By September fifth, the organized mass killings across Paris were gradually ebbing away. Yet the prison tribunals—set up to “try traitors” in the name of justice—had not yet drawn their curtain.

  Sixty-year-old Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was seized at dawn that day by the Paris Commune’s “Revolutionary Guard,” a pike detachment, and dragged from his mansion in western Paris to the For-l’évêque prison in the city center. Someone had denounced the enormously wealthy playwright for having handled secret diplomacy for the Bourbon absolutist monarchy—Louis XV and Louis XVI—and that alone was enough to mark him for revolution. Beaumarchais protested that, during the famine earlier in the year, he had donated most of his fortune; it did not matter. He was still charged with two major crimes: monopolizing arms supplies, and inciting “anti-treason” agitation. Even at the moment of arrest, the trousered militants deliberately refused his request to change out of his nightclothes.

  At the prison gate, the aged playwright was nearly driven mad with terror by the hundreds of corpses piled in the square. He cried out and covered his eyes with both hands. A butcherous executioner, splattered with filth and blood, swaggered up to him, grinning as he said to Beaumarchais:

  “New arrival—don’t worry. You’re not like these poor wretches. At least you won’t be poked full of holes by pikes.”

  Only hours later, when he was brought before the tribunal, did Beaumarchais understand the meaning behind that cruel cheer: from that day forward, all condemned prisoners would be dispatched by a quicker, simpler method—the guillotine.

  In the stinking cell, an older jailer took a liking to the long robe Beaumarchais still wore over his silk sleeping gown. The man went to the heap of dead and stripped off a torn shirt, a yellow coat smeared with dried blood, and an old round hat, then tossed the bundle at Beaumarchais’s feet. After a short exchange of barked orders, the jailer conducted what he called a “fair” barter with the new prisoner.

  In the same cell there were three other detainees, all young. Beaumarchais did not know them, and they had no interest in talking with the newly arrived old man. Before dusk, two were abruptly released on the spot. The third—a bespectacled man said to be a royalist journalist—was informed that he would be executed by guillotine.

  The jailer who told Beaumarchais this was a man in his forties, plainly pleased with the playwright’s satin sleeping robe and therefore willing to talk. Perhaps there was another reason as well: five years earlier, at what had once been the Place Louis XV—now the Revolution Square—this same jailer had watched, for free, the classic stage play Beaumarchais had written, The Marriage of Figaro, and had never forgotten it.

  So when he realized who the old man was, the jailer leaned close to the iron bars and warned him in a low voice, “If I were you, I’d get rid of those court slippers—the ones with the lily emblem. If you keep them, the judge will almost certainly send you to the guillotine… No, don’t hand them to me. I wouldn’t dare take them home. Stuff them into a crack in the stone and hide them. And listen—go barefoot. Don’t wear any shoes at all. Remember this: in court, you must address everyone as Citizen, or else use you, me, he—nothing else. Don’t use polite forms of address, and especially not the kind used for nobles.”

  As the jailer turned to leave, Beaumarchais stopped him and begged him to do one thing. He tore off a corner of the white shirt, bit his index finger until it bled, and wrote his name on the scrap, along with the words one thousand livres. He handed it to the jailer.

  In a desperate voice, the playwright pleaded, “If you can, give this to Blanc Deyo, the editor-in-chief of The Figaro. I believe that if he reports truthfully what is being done to Beaumarchais, he will pay you one thousand livres at once.”

  In truth, Beaumarchais had no friendly ties with Blanc Deyo at all—only ill will. When The Figaro was first founded, Beaumarchais had sued Blanc Deyo in civil court, claiming the newspaper had effectively plagiarized the core idea of The Marriage of Figaro. He demanded the paper change its name immediately, publish an apology to Monsieur Beaumarchais, and pay monetary damages.

  The Paris civil court accepted the case and then stalled for months without setting a date. The reason was simple: the judges had learned, from colleagues, that The Figaro’s true patron was Deputy André. Earlier in the year, when André heard of the lawsuit, he did not throw his weight around over so small a matter. He instructed Blanc Deyo to settle with Beaumarchais voluntarily, and to pay one thousand livres as compensation for purchasing the right to the name “Figaro.”

  Even after “winning” the dispute, Beaumarchais was frightened out of his wits. That very night he moved from his old house on the ?le Saint-Louis to an estate in the western suburbs and lived in seclusion. As for the one thousand livres, he never even went to the newspaper office to collect it. But at this moment—when his life was at stake—he could only gamble on a dead chance. The Paris Commune had driven his family out, confiscated all his Paris assets and cash, and left him no money with which to bribe the jailer. He could place his hopes only in that one thousand livres. More than that, he hoped that Blanc Deyo—who represented the northern theater’s supreme command in the public eye—might speak a fair word for him in court.

  Beaumarchais’s tribunal hearing at the For-l’évêque prison took place in the afternoon. Four or five brutal men carrying long knives and clubs shoved and jostled the sixty-year-old suspect along the corridor and into the courtroom queue.

  On the bench sat the presiding judge, a tricolor sash across his chest, his face thin and unpleasantly familiar. Beaumarchais’s heart sank. He knew this man: Piero. Before the Revolution, Piero had been a third-rate lawyer at best; once he had even tried to extort money from Beaumarchais and his family. The playwright had publicly rebuked him, and Piero was said to have lost his position and become a joke among Paris lawyers.

  On the long table before the judge lay a few sheets of paper and an ink bottle—and a long knife stained with old blood. Two court clerks hunched over a small desk to the left, copying earlier verdicts without once looking up. Around the room stood more than ten prison guards. Many slumped on benches, snoring, or entertained themselves by tormenting the suspects waiting to be tried, frightening them with the crudest language imaginable. Unfortunately, the five prisoners ahead of Beaumarchais were all sentenced to death. Then it was the playwright’s turn.

  As expected, the hearing was a one-man performance by the public accuser, who kept flinging out accusations that were either thinly supported or outright invented. Beaumarchais was asked only one question by the judge: “Do you confess?” Having followed the jailer’s advice, the playwright denied everything. He knew perfectly well that if he confessed, then just outside the courtroom—turn left into the open space—stood the guillotine, towering over the yard. When Beaumarchais requested counsel or asked to speak in his own defense, the judge rejected him each time, offering one pretext after another.

  More than two hours after the hearing ended, Beaumarchais was brought back into court. It was now night. He noticed the wavering light cast by two torches mounted above the bench.

  Perhaps that flicker was his own life, already unable to see tomorrow’s sun. The tribunal would decide whether he lived or died. Sorrow flooded his chest as he thought of his wife and children.

  At about eight in the evening, the presiding judge Piero stood to read the verdict. “In the name of the just people, I declare the sentence, and punish the criminal Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais…”

  The word “death” was almost out of his mouth when a voice—familiar in its tone—cut in from outside the courtroom.

  “Citizen Beaumarchais is not guilty. Release him at once!”

  A moment later, the Deputy Director of the Paris Police, Javert, strode in with his chin high.

  “Citizen Javert, mind yourself,” the judge shouted, pounding the table. “This is the sacred tribunal of justice, not the Paris Police Bureau where you can issue orders at will!”

  At first, Piero meant to have the militants and guards throw Javert out. But he quickly discovered that, the moment the deputy director arrived, everyone in the room who was not trapped by duty had slipped away. Only the two clerks remained at their desks, the public accuser sat trembling, and the “condemned man” looked as if he might faint with relief.

  In the alleyways and marketplaces of Paris, few dared to meet Javert’s gaze. His severe face had a chilling authority that made men’s hearts jump. As a relentless keeper of law and order, Javert loathed these private, improvised “trials” without defense counsel or jury—proceedings that offered neither fairness nor justice. Too often they were nothing more than a ritual for tasting revenge.

  He did not waste words on a bully like Piero. Javert simply motioned to the policemen behind him, had Beaumarchais pulled down from the dock, and marched him straight to The Figaro’s office.

  “Three minutes,” Javert said as he left. “I want the final written verdict in my hand.”

  He produced a short pistol and placed it directly on top of Piero’s blood-stained knife, then added in a cold voice, “I know you hate me. I know you’ll try to make trouble for me. Fine. If you think a knife is faster than a bullet, come and test it.”

  To provoke Javert was a spectacularly foolish choice. The deputy director’s real power was not less than that of the Paris director who spent his days behind a desk; in practice it was often greater. And behind Javert stood a man who commanded 200,000 French troops—a military and parliamentary heavyweight notorious for protecting his own.

  In March, Minister Roland tried to cut the police school’s funding. Deputy André answered by ordering an investigation into collective corruption inside the Ministry of the Interior. Roland was left humiliated, and the matter quietly died.

  In July, the royalist Marshal Maillé de La Tour-Landry attempted to destroy André’s loyal hound by collecting and spreading “black dossiers” on Javert. But on August tenth, the pitiful old marshal—having only just fled the royal residence—was surrounded by a mob and hanged from a streetlamp, while the nobles near him were left untouched.

  Only weeks ago, Marat and Hébert had cursed Javert in the Paris Commune, calling him a cold executioner with “a dog’s head on a wolf’s neck.” The next day, two powerful figures from the Commune and the Cordeliers Club were sent, on André’s orders, to hard labor in the Versailles quarries.

  A mere judge like Piero could be crushed by Javert alone; as for the “important men” behind him, none of them dared to tear openly with André.

  Early the next morning, Javert put Beaumarchais and his family into a carriage bound for Reims and assigned two mounted troopers to ride alongside. André needed, at his side, a skilled playwright—someone to record and write the future history of his coming victories.

  Meanwhile, Piero rushed to the second floor of a carpenter’s rented rooms and poured out his grievance to Robespierre and Couthon, claiming that Javert had acted like a tyrant and openly freed a prisoner whom the tribunal had already condemned.

  In fact, Deputy Couthon disliked this incompetent judge as well. He said nothing throughout the complaint. Only after Piero left did Couthon speak to Robespierre. “Maximilien, the prison tribunals cannot be allowed to continue. In a few days it will be election day. Paris must return to normal order.”

  Robespierre nodded. “Take your words to Marat. He will understand.”

  On September eighth, the Paris Commune abolished the six prison tribunals across the city. It marked the formal end of the terror campaign of arrests, and men like Judge Piero vanished without a trace.

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  …

  While André concentrated heavy forces in the eastern hills of the Marne and prepared for the final decisive battle against the Prusso-Austrian Coalition, a political transformation—certain to reshape France and Europe—was quietly approaching in Paris. Citizen, republican, and republic had become the most fashionable words on every street corner.

  As the price of a political bargain, the day the National Legislative Assembly signed the dissolution of the terror-producing Paris Commune, September tenth, was set as the sacred election day on which the third national legislature—also called the National Convention—would choose twenty-four representatives for the capital, Paris. As repayment to the four national representatives from the northern theater’s Command Headquarters who had fought and bled at the front, the members of the Paris Electoral Committee unanimously raised their hands: André, Carnot, Thuriot, and Gensonné would enter the National Convention automatically as Paris representatives, with all the honor that implied.

  On the list of the twenty Paris seats, Robespierre—known as the Incorruptible—took first place and regained his parliamentary chair.

  Georges Danton, preparing to resign as Minister of Justice and become a deputy, ranked second.

  With Danton’s backing, the stammering, unpolished Desmoulins unexpectedly rose to third.

  In seventh place came the “madman” Marat, the Swiss doctor who now entered the hall as a national leader.

  Under Robespierre’s influence, his brother Augustin ranked seventeenth.

  The painter David, who called himself a revolutionary artist, placed nineteenth after producing a fine plaster bust of Robespierre.

  And the final seat went, astonishingly, to Duc d’Orléans—though he now called himself Citizen Louis Egalité, a name that sounded both odd and faintly ridiculous.

  The election of the third legislature’s deputies took place amid an extremely tangled situation. France’s future form of government was under furious debate. The Paris Commune, along with the Jacobin Club and more than half of its provincial branches, demanded a French republic, yet the Legislative Assembly—already on the verge of dissolution—could never bring itself to decide.

  While André served as France’s supreme military commander against the foreign invasion, Brissot and his allies regained control of the Assembly’s voice. These moderates initially opposed abolishing the monarchy. They argued that a king reduced to a puppet would help national unity and social stability, and would lower Europe’s fear of revolutionary France. To that end, Brissot attacked the radical republicans—Robespierre and Danton’s circle, along with Marat—in the newspapers he controlled, a campaign that left Paris’s street militants, fresh from executing nobles and clergy, deeply resentful.

  In the two days before the election, the crowds—whipped up and inflamed—marched again and again before the district electoral committees, shouting, “The nation above all—no king is needed!” In the vote that followed, the radicals led by Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, and Marat won a sweeping victory in Paris.

  This was, above all, the result of universal suffrage. In the Paris region, 100,000 “passive citizens”—adult men who were not servants and had lived in Paris for more than one year—now held equal voting rights. These men, filled with revolutionary zeal, included long-term unemployed workers, craftsmen with no business, small shopkeepers with no buffer against risk, and apprentices with nothing at all. They effectively carried their chosen leaders into the Riding School Hall on their shoulders. One point must be noted: under the compromise between the Legislative Assembly and the now-dissolved Paris Commune, former deputies of the Legislative Assembly were permitted to stand again for the next legislature.

  In addition, the early-September massacre had produced a clear political effect. Nobles of the Bourbon era and non-juring priests—both threatened by the street—were almost entirely shut out of representation. By late September, when the National Convention convened, of the more than seven hundred deputies in the hall, only a little more than ten were nobles. They included Vicomte de Barras, a dissolute young rake from Provence; Citizen Louis Egalité, formerly Duc d’Orléans; and the scholar Marquis de Condorcet, who seemed to have forgotten he was a noble at all.

  Where there are winners, there must be losers.

  Brissot and Pétion, unfortunately, failed to win seats in Paris. The bold, radical mood of the city had rejected their careful moderation. In the eyes of many, abolishing monarchy and founding a republic meant that anyone might become “king.” In fact, while canvassing for Desmoulins, Danton had made that promise openly to the street voters.

  Yet defeat in Paris did not fill Brissot and his friends with much regret. It was a small setback, and one they had expected. Just as most Parisians disliked the moderates, Brissot’s circle despised the brutal, radical street militants. But in France’s central and southern regions—in cities like Nantes, Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, N?mes, and Marseille—the commercial classes still included many loyal supporters of Brissot’s faction.

  At one point, when 140,000 foreign troops invaded northern France, Roland and Brissot even proposed moving the capital to the south-central part of the country. Robespierre, Danton, and André opposed the idea decisively. André in particular threatened to send anyone who advocated such a move before a military tribunal. He understood that relocating the capital would mean abandoning the northeastern occupied zone, with a fatal blow to morale in the front-line armies.

  Brissot’s base lay in the south and center. Influenced by André’s successful experience of ruling the Marne and the Ardennes by decree in 1791, and urged on repeatedly by Condorcet, Brissot’s faction pushed through a pro-peasant proposal in the Legislative Assembly’s final week, declaring that the future France would carry out some form of land reform. The Revolution had already freed 20,000,000 peasants from feudal shackles; the intensity of the newly freed men’s hunger for land was astonishing.

  The plan was to take collectively held lands, the estates of émigrés and traitors who refused to return, and the remaining undistributed church lands, then break them into small plots and distribute them, for payment, to peasants who had no land or too little land. Such laws, heavy on propaganda and light on immediate effect, could not be implemented at once. They would be delayed for nearly a year. Even so, they won Brissot’s camp firm support among rural voters in the south and center.

  As expected, Brissot and Pétion won easily in the Loire department elections. Vergniaud, Guadet, Ducos, Grangeneuve, and Barbaroux likewise prevailed across the Gironde and the south. To keep his alignment with his comrades, Gensonné refused the Paris seat offered to him; he returned to Bordeaux and ran again as a deputy for the Gironde.

  By September twentieth, the full list of 749 deputies was posted on the public board outside the Riding School Hall. Brissot and his friends—now renamed by Robespierre as the “Girondin faction”—astonishingly seized more than 200 seats in the National Convention. They became the right wing within the national legislature, and also the right wing inside the Jacobin world itself. Meanwhile, the previous parliamentary right—royalists and constitutional-monarchist nobles—had been largely purged from the hall.

  The radical Mountain group around Robespierre and Danton, despite its sweeping victory in Paris, gained less in the provinces, with only a little more than one hundred deputies reliably backing them. Those included Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Desmoulins, David, Augustin, Billaud-Varenne, Legendre, Carnot, Louis Egalité, Fréron, Manier, and Paris. Robespierre privately suspected that Legendre, Carnot, and Manier were highly dubious—informants planted by André inside the Mountain—but Danton did not support this suspicion, and the matter died away.

  The largest force in the legislature was the middle group, holding more than half the seats: rebranded constitutional monarchists, a small number of noble clergy, and above all the majority of northern deputies who looked to André as their sole guiding figure.

  …

  In the luxurious office of the Minister of Justice, Desmoulins stormed in, furious. He threw down, before Danton, a copied roster of the National Convention’s deputy list and shouted, “Damn André! He and his André faction dare to seize more than half the seats in the national legislature. We must overthrow this shameless dictator—this tyrant of Reims!”

  Danton’s eyes swept coldly across the roster. Then he rose at once, went to the door, and closed it. Turning back, he scolded Desmoulins with a grim face.

  “Camille—tell me, who has been teaching you to oppose André? Is it the royalists, the constitutional-monarchist nobles, the non-juring priests who are stirring rebellion in the Vendée and elsewhere? Or have you been bought by the spies of the foreign intervention armies?”

  Desmoulins froze, eyes widening in shock as he stared at his friend, mentor, and superior. “Georges… how can you suspect me like this?”

  Danton continued, harsh and unyielding. “If you walk outside right now and say what you just said to anyone, 700,000 Parisians will have every reason to suspect you are a traitor to the Revolution—a foreign agent. Remember, my friend: the only reason we can still live and work in Paris without fearing a royalist return is that André and his Command Headquarters are directing French armies that are fighting to the death in Alsace, in Lorraine, in Champagne, and in the southern Netherlands against 140,000 coalition troops. So long as victory is secured, then even dictatorship and autocracy—yes, even the sacrifice of our lives—would be justified.”

  At that, the minister—still not yet resigned—collapsed back into his chair. He sat in silence for a long while, then softened his tone and spoke calmly.

  “Remember this: with the enemy at the gate, any internal civil strife within the Jacobins would be a fatal disaster. On that point, Brissot, Robespierre, Marat, and I all share the same view. If you still cannot understand this, I can have you chosen as a deputy—and I can also strip you of the right to sit on the benches. At least if you remain only an editor and journalist, you may live to see you and Lucile’s child grow to adulthood.”

  When Desmoulins left the minister’s office, his face ashen, Danton locked himself inside again. This time, he regretted not having followed Robespierre’s sound advice. Robespierre had strongly opposed letting the na?ve, romantic, guileless, and sharp-tongued Desmoulins enter the National Convention.

  “Because it will make Camille, without even realizing it, create more—and more dangerous—enemies. One day, perhaps, neither you nor I will be able to protect our friend,” Robespierre had warned. As for the hidden hand trying to push Desmoulins into a collision with André, Danton knew exactly who it was.

  The more he thought, the more he felt Robespierre’s mind was keen and his judgment precise. Even the Friend of the People held the Incorruptible in high esteem, calling the man from Arras the hope of France. And before this, Marat had offered that same admiration to only two men: Danton—and André.

  Although André, holding immense power, had again and again struck at Marat and his followers in the name of state or law, and although Marat had openly denounced André’s dictatorship and autocracy on many occasions, Danton understood that both sides still kept a measure of reason—and a certain trust. They were far from a fight to the death.

  Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and André all faced the same enemy: a powerful enemy, within France and beyond it. Thus André, who had once acted as head of state, allowed Robespierre, Danton, and Marat to form an alliance and dominate the Paris deputy elections. The usual method was simple: Robespierre dictated, Marat published, Danton executed.

  As for Brissot’s camp accusing the “ghost” of the Paris Commune—now dissolved—of manipulating tricks and illegal practices in the Paris election, André, far away on the anti-coalition front, did not respond at all. Marat had published the names of all candidates in his newspaper. He sent street detachments to “remind” voters—sometimes politely, sometimes by threat—not to cast ballots for opponents of the Revolution. In the end, with André’s tacit permission, and perhaps even his indulgence, not one Brissot-aligned figure was elected from Paris to the National Convention, and even Gensonné chose to resign and run again elsewhere.

  Danton glanced at the large clock to his left. It was now seven thirty in the evening. He remembered he had a dinner appointment—agreed with Robespierre and Marat—for a small tavern on Peacock Street.

  Peacock Street lay between the Saint-Renault boulevard and the national legislature, a narrow back alley where a “coffeehouse” tavern did business. On one occasion, Robespierre had discovered a hidden back room there, and from then on he used it as a discreet place to discuss secrets with comrades.

  After the August tenth uprising, three men usually sat around the table in that back room. They sat apart, each on one side of the table, leaving the fourth side empty. It was now about eight o’clock. The street outside was still bright, yet inside the room it was night, lit only by an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, its small flame aimed at the tabletop. Gas lighting—high technology for the time—could be found only in places like Reims and Chalons-en-Champagne.

  The first of the three men was pale and severe. His cheeks twitched with a habitual nervous tic that made smiling difficult. He wore powder, gloves, a carefully brushed coat, and neatly fastened buttons; not a single wrinkle showed in his light-blue jacket. The other two were opposites: one a giant, the other almost a dwarf. The tall man was rough and unkempt, wearing a wide, vivid red wool jacket thrown open, boots turned down at the top. His hair stuck up in disorder; his lips were thick; his teeth large; his fists heavy; his eyes bright; his smile kind. The smaller man’s complexion was sallow, and he sat like a misshapen creature. His head leaned back; his eyes were bloodshot. He wore trousers, slippers, and a waistcoat that had once been white satin, now covered by a coarse wool coat.

  The first man was Robespierre, the second was Danton, the third was Marat.

  Danton lifted his head. His clenched fists knocked together, as if he were forcing courage into himself. “At a suitable moment, I will formally resign my post as Minister of Justice. At the same time, I will restate a principle of law: a deputy to the National Convention cannot hold, at the same time, a chief office in the cabinet government or in a field command headquarters for more than six months.”

  Robespierre nodded. “I will also, on behalf of the Jacobin Club’s members, praise Georges for the noble virtue of respecting the constitution. Remember—the timing must be after the foreign intervention armies have entirely left France.”

  Marat gave a disdainful snort. “Ah. So this is your plan, you guardians of the law—after this war of national defense, to use ‘the law’ as a weapon to force André to surrender command of 200,000 troops and the legal form of his northern dictatorship?”

  His face hardened. “It will not work. André will never accept such a scheme.”

  “Then what is your solution,” the other two asked at once, “provided it does not trigger a civil war? And André must not interfere in the free political life of the new France.”

  Marat smiled. He pushed the table away with both hands and declared loudly, “Send him north, and east—Brussels, Cologne, Mainz, Koblenz, Berlin, even Vienna. Those were the places he swore to reach, in public, on the floor of the Legislative Assembly.”

  Robespierre and Danton exchanged a look, then nodded in unspoken agreement.

  “Fine,” one of them said. “Next item: should we expel Brissot from the Jacobin Club?”

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