Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (4 page)

Here, at least, among a throng of other scholarship students from backgrounds as modest as his own, the proud and serious young Robespierre, with his paltry wardrobe and conspicuous lack of familial wealth, would feel not wholly out of place. Twice during his time at Louis-le-Grand he had to apply to his
préfet d’études
, or director of studies, for money to buy decent clothes. Perhaps this meant he was significantly poorer than lots of the other boys, or perhaps he preferred to spend his money on books. As he tried to settle into the new school, with its austere entrance gateway, eight quadrangles, private chapel, and lecture rooms, it might have helped that the Collège d’Arras was one of a number of provincial schools recently affiliated with Louis-le-Grand, making the move to Paris a natural next step for a promising pupil from Arras. From Robespierre’s point of view, the expulsion of the Jesuits was a piece of good luck, a benign historical contingency that helped him break free from the restrictive circumstances into which he had been born.
⁵

The year of the Jesuits’ expulsion, 1762, saw another upheaval in educational thinking with the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sensational novel
Émile
. Part fiction, part treatise on education, the book was almost immediately condemned by the archbishop of Paris and publicly burnt. Despite this, and perhaps in part because of it,
Émile
became a best seller, plunging the country into debate about the schooling of its young and all that was morally, spiritually, and politically at stake. Rousseau escaped arrest and imprisonment only by fleeing France in the middle of the night. It was the “heretical” discussion of religion in
Émile
that caused so much trouble. The archbishop especially objected to Rousseau’s insistence that mankind is naturally good but corrupted by society.

Rousseau was of a particularly sensitive and emotional temperament. Like Robespierre, he lost his mother prematurely, from complications following childbirth, and he spent his early childhood reading her collection of sentimental novels, before moving on to philosophy. In his own words,
Émile
was “merely a treatise on the original goodness of man, intended to show how vice and error, alien to his constitution, are introduced into it from outside and imperceptibly distort it.”
⁶
His aim was to set out the kind of education that might preserve and protect the natural goodness of man from the corrupting influences of society. Thus he emphasized not formal schooling but respect for the child as a being in its own right, and the nurturing of self-worth and self-reliance. This was not a practical program of reform but a bold assertion of the influences that shape a child that remains topical to this day. “We know nothing of childhood,” Rousseau insisted.
⁷
One reason was that people were always “looking for the man in the child, not thinking of what he is before he becomes a man.”

Rousseau’s discussions cover a wide range of topics. He opens the novel with a controversial argument for maternal breast-feeding. Even comparatively impoverished urban women like Robespierre’s mother dispatched their babies to wet nurses, usually in the countryside. Rousseau thought this ill advised and unnatural:

Any mother would feel panic and guilt reading this. Rousseau wanted to shake a society that seemed to him complacent in its practices, so
Émile
was full of clever, carefully aimed provocation. “I hate books” is an odd statement to find in a treatise on education. And some of Rousseau’s advice is so far-fetched it is ridiculous: “The only habit the child should be allowed to contract is that of having no habits.” At the center of this important book is the revolutionary idea that mankind is not the being blighted by the original sin that lies at the core of Christianity. “Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule,” he writes, “that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced.”

We do not know when Robespierre first read Rousseau. Very probably it was during his time at Louis-le-Grand. What is indisputable is that when he did he took him into his mind as a companion for life. In the
Mémoires authentiques de Maximilien Robespierre
, a forgery from 1830, there is an account of the young Maximilien’s pilgrimage to see the aged, isolated, persecuted author in the final years of his extremely strange life. While the source is discredited, almost no one who writes about Robespierre can simply ignore it: the apocryphal meeting with his lifelong hero, who died in 1778, is too alluring to pass over. Besides, the invented Robespierre sounds remarkably like the real one. He recalls:

The meeting might have taken place in the woods near the Parisian suburb of Ermenonville, where Rousseau went to live and think about his final book,
Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire
(
Reveries of the Solitary Walker
). Or indoors in an attic in the rue Plâtrière, the author bedridden, the frail student breathless from climbing the stairs, overwhelmed with emotion when he reached the top. Both scenes are fanciful, but the spell Rousseau cast over Robespierre is not. It can be traced in many different ways throughout his life. In the end its political consequences were devastating, but it began as a personal sentiment, nothing more or less than a temperamental affinity. Rousseau had a profound love of individual liberty and a fear of coercion so intense that he was almost allergic to power. Robespierre identified with the victims of injustice—those misunderstood, isolated, denied, or despised. What the two men shared was compassion for the vulnerable and a fierce censoriousness toward those less principled in their attitudes to power than they were confident of being themselves.

THE REGIME AT Louis-le-Grand gave equal attention to the moral character of the school’s charges and their academic attainment. Both objectives were pursued through a rigid daily schedule with strong emphasis on devotional duties.
¹⁰
During his school days, Robespierre rose from his dormitory bed, freezing cold in winter, at 5:30 a.m., attended prayers at 6:00 a.m., Scripture study at 6:15 a.m., and Mass at 10:30 a.m. A long day of lessons was followed by more prayers and devotional readings at 8:45 p.m., after which the boys undressed for bed while listening to a reading from the life of the saint whose feast occurred the following day. They were expected to go to confession once a month, and the college brought in clergy from outside for this purpose, hoping perhaps to bolster the boys’ trust in the confidential nature of the sacrament. How did Robespierre respond to these devout routines? Some of his enemies have imagined him waging a silent bitter protest: standing with the Book of Hours in his hands, the pages resolutely unturned, refusing to pray or sing, shunning the confessional and Holy Communion. But if his own testimony can be believed, he was a more passive and conventional schoolboy. He later rated himself “a pretty poor Catholic ever since my time at college,” which suggests that, whether by force or inclination, he must still have been a practicing Catholic at school.

The pupils were effectively cloistered inside the walls of Louis-le-Grand, their contact with the exciting city of Paris outside the main gate on the rue Saint-Jacques severely limited. Earlier in the century, Rousseau had described Paris as a city of “small, dirty and stinking streets, ugly black houses, an air of filth, poverty, beggars, carters, seam-stresses, women hawking tisanes and old hats.”
¹¹
But with a population of around 600,000, Paris was the largest city in Europe after London, and it is hard to believe that the students at Louis-le-Grand felt as negatively about it as Rousseau did. The boys went on outings only infrequently and always under the strict supervision of chaperones. Aside from the clergymen brought in to hear confession, the only regular visitors to the school were tailors, shoemakers, launderers, and hairdressers. Some of these could be persuaded to smuggle proscribed books, like Rousseau’s
Émile
, into the college, concealed inside washing baskets or under piles of mended clothes. For this reason, pupils were expressly forbidden to commission errands of any kind without official permission. Despite these strictures, soon after he arrived in Paris Robespierre managed somehow to develop a close friendship with a canon of Notre-Dame, M. Delaroche. He was a distant relative, and Robespierre’s aunts encouraged Maximilien to get in touch in hope of securing a sympathetic confidant in the big city. According to Charlotte, their relationship got off to an excellent start, with Robespierre finding a mentor in the older man and M. Delaroche discerning rare qualities in the young boy. Within two years, however, the canon was dead, and Robespierre had lost yet another adult protector. Once again, he consoled himself with the solitary pursuit of reading.

The college library where he spent so many hours was beautiful. Light streamed in through its twenty-five large windows and fell across the desks and open books. Looking up from his page, a dreamy or distracted schoolboy might grow fond of the paintings that adorned the library walls. Robespierre already loved paintings, but these were far more intriguing than any he could have owned, or perhaps even seen, in Arras. Also in the library stood two pairs of globes, made by the Italian cartographer Coronelli for Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, reminders of the immensity of the world beyond the college walls. When he wasn’t dreaming, Robespierre could choose from an impressive range of approved books. The Jesuits had begun the collection of over thirty-five thousand volumes. When they were expelled from the college, most of their books were repurchased for the library. All of them were confiscated during the Revolution when Louis-le-Grand was renamed Equality College, but the revolutionary librarian in charge of the operation was moved to acknowledge that the books were “an assortment of the best works in all fields. It is evident that the library was brought together by men of learning.” The books were later returned to the University of Paris, where they have remained ever since. The report on the confiscation also lists two old microscopes, good quality lenses, a strong magnet, a glass case for natural history specimens, and some animal horns and claws. But, in Robespierre’s day the curriculum still centered, as it had done for decades, on the classic literatures of Greece and Rome. These were what really interested him, not the newer, tentatively introduced opportunities to study experimental science.

The most detailed account of Robespierre’s school days can be found in an embittered early biography that still turns up in Arras from time to time. It drew on the memories of the abbé Proyart, who taught at Louis-le-Grand during Robespierre’s time there and was first published in 1795 by Le Blond de Neuvéglise, then amended and reissued in Arras in 1850 by the abbé Proyart’s nephew. According to this source, Robespierre was the kind of boy with whom parents preferred their sons not to associate. He was seething with envy and a subversive egoism that constantly put him at odds with the school rules. When he troubled himself to conform, it was only because his pride made him dread humiliating reprimands. He viewed his school as a prison, its pupils as captives, and the teachers (priests or lay clergy) as despotic oppressors of liberty. But he was far from audacious in the face of this oppression. One day, for example, the biography recounts, a prefect, Yves-Marie Audrein, came upon Robespierre reading a forbidden book in an unfrequented corner of the school—
Émile
, perhaps, or another of Rousseau’s works illicitly smuggled in. The frightened boy threw himself at the prefect’s feet, begging not to be exposed. Since the prefect was himself interested in new and progressive ideas, he had mercy on the young boy. If this incident, or something even remotely similar, actually occurred, abject panic would almost certainly have been a histrionic response. The proscription of books at Louis-le-Grand was taken seriously and covered by the institutional statutes drawn up after the Jesuits were expelled. Article 10 under title 5 stipulates: “Each assistant master will often examine the books that his pupils are reading; he will take away those that are dangerous to morals or religion and not allow even those that are simply useless or might engender a taste for frivolity. He will prevent his pupils from lending books to each other without his consent.” There were many such statutes, excessively detailed, covering everything from religious exercises to personal hygiene and behavior on school outings, where pupils were to “walk neither too fast nor too slowly, nor raise their voices, nor offer provocation to anyone.” But those who found themselves in contravention of the statutes (and there must have been many) were unlikely to suffer corporal punishment as drastic as that dealt out in some other Parisian colleges. Article 5 under title 1 directs that masters “will use no severity until they have exhausted all other means of making an impression on an honest and sensitive mind.”