Read Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution Online
Authors: Ruth Scurr
Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (32 page)
It was when he came to the subject of the September Massacres that Robespierre made a truly staggering announcement:
It is certain that one innocent person perished [an alleged victim of mistaken identity]; the numbers have been exaggerated, but one [innocent] without doubt [perished]. We should weep, citizens, at this cruel mistake, and we have wept over it for a long time. He was said to be a good citizen and was therefore one of our friends. We should weep also for the guilty victims, reserved for the vengeance of the laws, who fell beneath the blade of popular justice; but let this grief have an end, like all mortal things. Keep back some tears for more touching calamities; weep instead for the hundred thousand victims of tyranny.
33
The kinds of comparison Robespierre calls for in this speech are morally disturbing. Were the deaths of forty-three frightened children at the Bicêtre reformatory really less moving than the deaths of the many more who never had enough to eat, never had a real hope or start in life under the old regime? Were the deaths of those cornered, defenseless priests any less disturbing than the persecutions inflicted on nonbelievers in the past? Robespierre was defending the Revolution and himself; the two were scarcely distinct in his mind anymore. He argued that the end of the Revolution—liberty—justified its means—bloodshed—and asked a chilling political question, destined to reverberate down the centuries: “Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?”
34
To people who complained that the Insurrectionary Commune of 10 August had done illegal things, he replied, “The Revolution is illegal: the fall of the Bastille and of the monarchy were illegal—as illegal as liberty itself!”
35
There can be little doubt that however much he preferred to distinguish himself publicly from Marat’s tasteless and flamboyant calls for violence, Robespierre was quite prepared to sanction it in practice. He believed violence indispensable for advancing the political experiment on which he had staked his life. The Girondins were no different. Their fight with Robespierre, Danton, and Marat was about who would control the new republic, not whether or not it was legitimate to use violence in bringing it into existence. Louvet tried to reply to Robespierre’s speech, but this time he was howled down. Dr. Moore recorded that another of the deputies, Bertrand Barère, a suave lawyer from the Midi soon to be known as “the Anacreon of the Guillotine,” brought the venomous debate to a close with incomparable condescension:
It is time to estimate those little undertakers of revolutions at their just value; it is time to give over thinking of them and their manoeuvres: for my part, I can see neither Sullas nor Cromwells in men of such moderate capacities; and instead of bestowing any more time on them and their intrigues, we ought to turn our attention to the great questions which interest the republic.
36
That night Robespierre’s speech was celebrated in the Jacobin Club as a resounding success. Louvet, unsurprisingly, had been expelled, just like Brissot. The club was now, more than ever, the Incorruptible’s domain. But he could not savor his triumph. He went home, collapsed, and did not speak in the Convention again until 30 November. He was ill for nearly a month, not in the Duplay household but in rooms around the corner in the rue Saint-Florentin, to which Charlotte had at last managed to make him move. Why was he ill? His immune system seems to have been weak at the best of times, and this was far from the best of times. The nervous strain of defending himself in the Convention had clearly taken its toll. Overwork, the approach of winter, the rivalry between his sister and his landlady all weighed on him. To make matters worse, Charlotte attempted to conceal Robespierre’s illness from Mme Duplay, judging that “his indisposition was nothing serious. He needed a lot of care and I certainly made sure that he got it.”
37
When Mme Duplay eventually found out, she was furious and demanded Robespierre’s immediate return to the rue Saint-Honoré. According to Charlotte, he resisted at first but soon gave in because he did not want to hurt the Duplays’ feelings: “They love me so, they have such consideration, such kindness for me, that it could only be ingratitude on my part to reject them.”
38
Years later, Charlotte was still complaining that he had sacrificed her feelings to those of Mme Duplay. Evidently she shared his propensity for lasting personal offense, even when none had been intended. For her, as for him, it was the principle that mattered. “He ought not” to have done it, she says over and over again. While Robespierre’s principles were broader and grander than his sister’s domestic codes of conduct, the tenacity with which each held fast was remarkably similar.
Throughout this period, Robespierre was absent from the Jacobins. By the time he returned to the club, Mirabeau’s posthumous reputation had been ruined by the dramatic discovery of his secret letters of advice to Louis XVI. The ransacked Tuileries were being renovated as the new home for the Convention, and the letters had been discovered in a locked chest on 20 November. It was 5 December before Robespierre addressed the club on the subject of its disgraced ex-leader, whose bust still presided over its meetings and whose remains had been laid to rest with such pomp and ceremony in the Pantheon. At the time of his death popular sentiment had called for Mirabeau to be eulogized and Robespierre, “the organ of the people,” had gone along with it. Now he spoke in support of Duplay’s suggestion that the bust of Mirabeau should be removed from the Jacobin hall. His bust in the Manège had already been covered with a black veil, pending the report of a committee investigating the discovery at the Tuileries. The Jacobins were less restrained. They fetched ladders and pulled down the busts of both Mirabeau and the philosopher Helvétius, who, Robespierre reminded them, had persecuted Rousseau and shown counterrevolutionary tendencies before his time. The busts were smashed and the Jacobins made a show of trampling the pieces into the floor—a parody of the civic spirit that had prevailed when they trampled the Champ de Mars to prepare it for the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The hostile
Patriote français
reported the incident with some glee:
This evening the Jacobins broke the bust of Mirabeau in their hall. It was on Robespierre’s motion that this execution was carried out, just as it was on Robespierre’s motion that Mirabeau was accorded the honors of the Pantheon. This is how demagogues sanctify popular idols to please worshipers, then break the idols in order to succeed them.
39
In response, Robespierre composed a letter to the paper that stands out from the rest of his writings and speeches in being an apology, not a personal defense: “I feel remorse today for the first time in my life; for I may have let it be believed that I shared the good opinion of Mirabeau held by the [National] Assembly and by the general public.”
40
As apologies go, Robespierre’s was hardly abject. But by his own standards—he was not and never had been wrong—it was remarkable. The fact was that not even he could deny that at the time of Mirabeau’s death only Marat had dared criticize Mirabeau in public. On 4 April 1791,
L’ami du peuple
had declared:
People, give thanks to the gods! Your most redoubtable enemy has fallen beneath the scythe of Fate. Riquetti [Mirabeau] is no more; he dies victim of his numerous treasons, victim of his too tardy scruples, victim of the barbarous foresight of his atrocious accomplices. Adroit rogues who are to be found in all circles have sought to play upon your pity, and already duped by their false discourse, you mourn this traitor as the most zealous of your defenders; they have represented his death as a public calamity, and you bewail him as a hero, as the savior of your country, who has sacrificed himself for you. Will you always be deaf to the voice of prudence; will you always sacrifice public affairs to your blindness?…Beware of prostituting your incense.
41
Irresponsible, crazy, disconcerting as ever—still Marat definitely had a gift for prophecy. Robespierre never had his clinical capacity to fearlessly diagnose the pathology of politics. But even now that Marat had been proved so devastatingly right—Mirabeau had been a double-crossing traitor and there were documents to prove it—Robespierre resisted identifying with him. On 23 December the Jacobins circulated a memorandum to their affiliated societies warning true patriots not to confound Robespierre and Marat. The prudent patriotism, statesmanlike views, and superior abilities of the former were on no account to be confused with the sanguinary gutter journalism of the latter.
THE QUESTION OF putting Louis XVI on trial was first discussed in the Convention on 13 November. Ill though he was, Robespierre made a point of attending. The Convention, determined not to get sidetracked by another protracted fight between the Mountain and the Girondins, focused the debate on three questions: Can the king be judged? By whom ought he to be judged? And in what respect may he be judged? Charles Morisson, deputy for the Vendée, was the first to speak in defense of the king. He reminded the Convention that the constitution of 1791 had declared that “the person of the king is inviolable and sacred.” For this reason, he could not be brought to trial:
Citizens, like you I am overcome with the greatest indignation when I consider the many crimes, the atrocities, with which Louis XVI is stained. My first and doubtless most natural impulse is to see this bloody monster expiate his crimes by the cruellest torments that can be devised. I know that he has earned them all. Yet I must deny my impulse: before this tribunal, representing a free people who seek happiness and prosperity in acts that are just, in acts that are humane, generous, and kind, because only through such acts can happiness be found, I must deny my impulse, and heed instead the voice of Reason, consult the spirit and the disposition of our law, seek only the interest of my fellow citizens, for that alone must be the single goal of all our deliberations.
42
Already in his fifties, Morisson, unlike most of his younger colleagues in the Convention, had adult memories of the reigns of two French kings. He had not been a mere schoolboy, like Robespierre and Danton, when Louis XV died and his grandson was crowned Louis XVI in 1775. It was rumored that, in his heart, Morisson still believed in the sanctity of kingship. But his argument turned on law, not religion. He could see that, in the circumstances, an appeal to the failed constitution of 1791 was Louis XVI’s best hope.
Immediately after Morisson, Saint-Just, deputy for Picardy, stepped up to the podium. Twenty-five, handsome, well-dressed, and self-confident, Saint-Just had long coveted a more prominent role in the Revolution—and a closer relationship to Robespierre. “You whom I know, as I know God, only through his miracles,” he wrote to him back in 1790.
43
He had tried to stand for election to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 but was disqualified when the irate father of his young mistress pointed out that at twenty-four he had not yet reached the minimum age to stand as a deputy. A year later, a year older, he had at last been elected to the Convention. Now he settled himself, took a breath, and began his maiden speech. It brought him everlasting fame:
I say that the King should be judged as an enemy; that we must not so much judge him as combat him; that as he had no part in the contract which united the French people, the forms of judicial procedure here are not to be sought in positive law, but in the law of nations…. Someday men will be astonished that in the eighteenth century humanity was less advanced than in the time of Caesar. Then, a tyrant was slain in the midst of the Senate, with no formality but thirty dagger blows, with no law but the liberty of Rome. And today, respectfully, we conduct a trial for a man who was the assassin of a people, taken
in flagrante
, his hand soaked with blood, his hand plunged in crime…. Citizens, if the people of Rome, after six hundred years of virtue and hatred for kings, if Great Britain, after the death of Cromwell, saw kings reborn despite their energy, what must these good citizens among us fear, those who are friends of liberty, seeing the axe tremble in our hands, seeing a people, from the first day of its liberty, respect the memory of its chains!…For myself, I can see no mean: this man must reign or die.
44
Reign or die—one or the other, Saint-Just insisted, his political logic slicing through Morisson’s legal argument like a freshly sharpened blade. Then, as if he had not done enough to dazzle posterity and make the Convention swoon, he pronounced the sentence that would never be forgotten:
On ne peut point régner innocemment
—no one can reign innocently. The king, he repeated at the end of his speech, must be judged as an enemy. He was the murderer of the Bastille, of Nancy, of the Champ de Mars, of the Tuileries. What enemy had ever done more harm? When he had finished, Saint-Just proudly stepped down from the tribune. He walked back to his seat, carrying his head, as Camille Desmoulins scathingly remarked, like a sacred host. Robespierre was electrified. He demanded to be heard at once, even though it was not his turn and he was not next on the list of speakers. He would not take no for an answer and caused an unseemly commotion at the tribune. He was asked if it was for or against the king’s inviolability that he wanted so urgently to speak. But he would not give a straight answer, saying only that he proposed to speak “on the king’s inviolability,” that he must address the Convention in the wake of Saint-Just. He did not get his way and the meeting soon adjourned.