On 17 September, a Law of Suspects granted the Committee powers of summary execution as they assumed total command of the economy and then declared a new revolutionary calendar. Public hysteria, military chaos, factional rivalry and brazen corruption intensified the Terror. On 31 October, Brissot and twenty-eight Girondins sang republican songs on their way to the guillotine. Sixteen thousand victims, many denounced in a frenzy of fear and cowardice, and most guilty merely of being ‘aristos’, would be guillotined. The Terror did not kill people for religious reasons, as had been the practice in Europe for centuries, but to enforce loyalty. Robespierre investigated a Foreign Plot against the revolution that was really a case of peculation of
The Committee’s envoys travelled across France, executing traitors. ‘These monsters must be unmasked and exterminated,’ said Robespierre of the Lyons rebels. ‘The city of Lyons shall be destroyed,’ ordered Robespierre. Two thousand were killed there, tied together before cannon and shot to pieces. At Nantes, 2,000 were locked into barges that were then sunk.
In Paris, Sanson – now beloved as Charlot, or the National Avenger – and his sons frantically beheaded 2,900 of Robespierre’s victims. Sanson became so exhausted that he handed over to his son Gabriel. In a telling moment of the Terror, Gabriel was beheading so many people that, holding up a head to the crowd, he slipped on the blood, fell off the scaffold and broke his neck. ‘Like Saturn,’ wrote an observer, ‘the revolution devours its children’ – and the feasting had begun. Philippe Égalité voted for the Terror, but when his son, Louis Philippe, disgusted by the king’s killing, defected to the coalition, the duke was guillotined.* So was Barnave. Among those arrested was a young slave owner’s daughter, Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, the future Empress Josephine, who aged fifteen had arrived from Martinique to marry Vicomte Alexander de Beauharnais. Now in crowded cells, both awaited death.
Little Louis XVII, separated from his mother, half starved and plied with booze, was brainwashed and forced to denounce his mother for sexual abuse. When he heard their footsteps in the cell above, the boy sneered, ‘Have those fucking whores been guillotined yet?’ Antoinette’s eldest child, Marie Thérèse, and her sister-in-law, Madame Élisabeth, remained with the queen. Then they too were parted.
On 14 October 1793, wearing mourning black but red high heels from another era, Antoinette was tried, found guilty of spying for Joseph II, of paying him money and of sexually abusing her son. When informed of her son’s allegation that she was a ‘new Agrippina’, who had taught him to masturbate so hard that one of his testicles had swollen and had then fornicated with him, she replied, ‘Nature refuses to answer such a charge, but I appeal to all the mothers who are here.’ Robespierre feared that her dignity would ‘make her an object of pity’. The daughter of Maria Theresa disdained her tormenters: ‘I was a queen and you dethroned me. I was a wife and you murdered my husband. I was a mother and you’ve torn my children from me. I have nothing left but my blood – hurry up and take it!’ Her last letter to her sister-in-law and daughter testified to her regret at her parting from her children and begged Élisabeth to forgive her son’s allegations – ‘Think how easy it is at that age to make a child say anything’ – asking her to kiss her ‘poor and dear children’. Her letter was not delivered but given instead to Robespierre.
When her executioner, Henri Sanson, who had succeeded his brother, arrived at the Conciergerie prison to bind her wrists she asked if she could relieve herself in private. He refused and she squatted in a corner in front of the jailers. Dressed in white, Antoinette, thirty-seven years old but looking like an old lady, was transported in an open tumbril, mocked by the crowd. At some point, she scribbled a note to Fersen that was later smuggled out to him: ‘Adieu, my heart is all yours.’ She died courageously.
‘I was devastated,’ wrote Fersen. ‘I thought about her constantly, all the horrible circumstances of her sufferings, the doubt she might have had about me, my attachment … tormented me.’
Louis XVII deteriorated in a cell awash with faeces. ‘My brother is sick,’ wrote his sister Marie Thérèse. ‘I’ve written to the Convention for permission to nurse him.’ But Robespierre was implacable. When the boy died, his doctor smuggled his heart out in a handkerchief for sacred burial.
