Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (14 page)

ON 4 OCTOBER Paris awoke to find no bread in its bakeries. To add insult to injury, the newspapers were full of inflammatory reports of revelry at Versailles the night before. The papers claimed that there had been a raucous and unpatriotic banquet for the Flanders Regiment, which had recently arrived in Versailles to reinforce the royal bodyguard. Allegedly, the national cockade had been trampled beneath the aristocracy’s well-shod and contemptuous feet. One witness, Mme de la Tour du Pin, remembered the event very differently. She noticed Marie Antoinette’s nervous anxiety when a Swiss officer asked permission to carry the five-year-old dauphin, like a trophy, around the crowded hall. Understandably fearful in such uncertain times, the ashen-faced queen, who was still mourning the death of the child’s elder brother, was visibly relieved when he was returned to her arms.
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Nevertheless, on the morning of 4 October, hungry and outraged, Paris rioted. A baker was murdered by the mob and General Lafayette and his cockade-wearing National Guard struggled to keep order. The next day a mob of about seven thousand women set off from the Hôtel de Ville for Versailles through driving rain, led by a man named Stanislas Maillard, who bore the unofficial title “Captain of the Bastille Volunteers.” They reached their destination in the evening and it was Robespierre who received them: 5 October was crucial to his revolutionary career.

A delegation of twelve of the women plus Maillard, all drenched and mud-splattered from their long walk, entered the National Assembly, demanded food for Paris, and insisted that the king’s bodyguard be forced to adopt the patriotic tricolor cockade. The rest of the mob waited, hungry and restless, outside. Robespierre, standing neat and composed at the tribune, answered the delegation by ordering an inquiry into the food shortages that menaced Paris. He supported Maillard’s complaint against one particular miller who played the market by refusing for weeks to grind his flour, despite having been paid two hundred livres for it. In this way, he made common cause with the poor, echoing their customary fear that there was a plot against them—that their hunger and suffering were no accident but instead the result of a deliberate and despicable conspiracy.
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The prospect of an inquiry did nothing to calm the expectant mob, though it did deflect their anger from the National Assembly. The ensuing night was uncomfortable and full of anxiety: Versailles was already crammed with people and there was nowhere for the women to sleep; some bedded down on benches in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs; pistol shots rang out in the darkness. Inside the palace the court was in panic, barricaded behind doors that there had been no reason to close for decades. Some of the Parisian women found, or were shown, a small door opening onto a secret staircase into the palace, and as they emerged into the royal precincts surprised bodyguards opened fire on them. More enraged and frightened than ever, the destitute women then rampaged through the palace, eating any food they could lay their hands on. Eventually, after midnight, General Lafayette and twenty thousand National Guardsmen arrived in Versailles, soaking wet from the continuing rain.

General Lafayette said to the king, “Sire, I thought it better to come here and die at the feet of Your Majesty than to die uselessly on the place de Grève”—which was histrionic but honorable.
⁶²
Then he explained that the people were rioting for want of bread and urged the king to let the National Guard replace the royal bodyguards. The king, who had been hesitating all night over the best course of action, frantically eliciting opinions from everyone he could find to ask, and repeating all the while, “I do not want to compromise anyone,” gave in immediately on the replacement of his bodyguard.
⁶³
The next day, after a mob had nearly broken into the queen’s apartments, the royal family agreed to return to Paris for good. They found themselves accompanied by an unruly procession of some sixty thousand people, many chanting triumphantly that they were bringing the baker, the baker’s wife, and their boy back to the capital. As a gesture of goodwill, the king had ordered sacks of flour to be transported from Versailles to Paris. Yet on the journey he heard himself derided as a baker and could see, outside the carriage windows, the severed heads of murdered palace guards ghoulishly bobbing alongside on pikes.

“Men had captured the Bastille,” wrote the historian Jules Michelet, “but it was women who captured the king.”
⁶⁴
Entering Paris, the royal family were prisoners in all but name. On the morning of 7 October, they tried to settle into their new accommodation—the dusty Tuileries palace on the right bank of the Seine that had been unused since the Sun King, Louis XIV, abandoned Paris for Versailles—while Jean-Paul Marat’s daily paper,
L’ami du peuple
(
The People’s Friend
), gleefully celebrated their arrival:

Marat, a physician and scientist admired by Benjamin Franklin, had begun writing revolutionary pamphlets in 1788. His
Offrande à la patrie
(
Offering to the Fatherland
) had some points in common with the abbé Sieyès’s more famous
Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat?
(
What Is the Third Estate?
), arguing for the identification of the third estate with the nation. Marat, like Sieyès, had a deep knowledge of eighteenth-century political thought, but he soon switched to more direct ways of communicating with the public. He stood on street corners reading aloud from Rousseau’s
Social Contract
, and he issued his daily paper under the motto “Truth or death.” He preached insurrection to all who listened and helped instigate the women’s march to Versailles. Indeed, he went with them on 5 October but had to rush straight back to Paris to keep up his running commentary on revolutionary events. “Marat flies to Versailles and returns like lightning, making as much noise as the four trumpets of the Last Judgment summoning the dead to rise,” commented Camille Desmoulins in his own newspaper,
Révolutions de France et de Brabant
.
⁶⁶
For his pains, Marat was arrested by the Parisian police on 8 October and imprisoned for about a month. Afterward he resumed his provocative journalism, giving voice to “the wrath of the people” and evading arrest by hiding in the cellars and sewers of Paris, where he caught a disfiguring skin disease. The People’s Friend, wracked by migraines, his head wrapped in a vinegar-soaked handkerchief, his body covered with open sores, worked relentlessly to ensure that the ordinary people of Paris played their part in the Revolution. If Marat wanted to keep the king in the Tuileries palace until the new constitution came into effect, he seemed to believe he could bring it about by shouting, as loudly as possible, day in day out, into the ears of the Parisian mob.

THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY did not immediately follow the king to Paris; it stayed behind to debate the new constitution and only closed its sessions at Versailles on 15 October. Buoyant with success, Robespierre was very active in the debates. By now he had made a name for himself—one that most journalists recognized and could even spell. He insisted, against Mirabeau, that the king’s list of state-funded employees should be subject to annual approval, not permanently funded by the treasury.
⁶⁷
He argued vehemently that all those still imprisoned by the old regime’s notorious lettres de cachet should be unconditionally released. The case of the ex-soldier Dupond, whom he once defended in Arras, may have been in his mind, but this stance also fitted his growing reputation for radicalism, his passion for the application of clear, uncompromising principles, and the sublime emotions he had felt as he stood amid the rubble of the Bastille. With characteristic seriousness, Robespierre entered into discussions about the form in which the National Assembly’s decisions should be published. It was not appropriate for them to read like old-style royal proclamations, he argued, especially since the parlements, once responsible for registering the king’s edicts, had now been abolished. He suggested an alternative formulation that was somewhat ponderous and prolix: “Louis, by the Grace of God, and by the Will of the Nation, King of the French: to all citizens of the French Empire: People, here is the law which your representatives have made, and to which I have affixed the royal seal.”
⁶⁸
According to newspaper reports, Robespierre read this out to the boisterous and disorderly assembly in such a pious and earnest tone of voice that someone called out, “Gentlemen, this formula is of no use; we want no psalm singing here!” and he was laughed off the podium. He was sensitive and extremely easy to wound or offend and still rather gauche: a painfully self-conscious provincial with a heavy Artois accent who had thrown himself into the Revolution as he might, in different circumstances, have thrown himself into an important love affair, reckless, unreserved, completely devoid of ironic distance from the events on which he was staking his life. To be laughed at in such circumstances can only have stung him deeply.

After closing its sessions at Versailles, the National Assembly reconvened in the archbishop’s palace in Paris on 19 October. Located on the Ile Saint-Louis in the river Seine at the heart of the city, very close to where the old parlement had met, the palace was never a suitable venue, and when a gallery collapsed in midsession, injuring members of the public and a number of deputies, the assembly had to move again. This time it convened in the Manège, a long, narrow building originally designed as Louis XV’s riding school, prominently situated on the right bank of the Seine, between the Tuileries garden and the Feuillants monastery. Here, too, there were problems—overcrowding, bad acoustics, and inconveniently small public galleries. At Versailles there had been room for around three thousand spectators, but now there were just two galleries, one at either end of the Manège, with only a hundred seats each. There was a third gallery halfway down the hall, but admission to this was by ticket only. Soon an avid traffic in these tickets developed, along with a new practice of strategically positioning “claques” of people in the gallery to hiss, applaud, or throw missiles at the speakers. It was amid this chaos that Robespierre resumed his struggle to make something of himself and the Revolution—projects that had already converged in his mind. His new lodgings at 30 rue Saintonge, in the Marais Quarter, were comparatively cheap and tranquil. Living some distance from the city center, however, Robespierre had to travel two miles to reach the assembly, by foot or carriage, through congested streets. One acquaintance remembered being stuck in traffic with Robespierre one morning, en route to the Manège: “Our cab stopped at the corner of the rue Gréneta owing to a crowd that was hurrying to the rue Saint-Denis. He was impatient so I got out to see what was stopping us. I came back and told him, ‘It is a deputation of the 84th Section that is going to present the assembly with a model of the Bastille made from one of its stones.’ ‘Pay,’ he said, ‘and let us get down and go on foot. A Bastille, all the Bastilles in the world, will not hinder me from going to my post.’”
⁶⁹

(1789–1791)

Robespierre’s lodgings in the rue Saintonge were on the second floor, a sign of relative impoverishment in status-conscious Paris, where ground or first-floor apartments were highly prized, as they still are today.
¹
Since 12 August, he had been paid eighteen livres a day as a deputy to the National Assembly, plus arrears backdated to 27 April, which would have amounted to a lump sum of over twenty-two thousand livres—more money than he had ever had in his life. And yet he still felt himself to be poor and seemed so to others. A penurious journalist and playwright named Pierre Villiers, who claimed to have worked as Robespierre’s secretary for seven months in 1790, included some rare domestic details about Robespierre’s life in his memoirs.
²
Villiers remembered: “He was very poor and had no proper clothes. When the assembly decreed mourning for Benjamin Franklin I asked a young friend of mine to lend him a black suit, which he wore, though its owner was four inches taller than he was.”
³
The secretary’s memoirs, like those of Charlotte Robespierre, are unreliable and should be treated cautiously, as suggestive rumors—not robust facts—about Robespierre’s home life. “I had some quarrels with him,” Villiers recalled, “and later he would have killed me if he had remembered me.”
⁴
As in more ordinary households, some of the bitterest fights were over money. Charlotte had noticed her brother’s lack of interest in money when she kept house for him in Arras, and his renowned indifference to bribes was one of the sources of his nickname, the Incorruptible. Villiers, who claimed to have worked for Robespierre free of charge, was irritated by his unworldly attitude to finances: “Several times I have known him to refuse offers of money that required from him no return, not even thanks, and if sometimes I allowed myself to insist on his accepting, he abused me. He was of a fiery temper that he always fought to control, and nearly every night he bathed his pillow in blood.”
⁵
Perhaps Robespierre had nosebleeds (people with high blood pressure and fiery tempers often do). These certainly would have left him anemic and contributed to the unusual pallor of his skin that many contemporaries noticed.

Each morning, Villiers arrived to help him with the volume of correspondence he received as an increasingly prominent member of the National Assembly. Deputies could frank letters or reclaim their expenditure on postage associated with the assembly’s business. Robespierre, parsimonious by nature, was fastidious about his record keeping. He always took the assembly’s business seriously, which was more than could be said for some of its other members. Villiers remembers one of them, a deputy from the Department of Mont Blanc, franking a parasol for his mother “that traveled in consequence free of cost.”
⁶
It was inconceivable that Robespierre would behave like this—his principles forbade it. And yet admirable as they were, there was already something unnervingly vehement about these principles. “One morning I arrived at his house earlier than usual,” Villiers writes. “He was striding about his room. ‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘Your Assembly held a regular witches’ Sabbath last night, a fine piece of work!’ ‘What is the matter, my fine aristocrat?’ he responded. ‘Your colleagues,’ I said, ‘have abolished titles of nobility as well as ribbons and sashes.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you should have been there to shout out
Hang yourself, Robespierre!
Too bad you weren’t there to do it.’”
⁷

According to Villiers, one of the first things Robespierre did when he got to Paris was to find a mistress, a woman of twenty-six who worshiped him. In the assembly and the public press he was already acquiring the reputation for irreproachable purity (another source of his enduring nickname). Perhaps this was why his relationship with his mistress, whoever she was, came to an abrupt end. As Villiers remembers, the end was ugly. For a time, Robespierre diverted about a quarter of his modest funds toward supporting this woman (which suggests that she was even poorer than he was), then suddenly he cut her off after refusing to admit her into the house.
⁸
Perhaps he sat at his desk and pretended, as many do in the aftermath of a failed or indiscreet love affair, that nothing had happened. Villiers says he found himself repeatedly in the unenviable position of facing the distraught woman on the doorstep when she came to talk to Robespierre; he concluded that she had been “treated quite badly.” No other trace of the affair remains, but someone embarrassed, priggish, callous, or frightened enough to refuse kindness to his former lover would surely have destroyed any material evidence well in advance of posterity.
⁹
Throughout his short life, Robespierre was loved by women: his combination of strength and vulnerability, ambition and scruples, compassion and refinement attracted women with strong defenses against obviously vulgar men but none against the seemingly sensitive.
¹⁰
It is entirely plausible that, after an initial rush of tenderness, Robespierre felt guilty and ashamed of his emotional or sexual liaison, so ended it with brutal efficiency, sparing his own feelings first and reminding himself that he was, after all, a public figure with responsibility toward the future of France. If so, his behavior was not admirable but at least understandable.

About his busyness at this time, however, there can be no question. In November 1789 he wrote again to Buissart after an interval of many months: “My dear friend, I know you are sulking about me; and I cannot blame you. Despite all the good reasons I could give you to justify the long silence there has been between all my friends and me, I am forced to recognize that you deserve to be an exception, and I ought to do the impossible and find the time to write to you. There is nothing more I can do except ask your forgiveness and make good my negligence.”
¹¹
Buissart can hardly have been as much in need of a word from Robespierre as the distraught woman outside his door. But this was a far more agreeable letter for him to write, detailing as it did the steady rise in his reputation within the National Assembly and his precious contributions to its debates. The letter reveals someone entirely devoted to current politics, swept up in the assembly’s affairs, and completely out of touch with his former life: “What is going on in Artois? What is said? What is thought?…Who is in charge? Please inform me on these matters and tell me if the National Assembly’s decrees, especially those concerning provisional reforms in the criminal procedures, are registered and observed by the courts.” Robespierre wrote as if he had almost forgotten that practicing law in Artois had once been the summit of his professional ambitions. He had moved very far away in the six months since he left, so after apologies for his long silence and perfunctory inquiries about how the Revolution was going in Arras, his letter soon turned to the constitutional debates.

These debates had begun before the assembly departed from Versailles and followed the king to Paris. They were conducted in an inefficient manner; instead of arguing their points against one another and advancing their understanding of the constitutional question under discussion, the deputies spent their time reading out prepared speeches. Repetition, redundancy, refutation of points that no one had yet asserted, and so on abounded. At the heart of these poorly mediated discussions, there was the problem of Louis XVI. How could he be incorporated into the new constitution? Could he be trusted? Would a monarch who was accustomed to absolute sovereignty play the limited role of constitutional monarch in good faith? In his letter to Buissart, Robespierre was moved to raise a deep and politically subversive question that seemed to him no less urgent in the autumn of 1789 than it had ever been: “Are we free?”
¹²
The new constitution was beginning to take shape. The assembly had already firmly rejected the British constitutional model with its dual legislative chambers, the House of Commons and House of Lords. A separate aristocratic chamber would have been too inflammatory and dangerous in France, where noble privileges had only recently been abolished. So the deputies decided that, under the new constitution, legislative power should be entrusted to a single body of 745 elected representatives. This decision raised the question of an executive veto over legislative decisions. What was the best way to build safeguards into the legislative process? Should the king be given an absolute veto or only a suspensive veto? The latter would allow him to delay new laws for a fixed period of time but not to permanently prohibit any he disagreed with. Would Louis XVI use either kind of veto in the interests of the people?

Mirabeau thought that an absolute executive veto over legislation was essential to the future of the monarchy—he did not see how any kind of constitutional monarchy could be viable otherwise, and he intended to argue the case before the assembly. Mirabeau was a brilliant orator. Unlike Robespierre’s weak, wheedling voice, Mirabeau’s was “full, manly, and sonorous; it filled and pleased the ear. Always powerful, yet flexible, it could be heard as distinctly when he lowered as when he raised it.”
¹³
His intellect was flexible, too, and he could so easily incorporate penciled notes passed to him from the floor as he spoke that one contemporary compared him to a magician who tears a piece of paper into twenty little bits, swallows each of them separately, then produces the piece whole again. But as he mounted the tribune to deliver a speech on the veto, his gifts failed him. Working and playing harder than ever, despite bad health, Mirabeau had fallen into the habit of relying on other people to write most of his speeches and articles, and was now faced with a text he had not read. Later he confided to a friend that this was the only time in his entire political career that he broke into a cold sweat at the tribune. The speech before him was almost unintelligible, dry, obscure, and completely unsuited to the general mood in Paris, where, urged on by the popular press, people were frenziedly opposing the “monstrous” prospect of an absolute veto. Mirabeau tried to extemporize. He digressed. He inveighed against despotism in general. Then he cut his speech short. The prime opportunity for strengthening Louis XVI’s position under the new constitution had just been lost through the inattentive overconfidence of the king’s most powerful ally in the assembly.

The abbé Sieyès argued that the king should have the power to sanction the law but that any law he refused to sanction should be subjected to an alternative checking mechanism—it was, after all, the people who were sovereign. Earlier in 1789, Sieyès’s lucid intellect had had a dramatic effect on the deputies, altering the terms and course of their debates, by redefining the third estate as the nation. Now he was trying to redirect them again by attacking the widespread assumption that, in the absence of a House of Lords to regulate legislative decisions, the king must be given a veto of some kind. Robespierre was one of the few who immediately recognized the radical potential of Sieyès’s argument—not the finer details of his ideas for organizing legislative power but his forthright assertion of the principle of popular sovereignty. This was one of the political principles to which Robespierre was vehemently attached, and he was inspired to compose a passionate and lengthy speech of his own on the veto question.

He began by berating the misguided pragmatism of many of his fellow deputies. Thinking that some kind of executive veto was inevitable in the circumstances, they were prepared to vote for the lesser of two evils: a suspensive rather than absolute veto. Instead, Robespierre recalled his colleagues to fundamental principles: the power of truth, the safety of the people, liberty, equality, justice, and reason. He insisted that the assembly must remain faithful to these principles when making its constitutional decisions—anything else would be a disgraceful abuse of its authority. The all-important power to make the laws belonged to the sovereign people and must be exercised only by their representatives. Of course it was important to make sure that the laws created were good, fair, and useful, but that outcome could not be achieved by executive veto, only by true democracy. To that end, Robespierre outlined some alternative methods: representatives elected to the legislature should serve for only short periods of time, after which they would once again become ordinary citizens and so have an interest in passing only impartial laws; citizens should be elected only on grounds of virtue and merit, with no other distinctions taken into consideration; no representative should continue in the legislature beyond the initial period for which he was elected.

Having worked hard to set out his principles with clarity, Robespierre was frustrated to find himself prevented from delivering his carefully planned speech. Increasingly desperate to do so, he tried convincing the assembly that every deputy should have the opportunity to speak on a matter as important as the veto, before voting could begin. A number of members of the assembly, keen to move on to other constitutional questions, were impatient with his suggestion and so, despite some dissent and disorder, the voting soon went ahead without benefit of Robespierre’s speech. The proposal for the king’s suspensive veto was passed, 673 votes in favor, 325 against. This meant that when the constitution came into effect, Louis XVI would be able to delay new laws for the duration of two successive legislative sittings (a maximum of three years).
¹⁴
Robespierre consoled himself by publishing his speech as a pamphlet at the end of September and applying his political principles rigorously to the remaining constitutional questions facing the assembly.

Some months later, in the rue Saintonge, there was yet another early morning fight. Villiers arrived, keen as always to gossip about the assembly’s constitutional debates before settling down to work. “I cannot conceive how any subjects can treat their king so unworthily,” he remarked to Robespierre, sure, no doubt, of provoking a testy response. “They will finish by killing him like the English did their unhappy Stuart.” “So you see yourself as a subject, do you?” Robespierre asked him. “Yes, I do,” replied Villiers, provocatively. “You speak of Charles,” came Robespierre’s reply. “Well, the English freed by his death should have put an end to his line.”
¹⁵
It is likely that Villiers embellished this anecdote. Publicly, Robespierre was working hard to establish a constitutional monarchy. Like everyone else, he could see that the presence of Louis XVI made it impossible to draft a constitution with a wholly new executive power, as the Americans had done in their revolution. Instead the assembly had to compromise and design a new role for their existing monarch. The radical deputies did so grudgingly and with a great many suspicions. Even so, there was never any suggestion in the assembly (and almost none outside it either) that the king should simply be deposed, still less executed, and France declared a republic.