CHAPTER 20. The Insurrection of June 2, 1793

THE REVOLUTION IN LIMBO

The period from late 1792 to early 1793 was marked by an uneasy truce, broken by growing eruptions of differences between the Girondins and the Montagnards in the Convention, and increasing tension between the radical sections and all other governmental institutions.

The direct democracy, embodied by the Parisian sections, had essentially become a popular dual power that confronted the republican state, embodied by the Convention. This historic confrontation was blurred by the political conflict between the two parliamentary factions in the national government. The Girondins now detested Paris and addressed themselves primarily to the provinces in harsh opposition to the radicals in the capital. The Montagnards, in turn, did not hesitate to appeal to the radical sans-culottes when they needed them, albeit not without fear that the Revolution might slip out of the hands of the Conventionnels into those of the sectionnaires. Thus, when the sections early in March 1793 demanded the establishment of a Revolutionary Tribunal to exact swift justice on all suspects, it was Danton, speaking for the Montagnards, who took up the call in the Convention and saw to its formation. Alas, months later, it was to be this institution that began to try the popular leaders of the sections and, in the following year, to send Danton and his supporters to the scaffold.

The Girondins, for their part, were becoming increasingly loathsome to the radical sections. Basically, these provincial deputies were convinced that the Revolution had gone far enough in fulfilling its tasks and that it should be arrested, even rolled back, if possible, to a moderate republic. By the same token, the radical sections were convinced that the Revolution had not gone far enough in fostering democracy, and demanded a more equitable distribution of the means of life, such as the greater availability of consumer goods at reasonable prices.

The fact that the Convention met in Paris continued to dismay the Girondins, since it left the body vulnerable to popular pressure from armed radical sansculottes. At each opportunity, the deputies not only portrayed the Paris Commune and the sections as irresponsible extremists and bloodthirsty “Septembrists,” but steadily escalated their attempts to turn the departments against the capital.

Moreover, the conflict between the sectional democracy and the central authorities was also complicated by the civil war raging in the western part of the country. After the Convention issued a military levy for 300,000 men on February 23, 1793, the west of France erupted in violent defiance of the Republic’s call to arms, to the anger of the radicals and even many moderates. In the Vendee department and in Brittany, major revolts broke out, as peasants, led by local refractory priests, refused to be conscripted into the revolutionary army. Massacring local republicans, they openly fought the National Guard and connived with Britain against revolutionary France. Nor were other parts of the country spared similar peasant uprisings, which in Paris were generally blamed on the Girondins—in some cases not without good reason.

The Convention responded to the revolts by further centralizing its authority through a series of important emergency decrees. On March 9, it selected eighty Convention members, most of whom were Jacobins, to function as “representatives on mission” to the army and the troubled areas of the country, endowing them with powers to crush the rebellions at any cost and by any means whatever. Still another decree empowered military commissions to execute anyone who resisted the levy, as well as tmigris who returned to France. All rebels who were captured bearing arms were to be killed, and any priest who had been denounced by six citizens was to be deported.

Barely two weeks later, on March 21, the Convention charged each section and commune in the country to elect a watch committee {comiti de surveillance) with a view toward maintaining local surveillance, searching houses for hoarders, rounding up suspected counterrevolutionaries, and enforcing obedience to sectional decisions. On April 6 it created a nine-member Committee of Public Safety which was soon to become its famous—and much maligned—executive authority, with sweeping powers to crush the counterrevolution and innovate new social policies for the Revolution.

Initially, these repressive and centralizing measures had little effect on dealing with the counterrevolution or the war. The provincial rebels, undeterred by actions in Paris, proceeded rapidly to capture town after town and soon swelled into a major force, mobilizing an estimated forty-five thousand men, who vastly outnumbered the fifteen thousand republicans who had been sent from Paris to quell them. The Paris Commune, in turn, was drawn into the sections’ revolutionary vortex as the political crisis in the capital intensified and as the counterrevolution deepened in the provinces. No longer did the Commune embody the increasingly radicalized sectional democracy, as had been the case after the August 10 journde. To the degree that the radical ordinary laborers or bras tius moved to the forefront of the conflict with other institutions, its General Council—which was composed of three more or less well-to-do delegates from each section—became more fearful of the masses and more moderate in its policies.

This growing vortex of tendencies and countertendencies in the Revolution produced major changes, particularly in Paris, that began to throw once-united political forces into growing conflict with each other. With its influential deputy procureur Hubert, no less than its procureur Anaxagoras Chaumette, sitting on its General Council, the Commune tried to maintain ties both to the enragds in the sections and to the relatively prudent Montagnards in the Convention. These two tendencies were basically hostile toward each other and were never to be reconciled. The Commune, in turn, like the Montagnards, increasingly distrusted the sections that were influenced by the enrages; in fact, it seemed to fear any sections that it could no longer control. Yet, if it could trust neither the enragds nor the Jacobins, it was obliged to retain sufficient influence over the popular movement in Paris to maintain itself against complete Montagnard control, which would have destroyed its independence, if not its very identity. Thus, apart from the Girondins, who relied for support on the moderate center in the Convention (or “marsh,” as it was called), the provinces, and a few of the conservative sections, all the different tendencies in Paris were making fragile ad hoc alliances that were readily broken, and basically played one political group against another in order to retain or enhance their power. Put bluntly: the Revolution had come to a crossroads, and its direction—whether it would move leftward or rightward—was patently uncertain.

As the war effort faltered, as bread prices rose, and as counterrevolution spread in the provinces, the discontent of the sans-culottes, especially the bras nus, in Paris increased in direct proportion to the evident instability of all the existing institutions—the Commune no less than the Convention—to carry the Revolution forward. At length, on March 10,1793,Varlet and other enrages tried to stage an insurrection against the Convention, presumably with the intention of removing its Girondin members and ministers, as well as army officers whose loyalty to the republic was suspect. The failure of the journde can be attributed to lack of support which the insurrectionaries had hoped to receive from the Jacobin Club, the National Guard and, to be sure, the Commune, which Varlet did not hesitate to accuse of “infection with aristocracy.”[305] In fact, Santerre, the National Guard commander, mobilized nine thousand Guardsmen to deploy against the rebels and restore order.

Despite its failure, however, the journde established a precedent: the sections might one day, by sheer force of numbers, be able to intimidate the seemingly inviolable Convention and get it to do their bidding. In Convention debates the failed journie became more fodder for the growing rivalry between the Girondins and the Montagnards. The Girondins portrayed it as yet another attempt on the part of the bloodthirsty Parisian deputies to massacre them, while the Montagnards could truthfully claim that they had nothing to do with it. Within the Commune, Hubert and Chaumette, not to be outdone by the Girondins and the Mountain, charged the insurrectionaries of plotting with Prussia and Britain, a preposterous accusation among the many that were being made at the time, and one that further alienated the radicals from the municipal body.

A few days after the aborted insurrection, Varlet defiantly appeared before the Jacobin Club and chastised its members for their failure to support the uprising, harshly contrasting their behavior with the bold women of the October 5 journie who had brought the king back to Paris. Nor would the March insurrection be the last one, Varlet pointedly warned them. It was now clear that the March uprising was essentially a dress rehearsal for a more far-reaching one: a final reckoning between all the contending forces, particularly the bras nus and the Convention.

And, indeed, the differences between the radical sections and the Convention could be resolved in favor of the sections only by a new insurrection: that is, a “third revolution.” In early 1793, this expression was much in vogue among various political tendencies. For the Girondins, who used it in their oratory at the Convention, the third revolution portended an insurrectionary resurgence of the Parisian “anarchistes.” “As I have been saying ever since this Convention began,” Brissot observed on March 24,1793,

we have to put an end to the third revolution, the revolution of anarchy. We will only be able to finish it off by establishing a good constitution in place of this system of disorganization and of despotism, which some people would like to perpetuate.[306]

To Danton, in his more militant Jacobin posture, a third revolution would have meant a curtailing of the Girondins, who, despite his overtures to them, persistently refused to collaborate with the Mountain. To Hubert and his associates on the Paris Commune and in the war ministry, the expression would have summarized their attempts to enhance their own waning revolutionary prestige and find ministerial places in the national government. But to Varlet and his supporters, a third revolution clearly meant an insurrection that would successfully overthrow the Convention and establish a direct democracy throughout France.

THE ÉVÉCHÉ ASSEMBLY

If any single event could be said to have broken the political deadlock that existed in Paris, it was probably General Dumouriez’s denunciation of the Revolution and his attempt at the beginning of April to march on the capital, restore the king, and reestablish the Constitution of 1791. Only the refusal of the army to follow him prevented the country from plunging into a civil war of monumental proportions, possibly leading to the defeat of the Republic. That Dumouriez was wrongly identified in the public mind with the Girondins (he was, in fact, more of a constitutional monarchist than a republican) heightened the sentiment that there was treason at home, in the very heart of the Revolution, and that extraordinary measures were needed to extirpate the dangers that confronted Paris from “royalist” Conventionnels and from suspect military leaders.

Faced with the rising political fever of the people, the Paris Commune, roused out of its lethargy, began to round up more suspected counterrevolutionaries and conduct more house searches. But many sections now felt that such measures were half-hearted—that they needed an extralegal body to meet the coming crisis, one that was more resolute and revolutionary than the Commune; in fact, a body that could bypass the Paris municipal authorities, the Convention, and its executive committees to engage in effective political and economic action.

On March 27 the section Droits de l’Homme, strongly influenced by its secretary, Varlet, passed a resolution decrying “the dangers facing France” and summoning Parisians to “save the country and liberty” from the “liberty-killing faction.”[307] It called upon all the sections to send commissioners to a meeting at the fiveche, the expropriated palace of the city’s archbishop.

Nominally, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss a forced loan that had been imposed in order to wage the war. But the real, and decidedly secret, intention of the meeting was to take forceful measures to purge the Convention of the Girondins and their supporters who were fomenting civil war in the country. Indeed, if Varlet had his way, the Évéché Committee would try to overthrow the Convention itself. On April 1, delegates from the twenty-seven Parisian sections that had sent commissioners to the Évéché formally constituted themselves into an extralegal but public “Central Assembly of Public Safety and of Correspondence with the Departments,” which, in short order, opened the doors of the fiveche to some five or six hundred people. This Évéché assembly left little doubt that it intended not only to make food requisitions, levy contributions on the wealthy, and round up counterrevolutionary suspects, but also to purge the Girondins from the Convention.

As news of the Évéché assembly and its committee spread through Paris, the Girondins were infuriated and the Mountain felt very uneasy over an emerging movement it did not control; indeed, as we have seen, it was no more eager to see a sectional democracy than its rivals in the Convention. Marat, the “friend of the people,” speaking at the Jacobin Club, denounced the meeting as “unpatriotic” (anticivique), nor did it gain any support from the General Council of the Commune, least of all its Hébertist members. Even earlier, on April 2, the Commune had set up its own committee of correspondence with other municipalities throughout the country, to countervail any initiative of the kind that actually occurred with the establishment of the Évéché assembly.

THE ROAD TO INSURRECTION

The events that were to follow the convocation of the Évéché assembly and the various efforts by the Girondins, Montagnards, and members of the Commune’s General Council to cope with the joumie of June 2 form one of the muddiest chapters in the history of the Revolution, based on unclear facts, some conjecture, unrecorded negotiations, concealed compromises, and mutual betrayals. Indeed, it is often necessary for any history of this brief but remarkable period to speculate about the intentions as well as the actions of the various actors and committees that soon became involved in this decisive joumie, which was to set a new and fateful course for the Revolution and the lives of its most important figures. The one guiding thread that explains what little is known about the events leading up to the journie is the fact that all of the Montagnard deputies, leaders of the Jacobin club, major figures in the General Council of the Commune, and even many moderates in the sections were determined to prevent Varlet and his supporters from establishing a sectional democracy; and by all means, fair and foul, they employed whatever measures were at their disposal to neutralize the influence of the radicals in the Évéché assembly—which itself was far from unified in its social goals.

Perhaps the best foil at the disposal of these moderate worthies in dealing with Varlet and his supporters was the Girondin leaders, who, with incredible political ineptness, inadvertently diverted public attention away from the social goals of the Évéché radicals toward themselves. The Girondins, in effect, proceeded by their tactics in the Convention to make themselves appear to be the cause of all that was going wrong with the Revolution, from Dumouriez’s defection to the Austrians to the counterrevolution that was spreading through the provinces.

The events in the mid-spring of 1793 have an almost funereal quality about them and were grim in the inexorability of their development. Following news of Dumouriez’s defection, a majority of the sections petitioned the Convention to expel the Girondin leaders, who were “guilty of the crime of treason against the sovereign people.”[308] In fact, even the Montagnard deputies were now in the unenviable position of seeming to be reticent about removing the twenty-two Girondins who figured most in the public mind, for to do so would have been a gross violation of republican legality that could have been used against the Mountain itself.

But the radical sections were adamant. Addressing the Mountain directly, they bluntly declared that if the Convention refused to do so, they would take on the task themselves. Although the petition was signed by thirty-three of the fortyeight sections, the Convention denounced it as “slanderous” five days later. Indeed, with predictable ineptness, the Girondins retaliated against the sections by ordering the arrest of Marat, who was not only a Montagnard deputy but one of the Girondins’ most consistent critics. To the fury of the sans-culottes , the “friend of the people” was arraigned before the new Revolutionary Tribunal. Again, the thirty-three sections adamantly demanded that he be released, repeating their call for the expulsion of the twenty-two Girondins. As the Girondins should have foreseen, not only did the Tribunal acquit Marat, but he was returned to his seat at the Convention borne on the shoulders of sansculottes, amid even greater public acclaim than before.

Spurred on by their victory over the Girondins, the radical sections pressed the demand that the Convention impose controls on the price of bread, which was now skyrocketing, and in mid-April the Commune and the mayor met at the Jacobin Club to draw up a petition demanding the setting of a maximum price. When the petition was presented at the Convention, the Girondins, in yet another political blunder, tried to bury the demand by referring it to the agricultural committee. Adding insult to injury, they reproved the sans-culottes for failing to understand the sublime economics of free trade—this at a time when bread prices were soaring and hunger was rampant in the capital, in no small part owing to speculators and to ineptness in the distribution of food.

For many radicals and even moderates, these tactics of delay and factionalism were unendurable. On May 1, eight thousand outraged sans-culottes from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine invaded the Convention and declared themselves in a state of insurrection until controls were established, and the Commune’s General Council, mindful of the importance of the issue to the sections, proclaimed itself “in a state of insurrection” in an effort to place itself at the head of the popular movement. The Montagnards, it should be noted, were not at all sympathetic to the price maximum. Like the Girondins, they too had been arguing in favor of free markets against feudal restrictions, but, faced with the popularity of the demand, they demagogically expressed their support for the maximum, to which the Convention capitulated three days later by imposing price controls on grain and bread prices.

The month of May 1793 was marked by a steady radicalizing of many sections, opening the prospect for a new journie. Most of the Faubourg Saint Antoine sections (albeit by no means all of them) were probably controlled by the radicals, as was the section La Cité and, on the Left Bank, the sections Marseilles and Sans-Culotte. Often in pitched battles in assembly meetings, five more sections, including the Gravilliers and Bon Conseil, finally purged themselves of moderate members, as did eight others, many of which voted to grant the Évéché assembly “unlimited powers.”

These developments served only to spur the Girondins and their moderate supporters into more foolhardy behavior. Having decided that the sections had acquired too much power through the intolerably radical Commune—a gross misjudgment on their part of the relationships of forces in Paris—they set about to eliminate it once and for all, and, in the process, to curtail the power of the sections. Amid proposals that the Commune be suppressed and the Convention be moved away from Paris to Bourges, on May 21 the Girondins established a Commission of Twelve, composed mainly of their own deputies, to investigate the vexatious conduct of the Commune, the sections, and their committee at the Évéché. Over the protests of Danton, the Convention provocatively ordered the sections to turn over all their minutes and registers to the new Commission for scrutiny.

The Commission had little difficulty in showing that a journée was being planned; the evidence of insurrectionary activity was apparently abundant enough in the sectional minutes. When several Girondin commissioners attended a meeting of the Paris Commune, they encountered an agenda laden with items such as “Identify members of the Convention to be expelled” and “Compile lists of suspects.” After only four days of work, the Commission issued its conclusions and recommendations, which the Girondins followed to the letter. It ordered that the National Guard contingents stationed around the Convention for the security of its members be reinforced, and that all section meetings be adjourned by ten in the evening to make it difficult for the bras nus, who worked long hours, to attend them. Amusingly, the latter stricture failed to produce its desired effect: when a sectional assembly wished to continue a session beyond the legal hour, it simply declared the assembly adjourned and thereupon resumed its proceedings as a meeting of a popular society.

Additionally, the Girondins issued orders for the arrest and imprisonment of those individuals whom the Commission had identified as the main plotters of insurrection; in all, four men, including Varlet and Hubert. Hubert was brought before the Commission to answer for his last issue of Ptre Duchesne, in which, with his usual vitriol, he had encouraged the sans-culottes to rise up against the Girondin “plotters against the republic,” alleging that they were conspiring with Britain in the war against France and with the Vendee in the revolt against Paris.[309] On May 25 the president of the Convention, the exasperated Girondin Henri Isnard, countered the threats to the Convention by issuing a threat of his own: “If harm should ever befall the national representation, I declare in the name of all France, Paris would be reduced to nothing; it would not be long before people had to search the banks of the Seine for evidence that Paris ever existed.”[310] With this warning, which scandalously echoed the Duke of Brunswick’s earlier manifesto, the Girondins were openly threatening to foment a civil war against the capital.

Nor did Paris have any reason to doubt the reality of such a threat. The counterrevolution, which many Parisians attributed in part to the Girondins, was spreading throughout the provinces. Rebellious communes overthrew the local Jacobin leadership, not without bloodshed in many cases. In Marseilles, where the thirty-two sections had previously constituted a well-known Jacobin stronghold, port workers joined with merchants in the face of shared economic distress to overthrow the local Jacobin commune and declare the city in a “state of insurrection” against the Convention. Other cities specifically went into revolt against Paris itself: on May 21, Bordeaux, a Girondin stronghold, declared that it would overthrow the sans-culottes authorities in the capital, followed two weeks later by Caen, also Girondin in sentiment, which declared itself in a state of insurrection to “resist oppression.”

This “federalist” revolt, as it was to be called, attained serious proportions in the last days of May, especially in Lyon, the second-largest city in France, which, before 1789, had been the silk-manufacturing center of the country. The loss of the industry’s wealthy customers, who had emigrated in great numbers as a result of the Revolution, left little employment for the silk workers. This was a problem that the local Jacobins could hardly be expected to solve for a city based on the production of a luxury fabric. On May 24 warehouses of provisions intended for the armies were ransacked, and the goods were then sold off by crowds of women at prices they judged to be fair. Four days later, the Jacobin commune at Lyon was overthrown.

When news of these revolts reached Paris, the enrages and sans-culottes in the sections decided that they had to remove the Girondins, whom they accused of summoning the provinces to rebel against the capital. Again, radical sectionnaires found themselves allied uneasily with the Montagnards. “Deputies of the Mountain,” wrote Jacques Roux on May 29,

we implore you to save the country. If you can and do not want to do so, you are cowards and traitors. If you want to but cannot, say so. This is the purpose of our mission. One hundred thousand men are armed to defend you.[311]

In fact, even before Roux’s threatening plea, on May 27 a crowd of bras nus burst into the Convention and demanded that Hebert, Varlet, and the other prisoners be promptly released and that the Commission of Twelve be abolished for exceeding its authority—a demand with which the cajoled Convention temporarily complied, only to restore the Commission on the next day. The backtracking, furious factionalism, realigning of positions, and repeated interventions of the sans-culottes had brought the political crisis in the capital to an impasse which only the victory—or defeat—of a popular journie could resolve.

THE MAY 31-JUNE 2 JOURNEE

The actual steps that led to this unavoidable journie are among the most difficult to unravel from the skein of events that immediately preceded it.

On May 28, delegates to the Évéché, speaking for thirty-three sections, began to take decisive steps toward a journie, empowering a secret Committee of Six to act as an executive for planning the uprising. As Morris Slavin observes:

There seem to have been two plans under deliberation when the [Évéché] assembly met the following day (May 29]. The first was public and was discussed openly (and] on the whole was moderate in tone and was noncommittal about the insurrection. The second plan, in contrast, was formulated by commissioners who were tacitly invested with a sort of executive mandate to determine the course of action. This plan was meant to launch an insurrection.[312]

And, in fact, during the night of May 30 and early morning of May 31, the Évéché assembly announced that Paris was in a state of insurrection against “the aristocratic and liberty oppressive faction,” notably the Girondins.[313] Declaring itself to be in permanence, the Évéché delegates elected a Committee of Nine, which supplanted the Committee of Six, and placed Varlet at its head. It was this new committee, the authentic “insurrectionary committee,” as the Évéché Committee of Nine was loosely called, that laid the initial plans for the journie, while a second assembly, convoked by the Commune, was established shortly afterwards, and included representatives from the Paris department as well as the General Assembly of the Commune itself.

The night of May 30–31 was marked by considerable confusion, for two committees now occupying separate rooms in the Évéché palace were apparently at odds with each other. In one, la Grande Salle, could be heard the mixed voices of Marat, who detested the enragis, and Varlet, who had been the original head of the Committee of Nine. Less explicably, the Committee of Nine sat in “a neighboring hall,” Slavin tells us, “about to declare itself in a state of permanence and insurrection.” Apparently, it was out of these two committees that the “Évéché committee” was composed, which “organized itself into ten different departments” corresponding with the Convention’s own executive and administrative bodies. “Exercising the powers embodied in these department made the Évéché committee the real government of France,” Slavin concludes. “For a few days, it was just that.”[314]

Which raises the question: precisely what was this “Évéché committee,” as it has been broadly called, during the night of May 30–31? How did it function when it was under the guidance of Varlet, and how was its character changed in the days, indeed hours, that followed?

The difficulty in answering these questions arises from the multitude of meetings that were being held throughout Paris: at the Évéché palace, the H6tel de Ville, and the Jacobin and Cordelier clubs among other places, where one group often combined with another or met independently, if not secretly, as a faction. Very few of these meetings left any records behind, and what little we do know about them was only to be disclosed in obviously tendentious and selfjustifying letters, pamphlets, and memoirs, particularly after the Revolution. Nor is there any reason to believe that Varlet and his supporters on the old “insurrectionary committee” ceased to meet after two committees were merged under the rubric of a broad Central Revolutionary Committee; indeed, there is sketchy evidence that its radical members were to retain close ties with each other and function, to the extent that it was possible, as a caucus within the Central Revolutionary Committee itself, together with such presumably supportive organs as the General Council of the Commune. What can be said with reasonable certainty is that the Évéché militants surrounding Varlet on the committee wanted the insurrection to accomplish aims radically different from those of the moderates.

Most immediately, the new Central Revolutionary Committee wanted the Girondin leaders expelled from the Convention. The bras nus among the sansculottes wanted to put an end to speculation and hoarding, and to make bread and other staples available; and they prepared a petition demanding not only price controls on basic goods but the establishment of a “revolutionary army” to search out suspects in the countryside, to impose measures against “suspects” in the city, to purge the army and civil service of unreliable elements, and to levy a forced loan on the rich.

Varlet, for his part, obviously wanted to go much further. He saw the coming insurrection as an opportunity to dissolve the entire Convention and even the Paris Commune, replacing both bodies with a direct sectional democracy. In this respect, he was carrying out what R.B. Rose, in his study of the sans-culotte movement, calls the “basic principles” of the sectional movement:

the inalienable embodiment of sovereignty in the primary [face-to-face] assemblies of the people, popular legislation by referendum, binding mandates for the people’s deputies and the constant right of recall; in extremis the reserved right of insurrection to dislodge usurping governments and to insure the effective continuity of the sovereignty of the people. This fiercely intransigent interpretation of the meaning of democracy would remain a central feature of the sans-culotte movement during its period of greatest solidarity and influence, in 1793 and 1794.[315]

It was the realization of the democracy that the Montagnards, no less than the Girondins; the Commune, no less than the Convention; posturing Huberts, no less than staid Robespierres; “friends of the people” like Marat, no less than disdainful opponents of “/es anarchistes” like Vergniaud—all were resolutely determined to prevent. The conflict between the Committee of Nine and its largely Jacobin opponents was joined during the fateful night of May 30–31, when the committee, on Varlet’s proposal, voted to abolish the Paris Commune and its General Council and to suspend the authority of Mayor Pache and the Paris Department. That the Évéché’s “program failed,” observes Rose,

was due to two things: the stubborn resistance of the Commune and the municipal administration, who refused to disband on the orders of the Évéché, and refused to back the insurrection on the Évéché’s terms, and the skillful tactics of the Mountain, particularly Marat and some of the rank-and-file Jacobins, who managed to divert the popular pressure for the dispersal of the Convention into the more manageable channel of a demand for a purge of a handful of Girondin “public enemies.” Meanwhile Varlet and his supporters gradually lost control of the central insurrectionary committee.[316]

How were Varlet and the enrages on the Committee of Nine outmaneuvered? This question is one of the most vexing of the Revolution, given the decisive shift it produced in the uprising’s aims and its dismal sequelae.

In the absence of written evidence, we may surmise that during the night of May 30–31 the Montagnards, the Commune, and the Department of Paris recognized the potential danger of the Committee of Nine and were frantically looking for a way to neutralize it. The enrages, they rightly suspected, were taking the upcoming insurrection out of the government’s control, and the fact that a committee headed by Varlet might set masses of armed men in motion gave this fear an intense urgency. On this score, there could be little doubt that the Commune, particularly Hubert and his supporters, openly sided with the Montagnards in usurping the influence of the radical elements on the committee and, in time, quashing their influence.

Casting around for an emissary to the Committee, the Montagnards and Commune seem to have settled on Claude-Emmanuel Dobsen, the influential president of the revolutionary section de-la-Cité—the section in which the Évéché palace was physically located. Dobsen was immensely popular with the sans-culottes, not only for his revolutionary fervor but because during the investigations of the Commission of Twelve he had defiantly refused to surrender his section’s registers to the Convention. The fact that he had been one of the four who were arrested by the Girondins greatly enhanced his status among the sans-culottes.

On the critical night of May 30–31, persons unknown (did they include Marat, who seems to have been showing up everywhere?) approached Dobsen while he was still in prison, presumably with pleas to neutralize the influence of the enragis on the Committee of Nine—a task which he apparently agreed to perform. Released from captivity on that fateful night, Dobsen wasted no time in going to the meeting of the Évéché palace, where the nine-member committee welcomed him and made him its tenth member.

Again, the sequence and causes of the events that immediately followed are not entirely clear. But we do know that Varlet thereafter ceased to be president of the committee and was replaced in that crucial office by Dobsen. We also know that the actions of the new Committee of Ten, as the original Évéché Committee was now known, were abruptly moderated. From his new position of power Dobsen seems to have set about redirecting the militants from their fairly radical goals toward policies more congenial to the Commune and the Montagnards. It is easy to speculate that he brought about this shift—over Varlet’s furious objections—by persuading his fellow committeemen that the need for “unity” with the Commune and the Mountain must override their seemingly “minor” differences. As in so many radical movements since, the plea for “unity” to create a “broad-based” movement that presumably could be more “effective” has been one of the most common techniques for disarming the left wing of a movement and persuading naive elements in moments of decision to acquiesce to less principled, safer, and more socially congenial policies.

Finally, it was probably on Dobsen’s motion that the Committee of Ten was supplanted by a newly created and presumably broader Central Revolutionary Committee, which consisted not only of the Committee of Ten but fifteen additional members from the Commune, an assembly of moderate sections, and the Jacobin-controlled department of Paris.[317] Since the new Central Revolutionary Committee had a total of twenty-five members, the enrages found themselves in the minority. The Central Revolutionary Committee now took control of the insurrection, shunting the enragis to the side. “There was no question,” writes Slavin,“that the Jacobins, with the connivance of the departmental authorities, aimed at subordinating the Évéché committee to their own” in order to keep the insurrection within existing institutional boundaries.[318]

One of the new Committee’s first acts, at nine in the morning of May 31, was to neutralize the order of the former Committee of Nine—the one Varlet had signed before the arrival of Dobsen—to abolish the Paris Commune, which they symbolically “dissolved” and immediately reinstated after it took an oath recognizing the authority of the “sovereign people.” Varlet’s intention of abolishing the Commune was now turned into a purely ceremonial act and became—wrongly, as R.B. Rose points out—little more than a farcical gesture rather than a major betrayal of the Committee of Nine’s original revolutionary intentions.[319]

The process of diluting the influence of the radicals in the Central Revolutionary Committee and the BvSchd Assembly proceeded at a steady pace, until their impact was soon negligible. When a citizen (who Daniel Guerin opines may have been Varlet) came forward at the General Council of the Commune and offered to lead the Paris battalions in their march on the Convention, the Council’s prudent majority expressed “their complete indignation, their complete horror at such a proposal.”[320] Mayor Pache pompously asserted that “the people of Paris can distinguish between their true friends and the fools and imbeciles who try to mislead them and embroil them in perverted schemes.” When a young radical, S6bastien de Lacroix, tried to present a “certain very violent project,” Dobsen cut him off, and some months later he was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on charges that on that night, he “almost went beyond the limit at which the revolution stopped.” When still another citizen raised the question of the arrest of the Girondin leaders, which the Jacobins were later obliged to do, the Jacobin Anaxagoras Chaumette at the time tried to quell all discussion of the subject, while another member proposed to censure anyone who brought it up. The Central Revolutionary Committee, as Chaumette later wrote, did all it could to “moderate the volcanic activity” of the sans-culottes.[321]

It was now apparent to Varlet and his supporters that they had been deceived. In a pamphlet published much later, in the fall of 1794, Varlet recalled the day: “The insurrectionary committee contained the germ of a revolutionary government, conceived secretly at the very beginning. The false insurgents substituted Robespierre for Brissot; for federalism, a revolutionary dictatorship, decreed in the name of public safety.”[322]

Yet for all its moderation, the real power in Paris now lay in the hands of the Central Revolutionary Committee. It shut the gates of the city and installed the Jacobin Francois Hanriot as commander of the National Guard. Since the 31^st was a Friday and therefore a work day, which would prevent many needy sansculottes from participating in the joumie, the Central Committee decreed that all armed working men would be compensated in the amount of forty sous per day from funds levied on the wealthy. Early that morning, Varlet ordered the tocsin sounded (this act has wrongly been imputed to Marat), and thousands of sans-culottes from the radical sections streamed toward the Tuileries.

Their numbers, however, were small, and the joumie was more a demonstration than an intimidating insurrection. The Central Revolutionary Committee apparently had been remiss in reaching the sans-culottes, who were already at work when the joumie started in the afternoon. The Convention, in turn, disdainfully ordered that the “insurrection” be investigated, even as it was still under way, and some Girondins even proposed disarming the people and transferring control of the armed forces from the sections to the Convention.

The Montagnards, to retain the support the sans-culottes, were obliged to take action against the Girondins, however irresolutely. Marat moved that the Committee of Public Safety report in three days on the possibility of arresting the twenty-two Girondins—a remarkably tame proposal in view of the excoriations he heaped upon them—and later in the day, Robespierre finally proposed that the twenty-two Girondin leaders be impeached. By that time, the crowd, which numbered several thousand, was already dissipating. The Convention’s only real concession was to abolish the despised Commission of Twelve once and for all, a concession to which the Montagnards readily agreed.

This done, some moderates tried to portray the events on the Friday as a success. Although it could hardly be compared with the journee of August 10, one speaker extolled it as a nonviolent “insurrection morale ” as opposed to a violent “insurrection brutale.” The normally volatile Hubert called it one of the most “beautiful” journies of the entire Revolution, and he commended the citizens of Paris, who, he declared, “always counted on the force of reason rather than on that of arms.”[323]

Yet the twenty-two Girondin delegates still sat in the Convention, and no motion had been passed to expel them. Faced with Girondin intransigence and Montagnard equivocation, the fiveche militants around Varlet patently felt that the insurrection had miscarried, and they persevered in their demands for resolute action. On June 1, a Saturday, crowds of sans-culottes came out into the street, complaining of the Montagnards’ sluggishness the day before. Indeed, the section Piques, to which Robespierre belonged, issued a statement announcing that the Central Revolutionary Committee was “unworthy of the confidence of the section” and warned that

If, within twenty-four hours, the country is not saved, the sections will be invited to elect new commissioners worthy of their confidence, who will meet in the Évéché, and who, invested with unlimited powers, shall be charged with taking sweeping measures which alone can save public affairs.[324]

The sans-culottes movement had reached a boiling point. That there would now be an insurrection seemed unquestionable; all that had to be settled was its aim. Would it be content to force the expulsion of the twenty-two, or would it overthrow the Convention altogether, possibly establishing Varlet’s coveted sectional democracy?

That same Saturday morning, the Committee of Public Safety expressed its alarm at the events of the day before and its fear that another insurrection was in the offing, this time a violent one. The Central Revolutionary Committee, in turn, dispatched Dobsen to the Committee of Public Safety to consider “means to save the country.”[325] There he conferred with the Committee members, and if he received instructions from them, which is very likely, the Committee of Public Safety and by extension the Convention itself were brought into active complicity with a committee—the Central Revolutionary Committee—that had initially been created out of the earlier Committee of Nine to overthrow them. That very evening, in fact, Varlet openly accused Dobsen of obstructing the work of the Committee—to which Mayor Pache responded, “This is what happens... every time you place a Varlet at your head; he will go beyond you.” [326]

A completely uncertain situation existed the next day, on June 2, a Sunday. Hanriot had been ordered to ring the Tuileries with sixty cannon and handpicked, heavily armed battalions of National Guardsmen, some five to six thousand strong. Once again, Varlet had the tocsin sounded, and since the sansculottes did not have to be at work, an overwhelming crowd of citizens— estimates range from 75,000 to 100,000—assembled behind the National Guardsmen, who were stationed between them and the Convention. In an arrangement typical of the ambiguity of the situation that existed, the Guardsmen were so positioned that, given the appropriate order, they could either attack the Convention together with the sans-culottes, or effectively defend the Convention from the crowd. To further complicate the situation, Hanriot ordered his men to arrest any deputy who left the Tuileries before the twenty-two were expelled. A delegation of sans-culottes thereupon entered the palace headed by a member of the Central Revolutionary Committee to demand the arrest of the Girondins “and threatened to have the people save public affairs should the Convention refuse.”[327]

In the raucous debate that followed, some deputies tried discreetly to leave the palace, only to find their passage at the gate barred by National Guardsmen. Infuriated at this behavior, the Convention ordered that the National Guards be withdrawn, only to be told in no uncertain terms by Hanriot: “Tell your f- president that I f- him and his Assembly, and that if within one hour, he doesn’t deliver to me the twenty-two, I’m going to blast it.”[328]

Faced with this earthy challenge to the Convention’s dignity, the deputy Barére now suggested that the deputies dramatically demonstrate their defiance of the Guard and the sans-culottes by leaving the building en masse, much to the horror of Robespierre, who is reported to have reproached Barfere: “What are you doing? You’re making a mess of it.”[329] In any case, the deputies of the right and the center—the majority—rose forthwith and headed toward the Tuileries courtyard. The Montagnards remained seated. But after being scolded for not braving the common danger with their fellow deputies, the majority of them rose and joined the others.

Scarcely had the Convention deputies reached the outside of the palace when armed sans-culottes furiously shouted at them to remain in the Tuileries until they decreed the arrest of the Girondins. Indeed, Hanriot told the president of the Convention, Herault de Sechelles, a fellow Jacobin, to “swear to me on your head that the twenty-two members will be surrendered within twenty-four hours.” When Herault de Sechelles refused, Hanriot responded menacingly, “In that case, I shall not say anything.” With a gesture to his troops, he was heard to order: “To arms, gunners, to your cannon!”[330] Some of the Guards cried, “Down with the Right! Long live the Montagnards! To the Guillotine with the Girondins! Long live Marat!”[331] A crucial moment of truth, as it were, seems to have arrived when the artillerymen were prepared to fire, while the cavalrymen, with drawn sabers, and infantrymen at the ready, pointed their weapons at the Conventionnels.

So delicate was the situation, now, that even a slight altercation between the deputies and the Guards might have led the crowd as well as the militia to fire on the Conventionnels. Indeed, had a single shot been fired, all the guns and artillery ringing the Tuileries could have gone off at once. The sans-culottes might very well have dissolved the Convention and possibly tried to establish a sectional democracy in France.[332] Varlet reportedly shouted at Hanriot to fire and was beside himself when the commander failed to do so.

At this point, Marat, the “friend of the people,” stepped in and defuzed the crisis by shouting to Herault de Sechelles, “I call on you and your followers to return to the posts which you have abandoned like cowards.”[333] This was a clever ruse. It gave the deputies the excuse they needed to return to the Tuileries with the Montagnards in the lead. To Varlet’s alarm, Hanriot permitted the delegates to make their retreat without firing a shot. Even though the deputies had been humiliated, the decisive moment had passed. Viewed from the standpoint of the enrages, the nearest France had come to a third revolution had failed.

Having escaped dissolution, the Convention deputies resumed their seats and nervously debated the fate of the Girondins, a debate whose outcome was essentially decided as soon as news arrived that the Jacobin commune in Lyon had been overthrown. Marat proposed that thirty-one Girondin deputies be arrested. Despite resistance from most of the center and right deputies, who were unwilling to make such a decision under duress, the Montagnards resolutely pressed their demand until Marat’s motion prevailed.

Not only would a failure to remove the Girondins have reopened a confrontation between the Convention and the people, but the Mountain was only too aware that, had it failed to support Marat’s motion, it would have lost the allegiance of the sans-culottes. Nor was the vote wholly distasteful to them, politically; by voting for the arrests of their opponents’ leaders, they were assured of becoming the dominant party in the Convention.

The expelled Girondins were treated with extraordinary leniency. At most, they were placed under house arrest and watched over by a gendarme, while others simply slipped away and fled to the provinces, where they were to produce mayhem for the new Jacobin republic. A messenger was sent outside to inform the crowd of the vote, and the way was cleared for the deputies to leave. Marat, in effect, had shrewedly manipulated the situation to contain the insurrection within institutional boundaries and in the process had awarded political supremacy to the Montagnards. His assassination by Charlotte Corday several weeks later, on July 13, was no great loss for the sans-culottes, particularly the bras nus, who revered him—and whom he betrayed in the May 31 and June 2 journees.

The initiative for the insurrection on Sunday had been taken by the enragis and their sans-culotte allies. And it was they alone who had formulated its demands and propelled it forward toward a revolutionary confrontation with the Convention over the preceding weeks. Moreover, as Slavin points out, “It was the sectionnaires who composed the bulk of the armed crowd that surrounded the National Assembly. It was their insistence that forced the Convention to bow before them.”[334] The Montagnards trailed behind the enrages and the sansculottes with fearful trepidation. Apart from opposing the Girondins, Robespierre had kept discreetly silent during much of the affair, while Marat had turned a potentially decisive sans-culottes uprising into mere Jacobin coup d’itat. In Paris, at least, the Girondins were either expelled or silenced, and they ceased to be to be a viable political grouping after June 2.

AFTERMATH

Although the Montagnards now controlled the Convention, the most immediate demands of the sans-culottes and the enragis remained unfulfilled. Bread was still scarce, and speculation and hoarding continued. The Montagnards now had to perform the delicate task of quelling the power of the sans-culottes without thoroughly alienating them. They still required the support of the sections, albeit with their powers trimmed. The first task of the Jacobin-controlled Convention was to reclaim for itself all the authority that the Central Revolutionary Committee had acquired, where the “dangerous elements,” as they were called, still found an institutional home in addition to the sections. The fact that the Committee had no funds gave the Jacobins their initial opening in dissolving it. Before the June 2 journie, it should be recalled, the Committee had promised the sans-culottes that, in compensation for lost wages, they would receive forty sous for each day (May 31 to June 2) on which they were involved in the insurrections. This responsibility was now given to the Committee of Public Safety, which agreed to approve compensatory funds provided that the Central Revolutionary Committee disband—a requirement with which Dobsen and his supporters complied only too willingly. To close the sordid chapter on Dobsen and company, shortly afterwards, on June 8, the Department of Paris, in collusion with the Montagnards, created a new, completely innocuous “Committee of Public Safety for the Department of Paris,” which provided sinecures for the members of the former Central Revolutionary Committee. The enragis were conspicuously excluded from it.

What can be said about the remarkable miscarriage of the journtes of May 31 to June 2? The failure of the enragis to create a well-organized political force and advance a coherent program had not only been their undoing; it had cost the radical sans-culottes, particularly the bras nus, the Revolution. Although the Girondins had been finally expelled from the Convention, the journees had simply replaced them with a government dominated by vigorous Jacobin centralizers—one that differed from the preceding government by virtue of its greater resoluteness and its seemingly unlimited willingness to employ violence. Unlike the insurrection of August 10, which had dethroned the monarchy, created the republic, and broadened the powers of the sections and the Commune, the uprising of June 2 merely replaced the authority of one faction in the Convention by another—the Girondins by the Montagnards. Institutionally, the Montagnards left the Convention intact. Indeed, nothing could have been further from their minds than the direct democracy that Varlet and his supporters envisioned.