Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Within the electoral assembly, he continued to align himself with radical democratic proposals, defending, for example, the idea of reimbursing those delegates who usually lived off their earnings for income lost during the elections. Never one to drop a fight, he asked sarcastically: “Do you think the councillors will not find an objection to this demand? They will reply that it appears just but that they oppose it on form.” Only a quarter of the 550 delegates could go through to the next stage—the final assembly of the third estate, from which the representatives to Versailles would be chosen. Robespierre’s name went forward for the final meeting, and as he waited nervously, to see if he would be chosen for Versailles, he wrote a second political pamphlet. Characteristically entitled Les ennemis de la patrie démasqués (The Enemies of the Country Unmasked), it recounted his experiences of elections in recent months and reviled anyone who had stood in the way of his candidacy. It ended in high style:

  One trembles when one sees the reasons given for the choice of representatives who will decide the destiny of the nation. May God keep us from such hollow reasons, and inspire in all citizens the spirit of righteousness, truth, courage, and disinterestedness, the celestial love of humanity, and that healthy passion for the public good on which depend the happiness of the people and the safety of empires.15

  Because of the timing of Easter, an important consideration in devout Artois, it was not until 20 April that the third estate met with the nobility and clergy to hear Mass in the abbey of Saint-Vaast, swear a solemn oath before the bishop, and separate again to choose their representatives by ballot.16 There had been no assembly on this scale at Arras within living memory. Considerable sums of money were spent preparing the cathedral and perfuming the halls in which the estates would meet, surrounded by tapestries. When the chairman of the third estate proposed sending an amiable greeting to the other two orders, Robespierre immediately opposed it: what was there to congratulate them on? In his retrospective account of 1792, he cited this episode as another instance of his having upheld the principle of the sovereignty of the people, just as he had done against the Lamoignon Edicts.

  Divisions not merely between but also within each of the three orders dominated the elections in Artois, as they dominated elections elsewhere in France. Across the country the higher and lower clergy were divided. Differently ranked nobles were divided. And the third estate, as Robespierre had seen, was riven with conflict. In all three estates the deputies elected to the Estates General, Robespierre among them, were chosen primarily because they were known to have opposed government directives in recent years. Dubois de Fosseux attended the meeting of the nobility and helped draft their grievances, but he did not stand as a candidate for election because his mother was gravely ill and he did not want to be separated from her for months to come. He remained behind and resumed the wide network of correspondence he had developed since becoming secretary of the Academy of Arras. In this role he was invaluable as witness and recorder of revolutionary change across France.

  By 30 April Robespierre was sure at last that he had been chosen as one of the third estate’s eight representatives from Arras. The elected deputies were due in Versailles in a matter of days for the ceremonial opening of the Estates General on 4 May. Robespierre would have been happy to leave even sooner. The maid who helped him pack remembered that he had very few clothes and belongings: a bag of powder and a puff for his meticulously maintained hair; perhaps the shaving bowl that is now in the Musée Carnavalet; some very clean linen (six shirts, six collars, six handkerchiefs); three pairs of stockings (one almost new); one pair of well-worn shoes and a newer pair; a satin waistcoat (probably pink) and a waistcoat of raz de Saint-Maur (a very fine shaven cloth) which was threadbare; three pairs of trousers, one black, one green, and one black velvet; a black cloth coat; and his lawyer’s gown. There were also clothes brushes, shoe brushes, needles and thread (his mother had taught him to sew and make lace before she died).17 Everything fitted easily into the trunk he borrowed from one of his sister’s friends. He may also have needed to borrow money; the journey cost about thirty-five livres.

  Some say that the coach waited for him outside the theater in the place de la Comédie, since it could not enter his narrow street, and that a small crowd of well-wishers gathered to see him leave. But these were hard times in Arras and there was little optimism in the streets, where there had recently been riots over bread shortages. During the past few months, as the electoral assemblies had argued among themselves in their perfumed halls, hungry mobs had marauded outside, with no reason to believe that the changes imminent in France would benefit them personally. It is more likely that Robespierre took his place in the public coach to Paris that changed horses in Arras at the merchant Lefebvre’s and that his siblings and a few of his small circle of friends waved him off from there. According to one story, he turned to the servant who carried his bag to the coach and boasted that he would one day make him mayor of Arras. In another version Robespierre threw a celebratory dinner for his friends before leaving and said to a servant nicknamed Lantillette, “Remember, my dear friend, that everything is going to change in France. Yes…The Lantillettes of this world will become mayors and the mayors will be Lantillettes.”18 There is more personal spite in this than revolutionary foresight, yet when he left Arras in 1789, Robespierre certainly had reason to expect that he would return to find it dramatically altered.

  4

  Representing the Nation at Versailles

  With a population of about fifty-five thousand, Versailles was nearly three times the size of Arras and almost one-tenth the size of Paris. By eighteenth-century standards, it was a modern European city, with a carefully planned symmetrical grid of streets, avenues, and monuments (which was later borrowed as a model for Washington, D.C.).1 When Arthur Young visited Versailles on his travels in 1789, he noted that “this town is absolutely fed by the palace.”2 He had heard stories of the grandeur of what had been France’s unofficial capital since the Sun King Louis XIV moved there with his court in 1682. Versailles was only about ten miles southwest of Paris, but it was at a higher altitude and surrounded by attractive wooded hills, very convenient for royal hunting parties. Young, however, was unimpressed:

  The palace of Versailles, one of the objects of which report had given me the greatest expectation, is not in the least striking. I view it without emotion; the impression it makes is nothing. What can compensate the want of unity? From whatever point viewed, it appears an assemblage of buildings; a splendid quarter of a town, but not a fine edifice…. The great gallery is the finest room I have seen; the other apartments are nothing; but the pictures and statues are well known to be a capital collection.3

  Later Young rambled through the gardens and by the Grand Canal “with absolute astonishment at the exaggerations of writers and travellers”—he found no beauty anywhere. An earlier visitor was even harsher:

  The unpleasant odours in the park, gardens, even the château, make one’s gorge rise. The communicating passages, courtyards, buildings in the wings, corridors, are full of urine and faeces; a pork butcher actually sticks and roasts his pigs at the bottom of the ministers’ wing every morning; the avenue Saint-Cloud is covered with stagnant water and dead cats.4

  The stench must have reached the royal apartments where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were living with their young family. And it can only have got worse with the arrival of well over a thousand delegates to the Estates General, plus friends and spectators, all swelling the population of Versailles and further straining its sanitation.

  LIKE LOUIS XVI’S coronation in 1775, but even more so, the meeting of the Estates General was a spectacular reenactment of the history, tradition, and pageantry of France. On Monday, 4 May 1789, the deputies of all three estates first assembled in Versailles’s neoclassical Church of Notre-Dame for the roll call of the bailliages. There were 302 clergy, 289 nobles, and 576 third estate: 1,167 deputies in total (this number rose by 35 when the third esta
te deputies from Paris, delayed by complex elections, arrived a month later).5 The chancel was covered in ceremonial drapes and there was a throne to the right of the choir screen, awaiting the entrance of the king, who was distracted because his eldest son was ill (and had just weeks to live). Louis XVI finally appeared at ten o’clock, wearing his coronation robes and heralded by trumpets, fifes, and tambours. The third estate was expected to kneel in his presence, as it had in 1614, but it refused to do so. He took his seat and the high-ranking officers of the realm took theirs below him on velvet benches embroidered with fleurs-de-lis. The queen and other ladies of the court sat opposite, to the left of the choir screen, beautifully attired and sparkling with jewels. Two by two, the deputies approached the king, candle in hand, bowing to him and then to his queen. Outside, the king’s Swiss Guard lined the short route from Notre-Dame to the Church of Saint-Louis, where the estates would reassemble for Mass. Proceeding with the Eucharist, the deputies moved past buildings hung with tapestries, watched by an adoring crowd, sometimes respectfully silent, sometimes applauding and shouting, “Long live the king!” First came the clergy wearing cassocks and square bonnets, then the nobility in garments of black silk and gold brocade with magnificent hats plumed à la Henri IV, and finally the third estate—far less resplendent—in black coats and batiste cravats. Preparing for the ceremony, one liberal-minded noble from Saumur, the Marquis de Ferrières, wrote to his wife, “My crimson vest will be superb; I still need the trimming for the garment and for the coat. But the hat is expensive. The cheapest one cost 180 livres.”6 On the day, he was surprised to find himself spiritually moved far beyond such mundane concerns:

  Soon I ceased to see the spectacle that I had before my eyes; thoughts that were more intoxicating and yet at the same time melancholy offered themselves to my spirit. France, my fatherland [patrie], revealed itself in all its splendor. And I asked myself, what muddled minds, what ambitious, vile men, for their own interests, are trying to break up this whole, so great, so respectable, and dissipate this glory like insubstantial smoke dispersed on the wind? Love for my country has made itself very powerfully felt in my heart. I was not previously aware just how far the mutual ties extend that unite us all to this soil, to the men who are our brothers, but I understood it in that instance.7

  Somewhere in this procession was Robespierre, walking with the seven other third estate deputies from Arras. They were only just in time, having left Arras late and struggled to find accommodation in crowded Versailles, until they were lucky at The Fox (Hôtellerie du Renard) in the rue Sainte-Elisabeth.

  From a window overlooking the main street of Versailles, Necker’s grown daughter, Mme de Staël, was watching the procession. She could see her father, the king’s chief minister, walking stiffly past. She could see the king and queen gloriously attired. But her attention was caught by one of the deputies of the third estate—the comte de Mirabeau, a nobleman who had been elected to the third estate. Mirabeau was hard to miss. When he arrived in Versailles, aged forty, he was accompanied by a varied and outrageous reputation. He had been many things under the old regime: a man of letters, a journalist, an infamous son of a respectable father, a rivetingly ugly seducer of women, a pornographer, a prisoner alongside the Marquis de Sade, and an accomplished orator. Condemning him to death in his absence for seduction and abduction, the Parlement of Besançon had gone so far as to behead a paper effigy of him. Mirabeau had been rejected as a representative of the nobility so had appealed to the third estate, which elected him in both Aix and Marseille. Looking down on him, Mme de Staël reflected:

  You could not but look at this man, when once you had noticed him: his immense black head of hair distinguished him among them all; you would have said his force depended on it, like that of Samson: his face borrowed new expression from its very ugliness; his whole person gave you the idea of an irregular power, but a power such as you would figure in a Tribune of the People.8

  Robespierre—whom next to no one had heard of, and who never stood out in a crowd—went unnoticed.

  The following day was the official opening of the Estates General in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, a hall specially constructed on the grounds of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, which housed the administrative office responsible for arranging royal festivities in Versailles. The new hall was spacious and provided abundant spectator seating (three of the four walls supported public galleries). Under the interested gaze of the excited audience, one old man arrived in his farming clothes, ostentatiously rejecting the austere black costume of the third estate. His fellow deputies, already restless amid the noble and clerical pomp and ceremony, applauded loudly. Necker, still the popular idol on whom the hopes of Paris were resting, read his opening address. It was a very disappointing speech, conservative in idiom and content. One contemporary described it as the product of “a mind intoxicated with vanity, displaying an incapacity or unwillingness to explain or illustrate: a composition indecent, unmanly, out of place, betraying a narrow understanding and a timorous heart.”9 At the end of Necker’s long disquisition, the king ceremoniously raised and replaced his hat. The nobles did the same. So did some of the third estate, but then, one after another they took their hats off again—an impromptu expression of belligerence. Confused by this unscripted development, the king removed his own hat again. The queen leaned over to ask him what he was doing and there was an unscheduled pause in the proceedings during which the nobles started hesitantly uncovering their heads as well.

  Subtle signs of intransigence turned rapidly into open defiance. On 6 May the third estate refused to take a roll call of its deputies or to verify their representative credentials separately from the clergy and nobility. The concern was that separate verification would lead to separate voting by order. Instead, the third estate demanded a joint assembly with the other two estates, where votes would be counted by head and it would stand a chance of outvoting the nobility and clergy. Among the delegates to the third estate were many close students of the recent debate over how the Estates General should be organized, a debate that Louis XVI had publicly welcomed a year ago and was now sorely regretting.

  The nobility and clergy went off to their separate assemblies, in nearby halls built for the purpose, but the third estate remained in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs. All the third estate had to do to maintain the impasse arising from its refusal to verify its representative credentials was nothing, which was just as well considering the chaos in which it found itself. Friends, relations, journalists, and other members of the public spilling over from the spectator galleries filled the seats vacated by nobles and clergymen. From the big central table no one could make a speech without turning his back on half the deputies. Eventually, practical-minded Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin—a Parisian physician and philanthropist—resolved the problem by rearranging the seats in a semicircle. Even so, it was hard to follow the disorderly debates echoing around the high-vaulted hall, competing with chatter from journalists and members of the public mingling with the delegates.

  In these unpromising circumstances, Robespierre, Robespierre, Robesse-pierre, Robertz-Pierre, Rabesse-Pierre, Robests-piesse, Robespienne—the journalists found it hard to catch his name and even harder to spell it—made his first contribution. To one acquaintance he confided that he was shaking with fear as he approached the table, that the hall went dark before him and he could see or hear nothing as he raised his voice: “He told me that he was prey to the most childish timidity, that he never approached the tribune without trembling, and that when he began to speak, his faculties were entirely overwhelmed by fear.”10 But to Buissart, back in Arras, Robespierre wrote in proud, confident tones, explaining how only bad luck had come between his first intervention and lasting glory. He spoke about the third estate’s urgent need to decide how to proceed in its impasse with the other two orders. One possibility was to nominate and dispatch negotiators to the other assemblies; another was to stay put but invite the nobility and clergy to return and reu
nite with the third estate. Robespierre had a third idea, unoriginal but politically powerful: divide and rule. He suggested inviting only the clergy to return in the first instance. The nobility would be left isolated and under more pressure to join the rest of the nation. Because he outlined this plan at a comparatively late stage in the debate, delayed perhaps by his nerves or merely by the number of other speakers ahead of him, it was not voted on. Afterward, Robespierre criticized the voting procedures but took comfort in the fact that many delegates came up to him to comment favorably on his plan and claim they would have voted for it if only they had been allowed to.

  During these early days, as Robespierre developed his fledgling reputation, he was invited to dine with Necker. Allegedly, this was one of the occasions when Robespierre had to borrow smarter clothes than he owned. Necker’s wife regularly held supper parties for friends of her husband and admirers of her glamorous daughter, Mme de Staël, and took to inviting along some of the deputies newly arrived in Versailles. Robespierre admired Necker. A few years earlier he had called him “a great man who seems to have been shown to the people merely for them to glimpse the full extent of the happiness they might enjoy, whose elevation was a triumph for genius, virtue, and the nation.”11 We don’t know whether he admired Mme de Staël, an imposing figure for anyone encountering her for the first time; married to the Swedish ambassador, Baron de Staël-Holstein, she was accustomed to being at court, attractive, flirtatious, intellectual, and extremely well connected. What we do know is that Robespierre did not make a favorable impression on her. She later recalled her first meeting with the Incorruptible: “His features were mean, his complexion pale, his veins a greenish hue.”12 She also noted the radicalism of his democratic views. Considering the differences in their circumstances, it would have been peculiar if Robespierre had seemed anything other than common and unappealing to Mme de Staël. Provincial, puritanical, inexperienced, Robespierre was worlds away from her sophisticated way of life, as was immediately obvious when he sat down at her parents’ table.