Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  At five on the morning of 20 June a mob began to assemble at the site of the fallen Bastille. Later in the day it set off with a tree of liberty in the direction of the Tuileries. Rœderer, furious at the flouting of his advice, got there first, entered the Manège, and told the assembly that had it not recently broken a constitutional rule to admit armed men into one of its own sessions, the impending crisis would never have loomed.55 One of Brissot’s friends stood up and retorted that since the assembly had indeed recently received armed men, when the Châteauvieux soldiers marched through the Manège, it would be a gross insult to the people of Paris if their petition was rejected merely because it came accompanied by arms. Before the deputies could decide how to settle the argument, the mob arrived and forced its way into the hall. The demonstrators were persuaded to leave peacefully, but only on the condition that they would be allowed to march back in later. And so they did, drums, weapons, pikes, banners, and all, and for the second time in three months the assembly applauded the rabble-rousing music of the people in arms. It drew the line only at a bloody bullock’s heart skewered on a pike and inscribed, THE HEART OF AN ARISTOCRAT. This was one popular emblem too many for the deputies and they sent it straight outside, where it was paraded instead at the gates of the Tuileries. The single pike, which the king’s sister had laughed at in April, was back in the garden in June, covered in blood: DEATH TO VETO AND HIS WIFE, the crowd menaced from below. When it came to the planting of the tree of liberty—which, after the presentation of the petition to the assembly and the king, was the ostensible point of the demonstration—a new problem arose. There were twenty-four battalions of National Guardsmen strategically positioned in and around the Tuileries, and the palace gates were closed.56 The petitioners had no hope of forcing their way into the gardens, and anyway it would have been absurd to risk a bloody confrontation over planting a tree, even if it was a tree of liberty. They compromised and planted it instead behind the assembly in the courtyard of the Capuchin convent on the south side of the rue Saint-Honoré, almost directly opposite the Duplays’ house. If Robespierre was at home in his room that day—and very likely he was—he could have watched the planting from his first-floor window. Otherwise he played no part.

  Given the number of National Guardsmen defending the Tuileries—ten battalions on the western terrace of the palace alone—it was, and remains, something of a mystery how the demonstrating mob managed to get inside. One explanation is that a delegation of municipal officers went to the king and complained that the locked gates were offensive to the people, who were merely holding a peaceful demonstration on the anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. They may, or may not, have pointed out that back in 1789 it was the king’s attempt to lock the third estate out of its own meeting hall in Versailles that led to its reassembling on a tennis court and swearing never to be disbanded until the nation had received a new constitution. Three years later, to the very day, it was locked out again and definitely no less offended. In another letter to her friend the Marquise de Raigecourt, the king’s sister wrote her account of that frightening day, from the perspective of those trapped inside the Tuileries:

  For three days [before 20 June] we expected a great upheaval in Paris, but thought we had taken all necessary precautions to ward off every danger. On Wednesday morning the courtyard and garden were full of troops. At midday we learnt that the faubourg Saint-Antoine was on the march; it brought a petition to the Assembly, and did not declare its plan to cross the Tuileries [garden]. Fifteen hundred people filed into the Assembly; a few National Guards and some Invalids, the rest were sans-culottes and women. Three municipal officers came to ask the King to allow the demonstrators to enter the garden, saying that the Assembly was troubled by the crowd, and the passageways so crammed that the gates might be forced. The King told them to arrange with the commandant to let them defile along the terrace of the Feuillants and go out by the gate of the riding-school [Manège].

  Despite these orders, shortly afterwards the other gates of the garden were opened. Soon the garden was full [of demonstrators]. The pikes began to defile in order under the terrace in front of the Palace, where there were three lines of National Guards…. The National Guard, which had not been able to obtain any orders since the morning, had the grief of watching them cross the courtyard without being able to bar the way…. At this point, we were at the King’s window…. The doors were closed…. The pikes entered the chamber like a thunderbolt; they looked for the King, especially one of them, who said the most dreadful things…. At last Pétion and members of the municipality arrived. They first harangued the people, and after praising the “dignity” and “order” with which they had marched, he enjoined them to retire with “the same calmness” so that no one could reproach them for abandoning themselves to excess during a “civic festival.” At last the populace began to depart…. The King returned to his room, and nothing could be more touching than the moment when the queen and his children threw themselves around his neck. The deputies who were there burst into tears…. At ten o’clock the Palace was empty again, and everyone went to bed…. The Jacobins are sleeping. These are the details of the 20 June. Adieu; I am well; I kiss you, and am thankful you are not here in the fray.57

  HEARING OF THE mob’s invasion of the Tuileries, Lafayette decided to wait no longer, abandoned his embattled troops on the front line, and returned to Paris, calling on the assembly to punish the perpetrators of 20 June, destroy the Jacobin Club, and force a return to law and order. He went to see the king—for the last time, as it turned out. “The King told me in the presence of the Queen and his family,” Lafayette reported, “that the Constitution was his safety, and that he was the only person who observed it.”58 By now this was true. Robespierre was still publishing his journal, Le défenseur de la constitution, but the presence of Lafayette in Paris—the general’s open hostility to the Jacobins and the imminent threat of a military coup—reunited him temporarily with Brissot’s faction. For the time being, the enemies of Robespierre’s enemy Lafayette were his friends. He began to work with them for “the constitutional rising against the constitution,” maintaining through this contorted paradoxical phrase the impression that he had not been wrong to defend the constitution in recent months and was not wrong now in seeking to overthrow it. By his own standards, he came dangerously close to admitting he had been wrong on the war. In the eighth issue of his journal he reflected on it at length, introducing a strained distinction between a war of liberty and a war of intrigue or ambition:

  When a powerful nation conducts a war of liberty it arises in its entirety, it marches under leaders that it has chosen from the most zealous defenders of equality and the general interest. At the time it declares [a war of liberty] formidable preparations are in place to assure the success of its enterprise. Its object is sublime, its force invincible, its measures wise and grand, its attacks prompt and irresistible…. It does not purchase a painful victory through torrents of blood.59

  A war of intrigue, conducted by one tyrannous power against another, was altogether different. It led to oppression and crimes against liberty on the home front as well as on the battlefield—there could be no hope of unity between opposed nations if their only point of contact was clashing armies sacrificing themselves for the despots, the enemies of liberty, who ruled them. For the last three months, according to Robespierre, France had been involved in the second of these two kinds of war, a disgraceful war of intrigue. But the time had come to convert it into an admirable war of liberty. True patriots must replace treacherous generals like Lafayette. Liberty must first be secured at home and then carried triumphantly, effortlessly abroad. Citing famous examples of bloodshed, he promised:

  Unhappy French, Belgian, German slaves of the tyrants who divide the human race like base herds, you will be free, doubt it not. I swear it by the burning of Courtrai, by the children of Brabançons, murdered in their mother’s wombs and carried blood-soaked on the points of Austrian bayonets; I swear
it by the shades of Avignon who perished at the hands of our common enemies; I swear it by our wives and children slaughtered by cowards on the Champ de Mars, by the defenders of the fatherland,…by the patriots; I swear it by the foreign armies…and by the traitors who summoned them,…I swear it by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, so solemnly promulgated and insolently violated, by the disasters of twenty centuries, by our ancestors, whom we must avenge, by our descendants, whom we must liberate, and by ourselves, whom we must save.60

  This outburst was characteristically personal, populist, and hysterical. But was Robespierre really now endorsing the war he had so adamantly opposed? Yes and no. He endorsed it but only insofar as it conformed to his vision of a democratic war—the war of a free people against the despots of an oppressed people, in the interests of those oppressed people, who would welcome their invading army with open arms. Robespierre had never been to war. The closest he came to it was brawling in the playground at Louis-le-Grand, where he had a reputation for defending the smaller boys against bullies. His distinction between a war of liberty and a war of intrigue made sense in theory, but how would it look on the battlefield? Is a democratic war—or a war waged in the name of democracy—so very different from any other when it comes to the fighting? Those easy, bloodless, swift, efficient, popular victories Robespierre envisaged are extremely scarce.

  When Brissot’s party had proposed calling a new federal army of twenty thousand men to Paris, Robespierre had been critical. Despite the king’s threatened veto, the new army was now assembling in Paris, ready for the annual celebration of the fall of the Bastille. In the next issue of his paper, Robespierre addressed these federal forces directly. Their mission, he told them, was to save the constitution—not the constitution as drafted in 1791 but the timeless constitution that guaranteed sovereignty and natural rights. “The fatal hour strikes…. Let us march to the field of Federation. There is the Altar of the Fatherland! There the place where the French once strengthened the bonds of their political association!”61 Let them do so again, he entreated, but this time not in the presence of false idols like Louis XVI and General Lafayette: “Let us take no oath but to the country and to ourselves; and let us take it at the hands not of the King of France but of the immortal King of Nature, who made us for liberty and punishes our oppressors.” Robespierre had never missed the 14 July festival. He was there in 1790, standing behind the king in the pavilion. He was there again in 1791, when the king was absent, in disgrace, and the assembly was wavering over its response to his flight to Varennes. Now he was there for the third time, mindful of the blood that had been spilled on the Altar of the Fatherland during the Champ de Mars massacre, mindful of the blood that was still being spilled at the front line, and wondering how long it would be before another Parisian insurrection brought the monarchy to an end. From the crowd he heard cries of “Vive Pétion!” But if he was jealous of his friend he did not show it. Pétion was prominent in people’s minds because he had been briefly arrested after the invasion of the Tuileries, then quickly reinstated as mayor. At the close of the National Assembly in 1791, and afterward in Bapaume and Arras, the crowd had shouted, “Vive Pétion! Vive Robespierre!” Now it was only “Vive Pétion!”—but not for much longer.

  Robespierre hoped that when it came the insurrection would sweep all before it: the king, his ministry, the Legislative Assembly, the army generals, the departmental administrators, the municipal government. In preparation for all the changes to come, the electoral assemblies of Paris’s forty-eight sections once again went into permanent session. Robespierre wrote approvingly to his friend Couthon, who was taking a mud cure at Saint-Amand: “The Revolution is about to take a more rapid course, unless it buries itself in military despotism and dictatorship…. The Paris sections are manifesting an energy and prudenceworthy to serve as a model for the rest of the state. We miss you.”62 On 30 July armed men from Marseille arrived in Paris, as part of the new federal army. They had threatened to come once before, to save Robespierre after the Champ de Mars massacre. Now they came dragging cannons: a black cloud on the horizon advancing rapidly toward the capital and singing a new song, the “Marseillaise.” “If they leave Paris without saving the country, all is lost,” Robespierre wrote to his friend in Arras. “We all intend to lay down our lives in the capital rather than shrink from risking everything in a final attempt.”63 Later that evening he was in the chair at the Jacobins as a recent manifesto from the Duke of Brunswick, the commander of the enemy forces, was read out. Brunswick threatened to hold all Paris answerable for the safety of the king: “If the palace of the Tuileries be insulted or forced,…if the least violence, the least assault, be perpetrated against Their Majesties the King, the Queen, and the Royal Family,” Paris would suffer “an exemplary and never-to-be-forgotten vengeance,…martial law and complete destruction.”64 At this grandiose threat, the Jacobins burst out laughing. But Robespierre refused to participate in their frivolity. He suspended the meeting early, appealing for calm. Again and again he cautioned against a premature insurrection that would only play into the hands of the people’s enemies and turn public opinion against the true friends of liberty. If it had been up to him to give the signal, to decide that the time had definitely come for the people to rise up and revolt, he might never have done so. He wanted his “constitutional rising against the constitution,” but he both feared it and was afraid for it. His fears, in the circumstances, were wholly reasonable.

  IN THE EVENT, it was Danton who gave the signal. First he went home to Arcis and settled money on his seventy-year-old mother in case he was killed. Then he came back and called together representatives of the city’s forty-eight sections. On the night of 9 August they formed the Insurrectionary Commune and proceeded to take over the municipal government (which Danton himself had belonged to in recent months). Danton briefly lay down to rest as his colleagues rang the tocsin in the tower of the Cordelier church nearby. The tocsin echoed across the city, a call to arms resounding from the churches of central and eastern Paris. Robespierre heard it in the Section of the place Vendôme, where the lights in the houses had been lit again. He sat in the Duplays’ cellar, running up the narrow stairs to his bedroom from time to time if his curiosity got the better of him and he wanted to look out a first-floor window. According to Lucile Desmoulins, there had been a recent attempt to assassinate him, so he was even more nervous and suspicious than usual.65 The bell rang all night, like a troubled infant that cannot sleep—rhythmic, relentless, inconsolable—but it did not, at first, bring the people out into the streets.66 Perhaps it woke the Desmoulins’s baby, now nearly a year old but too young still to know his godfather, Robespierre. Camille had gone out with a gun and Lucile remembered how “the tocsin of the Cordeliers rang, it rang for a long time. Bathed in tears, kneeling at the window, my face hidden in a handkerchief, I listened to the sound of that fatal bell. People came to comfort me in vain. It seemed to me that the day that preceded this deadly one had been our last.”67 From 2:00 a.m. on, Danton was giving orders to the insurrectionists from the Hôtel de Ville. Eventually a crowd for the storming of the Tuileries assembled. Unlike the Bastille, the palace was properly defended, and there was likely to be considerable loss of life. Since 20 June the king had recalled his loyal Swiss Guard and his constitutionally mandated bodyguards. Several battalions of National Guardsmen were on his side, too, and Pierre-Louis Rœderer was there again, giving advice on behalf of the Department of Paris, while pacing nervously around the Tuileries gardens. Louis XVI thought that Paris could be subdued; he regretted not having done so in 1789. He would do it now with belated help from Europe’s invading army, whose arrival in the capital was, surely, only weeks away.

  At dawn, the king’s sister called the queen to the window to see the summer sun rise; allegedly, it was very red that day. The king, like Danton, had not slept, only lain down for a little in his violet breeches, flattening the curls and rubbing the powder from one side of his head. Still dish
eveled, he heard of the arrival of an early morning message from the Insurrectionary Commune demanding that the current head of the National Guard, a man named Mandat, leave the palace and present himself at the Hôtel de Ville immediately. He did so and was murdered on the steps outside (where de Flesselles and Governor de Launay had been butchered by the crowd after the fall of the Bastille). By 6:00 a.m., Rœderer had persuaded the king to seek sanctuary in the Manège—just a short walk across the garden—where the Legislative Assembly had been burning candles through the night. The queen was opposed. She thought they should fight on with their “considerable forces,” but Rœderer dissuaded her with “Madame, all Paris is against you.”68 It was only 10 August, but the leaves in the garden had started to fall. As they walked through them the dauphin kicked them playfully into the air and the king remarked, “What a quantity of leaves! They fall early this year,” knowing as he did that the popular press had been claiming for months that the monarchy would not last beyond autumn. In the assembly he said, “I am come hither to prevent a great crime; and I think I can be nowhere more secure, gentlemen, than in your midst.” The president assured him he was right, but then one of the deputies drew attention to the constitutional rule against the Legislative Assembly’s deliberating in the presence of the king. So the royal family was quickly ushered into a side room, where they could watch the assembly’s proceedings through a grate. For all the president’s and Rœderer’s reassurances, that room was the first of their real prisons. Outside, the fighting began. Led by the contingent from Marseille, on whom Robespierre pinned such high hopes, the armed mob—estimated at twenty thousand—succeeded in entering the palace at around nine that morning. But they were driven out again when the Swiss Guard—a force of nine hundred professional soldiers—opened fire.69 The battalions of National Guardsmen that had remained loyal to Louis XVI now joined forces with the mob, and an hour later the Swiss Guardsmen were in retreat. Around six hundred of them were hacked to pieces. Several hundred of the mob—National Guardsmen, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and artisans among them—were also killed in the siege. By midday well over a thousand lay wounded or dead among the fallen leaves. The queen had been right and the defense of the Tuileries was formidable. Contrary to appearances, however, to the stretchers and screams, the loss of blood and life, this was a victory for the people. Afterward they lit celebratory bonfires to burn not early autumn debris but the naked bodies of the slain Swiss Guardsmen.