Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (21 page)

At Varennes everything went wrong. The special relay of fresh horses was nowhere to be seen. As the coach drove into the town, the travelers peeped through the blinds and saw groups of National Guardsmen milling around, some carrying muskets. The yellow livery worn by the three guards accompanying the suspicious coach shone beneath the lamps and moonlight; to make matters worse, the livery resembled that of the Prince de Condé, leader of the émigré nobles in exile, and people stopped to stare. It was exactly like the beginning of a play. None of the party could sustain their assumed identity for long—the king’s papers were made out for Frankfort, but Varennes was not on the road to Frankfort—and besides he had been recognized at one of the post houses earlier in the day. At first, there was general excitement—it was quite something to have Louis XVI paying the town an unexpected nocturnal visit—and there was even talk among the townspeople of escorting the coach to Bouillé at Montmédy in the morning. However, Lafayette’s orders from Paris arrived by 5:00 a.m. on 22 June, along with a decree from the assembly that the royals must return. And so they set out again, slowly retracing their path, accompanied by the National Guard and an angry, jeering crowd throwing dung at the liveried guards, who were prominently seated on top of the carriage like three bright badges of shame.

Robespierre was not in Paris on 20 June. He was in Versailles for the day, visiting his friends in the local Jacobin Club, tactfully explaining his decision to give up the post of judge on the Versailles tribunal, a position he had held since 1790 but never devoted any time to. Tact was required because Robespierre had recently been appointed public prosecutor in Paris and so had a good job to look forward to once the assembly’s business was finished and the new constitution went into effect. However, he remained anxious not to alienate his friends in Versailles. Just as he had cultivated every available source of support when standing for election in Arras, so Robespierre continued in 1791 to value each and every expression of interest in himself and his career, no matter how lowly or improbable. He definitely did not want the Jacobins at Versailles to think badly of him, especially when he was doing so well among the Paris Jacobins, so he went in person to apologize and explain. By happy coincidence, his visit fell on the day of the second anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath, and he joined the local Jacobin Club in its celebrations, amid cries of “Vive Robespierre! Vive the nation! Vive the Friends of the Constitution [Jacobins]!” “No one ever deserved flattery as much as Robespierre,” commented a Versailles newspaper approvingly.
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The next morning he woke to a city in tumult. Rumors of the royal flight filled the air and Robespierre had to fight his way to work through crowds of people all heading toward the Manège to find out what had happened in the Tuileries. He pushed his way through and was in his seat by nine. There was stunned silence in the assembly. Hoping to save the constitutional monarchy, Bailly, mayor of Paris, was maintaining that Louis XVI had been kidnapped against his will and that there was no reason for the assembly to distrust the king or his ministers. On his desk in the Tuileries, however, the king had left behind—in his own handwriting—a list of his complaints against the assembly and the constitution it was drafting. These ranged from regrets over the formal powers (such as direct control of the army) that he had been forced to relinquish, to more personal slights (especially the Assembly’s reduction of his personal revenues). This detailed account of his reasons for fleeing Paris was tantamount to a confession of guilt. There was uproar in the assembly, and Robespierre, urging his fellow deputies to “tell all good citizens to be vigilant for traitors,” could not make himself heard at greater length in the chaos. At lunchtime he went home with Pétion, his fellow radical deputy, to discuss the response these unforeseen developments required. The journalist Jacques Brissot was there at lunch, too, along with a newcomer, Manon Roland, both destined for political eminence over the coming year.

Brissot, whose father was an innkeeper in Chartres, was thirty-five when the Revolution began, just four years older than Robespierre. Thirteenth in a family of seventeen children, he had used his outstanding memory to educate himself and escape from his lowly background into the worlds of law and journalism. Rather pretentiously, he had adopted the name of a neighboring village, calling himself “Brissot de Warville” under the old regime. He was not elected to Versailles in 1789 but nevertheless somehow managed to inveigle his way onto the assembly’s Constitutional Committee and into Paris’s Municipal Assembly. Before 1789 he had founded a society to campaign for the abolition of slavery (
Ami des noirs
) and a newspaper called the
Patriote français
. Now that he was a revolutionary, Brissot dropped the aristocratic sounding “de Warville.” However, when he came to write his self-portrait—a popular genre at the time—he followed the fashion for doing so under an assumed name and called himself Phédor:

Brissot thought of himself as unworldly, but he kept up with fashion. He attached great importance to dressing the part of a revolutionary. He was a prominent member of the Jacobin Club and one of the first to stop powdering his hair and start wearing the
bonnet rouge
. Active as he was in radical circles, Brissot had recently met and introduced to Pétion the fascinating Mme Roland, a staunch patriot who would soon preside over her own salon. Mme Roland had arrived in Paris early in 1791 on a business trip with her husband, an inspector of manufactures in Lyon. The business completed, he was ready to leave, but she insisted on staying and attending the Jacobin Club, where she could meet and socialize with radical revolutionaries. Manon Phlipon was the daughter of a Parisian artisan, a master engraver who had his workshop on the quai de l’Horloge, very close to Pont-Neuf. Her six siblings had all died at birth or in infancy. Precociously intellectual—she claimed Plutarch had been a major influence before she was nine years old—Manon grew up devouring books, teaching herself foreign languages, memorizing the Bible, and impressing the local parish priest with her knowledge of theology. Whomever would her parents find to marry her? In the end it was Jean Marie Roland, twenty years her senior, who asked for her hand when she was twenty-five. Like Brissot, she composed a self-portrait:

By the summer of 1791, the Rolands, Brissot, and Pétion had become firm friends, so when the king’s flight to Varennes was discovered, it was natural for them to meet to discuss the implications for the Revolution. Yet for all the fervent ideas that flew around in their circle, Brissot and his friends were not at all sure how to react to the king’s flight. Over lunch chez Pétion on 21 June there was much agonizing. Was this the end of the monarchy? And what about a republic—was it necessary, or even possible, to have one in France? According to Mme Roland, “Robespierre, with his habitual grimace, and biting his nails, asked: ‘What is a Republic?’”
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He suspected a plot to assassinate the patriots and did not expect to survive another twenty-four hours. Nothing was clear. While Pétion later volunteered to go and fetch the king back from Varennes, Robespierre was more preoccupied with what was going on in the Jacobin Club in Paris. It was here, the same evening, that he made the most flamboyant speech of his career so far.

“For me, the flight of the first public functionary ought not to appear a disastrous event. This could have been the best day of the Revolution, and it might still be,” Robespierre began. He told the Jacobins, calmly, directly, right at the beginning of his speech, that the assembly had been wrong to present the king’s flight as a kidnapping and to reaffirm its faith in his ministers. The assembly had not listened to him and had disregarded his cautionary words. It was obvious, Robespierre continued, that the king had chosen to desert his post at a crucial juncture in the Revolution. The constitution was nearly finished and there was lots wrong with it, not least the ridiculous divisions between citizens who could vote or stand for election and those who could not. Throughout France’s eighty-three new departments, treacherous priests were rejecting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Foreign powers (Prussia and Austria) were preparing an invasion to end the Revolution, and on top of everything else, the harvest, though ready, was still in the fields: it would take only a small band of brigands to set it alight and starve the whole country. There could be no mistake: Louis XVI—or the prime public functionary, to give him the less glamorous title Robespierre preferred—had chosen to abandon revolutionary France at its most vulnerable. But that was not the worst of it:

The real enemy, as he saw it, was right there, in Paris, mingling with the true patriots. “Share my fear” was his invitation to the Jacobins to join him in the next stage of the Revolution. Here he took the dramatic step of turning not only against the king and his ministers but also against the assembly that had affirmed its faith in them earlier in the day. The assembly was wrong—Robespierre dared say it. For the public good, he would take the dangerous step of accusing almost all his colleagues in the assembly of being counterrevolutionary out of ignorance, terror, resentment, pride, or corruption. Let the press term him the new Nostradamus, prophesying the future in apocalyptic mode: he was, he assured the Jacobins, ready to sacrifice his life to truth, liberty, and the fatherland (
la patrie
). At this (according to his own newspaper), Camille Desmoulins leapt to his feet and cried, “We would all give our lives to save yours!” and the audience of eight hundred Jacobins, crammed inside the old monastery, joined in an impromptu oath to defend Robespierre’s life. It seems unlikely that Robespierre was genuinely in more danger than any of the other radical revolutionaries, who feared that the forces of counterrevolution might be galvanized into action by the king’s flight. Even so, the Jacobins in Marseille wrote to say they would come to Paris and defend him if the need arose. And the Cordeliers Club sent an armed guard to protect him in the rue Saintonge.

Later that night, before going to bed, Robespierre made his will. The assembly and General Lafayette had issued orders for the royal family to return to Paris. But though they could still issue orders and be obeyed, as far as Robespierre was concerned, the assembly and General Lafayette were mutually discredited by the king’s flight: neither could be relied upon in the continuing struggle to provide France with a legitimate constitution. In his attempt to persuade the Jacobins of this, Robespierre succeeded in creating a schism at the club: 264 of the members who were also deputies in the assembly left to form the Feuillants, in a disused monastery of that name across the street from the Jacobins. The Feuillants Club, led by Antoine Barnave (a Protestant advocate from Grenoble), was committed to defending the king’s role in the forthcoming constitution, despite the discredit brought upon him by the flight to Varennes. Robespierre remained behind in the Jacobins with a handful of radical deputies, dedicated to curtailing the king’s powers under the new constitution. Robespierre’s break with his more moderate colleagues was decisive; from this point on his political future rested on his influence over what remained of the Jacobin Club and its network of affiliates throughout France. If the king had not fled, Robespierre would probably have settled down to his job as public prosecutor under the proposed constitutional monarchy. It would have been a more glamorous life than he ever hoped for in Arras, but not so very different in kind. However, the king had fled, and Mirabeau, who might have turned the situation around and rescued the monarchy despite everything, was dead. The configuration of power in Paris was changing very fast.

The flight to Varennes had taken one day, yet the return of the royal family to Paris took four; during this time, Marie Antoinette’s hair turned gray.
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They were halfway back by the time deputies from the assembly (Pétion and Barnave) arrived to take charge of the dismal procession and protect it from the mob. Pétion and Barnave climbed into the carriage and the royal children sat on the other adults’ laps for the rest of the journey. Despite the presence of the deputies, violent incidents continued to plague the exhausted travelers, including a near miss with brigands in the notorious forest of Bondy. Inside the coach, Barnave did his best to befriend the king, assuring him that it would still be possible to save the constitutional monarchy. Robespierre’s friend Pétion was much less ingratiating, but it is hard to tell if his rudeness was deliberate or inadvertent. Afterward he claimed that Louis XVI’s sister had fallen in love with him by the time they reached the Tuileries, which seems unlikely, to say the least.