Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  At the same sitting the Convention approved the decree establishing worship of the Supreme Being. Article 7 outlined the festivals to be celebrated by the republic on successive décadis, or Sabbaths, occurring once every ten days:

  The Supreme Being and Nature; the human race; the French people; the benefactors of mankind; the martyrs of freedom; liberty and equality; the republic; the liberty of the world; patriotism; hatred of tyrants and traitors; truth; justice; modesty; glory and immortality; friendship; temperance; courage; good faith; heroism; impartiality; Stoicism; love; conjugal fidelity; fatherly affection; mother love; filial piety; childhood; youth; manhood; old age; misfortune; agriculture; industry; our ancestors; posterity; happiness.

  These festival plans were a straight projection of Robespierre’s own sober system of values. He saw the long-suffering ordinary people of France as modest, stoical, and oppressed by misfortune. For them, he wanted to inaugurate a democratic regime in which poverty would be honorable, not shameful, and glory more meaningful than sensual gratification. Ultimately, his model of family life was traditional: conjugal fidelity, fatherly affection, mother love, and filial piety—all the things that were missing from his own disrupted childhood. The secure foundation for his values was, as it had always been, belief in God. Earlier that year, he had been horrified to hear that the gates of cemeteries in Lyon and Nevers were being inscribed with the atheistic motto “Death is an eternal sleep.” Now, with deep gratification, he saw, as he walked through Paris, men on ladders painting in gold letters over the doors of abandoned Christian churches, article 1 of the new religion:

  The French people recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.

  Three days after delivering his momentous speech, Robespierre and Barère, his colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, were browsing in a bookshop near the Palais-Royal. The talk that day was of Louis XVI’s sister, Mme Élisabeth, who was on her way to the guillotine after nearly two years’ imprisonment in the Tower. Out in the street people were blaming Robespierre for her death, although he, in fact, had argued against it on the committee. Bitter or just despondent, he turned to his colleague and said, “You see, it is always me.”8 He had done more than anyone to identify himself wholly with the Revolution, and now that the Revolution had become the Terror, he found himself identified with that, too. The next day, 22 Floréal (11 May), he decided to make an impromptu visit to the Tower. No one knows why he went. When they heard about it, his enemies spread the rumor that he was contemplating marriage to the deceased king’s daughter, Mme Royale, and scheming to secure his tyranny over France by mixing his blood with that of the Capet dynasty. The princess left her own report of the incident, which mentions no such ludicrous designs:

  One day there came a man who I believe was Robespierre. The officers showed him great respect. His visit was a secret even to the people in the Tower, who did not know who he was; or, at least, would not tell me: he stared insolently at me, cast his eyes on my books, and, after joining the municipal officers in a search, retired.9

  Whatever he was doing, or looking for, it was typical of Robespierre to be momentarily distracted by the spines of some books. Another source claims that the princess managed to pass her distinguished visitor a note:

  My brother is ill. I have written to the Convention for permission to go take care of him. The Convention has not answered me. I repeat my request.10

  There is no record of Robespierre’s having visited the young heir to the abolished throne, Louis Capet, as he was now known. The nine-year-old boy, living in squalid solitary confinement, severely beaten for saying his prayers at night, degraded, and sick, might have touched the Incorruptible’s heart. What would Robespierre have said if he had known that Capet had been allowed to raise three canaries in his dank and lonely prison cell? If he had heard that those tamed and treasured birds were suddenly taken away because the pastime that had brightened his own childhood was considered too aristocratic for poor Capet? But no one bothered Robespierre with such details or dared ask him what was on his mind when he walked away from that terrible place, its child prisoners and abusive guards.

  THE FIRST FESTIVAL of the Supreme Being was scheduled for 20 Prairial (8 June). Amid the frenzy of preparation—revolutionary stage sets by David and music by Gossec, as usual—there were two attempts to assassinate Robespierre. Neither was very determined. In the first, on 3 Prairial (22 May), a man named Admiral hung about in the street all day, hoping to fire at Robespierre, but ended up aiming at another member of the Committee of Public Safety, Collot d’Herbois. The gun misfired and the only person injured was a locksmith who ran to help Collot. The second attempt occurred the following evening. At about nine, a sixteen-year-old girl named Cécile Renault knocked on the Duplays’ door and asked to see Robespierre. She acted very suspicious, babbled something about the old regime, and was soon arrested and found to be in possession of a knife (a fruit knife, not the kind of blade that had killed Marat). When questioned she said she had only “wanted to see what a tyrant looked like,” rather as Danton had once skipped school at the time of Louis XVI’s coronation “to see how they made a king.” Renault’s testimony was as confused and confusing as Damiens’s had been after his attempt to assassinate Louis XV back in 1757. It was not even clear that she planned on murdering Robespierre, still less what her motives for doing so might have been. A rumor went around that he had staged the whole affair to boost his popularity with the people, who loved a near martyr almost as much as they loved a real one.

  Whatever the real story was, Robespierre, who had been speaking regularly for the last four years of his imminent assassination, reacted with all the panic of someone who had narrowly escaped death. When the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, called on Robespierre at the Duplays’ later in the evening, he found him offensively dictatorial. Robespierre persuaded the Committee of Public Safety that the situation warranted recalling Saint-Just to Paris from his latest mission with the army. Such was Robespierre’s agitation that he managed to sign the document recalling his best friend twice. He also vetoed any special honors for the locksmith wounded trying to help Collot d’Herbois and made a speech in the Convention that was almost incoherent with paranoia:

  Slander, arson, poison, atheism, corruption, starvation, and murder—they [the enemies of France] have been prodigal in every sort of crime: but there still remains assassination, assassination, and again assassination.11

  Even so, he could not disguise his pleasure at being (at last) “judged worthy of the tyrant’s dagger.” Let no one say city life was less dangerous than the battlefield, “we have nothing to envy our brave brothers in arms,” he reassured himself and the other deputies, who had kept a safe distance from the front line. Later that evening the Jacobins were rapturous in their relief that Robespierre had survived. He rose to the occasion, announcing:

  I feel myself more independent than ever of the wickedness of man. The crimes of tyrants and the weapons of their assassins have rendered me freer and more formidable to the enemies of the people, my spirit is more disposed than ever to unmasking traitors and tearing off the masks with which they still dare to cover themselves…. We swear by the daggers already reddened with the blood of the Revolution’s martyrs, and recently sharpened for us, too, to exterminate every single one of the criminals who want to rob us of happiness and liberty.12

  Letters of congratulation flooded into the rue Saint-Honoré and Robespierre kept at least some of them. “Everlasting thanks to the Supreme Being, who has watched over your life!” wrote one admirer from Vesoul.13 Whether or not Robespierre staged the first or second attempt on his life (or both), no one can doubt that he turned them instantly to political advantage. Yet this does not mean that his fear was faked. “We shall never get out of our present state. I am worried to death. I am losing my mind,” he muttered in unguarded moments to his tobacconist, a pretty shopkeeper in the rue Saint-Honoré who did not matter, one way or the
other, politically.

  THE MORNING OF 20 Prairial (8 June), Whitsunday in the old Christian calendar,14 was bathed in brilliant summer sunshine, and the rest of the day was destined to be the happiest of Robespierre’s life. The citizens of Paris had decorated their houses with wreaths of oak, laurel, fresh flowers, tricolor ribbons, and flags.15 Joachim Vilate, a friend of Robespierre’s and a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal who had been given lodgings in the part of the Tuileries palace known as the Pavilion de Flore, encountered him pacing around the premises at an early hour, far too nervous to have breakfast, because the day of the first Festival of the Supreme Being had arrived. Vilate persuaded Robespierre to accompany him upstairs to try to eat something. Robespierre’s nerves stemmed from his election four days previously as president of the Convention, which meant he would officiate as a kind of high priest at the inaugural ceremony of the new religion that meant so much to him. From Vilate’s rooms there was a wonderful view of the Tuileries gardens. Robespierre, standing at the window, was awed by the crowd beginning to assemble below. He could see women with garlands of fresh-blown roses in their hair and branches of palm or laurel in their hands, men with oak leaves in their hats, and children strewing the ground with violets and myrtle. Intoxicated with joy, he said to Vilate:

  Behold the most interesting part of humanity! Here is the universe assembled before us! Nature, how sublime, how delightful thy power! How the tyrants must turn pale at the thought of this festival!16

  That same morning, the guillotine, which had been in alarmingly frequent use within earshot of the Tuileries palace (over the previous seven days alone it had executed 119 people), was tactfully moved to the site of the demolished Bastille. Afterward it was moved even farther out of the city center because the blood pooling beneath it was beginning to pollute the city’s water supply.17

  At midday, Robespierre, dressed in a sky blue coat with an immense tricolor sash, went back down into the garden, where he joined the other deputies to the Convention, similarly attired, wearing swords and plumed hats and bearing posies made of flowers and sheaves of corn. Robespierre’s posy was slightly larger than everyone else’s—it had been lovingly constructed in the Duplay household. According to Vilate, Robespierre absentmindedly left it behind on an armchair on his way down to the festival and had to go back to get it. The immense crowd listened to him give a rather vague theistic speech, beginning: “The day forever fortunate has arrived that the French people have consecrated to the Supreme Being.”18 They watched him set fire to a cardboard statue of Atheism—a hideous misshapen figure with cumbersome drapery and ass’s ears that the crowd had been puzzling over earlier in the day. From the flames another cardboard statue emerged—a representation of Wisdom—fair, majestic, and only slightly singed. After one more speech underscoring the meaning of this ceremony, they all sang a song to the Supreme Being and processed to the Champ de Mars (recently renamed the Champ de la Réunion).

  Throughout the ceremony, Robespierre could hear behind him the sarcastic and derisive comments of fellow Convention deputies who dared to snicker at the rituals in which he had invested so much thought and hope. There was nothing he could do, short of turning around and interrupting the proceedings, but afterward he complained about it bitterly. Almost the whole population of Paris, about half a million people, had turned out for the occasion. On the old Champ de Mars—where there had already been four celebrations of the fall of the Bastille, with a fifth now imminent—the assembled congregation sang patriotic songs as the deputies filed up a papiermâché mound (symbolic of the Jacobin Mountain) and took their seats beneath a tree of liberty at the summit. Cries of “Vive la République!” echoed all around, and the day ended with athletics, inspired by the festivals of ancient Greece. It must have seemed to Robespierre that the optimism of the early Revolution had been revived—a new religion, a new beginning: his tremendous personal and political struggle had not been in vain.

  The next day he drew up laws to further fortify the Revolutionary Tribunal and invented a new official category of criminals: enemies of the people, “those who, in any manner and no matter with what mask they have concealed themselves, have sought to thwart the progress of the Revolution and prevent the strengthening of the Republic.”19 Through his friend Couthon, who presented the proposals in the Convention, Robespierre recommended that the tribunal should now accept “moral proofs” against accused persons, who were no longer to be allowed advocates. Power to send people before the tribunal was to be extended (from the Committee of Public Safety and the larger Committee of General Security) to the Convention, to individual representatives on mission in the provinces, and to the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. Enemies of the people included anyone seeking to reestablish the monarchy, discredit the Convention, betray the republic, communicate with foreign enemies, interfere with food provision, shelter conspirators, speak ill of patriotism, suborn officials, mislead the people, spread false news, insult morality, deprave the public conscience, steal public property, abuse public office, or plot against the liberty, unity, and security of the state. The punishment for all these crimes was death. The proposals were passed by the Convention without the usual prior discussion in the Committee of Public Safety and became known as the Law of 22 Prairial, the climax of the Terror. The passing of this law made it possible to execute someone for declaring, “A fig for the nation,” for producing sour wine, for hoarding, for writing to or attempting to communicate with the English. From 22 Prairial (10 June) until the arrest of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (27 July), 1,376 people were guillotined in Paris. In those forty-seven days, the Revolutionary Tribunal condemned more people to death than it had done in all the months since Danton established it in March 1793. Was the bloodletting Robespierre’s fault?

  He bears direct responsibility for the Law of 22 Prairial, which was designed to both speed up and expand the Revolutionary Tribunal’s work. In this simple, technical, legal sense, his hands are covered in blood. It does not matter which, or how many, individuals he intervened personally to save at the eleventh hour. He initiated the law that menaced absolutely everyone, on the most spurious grounds and without offering recourse to any form of defense. He also played a prominent part in extending the Revolution’s agenda to include the moral regeneration of the people, and he was prepared to resort to the most drastic measures to achieve this. It was not enough to encourage patriotism—antipatriotic sentiment had to be exterminated. It was not enough to nurture moral rectitude—depravity had to be stamped out. In this way, the joyous Festival of the Supreme Being and the dreadful Law of 22 Prairial were all too compatible. Together they aimed at realizing the republic of virtue that Robespierre dreamed of. He may not have thought it likely to come about in his lifetime—he was ill, desperately anxious, anticipating assassination, in despair over the corruption silting up around him—but for him none of these were reasons to stop trying. And so he went on, not as a man like Macbeth, so steeped in a river of blood that “returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Robespierre was no cynic. He was, as Danton told the Revolutionary Tribunal, “above all, a tenacious man,” and what he held on to most tightly of all was his dream of virtue. He went on with the Terror, kept moving through that gory river, because he believed it necessary for saving the Revolution. He can be accused of insanity and inhumanity but certainly not of insincerity.

  Following the Law of 22 Prairial, there was a savage quarrel in the Committee of Public Safety; they had to shut the windows to avoid a public scandal.20 This was hardly the first big fight to erupt around the oval table in the green room. What exactly was said is unrecorded, but if Robespierre and Couthon were criticized for the manner in which they had pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial, their colleagues cannot seriously have criticized the content, which reflected common policy. The Committee of Public Safety was still an emergency wartime government; once the Terror ended and the constitution of 1793 came into effect, the committee would be annulled. All agreed that if t
his happened before sufficient measures had been taken to safeguard the republic from its internal and external enemies, all would be lost and the Revolution would have been in vain. Robespierre had taken the Terror to an extreme, but he had not departed from the basic principles from which the Committee of Public Safety drew its power. Serious clashes of personality and policy, however, fractured its unity of purpose. In particular, Robespierre clashed with Lazare Carnot, the army officer and stern patriot who was responsible for the conduct of the war. After the recapture of Toulon the main focus of the foreign war was once again the frontier with the Austrian Netherlands. Carnot’s program of mass mobilization, combined with military reforms to integrate new recruits into a coherent fighting force, were beginning to show profit. Back in Paris, however, the war was causing political conflict. In April, Carnot had called Robespierre and Saint-Just absurd dictators. He had quarreled bitterly with Saint-Just over military issues. More recently, he had dispatched artillery units loyal to Robespierre to the front line. Robespierre suspected this action was a deliberate ploy to get those who would defend him, should the need arise, out of Paris. Since there were 700,000 armed men at the front and a constant need for reinforcements, his suspicions may have been unfounded. There was no doubt, though, that Carnot was hostile to him.

  Robespierre had enemies outside the Committee of Public Safety, too. The Committee of General Security, angry at not having been consulted over the Law of 22 Prairial, began scheming to expose the Incorruptible as a dictator. Many deputies in the Convention were now frightened of being sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal—especially those who had been called back in disgrace from their provincial missions, among them Joseph Fouché and Jean Lambert Tallien, both notorious for their cruelty. Sensing so much ill feeling, Robespierre increasingly withdrew from the Convention and from meetings of the Committee of Public Safety. Instead he turned his attention to running the committee’s new Police Bureau, which he had taken over on 14 Floréal (3 May) when Saint-Just left Paris again to supervise the army in the north. Saint-Just had set up the Police Bureau one revolutionary week earlier, on 4 Floréal (23 April), an act that caused immediate friction with the Convention’s other executive committee, the Committee of General Security, which had had responsibility for policing ever since it was established in September 1792. That committee had not been pleased when the Committee of Public Safety acquired the right to issue arrest warrants back in July 1793, but it was yet more threatened by the new Police Bureau. Internal security—eradicating the insidious threat of the enemy within—had been a concern of Robespierre’s from the outset of the Revolution. Now in charge of the Police Bureau, he spent hour after hour assessing the reports of informers, sifting through the denunciations of unpatriotic enemies of the people pouring in from all over France. His small staff summarized each case for him, leaving a space in the margin for his decision. This work must have played on his worst nightmares. It forced him to confront on a daily basis the questions he found most tormenting: How could true and false patriots be distinguished? Who was more likely to look at a tree of liberty with indifference—the hypocrite or the real patriot? In some cases he dutifully asked for more information before making a decision; in others he simply authorized an arrest. For example, when the mayor of Mont-Rouge was accused of incivisme, or lack of public spirit, during the local Festival of the Supreme Being and, more specifically, of saying as he watched the celebrations, “This rabble doesn’t wear undergarments. See how they dance,” Robespierre directed: “Arrest the mayor of Mont-Rouge and have Herman interrogate him.” However, when the popular society of Valence denounced the quartermaster of the Armée des Alpes as immoral, Robespierre questioned the esprit of the society and asked for more information from his friend Payan.21