Revolutions - 3.31- The Man of Blood Part Deux

Episode Date: March 23, 2015

In the summer of 1793 the Revolutionaries in Paris were besieged from all sides.

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 3.31, The Man of Blood, Part D. When we left off last time, the Enraget had just successfully expelled the Girondins from the National Convention, which capped off a very chaotic spring of 1793. Today, we are going to push our way into the very chaotic summer of 1793, because believe me, the summer is going to bring the revolution, and students of the revolution, no relief. It is a summer that will see the French armies push back on all fronts.

The Voday rebels continue to defy attempts to pacify them. The federalist cities try to raise an army to march on Paris, and the Jacobin revolutionaries in Paris attempting to push back against all of it and force the rest of France and indeed the rest of Europe to recognize that they were now the pure and righteous embodiment of the revolution and the future. An assertion that was very much not recognized by a young woman from Normandy named Charlotte Corday, who will purchase a kitchen knife from a vendor in the Palais Royale, and then go off to show the world who was really the pure and righteous embodiment of the revolution.

To start today, we must head back out to the front lines of the war, where the generals who attempted to salvage the situation after the defection of General Dumourier found themselves threatened not just by the Allied forces array against them, but by a click of zealous revolutionary representatives sent to keep an eye on them all. As we will see, both of these threats would prove equally deadly. After the scandal of Dumorier's treason, the National Convention voted on April 9th to create an additional core of representatives on mission, who would be sent to keep a much closer watch on the senior commander,

leading the Revolution's armies. To ensure that those commanders would not be able to duplicate Dumorier's treason, these representatives, like their civil counterparts, were given blanket jurisdiction over all military matters. Those representatives were now the supreme authority in camp and involved themselves in every aspect of the war, from arranging logistics to planning strategy to deciding when and where to fight. The arrival of these representatives,

caused nothing but ulcers for the senior generals, who now had to fight a war under the watchful eye of political commissars, who equated prudence and caution with treason, and thought defeat in the field a capital crime. The first poor sod thrust into this unenviable position was the man who was tapped to fill Dumourier's treasonous boots in the north, the former Marquis de Dompierre, now styled, of course simply General Dompierre. Don Pierre was one of those liberal nobles who had long been sympathetic to the aims of the revolution. He had started the war as an aide-de-camp to Rochambeau, and then quickly rose through the ranks,

because what with half the officer corps deserting, there was plenty of opportunity for rapid advancement in the Revolution's army. Don Pierre had stood his ground at Valle Mie, led the crucial right-wing at Jemap, and was then promoted to general for the invasion of Holland. After the defeat at Niervindon and the defection of Dumorier, it was left to Dompierre to hold the line. He managed to regroup with about 30,000 at a fortified camp at Fomar, which was a few miles south of the fortress city of Valenciennes. And from there, tried to figure out what to do next. Spoiler alert, it's not really going to be his decision. With the French now almost entirely evacuated from Belgium, the Allied forces prepared for a renewed,

invasion of France. And now that the British had joined the war and the Prussians had settled things with Russia in Poland, these allied forces were bigger and stronger and more determined than Brunswick's army of 1792 had been. But instead of just barreling towards Paris as Brunswick had done, the Allies this time elected to follow a more methodical approach to invading France and concentrated their efforts first on capturing the string of French fortresses that dotted the Franco Belgian frontier. And the first target was the city of Condé, and on April the 8th, the Allies opened up a siege. Back in the French camp, General Dompierre would have preferred to take the opportunity presented by the Allied focus on Condé to rest and recuperate his men. But then along

came the representatives on mission from Paris, and they, of course, had other ideas. They helped Dompierre to understand that anything but an aggressive campaign to relieve Condé would be taken as proof that Dompierre was a traitor. Thus, encouraged to fight, Dompierre gathered up his men and said, well, I guess we're going to go try to relieve Condé now. After reluctantly marching north, Don Pierre made contact with a coalition army mobilized to block any attempt to relieve Condé on May 8th. The two sides, both numbering about 40,000, squared off across a long line, central around the town of Reismus. When the fighting began, the French did surprisingly well, given the circumstances.

And, no doubt, very aware that his every move was being scrutinized by the representatives on mission, Dompierre led the charge at the middle of the Allied line personally. The French nearly succeeded in pushing the Allies into retreat. But in the fighting, Dompierre himself took a cannonball through the leg and had to be carried off the field. Their commander mortally wounded, the French attack wilted into a retreat back to the camp at Femar. Dompierre died of his wounds the next day. And though there was apparently some attempt in the convention to posthumously denounce Dompierre as a traitor, for the crime, I suppose of getting killed, fighting a battle he did not really want to fight, less ungrateful

heads prevailed, and Dompierre was instead interred in the pantheon as a hero and a martyr, though his remains would be later removed, so we can't go pay our respects when we're in Paris here in a couple of weeks. The bulk of the French forces reconvened back at Fomar, under the temporary command of another poor sod, named Francois Le March. With the siege of Condé, now safe from French relief efforts, the Allies moved on to their next target, the Fortress of Valenciennes. And the first move in that operation was to attack the demoralized French soldiers hold up up at Fmard on May the 23rd. Though the French were badly outnumbered, 27,000 to 53,000, their camp was up on a defensible ridge,

and with a little help from some delays and lack of coordination amongst the Allies, the French managed to hold their position despite suffering 3,000 casualties in the fighting. But as night fell, it was clear to Lamarst that the next day he was likely to be surrounded and forced to surrender. so he abandoned the ridge and headed southwest to regroup. For the crime of withdrawing from a dangerously untenable position in the face of far superior numbers, Lamarche was denounced by the representatives on mission, arrested, and sent to Paris to stand trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal.

This sort of thing is about to start happening a lot, and it almost certainly would have been Dom Pierre's fate had he not had the good sense to get his leg blown off and then die. The clearly cursed command of the Army of the North was next handed to the former Comp de Custina. Custina had once upon a time been a young colonel in Rochambeau's expeditionary force that had fought in the American War of Independence, and he had earned himself a bunch of medals for his actions at Yorktown. Coming home, he was elected to the Estates General, where he was tightly associated with fellow American veteran and fellow liberal noble Lafayette. After the National Assembly gave way to the Legislative Assembly, Kustina rejoined the army and soon found himself leading the army of the Rhine.

And it was under Kustina's command that the French army seized all those German principalities on the west side of the Rhine back when everything was going peachy-keen in the fall of 1792. But the rapid French advance started to be reversed in December when the Prussians retook Frankfurt. Come the spring, the Prussians then redoubled their efforts, and Custina was pushed back so fast that he was forced to abandon a French garrison of 20,000 men holding Mints, which was now a little island in enemy territory. For the crime of retreating, Custina was ordered back to Paris to answer accusations of engaging in D'Mourier-esque treason. Defending him, though, was none other than Ropes-Bier himself, who successfully convinced the Committee of Public Safety that Custina was above reproach.

So General Custina was given command of the Army of the North on May the 29th, and would soon enough fall prey to its curse, and this time Robespierre would not be able to get him off the hook. But we are going to leave the rolling disasters up on the Belgian frontier for the moment, because things were going no better in the West, where the revolutionaries faced both the uprising in the Vodday that showed no signs of slowing down, and an invasion across the Pyrenees by the Spanish. Soon to be joined in those threats was the federal's insurrection of Bordeaux and their call for a federalist army to be raised and marched on Paris. When last we left the Voday, the initial spontaneous uprising of angry peasants had been put under the direction of local nobles who were military veterans of the Ancian regime army. These nobles then set about turning the rebels into a more coherent army, or should I say it, more coherent armies, because the form the rebel forces now took were basically that of old feudal armies. You know, where the baron enlists the subjects in his dominion into a sort of private army that then goes off to fight under his personal authority.

While that's exactly how the rebel armies in the Vod day will coalesce, peasants would gather and fight under the banner of their own local lord. Now, on the one hand, this was great because the direct client-patron relationship ensured the kind of loyal discipline an army needs to survive. But on the other hand, it hampered the ultimate power of the rebels because those lords often had opposing notions about what to do next. And so they were never able to combine their full strength and pursue a single unified strategy. But in May 1793, the initial strength, rather than the ultimate weakness of the rebels, was on display. The rebels went back on the offensive against the beleaguered Republican forces who lacked the training, the discipline, and the morale to hold them back.

And on May the 5th, 20,000 rebels overwhelmed the 5,000 blues defending the city of Tours. And the capture of Tours was a huge boon to the rebel fortunes because the city held a major cache of heavy guns and powder. With these guns in hands, the Badei rebels really started to resemble a fully functional. functioning army. Their great strength was obviously the huge and passionate peasant infantry, but they also now boasted an irregular cavalry composed of local horsemen and now obviously batteries of artillery. All of this was put to good use a month later when a 30,000 man army marched on the city of Somere and seized it from the 12,000 Republicans trying to hold it. After the capture of Somere, the entire Voday region was basically in rebel hands.

But then they made a fateful mistake. Instead of coordinating a push to break out of the Voday, and for example, head north to link up with the British, who were eager to keep them supplied, the rebels got bogged down laying seeds to the city of Nantes. And this time, the Republican defenders managed to hold out, forcing the rebels to break off on June the 29th. It was the first important victory for the blue since the uprising began, and it cost the rebels a lot of time. and a lot of momentum, they really didn't have to spare. As the uprising in the Vodday was expanding, the convention then got word that down in the southwest, the Spanish were opening up a whole new front in the war.

In April 1793, the Spanish marched two modest armies up across the border into French territory, one across the eastern Pyrenees and one up through the Western Pyrenees. After taking a string of towns and pushing the very modest French garrisons backward, The Spanish drove the French out of their fortified camp at Mastu on May the 19th, which paved the way for the siege of Belgaard, which began on May the 23rd. And when the Spanish successfully captured Belgarde a month later, it gave them unrestricted access to one of the major roads through the Pyrenees.

Now, though the fighting down on the Spanish front was of a much smaller scale than the main centers of action in the Vodday and then up in the northeast, it still forced the revolutionaries in Paris to accept that they were now fighting a war literally on all fronts, and we're currently losing. Back in Paris, this is, of course, the moment when the enrages go crazy and rise up in armed insurrection. So the delegates in the National Convention were now under siege from like every single direction, from the poorest quarters of Paris to the richest courts of Europe, from royalists and Catholics and federalists, radicals, conservatives, moderates. In June 1793, the central, the centralists, the centralists, and Catholics,

revolutionary government in Paris had now been winnowed down to a handful of zealous Jacobins who everyone was gunning for, but who, for some crazy reason, decided that they were not going to give an inch and that instead they were going to fight this thing to the death. And their life and death struggle against everyone everywhere would soon enough give birth to the reign of terror, the Jacobin's final bloody answer to every question. After the insurrection of May the 31st, June the second. The first order of business for the Jacobins was neutralizing the rabble-rousing enragee, who had just handed them control of the convention. Robespierre and the other delegates of the mountain may have been the beneficiaries at the purge of the gerondins, but they had exactly

zero love for the enraget, where the mountain thought little better than rabid anarchists. So on the same day that the gerondins were purged, that is, June the 2nd, 1793, the convention voted to spend every day working on a new constitution for France, one that would be full of red meat for the Sancuilot, and hopefully undercut the position of the enragettes. Now, since the inception of the convention back in September 1792, a constitutional committee had been slowly working up a draft, but that committee had been stuffed full of gerondins, and its final draft was delivered just a few weeks after the gerondins had all been painted as royalist appeasers for backing the appeal to the people. And so, the Tainted Committee's draft was dead on arrival.

Over the next few months, other drafts floated around, but with so much else going on, cobbling together the various proposals wasn't really a priority. After the honorage insurrection, though, the Mountain made that constitution its top priority. A five-man committee was appointed to come up with a new draft as quickly as possible, and further signaling the importance of their work, these five guys were appointed to the Committee of Public Safety, which is how young Louis Antoine de San Juste gets on to the committee that will help make him so infamous. But before he became the Angel of Death, which he's about to become, San Juist was simply a charismatic young man who fancied himself a literary genius, and so he took the lead composing

the first draft. The articles he cranked out dispensed with all the carefully arranged niceties of the Constitution of 1791. There would be no more separation of powers or checks and balances. Republican France would be governed by a single unicameral legislative body that would then elect a 24-man executive committee to handle the administration and execution of the laws. Now, I've also seen it regularly reported that Saint-Jou's draft swept aside the usual two-tiered electoral apparatus and instead went with a simple one-man, one-vote, direct election of delegates, but the final draft clearly lays out a system of primary assemblies feeding into electoral assemblies, so obviously something happened on the way to the printer. Not that it mattered, as we'll see

once the thing gets ratified. The final draft presented to the whole convention on June the 10th was also prefaced by a revised and expanded declaration of the rights of man, where the original version was composed of 17 articles. This new version had 35 articles, and included now was the statement that public relief was a sacred debt and unfortunate citizens must be provided for. It also said that education is needed by all and ought to be available to every citizen, and that if any government should ever break the public trust enshrined in the Declaration of Rights, that an insurrection against that government was, quote, the most sacred of rights. With a little luck, the Sankulot in the street would read this retroactive sanction of their actions

and feel a little less inclined to exercise that most sacred of rights against the now mountain-led national convention. And indeed, after the new convention was approved by the convention on June the 24th and sent out to the provincial primary assemblies for ratification, the honorage priest, Jacques Rue led a deputation into the house demanding cheaper bread and a variety of other radical economic reforms, and he accused the revolution of being worse for the poor than the Ancian regime had ever been. When the delegates scoffed him out of the room, though, he was unable for the moment to

muster enough outrage in the streets to do anything about it. Not that the Sancu-Lot weren't still ticked off about a whole bunch of different things. They were, in a series of riots targeting soap retailers of the next few days would attest to that. it was just that they appeared willing, for the moment, to give the purged convention the benefit of the doubt. And luckily for the delegates in the convention, Paris was about to be rocked by an incident that not only distracted the Sankuilat, but also gave the Jacobins a bona fide martyr to further cement their hold on the course of the revolution. And I speak now of the assassination of Jean-Paul-Mir-Raw.

As you'll recall, after the Girondins were put under loose house arrest, a few of them got up and walked out the door one day, including ex-Mayor of Paris and former darling of the people, Jerome Petion. This little group surfaced a few days later in Ka, that's C-A-E-N, up in Normandy, where they started making all kinds of noise about leading the rest of France in revolt against the usurpers in Paris. To this end, they started recruiting young men to join a Norman brigade of the Hope for Federalist Army to join with the brigades no doubt being raised in Bordeaux and Lyon and Marseilles. But the recruitment turned out to be tougher than they thought, a problem that was eventually run into by all the other federalist leaders. Because when one of the main drivers of local opposition to Paris is the fact that they're trying to institute a draft, well, good luck trying to get anyone to join an army. So when the Girondins in Normandy staged a rally on July of the 7th, they were

only able to muster about 2,500 to march around on parade. But though this showing did not impress many, it did impress 24-year-old Charlotte Corday, who was at that moment about as rabidly anti-Jackobin as any woman in France this side of Marie Antoinette. Charlotte Corday came from a family of minor Norman gentry, and seems to have spent her childhood inhaling Rousseau and Roman history, emerging as a fierce Republican idealist who was furious that the revolution had been hijacked by the bloodthirsty tyrants of the Jacobin Club who were perverting the revolution. The purge of the noble and moderate Girondins was just further proof that the revolution

had been hijacked by a gang of dangerous pirates, and she nodded approvingly at every new anti-Jackovan tract that emerged from the little Girondon headquarters that had set up shop right next door to her house in Ka. Above all, she hated the murderous little troll Jean-Paul Mara. And no doubt nodded very approvingly when she read a circular that was going around that read Let Mara's head fall and the Republic is saved. Purge France of this man of blood. His head must fall to save 200,000 others.

This is, of course, a quote that I'm happy to highlight, since we all remember when King Charles was denounced. with that same reference to the biblical man of blood, the man who must be killed for the realm to be redeemed. On July the 9th, Charlotte Corday boarded a stagecoach for Paris. She had decided it was time to redeem the revolution by purging France of the man of blood. She arrived in the capital on July the 12th, took up lodgings and set to work.

Now, her initial plan was to apparently kill Mara right on the floor of the convention in a dramatic act of patriotism. But she soon discovered that Mara had recently been forced to quit attending sessions. He was suffering from some kind of painful skin disease that could now only be soothed by soaking in a cool bath. And stricken by a particularly bad flare-up, he now rarely left his room and worked full-time at a makeshift desk sitting in a bathtub. But despite being robbed of her intended stage, Corday pressed on with her plan.

She purchased a kitchen knife from a vendor at the Palais Royale, and the next day, July the 13th, 1793, she headed down to the Cordell Yee district to talk her way into an audience with the man of blood. Her first attempt to gain an audience failed, but the second time she shouted loudly enough for Mara to hear that she had information about the Girondins who had fled up to Normandy. His interest peaked.

Mara called down to let this noisy young woman come up. Corday was then escorted into Mara's room, and under the suspicious eye of one of his housekeepers, proceeded to feed Mara exactly what he wanted to hear. After about 15 minutes, the two were finally left alone, and that's when Corday got up, pulled out the knife, and plunged it into Mara's chest. The screaming brought the whole neighborhood running, and they were horrified by what they saw the great friend of the people dying rapidly in a bath filled with his own blood,

and the murderer right there not even really trying to get away. Corday was taken into custody and interrogated by the authorities who pressed and pressed and pressed for the names of the men who had put her up to it, but she swore up and down that no one had put her up to it, that it was all her idea, and that it had been an act of patriotic duty. Mara was the man of blood. He had to die to save thousands of innocent lives and avert civil war. Very put out that they did not have a huge conspiracy to crack down on, the Paris authorities then tossed Corday into the conciergerie. She was guillotined before a huge crowd on July the 17th, believing her own death to be a noble sacrifice

and that she had struck the first critical blow in the war against Jacob and tyranny. But sadly for Corday, her actions did not help bring about the end of Jacob and tyranny, and in many ways she helped bolster their cause. Mara overnight became a revolutionary martyr. His funeral was carefully orchestrated to exalt him as a popular hero, and eventually something of a cult grew up around him. When de-Christianization really starts getting going, busts of Mara would often replace crucifixes in co-opted churches.

Now, interestingly enough, though, Mara's remains were not immediately transferred into the pantheon, as we all might imagine they would have been. it was not until after the Termidorian reaction, that is, after the fall of Rogue Spier, that Mara was dug up and put into the Pantheon, and that seemed to be simply a PR stunt to try to link the Termidorians to the beloved revolutionary martyr. But wherever his body lay, the Jacobins deployed the memory of Mara to boost their own image and attack their opponents. So in a big way, Corday's assassination of Mara only strengthened the position

of the men she hoped to destroy. Doubally, sadly for Corday, the Girondins, on whose behalf she had died, were not about to come storming down to retake Paris. And across France, their struggle to raise willing recruits to form a Federalist army went nowhere. A few thousand joined up in Bordeaux, but those guys didn't want to leave Bordeaux. A few thousand joined up in Marseilles, but those guys didn't want to leave Marseille. The Federalist leaders never got any... near the pipe dream of 80,000 men they hope to raise.

The Federalist revolt, such as it was, would remain a series of independent uprisings and could thus be dealt with each in their own turn. Not that anyone knew the Federalist uprising wasn't going to turn out to be as dire as predicted, and certainly not the leaders of the Allied Coalition. Though the French armies just about everywhere were demoralized, and reinforced only by recruits raised, by the Leve of 300,000 who were both inexperienced and not a little bit sullen about being drafted, the Allies did not go on the attack.

Their firm belief was that the small clique of radicals in Paris were about to be consumed by the combined effort to the Voday uprising and the Federalist insurrections, and that the entire revolutionary project was about to collapse into a busted pile of rubble broken by internal strife and civil war. All they needed to do was maintain pressure on the periphery, and the center would collapse all by itself. This allied lack of aggression, though, was not enough to save old General Custina,

who took command of the Army of the North on May the 29th. He barely got his feet wet before being stripped of that command and ordered back to Paris. His crime, not immediately relieving the nation's, now hopelessly unreliable city of Condé, which finally capitulated on July the 12th. Ordered back to Paris after the fall of Condé, Custina was arrested by the revolutionary authorities, just as word was coming in that the garrison he had left behind in Mainz had finally surrendered on July the 23rd, and that then the garrison at Valenciennes had done the same on July the 28th.

Tossed into the conciergerie, Custina would be convicted of negligence by the revolutionary tribunal and eventually guillotined in the reign of terror. As you can imagine, the applications just flooded in to take over the army of the north. But as I just mentioned, instead of capitalizing on their victories and the weakness of the French, the Allies elected to linger on the periphery, and up in Belgium they simply moved off to take two more fortress cities, rather than truly launch an invasion. And they were further held back by Prime Minister William Pitt's insistence that the Allies lay siege to Duncirk, which wasn't a particularly vital stronghold in terms of winning the war,

but which was the main spoil of war Pitt had his eyes on. So the huge Allied army on the Belgian frontier, now numbering almost 100,000, was divided up and dispatched to their various sieges, totally unaware that France was not about to implode on itself and was in fact about to explode against all of them, and that they had just missed a golden opportunity to end the war right there. As all of this was unfolding, the so-called Constitution of 1793 was circulating through France. That is, the parts of France not currently in armed revolt. And when the vote came back in, the Constitution turned out to be accepted by an overwhelming margin,

signaling widespread support not just for the Constitution itself, but also for the Jacobins who had drafted it. The margin of victory was so huge, it was almost unbelievable. The reported numbers were 1,800,000 yes, 11,000 no. Yes, that is correct. 1.8 million to 11,000. It's almost unbelievable. Like maybe they were just some numbers that the Jacobins back in Paris had decided sounded like a comfortable enough margin of victory.

Which isn't to say that the Constitution wasn't popular, it was, and that's not to say that the kind of men who might show up in the primary assemblies to vote on it weren't predisposed to favor the Constitution, they were, just a 1.8 million to 11,000? I mean, come on, guys, at least make your ballot stuffing plausible. In part to celebrate this glorious ratification of the great Constitution of 1793, the Parisians threw a massive party called the Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility, of the Republic, which, yeah, that doesn't sound like you're trying to convince yourself of something that is flying in the face of reality. The Roving Festival was staged on August

the 10th, 1793, the first anniversary of the toppling of the monarchy, and was orchestrated by artist and ardent revolutionary Jacques Louis David. It involved the Parisians moving on a set path from location to location, starting at the remains of the Bastille and ending at the Sham to Mars. Along the way, David had erected huge theatrical stageworks to celebrate this or that aspect of the revolution. And in case anyone was wondering what the Parisians thought of those out in the provinces who had risen up against them, one station along the route showed Hercules preparing to kill an evil monster representing federalism. Not exactly a call for reconciliation or fraternity, nor exactly signaling the unity and indivisibility of the Republic.

And what was the fate of the Constitution of 1793 that they were all in part celebrating the ratification of? Well, when a delegate in the National Convention stood up the next day to suggest calling elections for the new legislature, he was practically laughed out of the room. There were far too many emergencies out there to risk inaugurating a new government. the elections would be postponed, and then they would be permanently postponed. The Constitution of 1793 would never be put into effect. And next week, we will introduce the men of the reconstituted Committee of Public Safety, to whom the fate of the revolution would be entrusted,

since the fate of the revolution could clearly not be entrusted to the people of France.