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-Prés 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 Châtelet; 115, including an archbishop, at a Carmelite convent. At the Bicêtre, 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 François 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 chargé 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 émigrés. 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.
