by Ruth Scurr
Coded Messages
Anyone who wants to procure a method for rendering correspondence impenetrable, contact M. Loppin, rue l’Evêque…. By this method you can confidently dictate a letter to your secretary, or any public scribe, without fearing that he will be able to guess your thoughts. Five minutes suffices to put this method into operation.37
Given the political climate of the time, it is not surprising that Robespierre grew more suspicious by the day. Like many other patriots, he feared an aristocratic plot. He had made an irreversible personal commitment to the Revolution, so anything that menaced it menaced him too. At the center of his suspicion was the fear that if the Revolution’s enemies succeeded in plunging France into a foreign war, all would be lost.
IN THE SPRING of 1790, the threat of war was suddenly real. Back in 1778, toward the end of his last voyage of discovery, Captain Cook had sailed his ship, Resolution, into Nootka Sound in the Pacific, to what is now British Columbia. Though the Spaniards had arrived before Cook and taken formal possession of the coastline, English ships followed in his wake and set up a lucrative trade in animal pelts. These English adventurers had the full approval of their government and Prime Minister Pitt. So when Spanish forces arrived to reclaim possession of Nootka Sound, Pitt prepared his fleet for war. Spain demanded French support under the Bourbon alliance that united the two countries. Louis XVI acknowledged his obligation and ordered his foreign minister to ready the French fleet for action. There was only one problem: if Louis XVI was still in charge of foreign policy and could single-handedly commit the country to war, where did that leave the National Assembly? Somewhat surprisingly, from the point of view of his radical colleagues, Mirabeau urged the assembly to accept the king’s exclusive right to declare war and make peace. Still hoping to reconcile the king and the assembly, he thought such a move would be a step toward establishing a secure constitutional monarchy. Robespierre, among others, vigorously opposed him.
Robespierre wanted to see the assembly take foreign affairs into its own hands and act in a conciliatory manner that would bring about peace. Beyond this, he disputed the king’s right to declare war on behalf of France, referring to him as a delegate of the nation who must do what he was told. As so often, his contentious intervention was greeted by both murmurs and loud applause. Mirabeau, however, rose to the occasion and gave one of the most brilliant oratorical performances of his—by now—distinguished career. He insisted that even if decisions on war and peace were to rest ultimately with the assembly, the right to initiate or propose such decisions must remain with the king. Mirabeau won this point and the assembly went on to decide that “war can be declared only by a decree of the legislature, passed after a formal proposal by the king, and subsequently sanctioned by him.”38 Though this outcome was not as radical as Robespierre would have liked (and, in the event, France did not go to war to help Spain), it was still a blow to the monarchy, and on the evening of 22 May Robespierre, his friend and fellow radical Jérôme Pétion, and other leading Jacobins processed through the Tuileries gardens escorted by a jubilant crowd. Pétion, the son of a lawyer at Chartres, was two years older than Robespierre and, like him, had been a lawyer with literary ambitions before the Revolution. In the assembly the two were increasingly paired as the up and coming leaders in Mirabeau’s wake. As the friends walked through the gardens, enjoying the spring blossoms on the cherry trees, the evening light, and the admiration of the crowd, they saw someone watching at one of the tall windows of the Tuileries palace. It was the small figure of the dauphin, waving and clapping his hands.
Louis XVI and his family were already effectively prisoners in the Tuileries, the magnificent palace on the right bank of the Seine. Commissioned in 1564 by Henry II’s widow, Catherine de Médicis, and named after the tile kilns or “tuileries” that had previously occupied the site, the Tuileries palace, for all its splendor, was certainly not a desirable abode. It had stood vacant, and been used only as a theater, for a century before the royal family were dragged from Versailles and forcibly installed in it. Connected to the even older Louvre palace by a riverside gallery, the Tuileries was within spitting distance of the Manège where the assembly and its throng of interested onlookers met every day, including Sunday. And there were many service buildings—porters’ lodges, barracks, domestic offices, and stables—clustered against the walls of the palace, so that almost all its doors and windows opened onto a public thoroughfare. There was little chance of privacy for the royals. Marie Antoinette complained that even in high summer she “could not open the windows for a little fresh air without being exposed to the grossest invectives and menaces.”39 For the same reason, it was difficult for her family to take any exercise, except on the terrace next to the river, and here the air was soon thick with insults and jeers from the angry Parisian mob. Louis XVI’s relations with the assembly were becoming more and more fraught as the weeks went by and rumors of foreign invasion, or “the aristocratic plot,” multiplied. Yet, to the noisy crowd accompanying Robespierre and Pétion through the Tuileries gardens that evening in May, the innocent applause of the six-year-old dauphin at the window seemed a good omen: here was the heir to the throne cheering the radical deputies. Here was hope, perhaps, that the constitutional monarchy might be made to work, that king and assembly could agree to a stable form of government for France.
In Camille Desmoulins’s report of these events, he has Robespierre sneering at the revelers: “Why, gentlemen! Upon what are you congratulating yourselves? The decree is hateful—as hateful as can be. Let that brat at the window clap his hands if he will: he knows what he is doing better than we do.”40 When he opened the paper and read this version, Robespierre was indignant. He wrote at once to Camille, pointing out that he had spoken his mind in the assembly but had left it at that and would never have been so indiscreet in public. In fact, he had not addressed the crowd in the garden at all. At Robespierre’s request, Camille printed his complaint, but he added a long editorial note:
If I insert these errata, my dear Robespierre, it is solely to display your signature before my fellow journalists and to warn them not to mutilate in future a name rendered famous by the patriotism of its bearer. There is a righteousness about your letter, and a senatorial weightiness, that hurts me, as an old college friend. You are proud, and you have a right to be, to wear the toga of the National Assembly. I like this noble conceit, and I am only sorry that all the deputies are not as conscious of their dignity as you are. But you might at least have given an old comrade like myself something more than a nod of the head—not that I love you any the less for it, because you are faithful to your principles, however it may be with your friends. All the same, why this insistence on my recantation? I may have slightly altered the facts in the story I told; but it was all to your credit, and if you never actually used the words I put in your mouth, still they certainly express your thoughts…. Surely you are not one of those wretched creatures described by J. J. Rousseau who hate to have their thoughts revealed, and who only say what they really think in the presence of their butler or their valet but never before the National Assembly or in the Tuileries gardens.41
Camille was still Robespierre’s closest friend in Paris. At the end of the year, Robespierre acted as a witness at his wedding to Lucile Horace. Their old headmaster, a priest from Louis-le-Grand, officiated. (Civil marriages had not been introduced at this stage in the Revolution, so the ceremony was a traditional Roman Catholic one, even though Camille had recently made some disparaging remarks about Christianity in his newspaper. When questioned about them before the wedding, he cheekily expressed surprise that the clergy read his paper. “Only sometimes,” came the priest’s wry response.)42 There was even talk of Robespierre’s marrying the bride’s sister and making it a double wedding. Yet despite the continuing friendship, Robespierre’s newly acquired ponderousness was beginning to irritate Camille. While Camille was a poet and a journalist, Robespierre was a deputy to the National Assembly; if at
Louis-le-Grand they had been equals, now Robespierre seemed to think he was more important. In these circumstances, it was clever of Camille to quote Rousseau. He knew how strong an impression Rousseau’s books—with their emphasis on equality and integrity—had made on Robespierre. This was also a sly way of warning his friend against the vice of hypocrisy, another of Rousseau’s obsessions. But the charge “You are faithful to your principles, however it may be with your friends” is serious. Had Robespierre really been disloyal to his friend? In this instance there is no evidence against him. Camille was hurt and his accusation exaggerated. Robespierre was certainly not the only revolutionary vulnerable to injured pride.
Not long after this public tiff with Camille, a letter arrived on Robespierre’s chaotic and heavily laden desk that marked the beginning of another important friendship with a younger man. The letter was from an officer in the National Guard of the Aisne, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, who was nine years younger than Robespierre and four years younger than Camille. Wild, handsome, transgressive, he was a most unlikely friend for Robespierre. Before the Revolution, Saint-Just had written a long, obscene poem called Organt and mischievously dedicated it to the Vatican. He wrote it while languishing in prison for six months, having been convicted for stealing and selling his widowed mother’s silver. His completely ludicrous excuse for mistreating his mother was that he needed money to consult a doctor about a disease brought on by overwork. Nevertheless, the preface to his poem was penitent: “I am twenty; I have acted badly; but I shall do better.” With the Revolution came Saint-Just’s chance at a fresh start. He became involved in local politics, specifically the issue of choosing the new capital of the new Department of the Aisne, as the assembly’s plans for reorganizing and redividing France were taking shape. Like many others throughout the country, he swore the new patriotic oath of “Fidelity to the Nation, the Law, and the King.” He had already contacted Camille Desmoulins, when he decided to write to Robespierre as well:
You who uphold our tottering country against the torrent of despotism and intrigue, you whom I know, as I know God, only through his miracles—it is to you, Monsieur, that I address myself, to entreat you to unite with me in saving my poor land…. I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not merely the deputy of a province, you are the deputy of the Republic and of mankind.43
All Saint-Just actually wanted Robespierre (whom he had never met) to do was to sign a petition supporting his village in the Aisne, Blérancourt, in a trade dispute with the neighboring town of Couci—it would have been hard to find a more parochial problem. So why did Robespierre keep this short letter, from someone he did not know, on a topic of little interest to him? It was found among his papers after he died when so many other letters had been lost or disposed of. Perhaps it was true, as Camille claimed, that Robespierre in 1790 was already getting above himself. And Saint-Just had, after all, just compared him to God! Still, the friendship that later developed between these two men centered on their shared ideas and political passions: they had an intellectual affinity aside from any more personal emotional or sentimental attachment. “You are the deputy of the Republic and of mankind,” said Saint-Just, and this is exactly how Robespierre saw himself, even if he had not yet put it so clearly. He might simply have been flattered by the letter. Or it could be only an accident that it survived. Or perhaps Robespierre somehow sensed the beginning of a deep and mysterious friendship that would last until the day he died.
THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the fall of the Bastille was coming up. How would Paris celebrate? Ever since Louis XVI had agreed to become a constitutional monarch, so-called Festivals of Federation had been in vogue throughout France. They varied greatly in size and grandeur but centered on ordinary citizens and members of the National Guard, who, jubilantly swearing patriotic oaths, were happy for any excuse for a public holiday as revolutionary optimism swept across the country. Why not celebrate the fall of the Bastille with a grandscale Festival of Federation? Why not turn the Champ de Mars parade ground, a vast open space close to the center of Paris, into an amphitheater with tiered seating for spectators, a triumphal arch at one end, and an “altar of the fatherland” in the middle? The king and National Assembly deputies could sit together in a specially built pavilion and watch the National Guards pass beneath the arch and swear their patriotic oath at the altar. The only difficulty was that things had been left until very late and these plans were approved just three weeks before the anniversary. However, there was public spirit and goodwill in abundance at this point in the Revolution, so volunteers from all walks of life flocked to the Champ de Mars to clear and level the ground. Robespierre would have been pleased to see monks with cockades pinned to their cassocks trampling the earth alongside soldiers, laborers, and well-dressed women. Excitement, cooperation, and holiday spirit accomplished the necessary and by 14 July everything was ready.
In the midst of these last-minute preparations, Augustin wrote to Robespierre hinting, as he had done before, that he would like to come to Paris. He thought he should try to join the local delegation to the national Festival of Federation, since he was sure to be deprived of any patriotic celebrations in conservative Arras. Life there for him and Charlotte was hard, Augustin complained.44 They had little money and no prospects. There is no record of Robespierre’s response, but if Augustin got his way and arrived in Paris for 14 July, he would have been proud to catch sight of his brother at the heart of the celebrations. On the day, it rained, so Louis XVI and the National Assembly deputies were glad of the shelter of the pavilion as they watched mud-splattered battalions of National Guards troop past the Altar of the Fatherland and swear allegiance to “the best of kings.” One of the deputies later remembered, “I was standing behind His Majesty’s seat and almost cheek by jowl with that famous rascal Robespierre.” Had Louis XVI turned to glance over his shoulder, he might have noticed the pallid, feline features of the lawyer from Arras whose reputation was growing steadily, week by week. Probably Louis XVI could not have said when exactly he had started to recognize the name Robespierre and attach importance to it. Certainly he did not recall the very first time he had set eyes on him, fifteen years earlier, when Robespierre was kneeling in the street outside Louis-le-Grand to greet the king on the way back from his coronation. But Robespierre surely remembered. Standing beneath the sodden canvas, so close to the king on this first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, he could feel confident that he would not have to get down on his knees before anyone ever again. “All mortals are equal; it is not by birth but only virtue that they are distinguished. In every state the Law must be universal and mortals whosoever they be are equal before it.”45 These were the words inscribed on the Altar of the Fatherland. Robespierre was too nearsighted to read them from where he was standing, but the sentiments they expressed were emblazoned on his heart.
Despite the weather, Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord, bishop of Autun, said Mass at the open-air altar and blessed the tricolor banners flapping hard against their poles like great wet towels. Talleyrand was lame, and for this reason had been forced into a clerical career by his family.46 After the Mass, General Lafayette, emblematic citizen-soldier and head of the National Guard, took over. The sun broke through the clouds and the rain—almost miraculously—stopped. Glamorously mounted on a white charger, Lafayette looked down his long nose and surveyed the assembled ranks below him: forty thousand National Guardsmen, a battalion of children, one of veterans, companies of professional soldiers and sailors, and delegates from France’s eighty-three new departments. He turned his horse toward the pavilion, the guards parted to let him through, and there he dismounted to receive the king’s permission to administer the patriotic oath. This he did back at the altar. The heady blend of religious sentiment and militarism went down well with the crowd, and in this symbolic way the whole country gave its support to the revolutionary actions of Paris. Afterward, the king, in turn, swore to uphold the decrees of the National Assembly. La
fayette was acting as the intermediary between the people and their king. All eyes were on him. For someone who had volunteered to cross the Atlantic and fight in the American Revolution at the age of twenty-one, he remained remarkably sanguine—his motto was still “Why not?”47 He wanted harmony between Louis XVI and the Revolution; he believed it possible; he fancied himself the man who could bring it about. “Royalty can only preserve itself by being in unison with the Revolution: otherwise it must be destroyed, and I will be the first to contribute to its destruction. The king is king neither of the aristocrats nor of the factions; he is king of the people and of the Revolution; otherwise he may be dethroned either by the former or by the latter.”48 Robespierre agreed, but he already disliked Lafayette—and within a year he would hate him.
THE FESTIVAL OF Federation did not impress everyone. In his newspaper, Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Camille Desmoulins derided it as an opportunity for Lafayette to show off, then mocked the ceremony by depicting a humiliated, supplicating king being dragged through the mud behind the chariot of his conquerors. A leading reactionary deputy, Pierre-Victor Malouet (who had been identified by Robespierre at the very beginning of the Revolution as “the most suspect, the most odious of all the patriots”), decided that radical sectors of the Parisian press had gone too far. In addition to Camille pouring scorn on the Festival of Federation, there was also the poisonous Marat, who day after day vehemently denounced the National Assembly in his paper. IT’S ALL OVER FOR US (“C’en est fait de nous”), screamed the Ami du peuple on 26 July, when a detachment of Austrian troops asked permission to cross the border into France. This was not yet an invasion but a sharp reminder that the Revolution had foreign enemies. Austria, France’s old rival for territory in Europe, was now poised to take advantage of the chaos the Revolution had brought; in addition, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, was anxiously watching events unfold in France, prepared to intervene, if necessary, to save the monarchy. Just in case anyone had missed the paper, Marat posted placards all over Paris with the same message, ending with ominous forebodings of war: “Five or six hundred [aristocratic] heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers.”49 Marat claimed that he was only trying to make a strong impression on people and destroy their complacency or “fatal” sense of security in the face of the growing counterrevolution—and was not really calling for bloodshed in the street.50 However, his tactics appalled most of the deputies in the assembly.