8

The King’s Trial

SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER the storming of the Tuileries, Paris was still in turmoil. Pétion remained mayor. Lafayette had fled the country. The Legislative Assembly continued to meet in the Manège. France was again without a constitution and government. To acquire these, a new nationally representative body would need to be elected and invested with constituting power. In the interim, the Assembly re-called Brissot’s friends (Roland, Servan and Clavière) to ministerial office and formed a provisional government. Danton was made Minister for Justice, in recognition of the part he had played in ending the monarchy. It was possible for Danton to serve alongside Brissot’s friends because there was no personal animosity between him and them, but Robespierre could never have done so.¹Instead, he threw himself into the politics of his section, the Place Vendôme section, soon renamed Section des Piques (pikes). Meetings were daily and increasingly dominated by sans-culottes, determined to further the revolutionary demands of the poor and disadvantaged. From here Robespierre was elected to the Insurrectionary Commune. The Commune was a body of 288 members, formed by the election of six representatives from each of the forty-eight sections of Paris. Like Robespierre’s, many of these sections were radical, so sent to the Commune representatives likely to push for extreme measures, such as economic redistribution and price controls on essential commodities. But the sections, the Commune, the mayor, the Legislative Assembly and the provisional government could not reliably control the streets, filled with panic after the Duke of Brunswick kept his promise and marched into France on 19 August.

By the beginning of September the invading army was at Verdun (only fifteen miles from Varennes), where the last fortress on the road to Paris surrendered. Less than a month earlier, the Jacobins had laughed at the duke’s manifesto and its threat to raze Paris. But no one was laughing now. Black flags flew from the towers of Notre Dame and above the Hôtel de Ville, with the word ‘Danger’ (the same in French and English) emblazoned in white letters. The city gates were closed. The prisons were crammed with royalists, refractory priests and other suspects summarily arrested since the fall of the monarchy. The patriots were afraid to leave the city to fight Brunswick’s forces in case the counter-revolution took hold in their absence. Nor could they sit and wait calmly for the destruction of Paris. Towards the end of another restless weekend, there was a sudden crescendo of violence:

• Twenty-four priests, conveyed in four carriages to the prison of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près, on Sunday afternoon, 2 September 1792, were set upon by a mob and murdered.

• One hundred and twenty-two other prisoners inside the abbey were condemned to death later that evening by an informal tribunal. They were taken outside and killed with pikes.

• About a hundred and fifty priests held at the Convent of the Carmelites, including the Archbishop of Arles and the bishops of Saintes and Beauvais, were murdered.

• Two hundred thieves and debtors held at the Châtelet were slaughtered.

• On Monday 3 September the queen’s friend the Princesse de Lamballe and other prisoners held at La Force were butchered. The princess’s severed head was then paraded on a pike outside the windows of the Temple, the medieval fortress in the Marais where the royal family were now incarcerated.

• An unknown number of convicts awaiting deportation were murdered.

• So too were an unknown number of priests held at the monastery of Saint-Firmin.

• One hundred and sixty inmates at the Bicêtre reformatory, forty-three of them between the ages of twelve and eighteen, were murdered.

• On Tuesday 4 September thirty-five women incarcerated at La Salpêtrière on charges of prostitution were sexually assaulted and killed.

So much then for the people’s justice: well over a thousand victims, some from the weakest and most vulnerable sectors of society, were put to death in the first weeks of the new republic to satisfy the blood lust of the mob that brought down the monarchy. Men, women and children who did not matter to the Revolution, whose names have been forgotten by history, were sacrificed to the braying crowd. Danton claimed he saw them afterwards in his dreams, shaking their gory locks at him.

How much did Robespierre know about the September massacres? Did he, during those horrific three days, do anything to try to stop the slaughter? He was definitely present at the meeting of the Insurrectionary Commune on 2 September when reports came in about what was happening at the Abbaye Saint-Germain-des-Près. On that day, the Commune did nothing. On 3 September, in response to news of the killings at La Force, it sent someone to investigate ‘the excitement’.² As the week wore on, the Commune made no attempt to restrain the violence: it left the most radical of Paris’s forty-eight sections to do as they liked in the face of it, perhaps because restraint was impossible, or perhaps because members of the Commune genuinely thought the people had earned their right to bloody vengeance. It did, however, send Robespierre across to the Temple, close to his former residence in the rue Saintonge, to make sure that ‘everything was quiet there’. The royal family were potentially valuable hostages if the advance of Brunswick’s invading army could not be stopped; they must not be perfunctorily cut down in the general bloodletting. When he got to the Temple, Robespierre found everything in order, if not exactly quiet. There was no reason for him to ascend the narrow winding stair of the tower in which the deposed king and his family were imprisoned and guarded by sans-culottes. Outside, the patriot Palloy, who had turned the demolition of the Bastille into such a profitable business, was contemplating demolishing the buildings surrounding the tower and erecting a new perimeter wall for extra security, in case the royal family tried to escape. In 1789 Palloy had destroyed a prison; three years later he was building one.³Robespierre, who had seen liberty appear like a vision on the crumbling battlements of the Bastille, probably did not linger looking up at the Temple tower.

Aside from checking that no unauthorised acts were being committed at the Temple, Robespierre intervened in the Commune’s deliberations for only one purpose: to try and get his opponents – Brissot and Roland – arrested and taken off to prison. There, as he well knew, they would, very likely, be killed immediately, along with the other prisoners condemned by the improvised tribunals set up by the sans-culottes inside the prisons. These makeshift tribunals acquitted a few fortunate victims, but the rest were hacked to death as they left the temporary courtrooms. Danton saw to it that the arrest warrants for Robespierre’s personal enemies were withdrawn. To sanction, or even encourage, the alarming spectacle of the people’s vengeance was one thing – but to use it to settle personal scores was quite another. As Danton already knew, however, this was a difference lost on Robespierre. Yet the Duplay family doctor, years later, said Robespierre could never speak of the September massacres without horror. ‘Blood again! Nothing but blood,’ he remembered him saying, in the privacy of the Duplay household.⁴ Perhaps, like Danton, he also had nightmares. After all, Robespierre was still the same squeamish man who collapsed in Arras when his legal duties there required him to condemn a man to death. But now he was also a committed revolutionary leader who knew that he owed his power to the people’s propensity for violence. Without it, the monarchy would not have fallen on 10 August. Robespierre, for all his refined sensibility, was too astute a politician either to deny this fact or ignore it: mob violence was there to be compromised with, not censured by the revolutionaries whose careers it had done so much to promote. His solution was to demand the establishment of an official Revolutionary Tribunal, which, he insisted, would maintain the peace, satisfy the people’s impatience for justice, and investigate promptly all counter-revolutionary activities. He got his way, and in the short period between the collapse of the monarchy on 10 August and the end of 1792, this tribunal sentenced a total of twenty-eight people to the guillotine.

The guillotine was first used publicly in Paris on 25 April 1792 to execute a criminal named Nicholas Jacques Pelletier. It was erected on scaffolding and positioned outside the Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, where Damiens and others had been gruesomely dispatched under the Old Regime. On that day, anticipating a large crowd at this new public spectacle and worried about maintaining order, Pierre-Louis Rœderer wrote to General Lafayette asking him to ensure that the National Guards remain in place until the execution was over and the scaffolding had been dismantled (when it was first introduced, the guillotine was kept in store and out of sight). The day was long in coming. Pelletier had been condemned for robbery and murder soon after the National Assembly made decapitation the only legal capital punishment. He had had to wait in gaol for over three months while the guillotine was built in Strasbourg according to the design of the surgeon M. Antoine Louis, at a cost of 38 livres. Some more weeks passed while the public executioner Charles Henri Sanson tested the machine on corpses in the Bicêtre hospital. Sanson favoured the guillotine because he knew the practical problems of trying to decapitate a person with a sword – the nobility’s Old Regime privilege.

How can the executioner have the necessary power over a man who will not or cannot keep himself in a convenient posture? It seems, however, that the National Assembly only devised this species of execution [decapitation] for the purpose of avoiding the protracted executions of the old way [hanging]. It is in furtherance of these humane views that I have the honour of giving this forewarning of the many accidents that executions may produce if attempted by the sword. It is therefore indispensable that, in order to fulfil the humane intentions of the National Assembly, some means should be found both to avoid delays and ensure certainty, by fixing the patient so that the success of the operation shall not be doubtful.⁵

After 10 August and the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal that Robespierre demanded, the guillotine was set up closer to the Tuileries palace, on either the Place de Carrousel or the Place de la Révolution. As it turned out, though, very few of the twenty-eight condemned by the new tribunal were executed for political crimes: like the murderer Pelletier, most were just ordinary criminals.

When he first outlined his idea of a democratic war – a war of defence, not conquest, conducted by the whole people, armed with pikes if nothing more – Robespierre’s was an isolated eccentric voice at the Jacobins. One year on, the people rose up as he had said they would, to grab whatever weapons they could and meet the invading army on the road from Valmy. During those early days of September, as bodies were piled up in the prisons, thousands of patriot volunteers collected on the Champ de Mars, ready to die for the fatherland. Danton urged them on with the most famous speech he ever made, this man with stentorian lungs to equal Mirabeau’s, who spoke five languages, but none so fluently as the language of the crowd. His speech ended: ‘Audacity! Yet more audacity! Always audacity – and France will be saved.’⁶ (Danton’s heavy engagement in trying to save revolutionary France might account for his reported callousness with regard to the prison victims. When asked what to do about them, he replied, according to Mme Roland, ‘Let them save themselves.’⁷) The tocsin rang out as it had before. The royal family listened to it in their beds in the Temple. They heard it accompanied by Marie Antoinette’s anguished cries for her murdered friend whose beautiful blonde head had been paraded on a pike at the window. Fortunately for the Revolution, unfortunately for the royal family, the fighting at Valmy went well – the French forces, an amalgam of old army professional soldiers, National Guards and new volunteers, repelled the Duke of Brunswick’s troops, charging into battle and shouting above the cannon fire, ‘Vive la nation!’ The poet Goethe was with the invading army. On the evening of 20 September, as the autumn nights were drawing in, he sat with other downcast Prussian soldiers, huddled round a campfire. They asked him what he made of the day’s events and he pronounced: ‘Here and today a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.’ Europe’s first concerted attempt to end the Revolution had failed.⁸

Robespierre, of course, was far from the battlefield. It is doubtful whether he even knew how to fire a musket, or would have lasted an hour in the mud at Valmy. Instead, he was doing something at which he had, over the last three years, become extremely skilled: electioneering. He was in the vanguard of those demanding a new representative assembly to draft France’s first republican constitution. Soon after 10 August he had published his own call to arms in his journal: ‘You must prepare the success of this Convention by the regeneration of the spirit of the people. Let all awake – all, all arise – all arm; and the enemies of liberty will hide themselves in darkness. Let the tocsin of Paris reverberate in all the Departments. Let the people learn to reason as well as to fight.’⁹To get himself elected again, Robespierre did both. The existing Legislative Assembly, diminished in power since 10 August, had nevertheless managed to decree that the new elections must be indirect, like the elections of 1789 and 1791. Primary assemblies would elect members of an electoral body to choose their delegates for them. However, the distinction between active and passive citizens – ones with the vote and ones without – to which Robespierre had always strongly objected, was abolished. Instead there was male universal suffrage: the electoral assemblies were to be chosen by primary assemblies composed of all independent male citizens over the age of twenty-one, and they were to deliberate in public. In the primary assembly for his Section des Piques (which had already elected him to the Commune), Robespierre was chosen first. His landlord and friend Duplay was another of the sixteen elected. Rabble-rousing Marat, who had openly approved of the prison massacres, was chosen in another section. When the whole body of 990 representatives for all the sections and suburbs of Paris met, radical patriots dominated it. The body first assembled on 2 September – the day the massacres began – in the Archbishop’s Palace, where the National Assembly had reconvened for a brief period after moving to Paris from Versailles. Robespierre remembered that this hall had proved very unsuitable and that the National Assembly had soon had to abandon it for the Manège. Indeed, he had been working since the end of August to persuade the representatives to ask permission from the Jacobin Club to meet in its more publicly accessible hall, where it would be much easier for the people – and of course the Jacobins – to oversee the proceedings. He succeeded. Not content with this, he also proposed, in the name of the primary assemblies, that any of their chosen representatives who had previously displayed monarchist sympathies – who had joined the Feuillants, for example, after the Champ de Mars massacre – should be excluded immediately. The majority of radical patriots hastened to agree and expelled the dubious minority whom the primary assemblies had only just elected. This time, evidently, the Jacobins would take no chances.

At that first meeting, Robespierre, comfortably out of range of the front line, declared from the tribune that he would ‘face with perfect calmness the swords of the enemies’.¹⁰ In doing so he would take with him to the grave ‘the certainty that France would remain free, and the satisfaction of having served the fatherland’. Since he was now accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard, to discourage any repetitions of the alleged assassination attempt earlier in the year, he could not have been as sanguine about going to his grave as he claimed. Two days later he was top of the list of deputies elected to the new National Convention. The person standing against him was Pétion. Their friendship had been strained for months, but after 10 August it deteriorated dramatically. Just days after the storming of the Tuileries, Pétion, as mayor of Paris, wanted to disband the Insurrectionary Commune and reinstate the municipal government which it had displaced. The Commune commissioned Robespierre to get Pétion to back down. Their meeting did not go well, and soon afterwards Robespierre received yet another disconcerting letter from the man who, only a year ago, had been his closest revolutionary colleague:

You know, my friend, what my feelings are towards you: you know that I am no rival of yours and that I have always given you proof of my devoted friendship. It would be idle to attempt to divide us. I could not cease to love you unless you ceased to love liberty. I have always found more fault with you to your face than behind your back. When I think you too ready to take offence, or when I believe, rightly or wrongly, that you are mistaken about a line of action, I tell you so. You reproach me with being too trustful. You may be right, but you must not assume too readily that many of my acquaintances are your enemies. People can disagree on a number of unessential points, without becoming enemies, and your heart is said to be just. Besides, it is childish to take offence at the things people say against one. Imagine, my friend, the number of people who utter libels against the mayor of Paris! … Yet it does not worry me, I can assure you. If I am not totally indifferent to what other people think about me, at least I value my own opinion more highly … You and I are never likely to take opposite sides. We shall always be of the same political faith. I need not assure you that it is impossible for me to join any movement against you: my tastes, my character, my principles all forbid it. I don’t believe you covet my position any more than I covet the King’s. But if, when my term of office comes to an end, the people were to offer you the mayoralty, I suppose that you would accept it; whereas, in all good conscience I could never accept the crown. Keep well. March ahead! The times are too serious to think of anything but the public interest.¹¹

When Robespierre came back from his holiday in Arras and visited Pétion for the first time in his grand new residence, he had reassured himself nervously that the job would not go to his friend’s head, that his spirit would remain ‘simple and pure as ever’. This pompous letter proved otherwise. For almost a year, Pétion had sat on the fence between the rival factions at the Jacobins, believing, perhaps, that his official position enabled him to rise above the hatred between Robespierre and Brissot, who were both his friends. He had played the part of peacemaker to no avail. Who, in the circumstances, did he think might offer him a crown? What reason did he have to believe that Robespierre coveted the role of mayor of Paris? Despite his delusions of grandeur, Pétion’s letter captures two of the most prominent features of Robespierre’s personality: his perennial distrust – ‘Share my fear’, he had urged the Jacobins in 1791 – and his propensity to take personal offence of the most lasting and rancorous kind. Robespierre himself testified to the deep spiteful gratification he experienced in the electoral assembly when he, not Pétion, was chosen as the first of Paris’s deputies to the Convention. As he wrote to the self-important mayor:

Everyone saw the change in your countenance when, in the progress of the ballot, another name [Robespierre’s own] seemed to have the advantage of yours. You were aware that it was the Assembly’s intention to have you named the next day, but you left the hall abruptly and never reappeared. You would not even keep your dinner engagements; and you have at last confessed the true motive of your vexation by saying, ‘Well then, to be candid with you, I did think that if I was named at all, I was entitled to be first.’¹²

So who was jealous and who was gloating now? Once, Pétion had been all but indistinguishable from Robespierre; his name had been honoured alongside Robespierre’s after the end of the first National Assembly; and since then his career had gone from strength to strength, but the toast of the crowd at the 14 July celebrations in 1792 was no longer the most popular man in Paris two months later. Pétion’s confident belief that nothing could ever come between himself and Robespierre was not unwarranted – just, as it turned out, completely mistaken.

After being passed over in the capital, Pétion was elected as a representative to the forthcoming Convention from the department of Eure-et-Loir (which included his home town, Chartres). Brissot was also chosen as a deputy for Eure-et-Loir. Even before the Convention of 749 deputies met, many of those elected from the provinces, especially those from the Gironde department in western France, were concerned that the Paris delegates, backed by the Commune and the city’s radical sections, would try to dominate proceedings. On the list of Paris’s twenty-four delegates to the Convention, Robespierre was first, Danton was second, Camille Desmoulins sixth, Marat seventh, the revolutionary artist David twentieth and – rather more surprisingly – Robespierre’s brother from Arras nineteenth. At last Augustin had a real reason to be in Paris. Let people say what they liked about corruption, Robespierre was convinced that his brother had stood independently and been elected on merit, yet only his own influence could have secured such an unlikely outcome. Augustin had distinguished himself as president of the Arras Jacobins and, since 10 August, had been active in the Arras commune (one of the many provincial imitations of Paris’s Insurrectionary Commune), but he scarcely knew anyone in the capital. He wasted no time at all in packing his bags. However, it soon became clear that Charlotte was not going to be left behind in an empty house in the rue des Rapporteurs while both her brothers pursued exciting revolutionary careers in the capital. Robespierre’s siblings arrived on his doorstep and proceeded to move into the Duplay house, renting from 1 October for 1,000 livres a year one furnished and one unfurnished room. Inevitably, their arrival disrupted Robespierre’s comfortable Parisian home life. His own rooms at the Duplays’ had started filling up with congratulatory letters, statuettes, medals and prints of himself. For example, there was a medal to commemorate 10 August on which he was represented cupping milk flowing from the breasts of Liberty and offering it to a patriot to drink. It would have been ungracious to dispose of these tributes – even if he had wanted to – so instead Robespierre carefully arranged them round his two small rooms, which soon resembled a shrine.

The Duplays were so proud of their famous patriotic Jacobin lodger, so devoted to him both personally and politically, that Robespierre’s rooms never struck them as peculiar. But Charlotte was uncomfortable. It was not the emergence of a personality cult focused on her older brother that disturbed her. Nor was it all the pictures of him – he had always been fond of collecting prints, fond too of sketching, and he used to organise small exhibitions when Charlotte and Henriette visited him on those long Sunday afternoons of their childhood in Arras. Admittedly, the subject of the pictures had altered dramatically since those far-off days, but Charlotte was at least as fixated on Robespierre as the Duplays were, and said nothing about finding his rooms peculiar. It was the private attentions lavished on him by the smotheringly maternal Mme Duplay that irritated her. Even at an epistolary distance she had been jealous at the idea of Robespierre cosseted in the home of another woman; she could imagine only too well how responsive he would be to this kind of fussing. She knew his domestic character to be ‘débonnaire’ (meek or accommodating), so even before setting foot in number 366, rue Saint-Honoré, she feared finding him passively relaxed in a home she could not control. The reality was intolerable. Almost as soon her clothes were unpacked, Charlotte began lobbying Robespierre to rent a house of his own. Now that he was an important public figure, he ought, she said, to have an independent establishment. And who better than his sister to preside over it, unimpeded by the likes of Mme Duplay and her irritating daughters?

Robespierre, of course, had more important things on his mind than the row brewing between his sister and his landlady. On 20 September, as Goethe and the rest of the Prussian army retreated before the full force of the French nation, the National Convention met for the first time in Paris. It had two purposes: to win the war and to draft a republican constitution. The Convention officially opened the following morning, with the newly elected deputies from all over France assembling at the ransacked Tuileries and processing to the Manège, where they filled the vacant seats. The majority of the 749 new deputies had not belonged to either of the two earlier assemblies to meet in that former riding school. But the National Assembly, which had taken over two years to design the constitutional monarchy, and the Legislative Assembly, which saw it collapse in under a year, seemed very far away now even to those who had experienced them personally. It was only a short walk across the garden from the Tuileries to the Manège – there was no celebratory Mass, no ceremonial robes, none of the symbolism that had moved the Marquis de Ferrières to write to his wife in 1789: ‘Love for my country has made itself very powerfully felt in my heart. I was not aware just how far the mutual ties extend which unite us all to this soil, to the men who are our brothers, but I understood it in that instance.’¹³ Then Ferrières had been a noble in the procession at Versailles. Now he was in danger of losing his life: one of the despised enemies of liberty from whom the new National Convention must protect the nascent French Republic.

On that day in 1792, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Marat, David and Augustin were all there in the procession with Robespierre, but none of them had been with him in 1789. Robespierre was one of a minority who could compare the two occasions in his head; Pétion was another, but these days the two men were staying far apart, not walking together reminiscing about the past.¹⁴ They entered the Manège at different ends of the procession, and once inside Robespierre and his friends made a point of occupying the high seats at the far end of the hall to the left of the president’s chair – Pétion had already been chosen as the Convention’s first president, which cannot have pleased them. They sat there looking down, and soon afterwards the group around Robespierre became known as the Mountain; Pétion, Brissot and his friends became the Girondins (so called because some of them came from the department of the Gironde). And between these two rival factions – bemused or irritated by their crossfire but inextricably caught up in it – there was the Plain: all those new deputies who had only just arrived in Paris to make a republican constitution.

At four o’clock on 21 September, trumpets sounded outside the Temple and a voice pronouncing the formal abolition of the monarchy boomed through the thick walls and windows of the royal family’s rooms. Louis XVI was reading. Between 10 August 1792 and the start of the New Year he read 250 volumes in several different languages and translated Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III. At the announcement of the Republic, he did not even look up from his book.¹⁵

Since 10 August, Robespierre had been too busy to issue his journal. But once the preoccupying business of electioneering was over, he relaunched it under the new title Lettres à ses commettans (Letters of Maximilien Robespierre, member of the National Convention of France, to his Constituents). It was, as ever, a platform for both his theoretical and his practical political concerns. In the first article of the first new issue he argued:

It is not enough to have overturned the throne: our concern is to erect upon its remains holy equality and the imprescriptible Rights of Man. It is not in the empty word itself that a republic consists, but in the character of the citizens. The soul of a republic isvertu – that is, the love of the fatherland, and the high-minded devotion that resolves all private interests into the general interest. The enemies of the republic are those dastardly egoists, those ambitious and corrupt men. You have hunted down kings, but have you hunted out the vices that their deadly domination has engendered among you? Taken together you are the most generous, the most moral of all peoples … but a people that nurtures within itself a multitude of adroit rogues and political charlatans, skilled at usurpation and the betrayal of trust.¹⁶

Like an austere godfather at the birth of France’s republic, Robespierre advised the nation to seek first the enemy within. These were not new sentiments. Before he left Arras for Versailles in 1789 he had written a pamphlet entitled ‘The Enemies of the Fatherland Unmasked’. Absolutely nothing had happened since then to reduce his fear of surreptitious political foes. Now that everyone claimed to want a republic, he thought the really important distinction was between those who wanted it for their own selfish purposes, and those – himself, for example – who genuinely wanted to found it on the principle of equality and in the general interest. Next he revisited another long-standing concern: fear of executive power. As he understood it, overly strong governments had caused most of the misery of human society – he was more frightened of despotism than of anarchy. In this, as in his conception of the general interest into which all private interests could, and should, be dissolved, Robespierre was again following Rousseau. Around this time there was a rumour that he slept with a copy of the Social Contract under his pillow. It does not appear in the inventory of his books taken after his death, but his speeches refer to it so often that there can be no doubt about how much it meant to him. Perhaps one of the Duplays took his personal copy as a keepsake before the inventory was compiled.

At one point in the Social Contract, Rousseau describes his ideal law-giver. The qualities required in someone truly worthy of formulating the laws are extraordinary: ‘You would need a superior intelligence, that sees all the human passions without experiencing them … that earns a far off glory, perhaps even working in one century for the benefit of another; it would take Gods to give laws to men.’¹⁷ Robespierre quoted this passage in full in his article. But then he proceeded to gloss it, significantly altering the meaning so that an unusually admirable human being – Robespierre himself, for example – might enact the role of law-giver that Rousseau had reserved for the Gods:

You would need philosophers as enlightened as they were intrepid: who experienced the passions of man, but whose first passion would be the horror of tyranny and the love of humanity; treading underfoot vanity, envy, ambition and all the weaknesses of petty souls, inexorable toward crime armed with power, indulgent toward error, sympathetic toward misery and tender and respectful toward the people.¹⁸

This was a self-portrait – an extremely flattering one. Despite his shrine of sorts in the Duplay house, Robespierre probably did not think he was above human passions, but he did consider himself more self-controlled than most, more resistant to political temptation, more unambivalently for the people, less selfish, less corruptible, perhaps even incorruptible. He seemed to share Rousseau’s belief in the need for an almost superhuman law-giver, omniscient, disinterested and capable of directing the people for their own good. And he may well have been privately preparing himself to assume just that role. In this context, Robespierre’s vision of democracy was very different from anything we would recognise today. The rule of the people, as he understood it, was not simply derived from the will of the majority. The point was to ensure the triumph of the good, pure, general will of the people – what the people would want in ideal circumstances – and this needed to be intuited on their behalf until they had received sufficient education to understand their own good. When it came to drafting the laws, to giving France its new republican constitution, Robespierre believed that he was far closer to Rousseau’s conception of the ideal law-giver than Brissot and his friends could ever have been.

Robespierre’s enemies in the Convention wasted no time. On 25 September, just four days after the official opening, they accused him of aspiring to be a tyrant. His enemies – many of them friends of Brissot’s – were dismayed at his influence and popularity in the capital. They insisted that since Paris was only one of eighty-three departments in France, its representatives should only have the weight in decisions within the National Convention of one eighty-third. Robespierre, denounced as leader of the Paris deputies in their illegitimate quest for power, hesitated. But Danton leapt to the tribune to defend him as he had done before at the Jacobin Club. He demanded the death penalty for anyone scheming to destroy the unity of France. By this he meant death to anyone scheming to turn France into a federation of independent departments or small republics in order to diminish the power of Paris. This was one of the accusations the Mountain levelled against the Girondins. When Robespierre finally stood up to defend himself, he struck a characteristic note. ‘I begin by thanking my accusers. Calumny serves the public good when it clumsily unmasks itself.’ First he appealed, as usual, to his personal patriotic credentials: ‘I did this … I did that …’ he reminded the Convention, summarising his achievements since 1789 until the audience got restless and someone shouted, ‘Enough!’ Then he said he had long suspected that Brissot’s faction wanted to divide France into a federation of small republics, leaving it even more vulnerable to internal and external enemies than it already was.¹⁹ He had not been in the room when Mme Roland and her friends bent over the map and discussed the division of the country into monarchical and republican parts. But now the monarchy had fallen, he was convinced they wanted another kind of division: one that would curtail the influence of Paris, so essential to sustaining revolutionary ideals, and diminish his own power base.

Robespierre’s intervention was subtle and sardonic, but completely overshadowed by the next speaker. Blistering with skin disease and reeking of vinegar, this was the infamous Marat, the so-called L’Ami du Peuple (people’s friend), the indefatigable pamphleteer who, since 1789, had consistently called for blood and anarchy: ‘I believe in the cutting off of heads,’ he had declared offensively in his newspaper.²⁰ Of course he did not always mean what he said: ‘… my hand would wither rather than write another word if I really thought the people were going to do what I tell them to’, he confided to a friend.²¹ But even so, he had openly approved of the September massacres, and may have had more to do with arranging them than Robespierre cared to hear about. The two were not close friends. Marat claimed that the only time they had ever met privately, Robespierre was horrified by his sanguinary attitudes: ‘Robespierre listened to me with terror. He grew pale and silent for some time. This interview confirmed me in the opinion that I always had of him, that he unites the knowledge of a wise senator to the integrity of a thoroughly good man and the zeal of a true patriot, but that he is lacking as a statesman as regards clearness of vision and determination.’²² This was high praise indeed from Marat, who so delighted in defamation. The admiration may not have been mutual, but it was nevertheless thanks in part to the Incorruptible that as people were being hacked to pieces in the prisons, Marat had been elected to the Convention as a representative for Paris: a flagrant travesty of Rousseau’s ideal law-giver.

As Marat stood up to speak, the hall erupted in hoots of disapproval. When the booing relented he said in his hollow croaking pantomime villain’s voice: ‘I perceive that I have enemies here.’ ‘All, all, all are your enemies,’ cried his fellow deputies.²³ Undeterred, he addressed the charge of tyranny that had been levelled at Robespierre and the other representatives of Paris, whose election the Jacobins had so vigilantly monitored: ‘… I owe it to justice to declare that my colleagues, and especially Danton and Robespierre, have always opposed the opinions that I avow on this point; I, first and alone, of all public writers in France, have thought of a Dictatorship as the only means to crush the counter-revolutionary traitors.’²⁴

A few days later Marat despaired of the Convention in his paper, and prophesied to the French: ‘Fifty years of anarchy await you, and you will emerge from it only by the power of some dictator who will arise – a true statesman and patriot. Oh prating people, if you did but know how to act!’²⁵Among the crowd at the Tuileries on 10 August was an unemployed army captain who watched with horror as the Swiss Guards were murdered and burnt. ‘If he had mounted his horse’, the young Napoleon Bonaparte wrote of Louis XVI, ‘victory would’ have remained with him.’²⁶ Here was the future statesman and patriot whose dictatorship Marat foretold but did not live to see.

The Girondins’ attacks on Robespierre redoubled. The old divide at the Jacobins between Brissot and Robespierre was carried over into the Convention, where it mutated into the hostility between the Girondins and the Mountain. But whereas the previous year Robespierre had struggled to win ascendancy over the Paris Jacobins, now he succeeded in having Brissot and his friends formally expelled from the club. On 29 October, in the Convention, Mme Roland’s husband denounced in general terms the proponents of violence and blamed the Insurrectionary Commune for the September massacres. Robespierre responded with general refutations, but also asked rhetorically, ‘Who dares accuse me?’²⁷ From the seats at the other end of the hall, where the Girondins were sitting, came a voice. ‘I do,’ called Jean Baptiste Louvet, the licentious novelist married to one of Mme Roland’s close friends. Silence fell among the assembled deputies. According to Dr John Moore (a distinguished medical doctor studying in Paris who had heard a rumour that something exciting was going to happen that day), Louvet, thin, lank and pale-faced, ‘stalked along the hall like a spectre; and being come directly opposite to the tribune, he fixed Robespierre, and said, “Oui Robespierre, c’est moi qui t’accuse!” [“Yes, Robespierre, it is I who accuses you.”]’ Robespierre froze. ‘He could not have seemed more alarmed had a bleeding head spoken to him from a charger.’ Danton tried to help by causing a distraction – he knew his friend was a skilled yet nervous speaker and could see he was deeply flustered. But Louvet had captured the deputies’ attention and they wanted to hear what he had to say. Realising this, Danton, always so adept, so agile as a public speaker, began to threaten Louvet before he could even begin: ‘I want the accuser to put his finger into the wound,’ he said, meaning that Louvet must back up his allegations.²⁸ ‘I intend it,’ Louvet replied, ‘but why does Danton scream beforehand?’

In fact, Louvet had nothing new to say. He accused Robespierre of conspiring to control the Insurrectionary Commune, of complicity in the September massacres, of trying to include Roland and Brissot among the victims, of associating with Marat, and of dominating the Jacobin Club.

I accuse you of having produced yourself as an object of popular idolatry, and of having caused it to be rumoured that you are the only man capable of saving the country. I accuse you … of having tyrannised by intrigue and fear over the Electoral Assembly of Paris, and of having aimed at supreme power by calumny, violence, and terror; and I demand that a Committee be appointed to examine your conduct.²⁹

It had all been said before, and yet, Dr John Moore observed, this speech stirred up so much hostility against Robespierre that he was in danger of being lynched on the spot. Answer, Danton urged him, answer immediately. But either he could not or he would not. Once again Danton spoke on his behalf, rejecting the charges of tyranny. Finally Robespierre was given a week to prepare his own response. There was cunning behind his reluctance to speak. He knew he lacked Danton’s fluency and that if the Convention turned against him his career was finished. He knew he could use the coming week to write and rewrite in his small neat handwriting another finely honed account of his exemplary revolutionary credentials. But there must have been fear as well. Standing there, facing Louvet, resolute as Banquo’s ghost, he completely lost his nerve. He needed the week to recover, to write his defence, and, above all, to assemble the facts of his revolutionary contribution thus far and square them with his conscience. He was not, he never had been, wrong. Much as he needed others to believe this, what he needed still more was to believe it himself.

Robespierre defended himself before, the Convention on 5 November. On that day Dr Moore was at the Manège again, in the crowd of people that went early to secure a place in the public galleries. Looking around, he noticed suddenly that the galleries were ‘almost entirely filled with women’. They applauded Robespierre loudly. Dr Moore was not the only person to notice Robespierre’s female fan club. Later that week the Marquis de Condorcet, secretary to the Academy of Sciences under the Old Regime, now a Girondin deputy in the Convention, raised the subject in the newspaper Chronique de Paris:

There are some who ask why there are always so many women around Robespierre: at his house, in the galleries of the Jacobins and of the Convention. It is because this Revolution of ours is a religion, and Robespierre is leading a sect therein. He is a priest at the head of his worshippers … Robespierre preaches; Robespierre censures; he is furious, grave, melancholy, exalted – all coldly; his thoughts flow regularly, his habits are regular; he thunders against the rich and the great; he lives on next to nothing; he has no necessities. He has but one mission – to speak, and he speaks unceasingly; he creates disciples … he talks of God and of Providence; he calls himself the friend of the humble and the weak; he gets himself followed by women and by the poor in spirit; he gravely receives their adoration … He is a priest, and will never be other than a priest.³⁰

Condorcet’s characterisation was ill-intentioned, but there is plenty of other evidence that Robespierre had a peculiar appeal for women. Olympe de Gouges, a butcher’s daughter and pioneering feminist, wrote to him at this time, suggesting they drown themselves together in the Seine as an act of extreme patriotism: in this way, she suggested, he could cleanse himself of the stains that had sullied his reputation since 10 August.³¹ Robespierre, understandably, preferred to redeem his reputation by more conventional methods.

Before the Convention, he denied outright having played any part in the election of Marat. He confirmed that he had met him privately only once, in January 1792. At that meeting they had spoken of public affairs and Marat had been despondent. ‘I told him myself what all patriots, even the most ardent, thought of him.’³² Robespierre informed the Convention how he reproached Marat for inciting extreme violence in his editorials; calling for five or six hundred guilty heads to be lopped off was, he insisted, as repugnant to the friends of liberty as to the aristocracy. After ‘that first and unique visit’ he had encountered Marat next in the Convention itself, where he was simply amazed to find himself accused of having schemed to get him elected. There were elements of truth in this retrospective account. Strictly speaking, it was Danton and the Cordeliers, not Robespierre, who had proposed Marat. But certainly Robespierre had not opposed Marat’s candidature; in fact, he had favoured it. For the benefit of the deputies, cheered on by all those admiring women in the galleries, he was expertly managing the truth, staying as close to it as possible, while massaging it to produce a particular impression, as all skilled politicians do.

It was when he came to the subject of the September massacres that Robespierre made a truly staggering announcement:

It is certain that one innocent person perished [an alleged victim of mistaken identity]; the numbers have been exaggerated, but one [innocent], without doubt [perished]. We should weep, citizens, at this cruel mistake, and we have wept over it for a long time. He was said to be a good citizen, and was therefore one of our friends. We should weep also for the guilty victims, reserved for the vengeance of the laws, who fell beneath the blade of popular justice; but let this grief have an end, like all mortal things. Keep back some tears for more touching calamities; weep instead for the hundred thousand victims of tyranny.³³

The kind of comparisons Robespierre calls for in this speech are always morally disturbing. Were the deaths of forty-three frightened children at the Bicêtre reformatory really less moving than the deaths of the many more who never had enough to eat, never had a real hope or start in life under the Old Regime? Were the deaths of those cornered defenceless priests any less disturbing than the persecutions inflicted on non-believers in the past? Robespierre was defending the Revolution and himself; the two were scarcely distinct in his mind any more. He argued that the end of the Revolution – liberty – justified its means – bloodshed – and asked a chilling political question, destined to reverberate down the centuries after him: ‘Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?’³⁴ To people who complained that the Insurrectionary Commune of 10 August had done illegal things, he replied: ‘The Revolution is illegal: the fall of the Bastille and of the monarchy were illegal – as illegal as liberty itself!’³⁵

There can be little doubt that however much he preferred to distinguish himself publicly from Marat’s tasteless and flamboyant calls for violence, Robespierre was quite prepared to sanction it in practice. He believed violence indispensable for advancing the political experiment on which he had staked his life. The Girondins were no different. Their fight with Robespierre, Danton and Marat was about who would control the new republic, not whether it was legitimate to use violence in bringing it into existence. Louvet tried to reply to Robespierre’s speech, but this time he was howled down. Dr Moore recorded that another of the deputies, Bertrand Barère, a suave lawyer from the Midi soon to be known as ‘the Anacreon of the Guillotine’, brought the venomous debate to a close with his incomparable condescension:

It is time to estimate those little undertakers of revolutions at their just value; it is time to give over thinking of them and their manoeuvres: for my part, I can see neither Syllas nor Cromwells in men of such moderate capacities; and instead of bestowing any more time on them and their intrigues, we ought to turn our attention to the great questions which interest the republic.³⁶

That night Robespierre’s speech was celebrated in the Jacobin Club as a resounding success. Louvet, unsurprisingly, had been expelled, just like Brissot. The club was now, more than ever, the Incorruptible’s domain. But he could not savour his triumph. He went home, collapsed, and did not speak in the Convention again until 30 November. He was ill for nearly a month, not in the Duplay household, but in rooms round the corner in the rue Saint-Florentin, to which Charlotte had at last managed to make him move. Why was he ill? His immune system seems to have been weak at the best of times; and this was far from the best of times. The nervous strain of defending himself in the Convention had clearly taken its toll. Overwork, the approach of winter, the rivalry between his sister and landlady all weighed on him. To make matters worse, Charlotte attempted to conceal Robespierre’s illness from Mme Duplay, judging that ‘his indisposition was nothing serious. He needed a lot of care and I certainly made sure that he got it.’³⁷ When Mme Duplay eventually found out, she was furious and demanded Robespierre’s immediate return to the rue Saint-Honoré. According to Charlotte, he resisted at first, but soon gave in because he did not want to hurt the Duplays’ feelings: ‘They love me so, they have such consideration, such kindness for me, that it could only be ingratitude on my part to reject them.’³⁸ Years later, Charlotte was still complaining that he had sacrificed her feelings to those of Mme Duplay. Evidently she shared his propensity for lasting personal offence, even when none had been intended. For her, as for him, it was the principle that mattered. ‘He ought not’ to have done it, she says over and over again. While Robespierre’s principles were broader and grander than his sister’s domestic codes of conduct, the tenacity with which each held fast was remarkably similar.

Throughout this period, Robespierre was absent from the Jacobins. By the time he returned to the club, Mirabeau’s posthumous reputation had been ruined by the dramatic discovery of his secret letters of advice to Louis XVI. The ransacked Tuileries were being renovated as the new home for the Convention, and the letters had been discovered in a locked chest on 20 November. It was 5 December before Robespierre addressed the club on the subject of its disgraced ex-leader, whose bust still presided over its meetings, and whose remains had been laid to rest with such pomp and ceremony in the Panthéon. At the time of his death the people had wanted Mirabeau eulogised and Robespierre, ‘the organ of the people’, had gone along with it. Now he spoke in support of Duplay’s suggestion that the bust of Mirabeau should now be removed from the Jacobin hall. His bust in the Manège had already been covered with a black veil, pending the report of a committee investigating the discovery at the Tuileries. The Jacobins were less restrained. They fetched ladders and pulled down the busts of both Mirabeau and the philosopher Helvétius – who, Robespierre reminded them, had persecuted Rousseau and shown counter-revolutionary tendencies before his time. The busts were smashed and the Jacobins trampled the pieces into the floor – a parody of the civic spirit that had prevailed when they trampled the Champ de Mars to prepare it for the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The hostile newspaper, the Patriote français, reported the incident with some glee: ‘This evening the Jacobins broke the bust of Mirabeau in their hall. It was on Robespierre’s motion that this execution was carried out, just as it was on Robespierre’s motion that Mirabeau was accorded the honours of the Panthéon. This is how demagogues sanctify popular idols to please worshippers; then break the idols in order to succeed them.’³⁹ In response, Robespierre composed a letter to the paper that stands out from the rest of his writings and speeches in being an apology, not a personal defence: ‘I feel remorse today for the first time in my life; for I may have let it be believed that I shared the good opinion of Mirabeau held by the [National] Assembly and by the general public.’⁴⁰ As apologies go, Robespierre’s was hardly abject. But by his own standards – he was not and never had been wrong – it was remarkable. The fact was that not even he could deny that at the time of Mirabeau’s death only Marat had dared criticise Mirabeau in public. On 4 April 1791, L’Ami du Peuple had declared:

People, give thanks to the gods! Your most redoubtable enemy has fallen beneath the scythe of Fate. Riquetti [Mirabeau] is no more; he dies victim of his numerous treasons, victim of his too tardy scruples, victim of the barbarous foresight of his atrocious accomplices. Adroit rogues to be found in all circles have sought to play upon your pity, and already duped by their false discourse, you mourn this traitor as the most zealous of your defenders; they have represented his death as a public calamity, and you bewail him as a hero, as the saviour of your country, who has sacrificed himself for you. Will you always be deaf to the voice of prudence; will you always sacrifice public affairs to your blindness? … [B]eware of prostituting your incense …⁴¹

Irresponsible, crazy, disconcerting as ever – still Marat definitely had a gift for prophecy. Robespierre never had his clinical capacity to fearlessly diagnose the pathology of politics. But even now that Marat had been proved so devastatingly right – Mirabeau had been a double-crossing traitor and there were documents to prove it – Robespierre still resisted identifying with him. On 23 December the Jacobins circulated a memorandum to their affiliated societies warning true patriots not to confound Robespierre and Marat. The prudent patriotism, statesmanlike views and superior abilities of the former were on no account to be confused with the sanguinary gutter journalism of the latter.

The question of putting Louis XVI on trial was first discussed in the Convention on 13 November. Ill though he was, Robespierre made a point of attending. The Convention, determined not to get sidetracked by another protracted fight between the Mountain and the Girondins, focused the debate on three questions: Can the king be judged? By whom ought he to be judged? And in what respect may he be judged? Charles Morisson, deputy for the Vendée, was the first to speak in defence of the king. He reminded the convention that the constitution of 1791 had declared that ‘the person of the King is inviolable and sacred’. For this reason, he could not be brought to trial:

Citizens, like you I am overcome with the greatest indignation when I consider the many crimes, the atrocities, with which Louis XVI is stained. My first and doubtless most natural impulse is to see this bloody monster expiate his crimes by the cruellest torments that can be devised. I know that he has earned them all. Yet I must deny my impulse: before this tribunal, representing a free people who seek happiness and prosperity in acts that are just, in acts that are humane, generous, and kind, because only through such acts can happiness be found, I must deny my impulse, and heed instead the voice of Reason, consult the spirit and the disposition of our law, seek only the interest of my fellow citizens, for that alone must be the single goal of all our deliberations.⁴²

Already in his fifties, Morisson, unlike most of his younger colleagues in the Convention, had adult memories of the reigns of two French kings. He had not been a mere schoolboy, like Robespierre and Danton, when Louis XV died and his grandson was crowned Louis XVI in 1775. It was rumoured that, in his heart, Morisson still believed in the sanctity of kingship. But his argument turned on law, not religion. He could see that, in the circumstances, an appeal to the failed constitution of 1791 was Louis XVI’s best hope.

Immediately after Morisson, Saint-Just, deputy for Picardy, stepped up to the podium. Twenty-five, handsome, well-dressed and self-confident, Saint-Just had long coveted a more prominent role in the Revolution – and a closer relationship to Robespierre: ‘You whom I know, as I know God, only through his miracles,’ he wrote to him back in 1790.⁴³ He had tried to stand for election to the Legislative Assembly in 1791, but was disqualified when the irate father of his young mistress pointed out that at twenty-four he had not yet reached the minimum age to be a deputy. A year later, a year older, he had at last been elected to the Convention. Now he settled himself, drew breath and began his maiden speech. It brought him everlasting fame.

I say that the King should be judged as an enemy; that we must not so much judge him as combat him; that as he had no part in the contract which united the French people, the forms of judicial procedure here are not to be sought in positive law, but in the law of nations … Some day men will be astonished that in the eighteenth century humanity was less advanced than in the time of Caesar. Then, a tyrant was slain in the midst of the Senate, with no formality but thirty dagger blows, with no law but the liberty of Rome. And today, respectfully, we conduct a trial for a man who was the assassin of a people, taken in flagrante, his hand soaked with blood, his hand plunged in crime … Citizens, if the people of Rome, after six hundred years of virtue and hatred for kings, if Great Britain, after the death of Cromwell, saw kings reborn despite their energy, what must these good citizens among us fear, those who are friends of liberty, seeing the axe tremble in our hands, seeing a people, from the first day of its liberty, respect the memory of its chains! … For myself, I can see no mean: this man must reign or die.⁴⁴

Reign or die: one or the other, Saint-Just insisted, his political logic slicing through Morisson’s legal argument like a freshly sharpened blade. Then – as if he had not done enough to dazzle posterity or make the Convention swoon – he pronounced the sentence that would never be forgotten: on ne peut point régner innocemment – no one can reign innocently. The king, he repeated at the end of his speech, must be judged as an enemy. He was the murderer of the Bastille, of Nancy, of the Champ de Mars, of the Tuileries. What enemy had ever done more harm? After he had finished, Saint-Just, very proud and upright, stepped down from the tribune. He walked back to his seat, carrying his head, as Camille Desmoulins scathingly remarked, like a sacred host.

Robespierre was electrified. He demanded to be heard at once, even though it was not his turn and he was not next on the list of speakers. He would not take no for an answer and caused an unseemly commotion at the tribune. He was asked if it was for or against the king’s inviolability that he wanted so urgently to speak. But he would not give a straight answer, saying only that he proposed to speak ‘on the king’s inviolability’, that he must address the Convention in the wake of Saint-Just. He did not get his way and the meeting soon adjourned.

By the time the Convention resumed its discussion, the king’s reputation had been even further blackened by the discovery of Mirabeau’s incriminating correspondence in the Tuileries. Meanwhile, Robespierre, re-ensconced at the Duplays’, was feeling much better. On 3 December a brilliantly incisive speech signalled his complete return to form:

Louis was king, and the Republic is founded. The great question with which you are occupied is settled by this argument: Louis has been deposed by his crimes. Louis denounced the French people as rebels; to punish them he called upon the arms of his fellow tyrants. Victory and the people have decided that he alone was a rebel. Therefore, Louis cannot be judged; he has already been condemned, else the Republic is not cleared of guilt. To propose a trial for Louis XVI of any sort is to step backward toward royal and constitutional despotism. Such a proposal is counter-revolutionary since it would bring the Revolution itself before the court. In fact, if Louis could yet be tried, he might be found innocent … If Louis is acquitted, where then is the Revolution?⁴⁵

This was Saint-Just’s argument, recast in Robespierre’s words. Characteristically, he personified the Revolution. Whereas Saint-Just invoked the law of nations (and the law of nature) with devastating clarity, Robespierre brought it to bear on a fight to the death between the king and the Revolution. On the subject of the death penalty itself, he did not hesitate to remind the Convention that he had spoken against it at length in May 1791. Lest anyone now accuse him of inconsistency, he explained why the king’s case was different:

Public safety never calls for the death penalty against ordinary citizens because society can always prevent them by other means and render the guilty man incapable of doing further harm. But a deposed king in the midst of a revolution as yet unsupported by just laws; a king whose very name draws the scourge of war on the restless nation: neither prison or exile can render his existence indifferent to the public welfare … Regretfully I speak this fatal truth – Louis must die because the nation must live.⁴⁶

As Robespierre presented it, the execution of the King was to be another manifestation of the people’s revolutionary justice, very different in kind from ordinary legal justice: ‘A people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts; it does not condemn kings, it plunges them into the abyss; such justice is as compelling as the justice of the courts.’⁴⁷

The justice of the courts had been Robespierre’s whole life before 1789, when he exchanged it for the justice of the people: swift, inexorable, revolutionary. He found both compelling, but he knew too, from personal experience, that they were incompatible. There could not be a legal revolution, or a revolution without the people’s justice. When he began his new career in Versailles, Robespierre had had plenty of revolutionary instincts, but no theory of revolution to guide them. After three years’ hard learning he was beginning to develop such a theory. ‘Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?’ he had asked after the September massacres.⁴⁸ Now, at the very end of 1792, he was even clearer and more explicit: any revolution must be a transitional period of struggle on the part of an entire people desiring liberty, but ‘as yet unsupported by just laws’.⁴⁹ To him this was unmistakably what the French Revolution was. He urged the Convention to execute Louis XVI without further delay, ‘to nourish in the spirit of tyrants a salutary terror of the justice of the people’.⁵⁰

The friendship between Saint-Just and Robespierre was spontaneous, profound and hugely consequential for the Revolution. Beyond the powerful coincidence of their views on the king’s trial, they shared an obsession with vertu, which can only loosely be translated into English as virtue. Vertuin French has the wider meaning of righteousness and is a public as well as a private good. Robespierre had read a great deal about vertu and its pivotal role in republican governments in the books of both Montesquieu and his beloved Rousseau. He had mentioned it already in some of his speeches, but the arrival of Saint-Just in Paris brought it to the forefront of his concerns. The two men talked often, and at length. Saint-Just was the only person who dared run straight up the outside staircase into Robespierre’s rooms at the Duplays’ – everyone else tended to approach his quarters more tentatively, through the house. Saint-Just had about him the allure of a reformed sinner – ‘I have done badly, but I shall be able to do better,’ he said, aged twenty. Five years later, bursting with political talent, ambition and ideals, he renounced his mistress.⁵¹ She followed him to Paris, but he would not open the door to her. Robespierre must have approved. The two men agreed about Christianity too: the early Christians were austere and full of vertu, but things had gone badly wrong ever since. As Saint-Just wrote the year before he was elected to the Convention:

The early Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians were Christians because they were good and kind, and that is Christianity. Most of those called Christians since the time of Constantine were nothing but savages and madmen. Fanaticism is the work of European priest-craft. A people which has suppressed superstition has made a great step towards liberty. But it must take great care not to alter its moral principles, for they are the basic law of vertu.⁵²

Robespierre’s fascination with Saint-Just was inevitable. Their unsuccessful joint attempt to stop the king’s trial and have him immediately executed was just the beginning of an intense revolutionary alliance.

Louis XVI was brought to the Convention for questioning for the first time on 11 December. Inside the tower of the Temple, he and the young Dauphin had been kept on a different floor from the rest of their family since October. He had been teaching his young son geography and Latin, his own favourite subjects, and had devised a game with maps: an elaborate jigsaw puzzle that required the Dauphin to fit countries back in their right place. When guards came to escort him to the Convention that morning, the king was separated from the Dauphin and only saw his family again to say goodbye on the eve of his death. At the Convention he was interrogated by the suave deputy Bertrand Barère. Accused, among other things, of deploying troops against the citizens of Paris, he replied: ‘I was the master then and I sought to do what was right.’⁵³ Afterwards, in the carriage back to the Temple, he made polite small talk about the history of the streets through which he passed with the new secretary of the Paris Commune sitting beside him. He had been just as polite in the carriage on the way back from Varennes in April 1791, but now as then it did him little good.

The questioning continued for several days, and then the Convention had to postpone further discussion of the king’s fate for ten days to give his lawyers a chance to prepare his case. They presented it the day after Christmas, 26 December. Louis XVI was portrayed as a victim of circumstance, not a resolute tyrant, a monarch who had tried to do his best for the people, who had never intended bloodshed. Saint-Just was the first to respond the following day.

Louis tainted vertu; to whom henceforth will it appear innocent? … Some will say that the Revolution is over, that we have nothing more to fear from the tyrant … but citizens, tyranny is like a reed that bends with the wind and which rises again. What do you call a Revolution? The fall of a throne, a few blows levelled at a few abuses? The moral order is like the physical; abuses disappear for an instant, as the dew dries in the morning, and as it falls again with the night, so the abuses will reappear. The Revolution begins when the tyrant ends.⁵⁴

Saint-Just was already looking to the future. He wanted the king executed so the Revolution, as he understood it, could truly begin. Ultimately, Robespierre was extremely sympathetic to the thorough regeneration of the moral order that Saint-Just envisaged. But for the time being his own attention was more closely focused on defeating the Girondin deputies, who were demanding a national referendum on the king’s fate. In this way, some of them hoped to save the king’s life; others to diminish the influence of Paris by appeal to the rest of France; all to defeat the Jacobin policy that Robespierre and Saint-Just had defined. In a long speech on 28 December, Robespierre reminded the Convention of the mistakes the National Assembly had made following the flight to Varennes, when he alone dared argue for the king to be put on trial. He characterised the demand for a referendum as yet another Girondin plot ‘to destroy the work of the people and to rally the enemies that they vanquished’ on 10 August:

Yes, doubtless there is a plot to degrade the Convention and perhaps to cause its dissolution as a result of this interminable question [of referendum] … This plot thrives among a score of rascals who abstain above all from announcing an opinion on the question of the last king, but whose silent and pernicious activity causes all the ills which trouble us and prepares all those that await us.⁵⁵

To defeat the threatened referendum, Robespierre drew on a principle of representation that had dominated the Revolution since 1789: there could be no appeal against a body that embodied the sovereign will of the people. The National Assembly in 1789 was such a body, as was the Convention in 1792. The principle was clear enough, but in his fevered exposition of it, Robespierre’s speech became obscure, his logic hard to follow: ‘The general will is not formed in secret conventicles or round the tables of ministers.The minority retains an inalienable right to make heard the voice of truth, or what it regards as such. Vertu is always in the minority on this earth.’⁵⁶

At this, Marat, who was on the same side but independent and outspoken always, shouted: ‘All this is nothing but charlatanism!’ Most of the Jacobins were altogether more appreciative of Robespierre’s speech, and two days later the club suspended all other business so he could solemnly read it aloud again. Afterwards he published it in his journal, along with criticisms of his old enemy Brissot. But Brissot had certainly not given up the fight against the Mountain. As the unofficial leader of the Girondins (who were sometimes even referred to as the Brissotins), he continued proposing measures to diminish the influence of Paris and its delegates over the Convention. He proposed abolishing the permanence of the Paris sections, which, together with the Jacobins, were the chief support of the Mountain. Robespierre took the tribune in opposition, but could not be heard above shouts of ‘Censure him! Lynch him!’ from the other end of the hall. Once again the Manège resounded with violent remarks, personal abuse flying back and forth between the factions, and in the middle of it all Marat outdoing himself with contributions euphemistically described in the official minutes as ‘unacademic phrases’.⁵⁷ The president rang his bell for order until it broke in his hands. When at last he could make himself heard, he censured everyone: Robespierre, Brissot, Marat, the rest of the Assembly and the public in the galleries too. One observer said the scene far surpassed a cockfight.⁵⁸

On 14 January the Convention unanimously voted the king guilty. On 15 January the call for a referendum on his fate was defeated by 424 votes to 287; led by Robespierre, all twelve deputies from the department of Paris were against it. On 16 January voting began on the king’s sentence, with each deputy giving his opinion and explaining his reasons. The session continued all day, all night, all the following day and night, and on into 18 January. An eyewitness said, ‘It is impossible to describe the agitation, even to madness, of that long and convulsive sitting.’

One would naturally suppose that the Convention was a scene of meditation, silence and a sort of religious terror. Not at all: the end of the hall was transformed into a kind of opera-box, where ladies in charming negligés were eating ices and oranges, drinking liqueurs, and receiving the compliments and salutations of those coming and going. … on the side of the Mountain, the Duchess Dowager [a relation by marriage of the king], the Amazon of the Jacobin bands, made long ‘Ha-ha’s!’ when she heard the word ‘death’ strongly twang in her ears.

The lofty galleries, assigned to the people during the days that preceded this famous trial, were never empty of strangers and people of every class, who drank wine and brandy as if it had been a tavern. Bets were open at all the neighbouring coffeehouses.⁵⁹

There was such confusion, such variety of opinion as to what the king’s punishment should be, that it was very difficult to collate the results. Of the 721 deputies who voted, at least 361 had to have voted for death for this to be the majority outcome. On the night of 17 January, the president announced that 365 had indeed done so. The next morning Barrère took over as president (the role was routinely rotated) and revised the figure to only 361 – the barest majority. To this day there is disagreement about the actual figures, but no disagreement at all about the narrowness of the margin that decided Louis XVI’s fate. When someone questioned whether a mere majority was really enough to condemn him, Danton retorted: ‘You decided the Republic by a mere majority, you changed the whole history of the nation by a mere majority, and now you think the life of one man too great for a mere majority; you say such a vote could not be decisive enough to make blood flow. When I was on the frontier the blood flowed decisively enough.’⁶⁰

Throughout the whole protracted process, Robespierre worked zealously to ensure the king’s execution. On 16 January, as he was polled for his opinion, he gave what was, by his standards, a short speech advocating death:

I am inflexible in relation to oppressors because I am compassionate toward the oppressed; I do not recognise the humanity that butchers the people and pardons despots. The sentiment that led me to demand, in vain, in the National Assembly, the abolition of the death penalty, is the same as that forcing me today to demand that it is applied to the tyrant of my fatherland, and the King in person.⁶¹

It was not enough for him to argue that Louis XVI was an exception to the general case he had made against capital punishment; Robespierre, for the sake of his own sense of perfect consistency, had to go a step further and argue that the same principle underpinned his two conflicting opinions.

The following morning, before the first count of the votes, the Convention received a letter from the king’s lawyers, asking to be heard again. Danton said yes, after the result was known. Robespierre said no, the Convention should proceed straight to other business: ‘Never when an accused person is definitively condemned do his defenders have the right to an extension; I demand the order of the day.’ After the result was known later that day, he spoke again, insisting there must be no further appeal beyond the Convention: ‘The nation has condemned the King who oppressed it, not simply to execute a great act of vengeance; it has condemned him to give a great example to the world, to affirm French liberty, to evoke liberty in Europe, and, above all, to affirm among you public tranquillity.’⁶²

After this, the only hope for the king was a reprieve, or postponement of his sentence. For twenty-four hours the Girondin leaders tried to save him this way – tried also to secure their own victory over the Jacobin faction. Robespierre intervened three times to make sure they did not succeed. On the night of 19 January, he led the Paris deputies in voting against the reprieve, and it was defeated, 380 votes to 310. In the circumstances, seventy votes was a narrow enough margin to mean that, without Robespierre’s special exertions, Louis XVI might have lived. Robespierre fought for the king’s death with a religious solemnity that had nothing in common with the ribald vulgarity of the brandy-swilling public in the galleries. It is true that he was backed all the way by the radical Paris sections, backed in their turn by revolutionaries throughout France. But his sensibility was all his own. The evening before the execution, scheduled to occur as soon as possible on 21 January, Robespierre told the Jacobins to present in the morning ‘a calm demeanour, so dignified and formidable that it will freeze with fear the enemies of freedom’. The Girondin Condorcet had been absolutely right to identify Robespierre as the high priest of revolution.

Louis XVI’s chief lawyer was M. de Malesherbes, the great-grandfather of Alexis de Tocqueville, who would write one day of the inevitable progress of equality and democracy in France (and America) that Robespierre, in advance of his time, fought for with such passion. After the Convention had counted and recounted its votes, Malesherbes ascended the narrow winding stairs of the Temple tower to tell the king he must die. Halfway through their interview he broke down and fell weeping on the floor. Recovering himself he said, ‘But Sire, these wretches are not yet our masters, and every honest man will endeavour to save your Majesty, or to die at your feet.’⁶³ The king replied, ‘M. de Malesherbes, such proceedings would involve a great many persons, and would incite a civil war in Paris. I had rather die. You will therefore, I entreat of you, command them from me to make no effort to save me – the King of France never dies!’⁶⁴

‘The king is dead! Long live the king!’ This famous cry had echoed through the centuries down the long line of French monarchs, marking the times when they passed the crown uninterruptedly one to another: to Louis XVI from his grandfather Louis XV, to him from the Sun King Louis XIV, to him from Louis XIII, the successor of Henry IV, the first of the Bourbon branch of the Capetian dynasty founded by Hugues Capet in 987 after the demise of Frankish power.⁶⁵ It was this cry that still sustained the last of their line when he learnt that, like none of his predecessors, he was to die on the scaffold. He saw his family for the final time on the evening of Sunday 20 January, told his son never to think of avenging his death, and gave both his children his blessing. Marie Antoinette wanted the family to stay together all night, but the king needed to be alone with his priest. He told his wife he would see her again in the morning – the tenderest of marital white lies, for he knew he could not stand to confront her grief on his way to his execution. After they left, he asked the guards not to permit his family to return. He spent until midnight with the abbé Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont, a Roman Catholic priest of Irish provenance whom he had specially requested.

He was awoken by drums outside at 5 a.m. The priest said Mass and administered Holy Communion. On his way to execution, Louis XVI read more prayers, the special ones for those at the point of death. He wanted to address the people from the scaffold, but the drums beat loud to prevent him. He was asked to remove his coat and resisted at first – surely they could execute him as he was? When it was explained that the collar of his coat might obstruct the blade of the guillotine, he consented and removed it himself. Then they wanted to tie his hands. Again he resisted – surely that gratuitous humiliation was unnecessary? The abbé Edgeworth helped him by reminding him that Christ’s hands had been tied at the crucifixion. He helped him again by proclaiming as the blade fell: ‘Son of St Louis, ascend to heaven!’ The executioner showed the king’s head to the people. Some of them surged forward to dip handkerchiefs or pieces of paper in his blood. One was inspired to mimic a priest blessing the congregation with holy oil:

One citizen got up to the guillotine itself, and, plunging his whole arm into the blood of Capet, of which a great quantity remained, he took up handfuls of the clotted gore, and sprinkled it over the crowd below, which pressed round the scaffold, each anxious to receive a drop on his forehead. ‘Friends,’ said this citizen, in sprinkling them, ‘we were threatened that the blood of Louis should be on our heads; and so you see it is!’⁶⁶

Alone in her room, Marie Antoinette had not slept, had not even undressed for bed. At 6.15 a.m. guards had come, to take her to the king she thought, but they were only looking for a prayer book for the king’s last Mass. She had waited all morning, still thinking she would see him again, until shouts of joy from the crowd below told her he was dead. Hearing the jubilant cries, Marie Antoinette stood like a statue in a state of silent, choking agony. When at last she roused herself, she asked to see one of the men who had been in the king’s rooms until he was taken away. This man gave her back the king’s wedding ring with a message – he would never have parted with it but with his life. She turned it over in her hand. Inside it was engraved: M.A.A.A. 19 Aprille 1770.⁶⁷ Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria, had married the heir to the French throne twenty-three years earlier. Now she had to ask his executioners’ permission to wear mourning.

Robespierre had breakfast as usual that day with the Duplays. Élisabeth, the youngest of the daughters, to whom he was always so kind, asked him why there were so many people out in the street at that early hour. He told her something was happening that she should not see, and asked one of the household servants to go and shut the great outer door that opened from the carpenter’s courtyard on to the rue Saint-Honoré. Later in the morning, Louis XVI passed that closed door with his priest, guards and a vast silent crowd of the French people. It was in the name of those people that the king was guillotined, just around the corner from the Duplays’, on what had once been the Place Louis XV and was now the Place de la Révolution. Robespierre had counselled solemnity to the Jacobins. He was solemn himself that morning: he turned his back on the public spectacle that he had persuaded the Convention was indispensable for the future of the Republic, but which he did not, himself, care to witness.