Cosmic Clown

October 31, 1793. Twenty-one men who had led the French Revolution were guillotined in Paris in about half an hour. One of them had already killed himself with a dagger in the courtroom, and they put his corpse in the cart and took it to the scaffold anyway. That is the moment the Revolution started eating the people who made it. The Girondins were not royalists or counter-revolutionaries. That is the whole point. They were republicans. They had voted for the republic. They had pushed hardest for the war against Austria and Prussia in 1792, believing it would spread the revolution across Europe. Several of them were the most admired orators in France. They took their name loosely from the Gironde, around Bordeaux, where some of their leaders came from. They started as the radical wing and ended up as the moderates, which is what happens in a revolution. They did not move. The ground did. Their opponents were the Montagnards, the Mountain, the faction around Robespierre, Danton and Marat, based on the Jacobin clubs and on the Paris sections. The split was partly over principle and partly over Paris. The Girondins wanted the provinces to count and feared the capital's crowds dictating to the national assembly. The Montagnards were the capital's crowds organised. The specific fights that broke them were the trial of the King, where the Girondins wavered and proposed a referendum rather than straightforward execution, and their refusal to work with Danton after the September Massacres in 1792, when over a thousand prisoners were killed in the Paris jails and Danton's role was never satisfactorily explained. Lord Acton's verdict on them was that they were always impolitic, disunited and undecided, and that at times they rose to the level of honest men. That is harsh and not entirely unfair. On June 2, 1793, armed sections of Paris surrounded the Convention and demanded the arrest of the Girondin deputies. The Convention, under siege in its own building, complied. That is a legislature voting to purge itself at gunpoint, carried out by the citizens in whose name it governed. Some of the arrested escaped and tried to raise the provinces, which gave the government exactly the justification it needed. The revolts in the Vendée, at Lyon, at Bordeaux and at Toulon could now be presented as a Girondin conspiracy. Their trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal opened in late October. And it was going badly for the prosecution, because these were professional politicians and orators defending themselves in public and they were good at it. So the Convention passed a decree allowing the Tribunal to cut off the defence and move straight to a verdict if a trial ran past three days. They were condemned on October 30. Charles Dufriche-Valazé had a dagger with him. When the sentence was read he stabbed himself in the heart in the courtroom and died there. The Tribunal ordered that his body be carried to the guillotine with the living men the next day, so that the sentence was executed on him too. On October 31 five tumbrils took them to the Place de la Révolution, with Valazé's corpse among them. Accounts describe them singing the Marseillaise on the way, and continuing as the number of voices dropped. Pierre Vergniaud was the last of them to climb the scaffold. He was probably the finest speaker of the entire Revolution, the man who had announced the suspension of the monarchy. He had said earlier that the Revolution, like Saturn, would devour its own children. Twenty-one in roughly half an hour, which tells you how industrialised the process had become by late 1793. Then it kept going. Madame Roland, whose salon had effectively been Girondin headquarters, was guillotined eight days later. Her last words are reported as an address to a statue of Liberty, asking what crimes were committed in its name. Her husband killed himself when he heard. Condorcet, the philosopher and mathematician, died in a cell in March 1794. Several of the escaped deputies were hunted down in the southwest and killed themselves rather than be taken, and two of them were found dead in a field near Saint-Émilion, partly eaten by animals. And then the machine turned again. Danton, who had helped destroy the Girondins, was guillotined in April 1794. Robespierre, who had destroyed Danton, was guillotined in July. From the purge of the Girondins in June 1793 to the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 is thirteen months. In that time the Revolution executed its moderates, then its radicals, then the man who had executed both.