Jacques Hébert
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| Jacques René Hébert | |
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| Born | November 15, 1757 Alençon, France |
| Died | March 24, 1794 (aged 36) Paris, France |
| Cause of death | guillotined |
| Residence | Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Other names | Père Duchesne |
| Alma mater | College of Alençon |
| Occupation | newspaper editor |
| Known for | editor of Le Père Duchesne |
| Political party | Hébertists |
| Opponent(s) | Jean-Sifrein Maury, Marie Antoinette, Christianity, Maximilien Robespierre, Committee of Public Safety |
| Religious beliefs | Cult of Reason |
| Spouse(s) | Marie Marguerite Françoise Hébert |
| Children | Scipion-Virginia Hébert (7 February 1793 - 13 July, 1830) |
| Parents | Jacques Hébert (-1766), Marguerite La Beunaiche de Houdré (1727-1787) |
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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 goldsmith, former trial judge, and deputy consul, Jacques Hébert (died 1766) and Marguerite Beunaiche de Houdrie (1727-1787). Jacques-René Hébert studied law at the College of Alençon and went into practice as a clerk in a solicitor of Alençon, at which time he was ruined by a lawsuit against a Dr. Clouet. Hébert fled first to Rouen and then to Paris. For a while he passed through a difficult financial time and lived through the support of a hairdresser in rue des Noyers. There he found work in a theater, la République, where he wrote plays in his spare time, but these were never produced. He was fired for stealing. He then entered the service of a doctor. It is said that he lived through expediency and scams.
In 1789 he begin his writing with a pamphlet "la Lanterne magique ou le Fléau des Aristocrates" (Lantern Magic, or Scourge of Aristocrats). He published a few booklets. In 1790, he attracted attention through a pamphlet he published, and became a prominent member of the club of the Cordeliers in 1791.
[edit] Le Père Duchesne
Hébert's influence was mainly due to his articles in his journal, Le Père Duchesne, which appeared from 1790 to 1794. The first publication of Le Père Duchesne occurred in September 1790 and opened a new period in his life. The polemic articles he penned were written with wit, but were also violent and abusive, and purposely couched in foul language in order to appeal to the sans culottes. Street hawkers would yell: Il est bougrement en colère aujourd’hui le père Duchesne! (Father Duchesne is very angry today!).
Initially, 1790-1791, Le Père Duchesne supported a constitutional monarchy and was even favorable towards King Louis XVI and the opinions of the Marquis de La Fayette. His violent attacks of the period were aimed at Jean-Sifrein Maury, a great defender of papal authority and the main opponent of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
With the king's flight to Varennes, his tone significantly hardened. Starting in 1792 the Paris Commune and the ministers of war Jean-Nicolas Pache and, later, Jean Baptiste Noël Bouchotte bought several thousand copies of Le Père Duchesne which were distributed free to the public and troops. He referred to Marie Antoinette as 'the Austrian bitch' and addressing Louis XVI as 'Monsieur Veto, the drunken drip.'
[edit] Revolutionary Role
On July 17, 1791 was at the Champ de Mars to sign a petition to demand the removal of King Louis XVI and was involved with the subsequent Massacre of Champ de Mars by troops under Lafayette. This put him in the revolutionary mindset, and the Le Père Duchesne adopted a sloppier style to better to appeal to the masses. Le Père Duchesne began to attack Lafayette, Mirabeau, and Bailly. Following Louis XVI's failed flight to Varennes he begain to attack both King Louis XVI and Pope Pius VI as well.
He met his future wife, Marie Goupil (born 1756), who was a 37-year-old nun who left convent life at the "Sisters of Providence" convent at rue Saint-Honoré. Marie's passport from this time shows regular use. They married on February 7, 1792, and had a daughter, Virginia Scipion-Hébert (7 February 1793 - 13 July 1830). During this time, Hébert had a luxurious, bourgeois life. He entertained Jean-Nicolas Pache, the mayor of Paris and Minister of War, for weeks, as well as other influential men.
Hébert was like Robespierre and liked to dress elegantly and surround himself with beautiful objects as beautiful tapestries -- an attitude that can be contrasted to that of Pierre Gaspard Chaumette. Where he got the financial support to support his lifestyle, is unclear, however Pache's commissions to print thousands of issues of Le Père Duchesne and his relationship to Delaunay d'Angers, mistress and wife of Andres Maria de Guzman.
As a member of Cordeliers club, he had a seat in the revolutionary Paris Commune where on the the 9th and 10th of August, 1792 he was sent to the Bonne-Nouvelle section of Paris. As a public journalist, he supported the September Massacres. On December 22, 1792, he was appointed the second substitute of the procureur of the commune, and through to August of 1793 supported the attacks against the Girondin faction. In April-May of 1793 he, along with Marat and others, violently attacked Girondins.
[edit] Calculated Radical Action
In February 1793 he voted with his fellow bourgeoisie Hébertists against the Maximum Price Act, a Price ceiling on grain, as it would cause hoarding and stir resentment. On May 20th, 1793 the moderate majority of the National Convention formed the Special Commission of Twelve, which was designed to investigate and prosecute conspirators. At the urging of the Twelve on May 24, 1793 he was arrested.
However, Hébert had been warned in time, and, with the support of the Sans Culottes, the Natiaonal Convention was forced to order his release three days later.
[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] Clash with Robespierre, Arrest, Conviction, and Execution
After successfully attacking the Girondins, he continued to attack others who he viewed as too moderate including Danton, Philippeau, and Robespierre in the fall of 1793.
The government, supported by the Jacobins was exasperated and finally decided to strike on the night of March 13th, 1794, despite the reluctance of Barère of Vieuzac, Collot d'Herbois and Billaud-Varenne. The order was to arrest the leaders of the Hébertists, these included individuals in the War Ministry and others.
In the Revolutionary Tribunal, Hebert was treated very differently than Danton, more like a thief than a conspirator, his earlier scams were brought to light and criticized. He was sentenced to death, along with his co-defendants, on the third day of deliberations. The execution by guillotine was to a jeering crowd on March 24, 1794. His wife was executed twenty days later on April 13th, 1794.
[edit] Gallery
 Young Jacques Hébert |
 Illustration from the Pere Duchesne broadsides |
 A Letter by Jacques Hébert to Citizen Pierre-François Palloy |
[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 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 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 2007-10-24.
- ^ "French Revolution". History.com. The History Channel. http://www.history.com/encyclopedia.do?articleId=209830. Retrieved 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 2007-10-24.
