Before proceeding to his execution, the Marquis de Favras is said to have inquired whether disclosing a name might yet preserve his life. According to the account of M. Thiers, transcribed by Champagnac, he admitted to having received one hundred louis from a high dignitary of the State in order to dispose men’s minds in favor of the King, though he declined to name him. The answer he received offered him no reassurance. He chose to die with his secret.
This latter version comes down to us from M. Thiers, whom Champagnac cites after having already reproduced a relation from the Journal des révolutions de Paris. The Marquis was put to death in 1790, yet the chapter devoted to his fate constitutes neither a formal record of criminal examination nor a unified report of proceedings. It weaves together voices that champion his innocence alongside those detailing the charges against him. It is therefore necessary to distinguish the conspiracy imputed to his charge, the declarations he made in his own defense, and the judgment that condemned him.
Favras was born in Blois in 1745, into a family of magistrates. He entered the profession of arms, attaining the post of lieutenant in the Swiss Guards of Monsieur, from which he resigned in 1786. Champagnac portrays him as a man of fertile imagination, ever inclined to advance projects upon a multitude of subjects. He took an interest in public finance and had drafted a scheme designed to extinguish the debts of the State within twenty years. From the very outset of the Revolution, his political proposals rendered him an object of suspicion to those who upheld the new order.
In 1790, the prosecution imputed to him a design of far vaster magnitude: the levying, upon the frontiers, of an army of one hundred and forty-four thousand men against the Constitution, commencing with the assembly of twelve hundred armed horsemen, each bearing an infantryman on his crupper. These two thousand four hundred men were allegedly to enter Paris through three separate gates, assassinate Mayor Bailly and Lafayette, and carry off the King and his family to Péronne, where twenty thousand troops would await them. The mathematical precision of these figures lent the scheme the semblance of a concerted plan; yet in Champagnac’s account, it remains insufficient to reveal the concrete evidence upon which the tribunal founded its sentence of death.
Brought before the Châtelet, Favras denied all treasonable design and defended himself with composure. Prudhomme, in his journal, depicted him as a gentleman of decent bearing, fluent in speech, and trenchant in reply, whose noble countenance and Cross of Saint-Louis struck the spectators with awe. This depiction of the accused is no deposition from an eyewitness to the conspiracy; it records the impression he produced upon those who observed him from the benches. The same account affirms that the judges deliberated for six hours before condemning him to the gallows, to be preceded by the amende honorable.
On February 18, the condemned man was to be conveyed to his punishment. One of the relations cited by Champagnac places him upon the fatal road at three o’clock in the afternoon: at Notre-Dame he descended from the tumbril, took from the clerk’s hands the decree of his condemnation, and read it aloud with a steady voice. At the Hôtel-de-Ville, he then requested leave to dictate a final testament. He forgave, he declared, those who had accused him against their conscience, protested that he had ever loved the King, and denied having ever intended to employ violence against the new order. He added that the people clamored for a victim, and that he preferred the lot should fall upon himself rather than upon some feebler innocent.
The clerk had committed sundry errors of orthography and punctuation in recording this declaration. Favras corrected them with cold precision before bidding farewell to those who surrounded him. In Prudhomme’s account, when the reporting judge urged him to name his accomplices, the Marquis answered that he was guiltless. As he mounted the scaffold, he turned toward the citizens and solicited their prayers. He then bade the executioner perform his office. These utterances, preserved by a source favorable to the accused, are those the chronicler elected to transmit; they do not, of themselves, reveal the full weight of the evidence assembled against him.
The Place de Grève was thronged. Champagnac records that windows were let for as much as thirty-six livres to view the spectacle. The multitude that had clamored for Favras’s death was subsequently moved by his fortitude, deeming him innocent. The chronicler discerns in this the caprice of a populace by turns barbarous and compassionate. Cries demanding the lantern had nonetheless resounded throughout the trial, and the scaffold was reared high that his death might be observed from every quarter. After the execution, a rumor arose alleging that he had survived, the executioner having supposedly suspended him by the armpits to feign strangulation; the chronicle relates this tale as subsequent hearsay, not as an established fact.
The chronology of that day varies across the surviving narratives. Prudhomme, as cited by Champagnac, conducts Favras past Notre-Dame, then to the Hôtel-de-Ville, where he indited his declaration prior to his execution. Thiers, cited thereafter, likewise brings him to the Hôtel-de-Ville, but asserts that he remained immured there until nightfall while the populace waited upon the square. Both relations depict him as resolute and confirm his death upon the gallows; yet Thiers’s text alone recounts the interview concerning the one hundred louis and his refusal to name the personage who had delivered them. They agree neither upon the order of his passage nor upon the hour of his death.
Thiers supplies the dialogue that imparts grave significance to Favras’s silence. The Marquis reportedly confided that he had received one hundred louis from an eminent dignitary of the State, who had charged him with disposing men’s minds in the King’s favor. He named no one. When asked whether this confession might avail to save his life, the answer returned to him appeared insufficient. He resolved to keep his secret. Champagnac offers no name whereby this personage might be identified; the silence of the condemned man permits no historian to choose one in his stead.
In Champagnac’s estimation, the obscurity of the trial, the solemnity of the dying declaration, and the parting words of a contemporary suffice to mark Favras as the victim of an intrigue. The author likens his fate to that of La Mole and Coconas, executed under Charles IX after being abandoned by the Duke of Alençon, suggesting that men of higher station sometimes preserve themselves by offering up their instruments. This is an editorial judgment of the chronicle, taking a decided stance. The extant record affords us neither the unexpurgated minutes of the interrogatories nor the formal confrontation of witnesses and written proofs; it does not permit us to elevate this historical parallel into a verified judicial finding. To lend full weight to the comparison, Champagnac recalls the enterprise he attributes to the Duke of Alençon, brother to Charles IX: that of quitting the court to place himself at the head of the Huguenots and the malcontents. Once the plot was discovered, the prince is said to have surrendered La Mole, Coconas, and other confidants to clear himself of suspicion. The analogy reduces Favras to a subordinate sacrificed by a patron lurking in the shadows; yet this remains the interpretive framework chosen by the chronicler, not the unmasking of an identity that the Marquis carried undisclosed to the grave.
The Marquis was hanged. He had denied the violent designs imputed to his charge; shortly before his death, according to Thiers, he acknowledged a restricted political association confined to the acceptance of money to serve the King, while refusing to deliver up the name of his paymaster. Between these two accounts there remain only a capital sentence, a restless crowd, a declaration dictated by the condemned man, and the secret he carried to the tomb. His execution is an indisputable certainty of the record; his complete innocence, maintained by Champagnac, remains the conviction of an author, not a revised verdict rendered by any court of law.