Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  5

  The National Assembly in Paris

  Robespierre’s lodgings in the rue Saintonge were on the second floor, a sign of relative impoverishment in status-conscious Paris, where ground or first-floor apartments were highly prized, as they still are today.1 Since 12 August, he had been paid eighteen livres a day as a deputy to the National Assembly, plus arrears backdated to 27 April, which would have amounted to a lump sum of over twenty-two thousand livres—more money than he had ever had in his life. And yet he still felt himself to be poor and seemed so to others. A penurious journalist and playwright named Pierre Villiers, who claimed to have worked as Robespierre’s secretary for seven months in 1790, included some rare domestic details about Robespierre’s life in his memoirs.2 Villiers remembered: “He was very poor and had no proper clothes. When the assembly decreed mourning for Benjamin Franklin I asked a young friend of mine to lend him a black suit, which he wore, though its owner was four inches taller than he was.”3 The secretary’s memoirs, like those of Charlotte Robespierre, are unreliable and should be treated cautiously, as suggestive rumors—not robust facts—about Robespierre’s home life. “I had some quarrels with him,” Villiers recalled, “and later he would have killed me if he had remembered me.”4 As in more ordinary households, some of the bitterest fights were over money. Charlotte had noticed her brother’s lack of interest in money when she kept house for him in Arras, and his renowned indifference to bribes was one of the sources of his nickname, the Incorruptible. Villiers, who claimed to have worked for Robespierre free of charge, was irritated by his unworldly attitude to finances: “Several times I have known him to refuse offers of money that required from him no return, not even thanks, and if sometimes I allowed myself to insist on his accepting, he abused me. He was of a fiery temper that he always fought to control, and nearly every night he bathed his pillow in blood.”5 Perhaps Robespierre had nosebleeds (people with high blood pressure and fiery tempers often do). These certainly would have left him anemic and contributed to the unusual pallor of his skin that many contemporaries noticed.

  Each morning, Villiers arrived to help him with the volume of correspondence he received as an increasingly prominent member of the National Assembly. Deputies could frank letters or reclaim their expenditure on postage associated with the assembly’s business. Robespierre, parsimonious by nature, was fastidious about his record keeping. He always took the assembly’s business seriously, which was more than could be said for some of its other members. Villiers remembers one of them, a deputy from the Department of Mont Blanc, franking a parasol for his mother “that traveled in consequence free of cost.”6 It was inconceivable that Robespierre would behave like this—his principles forbade it. And yet admirable as they were, there was already something unnervingly vehement about these principles. “One morning I arrived at his house earlier than usual,” Villiers writes. “He was striding about his room. ‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘Your Assembly held a regular witches’ Sabbath last night, a fine piece of work!’ ‘What is the matter, my fine aristocrat?’ he responded. ‘Your colleagues,’ I said, ‘have abolished titles of nobility as well as ribbons and sashes.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you should have been there to shout out Hang yourself, Robespierre! Too bad you weren’t there to do it.’”7

  According to Villiers, one of the first things Robespierre did when he got to Paris was to find a mistress, a woman of twenty-six who worshiped him. In the assembly and the public press he was already acquiring the reputation for irreproachable purity (another source of his enduring nickname). Perhaps this was why his relationship with his mistress, whoever she was, came to an abrupt end. As Villiers remembers, the end was ugly. For a time, Robespierre diverted about a quarter of his modest funds toward supporting this woman (which suggests that she was even poorer than he was), then suddenly he cut her off after refusing to admit her into the house.8 Perhaps he sat at his desk and pretended, as many do in the aftermath of a failed or indiscreet love affair, that nothing had happened. Villiers says he found himself repeatedly in the unenviable position of facing the distraught woman on the doorstep when she came to talk to Robespierre; he concluded that she had been “treated quite badly.” No other trace of the affair remains, but someone embarrassed, priggish, callous, or frightened enough to refuse kindness to his former lover would surely have destroyed any material evidence well in advance of posterity.9 Throughout his short life, Robespierre was loved by women: his combination of strength and vulnerability, ambition and scruples, compassion and refinement attracted women with strong defenses against obviously vulgar men but none against the seemingly sensitive.10 It is entirely plausible that, after an initial rush of tenderness, Robespierre felt guilty and ashamed of his emotional or sexual liaison, so ended it with brutal efficiency, sparing his own feelings first and reminding himself that he was, after all, a public figure with responsibility toward the future of France. If so, his behavior was not admirable but at least understandable.

  About his busyness at this time, however, there can be no question. In November 1789 he wrote again to Buissart after an interval of many months: “My dear friend, I know you are sulking about me; and I cannot blame you. Despite all the good reasons I could give you to justify the long silence there has been between all my friends and me, I am forced to recognize that you deserve to be an exception, and I ought to do the impossible and find the time to write to you. There is nothing more I can do except ask your forgiveness and make good my negligence.”11 Buissart can hardly have been as much in need of a word from Robespierre as the distraught woman outside his door. But this was a far more agreeable letter for him to write, detailing as it did the steady rise in his reputation within the National Assembly and his precious contributions to its debates. The letter reveals someone entirely devoted to current politics, swept up in the assembly’s affairs, and completely out of touch with his former life: “What is going on in Artois? What is said? What is thought?…Who is in charge? Please inform me on these matters and tell me if the National Assembly’s decrees, especially those concerning provisional reforms in the criminal procedures, are registered and observed by the courts.” Robespierre wrote as if he had almost forgotten that practicing law in Artois had once been the summit of his professional ambitions. He had moved very far away in the six months since he left, so after apologies for his long silence and perfunctory inquiries about how the Revolution was going in Arras, his letter soon turned to the constitutional debates.

  These debates had begun before the assembly departed from Versailles and followed the king to Paris. They were conducted in an inefficient manner; instead of arguing their points against one another and advancing their understanding of the constitutional question under discussion, the deputies spent their time reading out prepared speeches. Repetition, redundancy, refutation of points that no one had yet asserted, and so on abounded. At the heart of these poorly mediated discussions, there was the problem of Louis XVI. How could he be incorporated into the new constitution? Could he be trusted? Would a monarch who was accustomed to absolute sovereignty play the limited role of constitutional monarch in good faith? In his letter to Buissart, Robespierre was moved to raise a deep and politically subversive question that seemed to him no less urgent in the autumn of 1789 than it had ever been: “Are we free?”12 The new constitution was beginning to take shape. The assembly had already firmly rejected the British constitutional model with its dual legislative chambers, the House of Commons and House of Lords. A separate aristocratic chamber would have been too inflammatory and dangerous in France, where noble privileges had only recently been abolished. So the deputies decided that, under the new constitution, legislative power should be entrusted to a single body of 745 elected representatives. This decision raised the question of an executive veto over legislative decisions. What was the best way to build safeguards into the legislative process? Should the king be given an absolute veto or only a suspensive veto? The latter would allow him to delay new laws for a
fixed period of time but not to permanently prohibit any he disagreed with. Would Louis XVI use either kind of veto in the interests of the people?

  Mirabeau thought that an absolute executive veto over legislation was essential to the future of the monarchy—he did not see how any kind of constitutional monarchy could be viable otherwise, and he intended to argue the case before the assembly. Mirabeau was a brilliant orator. Unlike Robespierre’s weak, wheedling voice, Mirabeau’s was “full, manly, and sonorous; it filled and pleased the ear. Always powerful, yet flexible, it could be heard as distinctly when he lowered as when he raised it.”13 His intellect was flexible, too, and he could so easily incorporate penciled notes passed to him from the floor as he spoke that one contemporary compared him to a magician who tears a piece of paper into twenty little bits, swallows each of them separately, then produces the piece whole again. But as he mounted the tribune to deliver a speech on the veto, his gifts failed him. Working and playing harder than ever, despite bad health, Mirabeau had fallen into the habit of relying on other people to write most of his speeches and articles, and was now faced with a text he had not read. Later he confided to a friend that this was the only time in his entire political career that he broke into a cold sweat at the tribune. The speech before him was almost unintelligible, dry, obscure, and completely unsuited to the general mood in Paris, where, urged on by the popular press, people were frenziedly opposing the “monstrous” prospect of an absolute veto. Mirabeau tried to extemporize. He digressed. He inveighed against despotism in general. Then he cut his speech short. The prime opportunity for strengthening Louis XVI’s position under the new constitution had just been lost through the inattentive overconfidence of the king’s most powerful ally in the assembly.

  The abbé Sieyès argued that the king should have the power to sanction the law but that any law he refused to sanction should be subjected to an alternative checking mechanism—it was, after all, the people who were sovereign. Earlier in 1789, Sieyès’s lucid intellect had had a dramatic effect on the deputies, altering the terms and course of their debates, by redefining the third estate as the nation. Now he was trying to redirect them again by attacking the widespread assumption that, in the absence of a House of Lords to regulate legislative decisions, the king must be given a veto of some kind. Robespierre was one of the few who immediately recognized the radical potential of Sieyès’s argument—not the finer details of his ideas for organizing legislative power but his forthright assertion of the principle of popular sovereignty. This was one of the political principles to which Robespierre was vehemently attached, and he was inspired to compose a passionate and lengthy speech of his own on the veto question.

  He began by berating the misguided pragmatism of many of his fellow deputies. Thinking that some kind of executive veto was inevitable in the circumstances, they were prepared to vote for the lesser of two evils: a suspensive rather than absolute veto. Instead, Robespierre recalled his colleagues to fundamental principles: the power of truth, the safety of the people, liberty, equality, justice, and reason. He insisted that the assembly must remain faithful to these principles when making its constitutional decisions—anything else would be a disgraceful abuse of its authority. The all-important power to make the laws belonged to the sovereign people and must be exercised only by their representatives. Of course it was important to make sure that the laws created were good, fair, and useful, but that outcome could not be achieved by executive veto, only by true democracy. To that end, Robespierre outlined some alternative methods: representatives elected to the legislature should serve for only short periods of time, after which they would once again become ordinary citizens and so have an interest in passing only impartial laws; citizens should be elected only on grounds of virtue and merit, with no other distinctions taken into consideration; no representative should continue in the legislature beyond the initial period for which he was elected.

  Having worked hard to set out his principles with clarity, Robespierre was frustrated to find himself prevented from delivering his carefully planned speech. Increasingly desperate to do so, he tried convincing the assembly that every deputy should have the opportunity to speak on a matter as important as the veto, before voting could begin. A number of members of the assembly, keen to move on to other constitutional questions, were impatient with his suggestion and so, despite some dissent and disorder, the voting soon went ahead without benefit of Robespierre’s speech. The proposal for the king’s suspensive veto was passed, 673 votes in favor, 325 against. This meant that when the constitution came into effect, Louis XVI would be able to delay new laws for the duration of two successive legislative sittings (a maximum of three years).14 Robespierre consoled himself by publishing his speech as a pamphlet at the end of September and applying his political principles rigorously to the remaining constitutional questions facing the assembly.

  Some months later, in the rue Saintonge, there was yet another early morning fight. Villiers arrived, keen as always to gossip about the assembly’s constitutional debates before settling down to work. “I cannot conceive how any subjects can treat their king so unworthily,” he remarked to Robespierre, sure, no doubt, of provoking a testy response. “They will finish by killing him like the English did their unhappy Stuart.” “So you see yourself as a subject, do you?” Robespierre asked him. “Yes, I do,” replied Villiers, provocatively. “You speak of Charles,” came Robespierre’s reply. “Well, the English freed by his death should have put an end to his line.”15 It is likely that Villiers embellished this anecdote. Publicly, Robespierre was working hard to establish a constitutional monarchy. Like everyone else, he could see that the presence of Louis XVI made it impossible to draft a constitution with a wholly new executive power, as the Americans had done in their revolution. Instead the assembly had to compromise and design a new role for their existing monarch. The radical deputies did so grudgingly and with a great many suspicions. Even so, there was never any suggestion in the assembly (and almost none outside it either) that the king should simply be deposed, still less executed, and France declared a republic.

  IF ROBESPIERRE WAS not overtly republican in 1790, he was nevertheless the assembly’s leading advocate of democratic principles. He passionately opposed the plan to divide French citizens into two groups, active and passive (citoyen actif and citoyen passif), according to whether or not they paid a prescribed amount of direct taxation, equal to the proceeds of two days’ labor. Despite Robespierre’s protests, the assembly went ahead, limiting the franchise to active citizens. In this way an estimated 39 percent of male citizens were denied the vote, most of them pauvre, vulnerable, and disadvantaged—the very people Robespierre was determined to help.16 He was further appalled by the suggestion that only active citizens should be eligible to join the National Guard. To his mind the distinction between active and passive citizens contravened the Declaration of Rights, and the assembly, in accepting it, had betrayed the fundamental principle of equality to which it had only recently committed itself. Similarly, he objected to the marc d’argent, a qualification the assembly thought of imposing on those who wished to stand for election, restricting eligibility to those who paid taxes worth about fifty-three livres, well over ten times the amount of direct taxation necessary to become an active citizen. Thus Robespierre began the long campaign for universal suffrage in France. Using the example of Artois, he showed that the distinction between active and passive citizens would disenfranchise most residents of the region, who were currently paying more indirect than direct taxation. And he pointed out that there were very few in Artois who would be eligible for election if the marc d’agent were introduced. His argument was strong enough to win Artois, and other regions similarly affected, exemption from the electoral qualifications until the country’s whole system of taxation could be reorganized. But he was not universally applauded. In the assembly he was accused of encouraging his constituents not to pay tax, and in Arras he was accused of slandering the region by
claiming it had not paid tax.

  Indignant, Robespierre drafted a spirited reply to his detractors and had it countersigned by his fellow delegates from Artois: “Although M. Robespierre needs no other testimony to his patriotism than that of his conduct, and of his public reputation, we have much pleasure in giving him proof of the esteem and affection with which he is regarded by all his colleagues…. He has always zealously defended the cause of the people at large, and of public liberty, as well as the special interests of Artois.”17 Be that as it may, it was quite clear that Robespierre’s regionally focused arguments and concerns came second to his passion for abstract political principles. Artois provided him with a convenient argument against the assembly’s electoral proposals, but the people, public liberty, and the inalienable right of every citizen to vote were closer to his heart. Already isolated for his commitment to universal male suffrage, he went on to argue for the rights of excluded groups like actors, Jews, and West Indians living under French colonial rule.

  THE RATIONALIZATION OF French administration that had been so long postponed under the old regime was happening at last. The assembly went from strength to strength, its committees working overtime to come up with suitable proposals for this, that, or the other part of the new constitution, which was slowly but surely coming into being. If the new regime was to be genuinely representative of the people, it would need to be securely founded on a nationwide system of carefully organized elections. In the light of the chaos that had characterized the elections to the Estates General in 1789, most deputies agreed that there was a strong case for reorganizing France into new departments, districts, and cantons. Future elections could then be conducted and local government administered in a clearer, fairer, more convenient fashion. The abbé Sieyès was especially interested in these plans and very influential in shaping them. Unlike most—perhaps even all—of his colleagues in the assembly, he had definite ideas about how to institute representative government. In fact, he had been turning them over in his mind for years. “For a long time I have sensed the need to divide the surface of France afresh. If we let this occasion pass, it will never return, and the provinces will keep their esprit de corps, their privileges, their pretensions, their jealousies forever.”18 After much discussion, the assembly fixed the boundaries of eighty-three new departments and restructured municipal power throughout the country.