CHAPTER 3

Redress

Les Biens des Condamnés

In 1819, François Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas published a book on the life of Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the royal official in charge of the book trade from 1750 to 1763, who was guillotined in 1794. During the Revolution, Boissy was a centrist and very cautious member of the National Convention. He voted against the execution of Louis XVI, distrusted Robespierre, but knew how to pay tribute to his power when it was the wise thing to do politically.¹ After 9 Thermidor, he was appointed to the Committee of Public Safety. In that capacity he was occupied mostly with matters of subsistence. His decision to ration bread during the difficult winter of 1795 earned him the nickname Boissy Famine. He presided over the Convention during the insurrection of 1 Prairial (May 20, 1795), when a crowd of Parisian sansculottes, incensed by the harsh economic conditions, invaded the hall and presented the head of the deputy Jean-Bertrand Féraud to him on a pike. As the 1790s were drawing to a close, his opinions became more openly royalist. In spite of that, he managed to avoid being exiled after the coup of 18 Fructidor (September 4, 1797), though he had to keep a low profile. He returned to political life under Napoleon, becoming a comte de l'Empire in 1808, and a member of the Legion of Honor in 1811. The most illustrious chapter in his parliamentary career, however, unfolded during the Restoration. Elected to the Chamber of Peers in 1815, Boissy emerged as a staunch defender of liberal principles, taking a decisive stand for freedom of the press and of
religion. He made a valiant effort to defend his former revolutionary colleagues when Louis XVIII had many of them exiled, writing numerous petitions on their behalf and intervening personally with the king. His efforts in this matter served to rehabilitate his reputation somewhat in republican circles.² It was at this time in his life that Boissy sat down to write the essay on Malesherbes.

In the preface to the book, dedicated to his children, Boissy noted that he had written it for their edification and did not intend it for publication. But upon completing the work, he came to realize that a tribute to a man such as Malesherbes should not remain a private matter. After deciding to publish the work, he added in its first pages a speech, which he had originally delivered in March 1795 at the Convention, on the restitution of property that had been confiscated from the victims of the Terror. Boissy wrote that he found this speech so relevant to the “painful circumstances” he had been forced to recall that he thought it could be read with some interest today, “now that the sad times, which rendered it necessary, are far behind us.” At the time of delivering his speech in favor of restitution, not even a year had passed since the guillotining of Malesherbes and his family, and Boissy ended his preface by expressing hope that “their spirits, which have been afflicted with so much injustice, would find some consolation” in this homage to their memory.³

A tribute to the memory of victims of the Terror, an acknowledgment that those difficult times are long gone, an appeal to the souls of the dead, and the restitution of property—haunting and closure, side by side. Boissy’s text speaks to the difficulty at the heart of trying to redress the damage done to victims of massive devastation. For at the end of the day, the victims want one thing: to go back to where things were before the damage had been done. They are hurt; their lives have been torn apart; and they want to be made whole again. The term restitution itself, as the legal means by which a state fulfills its obligation to repair the harm caused by its actions, designates the desire to reestablish, as much as possible, the situation that existed before the wrongful act had been committed.⁴ The historian Charles Maier notes that the aspiration expressed in all these “re” words—retribution, restitution, remembrance, reconciliation—is inherently impossible. “None of these functions or roles can turn time backward. We repair and remember because we cannot return. What community existed has been rent. All the ‘re’ functions are designed to enable survivors to carry on life after the rending.”⁵

This chapter is about this inherent impossibility: the compulsion to undo the damage caused by the violence of Year II and the inescapable inability to do so. It examines the debate about the restoration of property to the widows and children of victims of the Terror. The issue first came up in Decem-
ber 1794, when numerous relatives of victims began sending petitions to revolutionary authorities, demanding the restitution of property and the re-habilitation of memory—*restitution des biens et réhabilitation de la mémoire*—of their loved ones. These demands gave rise to painful, complex debates within and beyond the walls of the Convention. They eventually led to a decree stipulating that the property confiscated from those who had been condemned to death by revolutionary tribunals would be returned to their surviving relatives. But the decree included such a long list of exceptions, and it made such contorted distinctions between deserving and undeserving victims, that, rather than closing the books on this matter, it ensured that it would remain open for years to come.

## Les Biens des Condamnés

There is a perplexing phrase in the registers of the revolutionary Committee on Legislation: *les biens des condamnés*. It records petitions for the restitution of property, which had been confiscated from victims of the Terror. The phrase first appears in December 1794 and remains on the books until the passing of the decree ordering the restoration of property in June 1795. Thereafter, it appears less often and eventually it is supplanted by other concerns, such as the property that had been confiscated from the émigrés. But for this brief window of time, the phrase appears with alarming regularity, recording over 250 petitions on this matter.⁶ It is perplexing, first, because of the contrast between the two words *biens* and *condamnés*, “goods” and “the condemned.” *Biens*, of course, means possessions, but as the translation to English shows all too well, it is also associated with a normative or moral meaning, the good. And the contrast between something that is good and the fate of those who had been condemned to death by revolutionary tribunals is jarring. Furthermore, the possessions of the dead are what remain after they are gone, and as long as the status of these possessions remains unclear, so too is the status of their late owners. In this sense, *les biens des condamnés* is a phrase that denotes a past that has not passed.

The origins of this category were more prosaic. The *biens des condamnés* derived from the revolutionary institution of *biens nationaux*, or national properties.⁷ The creation of national properties dates back to the early days of the Revolution. In May 1790, the Constituent Assembly adopted a law regulating the sale of church lands. The profits were to be used to pay off France's national debt. But there was more to it than that. By confiscating the lands of the church, dividing them into small plots, and selling them to private citizens,
the revolutionaries were creating what Rafe Blaufarb has called “the great demarcation.” By that he meant the distinction between power and property, politics and society. This distinction, so fundamental to modern life, did not exist under the Old Regime. Under the Old Regime, positions of public power in the administration, the military, and the judiciary were owned privately, and could be bequeathed to one’s children or sold to someone else. Real estate was for the most part owned by multiple parties who stood in legally enforced relations of hierarchy and dependency to each other. In other words, under the Old Regime, public power was privately owned, and private property was publicly owned. Indeed, it is somewhat misleading to speak of private property at all before 1789.⁸

The revolutionaries changed all that. By divorcing private interest from public power, they were making a clear distinction between the social—the realm of private interests—and the political, the realm where these multiple, competing interests would be adjudicated to the benefit of all. The creation of national properties was thus more than a response to a fiscal crisis. It was “a theoretically informed, programmatic attempt to excise property from sovereignty and return it to society.”⁹ This was a measure that enjoyed widespread support from the population. Many communes had expressed similar sentiments in the *cahiers de doléances* that were collected across France in preparation for the meeting of the Estates-General. The commune of Borne in the department of Ardèche, for example, demanded in March 1789 that “those rich monks, who live in sluggishness and idleness, be brought back into society and that the profit generated by the sale of their possessions serve for the payment of the national debt.”¹⁰ The nationalization of church lands, which came to be known as *biens nationaux de première origine*, or first-round properties, was the first step on the path leading to the confiscation of *les biens des condamnés*.

The second, more immediate step in this direction was the seizure of the property of the émigrés. The revolutionaries adopted this measure in the context of war. On February 9, 1792, the Legislative Assembly decided to seize the possessions of the émigrés “so as to ensure that the Nation receives the indemnity that is owed to it, for the extraordinary costs occasioned by the conduct of the émigrés, and to take away from them the means to harm the fatherland.”¹¹ The war between the young French Republic and an alliance of European monarchies would break out only two months later, but the buildup to it was well under way. In December the assembly summoned an army of volunteers to defend French borders, and on February 7, two days before the Legislative Assembly’s decision concerning the property of the émigrés, Austria and Prussia signed an agreement to invade France. The revolutionaries
targeted the refugees who had been fleeing France because many of them had joined the monarchical coalition that was forming across the border. Most of the refugees who joined this alliance were from the French nobility. Nobles made up only 17 percent or so of the émigrés, but it was high-ranking nobles, such as the prince of Condé, who formed royalist armies that joined Austrian and Prussian forces in an effort to restore Bourbon rule and end the Revolu-
tion.¹² The logic of the first revolutionary seizure of private property was thus fairly straightforward: make those who were responsible for the war pay for it. The seized possessions of the émigrés came to be known as *biens nationaux de deuxième origine*, or second-round properties.

Les biens des condamnés emerged as a subcategory of second-round proper-
ties. It is not entirely clear when the revolutionary government decided to seize
the possessions of citizens who had been convicted as enemies of the people.
The Law of Suspects, which formed the legal foundation of the Terror, did
not stipulate this measure.¹³ It merely stated that the papers found in the homes
of detained suspects be sealed. The main issue seems to have been security, not
punishment. Yet fairly soon after the adoption of this law, we find the revolu-
tionary government dealing with the difficulties that arose from the expropria-
tion of citizens who had been condemned to death. In November 1793, the
Convention discussed the case of Magdelaine Françoise de Robec, the widow
Kolly. Her husband, the tax-farmer Paul Pierre Kolly, had been executed in
May 1793. Madame de Robec was sentenced to death as well, but her execution
had been stayed because she was pregnant at the time. This raised a difficult
question: What was to be done about the infant once the stay on her execution
was lifted? The Convention decided that the young children of expropriated
families "belong to the Republic," and as such they would be cared for at public
expense.¹⁴ An annual indemnity was offered to families who would take on the
foster care of these children.¹⁵

These difficulties aside, there was considerable confusion around the prop-
erty of suspected or convicted enemies of the people. Practices varied between
localities. Some departments sequestered and inventoried the possessions of
suspects but avoided selling them until judgment was rendered. Other depart-
ments proceeded with the sale of seized goods swiftly. In January 1794 the Con-
vention charged its executive committees with preparing a report on the matter
in an effort to standardize practices. In March and April, Antoine de Saint-Just,
Robespierre's right-hand man in the Committee of Public Safety, presented the
Ventôse Decrees. These decrees offered a radical solution to the problem. Saint-
Just proposed to distribute the possessions of the enemies of the people to indi-
gent patriots. "That which constitutes a Republic," he argued, "is the destruction
of those who are opposed to it." The enemies of the Republic have excluded
themselves from the social contract by their actions. The rights of man and citizen no longer apply to them. “The property of patriots will be inviolable and sacred,” Saint-Just said, “but the possessions of conspirators are there for the poor.”¹⁶ Each commune was to draw up a list of the suspects and their seized possessions, as well as a list of destitute citizens who would be receiving the confiscated goods.

The Ventôse Decrees were never applied. They encountered resistance from both left and right.¹⁷ The indigent patriots who were supposed to benefit from these measures were not eager to register themselves with the authorities. In the end, the property of citizens who had been condemned to death by revolutionary tribunals was not distributed to the needy, but rather sold in public auctions. The following, for example, is a poster announcing the sale of “the moveable goods that used to belong to Jean-Baptist Dubbary, *condamné.*” Dubbary, a nobleman from Toulouse, was guillotined in March 1794. The goods on sale included “bed decorations of fine silk, chests of drawers with their marble top, sofas, and a billiard table” but excluded “bottles of local and imported wine, liquors and fruit brandy, linen that could be useful for hospitals, items that could prove useful for the army, as well as objects needed for the teaching of botany and the cultivation of plants and vegetables.”¹⁸ At the auctions, a candle or a torch would be lit and biddings were accepted as long as the flame was burning. We thus find in the official protocols of these sales descriptions such as “we lit the first fire” or “during the second flame.”¹⁹ The buyers were sometimes ordinary citizens, but more often they were speculators or “professional buyers” who tended to drive prices up.²⁰

There are two points about *les biens des condamnés* that are important for understanding some of the issues around restitution after 9 Thermidor. The first is that the expropriation of enemies of the people emerged from the context of war, much like the expropriation of the émigrés, but it did not fit neatly within it. When it came to the seizure of the property of the émigrés, the revolutionaries could rely on ancient customs established in the *ius genitium* or Law of Nations.²¹ The most influential attempt to codify the Law of Nations in the eighteenth century, and the one the revolutionaries were probably most familiar with, was *Le droit des gens*, published in 1758 by the Swiss philosopher, Emmerich de Vattel.²² Vattel argued that, in war, every nation has the right to deprive its enemies of their property. In so doing, Vattel wrote, “besides diminishing the enemy’s power, we augment our own, and obtain at least partial indemnification . . . either for what constitutes the subject of the war, or for the expenses and losses incurred in its prosecution—in a word, we do ourselves justice.”²³ Since most of the émigrés ended up in countries that were at war with France, and many of them joined the armies of these coun-
tries, the revolutionaries could invoke the *ius gentium* in justifying their dispossession.

Things were less clear-cut with victims of the Terror. If we follow the revolutionary legislation on seizures of property, it is easy to see an escalating dynamic whereby more and more groups are designated enemies of the Republic and treated as such. Thus, in September 1793 there was a decree ordering the expropriation of all foreign nationals; in October, it was the turn of the rebels in Lyon; in December, the Convention ordered the dispossession of parents of émigrés.²⁴ The expropriation of citizens delineated an ever-expanding circle of those who were excluded from the body politic. It amounted to a form of civil death, that is, “the privation of the rights and advantages of society.”²⁵ The dispossession of victims of the Terror did eventually fall within the same dynamic, but it had different implications because it affected French citizens who did not necessarily bear arms against the Republic. In short, *les biens des condamnés* concerned civil war rather than war. Vatel’s * Droit des gens* addressed this issue by arguing that “when a nation becomes divided into two parties absolutely independent, and no longer acknowledging a common superior, the state is dissolved, and the war between the two parties stands on the same ground . . . as public war between two different nations.”²⁶ Be that as it may, the distinction between war and civil war would lead to some contorted legal and political reasoning after 9 Thermidor, when the revolutionaries would struggle to justify the restoration of property to the families of victims, but not to the émigrés.

The second point is that there was more at stake in restitution than the question of property. Petitions for restitution after the fall of Robespierre were also an effort to be brought back into society, into the body politic. They would force the revolutionaries to make difficult decisions about who was and who was not part of the social order they were trying to create. Indeed, they would force a rethinking of that social order itself. If the expropriation of victims of the Terror amounted to civil death, the struggle for restitution constituted a resurrection of sorts.

## The Voices of the Victims

One of the petitions recorded in the registers of the Committee on Legislation under the heading *biens des condamnés* concerned the case of the brothers Toebaerts, merchants from Bordeaux. The two brothers were arrested as suspects during the Terror. One of them was sentenced to death. However, the wrong brother was executed in what seems to have been a tragic case of
mistaken identity. In April 1795, nine months after 9 Thermidor, the surviv-
ing brother sent a petition to the Convention that began by stating, “I am
André Toebaerts, merchant from Bordeaux. . . . I exist, and yet the military
commission sentenced me to death.” A “certificate of life” from the authori-
ties in Bordeaux confirmed that “André Toebaerts is actually alive and is pre-
sent here before us today.”²⁷ In a different case, a prominent citizen from Lille
by the name of Joseph Pâris de l’Épinard, who had been the printer of the
Gazzette du département du Nord until he was arrested as a suspect, published a
pamphlet in the fall of 1794 titled My Return to Life after Fifteen Months of
Pain.²⁸ For those affected by expropriation during the Terror, 9 Thermidor
marked something of a rebirth, whether as a dramatic flourish or, as in the
case of André Toebaerts, quite literally.

The story of restitution after the Terror begins with the inadvertent actions of the représentant en mission in Bordeaux, Claude-Alexandre Ysabeau. In the weeks after the fall of Robespierre, Ysabeau, on his own accord, formed a special commission in the city. The commission proceeded to annul the judgments passed by revolutionary tribunals in the previous year and to restore property to the families of victims. The Convention did not approve of this measure. It quickly halted all actions related to the biens des condamnés, dissolved the special commission in Bordeaux, and recalled Ysabeau to Paris. It did not further persecute this official, “whose good views are just, no doubt, but little thought-through.”²⁹ It was too late, however, to stop the snowball effect of Ysabeau’s actions. As family members of victims learned of events in Bordeaux, they latched on to the idea of restitution, swamping the authorities with petitions. Inadvertently, Ysabeau had opened a Pandora’s box.

In December 1794, a delegation of widows and orphans of victims of the
Terror appeared before the Convention in Paris. The speaker of the delega-
tion implored the legislators to “listen today to the painful cries of wives and
children whose husbands and fathers have been dragged inhumanely to the
scaffold.” He proceeded to describe in great detail the process of expropria-
tion: the officials arriving to sequester the property, the inventories, families
deprived of resources, the corruption and speculation that accompanied the
seizure and sale of these goods. He admitted that some of those convicted by
revolutionary tribunals were guilty of the charges against them, but many were
not. The revolutionary government itself had been saying as much since the
fall of Robespierre. The speaker concluded his address by telling the deputies
in the Convention that “it is from your energy . . . that France awaits a cure
for the deep wounds inflicted by the barbarity of tyrants.”³⁰ Several months
later, a seventy-year-old woman appeared before the Convention to ask for an
annual pension. She was the mother of Jean-Marie Girey-Dupré, a revolution-
ary and the editor of the newspaper *Le Patriot français*. He had been executed alongside the Girondin faction of Brissot in the fall of 1793, and his mother now had come to ask for some sort of aid or compensation. Arguing that she had spent her life's earnings on his "republican education" and that he had been her sole source of support in her old age, she asked the legislators to "hear the grim concert of groans of so many bereaved mothers who shed their tears together with the tears of a country in mourning."³¹ The deputy who happened to be presiding over the session of the National Convention that day was Marie-Joseph Chénier, whose own brother, the poet André Chénier, was one of the most celebrated victims of the Terror. Chénier bestowed honors on the bereaved mother and proposed to accord her an annual pension of 1,200 livres to the resounding applause of his colleagues, who nevertheless declined to vote on the motion and promptly referred it for further discussion in the committees.

As these recurring pleas to “listen to the painful cries” and “hear the bereaved mothers” indicate, the Thermidorian Reaction opened up space for the voices of the victims. Political and economic liberalization, and even more so the relaxation of censorship, created an atmosphere where those who had been persecuted by the Jacobin dictatorship could speak of their experiences. And often, they had a captivated audience. Prison memoirs became a short-lived sensation, as former suspects freed from prison after the fall of Robespierre rushed to publish their tales of woe and misfortune. An *Almanach des prisons*, containing anecdotes, testimonies, and poems by former suspects appeared in several editions in the second half of the 1790s.³² The most successful of these was probably the *Mémoires d’un détenu*, published in 1795 by Honoré de Riouffe. It sold multiple editions and was translated and read outside of France.³³ The narratives in these texts often followed a certain pattern: the story of the arrest, horror tales from prison, a testament of the writer’s impossible politics called a *conduit politique*, the naming of the individuals who had been responsible for the author’s troubles, a demand for some form of compensation, and, often, evidence supporting the author’s claims under the heading *pièces justificatives*.³⁴ These narratives found a readership eager for some sort of catharsis after the Terror. Victims’ stories accorded with the political agenda of the Reaction, which was anxious to bolster its own legitimacy by depicting the former regime as criminal.

The petitions examined in this chapter belong to the same world, but they are also a different kind of document. Most of them were never intended for publication. They were handwritten pleas to the authorities demanding the undoing of an alleged injustice. That is to say, they were written to obtain a specific result and, as such, should be read with attention to the strategic
choices behind them. But they also afford a glimpse of how those who had been affected most directly by the violence of Year II narrated what they had been through and presented themselves as victims to the state. The petitions were part of what Suzanne Desan has described as the reconstitution of civil society after the Terror. Desan studied petitions on family matters: marriage, divorce, inheritance, and property. She found that in making their personal cases, petitioners raised much broader issues, such as the gendered, patriarchal order of the Republic and, indeed, the very foundations of society.³⁵ Similarly, the petitions for the restoration of *les biens des condamnés* concerned specific cases, where the circumstances of each petitioner differed in some way from the circumstances of another. But here too, petitioners ended up raising broader issues, such as the nature of the Terror as a mass crime or the moral obligation of the state toward its citizens. The story of redress after the Terror unfolds in the nexus between popular demands for justice and the attitudes of legislators.

Petitions for recompense were registered in official records under the head-
ing “relatives of condemned persons” or, more commonly, “widow of a con-
demned person” (*veuve de condamné*).³⁶ This somewhat narrow category of
victimhood obscured considerable diversity from view. The Terror cast a wide
net and, consequently, petitioners came from a variety of social and economic
backgrounds. Most were literate, of course, or at least had access to someone
who could write on their behalf. This bears mentioning because many victims
of the Terror were poor, even destitute, and their names, in general, do not
appear in the registers of the Committee on Legislation. As material objects,
the petitions display a wide range: some form veritable dossiers, with impec-
cable legal reasoning, while others are little more than scribbled notes. The
petition of Marie-Anne Poirevesson, for example, whose brother, Jean-Baptist
Pellegrin, a captain in the gendarmerie of Gondrecourt, department of the
Meuse, was executed for collaborating with the Prussian occupation of Ver-
dun, is touching in its simplicity. Consisting of two pages, with no date and
with none of the customary salutations and greetings that accompanied offi-
cial letters in the eighteenth century, it makes the case that Pellegrin could not
have been guilty of the charges against him because he was a real patriot. This
was evidenced by the fact that he had been among the first to display the co-
carde tricolor on his hat in his commune. The signature at the bottom of the
petition seems to be in a different handwriting, suggesting that someone else
had written on behalf of the petitioner.³⁷

The one generalization that can be made with confidence about the peti-
tioners is that the vast majority of them were women and, even more specifi-
cally, widows. This fact had certain social and cultural implications. The
situation of single women in the eighteenth century—whether they were never married or were recently widowed—was often precarious. If they were working, their wages were barely enough for living expenses. If they were poor, they probably had lost their only source of income. They could rely on support from a network of friends and neighbors, all equally poor, but the road to utter misery was very short. The situation of widows from the nobility was quite different. In their case, the death of a husband could be liberating. They could look forward to a life of living off the income from the property of their late husbands, freed from the tutelage of marriage with its suffocating social expectations. As Olwen Hufton put it, “the wealthy, merry widow is there in her own right. *Mutilée de guerre*, hardened by experience, or made giddy with freedom . . . her *monde* was *en rose*.”³⁸ Here too, attention must be paid to the intersection of gender norms and social status. The difficulties facing a *veuve de condamné* from the upper classes were very different from those facing a widow of a peasant or a mildly successful artisan.

What did the petitioners want? Most petitions on the matter of *les biens des condamnés* included two demands: restitution and the rehabilitation of memory. The first of these was relatively simple. Petitioners demanded that the property that had been confiscated from their husbands be restored to them. If the property had already been sold, they expected to receive its equivalent value in money or some other form of compensation. The widow Lamotte, for example, who was in her early thirties, wrote to ask for aid because much of the property that was seized when her husband was arrested had already been sold. She was left, she said, with “three poor boys . . . the eldest of whom is barely six.”³⁹ She implored the Convention not to deprive the children of their patrimony. The reference to the difficulties of raising children without the necessary means is a recurring motif in the petitions, since many of the petitioners were mothers. Cases involving seized property that had already been sold were more complicated because restitution would mean depriving the new owners of their property. This was especially the case when either land or real estate was involved. The widow of a farmer from the area of Lyon, for example, wrote to demand usufruct, that is, the right to enjoy the fruit of the land that had been confiscated from her husband and already sold as *biens nationaux* until the Convention decided what to do in these matters.⁴⁰

In some cases, especially when the family in question was of modest means, petitioners wrote to ask for financial aid as compensation for the unjust execution of a husband. This was the case of the brothers Louis and Frédéric Edelmann, musicians from Strasbourg, who were guillotined in July 1794. The widow of Louis Edelmann wrote to the authorities several months after 9 Thermidor asking for an annual pension. Without such a pension, she claimed,
"I could not survive, nor could my poor children. . . . My husband had no property; he was a musician." The members of the *société populaire* of Strasbourg sent a collective petition to support her case. The petition, signed by dozens, recounted how Louis, a good republican, had been arrested on the orders of Saint-Just, "who mixed up patriots and aristocrats." The members of the society donated six hundred livres to the widow, a significant sum that they collected among themselves.⁴¹ This grassroots, collective effort on behalf of widows of victims of the Terror may seem surprising, but it was not the only one. The members of the revolutionary Section of the Market in Paris published a collective printed petition on behalf of the widow Quatremere, whose husband, a linen merchant, had been sentenced to death by the revolutionary tribunal in January 1794. The members of the section asked that the widow be allowed to reopen the drapery shop that the couple had owned and added that the Convention should "proclaim the innocence of her husband."⁴²

As this last petition indicates, there was more to restitution than property. The *Dictionnaire de l'Académie française* defines restitution as an action meant to restore that which had been taken unjustly, referring not just to material possessions but also to honor: "to restore, reestablish, to repair someone's honor."⁴³ Honor and property were intertwined in eighteenth-century France. Violent fights over clan honor in the countryside often concerned property transfers, where, as Robert Nye put it, "terms of dignity and reputation served as metaphors for each family's struggle to accumulate and maintain the means to survive."⁴⁴ In a society where the ability of the state to regulate and shape interpersonal relations was not yet what it would become in the course of the nineteenth century, honor and reputation were matters of survival no less than material possessions.⁴⁵

Hence, petitioners demanded not only the restoration of property but also posthumous exoneration. This demand was captured in the evocative phrase *réhabilitation de la mémoire*. This phrase alluded to a variety of measures aimed at establishing the innocence of those who had been found guilty by revolutionary tribunals. In technical, legal terms, the demand for rehabilitation of memory could mean revision (*révision*) or annulment (*cassation, annulation*). The first of these meant reviewing the material in a given case in order to determine whether the tribunal in question had followed due process and whether it was necessary to launch a retrial. The second meant a straightforward abolition of the judgment, as if it had never existed. The distinction between the two legal measures was established in a pamphlet written on behalf of the widows and orphans of victims of the Terror by the celebrated lawyer Tronson-Ducoudray. Famous for having defended Marie-Antoinette at her trial, he was incarcerated during the Terror but released from prison after
9 Thermidor. He went on to defend the notable citizens of Nantes in the trial that led to Carrier's indictment.⁴⁶ In the pamphlet he published on behalf of the widows, Ducoudray argued that revision was impossible because trials in the revolutionary tribunal were by jury; hence, testimonies were oral rather than written. There was simply not enough written material in order to review the cases.⁴⁷ Ducoudray concluded that the only feasible recourse for the Convention was to declare an annulment en masse of all the judgments handed down by revolutionary tribunals.⁴⁸ Revision and annulment were both forms of rehabilitation, but the political and moral implications of each were different. Revision was a slow, laborious process, but it implied that some of the judgments of revolutionary tribunals were valid. Annulment, on the other hand, implied that all victims of the Terror were innocent and, in this sense, the policies of the revolutionary government in Year II and, by implication, the very foundation of the Republic, were a massive act of injustice.

The demand of victims of the Terror to undo the injustice that had been done to them was embedded in a particular view of the recent past, a certain historical narrative. The widow Hélyot from Toulouse, whose husband had been a magistrate in the city's *parlement*, or appellant court, and had been guillotined in 1794, embedded her demand for posthumous exoneration in a Thermidorian narrative of crime and redemption: "It was not under the blade of the law, but under the murderous dagger of the bloody Robespierre that he had been killed so inhumanely. . . . A few silk threads of consolation now pierce through the funerary ribbons that engulf us: the Reign of Justice has arrived. It is you, citizen representatives, that brought it back to life."⁴⁹ Some of the tropes in this petition—bloody Robespierre, the Reign of Justice—were recurring motifs in the political rhetoric of the Reaction. Perhaps there was a tinge of tailoring here, using the same tropes that emanated from the debates in the Convention in order to obtain the petitioner's desired outcome. The insistence that the victims of the Terror were murdered rather than tried and found guilty, and that their executions were "juridical assassinations," was another motif that recurred in these petitions.⁵⁰

Posthumous exoneration was also about removing the stain of being branded a traitor—letting those who had been affected back into the folds of the social contract.⁵¹ The widower Louis François Mayoul from Arras wrote to demand the exoneration of his wife and two daughters who were executed on the same day in May 1794. "The republic cannot bring back to life the unfortunate victims," he wrote, but at least "it would provide the most unfortunate of fathers and husbands the satisfaction of seeing their memory cleansed from the horrible accusation of having conspired against the liberty of their patrie."⁵² Sometimes petitioners made their demands in public. This was
especially the case when the petitions concerned *conventionnels* who had been executed. On April 18, 1795, the widow of Gustave Dechézeaux appeared before the Convention in Paris. She came to demand the restitution of property and the rehabilitation of memory of her husband, a deputy in the Convention, who was executed in 1794 for having protested the purge of the Girondins. The widow Dechézeaux came to make her case in person, but she was not the one who actually spoke. Her brother-in-law spoke on her behalf. "You see before you the widow of Gustave Dechézeaux," he told the deputies in the assembly. "He was sacrificed, assassinated under the appearances of judicial forms for having protested those *journées* that all of France regards today as among the cruelest, most disastrous periods in world history."⁵³ Another member of the Convention, one Pènières, introduced the private letters that Dechézeaux had written to his mother and wife before he was guillotined.⁵⁴ There followed an emotional, public reading. The petition of the widow Dechézeaux, and all of the supporting material in her case, were collected in a book that was published at the Convention's expense and ran to some 240 pages.⁵⁵

The appearance of the widow Dechézeaux and of others like her before the Convention was especially painful.⁵⁶ Eighty-two members of the Convention had been executed or had died in prison during the Terror.⁵⁷ The demand of the widows to undo that, which at the end of the day could not be undone, brought the fresh memories of these internal bitter conflicts to the surface. There was something of a performance of mourning in these events: the public reading of last letters, the loss of colleagues and friends, the presence of the widow, standing there silent, a mythical figure drawn from bibli cal tropes of vulnerability and helplessness—widows, orphans, and the poor.⁵⁸ This placing of the revolutionary widows in the limelight stood in contrast to their actual condition, which worsened during the Thermidorian Reaction. It was actually the Jacobins who had introduced a comprehensive scheme for war widows’ pensions in 1793. The Thermidorians stopped allocating funds for this project gradually, and in 1798 it was repudiated along with most policies of Year II.⁵⁹ One must mention, however, that in 1796 the Council of Five Hun dred decided to accord an annual pension of 2,000 francs to the widows of the Girondin deputies who had been executed in the spring of 1793. Felicité Dupont, the widow of Jacques Pierre Brissot, was one of the women who re ceived this pension.⁶⁰ Be that as it may, the public appearances by widows of victims of the Terror to demand the rehabilitation of their loved ones illus trates one inescapable fact: the violence of Year II may have been the doing of men, but dealing with its legacies was very much the business of women.
The Case of Emilie Prax

Before moving on to examine the response of the revolutionary government
to the demands of the victims, let us take a closer look at one particular case,
that of Emilie Prax, the widow of Charles Blanquet-Rouville. Her husband, a
former councilor in the *parlement* of Toulouse, was executed in July 1794. Em-
ilie Prax began petitioning for restitution and rehabilitation in May 1795. A
month later, the Convention passed the law on restitution, yet the petitions in
the matter of Blanquet-Rouville continued until 1797. The case was even dis-
cussed in the Council of Five Hundred. Following the unfolding of this case
from its beginnings to its end, which is somewhat unclear, allows us to bring
together several of the themes discussed in this chapter so far: the seizure and
sale of *les biens des condamnés*, the demands for restitution, the complications
that arose when the property in question had been sold to multiple buyers,
the moral and political implications of posthumous exoneration, and the cen-
tral role of women in the struggle for redress after the Terror.

The beginning of the case lies in the early days of the Revolution. In Sep-
tember 1790, the National Assembly abolished the *parlements*, which had been
operating in France since the Middle Ages. In response, the *parlement* of Tou-
louse, second only to the one in Paris in terms of its power and prestige, is-
sued a public protest "in the name of the King, the clergy, the nobility, and all
the citizens, against the attack on the rights of the Crown, the destruction of
the ancient orders, the encroachment on their properties, and the upheaval
in the French monarchy."⁶¹ Based on this, all former members of the *parlement*
were arrested in the spring of 1793 but were soon released. They were arrested
again in the spring of 1794 and transferred to the revolutionary tribunal in
Paris, where they stood trial for conspiring against the liberty of the people.
They were all sentenced to death.⁶²

One of them was Charles Blanquet-Rouville, viscount of Trébons. Born in
1756 in Provence to a family that traced its noble roots back to the fifteenth
century, he embarked on a brief military career before purchasing a judicial
position and joining the *parlement* in Toulouse. He married Emilie de Prats de
Vieux, who came from another provincial noble family. The appearance of her
name in later documents as Prax, shorthand for Prats de Vieux, was meant
perhaps to obscure her noble status. The couple had six children, the eldest
of whom was about fifteen years old at the time of Rouville's death. The family
owned land in the area of Toulouse; their most important possession was prob-
ably a chateau in the municipality of Gratens, a commune in the department
of Haute-Garonne. Based on the sale of Rouville's property as *biens nationaux*,
we can say that he was a man of means but not extraordinarily wealthy for someone in his position.⁶³

Emilie Prax's first mention in the archival record dates to November 1793. She had appeared before the local authorities to protest the confiscation of the family's property in Gratens. It seems the property was seized because Rouville failed to comply with the law of August 1, 1793, which stipulated the removal of coats of arms from all houses, parks, and gardens.⁶⁴ The letter from the authorities refers to her as "the woman Rouville de Gratens" and notes that she had testimonies of her husband's patriotism. These testimonies, however, failed to impress their intended audience.⁶⁵ It is thus in the context of dealing with the consequences of the Terror that the widow Blanquet-Rouville acquires a voice in the archival record. Before 9 Thermidor, her presence in the archive is marginal, ephemeral. After 9 Thermidor, her role becomes central.

In May 1795, Emilie Prax sent a petition to the revolutionary government in Paris demanding the restitution of property and the rehabilitation of memory of her husband. Her main claim was that his expropriation had been illegal. Her husband, she argued, was executed without being judged. The supporting material that she submitted confirmed that his name was included neither in the list of those who were tried before the revolutionary tribunal in Paris nor in the list of those who had been sentenced to death. Since there was no judgment, she maintained, all confiscations of his property were illegal and should be declared null and void. But she had more than this in mind. "There still remains for you," Emilie Prax wrote to the Convention, "a more important duty to fulfill. It consists of conveying to posterity the regrets and remorse of the French Nation for the murders committed in front of its very eyes." She went on to demand the construction of a pillar of stone with the inscription "Charles Blanquet-Rouville was murdered, not condemned." This monument was to be located in one of the public squares in Toulouse. Its construction was to be funded from the sale of the confiscated possessions of Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, the chief prosecutor of the revolutionary tribunal in Paris who himself had been tried and executed several months earlier.⁶⁶ress for the widow Blanquet-Rouville, therefore, was about a great many things: the restoration of material possessions, a formal acknowledgment of the injustice done to her, a public apology, a commemorative project, an act of revenge, and maybe also a desire for closure—these were all elements in her search for rehabilitation.

In June 1795, the Convention passed a law stipulating the restitution of *les biens des condamnés*. One would think that this would have resolved Emilie Prax's problems, but this was not the case. We find her petitioning again a year later, this time for the annulment of the sales that had already taken place with
regard to Rouville's estate. The land in question had been divided into small plots and sold to multiple buyers, as was often the case with national properties. The law on restitution ensured that in cases where the confiscated property had already been sold, the surviving relatives would receive monetary compensation. But the widow Blanquet-Rouville wanted the sales to be annulled and the estates themselves restored to her possession. Naming the buyers of this land, which, she wrote, was "watered with innocent blood," she implored the legislators to do her justice and expressed hope that in so doing they would "provide a salutary balm that will seal the wounds, which nothing so far could heal."⁶⁷ Legal disputes between the buyers and the original owners of national properties were fairly common well into the nineteenth century.⁶⁸ The dispute between Emilie Prax and the buyers of the Rouville estate continued under the Directory, and involved the highest echelons of the Republic. Lazare Carnot, former member of the Committee of Public Safety and now one of the five directors of the Republic, presided over a discussion that ended with a resolution to uphold the sales of the estate.⁶⁹ Several months later, Antoine Thibaudeau, former secretary of the Convention and now a member of the Council of Five Hundred, proposed an opposite motion, aimed at granting the widow Blanquet-Rouville many of her requests.⁷⁰ The final outcome of the case is unclear. The paper trail ends around 1797. By her own account, Emilie Prax did receive monetary compensation and some of the confiscated goods were restored to her, but she probably never obtained the full extent of the re-habilitative measures she had been demanding for more than four years.⁷¹

We learn several things from this case. First, dealing with the legacies of the Terror took very concrete forms, at least in part. Numbers, estimates of value, legal disputes: these were all an essential part of the process. Second, women were at the forefront of this reckoning. The archival record of the Terror is masculine for the most part; the majority of victims were men, as were the perpetrators. But the archival record of reckoning with the Terror is peopled with women: petitioning, appearing before the authorities, running from one administrative bureau to another, picking up the pieces. Third, for many of these women, and for many of those involved in these disputes, the Terror did not end on 9 Thermidor. Looking at the transition from the Terror to its aftermath from the perspective of someone like Emilie Prax reminds us that on the level of individual experience there were considerable continuities that are difficult to see sometimes underneath the surface of the abrupt political changes of the time. No doubt, 9 Thermidor was an important turning point. Without it, relatives of victims would not have had a chance to pursue restorative justice at all. But the effort to come to terms with the Terror, which began when the repression was under way, continued across and beyond
the Thermidorian divide. Individual experience, in other words, challenges conventional historical periodization. The sociologist Andrew Abbot pointed out that whereas many of the social sciences focus on structures and their transformations, the life span of most individuals cuts across these changes, sometimes more than once. Individuals, Abbot writes, “are the prime reservoir of historical connection from past to present.”⁷² If the Terror constituted a difficult past, Emilie Prax was one of its bearers.

## The Debate on Restitution

The various demands made by widows and relatives of victims of the Terror form part of what modern scholars refer to as restorative or reparatory justice. Unlike retribution, which focuses on perpetrators and on accountability, restorative justice focuses on the victims and the rectification of past wrongs. Its backward-looking agenda often clashes with the forward-looking gaze of the state. What should be done when the reparation of individual loss comes at the expense of public gain? And how far back should the state go in trying to undo the damage caused by its own actions?⁷³ Reparatory justice involves dilemmas between the retrospective and the prospective, self-interest and collective good. These dilemmas stood at the heart of the public debate occasioned by the demands for the restoration of *les biens des condamnés*.

Those who opposed restitution put forth three arguments. First, restitution would undermine the finances of the Republic, which were already fragile. Second, it was a retrogressive measure that threatened to undo much of the Revolution while trying to undo the Terror. Third, it put individual interests above the public good. The debate in the Convention started immediately after the decision to recall Ysabeau and to suspend all actions—sales or restitution—related to confiscated goods. Laurent Lecointre, famous for denouncing the seven members of the revolutionary committees, warned against the destabilizing effects of this decision on the economy. The value of the *assignats*, the paper money issued by the revolutionary government, depended greatly on the redistribution of property that had been under way since 1790.⁷⁴ Suspend-ing the sale of *les biens des condamnés* could easily be read as a first step in a repudiation of policies in this matter, something that made both buyers and sellers very nervous. This measure, Lecointre claimed, had already resulted in a sharp depreciation of the *assignats*: “If you take one retrogressive step in this matter, what will become of public trust? What will become of our finances? If you look back even once on the matter of these possessions, you will give the government an incalculable shock.”⁷⁵
Many members of the Convention were opposed to restitution because of its retrospective nature. Reopening cases, conducting inquiries into each seizure of property, revisiting the circumstances of arrest or the denunciations that led to it—all of this could only end by delegitimizing the revolutionary project. Nicolas Raffron, who was affiliated with the Montagnards but was never really committed, argued that insofar as revolutions are like wars, there was no point in going back, trying to determine who among the dead deserved his fate. “Whatever side they have fought for, they are all buried pell-mell . . . such is the fate of war.” The government, he suggested, could find other ways to compensate the families of the victims, perhaps with some sort of aid. It should “pour soothing oil on their wounds, but all other courses of action are retrogressive and are the product of the Reaction.”⁷⁶

The difficulty with restitution, and with reparatory justice more generally, was in knowing how far back to go. Jean-Baptiste Matthieu, a lawyer and a relatively moderate member of the Convention, wondered whether they were about to “lift the veil that should cover all these horrors, and to show us again the cruel spectacle of all the murders that had been committed.”⁷⁷ Similar to the arguments made by Robert Lindet several months earlier, Matthieu implied that revolutions could not afford a reckoning with their own past. Their progressive nature clashed with the retrogressive implications of the victim’s demands. Pierre Guyomar, a moderate member of the Convention who had tried to defend Condorcet from the Jacobins in 1793, was even more explicit: “Restoring the possessions of the condemned, this actually means a general amnesty. For, among the condemned there are émigrés, there are squanderers of public funds. Shall we restore property to the Duke of Orléans? Shall we restore to Robespierre, to Hanriot, to the conspiratorial commune of Lyon?”⁷⁸ The problem was the cumulative effect of measures like restitution. Once one started on this path, it was difficult to know when and where it would end.

The rectification of past wrongs risked undermining the revolution's most expansive vision of social justice. “I sense that you are about to restore property to those who already have,” observed Guyomar.⁷⁹ The real question was how to help those who did not. Bourdon de l'Oise, a former Jacobin turned reactionary, proposed to align redress with the revolution's redistributive agenda by restoring all confiscated possessions to poor families, but only part to wealthier families.⁸⁰ At the end of the day, those who opposed restitution believed it prioritized self-interest over a broader social, perhaps even collective, vision. “The existence of society is as sacred as that of individuals. It is not for you to be generous at the expense of the people.”⁸¹

Those who supported restitution made two arguments. First, the repressive policies of Year II were a historical injustice. As such, they had to be undone
and repaired. Second, restitution was an essential element in the moral renewal of French society after the Terror. The journalist Michel Antoine Servan, whose brother Joseph had served as minister of war in 1792, published a pamphlet titled *On Assassinations and Political Theft* in 1795.⁸² The repressive measures of Year II, he argued, were “juridical crimes,” and the confiscation of property during the Revolution was “nothing but theft and the most tyrannical violence.”⁸³ Situating the Reign of Terror in a *longue durée* account of spoliations and violence committed by rulers and political regimes, Servan argued that “the history of this world is nothing but a succession, a genealogy of murder and pillage.” Echoing the trope of resurrection, he ended his pamphlet by writing, “Today I return, like a shadow of myself.” Servan congratulated the revolutionary government for having punished the authors of these crimes but urged it not to “let the results of their most abhorrent work subsist.”⁸⁴ The view that equated the confiscation of *les biens des condamnés* with theft pure and simple seems to have been rather prevalent after 9 Thermidor. The Swiss political economist François d'Ivernois analyzed what he described as the twin system of “spoliation and Terror.” Referring to the guillotine as “an engine for coining money,” he exclaimed that “we all know that the confiscations founded on the monstrous sentences passed by our late tyrants are robberies. . . . The ghosts of the murdered hover above this hall; they call on you to restore the property.”⁸⁵

By mentioning the duty owed to the “ghosts of the murdered,” d’Ivernois may have been echoing what he heard in the speeches in favor of restitution made by members of the Convention. The most influential of these was the speech made by Boissy d’Anglas in March 1795, when he urged his colleagues to annul the judgments passed by revolutionary tribunals and to restore the confiscated possessions to the families of victims. By removing Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, Boissy told the Convention, “we have taken on before the entire universe the sacred commitment to be just, to dry the tears, to soften the pains, to cure the wounds of the unfortunate victims of tyranny. . . . We cannot bring back to life those whom crime has struck down, but at least let us console their spirits [mânes], which, at this very moment, surround us, follow us, press us, and roam this place.” Restitution, in Boissy’s words, was an act of healing, a duty of the living to the dead. But it was also a necessary measure politically and economically. Politically, it would help to rebuild the fledgling legitimacy of the revolutionary government after the Terror. “The whole of Europe has its eyes on us,” Boissy told his colleagues. “It awaits in silence the decrees that are going to be pronounced by an assembly whose liberty has been restored.” Economically, restitution was necessary to rebuild public trust. Against those who argued that the restoration of *les biens des*
condamnés would ruin the finances of the Republic, he argued that, first, the sums involved were relatively modest and, second, a healthy republican economy could not be founded on injustice. “Good faith,” Boissy exclaimed, “this is the basis of credit. . . . If we steal the property of individuals, by what right could we generate confidence in our money?”⁸⁶ Reparatory justice was morally necessary, politically wise, and economically sound.

Boissy’s speech in the Convention drew extensively on the ideas of the philosophe the Abbé Morellet. A contributor to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and the translator of Cesare Beccaria’s influential work *On Crimes and Punishments* from Italian to French, Morellet was one of the last living philosophophes at the time of the Revolution.⁸⁷ In 1795 he intervened in the debate on les biens des condamnés by publishing a pamphlet titled *Le cri des familles*. By his account, it sold more than three thousand copies in two weeks.⁸⁸ In it, Morellet argued that undoing the damage done to families of victims of the Terror by restoring the confiscated possessions to them was an essential element in the moral renewal of French society. Justice, he believed, rested on two foundations: the inviolability of property and the sacredness of family ties. The expropriation of suspects during the Terror deprived children of their rightful inheritance. “This is a question of fathers and sons,” he wrote. Speaking of them by using generic terms such as inheritors and relatives “hides from view the sacred relations that have guided the legislation of all peoples.”⁸⁹ Restitution, Morellet was saying, was necessary for the restoration of family ties and, by implication, social ties as a whole.

The debate on les biens des condamnés was thus substantial. Stretching over six months, from December 1794 to June 1795, it involved the widows of victims, members of the revolutionary government, and men of letters. It raised a series of dilemmas between the backward-looking nature of reparatory justice and the forward-looking dynamic of the Revolution, between the needs of individuals and the welfare of society. At bottom, it involved a clash between two visions of the social world, one that prioritized individual rights and the other that prioritized the collective. The difficulty of closing the books on les biens des condamnés was the difficulty of leaving the Terror behind. Stanislas Fréron, a member of the Convention whose newspaper *L'orateur du peuple* was one of the most influential and most incendiary platforms of the Thermidorian Reaction, lambasted the buyers of property that had been confiscated from victims: “To purchase such possessions is to nourish oneself on cadavers. . . . It is to consume the innocent blood dripping from the scaffold . . . to drink the blood of the widow and the orphan.”⁹⁰ Leaving aside the hyperbolic rhetoric with its mixture of Gothic imagery, associations of cannibalism, corporeal metaphors of the body politic, and Catholic motifs of the host and the blood
of Christ, this passage by Fréron suggested that as long as the question of *les biens des condamnés* was unresolved, the Terror, in some sense, was not over.

## The Law of Restitution

In June 1795, the Convention adopted a law regulating the restoration of property to the widows and heirs of victims of the Terror. It stipulated that the property be restored to the families of victims en masse, without the need for exoneration or revision of judgment. The law was divided into two parts. The first part specified who would benefit and who would be excluded from this measure. The second part detailed the way restitution was to be carried out, including such issues as monetary compensation in case the possessions in question had already been sold. The first article after the preamble to the law stated simply that “all confiscations of the goods, which have been ordered by revolutionary tribunals as well as revolutionary, military, or popular commissions, since 10 March 1793 and until 8 Nivôse, Year III, are considered null and void. . . . The surviving spouses and heirs will gain full possession of them, in conformity with the laws.”⁹¹

Several things stand out in this law. The first is the decision to eschew the revision of judgments. The preamble to the law stated that there was less harm in restoring property to the families of a few people who were actually guilty of the charges against them than in holding on to the property of those who were really innocent. This decision was criticized roundly by the families of victims. A collective petition from Bordeaux declared that the rejection of demands to rehabilitate the memory of the victims “consecrates judicial assas- sinations . . . and condemns us to disgrace and misery.”⁹² Be that as it may, the decision to restore the property en masse amounted to an acknowledgment that revolutionary justice constituted a mass crime. The second detail that stands out is the period of application specified in the law. March 10, 1793, re- ferred to the founding of the revolutionary tribunal in Paris. Eight Nivôse, Year III, referred to the reorganization of this tribunal several months after the fall of Robespierre.⁹³ Choosing March 1793 as the starting date meant, of course, that the seizures of property carried out before that time, such as the expropriations of the church and the émigrés, would remain in effect. But more than that, it embedded redress in a particular narrative. “Every type of response to historical injustice,” writes the legal scholar Robert Gordon, is also “a narrative that stitches together the society’s past and future. . . . The re- gime’s response to injustice is a way of defining the new society’s identity . . . by getting history back on track.”⁹⁴ The chronological arc of the law on resti-
tution bracketed the interval between March 1793 and the Thermidorian Re-
action as the period when things went wrong.

Finally, the list of exceptions to the law is particularly telling. It included
“Louis Capet” and the royal family; the Dubarry family; those who were ex-
ecuted or sentenced to death in relation to 9 Thermidor; the émigrés, coun-
terfeitors, distributors of fake *assignats*, squanderers of public funds, and, more
generally, conspirators.⁹⁵ It created, in effect, a distinction between deserving
and undeserving victims. One reason for this had to do with the internal pol-
itics of the Convention. The families who were to benefit from redress were
mostly those who had suffered as a result of the law of suspects, the repres-
sion of the federalist revolt, and the purge of the Girondins. The political econ-
omist d’Ivernois noted that it was the need to foster alliances with former
federalists and returning Girondins that shaped the policies on restitution.⁹⁶
Perhaps, but in any case the result was a compromise that accepted the need
to undo the Terror but was wary of undoing too much. The distinction be-
tween *les biens des condamnés* and *les biens des émigrés* was especially interesting
in this regard. During the debates that preceded the adoption of the law, the
*conventionnel* Jean-Baptise Louvet, who was himself a returning Girondin, used
war to justify holding on to the possessions of the émigrés while restoring the
property of the victims. With the émigrés, Louvet argued, “the social pact is
broken. . . . Their property is the just fruit of victory.” But those who were
proscribed by the laws of the Terror were part of society, and “there can be
no conquest among members of the same society.”⁹⁷ Setting aside the legal
contortions necessary to justify holding on to one category of property while
restoring another, the list of exceptions to the law on restitution was telling in
its attempt to limit the retrogressive implications of reparatory justice. In ef-
fect, it drew a series of boundaries between the time of justice and the time
of injustice, between deserving and undeserving victims, and, most of all, be-
tween those who were party to the social contract and those excluded from it.

The list of exceptions to the law covered many of the charges that brought
people before revolutionary tribunals in the first place, so that one wonders
who was left to benefit from this restorative measure. Anecdotal evidence sug-
gests that some widows and relatives did indeed get property back. The
widow of Antoine Lavoisier, the renowned chemist who was executed in 1794,
managed to get back his extensive mineralogical collection.⁹⁸ Paintings, such
as *Belisarius Begging for Alms* by Jacques-Louis David, were returned to their
original owners.⁹⁹ So many objects of science and art were returned to their
original owners that a member of the Committee of Education complained
about the reduction in the collections of the Depot of Natural Science caused
by “the daily restitution made to the inheritors of condemned persons.”¹⁰⁰
Correspondence between the revolutionary government and local authori-
ties indicates that the process of restoration was under way within weeks
after the passing of the law. It also indicates that it raised various difficulties.¹⁰¹
In the absence of more systematic research, the best we can say is that the
law of restitution was applied, but many families of victims probably never
got their property back, or at least not all of it.¹⁰²

Conclusion

In the aftermath of the Terror, widows of victims, revolutionary leaders, and men of letters engaged in a public debate on the restitution of *les biens des condamnés*. Petitioners demanded the restitution of property and the posthumous exoneration of their loved ones. Their demands gave rise to complex debates within and beyond the circles of revolutionary leadership. These debates were about a great many things—the stability of the Republic, the depiction of the Terror as a massive act of injustice, the extent of the state’s responsibility toward those who were harmed by its actions, the clash between the rights of individuals and the collective good—but at bottom, they were about the retrospective nature of redress. It proved difficult to turn backward and face the past in the context of a revolutionary movement that was focused on the future. The law on restitution that was eventually adopted in June 1795 reflected these dilemmas. It was an ambiguous compromise between the backward-looking agenda of the victims and the forward-looking gaze of the state.

Two findings of this chapter deserve to be emphasized in particular. First, the stakes of restitution after 9 Thermidor derived from the Revolution's earlier politics of property. The revolutionaries made the ownership of property one of the essential preconditions for citizenship, that is, for full participation in civil life. The seizure of the possessions of the émigrés and of suspects during the Terror was more than an economic measure, aimed at augmenting the income of the Republic by selling these confiscated goods as national properties. It was also, and perhaps foremost, a symbolic act that aimed at signaling the exclusion of enemies of the Revolution from the body politic. In other words, it was a form of civil death; the loss of rights inflicted on a person convicted of crimes against the state. Consequently, the restoration of property marked a resurrection of sorts; the regaining of one's civil rights and a reentry, as it were, into the folds of the body politic. Second, women were at the forefront of dealing with the legacies of the Terror. The violence of Year II was by and large a masculine affair, but the struggle for redress was very much
the domain of women. This fact had certain implications for how the debate on redress unfolded and for what the demands of petitioners symbolized in the public arena. The reconstruction of civil society after 9 Thermidor passed through the reparation of family ties. As was the case with religion, the process of dealing with the legacies of the Terror opened up a new space for women to emerge as political actors.¹⁰³

The restitution of *les biens des condamnés* was the first step in a broader reparatory dynamic. It was followed soon by the restoration of the property confiscated from refractory priests.¹⁰⁴ Some of the possessions of the émigrés and noble families were also restored in a process that stretched across the Napoleonic period, and which was often carried out through informal arrangements and under the table.¹⁰⁵ In 1825, Charles X distributed a billion francs as compensation for property lost during the Revolution to some twenty-five thousand returning émigrés or their heirs. The money given out in the form of annuities via this indemnity bill, which came to be known as *le millard des émigrés*, fell short of the real value of the lost property, and the actual procedure for receiving the indemnity was widely criticized for being unfair and selective. The indemnification process was partially canceled after the 1830 Revolution, but it was discussed again during the 1848 Revolution, when the radicals demanded that the funds distributed to the émigrés since 1825 be paid back to the Republic.¹⁰⁶

Reparatory justice and the demands of victims of revolutionary violence thus remained subjects of political debate well into the 1840s. This much was captured in Honoré de Balzac's novella *Le colonel Chabert*, which was published in 1832. The novella tells the story of a soldier who, having risen in the ranks of the Napoleonic army, is wounded badly while fighting against the Russians in Eylau (1807) and then left for dead on the battlefield. He survives by crawling out of the mass grave that he had been thrown into by the French soldiers who believed him to be dead. After several years, he returns to Paris only to find that his wife has remarried and that his property has been liquidated. He presents himself at the office of a lawyer, Derville, and asks him to help restore his possessions and his honor. Derville's efforts on behalf of Chabert ultimately fail, and he ends up living the rest of his days in an asylum. Balzac's novella thus brings together several of the themes that have been discussed in this chapter: redress, restitution of property, survival, and haunted memory.¹⁰⁷ The ghostly figure of Chabert, literally coming back from the dead to reclaim his property and his life, illustrates just how much reparation remained an open subject in the decades after the fall of Robespierre.