Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  During Robespierre’s short life he lived in only two places, Arras and Paris. He was briefly in Versailles at the start of the Revolution, but otherwise there were remarkably few changes of scenery. This partially explains the high-spirited excitement with which he described a short trip to visit friends or relatives in Carvins in a letter of June 1783:

  We started at five in the morning. Our car quitted the gates of the city at precisely the same moment as the chariot of the sun sprang from the bosom of the ocean. It was adorned with a cloth of brilliant white, one portion of which floated on the breath of the zephyrs.3

  The letter continues in hyperbolic mode. Robespierre leans out to raise his hat and bestow a gracious smile on some watchmen who have been on duty all night or else are still half asleep on the early shift. They respond with surly indifference. He remarks, “I have always had an infinite self-love; that mark of contempt cut me to the quick; and for the rest of the day my temper was unbearable.” He can, it seems, laugh at himself. At Sens, while his traveling companions pause for breakfast, he avoids visiting the tourist sites and climbs a hill to survey the plains over which the Prince of Condé, still in his early twenties, led France to victory against the Spaniards in 1643. Then he rouses a porter with keys to the Hôtel de Ville. Of all the things to see in Sens—the famous cathedral where Saint Thomas à Becket spent time in exile, the Palais Synodal, with its rose windows and battlements—the Hôtel de Ville was a curious choice. The building, Robespierre notes, is neither remarkable nor grand, but he is fascinated to see where the great T——(he does not give the name), who combined the roles of judge and medical doctor, administered justice and afterward prescribed medical treatment for the criminals:

  I rush into the hall. Seized with a holy awe, I fall on my knees in this august temple and kiss with transport the seat that was formerly pressed by the rump of the great T——. It was thus that Alexander knelt at the tomb of Achilles and that Caesar paid his homage to the monument that contained the ashes of the conqueror of Asia!4

  The identity of “the great T——” is unclear, but the reason Robespierre was so impressed by him is explicit in the letter: “This great man enjoyed, by virtue of his double office, the most extensive power that a man ever exercised over his compatriots.” Achilles, Alexander, Caesar were conquering heros of a kind, but the sort of power Robespierre admired was more sophisticated and philanthropic. He was excited by the idea of intervening in the lives of criminals and sick people—making a difference for the better.

  Arriving at last at Carvins, Robespierre is immensely flattered by the interest and enthusiasm with which his party is greeted:

  How pleasant it is to travel! I said to myself. It is a great truth that one is never a prophet in one’s own land. At the gates of one’s own town one is despised; six leagues beyond it one is a personage worthy of public curiosity!5

  Robespierre is certainly sending himself up, but at the same time his florid rhetoric is an evident source of self-regarding delight. The letter also captures his readiness to suspect others of disrespecting him. The surly watchmen are a minor example, and even Robespierre could see the joke. Yet the theme of misunderstood, unrecognized, or slighted greatness haunts his early writings just as it recurs over and over again in later speeches, pamphlets, and letters. As he says in one of his poems:

  The just man’s torment, at his final hour,

  The only pang he feels—and I shall feel—

  Is the dark breath of calumny and blame

  Breathed by a grimmer ghost than death himself:

  The hate of those for whom he gives his life.6

  Law was the traditional profession of the de Robespierre family and in Arras there were still contacts and patrons to help Robespierre at the beginning of his career, despite the disrepute into which his father had fallen. While at school he had written to the head of the Paris bar for advice: “I want to be a lawyer. Of all the qualities needed for distinguishing oneself in that profession, I at least possess keen ambition and an unqualified desire for success.”7 According to Charlotte, though, Robespierre’s attraction to the law was motivated by more than familial tradition, pragmatism, or ambition: he had a personal predilection for what he believed to be the most sublime profession in the world, when practiced impartially and humanely. She remembers him saying:

  To defend the oppressed against their oppressors, to plead the cause of the weak against the strong who exploit and crush them, this is the duty of all hearts that have not been spoiled by egoism and corruption…. It is so sweet to devote oneself to one’s fellows that I do not know how there can be so many unfortunates still without support or defenders. As for me, my life’s task will be to help those who suffer and to pursue through my avenging speech those who take pleasure in the pain of others. How happy I will be if my feeble efforts are crowned with success and if, at the price of my devotion and sacrifices, my reputation is not tarnished by the crimes of the oppressors I will fight!8

  Even if it is true that Robespierre made such declarations in the privacy of his home, in front of the mirror, or in the hearing of his sister, her account was composed long after the Revolution. At the time, Robespierre’s motives for choosing the law were more likely a mixture of high-minded principle and straightforward personal ambition for ordinary things like status, respect, income, and independence. It is possible, too, that he wanted to prove to his de Robespierre relatives that he could be every bit as impressive as his grandfather had been, and considerably more so than his father ever was.

  The judicial system, like so much else in old regime France, was extremely intricate and confusing. Arras had nine separate courts and Robespierre’s work generally took him to three of them: the Conseil d’Artois (Council of Artois), the Echevinage (Magistrate’s Court), and the Salle Episcopale (Bishop’s Court). The courts met in the morning—after Mass—in expansive halls connected by dark passages and arcades: here the counts of Flanders had resided before Artois became part of France; now the walls were hung with portraits of distinguished local nobles and public officials. Illicit lovers, duelists, beggars, and criminals took refuge in the shadows, just feet away from the rooms in which justice was done. The arcades were a particularly dangerous place to be at night and the rubbish strewn about festered on hot summer days. Robespierre, adequately patronized and intent on advancement, quickly established himself in his chosen profession, losing relatively few cases. His sister claims people often asked her to explain the secret of his success. He had some natural talents: he was fluent and logical, but according to Charlotte it was his choice of cases that contributed most of all to his growing reputation. “He took on only just cases, never unjust, and he almost always won them.” He preferred to represent the poor. When opposing parties approached him, he chose to represent the poorest of them, even if it meant he might never be paid. “The supporter of the oppressed and the avenger of the innocent,” Charlotte called him, making a direct connection between the boy who protected the vulnerable at school and the young lawyer.9

  One of Robespierre’s friends in Arras was a lawyer, twenty years older, nicknamed “Barometer” Buissart on account of his keen interest in experimental science. Robespierre corresponded with Antoine Buissart and his wife throughout his political career—a fact overlooked by his detractors, who insist he was incapable of lasting friendship and eager to renounce his provincial provenance. Buissart helped to bring Robespierre his first taste of fame beyond the city walls by involving him in the legal defense of one M. de Vissery de Bois-Valé. M. de Vissery was a lawyer, painter, botanist, amateur scientist, and inventor: among the many forgotten things he invented was a technique for preserving pure water for over a year. In 1780 he designed and positioned a lightning conductor on the roof of his house at Saint-Omer. This consisted of a pointed piece of a gilded sword screwed onto a sixteen-foot iron bar, decorated with a weathercock at the join, and connected to a metal pipe running the length of the neighboring house. The neighbor complained
and a rumor spread that the conductor threatened the lives of all in its vicinity. One woman started a petition to have it removed, provoking an early example of Robespierre’s sarcasm: “Many refused the glory of associating themselves with this initiative,” he commented dryly. There were, in fact, only six or seven signatories. G. H. Lewes, one of Robespierre’s English biographers, joined him in sneering at “these obese and stupid citizens of Arras.”10 It is more charitable, though, to assume that the ordinary, provincial neighbors simply failed to understand the purpose of the eye-catching novelty on M. de Vissery’s roof. The fact that the decorative weathercock featured figurative bolts of lightning cannot have reassured those of nervous dispositions.11

  When the Magistrate’s Court decreed that the conductor must come down, M. de Vissery appealed to the higher Council of Artois, engaging Robespierre as his advocate on Buissart’s advice. Barometer Buissart himself wrote a detailed paper on the subject after seeking guidance from experts in the field, among them the distinguished philosophe the Marquis de Condorcet, then secretary to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and the future revolutionary journalist Dr. Jean-Paul Marat, a candidate for the directorship of the new Academy of Science in Madrid, known at the time for his experiments with optics and electricity. Robespierre drew heavily on Buissart’s carefully researched paper in his pleadings of 1783—science, after all, had not been his subject at school. In court, however, he gave the performance of his early career, evoking the persecution of Galileo, Harvey, and Descartes and calling on the judges to side with the forces of progress and enlightenment. Scathingly he belittled those who thought lightning conductors disturbed the peace and threatened public safety; appealing to national pride, he insisted that such instruments were already commonplace in England, and France must not lag behind. French scientists had contributed to the discovery of electricity—M. Dalibard, for example, had proved Benjamin Franklin’s theory that lightning and electricity are one and the same during an experiment at Marly-la-Ville in 1752. Ignorance must not deprive the nation of its right to benefit from scientific advances.

  Robespierre won the case and his success was reported in the Parisian newspaper Mercure de France. M. de Vissery was pleased, despite renewed threats of prosecution or vandalism by his still disquieted neighbors, and he offered to finance the publication of the pleadings to make them available for wider circulation. Robespierre gratefully accepted the offer and sent a personal copy to Franklin, who was in Paris at the time, addressing him as “one whose least merit is to be the most distinguished scientist in the world.” Franklin’s reply, if there was one, is lost.

  While the lightning conductor case shows Robespierre as an ambitious lawyer, his defense of Marie Sommerville in 1786 shows him championing the poor and oppressed. Marie Sommerville was an Englishwoman, the young widow of Colonel George Mercer, lieutenant governor of South Carolina. She had lived in Saint-Omer as a child, returned many times during her marriage, and moved back permanently after her husband’s death. Here she fell into serious debt. Unfortunately for her, the adoptive town, of which she had always been so fond, was one of a small number in the province of Artois where it was legal both to seize a debtor’s belongings and imprison him or her without a warrant, even when the debtor in question was a foreigner. Sommerville was duly taken into custody on May 24, 1786. She complained that she had been humiliatingly arrested in her own home, escorted roughly to prison, followed by a crowd of curious onlookers, and refused medication during her few days of incarceration. Robespierre argued her case flamboyantly, claiming that women should be exempt from Saint-Omer’s draconian debtors law:

  The gullibility and inexperience of their sex allow women to enter too lightly into contracts detrimental to their liberty; their weakness and sensibility render them more vulnerable to the shame and rigor of imprisonment; there is also the terrible effect imprisonment has on their natural timidity, and the fatal consequences of such treatment, especially during pregnancy—what more can I say? Women’s delicate honor is publicly, legally, irreversibly debased in the eyes of men, whose tenderness disappears along with their respect…. What compensation could there be for such inconvenience and cruelty, beyond simply expediting the payment of a civil debt?12

  Robespierre’s opponents were skeptical of his gallantry. Truth and justice, they complained, would not have required such decorative rhetoric. Allegedly, Sommerville had been spotted leaving prison happy and well in the company of a doctor, and the only change in her condition was that she had been forced to settle some of her debts. In the event, there was no ruling on the case because the special privilege of arresting debtors in Saint-Omer was revoked in August that year. Perhaps this was one of the many occasions on which Robespierre, according to his sister, received no payment. Instead there was the satisfaction of seeing the law, to which he had so eloquently objected on his client’s behalf, abolished. Even before the Revolution there were many such attempts to rationalize the legal system of the old regime, and Robespierre was fast forging a distinguished, if controversial, career through his own efforts in this direction. Already he tended to be long-winded and markedly sentimental. But he also had a ready sneer and could be cuttingly condescending—skills required by his profession. He was an adversarial advocate, so even though he invoked the principles of eternal truth and justice, it was not his job to be impartial.

  Very soon after he began practicing law in Arras, Robespierre was chosen as one of five judges in the Bishop’s Court. In the course of his routine work for this court, Robespierre was required to sentence a murderer to death. The death was to be a hanging, possibly preceded by a protracted breaking on the wheel, nothing like the comparative speed and merciful efficiency that the guillotine would bring. Before the Revolution, decapitation was considered a privilege, reserved for noble criminals who died as they had lived, carefully segregated from commoners. Robespierre went home that evening to Charlotte in a terrible state with “despair in his heart.”13 He did not eat for two days and paced the house muttering over and over again, “I know he is guilty, that he is a villain, but even so, to cause a man to die!” Intent on proving that Robespierre was anything but the bloodthirsty charlatan vilified by his detractors, Charlotte claims that he was so disturbed by this case that he resigned his post immediately—a claim not borne out by the facts, since he still held the position in 1788.

  Charlotte perhaps exaggerates her brother’s qualms about capital punishment, yet there is no reason to believe that she invented them. Robespierre prided himself on progressive and enlightened views, he would have been familiar with the strong arguments against the death sentence made by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Cesare Beccaria, and he was squeamish by nature. In an essay published in August 1784, he argued for extending the privilege of decapitation—“a punishment to which we have come to attach a sort of éclat”—to commoners.14 Here he anticipated the revolutionary demand for the right to efficient, dignified, and equal capital punishment. “Crimes of the same kind will be punished by the same kind of punishment,” Dr. Guillotin would assert in 1789, “whatever the rank and status of the guilty man may be.”15 In the meantime a reluctant Robespierre went ahead and condemned the murderer to a hideous end—his signature is on the death warrant.

  As much as this incident discloses Robespierre’s attitude toward capital punishment, it also reveals his habitual response to nervous strain. Throughout the Revolution he suffered periods of physical and mental collapse, usually precipitated by the need to make an important decision. Sometimes these seem strategic; his enemies were (and remain) convinced that feigning illness was one of the many manipulative techniques he used to get his own way. But even in Arras he suffered at least one episode of psychosomatic illness. In this early example, as in many later ones, Robespierre struggled to reconcile his public actions with his personal principles and convictions. When this proved impossible, he collapsed, stopped eating, and brooded obsessively. The demands of public responsibility and p
ower filled him with anxiety. He was, in important respects, constitutionally and temperamentally ill suited to assume either—but nevertheless intent on pursuing them both.

  ANTOINE BUISSART’S PATRONAGE did not stop with bringing Robespierre legal cases; he also helped him win election to the Academy of Arras, a gathering of the city’s “best brains,” who met regularly to present and discuss academic papers. Established in 1773 on the foundations of a local literary society, the academy thrived for a decade before Robespierre was invited to join. His inaugural speech in 1784 was devoted to attacking the tradition of bad blood whereby a criminal’s family was shamed and disgraced by association with his or her crime. He wrote up his speech afterward and entered it in a prize competition organized by the Academy of Metz. Undoubtedly, the subject of bad blood evoked the circumstances of Robespierre’s childhood and the injured pride that dogged him throughout his life. Professionally, too, he was drawn to ponder the individuation of guilt and the principles and processes through which people apportion blame. Shame by association, he insisted, was simply an extension of the natural tendency to regard all individuals as intimately connected to their family, friends, and fellow citizens, but its implications varied depending on the form of government. It was characteristic of democratic government to treat people as individuals, to liberate them from shame by association, or at least provide them with opportunities to regain personal dignity through independent acts of merit, heroism, and public service. The key to republican or democratic government was patriotic virtue, Robespierre argued: the triumph of the general good over private interests or personal relationships. “A man of high principle will be ready to sacrifice to the State his wealth, his life, his very nature—everything, indeed, except his honor.”16