Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (49 page)

Lying on a plank, Robespierre was carried back to the Committee of Public Safety between one and two in the morning. He was bleeding profusely from the wound to his left lower jaw. He tried to stop the blood flow by pressing with a white leather pistol bag. Later someone noted the words inscribed on it: “Lecourt, gun maker to the king and to the army, rue Saint-Honoré, near the rue des Poulies, Paris.”
⁶⁵
Probably it was the bag for the pistol that Lebas gave Robespierre to shoot himself with—it might still have been in his left hand after he pulled the trigger with his right. He was only semiconscious by the time his rough stretcher was carried up the stairs of the Tuileries and put down on a table in the antechamber to the committee’s meeting room. Someone placed a small box, containing samples of bread intended for the army in the north, under his head as a pillow. He was unconscious for an hour or so and seemed unlikely to last the night. But around three or four in the morning he opened his eyes again and tried to remove some of the blood from his mouth with the pistol bag. At one point someone handed him some sheets of paper for this purpose. The leather bag must have been too soiled to be of further use. At about six a surgeon was called in to dress the wound. Two or three teeth were extracted and the shattered jaw bandaged tightly. Sometimes Robespierre looked steadily at the people around him, but mainly he looked up at the ceiling. He made very little noise even though he must have been in terrible pain. Suddenly he sat bolt upright on the table. He pulled up his stockings, which were hanging down around his ankles, stood up, crossed the room, and seated himself in a vacant armchair. He was wearing the same sky blue coat that he had worn for the Festival of the Supreme Being. Fastidious to the end, he asked for some clean linen.

At 9:00 a.m. Couthon was brought to the Tuileries, also on a makeshift stretcher—or, possibly, in a wheelbarrow. Before he was carried up the grand staircase, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, and Barère, who were all inside the committee room, decided to send the prisoners to the Conciergerie. By this time, Saint-Just, in much better physical shape than his friends, had joined them. He stood motionless before the framed copy of the Declaration of Rights that hung in the antechamber to the Committee of Public Safety. Finally he raised his arm, pointed, and said composedly, “And yet it was I who did that.”
⁶⁶
It was true. He had helped draft the democratic constitution of 1793 that never came into effect. Robespierre was carried down the stairs in the armchair he was sitting in. Legend has it he struck at the men carrying him, but it seems very unlikely he had the strength left.
⁶⁷
Later that morning, the five deputies who had stood before the bar of the Convention the previous day, been arrested, escaped, and been hunted through the night were at last assembled before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Augustin may have been dead already, Lebas certainly was, and Couthon and Robespierre were both physically mangled. Only Saint-Just remained on his feet. The five were joined by seventeen other prisoners considered loyal to the Incorruptible, including Hanriot. Outside, the carts were already waiting for them, and the guillotine had been brought back into the city center and reassembled in the place de la Révolution especially for the occasion. By early evening, enormous crowds filled the streets and the banks of the Seine. Everyone wanted to see Robespierre go past.

There was not much to see. The bandage covered most of his face. He showed no emotion and closed his eyes. Perhaps he opened them again when he felt the cart jolt to a halt suddenly. They had stopped outside the Duplay house on the road that led to the guillotine. The windows were all closed, as they had been on the days that Louis XVI and later Danton passed that way. Amid all the terrible jeering and bitter rejoicing, someone threw a bucket of animal blood against the bolted outer door. Madame Duplay was not behind it; she was in prison, where she later killed herself. Eléonore Duplay might have been at home—afterward they called her the Widow Robespierre.
⁶⁸
One witness saw a woman in the crowd pull herself up on the railing of the cart to curse the Incorruptible face to face: “Monster spewed up from hell. The thought of your punishment intoxicates me with joy.” He looked at her sadly as she added, “Go now, evil one, go down into your grave loaded with the curses of the wives and mothers of France.”
⁶⁹
The carts at last moved on. The first contained the Robespierre brothers and Hanriot; Saint-Just was in the second, and Couthon behind in the third. Some of the condemned had to be carried up the scaffold, but not Robespierre. He went last but one, ascending the steps on his own, a frail figure in sky blue. If he looked around when he got to the top, he would have seen the Tuileries again, from which, only six weeks before, he had emerged so proudly as the high priest of a new religion. His coat came off. Just before they strapped Robespierre to the plank, the executioner decided to rip off the bandage that was holding his face together. Perhaps the executioner—so experienced by now—thought the bandage was thick enough to get in the way of the descending blade; perhaps he wanted to be cruel. Robespierre let out a scream. It was the deep, sharp cry of a man in excruciating pain that you hear sometimes in hospitals—the violent protest of a wounded human animal that, however brave or bent on self-control, cannot stop the voice of torment.

The scream was the last act of the man who had tried as no one else did to embody the Revolution. It was the point of severance, when Robespierre’s precious vision of a democratic republic, pure and founded on virtue, must have finally left him. A “tenacious” man, Danton had called him. And indeed he carried his vision right to the end, only surrendering it in those last few seconds before he was guillotined. Perhaps it went out into the world on the back of that scream. It is certainly true that friends and later followers of Robespierre in France, and elsewhere, tried to keep fighting for it, as he would have done. And some of them are still trying, for all the damage inflicted on left-wing political dreams by the collapse of communism across Europe and beyond. But the vision itself has never been clearly understood: a democracy for the people, who are intrinsically good and pure of heart; a democracy in which poverty is honorable, power innocuous, and the vulnerable safe from oppression; a democracy that worships nature—not nature as it really is, cruel and disgusting, but nature sanitized, majestic, and, above all, good. “The end of the Revolution is the triumph of innocence,” Robespierre believed.
⁷⁰
Many of those claiming to be inspired by his vision have shared it only in part. The most honest always admit that there is something peculiar and elusive about it. If the vision was entirely clear to him—as he sat alone in his room at the Duplays’, as he walked out in the countryside with his dog, or as he lay there on the table in the Tuileries staring up at the ceiling through the long last night of his life—he never succeeded in making it so to others. One historian describes that scream as “the end of the bright hope for a democratic Republic.”
⁷¹
Others hear it as a rallying cry to continue the fight. As a biographer, I hear it as the agonized separation of Robespierre and the Revolution: the man and what he lived for. When it finally came to it, what was pushed under the guillotine on 10 Thermidor (28 July) was as limp, frail, and meaningless as a puppeteer’s marionette. The real severance had already happened—it happened when he screamed and the picture in his mind went blank.

A few days later, in England, the poet William Wordsworth was crossing Morecambe Bay after visiting the grave of his former school-teacher. Like his compatriot the agronomist Arthur Young, Wordsworth had traveled in France on the eve of the Revolution, and he, too, had been to Arras in 1789:

Wordsworth resented that memory of joy and hope in the streets of Arras. It seemed to mock him in the wake of all the horror and bloodshed that the Revolution brought with it. Wordsworth had seen some of it for himself. He was there at the Convention watching in 1792 when Louvet rose before the tribune and said, “Yes, Robespierre, it is I who accuse you!” He wrote about it afterward, and about the storming of the Tuileries palace, the royal prisoners in the Tower, the September Massacres, the war, and the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is all in Book 10 of
The Prelude
. It was in Morecambe Bay that he heard the news of Robespierre’s death:

Wordsworth uttered a hymn to everlasting justice on those open sands. He was among the first to get Robespierre completely wrong. How could he call him, of all things, the leader of “the Atheist crew”? How could he not know that the small, ruined, shell-encrusted chapel would have moved the Incorruptible? Robespierre, too, would have liked the procession of simple working or traveling people, their horses, and their motley vehicles. He, like Wordsworth, might have longed to sketch the scene. For he, too, loved nature in all its majesty—even though, so far as we know, he never once saw the splendor of the sea.

Robespierre’s Writings

With few exceptions (the holograph speech of 8 Thermidor in his own writing, for example), what is known of Robespierre’s political speeches is known through newspaper reports that are subject to slight variations. These have been collated in the
Œuvres complètes.
On the day of Robespierre’s arrest, his close friend Eléanore Duplay hid what she could of his papers. Another member of the Duplay family, still fearing recrimination in 1815, burnt them. The rest of his papers were seized, and E. B. Courtois was commissioned to present an official report on them to the Convention. In doing so, Courtois suppressed a quantity of evidence that was later published.

(1910–67)
Œuvres complètes
, ed. E. Hamel, 10 vols., Société des études Robespierristes, Paris: Ernest Leroux.

(1920?)
A Facsimile and Transcript of the Manuscript Notes Found in Robespierre’s Possession at His Arrest
, Paris: [s.n.].

(1906)
De Robespierre à Fouché. Notes de Police. Documents inédits
, preface J. Claretie, Paris: Ernest Flammarion.

(1795)
Rapport fait au nom de la commission chargée de l’examen des papiers trouvés chez Robespierre et ses complices…dans la séance du 16 nivôse, an IIIe de la république française, etc.,
by E. B. Courtois, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale des Lois.

(1828)
Papiers inédits trouvés chez Robespierre, Saint-Just, Payan, etc. supprimés ou omis par Courtois; précédés du rapport de ce député à la Convention nationale
, 3 vols., Paris: Baudouin Frères.

(1989)
A la nation artésienne, sur la nécessité de reformer les Etats d’Artois, nouvelle edition, considérablement augmentée de nouveaux faits, recueillis depuis la première
, French Revolution Research Collection, Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Revolutionary Journals and Newspapers

L’ami du peuple
, reprinted in Marat, J. P. (1989)
Œuvres politiques, 1789–1793
, ed. J. Cock and C. Goëtz, 10 vols., Brussels: Pole Nord.

Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860
,
débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises
, sous la direction de M. J. Mavidal et de M. E. Laurent, première série, 1787–99, 82 vols., Paris: Libraire Administrative de Paul Dupont, 1885.

Courier français
(1789–), Paris: Imprimerie de Gueffier.

Chronique de Paris
(24 August 1789–25 August 1793), Paris: Imprimerie de Fiévée de la Chronique.

Le moniteur, réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur: Depuis la réunion des États-généraux jusqu’au Consulat (mai 1789–novembre 1799) avec des notes explicatives
, 30 vols., Paris: Au Bureau Central, 1840–45.

The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1791
, London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, Pater-noster-row, 1791.

Le Patriote français
, Paris: [s.n.], 1793.

Le républicain
,
ou le défenseur du gouvernement représentatif par une société de républicains
, 10 July 1791–23 July 1791, Paris: [s.n.], 1791. Only four issues of this journal appeared, the first two published together on 10 July, the third on 16 July, and the fourth on 23 July.

Révolutions de France et de Brabant
, reprinted in C. Desmoulins,
Œuvres de Camille Desmoulins,
10 vols., Munich: Kraus Reprint, 1980.

Révolutions de Paris…publiées par L. Prudhomme
, Paris: Imprimerie de Prudhomme, 1789–93.

Le vieux Cordelier
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Collection des mémoires relatifs à la Révolution française, avec des notices sur leurs auteurs
, Paris: Baudouin Frères, 1825.

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———. (2005)
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———. (1901)
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———. (1927)
Robespierre: A Study
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———. (1996)
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———. (1996) (ed.)
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———. (1961–63)
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———. (1936)
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———. (1921)
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———. (1857)
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———. (1967)
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