The baker had been brought before the authorities; he found no shelter there. Depositions were taken in his favour, precautions were observed, and there was talk of trying him according to the laws. Then the crowd overpowered the guard and carried him off. Denis François died thus on the 21st of October 1789, in Paris, caught between the promise of justice and the impossibility of enforcing it.
Bread had prepared the ground long before a name was attached to the grievance. Dearth turned every wait into suspicion, every reserve into an incrimination. In a city haunted by the dread of wanting for necessities, the threshold of a bakehouse was no mere shop entrance: it stood between those demanding food and the man presumed master of the answer. The municipality posted guards before the shops. This presence bore witness to the threat, yet proved powerless to contain it.
François plied his trade in the parish of Notre-Dame. On the morning of the 21st of October, a woman accused him of concealing bread. Others joined her cry. A reserve was uncovered, which contemporary accounts describe as set aside for the service of the National Assembly. What might have warranted verification became, in the eyes of the accusers, immediate proof. Bread was there: why, then, were those who clamoured for it forced to wait? A material grievance hardened into an accusation of treason.
Here one must check the momentum that the assailants hastened. A reserve did not establish hoarding; a complaint was not a conviction. In the report dispatched that very day to the Assembly, the representatives of the Commune affirmed the baker’s innocence and cited the favourable testimony of bourgeois of the district. This official voice does not furnish every detail of the opening strife. It establishes at least that the authorities had not simply abandoned a man after acknowledging his guilt.
He was conducted to the Hôtel de Ville toward half-past eight. Men and women followed him, and upon the Place de Grève the gathering swelled. The magistrates endeavoured to pacify the throng. According to the account preserved by Edmond Seligman, they announced that François would be conveyed to the Châtelet. Due process was to regain custody of the accused. Yet, to a portion of those who already held him guilty, the transfer threatened to snatch the man from the punishment they demanded.
The notion of selecting judges from among the assembled persons was put forward. For an instant it retained the semblance of a trial, as though bestowing a name upon a few onlookers could substitute for the inquiry and the guarantees that the mob refused to await. Time was wanting even for this mimicry. François was torn from those shielding him, hanged from a lantern, and his corpse subjected to further outrages. The murder had outstripped the sentence for which it purported to stand.
His wife was pregnant. Contemporary accounts depict her terror; subsequent prints recorded her grief and the relief bestowed upon her. The neighbours might return to their callings and the magistrates to their deliberations; she returned to a dwelling whose threshold its master would never cross again. The child she carried would be born in the wake of a gathering of a few hours, the consequences of which, for its mother, were henceforth without end.
The representatives of the Commune appeared before the National Assembly. They announced the death of the baker, their own powerless efforts, and an imminent peril: two other bakers held at the Châtelet were, they reported, in danger of being seized and hanged. The murder appeared not as a finished event, but as one pregnant with repetition. The delegates demanded both the means to secure provisions and a statute against the assemblies they could no longer master.
The Assembly responded that very day with a law of martial force. It conferred upon municipal officers the power, and under specified circumstances the duty, to summon military force. A red flag would signal this resolve from the town hall and throughout the streets. The assembled persons might delegate representatives to set forth their grievances, but were required to disperse. Formal summonses were to precede the employment of force should the crowd persist.
Thus the death of François gave birth to a rule whose reach far exceeded his shop. The authorities sought to prevent a crowd from once again seizing an accused man; to that end, they equipped themselves with an instrument capable of falling upon gatherings that had committed no murder. The problem of legal guarantees shifted ground without vanishing. After a man was slain in the name of an immediate popular will, public authority received the means to disperse those who invoked that very will.
While the deputies legislated, arrests were effected. François Blin, a porter at the corn wharf, was prosecuted as the author of the hanging. Michel Adrien, a day-labourer, was arrested for having distributed cards intended to foment an uprising. Their cases are often confounded under a single formula: the baker’s murderers. Yet the imputed acts must be distinguished. The documents consulted here link Blin to the death of François; they designate Adrien as a man accused of inciting unrest.
Both were condemned and hanged on the following day. This swiftness was intended to lend repression the firmness that the baker’s protection had lacked. Yet this proximity of dates begets an unease that restored order cannot dispel. On the 21st, authority had been unable to preserve the life of a man promised a trial. On the 22nd, justice possessed the means to dispatch to their deaths two men seized in the tumult of the eve.
The aftermath was not solely penal. The widow received charitable relief, and an engraving preserved the memory of her presentation to the King and Queen in November. Compassion turned to ceremony, and thence to iconography. It rendered visible the victim of a disorder from which the authorities intended to dissociate themselves. Nothing warrants dismissing this aid as mere theatre; nor is there any reason to overlook the public use that could be made of genuine suffering.
At the close of this sequence, bread remains. It was bread that was sought that morning, bread whose presence had been taken for an admission, bread whose scarcity had furnished fear with its vocabulary. The murder had fed no one. The subsequent executions had not replenished the bakehouses. Caught between hunger, suspicion, and the preservation of order, the François affair demonstrates how swiftly a life may be engulfed by questions that surpass it, only to vanish almost entirely behind the remedies devised in their wake.
Denis François had been slain; François Blin paid with his life for his share in the lynching imputed to him by justice; Michel Adrien died for having incited to murder. Within two days, the public square had seen three men pass under three distinct accusations. The swiftness of the sentences afforded the authorities an immediate response. It left to the families three bereavements that no proclamation could abridge.