Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  THE QUESTION OF putting Louis XVI on trial was first discussed in the Convention on 13 November. Ill though he was, Robespierre made a point of attending. The Convention, determined not to get sidetracked by another protracted fight between the Mountain and the Girondins, focused the debate on three questions: Can the king be judged? By whom ought he to be judged? And in what respect may he be judged? Charles Morisson, deputy for the Vendée, was the first to speak in defense of the king. He reminded the Convention that the constitution of 1791 had declared that “the person of the king is inviolable and sacred.” For this reason, he could not be brought to trial:

  Citizens, like you I am overcome with the greatest indignation when I consider the many crimes, the atrocities, with which Louis XVI is stained. My first and doubtless most natural impulse is to see this bloody monster expiate his crimes by the cruellest torments that can be devised. I know that he has earned them all. Yet I must deny my impulse: before this tribunal, representing a free people who seek happiness and prosperity in acts that are just, in acts that are humane, generous, and kind, because only through such acts can happiness be found, I must deny my impulse, and heed instead the voice of Reason, consult the spirit and the disposition of our law, seek only the interest of my fellow citizens, for that alone must be the single goal of all our deliberations.42

  Already in his fifties, Morisson, unlike most of his younger colleagues in the Convention, had adult memories of the reigns of two French kings. He had not been a mere schoolboy, like Robespierre and Danton, when Louis XV died and his grandson was crowned Louis XVI in 1775. It was rumored that, in his heart, Morisson still believed in the sanctity of kingship. But his argument turned on law, not religion. He could see that, in the circumstances, an appeal to the failed constitution of 1791 was Louis XVI’s best hope.

  Immediately after Morisson, Saint-Just, deputy for Picardy, stepped up to the podium. Twenty-five, handsome, well-dressed, and self-confident, Saint-Just had long coveted a more prominent role in the Revolution—and a closer relationship to Robespierre. “You whom I know, as I know God, only through his miracles,” he wrote to him back in 1790.43 He had tried to stand for election to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 but was disqualified when the irate father of his young mistress pointed out that at twenty-four he had not yet reached the minimum age to stand as a deputy. A year later, a year older, he had at last been elected to the Convention. Now he settled himself, took a breath, and began his maiden speech. It brought him everlasting fame:

  I say that the King should be judged as an enemy; that we must not so much judge him as combat him; that as he had no part in the contract which united the French people, the forms of judicial procedure here are not to be sought in positive law, but in the law of nations…. Someday men will be astonished that in the eighteenth century humanity was less advanced than in the time of Caesar. Then, a tyrant was slain in the midst of the Senate, with no formality but thirty dagger blows, with no law but the liberty of Rome. And today, respectfully, we conduct a trial for a man who was the assassin of a people, taken in flagrante, his hand soaked with blood, his hand plunged in crime…. Citizens, if the people of Rome, after six hundred years of virtue and hatred for kings, if Great Britain, after the death of Cromwell, saw kings reborn despite their energy, what must these good citizens among us fear, those who are friends of liberty, seeing the axe tremble in our hands, seeing a people, from the first day of its liberty, respect the memory of its chains!…For myself, I can see no mean: this man must reign or die.44

  Reign or die—one or the other, Saint-Just insisted, his political logic slicing through Morisson’s legal argument like a freshly sharpened blade. Then, as if he had not done enough to dazzle posterity and make the Convention swoon, he pronounced the sentence that would never be forgotten: On ne peut point régner innocemment—no one can reign innocently. The king, he repeated at the end of his speech, must be judged as an enemy. He was the murderer of the Bastille, of Nancy, of the Champ de Mars, of the Tuileries. What enemy had ever done more harm? When he had finished, Saint-Just proudly stepped down from the tribune. He walked back to his seat, carrying his head, as Camille Desmoulins scathingly remarked, like a sacred host. Robespierre was electrified. He demanded to be heard at once, even though it was not his turn and he was not next on the list of speakers. He would not take no for an answer and caused an unseemly commotion at the tribune. He was asked if it was for or against the king’s inviolability that he wanted so urgently to speak. But he would not give a straight answer, saying only that he proposed to speak “on the king’s inviolability,” that he must address the Convention in the wake of Saint-Just. He did not get his way and the meeting soon adjourned.

  By the time the Convention resumed its discussion, the King’s reputation had been even further blackened by the discovery of Mirabeau’s incriminating correspondence. Meanwhile, Robespierre, reensconced at the Duplays, was feeling much better. On 3 December a brilliantly incisive speech signaled his complete return to form:

  Louis was king, and the republic is founded. The great question with which you are occupied is settled by this argument: Louis has been deposed by his crimes. Louis denounced the French people as rebels; to punish them he called upon the arms of his fellow tyrants. Victory and the people have decided that he alone was a rebel. Therefore, Louis cannot be judged; he has already been condemned, else the republic is not cleared of guilt. To propose a trial for Louis XVI of any sort is to step backward toward royal and constitutional despotism. Such a proposal is counterrevolutionary since it would bring the Revolution itself before the court. In fact, if Louis could yet be tried, he might be found innocent…. If Louis is acquitted, where then is the Revolution?45

  This was Saint Just’s argument, recast in Robespierre’s words. Characteristically, Robespierre personified the Revolution. Whereas Saint-Just invoked the law of nations with devastating clarity, Robespierre brought it to bear on a fight to the death between the king and the Revolution. On the subject of the death penalty itself, he did not hesitate to remind the Convention that he had spoken against it at length in May 1791. Lest anyone now accuse him of inconsistency, he explained why the king’s case was different:

  Public safety never calls for the death penalty against ordinary citizens because society can always prevent them by other means and render the guilty man incapable of doing further harm. But a deposed king in the midst of a revolution as yet unsupported by just laws, a king whose very name draws the scourge of war on the restless nation: neither prison nor exile can render his existence indifferent to the public welfare…. Regretfully I speak this fatal truth—Louis must die because the nation must live.46

  As Robespierre presented it, the execution of the king was to be another manifestation of the people’s revolutionary justice, very different in kind from ordinary legal justice:

  A people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts; it does not condemn kings, it plunges them into the abyss; such justice is as compelling as the justice of the courts.47

  The justice of the courts had been Robespierre’s whole life before 1789, when he exchanged it for the justice of the people: swift, inexorable, revolutionary. He found both compelling, but he knew too, from personal experience, that they were incompatible. There could not be a legal revolution or a revolution without the people’s justice. When he began his new career in Versailles, Robespierre had had plenty of revolutionary instincts but no theory of revolution to guide them. After three years’ hard learning he was beginning to develop such a theory. “Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?” he had asked after the September Massacres.48 Now, at the very end of 1792, he was even clearer and more explicit: any revolution must be a transitional period of struggle on the part of an entire people desiring liberty but “as yet unsupported by just laws.”49 To him this was unmistakably what the French Revolution was. He urged the Convention to execute Louis XVI without further delay, “to
nourish in the spirit of tyrants a salutary terror of the justice of the people.”50

  THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN Saint-Just and Robespierre was spontaneous, profound, and hugely consequential for the Revolution. Beyond the powerful coincidence of their views on the king’s trial, they shared an obsession with vertu, which can only loosely be translated into English as virtue. Vertu in French has the wider meaning of righteousness and is a public as well as a private good. Robespierre had read a great deal about vertu and its pivotal role in republican governments in the books of both Montesquieu and his beloved Rousseau. He had mentioned it already in some of his speeches, but the arrival of Saint-Just in Paris brought it to the forefront of his concerns. The two men talked often and at length. Saint-Just was the only person who dared run straight up the outside staircase into Robespierre’s rooms at the Duplays’—everyone else tended to approach his quarters more tentatively, through the house. Saint-Just had about him the allure of a reformed sinner—“I have ached badly, but I shall do better,” he said, aged twenty—five years later, bursting with political talent, ambition, and ideals, he renounced his mistress.51 She followed him to Paris, but he would not open the door to her. Robespierre must have approved. The two men agreed about Christianity, too: the early Christians were austere and full of vertu, but things had gone badly wrong ever since. As Saint-Just wrote the year before he was elected to the Convention:

  The early Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians were Christians because they were good and kind, and that is Christianity. Most of those called Christians since the time of Constantine have been nothing but savages and madmen. Fanaticism is the work of European priest craft. A people that has suppressed superstition has made a great step toward liberty. But it must take great care not to alter its moral principles, for they are the basic law of vertu.52

  Robespierre’s fascination with Saint-Just was inevitable. Their unsuccessful joint attempt to stop the king’s trial and have him immediately executed was just the beginning of an intense revolutionary alliance.

  LOUIS XVI WAS brought to the Convention for questioning for the first time on 11 December. Inside the tower of the Temple he and the young dauphin had been kept on a different floor from the rest of their family since October. He had been teaching his young son geography and Latin, his own favorite subjects, and had devised a game with maps, an elaborate jigsaw puzzle that required the dauphin to fit countries back in their right place. When guards came to escort him to the Convention that morning, the king was separated from the boy, and he only saw his family again to say good-bye on the eve of his death. At the Convention he was interrogated by the suave deputy Bertrand Barère. Accused, among other things, of deploying troops against the citizens of Paris, he replied: “I was the master then and I sought to do what was right.”53 Afterward, in the carriage back to the Temple, he made polite small talk about the history of the streets through which he passed with the new secretary of the Paris Commune sitting beside him. He had shown similar politeness in the carriage on the way back from Varennes in April 1791, but now as then it did him little good.

  The questioning continued for several days, after which the Convention postponed further discussion of the king’s fate for ten days to give his lawyers a chance to prepare his case. They presented it on 26 December. Louis XVI was portrayed as a victim of circumstance, not a resolute tyrant, a monarch who had tried to do his best for the people, who had never intended bloodshed. Saint-Just was the first to respond the following day:

  Louis tainted vertu; to whom henceforth will it appear innocent?…Some will say that the Revolution is over, that we have nothing more to fear from the tyrant…but citizens, tyranny is like a reed that bends with the wind and which rises again. What do you call a Revolution? The fall of a throne, a few blows leveled at a few abuses? The moral order is like the physical; abuses disappear for an instant, as the dew dries in the morning, and as it falls again with the night, so the abuses will reappear. The Revolution begins when the tyrant ends.54

  Saint-Just was already looking to the future. He wanted the king executed so the Revolution, as he understood it, could truly begin. Ultimately, Robespierre was extremely sympathetic to the thorough regeneration of the moral order that Saint-Just envisaged. But for the time being his own attention was more closely focused on defeating the Girondin deputies, who were demanding a national referendum on the king’s fate. In this way, some of the Girondin deputies hoped to save the king’s life, others to diminish the influence of Paris by appeal to the rest of France, all to defeat the Jacobin policy that Robespierre and Saint-Just had defined. In a long speech on 28 December, Robespierre reminded the Convention of the mistakes the National Assembly had made following the flight to Varennes, when he alone dared argue for the king to be put on trial. He characterized the demand for a referendum as yet another Girondin plot “to destroy the work of the people and to rally the enemies that they vanquished” on 10 August:

  Yes, doubtless there is a plot to degrade the Convention and perhaps to cause its dissolution as a result of this interminable question [of referendum]…. This plot thrives among a score of rascals who abstain above all from announcing an opinion on the question of the last king but whose silent and pernicious activity causes all the ills that trouble us and prepares all those that await us.55

  To defeat the threatened referendum, Robespierre drew on a principle of representation that had dominated the Revolution since 1789: there could be no appeal against a body that represented the sovereign will of the people. The National Assembly in 1789 was such a body, as was the Convention in 1792. The principle was clear enough, but in his fevered exposition of it, Robespierre’s speech became obscure, his logic hard to follow:

  The general will is not formed in secret conventicles or around the tables of ministers. The minority retains an inalienable right to make heard the voice of truth, or what it regards as such. Vertu is always in the minority on this earth.56

  At this, Marat, who was on the same side but as independent and outspoken as usual, shouted: “All this is nothing but charlatanism!”57 Most of the Jacobins were more appreciative of Robespierre’s speech, and two days later the club suspended all other business so he could solemnly read it aloud again. Afterward he published it in his journal, along with criticisms of his old enemy Brissot. But Brissot had certainly not given up the fight against the Mountain. As the unofficial leader of the Girondins (who were sometimes even referred to as the Brissotins), he continued proposing measures to diminish the influence of Paris and its delegates over the Convention. He proposed abolishing the permanence of the Paris sections, which, together with the Jacobins, were the chief support of the Mountain. Robespierre took the tribune in opposition but could not be heard above shouts of “Censure him! Lynch him!” from the other end of the hall. Once again, the Manège resounded with violent remarks, personal abuse flying back and forth between the factions, and in the middle of it all Marat outdoing himself with contributions euphemistically described in the official minutes as “unacademic phrases.”58 The president rang his bell for order until it broke in his hands. When at last he could make himself heard, he censured everyone: Robespierre, Brissot, Marat, the rest of the assembly, and the public in the galleries, too. One observer said the scene far surpassed a cockfight.59

  On 14 January the Convention unanimously voted the king guilty. On 15 January the call for a referendum on his fate was defeated by 424 votes to 287; led by Robespierre, all twelve deputies from the Department of Paris opposed it. On 16 January voting began on the king’s sentence, with each deputy giving his opinion and explaining his reasons. The session continued all day, all night, all the following day and night, and on into the 18 January. An eyewitness said, “It is impossible to describe the agitation, even to madness, of that long and convulsive sitting”:

  One would naturally suppose that the Convention was a scene of meditation, silence and a sort of religious terror. Not at all: the end of the hall was transformed into a kind of op
era-box, where ladies in charming negligés were eating ices and oranges, drinking liqueurs, and receiving the compliments and salutations of those coming and going…. On the side of the Mountain, the Duchess Dowager [a relation by marriage of the king’s], the Amazon of the Jacobin bands, made long “Haha’s!” when she heard the word “death” strongly twang in her ears.

  The lofty galleries, assigned to the people during the days that preceded this famous trial, were never empty of strangers and people of every class, who drank wine and brandy as if it had been a tavern. Bets were open at all the neighbouring coffeehouses.60

  There was such confusion, such variety of opinion as to what the King’s punishment should be, that it was very difficult to collate the results. Of the 721 deputies who voted, at least 361 had to have voted for death for this to be the majority outcome. On the night of 17 January, the president announced that 365 had indeed done so. The next morning Barrère took over as president (the role was routinely rotated) and revised the figure to only 361—the barest majority. To this day there is disagreement about the actual figures but no disagreement at all about the narrowness of the margin that decided the king’s fate. When someone questioned whether a mere majority was really enough to condemn him, Danton retorted:

  You decided the Republic by a mere majority, you changed the whole history of the nation by a mere majority, and now you think the life of one man too great for a mere majority; you say such a vote could not be decisive enough to make blood flow. When I was on the frontier the blood flowed decisively enough.61