Jacques Hébert
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Jacques René Hébert (15 November 1757—24 March 1794) was editor of the extreme radical newspaper Le Père Duchesne during the French Revolution. His followers are usually referred to as the Hébertists or the Hébertistes; he himself is sometimes called Père Duchesne, after his newspaper.
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[edit] Life
[edit] Early life
Born 1757 at Alençon, to Jacques Hébert (died 1766) and Marguerite Beunaiche of Houdrie (1727-1787). His family was ruined by a lawsuit while he was still young, and Hébert came to Paris. There he found work in a theatre, where he wrote plays in his spare time, but these were never produced.
In 1790, he attracted attention through a pamphlet he published, and became a prominent member of the club of the Cordeliers in 1791.
[edit] Père Duchesne
Hébert's influence was mainly due to his articles in his journal, Le Père Duchesne, which appeared from 1790 to 1794. These polemic articles were written with wit, but were also violent and abusive, and purposely couched in foul language in order to appeal to the sans culottes. Initially, Le Père Duchesne supported (1790-1791) a constitutional monarchy around King Louis XVI, as well as the opinions of the Marquis de La Fayette; its most violent attacks of the period were aimed at Jean-Sifrein Maury (the main opponent of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). Hébert changed his beliefs after the king's flight to Varennes in June 1791, and started referring to Marie Antoinette as 'the Austrian bitch' and addressing Louis XVI as 'Monsieur Veto, the drunken drip.'
[edit] Prominence and clash with Robespierre
During the insurrection of 10 August, 1792, he was a member of the revolutionary Commune of Paris, and became second substitute of the procureur of the Commune on 2 December 1792.
His violent attacks on the Girondist presence in the National Convention led to his arrest on 24 May 1793, but he was released owing to the threatening attitude of the mob. His tone was further radicalised by the killing of Jean-Paul Marat in July 1793; his attacks on Marie Antoinette contributed to the mood of hostility towards her, and indirectly to her execution. Henceforth very popular, Hébert organized with Pierre Gaspard Chaumette the worship of Reason, in opposition to the theistic cult of the Supreme Being inaugurated by Maximilien Robespierre, against whom he tried to instigate a popular movement. The failure of this brought about the arrest of the Hébertists.
Hébert and his immediate followers —although certainly not all his sympathizers— were guillotined 24 March 1794, and were among the few to have become adversaries of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety for an excess of zeal rather than for any accusations of counter-revolutionary activity. It is said that Hebert was hysterical on his way to his execution and fainted at the sight of the guillotine. His wife, Marie Marguerite Françoise Hébert (née Goupil) (born 1756), who had been a nun, was executed twenty days later. They had a daughter, Scipion-Virginia Hébert (7 February 1793 - 13 July, 1830).
[edit] Reign of Terror and Campaign to Dechristianize France
On 7 June 1793 Paris sections — encouraged by the enragés ("enraged ones") Jacques Roux and Jacques Hébert — took over the Convention, calling for administrative and political purges, a low fixed price for bread, and a limitation of the electoral franchise to sans-culottes alone. With the backing of the National Guard, they convinced the Convention to arrest 31 Girondin leaders, including Jacques Pierre Brissot. Following these arrests, the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety on 10 June, installing the revolutionary dictatorship. On 13 July the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat — a Jacobin leader and journalist known for his bloodthirsty rhetoric — by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin, resulted in further increase of Jacobin political influence.[1] Georges Danton, the leader of the August 1792 uprising against the King, was removed from the Committee. On 27 July Maximillien Robespierre, self-styled as "the Incorruptible", made his entrance, quickly becoming the most influential member of the Committee as it moved to take radical measures against the Revolution's domestic and foreign enemies.[2]
Meanwhile, on 24 June the Convention adopted the first republican constitution of France, the French Constitution of 1793. It was ratified by public referendum, but never put into force; like other laws, it was indefinitely suspended by the decree of October that the government of France would be "revolutionary until the peace". The eventual constitution under the Directory was quite different.
Facing local revolts, foreign invasions and riots in both the East and West of the country, the most urgent government business was the war. On 17 August the Convention voted for general conscription, the levée en masse, which mobilized all citizens to serve as soldiers or suppliers in the war effort. On 5 September the Convention institutionalized The Reign of Terror: systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.
The result was policy through which the state used violent repression to crush resistance to the government. The guillotine became the symbol of a string of executions: Louis XVI had already been guillotined before the start of the terror; Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins, Philippe Égalité, Madame Roland and many others lost their lives under its blade.[3] The Revolutionary Tribunal summarily condemned thousands of people to death by the guillotine, while mobs beat other victims to death. Sometimes people died for their political opinions or actions, but many for little reason beyond mere suspicion, or because some others had a stake in getting rid of them. Most of the victims received an unceremonious trip to the guillotine in an open wooden cart (the tumbrel). Loaded onto these carts, the victims would proceed through throngs of jeering men and women.
The victims of the Reign of Terror totaled approximately 50,000. Among people who were condemned by the revolutionary tribunals, about 18 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 4 percent middle class, and 72 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion, and other purported minimal crimes.[4] Of these social groupings, the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church suffered proportionately the greatest loss.
Another anti-clerical uprising was made possible by the installment of the Revolutionary Calendar on 24 October. Against Robespierre's concepts of Deism and Virtue, Hébert's (and Chaumette's) atheist movement initiated a religious campaign in order to dechristianize society. The program of dechristianization waged against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included the deportation of clergy and the condemnation of many of them to death, the closing of churches, the institution of revolutionary and civic cults, the large scale destruction of religious monuments, the outlawing of public and private worship and religious education, forced marriages of the clergy and forced abjurement of their priesthood.[5] The enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 made all suspected priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight.[5] The climax was reached with the celebration of the goddess "Reason" in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November. Because dissent was now regarded as counterrevolutionary, extremist enragés such as Hébert and moderate Montagnard indulgents such as Danton were guillotined in the Spring of 1794.[6] On 7 June Robespierre, who had previously condemned the Cult of Reason, advocated a new state religion and recommended that the Convention acknowledge the existence of God. On the next day, the worship of the deistic Supreme Being was inaugurated as an official aspect of the Revolution. Compared with Hébert's somewhat popular festivals, this austere new religion of Virtue was received with signs of hostility by the Parisian public.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, in turn, gives the following references:
- Louis Duval, "Hébert chez lui", in La Révolution Française, revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, t. xii. and t. xiii.
- D. Mater, J. R. Hibert, L'auteur du Père Duchesne avant la journée du 10 août 1792 (Bourges, Comm. Hist. du Cher, 1888).
- François Victor Alphonse Aulard, Le Culte de la raison et de l'être suprême (Paris, 1892).
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ Faria, Miguel (2004-07-15). "Bastille Day and the French Revolution, Part I:The Ancien Régime and the Storming of the Bastille". La Nueva Cuba. http://www.haciendapub.com/lnc6.html. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
- ^ Faria, Miguel (2004-07-14). "Bastille Day and the French Revolution, Part II: Maximilien Robespierre --- The Incorruptible". La Nueva Cuba. http://www.haciendapub.com/lnc7.html. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
- ^ Faria, Miguel (2004-11-21). "Reinventing Radicals: Girondins vs. Jacobins in the French Revolution (A Book Review) Part II". La Nueva Cuba. http://www.haciendapub.com/lnc5.html. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
- ^ "French Revolution". History.com. The History Channel. http://www.history.com/encyclopedia.do?articleId=209830. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
- ^ a b Latreille, A.. "French Revolution". New Catholic Encyclopedia. 5 (Second Ed. 2003 ed.). Thomson-Gale. pp. 972–973. ISBN 0-7876-4004-2.
- ^ Faria, Miguel (2004-11-18). "Reinventing Radicals – Girondins vs. Jacobins in the French Revolution (A Book Review) Part I". La Nueva Cuba. http://www.lanuevacuba.com/nuevacuba/faria-22.htm. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
