eliminate a man she regarded as responsible for revolutionary violence. Instead, she transformed him into a martyr.

Corday was put on trial and defended her actions openly. She insisted that she had killed Marat to save France from civil war. Her reasoning did not save her. On July 17th 1793, just four days after the assassination, Charlotte Corday was guillotined. She was 24 years old. According to contemporary accounts, her final demeanour was remarkably composed. But while Corday disappeared beneath the guillotine, Marat’s reputation was beginning to grow.

The revolutionary government transformed Marat’s death into a political spectacle. His funeral became a huge public event. His body was displayed, speeches were delivered in his honour and revolutionary leaders presented him as a martyr who had died serving the people. The revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David was commissioned to paint his death. The result was The Death of Marat. David presented Marat almost as a secular saint. He lies peacefully in his bath, his wounds visible but his expression calm. The painting deliberately echoes traditional Christian imagery of martyrdom. This was not accidental. The Revolution was increasingly creating its own political culture, complete with heroes, martyrs, festivals and symbols. Marat was no longer merely the journalist who had demanded the destruction of the Revolution’s enemies. He had become “the Friend of the People” who had died for France.

His body was eventually transferred to the Panthéon, where he was buried alongside some of the figures whom the Revolution regarded as its greatest heroes. The symbolism went even further. As the revolutionary government pursued its campaign of dechristianisation, traditional Catholic symbols were increasingly removed or replaced with revolutionary imagery. Images and busts of Marat appeared in public spaces, sometimes occupying positions previously associated with saints and religious figures. The Revolution was beginning to create a new civic religion. And Marat became one of its saints.

The assassination of Marat did not stop the Terror. If anything, it strengthened the radical government’s determination to eliminate its enemies. The Committee of Public Safety became increasingly powerful. The Revolutionary Tribunal expanded its activities. The Law of Suspects allowed the revolutionary authorities to arrest people considered enemies of the Republic. Thousands would eventually be executed. The irony of Marat’s assassination was therefore enormous. Charlotte Corday believed that killing one radical would help bring peace to France. Instead, Marat’s death gave the radicals another martyr around whom they could rally. Corday believed that the Revolution had become too violent. Her murder of Marat became another act of revolutionary violence. She wanted to kill the man she believed was responsible for the bloodshed. In doing so, she became part of the bloodshed herself.

The Revolution had reached a point where even murder could be transformed into political propaganda. Marat’s killers portrayed him as a martyr. Marat’s supporters portrayed Corday as a monster. Corday’s supporters portrayed her as a heroine. And somewhere between those competing images was the reality: a revolution increasingly unable to distinguish between political disagreement, treason and violence. Jean-Paul Marat had spent years demanding that the enemies of the Revolution be destroyed. On July 13th 1793, one of those enemies finally destroyed him. And in death, Marat became more powerful than he had ever been in life.

The French Revolution had begun with the transformation of Louis XVI from an absolute monarch into a constitutional king. By the beginning of 1793, he was no longer a king at all. He was a prisoner. The events of August 10th 1792 had destroyed the monarchy. Louis and his family had been imprisoned in the Temple, while the newly elected National Convention abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the French Republic. Yet the existence of the former King remained an uncomfortable problem for the revolutionaries.

Louis was not simply another political prisoner. He represented the old France. As long as he remained alive, monarchists could imagine that the monarchy might one day be restored. Worse still, France was now at war with the monarchies of Europe, many of which had a direct interest in his survival. The question therefore became unavoidable: What should the Republic do with its former king? The discovery of documents from the Tuileries Palace appeared to provide the revolutionaries with evidence that Louis had secretly communicated with France’s enemies and attempted to resist the Revolution. His failed flight to Varennes in 1791 had already demonstrated that he did not accept the revolutionary settlement imposed upon him. Now the Convention had to decide whether a former king could be tried as an ordinary citizen. The answer was yes.

Louis was brought before the National Convention and accused of conspiring against the liberty of the nation and of maintaining contacts with foreign powers. His defenders argued that the Constitution of 1791 had protected the King from prosecution and that, since he was no longer sovereign, the Convention had no legitimate authority to try him. The revolutionaries rejected this argument. To them, Louis’s position was precisely what made the case so important. If sovereignty belonged to the nation rather than the monarch, then Louis could not claim immunity merely because he had once been king. He was now Louis Capet, citizen of the Republic.

The trial became one of the most important political confrontations of the Revolution. Louis’s defence attempted to separate him from the decisions of his ministers and representatives, while the prosecution presented his correspondence and actions as evidence that he had worked against the Revolution. The question was not simply whether Louis had personally committed an act of treason in the conventional sense. It was whether the Revolution could allow the former monarch to survive without creating a permanent threat to the Republic. For the radicals, the answer was no.

The Convention eventually reached its verdict. Louis was declared guilty. The more difficult question was what should happen to him. There were revolutionaries who favoured imprisonment, exile or another punishment. Executing a former king was an extraordinary step, and some feared that it would provoke foreign intervention, strengthen the counter-revolution and make reconciliation impossible. Others, however, believed that allowing Louis to live would leave France permanently vulnerable. Among the most uncompromising was Maximilien Robespierre.

Robespierre argued that the issue was not simply the punishment of an individual. The Republic had to demonstrate that sovereignty had passed from the monarchy to the nation. In his view, Louis could not simultaneously be a former sovereign and an ordinary citizen. His continued existence could become a rallying point for the enemies of the Revolution. The Convention therefore voted on his fate. The result was extraordinarily close. The vote for the death penalty was carried by 361 votes to 360 among those voting on the question. By a single vote, Louis XVI was condemned to death. The decision meant that the Revolution had crossed a line from which it could not easily return. The King who had summoned the Estates-General in 1789 in an attempt to resolve France’s financial crisis was now condemned by representatives of the nation he had once ruled. His execution was scheduled for January 21st 1793.

Louis awoke at approximately five in the morning. He spent his final hours with the Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont, the Irish-born priest who had agreed to accompany him to the scaffold. Louis prayed and prepared himself for death. He also attempted to put his affairs in order. He gave his royal seal to be passed to his son, the young Louis-Charles, who remained imprisoned with his family. He also gave his wedding ring to be returned to Marie Antoinette. The symbolism was extraordinary. The royal seal represented the authority he had once exercised over France. The wedding ring represented his family. Both were now being passed on by a man who was about to die as a condemned prisoner.

Shortly after 9 a.m., Louis was taken from the Temple. He was placed inside a carriage and transported through the streets of Paris towards the Place de la Révolution, the modern Place de la Concorde. The journey was deliberately surrounded by security. Soldiers lined the streets, while thousands of Parisians gathered to watch. The Revolution was making a spectacle of the death of its former ruler. Louis eventually reached the scaffold. The guillotine had become one of the defining instruments of revolutionary justice. Introduced in 1792 as a supposedly more humane and egalitarian method of execution, it had been designed to eliminate the distinction between the manner in which aristocrats and ordinary criminals were put to death. Now it was being used against the former King of France.

Louis climbed the scaffold. According to the traditional account, he attempted to address the crowd before his execution. The drums began to roll, but Louis asked for them to stop. He then declared:

Frenchmen, I die guiltless of the crimes imputed to me. I forgive the authors of my death, and I pray to God that the blood you are about to shed may never fall upon France.

Louis’ last words to the people of France

The executioners then prevented him from continuing and the drums resumed. Louis was prepared for the execution. His hair was cut and his clothing adjusted, while his hands were bound. He was then positioned upon the guillotine. For almost 800 years, France had been ruled by a hereditary monarchy. Now its former King placed his head upon the same execution machine used for other condemned citizens. The blade fell. Louis XVI was dead. The cannons fired across Paris, announcing the execution. The man who had been crowned King of France at Reims in 1775 had been publicly executed in the capital of the Republic. He was 40-years-old.

The execution of Louis XVI represented far more than the death of an individual monarch. It was a declaration that the old political order was dead. There could now be no simple restoration of the constitutional monarchy created in 1791. The Republic had executed the man who had personified the French monarchy. Any compromise with the old order had become considerably more difficult. The consequences were immediate. Across Europe, the execution shocked monarchies that had already regarded the French Revolution as a dangerous threat. Britain entered the war against revolutionary France shortly afterwards, joining a growing coalition of European powers.

Inside France, meanwhile, the execution intensified the conflict between revolutionaries and their opponents. For the radical revolutionaries, Louis’s death represented the defence of the Republic. For monarchists, it was regicide. For Europe’s other monarchies, it was evidence that the Revolution was willing to destroy the traditional foundations of European political order. The execution therefore transformed Louis XVI into something he had never quite been during his lifetime: a martyr. His death would become a rallying point for French royalists and counter-revolutionaries, while his execution would help convince foreign monarchies that the revolutionary government could not simply be contained within France. The Revolution had begun by demanding that the King share his authority with the nation. It had ended by putting him beneath the blade. The French monarchy had survived wars, rebellions, religious conflicts and centuries of political change. It did not survive the Revolution. On January 21st 1793, Louis XVI became the first King of France to be publicly executed by his own subjects.

The fall of the monarchy did not bring peace to revolutionary France. Instead, it created a political vacuum at precisely the moment when the country was facing its greatest crisis yet. France was at war with the European monarchies, the government was increasingly divided between competing revolutionary factions, and Paris was filled with rumours of treason and counter-revolution. The danger appeared to be coming from outside as well as within. On July 25th 1792, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Prussian forces invading France, issued a declaration on behalf of the allied Austrian and Prussian armies. The Brunswick Manifesto warned that if the royal family were harmed, Paris would face severe reprisals. The city would, it threatened, be subjected to military punishment.

Rather than frightening the revolutionaries into submission, the manifesto had almost the opposite effect. To many Parisians, it appeared to confirm their suspicion that Louis XVI was conspiring with France’s enemies. If foreign monarchies were threatening to destroy Paris in order to protect the King, then the King himself increasingly appeared to be an enemy of the Revolution. The result was the insurrection of August 10th 1792. Thousands of revolutionaries, including the radical Paris Commune and fédérés who had arrived from the provinces, marched on the Tuileries Palace. The Swiss Guards defending the palace opened fire, and a bloody battle followed. Hundreds of insurgents were killed, while the Swiss Guards were eventually overwhelmed. Louis XVI, recognising that the palace could not be held, fled with his family to the Legislative Assembly.

The Assembly suspended the King’s constitutional powers. Louis was no longer effectively the ruler of France. He and Marie Antoinette were placed under guard and eventually imprisoned in the Temple. The monarchy was finished. But the Republic that replaced it was born into an atmosphere of fear. The Legislative Assembly was replaced by a newly elected National Convention, which met for the first time on 20 September. On 21 September, it formally abolished the monarchy. The following day, September 22nd 1792, the Convention declared the French Republic. For revolutionaries, this represented the fulfilment of a remarkable transformation. France was no longer to be a kingdom ruled by a hereditary monarch. The old political order had been overturned in the name of popular sovereignty, citizenship and equality.

Yet outside Paris, the armies of Austria and Prussia were advancing. The revolutionary government feared that France might collapse from within before it could defeat its enemies from without. The fortress of Longwy had fallen on August 23rd, and Verdun was under threat. On September 2nd, news reached Paris that Verdun had fallen. The road to the capital appeared open. This was the environment in which paranoia became explosive. Thousands of men were being called upon to leave Paris and fight at the front. If the city’s defenders departed, what would prevent royalists and counter-revolutionaries from rising behind them? Rumours spread that aristocrats and refractory priests imprisoned in Paris were preparing to escape, seize weapons and massacre the families of revolutionaries while the city’s men were away fighting. There was little evidence for such a conspiracy. But revolutionary politics had increasingly developed a language in which political opponents could be portrayed not merely as people with different opinions, but as enemies of the nation. Jean-Paul Marat was particularly influential in this atmosphere. Through his newspaper, L’Ami du peuple, Marat repeatedly warned that enemies of the Revolution were hiding within France and called for decisive action against them. The question was no longer simply whether the Revolution could defeat its enemies. It was whether the enemies of the Revolution were already inside Paris.

On September 2nd, as volunteers prepared to leave Paris for the front, crowds gathered outside the city’s prisons. The first killings began at the Abbaye prison. Prisoners were dragged out and subjected to improvised tribunals. Those judged to be dangerous counter-revolutionaries were killed. But the violence quickly spread. Over the following several days, groups of armed Parisians moved between the city’s prisons. Clergy, aristocrats, suspected royalists and ordinary criminals were brought before makeshift courts. Some were released. Others were condemned and killed. The distinction between political vengeance and indiscriminate violence rapidly began to disappear. Among the victims was Princess Marie-Louise de Lamballe, a close friend of Marie Antoinette. She was murdered after being brought before the killers, and her death became one of the most notorious episodes of the massacres. Her body was mutilated and her head was reportedly displayed before the Temple prison where the royal family was being held.

The violence was not limited to aristocrats. Priests who had refused to accept the revolutionary state’s religious reforms were among the principal targets, while ordinary prisoners were also killed. Men, women and some children were caught up in the violence. By the time the massacres subsided around 6 September, approximately 1,100 to 1,400 prisoners had been killed. The September Massacres were not formally ordered by the National Convention. They were carried out largely by crowds and militants in Paris. Yet the revolutionary authorities did remarkably little to stop them. Figures such as Georges Danton have consequently been the subject of considerable historical debate over their responsibility, with historians disagreeing about how much the revolutionary leadership encouraged, tolerated or simply failed to prevent the killings.

What is clear is that the massacres demonstrated how far revolutionary politics had changed. Only three years earlier, the Revolution had proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, declaring that men were born free and equal in rights. Now prisoners were being condemned and executed by crowds without anything resembling a normal judicial process. The contradiction was noticed almost immediately outside France. The British press followed events in Paris with horror. The Times of London reported the killings on 10 September 1792, describing the streets as being filled with the bodies of victims and asking:

Are these “the Rights of Man”? Is this the liberty of Human Nature?

The London Times, Sept 10, 1792

The quotation captured one of the great questions raised by the Revolution. Could a movement founded upon liberty and human rights justify violence against those it considered enemies of liberty? The September Massacres were not yet the Reign of Terror. That came later, particularly after the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Committee of Public Safety and the Law of Suspects in 1793. Nor did the massacres represent the inevitable consequence of republicanism or democracy. They emerged from a very specific combination of circumstances: foreign invasion, the collapse of the monarchy, political instability, fear of counter-revolution, rumours of conspiracy and the radicalisation of popular politics. Nevertheless, they marked a profound psychological turning point.

The Revolution had begun by attacking the privileges of the old order. It was now beginning to define itself through the identification and destruction of its enemies. That distinction would become increasingly important. A political opponent could be described as a royalist. A royalist could be described as a counter-revolutionary. A counter-revolutionary could be described as a traitor. And a traitor, in the logic of revolutionary emergency, could be treated as someone who had forfeited the protections normally afforded to a citizen. The language of universal rights therefore existed alongside a new language of revolutionary necessity.

The Republic itself would soon become radically more secular. The dechristianisation campaigns of 1793–94 would see churches closed or transformed, religious symbols destroyed and the revolutionary Cult of Reason promoted by some of the most radical revolutionaries. Notre-Dame de Paris was converted into a Temple of Reason in November 1793. The revolutionary government would also introduce the Republican Calendar, beginning retrospectively on September 22nd 1792, the first day of the Republic. These developments belonged to a later phase of the Revolution, but they reflected the same desire to break decisively with the institutions, symbols and traditions of the ancien régime.

The September Massacres therefore occupy an important place in the story of the Revolution. They were not simply a particularly bloody riot. They demonstrated the extent to which fear could transform a political movement. France had overthrown its king. It had proclaimed a republic. It had declared the equality of its citizens. But now, faced with war and internal conspiracy, the Revolution had begun to ask a darker question: Who deserved to be a citizen at all?