ABSTRACT

When, at two-thirty in the morning of the night between 9 and 10 Thermidor, Year II, in the chamber of the Maison Commune de Paris, a bullet pierces the jaw of Maximilien Robespierre, the agony of the Incorruptible begins. It lasts more than seventeen hours, haunting various places, up to the communal ditch of the Errands cemetery, near the Parc Monceau. The circumstances of this agony as well as the succeeding peripeteia have been amply commented on, and we will restrict ourselves at the outset to recalling them very briefly. 1 The conspirators, at the head of the General Council of the Commune, are at bay: Robespierre, his younger brother Saint-Just, Lebas, Couthon, Hanriot, in the course of the night all see themselves surrounded in the Maison Commune, where they have taken refuge from the Parisian troops who have remained loyal to the Convention. When the place is attacked, in the heart of the night, they are lost. Some try to flee, such as Hanriot or Couthon; others commit suicide, like Lebas, the younger Robespierre—whose attempt fails when he leaps out the window—and, perhaps, Maximilien Robespierre. Does the bullet that shatters his jaw comes from his own pistol or from that of the policeman Charles-André Merda? Or are there even two bullets? 2 Scholars have been quarreling over this point for centuries. That of course is not our object here. The fact remains that the survivors, for the most part in pitiable condition, are conveyed to the Tuileries in the night. At three-thirty in the morning it is announced at the Convention, which is in permanent session, that the “tyrant” can appear before it. The assembly refuses, and Robespierre, whose physical condition seems to be worsening, is carried under escort into the audience hall of the Committee of Public Safety. There he is laid out on a table where the curious are able to come look at him. At six o'clock in the morning, two surgeons clean his wounds and bandage him. At eleven o'clock, the conspirators are transferred to the Conciergerie. After a short judicial procedure, and on a simple recognition of identity, they are condemned to death. But the path to the guillotine is at once swift and slowed down, since the Robespierrists wait for seven more hours in the Conciergerie, where Robespierre is again stretched out on a table. His strength leaves him little by little. It is not until six o'clock in the evening, on 10 Thermidor, Year II, that three wagons, carrying twenty-two people condemned to death, set off for the Place de la Révolution, where the scaffold has been set up. The journey is slow, for the crowd is extremely numerous all along the way, and there are many halts. At seven-thirty, finally, the execution of the twenty-two Robespierrists is completed, Robespierre himself being the last but one to die.