Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Robespierre’s speech was interrupted throughout by loud applause. Afterward it was printed and widely distributed by the Convention and the Jacobins. Three days later he retired from public view. A rumor went around that he had been poisoned. When he reappeared in March (Ventôse) he said: “Would to God that my physical strength were the equal of my moral fortitude! I might then, this very day, confound the traitors and call down national vengeance on every guilty head.”96 If his illness was genuine, if the Revolution had strained him to the breaking point, his instinct was still to turn his suffering to political advantage. He was frailer than many of the other revolutionaries—a much less powerful speaker than Danton, slower than Camille Desmoulins, more circuitous than Saint-Just—but none of them had sharper political instincts. While Robespierre was ill, or possibly pretending to be ill, Saint-Just rushed back to Paris. He reiterated the message of his friend’s widely praised speech, but, unlike the Incorruptible, he was alarmingly succinct:

  The republic is built on the ruins of everything anti-republican. There are three sins against the republic: one is to be sorry for State prisoners; another is to be opposed to the rule of virtue; and the third is to be opposed to the Terror.97

  By these criteria, the friends of Hébert and the friends of Danton were all republican sinners. As usual Saint-Just thought there was only one appropriate punishment: death.

  Robespierre had asked for a vote of confidence in the Committee of Public Safety to pursue the new enemies on his list. But the committee’s members were far from agreed on how to save the Revolution. Collot d’Herbois, for example, thought Paris could be placated by an alliance between the Jacobins and Cordeliers (now led by Hébert), if the Jacobins could be persuaded to abandon Robespierre’s censorious attitude toward extreme violence at this point. Collot was even taking up the cause of the disgraced terrorist and former representative on mission Jean Baptiste Carrier. Carrier had been in charge of the repression in Lyon and Nantes. Among other atrocities, he had instituted a new version of republican marriage, which involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them. When he heard of this, Robespierre, appalled, insisted on recalling Carrier to the capital.

  On 14 Ventôse (4 March) Carrier proposed, and Hébert seconded, a motion at the Cordeliers Club to declare a state of insurrection. The motion was carried and the club hung black crepe over its copy of the Declaration of Rights. Plans were afoot to surround the Convention and demand the expulsion of Robespierre and his allies, a repetition of the insurrection that brought down the Girondins on 2 June 1793. But Hébert’s insurrection never materialized: only two of the city’s forty-eight sections were prepared to rise. Nor did the Commune rise. There are many possible explanations. Hébert was not Danton—it is not a simple task to rouse and direct a violent crowd, even in a time of revolution. Danton had a special gift for it, something to do with his astoundingly deep, strong voice and the breadth of his physical frame. Moreover, many of the poor in Paris thought Robespierre and his allies could and would help them, which diminished the appeal of Hébert’s promises to intervene even more radically in the economy. Others were too jaded after five tumultuous years to take to the streets again. And some were too frightened of falling foul of the police in these brutal times—the centralizing Law of 14 Frimaire had done its work, and there were considerably more obstacles to insurrection now than there had been earlier in the Revolution.

  Robespierre returned to work on 22 Ventôse (12 March), along with Couthon, who had also been ill. The next day the Jacobins gave them a rapturous welcome. Seizing the moment, Robespierre immediately denounced Hébert and his faction, who were arrested later that evening on the general charge of conspiracy. Twenty of them were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal seven days later and, by application of the three-day rule, which Hébert himself had supported when it was introduced to secure the conviction of the Girondins, all but one were found guilty and sent to the guillotine. In the short interval between the arrest and trial of the Hébertistes, a delegation arrived at the bar of the Convention, including someone who sang a song of congratulation to the deputies and their Committee of Public Safety. Danton objected—he proposed that no one should be allowed to sing songs in the Convention, that such behavior was disrespectful and inappropriate. No one knew it at the time, but this uncharacteristically prim intervention was destined to be Danton’s last. There were already some signals suggesting that, after the Hébertistes, his own faction might be next to fall. But Danton still believed that the committee and tribunal he had brought into being—not to mention the Convention, which owed its existence to his part in the fall of the monarchy—would never dare strike at him.

  WHATEVER HIS PRECISE role in bringing about the downfall of the Hébertistes—his illness and absence from public life make it impossible to tell precisely—Robespierre benefited enormously from their demise. Besides the Cordelier Club, the War Ministry was the main source of Hébert’s support, and it had distributed his Père Duchesne to the troops, greatly boosting the newspaper’s circulation and influence. Carnot, Robespierre’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, had for months been working to erode the power of the War Ministry, but soon after the executions of the Hébertistes, all six of the ministries inherited from the failed constitutional monarchy were radically restructured, purged, and downgraded to commissions. On 12 Germinal (1 April) the Convention, following the committee’s recommendation, agreed to the formation of twelve new executive commissions, which Robespierre succeeded in staffing with personnel loyal to him. There were only two exceptions: the army movement commission and the finance commission. The rest were effectively under Robespierre’s control. Once again, he displayed his sharp political instincts, expanding his sphere of control through patronage. In this respect, he far surpassed his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety. Where they tended to operate as isolated individuals, carving up the committee’s great power among themselves, specializing, and working alone, Robespierre—perhaps by instinct, perhaps as a result of his experience in the Jacobin Club—relied on a loyal entourage. To an outsider, it looked like a faction. To him, it was simply a network of like-minded people he could trust.

  Another consequence of the downfall of the Hébertistes concerned the Commune. Hébert had been powerful within it and after his execution his superior, the atheist Chaumette, who had closed the Parisian churches, was arrested. At this point, Robespierre moved to remodel the Commune, specifically by doing away with the municipal elections through which its delegates were chosen by the Paris sections. In the autumn of 1792, after the collapse of the constitutional monarchy, Robespierre had exerted a powerful influence in the Commune and, despite its recent domination by the Hébertistes, he still had friends there. Some were representatives from his own Paris Section des Piques, and one was a former priest, Jacques-Claude Bernard, whom the Commune had deputed to escort the king to the guillotine; others included a clock maker, a bookseller, and a manufacturer of colored prints. Chaumette was replaced with a very close associate of Robespierre’s, Claude Payan, originally an artillery officer from Valence, who set about developing Robespierrist support inside the Commune. Payan and his brother had come to Robespierre’s attention during the federalist revolt when they played a prominent role in rallying the Jacobins of the Midi in support of the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. Payan, like Saint-Just, was almost ten years younger than Robespierre. An ardent believer in the power of propaganda, he began a paper, the Antifédéraliste, which became the Committee of Public Safety’s official publication. An ardent moralist as well, he hoped Robespierre would “centralize public opinion and make it uniform.”98

  There were also changes to the National Guard that indirectly benefited Robespierre after the fall of the Hébertistes. The sans-culottes’ Revolutionary Army (one of the instruments of the Terror which Danton had first suggested in April 1793) was disbanded on 7 Germinal (27 March) following the execution of its commander in chie
f as an Hébertist. Its all-important artillery units, however, were kept intact and added to those already under the control of François Hanriot, head of the National Guard and Robespierre’s close friend. Hanriot had previously displayed his loyalty to the Jacobin faction in the Convention when he used his troops to surround the Tuileries and arrest the Girondin deputies. Now, with the artillery units under his command, Hanriot had even more power at his disposal; he effectively controlled the armed forces of Paris.

  ON THE EVENING of 2 Germinal (22 March), Robespierre retraced his steps to the Marais Quarter, where he had lived his first two years in Paris. He went to a dinner at which Danton was also a guest. Robespierre seemed silent and agitated. Bold as ever, Danton asked him directly why there were still so many victims of the Terror: “Royalists and conspirators I can understand, but what about those who are innocent?” “And who says anyone innocent has perished?” Robespierre retorted coldly.99 Danton asked if they could put aside their private differences and think instead of the future of France. He should have known that the Incorruptible already thought of nothing else. If the reports of what passed between them are accurate, Danton tried to talk candidly to Robespierre, tried, as he often did in both his personal and his political life, to compromise. But Robespierre never favored compromise. His principles were paramount; everything, even his conscience, had to be tailored to fit them. To him, the idea that he and Danton were similar kinds of men who might mutually agree to set their differences aside was anathema. “At this moment, I am you,” Robespierre had written when Danton’s wife died. A little over a year later, there was no trace of identification left. “I suppose that a man of your moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment,” he said sarcastically to Danton. “And I suppose that you would be annoyed if none did,” came the cutting reply. Robespierre got up and left. Danton’s eyes filled with tears.100

  Later that evening Robespierre allowed the committee to add Danton’s name to the list of the proscribed. Before he had violently opposed that action; now he agreed. His signature on the warrant for the arrest of Danton and his followers is the smallest: eleven tiny tight letters and half a neat line underlining them—emphatic or perhaps just resigned. Robespierre could lose his temper. He had lost it with Camille and now he had lost it with Danton. But he was not the kind to send people to the guillotine just because he was angry. He had reached the firm conclusion that his vision of the republic and the conditions for its survival had parted company with Danton’s. Soon afterward, Camille went around to the Duplay household but soon came back to the flat he and Lucile still lived in, upstairs from Danton. “I am done for,” he said. “I have been to call on Robespierre, and he has refused to see me.”101 There were still people loyal to Danton in the Convention and throughout the city. One of them came to tell him the warrant had been signed and he must flee to avoid arrest. Allegedly, he refused, saying, “One does not take one’s country with one on the soles of one’s boots,” a poignant remark from someone who had his own understanding of patriotism.102 Danton’s patriotism was every bit as passionate as Robespierre’s—but fatally different in other respects. He kept repeating over and over, “They will not touch me.”103

  Danton was wrong. He was arrested in the middle of the night after a joint meeting of the Committee of Public Safety and the larger but less powerful Committee of General Security. Camille Desmoulins, Fabre, and other close associates of Danton’s were also arrested. They were placed in solitary confinement in the Luxembourg jail, very close to the Cordeliers Club and the building in which Danton and Camille had lived since 1789. As Danton arrived, another inmate, Thomas Paine, famous author of The Rights of Man, came up to greet him. Paine had made a distinguished contribution to both British politics and the American Revolution. He had come to Paris hoping for similar success, but after befriending the Girondins he had landed in prison. Danton’s English was better than Paine’s French. He said, “Mr. Paine, you have had the happiness of pleading in your country a cause which I shall no longer plead in mine.”104

  In the Convention the next morning, Saint-Just read out a report against the Dantonists. He stood stiffly at the tribune, his text held motionless in one untrembling hand, while he used the other to emphasize main points with a cutting gesture that reminded his audience of the guillotine:

  If you save Danton you save a personality, someone you have known and admired; you pay respect to individual talent, but you ruin the attempt in which you have so nearly succeeded. For the sake of a man you will sacrifice all the new liberty that you are giving to the whole world.105

  He ended devastatingly with: “The words we have spoken will never be forgotten on earth.” The Convention sat in stunned silence. Saint-Just’s speech drew on a series of hurried notes that Robespierre had jotted down for him, notes that still survive and that show beyond a shadow of doubt the depth of the Incorruptible’s complicity in the attack on his former friends.106 In the wake of recent financial scandals, the evidence against Fabre was so strong that it hardly needed special corroboration. Nevertheless, Robespierre blamed Fabre for inspiring Camille Desmoulins to publish Le vieux Cordelier, implicitly repudiated his own involvement with the paper, and suggested it had been part of a counterrevolutionary plot approved by Danton. Moving on to Camille, Robespierre noted his vanity and vibrant imagination, which equipped him well for being Fabre’s and Danton’s henchman. He hesitated to add more—and this in itself suggests that Robespierre’s notes were sincere, however distorted and fantastical; he believed what he was writing.

  On Danton, he wrote much more. Danton had once been close to General Lafayette and to Mirabeau; he had associated with Barnave and the Lameth brothers (who sided with the Feuillant reactionaries when the Jacobins split after the king’s flight to Varennes); he had tried to save Brissot and the other Girondins; he had been friends with the treacherous General Dumouriez. All these liaisons looked much more suspicious in retrospect than they had at the time. But this was not the kind of distinction Robespierre’s fevered mind now made. The notes continued: Danton had set himself to imitate Fabre’s theatrical mannerisms and had made himself ridiculous by crying at the tribune and privately in Robespierre’s presence. It is true that at the end of their last meeting, Danton’s eyes filled with tears—how haunted by those tears Robespierre must have been to explain them away in such an extraordinary manner. Moreover, Robespierre went on, Danton’s reputation for patriotism was unwarranted. He had played no part in the rising that ended the monarchy on 10 August 1792, having left Paris for Arcis before it, and on the night itself he had to be dragged from his bed to attend the meeting of his section. In fact, Danton had been in the street that night and had sanctioned murder on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville; afterward he had been to the front line and seen blood flowing. Now Robespierre, who had never personally participated in revolutionary violence, reproached him with physical cowardice. He also accused him of being fat, lecherous, and indolent. There was bile and a touch of madness in this document—even Saint-Just could see that only bits of it could be incorporated into the official report.

  After Saint-Just’s speech, one of the deputies broke the silence in the Convention by proposing that Danton should be heard at the bar. Robespierre moved at once to prevent this, arguing that it would be tantamount to granting Danton a privilege because of who he was. The Revolution, Robespierre insisted, was not about men, it was about principles. Danton must be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal as an ordinary prisoner and not given a special opportunity to defend himself before the Convention: “No! We want no privileges! No! We want no idols!”

  I must add here that a particular duty is imposed on me to defend the purity of principles against the designs of intrigue. For they have tried to frighten me as well: they wanted me to think that if Danton were in danger, the menace would reach me, too. They represented him to me as a man to whom I ought to adhere—as a shield that could defend me, a rampart without which I would be exposed
to the darts of my enemies. I have been written to—Danton’s friends have sent me letters, they have persecuted me with their speeches. They thought the memory of an old friendship, former faith in feigned virtues, would induce me to slacken my zeal and my passion for liberty. Well, I declare that not one of these motives has made an impression on me. I declare that, were it true that Danton’s dangers were to become my own, that if they were to cause the aristocracy to take another step toward seizing me, I would not look upon that circumstance as a public calamity. What are dangers to me? My life belongs to my country, my heart is free of fear, and if I died it would be without reproach and ignominy.107

  Long and rapturous applause followed Robespierre’s intervention. His speech was masterful, preaching the rigid application of impersonal principles, but in the distinctively self-referential rhetorical style that he had refined to perfection over the last five years. No one else spoke so insistently, so predictably, or so protractedly about himself in the Revolution. Yet no one else could have been relied upon to put his personal feelings aside with Robespierre’s relentless commitment to what he believed was the common good. No friendship, no bribe, no pleasure, no pain could deflect him from pursuing what he saw as the people’s cause. It is true that Danton’s friends had written to him. Lucile Desmoulins’s mother had even asked him to remember the joy he had felt holding his godson Horace on his knee.108 Surely Robespierre would intervene to save Danton and Camille so they could return to their families? But it was on his ability to scrupulously set aside such feelings that the Incorruptible prided himself. He could speak about himself so often because he identified so completely with the Revolution—the two were not separate in his mind. Even more peculiarly, he was surrounded by others who also believed in this coincidence of Robespierre and the Revolution. It helped that his incorruptibility was genuine, not a fraudulent facade. Had he been implicated in a financial scandal (like Danton or Fabre), taken a bribe, indulged a streak of personal perversity (as Carrier had in Nantes), or even just been spotted, like Mirabeau, with a couple of prostitutes in the Palais-Royal gardens, Robespierre’s career would have disintegrated. The strange combination of his self-centered rhetoric, clean living, clear principles, and passionate political commitment made him seem like the Revolution incarnate.