Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (41 page)

SAINT-JUST, WHO LOVED the countryside, much preferred being sent out on mission to being cooped up in Paris pacing the short distance back and forth between the Jacobin Club and the Convention. In 1794 in the month of Nivôse (January), he went to the army of the Rhine, accompanied by his friend and fellow Jacobin Philippe Lebas, who had just married Elisabeth Duplay. This small traveling party, like the one that had accompanied Augustin Robespierre earlier in the year, managed to combine business and pleasure. Saint-Just was a charming companion, reading aloud passages from Molière and Rabelais, singing Italian arias to pass the time, and fastidiously tending to the needs of his friend’s new wife when she was coach sick. Arriving in Strasbourg, he set about punishing counterrevolutionary conspirators and taxing the rich to relieve the sufferings of the poor. The soldiers did not like him; they found him too severe, unwilling as he was to recognize any form of punishment short of death. Saint-Just’s second mission took him to Lille and its environs. Here he was even more severe, initiating draconian measures against all former nobles still living in the area. He was still away on 17 Pluviôse (5 February) when Robespierre, shortly before collapsing completely, delivered to the Convention one of the most important speeches of his life,
“Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans l’administration intérieure de la République”
(
A Report on the Principles of Political Morality That Should Guide the Convention in the Interior Administration of the Republic
).

In this speech Robespierre developed the personal revolutionary creed that he had privately professed on the eve of his election to the Committee of Public Safety. He asked, “What is our aim?” And answered: “The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality and the reign of that eternal justice whose laws are engraved, not in marble or stone but in the hearts of every man—of the slave who forgets them and the tyrant who denies their truth.” Then he went further, outlining the kind of morality that would obtain in his ideal republic:

There it was, Robespierre’s vision of France, a prim society of patriotic, uncorrupted, dedicated equals. In his republic there would be only innocent pleasures, no frivolous distractions, no debauchery. No one would value money above honor, and honor itself would be defined as personal integrity, just as Rousseau said it should be long before 1789. The problem was that even after five tense and traumatic revolutionary years, Robespierre’s dream was still a very long way off. For this reason, he explained, the Terror must continue:

In the hands of despots, Robespierre argued, terror was a weapon of oppression. But terror wielded by virtue was the refuge of the poor. Back in 1792 he had advised the Jacobins not to sponsor the development of a new kind of musket that could fire twenty rounds a minute: what might happen if aristocrats got hold of it and turned it on the people? Now he made the opposite case, arguing that the weapons of tyranny must be appropriated by the people and used in their name. Specifically, the people, so long oppressed, must seize the weapon of terror and turn it against the republic’s external and internal enemies. Robespierre had always been preoccupied with internal enemies. Since the Revolution began, however, they had multiplied dramatically; disguised and insinuating, they were not always easy to recognize, but Robespierre had been quick to spot the most prominent: General Lafayette, Mirabeau, Brissot, General Dumouriez. Now he identified the two opposing factions—Hébert’s proponents of extreme violence and Danton and Camille’s advocates of extreme indulgence—as the new internal enemies of the French people. Demanding a vote of confidence in the Convention for the Committee of Public Safety, doing its best to save the Revolution, he issued a double warning to its critics, both those who thought the committee too harsh and those who thought it not nearly harsh enough.

Robespierre’s speech was interrupted throughout by loud applause. Afterward it was printed and widely distributed by the Convention and the Jacobins. Three days later he retired from public view. A rumor went around that he had been poisoned. When he reappeared in March (Ventôse) he said: “Would to God that my physical strength were the equal of my moral fortitude! I might then, this very day, confound the traitors and call down national vengeance on every guilty head.”
⁹⁶
If his illness was genuine, if the Revolution had strained him to the breaking point, his instinct was still to turn his suffering to political advantage. He was frailer than many of the other revolutionaries—a much less powerful speaker than Danton, slower than Camille Desmoulins, more circuitous than Saint-Just—but none of them had sharper political instincts. While Robespierre was ill, or possibly pretending to be ill, Saint-Just rushed back to Paris. He reiterated the message of his friend’s widely praised speech, but, unlike the Incorruptible, he was alarmingly succinct:

By these criteria, the friends of Hébert and the friends of Danton were all republican sinners. As usual Saint-Just thought there was only one appropriate punishment: death.

Robespierre had asked for a vote of confidence in the Committee of Public Safety to pursue the new enemies on his list. But the committee’s members were far from agreed on how to save the Revolution. Collot d’Herbois, for example, thought Paris could be placated by an alliance between the Jacobins and Cordeliers (now led by Hébert), if the Jacobins could be persuaded to abandon Robespierre’s censorious attitude toward extreme violence at this point. Collot was even taking up the cause of the disgraced terrorist and former representative on mission Jean Baptiste Carrier. Carrier had been in charge of the repression in Lyon and Nantes. Among other atrocities, he had instituted a new version of republican marriage, which involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them. When he heard of this, Robespierre, appalled, insisted on recalling Carrier to the capital.

On 14 Ventôse (4 March) Carrier proposed, and Hébert seconded, a motion at the Cordeliers Club to declare a state of insurrection. The motion was carried and the club hung black crepe over its copy of the Declaration of Rights. Plans were afoot to surround the Convention and demand the expulsion of Robespierre and his allies, a repetition of the insurrection that brought down the Girondins on 2 June 1793. But Hébert’s insurrection never materialized: only two of the city’s forty-eight sections were prepared to rise. Nor did the Commune rise. There are many possible explanations. Hébert was not Danton—it is not a simple task to rouse and direct a violent crowd, even in a time of revolution. Danton had a special gift for it, something to do with his astoundingly deep, strong voice and the breadth of his physical frame. Moreover, many of the poor in Paris thought Robespierre and his allies could and would help them, which diminished the appeal of Hébert’s promises to intervene even more radically in the economy. Others were too jaded after five tumultuous years to take to the streets again. And some were too frightened of falling foul of the police in these brutal times—the centralizing Law of 14 Frimaire had done its work, and there were considerably more obstacles to insurrection now than there had been earlier in the Revolution.

Robespierre returned to work on 22 Ventôse (12 March), along with Couthon, who had also been ill. The next day the Jacobins gave them a rapturous welcome. Seizing the moment, Robespierre immediately denounced Hébert and his faction, who were arrested later that evening on the general charge of conspiracy. Twenty of them were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal seven days later and, by application of the three-day rule, which Hébert himself had supported when it was introduced to secure the conviction of the Girondins, all but one were found guilty and sent to the guillotine. In the short interval between the arrest and trial of the Hébertistes, a delegation arrived at the bar of the Convention, including someone who sang a song of congratulation to the deputies and their Committee of Public Safety. Danton objected—he proposed that no one should be allowed to sing songs in the Convention, that such behavior was disrespectful and inappropriate. No one knew it at the time, but this uncharacteristically prim intervention was destined to be Danton’s last. There were already some signals suggesting that, after the Hébertistes, his own faction might be next to fall. But Danton still believed that the committee and tribunal he had brought into being—not to mention the Convention, which owed its existence to his part in the fall of the monarchy—would never dare strike at him.

WHATEVER HIS PRECISE role in bringing about the downfall of the Hébertistes—his illness and absence from public life make it impossible to tell precisely—Robespierre benefited enormously from their demise. Besides the Cordelier Club, the War Ministry was the main source of Hébert’s support, and it had distributed his
Père Duchesne
to the troops, greatly boosting the newspaper’s circulation and influence. Carnot, Robespierre’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, had for months been working to erode the power of the War Ministry, but soon after the executions of the Hébertistes, all six of the ministries inherited from the failed constitutional monarchy were radically restructured, purged, and downgraded to commissions. On 12 Germinal (1 April) the Convention, following the committee’s recommendation, agreed to the formation of twelve new executive commissions, which Robespierre succeeded in staffing with personnel loyal to him. There were only two exceptions: the army movement commission and the finance commission. The rest were effectively under Robespierre’s control. Once again, he displayed his sharp political instincts, expanding his sphere of control through patronage. In this respect, he far surpassed his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety. Where they tended to operate as isolated individuals, carving up the committee’s great power among themselves, specializing, and working alone, Robespierre—perhaps by instinct, perhaps as a result of his experience in the Jacobin Club—relied on a loyal entourage. To an outsider, it looked like a faction. To him, it was simply a network of like-minded people he could trust.

Another consequence of the downfall of the Hébertistes concerned the Commune. Hébert had been powerful within it and after his execution his superior, the atheist Chaumette, who had closed the Parisian churches, was arrested. At this point, Robespierre moved to remodel the Commune, specifically by doing away with the municipal elections through which its delegates were chosen by the Paris sections. In the autumn of 1792, after the collapse of the constitutional monarchy, Robespierre had exerted a powerful influence in the Commune and, despite its recent domination by the Hébertistes, he still had friends there. Some were representatives from his own Paris Section des Piques, and one was a former priest, Jacques-Claude Bernard, whom the Commune had deputed to escort the king to the guillotine; others included a clock maker, a bookseller, and a manufacturer of colored prints. Chaumette was replaced with a very close associate of Robespierre’s, Claude Payan, originally an artillery officer from Valence, who set about developing Robespierrist support inside the Commune. Payan and his brother had come to Robespierre’s attention during the federalist revolt when they played a prominent role in rallying the Jacobins of the Midi in support of the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. Payan, like Saint-Just, was almost ten years younger than Robespierre. An ardent believer in the power of propaganda, he began a paper, the
Antifédéraliste
, which became the Committee of Public Safety’s official publication. An ardent moralist as well, he hoped Robespierre would “centralize public opinion and make it uniform.”
⁹⁸

There were also changes to the National Guard that indirectly benefited Robespierre after the fall of the Hébertistes. The sans-culottes’ Revolutionary Army (one of the instruments of the Terror which Danton had first suggested in April 1793) was disbanded on 7 Germinal (27 March) following the execution of its commander in chief as an Hébertist. Its all-important artillery units, however, were kept intact and added to those already under the control of François Hanriot, head of the National Guard and Robespierre’s close friend. Hanriot had previously displayed his loyalty to the Jacobin faction in the Convention when he used his troops to surround the Tuileries and arrest the Girondin deputies. Now, with the artillery units under his command, Hanriot had even more power at his disposal; he effectively controlled the armed forces of Paris.