Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  1 Frimaire (21 November), the day that Robespierre lectured the Jacobins on God, was also the day that Danton returned to Paris. No one knows exactly why: perhaps after five years at the center of the Revolution he simply could not stay away, or maybe friends in Paris persuaded him to return. As soon as he entered the Jacobin Club, Hébert tried to have him expelled. When the Girondins had tried to do the same to Robespierre in 1792, Danton had leapt to his defense. Now Robespierre returned the favor. He did so in measured terms, so it was possible to hear notes of criticism within the overarching message of support. He made a point of mentioning that Danton had misjudged the treacherous General Dumouriez (so, at the time, had Robespierre himself, but this he omitted to note). Danton had also been less than enthusiastic in pursuing Brissot and the other Girondins, his friend reminded the Jacobins, but he was definitely not a traitor. Without this carefully modulated defense, Danton might have been excluded from the Jacobins. Instead, when Robespierre concluded his speech the president of the club embraced Danton and welcomed him back amid loud applause. After this slightly stilted scene of reconciliation, Danton, Robespierre, and their old friend Camille Desmoulins joined forces against Hébert’s faction, which now dominated both the Commune and the Cordeliers Club. The Girondins had not been dead two months, but the Jacobins had already found a new enemy to fight. This time they were fighting against, not with, the Commune and the mob. Marat’s heart was swinging in its urn above the hall of the Cordeliers; it is difficult to guess which side he would have been on had he lived to see the Cordeliers turn on Danton.

  On 14 Frimaire (4 December) the Convention passed a law designed to further strengthen and centralize the revolutionary government.84 The new law made the Convention “the sole center of the impulse of government,” and it brought public power throughout the country—departments, districts, and local communes at the lowest level—under the direct control of the Committee of Public Safety. Locally elected administrators now became “national agents” and the militant surveillance committees that had sprung up nationwide to defend republican principles and enforce the Law of Suspects found themselves integrated into a newly hierarchical system of authority. The “representatives on mission” were systematically recalled and replaced with administrators rigorously vetted by the government. From this point no one, anywhere, was allowed to raise a private army, impose taxation, or deviate from national policy—the days when “representatives on mission” could act unchecked in the provinces were over. Meanwhile, popular assemblies in Paris’s forty-eight sections were suddenly answerable to the Convention over and above the municipal Commune. In effect, the Law of 14 Frimaire was an iron-fisted clamp-down on all activism that was not directly sanctioned by the Committee of Public Safety.

  Despite the draconian Law of 14 Frimaire, Camille Desmoulins set off on a new course of activism. He started a newspaper called Le vieux Cordelier (The Old Cordelier) in memory of the Cordelier Club as it had been before Hébert and his ultrarevolutionists took it over. The paper was dedicated to both Robespierre and Danton, “two friends of the editor,” and Robespierre read the proofs of the first issue, which appeared on 15 Frimaire (5 December). The paper was a call for clemency. Under the Law of Suspects, the prisons of Paris were crammed full of ordinary men and women. It was time, Camille declared in his paper, to open the prisons. Recent news from the front line was good, the republic had repelled its foreign enemies, the Terror had served its purpose—let it end. The call for clemency got a rapturous response. The crowd grabbed copies of Le vieux Cordelier as they came off the press. Camille, who had roused his audience in the Palais-Royal gardens and defined for them the meaning of the revolutionary cockade in 1789, was working his magic again, this time to end the violence he once incited so passionately. He had never been a cautious person. Feeling himself protected by both Robespierre and Danton (the latter strongly supported the move toward clemency) and emboldened by the public’s enthusiastic response to his paper, Camille went further: in issue 3 he dared to call the Revolutionary Tribunal into question and to hope complete liberty of the press might soon be restored. This time Robespierre had not seen the proofs. Issue 4, fifteen days—one and a half revolutionary weeks—later, was a direct appeal to him:

  O my dear Robespierre! It is you whom I address here…. O, my old school friend, whose eloquent discourses posterity will read! Remind yourself of the lessons of history and philosophy: love is stronger, more lasting than fear; admiration and religion are born of generosity; acts of clemency are the ladder of pride by which members of the Committee of Public Safety can elevate themselves to the sky (the Roman Tertullian tells us this); they will never reach it through paths of blood.85

  Not content with asking Robespierre to redirect the policy of the Committee of Public Safety—a dangerous and perhaps impossible undertaking—Camille went on to suggest that his friend had already publicly indicated willingness to do so. It would be wrong of him, Camille recklessly implied, to renege on such good intentions.

  It is true that on 30 Frimaire (20 December) Robespierre had raised the possibility of forming a committee of justice to examine some of the more contentious arrests under the Law of Suspects. Camille seized on this and called for something more dramatic: a committee of clemency. Let the prisons open and the Terror resolve itself in love and reconciliation. He knew he would be accused of being reactionary (or excessively moderate), so he evoked Marat, arguing unconvincingly that, at this point in the Revolution, his own extreme clemency was the equivalent of Marat’s extreme violence.86 Robespierre had already warned him obliquely to stop being “so versatile.” Robespierre’s friend the printer Léopold Nicolas had warned him, too: “Camille, you seem very close to the guillotine.”87 But Camille quipped back, “Nicolas, you seem very close to a fortune. It is only a year since you dined on baked apples, but here you are printer to the state.” He was a man of great boyish charm—seemingly still at school, wisecracking in the playground and showing off his knowledge of classical literature. His wife, Lucile, adored him. “Let him save the country in his own way,” she said, covering the mouth of a friend who was counseling caution.88

  In the Jacobin Club on 18 Nivôse (7 January), Robespierre finally lost his temper with Camille. The Jacobins, as expected, were critical of Camille’s moderation—it had nothing at all in common with Marat’s revolutionary extremism so far as they could see. Cheekily, Camille offered to burn issue 3 of Le vieux Cordelier as long as his forthcoming issue 5 was read. Robespierre apologized for him, telling the club to think of him as an unthinking child who had fallen into bad company: “There is no need to expel Camille. We will burn his pamphlet.”89 Camille, so fond of, and so good at, repartee, could not resist. “Burning is no answer,” he retorted. This, famously, was Rousseau’s response when the Parlement of Paris burned his novel Emile. Camille knew exactly what Rousseau and his works meant to Robespierre. He had quoted Rousseau against his friend once before, when they had a public tiff in 1791. It was infinitely more dangerous to do so again now. Any trace of amusement left the Incorruptible’s lips; any glimmer of indulgence in his weak green eyes disappeared instantly. He might not have been Camille’s equal at repartee, but he was much better at anger:

  What! You still try to justify your aristocratic works! Understand this, Camille, that were you not Camille there would be no indulgence for you. Your intentions are bad. Your citation: Burning is no answer! Is it applicable here?90

  Even Camille could see he had gone too far. He started to panic. Falling back on their long-standing connection, he said to Robespierre: “You criticize me here, but was I not in your home? Did I not give you my proofs to read and solicit your help and advice in the name of friendship?”91 His response could only make things worse by putting Robespierre on the defensive in front of the Jacobins. “You did not show me all your proofs; I saw only the first two. Not wishing to be involved in a quarrel of any kind, I preferred not to read the rest. If I had read them, I would have been a
ccused of dictating them.” Danton intervened to try to limit the damage. He urged Camille to accept Robespierre’s chastisement as well meant. Danton may or may not have believed in Robespierre’s good intentions, but he wanted to end the damaging standoff. It was obvious that Robespierre genuinely cared for Camille; it was equally obvious that the Incorruptible might well pride himself on sacrificing a personal friend to the Revolution. Until now, Robespierre had only sacrificed his enemies. Perhaps Danton had some inkling that this was about to change.

  The following evening Fabre d’Églantine was at the club when the discussion of Camille’s Vieux Cordelier resumed. Despite the success of his revolutionary calendar, Fabre was feeling very nervous because his involvement in a financial scandal concerning the colonial East India Company had recently become public. As Desmoulins again came under attack, Fabre got up to leave. Robespierre noticed and turned on him as well:

  As for this fellow, who never appears without a lorgnette in his hand and is so clever at expounding theatrical plots, let him explain himself here, and we will see how he comes out of it.92

  That lorgnette really irritated Robespierre. Fabre had an ostentatious habit of sitting in the Jacobins or the Convention and surveying the proceedings as though he were at the theater. Perhaps he just wanted to remind everyone that he had once been an actor denied civil status under the old regime. Robespierre—egocentrically—had another explanation. He suspected that Fabre was parodying his own habit of fixing the audience through eyeglasses that he moved up and down on his forehead while speaking at the tribune. If this was what Fabre was doing, he must have been as foolish as he was foppish, since the time when it was safe to poke fun at Robespierre had long since past. Stopped in his tracks skulking out of the club, Fabre heard cries of “Guillotine him!” and fled as the Jacobins voted to strike his name from their register.

  On 23 Nivôse (12 January) the Committee of Public Safety ordered Fabre’s arrest on charges of corruption and forgery in connection with the East India Company. The original French East India Company (Compagnie des Indes) went bankrupt in 1769 under the old regime. But it was relaunched under royal patronage in 1785 and enjoyed a lucrative trade monopoly. Early in the Revolution this monopoly was canceled in the name of liberty, but the company continued to thrive regardless. It even managed to evade the Legislative Assembly’s attempt to impose stringent taxation on transferable stock after the fall of the monarchy in 1792. In fact, the Girondin ministers had connived in this evasion, believing as they did that prosperous foreign trade was essential to the modern republic they envisaged for France. With the proscription of the Girondin deputies in June 1793, however, the company had lost its protection, and the Convention charged it with profiteering, sealed its warehouses, and forced it into liquidation. Fabre was vocal in the debates and suggested that the company’s attempts to evade taxation had been inspired by foreign enemies, Prime Minister Pitt in particular. Meanwhile a group of speculators bought up falling shares in the company, anticipating that certain interested members of the Convention would force through a decree that would cause the share price to rise before the company finally went into liquidation. Fabre managed to get himself tangled up in this scam. And through Fabre, Danton was possibly implicated.

  Fabre was thrown out of the Jacobins on 19 Nivôse (8 January), and two days later Camille was struck off too. Robespierre, having initially convinced his fellow Jacobins to opt for censure, now supported Camille’s expulsion:

  You can see in Camille’s writings revolutionary principles side by side with the maxims of a thoroughly pernicious reaction (or moderation). In one passage he raises the courage of patriots, in another he feeds the hopes of aristocrats…. He is a fantastic mixture of truth and falsehood, of statesmanship and absurdity, of sensible ideas and selfish chimerical designs. In my view, Camille and Hébert are equally wrong…. I assure all faithful members of the Mountain that victorylies within our grasp. There are only a few serpents left for us to crush. [Applause and cries of “We will crush them.”] Let us not trouble about this or that individual, but only about the country.93

  There is no reason to think Robespierre spoke in bad faith. He thought the Terror was still needed to control the threat of counterrevolution. Against the violence of Hébert and the Commune, Camille and Danton had launched a cry for clemency. Robespierre thought treading the middle ground between these two extremes more prudent. He was irritable, tired, and unwell—Camille and Fabre (for different reasons) had annoyed him—but he was capable of setting personal feelings aside to concentrate on what he believed best for the Revolution. “Let us not trouble about this or that individual, but only about the country” is a formula as admirable as it is chilling. Robespierre had no intention of defending Camille simply because he was an old school friend, which does not mean he felt easy at the looming sacrifice of his former friends. Soon after the public quarrel with Camille, he collapsed, was ill intermittently for the rest of the month, and then between 22 Pluviôse (10 February) and 22 Ventôse (12 March) scarcely left the Duplay household. In this state of nervous strain he called Saint-Just back to Paris to help him. Saint-Just had gone on mission to the army, but Robespierre’s need took precedence.

  SAINT-JUST, WHO LOVED the countryside, much preferred being sent out on mission to being cooped up in Paris pacing the short distance back and forth between the Jacobin Club and the Convention. In 1794 in the month of Nivôse (January), he went to the army of the Rhine, accompanied by his friend and fellow Jacobin Philippe Lebas, who had just married Elisabeth Duplay. This small traveling party, like the one that had accompanied Augustin Robespierre earlier in the year, managed to combine business and pleasure. Saint-Just was a charming companion, reading aloud passages from Molière and Rabelais, singing Italian arias to pass the time, and fastidiously tending to the needs of his friend’s new wife when she was coach sick. Arriving in Strasbourg, he set about punishing counterrevolutionary conspirators and taxing the rich to relieve the sufferings of the poor. The soldiers did not like him; they found him too severe, unwilling as he was to recognize any form of punishment short of death. Saint-Just’s second mission took him to Lille and its environs. Here he was even more severe, initiating draconian measures against all former nobles still living in the area. He was still away on 17 Pluviôse (5 February) when Robespierre, shortly before collapsing completely, delivered to the Convention one of the most important speeches of his life, “Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans l’administration intérieure de la République” (A Report on the Principles of Political Morality That Should Guide the Convention in the Interior Administration of the Republic).

  In this speech Robespierre developed the personal revolutionary creed that he had privately professed on the eve of his election to the Committee of Public Safety. He asked, “What is our aim?” And answered: “The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality and the reign of that eternal justice whose laws are engraved, not in marble or stone but in the hearts of every man—of the slave who forgets them and the tyrant who denies their truth.” Then he went further, outlining the kind of morality that would obtain in his ideal republic:

  In our country, we want to substitute morality for egoism, honesty for love of honor, principles for conventions, duties for decorum, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, the fear of vice for the dread of unimportance. We want to substitute pride for insolence, magna-nimity for vanity, the love of glory for the love of gold. We want to replace good company with good character, intrigue with merit, wit with genius, brilliance with truth, dull debauchery with the charm of happiness. For the pettiness of the so-called great we would substitute the full stature of humanity; in place of an easygoing, frivolous and discontented people, we would create one that is happy, powerful, and stouthearted and replace the vices and follies of the monarchy with the virtues and astounding achievements of the republic.94

  There it was, Robespierre’s vision of Fran
ce, a prim society of patriotic, uncorrupted, dedicated equals. In his republic there would be only innocent pleasures, no frivolous distractions, no debauchery. No one would value money above honor, and honor itself would be defined as personal integrity, just as Rousseau said it should be long before 1789. The problem was that even after five tense and traumatic revolutionary years, Robespierre’s dream was still a very long way off. For this reason, he explained, the Terror must continue:

  If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in a time of revolution is both virtue and terror—virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue has no power…. Terror is merely justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue and results from the application of democracy to the most pressing needs of the country.95

  In the hands of despots, Robespierre argued, terror was a weapon of oppression. But terror wielded by virtue was the refuge of the poor. Back in 1792 he had advised the Jacobins not to sponsor the development of a new kind of musket that could fire twenty rounds a minute: what might happen if aristocrats got hold of it and turned it on the people? Now he made the opposite case, arguing that the weapons of tyranny must be appropriated by the people and used in their name. Specifically, the people, so long oppressed, must seize the weapon of terror and turn it against the republic’s external and internal enemies. Robespierre had always been preoccupied with internal enemies. Since the Revolution began, however, they had multiplied dramatically; disguised and insinuating, they were not always easy to recognize, but Robespierre had been quick to spot the most prominent: General Lafayette, Mirabeau, Brissot, General Dumouriez. Now he identified the two opposing factions—Hébert’s proponents of extreme violence and Danton and Camille’s advocates of extreme indulgence—as the new internal enemies of the French people. Demanding a vote of confidence in the Convention for the Committee of Public Safety, doing its best to save the Revolution, he issued a double warning to its critics, both those who thought the committee too harsh and those who thought it not nearly harsh enough.