The crisis appeared quite beyond the control of the original Committee of Public Safety, and Danton’s attempts to save France by diplomatic negotiations both with foreign powers and federalist leaders were by now utterly discredited. He and several others were thrown off the Committee; and on 27 July a new member joined it, a man who for long had played a dominant role in the affairs of the Jacobins and was now to dominate the Revolution itself.
Maximilien Robespierre was a small, thin, dogmatic man of thirty-two with thick, carefully brushed and powdered hair and a slightly pock-marked skin of a deathly greenish pallor. His grey eyes, too, had a greenish tint; and green was the shade he most often favoured in the choice of the clothes he wore with such attention to their immaculate neatness and precision of cut. He seemed extremely nervous and highly strung: he walked very fast on high-heeled shoes; a convulsive tic occasionally distorted the livid, pitted skin between his prominent cheekbones and the corners of his long thin lips; he bit his nails; he had a habit of sharply pushing his tinted spectacles up from his short-sighted eyes on to his bonily bulging brow. He rarely laughed and when he did so the sound seemed forced from him, hollow and dry. He appeared to be unremittingly conscious of his own virtues.
He came from Arras where he was born on 6 May 1758, the son of a lawyer who was himself the son and grandson of lawyers. In fact the Derobespierres, as their name was then written, had been well-known attorneys, notaries and barristers in north-eastern France for several generations, though Maximilien’s father had at first been intended for the Church. After spending some time as a novice at an abbey in Ponthieu, however, François Robespierre had decided that he had ‘no inclination for a religious life’ and, having studied law at Douai University, he joined his father’s practice. Unfortunately he had little inclination for the respectable life of an Arras lawyer either. He shamed his family by falling in love with the daughter of a brewer and by marrying her when she discovered herself to be pregnant. Maximilien was the first of the five children of this marriage.
Maximilien’s early years were fairly happy ones. His mother was kind and gentle, and his father, whose restless, unhappy nature was soothed by her devotion, prospered as a barrister. But then the death of his fifth child was quickly followed by that of the mother, and his father, overwhelmed by grief, sank into what Maximilien’s sister called his ‘odd behaviour again’. He took to drink and neglected his practice. Eventually, abandoning the children to the care of his sisters and his father-in-law, he left Arras and not long afterwards died in Germany.
At the time of his father’s departure Maximilien was eight years old. The cheerful, carefree little boy had now become quiet and grave. When he heard his mother spoken of, tears came into his eyes. He spent much of his time making lace, a craft which his mother had taught him, constructing models of farms and houses and churches, collecting pictures, showing the fruit of his careful labours to his younger sisters, anxious for their approval and praise. He was kind to these sisters. But if he joined in their games it was usually to tell them how they ought to be played; and when they asked him for one of his pet pigeons he refused to give it to them for fear that they might not look after it properly. In the end he relented. They left its cage out in a storm one night and it died. Between his tears, so Charlotte said, he poured reproaches upon the culprits for their carelessness.
At school he was a model pupil, attentive, hard-working and intelligent. And at the age of eleven he was awarded a scholarship to the famous Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Before leaving he gave his sisters all his toys. He would not give them the pigeons, though, entrusting these to someone more responsible.
In Paris his own responsibility was never in doubt. He was not one of the university’s brightest students, but there was scarcely another more conscientious, more thorough, more determined to succeed, readier to return to subjects which he felt he had not fully mastered or in which his examination results had proved disappointing.
He seems to have been a solitary student who made no intimate friends and was apparently content to spend most of his time alone in the private room with which his scholarship provided him. He was not much liked, his contemporaries resenting in particular his practice of reporting their misdemeanours to their masters. ‘He was a melancholy boy,’ one of them recalled. ‘I do not remember ever having seen him laugh.’ Even then he was excessively neat in his dress, and spent the little pocket money that was allowed him on lace cuffs and shoe buckles and on having his hair curled at the barbers.
No one who knew him then pictured him as a revolutionary. He professed – and for several years continued to profess – his belief in the King as a ‘young and wise monarch’, part of whose ‘august character’ was a ‘sacred passion for the happiness of the people’. And when the King and Queen passed by the gates of the Collège Louis-le-Grand in the summer of 1775 to be greeted by its masters and students, Maximilien Derobespierre was deputed to make the speech of welcome in Latin. He did so most respectfully, kneeling in the rain by the open door of the royal carriage while the King remained seated inside, shy and confused, not knowing what to say when the speech was finished, so saying nothing.
Yet the masters at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, who included Jean le Rond d’Alembert, a contributor to the Encyclopédie, were anxious to instil into their pupils not so much the glories of the Bourbon dynasty as the virtues of the Roman Republic and the principles of the philosophes. And Derobespierre was soon reading Rousseau’s Social Contrat with profound attention and respect. He did not care for the agnosticism of Voltaire and clung to his belief in God and the immortality of the soul. But his former observances as a good practising Catholic were now abandoned for ever.
After nine years at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, Derobespierre began to specialize in legal studies, and in June 1780, at the age of twenty-three, he received his degree. He was awarded a leaving prize of 600 livres, the highest sum ever given to a graduate of Louis-le-Grand, and with this he endeavoured to establish himself practice in Paris. But the weeks passed; no clients came to him; and within four months he was back in Arras. He rented a small house which he shared with his sister, the pretty and possessive Charlotte, and, like his father and grandfather before him, was admitted as a barrister to the Superior Council of Artois. Helped by a friend of the family who brought him his first brief, he soon established a reputation for himself as a clever, honest, fastidious young man, never greedy for large fees, anxious always to do his best for his clients, and, unlike Danton, avoiding cases in which he might be expected to propound or defend an unworthy cause.
But if he was recognized as a man who was not set upon making money, everyone who knew him realized how determined he was to make himself famous. Having won one well-publicized case, he persuaded his client to pay for the cost of having his pleadings printed. Reluctantly the client agreed, and the printed copies went off to professional colleagues, to relations and acquaintances, and to celebrated men he did not know, including Benjamin Franklin whom he addressed in his covering letter as ‘the most brilliant scholar in the universe’.
It was, however, admiration for his gifts as a writer rather than for his skill as an advocate which he principally desired. And it was in the Academy of Arras, to which he was elected in 1783, that he sought to shine even more than in the courts of law. This Academy, like similar establishments in other provincial cities, was a kind of literary and scientific club whose members read papers to each other, debated the important questions of the day, and held intellectual competitions for the winners of which occasional prizes were awarded. Derobespierre soon made himself a leading member, and within three years of his election he was appointed its director with the responsibility of presiding over meetings and making official speeches on its behalf.
By this time he had seen his work in print once more. The Academy of Metz had offered prizes for the best essays submitted on the theme of whether or not a criminal’s family should share his shame. Derobespierr
e had immediately put his eager mind to work, and had submitted an entry which had been awarded the second prize. He had spent the money he won in having an extended version of his essay printed and distributed in a booklet of sixty pages. He had also submitted an entry for a competition later set by the Academy of Amiens. This did not win a prize, but its author had had it printed and circulated all the same.
During his time as director of the Academy of Arras, when he was one of the three judges appointed to consider the entries, no prizes were awarded to any of the essays submitted in its competitions. They were, indeed, more likely to be rejected with some severe strictures upon their merits by the Academy director who, jealous as always of those whom he considered his rivals, pronounced upon one essay that it was as ill-organized as it was undeveloped; that it put forward nothing either new or useful; that it was ‘badly written and badly presented’; that its only merit was that it was short.
Derobespierre’s sister, Charlotte, described her brother’s daily life and habits at this time in a light which softens the rather harsh and disagreeable portrait others have drawn of the dapper, little, ambitious, pushing lawyer, marching so quickly and so purposefully through the cobbled streets of Arras. According to Charlotte, he woke up early and was out of bed by seven o’clock, sometimes by six. He worked for an hour or two before getting dressed, an operation which was performed with the utmost care and attention. Before putting on his coat his hair was brushed, dressed and powdered by the barber who now came to the house every morning for this purpose. After a meagre breakfast of bread and milk, he set off for the law courts, returning in time for an almost equally meagre evening meal with which he drank a little wine, and that much watered. He seems to have been almost completely uninterested in food, living mainly on bread, fruit and coffee. He had a passion for pastry, but as this gave him indigestion he could not indulge himself, and he never appeared to enjoy anything else. A fellow-guest at a dinner party said that when eating he looked like a cat lapping vinegar. Whenever Charlotte asked him what he would like for a meal he replied that he did not care.
Still, she did not find him either difficult or morose. Admittedly he was usually reserved and quiet, withdrawing to an armchair in a corner whenever other people in the room began to gossip about their neighbours or produced a pack of cards. Charlotte remembered one evening when she and her brother had been out visiting friends. On the way home he started walking at an even faster pace than usual, leaving her trailing far behind him. By the time he arrived home he had forgotten that she had been with him. He let himself into the house and settled down to work in his study. ‘I went into his study,’ Charlotte said, ‘and found him already in his dressing-gown, working very hard. He asked me with a look of some surprise where I had been to arrive back so late.’
In 1789 Robespierre, as he was beginning to call himself, was elected to the Estates General as one of the deputies for Artois. Although he was eventually to speak more than five hundred times during the life of the National Assembly and to gain wide respect as one of the shrewdest and most incorruptible men of the Left, he found it difficult at first to obtain a hearing. His voice was weak; his views unacceptable to most of his fellow-deputies; his rather self-righteous manner irritating; his habit of blinking his eyes and never looking directly at those to whom he spoke, disconcerting; his self-confidence not proof against the rowdy interruptions and catcalls with which speakers in those early days of the Assembly had to contend. ‘Monsieur de Robespierre took the floor,’ runs an account in the Courrier of one of his failures, ‘but the Assembly having shown its impatience, the honourable member withdrew with tears in his eyes.’ ‘He was interrupted again,’ according to another account describing a different occasion, ‘and, at last…he left the rostrum. The President remonstrated with the Assembly that this conduct was not fair. Monsieur de Robespierre was invited to take the rostrum once more. He did so. But whatever excellent things he might have had to say, the rude opposition he had experienced had put him off his stroke.’
When the Assembly moved to Paris, however, Robespierre’s voice was heard with greater respect and his sincerity unquestioningly admitted. ‘That man will go far,’ Mirabeau said of him. ‘He believes what he says.’ The public, too, admired him and listened to him attentively, and it was to them that his speeches were principally addressed. ‘I was always looking beyond the narrow confines of the house of legislation,’ he confessed. ‘When I spoke to the body of representatives, my aim was above all to be heard by the nation and by humanity. I wanted to arouse, and to arouse for ever in the hearts of citizens the feeling of the dignity of man.’ His only regret was that the Manège was not bigger; he would have preferred a debating chamber ‘open to twelve thousand spectators’. For, ‘under the eyes of so many witnesses neither corruption, intrigue nor perfidy would dare show themselves. Only the general will would be consulted. The voice of the nation alone would be heard’.
Robespierre’s new fame and influence in the Assembly and at the Jacobin Club made no alteration in the extreme – it seemed to some ostentatious – simplicity of his life. He still dressed with excessive neatness and was often to be seen in a smart green striped nankeen coat, a blue striped waistcoat and a crisp cravat of red and white stripes. His hair seemed more neatly brushed and carefully powdered than ever. But once his appearance had been attended to, he seemed to have little use for the generous allowance of eighteen livres a day which the deputies had voted for themselves. He shared a small third-floor apartment in the Rue Saintonge with another bachelor, and appeared to take no respite from his work except for an occasional walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, where he fed the sparrows, or a visit to the theatre where – fortunately for him since there were so many of them – he ‘liked declamatory tragedies’.
After the day of the Champ de Mars, when warrants had been issued for the arrest of several left-wing leaders, and various members of the Jacobin Club had gone into hiding, a master joiner, Maurice Duplay, who belonged to the Club, suggested that Robespierre would be safer with him than living so far away in the Rue Saintonge. So, after trying life with the Duplays for a few weeks, he moved his belongings and his beloved dog, Brount, from his apartment and settled in at 398 Rue Saint-Honoré with the Duplays who treated him as an honoured guest. Both the father and mother, as well as the three daughters who lived at home with them, tried ‘to detect in Robespierre’s eyes all his wishes,’ so one visitor thought, ‘in order to anticipate them immediately’. According to his sister, Robespierre was ‘extremely sensitive to all this kind of thing’; and it was certainly obvious to everyone who came to the house and found the Duplays’ distinguished guest sitting at the dining-table at which it was his practice always to say grace, that he greatly enjoyed the fussy attentions which were paid to him and that he was not in the least averse to having pictures of himself displayed in every room. One of the girls, Eleonore, a fat, plain girl of twenty-four, was particularly attentive. It was rumoured that they were engaged to be married, but his sister doubted this: ‘Overwhelmed with business and work as my brother was, and entirely taken up with his career,’ she asked, ‘how could he think of love or marriage?’ Indeed, Robespierre seemed to have as little interest in women as in food: some said he hated women.
There was certainly no doubt that he was preoccupied with his career. At the end of March 1790 he was elected President of the Jacobin Club and thereafter he was recognized as potentially its most influential member. He was largely instrumental in keeping it alive when so many of its members left to form the rival and more moderate Feuillant Club in protest against the petition for the King’s dethronement. And he received further acclaim both inside and outside the Jacobin Club when the military disasters of 1792 seemed to justify his early opposition to the war in which, he predicted, France would ‘be betrayed, thus defeated’. His strictures upon Brissot and the Girondins carried all the more weight because of these prescient warnings, and now that new military campaigns had to be
fought and Danton appeared to be lost in his web of ineffective diplomacy, Robespierre came forward as the man of the hour. He possessed a truly Machiavellian skill, so one of his rivals said, ‘in dividing men and sowing differences between them, of enticing others to test the ground for him and then either abandoning them or supporting them as prudence or ambition dictated’. Some held it against him that he was never to be seen when the Revolution needed journée and men and women took to the streets. The Girondins, taking note of the fact that he played no part in that momentous day of 10 August when the sans-culottes attacked the Tuileries, accused him of having hidden in a cellar. And it was also remarked that on the day the King was guillotined he remained in his sparsely furnished room in the Rue Saint-Honoré; that he asked the Duplays to close the shutters and the gates; and that he replied, when asked by the daughters why he required this to be done, ‘Because there is something that is going to take place today that it is not seemly that you should see.’ As Marat observed, ‘Robespierre avoids any group where there is unrest. He grows pale at the sight of a sabre.’ All the same, in the summer of 1793 he was recognized as being the potential saviour of revolutionary France. He was still an uninspiring orator, but there was something in his feline presence which commanded respect and defied inattention.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 21