Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution Read online

  To John

  Death is the beginning of immortality

  Robespierre’s last speech, 26 July 1794

  Contents

  Chronology

  Map: Revolutionary Paris

  Preface

  Introduction

  Part I. Before the Revolution (1758–1788)

  1 Child of Arras

  2 The Lawyer-Poet Back Home

  Part II. The Revolution Begins (1788–1789)

  3 Standing for Election in Arras

  4 Representing the Nation at Versailles

  Part III. Reconstituting France (1789–1791)

  5 The National Assembly in Paris

  6 The Constitution

  Part IV. The Constitution Fails (1791–1792)

  7 War

  8 The King’s Trial

  Part V. The Terror (1793–1794)

  9 The Pact with Violence

  10 Robespierre’s Red Summer

  Coda

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Chronology

  1758

  Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre, born in Arras, May 6

  1763

  End of the Seven Years War 1764 Death of Robespierre’s mother, July 14

  1769

  Robespierre goes to boarding school in Paris at the Collège Louis-le-Grand

  1772

  Disappearance of Robespierre’s father

  1774

  Death of Louis XV and accession of his grandson as Louis XVI

  1775

  Coronation of Louis XVI in the cathedral at Reims, June 11

  1778

  France supports the American war of independence

  1781

  Robespierre returns to Arras to practice law

  1788

  The Lamoignon Edicts fail, May

  Louis XVI agrees to the convocation of the Estates General, August

  1789

  Robespierre campaigns for election and is chosen as a representative of the third estate, April

  The Estates General meet in Versailles, May

  The third estate claims the right to represent the nation and renames itself the National Assembly, June 17

  Tennis Court Oath, June 20

  Storming of the Bastille, July 14

  Abolition of feudal rights and privileges, August 4

  Louis XVI and the National Assembly move from Versailles to Paris, October

  Robespierre rents rooms in the rue Saintonge

  The Jacobin Club established in Paris

  1790

  Proliferation of a network of political clubs throughout France affiliated to the Parisian Jacobin Club

  Threat of war over Nootka Sound

  Civil Constitution of the Clergy, July

  Festival of Federation on the first anniversary of the Bastille’s fall, July 14

  1791

  Death of Mirabeau, April 2

  Pope Pius VI condemns the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, April 13

  Royal family’s flight to Varennes, June 20

  Massacre on the Champ de Mars, July 17

  Robespierre moves to new lodgings in the rue Saint-Honoré

  The Jacobin Club splits and moderate members leave to establish the Feuillants Club

  Louis XVI accepts the new constitution, September

  National Assembly closes and Robespierre revisits Arras

  Pétion becomes mayor of Paris, November 14

  Robespierre returns to Paris and opposes war-mongering at the Jacobin Club, November 28

  1792

  Fall of Louis XVI’s Feuillant ministry and appointment of friends and associates of pro-war leader Brissot

  Death of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, March 1

  Festival in honor of the Châteauvieux soldiers, April 15

  France declares war on Francis II (Leopold II’s son and successor as Holy Roman Emperor), April 20

  The guillotine is used for the first time, April 25

  Prussia joins Austria in the war against France, June 13

  The Duke of Brunswick issues a manifesto threatening Paris if Louis XVI is harmed, July 25

  Paris’s 48 Sections declared in permanent session, July 27

  Fall of the monarchy, August 10

  Robespierre elected to municipal Commune governing Paris, August 12

  General Lafayette flees France

  Longwy falls to Prussia, August 20

  Establishment of the first Revolutionary Tribunal

  Verdun falls to Prussia, September 2

  Prison massacres, September 2–6

  Robespierre elected to new National Convention, September 5

  French victory over Prussia at Battle of Valmy, September 20

  National Convention meets in Paris, September 21

  Declaration of the Republic, September 22

  French victory at Battle of Jemappes, November 6

  Trial of Louis XVI, beginning with his indictment, December 11

  Dissolution of the first Revolutionary Tribunal

  1793

  Execution of Louis XVI, January 21

  France declares war on England and the Dutch Republic, February

  Enragés food riots

  France declares war on Spain, March 7

  Revolt in the Vendée

  Failed insurrection in Paris, March 9–10

  Establishment of the second and infamous Revolutionary Tribunal, March 10

  Defection of General Dumouriez after Battle of Neerwinden, March 18

  Establishment of the Committee of Public Safety, April 6

  Revolt in Lyon, May

  Insurrection in Paris, May 31

  Expulsion of Girondin deputies from the National Convention, June 2

  Jacobin Republican constitution accepted by referendum and adopted, June 24

  Danton voted off Committee of Public Safety, July 10

  Marat assassinated, July 13

  Robespierre voted into the Committee of Public Safety, July 27

  Siege of Lyon begins, August 8

  Smashing of royal tombs at Saint-Denis, August 10

  Toulon surrenders to the English, August 29

  Terror becomes the order of the day, September 5

  Law of Suspects, September 17

  Law of General Maximum, September 29

  Adoption of the Republican calendar (backdated to 22 September 1792), October 5

  Year I

  Fall of Lyon, Vendémiaire 18 (October 9)

  Execution of Marie Antoinette, Vendémiaire 25 (October 16)

  Execution of the Girondin deputies, Brumaire 10 (October 31)

  Festival of Reason in Notre-Dame, Paris, Brumaire 20 (November 10)

  Commune decrees closure of Parisian churches, Frimaire 3 (November 23)

  Constitution of Revolutionary Government, Frimaire 14 (December 4)

  First issue of Desmoulins’s Le vieux Cordelier, Frimaire 15 (December 5)

  French recapture Toulon, Frimaire 29 (December 19)

  Rebels in the Vendée crushed, Nivôse 2 (December 22)

  Year II

  Robespierre ill, Pluviôse 22–Ventôse 22 (February 10–March 12)

  Execution of Hébertistes, Germinal 4 (March 24)

  Recall of Fouché from Lyon, Germinal 7 (March 27)

  Execution of Dantonistes, Germinal 16 (April 5)

  Robespierre runs the Police Bureau after Saint-Just leaves on mission to the army, Floréal 9 (April 28)

  Cécile Renault attempts to assassinate Robespierre, Prairial 4 (May 27)

 
Festival of the Supreme Being, Prairial 20 (June 8)

  Reorganization of Revolutionary Tribunal, Prairial 22 (June 10)

  French victory at Battle of Fleurus, Messidor 8 (June 26)

  Fraternal banquets to celebrate the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall, Messidor 26 (July 14)

  Robespierre’s last speech to the National Convention, Thermidor 8 (July 26)

  Arrest of Robespierre, Thermidor 9 (July 27)

  Execution of Robespierristes, Thermidor 10 (July 28)

  Preface

  MY DEAR CROKER,

  I wish you would think seriously of the History of the Reign of Terror. I do not mean a pompous, philosophical history, but a mixture of biography, facts and gossip: a diary of what really took place with the best authenticated likenesses of the actors.

  Ever yours,

  ROBERT PEEL1

  Soon after he received this letter from his friend Sir Robert Peel, the once and future Tory prime minister, John Wilson Croker packed his bags for a seaside holiday. Although he was a prominent literary and political journalist and was hoping to work as he sat on the beach, Croker packed none of his collection of rare and fascinating books about the French Revolution that are now one of the glories of the British Library. He took with him only the list of those condemned to death during the Reign of Terror.2 He perused it against the rhythmic sound of waves breaking on the shore.

  Twenty-two impoverished women, many of them widows, convicted of forwarding “the designs of the fanatics, aristocrats, priests and other agents of England,” guillotined.

  Nine private soldiers convicted of “pricking their own eyes with pins, and becoming by this cowardly artifice unable to bear arms,” guillotined.

  Jean Baptiste Henry, aged eighteen, journeyman tailor, convicted of sawing down a tree of liberty, guillotined.

  Henrietta Frances de Marbœuf, aged fifty-five, convicted of hoping for the arrival in Paris of the Austrian and Prussian armies and of hoarding provisions for them, guillotined.

  James Duchesne, aged sixty, formerly a servant, since a broker; John Sauvage, aged thirty-four, gunsmith; Frances Loizelier, aged forty-seven, milliner; Mélanie Cunosse, aged twenty-one, milliner; Mary Magdalen Virolle, aged twenty-five, hairdresser: all convicted for writing, guillotined.

  Geneviève Gouvon, aged seventy-seven, seamstress, convicted of “various conspiracies since the beginning of the Revolution,” guillotined.

  Francis Bertrand, aged thirty-seven, convicted of producing “sour wine injurious to the health of citizens,” guillotined.

  Mary Angelica Plaisant, another seamstress, guillotined for exclaiming, “A fig for the nation!”

  Relaxing into his holiday, Croker continued reading through the long list of dubious charges against the several thousand victims of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, from its institution on 10 March 1793 until the fall of Maximilien Robespierre on 27 July 1794. He compiled some grimly fascinating statistics: in the last five months of Robespierre’s life, when he supposedly secured tyrannous power over France and the Revolution, 2,217 people were guillotined in Paris; but the total condemned to death in the eleven months preceding Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was only 399. On the basis of these statistics, Croker concluded that the executions “grew gradually with the personal influence of Robespierre, and became enormous in proportion as he successively extinguished his rivals.”3 In awed horror he recalled, “These things happened in our time—thousands are still living who saw them, yet it seems almost incredible that batches (fournées—such was the familiar phrase)—of sixty victims should be condemned in one morning by the same tribunal, and executed the same afternoon on the same scaffold.”

  Although Peel pressed his friend to write a popular and accessible book about the French Revolution, Croker never did so. When he got back from his holiday in 1835 he published his seaside musings in an article for the Quarterly Review. Here he acknowledged the enormity of the problem Robespierre still poses biographers: “The blood-red mist by which his last years were enveloped magnified his form, but obscured his features. Like the Genius of the Arabian tale, he emerged suddenly from a petty space into enormous power and gigantic size, and as suddenly vanished, leaving behind him no trace but terror.”4

  Introduction

  No backdrop can match the French Revolution. It teems with life and burns with human, historical, intellectual, and literary interest. More than haunting, it obsesses, because it will not lie down and die. When François Furet, its most famous French historian of recent years, proclaimed in 1978, “The French Revolution is over,” he provoked great waves of revisionist scholarship across France, beyond the Channel, and on the other side of the Atlantic, proving that it was still alive. With the Revolution’s bicentenary in 1989, and the collapse of Communism across Europe the same year, new scholarship brought a young generation face to face with the vivid hopes of 1789—liberty, equality, fraternity, popular sovereignty, representative democracy, rights, and happiness. Hopes that issued, after just four years, in the Terror, the system of emergency government and summary execution with which no one was more closely identified than Maximilien Robespierre.

  A pale and fragile man, Robespierre was anxious, hesitant, and principled. Before the Revolution he earned his living as a young lawyer in the northern French city of Arras. He sided consistently with the victimized and fiercely opposed the death penalty. Eloquent in person and on paper, but in a restrained and formal manner, he crossed a great deal out, nervously perfecting his prose, and had difficulty projecting his voice in public. His appearance was meticulously unflamboyant. His eyes were weak, his mind sometimes vague, and his routines colorlessly orderly. He should have drowned in the Revolution’s flood of epoch-shattering events and personalities. Instead Robespierre became the living embodiment of the Revolution at its most feral and justified the Terror as an emanation of republican virtue, a necessary step on the path to the ideal society that he was determined to establish in France. However hopelessly utopian, politically misguided, or historically premature Robespierre’s vision of this ideal society may have been, he made a unique contribution to events that shaped the future of Europe. To understand him is to begin to understand the French Revolution. It is also to cast light on the uneasy coincidence of democracy and fanaticism present at the birth of modern European politics.

  Political turmoil can foster unlikely leaders. The mediocre figure, strutting and fretting on the historical stage in the midst of a revolution, is always more riveting than the one who merely inherits power or gets elected to it in quieter times. But Robespierre’s mediocrity is only incidental, a weapon—of sorts—in the hands of his detractors and enemies but never the key to the personal and historical mystery that shrouds him. There were more intellectually gifted revolutionaries. There were better writers and speakers, and more sympathetic characters. Many disagreed politically with Robespierre every step of the way, from his election to the Estates General on the eve of the Revolution in 1789 to his death beneath the guillotine in 1794—often with good reason. But he cannot be explained by what he lacked, or failed to see and do.

  Robespierre’s private self and his public contribution to the events that inaugurated modern European politics are complex—by all accounts, he was remarkably odd, and the French Revolution was spectacularly complicated. No sooner were his severed remains collected, tossed into an unmarked grave, and covered with quicklime than the struggle began to grasp the connection between Robespierre’s personality and his role in the Revolution. While his short career in politics was long enough to win him a lasting place in world history, it was not long enough to show conclusively whether his is rightly a place of honor, one of shame, or something more inscrutable in between.

  To his enemies—living and dead—he will always be colored blood red: the first of the modern dictators, the inventor and perpetrator of the Terror who sent thousands to their deaths. One enemy, lucky enough to survive him, predicted, “History will say little about
this monster; it will confine itself to these words: ‘At this time, the internal debasement of France was such that a bloodthirsty charlatan, without talent and without courage, called Robespierre, made all the citizens tremble under his tyranny. Whilst twelve hundred thousand warriors were shedding their blood on the frontiers for the republic, he brought her to her knees by his proscriptions.’”1

  Vilification and belittlement were inevitable in the aftermath of the Terror, but “bloodthirsty charlatan” is hardly a satisfactory description of the fastidious lawyer who opposed the death penalty before the Revolution and afterward became France’s most articulate pacifist when war loomed with the rest of Europe. On the other hand, the subtler shades with which his friends paint him—reserved, enigmatic, highly principled, the first of the modern democrats—do not suffice either. To them he was an unjustly maligned prophet of the political order of the future. Almost fifty years after his death, one of them wrote: “I would have given my life to save Robespierre, whom I loved like a brother. No one knows better than I do how sincere, disinterested, and absolute his devotion to the Republic was. He has become the scapegoat of the revolutionists; but he was the best man of them all.”2 A sympathetic biographer went so far as to insist: “The more godlike I prove Robespierre’s conduct to have been—the greater will be the horror in which his memory will be held by the upper and middle classes.”3

  By the left in France and elsewhere, Robespierre has been cast primarily as the defender of the republic and the ideal of social democracy: a passionate witness to the grievances of the poor and the virtues of the meek or oppressed whom history betrays. He was, after all, the revolutionary who tried to change the Declaration of Rights to limit private property and enshrine the right to life and subsistence for all. It was Robespierre who said, “When will the people be educated? When they have enough bread to eat, when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous pens and tongues to deceive them…. When will this be? Never.”4