Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  While still a provincial rather than national representative, Robespierre identified strongly with his fellow delegates from Arras, for whom he had become the unofficial spokesman. Boasting to Buissart, he claimed that their group was distinguished for their close rapport with the forty-four deputies from Brittany, with whom they formed a progressive faction, radical and especially patriotic (ready to die for their country, according to Robespierre). The concept of patriotism had a long history in France, appearing in the preambles to royal edicts since the end of the seventeenth century.13 Involvement in America’s struggle for freedom in the 1770s transformed French notions of patriotism into a secular ideology opposed to despotic government, although the crippling cost of these wars somewhat tarnished the glamour of the idea.14 By 1789 a new version of patriotism was taking root: in the wake of the recent nationwide elections, and fervent public interest in what the Estates General would achieve, the concept increasingly became a label for third estate aspirations.15 Robespierre’s own understanding of patriotism was also influenced by Rousseau’s definition: “There can be no patriotism without liberty; no liberty without virtue; no virtue without citizens. Create citizens and you have everything you need; without them you have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the state downwards.”16

  If not all the third estate deputies were as committed to liberty and virtue as Robespierre, he nevertheless deemed most of them enlightened and well intentioned. There were exceptions, of course. In particular, he singled out Pierre-Victor Malouet, a deputy from the bailliage of Riom in Auvergne, whom he described to Buissart as “the most suspect, the most odious of all the patriots.”17 Here was a dangerous intriguer, a notorious conservative intent on promoting the aristocratic faction in the midst of the third estate. In his letter to Buissart, Robespierre related an occasion on which Malouet proposed an insidious motion “worthy of his servile soul” and the other deputies from Auvergne disassociated themselves, protesting that he represented only Riom, not their whole province. Interestingly, Robespierre did not say what the motion was, only that it went down very badly.

  He went on to summarize for Buissart his observations on the workings of the assembly—how and why speeches succeed or fail, the ways in which reputations can be made or lost. He was particularly interested in Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target, the leading Breton deputy, who arrived in Versailles with an established reputation and was prominent in the assembly from the start. Listening closely to his every word, Robespierre noticed that the points he made were ordinary, nothing but a summary of prevailing opinion delivered with great emphasis and eloquence, yet this was enough to win great applause. With a touch of glee Robespierre described Target as already “hors de combat” despite his promising start. One of Target’s motions had been so ridiculous the whole assembly immediately rejected it; Robespierre suspected him of having “versatile principles” and doubted his representative credentials. On the most famous man in the third estate assembly, Robespierre’s verdict was startling: “Mirabeau is nothing.” He thought Mirabeau’s dissolute moral character would make it impossible to trust him—or ought to. These opinions about Target and Mirabeau were eccentric, to say the least. In the short term, Robespierre could not have been more wrong: both men were to play prominent parts in the politics of the third estate over the coming weeks. But in the long term he proved to be right: neither was to put his stamp on the Revolution as he would. Robespierre would certainly have explained this difference in terms of moral character and firmness of principle—the strength of his own and the weakness of theirs—but this, too, would have been somewhat eccentric.

  Around the time of Robespierre’s election, the local newspaper in Arras had run a satirical article describing the character of each of the city’s deputies as though they were horses entered in a race. The entry for the horse Robespierre was longer and more detailed than the others: “impetuous, intolerant of bit and stick, vicious, only dares to bite from behind, fears the whip. Its inclusion was a surprise but it is said to be destined to provide a comic turn after the brilliant performances of Mirabeau, Bergasse, Malouet, etc., whose actions it has been trained to mimic in a ridiculous fashion.”18 The article meant to be cruelly amusing and it certainly underestimated Robespierre’s talent for politics, even if the full significance of his election would only become apparent years later. What it very accurately predicted, though, was his determination to transform himself into a successful politician. He knew he had much to learn from the delegates who arrived in Versailles with some political experience, and he set about studying diligently the techniques by which they influenced the assembly.

  The radical faction of deputies, to which Robespierre was so proud of belonging, started meeting to agree on objectives and to coordinate strategies. After each meeting of the third estate, this faction, known informally as the Breton Club, would repair to the nearby Café Amaury to discuss the implications of what had happened.19 Here, over the weeks to come, Robespierre, the deputies from Brittany, and other radicals distanced themselves from the constitutional ideas of the royalists in the third estate, like Malouet and the Grenoble patriot Jean-Joseph Mounier (another of the small number to come to Versailles with an established reputation). The Breton Club’s objectives were to obtain voting by head and not by order, the destruction of privileges like the tax exemptions that favored the clergy and nobility and harmed the third estate, and the creation of a nationwide network of patriots. During these early days, there were many future enemies drinking coffee together in the Café Amaury, united in their hopes for the third estate. As well as making contacts and developing a taste for club politics, Robespierre was also mixing with a more diverse set than he had encountered before. His fellow deputies from Arras watched as he grew in confidence and became gradually less withdrawn.

  Incipient factionalism, provincialism, chaos, confused ideas, and political uncertainty were escalating in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, when the deputies from Paris, who had been delayed by an electoral process even more complicated than the rest of France’s, at last reached Versailles on 3 June—a whole month late. Paris was always a case apart. When asked by the King to codify procedures for electing deputies to the Estates General, Necker had produced special guidelines for the capital. However, the sixty Parisian districts disregarded these guidelines and took the radical step of establishing their own electoral college to choose deputies for the third estate. One of the candidates for election, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, felt revived and exhilarated by the city’s new political climate: “I thought I could breathe fresh air,” he wrote. “It was truly a phenomenon to be something in the political order and by virtue alone of one’s capacity as a citizen.”20 Born in Paris in 1736, Bailly was over fifty when the Revolution began. A member of the French Academy of Sciences, known for his research on the planet Jupiter, he interrupted his studies to preside over the new electoral college and was elected as a deputy to Versailles. No sooner had he arrived than he was chosen as president of the assembly of the third estate. The late-arriving deputies brought with them new vigor, the expectations of all Paris, and the brilliant analytical mind of the abbé Sieyès, who had chosen to stand for election not as a clergyman but as a member of the third estate.

  Though he lacked a religious vocation, Sieyès had spent ten years in a seminary, consoling himself with scientific and philosophical study. Finally ordained a priest in 1773, two years before Louis XVI’s coronation, he proved to be a genius at the theory of politics: the nature and principles of representative government became his lifelong preoccupation. According to one contemporary, he was far from modest: “Politics is a science that I think I have mastered,” Sieyès allegedly confided to a friend.21 His self-confidence was well-founded. Early in 1789 he published the clearest of all the statements of the third estate’s predicament, beginning famously with three questions and answers: What has the third estate been until now? Nothing. What should it be? Everything. What does it aim to become? Som
ething. With devastating rhetoric and lucid reasoning he argued that the third estate simply was the nation and, as such, had the inalienable right to provide France with a new system of fundamental rules and principles by which the country would be governed. From this point, the third estate deputies explicitly asserted what many had hoped before arriving in Versailles: that they had been elected to endow France with a written constitution that would transform the old absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy. Sieyès insisted that anything or anyone that stood apart from the third estate was parasitical, a canker in the body politic that required excision. In this way he provided the theoretical basis for the third estate to seize the initiative from the clergy and nobility and remake the nation in its own image. Though others shared some of Sieyès’s ideas, no one expressed them with such coherent vehemence. His was “the explosion of a talent that, long concealed, at length appears in all its splendor, arrests attention, and extorts applause,” as Mirabeau put it.22 His talent had indeed been long concealed. When Sieyès first arrived in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs he experienced the problems often characteristic of intellectuals in politics—wry, brusque, conceptually elaborate, infuriatingly inaudible, he had a hard time projecting the distinctive clarity of his vision into the noisy and diffuse debates going on around him. “His voice is thin, his gesture insignificant, his expression slow, his conception difficult, his method unintelligible; he is incapable of ardent and animated language, and he prefers correctness of form to energy of diction,” a contemporary remarked.23 Despite all this, Sieyès had an early, epoch-defining success on 10 June when he persuaded the third estate that the time had come to “cut the cord” and arrogate to itself the power and identity of the nation. Delegates of the nobility and clergy were to have one last chance to join the third estate—and if they refused, the new national assembly he was proposing would simply leave them behind.

  Robespierre had played a part in moving the assembly toward Sieyès’s position. Three days after the exhilarating arrival of the Paris delegates, Robespierre, no longer feeling like a nervous child, had burst into a passionate denunciation of the clergy. The archbishop of Nîmes had come to the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs to plead with the third estate to break its deadlock with the other two orders for the sake of the poor and destitute, who were starving while the Estates General remained paralyzed, achieving nothing. Well fed, richly attired, and condescending, the archbishop stood before the third estate hoping to shame them into cooperation. Robespierre lost his temper. He had seen how the wealthy clergy in Arras lived. As a schoolboy he had had to borrow clothes good enough to appear before the archbishop in Arras. Much of his early legal practice had come through the ecclesiastical court. He knew and was indebted to the worldly power of the church in France. “Sell your coaches, give up your horses,” he demanded, reminding the assembly of the early church’s austerity and the principles of Christian humility:

  Go and tell your colleagues that if they are so impatient to assist the suffering poor, they had better come hither and join the friends of the people. Tell them no longer to embarrass our proceedings with affected delays; tell them no longer to endeavor by unworthy means to make us swerve from the resolutions we have taken. But as ministers of religion, as worthy imitators of their masters, let them forego that luxury which surrounds them and that splendor which makes indigence blush; let them resume the modesty of their origin, discharge the proud lackeys by whom they are attended, sell their superb equipages, and convert all their superfluous wealth into food for the poor.24

  The assembly was stunned. There was no applause but a confused murmur, which was much more flattering. The question “who is that?” passed along the benches and round the echoing hall. Sitting up and taking notice, some of Robespierre’s fellow deputies began to predict a prominent career: “This young man has not yet practiced, he is too wordy and does not know when to stop, but he has a store of eloquence and bitterness that will distinguish him from the crowd.”25

  Following the advice of the abbé Sieyès, the third estate issued its final invitation to the other two orders, received no response, and proceeded to the long-postponed roll call of its deputies, which signaled the formal beginning of its work. There was tremendous excitement on 13 June when three parish priests from Poitou defected from the assembly of clergy and joined the third estate. Sixteen more clergy followed suit over the next few days. On 17 June, after a week of verifying the credentials of its deputies, the third estate changed its name and formally declared itself the National Assembly. There was no turning back now, no more possible negotiation or rapprochement with the other two orders: the Revolution had arrived. Louis XVI was no longer absolute sovereign of France answerable only to God in the exercise of his power. Instead, he confronted a National Assembly asserting the principle of popular sovereignty. More than this, Target (still a leading radical despite Robespierre’s low opinion) proposed that existing taxes be declared illegal and only sanctioned provisionally until a completely new system could be instituted. This meant that, if the National Assembly was dissolved prematurely, taxation would come to an end. The Revolution was holding the king to ransom. Louis consulted Necker and Necker advised conciliation, unlike the queen, who thought the time for firmness long overdue and was secretly encouraging the king’s army to converge on Paris. Necker suggested a royal session—a public consultation between the king and the deputies of all three orders—at which Louis would reassert his authority, sweetened by lots of concessions to the third estate. Necker drafted some speeches to this effect for the king, but Marie Antoinette modified them behind his back.

  Early on Saturday, 20 June, deputies arrived at the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs expecting to welcome the rest of the clergy, who had finally voted as a body to join the third estate. They found themselves locked out. Soldiers guarded the bolted doors and posters everywhere announced a forthcoming royal session of which no one had previously heard. Dr. Guillotin, practical as ever, suggested that the angry crowd of deputies reassemble in a nearby indoor tennis court belonging to a friend of his. They did so, then swore a passionate oath never to disband until “the constitution of the realm and public regeneration are established and assured,” however long, however difficult that course might be. The revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David commemorated the scene on an unfinished canvas in 1789. David had already caused a sensation in the Paris Salon with his depictions of classical republican virtue and patriotism, The Oath of the Horatii (1785) and Death of Socrates (1787). Now he pictured the impassioned deputies on the tennis court, crowding around their president, Jean Sylvain Bailly, raising their right arms, holding their hats high, standing on chairs to swear the revolutionary oath as a welcome summer breeze swept through their impromptu meeting place. Among those prominent in the foreground are an enormous Mirabeau, a refined-looking abbé Sieyès, and Robespierre, clasping both hands to his breast, pledging twice over a heart beating passionately for liberty.

  Louis XVI’s royal session went ahead on 23 June, a day later than the posters had promised.26 Necker was absent. Aware of the king’s intentions, he had advised strongly against any attempt to dissolve the National Assembly and was, once again, ignored. All the political and fiscal concessions that the court and government could think of were overshadowed by the king’s uncompromising declaration that the divisions between his realm’s three orders must remain. At the end of his speech, he ordered the deputies to return to their separate assemblies. The clergy and nobles obeyed, some of them smirking with pleasure at what looked like the demise of the National Assembly. But Mirabeau leapt to his feet and declared: “We are here by the power of the people, and we will not leave except by the force of bayonnets.”27 These words signaled a rapturous renewal of the Tennis Court Oath. Meanwhile, the king was informed of Necker’s resignation. The third estate’s truculence seemed temporarily less important and for the rest of the day Louis XVI’s priority was to get Necker to return to his post. He did, but it was too lat
e: Paris had exploded in disgust. Necker, whose portrait had been paraded by a jubilant crowd after the fall of Lamoignon in 1788, once again inspired the people, but this time they wanted and demanded the National Assembly, which he viewed only as an inconvenient compromise in the circumstances. On June 27 a tearful Louis XVI finally gave in and ordered the nobility and clergy to join the third estate. Fireworks lit the sky over Versailles and Paris. Given Mirabeau’s prominent role it is not surprising that Robespierre, in his next letter to Buissart (dated 23 July), entirely revised his opinion: he no longer saw Mirabeau as dissolute and negligible but as the charismatic unofficial leader of the National Assembly. “The present Revolution,” his letter began, “has produced greater events in a few days than the whole previous history of mankind.”28

  DESPITE THE KING’S climb down, the royal troops now assembling in and around Paris—which included some regiments of foreign soldiers willing to fire on French civilians if necessary—were making the newly triumphant deputies very nervous. By early July there were more than enough soldiers present to quell an uprising in the capital. Mirabeau drew up a petition of protest and Robespierre was one of the deputies who presented it in person to the king. The petition, he assured Buissart, was “sublime, full of majesty, truth, and energy.” It had no effect whatever. The ominous military buildup continued, and on 11 July, despite his popularity and public standing, Necker was dismissed and sent into exile, blamed for the Revolution by many in Louis XVI’s court. At this Paris, predictably, rioted. Robespierre’s close friend from school, Camille Desmoulins—at twenty-six an attractively boyish man always known by his first name—addressed the crowd in the Palais-Royal gardens. Standing on a table in the Café de Foy, which had become a center of political discussion to rival the National Assembly, he cried: “Citizens, you know that the Nation asked for Necker to be retained, and he has been driven out! Could you be more insolently flouted? After such an act they will dare anything.” As the crowd cheered and applauded, Camille raged against the monarchy, comparing himself to Othryades, a warrior of the ancient world who wrote “Sparta has triumphed” in his own blood on a captured standard: “I, too, would write in my own blood ‘France is free!’”29