All consuming revolutions

The horrors of the French Revolution echo down the years.  From Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution 1793-1794 by Olivier Blanc.  

While going through boxes 111—195 in the W series of the Archives Nationales, a series of papers supposed to have belonged to the public prosecutor of the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal, I came to realize that, among the thousands and thousands of unpublished documents to be found there, the most moving were the letters written by men and women condemned to death a few hours or even a few minutes before their departure for the scaffold. These letters, most of which were intercepted by the courts and handed over to Fouquier-Tinville, ended up stuck into files without any apparent order. Those published in this book represent only a small proportion of those final, moving farewells. All those men and women, who, sometimes a week or so earlier, were dining peacefully at their family table or were on their way to the theatre when arrested, nevertheless had time to accustom themselves to the idea of their imminent death.

And why were they arrested?  Because the Revolution needed money for the totalitarian state.

It was soon the suspects who were to form the bulk of the prison population after the passing by the Convention on 17 September 1793 of the famous law that bears their name.

This new law laid down a very wide definition of suspects that made it possible to reach all the enemies of the Revolution with the utmost ease. All those who, by their behaviour, their associates, what they said or what they wrote, showed themselves to be ‘advocates of tyranny or federalism and enemies of liberty’ were defined as suspects. Those who did not have legal means of support and those who, having relations abroad, had failed to demonstrate their loyalty to the Revolution were suspect. Lastly, those who had emigrated and who had nevertheless been acquitted before the law was passed were suspects!

The law relating to suspects that marked the arrival of the Terror seems to have been mainly intended to bring a rapid halt to counterrevolutionary action and its concerted manoeuvres to destabilize the regime. To begin with, such destabilization could be economic, for the opponents of the Revolution soon realized that it would be more effective to attack the government in the economic and financial fields, rather than by armed intervention. Although the realization of these plans was defective, the idea was correct enough. Indeed, since 1789, the currency was strongly secured by the national wealth: the confiscated lands and wealth of the crown, the clergy, the emigres and those convicted of being enemies of the Revolution. But the realization of capital through the sale of this property was slow and difficult: the buyers, including speculators, deferred their payments by spreading them over a longer period of time, gambling on the rapid fall of the assignat. Many a property confiscated in 1791 was sold off in 1795 at half its true value!

Since the expected government revenues were not enough to supply the state with the money it needed, assignats were issued on a massive scale to cover, first, everyday expenditure, then, after 1792, the war. At the same time, taxes were no longer being collected and patriotic gifts or contributions, wealth taxes and other forced loans were failing to bring in the revenue expected of them. To cap it all, the civil servants in the Treasury and those working in the administration of government finances generally were often loyal to the ancien regime and did their best, if only through inertia, to sabotage the new order.