6

The Constitution

AT THE BEGINNING of 1791, Mirabeau was elected president of the Assembly, despite his deteriorating health. His friend, the Swiss jurist and political writer Étienne Dumont, remembered how ‘The irritation of his system, at this time, produced violent attacks of ophthalmia, and I have seen him, whilst he was President, sometimes apply leeches to his eyes in the interval, during the adjournment of the sitting from the morning to the evening, and attend the Assembly with his neck covered with linen to staunch the blood.’¹

Mirabeau was suddenly – very suspiciously – flush with money, and far from discreet with it. Marat, vigilant as ever, kept drawing attention to this: ‘Two years ago, Riquetti [Mirabeau] was obliged to send his breeches to the pawnshop to get six francs; today he swims in opulence … and has three mistresses whom he loads with gifts.’² Among other flamboyant extravagances, Mirabeau bought a large property in the Marais (quite close to the building in which Robespierre rented his humble second-floor flat). Here he retired at weekends, enjoyed overseeing the restoration and refurbishment of his grand new home, and looked forward to the coming of spring with the special delight of an ex-prisoner whose life has come right again. It was at his Marais retreat, on the night of Sunday 27 March, that he was taken seriously ill. Nevertheless, he insisted on getting up and going to the Assembly the next morning to defend the property rights of mine-owners. He had a friend who owned a mine, to whom he remarked afterwards, ‘Your case is won, but I am lost.’ The next day, the news that he was dying spread through Paris.

It is often said that Mirabeau had syphilis, which was known in eighteenth-century Britain and Italy as ‘the French disease’ and in France as ‘the Italian disease’, but also as ‘the great imitator’ because its symptoms were so difficult to distinguish from those of other illnesses. With typical candour, he often bragged about his venereal disease. Dumont reported Mirabeau boasting ‘that a statue ought to be raised to him by the physicians because he had discovered in the stews of the Palais Royal, the germ of a disease thought to be extinct – a kind of leprosy or elephantiasis’.³ His friends were not so frank or unabashed. Dumont thought Mirabeau had acute enteritis, whereas Dr Cabanis, who treated his last illness, wanted to believe that he died of systemic complications arising from ophthalmia. But between the two of them they recorded many of the symptoms of syphilis in its later stages. Ever since the Assembly had moved to Paris, Mirabeau had taken to travelling the short distance between his lodgings and the Manège by cab because he found it increasingly difficult to walk. His joints and his sense of balance were affected. In the autumn of 1790 a large swollen gland developed in his neck, just below his right ear. Dr Cabanis noted that when the gland softened and shrank, Mirabeau’s left eye deteriorated, and vice versa. From this he concluded that there must be a connection between the two sites of infection, and prescribed mercury – the conventional treatment for syphilis since the sixteenth century. The infection spread across Mirabeau’s face and neck. His energy declined rapidly, his colour was bad, his body lethargic, and his thoughts increasingly morbid. His liver weakened. His breathing was often laboured, a sign of heart disease, very typical of advanced syphilis. In the early months of 1791 he started showing signs of mental confusion and memory loss: ‘He was slow finding ideas or expressions, and sometimes could not find them at all.’⁴ His sufferings, in the final days of his life, were hideous.

All Paris was interested in Mirabeau’s decline. Crowds of people gathered beneath his windows, grabbing and frantically reading the regular health bulletins that were printed on demand. At the Tuileries, Louis XVI asked for news of the dying man to be brought to him twice a day. Marie Antoinette had tears in her eyes. Complete strangers offered Mirabeau their blood. Out of premature grief, his secretary stabbed himself several times – not fatally – with a penknife. Deputations from the Jacobin Club and the Assembly arrived, Robespierre, very likely, among them. Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun (last seen saying Mass at the Festival of Federation but excommunicated by the Pope since then on account of his support for the Civil Constitution of the Clergy), came to visit and Mirabeau entrusted him with his final speech to the Assembly. This turned out to be an offering on testamentary law, written by someone else, which proposed significant changes to the inheritance laws. ‘It is a very remarkable fact that, on his very deathbed, Mirabeau preserved his thirst for artificial fame, when he had so much personal glory,’ reflected his friend Dumont.⁵Talleyrand came away observing that Mirabeau was intent on dramatising his own death, which was true, but hardly reprehensible in the circumstances. ‘No weakness unworthy of you and of me,’ Mirabeau said stiffly to Dr Cabanis, who could not stop sobbing.

On the morning of 2 April, Mirabeau got out of bed, opened the window, and said, ‘My good friend, in a few hours, I shall die. Give me your word that you won’t leave me … Give me your word that you won’t let me suffer pointless pain. I want to enjoy, without interference, the presence of those I love.’⁶ By nightfall, he was dead and Paris was rioting. The crowd suspected that the leader of the Third Estate, the most famous deputy in the Assembly, had been poisoned, and wanted vengeance. ‘I go wearing mourning for the Monarchy,’ quipped Mirabeau on his deathbed: witty, politically astute and, in his own rough way, an admirable human being to the last.

The next day, deep in mourning, painfully conscious of Mirabeau’s empty chair, the Assembly received a delegation from the department of Paris, asking that the ashes of the nation’s greatest men should be housed beneath the dome of the recently completed neo-classical Church of Sainte-Geneviève in the Latin Quarter, and that Mirabeau should be the first revolutionary honoured in this way. Someone wanted to refer these plans to the committee that the Assembly had appointed to draft the constitution, but Robespierre demanded an immediate vote on whether or not Mirabeau was a great man. Who could doubt it the day after his death? In recent months, Robespierre had had his disagreements with Mirabeau, but now he urged the Assembly to recognise the claim of one ‘who had opposed despotism with all his might at the most critical moments’.⁷ Plans for turning the Church of Sainte-Geneviève into a national mausoleum dated back well before the Revolution, but now the Assembly’s subcommittee approved them. And so the church became the Panthéon: Mirabeau’s final destination after a sumptuous funeral that brought the city to a standstill on the evening of 4 April. An estimated 100,000 mourners took part in the league-long procession. Battalions of national guardsmen, all 1,200 or so of the National Assembly deputies, the Jacobins, the king’s ministers, journalists and grief-stricken members of the public: all accompanied the great orator’s remains – his heart inside a leaden urn – to his silent resting place on the left bank of the Seine. There were many orations in his honour, including one by Robespierre. There was music by Gossec, with haunting, mournful notes for the wind instruments. The ceremonies lasted well into the night, and were sombre and grand enough to satisfy the most overblown aspirations for funereal fame – even Mirabeau’s: ‘torchlight, wail of trombones and music, and the tears of men; mourning of a whole people – such mourning as no modern people ever saw for one man’.⁸

It is hard to overstate the impact of Mirabeau’s death on Robespierre’s future. A wide political vista opened behind that black-draped hearse. Into the large vacant space stepped the slim figure of Robespierre, much too small for Mirabeau’s clothes – like Macbeth, he would have felt them ‘Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe/ upon a dwarfish thief’. He had coveted Mirabeau’s ascendancy over the Assembly. He had envied his stentorian voice, confidence, agile intellect – he might even have envied his easy candour, because for all the progress he had made since 1789, the lawyer from Arras remained awkward and painfully shy. But as it turned out, Robespierre was spared the effort of working to usurp Mirabeau’s position. It was enough to wait patiently in the shadows, hone his own lesser talents and let the diseases that racked the unrepentant old roué do their worst. Now that Mirabeau’s tormented body was ashes in the Panthéon, Robespierre was eager to get back to the business of the Revolution. On 13 April, when one of the Jacobins proposed that the club’s plaster bust of Mirabeau should be cast in bronze, he interjected brusquely, ‘a bust, a mausoleum, a civic crown, an oak leaf, all are equal [honours], but may I remind you that your real work relates to the public good’.⁹He was notably less impatient when Mme Labille-Guyard, an artist preparing an exhibition of portraits of public men for the Salon later that year, wrote asking if Robespierre would sit for her. ‘They tell me that the Graces wish to paint a likeness of me,’ he replied, ‘I should be quite unworthy of such kindness, if I did not keenly appreciate its value.’¹⁰ So there was a touch of jealous pique in his insistence that the time had come to move on from honouring Mirabeau. ‘Mirabeau’s death gave courage to all the factions. Robespierre, Pétion and others, who dwindled into insignificance before him immediately became great men,’ remembered Dumont.¹¹ Immediately is too strong. There were still some months to go before Robespierre would be considered a great man. But what is true is that Mirabeau’s death was an enormous opportunity for Robespierre, just as consequential to his career as his election to the Estates General. He did not let it pass unnoticed.

Royalists were increasingly annoyed by the Arras lawyer. Who was he? Why was he so radical, so vexatious for them in the Assembly? Rumours began to circulate. The most outlandish claimed he was the nephew of Robert-François Damiens, the most infamous person to have emerged from Arras before him. Damiens had been an unemployed domestic who tried to assassinate the previous king of France on 5 January 1757 (the year before Robespierre was born). He chose the eve of the Epiphany for his attempt. Swathed in a cloak, he sauntered past the Swiss Guard on the palace steps at Versailles, and stabbed Louis XV in the side as he was climbing into his coach. It was an improbably naïve and simple-minded plan that very nearly worked. The king clutched his ribs, saw blood on his hands, announced, ‘Someone has touched me!’ and was carried back up the palace steps to die.¹² He had already called for a Jesuit priest and hastily confessed his last sins, when it became clear that the wound was superficial and not at all life-threatening thanks to the shortness of Damiens’ blade and the number of clothes the king was wearing to protect himself against the cold air. Damiens was arrested, interrogated, tortured and condemned to a gruesome death on the Place de Grève in Paris. As one eyewitness recalled:

After the tearings with the pincers, Damiens, who cried out profusely, though without swearing, raised his head and looked at himself; the same executioner dipped an iron spoon in the pot containing the boiling potion, which he poured liberally over each wound. Then the ropes to be harnessed to the horses were attached with cords to the patient’s body; the horses were then harnessed and placed alongside the arms and legs, one at each limb … The horses tugged hard, each pulling straight on a limb, each horse held by an executioner. After a quarter of an hour, the same ceremony was repeated and finally, after several attempts, the direction of the horses had to be changed … This was repeated several times without success.¹³

Damiens’ horrific suffering became an iconic representation of the arcane and ritualised cruelty of Old Regime France. There was no truth in the rumour that the would-be regicide and Robespierre were blood relations, but it gathered a flimsy credibility nevertheless. The royalist press was so keen to defame the Incorruptible that it seized on any opportunity. Yet there was a self-defeating irony in attempting to blacken Robespierre’s name and provenance by linking him with Damiens. Why should a radical revolutionary shun identification with the emblematic victim of Old Regime cruelty? No matter what the crime, had the accused been punished thirty-five years later, after the Revolution, there would have been no flesh ripped from his breast, arms, thighs and calves with enormous custom-made pincers, no molten lead, boiling oil, burning pitch, wax and sulphur poured on his wounds, no horses, four and then six, straining for interminable hours to pull his bleeding limbs apart. Instead Damiens would have suffered a cleaner, more humane end, in keeping with the Revolution’s penal code: ‘Every man condemned to death will have his head cut off.’

The Assembly finally got round to discussing the new penal code in May 1791. The issue had first arisen in Versailles just before the Assembly’s move to Paris, in a series of proposals put forward by Dr Guillotin:

I Crimes of the same kind shall be punished by the same kind of punishment, whatever the rank of the criminal.

II In all cases of capital punishment (whatever the crime), it shall be of the same kind – i.e. beheading – and it shall be executed by means of a machine.

III Crime being personal, the punishment of a criminal (whatever it may be) shall inflict no disgrace on his family.

IV No one shall be allowed to reproach any citizen with the punishment of one of his relations. The Judge shall reprimand anyone that dares to do so, and this reprimand shall be posted up at the door of the delinquent; and moreover shall be posted against the pillory for three months.

V The property of a convict shall never nor in any case be confiscated.

VI The bodies of executed criminals shall be delivered to their families if they demand it. In all cases the body shall be buried in the usual manner, and the registry shall contain no mention of the nature of the death.¹⁴

Because of its imminent move, and other pressing business, the Assembly postponed discussion of Dr Guillotin’s principles, and only took them up again several months later. The first was approved without any problems, following as it did from the abolition of Old Regime privileges – there was no question of reserving decapitation for nobles under the new constitution. The second article, however, provoked more discussion. Was it, or was it not, desirable to extend the practice of decapitation to all cases of capital punishment? One of the Assembly’s leading royalists, the abbé Maury, thought not. A brilliant preacher, a stalwart match for the stentorian Mirabeau, and the great hope of those who opposed the Assembly’s more radical initiatives, Maury argued against routine decapitation ‘… because it might deprave the people by familiarising them with the sight of blood’.¹⁵ Maury’s very interesting point was brushed aside by Dr Guillotin who insisted that hanging was a far worse public spectacle and confidently reassured the Assembly that decapitation had never been simpler or more humane: ‘Now, with my machine, I’ll knock your head off [je vous fais sauter la tête] in the twinkling of an eye, and you’ll never feel it.’¹⁶ At this the deputies collapsed in helpless mirth. As the acerbic historian John Wilson Croker pointed out, ‘amongst the laughers there were scores who were destined to be early victims of the yet unborn cause of their merriment’.¹⁷ Despite his crude boasting, Dr Guillotin’s machine was not yet ready, nor, strictly speaking, was it his own invention. Around the corner from the Assembly, at the College of Surgeons, a Monsieur Antoine Louis was busy reinventing the Halifax Gibbet that had cut off heads in seventeenth-century England.¹⁸

In the light of his earlier writings, we might expect to find Robespierre supporting Dr Guillotin’s proposals. Before the Revolution he had himself argued for extending the privilege of decapitation – ‘a punishment with a certain éclat’ – and putting an end to the tradition of bad blood that tainted a criminal’s whole family with his or her shame. However, in 1791 he distinguished himself by insisting that the time had come to abolish the death penalty altogether. He began his speech with a classical reference: on learning that the death penalty had been introduced in either Athens or Argos (the newspaper reports of his speech differ over which), the citizens ran to the temple to ask the gods to intervene and save man from such cruelty to man. For rhetorical flourish, Robespierre pointed out that his prayers had the same content, but were addressed not to gods, but to his fellow legislators in the Assembly. He was against the death penalty for two reasons: first its injustice; second its ineffectiveness as a deterrent. He thought it unjust because society could not have rights that individuals lacked, and individuals only had the right to kill in cases of self-defence. This, of course, left open the question as to when a society had the right to kill in order to defend itself, and how its enemies, internal or external, could be defined. Such questions had long preoccupied Robespierre, and would soon come to obsess him, fearful as he was about the threat of counter-revolution, but on this particular occasion he set them aside to present a clear argument against the death penalty:

Note well one circumstance that decides the question: when society punishes a culprit harming him is out of the question; instead it holds him in chains, it judges him peaceably, it may use its limitless authority to chastise him and make it impossible for him to make himself feared in the future. A conqueror that butchers his captives is called barbaric [murmurs from the floor]. Someone who butchers a perverse child that he could disarm and punish seems monstrous [more murmurs from the floor].¹⁹

At this point the abbé Maury interrupted, sarcastic as ever: ‘Tell M. Robespierre to go and deliver his opinion in the Forest of Bondy.’ This was slang for the badlands, haunts of bandits or outlaws, and a real forest too, just outside Versailles, where an Austrian king had once been assassinated. Ignoring Maury, Robespierre went on to consider the death penalty as a deterrent and here his argument became more idiosyncratic. No one, he insisted, was as afraid of dying as they were of calumny – in fact, good citizens would prefer to die rather than live with the scorn of their fellows. According to him, pride was the most dominant of human passions, stronger even than the desire to live. The death penalty confused severity of punishment with efficiency, when what was really needed was a system of punishment finely attuned to the passions that drive human nature. Robespierre was also concerned that the death penalty might discourage the innocent from denouncing the guilty, for fear of depriving them of life. He did not elaborate on the kinds of punishments he thought suitable for those denounced by their fellow citizens. Instead, he cautioned the Assembly against allowing the sword of the law to run with innocent blood. One royalist newspaper, Journal de Louis XVI et de son peuple, referred to him as ‘the democrat Robespierre’, but no one seems to have noticed that his arguments against the death penalty were all compatible with the most stringent social repression, should this be required to safeguard the interests of good and innocent citizens; everything he said was compatible with the famous maxim: Salus populi suprema lex (the safety of the people is the supreme law).

Despite Robespierre’s intervention and the applause it won him, the Assembly voted on 3 June 1791 to retain the death penalty, approving the second article: ‘Every criminal condemned to death will have his head cut off.’ At this point in the Revolution, hanging had been discredited by mob violence, lynching and brutal murders à la lanterne where aristocratic or counter-revolutionary suspects were set upon and strung up in the street from lampposts. Camille Desmoulins had gone so far as to tastelessly style himselfprocureur de la lanterne.

On 7 April, less than a week after Mirabeau’s death, Robespierre proposed and carried a decree prohibiting any member of the Assembly from becoming a minister of the king for four years after the new constitution became law. He was inspired by the earlier decree in November 1789 – aimed against Mirabeau – that had prevented Assembly deputies from simultaneously accepting posts as ministers of the crown. Now that Mirabeau was dead, why was Robespierre bothering to extend the prohibition for another four years? As so often, this was a point of principle for him. He had studied the writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau; both had insisted on the political importance of separating legislative and executive power. The Assembly was an extraordinary legislative body, so its members could not be ministers of the executive without confusing the two kinds of power. Not content with this, Robespierre went one step further and proposed that members of the existing Assembly should also be ineligible to stand for election to the new legislature under the new constitution. In an astonishing act of political self-denial, he effectively ensured that himself and all his colleagues in the Assembly would be thrown out of power when the new constitution came into effect.

Even at the time, it was unclear what exactly Robespierre hoped to achieve by this move: further proof of his incorruptibility; protection against the possibility that his reactionary colleagues might be re-elected and he might not; some other inscrutable scheme; or simply the relentless application of one of his political principles for its own sake. Some historians have argued that – irrespective of what he thought he was doing – the result of Robespierre’s decree was the disastrous exclusion from political life at a crucial juncture in the Revolution of the only people who had any relevant experience: those deputies who had been there from the beginning, who first in Versailles, then in Paris, watched the events unfold from the privileged vantage point of the Assembly. Others disagree and think that amidst the tumult spreading through Paris and all France, any elections would have returned only the most extreme candidates: ‘factious lawyers – infidel sophists – club orators – newspaper writers – and unprincipled adventurers of all disreputable classes and characters’.²⁰ Robespierre could not have been aiming for either of these outcomes. He was, more likely, exhibiting his fatal purity and remaining rigorously true to his ideals – whatever the consequences.

A few weeks later he addressed the Jacobin Club on the freedom of the press. Drawing inspiration from the American example, he argued for complete absence of censorship in both public and private life; perfect liberty, he insisted, was the best, indeed the only, way to ensure that what got published was ‘as pure, serious and healthy as your morals’.²¹ In an age as prone to pornography and libel as any other, there was something unworldly about this expectation. Yet he was nothing if not consistent. Amusingly, he thought there was no future for pornography in France, but he was still against restrictions on the exhibition or sale of obscene images: ‘The Law must be founded on principle,’ he argued – there must be absolutely no limits on liberty. He had already intervened in the Assembly in defence of the incendiary journalism of Marat and Camille Desmoulins, but now he set out a theoretical case for freedom of the press. In a free state, he explained, each and every citizen acts as a guardian of liberty. Everyone must be completely free to protest, in person or in print, at anything endangering liberty. If, as a consequence, public officials were to find themselves exposed to calumny, so be it:

Incorruptible men, who have no other passion besides the well-being and glory of their country, do not dread the public expression of the sentiments of their fellow citizens. They know only too well that it is not easy to lose their esteem, when one can counter calumny with an irreproachable life and proof of disinterested zeal; if they are sometimes victims of a passing persecution, this is, for them, the badge of their glory, the brilliant testimony of their virtue; they rest assured with gentle confidence in the suffering of a pure conscience and the force of truth which will soon reconcile them with their fellow citizens.²²

The influence of Rousseau, that ‘eloquent and virtuous citizen of Geneva’ – his emphasis on integrity, individual conscience, natural goodness and dignified independence from a gross and uncomprehending world – is stronger than ever in this passage. At this point, Robespierre was still acting on principle and according to ideals, adopting the kind of uncompromising stance on freedom of speech and freedom of the press that might have won him an essay prize before 1789. This stance was to prove much harder to sustain in practical politics than on the printed page: within two years he was to change his mind dramatically.

Robespierre also made the remarkable suggestion that libel suits arising from unrestricted liberty of the press should be adjudicated not on the legal merits of each case, but on the general character of the litigants concerned. In revolutionary circumstances, what could be more dangerously appropriate? The possibility of denouncing public officials not on account of some precise transgression of the law, but on grounds of their general attitudes or reputation, would soon become an indispensable – and merciless – way of dealing with the real and imaginary forces of counter-revolution. Without this opening to trial by character, it would not have eventually become possible to convict citizens ‘of hoping for the arrival in Paris of the Austrian and Prussian armies, and of hoarding provisions for them’; or to execute them for exclaiming ‘A fig for the Nation!’ – two examples of the ‘crimes’ later brought before the revolutionary tribunals and punished with the guillotine. While by contemporary standards Robespierre’s advocacy of complete freedom of speech was unusually liberal, his insidious suggestion that litigants should be judged according to their characters was the exact opposite. After all, who, beside himself, could claim an irreproachable character? Who, except Robespierre, was beyond suspicion? This more ominous nuance of his argument was probably lost on the Jacobins that night in 1791, and for the time being he remained their champion of untrammelled liberty.

It is testimony to how hard Robespierre was now working that he attended other political discussion groups on the few nights a week that the Jacobins did not meet. At one of these, the Cercle Social, he heard another discourse on the freedom of the press, two days after he had delivered his own to the Jacobins. He borrowed the text – which had been composed by one François-Xavier Lanthenas from Lyon and read to the assembled company by the radical bishop Claude Fauchet – so he could study it more closely at home. At about nine thirty that evening, he caught a cab on the Quai des Augustins and headed back to the rue Saintonge. Robespierre, as his sister remembered, had always been absent-minded. This time he left Lanthenas’s manuscript behind in the cab. Fauchet had only read part of it aloud to the Cercle Social, so there was a real danger that much of it would be lost for ever as a result of Robespierre’s inattentiveness. Mortified, Robespierre offered a reward in L’Orateur du peuple for anyone who helped trace the speech, hoping that ‘patriots will do their best’ to recover it.²³ Paris, for him, was full of vigilant patriots, hanging on the words of revolutionary orators, committing them lovingly to memory and tracking down precious manuscripts gone astray in the city’s filthy streets.

Contrary to Robespierre’s vision, many in Paris in 1791 were going about their everyday lives with little regard to the Revolution. The number of marriages and baptisms had risen significantly since the previous year and the mortality rate was falling. Judging by the small ads posted in the daily Chronique de Paris, the people still had plenty of mundane concerns. One Mme Gentil of the rue de Richelieu offered a handsome reward for her lost greyhound. There were elegant apartments to rent with facilities for stabling horses or parking carriages, as well as plenty of more modest accommodation. Opticians, hairdressers, pharmacists, dentists specialising in teeth whitening, and chiropodists all promoted their skills. An Italian singer just arrived in the city offered home tuition. Exchange visits between French and English children were still being advertised. Oysters, oranges and other luxurious comestibles continued to be imported. In the theatres and opera houses, the Revolution was being culturally assimilated. Jean-Baptiste Pujoulx wrote a play about the death of Mirabeau (La mort de Mirabeau) and Luigi Cherubini’s instrumental music for it was performed in the Théâtre Feydeau for the first time in May.

There were, however, ways in which Paris had not recovered from 1789. The rearrangement of the city’s sixty districts into forty-eight new sections had not destroyed local loyalties, and in poorer sections, like Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel, popular militancy did not disappear after the fall of the Bastille. Even though day-to-day policing was probably as effective in 1791 as it had been before the Revolution, tension between patriots and aristocrats, together with anti-clerical feelings exacerbated by the disputes over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, led to many incidents of violence.²⁴ In April, for example, rampaging patriotic women in the rue Saint-Antoine broke into local convents and dragged the nuns into the street for public whippings. Of course the scurrilous press was delighted by this, exaggerated what had happened, and inspired repetitions of the incident in other parts of the city. There was also widespread fear of brigands, or troublemakers, recently arrived in the capital. Such ‘enemies of the people’ could easily conceal themselves in Paris’s transient population: six out of ten people in the city at the time had been born elsewhere. The growing fear of malicious outsiders led to demands for a new census, and the Municipal Police Department ordered a survey of the city’s logeurs, or people letting furnished rooms, who might be harbouring suspicious newcomers.²⁵

In this context, the National Guard became all the more important. People throughout France had imitated the Parisians and formed local battalions of National Guards, but the relationship of these citizen militias to the Revolution was increasingly vexed. In theory, the National Guard was designed both to protect the Revolution and to maintain public order. However, in practice these two objectives sometimes conflicted. Soon after the fall of the Bastille in 1789, Robespierre had been horrified by the move to exclude non-tax-paying citizens (citoyens passifs) from the National Guard, and never ceased to oppose it. In his newspaper, on 5 December 1790, Marat – who had heard but still could not spell Robespierre’s name – had written, ‘Robertspiere, Robertspierre alone in vain raised his voice against the perfidious decree regarding superior conscripts, but his voice was muffled …’²⁶ Afterwards, Robespierre composed a speech on the topic, read it to the Jacobins at Versailles, then published and circulated it through the network of affiliated clubs across France. In February of the following year, he wrote sarcastically to the newly-wed Camille Desmoulins, reminding him to advertise the published speech in his newspaper: ‘May I remind Monsieur Camille Desmoulins that neither the beautiful eyes, nor the beautiful attributes, of charming Lucile [Camille’s wife] are reasons for not announcing my work on the National Guard …? There is not at this time anything more urgent or important than the organisation of the National Guard.’²⁷ Camille did as he was told and a notice about Robespierre’s recent work appeared in Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant a week later on 21 February. Even so, it was not until the end of April that the Assembly got round to discussing the subject again.

Robespierre argued that the institution of the National Guard was an unprecedented revolutionary act, resulting from a kind of patriotism previously unknown among free or enslaved peoples. The Assembly was busy formulating constitutional laws intended to protect the people’s liberty, but only force – public force – could ultimately guarantee that liberty. ‘The National Guard cannot be other than the whole nation armed to defend, when necessary, its rights; all citizens of an age to bear arms must be admitted without distinction.’²⁸ This idea was straight out of Rousseau, and when he spoke in the Assembly, Robespierre mentioned the philosopher by name: ‘The free cantons of Switzerland offer us examples in this area, even though their militias have a more extensive purpose than our National Guard, since they [the Swiss] do not have any other troops to direct against external enemies. All the inhabitants are soldiers, but only when it is necessary for them to be, if I might paraphrase J.J. Rousseau.’²⁹

The French still had a professional army and Robespierre was particularly insistent that it must be kept separate from the National Guard. He argued that because the professional army was nominally under the control of the king, Louis XVI must not be allowed to nominate the heads or officers of the National Guard; officers in the professional army must not hold posts in the National Guard; and the king and his ministers must not be allowed to deploy or discipline the National Guard either. Robespierre was mindful of recent problems inside the professional army. During the summer of 1790, at Béthune (near Arras) and Metz, there had been a series of conflicts between rank-and-file soldiers sympathetic to the Revolution and aristocratic officers intent on maintaining old-style discipline. In Nancy things had gone completely out of control when a cousin of General Lafayette, the Marquis de Bouillé, used severe military discipline to suppress a rebellion in the Châteauvieux regiment.

The rebellious soldiers had the support and encouragement of their local Jacobin Club, which, like many others across France, had affiliated itself to the Parisian Jacobins. But this did not save them from the draconian measures of General Bouillé’s military tribunal: one soldier was broken on the wheel, twenty were hanged and forty-one sentenced to the galleys for life – all of which astonished enlightened citizens, who thought such barbarism had been banished from France along with the Old Regime. Even more astonishing, though, was the Assembly’s decision to praise Bouillé for this pitiless repression. At first, only Robespierre, Pétion and a handful of other radical deputies protested. Robespierre was shouted down at the tribune. However, outside the Assembly he was supported by the Jacobins, and soon there were public demonstrations of solidarity with the heroes of the Châteauvieux regiment. To show their sympathy with those forty-one soldiers now toiling their lives away in the galleys, some patriots took to wearing thebonnet rouge: the cap of the galley slaves.³⁰ Robespierre himself kept aloof from this trend and was extremely irritated when, at the Jacobins one evening, someone leant over and dumped a bonnet on top of his meticulously maintained wig.³¹ Nevertheless, events in Nancy had made their impression on him, and he was adamant that there must be no confusion in the future between the National Guard and what remained of the Old Regime army. He wanted to see the former organised along rigorously democratic lines free of the authoritarian hierarchy that had caused such suffering at Nancy. Throughout his speech in April he kept referring to ‘the people’, until someone interrupted demanding to know what he meant exactly. ‘I myself protest against all manner of speaking that uses the word people in a limited sense,’ he said: ‘It is the people that is good, patient, and generous. The people asks for nothing but peace, justice and the right to live. The interest, the will of the people, is that of humanity: it is the general interest. The interest of that which is not the people, of that which separates itself from the people, is mere ambition and pride.’³² This was all very well in theory, but in practice the National Guard’s dual responsibilities – to protect the Revolution and to maintain public order – were bound to come into conflict, sooner or later, with particular sectors of this much-invoked people. Robespierre, following Rousseau, could define the people and their National Guard as one and indivisible, but this was not a definition that would hold up in a public brawl, still less a revolution.

As Easter 1791 approached, the king and queen, eager for a rest and a change of atmosphere, hoped to be permitted to leave Paris for Saint-Cloud. In this suburb west of Paris, Marie Antoinette owned a splendid château, surrounded by twelve hectares of gardens and terraces, overlooking the Seine. It was here that she had held her secret audience with Mirabeau – the occasion on which his ugliness overwhelmed her. Now Mirabeau was dead, the king was racked by terrible headaches, and Marie Antoinette longed more than ever to escape the confines of the Tuileries palace, where privacy was impossible and she scarcely dared open a window for fear of the abuse that would be hurled inside. Back in December 1790, the king had finally given in and signed the proposed Civil Constitution of the Clergy despite the Pope’s disapproval; but now his conscience was troubling him. At Saint-Cloud it might be possible to celebrate Easter in the old way, without political interference. However, for the last few weeks Marat had again been spreading panic, this time telling his readers that a hostile foreign army was massing at the Austrian border, and warning, ‘It is all up with liberty, it is all up with the country, if we suffer the royal family to quit the Tuileries.’³³ It was true that during the nine months that had passed since a battalion of Austrian troops asked permission to cross into France, foreign troops had been gathering at the border.³⁴ It was also true that it would be much more difficult for the Parisians to influence the course of the Revolution if the king abandoned the capital. So when the royal party tried to set off on 18 April, it was stopped by the mob. The next day, Louis XVI strode purposefully across the Tuileries gardens to the Manège, and addressed the Assembly:

Gentlemen, you are informed of the opposition expressed yesterday to my departure for St Cloud. I was unwilling to overcome it by force, because I feared to occasion acts of severity against a misguided multitude – but it is of importance to the nation to prove that I am free. Nothing is so essential to the authority of the sanction I have given to your decrees. Governed by this powerful motive, I persist in my plan of going to St Cloud, and the National Assembly must perceive the necessity of it.³⁵

This was a strong and dignified speech, but to no avail. Over at the Hôtel de Ville, the Municipality of Paris, urged on by Danton with the Cordelier Club behind him, decreed that the king was not to go to Saint-Cloud. The Assembly decided not to interfere, there was nothing General Lafayette could do to help, so the king, who had behaved well and wisely, had no choice but to walk back despondently across the garden and break the news to his disappointed wife.

Marie Antoinette had been planning an escape for many months. Mirabeau had fully shared her belief that removing the king from Paris was the only way to restore royal authority over the Revolution. All sorts of schemes had been auditioned – getting him out was, obviously, going to be very hard to pull off – but now even the famously indecisive king was determined to try. He was equally determined, however, not to leave France, not to flee as so many nobles had done and abandon what he still thought of as a kingdom entrusted to him by God. This narrowed his list of possible destinations down to one: he must try to reach the loyal troops under the command of General Bouillé, encamped at Montmédy, near the Austrian border, about 170 miles away. Bouillé was highly regarded by Louis XVI for his successful 1778 campaign against the English in the West Indies during the American revolutionary wars, and, much more recently, for suppressing the controversial rebellion in Nancy, with cavalry that remained under his control even as insubordination spread through the rank-and-file. Bouillé could not reach the king in Paris, but if the king could get to Bouillé, they could together start to assemble forces for reasserting royal authority, with or without reinforcements from abroad.

The most direct route from Paris to Montmédy ran through Reims. For this reason, the king rejected it, convinced he would still be widely recognised in the place of his coronation fifteen years before. Unfortunately, the alternative road was not only longer, but also less remote, passing through many small towns, where the royal fugitives might easily arouse suspicion. Nevertheless, that was the road chosen, and the departure date was set for 20 June. The decision to travel in an unusually shaped, extra-large, custom-made coach, capacious enough for at least eight people, did nothing to lower the risk of attracting attention. Since this striking vehicle could hardly pull up outside the Tuileries, on the night of 20 June it was parked discreetly near the city wall, while a more ordinary coach waited close to the palace on the corner of the rue de l’Échelle. This was the royal party’s first point of assembly. After 10 p.m., the king’s two surviving children, heavy with sleep and dressed in disguises, were carried out and left in the coach with their governess. The princess asked her young brother what he thought they were going to do that evening. ‘I suppose to act a play,’ he replied, ‘since we have all got these odd dresses.’³⁶ An hour later, their aunt, Mme Élisabeth, joined them, stepping on the Dauphin who had fallen asleep on the floor as she entered the carriage. ‘He had the courage not to cry out,’ his sister loyally recalled. Then the king and queen arrived, separately, Marie Antoinette shaken because her face had been caught for a few fleeting seconds in the lights of General Lafayette’s carriage, sweeping past unexpectedly at that late hour.

The royal family were conveyed successfully to their special travelling coach, and set off for the border accompanied by three guards in flamboyant yellow livery. If stopped and questioned, the plan was to pass themselves off as the family and travelling companions of a Russian woman, the Baroness de Korff, played by the governess. Marie Antoinette would assume the now vacant role of governess, the king’s sister would pose as a friend named Rosalie, and Louis XVI – most improbable of all – would take the part of a valet. The Dauphin had been quite right to guess that amateur dramatics were in store. As the sun rose behind the carriage window-blinds, the occupants settled into their journey, practised their parts and began on a picnic breakfast that lifted their spirits. It was pretty funny to think of the shock on Lafayette’s long face when he learnt of the empty beds in the Tuileries that morning. The king, always keen on lists and maps, was suddenly in his element, providing a running commentary on their progress for the benefit of his children. By the afternoon he was relaxed enough to get out and engage people in pleasant conversation about the weather and crops as the horses were changed at relay stops. As far as the town of Varennes, fresh horses were ordered in the ordinary way by sending a courier ahead. But at Varennes arrangements had been made for a special relay of horses to be protected by a small detachment of Bouillé’s troops. These troops drew suspicious comment from nervous locals – many of them newly signed-up members of the National Guard – even before the peculiarly shaped coach arrived in the middle of the night and squeezed through the narrow arch in the town wall. In the twenty-four hours since the escape from the Tuileries had commenced, the royal family had got to within twenty miles of their final destination.

At Varennes everything went wrong. The special relay of fresh horses was nowhere to be seen. As the coach drove into the town, the travellers peeped through the blinds and saw groups of National Guards milling around, some carrying muskets. The yellow livery worn by the three guards accompanying the suspicious coach shone beneath the lamps and moonlight; to make matters worse, the livery resembled that of the Prince de Condé, leader of the émigré nobles in exile, and people stopped to stare. It was exactly like the beginning of a play. None of the party could sustain their assumed identity for long – the king’s papers were made out for Frankfort, but Varennes was not on the road to Frankfort, and besides, he had been recognised at one of the post-houses earlier in the day. At first there was general excitement – it was quite something to have Louis XVI paying the town an unexpected nocturnal visit – and there was even talk among the townspeople of escorting the coach to Bouillé at Montmédy in the morning. However, Lafayette’s orders from Paris arrived by 5 a.m. on 22 June, along with a decree from the Assembly that the royals must return. And so they set out again, slowly retracing their path, accompanied by the National Guard and an angry, jeering crowd throwing dung at the liveried guardsmen who were prominently seated on top of the carriage like three bright badges of shame.

Robespierre was not in Paris on 20 June. He was in Versailles for the day, visiting his friends in the local Jacobin Club, tactfully explaining his decision to give up the post of judge on the Versailles tribunal, a position he had held since 1790 but never devoted any time to. Tact was required because he had recently been appointed Public Prosecutor in Paris and so had a good job to look forward to once the Assembly’s business was finished and the new constitution came into effect. However, he remained anxious not to alienate his friends in Versailles. Just as he had cultivated every available source of support when standing for election in Arras, so he continued in 1791 to value each and every expression of interest in himself and his career, no matter how lowly or improbable. He definitely did not want the Jacobins at Versailles to think badly of him, especially when he was doing so well among the Paris Jacobins, so he went, in person, to apologise and explain. By happy coincidence, his visit fell on the day of the second anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath, and he joined the local Jacobin Club in its celebrations, amidst cries of ‘Vive Robespierre! Vive the Nation! Vive the Friends of the Constitution [or Jacobins]!’ ‘No one ever deserved flattery so much as Robespierre,’ commented a Versailles newspaper approvingly.³⁷

The next morning he woke to Paris in tumult. Rumours of the royal flight filled the air and Robespierre had to fight his way to work through crowds of people heading in the same direction to find out what had happened in the Tuileries. He pushed his way through and was in his seat in the Assembly by 9 a.m. to hear what had happened. There was stunned silence in the Manège. Hoping to save the constitutional monarchy, Bailly, mayor of Paris, was maintaining that the king had been kidnapped against his will, and that there was no reason for the Assembly to distrust his ministers. However, on his desk in the Tuileries Louis XVI had left behind – in his own handwriting – a list of his complaints against the Assembly and the constitution it was drafting. This detailed account of his reasons for fleeing Paris was tantamount to a confession of guilt. There was uproar in the Assembly and Robespierre, urging his fellow deputies to ‘Tell all good citizens to be vigilant for traitors’, could not make himself heard at greater length in the chaos. At lunchtime he went home with Pétion, his fellow radical deputy in the Assembly, to discuss the response these unforeseen developments required. The journalist Jacques Brissot was there at lunch too, along with a newcomer, Mme Roland, both destined for political eminence over the coming year.

Brissot, whose father was an innkeeper at Chartres, was thirty-five when the Revolution began: just four years older than Robespierre. Thirteenth in a family of seventeen children, he had used his outstanding memory to educate himself and escape from his confined background into the worlds of law and journalism. Rather pretentiously, he had adopted the name of a neighbouring village, and called himself ‘Brissot de Warville’ under the Old Regime. He was not elected to Versailles in 1789, but nevertheless managed to inveigle his way on to the Assembly’s Constitutional Committee and into Paris’s Municipal Assembly. Before 1789 he had founded a society to campaign for the abolition of slavery (Ami des Noirs) and a newspaper called the Patriote Français. Now that he was a revolutionary, Brissot dropped the aristocratic-sounding ‘de Warville’. However, when he came to write his self-portrait – a popular genre at the time – he followed the fashion for doing so under an assumed name, and called himself Phédor:

Phédor is not very tall: at first glance there is nothing uncommon about him; but one can see in his eyes and face, particularly when he speaks, the active temper of his soul … He sacrifices his family to the cause of humanity. He is too credulous, too confiding. He is a stranger to revenge, as he is to self-interest. To judge from some of his writings, he might be compounded of bile and vengeance, whilst, in fact, he is too weak to hate anyone. He has friends, but not always of the heart-to-heart kind. He is as pleasant and easy-going in society and verbal argument as he is difficult and cantankerous in controversy. Phédor is one of those men who are at their best alone, and who are less useful to the world when they live in it than when they dwell in solitude.³⁸

Brissot thought of himself as unworldly, but he kept up with fashion. He attached great importance to dressing the part of a revolutionary. He was one of the first to stop powdering his hair and start wearing the bonnet rouge. He had recently met and introduced to Pétion the fascinating Manon Roland, who had arrived in Paris early in 1791 on a business trip with her husband, an inspector of manufactures at Lyon. The business completed, he was ready to leave, but she insisted on staying in Paris and attending the Jacobin Club, where she could meet and socialise with radical revolutionaries. Born Manon Phlipon, she was the daughter of a Parisian artisan, a master engraver, who had his workshop on the Quai de l’Horloge, very close to Pont-Neuf. Her six siblings had all died at birth or in infancy. Precociously intellectual – she claimed Plutarch had been a major influence before she was nine years old – Manon grew up devouring books, teaching herself foreign languages, memorising the Bible and impressing the local parish priest with her knowledge of theology. Whoever would her parents find to marry her? In the end it was Jean Marie Roland, twenty years her senior, who took her on when she was twenty-five. Like Brissot, she composed a self-portrait:

At fourteen, as today, I was about five feet tall, fully developed, with a good leg, very prominent hips, broad-chested and with a full bust, small shoulders, an erect and graceful posture and quick, light step … There was nothing special about my face apart from its fresh softness and lively expression. If one simply added together the individual features one might wonder whether there was any beauty there … The mouth is rather large; one may see hundreds prettier but none with a sweeter or more winning smile. The eyes, on the other hand, are smallish and prominent. The irises are tinged with chestnut and grey. The impression they convey is of openness, vivacity and sympathy, reflecting the various changes of mood of an affectionate nature. Well-moulded eyebrows of auburn, the same colour as the hair, complete the picture. It is on the whole a proud and serious face that sometimes causes surprise but more often inspires confidence and interest. I was always a bit worried about my nose; it seemed to me too big at the tip.³⁹

By the summer of 1791, the Rolands, Brissot and Pétion had become firm friends, so when the king’s flight to Varennes was discovered, it was natural for them to meet to discuss the implications for the Revolution. For all the fervent ideas that flew around in these circles at this time, Brissot and his friends were not at all sure how to react to the king’s flight. Over lunch chez Pétion on 21 June there was much agonising. Was this the end of the monarchy? And what about a republic – was it necessary, or even possible, to have one in France? According to Mme Roland, ‘Robespierre, with his habitual grimace, and biting his nails, asked: “What is a Republic?”’⁴⁰ He suspected a plot to assassinate the patriots and did not expect to survive another twenty-four hours. Nothing was clear. Pétion later volunteered to go and fetch the king back from Varennes, but Robespierre was more preoccupied by what was going on in the Jacobin Club in Paris. It was here, the same evening, that he made the most flamboyant speech of his career so far.

‘For me, the flight of the prime public functionary ought not to appear a disastrous event. This could have been the best day of the Revolution, and it might still be,’ Robespierre began. He told the Jacobins, calmly, directly, right at the beginning of his speech, that the Assembly had been wrong to present the king’s flight as kidnap and to reaffirm its faith in his ministers. The Assembly had not listened to him and had disregarded his cautionary words. It was obvious, Robespierre continued, that the king had chosen to desert his post at a crucial juncture in the Revolution. The constitution was nearly finished and there was lots wrong with it, not least the ridiculous divisions between citizens who could vote or stand for election and those who could not. Throughout France’s eighty-three new departments, treacherous priests were rejecting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Foreign powers (Prussia and Austria) were preparing an invasion to end the Revolution, and on top of everything else, the harvest was ready but still in the fields: it would take only a small band of brigands to set it alight and starve the whole country. There could be no mistake: Louis XVI – or the prime public functionary, to give him the less glamorous title Robespierre preferred – had chosen to abandon revolutionary France at her most vulnerable. But that was not the worst of it:

What scares me, Gentlemen, is precisely that which seems to reassure everyone else. Here I need you to hear me out, I say once again, what scares me is what reassures all the others: it is that since this morning all our enemies speak the same language as us … look about you, share my fear, and consider how all now wear the same mask of patriotism.⁴¹

The real enemy, as he saw it, was right there, in Paris, mingling with the true patriots. ‘Share my fear’ was his invitation to the Jacobins to join him in the next stage of the Revolution. Here he took the dramatic step of turning not only against the king and his ministers, but also against the Assembly that had affirmed its faith in them earlier in the day. The Assembly was wrong – Robespierre dared say it. For the public good he took the dangerous step of accusing almost all his colleagues in the Assembly of being counter-revolutionary out of ignorance, terror, resentment, pride or corruption. Let the press term him the new Nostradamus, prophesying the future in apocalyptic mode: he was, he assured the Jacobins, ready to sacrifice his life to truth, liberty and the fatherland (la patrie). At this (according to his own newspaper), Camille Desmoulins leapt to his feet and cried, ‘We would all give our lives to save yours!’ and the audience of eight hundred Jacobins, crammed inside the old monastery, joined in an impromptu oath to defend Robespierre’s life. It seems unlikely that Robespierre was genuinely in more danger than any of the other radical revolutionaries, fearing that the forces of counter-revolution might be galvanised into action by the king’s flight. But even so, the Jacobins at Marseille wrote to say they would come to Paris and defend him if the need arose. And the Cordeliers Club sent an armed guard to protect him in the rue Saintonge.

Later that night, before going to bed, Robespierre made his will. The Assembly and General Lafayette had issued orders for the royal family to return to Paris. But while they could still issue orders and be obeyed, as far as Robespierre was concerned, the Assembly and General Lafayette were mutually discredited by the king’s flight: neither could be relied upon in the continuing struggle to provide France with a legitimate constitution. In his attempt to persuade the Jacobins of this, Robespierre succeeded in creating a schism at the club: 264 of the members who were also deputies in the Assembly left to form the Feuillants, in a disused monastery of that name across the street from the Jacobins. The Feuillants Club, led by Antoine Barnave (a Protestant advocate from Grenoble), was committed to defending the king’s role in the forthcoming constitution, despite the discredit brought upon him by the flight to Varennes. Robespierre remained behind in the Jacobins with a handful of radical deputies, dedicated as he was to curtailing the king’s powers under the new constitution. Robespierre’s break with his more moderate colleagues was decisive; from this point on his political future rested on his influence over the remnants of the Jacobin Club and its network of affiliates throughout France. If Louis XVI had not fled, Robespierre would probably have settled down to his job as Public Prosecutor under the proposed constitutional monarchy. It would have been a more glamorous life than he ever hoped for in Arras, but not so very different in kind. However, the king had fled, and Mirabeau, who might have turned the situation around and rescued the monarchy despite everything, was dead. The configuration of power in Paris was changing very fast.

The flight to Varennes had taken one day, yet the return of the royal family to Paris took four; during this time, Marie Antoinette’s hair turned grey.⁴² They were halfway back by the time deputies from the Assembly (Pétion and Barnave) arrived to take charge of the dismal procession and protect it from the mob. Pétion and Barnave climbed into the carriage and the royal children sat on their parents’, aunt’s or governess’s lap for the rest of the journey. Despite the presence of the deputies, violent incidents continued to plague the exhausted travellers, including a near miss with brigands in the notorious Forest of Bondy. Inside the coach, Barnave did his best to befriend the king, assuring him that it would still be possible to save the constitutional monarchy. Robespierre’s friend Pétion was much less ingratiating – but it is hard to tell if his rudeness was deliberate or inadvertent. Afterwards he claimed that Louis XVI’s sister had fallen in love with him by the time they reached the Tuileries, which seems unlikely to say the least.

The second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was nothing like the first. Thursday 14 July 1791 was a beautiful summer’s day without a spot of rain, but the spirit of festive unity that had characterised the celebrations on the Champ de Mars a year earlier was lost. The king and queen did not attend, and the Assembly, instead of turning out en masse as it had before, sent a delegation of just twenty-four deputies – one of them Robespierre. General Lafayette remained prominent on his white charger, but even he could scarcely ignore the suspicion and open hostility with which many in Paris now regarded him because of his support for the king. On the Champ de Mars the stadium had been expanded to hold more spectators than the year before, and the Altar of the Fatherland had been remodelled: in 1790 its dedication read, ‘the Nation, the Law, the King’; in 1791 it read ‘the Nation, the Law, the […]’ – the last word was effaced. Gossec composed some music for the occasion: something innovative, but less mournful than for Mirabeau’s funeral, and aptly entitled La prise de la Bastille (The Fall of the Bastille).⁴³ During the ceremony there were occasional cries of ‘No more king!’ And back in the Manège the Assembly, meeting for business as usual despite the celebrations, heard a petition – one of many – from Danton’s Cordeliers Club, demanding a national referendum on the fate of the king who had tried to abandon the Revolution. In his newspaper, Marat wrote that he suspected the Assembly had included Robespierre in the delegation to the Champ de Mars to keep him away from the tribune – while his back was turned it might try to exonerate the king, that ‘crowned brigand, perjurer, traitor, and conspirator, without honour and without soul’. Vigilance, vigilance, screamed the Ami du Peuple.⁴⁴

Robespierre wanted to put Louis XVI on trial. Submitting to the rule of law could degrade no one, he insisted, not even the king. But more moderate deputies were concerned about the impact such a trial would have on the constitutional monarchy, which, after two long years of discussion and disagreement, was at last ready to come into effect. The moderates were helped by the unexpected arrival of a letter from General Bouillé, taking the blame for the flight to Varennes on his own shoulders from the safe distance of Luxembourg. ‘I arranged everything, decided everything, ordered everything. I alone gave the orders, not the King. It is against me alone that you should direct your bloody fury.’⁴⁵ This was the excuse the Assembly deputies who advocated exonerating the king needed. The day after the Festival of Federation, inside the Manège, they made a case for leniency, for putting the past behind and allowing Louis XVI to assume the role allotted him under the forthcoming constitution. But the Cordeliers Club was outside again, banging on the door, demanding a referendum. Robespierre and Pétion went out to negotiate. They told the petitioners it was too late. They gave them a discouraging letter to take back to their club: petitions like this were not a helpful contribution; please could they stop.⁴⁶ This letter – signed by both Robespierre and Pétion – did not have its intended effect. Instead, it inspired the Cordeliers and Jacobin clubs to unite behind a new petition calling for the deposition of the king. This was drafted by Brissot in terms that cleverly avoided calling for a republic by demanding the ‘replacement of Louis XVI by constitutional means’.

Danton read the text aloud to crowds assembled on the Champ de Mars on 16 July, standing at the Altar of the Fatherland, where General Lafayette had stood two days before to celebrate the fall of the Bastille. The same day, the deputies in the Manège voted to suspend the king, but only until he had approved the new constitution. This meant that the petition for his dethronement was now illegal, since it contravened the Assembly’s decree. Realising this, the Jacobins rapidly withdrew their support and cancelled the printing of the petition before it left the printer’s shop. The Cordeliers were less cautious. Reassembling the following day at the Altar of the Fatherland, they drew up yet another petition, demanding the trial of the king. There was a disturbing incident early in the morning, before the crowds arrived: two men were found hiding under the altar, assumed to be spies, and summarily hanged à la lanterne. However, since it was Sunday, many of the petitioners arrived later in the day with their wives and children, and the prevailing atmosphere that afternoon was peaceful and festive. By early evening more than six thousand people had signed the petition and the crowds showed no sign of dispersing. At around 7 p.m., General Lafayette and mayor Bailly arrived at the Champ de Mars. They came accompanied by armed National Guards, ready to suppress the demonstration. About fifty of the signatories were shot on the steps of the altar; their blood splattered across what was left of its dedication. A matching red mark of terror and repression appeared simultaneously above the Hôtel de Ville – the red flag of martial law was flying and the prominent revolutionaries ran for their lives.

Eighty years later, in the middle of another revolution in 1871, a fire in the Hôtel de Ville destroyed the soiled petition of 17 July 1791. Reputedly, Danton’s name was not on it and nor was Robespierre’s. After the petition on dethronement was outlawed, Danton had had nothing to do with organising the next one. He might not even have been at the Champ de Mars that Sunday. Nonetheless, on learning that his enemy General Lafayette had taken charge of Paris, he fled to Arcis-sur-Aube (where he had been born), then to London, where he lived in Soho on Greek Street for a month, until it was safe to return. Robespierre spent the evening of 17 July in the Jacobin Club. Hearing the news of bloodshed on the Champ de Mars, he wept unapologetically.

Let us weep for those citizens who have perished: let us weep even for those citizens who, in good faith, were the instruments of their death. Let us in any case try to find one ground of consolation in this great disaster: let us hope that all our citizens, armed as well as unarmed, will take warning from this dire example, and hasten to swear peace and concord by the side of these newly dug graves.⁴⁷

Was this perhaps ignoble? Given that he had supported – if not actually initiated – the idea of putting the king on trial for his flight to Varennes, why wasn’t Robespierre there among the men, women and children on whom the National Guard opened fire? Why was he weeping at the Jacobins, instead of with the wounded at the Altar of the Fatherland? Like Danton, Robespierre had had nothing to do with the petition that had caused the bloodshed – critical of the Assembly as he was, he recognised the legal force of its decision on the king and the forthcoming constitution. In his speech to the Jacobins it was right and responsible to point out that the National Guard were citizens too – volunteer soldiers following orders. Those who gave the orders, not those who carried them out, were the proper objects of the people’s anger.

Robespierre was speaking, as darkness fell on the Champ de Mars, to only a handful of Jacobins. Pétion was still there and so was Pierre-Louis Rœderer (an avocat in the Parlement of Metz before the Revolution and afterwards a supporter of progressive reform in the National Assembly). But most of the other liberal deputies – the abbé Sieyès among them – were in the Feuillants Club, across the street, where they professed themselves more moderate than the Jacobins, and more unequivocally committed to upholding the proposed constitutional monarchy. Suddenly there was a disturbance outside – shouting and the clash of arms in the rue Saint-Honoré. It was the National Guard returning to the city centre in shock and disarray. Some of the citizen soldiers made their way into the Jacobins courtyard and shouted abuse at the radicals within – the radicals whom they blamed for inviting civil unrest and bringing Paris to the brink of civil war. For the first but by no means the last time, there was complete panic inside the club. Robespierre managed, somehow, to talk it down, and Mme Roland was present to hear him do it. Later that evening she sat at home thinking about him, how terrified he had been, but also how brave, and wondered if he had managed to get safely home to the rue Saintonge ‘in the depths of the Marais’. On a daring but foolhardy whim, she decided to go and check. She persuaded her husband to go with her, and they reached Robespierre’s lodgings just before midnight, to find him still out. How surprised he would have been to find Mme Roland on his doorstep at that hour! Robespierre, as we have seen, did not do well with women on the doorstep, and 17 July had been an unusually long and terrible day. Since he was not there, however, there was nothing Mme Roland could do except go home again with her husband and resume worrying that the leader of the Jacobins – on whom she was developing one of her many crushes – had been arrested or worse.

In fact, he was fine. Another member of the Jacobin audience that night was a master joiner and cabinet-maker named Maurice Duplay, originally from Auvergne, but now living just doors from the Jacobins in the rue Saint-Honoré. As Robespierre was about to leave the club that night and step out into the unruly streets, Duplay intercepted him and offered sanctuary in his home close by. Robespierre, certainly exhausted and possibly frightened too, accepted the kind offer. Duplay lived modestly in a two-storey house centred on a small courtyard in which he kept the tools and materials of his trade. Stepping over planks of wood and a sawpit on his way in, Robespierre was greeted by Duplay’s wife and family: a son and three daughters. In this simple household he felt instantly at home. As his sister Charlotte pointed out, he had been accustomed to her own domestic ministrations in Arras. Since moving away he had lived as a bachelor, but it did not suit him. ‘Madame Duplay and her daughters expressed towards him the most vivid interest and surrounded him with their thousand delicate concerns. He was extremely susceptible to all those sorts of things. My aunts and I had spoilt him with an abundance of the little attentions that women alone are capable of.’⁴⁸ Charlotte was jealous at the very thought of the Duplay women looking after her brother. He, however, was very comfortable: close to the Jacobins, close to the Manège and living with the kind of skilled artisan whose straightforward work and home life seemed to embody the very essence of the political principles he believed in. After the massacre on the Champ de Mars, Robespierre lodged with the Duplays almost without interruption until he died. He had found his last home.⁴⁹

The king’s flight to Varennes was tactfully forgotten, and the constitution, so long in the making, was finally finished and formally accepted by Louis XVI in September 1791.⁵⁰ A hot-air balloon, trailing tricolour ribbons, floated over the Champ de Mars announcing the fact. The gesture was suitably ephemeral, since the constitutional monarchy relied on a tenuous partnership between the king and the people’s new representatives, tied together, but no better coordinated than the ribbons flapping in the sky. Because of the self-denying edict put forth by Robespierre, he and his fellow Assembly deputies were not eligible to stand for election to the new legislature. On the last day of the Assembly, in the atmosphere of relief and celebration overtaking Paris, Robespierre and his friend Pétion were crowned with wreaths of laurel and led through the city streets by a jubilant crowd. People who had yet to set eyes on Robespierre went to look at his portrait by Mme Labille-Guyard, hanging in the Paris Salon. He had entered the Assembly an unknown in 1789, but now left it a popular hero – a bold spokesman for liberty and equality, the defender of the poor, an advocate of democracy, that rare and admirable thing in politics: an incorruptible man. For the time being, however, he was not needed and could take his first holiday in over two years. Robespierre, unlike Danton, Pétion, Brissot and others whom he knew in Paris, had never been abroad. He could have gone at this point. He had enough money at last and his health, strained by the daily grind in the Manège and the late nights at the Jacobins, might have benefited. Instead, he answered the call of family duty, and went home to Arras.

Robespierre wrote to tell his sister he was coming, and that he wanted – if at all possible – to avoid a public welcome. She treated his request with characteristic seriousness, but could do nothing to prevent Augustin announcing their brother’s imminent return from the tribune at the local Jacobin Club. On the designated day, Charlotte and Augustin set out early in the morning to meet Maximilien, accompanied by Mme Buissart, the wife of his closest friend in Arras.⁵¹ They hired a coach and took the road to Paris as far as the small town of Bapaume. But though they waited all day, their brother did not arrive. They went back to Arras that evening, very disappointed. At the city gates a crowd had assembled, having heard a rumour that the famous deputy had finally returned. As the coach pulled up, the people began detaching the horses, so as to pull it inside the city walls themselves as a mark of respect and gratitude. Everyone was quite embarrassed when they discovered that it was only Charlotte, Augustin and Mme Buissart inside. On 14 October, the small welcome party set off again, even earlier this time, hoping to avoid attracting further attention. Camped at an inn at Bapaume, keeping out of sight, they waited for Robespierre. Although the inn was on the road from Paris, they were afraid of missing him, so posted a lookout in the street.

Bapaume was already in a turbulent state because a battalion of National Guards from Paris, among them some of the original heroes from the fall of the Bastille, were currently garrisoned in the town. Over the past week there had been bitter conflicts between these National Guards, full of revolutionary enthusiasm, and the locals – many of whom, as Robespierre was soon to discover, were considerably less enthusiastic. Suddenly the Incorruptible – away for over two long, eventful years – was in the arms of his nearest and dearest. Outside the inn the lookout had spread the word. The National Guards were delighted and gathered to congratulate Robespierre on his democratic principles, his tireless fight against the enemies of the people, his outstanding political courage. They set about organising an impromptu banquet, which detained Robespierre in Bapaume for several hours, so it was dark before he set off again with his proud siblings beside him.

At Arras there was an even bigger crowd. The people were in high spirits; they had waited excitedly all day, and some of them were probably rather inebriated by the time the coach – with Robespierre in it this time – rolled into view. Once again there was an attempt to detach the horses at the city gate so the appreciative crowd could pull their returning hero across the city threshold. Seeing this commotion through the window, Robespierre had one of his attacks of irritation and got out immediately. He proclaimed priggishly to his brother and sister that he did not approve of free citizens taking on the role of animals and debasing themselves in this manner – all his hard work in the Assembly had been for nothing if the people of his own home town were still so unenlightened. Undeterred by his disapproval, the crowd at Arras, now joined by the crowd that had followed the coach from Bapaume, surged through the streets towards his old home in the rue des Rapporteurs shouting, ‘Vive Robespierre! Long live the Defender of the People!’ This was exactly what he had not wanted. He had hoped for a discreet private homecoming, fearing that any public fêting would be reported in the Parisian press and turned against him by his growing number of political enemies. With immense relief he finally closed the front door behind him and was alone again with his strange small family.