The Reign of Terror 1793–1794: Leading the Angry Mob and Murdering Political Rivals. Part 9: Les Massacres de Septembre et la Bataille de Valmy
It is no surprise that the Reign of Terror was on the horizon, the angry mob had been conducting itself this way since 1789 but since the August Insurrection it was now the politicians who sanctioned terror. Prior to 1793 politicians merely turned a blind eye to the violence and secretly encouraged the angry mob to revolt as a necessary evil; however, those revolts and riots were directed toward the monarchy and nobility — they never thought the angry mob would turn on them. September 1792 altered France, and most Parisians conceded that it was for the best, yet the means of accomplishing the end goal brought upon the most gruesome methods and the realization that the angry mob could not be controlled. Unifying the angry mob and France would take a distraction such as the Prussian invasion, and to eliminate the Prussian incentive for invading: Louis must be executed. It is no surprise that the politicians accepted terror, shame, speculation, and murder as a means to accomplish their goals, because these attributes are the result of fear. Fear that once Prussia conquered and put Louis back on the throne, all the Revolution’s progress would be dismantled. The primary reason why the politicians turned a blind eye towards murder as a means to an end, is because they would receive no mercy if the Revolution failed. During the August Insurrection, it was Robespierre’s radical left-wingers who cheered on the sans-culottes/fédérés as they stormed the palace, and it was Robespierre’s radical left-wingers who turned a blind eye during the September Massacres of 1792.
The 10 August Insurrection brought the sans-culottes legitimacy as a political force, yet still the leftwing politicians viewed them as an ally and not the all-consuming fire they would eventually become. The Paris Commune acted as the de facto government while plans for deconstructing the Legislative Assembly and establishing the National Convention took place. With the Duke of Brunswick marching toward Paris, fear morphed to hysteria and hysteria incited murder. In the summer and autumn of 1792, Parisians had two kinds of enemies — Austrians, Prussians, and Émigré nobles invading France, and counterrevolutionaries and refractory priests within France. By 1792, both groups grew increasingly exhausted with the angry mob’s violence and propaganda, which they viewed as absolute anarchy, while the angry mob and leftwing politicians viewed it as liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Many national guardsmen throughout France, spurred on by the war fever, signed up to join the front-line regular soldiers. Though the sans-culottes joined with the same excitement, rumors of counterrevolutionary prison breaks struck the Parisians’ hearts and hysteria boiled over. On 2 September 1792, Danton stepped in front of the Assembly and presented his famous speech where he concluded with, “To conquer we have need to dare, to dare again, ever to dare! And the safety of France is insured” (Copeland, Lamm, and McKenna 1999, 189). Later that day, the angry mob swarmed upon a group of prisoners being transferred to the Abbaye Prison (thought to be counterrevolutionaries) and slaughtered them, but the slaughter did not stop with them. Historians estimate between 1,100 and 1,400 prisoners were mutilated to death for six days as the sans-culottes stormed prison after prison to ensure Paris’ safety before they marched off to face the Prussians. In Charles Dickens’ (2003, 265), A Tale of Two Cities, he describes the massacre from Charles Darnay’s point of view while he was in La Force prison when he writes, “Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by death they had died in coming there.” The angry mob is never capable of winning public opinion through political debate or civil means but must always resort to violence and public shame — and in the case of the September Massacres, a six-day purge to instill fear and submission upon those who slightly question the movement, and to ensure no possibility of a counterrevolutionary prison break while they are fighting the Prussians.
The angry mob, comprised of sans-culottes, fédérés, and those who participated in the Insurrection, earned the infamous moniker of “Septembriseurs” for hacking the prisoners to death. The most famous victim, the Princess de Lamballe, was Marie Antoinette’s favorite confidante. Princess de Lamballe came into the Queen’s service in 1774, accompanied the royal family wherever they went (even to Paris after the Woman’s March on Versailles in 1789), carried secret messages for the queen, and was frequently rumored to be an intimate partner with the Queen. After the Insurrection, de Lamballe accompanied Marie to the Temple prison but was transferred to La Force mid-August. On 3 September, the Septembriseurs dragged de Lamballe out of the prison and hacked her to death in the street. Severing her head and placing it on a pike, the angry mob paraded de Lamballe’s head in front of Marie Antoinette’s prison window daring her to kiss de Lamballe’s lips. Not every Parisian enjoyed the massacres, some thought them abhorrent, but many viewed them as a necessary evil. The newspapers and journals in Paris leaned towards defending the actions which the Courrier Français published, “the people made it their duty to purge the city of all the criminals, so as not to fear a prison breakout that would fall on the women and children,” while the Journal Universel stated, “they had so long conspired, that they were sacrificed in these days of vengeance with the swords of the people” (Tackett and Stick 2015, 213). Many leftwing politicians knew of the massacres and did not attempt to halt them in the slightest, while the Girondin party placed the blame on Robespierre and especially Marat. The September Massacres were the primary reason why Charlotte Corday assassinated Jean-Paul Marat almost a year later, believing him to be the leading instigator of the angry mob. As the bloodshed subsided, the results revealed that only a third of the Massacre victims were counterrevolutionary suspects (including roughly 240 priests). The rest of the victims were prostitutes and common criminals, most commonly arrested for theft and counterfeiting paper currency. The September Massacres did not prove that counterrevolutionaries were plotting to escape once the sans-culottes went to the front line but proved the angry mob’s propensity for ruthless carnage.
In the following weeks, the Parisian streets remained rather silent due to the National Guard’s and sans-culotte’s mobilization to the front, while the Girondin assembly members viciously accused Robespierre and his followers of allowing and encouraging the Massacre’s, and the rest of the population remained bewildered that the angry mob was capable of such violence. Yet, good news finally arrived for the Revolution when the French army defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Valmy. When news came that the Duke of Brunswick captured Verdun in early September, General Charles-François du Périer Dumouriez took his army away from the Austrian Netherlands border and moved south to prevent the Duke from capturing Paris. As Dumouriez marched south, the central army under the command of General François-Étienne-Christophe Kellermann, marched north in an attempt to trap the Duke in a pincer movement.
Leading up to 20 September 1792, General Dumouriez (Lafayette’s replacement), marched south and established his troops west of the Argonne Forest. As the Duke of Brunswick pushed through and performed a classic Prussian right flank, Dumouriez retreated south causing both armies to turn counterclockwise, resulting in the Prussians on the west and the French on the east with their backs to the Argonne Forest. Nothing lay between the Duke and Paris at this point, yet Dumouriez (with General Kellerman now joined to the south) stood between the Duke and his supply train/means of communication. Despite the ability to march on Paris, the Prussian army had no available food and was already impaired with dysentery. The Duke had no choice but to charge east against the French army, which established themselves on a hill next to a windmill near Valmy. Although much of the nobility fled from France in the early Revolutionary days, many former lower nobles remained and moved up the ranks based on merit (Napoleon being one of these lesser nobles), and despite the Revolution’s upheaval of nobility, the regular French soldiers remained since they never were from the nobility. Overall, France was still a significant force in Europe, especially since many former nobles in the artillery corps did not flee the country. The combination of torrential rain and French artillery is what saved the Revolution from Prussian invasion. Dumouriez and Kellerman held their ground, and the Duke of Brunswick’s forces retreated ten days later due to lack of food and dysentery.
Accompanying the Duke of Saxe-Weimar on the Prussian side of the battle was the already famous and accomplished poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who poetically painted the aftermath when he said, “From this place and from this day dates a new epoch in the history of the world, and you will be able to say, ‘I was there’” (Coox 1948, 204). Despite the romanticization by Goethe, the Battle of Valmy is not considered the most glorious of battles — not even in the top twenty of the time-period. Valmy’s importance lies in the fact that it saved the Revolution from Prussian invasion, it gave the Revolution hope in its armies, and Prussia’s failure to invade allowed the Revolution to establish the First Republic and place King Louis on trial.
References
Coox, Alvin D. “Valmy.” Military Affairs 12 (1948): 193,
Copeland, Lewis, Lawrence W. Lamm, and Stephen J. McKenna. 1999. The World’s Great Speeches. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.
Dickens, Charles. 2003. A Tale of Two Cities. Edited by Richard Maxwell. London: Penguin Books.
Tackett, Timothy, and James E. Strick. 2015. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
