by Ruth Scurr
In the sentimental memoirs of his sister Charlotte, the death of their mother was the pivotal emotional crisis in Maximilien’s life. She remembered that their younger brother, Augustin, not yet two, was still away from home with a wet nurse. So as the older siblings watched the funeral preparations they were at least spared the screams of a hungry infant denied its mother’s breast. Robespierre was inconsolable in a more complex and lasting way: he treasured the memory of a gentle woman lost to her young children when they most needed her. Before she died she found time to teach him to make lace skillfully, but little else.3 Whenever he spoke of her to Charlotte later in life, his eyes always filled with tears.
Soon after their mother’s death, their father began abandoning his young and grieving family for long periods of time, sometimes reappearing briefly in Arras to borrow money and on one occasion even renouncing his own and his children’s claims on the de Robespierre estate in order to raise some ready cash. Charlotte excuses this behavior by claiming that her father was demented with grief, but it is equally likely that he was still the profligate and unstable character who had caused his own parents so much concern. Deprived of their mother and without any independent means of support, the four siblings whom grief had drawn so close together were soon to be physically separated. The two boys went to live with their maternal grandparents in the brewery, and aunts on their father’s side took in Charlotte and Henriette, who went on Sunday visits to their brothers, a few streets away across the smaller of Arras’s two market squares. The fact that these children were shared out between their relatives like an unwelcome burden did not escape Robespierre. According to Charlotte, his character underwent a complete transformation: where previously he had been boisterous, careless, lighthearted just like other children, he became serious, poised, responsible, and diligent. From this point on he joined in his siblings’ childish games only to explain or enforce the rules. He preferred solitary pursuits like building model chapels and reading. He had a small collection of pictures and engravings that he liked to arrange in exhibitions for his sisters, delighting in their admiration. He was also given some sparrows and pigeons that he raised and cherished as pets. He would place them very gently one after the other into his sisters’ cupped hands, during their visits.
Charlotte and Henriette once asked to borrow one of these birds, assuring their brother that they would care for it in their aunts’ house and return it safely the following week. Robespierre was hesitant, but they were persistent, begging, promising to look after it, so he agreed. Inevitably, the bird was left in the garden, a storm blew up, and it died. Robespierre was furious. “At the news of this death, Maximilien’s tears flowed,” Charlotte reported. “He showered us with reproaches, which we more than deserved, and vowed never again to entrust us with one of his precious pigeons.” Sixty years later, Charlotte herself recalled this timeless childhood drama, “the tragic end of the poor pigeon,” tearfully. How could her brother’s detractors imagine that his early years in Arras were spent cutting off the heads of small birds with a toy guillotine? How could they so besmirch the kind and sensitive soul, the character full of le bon naturel she had loved all her life?
Besides his bereavement and heightened sense of responsibility, it is reasonable to assume that Robespierre grew up with a vague but persistent sense of familial shame. His father came from a long line of provincial lawyers, but he had wasted his promising start in life, failed to build on the achievements of his own father, and left his sons to build their lives with appreciably fewer advantages than those he had himself enjoyed. In 1772 he disappeared for good and his children never knew where or when exactly he died. On top of the practical difficulties Robespierre faced as an orphan—the uncomfortable dependency and penury—he had three siblings to care for and his father’s reputation for irresponsibility to live down. He grew up among relatives who could scarcely utter his father’s name without regret and disappointment. Gazing out the window of his grandparents’ house in the rue Ronville, down the busy street to the Church Jean-Baptiste, he must sometimes have wished it was his mother’s more modest name, Carraut, that he was carrying forward into the unknown future, not that of his disgraced father and disappointed grandfather, Maximilien de Robespierre.
ROBESPIERRE’S FIRST SCHOOL was the local Collège d’Arras, where he went at the age of eight already having learned to read and write. Founded in the sixteenth century and richly endowed, the school had over four hundred pupils, all boys. A small number boarded at the school, but most, like Robespierre, were day pupils, the sons of the province’s professional families. One old school fellow later remembered Robespierre as “a conventional good boy,” another claimed he had a detestable character and an inordinate love of domination, but these are the trite kinds of characterization anyone might make about a distantly recalled school acquaintance. The Collège d’Arras was governed by a committee that included the bishop of Arras, the teachers were priests, and the pedagogical emphasis was on learning the rudiments of Latin. Robespierre worked hard for three years, then distinguished himself by winning a scholarship to the elite Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, whose illustrious alumni included the playwright Molière, the philosophe Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade. Here he would stay until the age of twenty-three, receiving both the rest of his schooling and vocational training in law.
The scholarship was one of four given by Arras’s abbot of Saint-Vaast, who was personally known to Robespierre’s pious aunts. Those who doubt Robespierre’s natural talents and intellect suspect that it was really these family connections—not merit or achievement—that secured him this first important opportunity. Even his sister Charlotte, whose memoirs are usually so biased in his favor, comments that of her two brothers, the elder was the less academically gifted. He was, however, far more diligent and determined to succeed than the younger Augustin. His siblings saw Robespierre off on the public coach to Paris in October 1769, deeply distraught at the parting. Robespierre cried a great deal, too, but there was already something firm and resolute in his character that helped him focus on the long road stretching out before him. In the emotional last days before he left Arras, he gave his sisters all his toys—the model chapels he had constructed, the pictures and engravings he had collected, everything with which he had amused himself as a child—except his birds, for which he found a more trustworthy home. He loved his sisters, would miss them dearly, but they had already killed one of his pigeons, and there were to be no second chances. He was not the kind of person to forget being let down by anyone.
At the time of Robespierre’s schooling, education in France was in an unusually chaotic state. In 1762, only seven years before Robespierre left Arras, the controversial Jesuit order had been expelled from its hundreds of educational establishments. Political and theological opponents of the order—the more puritan and morally severe Jansenists and other detractors who denounced the Jesuits’ loyalty to Rome as anti-French—had finally prevailed on a reluctant Louis XV to act against them. Throughout the country Jesuit school buildings, property, and facilities were suddenly deserted, the order accused of teaching dangerous theology, promoting sin, amassing wealth, and perverting young boys. The Jesuits had only a single college in Paris, but it was an important one: the large and prestigious Louis-le-Grand, founded in the mid–sixteenth century in the heart of the Latin Quarter, just across the street from the much older Sorbonne. In the administrative confusion that followed the Jesuits’ expulsion, Louis-le-Grand came under the direction of the University of Paris and was reinvented as a college particularly dedicated to the encouragement of scholarship students “whose means do not allow them to enjoy the same advantages as others.”4
Here, at least, among a throng of other scholarship students from backgrounds as modest as his own, the proud and serious young Robespierre, with his paltry wardrobe and conspicuous lack of familial wealth, would feel not wholly out of place. Twice during his time at Louis-le-Grand he had to apply to his préfet d�
��études, or director of studies, for money to buy decent clothes. Perhaps this meant he was significantly poorer than lots of the other boys, or perhaps he preferred to spend his money on books. As he tried to settle into the new school, with its austere entrance gateway, eight quadrangles, private chapel, and lecture rooms, it might have helped that the Collège d’Arras was one of a number of provincial schools recently affiliated with Louis-le-Grand, making the move to Paris a natural next step for a promising pupil from Arras. From Robespierre’s point of view, the expulsion of the Jesuits was a piece of good luck, a benign historical contingency that helped him break free from the restrictive circumstances into which he had been born.5
The year of the Jesuits’ expulsion, 1762, saw another upheaval in educational thinking with the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sensational novel Émile. Part fiction, part treatise on education, the book was almost immediately condemned by the archbishop of Paris and publicly burnt. Despite this, and perhaps in part because of it, Émile became a best seller, plunging the country into debate about the schooling of its young and all that was morally, spiritually, and politically at stake. Rousseau escaped arrest and imprisonment only by fleeing France in the middle of the night. It was the “heretical” discussion of religion in Émile that caused so much trouble. The archbishop especially objected to Rousseau’s insistence that mankind is naturally good but corrupted by society.
Rousseau was of a particularly sensitive and emotional temperament. Like Robespierre, he lost his mother prematurely, from complications following childbirth, and he spent his early childhood reading her collection of sentimental novels, before moving on to philosophy. In his own words, Émile was “merely a treatise on the original goodness of man, intended to show how vice and error, alien to his constitution, are introduced into it from outside and imperceptibly distort it.”6 His aim was to set out the kind of education that might preserve and protect the natural goodness of man from the corrupting influences of society. Thus he emphasized not formal schooling but respect for the child as a being in its own right, and the nurturing of self-worth and self-reliance. This was not a practical program of reform but a bold assertion of the influences that shape a child that remains topical to this day. “We know nothing of childhood,” Rousseau insisted.7 One reason was that people were always “looking for the man in the child, not thinking of what he is before he becomes a man.”
Rousseau’s discussions cover a wide range of topics. He opens the novel with a controversial argument for maternal breast-feeding. Even comparatively impoverished urban women like Robespierre’s mother dispatched their babies to wet nurses, usually in the countryside. Rousseau thought this ill advised and unnatural:
These gentle mothers, having got rid of their babies, devote themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town. Do they know how their children are being treated in the villages? If the nurse is at all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business. Children have been found in this position purple in the face.8
Any mother would feel panic and guilt reading this. Rousseau wanted to shake a society that seemed to him complacent in its practices, so Émile was full of clever, carefully aimed provocation. “I hate books” is an odd statement to find in a treatise on education. And some of Rousseau’s advice is so far-fetched it is ridiculous: “The only habit the child should be allowed to contract is that of having no habits.” At the center of this important book is the revolutionary idea that mankind is not the being blighted by the original sin that lies at the core of Christianity. “Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule,” he writes, “that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced.”
We do not know when Robespierre first read Rousseau. Very probably it was during his time at Louis-le-Grand. What is indisputable is that when he did he took him into his mind as a companion for life. In the Mémoires authentiques de Maximilien Robespierre, a forgery from 1830, there is an account of the young Maximilien’s pilgrimage to see the aged, isolated, persecuted author in the final years of his extremely strange life. While the source is discredited, almost no one who writes about Robespierre can simply ignore it: the apocryphal meeting with his lifelong hero, who died in 1778, is too alluring to pass over. Besides, the invented Robespierre sounds remarkably like the real one. He recalls:
I saw you during your last days, and the memory remains a source of joy and pride. I contemplated your august features and saw on them the marks of the dark disappointments to which you were condemned by the injustice of mankind. Thus I understood all the pains of a noble life dedicated to the cult of truth. They did not scare me. Awareness of having wanted the good for others is the virtuous man’s reward; next comes the recognition of those who surround his memory with the honors that his contemporaries denied him. Like you I want to purchase such goods at the price of an arduous life—even at the price of a premature death.9
The meeting might have taken place in the woods near the Parisian suburb of Ermenonville, where Rousseau went to live and think about his final book, Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker). Or indoors in an attic in the rue Plâtrière, the author bedridden, the frail student breathless from climbing the stairs, overwhelmed with emotion when he reached the top. Both scenes are fanciful, but the spell Rousseau cast over Robespierre is not. It can be traced in many different ways throughout his life. In the end its political consequences were devastating, but it began as a personal sentiment, nothing more or less than a temperamental affinity. Rousseau had a profound love of individual liberty and a fear of coercion so intense that he was almost allergic to power. Robespierre identified with the victims of injustice—those misunderstood, isolated, denied, or despised. What the two men shared was compassion for the vulnerable and a fierce censoriousness toward those less principled in their attitudes to power than they were confident of being themselves.
THE REGIME AT Louis-le-Grand gave equal attention to the moral character of the school’s charges and their academic attainment. Both objectives were pursued through a rigid daily schedule with strong emphasis on devotional duties.10 During his school days, Robespierre rose from his dormitory bed, freezing cold in winter, at 5:30 a.m., attended prayers at 6:00 a.m., Scripture study at 6:15 a.m., and Mass at 10:30 a.m. A long day of lessons was followed by more prayers and devotional readings at 8:45 p.m., after which the boys undressed for bed while listening to a reading from the life of the saint whose feast occurred the following day. They were expected to go to confession once a month, and the college brought in clergy from outside for this purpose, hoping perhaps to bolster the boys’ trust in the confidential nature of the sacrament. How did Robespierre respond to these devout routines? Some of his enemies have imagined him waging a silent bitter protest: standing with the Book of Hours in his hands, the pages resolutely unturned, refusing to pray or sing, shunning the confessional and Holy Communion. But if his own testimony can be believed, he was a more passive and conventional schoolboy. He later rated himself “a pretty poor Catholic ever since my time at college,” which suggests that, whether by force or inclination, he must still have been a practicing Catholic at school.
The pupils were effectively cloistered inside the walls of Louis-le-Grand, their contact with the exciting city of Paris outside the main gate on the rue Saint-Jacques severely limited. Earlier in the century, Rousseau had described Paris as a city of “small, dirty and stinking streets, ugly black houses, an air of filth, poverty, beggars, carters, seam-stresses, women hawking tisanes and old hats.”11 But with a population of around 600,000, Paris was the largest city in Europe after London, and it is hard to believe that the students at Louis-le-Grand felt as negatively about it as Rousseau did. The boys went on outings only infrequently and always under the strict supervision of chaperones. Aside from the clergymen brought in to hear co
nfession, the only regular visitors to the school were tailors, shoemakers, launderers, and hairdressers. Some of these could be persuaded to smuggle proscribed books, like Rousseau’s Émile, into the college, concealed inside washing baskets or under piles of mended clothes. For this reason, pupils were expressly forbidden to commission errands of any kind without official permission. Despite these strictures, soon after he arrived in Paris Robespierre managed somehow to develop a close friendship with a canon of Notre-Dame, M. Delaroche. He was a distant relative, and Robespierre’s aunts encouraged Maximilien to get in touch in hope of securing a sympathetic confidant in the big city. According to Charlotte, their relationship got off to an excellent start, with Robespierre finding a mentor in the older man and M. Delaroche discerning rare qualities in the young boy. Within two years, however, the canon was dead, and Robespierre had lost yet another adult protector. Once again, he consoled himself with the solitary pursuit of reading.
The college library where he spent so many hours was beautiful. Light streamed in through its twenty-five large windows and fell across the desks and open books. Looking up from his page, a dreamy or distracted schoolboy might grow fond of the paintings that adorned the library walls. Robespierre already loved paintings, but these were far more intriguing than any he could have owned, or perhaps even seen, in Arras. Also in the library stood two pairs of globes, made by the Italian cartographer Coronelli for Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, reminders of the immensity of the world beyond the college walls. When he wasn’t dreaming, Robespierre could choose from an impressive range of approved books. The Jesuits had begun the collection of over thirty-five thousand volumes. When they were expelled from the college, most of their books were repurchased for the library. All of them were confiscated during the Revolution when Louis-le-Grand was renamed Equality College, but the revolutionary librarian in charge of the operation was moved to acknowledge that the books were “an assortment of the best works in all fields. It is evident that the library was brought together by men of learning.” The books were later returned to the University of Paris, where they have remained ever since. The report on the confiscation also lists two old microscopes, good quality lenses, a strong magnet, a glass case for natural history specimens, and some animal horns and claws. But, in Robespierre’s day the curriculum still centered, as it had done for decades, on the classic literatures of Greece and Rome. These were what really interested him, not the newer, tentatively introduced opportunities to study experimental science.