Great History

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.