Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Brissot had been one of those fortunate enough to escape arrest on 2 June; Pétion was another. Brissot headed first for nearby Chartres, where he had grown up in his father’s inn. Then with a loyal friend, a false passport, minimal luggage, and a brace of pistols, he traveled south through Nevers, then on to Moulins, where he was caught and taken back to the capital. He was imprisoned in the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près like Mme Roland, to whom he had once written movingly of his romantic responses to books during childhood. Reading Anson’s Voyage Round the World, for example, he had seen himself “constructing log-huts in the happy isles of Juan Fernandez and Tinian.”68 He had always been a dreamer. From prison he wrote long letters to the Convention, comparing himself to Cicero, asking to be heard, for a chance to explain himself. It was no use. Brissot and twenty other Girondins were moved to the Conciergerie to await trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Those who still eluded arrest were declared outlaws and hunted down. Pétion’s body was found in a field, half eaten by wolves. To complete matters, Robespierre arranged to have the house of his former friend demolished.

  The trial did not go well from Robespierre’s point of view. He had been reluctant to let it go ahead, probably because he knew there was still a great deal of public support for the Girondins, who were eloquent and sounded convincingly patriotic. After five days, during which the possibility of acquittal—politically disastrous for the Jacobins—gathered strength, steps were taken to ensure conviction. In the Convention a Jacobin named Osselin proposed a decree to end the trial. Robespierre stepped up to the tribune and said the proposal was too vague. In its place, he offered another to “reconcile the interests of the accused men with the safety of the country”:

  I propose the decree that after three days’ hearing the president of the tribunal shall ask the jury whether they have enough evidence to satisfy their conscience; if they say no, the trial is to proceed until they are in a position to reach a verdict.69

  But if they said yes, it was all over. Trial by conscience was something Robespierre had suggested before: it meant the jury’s decisions could be intuitive rather than reasonable and the accused could be convicted not only for their actions but also for their dispositions and attitudes. In that frightening room above the Conciergerie dungeons, where there was one chair for the ringleader and benches behind for those destined to share his or her fate, what was on trial was a frame of mind. Individuals were beside the point; what mattered was the triumph of the revolutionary mentality over anything that might oppose, challenge, or detract from it. “Whoever trembles is guilty,” Robespierre said darkly.

  Guilty was the verdict on the twenty-one Girondins. When it was pronounced, one witness heard Camille Desmoulins exclaim in shock, “My God! My God! It is I who kills them.”70 He was referring to the part his newspaper had played in turning public opinion in Paris against the Girondins; Camille was sorry now, but it was too late. Another eyewitness recalled that Brissot “had scarcely heard the fatal word death when his arms fell to his side and his head dropped suddenly upon his breast.” He wrote to his wife, “Good-bye, my darling; dry your tears; mine are wetting the paper as I write. We shall be parted, but not eternally.” Like Robespierre he still believed in an afterlife. Like Robespierre, too, he had lived for ideas—progress, human rights, grand abstractions that seemed almost within reach in the middle of the Revolution. On their way to execution the Girondins sang the “Marseillaise.” They sang it over the body of one of their party, Valazé, who had snuck a knife into the courtroom and stabbed himself as soon as he heard the verdict. There was talk of decapitating his corpse, but in the end it was only dragged along in the tumbril to the foot of the guillotine where the lives of the others ended. One contemporary remarked, “In the Girondins Robespierre only killed a party; in Brissot he guillotined an idea.”71 The idea in question might have been a federal French republic, on the American model that had so impressed Brissot during his transatlantic travels before 1789, or a new and original model of republican government that differed in crucial respects from Robespierre’s. It is true that Robespierre thoroughly disapproved of some of Brissot’s ideas, even while sharing others. But it is also indisputable that when Brissot died, Robespierre was at last rid of a thoroughly despised personal enemy. In this instance, guillotining the man meant as much to him as guillotining the ideas that menaced a republic “one and indivisible.” Mme Roland followed her Girondin friends to the guillotine in early November. Gesturing toward the statue of liberty that had recently been erected on the plinth of the demolished statue of Louis XIV in the renamed place de la Révolution, she said, “Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!”72 Her husband was in hiding in the countryside. When he heard of her death he walked straight out of the house and committed suicide in a ditch.

  ON 24 OCTOBER, the same day the trial of the Girondins began, the Convention heard the ex-actor and dramatist Philippe Fabre d’Églantine read his report on the new calendar it had requested for the new France: “We could not go on reckoning the years during which we were oppressed by kings as part of our lifetime. Every page of the old [Gregorian] calendar was soiled by the prejudices and falsehoods of the throne and the church.”73 There is evidence that Robespierre opposed this confusing and anti-Christian innovation, since he wrote in his private notebook, “indefinite adjournment of the decree on the calendar,” but he did not get his way.74 Fabre was the spokesman for the special commission that the Convention had set up to design the new calendar. He remembered seeing during his childhood what Robespierre certainly saw year in, year out in Arras: the priests going out into the fields in May to bless the growing crops. For the benefit of his audience, he put incriminating words into their mouths: “It is we, the priests, who have made this countryside green again; we who water these fields with so fair a hope…. Believe in us, respect us, obeyus, and make us rich: otherwise hail and thunder, which are at our command, will punish you for your lack of faith, docility, and obedience.”75 Now the people had arisen, the priests had fallen, and it was time for a revolutionary calendar. The new calendar was backdated to 22 September 1792, so that the day after the monarchy had been formally abolished became the first day of the Year I of the republic, a foundational event to rival the birth of Christ. In the new calendar, France now found herself already well into Year II of liberty:

  When Robespierre was a schoolboy he used to undress in the evenings to a reading about the life of the saint whose feast fell on the following day. Now Fabre explained that not only the months were to be renamed: the days of the new ten-day week (three to a month) would be named after the objects and animals associated with agricultural laborers. Every tenth day would be a day of rest bearing the name of an implement that would be useful to laborers returning to work in the morning: plough day, roller day, spade day, sickle day, water-pot day, and so on. Other days were to be named after animals, vegetables, flowers, and other natural phenomena, and the five extra days (six in a leap year) left over from standardizing the number of days in a month were to be special Sansculottides, or without-breeches days, in honor of the nickname given to the workingmen of Paris without whom the Revolution would have ended long ago.

  While Fabre was deploying his poetic gifts in designing the new calendar, Robespierre was contemplating the wider problem of education. Back in July, soon after the enactment—and suspension—of the new republican constitution, he had presented a bill on education to the Convention in which the formation of children’s moral character was given as much attention as the instruction of their minds. It proposed centralized compulsory state education of all girls aged five to eleven and all boys aged five to twelve. Free secondary education would be offered for older children who wanted it. The cost was to be met through progressive taxation. The bill was heavily criticized for being too interventionist and expensive. Robespierre remained determined:

  For a long time we have been waiting for this: the opportunity to help a large and integral sector of soc
iety. The revolutions of the last three years have done everything for the other classes of citizens yet almost nothing for the most needy, for the proletarian citizens whose sole property is their labor…. If you adopt the children of citizens without property, indigence will no longer exist for them. Adopt their children and you help them in the most precious part of their being. Those young trees will be transplanted into the national nursery, where the same soil will nurture them and a vigorous culture fashion them; pressed one against another, vivified by the rays of a benign star, they will grow, develop, flourish together under the regard and gentle influence of the fatherland.76

  Robespierre’s ideas on education were far in advance of his time and reflected both his sense of the difference education had made to his own life and his commitment to raising the standard of living for the poorest sector of society. But the Convention, unwilling to infringe parental opportunities to exploit child labor or to incur the cost of the nationwide program of education he outlined, approved only a modified system of primary education. Undeterred, Robespierre continued to develop his theories of moral development and the strategic role it might play in regenerating the republic. In this he was helped and inspired by his friend Saint-Just, who was beginning to argue that the Revolution must reach far beyond politics, into the heart of civil society, and make war on all forms of moral perversity.77

  ROBESPIERRE HAD MADE an implicit pact with street violence in order to destroy his Girondin enemies in the Convention. It had been the mob’s breaking into the Convention and surrounding it in June that had forced the expulsion of the Girondin deputies. But now that they were gone he needed to restrain the violence that had helped him to power—he needed, in short, to govern. The Convention had begun the process of reasserting control over Paris on 5 September when, at Danton’s suggestion, it limited the number of section meetings to two per week. However, it had given in to the demands for price regulation of basic commodities, which culminated in the General Maximum Law on 29 September. In a rare gesture of self-indulgence, Robespierre added his own items to the list of essential comestibles: coffee and sugar. Conceding that they were artificial, as opposed to natural, needs—human beings can survive well enough without them—he argued that these two products of colonialism were nevertheless addictive and the people would be deprived without them. Fabre d’Églantine backed him up, pointing out that sugar also had medicinal uses, and in the end Robespierre got his personal necessities onto the general list of price controls. His silk stockings were more of a problem. Robespierre’s friend Claude Gravier, a distiller whom he had promoted to the jury of the Revolutionary Tribunal, received a letter around this time from the postmaster general of Lyon, explaining that he was having great difficulty procuring hosiery for the Incorruptible and was sending some ham and sausage instead.78

  Once again the Jacobin Club was torn apart by factional strife. Danton was still a member, but increasingly critical of the regime of terror. He had lost control of the Cordelier Club, distanced himself from extreme sans-culottes, and openly opposed the enragés and followers of Hébert, whose newspaper was still voicing violent popular demands. At the end of September Danton took his children and new wife to his country house in Arcis-sur-Aube, seemingly retiring from politics. Hébert, meanwhile, was prominent in the Commune, supported by the Cordelier Club, and still attending Jacobin meetings. Robespierre was caught up in the strife between Jacobin followers of Danton and Jacobin followers of Hébert. He struggled to keep the club together, but his own attendance declined, perhaps because of ill health or because of his all-consuming responsibilities on the Committee of Public Safety. When he did speak at the Jacobins, he addressed the subject of atheism, insisting that it was one of the most fearsome hidden enemies menacing the Revolution.

  Robespierre had long opposed atheism and anticlericalism. On the day that the National Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris in 1789, he had noticed with interest, and perhaps optimism, tricolor cockades on the cassocks of clergymen lining the route. Later, back in Arras on holiday in 1791, he was dismayed to realize that every parish priest was a potential agent of the counterrevolution. When a large number of recalcitrant priests were murdered during the September Massacres of 1792, he showed no regret. But a year later he had had enough: “Whoever tries to stop the saying of Mass is a worse fanatic than the priest who says it,” he told the surprised Jacobins on 21 November (1 Frimaire). Robespierre thought atheism in a public man or legislator nothing short of insanity. He quoted Voltaire: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”:

  It will be said, perhaps, that I am a narrow-minded man, a prejudiced person, a fanatic. As I have already said, I do not speak as a private individual, or as a systematic philosopher, but as a representative of the people. Atheism is aristocratic. The conception of a great Being who watches over oppressed innocence, and punishes successful crime, is democratic through and through…. I have been a poor sort of Catholic ever since my College days; but I have never cooled in my friendship for, or failed in my championship of, my fellow men. Indeed, I have only grown more wedded to the moral and political ideas that I have expressed…. The French people pins its faith, not on its priests, nor on any superstition, or any ceremony, but on worship as such—that is to say, upon the conception of an incomprehensible power, which is at once a source of confidence to the virtuous and of terror to the criminal.79

  Robespierre reminded the Jacobins that he had raised his voice against atheism once before at their tribune. “There is nothing superstitious in using the name of the Deity. I believe myself in those eternal principles on which human weakness reposes, before it starts on the path of virtue,” he had said in spring 1792.80 He regretted nothing. Now he returned to the topic from a position of much greater power.

  Robespierre’s outburst was precipitated by the proselytizing atheism of Hébert’s faction, especially that of the procurator of the Paris Commune, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette. A few weeks earlier, the archbishop of Paris, an old man named Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel, had been persuaded to proceed to the Convention with an entourage of prorevolutionary clergymen and renounce his belief in God at the bar. To loud applause, he laid his staff and episcopal ring before the Convention and declared that he recognized no form of national worship except that of liberty and equality. Soon afterward Chaumette obtained a decree that closed all the churches of Paris and placed priests under even stricter surveillance. These measures were widely imitated throughout France. Meanwhile, Hébert set about organizing a new kind of devotional ceremony. He was close to a printer named Antoine François Momoro, whose wife agreed to dress up provocatively as the Goddess of Reason. On 20 Brumaire (10 November), seated high on the altar of what had once been the Cathedral of Notre-Dame but was now the Temple of Reason, she received her worshipers with an intimate kiss. When he heard, Robespierre was disgusted. He considered the recent vogue for flamboyant de-Christianization offensive and was convinced it would both exacerbate the civil war and alienate neutral foreign powers. Astutely, he pointed out that atheism must not become a religion in itself and argued passionately for liberty of worship. He agreed that it was important to keep priests under surveillance and to appropriate church wealth for the nation, but he wanted anti-Christian violence stigmatized, not encouraged by tasteless atheistic ceremonies. “Five years of Revolution directed against the priests have left them powerless,” he assured the Jacobins.81 The real danger was no longer religious fanaticism but political intrigue. The Girondin faction had been destroyed, but another had already replaced it. Robespierre turned on Hébert and his friends to unmask them: “They want our jobs…. Fine, let them have them,” he declared for rhetorical effect. Cries of “No! No! Stay where you are!” echoed around him as he proceeded to question their dedication. “I should like to see them,” he said, pointing at Hébert and his supporters, “day and night probing the wounds of the state, studying the needs of the people, and devoting their whole life to the national welfare.�
�� Claiming rationality for his own side, he continued. “It is not merely patriotism, or enthusiasm, or an ingrained love of freedom that sustains our efforts; it is reason, which will make the republic immortal; where reason reigns, the people are sovereign; and such an empire is indestructible.”82

  One of the problems, one of the sources of Robespierre’s tremendous irritation with Hébert, was that he was planning to design some novel religious ceremonies for the new republic. Hébert had stolen his thunder with a louche and ridiculous spectacle. Robespierre himself was hoping to achieve more pious and constructive effects through the worship of the Supreme Being, a vague but benign otherworldly presence that would raise the level of human conduct and moral aspiration, not lower it to the level of an orgy. In his private life, Robespierre could certainly be priggish. But his views on religion are not an example of priggishness. He thought Hébert’s approach irresponsible because it squandered a valuable opportunity to institute a new system of theistic morality that would benefit the poor. Atheism, he argued, is the preserve of an elite. “When the conception of God comes to be attacked, the attack will not proceed from the popular instinct, but from the rich and the privileged,” he warned.83