Committee of Public Safety

Born of a crisis

Spring 1793: Danton’s committee

In the spring of 1793 the Republic was losing the war. In early April news reached Paris that General Dumouriez, beaten at Neerwinden, had tried to turn his army against Paris and then gone over to the Austrians; the West was in revolt, and the government of six ministers seemed unable to cope. On 6 April the National Convention created a Committee of Public Safety of nine deputies, elected from among its own members. It was to deliberate in secret, watch over the ministers and speed up their work, and it could suspend their orders when it judged them against the national interest. Its powers were granted for a month, and the Convention renewed them every month after that.

The first committee is often called Danton’s committee. With Bertrand Barère and the finance expert Pierre-Joseph Cambon beside him, Danton tried to break up the coalition of France’s enemies by quiet negotiation while the armies were rebuilt. The summer went badly — the fall of the Girondins on 2 June, federalist revolts in the provinces, the war in the Vendée — and on 10 July the Convention renewed the committee without him.

The Twelve

The war government of 1793–1794

Over the following weeks the committee took the shape that history remembers. Robespierre joined on 27 July 1793; two military engineers, Lazare Carnot and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, followed in August; Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois, spokesmen of the Paris radicals, came in on 6 September. After a thirteenth member, Jacques-Alexis Thuriot, resigned on 20 September, the same twelve men ran it until the spring of 1794, re-elected every month (eleven after Hérault de Séchelles was arrested in March 1794): the “Twelve Who Ruled”, as the American historian R. R. Palmer called them.

They worked in the Tuileries Palace, in the rooms of the Pavillon de Flore, often late into the night. They shared out the work but not the responsibility: Carnot directed the armies, Prieur de la Côte-d’Or arms and gunpowder, Robert Lindet food supplies, Jeanbon Saint-André the navy; Barère reported to the Convention; Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon defended its policy; others spent long months on mission in the provinces and with the armies.

The first task was the war. The levée en masse of 23 August 1793 put every French citizen in “permanent requisition”: young men to fight, married men to forge arms and carry supplies, women to make tents and clothes and serve in the hospitals. By 1794 the Republic had some three quarters of a million men under arms, fed under price controls and armed from workshops set up in Paris. The victories followed: Wattignies in October 1793, the recapture of Toulon in December, and Fleurus on 26 June 1794, which opened Belgium to the French armies.

Government by terror

The same committee directed the Terror. On 10 October 1793 the Convention declared the government “revolutionary until the peace”, and the law of 14 Frimaire Year II (4 December 1793) placed ministers, generals, representatives on mission and local authorities under the committee’s supervision. The Committee of General Security ran the police and the arrests; the Revolutionary Tribunal judged. The whole story is told in What was the Terror?

Robespierre gave the system its justification in a speech to the Convention on the principles of political morality.

In the spring of 1794 the committee turned on the factions to either side of it. The Hébertists, who wanted the Terror harsher, were guillotined on 24 March; Danton, Camille Desmoulins and their friends, who wanted it relaxed, followed on 5 April, and with them a member of the committee itself, Hérault de Séchelles. On 10 June the Law of 22 Prairial, presented by Couthon, took away the defence counsel of the accused and left the Revolutionary Tribunal two verdicts, acquittal or death. In the seven weeks that followed, the Paris tribunal sent nearly 1,400 people to the guillotine.

Thermidor and after

The Twelve were never of one mind, and victory made their quarrels dangerous. Carnot clashed with Saint-Just over the conduct of the war; Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois feared that Robespierre meant to purge them; the Committee of General Security resented the police bureau the committee had set up for itself. Robespierre stayed away from the committee for weeks in the summer of 1794, then on 8 Thermidor (26 July) threatened unnamed traitors in the Convention. The next day his colleagues joined the attack. At the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon were outlawed, and in the night Robespierre, his jaw shattered by a pistol shot, was laid on a table in the committee’s antechamber. All three were guillotined on 28 July.

The Convention then made sure that no committee could rule alone again. Within days it decided that a quarter of the members would be replaced each month, and on 24 August 1794 it shared out the government among several committees, leaving the Committee of Public Safety with war and diplomacy. In the spring of 1795 Barère, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois were condemned to deportation; Barère escaped, and the other two were shipped to Guiana, where Collot died.

The committee ended with the Convention on 26 October 1795, when the Directory took over. Carnot sat in the new government as one of its five Directors.