Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  At that first meeting of the electors, Robespierre, comfortably out of range of the front line, declared from the tribune that he would “face with perfect calmness the swords of the enemies.”10 In doing so he would take with him to the grave “the certainty that France would remain free and the satisfaction of having served the fatherland.” Since he was now accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, to discourage any repetitions of the alleged assassination attempt earlier in the year, he could not have been as sanguine about going to his grave as he claimed. Two days later he was at the top of the list of deputies elected to the new National Convention. The person standing against him was Pétion. Their friendship had been strained for months, but after 10 August it deteriorated dramatically. Just days after the storming of the Tuileries, Pétion, as mayor of Paris, wanted to disband the Insurrectionary Commune and reinstate the municipal government that it had displaced. The Commune commissioned Robespierre to get Pétion to back down. Their meeting did not go well, Pétion did not back down, and soon afterward Robespierre received yet another disconcerting letter from the man who, only a year ago, had been his closest revolutionary colleague:

  You know, my friend, what my feelings are toward you: you know that I am no rival of yours and that I have always given you proof of my devoted friendship. It would be idle to attempt to divide us. I could not cease to love you unless you ceased to love liberty. I have always found more fault with you to your face than behind your back. When I think you too ready to take offense or when I believe, rightly or wrongly, that you are mistaken about a line of action, I tell you so. You reproach me with being too trustful. You may be right, but you must not assume too readily that many of my acquaintances are your enemies. People can disagree on a number of unessential points, without becoming enemies, and your heart is said to be just. Besides, it is childish to take offense at the things people say against one. Imagine, my friend, the number of people who utter libels against the mayor of Paris!…Yet it does not worry me, I can assure you. If I am not totally indifferent to what other people think about me, at least I value my own opinion more highly…. You and I are never likely to take opposite sides. Weshall always be of the same political faith. I need not assure you that it is impossible for me to join any movement against you: my tastes, my character, my principles all forbid it. I don’t believe you covet my position any more than I covet the king’s. But if, when my term of office comes to an end, the people were to offer you the mayoralty, I suppose that you would accept it; whereas, in all good conscience I could never accept the crown. Keep well. March ahead! The times are too serious to think of anything but the public interest.11

  When Robespierre on his return from Arras had first visited Pétion in his grand new residence, he had reassured himself nervously that the job would not go to his friend’s head, that his spirit would remain “simple and pure as ever.” This pompous letter proved otherwise. For almost a year, Pétion had sat on the fence between the rival factions at the Jacobins, believing, perhaps, that his official position enabled him to rise above the hatred between Robespierre and Brissot, who were both his friends. He had played the part of peacemaker to no avail. Who, in the circumstances, did he think might offer him a crown? What reason did he have to believe that Robespierre coveted the role of mayor of Paris? Despite his delusions of grandeur, Pétion’s letter captures two of the most prominent features of Robespierre’s personality: his perennial distrust—“Share my fear,” he had urged the Jacobins in 1791—and his propensity to take personal offense of the most lasting and rancorous kind. Robespierre himself testified to the deep spiteful gratification he experienced in the electoral assembly when he, not Pétion, was chosen as the first of Paris’s deputies to the Convention. As he wrote to the self-important mayor:

  Everyone saw the change in your countenance when, in the progress of the ballot, another name [Robespierre’s own] seemed to have the advantage of yours. You were aware that it was the Assembly’s intention to have you named the next day, but you left the hall abruptly and never reappeared. You would not even keep your dinner engagements, and you have at last confessed the true motive of your vexation by saying, “Well then, to be candid with you, I did think that if I was named at all, I was entitled to be first.”12

  So who was jealous and who was gloating now? Once, Pétion had been all but indistinguishable from Robespierre; his name had been honored alongside Robespierre’s after the end of the first National Assembly, and since then his career had gone from strength to strength. But the toast of the crowd at the 14 July celebrations of 1792 was no longer the most popular man in Paris two months later. Pétion’s confident belief that nothing could ever come between himself and Robespierre was not unwarranted—just, as it turned out, completely mistaken.

  AFTER BEING PASSED over in the capital, Pétion was elected a representative to the forthcoming convention from the Department of Eure-et-Loir (which included his hometown, Chartres). Brissot was also chosen a deputy for Eure-et-Loir. Even before the convention of 749 deputies met, many of those elected from the provinces, especially those from the Gironde department in western France, were concerned that the Paris delegates, backed by the Commune and the city’s radical sections, would try to dominate proceedings. On the list of Paris’s twenty-four delegates, Robespierre was first. Danton was second, Camille Desmoulins sixth, Marat seventh, the revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David twentieth, and—rather more surprisingly—Robespierre’s brother from Arras nineteenth. At last, Augustin had a real reason to be in Paris. Let people say what they liked about corruption, Robespierre was convinced that his brother had stood independently and been elected on merit, yet only his own influence could have secured such an unlikely outcome. Augustin had distinguished himself as president of the Arras Jacobins and, since 10 August, been active in the Arras Commune (one of the many provincial imitations of Paris’s Insurrectionary Commune), but he scarcely knew anyone in the capital. He wasted no time in packing his bags. It soon became clear, however, that Charlotte was not going to be left behind in an empty house in the rue des Rapporteurs while both her brothers pursued exciting revolutionary careers in the capital. Robespierre’s siblings arrived on his doorstep and proceeded to move into the Duplay house, renting from 1 October for a thousand livres a year one furnished and one unfurnished room. Inevitably, their arrival disrupted Robespierre’s comfortable Parisian home life. His own rooms at the Duplays’ had started filling up with congratulatory letters, statuettes, medals, and prints of himself. For example, there was a medal to commemorate the events of 10 August on which he was represented cupping milk flowing from the breasts of liberty and offering it to a patriot to drink. It would have been ungracious to dispose of these tributes—even if he had wanted to—so instead Robespierre carefully arranged them around his two small rooms, which soon resembled a shrine.

  The Duplays were so proud of their famous patriotic Jacobin lodger, so devoted to him both personally and politically, that Robespierre’s rooms never struck them as peculiar. But Charlotte was uncomfortable. It was not the emergence of a personality cult focused on her older brother that disturbed her. Nor was it all the pictures of him—he had always been fond of collecting prints, fond, too, of sketching, and he used to organize small exhibitions when Charlotte and Henriette visited him on those long Sunday afternoons of their childhood in Arras. Admittedly, the subject of the pictures had altered dramatically since those far-off days, but Charlotte was at least as fixated on Robespierre as the Duplays were and said nothing about finding his rooms odd. It was the private attentions lavished on him by the smotheringly maternal Mme Duplay that irritated her. Even at an epistolary distance, she had been jealous at the idea of Robespierre cosseted in the home of another woman; she could imagine only too well how responsive he would be to this kind of fussing. She knew his domestic character to be “débonnaire” (meek or accommodating), so even before setting foot in 366 rue Saint-Honoré, she feared finding him passively relaxed in a home she could no
t control. The reality was intolerable. Almost as soon as her clothes were unpacked, Charlotte began lobbying Robespierre to rent a house of his own. Now that he was an important public figure, she said, he ought to have an independent establishment. And who better than his sister to preside over it, unimpeded by the likes of Mme Duplay and her bothersome daughters?

  Robespierre, of course, had more important things on his mind than the fight brewing between his sister and his landlady. On 20 September, as Goethe and the rest of the Prussian army retreated before the full force of the French nation, the National Convention gathered to meet in Paris. It had two purposes: to win the war and to draft a republican constitution. The Convention officially opened the following morning, with the newly elected deputies from all over France assembling at the ransacked Tuileries and processing to the Manège, where they filled the vacant seats. It was only a short walk across the garden from the Tuileries to the Manège—there was no celebratory Mass, no ceremonial robes, none of the symbolism that had moved the Marquis de Ferrières to write to his wife in 1789: “Love for my country has made itself very powerfully felt in my heart. I was not aware just how far the mutual ties extend that unite us all to this soil, to the men who are our brothers, but I understood it in that instance.”13 Ferrières had been a noble in the procession at Versailles. Now he was in danger of losing his life, one of the despised enemies of liberty from whom the new National Convention must protect the nascent French Republic.

  Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Marat, David, and Augustin were all there in the procession with Robespierre, but none of them had been with him in 1789. Robespierre was one of a minority who could compare the two occasions; Pétion was another, but these days the two men were staying far apart, not walking together reminiscing about the past.14 They entered the Manège at different ends of the procession and, once inside, Robespierre and his friends made a point of occupying the high seats at the far end of the hall to the left of the president’s chair; Pétion had already been chosen as the Convention’s first president, which cannot have pleased them. They sat there looking down and soon afterward the group around Robespierre became known as the Mountain; Pétion, Brissot, and his friends became the Girondins (so called because some of them came from the Department of the Gironde). And between these two rival factions—bemused or irritated by their crossfire but inextricably caught up in it—there was the Plain—all those new deputies who had only just arrived in Paris to draft a republican constitution. At four o’clock that afternoon, trumpets sounded outside the Temple and a voice pronouncing the formal abolition of the monarchy boomed through the thick walls and windows of the royal family’s rooms. Louis XVI was reading. Between 10 August 1792 and the start of the New Year he read 250 volumes in several different languages and translated Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III. At the announcement of the republic, he did not even look up from his book.15

  SINCE 10 AUGUST, Robespierre had been too busy to issue his journal. But once the preoccupying business of electioneering was over, he relaunched it under the new title Lettres à ses commettans (Letters of Maximilien Robespierre, member of the National Convention of France, to his constituents). It was, as ever, a platform for both his theoretical and his practical political concerns. In the first article of the first new issue he argued:

  It is not enough to have overturned the throne: our concern is to erect upon its remains holy equality and the imprescriptible Rights of Man. It is not in the empty word itself that a republic consists but in the character of the citizens. The soul of a republic is vertu—that is, the love of the fatherland and the high-minded devotion that resolves all private interests into the general interest. The enemies of the republic are those dastardly egoists, those ambitious and corrupt men. You have hunted down kings, but have you hunted out the vices that their deadly domination has engendered among you? Taken together you are the most generous, the most moral of all peoples…but a people that nurtures within itself a multitude of adroit rogues and political charlatans, skilled at usurpation and the betrayal of trust.16

  Like an austere godfather at the birth of France’s republic, Robespierre advised the nation to seek first the enemy within. These were not new sentiments. Before he left Arras for Versailles in 1789 he had written a pamphlet entitled The Enemies of the Fatherland Unmasked. Absolutely nothing had happened since then to reduce his fear of surreptitious political foes. Now that everyone claimed to want a republic, he thought the really important distinction was between those who wanted it for their own selfish purposes and those—himself, for example—who genuinely wanted to found it on the principle of equality and in the general interest. Next he revisited another long-standing concern: fear of executive power. As he understood it, overly strong governments had caused most of the misery of human society—he was more frightened of despotism than of anarchy. In this, as in his conception of the general interest into which all private interests could, and should, be dissolved, Robespierre was again following Rousseau. Around this time there was a rumor that he slept with a copy of the Social Contract under his pillow. It does not appear in the inventory of his books taken after his death, but his speeches refer to it so often that there can be no doubt about how much it meant to him. Perhaps one of the Duplays took his personal copy as a keepsake before the inventory was compiled.

  At one point in the Social Contract, Rousseau describes his ideal lawgiver. The qualities required in someone truly worthy of formulating the laws are extraordinary:

  You would need a superior intelligence that sees all the human passions without experiencing them,…that earns a distant glory, perhaps even working in one century for the benefit of another; it would take gods to give laws to men.17

  Robespierre quoted this passage in full in his article. But then he proceeded to gloss it, significantly altering the meaning so that an unusually admirable human being—Robespierre himself, for example—might enact the role of lawgiver that Rousseau had reserved for the gods:

  You would need philosophers as enlightened as they were intrepid, who experienced the passions of man but whose first passion would be the horror of tyranny and the love of humanity, treading underfoot vanity, envy, ambition, and all the weaknesses of petty souls, inexorable toward crime, armed with power, indulgent toward error, sympathetic toward misery, and tender and respectful toward the people.18

  This was a self-portrait—an extremely flattering one. Despite his shrine of sorts in the Duplay house, Robespierre probably did not think he was above human passions, but he did consider himself more self-controlled than most, more resistant to political temptation, more unambivalently for the people, less selfish, less corruptible, perhaps even incorruptible. Robespierre seemed to share Rousseau’s belief in the need for an almost superhuman lawgiver, omniscient, disinterested, and capable of directing the people for their own good. And he may well have been privately preparing himself to assume just that role. In this context, Robespierre’s vision of democracy was very different from anything we would recognize today. The rule of the people, as he understood it, was not simply derived from the will of the majority. The point was to ensure the triumph of the good, pure general will of the people—what the people would want in ideal circumstances—and this needed to be intuited on their behalf until they had received sufficient education to understand it for themselves. When it came to drafting the laws, to giving France its new republican constitution, Robespierre believed that he was far closer to Rousseau’s conception of the ideal lawgiver than Brissot and his friends could ever be.

  ROBESPIERRE’S ENEMIES IN the Convention wasted no time. On 25 September, just four days after the official opening, they accused him of aspiring to be a tyrant. His enemies—many of them friends of Brissot’s—were dismayed at his influence and popularity in the capital. They insisted that since Paris was only one of eighty-three departments in France, its representatives’ votes should count as only an 83rd of the total within the National Con
vention. Robespierre, denounced as leader of the Paris deputies in their illegitimate quest for power, hesitated. But Danton leapt to the tribune to defend him as he had done before at the Jacobin Club. He demanded the death penalty for anyone scheming to destroy the unity of France. By this he meant death to anyone scheming to turn France into a federation of independent departments or small republics in order to diminish the power of Paris. This was one of the accusations the Mountain leveled against the Girondins. When Robespierre finally stood up to defend himself, he struck a characteristic note: “I begin by thanking my accusers. Calumny serves the public good when it clumsily unmasks itself.” First he appealed, as usual, to his personal patriotic credentials: “I did this…I did that…,” he reminded the Convention, summarizing his achievements since 1789 until the audience got restless and someone shouted, “Enough!” Then he said he had long suspected that Brissot’s faction wanted to divide France into a federation of small republics, leaving it even more vulnerable to internal and external enemies than it already was.19 He had not been in the room when Mme Roland and her friends bent over the map and discussed the division of the country into monarchical and republican parts. But now that the monarchy had fallen, he was convinced they wanted another kind of division, one that would curtail the influence of Paris, so essential to sustaining revolutionary ideals, and diminish his power base.