P. 35 Terror is nothing new; it has been an embodiment of sovereignty across the ages, especially at moments of state crisis. The Revolutionary Government, Robespierre argues, has put this on a new and morally defensible basis, due to the fact that sovereignty in the new Republic is embodied in the people not in the person of the ruler. Given this grounding, the government now freely deploys terror in the exercise of what he calls a “despotism of liberty against tyranny”.
P. 59 Fouche is also one of the most brazen atheists in the Convention, who in his period of service in the Nievre and surrounding departments in late 1793 made active dechristianization (attacks on priests, pillage of churches, religious iconoclasm, and so on a central plank of his strategy. His activities in this area were linked to militant atheists in the Paris Commune who have since been executed. This anti-clerical position makes him an implicit critic of Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being. Robespierre thinks that the new form of workship will be welcomed by all Christians and will help dissolve popular religious antagonism towards the Revolution.”
P. 70 “Divorce, a practice which, flying in the face of church lore, the Public instituted in September 1791. The new practice has been welcomed in the city, particularly by women, and reaches well down the social order. Later today, on the Rue Saint-Jacques, one of Paris’s prime printing neighbourhoods, Francoise-Nicole Soisy, under guidance from a justice of the peace, will behin legal process against her printer husband, Charles-Adrian Hernault (who has already abandoned the marital home and his 9-year-old daughter.)
“Those executive today at the Place du Trone-Renverse, after trial and conviction by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Once the guillotine has done its work, the public executioner and his aides place bodies and severred heads in huge baskets. They sit on the lids to close them up, then cram them in carts, painted read and lined with lead to prevent leakages of bodily fluids. The carts head south over open ploughland to reach the cemetery of the old Picpus convent. The newly nationalized property has served as a graveyard for the executed since the guillotine moved to the SE of the city on 14 June. Nearly 1,300 individuals have already been buried there, and the site has reached its third grave-pit.”
P. 104 5am “Bars and coffee-houses are larely male preserves at this hour. Women, by contrast, have a much stronger presence at another site of early morning sociability and exchange: the queue. Lining up outside food shops is not supposed to start happening under 6am, but the regulation is widely breached: early birds may catch the worm. Polic spies are an invariable silent present here … particularly attentive to queues, as are any passing National Guard patrols; for crowd anger about food can generate murmures in a queue that might trigger an attoupement (a gathering) or even a rassemblement (an unruly crowd) and lead on to a rebellion or an emeute (a riot). The lexicon of popular dissent is finely calibrated.
P. 111 Government policy appears to be driven by an erroneous assumption that the poor live by bread alone. Certainly there are large numbers of Parisians who have to get by on brea, with a few vegetables and scraps of cheese thrown in… but over the course of the 18th century, the tastes of ordinary Parisians have changed in line .. People don’t just want to be fobbed off with staples. One-exotic colonial produce such as sugar, coffee, and chocolate have come to be adjudged mainstays. .. Ronespierre’s first act n entering the CPS in July 1793 was to urge placing coffee on the Maximum on the grounds that it had become a popular necessity rather than an aristocratic luxury. The Royal Navy’s blockade of French ports, however, has caused many of these products to become rarer and more expensive.”
P. 150 Government, both municipal and national, has little patience with women playing a role in public life. The promises of freedom of expression and expansion of the public sphere after 1789 brought more women into public life than ever before. But since 1792-3, the movement has been waning. Attacks on prostitution and sexual irregularity form onlt the thin end of a much larger wedge of intolerance about women’s presence in any form of public life. Women’s most high-profile political association, the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, was banned in late 1793 and many of the most politically active women have suffered cruelly. Militants from the society like Claire Lcombe and pauline Leon are in goal, while Olympe de Gouges, author of the path-breaking Declaration of the Rights of women (1791) ended up on the scaffold, as did the Girondin salonniere Madam Roland. Theroigne de Mericourt has gone mad over it all, and is stalking Saint-Just by post. Influenced by the hyper-masculine military culture now in evidence, political figures stress a Rousseauist complementarity of gender role which consigns women to the home. Even *and for some especially the women who frequent the public galleries of the Convention and the Jacobin Club may find themselves roudly assailed.
P. 231 “The Journal historique et politique reported that Pariaians were disgusted with themselves for credulously following Hebert and Danton. At least, the journal concluded a little wistfully, the episode “had cured the people of its idolatry for individuals. The dangers of political celebrity have thus become a standard trope of public discourse to the extent that there is a real danger of Robespierre, the stern monitor of the celebrity of others, being hoist by his own petard.
P. 258 Hardened executionary Sanson has seen it all before. The range of reactions to impending death runs from the sheerest terror to studied insousiance. Louis XV’s last mistress, Mme du Barry, made a spectacular performance of shrieking and sobbing, while other individuals go laughing and joking to the scaffold as if they were off to a wedding heast. But even Sanson admits to feeling admiration for the way that studied sang-froid has become the default conduct for these moments. Uncannily, unsettlingly, he finds that many of his charges struggling to master their feelings smile as he goes about his business. Despite Citizenness du Barry’s example, this is especially true of women.Gently benign female smiles combine aristocratic sprezzature with the practiced sensibility learn from reading Roussea’s La Nouvelle Heloise or viewing Madame Vigee-Lebrun’s portraits. These is an “emulation about dying well” to which many aspire. On the road to the guillotine, the smile has become a silent weapon of symbolic resistance.”
p. 403 “Margueritte Barrois was expecting 9 Thermidor to be a normal day. She arrived from her village in eastern France by coach a couple of days ago, looking for work, probably in domestic service. She hoped to draw on a network of emigrants from her village. A cousin who is a second-hand clothes dealer agreed to put her up. But new to the city, she lost her way today. Unable to find her cousin’s residence, she accepted an offer of a bed from a shopkeeper in that civinity. But in teh course of the night she received a visit from her host’s shop boy, Charles Miquet, a lad from her region, who slept along the corridor. Perhaps it was to comfort her, as the National Guardsmen lining the quais in the early hours must have been kicking up a racket. There was nothing to fear, the boy whispered to her, there was no danger, and anyway the two of them could always return to their home and get married. He came twice that night into her bed and she really could not hold him back. By the end of the night she will be pregnant. Life will do on. And in nine months’ time, Martuerritte Barrois will have something by which to remember 9 Thermidor.”
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