Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Robespierre was now more publicly hysterical than ever, obsessed with death, convinced he was about to be assassinated, and constantly offering himself for martyrdom, as though that would resolve any of the Revolution’s problems. Fear most the enemy within, he warned the Jacobins again; the most dangerous traitors were not on the front line but mingling in disguise among the patriots in Paris. The time had come to choose between slavery and death: “We know how to die, and we will all die,” he announced triumphantly at the end of a speech on 13 March.12 “All! All!” echoed voices around the hall. Then Marat stood up and said, “No! We are not going to die; we will give death to our enemies, we will erase them!”13 Two weeks later, Robespierre had imbibed some of Marat’s fighting spirit. Speaking again at the Jacobins on the dangers menacing France, and the vigorous measures required to combat them, he asked, “Must we despair of the safety of the republic? No! Tyrants unmasked are nothing. The French people are only betrayed because they want to be; the French people are stronger than all their enemies. One republican who knows how to die can exterminate all the despots.”14 Such flamboyance went down well with his audience, who applauded vigorously, but in itself it hardly amounted to a strategy for saving the Revolution. Yet Robespierre had such a strategy, one that converged with Danton’s. He, too, wanted a strong government, an end to the separation of power between the legislature and the executive, in this time of crisis. But here even the Jacobins thought Robespierre had gone too far, while the Girondins accused him of aspiring to dictatorship. He retorted by denying even that he wanted to become a minister. At this someone in the Convention laughed openly.15

  When news of Dumouriez’s treachery reached Paris, Robespierre seized on yet another weapon in the fight with the Girondins, striving to implicate Brissot, Pétion, and their associates in the general’s spectacular betrayal of France. His move was both aggressive and self-defensive. The Girondins would happily have held Dumouriez against Robespierre, Danton, and the rest of the Jacobins if they could, and questions were already being asked as to why, when Danton went to the army a third time and met with Dumouriez, he had failed to denounce him as a traitor. Robespierre was exposed, too, for just weeks earlier he had publicly expressed full confidence in Dumouriez and his command of the foreign war. Characteristically, he did not say he had been wrong. Instead he deftly reworked the reasons he had given for trusting Dumouriez so that, in retrospect, they sounded far more conditional and skeptical than they had at the time. Simultaneously he insisted, over and over again, that Dumouriez had been collaborating with Brissot—surely the time had come at last to take action against the man responsible for plunging the country into a disastrous war well over a year ago. “Dumouriez and Brissot were the first apostles of the war,” he told the Convention, bending the facts to his advantage.16 As ever he spoke of plots and hidden enemies. “If you wish, I will raise a corner of the veil,” he tantalized his colleagues. “Raise it all!” they pleaded.

  This time the conspiracy Robespierre outlined had international components: it connected Prime Minister Pitt with General Dumouriez, the Girondin faction, property owners in France fearful for their assets, and the nobility hoping to recover their old regime privileges. Conspiracy on this scale was a figment of Robespierre’s fevered imagination. Yet he was absolutely correct to identify private property as the new focus of contention in the Revolution. The Girondins envisaged a republic with strong protection for private property and differences in the personal wealth of individual citizens. The Jacobins, led by Robespierre, distanced themselves from the radical demands of the enragés, but nevertheless proposed limits to private property in the interests of the people, the majority of whom were poor. Robespierre declared:

  All the ambitious persons who have appeared until now in the theater of the Revolution have had this in common: they defend the rights of the people for only as long as seems necessary. All have regarded them [the people] as a stupid flock, destined to be led by the most able or the strongest. All have regarded representative assemblies as bodies composed of men either greedy or credulous, who can be corrupted or tricked into serving their criminal projects.17

  His fight against the Girondins here emerges as more than personal enmity toward Brissot, who had successfully defeated his passionate crusade against the war. More, too, than hatred for Pétion, formerly his closest radical colleague, who had been—as Robespierre saw it—corrupted by power and public office. Beyond all such considerations lay Robespierre’s perception that the Girondins were not as sincerely, thoroughly, uncompromisingly for the people as he was himself. If he was deceived in this—and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he was not—the very least that can be said in his defense is that he genuinely believed he had committed himself to the people, the poor especially, and was acting accordingly to save their Revolution for them.

  Disadvantaged as they now were, the Girondins nonetheless fought on. They turned on Marat, the most outspoken and provocative of all the Jacobins, whose newspaper was now emblazoned with the motto “Let us tax the rich to subsidize the poor.”18 In early April, the Girondin Marguerite-Elie Guadet denounced Marat to his fellow deputies for having plotted against the convention. He was arrested, pending an investigation into the charges against him. Robespierre, reporting these events to the Jacobins, claimed that the move against Marat was a further development in the insidious counterrevolutionary plot he had just unveiled. Guadet had “exhaled the poison of an impure soul”; he had called for the seizure of Jacobin and Cordelier newspapers and an end to the permanence of the Paris sections.19 Despite these attacks, Robespierre appealed for calm and cautioned the Jacobins against any actions that would only play into their enemies’ hands and be held against them in the provinces where the Girondins had formidable influence. He was far from calm himself, though. On 12 April he thundered from the tribune, “I demand censure of those who protect traitors.”20 “Bravo, bravo,” shouted Marat. At this Pétion rose to speak, but before he could do so Robespierre added, “And their accomplices.” Pétion retorted, “Yes, their accomplices, and you yourself. It is time at last to end all this infamy; it is time that traitors and perpetrators of calumny carried their heads to the scaffold; and here I take it upon myself to pursue them to death.” “Stick to the facts,” said Robespierre. “It is you whom I will pursue,” returned Pétion (as though anyone were in doubt). At these open menaces there was uproar. Then the painter David ran into the middle of the hall, ripped opened his shirt, and, pointing to his bare breast, cried, “Strike here! I propose my own assassination! I, too, am a man of virtue! Liberty will win in the end!”21 Madness reigned in the Manège.

  The next day, the deputies heard the report against Marat. It proposed his indictment for “pillage, murder, and attempting to dissolve the Convention.”22 They voted 226 in favor of indictment and 93 against (48 deputies were absent, 3 refused to vote, and 7 asked for an adjournment). The new Revolutionary Tribunal awaited Marat. It met inside the Palais de Justice above the Conciergerie dungeon on the small island in the Seine at the center of Paris. It used the same great room that the parlement had used before 1789, but the tapestries had been stripped from the walls, the royal fleurs-de-lys carpet rolled up, and the king’s throne and Dürer’s painting of Christ removed. Instead there were wooden tables, chairs, and platforms for the judges, jury, prisoners, and members of the public. Prisoners were interrogated and allowed to prepare their defense. In Marat’s case this was hardly necessary. His Jacobin colleagues on the tribunal not only acquitted him but also crowned him with civic garlands. Marat was carried into the street on the shoulders of a jubilant crowd who took him straight back to the Convention, where he mounted the tribune again. He was determined on revenge against the Girondins. “I propose that the Convention shall decree complete freedom in the expression of opinion, so that I may send to the scaffold the faction that voted for my impeachment,” he said soon afterward.23

  The Paris sections, for their part, sought to
avenge Marat by demanding that the Convention expel twenty-two of its leading Girondin deputies. When they presented their petition on 15 April, a Girondin named Boyer-Fonfrède, who had not been included among the twenty-two, rushed to the tribune asking to be added to the list. Cries of “Include us all! All! All!” echoed through the volatile debating chamber, and a crowd of deputies grouped themselves around the twenty-two, bodily pledging solidarity with the Girondins.24 Two weeks later supporters of the Girondins took to the streets, marching and shouting, “Long live the law! Down with the Mountain!” In the Convention the Girondins now attacked the Commune, hoping in this way to undermine the support it had provided for the Jacobins since the insurrection that brought down the monarchy. Robespierre retaliated by claiming that the Girondin supporters had actually cried, “Long live the king! Down with the republic!” The Girondin Maximin Isnard was moved to point out that the French words for law and king (loi and roi) could easily be mistaken for each other. Robespierre ignored this smart remark and went on to defend Paris against its critics in the Convention and the provinces. Reporting his own speech afterward to the Jacobins, he said:

  I demanded that the factions in the Convention cease to slander the people of Paris and that the journalists who pervert public opinion be reduced to silence…. I demanded that the people make an effort to exterminate the aristocrats who are everywhere. [Loud applause.]…I demanded the existence in the heart of Paris of an army, not that of Dumouriez but a popular army composed of sansculottes perpetually armed against Feuillants and moderates. I demanded the allocation of sufficient funds to arm the artisans, all the good patriots…. I demanded that tomorrow forges be erected in all public squares to make weapons for arming the people….I demanded that the constituted authorities oversee the execution of these measures and not forget that they are the delegates of a city that is the boulevard of liberty, whose existence renders the counterrevolution impossible.25

  In quieter times Robespierre had stalwartly defended the freedom of the press, but no longer. Now he condoned the smashing of the Girondin print shops that more violent, less articulate men than himself had already undertaken in March. At the climax of his hour-long speech he told the Jacobins that in the current crisis only the most vigorous measures could save France. If they failed, virtue would vanish from the face of the earth. It was time to see if the Jacobins truly wanted to save the human race. The club members leapt to their feet, waving hats in the air, and crying, “Yes! Yes! We want to!” Two days later, at the end of a shorter intervention, Robespierre confessed to extreme fatigue and ended with, “I have nothing more to say to you, and I have decided that, unless there is a revival of public spirit, unless the patriots make one last effort, I will wait in the seat of office to which the people have raised me for the daggers of the counterrevolution.”26

  On 11 May the sections of Paris petitioned the Convention again, still demanding the expulsion of the Girondin deputies. In reply, Isnard, a notorious hard drinker who may already have been intoxicated even though it was still early in the day, made an extremely impolitic speech:

  If ever the Convention were insulted [Interruptions.]—if ever by one of those insurrections that since 10 March have been so unceasingly repeated [Violent interruptions.]—if by these incessant insurrections—any attack should be made on the national representatives, I tell you, in the name of all France [Loud negatives.]—I tell you, I repeat, in the name of all France, that Paris would be annihilated [General tumult.]—the traveller will seek along the shores of the Seine whether Paris had ever existed.27

  The last person to utter a threat of this kind against Paris had been the Duke of Brunswick in his ill-judged manifesto of July 1792. Then the Jacobins had laughed. This time they knew at once that their lives were in danger: they had staked everything on Paris and entered a pact with the violence of its people. The suggestion that the city might be obliterated reinforced the call to arms Robespierre had recently uttered before collapsing, exhausted, into his chair. The insurrection that Isnard had condemned in advance occurred on 31 May. A great crowd of Parisian petitioners arrived at the Convention, which had recently moved from the Manège to a new chamber in the revamped Tuileries palace. The crowd entered the chamber and took possession of the deputies’ seats. The Girondins protested and tried to end the session by leaving it. They returned when they saw their attempt had failed. Robespierre stepped up to the tribune and supported the petitioner’s demands. “Conclude then,” shouted one of the Girondins impatiently. “Yes, I shall conclude, and do so against you,” he replied bitterly:

  Against you who, after the revolution of 10 August wanted to bring to the scaffold those who had accomplished it, against you who have never ceased to provoke the destruction of Paris, against you who wanted to save the tyrant, against you who conspired with Dumouriez, against you who have rabidly pursued the same patriots whose heads Dumouriez demanded [the Jacobins], against you whose criminal vengeance has provoked the same cries of indignation that you want to proscribe in those who are your victims. Ah yes! My conclusion is the decree of accusation against all the accomplices of Dumouriez and all those whom the petitioners have designated.28

  His vehemence was vigorously applauded. But once again it had shattered him: “I am no longer capable of prescribing to the people the means of its salvation. It is a task beyond any single man’s powers—certainly beyond mine, exhausted as I am by four years of revolution, and by the heart-rending spectacle of the triumph of tyranny, and of all that is most vile and corrupt.”29 There followed two further days of insurrection, during which Robespierre probably collapsed in bed while Marat, despite his debilitating skin disease, climbed the tower of the Hôtel de Ville and rang the tocsin with his own hand. On 2 June the Girondin leaders who had not already fled were provisionally arrested. François Hanriot, a former customs clerk promoted to commander of the National Guard, played a crucial part in these events. He ordered grapeshot-firing cannons, placed around the Convention, thus forcing the intimidated deputies to give in to the demands of the capital and expel the Girondins.

  Mme Roland’s husband was one of the Girondins who was able to flee in time, but she herself did not intend to. In the early evening she went to the Tuileries and was surprised to find that all the deputies had already gone home:

  Imagine this! A day of insurrection, when the sound of the tocsin had scarcely ceased to rend the air, when two hours previously 40,000 armed men had surrounded the Convention and petitioners were threatening members at the bar of the house. Why was the Convention not in permanent session? Had it then been entirely subjugated and agreed to do all that it was told? Was the revolutionary power now so mighty that the Convention dare not oppose it? “Citizens,” I said to a bunch of sans-culottes standing around a cannon, “did everything pass off well?” “Marvellous well,” they replied.30

  Later that night she was arrested and imprisoned in the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près—the scene of the first of the September Massacres, she grimly noted as she passed through the door.

  IN THE MIDST of this intractable factional strife between the Jacobins and Girondins, the Convention tried to agree on France’s new republican constitution. The Constitutional Committee that had been set up after the fall of the monarchy included the abbé Sieyès, still hoping to realize his elaborate theory of representative republican government, Condorcet, who had called openly for a republic in 1791, long before Robespierre dared to, and others who were loosely associated with the Girondins. On 15 April the Convention declared discussion of the constitution open and thereafter dedicated three days a week to it until it was completed. Robespierre at once intervened, insisting, against those who wanted to get on with designing the government straightaway, that the constitution must begin with a new declaration of rights, which improved on both the American example and the flawed declaration of 1789. Abstract principles were his favorite subject and as usual he spoke at length, only breaking off to remark irritably, “It is impossibl
e for me to speak in the middle of these interruptions and sarcastic remarks!”31 A few days later, when the discussion of specific rights began, he had this to say on the freedom of the press:

  Revolutions are made to establish the rights of man. Therefore, in the interests of these rights, it is necessary to take all measures required for the success of such revolutions…. The revolutionary interest might require the repression of a conspiracy founded on the liberty of the press…. I declare that laws expressly made for the Revolution are necessary, even if they are contrary to the freedom of the press.32