of the evolving political, economic, social, and psychological condition of the people of France. Even as Catherine was writing, the radicalization of France was accelerating. The Jacobin Club, immensely powerful in Paris, was extending its membership and influence across the country. Meeting at a former convent of the Jacobins in the rue St.-Honore, it had begun its revolutionary role as a place for reading and discussion of needed reforms; then it evolved into an arena of radical thought, fiery speeches, and demands for drastic action. Its leaders, Georges Danton, Jean Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre, were reaching the summit of political power. By the summer of 1792, the Paris Commune, the new municipal government supported by the sansculottes—ordinary citizens “without fine knee breeches”—controlled the city. Danton, the new, thirty-year-old minister of justice, assumed responsibility for the royal family at the Tuileries.
On August 10, a mob, organized by the Commune, stormed the Tuileries Palace. Six hundred members of the Swiss Guard protecting the royal family resisted until the king, to prevent bloodshed, ordered them to surrender. The Swiss obeyed, were taken prisoner, and slaughtered. The royal apartments were invaded and the king, his wife, and their children were seized and carried off to the prison of the Temple.
That spring of 1792, Prussia had entered the Austrian war against France. By midsummer, a Prussian army stood on the Rhine, ready to march on Paris. As the army began to move, the Duke of Brunswick, commanding the Prussian forces, learned that Louis XVI and his family had been taken from the Tuileries. The duke’s response was to issue a manifesto threatening that Paris would be singled out for “an exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance … if the king and his family came to any harm.” This threat produced a result opposite to that intended. The Brunswick manifesto seemed to expose Paris to a terrible retribution. Having been told that they had already committed acts for which they would be punished, Parisians were persuaded that they had nothing more to lose. Rumor declared that when the enemy arrived, the population of the city would be massacred.
On July 30, 1792, five hundred men wearing red caps arrived in Paris from Marseilles and the south. Described by one member of the Assembly as “a scum of criminals vomited out of the prisons of Genoa and Sicily,” they had been hired by the Commune to come to Paris to help defend the city. To further bolster these ranks, the Commune drew on the local criminal population. Prisoners were released on condition that they would obey orders given by the Commune.
The savagery of the prison massacres of September 2–8, 1792, was planned. During the final two weeks of August, hundreds of Parisians, described as “presumed traitors,” were arrested. Destined to be killed, they were gathered in prisons to make this more convenient. Many of the prisoners were priests taken from seminaries and churches and accused of antirevolutionary beliefs. Some were former personal servants of the king and queen. Those arrested also included the playwright Pierre Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette’s close friend the Princesse de Lamballe, who had fled to London and then returned to Paris to be with the queen. Most were ordinary people. Danton was not an instigator, but he was aware of what was about to happen. “I don’t give a damn about the prisoners,” he said. “Let them fend for themselves.” Later, he added that “the executions were necessary to appease the people of Paris.” Robespierre said simply that the will of the people had been expressed.
News that the Prussians had seized Verdun reached Paris on Sunday morning, September 2. The massacres began that afternoon. Twenty-four priests being brought to the prison at the Abbaye de St.-Germain-des-Pres were pulled from the carriages transporting them and, before entering at the prison gate, slaughtered with swords, knives, axes, and a shovel on the cobbles of the narrow street. Prisoners already held in the abbey were pushed, one by one, down steps into a garden, where they were hacked to death with knives, hatchets, and a carpenter’s saw. Other bands attacked other prisons: 328 prisoners were slaughtered in the Conciergerie; 226 at the Chatelet; 115, including an archbishop, at a Carmelite convent. At the Bicetre, 43 adolescent boys were butchered. Thirteen were fifteen-year-olds, three were fourteen, two were thirteen, and one was twelve. Women of all ages including adolescent girls were brutally violated. When the Princesse de Lamballe refused to swear an oath of hatred against the royal couple, she was hacked to death. Her head was taken to the Temple to dance on a pike before the eyes of the king and queen.
On September 9, the French defeated the Prussians at Valmy, ending the allied invasion and forcing the Prussian army to retreat to the Rhine. The French did not stop there; they swept on to capture Mainz and Frankfurt. On September 21, three weeks after the massacres, the French monarchy was abolished and a republic established. In December, the National Assembly proclaimed that wherever France’s armies marched, the existing form of government would be replaced by the rule of the people.
On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was executed. This was too much for some who, until then, had believed in the revolution. General Francois Dumouriez, the military victor of Valmy, who had been Danton’s friend, deserted to the Austrians; Lafayette had defected after the storming of the Tuileries. The provinces rose against the Paris government and then paid dearly. When Lyon, France’s second city after Paris, capitulated, those to be killed, most of them peasants or laborers. were roped together in groups of two hundred, herded to fields outside the city, and executed by cannon firing grapeshot into the bunched human mass. One of Robespierre’s agents was present and reported to his master: “What delights you would have tasted could you have seen national justice wrought on two hundred and ninety scoundrels! Oh, what majesty! What a lofty tone! It was thrilling to see all those wretches chew the dust!”
A new executive committee of the government, the Committee of Public Safety, was created that included Danton and Robespierre. Eventually, Robespierre decided that the revolution was ideologically impure. A Reign of Terror was instituted “to protect the republic from its internal enemies … those who whether by their conduct, their contacts, their words, or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny or enemies of liberty” or those “who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.” Over nine months, the official count of those executed was sixteen thousand; there were estimates that the Terror actually claimed two or three times that number.
Informed that Louis of France had been sent to the guillotine, a shaken Catherine became physically ill. She remained in seclusion for a week and ordered six weeks of court mourning. She ordered a total break in relations with France. The French charge d’affaires, Edmond Genet, was expelled. The Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 was annulled and all trade between the two countries was prohibited. No vessel flying the tricolor flag of the revolution was allowed in Russian waters. All Russian subjects living or traveling in France were recalled, and all French citizens in Russia were given three weeks to publicly pledge allegiance to the king of France or leave Catherine’s empire. Of fifteen hundred French citizens in Russia, only forty-three refused to take this oath. In March 1793, two months after his brother’s death, she welcomed the Count of Artois to St. Petersburg, agreed to finance him, and exhorted him to work together with other emigres. But she still held back from military involvement in the war against France. With Austria and Prussia rebuffed, she believed that little could be achieved without Britain and that Britain had no intention of going to war. William Pitt, the prime minister, had said as much: that British policy was concerned with the security of Europe, not with the nature of the French government. The execution of Louis XVI changed Pitt’s mind. The king’s execution, Pitt said, was “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.”* The French ambassador was ordered to leave England. Once again, France acted first. On February 1, 1793, France declared war on Great Britain.
Six months after her husband’s death, the widowed Marie Antoinette, her hair white at thirty-seven, was taken from her children in the Temple tower and placed in the prison of the Conciergerie. The former queen of France—a Hapsburg archduchess, the daughter of an Austrian empress, the sister of two Austrian emperors, and the aunt of a third—remained alone for two months in a cell eleven feet by six feet. On October 5, 1793, she was placed in a tumbrel and taken through the streets to the guillotine.
The tumbrels continued to roll. The massive blade rose and fell forty, fifty, sixty times a day. Terrified politicians guillotined one another in order to escape the guillotine themselves. Hundreds went to their deaths for no better reason than personal quarrels or neighborhood jealousies; their crime was being “under suspicion.” The victims included twenty peasant girls from Poitou, one nursing a baby while sleeping on the cobbles of the Conciergerie courtyard, awaiting execution. The poet Andre Chenier was guillotined because he was mistaken for his brother; then, informed of its mistake, the Commune guillotined the brother, too. Antoine Lavoisier, the scientist, requested a short stay of his
