Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Thus the very same rights sought and promised by the Revolution could also be suspended, if necessary, in the Revolution’s cause. Rather than hypocrisy, these views signaled a new and dangerous political pragmatism on Robespierre’s part.

  When discussion turned to the right to property—which had been enshrined in the declaration of 1789 alongside life and liberty—Robespierre revealed the depth of his commitment to the poor. He was not a communist before his time. He did not oppose the very existence of private property, and he deliberately distanced himself from any suggestion that the Roman loi agraire might be revived in revolutionary France whereby the means of subsistence would be placed in the hands of the people. “Don’t worry, I don’t want to touch your treasures, however impure their source,” he sneeringly reassured the rich.33 He thought making poverty honorable more important (and more practicable) than proscribing wealth. He did nevertheless go on to propose some very definite restrictions on the right to property: “The right to property is limited, like all others, by the obligation to respect the rights of others.” Most significantly he called for progressive taxation, a policy that followed directly from Marat’s exhortation: “Let us tax the rich to subsidize the poor.” It was for this that he was eviscerated in the hostile press. “Robespierre consecrated the principle of progressive taxation, an absurd tax, destructive of equality, a tax ruinous to industry that would impede the sale of national property [confiscated from the church and émigrés],” complained the Girondin Patriote français, still in circulation despite recent curbs on the freedom of the press and violence directed at the Girondin print shops.34 While the Girondins envisaged a modern republic secured on free-market economics, Robespierre urged redistributive measures that would make a difference to the lives of the poor. After four years of revolutionary upheaval in a country that always had difficulty feeding itself, at a time when many in Paris and throughout the provinces were rioting for food, Robespierre’s policy had more appeal. As he put it:

  The first social law is therefore that which guarantees the means of existence to all the members of society; all other [laws] are subordinate to this one; property is only instituted or guaranteed to affirm it…. It is not true that property can ever be held in opposition to man’s subsistence.35

  In other words, if the people were starving they had a right to eat, regardless of who owned the food.

  Because the strife between the Jacobins and Girondins had entered so deeply into the Convention’s constitutional debates—delaying and distorting them—when the Jacobins finally triumphed at the beginning of June they appointed a new committee, including Robespierre’s close friends Saint-Just and Couthon, to redraft the republican constitution. This time the Convention set aside every afternoon to discuss it. France had been without a constitution for almost a year: people were becoming impatient with the protracted process of creating one. Wasting no time, the Jacobins had a draft on 10 June. “The constitution of 1793, like the world itself, was created in six days,” scoffed the historian Jules Michelet.36 It established universal male suffrage (which had seemed merely an eccentric political pipe dream when Robespierre demanded it three years earlier). The reworked Declaration of Rights made exciting new promises: welfare assistance for citizens in need and state education for all. (Robespierre had advocated both measures.) Although the new draft did not limit the right to property, Robespierre professed to be delighted: “All Europe will be constrained to admire this fine monument of human reason and of the sovereignty of a great people.”37 Europe was not currently disposed to admire France. Yet it was true that this was the most democratic constitution the modern world had seen. It was duly ratified by referendum in primary assemblies throughout the country—1,801,918 votes in favor and only 11,610 against.38 The majority was overwhelming, but in this time of civil war the electoral turnout was low: only about a quarter of those qualified to vote cared to do so. Meanwhile, the so-called federalist revolt against the direction the Revolution had taken in Paris spread south from the town of Caen in Calvados to Bordeaux, Bourges, Lyon, Toulouse, Nîmes, Marseille, and Toulon. By mid-June, sixty of France’s eighty-three departments were in open rebellion against Paris. No sooner did the new constitution come into existence than it had to be suspended. There were people in the capital who wanted—and needed—it out of the way. Saint-Just explained to the Convention:

  Your Committee of Public Safety has weighed the causes of our public misfortunes, and found them in the weakness with which your decrees are executed, in the wastefulness of the administration, in the lack of consistent policy, and in the party passions that compete for influence over the government. It has therefore resolved to explain the state of affairs to you, and to submit the measures it thinks best fitted to establish the Revolution, to confound federalism, to support and to secure abundance for the people, to strengthen the armies and to cleanse the State of the conspiracies that are the plague of its life.39

  The Convention, in agreement with the Committee of Public Safety, or perhaps cowed by it, agreed to the continuation of provisional revolutionary government until peace was achieved at home and abroad. The Revolution was embattled and it needed a war government—strong, directive, and fearsome. Robespierre, along with Saint-Just, Danton, and Marat, had long believed that terror was the only instrument capable of saving the Revolution. None of the Jacobin leaders had pretended otherwise since the fall of the monarchy. If the Girondins had triumphed in their place, they would have needed the same weapon to restore order. “This Committee [of Public Safety] is precisely what we want,” Danton had said back in April, “a hand to grasp the weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal.”40 Three months later, after the arrest of the Girondins and the suspension of the new constitution, the path to exercising terror lay clear, demanding, and austere before the exhausted Jacobins.

  THE REVOLUTION WAS an extraordinary palimpsest. With each passing year its significant dates were overwritten by still more remarkable words and events. On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Bastille’s fall, when celebrations were set to be more muted than in previous years—given the wars and the food shortages—an unknown woman of twenty-five came from Caen to Paris and inscribed her own indelible mark. Caen had become the center of Girondin resistance in the provinces. Some Girondin leaders like Pétion and Louvet, who had risen like a specter to accuse Robespierre in the Convention, had escaped arrest in the capital and reunited in Caen, from where they published a Girondin newspaper in direct defiance of the Committee of Public Safety. It was a call to rebellion that vilified the Jacobins, again singling out Marat as the most odious and culpable of them all. Charlotte Corday read this paper in her hometown and undertook a mission all her own. She traveled to Paris by coach, bought a long knife in the Palais-Royal, and called on Marat that evening in the rue des Cordeliers. He was almost always at home. He left this record of his daily regime:

  I only give two hours out of the twenty-four to sleep, and one to meals, dressing and household affairs. Besides the hours that I consecrate to my duties as a deputy of the people, I always devote six to listening to the complaints of a crowd of unfortunate and oppressed people who regard me as their defender, to forwarding their claims by means of petitions or memoranda, to reading and answering a multitude of letters, to supervising the printing of an important work that I have in the press, to making notes on all the interesting events of the Revolution, and putting my observations on paper, to receiving denunciations, and checking their veracity, and lastly to editing my paper. This is how I spend my day. I don’t think I can be accused of laziness. I haven’t taken a quarter of an hour’s recreation for more than three years.41

  No wonder he was ill, seeking a measure of relief from his skin disease in a medicinal bath, when Charlotte Corday came to the door. He was writing in the bath; his days were so crammed, he had to. She gave him the names of the Girondins at Caen. He thanked her and noted them down. He was making the list when she plunged the knife straight into his
heart. It was not so hard to kill him, small, frail, sick, naked, defenseless figure that he was.

  Robespierre, characteristically, was jealous. For months he had spoken of plots against his own life, and volunteered flamboyantly for martyrdom, while taking care to keep close to his bodyguards.42 Now that Marat was dead he hastened to remind his colleagues at the Jacobin Club that “daggers are also marked for me.”43 He disapproved of all the interest in Marat—his poverty, his paper, his revolutionary contribution—that sprang up in the wake of his murder: “Eh! Of what importance to the republic are the financial affairs of one of its founders?”44 Similarly, he was against honoring Marat’s remains by interring them in the Pantheon. “Is it next to Mirabeau that he will be placed? [Next to] that man who merits his reputation for profound villainy? Are these the honors solicited for the Friend of the People?”45 “Yes,” interrupted a Jacobin named Bentabole, “and he shall have them despite those who are jealous of him!” Ignoring the insult, Robespierre continued: this was not the time to be distracted by funeral ceremonies—there was a war going on—Marat’s honors should wait until it had been won. What should not wait was vengeance. Marat’s assassin must be guillotined, along with all the other perpetrators of tyranny, all the infidel representatives of the people (the Girondins) who encouraged revolt and intended to kill the true patriots one by one. The blood of these monsters must be taken to avenge their victims, whose blood had been shed for liberty. But it was too soon to distract the Jacobins from memories of Marat. Alive, he had been a maverick in their camp, more often than not a serious embarrassment. Dead he became a hero. The next evening they voted to create a subcommittee of men of letters dedicated to keeping his spirit alive. Robespierre, meanwhile, limited himself to suggesting the Jacobin Club acquire Marat’s printing presses for its own purposes.46

  Marat’s funeral became a public festival, in spite of Robespierre’s advice. On the day itself he was still feeling sour and so contrived to deliver an oration in Marat’s honor that pointedly avoided even mentioning his name. The artist David orchestrated the proceedings, decreeing that “Marat’s burial place will have the simplicity that befits an incorruptible republican dying in honorable poverty. It was from underground that he identified the people’s enemies and friends: let him rest underground in death.”47 He was interred in the garden of the Cordeliers Club. Young girls in white dresses and boys carrying branches of cypress surrounded his bier, followed by members of the Convention, the clubs, and the general public. Representatives of each of the forty-eight Paris sections filed past his grave and spoke movingly of him. His heart was suspended in an urn from the ceiling of the Cordeliers’ meeting chamber—a secular relic in that requisitioned convent. In 1794, after Robespierre’s own death, Marat finally made it to the Pantheon. His remains were carried in as Mirabeau’s were removed, so the revolutionary and the royalist never had to lie side by side as Robespierre feared.

  Why was Robespierre so sour? Did he really begrudge the murdered Marat a day of pomp and ceremony? It is only fair to point out that Robespierre felt the same way when Mirabeau died, uneasy at the distraction from the business of Revolution that a large public funeral occasioned. Back in 1791 he had been quick to remind the Jacobins that the focus of their preoccupations must remain the public interest—a grand abstraction from which personal feelings of bereavement or regard for specific individuals, whoever they were, must not detract. In 1793, too, Robespierre wanted to get on with saving the Revolution. Marat’s death, now that it had occurred, might be turned to advantage in the fight against the Girondins, the rebellious departments, and the counterrevolution. He may not have cared much one way or the other for Marat as a person, but he knew a political opportunity when he saw one. It is even possible that the oration in which he failed to mention the dead man’s name was itself intended to educate by example: beside the abstract principles of the Revolution mere individuals—their names, stories, and careers—no longer mattered. This reserve in Robespierre was not new. He had long prided himself, and others had never ceased to congratulate him, on being able to set the public good over his own private advantage. Like Marat, he worked incredibly hard. He attended the Convention by day and the Jacobins by night; he, too, wrote speeches, letters, and a weekly journal. There was precious little time for a private life, even if he had valued or wanted one. Nothing could come between Robespierre and the Revolution—if it had, the history of each would have been entirely different.

  CHARLOTTE CORDAY WAS guillotined four days after her crime, with a beatific smile on her face. The executioner held her severed head up to the crowd and, in a fit of pro-Marat enthusiasm, slapped her cheek. Allegedly, she blushed—both her slapped and unslapped cheeks reddened—and those who were watching gasped in amazement.48 Physiologists several years later were inspired by this story to speculate on whether human sensation ends instantly at decapitation or not. But at the time, political interests eclipsed scientific ones. From the execution of Charlotte Corday the Girondins acquired a secular saint of their own—the Jacobins had Marat, but they had a pure and beautiful young woman whose modesty did not desert her even in death. The fight between the two factions entered its final throes. It had long been a mortal combat. Now it was simply a question of how much more damage would be done to the Revolution—how much more bloodshed there would be in the provinces and at the frontier—before it was over. To try to assess the state of affairs, the Convention sent various deputies out on mission to the detachments of the army deployed on home soil. After the levy of three hundred thousand in February, the official number of men in arms had risen to 645,000, but by the summer of 1793 this was still not enough. The Convention decreed an unprecedented program of national mobilization: the levée en masse.49 In August Lazare Carnot, a member of the Committee of Public Safety with special responsibility for the army, decreed that “the republic is a great city in a state of siege: France must become one vast camp and Paris its arsenal.” He set out the war effort in graphic terms:

  Every Frenchman is commandeered for the needs of the armies. Young men will go to the front, married men will forge arms and carry food, women will make tents and clothing and work in hospitals, children will turn old linen into bandages, old men will be carried into the squares to rouse the courage of the combatants and to teach hatred of kings and republican unity.50

  Robespierre himself could not be parted from Paris, but his brother, Augustin, left for the south, heading for Nice via Lyon and Marseille, to report on the extent of the support for the Girondins, who were now calling openly for a federalist revolt against the capital.

  When Charlotte Robespierre heard that Augustin was about to leave as a “representative on mission” together with Jean François Ricord (deputy to the Convention from Var), who was taking his wife, she demanded to be included in the party. Charlotte got her way and the four set off accompanied by only two soldiers.51 Lyon was in revolt, but when their coach pulled up outside the town hall, things seemed calm enough. The two women waited outside while Augustin and Ricord went in. A crowd began gathering around the stationary coach and the women were drawn into conversation. “We know that the Parisians say we are counterrevolutionaries,” someone said, “but they are mistaken—look at our cockades.”52 Charlotte expressed suspicions, as her elder brother would have done; after all, counterrevolutionaries, indeed the king himself, had worn the tricolor cockade back in 1789. As the women’s exchange with the tense and increasingly angry crowd deteriorated, the two men were involved in a fierce altercation with municipal officers inside the town hall. It was apparent that sympathy with the Girondins was running very high in Lyon. Returning to the coach, Augustin and Ricord decided it was not safe to spend the night and they must press on to Nice. Since it was likely news of their mission had gone before them—Charlotte’s conversation with the crowd was, in hindsight, very unwise—they did not dare take the main road but went cross-country via the small town of Manosque.

  When they reached the b
ank of the river Durance, the soldiers who had gone ahead to check if it was safe to cross came rushing back warning that there were armed men from Marseille with cannons on the other side. There was no choice but to turn back to Manosque. Here, trying to be helpful, the mayor offered the party an escort of fifty local National Guardsmen. Uncertain of the sympathies of these local men, Augustin and Ricord politely refused. During their flight to Varennes, the royal family had encountered the same problem: it was always difficult to know how battalions of National Guardsmen would act since they were just ordinary citizens in arms, not professional soldiers. So the party set off again for Nice unaccompanied. En route they received a message from the well-disposed mayor that the Marseille insurgents were in pursuit. At this, they abandoned the coach and fled on horseback into the mountains bordering the Department of Vaucluse. Twelve local patriots went with them as guides—they had no choice but to trust them—and they journeyed all night through the difficult passes. By the following evening they had reached the old fortified village of Sault. Here they encountered a young doctor who had been elected to the new convention in exile that the Girondin leader Guadet was planning to convene as soon as possible at Bourges.

  This doctor took Augustin and Ricord to the local Jacobin Club, where they were enthusiastically received. Considerably cheered, the party then decided to return to Manosque, this time with a band of twenty or so patriots. Their two guards went ahead to prepare their arrival. To frighten the people who had been so unwelcoming before, the guards spread the rumor that the two deputies, one of them the brother of the famous Robespierre, were about to arrive with an army of six thousand. The town of Manosque would be razed to the ground and its inhabitants slaughtered in punishment for their treatment of the national representatives. Wisely, the party moved on again before the emptiness of the rumor could become apparent. Half an hour later the men from Marseille arrived, searched everywhere for the Parisians, then fell upon their abandoned coach, dragging it off to their hometown in triumph. Augustin and Ricord demanded the return of the coach and it was sent back, vandalized. Finally they got to Nice. Here, Charlotte recalled, “public spirit was no better.”53 But the presence of a detachment of professional soldiers from the French army, as opposed to unreliable battalions of local National Guardsmen, meant that the party was at least safe from counterrevolutionary attacks. Indeed, under the protection of the army’s General Dumerbion, they even felt safe enough to attend the theater. The third time they went they were pelted with rotten apples. Sympathy for the Revolution was dying in the provinces. Back in Paris, Robespierre himself described the situation in apocalyptic terms: