Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  All his energy now went into the Jacobin Club, whose support he needed more than ever. In his isolation he identified yet more closely with Rousseau. When Brissot returned to the club to try once again to defeat Robespierre on the question of war, Robespierre retorted that the only legitimate charge ever levied against him was that he had championed the cause of the people by opposing a war that he thought would lead to the defeat of the Revolution at home and abroad. He was proud to admit this charge. From his experience of public life so far he had learned for himself “the great moral and political truth announced by Jean-Jacques [Rousseau], that men are sincerely fond only of those who show them affection; that only the people are good, just and generous; and that corruption and tyranny are the monopoly of those who hold them in disdain.”27 Robespierre claimed to be happy in his isolation, happy even to retire from politics (at this some of the women in his audience gasped), so long as he could remain true to his principles and free to worship the “sacred image of Jean-Jacques.” “But where would you have me retire?” he asked his fellow Jacobins. What despotic regime would offer him asylum, and how could he leave France with liberty under attack?

  No! One might abandon one’s country in the hour of happiness and triumph; but when it is threatened, when it is torn asunder, when it is oppressed, one cannot do so; one must either save it or die for it. Heaven, which gave me a soul passionately fond of liberty and yet ordained that I should be born under the domination of tyrants, Heaven, which prolonged my existence up to the reign of faction and of crime, is perhaps calling me to mark with my blood the road that leads my native land to happiness and freedom. I accept with enthusiasm this sweet and glorious destiny.28

  It was this peculiar combination of acute political suspicion and personal animosity toward anyone who disagreed with him that carried Robespierre to his lonely and eccentric destination in the Revolution. Tellingly, he quoted a politically pregnant phrase of Rousseau’s: “Le peuple veut le bien, mais il ne le voit pas toujours” (The people want what is good, but they do not always see it).29 Robespierre was very sure of himself as an astute interpreter of what was or was not in the interests of the people. And so those whose opinions differed from his were instantly suspect.

  On 11 April a member of the Jacobins described a recent invention, a new kind of rifle that could fire twenty-five rounds a minute. Should the club help fund experiments to perfect it? Absolutely not, said Robespierre, such an invention was contrary to humanitarian principles. He said that sometime toward the end of the National Assembly, he had seen this rifle demonstrated in the garden of the house he was then living in. It could shoot nine rounds without needing to be recharged. The inventor asked his opinion, and Robespierre told him to keep silent about it—such a discovery in the hands of a free people might give them a momentary advantage over despots, but the weapon would soon pass into the hands of the despots and become just one more instrument for oppressing the people (a very pertinent and prescient point for all revolutionaries). The majority of the Jacobins, however, were not convinced. The atmosphere in Paris grew more bellicose by the day.

  The tide of public opinion ran against him, the Jacobins could not be swayed against the war, but Robespierre refused to back down. He feared that war could only damage the Revolution. If France lost, foreign enemies would crush the Revolution and reestablish a despotic government to suit their own interests. But if France won, Robespierre thought internal enemies, in league with the king and the victorious army generals, were just as likely to destroy the Revolution. General Lafayette was particularly untrustworthy, in Robespierre’s view. Lafayette had retired from public life after the king accepted the constitution in 1791. However, with war imminent, he had been recalled to command one of the three armies the French had now positioned on the frontier to attack the émigré forces and Austria, if necessary. Robespierre thought the ambitious veteran of the American Revolution was secretly hoping to lead France to victory, only to perpetrate a military coup and seize power afterward. There was no similarity, Robespierre insisted, between the American War of Independence and the war France was about to become embroiled in. When the Americans fought against foreign despotism, they did not have internal enemies to fight simultaneously. Arguing that the Americans had triumphed (not without cost) over a despot who made open war on them, Robespierre asked, would they still have triumphed if generals loyal to their enemy, George III, had been leading them?30

  On 1 March, the very day named in the French ultimatum he had received, the queen’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, suddenly died. Robespierre publicly thanked Providence for averting the war in this unexpected way. The Jacobins were astonished. As one of them blurted out, how could someone who had worked for three years to liberate the people subscribe to such superstitious nonsense as a belief in Providence? Instead of letting this rejoinder pass and confining himself to the debate about the international crisis, Robespierre veered off into a vehement profession of religious faith. Perhaps he could not stop himself or perhaps he saw no reason to:

  There is nothing superstitious in using the name of the Deity. I believe, myself, in those eternal principles on which human weakness reposes, before it starts on the path of virtue. These are not idle words in my mouth, any more than they have been idle words in the mouths of many great men, nonetheless moral for their belief in the existence of God.31

  There was an uproar in the old convent chapel. Robespierre shouted over it:

  No, gentlemen! You cannot stifle my voice. There is no call to order that can stifle this truth…. Yes, it is hazardous to invoke the name of Providence and express the idea of the Eternal Being who intimately affects the destinies of nations and who seems to me personally to watch over the French Revolution in a very special way. But my belief is heartfelt; it is a feeling I cannot dispense with. I needed it to sustain me in the National Assembly, surrounded by all those passions, vile intrigues, and so many enemies. How could I have carried out tasks that required superhuman strength, if I had not nurtured my isolated soul?…This divine sentiment has more than compensated me for the advantages that are gained by those who are prepared to betray the people.32

  With that the meeting ended. Four days later, Robespierre withdrew his proposal to circulate to the affiliated clubs another controversial address on regenerating the public spirit. For the moment nothing was more important than harmony among the Jacobins, he claimed—in bad faith, since he had purposefully exacerbated division in the club with his antiwar efforts. But he knew his latest speech had gone too far. “M. Robespierrot [sic] is completely out of favor, dépopularisé. He had the audacity to say in the middle of the Jacobins that he believes in the existence of God,” one newspaper reported.33

  ANOTHER CAUSE OF Robespierre’s political isolation, according to Fréron, his former schoolmate, was the Duplay household:

  Whilst he lived [in the rue Saintonge]…he was accessible to his friends and to any patriot. Once installed at the Duplays’, little by little he became invisible. They sequestered him from society, adored, intoxicated, ruined him by exalting his pride.34

  The family at 366 rue Saint-Honoré consisted of Duplay, his wife, three of their four daughters, a son, and a nephew. Although he was a joiner and cabinetmaker by trade, Duplay’s real income came from renting the houses he had bought after moving to the capital from Vézelay. Since the Revolution, his preferred tenants had been Jacobins. By the time they came to know Robespierre, Duplay and his wife were middle-aged, settled, hospitable people with strong political views and a wide circle of acquaintances that included the artists François Gérard and Pierre Paul Prudhon, the sculptor Pierre Cietty, and the musician Philippe Buonarotti. It is not credible that Robespierre was less accessible living at the heart of the Duplay household, just doors away from the Jacobins and around the corner from the Manège and the Tuileries palace, than he had been when he lived all the way out in the Marais. However, it must have been more difficult for anyone to see him alone
. His visitors could reach his rooms by narrow ladderlike stairs from the family dining room or by an external staircase in the yard—something like a modern fire escape. Those who chose the latter could avoid the scrutiny of the assembled company—Buonarotti on the piano if there was one, the Duplay daughters playing with Robespierre’s dog, Brount, Duplay himself holding forth on the day’s political developments. But footsteps and raised voices would be overheard downstairs through the timber floor. Real privacy was impossible at No. 366, where even the blue-and-white damask curtains around Robespierre’s bed had been made from one of Mme Duplay’s old dresses.

  Since Robespierre often took the Duplay daughters’ side when their mother was cross with them (an extension, perhaps, of his political insistence on championing the weak and vulnerable), they were soon extremely fond of Robespierre. The youngest, Elisabeth, recalled:

  I was very young, and rather silly; but he gave me such good advice that, young as I was, I enjoyed listening to him. If I was upset about anything, I used to tell him all about it. He was never censorious, but a friend, the best brother a girl could have, a model of virtue. He had a great regard for my father and mother, and we all loved him dearly.35

  Her older sister, Eléonore—plain, dark-haired, and serious—had more romantic feelings for the famous lodger. According to the family doctor, Souberbielle—who was in a better position than most to know the household’s private business—her feelings were reciprocated. Eléonore and Robespierre were, he remembers, “very fond of each other and they were engaged to be married, but nothing immodest passed between them. Without affectation or prudery, Robespierre kept out of, and even put a stop to, any kind of improper talk, and his morals were pure.”36 Doctors, for all their privileged access to information, are often far from reliable. Souberbielle’s testimony, however, seems credible because even if Robespierre was the kind of man to get himself into trouble with a mistress in the Marais, he was hardly the kind to carry on an indiscreet affair with a young girl under her father’s own roof. He was neither deeply jaded nor helplessly promiscuous—if anything he was rather romantic—and the idea that he and Eléonore should wait until his public commitments were less exacting would have held a deep appeal. “She had the soul of a man and would have known how to die as well as she knew how to love,” he boasted of his intended.37

  DESPITE THE DIVISION over the war in the spring of 1792, the Jacobins united to celebrate the return of the freed Châteauvieux soldiers, so controversially condemned to the galleys for their mutiny in Nancy. After serving less than two years of their life sentences of hard labor, these mutineers were now officially pardoned and received in Paris as heroes, their broken shackles badges of honor. At first, the assembly hesitated to receive the returning mutineers. The constitution, very reasonably, banned armed men from entering the legislative chamber. But on this occasion the assembly broke the rule and the ex-convicts marched through the Manège, accompanied by a detachment of National Guardsmen with drums, flags, banners, and weapons, to the resounding applause of the Jacobin deputies, in agreement for the first time in months. After the soldiers came a mob of men and women brandishing pikes—some of the thousands that had recently been manufactured in accordance with Robespierre’s demands. Over in the Hôtel de Ville, the municipal government decreed a national festival in honor of the Châteauvieux soldiers—exactly the sort of occasion that Robespierre hoped would regenerate the public spirit and propagate revolutionary principles.

  On Sunday, 15 April, an excited crowd paraded through Paris pulling a galley wreathed with flowers. With it came women carrying the broken shackles high for everyone to see; then forty placards, bearing the names of the ex-convicts, each adorned with a civic crown of oak leaves (a symbol of patriotism inspired by ancient Rome), and busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and the seventeenth-century English republican Algernon Sidney—all prophets of freedom in the eyes of the patriots. Finally there came a float carrying a statue of liberty brandishing, somewhat incongruously, an enormous club. Surrounded by a moving forest of pikes, the parade made ceremonial stops at the site of the demolished Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, the Champ de Mars, and so on: the ceremony was strangely similar to the Stations of the Cross that had been performed the previous week in Easter Masses throughout France. The crowd sang revolutionary hymns. Some proudly identified themselves as “sansculottes”: ordinary working people, patriots without fine clothes (literally, without the culottes, or knee breeches, of the wealthier classes). Pétion officiated in his capacity as mayor of Paris. He did not, however, wield the kind of control General Lafayette on his white charger had commanded at festivals commemorating the fall of the Bastille. This was a popular demonstration, not a disciplined military parade from which the people were carefully excluded. According to some hostile reports, it was a rather debauched affair. The girls carrying broken shackles had been recruited from among the prostitutes in the Palais-Royal gardens, not all the songs were pious revolutionary hymns, and there was apparently some louche dancing as well. But if there was, the Incorruptible did not notice, or turned a blind eye. The press described the event as “Robespierre’s Festival,” but it is hard to know whether he was really pleased with it. Afterward he proposed a monument commemorating “the triumph of poverty and the people, the National Guard, the soldiers of Châteauvieux, and all good citizens persecuted on account of the Revolution.”

  Three days later, the king’s sister wrote from the Tuileries palace to her friend the Marquise de Raigecourt:

  You think perhaps we are still in the agitation of the festival of Châteauvieux; not at all; everything is very tranquil. The people flocked to see Dame Liberty tottering on her triumphal car, but they shrugged their shoulders. Three or four hundred sans-culottes followed her shouting: “The Nation! Liberty! The Sans-Culottes!” It was all very noisy, but flat. The National Guards would not mingle; on the contrary, they were angry, and Pétion, they say, is ashamed of his conduct. The next day a pike with a bonnet rouge walked about the [Tuileries] garden, without shouting, and did not stay long.38

  Mme Élisabeth was not alone in finding the festival absurd, and there was some truth to the rumors she had heard about the ambivalence with which the National Guard and Pétion participated. On 20 April, France finally declared war on Leopold II’s son and successor as Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II (Prussia joined in on Austria’s side in June). Pétion immediately wrote to Robespierre imploring him to repair the divisions among the Jacobins that had been caused—Pétion dared suggest it—by his friend’s frustrated ambition and petty jealousy of those in power:

  We have lost the quiet energy of free men. We no longer judge things coolly. We shout like children or lunatics. I simply tremble when I consider how we are behaving, and I ask myself every moment whether we can continue to be free. I cannot sleep at night, for my usual peaceful slumbers are disturbed by dreams of disaster.39

  Robespierre did not reply.

  Nature gave me a strong frame, and she put into my face the violence of liberty. I have not sprung from a family that was weakened by the protection of the old privileges; my existence has been all my own; I know that I have kept and shown my vigor, but in my profession and in my private life I have controlled it…. I consecrated my whole life to the people, and now that they are beyond attack, now that they are in arms and ready to break the league [of foreign powers] unless it consents to dissolve, I will die in their cause if I must…for I love them only, and they deserve it. Their courage will make them eternal.40

  This was not Robespierre speaking but Danton, who had returned from London as soon as it seemed safe after the Champ de Mars massacre. Their physiques aside—Robespierre’s slight frame, Danton’s burly one—the two men had a great deal in common. Both were dedicated to the people, above all. Both were operating outside the Legislative Assembly and extremely active in the Jacobins (Danton was also still prominent at the Cordeliers and had an administrative post in Paris’s municipal government
). Both were against the war, convinced the country was unprepared, suspicious of the king, and afraid the forces of counterrevolution would triumph with a foreign invasion. Their suspicions were soon justified: after the fighting began at the border, the distressing dispatches that reached Paris, each more alarming than the last, made it clear that the war was not going well and the Revolution was hanging in the balance. Within two weeks the French generals had lost control—French soldiers actually murdered one of them—officers absconded, and the enemy captured entire regiments.

  The Jacobins—frightened, angry, hysterical—laid into one another. Their internecine fighting figured so prominently in the press that a letter arrived from the front deploring these distracting divisions at a time of national crisis. It was duly met with hisses in the club. The personal attacks continued. One newspaper held Robespierre single-handedly responsible for the private vendettas and endless denunciations: “M. Robertspierre [sic] resigned his position as public prosecutor to prove, as he himself said, that he is not ambitious. Does this not prove, on the contrary, that he is devoured by an immeasurable ambition?”41 On 10 May another letter from the front arrived, accusing Robespierre of sullying the tribune at the Jacobins by attacking General Lafayette. Despite fierce dispute and many disruptions, the letter was read aloud. Afterward, Robespierre went up to the tribune and snatched it from the hands of the reader. Chaos broke out again. On another occasion a Jacobin named Jean Baptiste Louvet, the licentious novelist and poetically gifted son of a Parisian stationery shop owner, accused Robespierre of tyrannizing over the club. Danton stepped forward to defend him: “M. Robespierre has never used any tyranny in this house, unless it is the tyranny of reason. It is not patriotism but base jealousy and all the most harmful passions that inspire the attacks against him.”42 But not even Danton could deny that his friend was always ready with a vicious counterattack.