The period of time during the French Revolution known as the Great Terror saw the deaths of hundreds of thousands of French citizens. Those responsible for instigating the Terror exempted few from persecution, as peasants and aristocrats alike were subject to the suspicion of the National Convention for counter-revolutionary activity. At first glance, the Revolution appeared to be true to the spirit of its famous motto ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’; however, as with many revolutionary movements in following decades, sinister characteristics soon emerged. Jacobin leadership became increasingly paranoid over the presence of enemies, both real and imagined, in their midst and in other spheres of French society; even those who embraced the Revolution with the greatest enthusiasm were targeted for execution.
The verbal construction of legislation passed by the National Convention was sufficiently fluid as to place citizens from all of France’s social classes in danger of accusation and conviction of counter-revolutionary activity. The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen was vague in its guarantee of civil liberties; in addition, legislation passed by the Convention on the eve of the Terror blatantly encouraged the measures of suppression characteristic of this event. Naturally such persecution, suppression of dissent, and ensuing mass executions evoked widespread disgust and horror, both within France and beyond its borders. Contemporary artists, through their work, recorded their observations of the resulting atrocities brought about by these laws; even artwork which supported the agenda of the Assembly revealed the institution’s collective paranoid and bloodthirsty mindset. While dissent was dangerous, art provided an avenue for commentary on, and expression of outrage at, contemporary sociopolitical conditions and the resulting human suffering. Accordingly, these works imparted a pronounced sense of hypocrisy and inspired fear within the French and international sphere.
By 1789, France’s ancien regime had collapsed. The nation’s economy had been decimated by numerous loans taken out by the government; although only a small percentage of this money was budgeted for maintenance of the royal court, the lavish lifestyle of the royal family and their courtiers was viewed as overly indulgent by those who lived in a harsher economic reality. While royalty and courtiers had almost constant access to food, common persons consumed a mere 600-1000 calories on average per day. The lower a French citizen’s socioeconomic status, the less favorable their odds were of receiving legal verdicts in their favor should they had been accused of a crime. Excessive taxation levied in an attempt to raise much-needed national funds had placed a burden on this already underprivileged population which would have been trying even during national economic growth; however, the recession made excessive taxation next to unbearable for such citizens. Such financial straits on both the local and national level created tension between the lowest and highest classes which contributed to governmental instability and the eventual usurpation of the ancien regime.
In order to appreciate the facility of such mass usurpation and violence, one must refer to the documents which supported such actions. The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, drafted and passed in the same year as the collapse of the ancien regime was finalized, was not unlike the Declaration of Independence drafted in the newly formed American Republic across the Atlantic. The rights guaranteed to Frenchmen by the Declaration included those of free expression in the media, equality before the law regardless of social status, presumption of innocence of accused persons until proven guilty, security in private property, and even reception of social welfare benefits.
Such principles, based on the pretext of Enlightenment rationality, were markedly progressive in comparison to the established legal and social order of the ancien regime; Section 25 of the Declaration states clearly that “sovereignty resides in the people.” Upon closer examination however, the Declaration encourages a defensive and even retaliatory legal policy. Anger at and paranoia over past social contexts are revealed in the text and in order to prevent the tyrants of the ancien regime from reclaiming power, stringent measures were passed to assure the continuation of the Republic. According to the new constitution, the role of law was to maintain societal safety and protection, as Section 27 recommends that “any person who may usurp the [popular] sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men.” Arbitrary arrests were forbidden by the new constitution, yet according to Section 10, citizens upon arrest are expected to “obey immediately; [the detained] makes himself guilty by resistance.”
Novel legal codes were not the sole influence on collective action; although dissent was risky and those who endeavored to do so faced severe consequences, many artists captured the grim reality of the Terror through their own perceptions, the perceptions of those sentenced to death and their families and through the perceptions of others in close proximity to France. Contemporary artwork and artists offer insight into the collective opinion regarding salient societal issues, and art produced after the passage of laws implementing the Great Terror were no exception. As the Revolution progressed, artistic commentary evolved accordingly. When the royal family was arrested, artists infused public opinion into their versions of the event. A depiction of the royal family from 1792 entitled Rare Animals, or the Transfer of the Royal Family from the Tuileries to the Temple shows Louis XVI as a turkey and Marie Antoinette and the royal children as barn animals. Behind them, a guard in revolutionary garb carrying a whip “herds” them to their destination. Not only can this be interpreted as an insult to the monarchy, but this also suggests that royalty, their sympathizers, and members of the old regime were ascribed subhuman status by supporters of the Revolution.
As with their arrests, attitudes regarding the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793 were recorded through sketches and paintings infused with personal and social perceptions. Un Sans-Culotte Instrument de Crimes Dansant au Miliey de Horreurs el.al depicts a woman in neoclassical dress weeping with the carnage and furor surrounding the execution of Louis XVI and others in the background. Besides her stands a sans-culotte, hovering menacingly. Jacques Louis David’s sketch of Marie Antoinette awaiting decapitation – aptly entitled Marie Antoinette on the Way to the Guillotine – contrasts sharply with previous characterizations of the late queen in her former glamor; instead, she is represented as a woman in peasant attire wearing a grim facial expression indicative of awareness of her fate. She had been stripped of her royal status, literally and figuratively, and has been depicted as a common criminal; had David not identified the condemned, the subject would have likely been difficult to identify. These works seem to reinforce the notion that beheading the royal couple had symbolically transferred political sovereignty from the monarchy to the people.
In September of 1793, Georges Jacques Danton and Claude Basire delivered speeches to the National Convention in which they identified persons and professions they suspected of being counter-revolutionary. Such persons were members of the aristocracy and clergy who were thought to be concealed among the population, “capitalists” (i.e. merchants), members of the former legal system, and other wealthy persons. Danton expressed the intention of the National Convention “to be constantly and entirely on guard against [the enemies of the Revolution]” and to this end advocated the creation of a revolutionary army. Basire declared that these counter-revolutionaries had gone unnoticed and unpunished, and that they should be “seized and strangled.” To punish such persons would satisfy the requirements of the Declaration to condemn such threats to the Revolution and popular sovereignty.
The decree which followed this meeting, the Law on Suspects, outlined the criteria of who constituted a counter-revolutionary and what constituted a counter-revolutionary action, and numerous arrests and executions began shortly thereafter. The aforementioned laws contradicted the Declaration’s provision of free expression through the media, yet also exposed the contradictory nature of the Declaration itself. While stating that people are secure in their speech, liberty, and property, the Law on Suspects prescribed that all those who engage in activities deemed a threat to republicanism (or who associate with such persons) must be detained unless they can prove their fidelity to the Republic through past or present activity.
The Great Terror started as an attempt to root out suspected dissenters in rural villages and provincial cities. Viewed with contempt as counter-revolutionaries by high-ranking city Republicans despite arguably having the most to gain from social and legal reforms, rural peasants were subjected to summary execution on account of such suspicion. One such event, the execution of peasants in Nantes through drowning in the Loire, was memorialized as an engraving and hailed as an achievement for the Revolution, as persons disloyal to the Republic had been “rightfully” exterminated. Perhaps this explains the artist’s refusal to depict human suffering; reminiscent more to a work of journalism than social commentary, the engraving depicts the boats and human figures at a distance. Other mass executions in the French countryside were to follow, but the targeting of others who resided in cities and were thought to be connected with the old regime – as well as those who had played an integral part in crafting the policies meant to root out those though to threatened the new Republic – would be closely and permanently associated with the French Revolution and the Great Terror.
The Law of 22 Prairial, passed on June 10, 1794, would prove to be the most ominous of the aforementioned legislation; while the Declaration of Rights had been vague in its guarantees of freedom, the Prairial law was broad in its qualification of those eligible to be tried and executed from treason. It dictated that those who “[abuse] the principles of the Revolution, the laws, or the measures of the government” and those “charged with public functions… who to distress the patriots or to oppress the people” be arrested and tried for treason, a situation which rarely resulted in acquittal for the accused. Activists for social reform and defenders of minority groups found their prerogatives under attack and quickly fell under suspicion. Countless people fell under these sets of criteria. As a result of the Prairial law, which permitted “moral evidence” to be leveled against the accused, scores of men and women – many of whom were by action and belief among the Revolution’s most ardent supporters – found themselves before the guillotine.
If Drowning in the Loire was a muted depiction of human rights atrocities committed in the name of the Revolution, James Gillray’s The Blood of the Murdered Crying for Vengeance and The Zenith of French Glory; the Pinnacle of Liberty are graphic counterparts to such portrayals. Blatantly infused with blood and depictions of callousness to human suffering, the first shows Louis’ detached head and body on the scaffold; where his head was once attached, animate blood flows out offering an oath of revenge, leaving little doubt that others thought the blood of other victims demanded the same. The Zenith of French Glory depicts a citizen engaged in obscene functions in close proximity to the hanged bodies of clergymen, hinting at the emergence of a furious and literally ungodly mob out of the Revolutionary fervor facilitated by the Law on Suspects and the Law of the Prairial.
As those connected with the old regime were targeted for extermination, so too were those who had been closely associated with the Revolution. The Death of Robespierre has a caption condemning Maximilien Robespierre – arguably the most widely recognized republican – as someone who “failed the Revolution” and in the process killed many innocents. Condemning Robespierre as someone who failed the principles of the Revolution may seem contradictory, yet the instability of the new Republic and its government served to increase collective paranoia. Added to this was the disappointment felt by many towards the Revolution’s failed promises (many revolutionary social clubs had been formally disbanded and forbidden by the National Assembly) and the horror, both within France and abroad, over the frenzied executions.
Despite the suspicion centered on the prominent figures of the Revolution, ordinary citizens were not exempt from such paranoia, and they continued to endure the brunt of the fury unfolding around them. An English engraved entitled Summoning to Execution depicts citizens being informed of their death sentences; grieving family members are embracing their condemned loved ones while the menacing informer waits to take them away to their deaths. This engraving suggests that the outside world viewed the actions of the French as barbaric and despotic, but also shows the consequences of the Law on Suspects and the Law of the Prairial levied on ordinary citizens, which almost always resulted in capricious profiling of persons considered a threat to the Revolution’s ideals.
Art produced in the time of the French Revolution depicted the social consequences of the policies enacted in the new republic. From regicide and purges meant to root out real or perceived dissent, art was a medium of expression which reflected the political culture and personal opinions of the artists. English artists portrayed the Revolution in a manner which was intended to inspire fear, sadness, and disgust at the actions of the French, as the French artists discussed above were either more muted in their depictions or glorified the acts of execution. Where English artistic reactions to the Revolution were generally constant in their disapproval, French artists seemed to follow the pattern of public opinion; as events progressed, depictions of the royal family went from degrading to sympathetic as the Revolution itself went from triumphant to horrific.
If the laws passed by the National Convention reflected a sense of necessity in implementing such repressive and bloody tactics in an attempt to strengthen the new Republic and grant it longevity, art captured the social ramifications and perceptions of such collective trauma. These illustrations also inspired fear of such events playing out in their own society. Attributing the disenchantment of French society towards the Revolution and the brutality of the Terror to contemporary art would be inaccurate; instead, pre-existing feelings were put to canvas and provide insight into the activities and opinions which contributed to such sentiments. In the end, the Republic would be dissolved, but the memories of the Revolution and the Terror would be preserved through the works of the artists who witnessed and lived through one of the bloodiest events in French history.
Works Cited
Anonymous. “The Death of Robespierre,” 1793. From The Center for History and News Media. Stable URL http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/11. Accessed 7/07/2010.
Anonymous. “Rare Animals; or the Transfer of the Royal Family from the Tuileries to the Temple,” 1792. From The Center for History and News Media. Stable URL http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/192. Accessed 6/30/2010.
Anonymous. “Summoning to Execution,” c.1795. From The Center for History and News Media. Stable URL http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/186/. Accessed 7/07/2010.
Anonymous. “Un Sans Culotte Instrument de Crimes Dasant au Milieu de Horreurs et.al.,” 1793. From The Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue. Stable URL http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.05416/. Accessed 7/07/2010.
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David, Jacques Louis. Marie Antoinette on the Way to the Guillotine, 1793. Stable URL http://www.jacqueslouisdavid.org/Marie-Antoinette-On-The-Way-To-The-Guillotine-1793.html. Accessed 7/12/2010.
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Gillray, James.“The Zenith of French Glory; The Pinnacle of Liberty,” 1793. In Regina Janes, “Beheadings,” in Representations, No. 35, Special Issue: Monumental Histories, pg 31. 2001.
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“Law on Suspects, 1793. National Convention.” In The French Revolution: A Document Collection, pp. 230-232. Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo ed. Boston, Mass., Houghton Mifflin 1999.
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