 |
| Interior of a Revolutionary Committee. After a drawing by A.-E. Fragonard, 1797. Musée Carnavalet https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-carnavalet/oeuvres/interieur-d-un-comite-revolutionnaire-a-paris-1793-1794-103eme-planche-des#infos-principales |
I have now discovered a little more information about the activities of the notorious Revolutionary Committee of the Bonnet-Rouge section... ..
The area covered by the Bonnet-Rouge centred on the carrefour de la Croix-Rouge (now place Michel-Debré) in the prosperous Faubourg Saint-Germain. It had a reputation as one of the most radical sections of Paris. Several of its activists - Devaux, Gobeau, Godefroy, Millier - were members of the General Council of the Commune on 10th August. Adrien-Nicolas Gobeau was to be guillotined with Robespierre on 10 Thermidor. Another member, a failed lawyer, Nicolas-Charles Pijeau-Villiers, was Treasurer of the Committee of General Security. Other individuals - Joseph Lebrun, Louis Seguin, Lecreps and Savoy - were known agitators, "patriotes très decidés", in the orbit of Hébert and Vincent.
The Revolutionary Committee of the section, however, seemed primarily intent on making a profit from its situation. The sweeping powers of arrest and detention laid down in the decree of 17 September 1793 offered the opportunity. Every authority which had the right of arrest acquired a vast "depot" to house its suspects - the municipality, the chief of police and every Revolutionary Committee. There were perhaps up to sixty such prisons. "We had arrived at that disastrous era when it was necessary to have Maisons d'arrêt everywhere, where every section of Paris jealously guarded its own, at the particular disposition of its Revolutionary Committee"(Histoire des prisons, 1797, t.III, p.89), The legislation specified that suspects were to be held at their own expense; they were forced to pay for their board and lodging, for transportation, even for the guard dogs. It was, as one source has it, "une sorte de spéculation de finance assez lucrative" (Précis, p.187-8) The Bonnet-Rouge section was only one of several involved in similar ventures, but its activities were particularly extortionate. The trial of 1795 revealed that the Committee had gone so far as to destroy whole sections of its register in order to conceal its illicit profiteering. On the advise of Pijean-Villiers, more than thirty pages had been torn out of their official minutes and rebound with replacement pages. According to the act of indictment, these were "men without probity and honour, who have deceived public faith, and covered themselves with the mask of patriotism".
The Committee ran not one but two Maisons d'arrêt. The first, set up in September 1793, was a comparatively modest affair, the former barracks of the Gardes-françaises in the rue de Sèvres. In this damp, overcrowded and insanitary facility, inmates were charged between 20 sous and 12 livres, yielding a gross profit of well over 200 francs a day. In March 1794 the Committee acquired a second, more grandiose building in the rue de Sèvres, commonly known as the Maison des Oiseaux. This was a comparatively pleasant prison with decent rooms and a garden to promenade in, but the favourable conditions came at a price. According to one estimate the total income for this location of as much as 150,000 livres per annum; the committee admitted to only 2,400 livres. The lease had never been signed by the owner or his representatives (Précis, p.188).
The surviving accounts are almost exclusively by former prisoners and give little insight into the mentality of the Committee members. The researches of Guy Périer de Féral (1952, p.136) suggest that that there was a small core of active members - Ballière, Laloue, Laquerière, Poincelot, Tosi , Vernay - who carried out almost all the domiciliary visits. Jean-Baptiste Daire was in charge of the day-to-day running of the Maison des Oiseaux. Two men of Italian descent - Tosi and Piccini, "homme de lettres" and ardent admirer of Voltaire, dominated their colleagues by virtue of their education. Pijeau-Villiers, who did not take part in the active operations of the Committee was an important point of contact with the Committee of General Security. He is usually credited with organising the acquisition of the prisons and (more certainly) with the subsequent destruction of the records.
As critics pointed out, these activists apart, the majority of the Revolutionary Committee had little previous involvement in Revolutionary affairs. It would seem that their primary loyalty was to their immediate confreres; several were heard to boast that they would not defer to the Convention but act only as they, the Committee, saw fit. The list of individuals reveals men of very humble origins. The most respectable were three painters (of heraldic arms, carriages and miniatures) who had been ruined and put out of work by the Revolution. Other tradesmen were a chandler, a vinegar seller, a salter, a locksmith. Often such men made ends meet by less reputable sidelines - lottery ticket sales, petty loans or running biribi tables. Other members included two former domestic servants, a coachman, a disgraced gendarme, a street cobbler and two casual errand-runners. Two months previously one man had emptied cesspits; he was said to have been in rags and without a sou though now he well dressed and boasted comfortable lodgings. Some had reputations for unreliability: four had lost positions through infidelity or fraud; three were known drunkards. Examination of the surviving documents show that most were barely literate. To such men the Revolution was a chance to invert the social order - a triumph of have-nots over haves, the vengeance, sometimes quite literally, of servants over their former masters. Poor patriots no doubt felt they had every right to acquire riches and comforts formerly reserved for the privileged few.
.
Reading
1. From the memoirs of the Président Dompierre d'Hornoy.
The former magistrate Dompierre d'Hornoy was a prisoner of the section in the Spring of 1794. His account was published by Guy Périer de Féral in 1952.
The section of the Bonnet-Rouge treated patriotism as a financial expedient. No Revolutionary Committee had shown so great a zeal for arrests. From the month of September, the notables of the area, a large number of them rich bourgeois, had been piled up in a former barracks in the rue de Sèvres, which was small, dark and cramped. A tiny courtyard, which received all the filth and excrement, provided the only light for rooms into which eight or ten persons were crowded. According to the fortune with which they were credited, inmates were charged from 40 sols to 12 livres a day for six feet of space in which to put a bed. Old gentlemen, and women, accustomed to all the conveniences of rank and fortune, were forced to pass the winter here; they obtained stoves only on the 23rd of December. The members of the Committee combined with the role of host, that of gaoler. They changed guard every twenty-four hours, when, after a general call-out, the outgoing commissary would entrust the captives to his relief. Policing was more or less severe, words more or less gross, according to the individual concerned; the commissaries were for the most part coachmen, lackeys, cobblers and doormen. (p.170)
 |
On the 26th of October, 1793 (O. S.), about eight o'clock in the morning, I beheld two men whom I had never seen enter my house. By their ferocious looks, and the clubs which they carried, I suspected they were messengers of a Revolutionary Committee; and the result proved that my suspicions were correct.
The unwelcome visitors were Rénaud and Potat, agents of the Committees of the Bonnet Rouge and the Contrat Social sections, both cobblers by trade. The writer was escorted from one committee room to the other, left under armed guard for half-an-hour, then brought home again without ever having been seen or interrogated. The men then declared their intention to arrest him and put his papers under seals. This proved "a matter of great difficulty for them" since they had to draw up a proces-verbal, but could not write, or at least could do no more than sign their names. They called to their aid the registrar from the Contrat Social section, a certain Robert "a man as ferocious as themselves". "Struck by the neatness of the furniture", he imagined the writer to be rich and wanted to appoint two guards to watch over the premises, though in the end he entrusted the task to the household cook.
The narrator was again taken out and forced to wait in the ante-rooms of the two committees. Eventually Lebrun, whom he "knew from his having been discharged from the situation of adjutant of the batallion of the Bonnet Rouge", ordered him to be held until further orders in the barracks in the rue de Sèvres.
Arrival in prison
On his arrival at the prison two commissaries of the Committee of the Bonnet Rouge took down his name. These individuals were Verney and Ballière, both of whom were former coachman - Vernay had been coachman to Monsieur, the King's brother.
The writer now had a chance to meet his fellow prisoners. He found himself among social equals and we soon encounter examples of the quiet courage and attractive sang-froid displayed by so many educated people imprisoned at this time. Some faces were familiar: "I recognised several amongst them who had long formed the delight of my company, by their virtues and the purity of their patriotism". A "respectable old man"offered him place in the room he shared with two others. In their three months together the elderly gentleman was to be his greatest comfort, sustaining him through his mildness of character, agreeable conversation and profound wisdom. The occupants of the chamber "lived like four brothers".
The prison regime
The prisoners were supervised by a rota of commissaries from the Revolutionary Committee and guarded by sixteen armed men: "Whatever can be imagined that is ferocious, tyrannical and inhuman, was found in the character of our commissaries, without accepting one among them." (p.359)
The narrator explains the profiteering scheme:
"More greedy for money than anxious for the welfare of the republic", the Revolutionary Committee had "speculated in arrests" . They had made a prison in the former barracks in the rue de Sèvres, into which they crammed 120 to 140 persons. The prisoners were obliged to contribute towards the expenses of the guard, from twenty sous to twelve francs a day. The writer provides the sums: The income from the prisoners amounted to three hundred francs a day, forwarded every month on receipts from a treasurer of the Committee. The guards were paid three francs a day each, a total of 48 francs; a further five francs was spent on lamps and candles, and nine francs on firewood. This made a total of 62 francs and hence a net profit of 238 francs a day!
The commissaries, he notes, lived well and entertained their friends in the room set aside for them. Meals of ten or twelve francs a head were nothing to them, whereas, among the detainees, "fathers-of-families" could scarcely afford the necessities of life. As many as ten persons could be crammed into tiny rooms, some forced, in contempt of the law, to sleep two to a bed. They would be locked in their rooms at nine o'clock, irrespective of whether they were ill or infirm.
The respectable prisoners suffered acutely from the contempt and discourtesy shown them by their former social inferiors: servants, tradesmen and indigents. A particular flash point was noon when the change of shift gave the commissaries an opportunity to subject their charges to verbal abuse; "the most brutal and scandalous sarcasms were their ordinary language". Wives who visited the prison were told to treat their husbands as dead, since it would be a long time before they regained their liberty. Their captors boasted that they would not release prisoners on the order of the Convention, but only if it suited their own ideas, after deliberating in the Committee.
A commemoration of Marat
The pamphlet includes this striking tableau of a slightly unlikely Revolutionary celebration:
The section of the Bonnet-Rouge gave a fête to the memory of Marat, on the 2nd Frimaire. The procession, on its return, passed under our windows, with two moveable forges in the line; the commissaries of the Revolutionary Committee took care to have them stopped opposite to us, and caused a pike and some chains to be made in our presence, insulting likewise our misfortunes by the most atrocious invectives; and the scene terminated by a circular dance, at the instigation of Lebrun and his companions, who sang the Carmagnole, point us out in derision, and exclaiming to the guillotine! We imagined our last hour had arrived, and undoubtedly such would have been the case, if the wishes of these monsters had been accomplished....
After three weeks, a friend of the narrator's, with a police officer in attendance, brought an order to have the seals on his property removed. The Committee refused and the friend himself was arrested that evening. Meanwhile, loss of income obliged his wife to give notice on their apartments. She dismissed the cook, who was guarding the premises, only to find herself obliged to replace her with a sans-culotte at the rate of six livres a day. When she refused to pay, twelve armed men arrived at her door; she was confined to a tiny room without bed or chair, despite the fact she was eight-months pregnant. Only when her mother payed the amount owed, was she rescued.
On 30th Nivose the writer was among a contingent of prisoners, marched on foot through Paris under armed guard to be detained at Picpus. Lebrun did not even allow them to gather their belongings so that some were obliged to embark without hats and in their slippers. In the event only five men were received and the author was sent back to the barracks. However, at five that evening he was transferred definitively to saint-Lazare.
List of the Persons who composed the Revolutionary Committee of the Bonnet Rouge
The author felt moved to add descriptions of all the men on the Committee that he knew:
I shall here add a list of their names, and the private life of each of them, that they may be known to posterity, and execrated as they deserve (p.355)
His list more or less corresponds to Soboul's - only one of the ten condemned men from November 1794 is missing.
 |
| Louis René Boquet, Interior of a Revolutionary Committee in 1793 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comit%C3%A9_r%C3%A9volutionnaire.jpg |
[Jean-Baptiste Daire, chandler; living at 1062 rue de Sèvres; 62 years old. Condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal in November 1794.]
[Claude Poinselot, painter; 1060 rue de Sèvres; 54 years old. Condemned by the Criminal Tribunal in November 1794.]
[Jean, François Laloue, painter; 593 rue du Bac, 41 years old. Acquitted by the Criminal Tribunal. Denounced as a partisan of terror in Year IX.]
[Guillaume Laquerrière, coach-painter;1119 rue de Sèvres; 51 years old. Condemned by the Criminal Tribunal.]
Louis Seguin, porter, rue Placide. in the French version his occupation is "
[Joseph Tosi, native of Milan and tutor of Italian, listed as living at 134 rue des Vieilles-Tuileries, aged 51 years. Condemned by the Criminal Tribunal].
Here is another contemporary account of this man: the writer was a young lawyer living in the Bonnet-Rouge section:None could be more dreadful, than the committee of the Bonnet-Rouge section that I found myself under. The first question that the president addressed to those forced to appear before it was: "What have you done to be hanged, if the counter-revolution were to come?"Its members were mostly former lackeys who had denounced their masters, market porters and the like. After 9 thermidor several of them were prosecuted as thieves and provocateurs and condemned to twenty years in irons, after being exposed to view ("sur le tabouret") on the place de Greve.Madame de Fleury, in a journey she had made in Italy several years before the Revolution, had taken a servant by the name of Tosi, whom she greatly trusted. This man had followed her on her return to France and his mistress had bestowed on him every favour. Tosi's extreme opinions soon got him noticed and he obtained the honour of a place on the committee of the Bonnet-Rouge.When she was arrested, Mme de Fleury thought that she could ask Tosi to obtain the committee's permission to have some linen and clothing sent from her house. She decided to write to him. Here, word for word, is Tosi's response to his former mistress:"I have not forgotten, Citizeness, the time when I had the honour of offering you my fist so that you could climb into your carriage. The only service that I am prepared to offer you now, is a hand up to the guillotine."This letter was deposited with the Criminal Tribunal and read aloud in Court, where I myself heard it.Memoirs of J-G-P Morice, Revue des questions historiques, vol. 52 (1892), p.471-2.[The flamboyent Élisabeth Perrette DUBOIS de COURVAL was the widow of the avocat-général Joly de Fleury. She was among those executed on 7 Thermidor.]
[Etienne Vernay, aged 40 years, native of the Commune of Bel-Air, formerly Saint-Christophe, in the department of Saone et Loire. Former a lemonade-seller, living in the rue de Sèvres. Condemned by the Criminal Tribunal]
Rein, without trade or known residence before the 10th of
August, formerly seller of lottery- tickets, was sent to For-l'Évêque by his own
confession, for having made false lottery-lists, and was discharged from the
service of the Revolutionary Committee for dishonest practices, in removing the
seals in the house of one of the proscribed.
[Philibert Luthun, journeyman wheelwright (?"compagnon charron"); 327 rue de Grenelle; 54 years old. Condemned by the Criminal Tribunal.]
[François Olivier, locksmith; rue du Bac; 46 years old. Condemned by the Criminal Tribunal. Member of the cercle constitutionnel of the 10th arrondissement in the Year VI. Listed in Year IX as "homme sanguinaire".]
[Joseph-Marie Piccini, "homme de lettres"; 209 rue Rousselet; 36 years. Listed as "a native of Marseille". Acquitted by the Criminal Tribunal.]
[Renaud, former cobbler. Was denounced on 30 vendémaire Year III as a member of the former revolutionary committee, but was already under arrest at that date.]
Thaer, dealer in vinegar, in the Rue St. Plaeide, known
throughout the revolution as a man without character; who did evil without
being conscious of it. He enriched himself by the petty lottery, which be made
a trade of for a length of time.
Ledru, saltpetre-manufacturer, living in the Rue Barouillère,
was unknown in the section before the 10th of August, and did nothing for the
revolution. He was deceitful, cruel, and without any morals, doing all that his
colleagues dictated, more particularly when the order was to tyrannize over the
prisoners.
[Nicolas, Charles Pijeau, also known as "Villiers", former lawyer;1082 rue de Sèvres. 49 years. Born in Paris. Treasurer to the Committee of General Security. Condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal.According to the denunciation of 16 vendémiare, he was unknown in the section before May 1793; named president of the general assembly of the section and revolutionary commissary. Condemned by the Criminal Tribunal and later transferred to Bicêtre. Denounced in Year IX.
Lebrun, without any fixed habitation, was expelled from the gendarmerie, or company of the centre, and afterwards from the situation of adjutant of the section to which he had been appointed. He was habitually a drunkard, base, cruel, and cowardly; patiently suffering insults, and always refusing to give reasons for those he bestowed upon others. As a husband he was brutal, and quarrelsome ; in his quality of member of the committee , he alone was the cause of almost all the arrests which took place by its orders, that he might be revenged upon those who had been the means of depriving him of his adjutancy. He was a great friend of Vincent, Hébert, Ronsin, and Henriot; and always concealed his share in every notorious act which originated with him and his colleagues.
Joseph Étienne Antoine Lebrun, 1039 rue de Sèvres, aged 63 years. Lebrun was one of the driving forces of the section. See Soboul (p.468): Born in Perpignan, Lebrun came from a family of carpetmakers, and had lived in Paris since 1750. He had been active in the Revolution from the beginning: volunteer in the National Guard battalion of the Prémontrés. vice-president of the district then of the section, elector in 1790 and 1792, justice of the peace after 10 August, member of the Revolutionary Committee. He was arrested on 19 vendémiaire Year III, accused of having intimidated good citizens and deprived patriots of '89. In Year IV he was accused of stirring up hatred against "weathy people, merchants, honest and enlightened men". He is last recorded as having been banished from Paris in Year IX. He was author of a set of Mémoires justicatifs.
Parrault, a Swiss, doorkeeper of Madame Narbonne Pelet, Rue
de la Planche, unknown to the section
before the 10th of August, not having appeared until his nomination as
commissary of the revolutionary committee, which situation he quitted for that
of adjutant. So much was he addicted to drunkenness, that he once disappeared
for two days, and was thought to be dead.
[Guillaume Ballière, former domestic coachman, rentier; 990 rue de Sèvres; 43 years old. Condemned by the Criminal Tribunal]
Such were the men who disposed of the liberty of more than three hundred fathers of
families, and who made them sigh in fetters for more than a year, without
having committed any other crime than that of resisting the tyrants in their
persecutions.
References
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8ppmAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA207&lpg=P-A207
https://archive.org/details/reignterroracol04unkngoog/page/n366/mode/2up
See also:
"Précis historique sur la maison d'arrêt de la rue de Sèvres" Mémoires sur les prisons, vol. 2(1823) p.187-201.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HFxZfvKDr54C&pg=RA1-PA187#v=onepage&q&f=false
In English: https://archive.org/details/reignofterrorcol02londuoft/page/28/mode/2up
No comments:
Post a Comment