Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  As unrest spread through France and pillaging increased in the provinces, the assembly launched into lengthy theoretical discussions about the new constitution that would not have been out of place in the Sorbonne. At the top of the agenda was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which was to head the constitution and serve as both the death certificate of the old regime and the birth certificate of the new. “I well remember the long debate on the subject, which lasted many weeks, as a period of mortal ennui,” wrote one witness. “There were silly disputes about words, much metaphysical jumbling, and dreadfully tedious prosing.”49 Even before 1789, many in France had watched the revolution in America with intense interest, and the deputies were well aware of the bills of rights preceding many of the constitutions adopted by the American states between 1776 and 1783, as possible models for the French.50 Thomas Jefferson was in Paris and a good friend of General Lafayette’s; Benjamin Franklin was still alive and corresponding with his many friends in France; opportunities for personal and intellectual exchanges between the two countries were increasing all the time. But when, after long discussion, the National Assembly settled on a draft for the French Declaration of Rights, it differed considerably from the American—it was more condensed, more abstract, and more suited to France’s specific circumstances. It morally condemned the old regime and its vestiges of feudalism and laid the ethical foundations for France’s new constitution. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” it asserted, repudiating legal and hereditary differences of rank or order.51 In the vision of the future embodied in the declaration, social distinctions could only be justified to the extent that they served the nation: France must become a meritocracy, sovereignty belonged to the nation, and the law would express the general will. There was also a hint of an international crusading mission, since the declaration proclaimed the universal rights of all, not just French men. By the time Mirabeau presented the projected declaration to the assembly, however, he had become skeptical about it: “I can safely predict,” he said, “that any Declaration of Rights ahead of the constitution will prove but the almanac of a single year!”52

  On 4 August, in the absence of both Mirabeau and the abbé Sieyès, the assembly abruptly decided to intervene to halt the widespread discontent that had been growing during the weeks since the fall of the Bastille. Hoping to reassure the people that, contrary to appearances, they were really going to benefit from the Revolution, the delegates decided to abolish formally the remaining traces of feudalism in France. As the assembly went into extraordinary session, a spirit of abandon took over. All day and all night, deputies, weeping tears of joy, renounced the offending features of the old regime, demolishing it piece by piece, like the Bastille. When he heard about their decisions, Mirabeau reflected, “The assembly resembled a dying man who had made his will in a hurry, or, to speak more plainly, each member gave away what did not belong to him and prided himself upon his generosity at the expense of others.”53 The payment of church tithes was stopped; seignorial relations between landlords and tenants ended; manorial forms of income and property were no more; differences in the taxes and legal penalties applied to nobles and commoners disappeared; the special exemptions and liberties of particular provinces were abolished; hunting rights and game laws favorable to landlords were dissolved. There was to be no more confusion between public authority and private position, no more purchasing of public offices; the trade guilds would be radically reformed and the parlements abolished. Rarely has so much legislative work been accomplished in such a short space of time. Yet, in the sober light of morning, Mirabeau and Sieyès were dismayed. “This is just the character of our Frenchmen, they are three months disputing about syllables, and in a single night they overturn the whole venerable edifice of the monarchy,” complained Mirabeau.54 For his part, Sieyès was most annoyed by the abrupt abolition of church tithes, which, as he saw it, would simply further enrich private landowners at the expense of the church. The two disgruntled men went for a walk together, lamenting that the assembly had failed to act in accordance with their wishes or advice. “My dear Abbé,” said Mirabeau to Sieyès, “you have let loose the bull and you now complain that he gores you!”55

  It took weeks for the assembly to work out the fine details of all its decrees. Robespierre did not play a prominent part in the debates. He intervened to insist that executive officers should be held accountable if they abused the power entrusted to them.56 He championed freedom of conscience when members of the clergy tried to limit provisions for religious freedom in the new Declaration of Rights.57 And, inspired by the American example, he argued for unlimited freedom of the press.58 He envisaged government through legislative and executive powers, carefully separated from one another, both strictly responsible to the sovereign people and financed through equitably distributed taxes. In the moderate newspaper the Courier français, he was commended as someone who often made very positive contributions to these discussions without getting worked up or overheated.59 Clear, precise, and calm as he was, however, there was little to distinguish him from other radicals in the National Assembly, patiently fighting their more conservative colleagues over the new constitution, line by line, article by article, day after day.

  ON 4 OCTOBER Paris awoke to find no bread in its bakeries. To add insult to injury, the newspapers were full of inflammatory reports of revelry at Versailles the night before. The papers claimed that there had been a raucous and unpatriotic banquet for the Flanders Regiment, which had recently arrived in Versailles to reinforce the royal bodyguard. Allegedly, the national cockade had been trampled beneath the aristocracy’s well-shod and contemptuous feet. One witness, Mme de la Tour du Pin, remembered the event very differently. She noticed Marie Antoinette’s nervous anxiety when a Swiss officer asked permission to carry the five-year-old dauphin, like a trophy, around the crowded hall. Understandably fearful in such uncertain times, the ashen-faced queen, who was still mourning the death of the child’s elder brother, was visibly relieved when he was returned to her arms.60 Nevertheless, on the morning of 4 October, hungry and outraged, Paris rioted. A baker was murdered by the mob and General Lafayette and his cockade-wearing National Guard struggled to keep order. The next day a mob of about seven thousand women set off from the Hôtel de Ville for Versailles through driving rain, led by a man named Stanislas Maillard, who bore the unofficial title “Captain of the Bastille Volunteers.” They reached their destination in the evening and it was Robespierre who received them: 5 October was crucial to his revolutionary career.

  A delegation of twelve of the women plus Maillard, all drenched and mud-splattered from their long walk, entered the National Assembly, demanded food for Paris, and insisted that the king’s bodyguard be forced to adopt the patriotic tricolor cockade. The rest of the mob waited, hungry and restless, outside. Robespierre, standing neat and composed at the tribune, answered the delegation by ordering an inquiry into the food shortages that menaced Paris. He supported Maillard’s complaint against one particular miller who played the market by refusing for weeks to grind his flour, despite having been paid two hundred livres for it. In this way, he made common cause with the poor, echoing their customary fear that there was a plot against them—that their hunger and suffering were no accident but instead the result of a deliberate and despicable conspiracy.61 The prospect of an inquiry did nothing to calm the expectant mob, though it did deflect their anger from the National Assembly. The ensuing night was uncomfortable and full of anxiety: Versailles was already crammed with people and there was nowhere for the women to sleep; some bedded down on benches in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs; pistol shots rang out in the darkness. Inside the palace the court was in panic, barricaded behind doors that there had been no reason to close for decades. Some of the Parisian women found, or were shown, a small door opening onto a secret staircase into the palace, and as they emerged into the royal precincts surprised bodyguards opened fire on them. More enraged and frightened than ever, the des
titute women then rampaged through the palace, eating any food they could lay their hands on. Eventually, after midnight, General Lafayette and twenty thousand National Guardsmen arrived in Versailles, soaking wet from the continuing rain.

  General Lafayette said to the king, “Sire, I thought it better to come here and die at the feet of Your Majesty than to die uselessly on the place de Grève”—which was histrionic but honorable.62 Then he explained that the people were rioting for want of bread and urged the king to let the National Guard replace the royal bodyguards. The king, who had been hesitating all night over the best course of action, frantically eliciting opinions from everyone he could find to ask, and repeating all the while, “I do not want to compromise anyone,” gave in immediately on the replacement of his bodyguard.63 The next day, after a mob had nearly broken into the queen’s apartments, the royal family agreed to return to Paris for good. They found themselves accompanied by an unruly procession of some sixty thousand people, many chanting triumphantly that they were bringing the baker, the baker’s wife, and their boy back to the capital. As a gesture of goodwill, the king had ordered sacks of flour to be transported from Versailles to Paris. Yet on the journey he heard himself derided as a baker and could see, outside the carriage windows, the severed heads of murdered palace guards ghoulishly bobbing alongside on pikes.

  “Men had captured the Bastille,” wrote the historian Jules Michelet, “but it was women who captured the king.”64 Entering Paris, the royal family were prisoners in all but name. On the morning of 7 October, they tried to settle into their new accommodation—the dusty Tuileries palace on the right bank of the Seine that had been unused since the Sun King, Louis XIV, abandoned Paris for Versailles—while Jean-Paul Marat’s daily paper, L’ami du peuple (The People’s Friend), gleefully celebrated their arrival:

  The king, the queen, the dauphin, etc., arrived in the capital at about seven o’clock last night. It is indeed a festival for the good Parisians to possess their king. His presence will promptly change the face of things: the poor people will no longer die of hunger; but this benefit will soon vanish like a dream if we do not keep the royal family in our midst until the complete consecration of the constitution. The People’s Friend shares in the joy of his dear fellow citizens, but he will not give himself over to sleep.65

  Marat, a physician and scientist admired by Benjamin Franklin, had begun writing revolutionary pamphlets in 1788. His Offrande à la patrie (Offering to the Fatherland) had some points in common with the abbé Sieyès’s more famous Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? (What Is the Third Estate?), arguing for the identification of the third estate with the nation. Marat, like Sieyès, had a deep knowledge of eighteenth-century political thought, but he soon switched to more direct ways of communicating with the public. He stood on street corners reading aloud from Rousseau’s Social Contract, and he issued his daily paper under the motto “Truth or death.” He preached insurrection to all who listened and helped instigate the women’s march to Versailles. Indeed, he went with them on 5 October but had to rush straight back to Paris to keep up his running commentary on revolutionary events. “Marat flies to Versailles and returns like lightning, making as much noise as the four trumpets of the Last Judgment summoning the dead to rise,” commented Camille Desmoulins in his own newspaper, Révolutions de France et de Brabant.66 For his pains, Marat was arrested by the Parisian police on 8 October and imprisoned for about a month. Afterward he resumed his provocative journalism, giving voice to “the wrath of the people” and evading arrest by hiding in the cellars and sewers of Paris, where he caught a disfiguring skin disease. The People’s Friend, wracked by migraines, his head wrapped in a vinegar-soaked handkerchief, his body covered with open sores, worked relentlessly to ensure that the ordinary people of Paris played their part in the Revolution. If Marat wanted to keep the king in the Tuileries palace until the new constitution came into effect, he seemed to believe he could bring it about by shouting, as loudly as possible, day in day out, into the ears of the Parisian mob.

  THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY did not immediately follow the king to Paris; it stayed behind to debate the new constitution and only closed its sessions at Versailles on 15 October. Buoyant with success, Robespierre was very active in the debates. By now he had made a name for himself—one that most journalists recognized and could even spell. He insisted, against Mirabeau, that the king’s list of state-funded employees should be subject to annual approval, not permanently funded by the treasury.67 He argued vehemently that all those still imprisoned by the old regime’s notorious lettres de cachet should be unconditionally released. The case of the ex-soldier Dupond, whom he once defended in Arras, may have been in his mind, but this stance also fitted his growing reputation for radicalism, his passion for the application of clear, uncompromising principles, and the sublime emotions he had felt as he stood amid the rubble of the Bastille. With characteristic seriousness, Robespierre entered into discussions about the form in which the National Assembly’s decisions should be published. It was not appropriate for them to read like old-style royal proclamations, he argued, especially since the parlements, once responsible for registering the king’s edicts, had now been abolished. He suggested an alternative formulation that was somewhat ponderous and prolix: “Louis, by the Grace of God, and by the Will of the Nation, King of the French: to all citizens of the French Empire: People, here is the law which your representatives have made, and to which I have affixed the royal seal.”68 According to newspaper reports, Robespierre read this out to the boisterous and disorderly assembly in such a pious and earnest tone of voice that someone called out, “Gentlemen, this formula is of no use; we want no psalm singing here!” and he was laughed off the podium. He was sensitive and extremely easy to wound or offend and still rather gauche: a painfully self-conscious provincial with a heavy Artois accent who had thrown himself into the Revolution as he might, in different circumstances, have thrown himself into an important love affair, reckless, unreserved, completely devoid of ironic distance from the events on which he was staking his life. To be laughed at in such circumstances can only have stung him deeply.

  After closing its sessions at Versailles, the National Assembly reconvened in the archbishop’s palace in Paris on 19 October. Located on the Ile Saint-Louis in the river Seine at the heart of the city, very close to where the old parlement had met, the palace was never a suitable venue, and when a gallery collapsed in midsession, injuring members of the public and a number of deputies, the assembly had to move again. This time it convened in the Manège, a long, narrow building originally designed as Louis XV’s riding school, prominently situated on the right bank of the Seine, between the Tuileries garden and the Feuillants monastery. Here, too, there were problems—overcrowding, bad acoustics, and inconveniently small public galleries. At Versailles there had been room for around three thousand spectators, but now there were just two galleries, one at either end of the Manège, with only a hundred seats each. There was a third gallery halfway down the hall, but admission to this was by ticket only. Soon an avid traffic in these tickets developed, along with a new practice of strategically positioning “claques” of people in the gallery to hiss, applaud, or throw missiles at the speakers. It was amid this chaos that Robespierre resumed his struggle to make something of himself and the Revolution—projects that had already converged in his mind. His new lodgings at 30 rue Saintonge, in the Marais Quarter, were comparatively cheap and tranquil. Living some distance from the city center, however, Robespierre had to travel two miles to reach the assembly, by foot or carriage, through congested streets. One acquaintance remembered being stuck in traffic with Robespierre one morning, en route to the Manège: “Our cab stopped at the corner of the rue Gréneta owing to a crowd that was hurrying to the rue Saint-Denis. He was impatient so I got out to see what was stopping us. I came back and told him, ‘It is a deputation of the 84th Section that is going to present the assembly with a model of the Bastille made from one of its stones.’ ‘
Pay,’ he said, ‘and let us get down and go on foot. A Bastille, all the Bastilles in the world, will not hinder me from going to my post.’”69

  Part III

  Reconstituting France

  (1789–1791)