Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Increasingly, Robespierre fell back on networks of patronage—friends and friends of the friends whom he already knew (or thought he knew) as pure of heart, “au courant” with his ideas, and “one of us.”22 His landlord, Maurice Duplay, for example, was appointed to the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is said that once, when Duplay returned home, Robespierre asked him what he had been doing on the tribunal that day. “I have never tried to find out, Maximilien, what you do on the Committee of Public Safety,” replied the carpenter correctly.23 Robespierre, in acknowledgment of Duplay’s irreproachability, silently shook his hand. But virtue like this was rare. Robespierre was now in a position to appoint a considerable number of public officials to administrative jobs, but he knew comparatively few people and was soon running out of candidates. Some he summoned from Arras; his prerevolutionary acquaintance Herman recommended to Robespierre another member of the Arras criminal tribunal: “I propose one Carron for your consideration…. He is a good sans-culotte republicanwhom I consider to be one of us [que je crois propre à être avec nous].24 Robespierre’s printer, Léopold Nicolas, the Duplays’ doctor, Souberbielle, and even their grocer also found themselves appointed to the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Duplays’ next-door neighbors at 365 rue Saint-Honoré proved another source of loyal personnel. Here lodged a hat merchant, Louis Emery, and a manufacturer, Didier Fillion, who were closely linked to a faction of Lyonnais Jacobins, the Friends of Chalier, with whom Robespierre had been connected since his friend Joseph Chalier was executed during the revolt in Lyon in 1793. Robespierre ended up appointing some members of this group to administrative jobs in Paris. The fact that a provincial faction gained such influence with him highlights the essentially domestic nature of his patronage networks. Politically, he relied on those he thought he could judge instinctively, and unsurprisingly they turned out to be his friends, his neighbors, the friends of his neighbors, and so on. At the end of one of Robespierre’s lists of potential candidates for appointment or promotion there is Saint-Just’s brother-in-law, described as “energetic, patriotic, pure, enlightened.”25 These were the personal attributes the Incorruptible most admired. To hostile eyes, his appointments look nepotistic, his values empty excuses for promoting friends and acquaintances to positions of power. To him, this seemed the only way of finding upright, trustworthy patriots for all the urgent jobs that needed doing. He wanted to surround himself with people who believed as he did that “duty comes first when it comes to serving the republic.”26 But his labors in the Police Bureau were a daily reminder that such people were very few and far between.

  By now there were unmistakable signs that Robespierre would soon turn on the deputies in the Convention whom he considered corrupt. Two in particular stood out: Tallien and Fouché. Both had been recalled from their missions to quell the counterrevolution after perpetrating infamous atrocities, Tallien in the Vendée and Bordeaux, Fouché in Nevers and Lyon. After the successful repression of Lyon, authorized by the Committee of Public Safety, Fouché remained behind in the city. His attempts to continue and even extend the repression with new excesses of brutality had led to conflict between him and the Friends of Chalier, who thought it was time for local Lyonnais patriots to resume control. Tallien, for his part, had felt personally menaced even before the Law of 22 Prairial was passed. His mistress, Thérésa Cabarrus, a twenty-one-year-old Spanish woman who had been married to a French nobleman at the age of fifteen, had been arrested earlier in the month. Tallien had met her when he was organizing the Terror in Bordeaux, spared her life, fallen in love with her, and brought her back to Paris. In his small, fastidious handwriting, Robespierre himself had written out the warrant for Therezia’s arrest. Considering that France was at war with Spain and the revolutionaries regarded ex-nobles as intrinsically suspicious, the arrest of Tallien’s mistress may not have reflected personal animosity on Robespierre’s part. But Tallien was convinced it did. Similarly, Fouché, a militant atheist, knew he was loathed by the Incorruptible. While on mission, he had vigorously overseen the ransacking of the churches in Nivre and delighted in having the motto that Robespierre so hated, “Death is an eternal sleep,” inscribed on the cemetery gates. More recently he had dared to jeer openly at the Festival of the Supreme Being. In addition to these personal reasons for hostility toward Fouché, Robespierre was encouraged to move against him by the Friends of Chalier, who, now that Fouché had been recalled to Paris, openly hoped he might be sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined.27

  In her memoirs, Charlotte Robespierre claims that she was present during the bitter conversation between Robespierre and Fouché that took place when Fouché returned from Lyon.28 She says her brother severely reproached Fouché for all the bloodshed he had caused in the republic’s second city. Fouché trembled, went pale, and babbled excuses for his cruelty. Robespierre told him there were no excuses for the crimes he was guilty of. True, Lyon had rebelled against the National Convention, but that did not justify killing crowds of unarmed civilians with grapeshot. According to Charlotte, Robespierre and Fouché were enemies from this day. Earlier in the Revolution, Robespierre had thought Fouché a sincere patriot and stalwart democrat and had even encouraged him to court Charlotte. Too beady-eyed to be swept up in a fanciful romance, Charlotte had understood immediately that Fouché was simply hoping to further his career by aspiring to become Robespierre’s brother-in-law. So she told him coldly that the idea of marrying him was not “repugnant” to her and that she would, of course, be guided by her brother. Fouché withdrew his interest, and later Charlotte felt she and Maximilien had been equally duped by this “hypocritical, treacherous man without convictions, without morality, capable of doing anything to satisfy his wild ambition.” Her account is biased as so often, but the souring of relations between Robespierre and Fouché that she describes certainly occurred. Robespierre may have thought Fouché had gone too far in Lyon, but he himself was not innocent of the bloody repression—indeed, through his connections with the Friends of Chalier, he was seriously implicated in the city’s politics, much more so than Charlotte knew or understood.

  At the Jacobins on 23 Prairial (11 June), when the infamous law was just one day old, Robespierre indignantly denounced Fouché for preaching atheism. The next day in the Convention he warned of a new faction trying to infiltrate the Mountain. “A member of the Mountain is a pure, reasonable, sublime patriot,” he said, insisting that nothing could be worse for the country or the people than a plot to corrupt his own supporters. One deputy, Léonard Bourdon, a fervent supporter of de-Christianization, sensing that, along with Tallien, Fouché, and several others, he was being threatened without being named, interrupted to ask outright if Robespierre was calling him a scoundrel. “I demand, in the name of the country, not to be interrupted. I have not named Bourdon; shame on him who names himself.” Then Robespierre continued with words to the effect of “if the cap fits wear it,” whereupon another voice cried, “Name them!” “I will name them when it is necessary,” he replied, meaning if and when he could be sure of arresting and guillotining them. He continued speaking in vague, abstract terms about the false patriots conspiring night and day to destroy the Mountain. He appealed to the Convention for unity and called on it to support the Committee of Public Safety:

  Give us your help; do not permit anyone to come between you and us, since we are a part of you and nothing without you. Give us the strength to carry the immense burden, almost beyond human effort, that you have imposed on us.29

  Tallien interrupted to say he and another deputy had been mocked in the street: the people no longer thought of them as their representatives. Robespierre turned on him—that was not true, he retorted—but what was true was that Tallien himself was seeking to degrade and menace the Convention by endlessly threatening its members with the guillotine. According to Robespierre, he had recently said: “They want to guillotine us, but first we are going to guillotine them.”30 By this point, what members of the general public thought of the
Convention was entirely beside the point. Robespierre and Tallien were really arguing about the fact that under the Law of 22 Prairial the Convention’s three hundred or so deputies were no longer immune from arrest and execution. Robespierre had just made it clear to anyone still in doubt that Tallien’s name was on his latest list of proscriptions.

  SOME OF THE atheists and supporters of de-Christianization whom Robespierre so hated decided to try to strike him before he struck them. It was obvious that a scandal would destroy his career, established as it was on personal purity. But there were no scandals where the Incorruptible was concerned. A scandal would have to be fabricated. There was an old woman in Paris who had been arrested many times under the old regime, and even interrogated in the Bastille at one point, for describing the extraordinary visions she had. Catherine Théot had grown up a serving girl in a convent. Convinced that she was destined to be the second virginal mother of God, she prophesized the final coming of the Messiah and was still expecting to give birth to him well into her eighties. Alternatively, she predicted his sudden appearance near the Pantheon amid flashes of lightning. She was almost certainly insane, but since the Revolution her sect of devoted followers had grown—these were, after all, times of tremendous turmoil and insecurity. One of her followers was an ex-monk, Dom Gerle, who had lodged with the Duplays before Robespierre did, been a member of the National Assembly, and more recently tried to involve himself in planning the worship of the Supreme Being. Thus Dom Gerle had close links to Robespierre’s most intimate circle, and recently the Incorruptible had been instrumental in obtaining him a certificate of civisme.

  These were the raw materials from which the Incorruptible’s enemies in the Convention’s Committee of General Security tried to concoct an embarrassing scandal. That they were driven to such desperate measures is testimony to the aptness of Robespierre’s nickname. Théot was arrested on 23 Floréal (12 May), just five days after Robespierre asked the Convention, “Who commissioned you to announce to the people that God does not exist?” Then on 27 Prairial (June 15), Marc Guillaume Albert Vadier, an atheist deputy, read a report on the Théot sect (renaming it the Theos sect by a clever slip of the pen) in the Committee of General Security. Later he planned to back up the report with the news that under Théot’s mattress the police had found a letter dictated but not written by the illiterate and partially paralyzed old woman, congratulating Robespierre on all he had done—by restoring belief in God—to prepare the way for her forthcoming son, the Messiah. The timing of this report was no accident: it was three days after Robespierre had publicly menaced Tallien and Fouché. According to one account, Vadier went to the green room in the old Tuileries palace the evening before he delivered his report and announced what he intended to do the next day in the Committee of General Security. Robespierre was mortified. Unsurprisingly, a quarrel ensued, Vadier called Robespierre a tyrant, and Robespierre, with tears of anger in his eyes, said, “I’m a tyrant, am I! Well, I shall release you from my tyranny and come here no more.”31 And that was the last time he attended the Committee of Public Safety. This story is exaggerated. Robespierre remained president of the Convention until 1 Messidor (19 June) and in the following week he signed a great many documents in the Committee of Public Safety. After this he does seem to have withdrawn.32 But it is certainly true that within just a few weeks of appealing to the Convention to unite behind the committee in its awesome task of saving the republic, he effectively distanced himself from both bodies and fell back on the older sources of his political support: his friends in the Paris Commune and, of course, the Jacobins.

  Whether or not he absented himself from committee meetings, Robespierre was still a highly influential member of the government, and as such he succeeded in preventing the trial of the Théot sect. Fouquier-Tinville was sent for in the middle of the night and told by Robespierre himself that the trial was not to go ahead. The public prosecutor informed Vadier and the other conspirators that: “He, he is against it,” which can hardly have come as a surprise to them.33 What was surprising, indeed frightening, was that one man had this power to impose his will on the Convention and its Committee of General Security, even when he was personally embattled in the smaller Committee of Public Safety. Robespierre’s formidable power derived from both formal and informal sources: his reputation for patriotism, his patronage networks, revolutionary experience, official responsibilities, control of the Police Bureau, popularity at the Jacobins, and support in the Commune. But taken together these do not add up to the powers of a dictator. Nevertheless, this was how his enemies perceived him. And when he quashed the trial of the Théot sect, he did indeed appear dictatorial. Soon afterward, Robespierre’s supporter in the Commune Claude Payan wrote urging him to secure his victory over the conspirators with a denunciation of fanaticism. Payan, like Saint-Just and Robespierre, was interested in the possibility of centralizing moral as well as physical government. But these were long-term objectives. Much more pressing was the need to eliminate the faction in the Convention that had dared to strike at Robespierre.

  Two days after the atheists failed to embroil the Incorruptible in their fabricated scandal, there was a terrible scene at the guillotine, even by the standards to which Paris had become accustomed (not for nothing had the royalist abbé Maury, back in 1791, warned against depraving the people by inuring them to the sight of blood). It was now two and a half revolutionary weeks since Cécile Renault’s confused attempt to assassinate Robespierre, and the days were getting warmer with the approach of midsummer. The inhabitants of the rue Saint-Honoré must have been relieved that the guillotine was still positioned outside the city center, so they no longer had to contend with the noise and stench of the crowd accompanying the tumbrils past their doorsteps every day. As a result, Robespierre probably did not see his would-be assassin on her way to execution on 29 Prairial (17 June). She was accompanied by her father, brother, and aunt, along with a random assortment of other prisoners, all clothed in the red shirts of parricides. Before the Revolution, Robespierre had written his first essay for the Academy of Arras against the tradition of bad blood. Under the old regime, the concept of guilt by association, used to implicate a criminal’s entire family in his or her shame, had been repugnant to him. How had it lost its horror for him under the republic? No wonder people began to suspect him of wanting to become king when they saw Cécile Renault and her family go by, costumed for their execution.

  Also among the prisoners that day were three members of the outstandingly good-looking Sainte-Amaranthe family—a mother and her two children, aged nineteen and seventeen. It was unclear what their crime was. A story went around that Robespierre had been to dinner at their house, got uncharacteristically tipsy, spoken somewhat indiscreetly about his political intentions, and so had the whole family condemned to death to keep them quiet. But there is another story to set against this. Allegedly, on the night that Vadier went to the Committee of Public Safety to announce his forthcoming report on the Théot sect, he also threatened to propose the indictment of the Sainte-Amaranthe family. “You will do no such thing,” said Robespierre imperiously. “I will,” retorted Vadier. “I have plenty of evidence.” “Evidence or not, if you do so I shall attack you,” came the Incorruptible’s reply. If the first story suggests he was a ruthless tyrant, the second suggests this was exactly how his enemies wanted to make him appear. Another prisoner among the sixty-one executed in that appalling throng was the underage servant girl of someone who had once been mistress to an Hébertist. When her small body went under the guillotine there were cries of “No children!” from the crowd, whose depravity, despite everything, still knew some bounds. We will never know for sure if the 29 Prairial executions were the revenge Robespierre demanded for a supposed attempt on his life or if those actively plotting his downfall staged them against his will. His friends and his enemies can choose the version they prefer.