Robespierre: A Virtuous Man

Maximilien Francoise Marie Isidore de Robespierre, one of the most misrepresented and villified men in history, was born in Arras, northern France on 6 May, 1758. Though not himself working class, his father was a lawyer, his early life was one of some poverty. His mother died in childbirth when he was aged just 6, and his father abandoned the family soon after. He, his brother, and two sisters, were raised in separate homes. It would appear that from an early age he acquired an acute awareness of the moral corruption that attended wealth and increased prosperity. Likewise, he was aware, to the point of paranoia, of his own lack of means and low social standing. He was a quiet, nervous, some might say, timid child. But he worked hard and devoted himself to study.

Eventually, aged 16, he won a scholarship to a college in Paris to study law. He was far and away the poorest of the students and they weren’t slow in letting him know it, and his paranoia only increased as a result. He would claim that those who disagreed with his views were oppressing him. This verbal expression of his sense of inferiority would become a constant refrain in later life.

He was though, an outstanding student, and in 1775, he was chosen to present an address to the newly crowned King of France, Louis XVI, who was passing through Rheims, on his way back to Paris following his coronation. The weather was awful and the King was late. Young Maximilien had been waiting in the rain all day to present his poem to his Sovereign. Louis never emerged from his carriage or so much as glanced out of its window. Maximilien’s presentation was never acknowledged. Seventeen years later that same young student was to be the prime mover in that same King’s execution.

“The Revolution speaks through him its most tragic and purest discourse”. (Francoise Furet)

“The greatest man not only of the Revolution but of all history”. (George Sand)

“The most hateful character in the forefront of human history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men”. (Lord Acton)

The Sea Green

Incorruptible

Who was the real Robespierre? It is a question not asked often enough. Was he the abstemious, thin-bloodied, pedantic, blood-thirsty tyrant of popular history? Or the virtuous, incorruptible, freedom loving champion of the people? Was he the man who said “Virtue produces happiness as the sun produces light”. Or the one who stated that a “Nation can only be generated on mountains of corpses”.

During the Revolution he lived in the house of the Duplay family in the Rue St Honore. He didn’t socialise and rarely left the house except when work demanded it. He would, however, walk his dogs in the Bois de Boulogne. The Duplay’s youngest daughter Elisabeth, would often accompany him. She remembered him as a kind and patient man. He would wear a waistcoat embroidered with roses and they would pick cherries and cornflowers together. Elisabeth would later be ridiculed as a silly and foolish girl for remembering him so.

He was slight and pale, his face pinched and his hair blonde. Quietly spoken, indeed his voice was considered weak, he was neither a loud nor bombastic orator, yet it was said he could seduce a rowdy crowd into mesmeric silence. His speeches would be laced with the language of victimhood. He would later remark that he felt he had been oppressed all his life. But he rarely raised his voice preferring to speak in hushed and precise tones. It was his way of controlling his nerves. He would appear sometimes to shake as he spoke. Indeed he was of such a nervous disposition that his sister, Constance, felt she had to travel to Paris to keep house for him. He didn’t drink and ate only sparingly. He has often been contrasted to his contemporary and fellow revolutionary, Jacques Danton. The heavy-drinking, philandering, corrupt Danton, who went to the scaffold before him. Danton spoke scathingly of Robespierre as a man. “He can’t fuck and is afraid of money”.

Robespierre has often been described as self-seeking and vain. Yet he never  actively sought high-office. Had it not been for the illness of an incumbent he would never have joined the Committee of Public Safety.

Robespierre and Virtue

For Robespierre the Revolution had to be justified. It had to be an expression of virtue. But what was this virtue? A dedicated follower of the precepts espoused by the philosopher Rousseau. he desired to see them enacted. His virtue spoke of strength, integrity, and purity of purpose. The public good must come before private self-interest. A better society need not be dreamed about, it could be created. But the people weren’t virtuous. They were corrupt, decadent, self-seeking, and immoral. To create his virtuous society, Robespierre, was to resort to summary justice and this was to lead to terror. For he perceived the judicial process to be part of the problem. With its trials, its defence, its calling of witnesses; due process of law was a cancer eating away at the Republic of Virtue. Henceforth, people would be judged solely on their actions, there would be no mitigating circumstances, and justice would be swift. As he stated, more than once, “Vice and Virtue forge the destiny of the earth”.

Robespierre and the Revolution

In 1789, Robespierre was elected to the Estates General. He was from the outset neither a liberal or a radical, but a revolutionary. He suspected the so-called Hero’s of 89′ to be nothing but the old regime with a different vocabulary. They were still supporters of the sectional interest. He would not be cowed or bought off. For two years he stuck to his rigidly revolutionary agenda. Others may pay lip-service to the Revolution but he would not. He meant every word of it. He supported manhood suffrage and opposed the property qualification for voting rights. He opposed capital punishment and slavery and sought the abolition of both. He was an advocate of full civil rights for Jews and Protestants and against the censorship of the press. For two years he was ignored. His ideas being far too radical for the majority. He was a lonely and often unheard trumpet of freedom. So where did it all go wrong?.

The Reign of Terror

Le Terreur (as it is known in France) is widely recognised as having lasted from 5 September, 1793, to 28 July, 1794, and the fall of the Republic of the Year II. Estimates vary as to how many died in this mass-execution of the enemies of the Revolution. Some have suggested that it may have been as low as 17,000 others as high as 100,000. As in most cases it probably falls somewhere between the two. The most common form of execution was the fast and efficient guillotine. Contrary to popular myth the majority of its victims were not aristocrats but common folk. It did, however, claim the lives of many notables including King Louis XVI, his Queen Marie Antoinette, his cousin, Philippe Egalitie, Madam Roland, Antoine Lavoisier, and very nearly the English radical, Tom Paine.

Threatened by internal civil wars in the Vendee and Brittany, invaded by foreign enemies and opposed by the Catholic Church, the French turned in upon themselves. With enemies everywhere and paranoia rife the revolution became a cancer upon its own body politic, eating itself up from within; and as in ancient Rome policy came to be dictated by fear of the mob. Political enemies and factions within the National Assembly went to the guillotine, Girondists, Dantonists and Enrages amongst them.

Such was the threat to the survival of the Revolution, the Committee of Public Safety, and the Revolutionary Tribunal along with it, were established to save it. Made up of 12 nominated members one man came to dominate it. That man was Maximilien Robespierre. It was he who set in motion the reign of terror. His vehicle for implementing the terror was the Revolutionary Tribunal. It arrested suspects, passed death sentences, and carried out executions on the spot. There was to be no right of appeal, no witnesses for the defence. The Tribunals organising genius was Antoine St Just (the Archangel of Death) Robespierre’s close friend and political ally.

Closure

Immorality, according to Robespierre, was the basis of despotism. “In order for the Government to keep in closest harmony with the law, it is over its own head that it must wield the heaviest stick”.

For the Republic of Virtue to be established it must be one and indivisible. No dissent could be tolerated. Any contrary views poisoned it in its entirety. Therefore, it had to be constantly and repeatedly cleansed. Despite Robespierre’s best intentions this could only lead to the spilling of blood. And it is for this that he is now best remembered (All else being too easily forgotten). As a young lawyer he defended the poor, often for free. As a politician he believed in the innate goodness of the people and struggled to create a France free of the extremes of wealth and poverty. But the events of the terror cannot be ignored. Whether they can be justified, or whether the Revolution could have been saved without them, is another topic. Needless to say, at the height of the crisis, when the Revolution was threatened from all sides, and in the crucible of war, terrible atrocities were committed. Peasants were tied to boats and drowned in the Loire, priests were disembowelled, mothers and children burned to death in their homes, and thousands guillotined. As the leading member of the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre cannot be exonerated of blame. But he tried to rein in those responsible for the worse excesses, and it was this more than anything else that was to lead to his own downfall.

Robespierre was the champion of the sans-culottes and the common people of Paris. They had loved him and he was feared because of their love. He had ordered a moratorium on their rents, kept prices artificially low, and forced the bakeries to open. In the wider political sphere he had redistributed land, created a fairer system of taxation, introduced a system of national welfare, and advocated compulsory free education for all. He had also abolished the Monarchy, defeated France’s external enemies and secured the Revolution.

But when the crisis came on 27 July, 1794 (9 Thermidor, according to the revolutionary calendar) the people abandoned him. He had addressed the Jacobin Club the night before and had been shouted down. It must have been evident to him what was in store. But he made no effort to flee or rouse the mob in his defence. He seemed resigned to his fate. When they came for him the following day he shot himself but only managed to smash his jaw. Saint-Just, who was present, remained with his friend cradling his head in his arms. They both went to the guillotine later that same day, Robespierre in great pain.

After his death, his enemies wrote the history. All the horrors of the Revolution were placed firmly at his door. It was even suggested that he had kept small birds as a child so he could decapitate them with a toy guillotine, so preternaturally bloodthirsty was he; (Even if the guillotine had not been designed at the time). Such is the level of the abuse and accusations levelled at him. He is the axis upon which discussions of the Revolution revolve. As Baudrillard wrote “There are those who let the dead bury the dead, and there are those who are always digging them up to finish them off”.

Postscript: The Cult of the Supreme Being

Culte de l’etre Supreme, was to be the new State religion. A religion of reason. There was such a thing as Godhead, but as a supreme and divine being, not one who interfered in human affairs. It was designed to effectively deChristianise France. Adherence to it was on the pain of death. The festival of its inaugaration took place on 8 June, 1794, with Robespierre at its head. For many this was the final straw, Robespierre associating himself with the Divine. Was he God, or merely the High Priest of his own religion? This could only mean that he had either gone mad, or become intoxicated with power. Though in hindsight, it is easy to see how this would have been the culmination of all he was trying to achieve.

Quotes

“The King must die so that the country can live”

“Terror is the only justice”

“Pity is treason”

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty”