Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (31 page)

At one point in the
Social Contract
, Rousseau describes his ideal lawgiver. The qualities required in someone truly worthy of formulating the laws are extraordinary:

Robespierre quoted this passage in full in his article. But then he proceeded to gloss it, significantly altering the meaning so that an unusually admirable human being—Robespierre himself, for example—might enact the role of lawgiver that Rousseau had reserved for the gods:

This was a self-portrait—an extremely flattering one. Despite his shrine of sorts in the Duplay house, Robespierre probably did not think he was above human passions, but he did consider himself more self-controlled than most, more resistant to political temptation, more unambivalently for the people, less selfish, less corruptible, perhaps even incorruptible. Robespierre seemed to share Rousseau’s belief in the need for an almost superhuman lawgiver, omniscient, disinterested, and capable of directing the people for their own good. And he may well have been privately preparing himself to assume just that role. In this context, Robespierre’s vision of democracy was very different from anything we would recognize today. The rule of the people, as he understood it, was not simply derived from the will of the majority. The point was to ensure the triumph of the good, pure general will of the people—what the people would want in ideal circumstances—and this needed to be intuited on their behalf until they had received sufficient education to understand it for themselves. When it came to drafting the laws, to giving France its new republican constitution, Robespierre believed that he was far closer to Rousseau’s conception of the ideal lawgiver than Brissot and his friends could ever be.

ROBESPIERRE’S ENEMIES IN the Convention wasted no time. On 25 September, just four days after the official opening, they accused him of aspiring to be a tyrant. His enemies—many of them friends of Brissot’s—were dismayed at his influence and popularity in the capital. They insisted that since Paris was only one of eighty-three departments in France, its representatives’ votes should count as only an 83rd of the total within the National Convention. Robespierre, denounced as leader of the Paris deputies in their illegitimate quest for power, hesitated. But Danton leapt to the tribune to defend him as he had done before at the Jacobin Club. He demanded the death penalty for anyone scheming to destroy the unity of France. By this he meant death to anyone scheming to turn France into a federation of independent departments or small republics in order to diminish the power of Paris. This was one of the accusations the Mountain leveled against the Girondins. When Robespierre finally stood up to defend himself, he struck a characteristic note: “I begin by thanking my accusers. Calumny serves the public good when it clumsily unmasks itself.” First he appealed, as usual, to his personal patriotic credentials: “I did this…I did that…,” he reminded the Convention, summarizing his achievements since 1789 until the audience got restless and someone shouted, “Enough!” Then he said he had long suspected that Brissot’s faction wanted to divide France into a federation of small republics, leaving it even more vulnerable to internal and external enemies than it already was.
¹⁹
He had not been in the room when Mme Roland and her friends bent over the map and discussed the division of the country into monarchical and republican parts. But now that the monarchy had fallen, he was convinced they wanted another kind of division, one that would curtail the influence of Paris, so essential to sustaining revolutionary ideals, and diminish his power base.

Robespierre’s intervention was subtle and sardonic but completely overshadowed by the next speaker. Blistering with skin disease and reeking of vinegar, this was the infamous Marat, the so-called
ami du peuple
(people’s friend), the indefatigable pamphleteer who, since 1789, had consistently called for blood and anarchy. “I believe in the cutting off of heads,” he had declared in his newspaper.
²⁰
Of course, he did not always mean what he said. “My hand would wither rather than write another word if I really thought the people were going to do what I tell them to,” he confided to a friend.
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Even so, he had openly approved of the September Massacres and may have had more to do with arranging them than Robespierre cared to hear about. The two were not close friends. Marat claimed that the only time they had ever met privately, Robespierre was horrified by his sanguinary attitudes:

This was high praise indeed from Marat, who so delighted in defamation. The admiration may not have been mutual, but it was nevertheless hard to imagine that Marat, this flagrant travesty of Rousseau’s ideal lawgiver, could have been elected to the Convention as a representative for Paris without the Incorruptible’s consent. As Marat stood up to speak the hall erupted in hoots of disapproval. When the booing relented he said in his hollow, croaking pantomime villain’s voice: “I perceive that I have enemies here.” “All, all, all are your enemies,” cried his fellow deputies.
²³
Undeterred, he addressed the charge of tyranny that had been leveled at Robespierre and the other representatives of Paris, whose election the Jacobins had so vigilantly monitored:

The same day Marat despaired of the Convention in his
L’ami du peuple
and prophesized to the French:

Among the crowd at the Tuileries on 10 August was an unemployed army captain who watched with horror as the Swiss Guards were murdered and burned. “If he had mounted his horse,” the young Napoleon Bonaparte wrote of Louis XVI, “victory would have remained with him.”
²⁶
Here was the future statesman and patriot whose dictatorship Marat foretold but did not live to see.

THE GIRONDINS’ ATTACKS on Robespierre redoubled. The old divide at the Jacobins between Brissot and Robespierre was carried over into the Convention, where it mutated into the hostility between the Girondins and the Mountain. But whereas the previous year Robespierre had struggled to win ascendancy over the Paris Jacobins, now he succeeded in having Brissot and his friends formally expelled from the club. On 29 October, in the Convention, Mme Roland’s husband denounced in general terms the proponents of violence and blamed the Insurrectionary Commune for the September Massacres. Robespierre responded with general refutations but also asked rhetorically, “Who dares accuse me?”
²⁷
From the seats at the other end of the hall where the Girondins were sitting came a voice. “I do,” called Jean Baptiste Louvet, the licentious novelist married to one of Mme Roland’s close friends. Silence fell among the assembled deputies. According to a Dr. Moore (a distinguished medical doctor studying in Paris who had heard a rumor that something exciting was going to happen that day), Louvet, thin, lank, and pale-faced, “stalked along the hall like a specter, and being come directly opposite to the tribune, he fixed Robespierre, and said, ‘Oui, Robespierre, c’est moi qui t’accuse!’” (Yes, Robespierre, it is I who accuse you). Robespierre froze. “He could not have seemed more alarmed had a bleeding head spoken to him from a charger.” Danton tried to help by causing a distraction—he knew his friend was a skilled yet nervous speaker and could see he was deeply flustered. But Louvet had captured the deputies’ attention and they wanted to hear what he had to say. Realizing this, Danton, always so adept, so agile as a public speaker, began to threaten Louvet before he could even begin. “I want the accuser to put his finger into the wound,” he said, challenging Louvet to back up his allegations.
²⁸
“I intend it,” Louvet replied, “but why does Danton scream beforehand?”

In fact, Louvet had nothing new to say. He accused Robespierre of conspiring to control the Insurrectionary Commune, of complicity in the September Massacres, of trying to include Roland and Brissot among the victims, of associating with Marat, and of dominating the Jacobin Club:

It had all been said before, and yet, Dr. Moore observed, this speech stirred up so much hostility against Robespierre that he was in danger of being lynched on the spot. Answer, Danton urged him, answer immediately. But either he could not or he would not. Once again, Danton spoke on his behalf, rejecting the charges of tyranny. Finally Robespierre was given a week to prepare his own response. There was cunning behind his reluctance to speak. He knew that he lacked Danton’s fluency and that if the Convention turned against him his career was finished. He knew he could use the coming week to write and rewrite in his small, neat handwriting another finely honed account of his exemplary revolutionary credentials. But there must have been fear as well. Standing there facing Louvet, resolute as Banquo’s ghost, he completely lost his nerve. He needed the week to recover, to write his defense, and, above all, to assemble the facts of his revolutionary contribution and square them with his conscience. He was not, he never had been, wrong. Much as he needed others to believe this, what he needed still more was to believe it himself.

Robespierre defended himself before the Convention on 5 November. On that day Dr. Moore was at the Manège again, in the crowd of people who went early to secure a place in the public galleries. Looking around, he noticed suddenly that the galleries were “almost entirely filled with women.” They applauded Robespierre loudly. Dr. Moore was not the only person to notice Robespierre’s female fan club. Later that week the Marquis de Condorcet, secretary of the Academy of Sciences under the old regime, now a Girondin deputy in the Convention, raised the subject in the newspaper
Chronique de Paris
:

Condorcet’s characterization was ill intentioned, but there is plenty of other evidence that Robespierre had a peculiar appeal for women. Olympe de Gouges, a butcher’s daughter and pioneering feminist, wrote to him at this time, suggesting they drown themselves together in the Seine as an act of extreme patriotism: in this way, she suggested, he could cleanse himself of the stains that had sullied his reputation since 10 August.
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Robespierre, understandably, preferred to redeem his reputation by more conventional methods.

Before the Convention, he denied outright having played any part in the election of Marat. He confirmed that he had met him privately in January 1792. At that meeting they had spoken of public affairs and Marat had been despondent. “I told him myself what all patriots, even the most ardent, thought of him.”
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Robespierre described to the Convention how he had reproached Marat for inciting extreme violence in his editorials; calling for five or six hundred guilty heads to be lopped off was, he insisted, as repugnant to the friends of liberty as to the aristocracy. After “that first and unique visit” he had encountered Marat next in the Convention itself, where he was amazed to find himself accused of having schemed to get him elected. There were elements of truth in this retrospective account. Strictly speaking, it was Danton and the Cordeliers, not Robespierre, who had proposed Marat. But certainly Robespierre had not opposed Marat’s candidacy; in fact, he had favored it. For the benefit of the deputies, and cheered on by all those admiring women in the galleries, he was expertly managing the truth, staying as close to it as possible while massaging it to produce a particular impression, as all skilled politicians do.