revolution_fr | Prieur de la Marne (Reply)

The first of my translations of the Humanité mini-biographies, as requested by trf_chan.

The rest will be forthcoming, though probably not soon because I have a paper to write.

PORTRAIT. 220 YEARS AFTER THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Pierre-Louis Prieur, missionary of the Republic

1756-1827. The young lawyer from Champagne, elected to the Estates-General, then a conventionnel and member of the Committee of Public Safety, was a loyal supporter of Robespierre. As a representative on mission with the armies on the frontiers where he put the revolutionary institutions into place, Prieur found himself immersed in the terrible civil war of the West.

On this fine day of May 1827, in Brussels, an old man has taken his last breath in a modest apartment on the Rue de Namur. The deceased is seventy-one years old, a respectable age at the beginning of the 19^th century. The neighbors know but little about him. He was a lawyer in Paris then lived frugally on the legal advice he gave to individuals in Brussels, where he settled in 1816. He dies without a sou, but will avoid a common grave thanks to the ultimate support of his friends, the members of the Masonic Lodge of the Philanthropic Friends [loge maçonnique des Amis philanthropes] into which he was inducted in his last years, and of exiles like him, banished from their homeland since the last Bourbons and all the ci-devants who had conspired against France had returned in the baggage carts of the English after Waterloo. Thus ends the journey of Pierre-Louis Prieur, a “regicide,” for having voted the death of Louis XVI, in the eyes of the restorers of the white flag who had taken it into their heads to erase everything capable of recalling the French Revolution. A pretention as absurd as it was futile.

The dead remain young. That goes for most of the principal actors of the French Revolution. Whatever their tendencies, Montagnards like Girondins, those of the Plain like those of the Mountain, all began their political life very early, in the formidable upheaval that shook France. The revolutionaries occupy the highest responsibilities very young. But when they mount the scaffold, erected on the Place de la Révolution, the present Place de la Concorde, rare are those who have reached forty years of age. Pierre-Louis Prieur, born in 1756 in a village in Champagne called Somessous, should not have been an exception to the rule: a member of the Committee of Public Safety and close to Robespierre, he would have climbed into the same tumbrel as the Incorruptible, Robespierre the Younger, Saint-Just, Couthon… if he had been in Paris on that 9 Thermidor, but Prieur, who within the committee (in fact the revolutionary government) was in charge of the navy, was on mission in Toulon. He will therefore survive Robespierre, and will not abandon the fight as long as it will be possible for him, despite the ill wind of the Thermidorian Reaction. Then, under the Empire, he will take up his profession as a lawyer once more. He will remain loyal to the end of his days to the revolutionary engagement of his youth.

As a child, Pierre-Louis is indistinguishable, in terms of family and sociology, from the majority of young people who will make the Revolution, in particular those with the most progressive positions. He belongs to a modest milieu, but one which already approaches the petite-bourgeoisie. His father is not very high up in the judiciary hierarchy: he is a secretary and a procurator-fiscal at the tribunal of Châlons, in that territory which with the Revolution will become the department of the Marne. That is why the revolutionary Prieur will be known by the name Prieur de la Marne, to avoid all confusion with his homonym on the Committee of Public Safety, Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, from Dijon.

The three Prieur children lose their mother very early, in 1761. The second, Pierre-Louis, after his years of college in Châlons, pursues his law studies in Reims. Having become a lawyer, he goes into Free-Masonry and joins the Lodge Saint Louis of Charity [loge Saint Louis de la bienfaisance]. He participates passionately in the democratic effervescence of 1789. He is elected deputy of the Third Estate to the Estates-General. In the Constituent Assembly, he attracted notice for his most radical positions and by an eloquence developed with the practice of pleading, which earns him the nickname of Crieur [Crier] de la Marne on the part of his detractors. He is among those who fight the tax-based voting [suffrage censitaire] according to which, if it had been applied, the majority of the deputies of the Third Estate would not even have had the right to vote. Elected secretary of the Assembly, he is a member of the committees on beggary and monies. With regard to the émigrés, who are going off to join the monarchies that would like to crush the Revolution, Prieur calls, on several occasions, for severe retaliatory measures. Louis XVI tries to leave France and his flight is stopped at Varennes. Immediately, Prieur obtains that the king’s name should be suppressed from the oath to the Constitution and opposes the principle of the inviolability of the monarch in the constitutional text. Then begin the comings and goings of Prieur as representative on mission between Paris and more or less far-off provinces. These missionaries of the Republic, to whom the historian Michel Biard has devoted an indispensable book,[1] played a decisive role in the victory over the counterrevolution. The first contingent was dispatched after Varennes. It was comprised of fifteen deputies, including Prieur, who goes to Finistère. He then exercises different functions in the Marne as departmental administrator, then as public prosecutor at Versailles, vice-president of the criminal tribunal of Paris…

Elected deputy of the Marne to the Convention in September 1792, he sits with the Mountain, carries out new missions (the reorganization of the military fortification of Châlons, in Verdun, the organization of local administration in the Loiret, the direction of military operations in Cherbourg. In the North, the Ardennes, the Moselle, the armies of the Rhine…).

On 6 April 1793, faced with the pressure of the European coalition that wants to crush very young republic, up against the royalist revolt coming from the Vendée, the Convention creates the Committee of Public Safety. Prieur joins it in July, like Robespierre, after the fall of Danton. But he returns anew to the front with the republican armies, engaged in the bloody battles of the West, in Mans where the monarchists are crushed in December 93, in Morbihan and in the Nantes region, where he organizes revolutionary power, replaces Carrier in Nantes then establishes republican power in Brest. Like other representatives on mission, Prieur found himself plunged into the heart of the pitiless war between the Blues of the Republic and the Whites of the Vendean armies. Fierce battles, without mercy on either side, and terrible repression exerted by the victors. Jean-Baptiste Carrier and General Taureau have remained famous for the bloody reprisals the military men gave themselves up to, but it is obvious, as Michel Biard observes, that most of those sent on mission to the Vendée, to the Loire-Inférieure, to Maine-et-Loire, and to Deux-Sèvres bear some part of the responsibility for the deaths of 250,000 to 300,000 persons killed during combat or the repression, or by more indirect consequences of the war. It is clear that in a civil war of such intensity, a number of innocent citizens with no ties to the counterrevolution do not emerge unscathed.

The representatives on mission, several hundred of whom traded places with each other on all the roads of France, on the frontiers, or more peacefully in departments situated outside the zones of conflict, constituted the only means of communication between Paris and the departments. Without these men dressed in blue redingotes and hats with tricolor plumes, it would have been impossible for citizens outside the gates of Paris to know of the debates of and decisions made by the Convention in the name of the French people, or for the central power to know the state of mind of the population, the dealings of the enemies, real or supposed of the Revolution. They were in charge of informing the soldiers. They were political and military commissaries without whom it is hardly probable that the Revolution would have extended its influence to the whole nation. They were the vectors of a necessary republican centrality.

After 9 Thermidor, Prieur would be reelected to the Committee of Public Safety and would even preside the Convention for a short period at the end of 1794, but his position has become fragile. The right attacks him. During the popular uprising of June 95 he joins with the rioters, which leads to his arrest. He escapes and hides in the Aisne until the amnesty. He abandons declared political battles, is named administrator of the civil hospices of Paris [which position he holds] until 1803, then puts on his lawyer’s robe again before taking the path of exile with the return of the last Bourbons.

Jean-Paul Piérot

Translated from the original French by <lj user=estellacat>

[1] Missionnaires de la République, by Michel Biard, Committee for Historical and Scientific Works. 2002. 634 pages, 32 euros.