Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Robespierre was speaking, as darkness fell on the Champ de Mars, to only a handful of Jacobins. Pétion was still there and so was Pierre-Louis Rœderer (a lawyer in the Parlement of Metz before the Revolution and afterward a supporter of progressive reform in the National Assembly). But most of the other liberal deputies—the abbé Sieyès among them—were in the Feuillants Club, across the street, where they professed themselves more moderate than the Jacobins and more unequivocally committed to upholding the proposed constitutional monarchy. Suddenly there was a disturbance outside—shouting and the clash of arms in the rue Saint-Honoré. It was the National Guard returning to the city center in shock and disarray. Some of the citizen soldiers made their way into the Jacobins’ courtyard and shouted abuse at the radicals within—the radicals whom they blamed for inviting civil unrest and bringing Paris to the brink of civil war. For the first but by no means the last time, there was complete panic inside the club. Robespierre managed, somehow, to talk it down, and Mme Roland was present to hear him do it. Later that evening she sat at home thinking about him, how terrified he had been, but also how brave, and wondered if he had managed to get safely home to the rue Saintonge, “in the depths of the Marais.” On a daring but foolhardy whim, she decided to go check. She persuaded Roland to go with her, and they reached Robespierre’s lodgings just before midnight, to find him still out. How surprised he would have been to find Mme Roland on his doorstep at that hour! Robespierre, as we have seen, did not do well with women on the doorstep, and it had been an unusually long and terrible day. Since he was not there, however, there was nothing Mme Roland could do except go home again with her husband and resume worrying that the leader of the Jacobins—on whom she was developing one of her many crushes—had been arrested or worse.

  In fact, he was fine. Another member of the Jacobin audience that night was a master joiner and cabinetmaker named Maurice Duplay, originally from Auvergne but now living just doors from the Jacobins in the rue Saint-Honoré. As Robespierre was about to leave the club that night and step out into the unruly streets, Duplay intercepted him and offered sanctuary in his home close by. Robespierre, certainly exhausted and possibly frightened too, accepted the kind offer. Duplay lived modestly in a two-story house centered on a small courtyard in which he kept the tools and materials of his trade. Stepping over planks of wood and a saw pit on his way in, Robespierre was greeted by Duplay’s wife and family, a son and three daughters. In this simple household he felt instantly at home. As his sister Charlotte pointed out, he had been accustomed to her own domestic ministrations in Arras. Since moving away he had lived as a bachelor, but that life did not suit him. “Mme Duplay and her daughters expressed toward him the most vivid interest and surrounded him with their thousand delicate concerns. He was extremely susceptible to all those sorts of things. My aunts and I had spoiled him with an abundance of the little attentions that women alone are capable of.”48 Charlotte was jealous at the very thought of the Duplay women looking after her brother. He, however, was very comfortable—close to the Jacobins, close to the Manège, and living with the kind of skilled artisan whose straightforward work and home life seemed to embody the very essence of the political principles he believed in. After the massacre on the Champ de Mars, Robespierre lodged with the Duplays until he died. He had found his last home.49

  THE ROYAL FLIGHT to Varennes was tactfully forgotten and the constitution, so long in the making, was finally finished and formally accepted by Louis XVI in September 1791.50 A hot-air balloon trailing tricolor ribbons floated over the Champ de Mars announcing the fact. The gesture was suitably ephemeral, since the constitutional monarchy relied on a tenuous partnership between the king and the people’s new representatives, tied together but no better coordinated than the ribbons flapping in the sky. Because of the self-denying edict put forth by Robespierre, he and his fellow assembly deputies were not eligible to stand for election to the new legislature. On the last day of the assembly, in the atmosphere of relief and celebration overtaking Paris, Robespierre and his friend Pétion, the acknowledged leaders of the radical faction, were crowned with wreaths of laurel and led through the city streets by a jubilant crowd. People who had yet to set eyes on Robespierre went to look at the portrait by Mme Labille-Guyard hanging in the Paris Salon. He had entered the assembly an unknown in 1789 but now left it a popular hero—a bold spokesman for liberty and equality, the defender of the poor, an advocate of democracy, that rare and admirable thing in politics: an incorruptible man. For the time being, however, he was not needed and could take his first holiday in over two years. Robespierre, unlike Danton, Pétion, Brissot, and others whom he knew in Paris, had never been abroad. He could have gone at this point. He had enough money at last and his health, strained by the daily grind in the Manège and the late nights at the Jacobins, might have benefited. Instead, he answered the call of family duty and went home to Arras.

  Robespierre wrote to tell his sister that he was coming and that he wanted, if at all possible, to avoid a public welcome. She treated his request with characteristic seriousness but could do nothing to prevent Augustin’s announcing their brother’s imminent return from the tribune at the local Jacobin Club. On the designated day, Charlotte and Augustin set out early in the morning to meet Maximilien, accompanied by Mme Buissart, the wife of his closest friend in Arras.51 They hired a coach and took the road to Paris as far as the small town of Bapaume. But though they waited all day, their brother did not arrive. They went back to Arras that evening, very disappointed. At the city gates a crowd had assembled, having heard a rumor that the famous deputy had finally returned. As the coach pulled up, the people began detaching the horses so as to pull it inside the city walls themselves as a mark of respect and gratitude. Everyone was quite embarrassed when they discovered that it was only Charlotte, Augustin, and Madame Buissart inside. On 14 October, the small welcome party set off again, even earlier this time, hoping to avoid attracting further attention. Camped at an inn at Bapaume, keeping out of sight, they waited for Robespierre. Although the inn was on the road from Paris, they were afraid of missing him so posted a lookout in the street.

  Bapaume was already in a turbulent state because a battalion of National Guardsmen from Paris, among them some of the original heroes from the fall of the Bastille, were currently garrisoned in the town. Over the past week, there had been bitter conflicts between these soldiers, full of revolutionary enthusiasm, and the locals—many of whom, as Robespierre was soon to discover, were considerably less enthusiastic. Suddenly the Incorruptible—away for over two long, eventful years—was in the arms of his nearest and dearest. Outside the inn the lookout had spread the word. The National Guardsmen were delighted and gathered to congratulate Robespierre on his democratic principles, his tireless fight against the enemies of the people, his outstanding political courage. They set about organizing an impromptu banquet, which detained Robespierre in Bapaume for several hours, so that it was dark before he set off again with his proud siblings beside him.

  At Arras there was an even bigger crowd. The people were in high spirits; they had waited excitedly all day; and some of them were probably rather inebriated by the time the coach—with Robespierre in it this time—rolled into view. Once again there was an attempt to detach the horses at the city gate so the appreciative crowd could pull their returning hero across the city threshold. Seeing this commotion through the window, Robespierre had one of his attacks of irritation and got out immediately. He proclaimed priggishly to his brother and sister that he did not approve of free citizens taking on the role of animals and debasing themselves in this manner—all his hard work in the assembly had been for nothing if the people of his own hometown were still so unenlightened. Undeterred by his disapproval, the crowd at Arras, now joined by the crowd that had followed the coach from Bapaume, surged through the streets toward his old home in the rue des Rapporteurs shouting, “Vive Robespierre! Long live the defender of the people!” This was exactly what he had not want
ed. He had hoped for a discreet private homecoming, fearing that any public feting would be reported in the Parisian press and turned against him by his growing number of political enemies. With immense relief he finally closed the front door behind him and was alone again with his strange small family.

  Part IV

  The Constitution Fails

  (1791–1792)

  7

  War

  Robespierre got home on a Friday evening. By the end of the weekend, when he wrote to the Duplays, all his irritation had been forgotten and he described his homecoming in glowing terms. “I was enchanted by the patriotism of the National Guard,” he wrote. The people of Arras had received him “with demonstrations of such affection as I cannot express and cannot recall without emotion.” Even his enemies, the aristocrats, had illuminated their houses in his honor, “which I can only attribute to their respect for the will of the people.” (A local newspaper, however, attributed it to the aristocrats’ fear of having their windows smashed.) The following day an unarmed battalion of National Guardsmen had danced and sung patriotic songs outside his house. All of this, he gleefully remarked, must have been very disagreeable for Feuillant ears. The split at the Paris Jacobin Club earlier in 1791 had reached Arras. Here as in many other places throughout the country, former members of the local Jacobin Club had followed the Feuillant example and formed new, more moderate clubs on hearing the news of the massacre on the Champ de Mars. According to Robespierre, the Feuillants now dominated the local government, which was increasingly hostile to the people, the patriots, and their Jacobin champions, including the most famous—himself. In fact, once the initial excitement of his homecoming had died down, many in Arras gave him the cold shoulder. He went to visit one old friend, only to find him distant and completely changed. Robespierre was upset to see that the Revolution had destroyed some of his connections from his days as a member of the Academy of Arras and the Rosati literary society.

  According to Charlotte, he was also upset to discover that, in his long absence, Anais Deshorties (the stepdaughter of one of their aunts, whom he had courted before the Revolution) had married another local lawyer—but if the news broke his heart, there is no evidence in his surviving correspondence. Instead his mind was full of two political subjects: the National Guard and the church. It was all very well to have battalions of National Guardsmen trooping about, singing and dancing and dressing up in their new uniforms, but were they really ready to defend the country? Some of them were not even armed, let alone trained—how could they repel an invading army? Arras was close to the frontier and Robespierre’s sense that revolutionary France was dangerously unready for war grew stronger as he traveled around during his six-week holiday, visiting Lille, Béthune, and environs. He also noticed, on these short trips, that the roadside inns were full of émigrés. Dropping in for refreshment on his travels, he was horrified to overhear well-bred voices at the surrounding tables discussing their discontent with the Revolution and their plans for abandoning the country. As the uncompromising defender of liberty in the assembly, he had argued for freedom of movement—if anyone (except the king) wanted to leave the country, they must be free to do so.1 When he saw the émigrés for himself, however, he was disconcerted. He interrogated the innkeepers. Was this typical? Yes, they told him, for quite some time people had been leaving in droves. His uncomfortable suspicion that the country’s borders were vulnerable and insecure became more intense. The counterrevolution was growing in strength and at Coblenz, just across the German border, the Prince de Condé was continuing to amass troops.

  Equally disturbing to Robespierre was the religious resistance to the Revolution gathering strength across provincial France. In Arras he had grown up in an atmosphere pervaded by Catholicism. He owed his education to the church, his intervention in the National Assembly in the interest of the lower clergy might have been an expression of gratitude, and he still sometimes spoke as though residual religious belief were the bedrock of his political convictions. When he returned home to the ecclesiastical center of Artois, he cannot have expected to find it transformed beyond recognition. What he did find, however, shocked him deeply. Months ago, his brother had written to him about the provincial clergy’s opposition to the Revolution. But in Paris, where the majority of priests had sworn to uphold the controversial Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Robespierre and his fellow radicals had little direct experience of that opposition. Not so in Arras, where there had recently been a reenactment of the Crucifixion with revolutionaries cast as Roman soldiers offering vinegar to the lips of the dying Christ. Refractory priests (priests who had followed the pope in rejecting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy) were flagrantly turning their congregations against the Revolution. Confronted now with the force of religion, Robespierre wrote to an unidentified friend in Paris:

  Nearly all the orators in the National Assembly were on the left over the question of priests; they spoke rhetorically about tolerance and the liberty of sects; they saw nothing but a question of philosophy and religion in what is really a question of revolution and politics; they did not see that every time an aristocratic priest makes a convert he makes a new enemy of the Revolution; since those ignorant people he leads astray are incapable of distinguishing religious from national interest, and, in appearing to defend religious opinions, [the priests] actually preach despotism and counterrevolution…. I realize now that in Paris we very poorly understand the public spirit and the power of the priests. I am convinced that they alone would be enough to bring back despotism and that the court need do no more than leave it to them, confident of soon reaping the benefit of their schemes.2

  Robespierre’s view was not so different from that of the Revolution’s most articulate foreign critic, the conservative philosopher and politician Edmund Burke, who thought that the counterrevolution could rely on the priests to establish “peace and order in every parish.”3 Burke’s great hope was Robespierre’s worst nightmare. To Robespierre’s surprise and irritation, this opinion, expressed in a private letter, was published the following week in not one but two Parisian newspapers—whoever Robespierre’s friend was, he or she had betrayed him. From Arras he wrote at once to the editors to complain at the infringement of his privacy, but he made no attempt whatsoever to disown the opinion itself.4

  In a letter to Maurice Duplay—a more reliable friend—Robespierre described another recent religious sensation in Arras. A refractory priest was celebrating Mass in the Chapel of Calvary when a crippled man in the congregation suddenly threw down his crutches and walked freely. The man’s wife fainted when she heard the astonishing news and, after she had recovered consciousness, gave thanks to heaven for the miracle. Interestingly, Robespierre does not flatly reject the concept of a miracle, as Mirabeau and other determinedly secular revolutionaries certainly would have done, often with ribaldry. Instead, he comments that it is not so surprising that a miracle should have occurred in that particular chapel, since others had occurred there in the past. There is perhaps a note of sarcasm in his next remark. “I do not propose to stay long in this holy land,” he tells his carpenter friend. “I am not worthy of it.”5 But this is not the letter of someone who simply sneers at religion. His provincial holiday had served to remind Robespierre of religion’s immense social power. Before the holiday was over, he concluded that the Revolution must harness the church for its own purposes or risk destruction. At the very end of his letter, he sends his greetings to Georges Couthon, another of Duplay’s Jacobin lodgers, himself a cripple as well as a prominent member of the circle of friends who now surrounded Robespierre in Paris. In Arras, he was homesick for that circle.

  ROBESPIERRE RETURNED TO Paris on 28 November. He went first to the Duplays, deposited his modest luggage, and refreshed himself in his low-ceilinged timber-framed bedroom, which looked out over the carpenter’s yard. Later that evening, he went to dine with Pétion. There had been some big changes in Pétion’s life since Robespierre last saw him. He had bee
n elected mayor of Paris in the recent municipal elections, receiving 6,728 votes to General Lafayette’s 3,126. Perhaps it was general disaffection, perhaps confusion about voting eligibility, but whatever the case about 70,000 people who were eligible to vote abstained and 100 voted for Robespierre even though he wasn’t a candidate: flattering or frustrating, depending on how he looked at it. Dinner chez Pétion was a much grander affair than it had been on the day after the king’s flight to Varennes. As mayor, Pétion was now living in a magnificent Parisian house, “but his spirit is as simple and pure as ever,” Robespierre reassured himself, nervously.6 He spoke freely in a letter to Buissart of the new configuration of power in Paris: Pétion had taken on an exacting role, but his personal virtue and love of the people equipped him well for it; the recently elected Legislative Assembly, according to Robespierre, was full of promise and a real improvement on its predecessor in the Manège; public opinion was turning against the Feuillants, among them Barnave, who had befriended the king on the difficult journey back from Varennes, and people were rightly suspicious of the king’s new Feuillant ministers. Chosen by the king, these ministers were men Louis XVI thought he could trust to bolster his own precarious constitutional role, including the Comte de Montmorin (the foreign affairs minister, who soon resigned) and the Comte de Narbonne (war minister). Popular opinion was increasingly hostile toward the monarch and concerned that he might try to reassert his power and strengthen his position under the new constitution. All in all, Robespierre’s first impression on arriving back in the capital was that things looked good for the patriotic party.