Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Later, in his letter to Buissart, Robespierre described the mounting fear in the National Assembly as it went into permanent session for three days and nights, ready to respond immediately to events as they unfolded.30 He told of a patriotic army of 300,000 rising, as if by magic, from the streets of Paris, including every class of citizen, of French and Swiss Guards and other soldiers going over to the people’s side. He marveled at the speed with which, on 14 July, this people’s army took the Bastille, the chief fortress in the “tax farmers” customs wall around Paris—a symbol of oppression before the Revolution, an iconoclastic triumph ever since its fall. Under the old regime most of the Bastille’s prisoners had been snatched from freedom by lettres de cachet and detained indefinitely inside the imposing fortress with its eight round towers and walls five feet thick. A recent vogue for anti-Bastille literature—lurid accounts of life inside by ex-prisoners—had further secured it as a place of horror in the popular imagination.31 By 14 July 1789, however, there were only seven prisoners left inside. The most famous of all, the Marquis de Sade, had been transferred elsewhere on 5 July after adapting his slop and urine funnel into a megaphone for haranguing passersby with lurid revolutionary bulletins: massacre was imminent inside the prison; its governor, de Launay, was butchering the inmates; the people must storm the walls before it was too late. Despite such colorful incitements, the infamous fortress had to wait its turn while first the people attacked the tollgates, the city wall that impeded free trade, the abbey of Saint-Lazare, where firearms were stockpiled, and the Invalides for its cannon and other weapons.

  The siege of the Bastille did not begin until early in the morning of 14 July and it was all over by early evening. It involved only about nine hundred citizens, many of them tradesmen—joiners, carpenters, cobblers, and so forth—from the Saint-Antoine district of Paris, which lay outside the city wall. Ranged against these patriots were apprehensive prison officers, regular prison guards, and some reinforcements from the Swiss Salis-Samade regiment that had arrived on 7 July. Lieutenant Deflue was in charge of these reinforcements and for a whole week he observed Governor de Launay’s preparations for defending the Bastille with surprise and dismay:

  I could see clearly, from his perpetual uneasiness and irresolution, that if we were attacked we should be very badly led. He was so terrified that at night he mistook the shadows of trees and other objects around him for enemies, and on this account we had to be on the alert all night. The staff officers, the lieutenant du roi, the regimental adjutant and I myself often argued with him, on the one hand to reassure him about the weakness of the garrison, of which he complained constantly, and on the other to induce him not to bother about insignificant details while neglecting important matters. He would listen to us, and seem to agree with our advice; then he would do just the reverse, then a minute later he would change his mind; in a word, his whole behaviour gave proof of the utmost irresolution.32

  On 14 July the two sides at first negotiated for control of the fortress. Fighting broke out in the afternoon, but the morale of those inside was low. Their leader was hopelessly indecisive, they had neither the food nor the water supply to survive a real siege, the moat between them and their attackers was dry, and anyway many of the guards really sympathized with the assailants. Soon after five o’clock the Bastille fell.

  The people promptly punished Governor de Launay for having fired the Bastille cannon “at those deputed by the inhabitants of Paris to seize the firearms and gunpowder that menaced them.”33 They also punished the city’s chief magistrate, Jacques de Flesselles, prévôt des marchands, who was widely suspected of conspiring with the court against the people and attempting to hide the city’s ammunition stores. Governor de Launay died in the street from multiple stab and shot wounds, and de Flesselles was murdered on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. The “livid and bloody” severed heads of both men were carried through Paris on pikes for twenty-four hours and only thrown into the river Seine on 15 July.34 In his account to Buissart, Robespierre seems entirely comfortable describing their fate as the people’s unmediated justice. He comments enthusiastically that “the terror inspired by this national army, ready to present itself in Versailles, determined the Revolution.”35 In a postscript, he explicitly sanctions mob violence. “M. Foulon was hanged yesterday by the people’s decree,” he writes, referring to the fate of Joseph François Foulon, one of the ministers chosen by Louis XVI to replace Necker. Allegedly, Foulon had claimed that “the country would be best governed where the common people should be compelled to feed upon grass” and had boasted that when he was minister “he would make the people of France live upon hay.”36 He was lynched by the Parisian mob, then his severed head was paraded through the streets, the mouth stuffed with grass because people blamed him for the famine now sweeping the country, even though it had been predicted long before he came to power. In truth, Robespierre’s calm assessment of these deaths at the hands of the mob was not unusual among the deputies in the National Assembly, still meeting in Versailles days after the revolutionary initiative had moved to Paris. Antoine Barnave, a deputy from Grenoble and a future enemy of Robespierre’s, quipped: “What, then, is their blood so pure?”37 Against this, Robespierre’s understanding of revolutionary violence, justice, and terror looks sophisticated. In his account, Governor de Launay, de Flesselles, Foulon, and others were lynched by the will of the people; the status of their blood, whatever Barnave meant by it, was irrelevant. From now on the will of the people was to be everything.

  ON LEARNING OF the day’s events, the National Assembly expected Louis XVI to recall Necker. This he failed to do, despite expressing regret for the bloodshed in Paris and beginning to withdraw his troops from the city center. On the following morning, 15 July, Mirabeau had just finished delivering a brilliant speech on the threat of foreign invasion, when Louis XVI himself arrived at the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, unexpectedly on foot, accompanied only by his two brothers, the Counts of Provence and Artois. There was still no mention of recalling Necker, though the removal of troops from Paris was enough cause for celebration. Robespierre tells of the king returning to his palace amid “demonstrations of enthusiasm and intoxication that are unimaginable.”38 Then on the evening of 16 July the Count of Artois and other members of the court suddenly fled the country. The following day Louis XVI and his family returned to Paris: the Parisians wanted him back in their city. The king was not yet a prisoner, but he was in a plain coach drawn by six black horses, at the mercy of the National Assembly and flanked by a hundred of its delegates, walking solemnly with a slightly funereal air. One of the hundred was Robespierre, who later evoked this journey to the Hôtel de Ville for Buissart. “It is,” Robespierre wrote, “impossible to imagine a spectacle so august and so profound, and even more impossible to convey the impressions it made on a responsive spirit.”39 “Imagine for yourself,” he continued, “a king whose name only yesterday made the entire capital and nation tremble, who hears for the first time cries of ‘Long live the Nation! Long live Liberty.’” As he processed to Paris, Louis XVI could see his own soldiers amid the newly formed citizen militia lining the route. Just weeks ago the crowd’s cry was “Long live the king” as he arrived to open the Estates General. Now the nation with its claim to liberty had displaced him.

  Paris was jubilant, with joyous citizens hanging from buildings and trees, women leaning out of high windows, all welcoming, applauding, and delighting in the procession. Robespierre called it a national festival. His responses were deeply emotional, his heart and imagination engaged. He noticed with particular pleasure some monks who had pinned on their cassocks the new patriotic cockade—a rosette of red and blue, the twin colors of Paris. (In the Café du Foy, the incendiary Camille Desmoulins attached a different significance to these colors: red for the blood shed for freedom and blue for the celestial constitution that would enshrine it.) Passing churches on the way, Robespierre saw robed and surpliced clergy competing with the crowd in their displays
of patriotic gratitude. There were even cockades attached to stoles and this, he promised Buissart, was fact, not fiction. Why was he so thrilled by these signs that the clergy endorsed the Revolution? Perhaps because he had not expected it and was pleasantly surprised or simply because what the clergy thought or felt still mattered a great deal to him.

  Robespierre already knew the astronomer Bailly as the president of the National Assembly, but now he watched him take on a new role as the mayor of revolutionary Paris, welcoming Louis XVI. Bailly had been elected by the capital’s electoral college, originally established to choose deputies to the third estate but now the de facto municipal government in permanent session in the Hôtel de Ville. In his memoirs Bailly wrote:

  I rose very early, intending to leave for Paris at seven o’clock, and before that to prepare what I was to say to the King on receiving him at the gates of Paris. I was sorry to leave Versailles; I had been happy there in an Assembly whose temper was excellent, and which was worthy of the great functions that it was called upon to fulfill. I had seen great things done, and had had some share in them. I was leaving all these memories behind: that day, my happiness was over. I have known splendid days since then and moments of satisfaction, but I have not been happy.

  I had sent for a carriage. I was kept waiting to leave; I could not conceive why. When I went out, I was met by all the court coachmen, who offered me a tree loaded with flowers and ribbons…. I had to allow them to fasten this tree to the front of my coach; all the coachmen accompanied me, letting off fireworks although it was broad daylight…. Finally I left them at the end of the avenue, much touched by their friendly pageantry, and much relieved to be able to go on my way freely after being somewhat delayed. I incurred much praise in the newspapers for the simplicity with which, though chief official of the capital, I arrived in Paris in one of those carriages vulgarly known as “chamber-pots.”40

  Bailly met the king at the city gates and presented him with the historic keys to Paris. Then the procession moved on to the Hôtel de Ville. There, on the steps recently stained with the blood of de Flesselles, Bailly welcomed the king again, together with General Lafayette, veteran of the American Revolutionary War and commander of the newly formed citizen militia, now named the National Guard. Lafayette was tall and thin, with a long nose and reddish hair. His background was aristocratic, but at nineteen he had abandoned his comfortable life in France to fight for freedom in America. Here he impressed George Washington, who remarked, “I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner among us, except the Marquis de Lafayette.”41 Back in France and a popular hero, Lafayette was poised to apply his experience of revolution on home soil. He adapted the red and blue cockade for the uniforms of his National Guard by adding white, the color of the Bourbon monarchy. Outside the Hôtel de Ville, Bailly presented Louis XVI with one of these cockades: “I did not know quite how the King would take this, and whether there was not something improper about such a suggestion; however, I felt that I was bound to present the cockade, and that the king was bound to accept it.”42 This he did, and gamely pinned it on his hat, despite the arch disapproval of his queen, who said, “I did not think I had married a commoner.” Robespierre records scenes of great joy and shouts of “Long live the king and the nation!” but nothing could disguise the fact that the terms on which Louis XVI held power had changed dramatically in a matter of weeks. He returned afterward to his court of Versailles, but his visit to Paris was testament to the capital’s ascendancy over the Revolution.

  ONE OF THE first things the deputies did after arriving in Paris was to go on a guided tour of the Bastille. Mirabeau led them, mindful of his own days of internment for immorality inside the prison of Vincennes, when “the voice of his despair reverberated from dead stone walls.”43 As the crowd in the rue Saint-Antoine parted before the triumphal procession, people threw flowers and poems in its path. Books and manuscripts found in the Bastille were piled into Mirabeau’s carriage. Inside the prison, he asked to see the dungeons. His servant, prevented from accompanying him, sobbed hysterically at the entrance to the dungeon, fearing an attack on the leader of the commons in that dark and somber place.44 But Mirabeau went on boldly, moving slowly through the underground cells, knocking on the walls to check for secret underground passages from which enemies of the Revolution might suddenly burst forth. Then he came blinking into the light, climbed one of the towers, lifted a pickax, and brought it down on the battlements. Robespierre remarked on how delightful the Bastille seemed now, in the hands of the people and under demolition: “I could not tear myself away from the place; the sight of it produced such feelings of pleasure and ideas of liberty in all good citizens.”45

  As Robespierre stood rooted to the spot, his gaze fixed on abstract ideas, the triumph of liberty and demise of oppression, others around him saw commercial opportunities in the Bastille’s rubble. The stone-mason Pierre-François Palloy had been among the nine hundred who originally stormed the fortress, fighting alongside carpenters and other tradesmen, many from the faubourg Saint-Antoine, where there had been violent riots over bread earlier in the year. After the fall of the Bastille, Palloy and four other construction specialists were put in charge of demolition. Very soon the ground was strewn with debris that would be recycled as Bastille memorabilia; inkwells, paperweights, commemorative daggers, and decorative models of the prison carved from its own stone were to prove popular and lucrative over the coming years. Spectators came to gawk at chains and manacles, to touch instruments of torture and lock themselves in dank cells where their fellow citizens, plagued by rats, had rotted to death. Robespierre was above all that. He was not much interested in money or, as far as we can tell, in sex. He was not commercially minded, not a connoisseur of thrills. He did not, like Mirabeau, have personal memories of imprisonment to lay to rest or fears about the threat the Bastille might still pose. To him the captured fortress was simply a vast monolith onto which his ideas could be projected. Just as when he first stood up to speak in Versailles the assembly went blank before him, so standing at the Bastille he saw only what was already in his mind. The picks and shovels fell silent as did the workers’ banter; the gaping crowd disappeared. The glorious figure of liberty appeared to him on the crumbling ramparts and Robespierre stood there hypnotized.

  ALL SPRING AND early summer hope helped fill empty stomachs as people throughout France waited on news from Versailles. But after the Bastille fell there was precious little calm left. Angry mobs marauded through the towns and countryside looking for food or work, barely restrained by detachments of the National Guard.46 This volunteer force of amateur soldiers that had started in Paris after the fall of the Bastille was now being imitated throughout France. The purpose of the National Guard was to contain spontaneous mob violence of the kind that had killed de Flesselles and de Launay—it was, from the beginning, a prorevolutionary but peacekeeping association of civic-minded people, and for this reason membership was generally restricted to taxpaying citizens who were eligible to vote. Lafayette reduced the number of Parisian National Guardsmen to twenty-four thousand and stipulated that they must buy their own uniforms (which necessarily excluded the poor from joining). He also integrated six thousand professional soldiers into the guard.47 But outside Paris, Lafayette had less control. Following the Parisian example, the citizens in Versailles and other cities organized their own people’s army. “We hope all France will adopt this essential institution,” comments Robespierre in a letter to Buissart, before urging him to promote it in Arras.48

  Since the new battalions of National Guards, springing up all over France in a piecemeal, spontaneous, and chaotic fashion, had suddenly become the main instrument of law and order in a nation succumbing to revolution, Lally-Tollendal (a conservatively minded member of the National Assembly) suggested excluding anyone likely to be reckless, anyone with nothing to lose, anyone too poor to have an interest in avoiding anarchy. Robespierre at once objected. “It is necessary to love order but not
to harm liberty,” he began. Insurrection, he argued, had saved Paris and the nation from despotism. To his mind it was wrong—or perhaps just too early—to condemn insurrection or distinguish it sharply from patriotism. There had been deaths, he admitted, a few heads had been lost, but they were guilty heads and no cause for reproaching the insurgent mob. Whatever he had understood liberty to be in the past—an idea, a legal concept, a beleaguered individual right more often breached than observed—it was now linked inextricably with the Revolution. He saw that insurgency was useful to the Revolution, so defended it in the name of liberty.

  The right to privacy, on the other hand, was not particularly useful to the Revolution—it might indeed be downright dangerous where its enemies were concerned. And Robespierre had no qualms about overriding the right to privacy when Bailly forwarded from Paris to the National Assembly a packet of sealed letters addressed to the Count of Artois, who had recently fled abroad. These letters had been dramatically snatched from the French ambassador to Geneva in the middle of the night and probably contained details of a counterrevolutionary plot. As the scrupulous deputies stood about discussing whether or not it was permissible to open them, Robespierre was incredulous; to him it was obvious that the Revolution must come first—in circumstances where national liberty was at stake, crime itself could “become an action worthy of praise.” Similarly, he agreed with other radicals in the assembly, just days after the crowd murdered Foulon outside the Hôtel de Ville on the place de Grève, that extraordinary courts to try crimes against the state were now needed; what was wrong in a time of peace and stability might be justified during a revolution. The original aim of the Revolution may have been civil liberty, but already in 1789, this was far from being its primary means. Robespierre grasped early, rapidly, intuitively the conflict between ends and means that was destined to blight the Revolution, cause tens of thousands of deaths, and haunt the consciences of the survivors. His response was passionate and political. He was vehemently committed to the Revolution and anything it entailed, passing quickly over moral scruples, intellectual incoherence, and political doubts. In short, he behaved like someone with nothing whatever to lose outside the Revolution itself—the kind of person more conservative members of the Assembly thought unsuited to the citizen militia, let alone positions of power.