Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Two days after the executions, Robespierre ceased to be president of the Convention and turned his attention to reorganizing the Police Bureau. The Committee of Public Safety agreed to increase the number of staff members under him, ordering them to work every day from eight-thirty to three-thirty and, if necessary, in the evenings, too. Despite the additional help the paperwork remained chaotic and Robespierre testily complained on 5 Messidor (23 June):

  The absence of dossiers that are mentioned but often found to have gone astray perhaps stems from the poor organization of the bureau, which means that the dossiers are not put back where they should have been.34

  He had always been fastidious. He lost his temper when he could not put his hand on the file he needed. It was a great relief when Saint-Just came back from the army in the north and took over the bureau again at the end of June. Then Robespierre could stay all day in his orderly room at the Duplays’ and Saint-Just could run around the corner and straight up the outside staircase to ask his advice if he needed it. During this period, the number of people guillotined grew steadily. The sixty-one who died on 29 Prairial set a gruesome new record. It was soon surpassed on 19 Messidor (7 July) when sixty-seven were executed and almost equaled on 21 Messidor (9 July) when a further sixty went under the guillotine. Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, was often summoned in the night to receive his orders for the next day. He said that ghosts trailed him on those dark walks, hideous ghosts appearing in defiance of the argument against clemency that Barère presented to the Convention: “It is only the dead who never come back.”35 In the month that followed, there were only four days on which fewer than twenty-eight people were executed: one of these was a décadi, a revolutionary day of rest, and another was the fifth anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The Police Bureau shared joint responsibility for this bloodshed with the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. It is impossible to know exactly how the responsibility was divided but implausible that none of it was Robespierre’s. Yet when he fell from power, those who pushed him gave not his extremism but his moderation as their reason. The atheist Vadier, for example, accused him “of having endeavored to save from the scaffold the enemies of the people and of having officiously interfered with Fouquier-Tinville to suspend the execution of conspirators.”36 Vadier may have meant the Sainte-Amaranthe family, over whom he and Robespierre allegedly quarreled, but there were perhaps others the Incorruptible also wanted to save.

  WHEN SAINT-JUST ARRIVED back in Paris and burst through the doors of the Committee of Public Safety on the night of 10 Messidor (28 June), Robespierre was immensely relieved for both personal and political reasons. Saint-Just brought exciting news. The Revolutionary Army had just won a decisive victory against the Austrian army at Fleurus in Belgium. In doing so, it had secured the road to Paris against the foreign enemy. The battle of Fleurus was the first in history to be won by the use of air surveillance: from a manned air balloon tethered to the ground by two long cables the French had been able to observe the enemy’s tactics from on high. The Committee of Public Safety received Saint-Just’s news nervously. Recently it had had to move to a new room on the top floor of the Tuileries palace, so that its violent disputes could not be overheard if the windows were opened because of the stifling summer heat.37 It was a war government. Once the war was won, there were sure to be calls for a return to constitutional government. Back in 1791, an air balloon trailing tricolor ribbons above Paris had announced the inauguration of the ill-fated constitutional monarchy. Many in the Convention now thought the air balloon floating over the battle of Fleurus should herald the institution of the long-postponed republican constitution of 1793. Robespierre, for all his differences with his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, did not want to see the war government disbanded until all the internal, as well as the external, enemies of the Revolution had been dealt with. In this he was supported by his friends in the Commune and Jacobin Club and by Saint-Just and Couthon on the Committee of Public Safety.

  It was at the Jacobins that Robespierre had always been surest of himself. There on 21 Messidor (9 July) he tried to define patriotism—the heart of virtue and the cornerstone of the dream republic he was still fighting for. His fatigue and disillusionment showed in his speech. “There are few generous men who love virtue for itself and ardently desire the happiness of the people,” he admitted with resignation, obviously numbering himself among the few.38 Reaching imaginatively back to the beginning of the Revolution, he recalled that Necker, Louis XVI’s chief minister, with whom he had once been invited to dine at Versailles, was a tyrant in his own home. Nothing astonishing there—a man who lacks public virtue cannot have private virtue either, remarked the Incorruptible. Similarly the Girondin minister Roland, married to that pretty woman so much younger than himself, displayed the kind of false virtue that Robespierre considered “diametrically opposed to heroism and humanity.”39 Then there was Hébert secretly trying to destroy the liberty of France, and the moderate Dantonists endangering the safety of the Revolution. Now there was a new plot against the revolutionary government and tribunal, which the Jacobins must alert the Convention to.

  Robespierre was terribly tired. He urged the Jacobins to be suspicious, to hold fast to their principles, to fight on against the Revolution’s internal enemies, so pernicious and yet so hard to identify. “It is necessary always to return to these principles: public virtue and supreme justice are the two sovereign laws under which all those charged with the interests of the country must bow.”40 His words and themes were what they had always been, but much of the vigor was gone. Did any of the Jacobins still bother about Necker or Roland? Why did Robespierre think their names might stir his audience when so many terrible things had happened since the fall of the monarchy? Everyone knew he had more immediate enemies now, and the time was fast approaching when he must move against them or die at their hands. “I will name them when I must,” he had told the Convention weeks before. The confrontation was long overdue, and still he continued with swirling abstractions, first principles, the public expression of his own private conscience, his pride, and his purity.

  The twenty-sixth of Messidor (14 July) marked the fifth anniversary of the Bastille’s fall. How would Paris—traumatized, frightened, disillusioned—celebrate? Some of the city’s sections organised fraternal banquets (repas fraternels), simple communal meals—“a bit of cold beef, a plate of haricots verts, and a salad”—consumed in the street on the warm, bright summer evening.41 A number of Robespierre’s closest associates saw no harm in these alfresco meals: François Hanriot, his friend in charge of the National Guard, Martial Joseph Armand Herman, his friend on the Revolutionary Tribunal, and Claude Payan, his friend in the city’s Commune, all took part in them. Robespierre did not. He celebrated the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall by attending the Jacobins, as usual, and trying for the second time to denounce Fouché. Here he was as sure as ever of acting impartially for the public good: “I begin with the declaration that the individual Fouché interests me not at all.” What, he asked, was Fouché afraid of? “Is it perhaps the eyes and ears of the people? Is it perhaps that his wretched face proves him too clearly the author of a crime?”42 What crime did Robespierre mean? He specified it only in vague terms at the very end of his speech: “These men have used the Terror to force patriots to keep silent; they have put patriots in prison because they dared break their silence. This is the crime of which I accuse Fouché.”43 This was enough for the Jacobins, and they immediately expelled the ferocious promoter of de-Christianization whom Robespierre so hated.

  Two days later he criticized the fraternal banquets, reminding the Jacobins that the time for fraternity had not arrived when so many internal enemies still remained. Those who called for an end to revolutionary government in the wake of the battle of Fleurus were false patriots, since Robespierre was convinced the banquets and conspiracies were closely linked. Together beneath the clear blue sky at the Festi
val of the Supreme Being, the people had been united, grand, sublime. But divided into little groups, seated around trestle tables, they were vulnerable to the schemes of intriguers: “How indeed could one mistrust a man with whom one has drunk from the same cup, on whose lips one has encountered the language of patriotism?”44 Even at this point in the Revolution, the shattered symbolism of the Catholic Mass retained enough power to make it worth fighting over. Robespierre asked the Jacobins to consider whether those who drank from one cup at the fraternal banquets were sincere in expressing unity with the people. “Share my fear,” he had urged the Jacobins in the past. Now he tried asking them again. His associates who had misread the signs and participated in the banquets wrote groveling letters excusing themselves: “Judge, judge what I must suffer at the thought of having involuntarily contributed to placing those instruments of mischief in the hands of our enemies,” wrote one abject member of the Revolutionary Tribunal.45

  Soon after, another member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Joachim Vilate, who had given Robespierre breakfast on the morning of the Festival of the Supreme Being, allegedly made a list of those whom the Incorruptible planned to proscribe. It had supposedly been dictated by Bertrand Barère, Robespierre’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety—why is a mystery. Even more of a mystery is why Vilate left the list lying on a desk in his charming apartment in the Pavilion de Flore, overlooking the Tuileries gardens, where the trees that shed their leaves early in the year the monarchy fell now sweltered in the heat. The list was still there a few days later on 3 Thermidor (21 July) when the Committee of General Security arrested Vilate. The list is lost, but the names of Fouché, Tallien, Vadier, and other members of the Convention probably figured on it. By now there were no walls thick enough, no rooms sufficiently high or soundproof, to conceal the personal and political differences tearing the Convention and its two committees apart. Saint-Just and Barère tried to act as peacemakers. Twice they convened joint meetings of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. Robespierre, now practically a recluse, except when at the Jacobins, went to the second of these meetings, on 5 Thermidor (23 July). He was cold and reserved—nothing new—but left his friends and enemies alike with the impression that he was prepared to compromise, that some headway had been made toward uniting the two committees. But he never did compromise. In his thirty-six years there are no examples, except, just possibly, when he agreed to the death of Danton. Compromise, to Robespierre, was corruption—the betrayal of his absolute principles, the stars by which he had steered his extraordinary political career.

  After the meeting, he went off on his own. Secluded in his room above the carpentry yard, he wrote for three days and nights preparing the text of a new speech. He consulted no one, not even Saint-Just. Perhaps he was offended by the younger man’s opening to compromise inside the Committee of Public Safety, or perhaps, however close they seemed to outsiders, Robespierre had kept something back from even this, the most significant of his personal and political alliances. On the morning of 8 Thermidor (26 July) he got dressed carefully, as he always did, drank coffee, and went out for the first time in days. It was a very short distance to the Convention. There he spoke for two hours—sincerely, passionately, truthfully—explaining what he had done in the Revolution and why. Who knows if before he opened his mouth the unwelcome thought crossed his mind that it was precisely this privilege—this opportunity to defend himself before the Convention—that he and Saint-Just had denied Danton. “I am going to unveil the abuse that is bringing about the ruin of the country, the abuse that your probity alone can repress.”46 This was his familiar vocabulary. His audience had heard him say such things before. This time was going to be different:

  The French Revolution is the first to have been founded on the theory of the rights of humanity and the principles of justice. Other revolutions required nothing but ambition; ours imposes virtue. Ignorance and power absorbed the others in a new despotism; ours, emanating from justice, stands alone. The republic, led insensibly by the force of circumstance and by the struggle of the friends of liberty against continually reborn conspiracies, has slid, so to speak, through all the factions…. It has been persecuted constantly since its birth, as have the men of good faith who have fought for it. And so, to preserve the advantage of their position, the heads of the factions and their agents have been obliged to hide themselves behind the edifice of the republic…. All the deceivers have adopted, each more convincingly than the last, all the formulas and all the rallying words of patriotism.47

  Here was the problem that had driven Robespierre mad: How can you tell a sincere man in politics? When the language of those who work for the public good is so easily adopted by those who work only for themselves, who can tell a true from a false patriot? And how? Robespierre, absolutely sincerely, did not see himself as the leader of just another faction. He saw himself as one of the persecuted, someone who had fought for the republic against “tyrants, men of blood, oppressors of patriotism.”48 After his death his enemies turned the very same words against him—he became the tyrant, the man of blood, responsible for the worst excesses, if not the entire system, of the Terror. He would not have been surprised. The slipperiness of language, that great gulf between what is said and what is true, was precisely what he complained of in this last of his astonishing speeches.

  He went on to defend the actions of both the executive committees. Each had only charged people—it was the Revolutionary Tribunal, in the name of the Convention, that had actually condemned them. Quite why Robespierre thought there was a valid distinction to be made between charging and condemning people under the Law of 22 Prairial, is a difficult question to answer. He was personally implicated in passing the infamous law that transformed the Revolutionary Tribunal’s work into something still more brutally perfunctory. Was his statement pure hypocrisy? Complete self-delusion? Or did he, insanely, believe that a true patriot would have been acquitted by the Revolutionary Tribunal despite everything? By now he certainly knew that innocent people had died. The best he could come up with was to say: It was not my fault, not even the fault of the Committee I sat on, it was the fault of the Convention to which I now appeal. His strategy was not admirable, but he did think his claim was true. Moreover, he believed there was a case for continuing with the Terror: “The guilty complain of our rigor—the country, more justly, complains of our weakness.”49

  Robespierre’s was a characteristically personal speech. He spoke of the ridiculous calumnies against him: who could believe that he wanted the Convention “to cut its own throat with its own hands” and so open the bloody path to his dictatorship? “The monsters who charge me with such insanity are the real cutthroats who meditate the sacrifice of all the friends of their country.” It hurt him deeply “to become an object of terror” to the people he loved and revered:

  They [the real conspirators] call me a tyrant. If I were one, they would grovel at my feet. I would shower them with gold and they would be grateful. When the victims of their perfidy complain, they excuse themselves by saying, “Robespierre will have it so.” To the nobles they say, “He alone persecutes you.” To the patriots they say, “Robespierre protects the nobles.” To the clergy they say, “He’s the one persecuting you.” To the fanatics they say, “He’s the one who destroyed religion.” All the grievances that I have tried in vain to redress are still imputed to me: “He did all of it,” “He won’t prevent it,” “Your fate is in his hands alone.” Spies are hired and stationed in our public places to propagate these calumnies. You see them at the sittings of the Revolutionary Tribunal. You find them around the scaffold when the enemies of the people expiate their crimes—you hear them saying, “These are the unhappy victims of Robespierre.” Above all, they strive to prove that the Revolutionary Tribunal is a tribunal of blood, created and guided by me alone…. When a deputy on mission to a department is recalled, they tell him it is I who recalls him. Obliging persons have been found to attribute
to me more good than I have done in order to impute to me mischief in which I had no hand. They kindly repeat to my colleagues everything that I happened to say, and, above all, everything that I did not say. If any measure of the government was likely to displease anyone, it was I who did all, exacted all, commanded all! It was never to be forgotten that I was the dictator.50

  “You see, it is always me,” Robespierre had complained to his colleague Bertrand Barère in a bookshop earlier that year—always him whom people blamed. Why was he surprised? He identified himself with the Revolution. He had insisted over and over again, in the Estates General, the National Assembly, the Jacobins, the Commune, the Convention, and the Committee of Public Safety, that there simply was no distinction: he was the living embodiment of the eternal principles upon which the Revolution was founded. Of course people blamed him for its excesses and failures. In his own mind, Robespierre had slid (as he put it) with the Revolution past all the factions that had tried to possess it for their own corrupt purposes. He and the Revolution had remained pure, and together they had eluded all those grasping hands that sought to sully his beautiful dream of a just and virtuous democracy. Now, inevitably, he thought the time had almost come to move against the latest set of conspirators:

  You will ask who are the authors of this system of calumny [against himself]. I answer, in the first place, the Duke of York, Mr. Pitt [the British prime minister], and all the tyrants who are in arms against us. But who next? [Long, dramatic pause.] Ah! I dare not name them at this moment and in this place—I cannot bring myself to a resolution to tear away altogether the veil that covers this profound mystery of iniquity.51

  Everyone in the room had a good idea whom he meant: Fouché, Tallien, Vadier, and perhaps even Barère, among others. Not naming, but only alluding to them at this point in his speech was extremely imprudent, leaving the whole Convention to tremble with fear. Whatever did he hope to achieve by it? In his isolation, perhaps he had failed to recognize that the time for insinuation at the Convention was long since past, since none of the deputies felt safe from the tribunal. Terrified and divided, they spent their days whispering the names of the soon-to-be-proscribed along the benches. Many had stopped sleeping at home, scared of a knock on the door in the middle of the night and an arresting hand on their shoulder. Now Robespierre, last seen in the Convention on 24 Prairial, two days after the infamous law was passed, had reappeared, speaking with devastating passion, but stopping short of actually naming names. Saint-Just, hearing only at the last minute what Robespierre intended to do, probably rushed to the Convention to watch his friend bare his soul and expose both their lives. Sitting there listening, Saint-Just would have felt like putting his head in his hands in a gesture of black despair. Camille Desmoulins had once jeered at him for carrying his beautiful head about like a sacred host, but those days, too, were gone.