Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (46 page)

Two days after the atheists failed to embroil the Incorruptible in their fabricated scandal, there was a terrible scene at the guillotine, even by the standards to which Paris had become accustomed (not for nothing had the royalist abbé Maury, back in 1791, warned against depraving the people by inuring them to the sight of blood). It was now two and a half revolutionary weeks since Cécile Renault’s confused attempt to assassinate Robespierre, and the days were getting warmer with the approach of midsummer. The inhabitants of the rue Saint-Honoré must have been relieved that the guillotine was still positioned outside the city center, so they no longer had to contend with the noise and stench of the crowd accompanying the tumbrils past their doorsteps every day. As a result, Robespierre probably did not see his would-be assassin on her way to execution on 29 Prairial (17 June). She was accompanied by her father, brother, and aunt, along with a random assortment of other prisoners, all clothed in the red shirts of parricides. Before the Revolution, Robespierre had written his first essay for the Academy of Arras against the tradition of bad blood. Under the old regime, the concept of guilt by association, used to implicate a criminal’s entire family in his or her shame, had been repugnant to him. How had it lost its horror for him under the republic? No wonder people began to suspect him of wanting to become king when they saw Cécile Renault and her family go by, costumed for their execution.

Also among the prisoners that day were three members of the outstandingly good-looking Sainte-Amaranthe family—a mother and her two children, aged nineteen and seventeen. It was unclear what their crime was. A story went around that Robespierre had been to dinner at their house, got uncharacteristically tipsy, spoken somewhat indiscreetly about his political intentions, and so had the whole family condemned to death to keep them quiet. But there is another story to set against this. Allegedly, on the night that Vadier went to the Committee of Public Safety to announce his forthcoming report on the Théot sect, he also threatened to propose the indictment of the Sainte-Amaranthe family. “You will do no such thing,” said Robespierre imperiously. “I will,” retorted Vadier. “I have plenty of evidence.” “Evidence or not, if you do so I shall attack you,” came the Incorruptible’s reply. If the first story suggests he was a ruthless tyrant, the second suggests this was exactly how his enemies wanted to make him appear. Another prisoner among the sixty-one executed in that appalling throng was the underage servant girl of someone who had once been mistress to an Hébertist. When her small body went under the guillotine there were cries of “No children!” from the crowd, whose depravity, despite everything, still knew some bounds. We will never know for sure if the 29 Prairial executions were the revenge Robespierre demanded for a supposed attempt on his life or if those actively plotting his downfall staged them against his will. His friends and his enemies can choose the version they prefer.

Two days after the executions, Robespierre ceased to be president of the Convention and turned his attention to reorganizing the Police Bureau. The Committee of Public Safety agreed to increase the number of staff members under him, ordering them to work every day from eight-thirty to three-thirty and, if necessary, in the evenings, too. Despite the additional help the paperwork remained chaotic and Robespierre testily complained on 5 Messidor (23 June):

He had always been fastidious. He lost his temper when he could not put his hand on the file he needed. It was a great relief when Saint-Just came back from the army in the north and took over the bureau again at the end of June. Then Robespierre could stay all day in his orderly room at the Duplays’ and Saint-Just could run around the corner and straight up the outside staircase to ask his advice if he needed it. During this period, the number of people guillotined grew steadily. The sixty-one who died on 29 Prairial set a gruesome new record. It was soon surpassed on 19 Messidor (7 July) when sixty-seven were executed and almost equaled on 21 Messidor (9 July) when a further sixty went under the guillotine. Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, was often summoned in the night to receive his orders for the next day. He said that ghosts trailed him on those dark walks, hideous ghosts appearing in defiance of the argument against clemency that Barère presented to the Convention: “It is only the dead who never come back.”
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In the month that followed, there were only four days on which fewer than twenty-eight people were executed: one of these was a
décadi
, a revolutionary day of rest, and another was the fifth anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The Police Bureau shared joint responsibility for this bloodshed with the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. It is impossible to know exactly how the responsibility was divided but implausible that none of it was Robespierre’s. Yet when he fell from power, those who pushed him gave not his extremism but his moderation as their reason. The atheist Vadier, for example, accused him “of having endeavored to save from the scaffold the enemies of the people and of having officiously interfered with Fouquier-Tinville to suspend the execution of conspirators.”
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Vadier may have meant the Sainte-Amaranthe family, over whom he and Robespierre allegedly quarreled, but there were perhaps others the Incorruptible also wanted to save.

WHEN SAINT-JUST ARRIVED back in Paris and burst through the doors of the Committee of Public Safety on the night of 10 Messidor (28 June), Robespierre was immensely relieved for both personal and political reasons. Saint-Just brought exciting news. The Revolutionary Army had just won a decisive victory against the Austrian army at Fleurus in Belgium. In doing so, it had secured the road to Paris against the foreign enemy. The battle of Fleurus was the first in history to be won by the use of air surveillance: from a manned air balloon tethered to the ground by two long cables the French had been able to observe the enemy’s tactics from on high. The Committee of Public Safety received Saint-Just’s news nervously. Recently it had had to move to a new room on the top floor of the Tuileries palace, so that its violent disputes could not be overheard if the windows were opened because of the stifling summer heat.
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It was a war government. Once the war was won, there were sure to be calls for a return to constitutional government. Back in 1791, an air balloon trailing tricolor ribbons above Paris had announced the inauguration of the ill-fated constitutional monarchy. Many in the Convention now thought the air balloon floating over the battle of Fleurus should herald the institution of the long-postponed republican constitution of 1793. Robespierre, for all his differences with his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, did not want to see the war government disbanded until all the internal, as well as the external, enemies of the Revolution had been dealt with. In this he was supported by his friends in the Commune and Jacobin Club and by Saint-Just and Couthon on the Committee of Public Safety.

It was at the Jacobins that Robespierre had always been surest of himself. There on 21 Messidor (9 July) he tried to define patriotism—the heart of virtue and the cornerstone of the dream republic he was still fighting for. His fatigue and disillusionment showed in his speech. “There are few generous men who love virtue for itself and ardently desire the happiness of the people,” he admitted with resignation, obviously numbering himself among the few.
³⁸
Reaching imaginatively back to the beginning of the Revolution, he recalled that Necker, Louis XVI’s chief minister, with whom he had once been invited to dine at Versailles, was a tyrant in his own home. Nothing astonishing there—a man who lacks public virtue cannot have private virtue either, remarked the Incorruptible. Similarly the Girondin minister Roland, married to that pretty woman so much younger than himself, displayed the kind of false virtue that Robespierre considered “diametrically opposed to heroism and humanity.”
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Then there was Hébert secretly trying to destroy the liberty of France, and the moderate Dantonists endangering the safety of the Revolution. Now there was a new plot against the revolutionary government and tribunal, which the Jacobins must alert the Convention to.

Robespierre was terribly tired. He urged the Jacobins to be suspicious, to hold fast to their principles, to fight on against the Revolution’s internal enemies, so pernicious and yet so hard to identify. “It is necessary always to return to these principles: public virtue and supreme justice are the two sovereign laws under which all those charged with the interests of the country must bow.”
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His words and themes were what they had always been, but much of the vigor was gone. Did any of the Jacobins still bother about Necker or Roland? Why did Robespierre think their names might stir his audience when so many terrible things had happened since the fall of the monarchy? Everyone knew he had more immediate enemies now, and the time was fast approaching when he must move against them or die at their hands. “I will name them when I must,” he had told the Convention weeks before. The confrontation was long overdue, and still he continued with swirling abstractions, first principles, the public expression of his own private conscience, his pride, and his purity.

The twenty-sixth of Messidor (14 July) marked the fifth anniversary of the Bastille’s fall. How would Paris—traumatized, frightened, disillusioned—celebrate? Some of the city’s sections organised fraternal banquets (
repas fraternels
), simple communal meals—“a bit of cold beef, a plate of haricots verts, and a salad”—consumed in the street on the warm, bright summer evening.
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A number of Robespierre’s closest associates saw no harm in these alfresco meals: François Hanriot, his friend in charge of the National Guard, Martial Joseph Armand Herman, his friend on the Revolutionary Tribunal, and Claude Payan, his friend in the city’s Commune, all took part in them. Robespierre did not. He celebrated the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall by attending the Jacobins, as usual, and trying for the second time to denounce Fouché. Here he was as sure as ever of acting impartially for the public good: “I begin with the declaration that the individual Fouché interests me not at all.” What, he asked, was Fouché afraid of? “Is it perhaps the eyes and ears of the people? Is it perhaps that his wretched face proves him too clearly the author of a crime?”
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What crime did Robespierre mean? He specified it only in vague terms at the very end of his speech: “These men have used the Terror to force patriots to keep silent; they have put patriots in prison because they dared break their silence. This is the crime of which I accuse Fouché.”
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This was enough for the Jacobins, and they immediately expelled the ferocious promoter of de-Christianization whom Robespierre so hated.

Two days later he criticized the fraternal banquets, reminding the Jacobins that the time for fraternity had not arrived when so many internal enemies still remained. Those who called for an end to revolutionary government in the wake of the battle of Fleurus were false patriots, since Robespierre was convinced the banquets and conspiracies were closely linked. Together beneath the clear blue sky at the Festival of the Supreme Being, the people had been united, grand, sublime. But divided into little groups, seated around trestle tables, they were vulnerable to the schemes of intriguers: “How indeed could one mistrust a man with whom one has drunk from the same cup, on whose lips one has encountered the language of patriotism?”
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Even at this point in the Revolution, the shattered symbolism of the Catholic Mass retained enough power to make it worth fighting over. Robespierre asked the Jacobins to consider whether those who drank from one cup at the fraternal banquets were sincere in expressing unity with the people. “Share my fear,” he had urged the Jacobins in the past. Now he tried asking them again. His associates who had misread the signs and participated in the banquets wrote groveling letters excusing themselves: “Judge, judge what I must suffer at the thought of having involuntarily contributed to placing those instruments of mischief in the hands of our enemies,” wrote one abject member of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
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Soon after, another member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Joachim Vilate, who had given Robespierre breakfast on the morning of the Festival of the Supreme Being, allegedly made a list of those whom the Incorruptible planned to proscribe. It had supposedly been dictated by Bertrand Barère, Robespierre’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety—why is a mystery. Even more of a mystery is why Vilate left the list lying on a desk in his charming apartment in the Pavilion de Flore, overlooking the Tuileries gardens, where the trees that shed their leaves early in the year the monarchy fell now sweltered in the heat. The list was still there a few days later on 3 Thermidor (21 July) when the Committee of General Security arrested Vilate. The list is lost, but the names of Fouché, Tallien, Vadier, and other members of the Convention probably figured on it. By now there were no walls thick enough, no rooms sufficiently high or soundproof, to conceal the personal and political differences tearing the Convention and its two committees apart. Saint-Just and Barère tried to act as peacemakers. Twice they convened joint meetings of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. Robespierre, now practically a recluse, except when at the Jacobins, went to the second of these meetings, on 5 Thermidor (23 July). He was cold and reserved—nothing new—but left his friends and enemies alike with the impression that he was prepared to compromise, that some headway had been made toward uniting the two committees. But he never did compromise. In his thirty-six years there are no examples, except, just possibly, when he agreed to the death of Danton. Compromise, to Robespierre, was corruption—the betrayal of his absolute principles, the stars by which he had steered his extraordinary political career.