#Méhée de la Touche

[rbzpr]

Robespierre’s Tail or The Dangers of the Freedom of the Press (Méhée de La Touche)

This pamphlet was published on 9 Fructidor, Year II – mere weeks after the events of Thermidor – by Méhée de La Touche, the former secretary of Tallien, under the name “Félhemesi” (an anagram for Méhée fils).

Being a a satirical commentary on the political discussions of the time, the pamphlet is directed against certain Thermidorian Montagnards (e.g. Billaud-Varenne, Barère, Collot d’Herbois), who were considered to be the « continuators » of Robespierre. This is what the title alludes to: while Robespierre’s head had been cut of, his “tail” – a term with various sexual connotations – was still wagging. The publication enjoyed great success, with around seventy thousand copies sold in only one week, and apart from inspiring numerous sequels and imitations that took up the image of “Robespierre’s tail” (e.g. Suite à la Queue de Robespierre, Anneaux de la queue, Rendez-moi ma queue, Défends ta queue!, etc), it inaugurated a flood of anti-Jacobin pamphlets that would come to shape the press of Year III, mixing political commentary and obscene humour.

Whoever dares to think was not born to believe in me: To obey in silence is your only glory

  – Voltaire, Mahomet.

Citizens,

this morning, the friends of order and of the good police have seen one of these liberticidal motions, whose danger one has always been able to hide under the veil of popularity that they present, being scandalously repeated at the Convention ; it concerned a new question, the freedom of the press: we have barely had two thousand years to reflect about it, and men [who are] enemies of any kind of order already wanted to wrest [from the Convention], in a single session, and without the report of the committees, a decree which would have acknowledged this right to the full extent. Where would we be, great Gods! if this fatal motion had passed, as it was supposed to! Where would we be, if these supposed axioms of eternal law, preached by the Voltaires, Rousseaus, Hélvetiuses and so many other factitious or moderate [writers] of the Ancien Régime, had prevailed over the maxims of royal prudence [that have been] practised for so long and with so contained success by the St. Florentins, Sartines, Lenoirs etc, and invoked today with so much reason by Cambon, Bourdon de l'Oise and Granet! Where would we be, if everyone came to meddle in examining and discussing! if some blunderer would come to manage financial matters! what would Louis XIV, so justly called the Great, have become, without the care which he always had to halt the babbling of the press! Ah! citizens, be wary of the mania of reasoning ; this mania is good only for confusing everything ; it alone can destroy the most beautiful order of things and disturb the most honest dispositions: one already reasons only too much in the entire Republic ; and if you just want to imagine the disasters that slander can cause, listen to only a part of what one says.

« One has to admit, a citizen said yesterday, that we are quite unfortunate: lo and behold, the Plain which still attacks the Montagne! – Bast, another one responded, do you believe that there is still a Plain and a Montagne? do you believe that we have guillotined forty deputies and locked up sixty others, just to still find divisions in the Convention? – Nothing is more true, my man continued. I had read Le Journal Universel by Adounin ; I wanted to see if it would inspire respect: I went to the National Convention, and I observed, very clearly, a Plain and a Montagne: in truth, it is no longer the Montagne of olden times ; I have seen the old friends of the people sitting on the lower seats, and I did not recognise anyone at the top, apart from BARRÈRE, whom I had seen at the Feuillants, and Billaud-Varennes, very pale and dishevelled. This should suffice, his colleague responded, in order to show you that the Plain and the Montagne have merged, in order to form only one compound of true friends of the people, which, in spite of slight disagreements, always unite when it is a matter of saving it! It is not necessary to attach civisme to [certain] rows of seats, nor to believe that a few continuators of Robespierre (I REPEAT THIS ; BUT THESE ARE HIS EXPRESSIONS), by seeking to seduce some honest men, who will soon be disillusioned, could ever succeed in separating them: let the freedom of the press come, and many things will be revealed. »

You see it, citizens, let the freedom of the press come: this is the hope of all these people ; this is their eternal chorus: they wait only for this in order to unthread a chain of certain unfortunate truths that one should be wary of hearing. It is, above all, around the Convention that the bad tongues are practising most relentlessly. Will you believe it! I have seen men denying the gentleness and humanity of Billaud-Varennes. I have heard others saying, with an air of self-assurance, that there could be innocents, and even patriots, among the men that had been mitraillés at Collot's command, and four thousand [people] at the same time! They are quite far from admiring, like me, this ingeniously revolutionary invention, and this spectacle, the idea of which has produced so many friends of the revolution. How petty Louis the Great was, with his changing dragonaille, compared to Collot, who, I hope, will be called the very Great! Several [people] assured that Collot deliberately came from Commune-Affranchie in order to defend Vincent and Ronsin. At last, one did not grow tired [of speaking about] this legislator: but it was much worse when one opened the discussion on Barrère ; on Barrère, this immortal man, whose reports on our victories are so pleasant, that it is a matter of knowing if one applauds to our victories or to his good words. They accused him of fickleness, whereas it is well-known that he constantly belonged to the party of the strongest ; they say that he was an aristocrat at first ; then, he became captain of the Feuillants, just as, towards the end, he made became a Jacobin, more or less as God has became become a human, and through the intervention of Robespierre, his mortal enemy. Far from stopping these detractors of the old Committee of Public Safety, which I thought was necessary, I have seen many people applauding them, one criticised that the Committee had the weakness of hiding a thousand acts of counter-revolution at the Convention ; these measures affirmed that it was not possible that Robespierre had done all the evil on his own: they said that the matter would at least have merited the ad hoc nomination of a commission, which would be charged with verifying who signed the famous last arrêtés, when Saint-Just was at the army, and Robespierre [was] absent from the committee ; they were surprised when Billaud denied that the famous law on the Revolutionary Tribunal had been the work of the committee (something that, according to them, it would have been necessary to say in the moment of the report), while this same committee had raged so much about a simple recital of said law ; they took fright when seeing these supposed suspects controlling our political means, our military forces and our public fortune.

On the other hand, I believed to get rid of all of these arguers by fleeing: but everywhere, I heard the same calumnies being repeated against these respectable men. Ah, well! citizens, judge by something that has been said in a corner of Paris, of what is said in France ; of what would be said, if one did not hasten to make this salutary terror the order of the day again, which has maintained, for six months, this fortunate harmony, without which Barrère can no longer govern. Thus, what would happen if one dares to print what one says? Where would we be if one came to demonstrate it? Where would we be, if one came to tell France that our faithful Audounin, the successor of this [party] of the Père Duchesne, sells fourteen thousand copies of his hellishly patriotic newspaper to the Committee of Public Safety per day ; which, with two liards of profit per rag, yields him a small income of 127.755 livres per year (the poor man!). What do you think, what opinion should one hold of Barrère and Billaud-Varennes, if one came to say that they give almost as much to Charles Duval for preaching, in their sense, against the old Montagnards, which they today call the Marais! Oh, my friends, let us repel, with salutary fear, the freedom of the press which is threatening us ; can you not see that, if the aristocrats or the royalists came to use it, we would recognise them, and everything would be lost? Is it not better that they continue wearing red bonnets and singing the Carmagnole: if the aristocrats preached counter-revolutionary maxims, one would unmask them, you see ; one would make the people see the danger of their opinions, and this must not happen! One must let them hide themselves under the patriotic mantle, so that, in the fray, we strike each other indistinctly, which is much better ; thus, beware of allowing the freedom of the press ; do not allow one to say that Granet, whose costume made me shed tears for his misery several times, has a hundred thousand écus of property in Marseille, and in good houses ; one must not know that his brother and him let themselves be granted a hundred thousand écus of compensation for three months of detention ; one must not say that, for five years, one has been seeking to federalise the Midi, and to turn Marseille into a capital: all these truths are good only for causing trouble in the state ; thus, let us stay quiet ; let us sleep, and the patrie is saved once more.

FETHEMÉSI. [sic]

Source: La queue de Robespierre

[rbzpr]

légende noire: archive project

In the immediate aftermath of the events of Thermidor, both the actors and spectators of these events sought to give meaning to what had just happened ; à chaud, a new imaginary was taking shape, centred around the person of Robespierre: his légende noire, which would impose itself over the next decades, slowly began to emerge in numerous speeches, proclamations, pamphlets etc. This “black legend”, which drew on the tropes and motifs that had characterised earlier attacks on Robespierre, would later acquire some degree of coherence, but at the time of its birth, it was still widely heterogeneous and, at times, even contradictory.

In the course of this research project, I have compiled some of the most influential speeches, writings and images that were published during or immediately after the events of 9 / 10 Thermidor, and which, in some cases, came to shape Robespierre’s légende noire as we know it today.

protocols, speeches, reports & proclamations

Session of 9 Thermidor at the National Convention

Report on the conspiracy against the national representation, plotted by Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Lebas &c. (9 Thermidor)

Proclamation of the National Convention (9 Thermidor)

Léonard Bourdon’s intervention at the Convention (10 Thermidor)

Report of the Committees of Public Safety & General Security on the “conspiracy of Robespierre etc.” (10 Thermidor)

Barère, au nom du comité de salut public (11 Thermidor)

Barère’s report on the reorganisation of the Committees (14 Thermidor)

Barras’ speech on the journées of Thermidor (27 Thermidor)

pamphlets & other writings

Robespierre’s Tail (Méhée de La Touche)

Robespierre peint par lui-même [...] (Laurent Lecointre)

On Robespierre’s conspiracy (Rouget de Lisle)

Véritable portrait de Catilina Robespierre (Jean Joseph Dussault)

Portrait of Robespierre (Merlin de Thionville)

La journée du 9 thermidor (André Pépin Bellement)

On the fall of Robespierre and his accomplices (C. Dejean)

Le front de Robespierre, et de sa clique [...] (Baraly)

Execrable Portraits of the traitor Robespierre [...] (J. J. Dussault)

Horrible conspiration formée, pour porter Robespierre à la royauté (Anonymous)

Facts collected in the last moments of Robespierre and of his faction, from 9 to 10 Thermidor (Anonymous)

Vie secrette, politique et curieuse de M. J. Maximilien Robespierre [...] (L. Duperron)

Fréron’s notes on Robespierre

engravings & medallions

IX Thermidor Year II (Charles Monnet)

Thermidorian medallion from Lyon (Anonymous)

Act of Justice from 9 to 10 Thermidor (Viller)

M. J. Maximilien Robespierre: nicknamed the modern Catiline, executed on 10 Thermidor Year 2 of the Republic (Anonymous)

The Triumvir Robespierre (Jean Joseph François Tassaert)

Robespierre guillotining the executor (Anonymous)

Triumphant Equality or The Punished Triumvirate (Villeneuve)

The Government of Robespierre (Anonymous)

The French People, or Robespierre’s System (A. Chataignier)

What do you think, citizens? Feel free to add things!

During my research for this project, I greatly relied on Robespierre: la fabrication d'un mythe (Belissa / Bosc) and on Jolène Audrey Bureau’s Robespierre meurt longtemps, as well as on Hippolyte Buffenoir’s extensive study Les portraits de Robespierre. I also want to thank @montagnarde1793 and @valeria-lagrimas for their generous help and advice!