Free The War of Wars by Robert Harvey

the next month. A simple measure may effect the desired purification. Convoke the people in the popular societies – Let the public functionaries appear before them – Interrogate the people on the subject of their conduct, and let their judgment dictate yours.
    At Nantes whole families were put aboard boats in the Loire and the craft scuttled: this was labelled ‘republican baptism’. Men and women were stripped naked, bound together and killed: this was dubbed ‘republican marriage’. The revolutionary army enforced order when necessary.
    The assassination of Marat in his bath by Charlotte Corday, whose mind was partly unhinged in a rather different manner to his own, left just Danton and Robespierre as the Revolution’s two consuls. The latter soon obtained evidence of Danton’s monumental corruption and threatened to expose this to force him into retirement. Meanwhile, in his paranoia, Robespierre sought to destroy also the government of Paris, whose men had been the means by which the Jacobins had seized power.
    The Jacobins also made an extraordinary attack on organized religion, forcing the bishop of Paris to denounce Christianity as priestly superstition and to deny the existence of God. ‘The Goddess of Reason’ – in fact a dancing girl at the Opera – was welcomed into the Assembly (where it was said she was already familiar with several deputies). The Paris commune had church bells cast into cannon and confiscated all silver and gold. Hebert, the commune leader, was the guiding force behind this. Robespierre, however, saw the excesses of the commune as an excuse further to impose his own order and in March 1794 he had the commune leaders arrested on ludicrous charges of conspiring with the British government. The revolutionary army was also disbanded as being a Parisian rather than national force.
    Danton at last decided that too much blood had been shed, and spoke out in favour of clemency and the defence of property. Robespierre moved more quickly and stealthily. On 31 March hehad his great rival, the most formidable orator in the Assembly and until recently the effective ruler of France, arrested. Danton went to his trial and execution with all the contempt that that formidable but deeply flawed figure was capable of. Of Robespierre he remarked: ‘The cowardly poltroon. I am the only person who could have commanded enough influence to save him.’ The words were prophetic: without Danton, Robespierre was merely an ideologue and police chief, with little power base. Danton, however unattractive, had been the true leader of the Revolution; Robespierre was a brittle, sarcastic little man who was at ease only in small gatherings and had few political skills. Yet he was a political thinker of note, and his influence on both the course of the Revolution and on one of his followers, the young Napoleon Bonaparte, was to be seminal.
    The government of France was now under the control of the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety, whose most powerful personality was Robespierre. Others include Louis de Saint-Just, who believed in the ‘complete destruction of everything that is opposed to the committee’, Herault de Sechelles, a rake, Collot d’Herbois, a psychopathic former minor playwright, as well as, later, Louis David, a superb painter and a fanatic who declared ‘let us grind plenty of red’.
    Robespierre, by contrast, was a brilliant political theoretician with a puritanical bent: his ideas in some ways were almost Marxist with their concept of the ‘general interest’. Wisdom, he asserted, ‘has disappeared in the individual and can only be found in the masses and the general interest’. For Robespierre this authoritarian view was an almost exact substitute for the old monarchical theory of personal supremacy: the People, in an abstract conception, had taken the place of the King. The movement was above the law, and was the law. The reason why the people had this power was because they had