Bastille Day and the French Revolution

Article of Interest

Bastille Day and the French Revolution

Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D.

The Ancien Régime and the Storming of the Bastille

July 14 is Bastille Day, a national holiday in France that commemorates 215 years from the day a Parisian mob stormed the "infamous" prison and commenced the upheaval of the French Revolution. The collapse of Soviet communism should not deter the invocation of the dreadful legacy of the French Revolution, the same revolution that a century later inspired the even worse and bloodier Russian Revolution and its communist aftermath.

The French Revolution began not with the clamor of the common people but with the theoretical conjectures of the blue-blooded aristocracy and the high clergy of the ancien régime, who had fallen for and become enamored with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the views of the enlightenment. This was convincingly demonstrated in the Assembly of Notables in February 1787, a gathering of wise men that King Louis XVI called for and convened to help him solve economic problems afflicting France, particularly the lack of solvency. This Assembly of Notables, in turn, advised the King to call the Estates General, the body which traditionally had the authority to raise taxes but which had not been summoned since 1614 during the reign of the popular king, Henry IV. The Estates General, which sparked the revolution with the Tennis Court Oath of June 1789, became the revolutionary National Assembly. The storming of the Bastille followed in July 14, 1789. Before that notable event, however, the riots of the revolution spilling into the streets of France began not in Paris but in the streets of Grenoble, the actual cradle of the revolution, with the Day of Tiles (June 10, 1788). The insurrection spread from there to the countryside with desultory grain riots, flaming more deliberately (from March through April of 1789) in the concerted defiance and in protest of the hated game laws protecting birds and animals for the hunting sport of the King and the nobility. Thereafter, the mobs also learned to command the streets after the Réveillon Riots (April 1789) so that by mid-summer of 1789, they had had ample practice for the storming of the Bastille.

Regardless of what the reader has been led to believe, the earliest revolutionaries were not bourgeoisie, but nobility and high clergy, many of them functionaries in the old regime, including some of the king's ministers and advisors. Intoxicated by idealism and Rousseau's sublime concepts of virtue, reason, equality, etc., they had set out to correct real or perceived iniquities in France. Louis XVI's loyal ministers saw the dangers lurking ahead, but seemed impotent to effectively protect the monarchy and solve the problems afflicting France, particularly the serious financial problem and the threat of national bankruptcy.

The truth is that in the 1780s, the old regime was of itself undergoing changes of modernity in trade, technology and laissez faire capitalism, influenced by the teachings of Francois Quesnay, the French economist and physician, and his physiocrat followers. Unfortunately, rather than being openly welcomed by the people, these changes, liberalizing the French economy, were actually decried and resented by the masses because they brought with them insecurity and incertitude. The common people wanted cheap bread and regimentation, and the lesser nobility sided with them because they wanted to hold onto the only thing left to them --- their titles of nobility and what remained of their ancient land privileges, poor as most of them might have been. The emerging bourgeois, on the other hand, supported greater economic freedom and supported these changes. By the time the middle class realized how fast changes were taking place within the revolution, it was too late to turn back. By August 4, 1789, the National Assembly had abrogated the special privileges of the nobility and the clergy. The lofty Declaration of the Rights of Man was also proclaimed.

It was the upper crust of the high nobility and clergy militating from above (operating in the voice of Mirabeau, Siéyès, Tallyrand, etc.) who initially led, and the mob who followed. The mob learned quickly to force radical change upon the National legislature, operating with ferocious bellicosity from below. In the two years preceding the upheaval of the Revolution, the working poor, peasants, and subsistence farmers had suffered greatly, and many of them had become displaced persons because of the unusually harsh cold winter, followed by the bitter harvest of 1788-1789. Suffice it to say, it wasn't the bourgeoisie and lesser nobility who led the revolution without recognizing the perilous nature of their actions, but the nobility and clergy who were making war against their own class that set the revolution in motion. Simon Schama provided ample evidence for this in his widely acclaimed book, Citizens (1989). This fiery revolution became a tumbling, violent cascade that later they were unable to control. In the end, for thousands of them, if they didn't escape as émigrés from the revolution they had helped to create --- they paid the ultimate price in the guillotine.

Charlotte Corday and the Girondins

Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer, walked bravely into the belly of the beast at 30 Rue des Cordeliers on July 13, 1793, and carried out the assassination of the radical, bloodthirsty Jean-Paul Marat. The savage Marat had already forced the expulsion of the brave Girondin leaders from the National Convention (June 2), and he was finalizing his plans for their arrest and grisly trip to the guillotine when Corday cut his life short. The guillotine, though, was already covering the ground red with blood at the Place de la Révolution. The story is beautifully told in Stanley Loomis' masterpiece, Paris in the Terror (1964). Marat's direct participation in the bloody conspiracy to eliminate the Girondin Party was prevented by the fateful deed of the heroine from Caen, Charlotte Corday. However, his demise also served to further fuel the fire of the gathering conflagration --- and ignite the Reign of Terror. Marat would turn into a revolutionary martyr, his body interred along with Mirabeau, Descartes, and Voltaire.

The Girondins, led by Madame Manon Philipon, her husband Roland de la Platiere, the journalist Pierre Brissot and the orator Vergniaud, were divided and remained oblivious to the mortal threat of Maximilien Robespierre in late 1792 and early 1793; they were for the most part young patriots and idealists, not conniving politicians or statesmen. As a party, they failed to recognize the need, or rather the necessity, for them to forge an alliance with Georges Danton, not just to win politically against the treacherous Robespierre, but for their very own survival. Some of the Girondins led by Madame Roland could not forgive Danton for his involvement in the brutal September Massacres of 1792.

While by 1791, the Constituent Assembly provided for a constitutional monarchy under King Louis XVI, the latter was short-lived and ineffective. The Legislative Assembly, which followed the Constituent Assembly (like its predecessor, the National Assembly), was subject to threat, coercion, and intimidation by the mob, the Communes, sans culottes, and the ubiquitous tricoteuses and other malcontents who had been aroused out of the cesspool of society by the calls of class envy and warfare by the usual demagogues.

The mobs were incited by the likes of Marat (L'Ami du Peuple) and Hébert (Pére Duchesne) to apply pressure from below. The revolutionary mobs would intimidate the Assembly with their swords, clubs, muskets, and pikes marching outside the halls of the Tuileries, demanding more radical political, social and economic change, more government largesse, or else blood. The leaders of the Cordeliers Club, Georges Danton, and the Jacobin Club, Maximilien Robespierre, used threats and exhorted the people to violence in rhetorical speeches or through the printed words in the numerous revolutionary pamphlets and newspapers.

Pressure from above in this scissors strategy was used when the Assembly and later the Convention were harangued or threatened by the radical Jacobin leaders when they rose to speak and make similar demands from the rostrum of the assembly.

This scissors strategy of applying simultaneous pressure from above and below to force destructive, radical changes, and ultimately bring on dictatorship was assimilated and presented by Karl Marx in the next century as a form of political and economic theory, the class struggle of dialectical materialism (also borrowing from Georg Hegel's dialectics). This blueprint was used by 20th century totalitarians, particularly communists, in their quest for and consolidation of power.

In the social democracies of the 20th century, this strategy, in a milder form wrapped in "compassionate" public welfarism and social concern, is still used today effectively to bring change and increase the size, scope and power of the central government --- socialism, at the expense of individual liberties and freedom. This still happens today in our society, when the media go searching for victims to parade in front of television cameras while leftist politicians call for more government to protect those same alleged victims who have "fallen through the cracks."

Before the ushering in of the Terror, the French revolutionary government was not a true republic, despite its appellation, but violent "democracy" in action, degenerating brutally and chaotically into mob rule, mobocracy. The revolutionists led by Jean Paul Marat, Danton, Saint-Just, René Hébert, Robespierre unleashed a horrible monster, a monster that, in the end, they could not control, for as Pierre Vergniaud said, "The revolution, like Saturn, is devouring its' own children." One by one, indeed, they would be devoured by the revolutionary monster.

When the Constitution of 1793 was popularly ratified, the citizens had to vote openly under the watchful eye of the revolution's 44,000-member Committee of Vigilance. Shortly after, the Constitution, with its lofty goals and rights, was suspended. Anarchy interspersed with tyranny was the order of the day. Eventually, the Deputies of the Convention came to rule by decree and at the pleasure of the oligarchy of the Committee of Public Safety headed by Robespierre and his ultra-radical Jacobins. At this point, the revolution jumped from mobocracy to dictatorship.

Gruesome, still one cannot help but draw subtle parallels between some of the events that unfolded during the French Revolution and the authoritarian, secular, and collectivist tendencies that have gradually, almost imperceptibly, crept into our American republic. This has taken place in contemporary American society in the name of (social/liberal) democracy and in the atmosphere of social egalitarianism (collectivism). The underlying engine is once again the incitement of the politics of envy, demands for wealth redistribution, and the concomitant calls for more growth in the size, power, and scope of the already behemothic federal government.

We learn from the French Revolution that forced egalitarianism leads to oppression, despite the assertion that equates liberty with equality. The fact is one can have personal liberty and equality of opportunity and equality before the law (blind justice), but you cannot have both liberty and equality of outcome. Liberty entails personal choice, as well as social and economic freedom that inherently produces differences in outcome (viz, inequalities); the French revolutionists never understood that.

Maximilien Robespierre --- The Incorruptible

The Incorruptible, Maximilien Robespierre, the Voice of Reason, did not give the French people a Republic of Virtue but a bloody reign of terror incited by mob rule, and the descent into barbarism with the mass killings of men, women, and children by their own government, not because of their deeds or misdeeds, or any real crimes, but because of their birth, opinions, and associations --- or simply, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The guillotine was kept busy during the Terror, and when it was not fast enough cutting commoner and aristocratic heads, other grisly methods were used, such as burning, hacking, stabbing, shootings, even cannonades. In the city of Nantes, the sanguinary Carrier instituted the brutal "republican marriages" whereby naked men and women were tied together and thrown into the Loire River. Others were simply tied to barges that were scuttled with resultant mass drownings, the infamous noyades.

At the time of the King's Trial, many deputies spoke, acted, and voted in fear of their lives (even Danton alluded to this, "it's our heads or theirs," according to author, Stanley Loomis), after all, they were deliberating in the belly of the Revolution, in the midst of Paris, surrounded by the ever threatening radical mobs. Many, perhaps most, deputies who were from "The Plain" and voted for regicide did so in fear of and to protect their own lives (it's the King's head or my own!), and not because of the persuasive skills of the sanguinary figures, Robespierre and Saint-Just. The Deputies spoke, debated, and voted in fear of their lives in the various people's assemblies up to the National Convention, fearing the Parisian mobs (and in the summer and fall of 1792 also of the dreaded federe, who inspired the revolutionary hymn Le Marseillaise) and their incitement by the various radical leaders such as Marat and later Hébert, as well as Danton and Robespierre.

Despite Robespierre's incessant reference to the virtue of the people, he only trusted the people as an abstract concept, like democracy, when the mob's passion could be rallied to serve the purposes of the revolution. The mob's violence was justified in the eyes of Robespierre when it answered his own personal call to carry out political riots and revolutionary insurrections. Jacobins, like Robespierre, harangued the convention from above, while the mob intimidated the convention from below to force it to move radically to the far left of the political and social spectrum. This is the very effective political/revolutionary scissors strategy of applying simultaneous pressure from above and below to attain radical change at work pre-dating Hegelian dialectics (dialectical idealism), Marx's dialectical materialism, and Gramsci's revolutionary theories for the overturning of society.

Indeed, we have seen the scissors strategy of applying pressure from above and below when the bloodthirsty mobs of the French Revolution, the sans culottes, and the Paris Commune intimidated the National Assembly and the Legislative Assembly with their swords and pikes, marching outside the Convention at the Tuileries demanding change in "government" policy or pleading for the blood of their enemies, while the leaders of the Jacobin Club serving as Deputies clubbed the Convention from within, haranguing the assembly from the speaker's podium, calling for slightly less of but essentially the same changes as the mob in the name of the people.

Robespierre recognized this fact and throughout the period of 1789-1793, aligned himself with the most vociferous and violent, minority of the elected "representatives of the people." Later, after assuming effective control of the Committee of Public Safety and his dictatorship was operational, Robespierre came, particularly in late 1793 and 1794, to no longer have any use for the mobs, and then his references to the people became a complete abstraction.

Between 1792-1794, The Incorruptible was instrumental in setting the stage for, and then presided over, the Reign of Terror. His technique was simple but time-tested --- namely, the Machiavellian tactic of divide et impera ("divide and conquer"). And, he did so with gruesome efficiency eliminating one by one his divided opposition --- i.e., first the monarchists followed by the Feuillants; then Girondins; then the Hébertists; then the Dantonists, its leader Camille Desmoulins and their followers; and finally then anyone who stood in the his way and the continuation of the Terror. Robespierre had succeeded in establishing institutionalized terror as an instrument of State power. He presided over it and used it against his enemies. For him, the end justified the means.

Robespierre sought to create a heaven on earth with himself as high priest, as became evident to many revolutionaries, on the occasion of the Festival of the Supreme Being (June 8, 1794; 20 Prairial). The reality is that while imbibing of this display of virtue and reason, he was accelerating the already rapid action of the guillotine. The Law of Suspects, which had been in effect since Sept. 1793, provided that those persons who by conduct or language were "enemies of liberty" were suspect and liable for immediate arrest. Sharpening the efficiency of the revolutionary tribunals to unimaginable levels of tyranny, the law of 22 Prairial eliminated the rules of evidence and the right of legal defense of suspects. Thus, in the six weeks preceding the Thermidorean Reaction (July 27, 1794), Robespierre had set the stage for institutionalized, legal mass murder, and 1376 victims were executed at the Place du Trône alone by the guillotine.

Before that, of course, the young, idealistic Girondins had been executed en masse with concocted evidence that everyone knew was penned by Robespierre's young friend, Camille Desmoulin. Later Camille cried when he realized his bearing false witness would send his former friends and colleagues, now political enemies, to the guillotine. The heads of 22 brave Girondin leaders, including Madame Roland, Vergniaud and Brissot rolled. Maximilien Robespierre, the ultimate hero (or anti-hero) of the French Revolution, a national event still magnificently celebrated today in France, believed in and defended the institution of mass murder in the name of the revolution. The country lawyer from Arras was totally devoid of mercy, even when it came to sending revolutionary heroes and former friends to the guillotine. L'Incorruptible thus sent Camille, his protégé, now a friend of Danton and the man who led the attack on the Bastille on July 14, 1789, to the guillotine. A few days later Camille's wife, Lucile followed him to the scaffold. She had pleaded with Robespierre to save her husband's life in the name of their infant son, Horace, to whom Robespierre was godfather --- but to no avail.

Robespierre also sent the "Titan of the Revolution," Georges Danton --- the man who had transformed the Paris Commune into the Insurrectionary Commune (i.e., in preparation for the storming of the Tuileries), the man who had inspired the Miracle of Valmy, and the revolution's greatest orator and hero --- to the guillotine. Danton had finally come to his senses and had tried to stop the Terror. He also pleaded, along with Camille Desmoulins, to end the excesses of the revolution and to free 73 Girondin Deputies held in prison among the 150 representatives of former assemblies or of the sitting National Convention. Robespierre, implacable as ever, refused to ease the Terror. The Incorruptible, thought he was in firm control of the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Tribunals and held all the cards. Hébert and his friends had already "been shaved by the national razor." Camille and Danton and their friends had followed that same spring of 1794. General Westermann, one of the military leaders of the storming of the Tuileries and the overthrow of the monarchy, August 10, 1793, voluntarily joined his friends and went with the Dantonists to receive the cold blade of the guillotine.

And yet, Robespierre tried to dissociate himself as much as possible from those decisions that could later incriminate him. When he signed Danton's death warrant, which had to be signed by the members of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security, he scribbled his signature in very small letters towards the corner and in between two other signatures, as furtively as possible, trying to escape responsibility for his action. Vacillation and acting stealthily against his enemies were two of Robespierre's modus operandi.

With these tactics, Robespierre nearly succeeded in having others do his dirty work while working stealthily against his divided enemies --- all the while trying to avoid responsibility. He never frontally attacked his enemies unless assured of victory. But, in the end, all of these precautions were of no use; it all collapsed when the erstwhile calls for Vive la République! Vive Robespierre became "Down with the Tyrant!" But I am getting ahead of myself.

In his book, Robespierre --- The Fool as Revolutionary, Otto Scott writes, "Robespierre simply died, but folly has a virulence that outlasts its inventor. He inspired more communes, more voices of virtue, more Lenins, and Castros and Maos, more murder and hatred, more death and misery, than any other of the Sacred Fools that have emerged to plague honest men."

The scissors strategy of having seemingly desperate forces acting together towards a common subversive goal and to force destructive change was assimilated as dialectics by Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto. It was learned well and followed by communists in the consolidation of power in their totalitarian regimes. We have seen this methodology followed in the 20th century in varied forms in Red China, the former Soviet Union, Cuba, and other former Soviet satellites during the Cold war.

In the Paris Jacobin Club from 1791-1793, Maximilien Robespierre developed the methods of public self-criticism, "purifying scrutiny" as he called it, which preceded purges of individuals and which amounted to their death warrants. Mass arrests and executions followed these purges. This methodology of mass purges were later emulated and surpassed by totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, particularly Joseph Stalin's. To facilitate the arrest and apprehension of political opponents, 20th century tyrants also followed the lead of the French revolutionists. They also established neighborhood committees (for public surveillance), revolutionary tribunals (for the administration of swift "people's" justice), and mass executions. The radical journals and pamphlets together with the publication of the most radical speeches delivered at the revolutionary clubs paved the way for manipulation of the press, the application of mass psychology for State indoctrination, etc.

As a guiding light, the revolutionists had stated that "all is permitted to those who act in the revolutionary direction." Using similar language shortly after the triumph of his revolution, the 20th century dictator, Fidel Castro, would admonish Cuban writers and intellectuals, "With the Revolution everything, against the Revolution, nothing." At the time, he was already instituting neighborhood committees and administering people's justice to consolidate his power.

The Denouement

We have seen that the French Revolution did not give the French people a true constitutional republic extending to its citizens the natural rights of man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The French Revolution wanted to go beyond that and create a utopia of happiness, misunderstanding liberty and adding fraternity and equality to the brew. Forced fraternity and equality were proven to be and remain mutually exclusive from individual liberty. While our American republic respected the rule of law and protected the basic concepts of individual rights and freedom --- namely, life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness --- the French Revolution established mob rule followed by dictatorship. It showed the world and put into practice the scissor strategy of forcing radical change upon society using fear and ultimately, terror as its basis --- a methodology that Karl Marx later expounded into dialetical materialism and communism. That philosophy, Marxism, would cost an excess of 100 million people their lives in the tainted 20th century.

The French Revolution had the least amount of success implementing the wealth redistribution policies of some of its adherents. Neither fraternity, liberty, nor economic equality were achieved. Terror was established on all fronts. While the state did confiscate property of the enemies of the revolution, Robespierre and his Jacobins kept such property that was salvaged in the hands of the government, and the rank and file revolutionists had to keep an inventory of such appropriated goods and properties. In a way, this firm, strict accounting of expropriated property (i.e., that was not stolen or destroyed) was helpful in keeping the mob from looting, overrunning and turning France into a wasteland. Robespierre disdained material wealth. Poverty to him was synonymous with virtue. The Incorruptible worshipped not on the altar of wealth and indulgence, but on the stone of abstract altruism, abstinence, and personal power. The fall of Danton was predicated, in part, by the economic and financial misdeeds of some of his close friends such as Chabot and Fabre d' Eglantine. For this association and Danton's calls for economic freedom, Robespierre called his former friend and colleague a "rotten idol" and sent him to the guillotine.

Francois Babeuf, a political activist, was one, if not the first, modern communist.* He espoused collectivism, agrarian reform and economic equality during the French Revolution, but his ideas never took complete hold with the leadership of the Jacobins. According to David P. Jordan in his book, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre (1985), a virtual apologia of the Incorruptible, both Saint-Just and Robespierre believed the state had a role to play in providing for "minimal subsistence" to the people. This was "the debt of the rich to the people." Buissart, an old friend of Robespierre from Arras, wrote that the people "were dying of hunger in the midst of abundance. I believe it is necessary to kill the mercantile aristrocracy just as we killed that of the priests and nobles." Robespierre never went as far as that, although he threatened and admonished "the rich egoist may share the fate of the nobles and the King if they continue to behave like them."

In the summer of 1793, the National Convention, in an effort to ease the worsening economic situation, went so far as to institute wage and price controls as well as regulation of the grain market. The Assembly imposed a ceiling on the price of grain and other grocery items, what amounted to an economic terror. Girondin leader Charles Barbaroux, already a marked man by the Hébertists, nevertheless spoke in opposition. He complained that the ceiling would exacerbate the problem of supply and demand and aggravate the scarcities. Barbaroux also predicted inflation because of the devaluation of the currency and loose fiscal policy. Every prediction he made came to pass. Vergniaud, the golden-tongued orator and Girondin leader, and Danton opposed these extreme economic measures. Nevertheless, that summer, the Convention implemented price ceilings, maximum wages, relief for the poor via obligatory loans, and exorbitant taxes on the rich and forced acceptance of fiat currency, assignats. Jacques Roux addressed the Convention on June 25, 1793 and accused the new "commercial aristocracy" of being "more terrible than the [old] nobility." He called for the crushing of the rich in France. On July 26, the death penalty was passed for hoarders of grain and "blood-sucker" currency speculators. The armées révolutionnaires were empowered to snoop around the towns and countryside to look for hoarders and speculators. They enforced the economic Terror by ransacking villages and terrorizing rural communities. The monetary policy failed and the deprecated assignats were demonized with the creation of a black market for hard currency. The economic Terror was truly underway by the fall of 1793.

The Ventose Decrees (February 26, March 3, 1794) proposed by Robespierre's most trusted lieutenant Saint-Just, provided that the State should confiscate émigré property and distribute it to the needy. Saint-Just and other Jacobins argued that the enemies of the revolution had no civil rights and their property should be confiscated. Robespierre, although supportive of these decrees, never felt he had the support of even the most hardline Jacobins to implement these decrees. These decrees died without enactment. Earlier, Pierre Chaumette, leader of the Paris Commune, had also militated and demanded that the National Convention authorize the government to confiscate private property and distribute it to the "people." He had the support of Hanriot, commander of the National Guard, and Pache, the mayor of Paris. Nevertheless, the ruling Jacobins in the National Convention, by this time in control of the sans-culottes army, also rejected this demand, to the chagrin of René Hébert and his ultra-radical followers.

Just before the denouement of 9 Thermidor, Barère had tried to reach a compromise with Saint-Just and Couthon. He would steer through the legislature the Ventrose Decrees, if only Robespierre would stop hurting Deputies in his quest for virtue. Robespierre refused to compromise. In his speech on 8 Thermidor, he would continue to exterminate the wayward Deputies and enemies of the revolution in his quest to build his Republic of Virtue.

By the spring of 1794, the valiant Girondins, Danton, and his friends Camille and Lucile Desmoulins, and even the sanguinary René Hébert --- had all been guillotined. The right side of the Convention stood empty; the center, "the Plain," remained silent, cowed and stupefied; even the radical Jacobins on the left, the Montagnards, were beginning to fear for their lives. The far ends of the political spectrum, like an excessively bent horseshoe, representing the extremes of anarchy (right) and tyranny (left), became separated by a narrow gap, that of anarcho-tyranny, which agent provocateurs, immorality, and chaos had bridged with the establishment of Robespierre's stern dictatorship.

As the Deputies trembled in fear, and Paris became deserted and terrorized, one man relatively unknown in history senses his own life is in mortal danger. He exhorts and finally convinces his fellow Deputies to act both decisively and swiftly in order to save their lives.

The rallying figure, Joseph Fouché, is relatively obscure in the annals of history, although the details of his life are well known. He was no saint; as a Jacobin, he was ruthless. He committed atrocities as a représentant-en-mission in Lyons in the early part of the Terror. But at the moment of truth, a fearless determined personality was needed to end the Terror that Robespierre had just recently escalated and did not want to end. Fouché conspired and bred intrigue in the shadows, rallying the conspirators, a motley crew, Vadier, Tallien, Barras, and even the sanguinary Billaud-Varenne and Collot d' Herbois, both in the Committee of Public Safety. The final showdown would take place in the convention, all or nothing, against Robespierre and his allies.

And on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794), the unthinkable finally happened at high noon. At the Convention, Robespierre was not allowed to speak. Vainly he rose to speak at the rostrum, but a group of conspirators prevented him from speaking. When he reached the podium, his eloquence uncharacteristically failed him. "The blood of Danton is choking you," yelled a conspirator. When Robespierre was finally able to speak, he could only utter, "For the last time, will you, let me be heard, President of Assassins!" But, it was of no use. The spell of terror and intimidation had been broken by a group of desperate but, ultimately, courageous men who acted as cornered animals, finally assisted by an embolden Convention. Vive la convention! They cried in unison.

The fall of Robespierre, brought an end to the Terror. Robespierre and his henchmen, his brother Augustin, St. Just, Couthon and Hanriot went to the guillotine. Le Bas shot himself to death at the Hôtel de Ville. Robespierre and those closely associated with him in his Committee of Public Safety dictatorship had come tumbling down to a gruesome end.

It was only after the fall of Robespierre and the Thermidorean Reaction that the French revolutionists, the Thermidoreans and the Directory, instituted laissez faire capitalism. Although the political situation was by no means stable, the government welcomed new businesses and entrepreneurship from 1794-1799. Nevertheless, it all ended with the coup of 19th Brumaire and the ascendancy of Napoleon Bonaparte. The revolution was then formally and quietly ended by a decree of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. The political cycle was nearly complete. The French Revolution that had brought about the chaos of mobocracy, anarchy, and tyranny had ended in dictatorship and empire.

Footnote

* Francois Babeuf (1760-1797) founded his journal in 1794 and founded the Conspiracy of Equals in 1795, to overthrow the ruling Directory and establish virtual communism in France. In 1797, he was arrested, tried, and executed for leading a plot to overthrow the government.

Dr. Faria is editor emeritus of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (formerly the Medical Sentinel) and author of Vandals at the Gates of Medicine (1995), Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (1997), and Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002). His essays and books are available at www.haciendapub.com.