Marat and Danon were both paid British agents during the Reign of Terror
Episode 29: The Revolution Devours Her Children
Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon
Dr Suzanne M Desan
Film Review
Dean begins this lecture by stressing that the Committee for Public Safety continued building the Republic and valiantly defended France against European invaders throughout the ten months of the Reign of Terror. By 1793, they had recruited and trained 750,000 troops, as well as passing taxes on the rich, building armaments factories and textile workshops to create jobs for poor women and public ovens; enacting food rationing; organizing public food distribution, abolishing slavery establishing free primary schools and selling former church and estate lands.
By winter 1793, France had suppressed the Vendée rebellion and began winning the war against the other European powers. The Committee for Public safety had arrested the most vocal Enragés leaders (the populists supported the Terror most strongly). They had also closed down the women’s clubs and limited section meetings (Ie neighborhood assemblies) to meeting three times a month.
In February 1794, Robespierre learned of a plot by British and Austrian spies, involving Jacques-Rene Hébert,* Danton and various revolutionaries who bribed National Convention officials to let them privately liquidate (pocketing the proceeds) the French East India company after the Committee banned all joint stock companies (in August 1793).
Hébert was arrested, tried and guillotined on March 24, 1794. Georges Danton (a friend of Hébert), who had resigned from the Committee for Public Safety in reaction to the Reign of Terror), was arrested in April 1794. At the time he was actively organizing the Sans-culottes towards embracing more moderate positions. Believing they were about to seize control of the National Convention and crush the revolution, Committee president Maximilien Robespierre ordered the arrest.
The Committee stopped Danton’s trial when he began haranguing prosecution witness. Eventually ruling that all Terror arrestees be be tried in Paris and denied the right to legal representation or to call witnesses, they had Danton guillotined April 5, 1794.
*The followers of Jacques-Rene Hebert, editor of the radical political journal Pere Duchesne, were known as Hébertistes. They campaigned for a more revolutionary government that was anti-Christian and dedicated to the eradication of Girondistes and other moderates. Hébert was eventually arrested and guillotined for “participating in a foreign coup.”
**Although Desan acknowledges that Jacobin club infiltration by foreign spies was real, she tends to minimize its effect on the Reign of Terror. Other historians disagree. According to the late Lyndon Larouche and others, documents held at the the British Museum reveal that George Jacques Danton was the paid agent of the Duke of Orleans, a British Foreign Office agent paid through Barings, the powerful British merchant bank.
According to Larouche, the mob that released the 18 or so petty criminals imprisoned in the Bastille on July 14, 1789 were hirelings paid by the Duke of Orleans and led by Danton, also his paid agent. The goal was to crush plans by Louis XVI (whose support enabled American victory in the 1775-1783 Revolutionary War), Thomas Paine, and the Marquis de Lafayette, to create a constitutional monarchy in strategic alliance with the US. The British Museum also holds documents revealing Jean-Paul Marat (who, prior to his assassination, justified the Reign of Terror as a “political necessity”) was also a paid British agent.
According to Larouche, the ideological godfather of the French Reign of Terror, was Jeremy Benthem, the first chief of British Foreign Office intelligence. Benthem ran a radical writers workshop in Paris which prepared many of the inflammatory texts Danton and his supporters circulated. Danton ran a number of of agents of his own (paid via Perregaux Bank), according to papers found among his belongings after his death.
See also Danton, by Norman Hampson and Secret Service, British Agents in France 1792-1815, E.Sparrow (Boydell Press, 1999)
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
The Most Revolutionary Act 