On 4 February 1794, in Paris, Robespierre backed the Convention’s decree to abolish slavery: ‘La Convention Nationale déclare que l’esclavage des Nègres dans toutes les colonies est aboli’, acknowledging that the slave rebellion was irreversible. Toussaint hailed this ‘great consolation for all friends of mankind’. Ending his tactical alliance with the slave-trading Spanish, he negotiated with the French governor Étienne de Laveaux and promised to become ‘devoted to crushing enemies of the republic’. Toussaint praised Laveaux for his ‘exceptional love of black people’; Laveaux raved to Paris, ‘I can’t speak highly enough’ of Toussaint’s ‘virtues, talent, martial qualities; he is full of humanity, indefatigable as warrior’.
Robespierre now embraced a vision of a state of virtue.* ‘If God didn’t exist,’ he said, quoting Voltaire, ‘it’d be necessary to invent him.’ On 8 June, at a turgidly solemn ritual atop a man-made mountain on the Champ de Mars, Robespierre presided over the launch of a new religion, ‘le Culte de l’Être suprême’. As virtuous potentate and hierophant of the Supreme Being, he was at his murderous zenith – but he was overreaching, his prominence resented by his colleagues. Two days later, a law granted Robespierre and the Committee powers to kill all public enemies. In July, sixty victims were beheaded daily; one of them was Josephine de Beauharnais’s husband, and she expected death herself. Now even the Sansons had doubts: the old father suffered ‘terrible visions … Perhaps I’m punished by God for my cowardly obedience to mock justice.’ Henri Sanson was arrested. But the Committee was reduced to nocturnal screaming rows. Robespierre retired to his lodgings to recover and plan the arrest of all his enemies. On 26 July, he delivered a disastrously misjudged speech, defending his revolution, ‘the first founded on the theory of the rights of humanity and the principles of justice’, and menaced its enemies – ‘the monsters’ – before reflecting, ‘Death is not an eternal sleep … Death is the start of immortality.’ But his threat to ‘crush all factions’ united both moderates and radicals in a conspiracy against him that night. Next day, 9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar, when they tried to launch their purge, he and his epigones were accused of planning to ‘murder the Convention’.
‘Down with the tyrant,’ cried Robespierre’s critics.
He tried to speak but fear stole his voice.
‘Danton’s blood’, came the shout, ‘chokes you!’
‘Is it Danton you regret?’ Robespierre replied. ‘Cowards! Why didn’t you defend him?’
Arrested then freed in the chaos, Robespierre and his henchmen fled to the Hôtel de Ville where, besieged by militia, Robespierre shot himself, but merely shattered his jaw. Watched by baying crowds, his face bandaged, he was conveyed to the national razor where Henri Sanson, reinstated, ripped off his bandage. Robespierre emitted a high-pitched shriek and fainted before Sanson removed his head. This was not a revolution but an internecine coup within the Committee, where the Jacobin faction continued to rule in partnership with the now empowered moderates. Prisoners, including Josephine, were released.* Among Robespierrists arrested in Nice was General Bonaparte, who was fortunate to be released. Meanwhile his patron, Barras, a bisexual Provençal bon vivant who had fought the British in India, helped dismantle the machine of terror.
On 5 October 1795, faced with a revolt in Paris, Barras summoned Bonaparte, who sent a Gascon innkeeper’s son, Joachim Murat, a jet-haired, six-foot-tall, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old, to get forty cannon. ‘The rabble must be moved by terror,’ said Bonaparte, ordering Murat to fire ‘a whiff of grapeshot’ into the crowd. The cannon fire killed 300 and won for the general the gratitude of Barras, who was now chosen as the president of a five-man Directoire. France, fighting the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and the British in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, was holding its own, efficiently organized by one of the directeurs, Carnot. Released from the Terror, enjoying their power, self-made revolutionaries and returning aristocrats celebrated their survival in a florescence of libidinous luxury and venal dealmaking: none more so than Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, a languid, lame libertine, who in British and American exile had met Pitt and Hamilton, and who became the wily and witty foreign minister.
