Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  But whatever the view, Robespierre’s self and the Revolution cannot be separated. It is not only historians, hostile or sympathetic, who insist on their identity. He claimed himself to represent the pure republic of virtue, and even his adversaries recognized the aptness of the sobriquet “incorruptible.” (“He would have paid someone to offer him gold, so as to be able to say that he had refused it,” one of them sneered.) His identification with the Revolution grew only closer as the Terror intensified. When Robespierre unveiled a new and perfect religion, the cult of the Supreme Being, at the public festival of the same name, he assumed the central symbolic role of high priest. And when, two days later, he initiated the infamous Law of 22 Prairial, which made summary execution the order of the day, Robespierre and the republic became one and the same tyrant. At what point exactly did the lawyer from Arras begin to believe in the image that the Revolution reflected back to him? Why did that image become so dangerously hypnotic, for him personally, for his contemporaries, and for posterity? And why is it so hard to break the spell, to understand—perhaps imperfectly, but at least clearly—who Robespierre was and what he meant?

  Fatal Purity attempts to answer these questions. It expresses neither partisan adulation nor exaggerated animosity; instead it is motivated by the open-minded interest Robespierre deserves. It tries, whenever possible, to give him the benefit of any rational doubt. It differs from what already exists on the subject in three crucial respects. Firstly, it situates Robespierre in the politics of the Revolution, without diminishing, or exaggerating, his personal importance. In this respect, I have heeded François Furet’s sagacious warning that: “There are two ways of totally misunderstanding Robespierre as a historical figure: one is to detest the man, the other is to make too much of him.”5 Unlike Furet, however, I have not approached Robespierre as the “mouthpiece” for the Revolution’s “purest and most tragic discourse,” nor do I share his view that “Robespierre’s relation to the Terror is not psychological.” Instead I have set out to show that Robespierre’s involvement in, and advocacy of, the Terror was psychologically motivated in vital respects. The political decisions he made were influenced by the kind of person he was. No matter how complex and terrible the events, individuals—their stories, characters, ambitions, and dreams—are always the most fascinating part of history.

  Secondly, I have given equal weight to the successive stages of Robespierre’s life. In doing so I have drawn sometimes on detailed scholarship focused on a particular aspect or stage of Robespierre’s career (John Hardman’s excellent reconstruction of the Incorruptible’s daily exercise of power during the Terror, for example). But my own purpose has been to follow the trajectory of Robespierre’s story in its entirety and convey this to the general reader.

  Thirdly, while I have framed his life, conventionally enough, by the cradle and the grave, I have not followed the cumbersome biographical convention of summarizing all the existing evidence. Instead I have selected carefully the incidents, anecdotes, letters, and speeches that seem to me most revealing of Robespierre’s distinctive sensibility. The result is a portrait: my interpretation, based on the evidence, of what he was like. Though Robespierre died over two hundred years ago, he still makes new friends and enemies among the living. I have tried to be his friend and to see things from his point of view. But friends, as he always suspected, can be treacherous; they have opportunities for betrayal that enemies only dream of.

  AS FAR AS it goes, the evidence about Robespierre’s life is a mass of personal, political, historical, and literary detail, some robust, some not, to be arranged on either side of the argument, for or against: you can tell the story one way, or you can tell it another, as any lawyer knows. The real challenge of explaining him arises not from any paucity of facts but from something deeper—a question of interpretation that reaches down to the roots of modern democratic politics. In 1941 one historian pleaded for a truce: “Robespierrists, anti-Robespierrists, we’ve had enough. We say, for pity’s sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was really like.”6 This is easier said than done.

  His astonishing story begins very slowly, deep in the provinces of eighteenth-century France, and only starts to pick up speed with the coming of the Revolution in 1789. Then it accelerates, like the Revolution itself, tearing wildly through ever more frightening personal and political dramas, to end abruptly beneath the guillotine, one warm day in July 1794. The rhythm of his life is a violent crescendo and its shape is extremely lopsided. He was thirty-six when he died. Volume upon volume has been written about his last five years—astounding times by anyone’s standard—but little is known about his first thirty-one years, except that they were less than remarkable.

  The town of Robespierre’s birth and ancestry offers little to balance this deficit. Wandering quiet streets, past buildings dignified by the sense that their time has come and gone, one looks in vain for an image of Arras’s most famous citizen, born there on 6 May 1758. There are no pictures of Robespierre in the shops, none in the public library, none even in the Maison Robespierre, identified as the house he lived in as a young lawyer from 1787 to 1789 by a small plaque outside the door. This rather prim stone house in the former rue des Rapporteurs (now the rue Robespierre), with its narrow shuttered windows and tall sloping roof, has been altered over the years but is still typical of those built during Arras’s eighteenth-century boom. Robespierre only rented it; he never owned a house of his own. Inside the door, finally, stands a large bust of him, but there are no reproductions of it to take away and it seems inconceivable that anyone might be so indiscreet as to pull out a camera and use it.

  The sense that Robespierre is someone to be ashamed of goes back a long way. After his death, one of his contemporaries, Jean Baptiste Dauchez, a fellow lawyer from Arras, suggested an “impenetrable curtain” should be drawn over all that had passed in the local assembly that elected Robespierre as a representative in 1789 and launched him on a career in national politics with such devastating consequences. Dauchez wanted to forget the story, wanted others not to find out. And his suggestion has been taken surprisingly seriously in Arras for over two hundred years.7 Entry to the Maison Robespierre is free, yet visitors leave feeling shortchanged, hardly any more informed about the young life of the local revolutionary no one is eager to discuss. Inside, in one corner, are three or four photocopied documents (including Robespierre’s birth certificate), a brief summary of his short life, and six tiny buttons with embroidered stag heads from an elegant waistcoat he liked to wear. Nothing more.

  From Robespierre’s later years in Paris, there is of course a wide range of portraits, engravings, and caricatures to give us some notion of what he “was really like.” There are also innumerable verbal descriptions of him in the memoirs, diaries, and letters of those who knew him more or less well. One contemporary claimed that he had the head of a cat: “But this face changed its character. At first it had the anxious but rather gentle look of the domestic cat; then the fierce look of the wild cat; and finally the ferocious look of the tiger cat.”8 There is indeed something feline in the surviving images of his face. He had big almond-shaped eyes, high-arching brows, and a long but not peculiarly large or prominent nose that continued the line of his back-sloping forehead, already exaggerated by receding hair and a short and impeccably powdered wig. According to another contemporary, “He had a sinister expression of countenance, never looked you in the face, and had a continual and unpleasant winking of the eyes.”9 He needed glasses but is only pictured wearing them in one unusually disheveled sketch, the last done in his lifetime, on the day he fell from power. At an earlier, quieter time another artist drew him with his glasses carefully balanced halfway up his forehead, far enough below the wig to avoid powder smears, looking every bit as affected as someone in a holiday snapshot with sunglasses on his head. Under the drawing are the words “green eyes, pale complexion, green striped nankeen jacket, blue waistcoat with blue stripes, white cravat striped with red.”

/>   Many allude to Robespierre’s vanity and fastidiousness about clothes. Before the Revolution he was registered as a customer in a clothing shop in Arras, but he was not rich, and his purchases there were few and modest. Political power did not diminish his preoccupation with appearance. At the height of his career he wore a beautiful sky-blue coat, more suited to the courts of the old kings of France than to a revolutionary assembly negotiating with violent mobs in the streets.10 But Robespierre would make no sartorial concessions to the times. He was particularly fond of elaborately embroidered waistcoats—an unlikely taste in a political activist who rose to power championing democracy and the rights of the poor in the face of aristocratic privilege.

  “He was five feet two or three inches tall”—not especially small by eighteenth-century standards—someone else remembered.

  He held his body stiffly upright; and walked firmly, quickly, and rather jerkily; he often clenched his hands as though by a kind of contraction of the nerves, and the same movement could be traced in his neck and shoulders, which he moved convulsively to right and left. His clothes were neat and fashionable, and his hair always carefully dressed. There was nothing remarkable about his face, which wore a rather discontented expression; his complexion was livid and bilious, his eyes dull and melancholy; whilst a frequent flickering of his eyelids was perhaps a result of the convulsive movements that I have already mentioned. He always wore green-tinted glasses. He had learnt how to give artificial softness to a voice that was naturally sharp and harsh, and to make his Artois accent sound attractive; but he never looked an honest man in the face.11

  He looked at his audience though. He carried a second pair of large-rimmed eyeglasses to fit on top of the green-tinted ones when he wanted to fix his listeners better with his feeble green eyes. He was both near-and farsighted, so everything he saw was slightly blurred. His glasses helped him focus, they filtered the harsh sunlight, and they were also props used to dramatic effect as he stood at the tribune speaking. As a fellow deputy recalled, “His delivery was slow, and his phrases so long that every time he paused and pushed his glasses up onto his forehead one might have thought that he had no more to say; but, after looking all around the Hall, he would lower his spectacles again, and add a phrase or two to sentences which were already long enough when he broke them off.”12

  For the last years of his life, Robespierre lived in a house in the rue Saint-Honoré with a Parisian furniture maker and his family, the Duplays. They adored him. Here he was surrounded by representations of himself: a little god in a domestic setting. There were many mirrors, his full-length portrait, his bust in metal or terracota, and—rumor has it—print after print of him all over the walls.13 It was the kind of shrine that Robespierre’s remaining friends would still like to have. I hope one day we get it. It would be very interesting to see what it feels like to be in a room dominated by him; to look again at all those images of him; to stand by the window and wonder what it was he saw, gazing at obsessively repeated representations of himself as the French Revolution unfurled outside the door. It is the pictures in Robespierre’s mind that are the key to his story. Two of them are more vivid than any of the others: his picture of an ideal society and his picture of himself. The Revolution superimposed the two and he believed, to the point of insanity, that he was the instrument of Providence, charged with delivering France to her exalted future. If the French were not yet worthy of such a future, it was clear to him that they must be regenerated—through virtue or terror—until they became what destiny demanded of them. And yet, even in this extreme and fanatical state of mind, he hesitated, holding something back. He knew that his ideal society was ultimately greater than himself. If his life had coincided with its birth, if he had played his part in realizing it in history, he could go tranquilly to his death, as he did, many times, in his imagination, before his body went under the guillotine.

  Part I

  Before the Revolution

  (1758–1788)

  1

  Child of Arras

  Robespierre’s story begins in the small city of Arras, in the province of Artois, in northern France. Located on the border between France and the Netherlands, Arras changed hands many times before it was firmly annexed by the French monarchy in 1659. Then the city walls were fortified and Arras settled down to a more peaceful existence as the province’s ecclesiastical and judicial center. It was known as “the city of a hundred steeples” because visitors, approaching across the surrounding fields or on the fine gravel road from the nearby town of Béthune, saw from afar the tall spires of Arras’s Gothic bell tower, the cathedral, the abbey, eleven parish churches, over twenty monasteries and convents, numerous hospices, chapels, and charitable institutions.1 Conservative piety pervaded the narrow cobbled streets like the smell of incense, as some twenty thousand men, women, and children went about their daily devotional duties.

  Robespierre’s birth in 1758 coincided with the beginning of an economic boom in Arras: work had begun to connect the eastern and western sides of the city, which were separated by a branch of the river Crinchon. There were ambitious schemes to clean the river, a seething channel of infection, and to dam or bridge the many places where it seeped insistently into the streets. There were elaborate plans to reconstruct the cathedral, which dated back to AD 687, and to renovate the abbey of Saint-Vaast, which, along with a lavish income and considerable personal power, made the bishopric of Arras an attractive post for the younger sons of France’s nobles. Alongside the new public buildings, wealthy investors commissioned new town houses several stories high, to meet growing demands for accommodation. Every Wednesday and Saturday even more people crowded inside the city walls to attend the twice-weekly markets trading in regional produce: hemp, flax, wool, soap, lace, porcelain—and especially grain.

  The grain trade was the main cause of this economic vibrancy. In the distant past Arras’s wealth had come from the beautiful tapestries that adorned Europe’s medieval castles. But while Shakespeare’s Hamlet may have immortalized these tapestries by lunging at a rat behind the arras, they were not the source of the city’s eighteenth-century wealth. Rather, local landowners, most of them nobles, had grown extremely rich from the rents on their arable land. The facades of their fine new buildings were decorated with stylized sheaves of corn signaling the source of the money that financed them. These well-to-do landowners were responsible, too, for Arras’s atmosphere of optimism and urban refinement. Paris was less than twenty-four hours away by courier.

  Behind all this prosperity there lay an onerous system of privilege by which the upper classes lived at the expense of the community, a system of taxation that placed the heaviest burden on those least capable of bearing it, outdated restrictions on manufacture and commerce, and the vestiges of feudalism, which weighed heavily on the peasants in the countryside. Along with the economy, crime thrived in Arras. The city’s three prisons were crammed full, and processions of beggars, criminals, and prostitutes were often seen leaving the city under armed guard, heading north for the house of correction in Lille.

  The de Robespierres, established in the province for over three centuries, were respectable but not noble.2 They did not own arable land, so did not benefit directly from Arras’s economic boom. The family had a coat of arms (which appears on a document of 1462), but the particle “de” included in its name indicated only that they were not manual laborers. One early record mentions Robert de Robespierre, living near Béthune in the mid–fifteenth century and working as un homme de justice. In the sixteenth century there was another Robert de Robespierre in Béthune, a grocer. His great-grandson was a notary and attorney, in Carvins, where the main branch of the family lived until the first Maximilien de Robespierre (grandfather of the revolutionary) moved to Arras as a barrister, married an innkeeper’s daughter, and through her acquired some property in the city. The first Maximilien proved canny at self-advancement. It happened that in 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender in exile,
spent six months in Arras. On his departure, he bequeathed the city a Masonic lodge, in gratitude for the hospitality he had received, and appointed Robespierre’s grandfather an official of the lodge—of all the people in Arras, he had been particularly ingratiating. Everything went well enough—though there were eight children to feed and clothe and never quite enough money for comfort. But gradually it became clear that the eldest son, the second Maximilien (father of the revolutionary), was a bit dissolute and unstable.

  Encouraged by his family to begin a novitiate with the Premonstratensians of Dommartin (a religious order founded in northern France by Saint-Norbert in the twelfth century), he gave up when he realized he had no vocation. Sent to Douai to read law, he came home to Arras to work as a barrister but almost immediately got Jacqueline Marguerite Carraut, the daughter of a local brewer in the rue Ronville, pregnant out of wedlock. The shame and scandal associated with illegitimacy in a small conservative city like Arras was considerable. Traditionally it was common for families to ostracize their wayward children or even request their imprisonment. The church was ubiquitous. Public and private libraries were full of religious texts outlining appropriate codes of spiritual and moral conduct, while the homes of nobles, bourgeois lawyers, and artisans were crammed with material objects evoking them: crucifixes, missals, and images of the life of Christ and the saints, before which a pious wife might kneel on an ornate prie-dieu.

  Robespierre was rescued just in time from the serious penalties of illegitimacy (which he would help to dismantle in the course of the Revolution) by his parents’ hasty marriage on 2 January 1758, when his mother was already five months pregnant. His paternal grandparents refused to attend the wedding. Four months later, they relented and agreed to act as witnesses at the baptism of their grandson, Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre, born on 6 May 1758 to a family whose wealth and status were declining steadily at a time when the city, in general, was flourishing. After her first son, Robespierre’s mother gave birth to a baby almost every year: two daughters, Charlotte, then Henriette, another son, Augustin, and a fifth child, who did not survive. She died on 14 July 1764 at the age of twenty-nine, an ordinary eighteenth-century woman defeated by pregnancy and childbirth. Robespierre was six.