Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution
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In the midst of this rancorous strife Robespierre decided to start his own journal. Despite being passionate and opinionated, he was not a natural journalist. Even more long-winded on the page, his speeches also seemed far flatter—almost pedantic—in print. But it was relatively easy to venture into journalism at this time, even with little natural talent; all you needed was a bit of funding and enough stamina to write a couple of thousand words a week. From the middle of May, Le défenseur de la constitution (The Defender of the Constitution) appeared every Tuesday in an eye-catching red paper cover. As was common practice, the issues were undated. Despite its conservative-sounding name (since when had Robespierre been the defender of a constitution he never ceased to criticize during its drafting in the National Assembly?), what he really wanted was another platform from which to attack Brissot and anyone else who disagreed with him over the course of the Revolution. Readers could subscribe for thirty-six livres a year and were welcome to send in comments or books for review. Initially, the printer was to be another of Duplay’s lodgers, an artisan from that close circle devoted to the Incorruptible. But then Robespierre came to an arrangement with a printer and bookseller in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie Française, who promised to get the paper into every post office in France and all the major bookshops of Europe.
There was something implausible about Robespierre’s prospectus for the paper. His pen, he professed, would be directed only by his love of justice and truth. He would descend from the tribune and “mount the platform of the universe to speak not only to an assembly, which might be agitated by the clash of different interests, but to the whole human race, whose interest is that of reason and general happiness.” He would be like an actor who, leaving the stage and positioning himself in the audience, is better able to judge the play. He would be like a traveler who flees the tumultuous metropolis—or, in his case, revolutionary politics—and climbs to the summit of a mountain so as to feel “the calm of nature sink into his soul and his thoughts broaden out with the horizon.” So Le défenseur de la constitution would be nothing like Marat’s or Desmoulins’s or Brissot’s or Louvet’s publications: no, Robespierre’s was to be modeled on the Sermon on the Mount with romantic overtones. Predictably enough, he promised to use it to unmask the enemies of the people: “Placed since the beginning of the Revolution at the center of political happenings, I have had a close view of the tortuous advance of tyranny, I have discovered that our most dangerous enemies are not those who have openly declared themselves, and I shall try to render my knowledge of value for the safety of my country.”43 For all the declared purity of its manifesto, the journal was really a weapon in a factional fight that Robespierre had no intention of relinquishing.
Brissot and his friends were now openly calling for a republic. In his fight against them, Robespierre went so far as to turn himself into the last defender of the constitutional monarchy. Now that Brissot had made the campaign for a republic in France his own, Robespierre dared to criticize republicanism itself: “I care no more for Cromwell than for Charles I,” he announced flamboyantly. “Surely it is not in the words monarchy or republic that we shall find the solution to the great problems of society.”44 Brissot had recently started a journal entitled Le républicain. There was nothing, Robespierre insisted in the first issue of his own journal, truly populist about Brissot’s new venture except its title. Furthermore, he argued, the very word republic had recently caused division among the patriots and given the enemies of liberty an excuse for claiming that there was a conspiracy afoot against the monarchy and the constitution. Indeed, in Brissot’s hands, the word republic had led directly to the massacre of innocent citizens, for it was Brissot who had been behind the petition that caused the debacle on the Champ de Mars on 17 July, almost a year earlier. It was Brissot who had insisted on calling for the abolition of the monarchy, when all the Jacobins had wanted was a referendum on the role of the king after his flight to Varennes. This—obviously—was splitting hairs. Robespierre had wanted to put the king on trial in 1791 and the call for a referendum was itself a challenge to the future of the monarchy. Moreover, the Jacobins had joined the call for deposition, however briefly. Here, however, it suited him to implicate Brissot in the bloodshed on the Champ de Mars—of all the crimes in the Revolution so far, the one that would never be forgotten or forgiven. Not even his worst enemy could claim that Brissot had intended the massacre, but he was nonetheless culpable, in Robespierre’s eyes, of inept and impolitic behavior. More recently, Robespierre argued, Brissot was guilty of collaborating with General Lafayette over the disastrous war. According to Robespierre, Brissot’s mask of patriotism had slipped and he now ripped it off. So much for rising above the factional strife and publishing a journal with Olympian impartiality!
Also in the first issue of Le défenseur de la constitution was Robespierre’s recent retort to Brissot in the Jacobin Club, delivered just after the declaration of war. Brissot had come again to the Jacobins to put an end to Robespierre’s vituperations. “What have you done,” he asked dramatically, “to give you the right to criticize me and my friends?” Robespierre seized the opportunity to summarize his own contributions to the Revolution so far. Now the readers of his journal throughout France (and beyond, if the bookseller kept his promise) would learn the story of his early revolutionary career:
When I was only a member of a very small tribunal [in Arras], I opposed the Lamoignon Edicts on grounds of the principle of popular sovereignty, when superior tribunals only opposed them on form…. In the epoch of primary assemblies [in Arras], I alone insisted that we not merely reclaim but also exercise the rights of sovereignty…. When the Third Estate [in Arras] wanted humbly to thank the nobles for their false renunciation of financial privileges, I persuaded them to declare only that they did not have the right to give to the people that which already belonged to them.45
In Robespierre’s eyes, one overwhelming conclusion followed from these flawless revolutionary credentials: those attacking him three years later, in political circumstances changed beyond all recognition, could only be enemies of the people. By now, Robespierre was personally invested in the public image of himself as incorruptible: he was not and had never been in the wrong. In this context, further comparison with Danton is illuminating. On one of the rare occasions that Danton spoke about himself in public, he was able to say: “If I was carried away by enthusiasm in the first days of our regeneration, have I not atoned for it? Have I not been ostracized?”46 Robespierre could not have spoken these words. Atonement—for all his religious sensibility—was outside his repertoire; martyrdom made more sense to him. Like Danton, he had given himself to the people and could envisage dying for them; but unlike Danton, he could never admit that he might have been wrong. Why? Because he was a self-righteous and hypocritical prig? In some respects, he certainly was. Yet it is the political implications of the differences between the two men that really matter in the history of the Revolution. Both aspired to be popular leaders. Danton’s identification with the people was objective—when he could, he left his flawed, colorful, life-loving self out of politics. For him, the distinction between private and public life was rarely confused. In contrast, Robespierre’s identification with the people was subjective. If he was wrong the people were wrong, and that, as Rousseau had assured him, simply could not be the case. Later in the Revolution, when his wife suddenly died, Danton was plunged into deep personal grief; despite his many alleged infidelities, he had loved her passionately. Robespierre wrote to him, “I love you more than ever, I love you until death. At this moment, I am you. Do not harden your heart to the voice of friendship.”47 To anyone who did not know Robespierre, such a letter at such a time might have seemed a bit gauche and offensively self-centered. Danton, however, did know Robespierre and recognized that that capacity to channel himself into someone or something else—to seamlessly identify with something beyond himself and make it his own—was the very center of his friend’s extraordinary
self.
FOR SOMEONE STAKING both his personal and political credibility on never being wrong, Robespierre’s defense of the ailing constitutional monarchy was extremely risky. In 1789 he had argued vehemently but unsuccessfully against giving the king a legislative veto. Now, over matters of religion and the army, the king was on the brink of using his veto against the Legislative Assembly. After their appointment in March 1792, Brissot’s friends had pursued a policy on religion guaranteed to antagonize the king. On 24 April, four days into the foreign war, Jean Marie Roland (supported or perhaps even inspired by his avidly political wife) called for repressive measures against the refractory priests whom Robespierre himself had already identified as a major counterrevolutionary threat. A month later, on 24 May, the assembly approved a decree to banish and deport all members of the clergy who still refused to swear the oath to the Civil Constitution. Effectively, this action sanctioned a nationwide priest hunt, and it was obvious that Louis XVI, already in trouble with his conscience, would balk at approving the persecution of Catholic priests. A showdown between the king and the assembly, at a time when the ministers it had imposed on him were calling for a republic, would certainly have resulted in the collapse of the constitution. Given his recent defense of it, Robespierre would have been left looking foolish, the hapless defender of a hopeless cause. The fact that he was prepared to risk this is testimony to two things, his confidence in himself as a revolutionary leader and his irreconcilable differences with Brissot’s faction, from which he wanted to distinguish himself at any cost.
The view that the refractory priests were a threat to the Revolution was far from eccentric, and it would be unreasonable to blame Brissot’s faction for the trouble it caused the king in this respect. But the faction went a step beyond troubling Louis’s conscience to menacing his person, when it persuaded the assembly to abolish his personal bodyguard. Holed up inside the Tuileries, pinning their hopes on a foreign invasion, and maintaining a stalwart sense of humor as the tide of hostility flowed round them (“a pike with a bonnet rouge walked about the garden…and did not stay long”) was all very well, but none of the royals could ignore the implications of the removal of their guards. They were even more alarmed to hear that the bodyguards were to be replaced not by ordinary Parisian National Guardsmen (most of whom were headed for the front line) but by members of a new federalist army, called to Paris from the provinces and selected by local Jacobin Clubs. This new institution was as offensive to the National Guard as it was threatening to the king and his family. Many people—thousands of National Guards among them—thus urged him to use his veto and put a stop both to the new army and to the persecution of the priests. On holiday in Arras in the autumn of 1791, Robespierre had fixed on two main sources of revolutionary anxiety: France’s armed forces and its refractory priests. Six months later, his twin anxieties were proving prophetic.
The idea of a new patriot army, summoned to Paris to supplement if not actually replace the National Guard, was originally Robespierre’s. He had first suggested something of the kind in one of his antiwar speeches to the Jacobins, when he imagined a new federation of civilian soldiers from all over France regenerating public spirit on the Champ de Mars.48 Since then, in the very first issue of his newspaper, he had called for an army of sixty thousand veteran soldiers to be assembled and garrisoned close to Paris. To his dismay, Brissot’s friend in the ministry (Joseph Servan, the new minister for war) was calling for something disconcertingly similar: a new national army of twenty thousand men chosen and sent to Paris by local Jacobin Clubs throughout France. The problem, from Robespierre’s point of view, was to determine which of the Jacobin factions would do the choosing—his own or Brissot’s? Where would the loyalties of the new troops really lie? For all his exertions on the Jacobin Correspondence Committee, there was next to nothing he could do to ensure the outcome he desired. Instead, he channeled his energy into an elaborate theoretical discussion of military discipline that filled twenty pages of the next issue of his journal. From this it emerged that he was as intent on applying democratic principles to the armed forces as to any other sector of society.
Every soldier was also a citizen and every citizen a member of the human race, Robespierre insisted. He envisaged duties attached to each of these three spheres in ascending order: the professional duties of a soldier were narrower than his duties as a citizen, which in turn were narrower still than his duties as a human being. Yet Robespierre completely evaded the real issue in this area: what would happen if, or when, the spheres of duty collided? The one example of such a collision that he mentioned was ludicrous. He imagined an off-duty soldier chatting up a woman at a party and being ordered by his superior officer to stop: “Your presence here displeases me. I order you to return to barracks and forbid you to talk to this woman. I reserve for myself alone the pleasure of conversing with her.”49 Irritating as such a scenario would no doubt be for the frustrated soldier, it hardly got to the heart of the problem of military discipline in a country slipping into civil war. The first anniversary of the Champ de Mars massacre was just weeks away. In the immediate aftermath of that massacre, Robespierre had done well to remind the Jacobins that the National Guardsmen who obeyed General Lafayette and fired on unarmed civilians were not to blame for their orders, were themselves still citizens and patriots too. But there was a huge difference between struggling to limit the bloodshed in a political crisis and delineating a coherent theory of how soldiers could be held to their duties. Unexpectedly, fragile, bookish Robespierre turned out far more talented at the practice than at the theory of politics. Before the Revolution he had been a competent lawyer and a second-rate essayist; in its maelstrom he was emerging as a quirkily brilliant politician. As the spring of 1792 ripened into summer, he was still overshadowed by Brissot’s faction.
The inner circle around Brissot was presided over by Mme Roland, who was growing ever more imperious in her modest parlor. They now planned a republic for part, if not all, of France. “We spoke often,” Mme Roland reported,
about the excellent spirit in the Midi, the energy of the departments there and the facilities which that part of France might provide for the foundation of a Republic should the Court succeed in subjugating the north of France and Paris. We got out the maps; we drew the line of demarcation. Servan studied the military positions; we calculated the forces available and examined the means of reorganizing supply. Each of us contributed ideas as to where and from whom we might expect support.50
Roland’s wife had come a long way since she married an obscure bureaucrat twenty years her senior out of intellectual respect. Now she was poring over maps of France and helping the ministry to divide it into putative republican and monarchical segments. On 10 June she prompted Roland to write an open letter to the king denouncing his threat to use his veto to delay the assembly’s decrees on the refractory priests and the new federal army (due to arrive in Paris in time for the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July). She may even have drafted the words in which Roland effectively accused the king of treason: “Much more delay and a grieving people will see in its king the friend and accomplice of conspirators.”51 Unsurprisingly, the king responded, two days later, by dismissing Roland and his friends from the ministry. They had lasted just three months in office.
General Lafayette heard the news on the front line. The war continued to go badly. Lafayette struggled more than ever to integrate new rank-and-file soldiers recruited from the National Guard with remnants of the old regime army. There were not enough funds or weapons; the frontier moved closer to Paris every day. In an open letter to the capital, he welcomed the fall of Brissot’s friends and blamed all France’s recent troubles, including the grim news from the front, on the Jacobin Club: “This sect, organized like a district empire, in its metropolitan and affiliated societies, blindly guided by ambitious chiefs, forms a separate corporation in the midst of the French people, whose power it usurps by governing its representatives an
d proxies.”52 What did Lafayette have in mind—a military coup to coincide with the 14 July observation, as Robespierre feared? Might he sweep down from the north on his white charger and put a stop once and for all to the relentless bickering in the capital when the nation already had its work cut out fighting a foreign war? If so, there would be bloodshed again on the Champ de Mars, for Paris meanwhile was planning a popular protest in support of the dismissed ministers. Robespierre disapproved. He hated and feared Lafayette. “Strike at Lafayette and the nation will be saved,” was his improbable advice to the Jacobins.53 But he hated Brissot’s faction just as bitterly, so he stood at the tribune and denounced the forthcoming protest:
You [friends of Brissot] that are sounding so loud an alarm and giving such an impulse to the public mind on the subject of a change of ministry, why do you not employ your power for a more national object—some object worthy of the French people? If you have grievances lay them before the assembly. No doubt a great country is justified in rising in its own defence, but only a degraded people can allow itself to be thrown into such agitation for the interests of individuals and the intrigues of a party.54
He might as well have said that Brissot was not worth a drop of patriotic blood. But no one was listening to him. The demonstration in favor of the dismissed ministers and against the king’s veto—widely vilified ever since it was first discussed in 1789—was planned for 20 June, the third anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. The Jacobin and Cordelier Clubs, the municipal government of Paris, the electoral assemblies of the city’s forty-eight sections were all involved. The plan was to present a petition to the assembly asking for the reinstatement of the ministers and plant a tree of liberty in the Tuileries. But the petitioners also wanted permission to bring their weapons, a request refused by the municipal government. As mayor of Paris, Pétion found himself in a very difficult position. He did not want to be blamed for suppressing the protest, but nor did he want responsibility for the bloodshed that might result if the crowd was armed. He referred the problem on to Pierre-Louis Rœderer, now the chief legal adviser of the Department of Paris, which had wider responsibilities than the municipality. Rœderer had the courage to ban the proposed demonstration, calling on the National Guard to stop the protestors from going ahead illegally: another massacre loomed on the Champ de Mars. Pétion, having passed the problem to Rœderer, now disputed his solution, said no power on earth should be allowed to prevent the demonstration, and suggested that the National Guard march alongside the petitioners, rather than against them. The National Guardsmen themselves were divided: some were delighted to join the petitioners, others refused.