Fragonard and his friends were of the independents—they were liberals whom love of elegance had not prevented from sympathising with the sufferings of the people, and who had thrilled with the new thought. Fragonard’s intelligence drew him naturally towards the new ideas; indeed he owed little to the Court; and when France was threatened by the coalition of Europe against her, he, with Gérard, David, and others, went on the 7th of September with the artist’s womenfolk to give up their jewelry to the National Assembly.
But the storm burst, and soon affairs became tragic red.
There came, for the ruin of the cause of a constitutional monarchy and to end the last hope of the Court party, the unfortunate death of Mirabeau—the hesitations of the king—his foolish flight to Varennes—his arrest.
The constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly, at first dominant, became subordinate to the more violent but more able Girondists, with their extreme wing of Jacobins under Robespierre, and Cordeliers under Danton, Marat, Camille Desmoulins, and Fabre d’Eglantine. The proscription of all emigrants quickly followed. It was as unsafe to leave as to stay in Paris. The queen’s insane enmity towards Lafayette finished the king’s business. On the night of the 9th of August the dread tocsin sounded the note of doom to the royal cause—herald to the bloodshed of the morrow. Three days afterwards, the king and the royal family were prisoners in the Temple.
The National Convention met for the first time on the 21st of September 1792; decreed the First Year of the Republic, abolished Royalty and the titles of courtesy, decreed in their place citoyen and citoyenne, and the use of tu and toi for vous.
(In the Collection of M. Wildenstein, Paris)
Here we see Fragonard in his phase of sentimental recorder of love-scenes so typical of the art of Louis the Fifteenth’s day.
The National Convention also displayed the antagonism of the two wings of the now all-powerful Girondist party—the Girondists and the Jacobins or Montagnards. The conflict began with the quarrel as to whether the king could be tried. The 10th of January 1793 saw the king’s head fall to the guillotine—the Jacobins had triumphed. War with Europe followed, and the deadly struggle between the Girondists and Jacobins for supreme power. The 27th of May 1793 witnessed the appointment of the terrible and secret Committee of Public Safety. By June the Girondists had wholly fallen. Charlotte Corday’s stabbing of Marat in his bath left the way clear for Robespierre’s ambition. The Jacobins in power, the year of the Reign of Terror began—July 1793 to July 1794—with Robespierre as the lord of the hellish business. The scaffolds reeked with blood—from that of Marie Antoinette and Egalité Orleans to that of the Girondist deputies and Madame Roland, and the most insignificant beggar suspected of the vague charge of “hostility to the Republic.” In a mad moment the Du Barry, who had shown the noblest side of her character in befriending the old allies of her bygone days of greatness, published a notice of a theft from her house. It drew all eyes to her wealth. And she went to the guillotine shrieking with terror and betraying all who had protected her. Then came strife amongst the Jacobins. Robespierre and Danton fought the scoundrel Hébert for life, and overthrew him. The Hebertists went to the guillotine, dying in abject terror. Danton, with his appeals for cessation of the bloodshed of the Terror, alone stood between Robespierre and supreme power. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Eglantine and their humane fellows, were sent to the guillotine. Between the 10th of June and the 27th of July, in 1794, fourteen hundred people in Paris alone died on the scaffold.