Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  From the north to the Midi, from sunset to dawn, the land is strewn with corpses and the blood of patriots drenches the whole of France; the Midi revolts and joins our enemies in the north to forge chains for us; Marseille, hitherto the rampart of liberty, is today its tomb. The same fate awaits us if we do not display energy and if Paris does not rise as one to crush the hydras that are whistling in our ears.54

  THE MEMBERS OF the Committee of Public Safety were reelected by the Convention every month, and Danton was voted off on 10 July. One of the reasons was his optimism in the face of the federalist revolt. Rejecting Robespierre’s apocalyptic vision, refusing to condone Jacobin threats of violent repression in Bordeaux and elsewhere, he acted as though effort and compromise might be enough to reunite the country. Danton, for all his ferocity in the streets, understood compromise. In June he had married the young woman his first wife had picked out for him and their two small children before she died. Noting this remarriage, only four months after the extraordinary scene in the graveyard over Gabrielle’s coffin, his critics conjectured that Danton was still unbalanced, distracted from public affairs, swept up in the solace of a new sexual liaison, no longer really in control of what he—still less the Revolution—was doing. Unlike Robespierre, Danton valued his private life. In a conversation between the two men during which Robespierre was speaking, as he did so often, about the importance of virtue and its role in revolutionary politics, Danton quipped, “Virtue is what I do every night in bed with my wife.”55 Robespierre, not amused, jotted this down in his notebook for future reference. Perhaps Danton did not mean it as a joke. In the circumstances in which he found himself, in the context of the life he had led since 1789—all that bloodshed, all those shattered dreams, the revolutionary fight still so far from won—sex, love, intimacy may indeed have seemed to him the best there is for human beings to hope for. Robespierre emphatically did not share that view. He may not have been as interested in sex as Danton was—he almost certainly had less experience of it, but his vision of the good life clashed drastically with Danton’s despite the fact that the two men had been such close revolutionary allies. When they were together in opposition to the old regime, the king, the Feuillants, the Girondins, their differences did not matter so much. Once the Jacobins came to power and had to decide what to do with it, they became enormously significant.

  ON 27 JULY, Robespierre was at last elected to the Committee of Public Safety. Now, though he had more power than ever before, he was one of twelve trying to rule France. When Danton had established the committee earlier that year, it had only nine members. Its personnel had changed over the intervening months, and three extra places had been added around the oval table at which it met in the Tuileries. There were four more changes of personnel soon after Robespierre joined, but then no more additions until after he fell.56 Some of his fellow members were close friends: Saint-Just, Couthon (who had to be carried into meetings up what was once known as the queen’s staircase), Jacques Billaud-Varenne, and Jean Marie Collot d’Herbois. The others were Barère, the honey-tongued lawyer, Carnot, Marie Jean Hérault de Séchelles, Lindet, Jean Bon Saint-André, and two unrelated men both with the surname Prieur. “Stranger set of cloud-compellers the earth never saw,” Thomas Carlyle remarked of the twelve.57 In addition to internal clashes of vision and temperament, the committee as a whole was thoroughly embattled: its power and legitimacy were disputed abroad and in the provinces. In Paris there were also clashes with the Commune, with some of the city’s forty-eight sections, with the clubs, the factions, and the streets.

  Robespierre began assiduously attending the committee’s meetings, which were usually held in the evening, in a green-papered room inside the former palace. Elsewhere in the building the intimidated Convention still went through the motions of assembling during the day, even though the republican constitution it had been called to design was indefinitely suspended, filed away on a dusty shelf awaiting happier times. As the first anniversary of the monarchy’s end approached, hope, power, and fear were focused on the nocturnal debates behind closed doors. Paris celebrated the 10 August anniversary by smashing the royal tombs at Saint-Denis. The already meager food rations for the surviving royal prisoners in the Tower were reduced further, and Marie Antoinette was transferred to the Conciergerie, pending trial. Danton’s policy of conciliation in the provinces was replaced by one of repression—Lyon, where Robespierre’s siblings had recently been made so unwelcome, was under siege a week after he joined the Committee of Public Safety. On the eve of his ascension to power, he had drafted a personal revolutionary catechism. It provides a window into his mind at this frenzied time:

  What is our aim?

  It is the use of the constitution for the benefit of the people.

  Who is likely to oppose us?

  The rich and the corrupt.

  What methods will they employ?

  Slander and hypocrisy.

  What factors will encourage the use of such means?

  The ignorance of the sans-culottes.

  The people must therefore be instructed.

  What are the obstacles to their enlightenment?

  The paid journalists who mislead the people every day by shameless distortions.

  What conclusion follows?

  That we ought to proscribe these writers as the most dangerous enemies of the country and to circulate an abundance of good literature.

  The people—what other obstacle is there to their instruction?

  Their destitution.

  When then will the people be educated?

  When they have enough bread to eat, when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous pens and tongues to deceive them and instead identify their own interests with those of the people.

  When will this be?

  Never.

  What other obstacles are there to the achievement of freedom?

  The war at home and abroad.

  By what means can the foreign war be ended?

  By placing republican generals at the head of our armies and by punishing those who have betrayed us.

  How can we end the civil war?

  By punishing traitors and conspirators, especially those deputies and administrators who are to blame; by sending patriot troops under patriot leaders to cut down the aristocrats of Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, the Vendée, the Jura, and all other districts where the banner of royalism and rebellion has been raised; and by making a terrible example of all the criminals who have outraged liberty and spilled the blood of patriots.58

  In Lyon and elsewhere there were plenty of terrible examples: horrific mass executions by grapeshot fired from cannons and group drownings in the Vendée—crimes against humanity that the revolutionaries would today be called to answer for under the European human rights legislation they themselves pioneered. Robespierre had argued consistently since 1789 that in a time of revolution the end justifies the means, and even his advocates have to acknowledge that he did not flinch from the bloodiest implications of his position. In 1792 the Commune of Paris had attempted to encourage France’s second-largest city to imitate the Parisian September Massacres. A friend of Robespierre’s named Joseph Chalier had been sent to Lyon as an emissary. Well received at the municipal level, Chalier met with resistance from the department and the National Guard. He asked for reinforcement from Paris and corresponded regularly with another close friend of Robespierre’s, Léopold Renaudin. When the counterrevolution finally triumphed in Lyon in May 1793, the members of Chalier’s circle were shattered to learn that he had been executed. Afterward, Robespierre led the Committee of Public Safety’s policy of repression against the rebellious city. The siege of Lyon lasted until 6 October, and in its wake the Committee decreed mass executions and the destruction of all buildings, except the houses of the poor. “Lyon is no more,” said Robespierre. His friend and colleague Collot d’Herbois admired his turn of phrase.59 Even so, Robespierre’s stance on Lyon was not the most extreme. When Couthon and Coll
ot d’Herbois tried to convince him that there were sixty thousand individuals in Lyon who would never make good patriots unless they were forcibly resettled elsewhere in France and that even then “the generations born of them would never be entirely pure,” Robespierre resisted. He continued to insist that ordinary people—including the poor of Lyon—were intrinsically good. But to those deemed counterrevolutionary, he showed no mercy.

  THE HARVEST OF 1793 was good—it had been a very hot summer—but many of the water mills remained dry and by autumn the flour was still not ready to send to the bakers. Since June prices had risen dramatically. In Paris food was scarce, soap had tripled in price, and even Robespierre had difficulty obtaining the silk stockings he always wore (he never abandoned his knee breeches for the humbler costume of the sans-culottes). At the end of July, the Convention fixed the price of bread and other basic necessities and imposed the death penalty on anyone convicted of hoarding. To some extent, the Convention’s measures were intended to address the demands of the new best-selling newspaper, Jacques René Hébert’s foul-mouthed Père Duchesne, which had taken over as the voice of the Parisian poor from L’ami du peuple after Marat’s murder. Hébert was a leading figure in the Commune, the Jacobin Club, and the Cordelier Club. Robespierre already had reservations about him and was certainly not in favor of radical social leveling of the kind proposed by the enragés, who had been calling for price controls since the beginning of the year.

  On 2 September, the first anniversary of the horrific prison massacres, news reached Paris that counterrevolutionary rebels had surrendered the great naval base at Toulon to the British. The enemy had penetrated France. Hungry, angry Parisians, impatient with the food lines that had become their way of life, panicked. The enragés took to the streets and another insurrection was under way. The city was completely out of control for several days. On 4 September Hébert and his allies in the Commune turned popular demands for better wages and more bread into a general strike and marched on the Convention the following day. The Jacobins were persuaded to join in, though Robespierre was reluctant. He knew that—as the current president of the Convention—he was going to have to placate the angry crowd when it burst into the debating chamber.

  On 5 September, confronted once again by the mob, the Convention declared terror “the order of the day.” Even though Danton had been voted off the Committee of Public Safety, he was still powerful in the Convention. Here he faced down the enragés and carried a controversial decree to limit the city’s forty-eight sections to just two meetings per week. This ended their daily sessions (or so-called permanence) and curbed what, since 1789, had been prominent sites for popular protest. Danton also called for a “Revolutionary Army,” the ordinary people in arms to act not against food hoarders (as the enragés wanted) but against the foreign enemy. On the spot, the Convention allocated a hundred million livres (which it did not have) to provide a musket for every man in France. In this atmosphere of patriotic unity, the main instrument for enforcing the Terror on the home front was fortified: the Revolutionary Tribunal was expanded and divided into four concurrent chambers, so that it could more rapidly process a greater number of cases. Henceforth all judges and jurors were to be appointed either by the Committee of Public Safety or the larger Committee of General Security. Finally, on 17 September, the Convention passed the terrifying Law of Suspects: anyone could now be arrested and punished with death who “either by their conduct, their contacts, their words, or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny or of federalism or to be enemies of liberty.”60 Under the Law of Suspects everyone—not just foreigners, as had previously been the case—was obliged to carry a certificate of civisme, which was both an identity card and a stamp of civic virtue in one. Anyone without one of these cards could be arrested, and many thousands were.

  After the declaration on 5 September, the Terror remained France’s official regime for nine months. During this time approximately sixteen thousand people were formally condemned to death, most of them in the provinces, and many more unofficial victims died in custody or were lynched without trial.61 Nearly two thousand were executed in Lyon after the city fell to the revolutionaries. Over three and a half thousand were guillotined when the revolt in the Vendée was finally suppressed, after terrible loss of life on the battlefield and the murder of an estimated ten thousand rebels and civilians in retreat. The policy of repression worked. As autumn turned to winter, the republic’s armies were once again succeeding abroad and the federalist revolt unleashed by the fall of the Girondin faction was effectively over. In December Augustin Robespierre, still with the army in the south, sent news that the strategic port at Toulon had been recaptured at last. He was proud to tell his brother that he had gone into action with the troops and distinguished himself as a fighter.

  BETWEEN OCTOBER AND the end of 1793, 177 people were guillotined in Paris after appearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal, now under the strict control of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. The trial of Marie Antoinette came early in the Terror. When the members of the royal family were first imprisoned in the Tower, Paris’s Insurrectionary Commune took responsibility for guarding them. It was the Commune that sent Robespierre to check that all was quiet there while the September Massacres were taking place. During the summer of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety intervened. Louis XVI’s son—Louis Capet, as the republic knew him—eight years old and ill, was separated from his mother, aunt, and sister on 9 July by the committee’s decree. Marie Antoinette resisted bodily, clinging to her child and the bedpost until someone threatened to call the guard and she understood it was hopeless. Summoning all her remaining strength, she said, “My child, we are about to part. Bear in mind all I have said to you of your duties…. Never forget God who thus tries you nor your mother who loves you. Be good, patient, and kind and your father will look down from heaven and bless you.”62 Her son was dragged from the room, one of his manhandlers declaring, “Don’t be uneasy—the nation, always great and generous, will take care of his education,” before the door slammed shut.63 In the garden where the prisoners were allowed to take exercise a new fence was erected to prevent Louis Capet from seeing his family. Marie Antoinette found a chink in it and surreptitiously glimpsed her son again three weeks after their separation. He was dressed as a miniature sans-culotte, with the red cap of liberty on his head, and accompanied by a rough, abrasive tutor, a man named Anthony Simon, who was Marat’s next-door neighbor.64 The murder of his friend and patron on 13 July, just days after he took on the role of tutor, did nothing to improve Simon’s treatment of his charge. Marie Antoinette was horrified. On 2 August she was taken to the Conciergerie in anticipation of her appearance before the Revolutionary Tribunal. That same day the Commune sent her son a toy guillotine.

  The queen’s trial began on 14 October and lasted two days. During it, Hébert tried to prove that she had sexually abused her son. “Nature refuses to answer such a charge,” Marie Antoinette retorted, “but I appeal against it to the heart of every mother who hears me.”65 Robespierre was highly irritated. “That fool Hébert will make her an object of pity!” he complained.66 The prisoner did not want pity. She said, “I was a queen and you dethroned me. I was a wife, and you murdered my husband. I was a mother, and you have torn my children from me. I have nothing left but my blood—make haste to take it.” She was guillotined before noon on 16 October. Robespierre seems to have taken little interest in this gesture of bloody vengeance. When Louis XVI went past his door on the way to execution, Robespierre turned his back in awed silence. When Marie Antoinette went past, not in a closed carriage like her husband with a priest and prayer book but in an open tumbril exposed to the braying crowd, he scarcely noticed. His mind was already on the trial of the Girondin leaders, much more politically significant for him and the Revolution than the death of one distraught, grief-stricken woman who had lost everything except her Roman Catholic faith.

  The tria
l of the Girondins opened on 24 October, eight days after the queen’s execution. Robespierre had already succeeded in opposing a vote in the Convention by appel nominal, which would have resembled the protracted vote over the king’s fate, with all the deputies individually stepping up to the tribune to deliver an opinion and verdict, some of them simply pronouncing the word death, others speaking interminably long into the night for exile, imprisonment, or acquittal. Even so, he did not have complete control of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which hesitated to condemn twenty-one Girondins brought before it, among them Brissot, so long the focus of Robespierre’s hatred. “I never liked Brissot as a politician,” one contemporary remembered, “no one was ever more intoxicated by passion: but that does not prevent me from doing justice to his virtues, to his private character, to his disinterestedness, to his social qualities as a husband, a father and a friend, and as the intrepid advocate of the wretched Negroes.”67 Why did Robespierre hate him so much? Both were idealists—supporters of the people and the oppressed everywhere. But they had disagreed bitterly over whether France should go to war in 1792, disagreed again over the fate of the king, and disagreed with yet more vehemence about whether the new republic should have a federal structure to counter the disproportionate influence of Paris. Unlike the Incorruptible, Brissot had political skeletons in his closet. He had had shadowy dealings with the police under the old regime, had traveled to Britain and the United States, had involved himself in schemes to resolve the debts that brought France to the precipice of revolution. Robespierre had tried to have Brissot arrested in the course of the September Massacres, so he might be disposed of without due process. The plan failed. Just over a year later, Robespierre was more desperate than ever to ensure the death of his long-standing enemy. Brissot would have felt the same if their situations had been reversed.