Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

The Girondists, who for some time had the upper hand in the Convention, wished to spare the king, and some of them proposed to leave the decision of his fate to the people at large; confident, no doubt, that the verdict of the nation would be, if not altogether favourable, at least not fatal to the unhappy monarch. The Girondists, however, could not get their views adopted by the Assembly generally; and in the end many of them voted for the king’s death.

The king having been tried and found guilty by the Assembly, each member was called upon to declare in writing what sentence the convicted monarch deserved. Some were for keeping him in prison until peace was made with the invading powers, and then sending him into exile on condition of his never attempting to return. The greater number, however, of the deputies were in favour of death. One, more brutal than the others, is said to have recorded his view as to the sentence that should be passed in these cynical words: “La mort sans phrase.” M. Edouard Fournier has, however, well explained, in his admirable little volume, “Les Mots Historiques,” that whereas in most cases the deputy signing the register explained, in one or more phrases, why he was in favour of a particular sentence, the sentence in this particular case was given without one word of explanation, “sans phrase” in short, as the registrar put it.

The day of the king’s sentence, one of the deputies, Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, who had voted for death, was assassinated just after he had left the Assembly, by a former member of the Body-guard named Pàris. The Convention ordered that he should receive the honours of the Pantheon, and assisted in a body at his funeral. This incident caused a deep sensation, deeper, it is said, even than the execution of the king, which took place on the 21st of January, 1793. The deepest indignation, too, was excited by the news that among those who had voted for the king’s death was his cousin, the Duke of Orleans, the so-called Philippe Égalité, whose son, Louis Philippe, was thirty-seven years afterwards to ascend the French throne. Writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes a few years after the latter event, Châteaubriand reproached the reigning king in plain terms with being the son of a regicide. Arguing that since the execution of Louis XVI., and as a punishment for that crime, it had become impossible to establish monarchy in France, he added:—

“Napoleon saw the diadem fall from his brow in spite of his victories; Charles X., in spite of[{235}] his piety. To discredit the Crown finally in the eyes of the nations, it has been permitted to the son of the regicide to lie for one moment in the bloodstained bed of the murdered man.” That Louis Philippe suffered this outburst to be published unchallenged has been regarded as a proof of his extreme tolerance in press matters. Probably, however, he thought it prudent not to invite general attention to words which, by a large portion of his subjects, would have been accepted as justifiable.

It has been said by the defenders of the “regicide” that Philippe Égalité did his best not to be present at the sitting of the Convention when sentence had to be passed on the unfortunate king; but that he was threatened by his friends of the Left with assassination unless he voted with them for the “death of the tyrant.” However that may be, he took his seat among the judges by whom the fate of his royal kinsman was to be decided, and, when it became his turn to deliver his opinion, did so in the following words: “Occupied solely with my duty, convinced that all those who have attacked, or might afterwards attack, the sovereignty of the people deserve death, I pronounce the death of Louis.”

Philippe Égalité had looked for general approval, and had voted in fear of death—which awaited him all the same, and came to him in the very form in which a few months before it had been inflicted on the unhappy Louis. When his vote was made known cries of indignation from all sides warned him that he had transgressed one of the great moral laws which are observed even by men who violate all others. Then it was that a former soldier of the King’s Body-guard, hearing of Philippe Égalité’s unnatural offence, resolved to kill him, but not being able to find him, killed another less guilty “regicide” in his place.

Very different was the feeling excited by the conduct of Philippe Égalité in the breast of the king himself. “I don’t know by what chance,” says the Abbé Edgeworth in his “Relation sur les Derniers Momens du Roi,” “the conversation fell upon Philippe. The king seemed to be well acquainted with his intrigues and with the horrid part he had taken at the Convention. But he spoke of him without any bitterness, and with pity rather than with anger. ‘What have I done to my cousin,’ he exclaimed, ‘that he should so persecute me? What object could he have? Oh, he is more to be pitied than I am. My lot is melancholy, no doubt, but his is much more so.’”

Meanwhile the faction of the Assembly which in the beginning of September, 1792, had, by its excited declamation and denunciation, brought about the massacre of the prisoners, was constantly attempting, in combination with other factions, to arrest some of the most influential members of the majority, accuse them of treason, and bring them before the Revolutionary Tribunal. On the 2nd of June, 1793, they struck their first blow; and on the 3rd of October in the same year they denounced forty-four deputies, ordered the arrest of seventy-one, and compelled many more to take to flight and seek safety in concealment. The majority was thus diminished by 150 members: the minority in fact became the majority.

Then one of the authors of these measures, Robespierre, hoping to monopolise whatever fruits they might bear, and finding no further obstacle to his ambition, became dictator in fact, bent everything beneath his will, and reigned by terror. During fourteen months he subjected the French to a ferocious tyranny. At Paris alone thirty, forty, sixty heads fell daily. At length, on the 27th of July, 1794, this monster, together with his chief accomplices, paid his reckoning, and France was delivered from an intolerable yoke. To the general desolation, grief, and alarm now succeeded the liveliest joy. The doors of many prisons were thrown open; the instrument of death ceased to ply its blade.

The Convention, free and tranquil, despite the difficulties it experienced from foreign factions, was now to pursue its way and to give France a constitution. On the 26th of October, 1795, it terminated its session.