Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

by Ruth Scurr

  Robespierre even hinted that the list on Vilate’s desk was part of the plot against him: “Inoffensive, ordinary people are tormented and patriots are every day cast into dungeons. Have not even members of the Convention been designated as victims on secret and odious lists of proscription? Has not this imposture been propagated with such combined artifice and audacity that a great number of deputies have not ventured to sleep in their own residences?”52 Next he discussed the plot to make him look ridiculous by association with Catherine Théot. Then he gave heartfelt thanks to the Convention for supporting his new religion of the Supreme Being:

  Immortal thanks to the Convention for that decree, which is in itself a revolution and has saved the country. You have struck with the same blow atheism and priestly despotism!…You have won over to the Revolution every pure and generous heart!…O day forever fortunate! When the French people rose altogether to offer to the Author of Nature the only homage worthy of him, what a touching assemblage was there of all the objects that can fascinate the eyes or attract the hearts of men! O honored old age! O generous and ardent youth! O pure and playful joy of childhood! O delicious tears of maternal fondness! O divine influences of innocence and beauty! O the majesty of a great people, happy in the contemplation and enjoyment of its own strength and glory and virtue!53

  If anyone had been in any doubt that the Festival of the Supreme Being was the happiest day of Robespierre’s life, they were no longer. Remembering it, he was moved to pray aloud in the Convention: “Being of beings, was the day on which the universe came forth from your creative and almighty hands brighter or more acceptable to your eyes than that recent day when the first People of the world, bursting the bonds of crime and error, appeared before you worthy of your favor and of its own destiny?” The best of his friends must have wondered what on earth he thought he was doing. What had “delicious tears of maternal fondness” got to do with the desperate crisis he found himself in? French mothers had wept ever since the Revolution began. Marie Antoinette had appealed to them when the Revolutionary Tribunal accused her of child abuse; the mothers of those lynched in the street, the mothers of those killed in battle, the mothers of those massacred in prison, the mothers of those sent to the guillotine—who could find their tears delectable? For the last time, Robespierre publicly described his vision of the republic as he thought it should be. The reality—as he was the first to admit—was far removed. Finally he turned on his enemies:

  No, Chaumette! No, Fouché! Death is not an eternal sleep. The French people will not submit to a desperate and desolating doctrine that covers nature itself with a funeral shroud, that deprives virtue of hope, and misfortune of consolation, and insults even death itself. No, we will efface from our tombs your sacrilegious epitaph and replace it with the consolatory truth DEATH IS THE BEGINNING OF IMMORTALITY.54

  Interestingly, and in the face of plentiful hints to the contrary, Robespierre did not feel himself close to death at this point. As usual, he announced that he was more than willing to sacrifice his life for the Revolution. And, as Danton had done when close to the end, he claimed life had become a burden: “Why should I regret escaping from the eternal torture of seeing this horrible succession of traitors, who, concealing the turpitude of their souls under the veil of virtue, and even of friendship, will leave posterity in doubt which was the greater, their cowardice or their crimes?”55 His conclusion was a self-referential remark of superb insight: “I was made to oppose crime, not to control it.” He knew and understood himself as no biographer ever could. However, when the Convention discussed its response to his two-hour address, Robespierre was genuinely shocked that it turned against him. Instead of immediately lauding, printing, and circulating his speech, the Convention referred it to the Committees of Public Safety and General Security. He had serious enemies on both. He tried to protest: “What! My speech is to be sent to be examined by the very deputies I accuse!” And so, in one spontaneous sentence, he suddenly revealed what he had tried to bury so carefully in the text of his long, bizarre oration. He had returned to the Convention to swing it against its own committees. There was no further need for him to name the conspirators—their identities were clear to everyone listening. Pierre Joseph Cambon, head of the finance commission and one of the few “monsters” who were eventually mentioned by name in Robespierre’s speech, was the first to denounce him. He began by defending himself and other members of the finance commission against Robespierre’s implicit charges of corruption and conspiracy, but then he went a step further and announced: “It is time to tell the whole truth: one man is paralyzing the National Convention; that man is the one who has just made a speech; it is Robespierre.” Soon afterward Barère intervened to distract everyone with a buoyant speech about recent military victories and the republic’s bright future. Barère’s purposes were unclear—and his feelings about Robespierre at best ambivalent—but he succeeded in deflecting the immediate crisis, and there was no call for Robespierre’s arrest.56

  If Robespierre decided not to consult Saint-Just before he made his speech because he thought his friend might try to talk him out of it, he was right. Saint-Just thought the way forward was to work with, not against, the committees, which, after all, still formed the locus of revolutionary government. Robespierre’s flamboyant, unilateral, and unmistakably personal intervention had seriously damaged any chance of compromise. That evening, Robespierre, accompanied by Couthon, went off to the Jacobins to make sure the club rallied behind him. But Saint-Just went alone to the Tuileries palace and sat in the meeting room of the Committee of Public Safety. Perhaps he had not yet decided what to do. Because he had played such an important role on mission to the army and been present for the decisive battle of Fleurus, Saint-Just’s revolutionary identity was not simply conflated with Robespierre’s. They had been, and still were, personally and ideologically close. They meant the same thing by the reign of virtue and were passionately committed to realizing it in France. But if Robespierre was going to fall, there was a good chance that Saint-Just might save himself. Wondering what was going on around the corner at the Jacobins on that warm summer evening, wondering if compromise might still, even now, reunite the two committees, Saint-Just must have turned over in his mind the possibility of betraying the Incorruptible.

  Meanwhile at the Jacobins things were, as usual, going in Robespierre’s favor. Despite some initial opposition, he succeeded in rereading his speech to the club. At the end he said it was his last will and testament and, identifying now with Socrates, declared: “If you forsake me see how calmly I shall drink the hemlock.”57 At this the artist David, emotional as always, shouted: “I will drink it with you.” (David, who had been close to the Incorruptible for a long time and deeply involved in designing the Festival of the Supreme Being, survived his fall and lived to be Napoleon’s painter too.) Most of the other Jacobins also backed Robespierre. They turned on Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne, two of his hostile colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, and drove them from the club. The pair, furious and humiliated, stormed off to the Tuileries palace, where they found Saint-Just sitting at the committee’s table, bent over the text of his speech for the following day. Carnot, Barère, and some of the other members of the committee were there, too. There was another loud quarrel—they had become a habit. Finally, Saint-Just, “cold as marble,” agreed to submit the draft of his speech to the committee before reading it to the Convention the next morning. Having secured this promise, Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne set off to reassure Fouché, Tallien, and the other deputies who were afraid of being proscribed by Robespierre. Saint-Just sat on in the committee room until 5:00 a.m.—he felt the insults of his colleagues branding his soul. When he left at last, he went to find Robespierre.

  Maybe Robespierre persuaded him. Maybe Saint-Just had already decided. But whatever he was thinking as he ascended—perhaps with a heavier tread than had been his wont—the outside staircase that led directly to the Incorruptible’s
room, he no longer believed in compromise with the committees when he came back out. On that beautiful summer morning he did not submit to the Committee of Public Safety, as he had promised to do, the draft of the speech he intended to deliver to the Convention. Instead he sent his colleagues a dramatic note: “You have seared my heart. I intend to open it to the Convention.”58 Saint-Just, who had wavered, had thrown in his lot with Robespierre and that morning would see a fight to the death. Leaving the Duplay household for what everyone knew might be the last time, Robespierre turned to his host and said, “Don’t be alarmed. The majority of the Convention is pure; I have nothing to fear.”59 Saint-Just, pasty from his sleepless night, went out with him, carrying the amended speech. Together they entered the Convention, where Couthon and Robespierre’s brother were waiting for them. Fouché, Tallien, Bourdon, and others determined to bring down Robespierre were there too, rallying moderate or undecided deputies to their cause. Unfortunately for Robespierre and his supporters, Collot d’Herbois happened to be the current president of the Convention. He was going to help Tallien and the others stop Saint-Just and Robespierre from speaking.

  Saint-Just began. He had scarcely finished his first sentence when Tallien interrupted, complaining that, like Robespierre the day before, the speaker had isolated himself from the committees and spoke only for himself. Saint-Just’s speech had not been sanctioned by the Committee of Public Safety, still less the Committee of General Security. Before Saint-Just could resume, Billaud-Varenne described how he and Collot d’Herbois had been expelled from the Jacobins the evening before. He accused Robespierre directly of plotting against the Convention. At the tribune, Saint-Just froze. He had stood there before and never trembled when he delivered those razor-sharp interventions on the fate of Louis XVI and afterward Danton. “The words we have spoken will never be forgotten on earth,” he had announced so proudly.60 Now, suddenly, he could find no more words. Robespierre saw and ran forward to interrupt Billaud-Varenne. But his enemies were prepared, and by prearrangement shouts of “Down with the tyrant!” rang out around the hall. No one could hear Robespierre in the tumult. From the chair, Collot d’Herbois ignored his requests to speak and instead allowed Tallien to do so again. Every time Robespierre tried to interrupt, cries of “Down with the tyrant!” deafened him. After Tallien, who proposed arresting Hanriot (Robespierre’s friend at the Commune), among others, it was Vadier’s turn. Vadier chose this moment to reveal that a letter implicating Robespierre in the Catherine Théot sect had been found under the old woman’s mattress at the time of her arrest. He developed this ridiculous line of attack until Tallien stopped him irritably: “I demand the floor to bring the discussion back to the real point.” “I could bring it back,” yelled Robespierre with all his might, making his voice heard at last in the fight. But they would not let him. “It is the blood of Danton that chokes you!” someone shouted, remembering that Robespierre, in his time, had prevented others from speaking. “Danton! Is it, then, Danton you regret? Cowards! Why did you not defend him?” he yelled as the din broke over his voice again and silenced it.61

  They voted for Robespierre’s arrest. Augustin at once asked to be arrested with his brother and no one objected. Next the deputies attacked the crippled Couthon, “thirsty for blood” and hoping “to make of our corpses so many steps to mount the throne.” “Oh yes! I wanted to get a throne,” said Couthon, gesturing at his wheelchair with bleak irony.62 Finally Saint-Just and Robespierre’s friend Lebas were arrested, too. The five were assembled before the bar and had to listen to a moralizing speech from Collot d’Herbois, the Convention’s far-from-neutral president. They were probably still in shock, knowing full well what failure meant in a time of revolution. Robespierre and Saint-Just had theorized, justified, and legalized the draconian punishment of death for anyone and everyone who failed the Revolution. Both had said they did not value life in and of itself: “I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you,” said Saint-Just before his eloquence deserted him.63 Now they really were very close to death. Despite everything, it came as a surprise.

  WHEN NEWS OF the events in the Convention reached the Commune, it rose in support of Robespierre. The city gates were closed and the tocsin rang out from the Hôtel de Ville as it had before the fall of the monarchy and later the Girondins. Armed men began assembling and dragging out any cannons that had not yet been sent from Paris to the front line. Robespierre’s friend Hanriot, who had also been threatened with arrest, ordered the city prisons to refuse admittance to prisoners sent by the Convention. Meanwhile the Jacobins went into permanent session, periodically sending messages of support to the Commune throughout the night. The problem was that the Commune did not have complete control over the city’s forty-eight sections, many of which disregarded the orders they received. Some sections went further and came out in support of the Convention. By ten that evening only thirteen of the forty-eight had sent armed men to the Hôtel de Ville to fight for Robespierre. Where was he? Hanriot had set off to find out and discovered the five arrested deputies in the rooms of the Committee of General Security, where they had been given dinner. When he arrived, Hanriot was arrested, too, so that made six. For some reason, Lebas was allowed to go home, watch the police seal his papers, and say good-bye properly to his wife, Elizabeth, and their tiny son. Afterward he was taken to the prison of La Force, where he joined Augustin, whom the prison of Saint-Lazare, following orders, had refused to admit. Robespierre was taken to the Luxembourg, close to the apartments where Danton and his wife and Camille and Lucile Desmoulins had lived. Couthon was wheeled to the Bourbe, and Saint-Just escorted to the Ecossais. Hanriot was still at the Tuileries palace when an armed deputation from the Commune arrived to liberate him. Unexpectedly, this proved quite easy.

  The Convention had just begun its evening session when news arrived that the men it had arrested earlier in the day were at large again: none of the prisons had wanted to detain them in defiance of orders from the Commune. Indeed, Robespierre had been spotted getting out of a cab with a white handkerchief over his mouth (perhaps he had been sick on the journey) and walking into the town hall, where he fell into the arms of the mayor’s staff. They reassured him that he was still among friends. Augustin had given a speech at the Commune. And by 1:00 a.m. all five, together with Hanriot, were at the Hôtel de Ville waiting for the insurrection to begin. Robespierre had hoped to avoid a resort to violence, would have preferred a proper opportunity to win the Convention around, but eventually was persuaded that, in the circumstances, there was no alternative. The Convention’s committees responded by declaring the prisoners outlaws, to be taken dead or alive and executed without trial. And so, Robespierre and his friends became hunted men, just like the Girondins had been a year before. But unlike the Girondins, who had fled Paris and scattered throughout France, Robespierre and his accomplices remained in a single room in the Hôtel de Ville. From here they sent out rousing proclamations to the Paris sections and arrest warrants for their enemies in the Convention. Robespierre’s own section was to receive the following:

  Courage, patriots of the Pikes Section! Liberty is winning the day! Those men whose constancy made them feared by the traitors have already been released. Everywhere the people are showing themselves worthy of their reputation. The rallying point is the Commune, where the brave Hanriot will carry out the orders of the Executive Committee [Robespierre and friends] that has been set up to save the country.

  Signed: Lerebours, Legrand, Louvet, Payan, Ro…

  Robespierre’s signature is incomplete and the document is blood-splattered. There is dispute about whose blood made the stains. Some historians think it is Robespierre’s own. According to one version, he was carefully adding his signature when the door flew open and soldiers sent by the Convention fired at him, shattering his jaw and knocking him forward bleeding onto the document. The soldiers had got past the Commune guards by guessing their not very difficult password: “Vive Robespierre!” Other, more skeptical histo
rians think the blood could be anyone’s, may not even have got onto the paper during the early hours of 10 Thermidor (28 July), and there will never be a proper explanation for Robespierre’s broken signature. He was, after all, in something of a catatonic state even before half his jaw was shot off—perhaps he broke off his signature simply to be sick again and, since there was so much going on, never got back to complete it.

  What is certain is that soldiers from the Convention did burst into the room and, one way or another, Robespierre suffered a bullet wound that shattered his jaw. The most likely explanation for this outcome is a bungled suicide attempt. When the soldiers came in Augustin escaped through a window, edged his way along a ledge overlooking the square below, holding his shoes in one hand, holding on with the other, but slipped suddenly and smashed onto the steps outside the Hôtel de Ville, to the horrified amazement of the people assembled there for the insurrection. An eyewitness observed that “the body had fallen on a sabre and a bayonet, and knocked down the two citizens who carried them.”64 Augustin was picked up later half dead. Hanriot jumped, or was pushed, through another window on the third story of the building, which overlooked an inner court. He landed in an open sewer and was found there several hours later, covered in excrement, in horrendous pain, and begging to be finished off. Couthon, who could not walk, pulled himself out of his wheelchair, only to fall down a staircase and cut his head open. Lebas, the only one who had been home since the defeat in the Convention, had two pocket pistols on him. He handed one to Robespierre and blew his own brains out with the other. Robespierre, who had probably never fired a gun in his life, may have tried to do the same but pulled the trigger too soon with a very shaky hand. Saint-Just, cold as marble, sat there like a statue, waiting.