April 17, 1790
It was an utterly ordinary day.
According to the Republican calendar that would come later, it should have been Germinal—a season when the grasses rise and the skylarks sing, when the air is warm and the flowers are open.
But for the procureur du roi Pratty, this bright spring morning was anything but pleasant. It was, in truth, detestable. His carriage had been forced to stop three hundred yards from the Châtelet courthouse—by the old royal measure, for the metric system had not yet been proclaimed—and the corpulent, heavy-bellied prosecutor had to waddle the rest of the way on foot.
Around the Châtelet, hundreds of Parisians had gathered—citizens and newspapermen alike—clamouring for a seat at the retrial of Babeuf. Though the hearing was still some time away, more continued to arrive from the outskirts of the city, even from distant Picardy. By eight o'clock, the entire forecourt was an unbroken tide of humanity, the gates of the criminal court lost behind a wall of bodies and noise.
"Look there—your opponent has arrived!" cried the sharp-eyed Lawyer Séchelles, spotting the prosecutor among the crowd. He turned back to alert André, who had just stepped down from his own carriage. The latter paused, unable to hear clearly through the deafening cheers and shouts, until Séchelles pointed towards a lumbering figure in the throng.
"My opponent?" André smiled faintly. "He's hardly worth the word."
According to the records of the Palais de Justice, Monsieur Pratty, aged forty-seven, had purchased his office before the Revolution for one hundred thousand livres—a perfectly legal transaction at the time. His command of the law was mediocre; he misquoted statutes with embarrassing frequency, and in more than six years of service had never produced a single memorable argument. His only merit, perhaps, was that he did his work for pay and never played both sides.
That, indeed, was one of the reasons André had taken the case. He found the man's very name distasteful. In another life, a Parisian prosecutor of the same name had, as André bitterly recalled, persecuted the wrong men and turned a blind eye to the true criminals, forcing André to feign his death and vanish—an absurd chain of accidents that had led him to this new existence.
Ascending the nine stone steps, the young advocate was already at the courthouse door when he suddenly halted. Out from the mass of journalists pushed a familiar figure—Fréron, once again wielding his reporter's notebook. Raising his voice over the noise, he called:
"Citizen Franck! As counsel for the defence, would you say a few words to the good citizens who care so deeply about the Babeuf affair?"
It was a prearranged performance, and André saw no reason to refuse.
Handing his briefcase to Séchelles, he turned to face the crowd. Under a thousand watching eyes, he lifted his right arm high—like a commander about to give the order to advance.
Almost at once, voices in the crowd began to hush others into silence.
"Quiet!"
"Let's hear the people's lawyer speak!"
In moments, a thousand murmurs fell away. The square became still. From within the crowd, Legendre, Hoche, and Meldar exchanged grins and waved at André like conspirators pleased with their own handiwork.
Drawing a deep breath, André began his call for justice.
"Today, I am honoured to stand before you as a lawyer of a free people, to join in a trial that will be remembered as one of the great moments in the history of France—
a trial fought in the name of twenty million peasants among our twenty-five million citizens, for their right to be free.
Five days ago, in the hall of the National Assembly, a group of honourable men affixed their signatures to the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
These noble documents were to shine as a great beacon of hope to those millions who had long been scorched by the fire of injustice; a dawn breaking the endless night of bondage.
Yet—
Eight months have passed, and still twenty million peasants are not free.
Eight months have passed, and still they labour beneath feudal chains.
Eight months have passed, and still they live on islands of poverty, without land, without property, their dignity trampled upon.
Eight months have passed, and still they curl like beggars in forgotten corners of the nation, driven from their homes to become wanderers in their own land.
Therefore today, on behalf of my client, Citizen Babeuf—imprisoned unlawfully for his cause—I call upon the people of France to look upon this monstrous injustice and make it known to the world!"
From Mirabeau, André had learned the art of cadence—the power of a thunderous opening, of sentences that march in rhythm and sweep the listener along. Eloquence was not a matter of polish or ornament, but of force—of presence that seizes the air and bends it to one's will.
Each time André finished a line, a murmur of approval rolled through the crowd; each time he raised his arm, the square fell quiet again, like soldiers awaiting their commander's next order.
Then, drawing from his coat a voided cheque—a mere prop, fluttering in the spring breeze—he held it aloft.
"In a certain sense," he declared,
"I stand here in the name of Citizen Babeuf, and of the twenty million peasants who have come to Paris to demand that a promise be honoured.
When the eight hundred founders of our new Republic drafted their mighty phrases in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they swore to every French citizen that all men are born and remain free and equal, endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Yet for the twenty million peasants of France, that promise has not been kept.
The Republic has defaulted on her sacred obligation—she has written them a cheque on the bank of justice, and it has been returned marked 'insufficient funds.'
But I do not believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt.
I do not believe that the vaults of this great nation are empty.
And so today, on behalf of Citizen Babeuf and the twenty million peasants of France, I demand that the cheque be honoured!
For this cheque is our faith.
With this faith, we shall work together, pray together, fight together, suffer imprisonment together.
With this faith, we shall defend our rights and claim the blessings of liberty and justice.
With this faith, standing before you, I, André, shall not disappoint the twenty million whose voice I carry!"
He had borrowed the structure—though not the words—from a speech that would one day be known to history, reshaping it to his own age. If time had allowed, he would gladly have spoken the rest.
Even so, his voice—firm, sonorous, almost prophetic—stirred the crowd into thunderous applause. Amid cheers and cries, André walked toward the great doors of the court, his head held high like an orator of Rome entering in triumph.
"A demagogue," muttered Pratty, trapped amid the crowd and unable to move. He dared not say it aloud; around him were men who would gladly tear a royal prosecutor apart for the sake of André and Babeuf. Instead, he turned to his clerk, whispered a few malicious instructions, and smiled to himself.
"Confounded man," murmured Judge Faria from behind the curtains of his third-floor chamber. Only the night before, he had sent Madame Lavoisier to propose a private compromise to the defence—an offer that André had rejected outright, insisting upon Babeuf's full acquittal. Now, listening to the speech below, he could hear its unspoken defiance: I care not for your verdict; I have already won, for I speak for twenty million souls.
"His whole speech," Faria muttered, "is one long sleight of hand—brilliant, dangerous rhetoric dressed as reason."
Among the crowd below, another silent observer was making notes in a small leather book—Maximilien Robespierre. Since arriving from Arras as a delegate of the Third Estate the previous May, the shy, ascetic lawyer had made it his habit to learn—from colleagues, rivals, and even from those who disdained him.
Not far away, in a quieter corner of the square, two other men spoke in low tones: Billaud-Varenne, member of the Paris Commune's General Committee, and the deputy Prieur. Both were lawyers, both thirty-four, both men of the far left; it was little wonder they had become allies in the Jacobin Club.
"Your countryman and fellow graduate of Reims acquitted himself well—remarkably well," Billaud-Varenne said, his admiration tinged with envy.
Indeed, not only had André mastered the crowd with his speech, he had also engineered the passing of a proposal that the two of them had long struggled to achieve: the creation of a special tribunal for the prosecution of the tax-farmers who had plundered the nation. That very morning, the Assembly had voted to establish such a court within fifteen days. If nothing changed, André himself would likely be appointed its procureur national.
Prieur nodded slowly. "He understands power—how to harness it, how to share it." Yet behind the measured tone was a trace of disapproval. To his mind, a true revolutionary should charge forward without calculation or fear. André, though gifted, was too cautious, too smooth.
And there was something else that pricked his pride: André had studied under Thuriot of Reims, with whom Prieur had long been at odds. When André first came to Paris seeking employment, he had gone not to his fellow alumnus Prieur, but to the disreputable Judge Vinault.
Billaud-Varenne lowered his voice. "They say that on the day André took charge of the Cordeliers Club, he expelled Hébert and his followers from Paris. Danton, it seems, was not pleased. Even our friend Marat had to flee to England because—"
"Enough, my friend," Prieur interrupted. "A politician must concern himself with results, not with process."
At the mention of Danton, a flicker of irritation crossed his face. The man boasted endlessly of his Reims education, yet he had earned his diploma through a four-week correspondence course—Saint-Just the same. They were but provincial upstarts beside the true sons of Reims: Prieur, André, Thuriot—the legitimate heirs of its old and rigorous school.