Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  The most detailed account of Robespierre’s school days can be found in an embittered early biography that still turns up in Arras from time to time. It drew on the memories of the abbé Proyart, who taught at Louis-le-Grand during Robespierre’s time there and was first published in 1795 by Le Blond de Neuvéglise, then amended and reissued in Arras in 1850 by the abbé Proyart’s nephew. According to this source, Robespierre was the kind of boy with whom parents preferred their sons not to associate. He was seething with envy and a subversive egoism that constantly put him at odds with the school rules. When he troubled himself to conform, it was only because his pride made him dread humiliating reprimands. He viewed his school as a prison, its pupils as captives, and the teachers (priests or lay clergy) as despotic oppressors of liberty. But he was far from audacious in the face of this oppression. One day, for example, the biography recounts, a prefect, Yves-Marie Audrein, came upon Robespierre reading a forbidden book in an unfrequented corner of the school—Émile, perhaps, or another of Rousseau’s works illicitly smuggled in. The frightened boy threw himself at the prefect’s feet, begging not to be exposed. Since the prefect was himself interested in new and progressive ideas, he had mercy on the young boy. If this incident, or something even remotely similar, actually occurred, abject panic would almost certainly have been a histrionic response. The proscription of books at Louis-le-Grand was taken seriously and covered by the institutional statutes drawn up after the Jesuits were expelled. Article 10 under title 5 stipulates: “Each assistant master will often examine the books that his pupils are reading; he will take away those that are dangerous to morals or religion and not allow even those that are simply useless or might engender a taste for frivolity. He will prevent his pupils from lending books to each other without his consent.” There were many such statutes, excessively detailed, covering everything from religious exercises to personal hygiene and behavior on school outings, where pupils were to “walk neither too fast nor too slowly, nor raise their voices, nor offer provocation to anyone.” But those who found themselves in contravention of the statutes (and there must have been many) were unlikely to suffer corporal punishment as drastic as that dealt out in some other Parisian colleges. Article 5 under title 1 directs that masters “will use no severity until they have exhausted all other means of making an impression on an honest and sensitive mind.”

  The statutes were normative, not descriptive, and Robespierre’s school doubtless had its fair share of sadistic masters ready to vent their frustrations on vulnerable children. But at least some of the teachers were open to progressive thinking and keen to encourage it in their pupils. Before the Revolution, the abbé Proyart wrote in defense of this aspect of Louis-le-Grand and the nine other colleges that had come under the direction of the University of Paris:

  I have looked everywhere for the Émile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and I find him nowhere but in his book. But the Émiles formed by the University of Paris I can find at the head of church and state; I can show them to you, standing out from the crowd, in every walk and condition of society.12

  Serenely unaware of the revolution to come, Proyart even praised the sense of equality that prevailed at Louis-le-Grand, which he fondly termed a “little republic.” No wonder he became so bitter. Looking back in 1800, Proyart insisted that Louis XVI had been effectively dethroned, before even becoming king, by a godless and subversive generation nurtured in the Parisian colleges. He wrote a retrospective diatribe against the expulsion of the Jesuits in which the revolutionary careers of Robespierre, the prefect Audrein who supposedly surprised him with the forbidden book and turned a blind eye, and other famous ex-pupils are presented in apocalyptic terms. Imagining himself back in 1762, he wrote:

  Remember that it is the educational establishment called Louis-le-Grand, from which you are today expelling the Jesuits, that will send forth twenty-five years from now furies armed with torches to burn their country, firebrands who will sound the tocsin against kings and their ministers. The same establishment will send forth an apostate priest whose sacrilegious hand will violate the secret portfolio of his king to draw from it charges justifying regicide and forge capital crimes: his name will be Audrein. And it is from this establishment that there will come, in human form, a more atrocious being than any known to the barbarism of antiquity, who, after having, more than anyone else, determined the murder of his king, will himself rule over you and yours by daggers and assassinations, and will drink the blood of a million men…. His execrable name will be Robespierre.13

  IN 1793, AS the Revolution slid into the Terror and the republican constitution of France was suspended, Robespierre looked back on his schooling. He claimed that the colleges directed by the University of Paris had been “nurseries of republicanism, which formed the mind of the Nation and made it worthy of liberty.” This was overstating the case, as he of all people must have been aware: on the brink of the Terror the mind of France was incoherent with factional strife, far from ready for the particular brand of liberty that Robespierre espoused. But his friend and fellow pupil Camille Desmoulins said similar things about their shared experience at Louis-le-Grand, citing masters who taught them to hate their own government and love republican liberty.

  We were brought up in the schools of Rome and Athens, and in the pride of the Republic, only to live in the abjection of the monarchy…. It was foolish to imagine…that we could admire the past without condemning the present.14

  One master in particular may have played such a part—the abbé Hérivaux, nicknamed the Roman, whose subject was rhetoric. Well respected and holding a responsible position at the college, Hérivaux apparently saw no glaring incompatibility between his ardent admiration for the heroes of ancient Rome and the confident teaching or practice of Catholicism. Robespierre spent two years in his class, possibly because his performance in the first year was mediocre and he longed to assuage his injured pride and redeem his reputation. With characteristic determination and application, he did manage to win a prize in the second year. But in the meantime his amour propre had been further inflamed by Hérivaux’s repeated and only partly playful assertions that there was something distinctively Roman in Robespierre’s character and countenance. Robespierre was clearly flattered by Hérivaux, glad of the attention from an approving teacher, and perhaps further reinforced in his fondness for classical literature.

  One day in 1775, Louis-le-Grand all but exploded with excitement: Louis XVI had decided to pay a state visit to the school on the way back from his coronation at Reims. The news quickly spread through the corridors, classrooms, and dormitories—everyone talked of it. Louis XVI was just four years older than Robespierre, twenty-one at the time of his accession. He set out with youthful optimism to win acclaim and affection from his subjects. As he put it, “I wish to be loved.” France, unfortunately, was not in a particularly loving condition. Public spending was spiraling out of control. Attempts to reform and liberalize the grain trade during the first year of his reign led to panic buying, rioting, a dramatic rise in the price of bread, and unrest that ended with a spate of public executions. In the circumstances, the new king had been advised to scale down and modernize the traditional coronation ceremony that was planned for June 1775—perhaps even move it to Paris, where it might raise more revenue from public participation.

  There were limits, however, to Louis XVI’s willingness to please public opinion and the coronation was duly enacted in full accordance with ancient custom in the cathedral at Reims, where French kings had been anointed and crowned for a thousand years. He had, in fact, already ruled for ten months by the time of his coronation, and many of his subjects were already seriously querulous. The ceremony was supposed to disguise such rifts in a show of unity and religious respect for the absolute monarch of France, God’s representative on earth, in whom sovereign power resided. Instead it inadvertently highlighted the deepest source of the nation’s discontent. French society was divided into three orders: the clergy, the nobility,
and the third estate (or commons). Everyone who was not a member of either the clergy or the nobility was a member of the third estate, which included professional families like Robespierre’s, as well as artisans, manual laborers, and peasants. There were approximately 130,000 members of the clergy, 110,000 members of the nobility, and 24,750,000 members of the third estate. The clergy and the nobility each owned about a fifth of the nation’s land but paid no taxes, while the third estate shared the rest of the land and carried the entire tax burden. This unjust arrangement was deeply resented—it meant privileges for the minority and poverty for the majority of French people. At the king’s coronation the third estate was further insulted by being barred entry to the cathedral. Afterward Louis XVI was not even presented to them in his full regalia for fear they might get ideas above their station. Among the disappointed crowd outside the cathedral was the young George Jacques Danton from Arcis-sur-Aube, playing truant from his school in Troyes. He had come all the way to the cathedral on foot, hoping to see for himself “how they made a king.” But rather than greet the crowd, the new king chose to participate in a series of smaller, more controlled encounters with his public. He laid a commemorative stone at the University of Reims before leaving the city, and he stopped on his way back to Versailles at Louis-le-Grand.

  Out of five hundred pupils in the school, Robespierre was chosen to deliver a ceremonial speech of welcome to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He was the master of rhetoric’s favorite prize-winning student, so hardly a contentious or unlikely choice. But the abbé Proyart read more into it, suspecting that in choosing Robespierre for such a prominent encounter with the new king, Hérivaux (the Roman) hoped to inspire the heart and soul of a future assassin like Brutus or a conspirator like Catiline. On the day of the visit, Robespierre, much rehearsed and very nervous, knelt outside Louis-le-Grand at the head of the assembled body of the University of Paris, which was also kneeling and waiting for the royal party to arrive. It was June, but it was raining. Possibly it was for this reason that the royal couple remained inside their coach, acknowledged the speech of welcome with polite smiles, and promptly drove on toward the Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Robespierre, along with everyone else, had probably been waiting in the street for many hours. The new or borrowed clothes he was wearing would have been soaked through. It’s plausible to assume he felt a sense of anticlimax mingled with relief that his speech was over, or perhaps a twinge of disappointment that the king had not spoken directly to him.

  While he was away at school, Robespierre’s younger sister Henriette died. In her memoirs, Charlotte remarks that their childhood was awash with tears, almost every year marred by the death of someone close and dear: “This fatal destiny influenced Maximilien’s character more than one would think. It left him sad and melancholy.” He threw himself into his work, redoubled his efforts to succeed, and, according to Charlotte, “always carried off first prize,” which is certainly not true. She claims that despite his sadness and his devotion to his studies, her brother was affable and popular with both his teachers and peers: “his disposition was so even and sweet that he never had a single fight with his fellow pupils; he appointed himself the protector of small boys against older ones, intervening on their behalf and even fighting in their defense when his eloquence did not prevail.” Charlotte was so biased in her brother’s favor she did not notice the contradiction here—one minute he never quarreled, the next he was brawling to defend the vulnerable in the courtyards of Louis-le-Grand. He was, however, protective of younger boys: Camille Desmoulins, two years his junior, was one of the students who came under his wing. This clever, attractive boy from Guise in Picardy, whose lieutenant-colonel father saved hard to buy him a superior education, became Robespierre’s closest companion. Their friendship deepened dramatically during the Revolution—until it went disastrously wrong.15

  Another schoolmate with a revolutionary future was Louis Marie Stanislaus Fréron, whose memories of Robespierre were distinctly unfavorable:

  He was the same [at college] as he was in later days—melancholy, bilious, morose, and jealous of his comrades’ successes; never taking part in their games but going for solitary walks, striding along in the manner of a dreamer and an invalid. There was nothing young about him. His restless face already showed the convulsive grimaces we came to know so well. Uncommunicative, reserved, unbending, secretive, he was marked by a self-centered amour propre, invincible stubbornness, and fundamental dishonesty. I can’t recall seeing him smile, not once. If anyone offended him he never forgot it. Vindictive and treacherous, he had already learned to conceal his resentment.16

  This retrospective account is hostile and sour, but it echoes many of the characteristics attributed to Robespierre by his friends and sister. He was melancholy, serious, reserved, and stubborn: a loner, a dreamer, someone who never forgot an offense or participated in games. Charlotte insisted that she often saw him laugh until he cried, but the haunting judgment that “there was nothing young about him” could be drawn as easily from her own account of Robespierre’s childhood as from Fréron’s. Friends and enemies see different things in a person, and when they see the same things they interpret them differently. For Charlotte and Desmoulins there was nothing sinister in Robespierre’s reserve. For the abbé Proyart and Fréron there was nothing admirable in his stubbornness.

  Whatever the character he exhibited at school, not even Robespierre’s worst enemy could doubt his academic success. When he left Louis-le-Grand with his law degree at twenty-three, he was awarded a special prize of six hundred livres (a value in excess of a whole year’s scholarship). The college’s administrative board gave him this prize in recognition of his outstanding abilities—twelve years of good conduct and sustained academic achievement. Even more flattering was the rare concession allowing Robespierre to transfer his scholarship to his younger brother, Augustin. The abbé Proyart, looking back after the Revolution, insists that those who gave Robespierre such honors did not really know him, had no idea how his misshapen character would one day bring a blood-drenched France to her knees. Yet at the time, the board’s decision was unanimous. Everyone believed that the young lawyer going home to Arras, with enough capital to set himself up in practice and to offer his sister a home of her own at last, was a credit to the charitable institution that had formed him.

  2

  The Lawyer-Poet Back Home

  Robespierre moved back to Arras in 1781, the same year his sister Charlotte finished her schooling at a charitable institution for impoverished girls in Tournai, the religious center of medieval Flanders, sixty miles northeast of Arras.1 Throughout most of their childhood the two had seen each other only in the summer holidays, but even so the bond between them was very strong. It was strengthened further by the changes they found in Arras. Together they grieved for their sister Henriette and missed Augustin, who had taken up his brother’s scholarship at Louis-le-Grand. They grieved, too, for their maternal grandparents, who had both died recently, and for the family brewery in the rue Ronville, which had been sold. The sale of the Carraut brewery resulted in a legacy, but before it could be made available to the three surviving orphaned grandchildren—Maximilien, Charlotte, and Augustin—who were greatly in need of it, their aunt and uncle on their father’s side, with whom Robespierre had been planning to live, laid claim to a share. The de Robespierres were still trying to recover the debts accrued by the children’s father, whose irresponsibility and misfortune had left them so close to destitution.

  This painful reminder of his father’s shame and his own vulnerability at a point when he was deep in mourning must have stung Robespierre for he refused to support his aunt and uncle in their claim and hurried to rent a house of his own in the rue du Saumon, just around the corner from the old brewery that had been his childhood home. But the rent here proved too high for a newly qualified lawyer, so a year later Robespierre and Charlotte moved into rooms opposite the abbey of Saint-Vaast, in the home of the aunt and uncle whose t
actlessness had caused such offense. No one can tell if this was because the quarrel had healed or if Robespierre, unable to make ends meet despite his legacy, handsome school prize, and growing legal practice, moved there with resentment and humiliation in his heart. It was another five years before he settled in the rented house in the rue des Rapporteurs that is known today as the Maison Robespierre.

  His daily routine as Charlotte remembered it was rigid and austere. Rising early, he worked at home until one of the town’s many hairdressers arrived at eight. He had bread and milk for breakfast and then worked before dressing and leaving for the courts by ten. He dined lightly in the afternoon, watering down his wine, consuming lots of coffee (which he could not do without), and displaying a particular fondness for fruit, especially oranges. Some infer from this that he was dyspeptic or frequently constipated, but his sister, unsurprisingly, offers no comment. He took a walk before resuming his work and ate again late in the evening. He often seemed absentminded or preoccupied. Charlotte recalls his indifference to food: “Many times I asked him what he would like to eat at dinner, and he would reply that he had no idea.” Not noticing a missing bowl, he once served himself some soup straight onto the tablecloth. Uninterested in games as he had been in childhood, he often sat in the corner during the after-supper cards or conversation—thinking, planning, or perhaps just dreaming. It has become commonplace to claim that, without the Revolution, Robespierre would have continued on this sensible path, living out his natural life as an increasingly respected provincial lawyer. Eventually he might have developed a stomach ulcer, bowel cancer, a respiratory illness spread by the river Crinchon, or some other contagious disease. After a couple of ineffective trips to local doctors and pharmacists (one of them still, in the mid-eighteenth century, stocked “common dragon blood,” oil of scorpion, toad powder, and human brains), he would have disappeared into obscurity forever after receiving the last rites of the Catholic Church.2 But the rigidity of Robespierre’s daily routine, far from restricting his prospects, left him free to take advantage of any opportunity for self-betterment or advancement that came his way, and he stuck to it.