by Ruth Scurr
Robespierre’s intervention was subtle and sardonic but completely overshadowed by the next speaker. Blistering with skin disease and reeking of vinegar, this was the infamous Marat, the so-called ami du peuple (people’s friend), the indefatigable pamphleteer who, since 1789, had consistently called for blood and anarchy. “I believe in the cutting off of heads,” he had declared in his newspaper.20 Of course, he did not always mean what he said. “My hand would wither rather than write another word if I really thought the people were going to do what I tell them to,” he confided to a friend.21 Even so, he had openly approved of the September Massacres and may have had more to do with arranging them than Robespierre cared to hear about. The two were not close friends. Marat claimed that the only time they had ever met privately, Robespierre was horrified by his sanguinary attitudes:
Robespierre listened to me with terror. He grew pale and silent for some time. This interview confirmed me in the opinion that I always had of him, that he unites the knowledge of a wise senator with the integrity of a thoroughly good man and the zeal of a true patriot but that he is lacking as a statesman in clearness of vision and determination.22
This was high praise indeed from Marat, who so delighted in defamation. The admiration may not have been mutual, but it was nevertheless hard to imagine that Marat, this flagrant travesty of Rousseau’s ideal lawgiver, could have been elected to the Convention as a representative for Paris without the Incorruptible’s consent. As Marat stood up to speak the hall erupted in hoots of disapproval. When the booing relented he said in his hollow, croaking pantomime villain’s voice: “I perceive that I have enemies here.” “All, all, all are your enemies,” cried his fellow deputies.23 Undeterred, he addressed the charge of tyranny that had been leveled at Robespierre and the other representatives of Paris, whose election the Jacobins had so vigilantly monitored:
I owe it to justice to declare that my colleagues, and especially Danton and Robespierre, have always opposed the opinions that I avow on this point; I, first and alone of all public writers in France, have thought of a dictatorship as the only means to crush the counterrevolutionary traitors.24
The same day Marat despaired of the Convention in his L’ami du peuple and prophesized to the French:
Fifty years of anarchy await you, and you will emerge from it only by the power of some dictator who will arise—a true statesman and patriot. O prating people, if you did but know how to act!25
Among the crowd at the Tuileries on 10 August was an unemployed army captain who watched with horror as the Swiss Guards were murdered and burned. “If he had mounted his horse,” the young Napoleon Bonaparte wrote of Louis XVI, “victory would have remained with him.”26 Here was the future statesman and patriot whose dictatorship Marat foretold but did not live to see.
THE GIRONDINS’ ATTACKS on Robespierre redoubled. The old divide at the Jacobins between Brissot and Robespierre was carried over into the Convention, where it mutated into the hostility between the Girondins and the Mountain. But whereas the previous year Robespierre had struggled to win ascendancy over the Paris Jacobins, now he succeeded in having Brissot and his friends formally expelled from the club. On 29 October, in the Convention, Mme Roland’s husband denounced in general terms the proponents of violence and blamed the Insurrectionary Commune for the September Massacres. Robespierre responded with general refutations but also asked rhetorically, “Who dares accuse me?”27 From the seats at the other end of the hall where the Girondins were sitting came a voice. “I do,” called Jean Baptiste Louvet, the licentious novelist married to one of Mme Roland’s close friends. Silence fell among the assembled deputies. According to a Dr. Moore (a distinguished medical doctor studying in Paris who had heard a rumor that something exciting was going to happen that day), Louvet, thin, lank, and pale-faced, “stalked along the hall like a specter, and being come directly opposite to the tribune, he fixed Robespierre, and said, ‘Oui, Robespierre, c’est moi qui t’accuse!’” (Yes, Robespierre, it is I who accuse you). Robespierre froze. “He could not have seemed more alarmed had a bleeding head spoken to him from a charger.” Danton tried to help by causing a distraction—he knew his friend was a skilled yet nervous speaker and could see he was deeply flustered. But Louvet had captured the deputies’ attention and they wanted to hear what he had to say. Realizing this, Danton, always so adept, so agile as a public speaker, began to threaten Louvet before he could even begin. “I want the accuser to put his finger into the wound,” he said, challenging Louvet to back up his allegations.28 “I intend it,” Louvet replied, “but why does Danton scream beforehand?”
In fact, Louvet had nothing new to say. He accused Robespierre of conspiring to control the Insurrectionary Commune, of complicity in the September Massacres, of trying to include Roland and Brissot among the victims, of associating with Marat, and of dominating the Jacobin Club:
I accuse you of having produced yourself as an object of popular idolatry, and of having caused it to be rumoured that you are the only man capable of saving the country. I accuse you…of having tyrannised by intrigue and fear over the Electoral Assembly of Paris, and of having aimed at supreme power by calumny, violence, and terror; and I demand that a Committee be appointed to examine your conduct.29
It had all been said before, and yet, Dr. Moore observed, this speech stirred up so much hostility against Robespierre that he was in danger of being lynched on the spot. Answer, Danton urged him, answer immediately. But either he could not or he would not. Once again, Danton spoke on his behalf, rejecting the charges of tyranny. Finally Robespierre was given a week to prepare his own response. There was cunning behind his reluctance to speak. He knew that he lacked Danton’s fluency and that if the Convention turned against him his career was finished. He knew he could use the coming week to write and rewrite in his small, neat handwriting another finely honed account of his exemplary revolutionary credentials. But there must have been fear as well. Standing there facing Louvet, resolute as Banquo’s ghost, he completely lost his nerve. He needed the week to recover, to write his defense, and, above all, to assemble the facts of his revolutionary contribution and square them with his conscience. He was not, he never had been, wrong. Much as he needed others to believe this, what he needed still more was to believe it himself.
Robespierre defended himself before the Convention on 5 November. On that day Dr. Moore was at the Manège again, in the crowd of people who went early to secure a place in the public galleries. Looking around, he noticed suddenly that the galleries were “almost entirely filled with women.” They applauded Robespierre loudly. Dr. Moore was not the only person to notice Robespierre’s female fan club. Later that week the Marquis de Condorcet, secretary of the Academy of Sciences under the old regime, now a Girondin deputy in the Convention, raised the subject in the newspaper Chronique de Paris:
There are some who ask why there are always so many women around Robespierre: at his house, in the galleries of the Jacobins and of the Convention. It is because this revolution of ours is a religion, and Robespierre is leading a sect therein. He is a priest at the head of his worshipers…. Robespierre preaches; Robespierre censures; he is furious, grave, melancholy, exalted—all coldly; his thoughts flow regularly, his habits are regular; he thunders against the rich and the great; he lives on next to nothing; he has no necessities. He has but one mission—to speak—and he speaks unceasingly; he creates disciples,…he talks of God and of Providence; he calls himself the friend of the humble and the weak; he gets himself followed by women and by the poor in spirit; he gravely receives their adoration…. He is a priest and will never be other than a priest.30
Condorcet’s characterization was ill intentioned, but there is plenty of other evidence that Robespierre had a peculiar appeal for women. Olympe de Gouges, a butcher’s daughter and pioneering feminist, wrote to him at this time, suggesting they drown themselves together in the Seine as an act of extreme patriotism: in this way, she suggested, he could cleanse himself of the stains
that had sullied his reputation since 10 August.31 Robespierre, understandably, preferred to redeem his reputation by more conventional methods.
Before the Convention, he denied outright having played any part in the election of Marat. He confirmed that he had met him privately in January 1792. At that meeting they had spoken of public affairs and Marat had been despondent. “I told him myself what all patriots, even the most ardent, thought of him.”32 Robespierre described to the Convention how he had reproached Marat for inciting extreme violence in his editorials; calling for five or six hundred guilty heads to be lopped off was, he insisted, as repugnant to the friends of liberty as to the aristocracy. After “that first and unique visit” he had encountered Marat next in the Convention itself, where he was amazed to find himself accused of having schemed to get him elected. There were elements of truth in this retrospective account. Strictly speaking, it was Danton and the Cordeliers, not Robespierre, who had proposed Marat. But certainly Robespierre had not opposed Marat’s candidacy; in fact, he had favored it. For the benefit of the deputies, and cheered on by all those admiring women in the galleries, he was expertly managing the truth, staying as close to it as possible while massaging it to produce a particular impression, as all skilled politicians do.
It was when he came to the subject of the September Massacres that Robespierre made a truly staggering announcement:
It is certain that one innocent person perished [an alleged victim of mistaken identity]; the numbers have been exaggerated, but one [innocent] without doubt [perished]. We should weep, citizens, at this cruel mistake, and we have wept over it for a long time. He was said to be a good citizen and was therefore one of our friends. We should weep also for the guilty victims, reserved for the vengeance of the laws, who fell beneath the blade of popular justice; but let this grief have an end, like all mortal things. Keep back some tears for more touching calamities; weep instead for the hundred thousand victims of tyranny.33
The kinds of comparison Robespierre calls for in this speech are morally disturbing. Were the deaths of forty-three frightened children at the Bicêtre reformatory really less moving than the deaths of the many more who never had enough to eat, never had a real hope or start in life under the old regime? Were the deaths of those cornered, defenseless priests any less disturbing than the persecutions inflicted on nonbelievers in the past? Robespierre was defending the Revolution and himself; the two were scarcely distinct in his mind anymore. He argued that the end of the Revolution—liberty—justified its means—bloodshed—and asked a chilling political question, destined to reverberate down the centuries: “Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?”34 To people who complained that the Insurrectionary Commune of 10 August had done illegal things, he replied, “The Revolution is illegal: the fall of the Bastille and of the monarchy were illegal—as illegal as liberty itself!”35
There can be little doubt that however much he preferred to distinguish himself publicly from Marat’s tasteless and flamboyant calls for violence, Robespierre was quite prepared to sanction it in practice. He believed violence indispensable for advancing the political experiment on which he had staked his life. The Girondins were no different. Their fight with Robespierre, Danton, and Marat was about who would control the new republic, not whether or not it was legitimate to use violence in bringing it into existence. Louvet tried to reply to Robespierre’s speech, but this time he was howled down. Dr. Moore recorded that another of the deputies, Bertrand Barère, a suave lawyer from the Midi soon to be known as “the Anacreon of the Guillotine,” brought the venomous debate to a close with incomparable condescension:
It is time to estimate those little undertakers of revolutions at their just value; it is time to give over thinking of them and their manoeuvres: for my part, I can see neither Sullas nor Cromwells in men of such moderate capacities; and instead of bestowing any more time on them and their intrigues, we ought to turn our attention to the great questions which interest the republic.36
That night Robespierre’s speech was celebrated in the Jacobin Club as a resounding success. Louvet, unsurprisingly, had been expelled, just like Brissot. The club was now, more than ever, the Incorruptible’s domain. But he could not savor his triumph. He went home, collapsed, and did not speak in the Convention again until 30 November. He was ill for nearly a month, not in the Duplay household but in rooms around the corner in the rue Saint-Florentin, to which Charlotte had at last managed to make him move. Why was he ill? His immune system seems to have been weak at the best of times, and this was far from the best of times. The nervous strain of defending himself in the Convention had clearly taken its toll. Overwork, the approach of winter, the rivalry between his sister and his landlady all weighed on him. To make matters worse, Charlotte attempted to conceal Robespierre’s illness from Mme Duplay, judging that “his indisposition was nothing serious. He needed a lot of care and I certainly made sure that he got it.”37 When Mme Duplay eventually found out, she was furious and demanded Robespierre’s immediate return to the rue Saint-Honoré. According to Charlotte, he resisted at first but soon gave in because he did not want to hurt the Duplays’ feelings: “They love me so, they have such consideration, such kindness for me, that it could only be ingratitude on my part to reject them.”38 Years later, Charlotte was still complaining that he had sacrificed her feelings to those of Mme Duplay. Evidently she shared his propensity for lasting personal offense, even when none had been intended. For her, as for him, it was the principle that mattered. “He ought not” to have done it, she says over and over again. While Robespierre’s principles were broader and grander than his sister’s domestic codes of conduct, the tenacity with which each held fast was remarkably similar.
Throughout this period, Robespierre was absent from the Jacobins. By the time he returned to the club, Mirabeau’s posthumous reputation had been ruined by the dramatic discovery of his secret letters of advice to Louis XVI. The ransacked Tuileries were being renovated as the new home for the Convention, and the letters had been discovered in a locked chest on 20 November. It was 5 December before Robespierre addressed the club on the subject of its disgraced ex-leader, whose bust still presided over its meetings and whose remains had been laid to rest with such pomp and ceremony in the Pantheon. At the time of his death popular sentiment had called for Mirabeau to be eulogized and Robespierre, “the organ of the people,” had gone along with it. Now he spoke in support of Duplay’s suggestion that the bust of Mirabeau should be removed from the Jacobin hall. His bust in the Manège had already been covered with a black veil, pending the report of a committee investigating the discovery at the Tuileries. The Jacobins were less restrained. They fetched ladders and pulled down the busts of both Mirabeau and the philosopher Helvétius, who, Robespierre reminded them, had persecuted Rousseau and shown counterrevolutionary tendencies before his time. The busts were smashed and the Jacobins made a show of trampling the pieces into the floor—a parody of the civic spirit that had prevailed when they trampled the Champ de Mars to prepare it for the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The hostile Patriote français reported the incident with some glee:
This evening the Jacobins broke the bust of Mirabeau in their hall. It was on Robespierre’s motion that this execution was carried out, just as it was on Robespierre’s motion that Mirabeau was accorded the honors of the Pantheon. This is how demagogues sanctify popular idols to please worshipers, then break the idols in order to succeed them.39
In response, Robespierre composed a letter to the paper that stands out from the rest of his writings and speeches in being an apology, not a personal defense: “I feel remorse today for the first time in my life; for I may have let it be believed that I shared the good opinion of Mirabeau held by the [National] Assembly and by the general public.”40 As apologies go, Robespierre’s was hardly abject. But by his own standards—he was not and never had been wrong—it was remarkable. The fact was that not even he could deny that at the time of Mirabeau’s
death only Marat had dared criticize Mirabeau in public. On 4 April 1791, L’ami du peuple had declared:
People, give thanks to the gods! Your most redoubtable enemy has fallen beneath the scythe of Fate. Riquetti [Mirabeau] is no more; he dies victim of his numerous treasons, victim of his too tardy scruples, victim of the barbarous foresight of his atrocious accomplices. Adroit rogues who are to be found in all circles have sought to play upon your pity, and already duped by their false discourse, you mourn this traitor as the most zealous of your defenders; they have represented his death as a public calamity, and you bewail him as a hero, as the savior of your country, who has sacrificed himself for you. Will you always be deaf to the voice of prudence; will you always sacrifice public affairs to your blindness?…Beware of prostituting your incense.41
Irresponsible, crazy, disconcerting as ever—still Marat definitely had a gift for prophecy. Robespierre never had his clinical capacity to fearlessly diagnose the pathology of politics. But even now that Marat had been proved so devastatingly right—Mirabeau had been a double-crossing traitor and there were documents to prove it—Robespierre resisted identifying with him. On 23 December the Jacobins circulated a memorandum to their affiliated societies warning true patriots not to confound Robespierre and Marat. The prudent patriotism, statesmanlike views, and superior abilities of the former were on no account to be confused with the sanguinary gutter journalism of the latter.