Part IV
7
ROBESPIERRE GOT HOME on a Friday evening. By the end of the weekend, when he wrote to the Duplays, all his irritation had been forgotten and he described his homecoming in glowing terms. ‘I was enchanted by the patriotism of the National Guard,’ he wrote. The people of Arras had received him ‘with demonstrations of such affection as I cannot express, and cannot recall without emotion’. Even his enemies, the aristocrats, had illuminated their houses in his honour, ‘which I can only attribute to their respect for the will of the people’. (A local newspaper, however, attributed this to people’s fear of having their windows smashed.) The following day an unarmed battalion of National Guards had danced and sung patriotic songs outside his house. All of this, he gleefully remarks, must have been very disagreeable for Feuillant ears. The split at the Paris Jacobin Club earlier in 1791 had reached Arras. Here, as in many other places throughout the country, former members of the local Jacobin Club had followed the Feuillant example and formed new, more moderate, clubs on hearing the news of the massacre on the Champ de Mars. According to Robespierre, the Feuillants now dominated the local government, which was increasingly hostile to the people, the patriots and their Jacobin champions, including the most famous – himself. In fact, once the initial excitement of his homecoming had died down, many in Arras gave him the cold shoulder. He went to visit one old friend, only to find him distant and completely changed. Robespierre was upset to find that the Revolution had destroyed some of his connections from his days as a member of the Academy of Arras and the Rosati literary society.
According to Charlotte, he was also upset to discover that, in his long absence, Anais Deshorties (the stepdaughter of one of their aunts whom he had courted before the Revolution) had married another local lawyer – but if this broke his heart, there is no evidence of it in his surviving correspondence. Instead his mind was full of two political subjects: the National Guard and the Church. It was all very well to have battalions of National Guards trooping about, singing and dancing and dressing up in their new uniforms, but were they really ready to defend the country? Some of them were not even armed, let alone trained – how could they repel an invading army? Arras was close to the frontier and Robespierre’s sense that revolutionary France was dangerously unready for war grew stronger as he travelled around during his six-week holiday, visiting Lille, Béthune and the environs. He also noticed, on these short trips, that the roadside inns were full of émigrés. Dropping in for refreshment on his travels, he was horrified to overhear well-bred voices at the surrounding tables discussing their discontent with the Revolution and their plans for abandoning the country. As the uncompromising defender of liberty in the Assembly, he had argued for freedom of movement – if anyone (except the king) wanted to leave the country, they must be free to do so.1 When he saw the émigrés for himself, however, he was disconcerted. He interrogated the innkeepers. Was this typical? Yes, they told him, for quite some time people had been leaving in droves. His uncomfortable suspicion that the country’s borders were vulnerable and insecure became more intense. The counter-revolution was growing in strength and at Colbentz, just across the German border, the Prince de Condé was continuing to amass troops.
Equally disturbing to Robespierre was the religious resistance to the Revolution gathering strength across provincial France. In Arras he had grown up in an atmosphere pervaded by Catholicism. He owed his education to the Church; his intervention in the National Assembly in the interest of the lower clergy might have been an expression of gratitude; and he still sometimes spoke as though residual religious belief was the bedrock of his political convictions. When he returned home to the ecclesiastical centre of Artois, he cannot have expected to find it transformed beyond recognition. What he did find, however, shocked him deeply. Months before, his brother had written to him about the provincial clergy’s opposition to the Revolution. But in Paris, where the majority of priests had sworn to uphold the controversial Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Robespierre and his fellow radicals had little direct experience of that opposition. Not so in Arras, where there had recently been a re-enactment of the Crucifixion, with revolutionaries cast as Roman soldiers offering vinegar to the lips of the dying Christ. Refractory priests (priests who had followed the Pope in rejecting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy) were flagrantly turning their congregations against the Revolution. Confronted now with the force of religion, Robespierre wrote to an unidentified friend in Paris:
Nearly all the orators in the National Assembly were on the left over the question of priests; they spoke rhetorically about tolerance and the liberty of sects; they saw nothing but a question of philosophy and religion in what is really a question of revolutionand politics; they did not see that every time an aristocratic priest makes a convert he makes a new enemy of the Revolution; since those ignorant people he leads astray are incapable of distinguishing religious from national interest, and in appearing to defend religious opinions, [the priests] actually preach despotism and counter-revolution … I realise now that in Paris we very poorly understand the public spirit and the power of the priests. I am convinced that they alone would be enough to bring back despotism, and that the court need do no more than leave it to them, confident of soon reaping the benefit of their schemes …2
Robespierre’s view was not so different from that of the Revolution’s most articulate foreign critic, the conservative philosopher and politician Edmund Burke, who thought that the counter-revolution could rely on the priests to establish ‘peace and order in every parish’.3 Burke’s great hope was Robespierre’s worst nightmare. To his surprise and irritation, this opinion, expressed in a private letter, was published the following week in not one but two Parisian newspapers – whoever Robespierre’s friend was, he or she had betrayed him. From Arras he wrote at once to the editors to complain at the infringement of his privacy, but he made no attempt whatsoever to disown the opinion itself.4
In a letter to Maurice Duplay – a more reliable friend – Robespierre described another recent religious sensation in Arras. A refractory priest was celebrating Mass in the Chapel of Calvary when a crippled man in the congregation suddenly threw down his crutches and walked freely. The man’s wife fainted when she heard the astounding news and gave thanks to heaven for the miracle, after she had recovered consciousness. Interestingly, Robespierre does not flatly reject the concept of a miracle, as Mirabeau and other determinedly secular revolutionaries certainly would have done, often with ribaldry. Instead, he comments that it is not so surprising that a miracle should have taken place in that particular chapel, since others had occurred there in the past. There is perhaps a note of sarcasm in his next remark: ‘I do not propose to stay long in this holy land,’ he tells his carpenter friend, ‘I am not worthy of it.’5 But this is not the letter of someone who simply sneers at religion. His provincial holiday had served to remind Robespierre of religion’s immense social power. Before the holiday was over, he concluded that the Revolution must harness the Church for its own purposes or risk destruction. At the very end of his letter, he sends his greetings to Georges Couthon, another of Duplay’s Jacobin lodgers and a prominent member of the circle of friends that now surrounded Robespierre in Paris. In Arras, he was homesick for that circle.
Robespierre returned to Paris on 28 November. He went first to the Duplays’, deposited his meagre luggage, and refreshed himself in his low-ceilinged timber-framed bedroom that looked out over the carpenter’s yard. Later that evening, he went to dine with Pétion. There had been some big changes in Pétion’s life since Robespierre last saw him. He had been elected mayor of Paris in the recent municipal elections, receiving 6,728 votes to General Lafayette’s 3,126. About seventy thousand people who were eligible to vote abstained, and a hundred voted for Robespierre even though he wasn’t a candidate: flattering or frustrating, depending on how he looked at it. Dinner chez Pétion was a much grander affair than it had been on the day after the king’s flight to Varennes. As mayor, Pétion was now living in a magnificent Parisian house, ‘but his spirit is as simple and pure as ever’, Robespierre reassured himself nervously.6 He spoke freely in a letter to Buissart of the new configuration of power in Paris: Pétion had taken on an exacting role, but his personal virtue and love of the people equipped him well for it; the recently elected Legislative Assembly, according to Robespierre, was full of promise and a real improvement on its predecessor in the Manège; public opinion was turning against the Feuillants, among them Barnave, who had befriended the king on the difficult journey back from Varennes; and people were rightly suspicious of the king’s Feuillant ministers. These ministers were royalists: men Louis XVI thought he could trust to bolster his own precarious constitutional role, among them the Comte de Montmorin (the foreign affairs minister, who soon resigned) and the Comte de Narbonne (war minister). Popular opinion was increasingly hostile toward the monarch and concerned that he might try to reassert his power and strengthen his position under the new constitution. However, on arriving back in the capital, Robespierre’s first impression was that things looked good for the patriotic party.
Despite his long day travelling, before dining with Pétion Robespierre visited the Jacobin Club. Here he was greeted with rapturous applause. No sooner had he stepped back into the old monastery than the Jacobins made him their president: he had truly come home. The following evening one of the club members raised the matter of confession – surely this Catholic sacrament was dangerous and should be discouraged? Robespierre, fresh from Arras, disagreed – it was pointless attacking religious customs beloved by the people, he warned his fellow Jacobins.7 Better to hope that over time the people would mature and abandon such prejudices. In the meantime, the club should stick to discussing issues raised by the Legislative Assembly, just as it had followed the National Assembly in the past. In this way it was sure to focus on urgently relevant business. And nothing, Robespierre insisted, was more relevant than the threat of war. He was far from alone in worrying about the émigrés at the frontier. Rumours of war, of a royal plot to restore despotism, were circulating wildly. Louis XVI appeared before the Assembly on 14 December and promised to send 150,000 French troops to protect the frontier within a month. But secretly, he had already written to the major European powers requesting their armed intervention to save his throne. Robespierre did not know this for certain, but he suspected as much, and ended the year 1791 as the de facto leader of an anti-war campaign.
Brissot, who, unlike Robespierre and Pétion, had been eligible for election to the new legislative body (never having been an official member of its predecessor), was the leader of the pro-war party. He had not attended a Jacobin meeting for several months; when he suddenly decided to go and confront Robespierre on his own territory. On the night of 16 December, having set the case for war before the Assembly earlier in the day, Brissot told the Jacobins that only war could save the Revolution and stop France from becoming a plaything for Europe’s tyrants. War, as he saw it, would consolidate the Revolution in France by carrying it into foreign countries in the wake of an invading army. Robespierre intervened to prevent Brissot’s speech being printed and circulated to the affiliated clubs until he had had a chance to reply.8 Two days later he harangued the Jacobins with his twenty-page response:
Is this the war of a nation against other nations, or a king against other kings? No. It is a war of the enemies of the French Revolution against the French Revolution. Are the most numerous and dangerous of these enemies at Coblentz [the headquarters of émigré forces]? No, they are among us … War is always the first desire of a powerful government that wants to become more powerful … Let us calmly assess our situation: the nation is divided into three parts; aristocrats; patriots; and the hypocritical in-between party, known as ministers.9
On and on he went, insisting that France was teetering on the brink of a foreign, civil and religious war, all equally menacing to the Revolution. The king and his Feuillant ministers must not be trusted. But always it was the hidden enemy – the enemy within – that preoccupied Robespierre. Turning on Brissot, he asked what security he could offer against such alarming dangers. None. ‘Mistrust is a shameful state,’ Brissot had argued. Now Robespierre rebuffed him: mistrust was a good deal less shameful than ‘the stupid confidence’ (a phrase borrowed from Danton) that might lead the nation over the edge of a precipice. ‘Patriot legislators, do not slander mistrust,’ he warned Brissot and the rest of the Assembly. Finally, mindful of what he had seen in and around Arras, he pointed out that in any event France could not go to war until it was ready: weapons would need to be manufactured, the National Guard would have to be properly armed, the people themselves would need to be armed too, albeit only with pikes. All of this was a direct development of Robespierre’s earlier speech on the National Guard. Now, as then, he drew on the idea of a democratic war, waged exclusively in the general interest by the whole people in arms. The war that, for different reasons, Brissot, the king and his ministers were all proposing could not have been more different.
Mutual friends at the Jacobin Club effected a personal reconciliation between Robespierre and Brissot early in the New Year, but no one could reconcile their positions on war. ‘I shall continue to oppose Brissot’s views whenever they seem contrary to my principles,’ Robespierre announced. ‘Let our union rest upon the holy basis of patriotism and virtue; and let us fight as free men, with frankness and, if necessary, determination, but also with respect for friendship and each other.’10 And this was exactly what he did when, against all his warnings, the Assembly approved the first ultimatum to Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman emperor Leopold II. The ultimatum demanded that Leopold disassociate himself from the counter-revolutionary émigrés and all European powers hostile to the Revolution. If, by 1 March, he had still not publicly declared his support for France, war would ensue.11 Snapping straight into his Nostradamus mode, Robespierre prophesied to the Jacobins:
Ah! I can see a great crowd of people dancing in an open plain covered with grass and flowers, making play with their weapons, and filling the air with shouts of joy, and songs of war. Suddenly the ground sinks beneath their feet, the flowers, the men, the weapons disappear; and I can see nothing but a gaping chasm filled with victims. Ah! Fly! Fly, while there is still time, before the ground on which you stand opens beneath its covering of flowers.12
Marat himself could have no found more powerful images for an audience still reeling from the shock of the massacre on the Champ de Mars.
The build-up to war accentuated the division at the Jacobin Club between Robespierre and Brissot. Robespierre had to struggle hard to secure his ascendancy over what was now his only power base.13 He tried to close the club’s doors, arguing against the admission of new members, or even the readmission of old members who had left but wanted to come back. He proposed posting a list of members up on the club wall, along with their addresses, current occupations and status prior to the Revolution. This would discourage people from claiming to be Jacobins when they were not (or were no longer), and would help keep track of the membership.14 But he failed to gain control of the club’s Correspondence Committee, which, as he astutely recognised, was the link between the Parisian Jacobins and their thousands of associated clubs throughout the country.15 In February it came to light that the Correspondence Committee, dominated by Brissot’s faction, was on the point of sending a pro-war circular to affiliated clubs throughout France, without consulting the Parisian club in its entirety. Then, on 10 February, Robespierre set out before the club his own vision of a war of defence, still hoping to sway the Parisian Jacobins against the war of conquest advocated by Brissot. Robespierre began characteristically. ‘I am going to propose means of saving the fatherland, that is to say, stifling the civil war and the foreign war by confounding the schemes of our internal enemies.’16
What followed was an outpouring of his obsessions at this crucial juncture in the Revolution – many he returned to, with far more power at his disposal, two years later. They fell into two categories: internal treason, and obstacles to the free expression of public spirit. Again he raised the question of arming the National Guard and the people themselves. The king’s war minister had suggested recruiting men into the ranks of the National Guard for the professional army. Treason, warned Robespierre. This was nothing less than a proposal to annihilate the National Guard, the very opposite of arming it properly in the defence of the people. He reminded the Jacobins of how, over a year ago, he had cautioned the National Assembly against letting the king retain the right to declare war. The deputies had only half listened to him, so now the new Legislative Assembly was paying the price of not being free to make decisions independently of the king and his untrustworthy ministry. To remedy the situation, he called for weapons inspections in all the municipalities, in the presence of the people, so everyone would know exactly what there was to defend the nation with. These weapons should then be distributed to National Guards throughout France, beginning with the battalions at the frontier with the Austrian Netherlands, since some, as he had seen for himself in Arras, were still unarmed.
The next step, as he saw it, was to arm the people:
I demand the manufacture of pikes, and that the [Legislative] Assembly commend this almost sacred weapon to the people and exhort them to never forget the important role it has played in our revolution; and I propose that it [the Assembly] summon all citizens to the defence of the state and liberty, and efface all the injurious and impolitic distinctions that divide them.17
Beyond this, he called for the electoral colleges of the forty-eight Paris sections to go into permanent, that is daily, session. Perpetual vigilance was required to save the state, he insisted, and only the sections could provide it. Here again, Robespierre echoed a speech he had given in 1790 in support of Danton; now as then he wanted to see ‘a tight and holy’ alliance between the people and their representatives. But this was not enough. ‘Do you want to invigorate and regenerate the whole state in an instant?’ he asked his amazed audience. This, he thought, could be achieved by organising a new Festival of Federation, on the model of the original one, which had commemorated the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Let National Guards all over France freely elect delegations and send them to Paris for 1 March. There, in a patriotic and fraternal festival, they could renew their commitment to the admirable principle ‘Liberty or Death!’ They could offer a symbolic sacrifice on the altar of liberty and appease the spirits of the virtuous citizens.
In the middle of this speech – playing dangerously on religious imagery and the memory of earlier revolutionary scenes on the Champ de Mars – Robespierre called upon his friend Pétion to officiate at this new festival:
O Pétion! You are worthy of this honour, worthy of deploying as much energy as wisdom in the dangers that menace the fatherland which we have defended together. Come, on the tombs of our brothers let us mingle our tears and weapons, remind ourselves of the pleasures of celestial virtue, and die tomorrow, if need be, from the blows of our common enemies.18
He called too on the members of the Legislative Assembly to join in this festival that he imagined so vividly. Let them come to the Champ de Mars, not as their predecessors had done, overshadowed by the corrupt pomp of an arrogant court (Robespierre remembered how he had sat in the pavilion behind the king on 14 July 1790), but proudly inspired by ‘all the majesty of the people and the simplicity of civic virtue’.19 This indeed would be proof that the France of 14 July still lived.
After this rhetorical climax, Robespierre returned to the causes of the current crisis in foreign policy. He pointed out that the National Assembly (against his advice) had misjudged the political situation and given too much credence to the king and his ministers. It had, for example, approved of General Bouillé’s brutal repression of the rebellious soldiers in Nancy. On this, as on so many other occasions, it had been led disastrously astray. The new Legislative Assembly must do better, must remember that it was in the middle of a revolution, surrounded by traitors wearing masks of patriotism, and must remain ever vigilant and critical of the advice it received. To this end, he proposed that a new hall to house the Assembly be built on the site of the razed Bastille. Things would never have gone so catastrophically wrong if in Paris, as in Versailles, the Assembly had met in a hall big enough to admit large numbers of the general public. The restricted spectator space at the Manège had led to treasonous decisions – like the declaration of martial law that gave rise to the massacre on the Champ de Mars – that would never have been made in the presence of the people. The hall Robespierre envisaged would hold at least ten thousand spectators, and he thought it could be built quickly if as much energy and determination went into the project as had gone into the building of opera houses under the Old Regime. (In this way, he anticipated by two hundred years the televising of parliaments in the democratic world.)
Finally, he came to the subject of education, obviously extremely important given the prominent role he envisaged for the people. He favoured a centralised national system of pedagogy, which a number of other revolutionaries had already advocated. But for his purposes in this speech he outlined only a small number of simple ideas for rapidly propagating the principles of the Revolution. Unsurprisingly, after what he had already said, national festivals topped his list of suggestions. He also wanted to see the theatres used in the service of the Revolution: plays, like Brutus, William Tell and Gracchus that depicted the charms of virtue and wonders of liberty would be edifying entertainments for the people.20 Nurtured in this way, Robespierre was convinced – or said he was convinced – that public spirit would soon converge with the true principles of the Revolution and resolve the problems menacing France. When it came to patriotism, the Paris sections made better judges than the academics in the Académie Française, better judges, too, than the administrators in the department of Paris. In making this unabashed populist argument, Robespierre, as so often, was following Rousseau, who had claimed in the Social Contract that all men and groups in positions of power have an interest apart from that of the people. With Rousseau in mind, he argued that the people alone are good: ‘the spirit of the people is good, and it alone renders justice to its friends and its enemies’.21
As Robespierre stepped down from the tribune after this remarkable speech, he was applauded as rapturously as on his return from Arras. He had found his public persona and hit his political stride. This was obvious even to a foreign visitor in Paris. The political writer and composer of comic operas, William Augustus Miles, wrote of Robespierre to the British poet laureate Henry James Pye:
He is a stern man, rigid in his principles, plain, unaffected in his manners, no foppery in his dress, certainly above corruption, despising wealth, and with nothing of the volatility of a Frenchman in his character … I watch him very closely [at the Jacobins] every night. I read his countenance with eyes steadily fixed on him. He is really a character to be contemplated; he is growing every hour into consequence.22
The Jacobins acclaimed Robespierre the hero of the Revolution, and, as was now customary in their club, they proposed to print and circulate his speech to their affiliated clubs and to the Paris sections (which would, of course, be very gratified by it). However, as so often before, this seminal speech that contained in embryo Robespierre’s core themes – his suspicion of internal enemies, his trust in the people – had little impact at the time. In January the Jacobin Club had sent a circular to all its affiliates claiming that war was inevitable. Even Danton, who like Robespierre was opposed, said: ‘If anyone were to ask me, “Are we to have war?” I would reply (not in argument, but as a matter of fact), “We shall hear the bugles.”’23 After Robespierre’s speech in February there was another club circular announcing that the majority of the Parisian Jacobins strongly favoured war. And in March the king gave in to the attacks on his ministers (who were suspected of trying to turn the imminent war to the advantage of the counter-revolution), dismissed them, and appointed instead friends and associates of Brissot’s, among them Mme Roland’s husband, who became Minister of the Interior, Étienne Clavière, a Genevan financier and journalist, now Minister for Finance, and Joseph Servan, Minister for War. Suddenly Brissot was at the centre of a sphere of political influence undreamed of by anyone since Mirabeau, ranging across the Jacobins, the Legislative Assembly and the executive power. His war-mongering had proved popular with those who resented the émigrés, feared foreign invasion and suspected the king’s commitment to the Revolution. Brissot was emerging as the leading advocate of a republic in France. All eyes were upon him – none more warily than Robespierre’s.
Ever since the Revolution began, Robespierre had been suspicious of the king’s ministers, whoever they happened to be, because they were entrusted with executive power and potentially corrupt. Even Necker, whom Robespierre eulogised before 1789, became a target for his attacks afterwards. Now that Brissot’s friends – Roland, Clavière, Servan – were ministers, executive power was, for the first time, in the hands of people Robespierre knew personally. Predictably, this only aggravated his hostility. Sneeringly he criticised Brissot, who had used his influence in the Assembly to help his friends to power: ‘You have got rid of certain old ministers, but you have filled their places with your own friends. It must be confessed that your patriotism is not without its little consolations. All the world sees the publicity – the ridiculous ostentation – with which you dispose of all the offices and employments in the country among your own creatures.’24
The Incorruptible could not tolerate such nepotism. Now, on top of his ideological differences with Brissot over the putative war, there was open personal contempt. In the circumstances, his relationship with Mme Roland also deteriorated sharply. After he returned from Arras she was as effusive and solicitous towards him as ever, but very soon even she could not ignore the distance that had developed between Robespierre and the circle of radicals she presided over so proudly. Now that she was the wife of the Minister of the Interior, she was prouder still:
When my husband was at the ministry I made it a rule not to make or to receive social calls and not to invite any women to meals … twice a week I invited to dinner ministers, deputies and others with whom my husband needed to be on good terms. They always talked business in front of me because I did not interrupt and was not surrounded by indiscreet friends … Thus without any need for intrigue or unseemly curiosity I found myself at the centre of affairs.25
Mme Roland wrote to Robespierre almost ordering him to come and see her so she could pick his brains and decide how to use her supposedly discreet influence: ‘You are at the head of my list. So please come at once. I am eager to see you, and to tell you again of my regard for you – a regard that nothing can alter.’26 If he went, he went only warily, and the decline in their friendship continued. Pétion tried to act as a peacemaker. But it would not be long before Robespierre – who had only recently imagined standing by Pétion’s side, pledging Liberty or Death on the Champ de Mars, fell out with him too. Here began a period of political isolation which Robespierre, determined as always never to compromise his principles, relished. He had no formal power of any kind, except his legal office as Public Prosecutor, which he resigned on 10 April, along with its steady income of 8,000 livres a year.
All his energy now went into the Jacobin Club, whose support he needed more than ever. In his isolation he identified yet more closely with Rousseau. When Brissot returned to the club to try once again to defeat Robespierre on the question of war, Robespierre retorted that the only legitimate charge ever levied against him was that he had championed the cause of the people by opposing a war that he thought would lead to the defeat of the Revolution at home and abroad. He was proud to admit this charge. From his experience of public life so far he had learnt for himself ‘the great moral and political truth announced by Jean-Jacques [Rousseau], that men are sincerely fond only of those who show them affection; that only the people are good, just and generous; and that corruption and tyranny are the monopoly of those who hold them in disdain’.27 Robespierre claimed to be happy in his isolation, happy even to retire from politics (at this some of the women in his audience gasped), so long as he could remain true to his principles and free to worship the ‘sacred image of Jean-Jacques’. ‘But where would you have me retire?’ he asks his fellow Jacobins. What despotic regime would offer him asylum, and how could he leave France with liberty under attack?
No! One might abandon one’s country in the hour of happiness and triumph; but when it is threatened, when it is torn asunder, when it is oppressed, one cannot do so; one must either save it, or die for it. Heaven that gave me a soul passionately fond of liberty, and yet ordained that I should be born under the domination of tyrants; Heaven, which prolonged my existence up to the reign of faction and of crime, is perhaps calling me to mark with my blood the road that leads my native land to happiness and freedom. I accept with enthusiasm this sweet and glorious destiny.28
It was this peculiar combination of acute political suspicion and personal animosity towards anyone who disagreed with him which carried Robespierre to his lonely and eccentric destination in the Revolution. Tellingly, he quoted directly a politically pregnant phrase of Rousseau’s: le peuple veut le bien, mais il ne le voit pas toujours (the people want what is good, but they do not always see it).29 Robespierre was very sure of himself as an astute interpreter of what was, or was not, in the interests of the people. And so those whose opinions differed from his were instantly suspect.
On 11 April a member of the Jacobins described a recent invention: a new kind of rifle that could fire twenty-five rounds a minute. Should the club help fund experiments to perfect it? Absolutely not, said Robespierre, such an invention was contrary to humanitarian principles. He said that some time towards the end of the National Assembly, he had seen this rifle demonstrated in the garden of the house he was then living in. It could shoot nine rounds without needing to be recharged. The inventor had asked his opinion, and Robespierre had told him to keep silent about it – such a discovery in the hands of a free people might give them a momentary advantage over despots, but the weapon would soon pass into the hands of the despots and become just one more instrument for oppressing the people (a very pertinent and prescient point for all revolutionaries). The majority of the Jacobins, however, were not convinced. The atmosphere in Paris grew more bellicose by the day.
The tide of public opinion ran against him, the Jacobins could not be swayed against the war, but Robespierre refused to back down. He feared that war could only damage the Revolution. If France lost, foreign enemies would crush the Revolution and re-establish a despotic form of government to suit their own interests. But if France won, Robespierre thought internal enemies, in league with the king and the victorious army generals, were just as likely to destroy the Revolution. General Lafayette was particularly untrustworthy, in Robespierre’s view. Lafayette had retired from public life after the king formally accepted the constitution in 1791. However, with war imminent, he had been recalled to command one of the three armies the French had now positioned on the frontier to attack the émigré forces and Austria, if necessary. Robespierre thought the ambitious veteran of the American Revolution was secretly hoping to lead France to victory, only to perpetrate a military coup and seize power afterwards. There was no similarity, Robespierre insisted, between the American War of Independence and the war France was about to become embroiled in. When the Americans fought against foreign despotism, they did not have internal enemies to fight simultaneously. Arguing that the Americans had triumphed (not without cost) over a despot who made open war on them, Robespierre asked if they would still have triumphed if generals loyal to their enemy, George III, had been leading them.30
On 1 March, the very day named in the French ultimatum he had received, the queen’s brother, the Holy Roman emperor Leopold II, suddenly died. Robespierre publicly thanked Providence for averting the war in this unexpected way. The Jacobins were astonished. As one of them blurted out, how could someone who had worked for three years to liberate the people subscribe to such superstitious nonsense as a belief in Providence? Instead of letting this pass and confining himself to the debate about the international crisis, Robespierre veered off into a vehement profession of religious faith. Perhaps he could not stop himself, or perhaps he saw no reason not to:
There is nothing superstitious in using the name of the Deity. I believe, myself, in those eternal principles on which human weakness reposes, before it starts on the path of virtue. These are not idle words in my mouth, any more than they have been idle words in the mouths of many great men, nonetheless moral for their belief in the existence of God.31
This caused uproar in the old monastery chapel. Robespierre shouted over it:
No, gentlemen! You cannot stifle my voice. There is no call to order that can stifle this truth … Yes, it is hazardous to invoke the name of Providence, and express the idea of the Eternal Being who intimately affects the destinies of nations, and who seems to me personally to watch over the French Revolution in a very special way. But my belief is heartfelt; it is a feeling I cannot dispense with. I needed it to sustain me in the National Assembly, surrounded by all those passions, vile intrigues, and so many enemies. How could I have carried out my tasks that required superhuman strength, if I had not nurtured my isolated soul? … This divine sentiment has more than compensated me for the advantages that are gained by those who are prepared to betray the people.32
With that the meeting ended. Four days later, Robespierre withdrew his proposal to circulate another controversial address to the affiliated clubs on regenerating the public spirit. For the moment nothing was more important than harmony among the Jacobins, he claimed, in bad faith since he had so purposefully exacerbated division in the club with his anti-war efforts. But he knew his latest speech had gone too far. ‘M. Robespierrot [sic] is completely out of favour, dépopularisé. He had the audacity to say in the middle of the Jacobins, that he believes in the existence of God,’ one newspaper reported.33
Another cause of Robespierre’s political isolation, according to Fréron, one of his former schoolmates, was the Duplay household. ‘It is perhaps to this change of residence that one should attribute the development of his ambition. Whilst he lived [in the rue Saintonge] … he was accessible to his friends and to any patriot. Once installed at the Duplays’, little by little he became invisible. They sequestered him from society, adored, intoxicated, ruined him by exalting his pride.’34 The family at number 366, rue Saint-Honoré consisted of Duplay, his wife, three of their four daughters, a son and a nephew. Although he was a joiner and cabinet-maker by trade, Duplay’s real income came from renting the houses he had bought after moving to the capital from Vézelay. Since the Revolution, his preferred tenants had been Jacobins. By the time they came to know Robespierre, Duplay and his wife were middle-aged, settled, hospitable people with strong political views and a wide circle of acquaintance that included the artists François Gérard and Pierre Paul Prudhon, the sculptor Pierre Cietty and the musician Philippe Buonarroti. It is not credible that Robespierre was less accessible living at the heart of the Duplay household, just doors away from the Jacobins and round the corner from the Manège and the Tuileries palace, than he had been when he lived all the way out in the Marais. However, it must have been more difficult for anyone to see him alone. His visitors could reach his rooms by narrow ladder-like stairs from the family dining room, or by an external staircase in the yard – something like a modern fire escape. Those who chose the latter could avoid the scrutiny of the assembled company – Buonarroti on the piano if there was one, the Duplay daughters playing with Robespierre’s dog Brount, Duplay himself holding forth on the day’s political developments. But footsteps and raised voices would be overheard downstairs through the timber floor. Real privacy was impossible at number 366, where even the blue and white damask curtains around Robespierre’s bed had been made from one of Mme Duplay’s old dresses.
Since Robespierre often took their part when their mother was cross with them (an extension, perhaps, of his political insistence on championing the weak and vulnerable), the Duplay daughters were soon extremely fond of him. The youngest, Élisabeth, recalled: ‘I was very young, and rather silly; but he gave me such good advice that, young as I was, I enjoyed listening to him. If I was upset about anything, I used to tell him all about it. He was never censorious, but a friend, the best brother a girl could have, a model of virtue. He had a great regard for my father and mother, and we all loved him dearly.’35 Her elder sister Eléonore – plain, dark-haired and serious – had more romantic feelings for the famous lodger. According to the family doctor, Souberbielle – who was in a better position than anyone else to know the household’s private business – her feelings were reciprocated. Eléonore and Robespierre were, he remembers, ‘very fond of each other and they were engaged to be married, but nothing immodest passed between them. Without affectation or prudery, Robespierre kept out of, and even put a stop to, any kind of improper talk; and his morals were pure.’36 Although doctors, for all their privileged access to information, are often far from reliable, Souberbielle’s testimony seems credible, because even if Robespierre was the kind of man to get himself into trouble with a mistress in the Marais, he was hardly the kind to carry on an indiscreet affair with a young girl under her father’s own roof. He was neither deeply jaded nor helplessly promiscuous – if anything he was rather romantic – and the idea that he and Eléonore should wait until his public commitments were less exacting would have held a deep appeal. ‘She had the soul of a man, and would have known how to die as well as she knew how to love,’ he boasted of his intended.37
Despite the division over the war tearing them apart in the spring of 1792, the Jacobins united to celebrate the return of the freed Châteauvieux soldiers, so controversially condemned to the galleys for their mutiny in Nancy. After serving less than two years of their life sentences of hard labour, these mutineers were now officially pardoned and received in Paris as heroes, their broken shackles badges of honour. At first, the Assembly hesitated to receive the returning mutineers. The constitution, very reasonably, banned armed men from entering the legislative chamber. But on this occasion the Assembly broke the rule and the ex-convicts marched through the Manège, accompanied by a detachment of National Guards with drums, flags, banners and weapons, to the resounding applause of the Jacobin deputies, in agreement for the first time in months. After the soldiers came a mob of men and women brandishing pikes – some of the thousands that had recently been manufactured in accordance with Robespierre’s demands. Over in the Hôtel de Ville, the municipal government decreed a national festival in honour of the Châteauvieux soldiers – exactly the sort of occasion that Robespierre hoped would regenerate the public spirit and propagate revolutionary principles.
On Sunday 15 April, an excited crowd paraded through Paris pulling a galley wreathed with flowers. With it came women carrying the broken shackles high for everyone to see; then forty-one placards bearing the names of the ex-convicts, each adorned with a civic crown of oak leaves (a symbol of patriotism inspired by Ancient Rome); and busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and the seventeenth-century English republican Algernon Sidney – all prophets of freedom in the eyes of the patriots. Finally there came a float carrying a statue of liberty, brandishing, somewhat incongruously, an enormous club. Surrounded by a moving forest of pikes, the parade made ceremonial stops at the site of the demolished Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, the Champ de Mars, etc.: the ceremony was strangely similar to the Stations of the Cross that had been performed the previous week throughout France. The crowd sang revolutionary hymns. Some proudly identified themselves as ‘sans-culottes’: ordinary working people, patriots without fine clothes (literally without the culottes, or knee breeches, of the wealthier classes). Pétion officiated in his capacity as mayor of Paris. He did not, however, wield the kind of control General Lafayette on his white charger had previously extended at festivals commemorating the fall of the Bastille. This was a popular demonstration, not a disciplined military parade from which the people were carefully excluded. According to some hostile reports, it was a rather debauched affair. The girls carrying broken shackles had been recruited from among the prostitutes in the Palais Royal gardens, not all the songs were pious revolutionary hymns, and there was apparently some louche dancing as well. But if there was, the Incorruptible did not notice, or turned a blind eye. The press described the event as ‘Robespierre’s Festival’, but it is hard to know whether he was really pleased with it. Afterwards he proposed a monument of commemoration with the inscription: ‘The Triumph of Poverty and the People, the National Guard, the soldiers of Châteauvieux, and all good citizens persecuted on account of the Revolution.’
Three days later, the king’s sister wrote from the Tuileries palace to her friend the Marquise de Raigecourt:
You think perhaps we are still in the agitation of the festival of Châteauvieux; not at all; everything is very tranquil. The people flocked to see Dame Liberty tottering on her triumphal car, but they shrugged their shoulders. Three or four hundred sans-culottes followed her shouting: ‘The Nation! Liberty! The Sans-Culottes!’ It was all very noisy, but flat. The National Guards would not mingle; on the contrary, they were angry, and Pétion, they say, is ashamed of his conduct. The next day a pike with a bonnet rouge walked about the [Tuileries] garden, without shouting, and did not stay long.38
Mme Élisabeth was not alone in finding the festival absurd, and there was some truth in the rumours she had heard about the ambivalence with which the National Guards and Pétion participated. On 20 April, France finally declared war on Leopold II’s son and successor as Holy Roman emperor, Francis II. (Prussia joined in on Austria’s side in June.) Pétion immediately wrote to Robespierre imploring him to repair the divisions at the Jacobins that had been caused – Pétion dared suggest it – by his friend’s frustrated ambition and petty jealousy of those in power: ‘We have lost the quiet energy of free men. We no longer judge things coolly. We shout like children or lunatics. I simply tremble when I consider how we are behaving, and I ask myself every moment whether we can continue to be free. I cannot sleep at night, for my usual peaceful slumbers are disturbed by dreams of disaster.’39 Robespierre did not reply.
*
Nature gave me a strong frame, and she put into my face the violence of liberty. I have not sprung from a family that was weakened by the protection of the old privileges; my existence has been all my own; I know that I have kept and shown my vigour, but in my profession and in my private life I have controlled it … I consecrated my whole life to the people, and now that they are beyond attack, now that they are in arms and ready to break the league [of foreign powers] unless it consents to dissolve, I will die in their cause if I must … for I love them only, and they deserve it. Their courage will make them eternal.40
This was not Robespierre speaking, but Danton, who had returned from London as soon as it seemed safe after the Champ de Mars massacre. Their physiques aside – Robespierre’s slight frame, Danton’s burly one – the two men had a great deal in common. Both were dedicated to the people, above all. Both were operating outside the Legislative Assembly and extremely active in the Jacobins (Danton was also still prominent at the Cordeliers and had an administrative post in Paris’s municipal government). Both were against the war; convinced the country was unprepared, suspicious of the king, and afraid the forces of counter-revolution would triumph with a foreign invasion. Their suspicions were soon justified: after the fighting began at the border, the distressing dispatches which reached Paris, each more alarming than the last, made it clear that the war was not going well and the Revolution was hanging in the balance. Within two weeks the French generals had lost control – French soldiers actually murdered one of them – officers absconded and the enemy captured entire regiments.
The Jacobins – frightened, angry, hysterical – laid into one another. Their internecine fighting figured so prominently in the press that a letter arrived from the front deploring these distracting divisions at a time of national crisis. It was duly hissed in the club. The personal attacks continued. One newspaper held Robespierre single-handedly responsible for the private vendettas and endless denunciations: ‘M. Robertspierre [sic] resigned his position as Public Prosecutor to prove, as he said himself, that he is not ambitious. Does this not prove, on the contrary, that he is devoured by an immeasurable ambition?’41 On 10 May another letter from the front arrived, accusing Robespierre of sullying the tribune at the Jacobins by attacking General Lafayette. Despite fierce dispute and many disruptions, the letter was read aloud. Afterwards, Robespierre went up to the tribune and snatched it from the hands of the man who had just read it. Chaos broke out again. On another occasion a Jacobin named Jean Baptiste Louvet, the licentious novelist and poetically gifted son of a Parisian stationery shop owner, accused Robespierre of tyrannising the club. Danton stepped forward to defend him: ‘M. Robespierre has never used any tyranny in this House, unless it is the tyranny of reason: it is not patriotism, but base jealousy and all the most harmful passions that inspire the attacks against him.42 But not even Danton could deny that his friend was always ready with a vicious counter-attack.
In the midst of this rancorous strife Robespierre decided to start his own journal. Despite being passionate and opinionated, he was not, in many respects, a natural journalist. Even more long-winded on the page, his speeches seemed far flatter – almost pedantic – in print. But it was relatively easy to venture into journalism at this time, even with little natural talent; all you needed was a bit of funding and enough stamina to write a couple of thousand words a week. From the middle of May, Le Défenseur de la Constitution(The Defender of the Constitution) appeared every Tuesday in an eye-catching red paper cover. The issues were undated – very peculiar for a journal or newspaper nowadays, but commonplace at the time. Despite its conservative sounding title (since when had Robespierre been the defender of a constitution he never ceased to criticise during its drafting in the National Assembly?) what he really wanted was another platform from which to attack Brissot and anyone else who disagreed with him over the course of the Revolution. Readers could subscribe for 36 livres a year and were welcome to send in comments or books for review. Initially, the printer was to be another of Duplay’s lodgers – an artisan from that close circle devoted to the Incorruptible. But then Robespierre came to a new arrangement with a printer and bookseller in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie Française, who promised to get the journal into every post office in France and all the major bookshops of Europe.
There was something implausible about Robespierre’s prospectus for the journal. His pen, he professes, will be directed only by his love of justice and truth. He will descend from the tribune and ‘mount the platform of the universe to speak not only to an Assembly, which might be agitated by the clash of different interests, but to the whole human race, whose interest is that of reason and general happiness’. He will be like an actor who, leaving the stage and positioning himself in the audience, is better able to judge the play. He will be like a traveller who flees the tumultuous metropolis – or, in his case, revolutionary politics – and climbs to the summit of a mountain so as to feel ‘the calm of nature sink into his soul, and his thoughts broaden out with the horizon’. So Le Défenseur de la Constitution would be nothing like Marat’s or Desmoulins’ or Brissot’s or Louvet’s publications: no, Robespierre’s was to be modelled on the Sermon on the Mount with romantic overtures. Predictably enough, he promised to use it to unmask the enemies of the people: ‘Placed since the beginning of the Revolution at the centre of political happenings, I have had a close view of the tortuous advance of tyranny; I have discovered that our most dangerous enemies are not those who have openly declared themselves; and I shall try to render my knowledge of value for the safety of my country.’43 For all the declared purity of the journal’s manifesto, it was really a weapon in a factional fight that Robespierre had no intention of relinquishing.
Brissot and his friends were now openly calling for a republic. In his fight against them, Robespierre went so far as to turn himself into the last defender of the constitutional monarchy. Recognising that, for the time being, Brissot and his friends had made the campaign for a republic in France their own, Robespierre dared to criticise republicanism itself: ‘I care no more for Cromwell than for Charles I,’ he announced flamboyantly. ‘Surely it is not in the words “monarchy” or “republic” that we shall find the solution to the great problems of society.’44 Brissot had recently started a journal entitled Le Républicain (The Republican). There was nothing, Robespierre insisted in the first issue of his own journal, truly populist about Brissot’s new venture except its title. Furthermore, he argued, the very word ‘republic’ had recently caused division among the patriots and given the enemies of liberty an excuse for claiming that there was a conspiracy afoot against the monarchy and the constitution. Indeed, in Brissot’s hands, the word ‘republic’ had led directly to the massacre of innocent citizens – for it was Brissot who had been behind the petition that caused the débâcle on the Champ de Mars on 17 July, almost a year before. It was Brissot who had insisted on calling for the abolition of the monarchy, when all the Jacobins had wanted was a referendum on the role of the king after his flight to Varennes. This – obviously – was splitting hairs. Robespierre had wanted to put the king on trial in 1791 and the call for a referendum was itself a challenge to the future of the monarchy. Here, however, it suited him to implicate Brissot in the bloodshed on the Champ de Mars: of all the crimes in the Revolution so far, the one that would never be forgotten or forgiven. Not even his worst enemy could claim that Brissot had intended the massacre – but he was nonetheless culpable, in Robespierre’s eyes, of inept and impolitic behaviour. More recently, Robespierre argued, Brissot was even more culpable for collaborating with General Lafayette over the disastrous war. According to Robespierre, Brissot’s mask of patriotism had slipped and he now ripped it off. So much for rising above the factional strife and publishing a journal of Olympian impartiality!
Also in the first issue of Le Défenseur de la Constitution was Robespierre’s recent retort to Brissot in the Jacobin Club, delivered just after the declaration of war. Brissot had come again to the Jacobins to put an end to Robespierre’s vituperations. ‘What have you done,’ he asked dramatically, ‘to give you the right to criticize me and my friends?’ Robespierre seized the opportunity to summarise his own contributions to the Revolution so far. Now the readers of his journal throughout France (and beyond, if the bookseller kept his promise) would learn the story of his early revolutionary career.
When I was only a member of a very small tribunal [in Arras], I opposed the Lamoignon Edicts on grounds of the principle of popular sovereignty, when superior tribunals only opposed them on form … In the epoch of primary assemblies [in Arras] I alone insisted that we not merely reclaim, but also exercise the rights of sovereignty … When the Third Estate [in Arras] wanted humbly to thank the nobles for their false renunciation of financial privileges, I persuaded them to declare only that they did not have the right to give to the people that which already belonged to them.45
In Robespierre’s eyes, one overwhelming conclusion followed from these flawless revolutionary credentials: those attacking him three years later, in political circumstances changed beyond all recognition, could only be enemies of the people. By now, Robespierre was personally invested in the public image of himself as incorruptible: he was not and had never been in the wrong. In this context, further comparison with Danton is illuminating. On one of the rare occasions that Danton spoke about himself in public, he was able to say: ‘If I was carried away by enthusiasm in the first days of our regeneration, have I not atoned for it? Have I not been ostracised?’46 Robespierre could not have spoken these words. Atonement – for all his religious sensibility – was outside his repertoire; martyrdom made more sense to him. Like Danton, he had given himself to the people and could envisage dying for them; but unlike Danton, he could never admit that he might have been wrong. Why? Because he was a self-righteous and hypocritical prig? In some respects, he certainly was. Yet it is the political implications of the differences between the two men that really matter in the history of the Revolution. Both aspired to be popular leaders. Danton’s identification with the people was objective – when he could, he left his flawed, colourful, life-loving self out of politics. For him, the distinction between private and public life was rarely confused. In contrast, Robespierre’s identification with the people was subjective. If he was wrong the people were wrong, and that, as Rousseau had assured him, simply could not be the case. Later in the Revolution, when his wife suddenly died, Danton was plunged into deep personal grief; despite his many alleged infidelities, he had loved her passionately. Robespierre wrote to him: ‘I love you more than ever, I love you until death. At this moment, I am you. Do not harden your heart to the voice of friendship.’47 To anyone who did not know Robespierre, such a letter at such a time might have seemed a bit gauche and offensively self-centred. Danton, however, did know Robespierre, and recognised that that capacity to channel himself into someone or something else – to seamlessly identify with something beyond himself and make it his own – was the very centre of his friend’s extraordinary self.
For someone staking both his personal and political credibility on never being wrong, Robespierre’s defence of the ailing constitutional monarchy was extremely risky. In 1789 he had argued vehemently, but unsuccessfully, against giving the king a legislative veto. Now, over matters of religion and the army, Louis XVI was on the brink of using his veto against the Legislative Assembly. After their appointment in March 1792, Brissot’s friends pursued a policy on religion guaranteed to antagonise the king. On 24 April, four days into the foreign war, Roland (supported or perhaps even inspired by his avidly political wife) called for repressive measures against the refractory priests whom Robespierre himself had already identified as a major counter-revolutionary threat. A month later, on 24 May, the Assembly approved a decree to banish and deport all members of the clergy who still refused to swear the oath to the Civil Constitution. Effectively, this sanctioned a nationwide priest-hunt, and it was obvious that Louis XVI, already in such trouble with his conscience, would baulk at approving the persecution of Catholic priests. A showdown between the Assembly and the king, at a time when the ministers it had imposed on him were calling for a republic, would certainly have resulted in the collapse of the constitution. Given his recent defence of it, Robespierre would have been left looking foolish, the hapless defender of a hopeless cause. The fact that he was prepared to risk this is testimony to two things: his confidence in himself as a revolutionary leader, and his irreconcilable differences with Brissot’s faction, from which he wanted to distinguish himself at any cost.
The view that the refractory priests were a threat to the Revolution was far from eccentric, and it would be unreasonable to blame Brissot’s faction for the trouble it caused the king in this respect. But the faction went a step beyond troubling Louis XVI’s conscience to menacing his person, when it persuaded the Assembly to abolish his personal bodyguard. Holed-up inside the Tuileries, pinning their hopes on a foreign invasion and maintaining a stalwart sense of humour as the tide of hostility flowed round them (‘a pike with a bonnet rouge walked around the [Tuileries] garden … and did not stay long’) was all very well, but none of the royals could ignore the implications of the removal of their guards. They were even more alarmed to hear that the bodyguards were to be replaced not by ordinary Parisian National Guards (most of whom were headed for the front line), but by members of a new federalist army, called to Paris from the provinces and selected by local Jacobin clubs. This proposal was as offensive to the National Guard as it was threatening to the king and his family. Many people – thousands of National Guards among them – thus urged him to use his veto and put a stop both to the new army and to the persecution of the priests. On holiday in Arras in the autumn of 1791, Robespierre had fixed on two main sources of revolutionary anxiety: France’s armed forces, and its refractory priests. Six months later, his twin anxieties were proving prophetic.
The idea of a new patriot army, summoned to Paris to supplement if not actually replace the National Guards, was originally Robespierre’s. He had first suggested something of the kind in one of his anti-war speeches to the Jacobins, when he imagined a new federation of civilian soldiers from all over France regenerating public spirit on the Champ de Mars.48 Since then, in the very first issue of his journal, he had called for an army of 60,000 veteran soldiers to be assembled and garrisoned close to Paris. To his dismay, Brissot’s friend in the ministry (Joseph Servan, the new Minister for War) was calling for something disconcertingly similar: a new national army of twenty thousand men chosen and sent to Paris by local Jacobin clubs throughout France. The problem, from Robespierre’s point of view, was to determine which of the Jacobin factions would do the choosing – his own or Brissot’s? Where would the loyalties of the new troops really lie? For all his exertions on the Jacobin Correspondence Committee, there was next to nothing he could do to ensure the outcome he desired. Instead, he channelled his energy into an elaborate theoretical discussion of military discipline that filled twenty pages of the next issue of his journal. From this it emerged that he was as intent on applying democratic principles to the armed forces as to any other sector of society.
Every soldier was also a citizen and every citizen also a member of the human race, Robespierre insisted. He envisaged duties attached to each of these three spheres in ascending order – the professional duties of a soldier were narrower than his duties as a citizen, which in turn were narrower still than his duties as a human being. Yet he completely evaded the real issue in this area: what is to happen if, or when, these spheres of duty collide? The one example of such a collision that he mentioned was ludicrous. He imagined an off-duty soldier chatting up a woman at a party and being ordered by his superior officer to stop: ‘Your presence here displeases me, I order you to return to barracks and forbid you to talk to this woman. I reserve for myself alone the pleasure of conversing with her.’49 Irritating as such a scenario would no doubt be for the frustrated soldier, it hardly got to the heart of the problem of military discipline in a country slipping into civil war. The first anniversary of the Champ de Mars massacre was just weeks away. In the immediate aftermath of that massacre, Robespierre had done well to remind the Jacobins that the National Guards who obeyed General Lafayette and fired on unarmed civilians were not to blame for their orders – were themselves still citizens and patriots too. But there was a huge difference between struggling to limit the bloodshed in a political crisis and delineating a coherent theory of how soldiers could be held to their duties. Unexpectedly, fragile, bookish Robespierre turned out far more talented at the practice than the theory of politics. Before the Revolution he had been a competent lawyer and a second-rate essayist; in its maelstrom he was emerging a quirkily brilliant politician. As blossoms fell once again from the cherry trees in the Tuileries gardens and the spring of 1792 ripened into summer, however, he was still overshadowed by Brissot’s faction.
The inner circle round Brissot was presided over by Mme Roland, growing ever more imperious in her modest parlour. They now planned a republic for part, if not all, of France. ‘We spoke often’, she reported,
about the excellent spirit in the Midi, the energy of the departments there and the facilities which that part of France might provide for the foundation of a Republic should the Court succeed in subjugating the north of France and Paris. We got out the maps; we drew the line of demarcation. Servan [Minister for War] studied the military positions; we calculated the forces available and examined the means of reorganising supply. Each of us contributed ideas as to where and from whom we might expect support.50
Roland’s wife had come a long way since she married an obscure bureaucrat twenty years her senior – out of intellectual respect. Now she bent her pretty head over maps of France and helped the ministry to divide it into putative republican and monarchical segments. On 10 June she prompted Roland to write an open letter to the king denouncing his threat to use his veto to delay the Assembly’s decrees on the refractory priests and the new federal army (due to arrive in Paris in time for the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July). She may even have drafted the words in which Roland effectively accused the king of treason: ‘much more delay and a grieving people will see in its King the friend and accomplice of conspirators’.51 Unsurprisingly, the king responded, two days later, by dismissing Roland and his friends from the ministry. They had lasted just three months in office.
General Lafayette heard the news on the front line. Still the war continued to go badly. Lafayette struggled more than ever to integrate new rank-and-file soldiers recruited from the National Guard with remnants of the Old Regime army. There were not enough funds or weapons; the frontier moved closer to Paris every day. In an open letter to the capital, he welcomed the fall of Brissot’s friends and blamed all France’s recent troubles, including the reverses in the war, on the Jacobin Club: ‘this sect, organised like a district empire, in its metropolitan and affiliated societies, blindly guided by ambitious chiefs, forms a separate corporation in the midst of the French people, whose power it usurps by governing its representatives and proxies’.52 Did Lafayette have in mind a military coup to coincide with 14 July, as Robespierre feared? Might he sweep down from the north on his white charger and put a stop once and for all to the relentless bickering in the capital when the nation already had its work cut out fighting a foreign war? If so, there would be bloodshed again on the Champ de Mars, for Paris meanwhile was planning a popular protest in support of the dismissed ministers. Robespierre disapproved. He hated and feared Lafayette: ‘Strike at Lafayette and the nation will be saved’ was his improbable advice to the Jacobins.53 But he hated Brissot’s faction just as bitterly, so he stood at the tribune and denounced the forthcoming protest:
You [friends of Brissot] that are sounding so loud an alarm and giving such an impulse to the public mind on the subject of a change of ministry, why do you not employ your power for a more national object – some object worthy of the French people? If you have grievances lay them before the Assembly. No doubt a great country is justified in rising in its own defence, but only a degraded people can allow itself to be thrown into such agitation for the interests of individuals and the intrigues of a party.54
He might as well have said that Brissot was not worth a single drop of patriotic blood. But no one was listening to him. The demonstration in favour of the dismissed ministers and against the king’s veto – widely vilified ever since it was first discussed in 1789 – was planned for 20 June: the third anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath at Versailles. The Jacobin and Cordeliers clubs, the municipal government of Paris, the electoral assemblies of the city’s forty-eight sections were all involved. The plan was to present a petition to the Assembly and plant a tree of liberty in the Tuileries. But the petitioners also wanted permission to bring their weapons, a request refused by the municipal government. As mayor of Paris, Pétion found himself in a very difficult position. He did not want to be blamed for suppressing the protest, but nor did he want responsibility for the bloodshed that might result if the crowd was armed. He referred the problem on to Pierre-Louis Rœderer, now the chief legal adviser of the department of Paris, which had wider responsibilities than the municipality. Rœderer had the courage to ban the proposed demonstration, calling on the National Guards to stop the protestors from going ahead illegally: another massacre loomed on the Champ de Mars. Pétion, having passed the problem to Rœderer, now disputed his solution, said no power on earth should be allowed to prevent the demonstration, and suggested that the National Guards march alongside the petitioners, rather than against them. The National Guards were divided: some were delighted to join the petitioners, others refused.
At 5 a.m. on the morning of 20 June, a mob began to assemble at the site of the fallen Bastille. Later in the day it set off with a tree of liberty in the direction of the Tuileries. Rœderer, furious at the flouting of his advice, got there first, entered the Manège and told the Assembly that had it not recently broken a constitutional rule to admit armed men into one of its own sessions, the impending crisis would never have loomed.55 One of Brissot’s friends stood up and retorted that since the Assembly had indeed recently received armed men, when the Châteauvieux soldiers marched through the Manège, it would be a gross insult to the people of Paris if their petition was rejected merely because it came accompanied by arms. Before the deputies could decide how to settle this argument, the mob arrived and forced its way into the debating hall. The demonstrators were persuaded to leave peacefully, but only on the condition that they would be allowed to march back in later. And so they did, drums, weapons, pikes, banners and all; for the second time in three months the Assembly applauded the rabble-rousing music of the people in arms. It drew the line only at a bloody bullock’s heart skewered on a pike and inscribed ‘THE HEART OF AN ARISTOCRAT’. This was one popular emblem too many for the deputies and they sent it straight outside, where it was paraded instead at the gates of the Tuileries. The single pike, which the king’s sister had laughed at in April, was back in the garden in June, covered in blood: ‘DEATH TO VETO AND HIS WIFE’, the crowd menaced from below. When it came to the planting of the tree of liberty – which, after the presentation of the petition to the Assembly and the king, was the ostensible point of the demonstration – a new problem arose. There were twenty-four battalions of National Guards strategically positioned in and around the Tuileries and the palace gates were closed.56 The petitioners had no hope of forcing their way into the gardens, and anyway it would have been absurd to risk a bloody confrontation over planting a tree, even if it was a tree of liberty. They compromised and planted it instead behind the Assembly in the courtyard of the Capucins convent on the south side of the rue Saint-Honoré, almost directly opposite the Duplays’ house. If Robespierre was at home in his room that day – and very likely he was – he could have watched the planting from his first-floor window. Otherwise he played no part.
Given the number of National Guards defending the Tuileries – ten battalions on the western terrace of the palace alone – it was, and remains, something of a mystery that the demonstrating mob did finally manage to get inside. One explanation is that a delegation of municipal officers went to the king and complained that the locked gates were offensive to the people, who were merely holding a peaceful demonstration on the anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. They may, or may not, have pointed out that back in 1789 it was the king’s attempt to lock the Third Estate out of its own meeting hall in Versailles that led to it reassembling in a tennis court and swearing never to be disbanded until the nation had received a new constitution. Three years later, to the very day, it was locked out again and definitely no less offended. In another letter to her friend the Marquise de Raigecourt, the king’s sister wrote her account of that frightening day, from the perspective of those trapped inside the Tuileries:
For three days before the 20 [June] we expected a great upheaval in Paris … but thought we had taken all necessary precautions to ward off every danger. Wednesday morning the courtyard and garden were full of troops. At midday we learnt that the faubourg Saint-Antoine was on the march; it brought a petition to the Assembly, and did not declare its plan to cross the Tuileries [garden]. Fifteen hundred people filed into the Assembly; a few National Guards and some Invalids; the rest sans-culottes and women. Three municipal officers came to ask the King to allow the demonstrators to enter the garden, saying that the Assembly was troubled by the crowd, and the passageways so crammed that the gates might be forced. The King told them to arrange with the commandant to let them defile along the terrace of the Feuillants and go out by the gate of the riding-school [Manège].
Despite these orders, shortly afterwards the other gates of the garden were opened. Soon the garden was full [of demonstrators]. The pikes began to defile in order under the terrace in front of the Palace, where there were three lines of National Guards … The National Guard, which had not been able to obtain any orders since the morning, had the grief of watching them cross the courtyard without being able to bar the way … At this point, we were at the King’s window … The doors were closed … The pikes entered the chamber like a thunderbolt; they looked for the King, especially one of them, who said the most dreadful things … At last Pétion and members of the municipality arrived. The first harangued the people, and after praising the ‘dignity’ and ‘order’ with which they had marched, he invited them to retire with ‘the same calmness’ so that no one could reproach them for abandoning themselves to excess during a ‘civic festival’. At last the populace began to depart … The King returned to his room, and nothing could be more touching than the moment when the queen and his children threw themselves around his neck. The deputies who were there burst into tears … At ten o’clock the Palace was empty again, and everyone went to bed … The Jacobins are sleeping. These are the details of the 20 June. Adieu; I am well; I kiss you, and am thankful you are not here in the fray.57
Hearing of the mob’s invasion of the Tuileries, Lafayette decided to wait no longer, abandoned his embattled troops on the front line and returned to Paris demanding the punishment of the perpetrators of 20 June, the destruction of the Jacobin Club and a return to law and order. He went to see the king, for the last time as it turned out. ‘The King told me in the presence of the Queen and his family’, Lafayette reported, ‘that the Constitution was his safety, and that he was the only person who observed it.’58 By now this was true. Robespierre was still publishing his journal, Le Défenseur de la Constitution, but the presence of Lafayette in Paris – the general’s open hostility to the Jacobins and the imminent threat of a military coup – reunited him temporarily with Brissot’s faction. For the time being, the enemies of Robespierre’s enemy Lafayette were his friends. He began to work with them for ‘the constitutional rising against the constitution’, maintaining through this contorted paradoxical phrase the impression that he had not been wrong to defend the constitution in recent months, and was not wrong now in seeking to overthrow it. By his own standards, he came dangerously close to admitting he had been wrong on the war. In the eighth issue of his journal he reflected on it at length, introducing a strained distinction between a war of liberty and a war of intrigue or ambition:
When a powerful nation conducts a war of liberty it arises in its entirety, it marches under leaders that it has chosen from the most zealous defenders of equality and the general interest. At the time it declares [a war of liberty] formidable preparations are in place to assure the success of its enterprise. Its object is sublime; its force invincible; its measures wise and grand; its attacks prompt and irresistible … It does not purchase a painful victory through torrents of blood.59
A war of intrigue, conducted by one tyrannous power against another, was altogether different. It led to oppression and crimes against liberty on the home front as well as on the battlefield – there could be no hope of unity between opposed nations if their only point of contact was clashing armies sacrificing themselves for the despots, the enemies of liberty, who ruled them. For the last three months, according to Robespierre, France had been involved in the second of these two kinds of war: a disgraceful war of intrigue. But the time had come to convert it into an admirable war of liberty. True patriots must replace treacherous generals like Lafayette. Liberty must first be secured at home and then carried triumphantly, effortlessly, abroad. Citing famous examples of bloodshed he promised:
Unhappy French, Belgian, German slaves of the tyrants who divide the human race like base herds, you will be free; doubt it not; I swear it by the burning of Courtrai; by the children of Brabançons, murdered in their mother’s wombs and carried blood-soaked on the points of Austrian bayonets; I swear it by the shades of Avignon who perished at the hands of our common enemies; I swear it by our wives and children slaughtered by cowards on the Champ de Mars; by the defenders of the fatherland … by the patriots; I swear it by the foreign armies … and by the traitors who summoned them … I swear it by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, so solemnly promulgated and insolently violated; by the disasters of twenty centuries; by our ancestors whom we must avenge, by our descendants whom we must liberate, and by ourselves whom we must save.60
This was characteristically personal, populist and hysterical. But was Robespierre really now endorsing the war he had so adamantly opposed? Yes and no. He endorsed it, but only in so far as it conformed to his vision of a democratic war – the war of a free people against the despots of an oppressed people, in the interests of those oppressed people who would welcome their invading army with open arms. Robespierre had never been to war. The closest he came to it was brawling in the playground at Louis-le-Grand, where he had a reputation for defending the smaller boys against bullies. His distinction between a war of liberty and a war of intrigue made sense in theory, but how would it look on the battlefield? Is a democratic war – or a war waged in the name of democracy – so very different from any other when it comes to the fighting? Those easy, bloodless, swift, efficient, popular victories Robespierre envisaged are extremely scarce.
When Brissot’s party had proposed calling a new federal army of twenty thousand men to Paris, Robespierre had been critical. Despite the king’s threatened veto, the new army was now assembling in Paris, ready for the annual celebration of the fall of the Bastille. In the next issue of his journal, Robespierre addressed these federal forces directly. Their mission, he tells them, is to save the constitution, not the constitution as drafted in 1791, but the timeless constitution that guarantees sovereignty and natural rights. ‘The fatal hour strikes … let us march to the field of Federation. There is the Altar of the Fatherland! There the place where the French once strengthened the bonds of their political association!’61 Let them do so again, he entreats, but this time not in the presence of false idols like Louis XVI and General Lafayette: ‘Let us take no oath but to the country and to ourselves; and let us take it at the hands not of the King of France, but of the immortal King of Nature, who made us for liberty and punishes our oppressors.’ Robespierre had never missed the 14 July festival. He was there in 1790, standing behind the king in the pavilion. He was there again in 1791, when the king was absent, in disgrace, and the Assembly was wavering over its response to the flight to Varennes. Now he was there for the third time, mindful of the blood that had been spilt on the Altar of the Fatherland during the Champ de Mars massacre; mindful of the blood that was still being spilt at the front line; and wondering how long it would be before another Parisian insurrection brought the monarchy to an end. From the crowd he heard cries of ‘Vive Pétion!’ But if he was jealous of his friend he did not show it. Pétion was prominent in people’s minds because he had been briefly arrested after the invasion of the Tuileries, then quickly reinstated as mayor. At the close of the National Assembly in 1791, and afterwards in Bapaume and Arras, the crowd had shouted ‘Vive Pétion! Vive Robespierre!’ Now it was only ‘Vive Pétion!’ but not for much longer.
Robespierre hoped that when it came, the insurrection would sweep all before it: the king, his ministry; the Legislative Assembly; the army generals; departmental administrators and municipal government. In preparation for all the changes to come, the electoral assemblies of Paris’s forty-eight sections went into permanent session. Robespierre wrote approvingly to his crippled friend Couthon, who was taking a mud cure at Saint-Amand: ‘The Revolution is about to take a more rapid course, unless it buries itself in military despotism and dictatorship … The Paris Sections are manifesting an energy and prudence worthy to serve as a model for the rest of the state. We miss you.’62 On 30 July, armed men from Marseille arrived in Paris as part of the new federal army. They had threatened to come once before to save Robespierre after the Champ de Mars massacre. Now they came dragging cannons: a black cloud on the horizon advancing rapidly toward the capital and singing a new song, the Marseillaise. ‘If they leave Paris without saving the country, all is lost,’ Robespierre wrote to his friend Buissart in Arras. ‘We all intend to lay down our lives in the capital rather than shrink from risking everything in a final attempt.’63 Later that evening he was in the chair at the Jacobins as the recent manifesto from the Duke of Brunswick, the commander of the enemy forces, was read out. Brunswick threatened to hold all Paris answerable for the safety of the king: ‘… if the Palace of the Tuileries be insulted or forced … if the least violence, the least assault, be perpetrated against their Majesties, the King, the Queen and the Royal Family’, Paris would suffer ‘an exemplary and never-to-be-forgotten vengeance … martial law and complete destruction’.64 At this grandiose threat, the Jacobins burst out laughing. But Robespierre refused to participate in their frivolity. He suspended the meeting early, appealing for calm. Again and again he cautioned against a premature insurrection that would only play into the hands of the people’s enemies and turn public opinion against the true friends of liberty. If it had been up to him to give the signal, to decide that the time had definitely come for the people to rise up and revolt, he might never have done so. He wanted his ‘constitutional rising against the constitution’, but he both feared it and was afraid for it. These fears, in the circumstances, were wholly reasonable.
It was Danton who gave Paris the signal. First he went home to Arcis and settled money on his seventy-year-old mother in case he was killed. Then he came back and called together representatives of the city’s forty-eight sections. On the night of 9 August they formed the Insurrectionary Commune, planning to take over the municipal government (which Danton himself had belonged to in recent months). Danton briefly lay down to rest as his colleagues rang the tocsin in the tower of the Cordelier Church nearby. The tocsin echoed across the city, a call to arms resounding from the churches of central and eastern Paris. Robespierre heard it in the section of the Place Vendôme, where the lights in the houses had been lit again. He sat in the Duplays’ cellar, running up the narrow stairs to his bedroom from time to time, if his curiosity got the better of him and he wanted to look out of a first-floor window. According to Lucile Desmoulins, there had been a recent attempt to assassinate him, so he was even more nervous and suspicious than usual.65 The bell rang all night, like a troubled infant that cannot sleep – rhythmic, relentless, inconsolable – but it did not, at first, bring the people out into the streets.66 Perhaps it woke the Desmoulins’ baby, now nearly a year old – but too young still to know his godfather, Robespierre. Camille had gone out with a gun, and Lucile remembered how ‘The tocsin of the Cordeliers rang, it rang for a long time. Bathed in tears, kneeling at the window, my face hidden in a handkerchief, I listened to the sound of that fatal bell. People came to comfort me in vain. It seemed to me that the day which preceded this deadly one had been our last.’67 From 2 a.m. Danton was giving orders to the insurrectionists from the Hôtel de Ville. Eventually a crowd for the storming of the Tuileries assembled. Unlike the Bastille, the palace was properly defended, and there was likely to be considerable loss of life. Since 20 June the king had recalled his loyal Swiss Guard and his constitutional bodyguards. Several battalions of National Guards were on his side too, and Pierre-Louis Rœderer was there again, giving advice on behalf of the department of Paris, while pacing nervously round the Tuileries gardens. Louis XVI thought that Paris could be subdued; he regretted not having done it in 1789; he would do it now with belated help from Europe’s invading army, whose arrival in the capital was, surely, only weeks away.
At dawn, the king’s sister called the queen to the window to see the summer sun rise; allegedly, it was very red that day. The king, like Danton, had not slept, only lain down for a little in his violet breeches, flattening his curls and rubbing the powder from one side of his head. Still dishevelled, he heard of the arrival of an early-morning message from the Insurrectionary Commune, demanding that the current head of the National Guard, a man named Mandat, leave the palace and present himself at the Hôtel de Ville immediately. He did so and was murdered on the steps outside (where de Flesselles and Governor de Launay had been butchered by the crowd after the fall of the Bastille). By 6 a.m., Rœderer had persuaded the king to seek sanctuary in the Manège – just a short walk across the garden – where the Legislative Assembly had been burning candles through the night. The queen was opposed. She thought they should fight on with their ‘considerable forces’, but Rœderer rebuffed her with: ‘Madame, all Paris is against you.’68 It was only 10 August, but the leaves in the garden had started to fall. As they walked through them, the Dauphin kicked them playfully into the air and the king remarked, ‘What a quantity of leaves! They fall early this year,’ knowing as he did that the popular press had been claiming for months that the monarchy would not last beyond autumn. In the Assembly he said, ‘I am come hither to prevent a great crime; and I think I can be nowhere more secure, gentlemen, than in the midst of you.’ The president assured him he was right, but then one of the deputies drew attention to the constitutional rule against the Legislative Assembly deliberating in the presence of the king. So the royal family was quickly ushered out into a side room, where they could watch the Assembly’s proceedings through a grate. For all the president’s and Rœderer’s reassurances, that room was the first of their real prisons.
Outside, the fighting began. Led by the Marseillais, on whom Robespierre pinned such high hopes, the armed mob – estimated at twenty thousand – succeeded in entering the palace at around 9 a.m. But they were driven out again when the Swiss Guard – a force of nine hundred professional soldiers – opened fire.69 The battalions of National Guards that had remained loyal to Louis XVI now joined forces with the mob, and an hour later the Swiss Guard was in retreat. Around six hundred of them were hacked to pieces. Several hundred of the mob – National Guards, shop-keepers, tradesmen and artisans among them – were also killed in the siege. By midday well over a thousand lay wounded or dead among the fallen leaves. The queen had been right: the defence of the Tuileries was formidable. Contrary to appearances, however, to the stretchers and screams, the loss of blood and life, this was a victory for the people. Afterwards they lit celebratory bonfires to burn not early autumn debris, but the naked bodies of the slain Swiss Guards.
That evening, Robespierre was at the Jacobins as usual. Here he offered his views on events of the last twenty-four hours, and afterwards published them in his paper for wider circulation. For him it was a new beginning, like the fall of the Bastille, but better, wiser, purer:
In 1789, the people of Paris raised themselves tumultuously to repel the attacks of the court, to free themselves of the old despotism, more than to conquer liberty, the idea of which was still confused, its principles unknown. All passions concurred in the insurrection and the signal it gave to the whole of France.
In 1792 it [the people of Paris] has raised itself with imposing sang-froid to avenge the fundamental laws of its violated liberty, all the infidel mandatories who sought to enslave once again the imprescriptible rights of humanity. It has put into action the principles proclaimed three years ago by its first representatives; it has exercised its recognised sovereignty, and deployed its power and its justice to assure its own safety and happiness.
In 1789 it was helped by a great number of those who were called great, by a party of men who took back the power of government.
In 1792 it has found all its own resources, both its direction and its force; alone, it has protected justice, equality and reason against their enemies. Not only did the people of Paris give a great example to France, the French people rose up at the same time. The solemnity with which it proceeded in this great act was as sublime as its motives and object.70
Robespierre urged his audience to believe that the promise of 1789 had been recaptured with the fall of the Tuileries. Everything that had gone wrong in the Revolution since the Bastille fell, all those departures from true principles that he had disputed so fervently in Versailles, and afterwards in Paris; all the compromises of the new constitution and its flawed enactment after 1791; all the disruption, misdirection and confusion caused by factional fighting at the Jacobins; all the life already squandered in an incipient civil war; all the life lost on the front line in a foreign war that was going badly wrong – it would all be cancelled and redeemed now that the Revolution had recovered its true course. There is no reason whatsoever to suspect Robespierre’s revolutionary optimism. He was speaking and writing from his heart; and those who dispute his interpretation of events cannot deny his sincerity. Mirabeau had said of him in 1789, ‘That man will go far, he believes everything he says.’ Quite how far, now that the monarchy had finally fallen, not even Mirabeau could have guessed.