Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution Read online

  When the Parlement of Paris was recalled in September 1788, after Lamoignon’s fall, it discredited itself once and for all as an advocate of progress by calling upon Louis XVI to reconvene the Estates General exactly as it had been composed in 1614. Then the Estates General had met in three almost numerically equal, but separately elected, chambers representing the orders of the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate. They had voted separately by order, and it was easy for the nobility and the clergy to defeat the third estate: two against one. Since 1614 the third estate had grown exponentially in numbers and wealth: it now represented 98 percent of the population, including the rising taxpaying bourgeoisie. So it would be severely underrepresented if the earlier composition of the Estates General were maintained, as the Parlement of Paris demanded. The popular credit the parlements had won through their clashes with the monarch disappeared overnight. Suddenly Robespierre was vitriolic in his denunciations of these old legal institutions. His fury marks the speed with which things were changing, some personal chagrin at the part he had played in shoring up the old order, and a passionate desire to exchange it for something new. Such sudden and violent feelings were far from unique at the time; they were everywhere, and the anger to which Robespierre seemed particularly prone was widespread in the last months of the old regime.

  Robespierre was one of thousands to publish a pamphlet with ideas on how the new Estates General should be organized, many of them calling for doubling the number of third estate representatives and for counting the votes by head, not by order. Instead of arguing for the historical, constitutional, or theoretical rights of the third estate nationwide, Robespierre’s pamphlet had a specific, local focus. It was preoccupied with the Estates of Artois, the provincial governing body grandly accommodated inside the city walls of Arras, and its standing claim to represent the province of Artois. This claim had to be undermined if the province’s deputies to the Estates General were to be newly elected. More precisely, unless the claim of the Estates of Artois to represent the province could be overridden, Robespierre had no hope of going to Versailles as a representative of the third estate the following year. What a difference in just three months! Instead of turning out for a local demonstration under the old regime, where there were such unbreachable limits to his ambitions, Robespierre was now within reach of a role in national politics. His recognition of this opportunity—and the ferocity of his determination to seize it—was amazing. In the past he had commented on politics when it intersected with his legal work or arose in the context of his prize essays, and he was certainly well schooled in the political theory of both Montesquieu and Rousseau, but he had never had any hope of even a minor role in national politics. Contemporaries in Arras noted with surprise (and some distaste) the vigor with which Robespierre started campaigning for election. He had had very limited, and largely dismaying, experience of elections before, in the Academy of Arras and the legal profession. He knew there was only one outcome that counted—winning—and in his circumstances, luck was not going to be enough.

  WHAT WAS ARRAS like on the eve of the Revolution? We can visit it as it was if we travel with Arthur Young, an English gentleman farmer from Norfolk and a pioneer of political science. In 1788 Young bought a mare in Bury Saint Edmunds, confidently assured that she would be fit for at least a year. He had traveled in France before as the guest of a noble family, but this time he went like a farmer, alone, on horseback, without servants. On 30 July he left his estate in Bradfield, crossed the Channel, and arrived in Calais. Then he took the road to Saint-Omer, where he found “little deserving of notice,” and from there to “Aire, and Lillers, and Béthune; towns well known in military story.”5

  By 8 August Young was on the “admirable gravel road” between Béthune and Arras. When he reached Arras later that day, it proved another disappointment, and he noted in his journal, “There is nothing but the great and rich Abbey of Var [Saint-Vaast], which they would not show me; it was not the right day, or some frivolous excuse.”6 He went off grumpily through the narrow streets. If he turned left, then left again, he would have walked past Robespierre’s front door on the corner of the rue des Rapporteurs and might unknowingly have passed him returning from work. But Young’s mood was ruined and he refused to be impressed, even by the town’s imposing Gothic cathedral. At the end of his long day, he wrote dismissively in his journal, “The cathedral is nothing,” and blew out his candle, tired and disgruntled. The next morning he woke to a city transformed by market day:

  Coming out of the town I met at least an hundred asses, some loaded with a bag, others a sack, but all apparently with a trifling burden, and swarms of men and women. This is called a market, being plentifully supplied; but a great proportion of all the labour of a country is idle in the midst of harvest, to supply a town which in England would be fed by one-fortieth of the people. Whenever this swarm of triflers buzz in a market, I take a minute and vicious division of the soil for granted.7

  Young was a serious agronomist with strong views on the merits of large-scale farming over small—hence his disapproval of the petty farmers converging on the market with their meager burdens. He also had wider criticisms of the society and politics he found in France. He despised the despotic government that seemed to take no account of public opinion and the oppressive system of privilege by which the first and second estates lived at the expense of the third. On his travels in the south of the country, he noted, “All the country girls and women are without shoes or stockings; and the ploughmen at their work have neither sabots nor stockings to their feet. This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity…. It reminded me of the misery of Ireland.”8 These glaring grievances, so obvious to an attentive English visitor, were prominent causes of the revolution that was just months away as Young prepared to leave Arras. From there, he continued on his way across France—wry, sarcastic, disabused, refusing whenever possible to be remotely impressed. He was still in France when the Revolution came. He welcomed it, suspended his sarcasm, and hoped the problems he had noticed on his travels were about to be resolved.

  WHEN THE PROVINCIAL government, the Estates of Artois, met in Arras in December 1788, the price of grain was rising dramatically and a winter of misery was setting in. Poverty was a widespread and complex problem in old regime France—there was an extensive and nuanced vocabulary to refer to different levels of deprivation, but the blanket term was pauvre. The poor made up over a third of the total population and were identified as “the family of a working man where such an individual cannot earn enough to support every member and where the individual members cannot support themselves.”9 At best the poor lived at subsistence level. A bad harvest would plunge many into destitution, and without adequate food, clothing, and shelter, they would soon die. These were the circumstances in which Robespierre began his election campaign. His pamphlet, A la nation artésienne, sur la nécessité de reformer les États d’Artois (To the Nation of Artois, on the Necessity of Reforming the Estates of Artois), argues that everything wrong in Artois is the fault of the provincial estates and that the only hope of purging corruption from local politics is popular election of the people’s own representatives.10 The provincial estates had monopolized for their own benefit public powers that rightfully belonged to the people.

  In this early pamphlet, Robespierre’s two most prominent political ideas are already present. It is here that he first presents the principle of election that was to characterize so many of his interventions early in the Revolution. This principle was based on a simple and consistent understanding of what representation must mean in politics: in order to represent a person, or a group of people, you must first be chosen by them. According to him, the bishops in the Estates of Artois represented no one because no one had chosen them for the purpose. The nobles and members of the third estate, chosen by the elite, represented only the elite. The poor, meanwhile, were so preoccupied with scraping together a living that they had no time to reflect on the
causes of their discontent or the natural rights of which they were being cheated by the unrepresentative Estates of Artois. This sense of the poor as deserving claimants of justice in a corrupt and unfair world is the second of Robespierre’s prominent political ideas. In Artois, he argued that the tyranny of wealthy elites excluded the poor from litigation. In recent years, he had built a certain professional reputation in the courts for taking on unprofitable cases for impoverished clients, but here already the poor have become a collective abstraction, enshrined in his rhetoric, soon to be unleashed in debates that reverberated far beyond Arras.

  As this early piece of writing shows, unscrupulous, abusive, and egotistical “enemies of the people” were vividly present to Robespierre from the start of his political career. He called on justice, reason, and humanity to vindicate the oppressed: the moment had come at last for vice to tremble and for virtue to put Arras, Artois, France, perhaps even the world beyond, to rights. In the thick of his election campaign, he attacked the members of the Estates of Artois for refusing reasonable requests for public expenditure on education or sanitation to alleviate public misery, while approving the refurbishment of their own offices to the sum of twenty-four hundred livres although they occupied them for just six weeks a year. He scorned the officials who refused to allot public funds for repairing important roads, imposed forced labor on peasants to maintain the roads free of charge, and then provocatively approved the construction of a new trunk road across the province—a completely pointless expenditure, except that the road passed by a château owned by a member of the provincial administration. The corruption was so transparent that once the road had reached the château, work on it stopped. And this was far from an isolated instance of abuse.

  In his pamphlet, Robespierre also denounced these enemies of the people for oppressing their victims with lettres de cachet and imprisoning them. He championed the rights of citizens rotting unjustly inside the Bastille of Artois (as he titled the city prison), thanks to the odious caprice of provincial officials who were no better than local despots. He lamented the fate of men, women, and children thrown into prison like animals—even pregnant women, “innocent victims of vile persecution”—and claimed there was not a mother in the province who could not make her son cower merely by mentioning the Estates of Artois. Once having seen the truth about the provincial government, the people of Artois, Robespierre was certain, would elect to change their representatives. The choice facing the people, as he presented it, was between liberty and slavery, happiness and oppression, victory or defeat. But the pamphlet’s implicit message was: Vote for Robespierre. Essentially, he conducted his election campaign as if he were already living in a democracy, as if there were popular suffrage, as if politics were open to anyone the people had chosen. None of this was true, but through sheer force of imagination Robespierre managed to suspend his own disbelief. Into his mind there had come the first of many pictures: Robespierre, delegate to the Estates General. He was greatly helped in realizing his ambition by the king’s decree on 7 March that Artois was to select its representatives to Versailles by holding new elections, in line with the rest of France; it was not simply to rely on the Estates of Artois to choose them. And so, the Estates of Artois, the long-time emblem of regional privilege and independence, had been superseded; the first great obstacle in Robespierre’s path had melted away.

  Nevertheless, his chances of election were slight. Because the Estates General had last met in 1614, no one remembered exactly how its delegates had been chosen. Louis XVI told his ministers to consult the archives, but this did not get them far since much had been left to local discretion in 1614: there was no coherent codification of the procedures. So the king’s minister Necker had to invent one. The electoral statute that resulted was an uneasy attempt to reconcile “respect for customary practice” with “current circumstances”.11 It decreed that the clergy and nobility would choose their delegates through direct elections. The third estate, however, was to elect deputies indirectly, through a series of preliminary assemblies that would allow rural communities and traditional artisan guilds to participate. The number of deputies for the various regions was to be decided on the principle of proportional representation, “according to their population and resources.” Necker made an exception for Paris, designing a special, even more complicated electoral procedure. Those eligible to participate in the third estate’s elections included all male commoners, born or naturalized in France, aged over twenty-five, and listed on the tax rolls. Voting was commonly by open ballot, and an absolute majority was required to win.

  On Monday, 23 March, Robespierre attended a meeting at his old school, the Collège d’Arras, for all members of the third estate who did not belong to one of the city’s thirty-nine trade guilds or corporations (apothecaries, carpenters, tailors, wig makers, and so on). Whereas the corporations met calmly and elected their representatives without any trouble, the meeting in the college chapel was chaotic. It got off to an unpromising start with people slowly filtering in between seven and nine-thirty in the morning. Soon afterward, a bitter fight erupted between the ordinary people who comprised the third estate and the échevins, or town councillors—who, in Robespierre’s opinion, were at least as suspect as the members of the old Estates of Artois had been.12 He attacked these councillors for corruption by association with the Estates of Artois, which had allowed them to attend meetings of the third estate. This practice was continuing despite the recent demise of the Estates of Artois. In their defense the councillors argued that they were as entitled as any other members of the third estate to a part in the election of its deputies.

  After two long days of deliberation, twelve deputies were chosen to draw up a list of the third estate’s grievances (cahier de doléance) and go on to the next electoral assembly. Robespierre was one of the twelve and so was his friend Buissart. As Robespierre put it, “People expressed their joy loudly in multiple applause, imposing, no doubt, a great responsibility on those whom they honored with these touching and energetic proofs of their confidence.” In this rapturous account, however, Robespierre was getting ahead of himself—this was just the first stage of elections for the third estate and there were still three to go.13 The next election meeting took place a few days later, again in the college chapel, where the twelve approved candidates were joined by fifty-three deputies from the corporations. At this time, as well as helping to draw up the general grievances of the third estate, Robespierre agreed to draft a list of specific grievances for the corporation of cobblers. Since this was one of the most impoverished and illiterate of the corporations, he may have been motivated by his habitual sympathy with the poor. But he was also eager to broaden the base of his potential supporters. So early in the electoral process, no effort was too speculative, no publicity or source of support too insubstantial.

  The fight with the town councillors came to a head in an argument between Robespierre and his old mentor at the academy, Dubois de Fosseux, over a procedural issue. Dubois de Fosseux, himself a councillor, was also a member of the noblesse non entrante, a person whose family had attained nobility comparatively recently. He was wealthy and less provincial than Robespierre, having spent six years at court in Versailles and developed a taste for literature and the theater about which he corresponded with Beaumarchais (already famous for his play Le Mariage de Figaro, the inspiration for Mozart’s opera). As secretary of the academy, Dubois de Fosseux had connections with cultural figures all over France.14 In Arras, he was highly respected for his public service, his involvement in improving roads and canals, and his attempts to monitor and resolve local economic crises. Since he held municipal office, he attended the assembly of the third estate as well as the assembly of nobles. He disputed the relentlessly pejorative terms in which the councillors were characterized by Robespierre, in particular, and insisted on their right to vote in the third estate. This bitter dispute raged for three days, and on 29 March the third estate of Arras had still not elected
its deputies to the key meeting of the third estate of the whole district, or bailliage, which was scheduled for the following day. The election was finally held in the middle of the night. Of the twenty-four who were chosen, four were councillors and the majority were lawyers. Robespierre came fourteenth on the list.

  The next morning the tired new deputies returned to the college church (if they had left it at all overnight) to welcome representatives of the other 245 constituencies of the bailliage, with a view to further amalgamating the province’s extensive lists of grievances. The list presented by the twenty-four representatives of the third estate of Arras bore signs of Robespierre’s influence, including a complaint against the shaming of the families of criminals by their association with bad blood, the subject of Robespierre’s inaugural speech at the Academy of Arras, and several other suggestions for reform of the criminal code. Perhaps it is true, as one hostile biographer claims, that Robespierre had organized his country relatives in Carvins into campaigning on his behalf. Or perhaps the representatives from the countryside, suffering from a stronger sense of oppression than their counterparts in urban Arras, proved more responsive to Robespierre’s dramatic rhetoric. Whatever the reason, when the 550 representatives from across the whole province voted, he was one of just forty-nine chosen to draft the final, most comprehensive list of grievances for the third estate. Even Robespierre could not tell whether it was luck, strategy, or a combination of both that had won him this opportunity.