Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  On 31 July Malouet urged his colleagues to censor Marat’s paper along with that of Camille Desmoulins. He moved that all authors, printers, and distributors of writings inciting the crowd to revolt against the law or disrupt the drafting of the constitution should be prosecuted for crimes against the nation. Marat responded with vitriolic fury in his paper, but Camille, who was a somewhat milder character, sent an address to the assembly defending himself. After it was read, Malouet thundered, “Is he innocent? Let him prove it. Is he guilty? I will conduct the case against him, and against anyone who takes up his defense. Let him justify his conduct if he dare.” From the public gallery, Camille shouted, “Yes, I dare!” This was an unprecedented flouting of the assembly’s protocol, and the president (whom the deputies elected from among themselves each month) ordered his immediate arrest. In the ensuing chaos, Robespierre came to his friend’s defense. “Do not confuse imprudence and inconsiderateness with crime,” he entreated his colleagues.51 Camille managed to escape and no charges were pressed. Robespierre could sleep soundly that night, knowing that he had proved his loyalty to his friend and that Camille now had reason to be ashamed of having doubted him back in May.

  But if Marat was chastised for having spread panic with his apocalyptic posters, the fact remained that Austrian troops were waiting to cross the border into France. Who was to blame? Who was behind this threat to the Revolution? Discussion in the assembly now turned to these questions. Louis XVI’s war minister was one possibility; he was suspected of hoping war would help reverse all the changes the Revolution had brought. Another was the leader of the émigrés in exile, the Prince de Condé. Robespierre dismissed both suggestions. He argued that the assembly must not be too hasty in identifying a single individual as responsible for the plot against the nation. Instead, it should urgently address the problem of how to deal with “all the enemies of the Revolution.”52 The royalist press was delighted that Robespierre, of all people, had deflected blame from Louis XVI’s ministry and the Prince de Condé and derisively congratulated him on his new aristocratic credentials. This, no doubt, irritated him; but he was more worried by his suspicion that the most dangerous enemies of the Revolution were not the most obvious ones but rather those with the best disguises. Prominent individuals hostile to the Revolution were less menacing, he insisted, than the hidden enemies who appeared as friends but were in truth the vanguard of counterrevolution. People were beginning to notice and remark on his recurring paranoia: Robespierre “once again enlarged on the plots and conspiracies of which he alone held the secret,” reported the Mercure de France.53 “M. de Robespierre, as usual, spoke of plots, conspiracies, etc., etc.,” remarked a fellow deputy earlier in 1790, bored but slightly amused.54 This distrustfulness was not, however, just a passing whim of Robespierre’s or further evidence of his peculiar personality; it was a political obsession that would intensify throughout the rest of his career:

  I blame those less who out of romantic enthusiasm justify their attachment to former principles they cannot abandon [i.e., defenders of the old regime] than those who cover their perfidious designs with the mask of patriotism and virtue.55

  Seek first the enemy within, he enjoined his colleagues. Beware of hypocrisy and corruption. He was more prescient than he knew, since, just weeks before the Festival of Federation, Mirabeau (still the most famous deputy in the assembly) had accepted a substantial retainer from the court, plus payment of the overwhelming debts he had accrued over a lifetime of drinking and womanizing. In return, Mirabeau agreed to secretly advise the king on how to strengthen his standing with the assembly. The king had promised him a further million francs when the assembly was at last disbanded. The historian J. M. Thompson argues that it is unlikely that any of the deputies would have refused such an offer at this point in the Revolution—except, of course, Robespierre. Whether or not that is the case, Robespierre, for all his concerns about corruption and plots, seems not to have suspected Mirabeau. In Versailles he had been wary of Mirabeau’s close connections with the court. But over the intervening months his admiration for him had grown, even when they disagreed—as they often did—over a particular decree or detail of the constitution. The royalist press was quick to notice; “Mirabeau’s monkey” was one of its many nicknames for Robespierre, and he was even accused of copying the older man’s hairstyle and following him about in the street like a puppy. Mirabeau wore an enormous quantity of false black hair, which dramatically increased the volume of his already enormous head: “When I shake my terrible locks, no one dares interrupt me!” he bragged.56 It seems highly unlikely that neat, slight, fastidious Robespierre set out to copy him in this way. Really their relationship was more distant and mutually respectful. “He will go far because he believes everything he says,” is what Mirabeau said of Robespierre—conscious certainly that the same was not true of himself.57

  When the royal family was brought to Paris from Versailles back in October 1789, Mirabeau had been quick to note that they were effectively prisoners in the Tuileries palace. As winter approached and Paris was in chaos, he wondered what the city would be like in three months’ time. And he offered his own grim answer: “A hospital, for sure, perhaps even a theater of horrors.”58 He foresaw strife between radical Paris and the more moderate provinces—he understood the “profound immorality” of Paris, as only someone who had led his kind of dissolute life could; and he concluded that the king would have to leave the capital if there was to be any hope of recovering his power and dignity. Once this proved impossible, Mirabeau tried to reconcile the king to the constitution as it was taking shape in the assembly. But in this he had no more success than General Lafayette and was soon wringing his hands, exasperated by the incessant intrigue at court: “What woolgatherers they are! What bunglers! How cowardly! How reckless! What a grotesque mixture of old ideas and new projects, of petty scruples and childish whims, of willing this and not willing that, of abortive loves and hates!”59 Now, almost a year had passed and conditions were little better. There was a serious threat of war: civil war, war with a foreign power, or both. Discontent was mounting in the provinces. There was terrible trouble brewing over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the oath to uphold it imposed on the recalcitrant priests. The assembly was increasingly fragmented and frustrated. The country was even more bankrupt than it had been before the Revolution. And Mirabeau was seriously ill, his personal degeneration a match for the general disintegration of France.

  At the beginning of the Revolution, Mirabeau suffered from jaundice, hereditary nephritis, intestinal troubles, rheumatism, swollen legs, and a recurrent infection in his left eye. His friend Dr. Cabanis remembers his drinking vast quantities of lemonade, the only treatment he had time for. The assembly’s long daily meetings were extremely insalubrious. At the best of times, the Manège was very poorly ventilated, but the quality of the air deteriorated still further in winter, when the doors and windows were kept closed and heating stoves belched smoke into the atmosphere. Eye and stomach infections were epidemic, affecting everyone from the most robust deputies to the frailest members of the public crowded into the spectator galleries. At one point, Mirabeau’s infected eyes were so sore that he covered them with bandages when he addressed the assembly. The soiled bandages came off for his secret audience with the queen on 3 July, when he kissed her hand and declared, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, “Madame, the monarchy is saved!” But even so, Marie Antoinette shivered in horror at the sight of the huge, vulgar sick man on whom her family’s future had come to depend. “You know not all the power of my ugliness!” Mirabeau liked to boast to his friends. Yet for all his bravado, he was desperate by the end of 1790, and his advice to Louis XVI became increasingly harebrained, unpatriotic, even treasonous. Stir up trouble between the National Guard and the Paris mob, he suggested; embarrass the assembly so as to suborn it; undermine General Lafayette; tamper with the press; and revive the royal army, starting with the Swiss and German regiments. Exacerbate
, in other words, the extent to which France was already ungovernable, so that power might, by default, be returned to the throne. Robespierre, in his darkest nightmares, scarcely imagined such treachery.

  6

  The Constitution

  At the beginning of 1791, Mirabeau was elected president of the assembly, despite his deteriorating health. His friend the Swiss jurist and political writer Etienne Dumont remembered:

  The irritation of his system produced violent attacks of ophthalmia, and I have seen him, while he was president, sometimes apply leeches to his eyes during the adjournment between the morning and evening sessions and attend the assembly with his neck covered with linen to stanch the blood.1

  Mirabeau was suddenly—very suspiciously—flush with money, and far from discreet with it. Marat, vigilant as ever, kept drawing attention to this new wealth: “Two years ago, Riquetti [Mirabeau] was obliged to send his breeches to the pawnshop to get six francs; today he swims in opulence…and has three mistresses whom he showers with gifts.”2 Among other flamboyant extravagances, Mirabeau bought a large property in the Marais (quite close to the building in which Robespierre rented his humble second-floor flat). Here he retired on weekends, enjoyed overseeing the restoration and refurbishment of his grand new home, and looked forward to the coming of spring with the special delight of an ex-prisoner whose life has come right again. It was at his Marais retreat, on the night of Sunday, 27 March, that he was taken seriously ill. Nevertheless, he insisted on getting up and going to the assembly the next morning to defend the property rights of mine owners. He had a friend who owned a mine, to whom he remarked afterward, “Your case is won, but I am lost.” The next day, the news that he was dying spread through Paris.

  It is often said that Mirabeau had syphilis, which was known in eighteenth-century Britain and Italy as “the French disease” and in France as “the Italian disease” but also as “the great imitator” because its symptoms were so difficult to distinguish from those of other illnesses. With typical candor, he often bragged about his venereal disease. Dumont reported Mirabeau’s boasting “that a statue ought to be raised to him by the physicians because he had discovered in the stews of the Palais-Royal the germ of a disease thought to be extinct—a kind of leprosy or elephantiasis.”3 His friends were not so frank or unabashed. Dumont thought Mirabeau had acute enteritis, whereas Dr. Cabanis, who treated his last illness, wanted to believe that Mirabeau died of systemic complications arising from ophthalmia. But between the two of them they recorded many of the symptoms of syphilis in its later stages. Ever since the assembly had moved to Paris, Mirabeau had taken to traveling the short distance between his lodgings and the Manège by cab because he found it increasingly difficult to walk. His joints and his sense of balance were affected. In the autumn of 1790 a large swollen gland developed in his neck, just below his right ear. Dr. Cabanis noted that when the gland softened and shrank, Mirabeau’s left eye deteriorated, and vice versa. From this he concluded that there must be a connection between the two sites of infection and prescribed mercury, the conventional treatment for syphilis since the sixteenth century. The infection spread across Mirabeau’s face and neck. His energy declined rapidly, his color was bad and his body lethargic, and his thoughts were increasingly morbid. His liver weakened. His breathing was often labored, a sign of heart disease, very typical of advanced syphilis. In the early months of 1791 Mirabeau started showing evidence of mental confusion and memory loss: “He was slow finding ideas or expressions and sometimes could not find them at all.”4 His sufferings, in the final days of his life, were hideous.

  All Paris was interested in Mirabeau’s decline. Crowds of people gathered beneath his windows, grabbing and frantically reading the regular health bulletins that were printed on demand. At the Tuileries, Louis XVI asked for news of the dying man to be brought to him twice a day. Marie Antoinette had tears in her eyes. Complete strangers offered Mirabeau their blood. Out of premature grief, Mirabeau’s secretary stabbed himself several times—not fatally—with a penknife. Deputations from the Jacobin Club and the assembly arrived, Robespierre very likely among them. Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun (last seen saying Mass at the Festival of Federation but excommunicated by the pope since then on account of his support for the Civil Constitution of the Clergy), came to visit, and Mirabeau entrusted him with his final speech to the assembly. This turned out to be an offering on testamentary law, written by someone else, which proposed significant changes to the inheritance laws. “It is a very remarkable fact that, on his very deathbed, Mirabeau preserved his thirst for false fame, when he had so much personal glory,” reflected his friend Dumont.5 Talleyrand came away observing that Mirabeau was intent on dramatizing his death, which was certainly true but hardly reprehensible in the circumstances. “No weakness unworthy of you and of me,” he said stiffly to Dr. Cabanis, who could not stop sobbing. On the morning of 2 April, Mirabeau got out of bed, opened the window, and said, “My good friend, in a few hours I shall die. Give me your word that you won’t leave me…. Give me your word that you won’t let me suffer pointless pain. I want to enjoy, without interference, the presence of those I love.”6 By nightfall, he was dead and Paris was rioting. The crowd suspected that the leader of the third estate, the most famous deputy in the assembly, had been poisoned, and they wanted vengeance. “I go wearing mourning for the monarchy,” quipped Mirabeau on his deathbed: witty, politically astute, and, in his own rough way, an admirable human being to the last.

  The next day, grief-stricken and painfully conscious of Mirabeau’s empty chair, the assembly received a delegation from the Department of Paris asking that the ashes of the nation’s greatest men be housed beneath the dome of the recently completed neoclassical Church of Sainte-Geneviève in the Latin Quarter and that Mirabeau be the first revolutionary honored in this way. One deputy suggested referring the proposal to the committee appointed to draft the constitution, but Robespierre demanded an immediate vote on whether or not Mirabeau was a great man. Who could doubt it the day after his death? In recent months, Robespierre had had his disagreements with Mirabeau, but now he urged the assembly to recognize the claim of one “who opposed despotism with all his might at the most critical moments.”7 Plans for turning the Church of Sainte-Geneviève into a national mausoleum dated back well before the Revolution, but now the assembly’s subcommittee approved them. And so the church became the Pantheon, Mirabeau’s final destination after a sumptuous funeral that brought the city to a standstill on the evening of 4 April. An estimated hundred thousand mourners took part in the league-long procession. Battalions of National Guardsmen, all twelve hundred or so of the National Assembly deputies, the Jacobins, the king’s ministers, journalists, and saddened members of the public all accompanied the great orator’s remains—his heart inside a leaden urn—to his resting place on the left bank of the Seine. There were many orations in his honor, including one by Robespierre. There was music by Gossec, with haunting mournful notes for the wind instruments. The ceremonies lasted well into the night and were somber and grand enough to satisfy the most overblown aspirations for funereal fame, even Mirabeau’s: “torchlight, wail of trombones and music, and the tears of men; mourning of a whole people—such mourning as no modern people ever saw for one man.”8

  It is hard to overstate the impact of Mirabeau’s death on Robespierre’s future. A wide political vista opened out behind that black-draped hearse. Into the large vacant space stepped the slim figure of Robespierre—much too small for Mirabeau’s clothes; like Macbeth, he would have felt them “Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief.” He had coveted Mirabeau’s ascendancy over the assembly. He had envied his stentorian voice, confidence, agile intellect. He might even have envied his easy candor, because, for all the progress he had made since 1789, the lawyer from Arras remained awkward and painfully shy. But as it turned out, Robespierre was spared the effort of working to usurp Mirabeau’s position. It was enough to wait patiently in the
shadows, hone his own talents, and let the diseases that racked the unrepentant old roué do their worst. Now that Mirabeau’s tormented body was ashes in the Pantheon, Robespierre was eager to get back to the business of the Revolution. On 13 April, when one of the Jacobins proposed that the club’s plaster bust of Mirabeau should be cast in bronze, he interjected brusquely, “A bust, a mausoleum, a civic crown, an oak leaf, all are equal [honors], but may I remind you that your real work relates to the public good.”9 He was notably less impatient when Mme Labille-Guyard, an artist preparing an exhibition of portraits of public men for the Salon later that year, wrote asking if Robespierre would sit for her. “They tell me that the Graces wish to paint a likeness of me,” he replied. “I should be quite unworthy of such kindness if I did not keenly appreciate its value.”10 So there was certainly a touch of jealous pique in his insistence that the time had come to move on from honoring Mirabeau. “Mirabeau’s death gave courage to all the factions. Robespierre, Pétion, and others who dwindled into insignificance before him immediately became great men,” remembered Dumont.11 “Immediately” is too strong. There were still some months to go before Robespierre would be considered a great man. But what is true is that Mirabeau’s death was an enormous opportunity for Robespierre, just as consequential to his career as his election to the Estates General. He did not let it pass unnoticed.