10

Robespierre’s Red Summer¹

ROBESPIERRE NOW FOUND himself deeply preoccupied by punishment. Within hours of Danton’s death he was back at the Jacobins, insisting they speak of nothing else that evening except conspiracy. ‘Let us now frighten aristocrats in such a way that they are not only afraid to attack us, but do not even dare to try and deceive us,’ he suggested to the applauding audience.² He may have been instrumental in the immediate promotion of his friend Martial Herman from president of the Revolutionary Tribunal to the Commission for Civil Administration and Police. Like Saint-Just, Claude Payan at the Commune and Robespierre himself, Herman was a stringent moralist.³ The son of the registrar of the old Estates of Artois, and a fellow lawyer, he had almost certainly known Robespierre in Arras long before the Revolution. Herman was at the top of Robespierre’s list of patriots, ‘an enlightened and honest man capable of the highest employment’, the perfect person to put in charge of a commission which, among other far-reaching powers, oversaw the operation of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Ten days (one revolutionary week) after Danton’s death, Robespierre supported Saint-Just’s recommendations to the Convention to revise and tighten police laws. Foreigners and ex-nobles were to be expelled from Paris and from all strategic towns on the Republic’s borders. All political trials would henceforth be held in Paris, so the punishment of counter-revolutionary suspects could be standardised. This centralisation may have been an attempt to halt the atrocities of the Terror in the provinces, but it had severe implications for the capital. There were already nearly seven thousand people crammed into the Paris’s prisons, and the new laws would greatly aggravate the crisis. Augustin set off again to the army (this time taking along a mistress instead of the uncongenial Charlotte). His letters to his brother were full of disturbing news from the provinces: food shortages; hunger; corruption; soldiers racked by venereal disease; anti-clerical vandalism; counter-revolutionary plots. Meanwhile, in the Vendée, the civil war still festered: burning, pillage, massacre – scenes of apocalyptic horror that Robespierre himself never saw, but had no difficulty at all in imagining, late at night in the rue Saint-Honoré.

After supporting the fierce new police laws, Robespierre was absent from the Jacobins and the Convention between 30 Germinal (19 April) and 18 Floréal (7 May). As always, it is possible he collapsed – the strain of condemning Danton taking its toll on his overworked mind and body. Yet rumour has it that he spent the day before his reappearance, his thirty-sixth birthday, celebrating out in the countryside with the Duplays and his dog Brount, perhaps even visiting one of Rousseau’s renowned retreats at Montmorency. Robespierre, by this point, looked much older than his years. The contemporary pictures of him all show sunken, heavily lined cheeks around a grimly set mouth; his eyes were more variable – sometimes simply intense, at other times terrifyingly severe. According to another rumour, on his return to the Convention he stood at the tribune with a new-found calm and control – for the first time there was none of the convulsive twitching or the neurotic fiddling with his glasses, or the other agitated mannerisms of someone who, despite everything, still found it a challenge to raise his voice in public.

Robespierre’s speech on 18 Floréal addressed the relationship between republican principles, religion and morality, consolidating the public professions of personal faith he had made in the past. There was, he had no doubt, a God and an afterlife for human souls. More than this, he attempted to show how the religion of patriotism that had been implicit in the Revolution ever since the great Festival of Federation on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille might now be developed, institutionalised and used to secure the social foundations of the still very precarious Republic. Here it was, at last: Robespierre’s presentation of his most profound personal beliefs, his ardent faith in a public religion that he thought could save the Revolution, and the close – to some minds very suspiciously close – connection between the two. Officially he was representing the views of the Committee of Public Safety, but as so often, his approach was blazingly personal.

He began with appropriate grandeur: ‘The world has changed. It must change again.’⁴ He listed evidence of man’s progress and mastery of the physical world: the development of languages; the advances of agriculture; the discovery of electricity (he had not forgotten his triumph in the lightning conductor case back in Arras); the construction of terrestrial and celestial maps (he had not forgotten the Coronelli globes in the library at Louis-le-Grand either); the discoveries of Newton; the artistic achievements of his friend the revolutionary artist David. Everything had changed in the physical order, and now everything must change in the moral and political order too. He compared man’s reason to the globe half in light and half in darkness; so far only the arts and sciences had been touched by enlightenment, but Robespierre wanted to venture further into the shadowy realms of morality. This was by no means an eccentric desire. The abbé Sieyès (temporarily retired from politics), the Marquis de Condorcet (dead in prison) and a fair number of the other revolutionaries Robespierre had met, or known, shared it too. What made his vision distinctive was the peculiar coincidence of three major obsessions: his interest in moral development; his belief in God; and his passionate commitment to democracy. Addressing the Convention, especially those deputies inclined towards atheism, he demanded to know:

Who commissioned you to announce to the people that God does not exist? Oh you, who are so passionate about this arid doctrine, yet have no passion for your country! How does it help a man if you persuade him that blind force presides over his destiny, and strikes at random, now at the virtuous, now at the criminal? Does it help him to believe that his soul is nothing but a thin vapour that is dissipated at the mouth of the tomb? Will the idea of annihilation inspire him with purer and higher sentiments than that of immortality? Will it give him more respect for himself and his fellow men, more devotion to his country, a braver face against tyranny, or a deeper disdain either for pleasure or for death? No … the dying breath of those poor people who die beneath the blows of an assassin is an appeal to eternal justice! The innocent on the scaffold make tyrants pale in their triumphal chariots: would they have such ascendancy if the tomb made the oppressor and the oppressed equals? … If the existence of God and the immortality of the soul were nothing but dreams, they would still be the most beautiful conceptions of the human spirit.⁵

No one could call Danton innocent – though he was not guilty of the crimes for which he was executed. No one knows if his last breath was an appeal to eternal justice – though this was certainly part of his rant outside Robespierre’s door on the way to the guillotine. How, in all seriousness, could Robespierre square his passionate belief in God and eternal justice with his part in a regime of terror that was claiming more and more lives by the day? He did it by convincing himself that not a single innocent person had been condemned. ‘And who says anyone innocent has perished?’ he asked Danton coldly at their last meeting. But it was increasingly difficult to maintain this contorted position. The strain became obvious when, in the middle of his speech proposing public worship of the Supreme Being, Robespierre suddenly lashed out at Danton’s ghost:

Danton, the most dangerous of all the enemies of the country, if he had not been the most cowardly – Danton, temporising with every crime, connected to every plot, promising criminals his protection and patriots his loyalty, artful in giving his treasons the pretext of public good, in justifying his vices by his pretended faults. He contrived through his friends to have the conspirators, who were on the point of bringing about the ruin of the Republic, accused in an insignificant or favourable manner, so that he might have an opportunity of defending them … and be the better able to rally all the enemies of liberty against the republican government.⁶

This defamation of a former friend, in the midst of a speech on patriotism and religion, may simply reflect Robespierre’s habitual impulse to suborn anything and everything fresh in the public’s mind to his current political purpose. Or perhaps it was a more personal exorcism of his confused regret at Danton’s death. Either way, it was a clear warning, that the new progressive and democratic religion he envisaged was perfectly compatible with the continuation – perhaps even the intensification – of the Terror.

At the same sitting the Convention approved the decree establishing worship of the Supreme Being. Article VII outlined the festivals to be celebrated by the Republic:

Article VII. It [the Republic] shall celebrate on successive décadis [the republican Sabbath, occurring once every ten days] the following festivals: The Supreme Being, and Nature; the human race; the French people; the benefactors of mankind; the martyrs of freedom; liberty and equality; the Republic; the liberty of the world; patriotism; hatred of tyrants and traitors; truth; justice; modesty; glory and immortality; friendship; temperance; courage; good faith; heroism; impartiality; Stoicism; love; conjugal fidelity; fatherly affection; mother-love; filial piety; childhood; youth; manhood; old age; misfortune; agriculture; industry; our ancestors; posterity; happiness.

These festival plans were a straight projection of Robespierre’s own sober system of values. He saw the long-suffering ordinary people of France as modest, stoical and oppressed by misfortune. For them he wanted to inaugurate a democratic regime in which poverty would be honourable, not shameful, and glory more meaningful than fleeting sensual gratification. Ultimately, his model of family life was traditional: conjugal fidelity, fatherly affection, mother-love and filial piety – all those things that were missing from his own disrupted childhood. The secure foundation for his values was, as it had always been, belief in God. Earlier that year he had been horrified to hear that the gates of cemeteries in Lyon and Nevers were being inscribed with the atheistic motto: ‘Death is an eternal sleep.’ Now, with deep gratification, he saw, as he walked through Paris, men on ladders painting in gold letters over the doors of abandoned Christian churches the first tenet of the new religion: ‘Article I. The French people recognises the existence of the Supreme Being, and the immortality of the soul.’

Three days after delivering his momentous speech, Robespierre and Barère, his colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, were browsing in a bookshop near the Palais Royal. The talk that day was of Louis XVI’s sister, Mme Élisabeth, who was on her way to the guillotine after nearly two years’ imprisonment in the tower of the Temple. Out in the street people were blaming Robespierre for her death, although he, in fact, argued against it on the Committee. Bitter, or just despondent, he turned to his colleague and said, ‘You see, it is always me.’⁷ He had done more than anyone to identify himself wholly with the Revolution, and now that the Revolution had become the Terror, he found himself identified with that too. The next day, 22 Floréal (11 May), he decided to go on an impromptu visit to the tower. No one knows why he went. When they heard about it, his enemies spread the rumour that he was contemplating marriage to the deceased king’s daughter, Mme Royale, and scheming to secure his tyranny over France by mixing his blood with that of the Capet dynasty. The princess left her own report of the incident, which mentions no such ludicrous designs: ‘One day there came a man who I believe was Robespierre. The officers showed him great respect. His visit was a secret even to the people in the Tower, who did not know who he was; or, at least, would not tell me: he stared insolently at me, cast his eyes on my books, and, after joining the municipal officers in a search, retired.’⁸ Whatever he was doing, or looking for, it was typical of Robespierre to be momentarily distracted by the spines of some books. Another source claims that the princess managed to pass her distinguished visitor a note: ‘My brother is ill. I have written to the Convention for permission to go and take care of him. The Convention has not answered me. I repeat my request.’⁹

There is no record of Robespierre having visited the young heir to the abolished throne: Louis Capet as he was now known. The nine-year-old boy, living in squalid solitary confinement, severely beaten for saying his prayers at night, degraded and sick, might have touched the Incorruptible’s heart. What would Robespierre have said if he had known that Capet had been allowed to raise three canaries in his dank and lonely prison cell? If he had heard that those tamed and treasured birds were suddenly taken away because the pastime that had brightened his own childhood was considered too aristocratic for poor Capet? But no one bothered Robespierre with such details, or dared ask him what was on his mind when he walked away from that terrible place, its child prisoners and abusive guards.

The first Festival of the Supreme Being was scheduled for 20 Prairial (8 June). Amidst the frenzy of preparation – revolutionary stage sets by David and music by Gossec, as usual – there were two attempts to assassinate Robespierre. Neither was very determined. In the first, on 3 Prairial (22 May), a man named Admiral hung about in the street all day, hoping to fire at Robespierre, but ended up aiming at another member of the Committee of Public Safety, Collot d’Herbois. The gun misfired and the only person injured was a locksmith who ran to help Collot. The second attempt occurred on the following evening. At about 9 p.m., a sixteen-year-old girl named Cécile Renault knocked on the Duplays’ door and asked to see Robespierre. She acted very suspiciously, babbled something about the Old Regime, was soon arrested and afterwards found to be in possession of a knife (a fruit knife – not the kind of blade that had killed Marat). When questioned she said she had only ‘wanted to see what a tyrant looked like’, rather as Danton had once skipped school at the time of Louis XVI’s coronation ‘to see how they made a King’. Renault’s testimony was as confused and confusing as Damiens’ had been after his attempt to assassinate Louis XV back in 1757. It was not even clear that she had intended to murder Robespierre, still less what her motives for doing so might have been. A rumour went round that he had staged the whole affair to boost his popularity with the people, who loved a near-martyr almost as much as they loved a real one.

Whatever the real story was, Robespierre, who had been speaking regularly for the last four years of his imminent assassination, reacted with all the panic of someone who had narrowly escaped death. When the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, called round to see him at the Duplays’ later in the evening, he found him offensively dictatorial. Robespierre persuaded the Committee of Public Safety that the situation warranted recalling Saint-Just to Paris from his latest mission with the army. Such was his agitation that he managed to sign the document recalling his best friend twice. He also vetoed any special honours for the locksmith wounded trying to help Collot d’Herbois, and made a speech in the Convention that was almost incoherent with paranoia: ‘Slander, arson, poison, atheism, corruption, starvation, and murder – they [the enemies of France] have been prodigal in every sort of crime: but there still remains assassination, assassination and again assassination.’¹⁰ Even so, he could not disguise his pleasure at being (at last) ‘judged worthy of the tyrants’ dagger’. Let no one say city life was less dangerous than the battlefield; ‘we have nothing to envy our brave brothers in arms’, he reassured himself and the other deputies, who had kept a safe distance from the front line.

Later that evening the Jacobins were rapturous in their relief that Robespierre had survived. He rose to the occasion, announcing:

I feel myself more independent than ever of the wickedness of man. The crimes of tyrants and the weapons of their assassins have rendered me freer and more formidable to the enemies of the people, my spirit is more disposed than ever to unmasking traitors and tearing off the masks with which they still dare to cover themselves … We swear by the daggers already reddened with the blood of the Revolution’s martyrs, and recently sharpened for us too, to exterminate every single one of the criminals who want to rob us of happiness and liberty.¹¹

Letters of congratulation flooded into the rue Saint-Honoré and Robespierre kept at least some of them: ‘Everlasting thanks to the Supreme Being, who has watched over your life!’ wrote one admirer from Vesoul.¹² Whether or not Robespierre staged either attempt on his life (or both), no one can doubt that he turned them instantly to political advantage. Yet this does not mean that his fear was faked. ‘We shall never get out of our present state. I am worried to death: I am losing my mind,’ he muttered in unguarded moments to his tobacconist, a pretty shopkeeper in the rue Saint-Honoré who did not matter, one way or the other, politically.

The morning of 20 Prairial (8 June), Whit Sunday in the old Christian calendar, It was a morning bathed in brilliant summer sunshine, and the rest of the day was destined to be the happiest of Robespierre’s life. The citizens of Paris had decorated their houses with wreaths of oak, laurel, fresh flowers, tricolour ribbons and flags.¹³ Joachim Vilate, a friend of Robespierre and a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal who had been given lodgings in the part of the Tuileries palace known as the Pavilion de Flore, encountered him pacing round the premises at an early hour, far too nervous to have breakfast, because the day of the first Festival of the Supreme Being had arrived. Vilate persuaded Robespierre to accompany him upstairs to try and eat something. Robespierre’s nerves stemmed from his election four days previously as president of the Convention, which meant he would officiate as a kind of high priest at the inaugural ceremony of the new religion that meant so much to him.

From Vilate’s rooms there was a wonderful view of the Tuileries gardens. Robespierre, standing at the window, was awed by the crowd beginning to assemble below. He could see women with garlands of fresh-blown roses in their hair and branches of palm or laurel in their hands; men with oak leaves in their hats, and children strewing the ground with violets and myrtle. Intoxicated with joy he said to Vilate: ‘Behold the most interesting part of humanity! Here is the universe assembled before us! Nature, how sublime, how delightful, thy power! How the tyrants must turn pale at the thought of this Festival!’¹⁴ On that same morning, the guillotine, which had been in alarmingly frequent use within earshot of the Tuileries palace (over the previous seven days alone it had executed 119 people), was tactfully moved to the site of the demolished Bastille. Afterwards it was moved even further out of the city centre because the blood shed beneath it was beginning to pollute the city’s water supply.¹⁵

At midday, Robespierre, dressed in a sky-blue coat with an immense tricolour sash, went back down into the garden, where he joined the other deputies to the Convention, similarly attired, wearing swords and plumed hats and bearing posies made of flowers and sheaves of corn. Robespierre’s posy was slightly larger than everyone else’s – it had been lovingly constructed in the Duplay household. According to Vilate, he absent-mindedly left it behind on an armchair on his way down to the Festival. The immense crowd listened to Robespierre give a rather vague theistic speech, beginning: ‘The day forever fortunate has arrived, which the French people have consecrated to the Supreme Being.’¹⁶ Then they watched him set fire to a cardboard statue of Atheism – a hideous misshapen figure with cumbersome drapery and ass’s ears that the crowd had been puzzling over earlier in the day. From the flames another cardboard statue emerged – a representation of Wisdom, fair, majestic and only slightly singed. After one more speech underscoring the meaning of this ceremony, they all sang a song to the Supreme Being, and processed to the Champ de Mars (recently renamed the Champ de la Réunion).

Throughout the ceremony, Robespierre could hear sarcastic and derisive comments coming from other Convention deputies behind his back, daring to snigger at the rituals in which he had invested so much thought and hope. There was nothing he could do, short of turning round and interrupting the proceedings, but afterwards he complained about it bitterly. Almost the whole population of Paris, about half a million people, had turned out for the occasion. On the old Champ de Mars – where there had already been four celebrations of the fall of the Bastille, with a fifth now imminent – the assembled congregation sang patriotic songs as the deputies filed up a papier-mâché mound (symbolic of the Jacobin Mountain) and took their seats beneath a tree of liberty at the summit. Cries of ‘Vive la République!’ echoed all around, and the day ended with athletic sports, inspired by the festivals of ancient Greece. It must have seemed to Robespierre that the optimism of the early Revolution had been revived – a new religion, a new beginning – his tremendous personal and political struggle had not been in vain.

The next day he drew up laws to further fortify the Revolutionary Tribunal and invented a new official category of criminals: enemies of the people, ‘those who, in any manner and no matter with what mask they have concealed themselves, have sought to thwart the progress of the Revolution and prevent the strengthening of the Republic’.¹⁷ Through his friend Couthon, who presented the proposals in the Convention, Robespierre recommended that the Tribunal should now accept ‘moral proofs’ against accused persons, who were no longer to be allowed advocates. Power to send people before the Tribunal was to be extended (from the Committee of Public Safety and the larger Committee of General Security) to the Convention, to individual representatives-on-mission in the provinces, and to the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. Enemies of the people included anyone seeking to re-establish monarchy, discredit the Convention, betray the Republic, communicate with foreign enemies, interfere with food provision, shelter conspirators, speak ill of patriotism, corrupt officials, mislead the people, spread false news, insult morality, deprave the public conscience, steal public property, abuse public office, or plot against the liberty, unity and security of the state. The punishment for all these crimes was death. The proposals were passed by the Convention without the usual prior discussion in the Committee of Public Safety, and became known as the infamous Law of 22 Prairial: the climax of the Terror. The passing of this law made it possible to execute someone for declaring: ‘A fig for the nation’, for producing sour wine, for hoarding, writing, or attempting to communicate with the English. From 22 Prairial (10 June) until the arrest of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (27 July), 1,376 people were guillotined in Paris. In those forty-seven days, the Revolutionary Tribunal condemned more people to death than it had done in all the months since Danton established it in March 1793. Was the bloodletting Robespierre’s fault?

He bears direct responsibility for the Law of 22 Prairial, which was designed to both speed up and expand-the Revolutionary Tribunal’s work. In this simple, technical, legal sense, his hands are covered in blood. It does not matter which, or how many, individuals he intervened personally to save at the eleventh hour. He initiated the law that menaced absolutely everyone, on the most spurious grounds, and without recourse to any form of defence. He also played a prominent part in extending the Revolution’s agenda to include the moral regeneration of the people – and he was prepared to resort to the most drastic measures to achieve this. It was not enough to encourage patriotism – anti-patriotic sentiment had to be exterminated. It was not enough to nurture moral rectitude – depravity had to be stamped out. In this way, the joyous Festival of the Supreme Being and the dreadful Law of 22 Prairial were all too compatible. Together they aimed at realising the republic of virtue that Robespierre dreamed of. He may not have thought it likely to come about in his lifetime – he was ill, desperately anxious, anticipating assassination, in despair over the corruption silting up around him – but for him none of these were reasons to stop trying. And so he went on: not as a man like Macbeth, so steeped in a river of blood that ‘returning were as tedious as go o’er’.¹⁸ Robespierre was no cynic – he was, as Danton told the Revolutionary Tribunal, ‘above all, a tenacious man’, and what he held on to most tightly of all was his dream of virtue.¹⁹ He went on with the Terror, kept moving through that gory river, because he believed it necessary for saving the Revolution. He can be accused of insanity and inhumanity but certainly not of insincerity.

Following the Law of 22 Prairial, there was a savage quarrel in the Committee of Public Safety; they had to shut the windows to avoid a public scandal.²⁰ This was hardly the first big row to erupt round the oval table in the green room. What exactly was said is unrecorded, but if Robespierre and Couthon were criticised for the manner in which they had pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial, their colleagues cannot seriously have criticised the content, which reflected common policy. The Committee of Public Safety was still an emergency wartime government; so if the Terror ended and the Constitution of 1793 came into effect, the Committee would be annulled. If this happened before sufficient measures had been taken to safeguard the Republic from its internal and external enemies, all would be lost and the Revolution would have been in vain. Robespierre had taken the Terror to an extreme, but he had not departed from the basic principles from which the Committee of Public Safety drew its power. Serious clashes of personality and policy, however, fractured its unity of purpose. In particular, Robespierre clashed with Lazare Carnot, the army officer and stern patriot who was responsible for the conduct of the war. After the recapture of Toulon the main focus of the foreign war was once again the frontier with the Austrian Netherlands. Carnot’s programme of mass mobilisation, combined with military reforms to integrate new recruits into a coherent fighting force, were beginning to show profit. Back in Paris, however, the war was causing political conflict. In April, Carnot had called Robespierre and Saint-Just absurd dictators. He had quarrelled fiercely with Saint-Just over military issues. More recently, he had dispatched artillery units loyal to Robespierre to the front line. Robespierre suspected this was a deliberate ploy to get those who would defend him, should the need arise, out of Paris. Since there were 700,000 armed men at the front, and a constant need for reinforcements, his suspicions may have been unfounded. There was no doubt, though, that Carnot was hostile to him.

Robespierre had enemies outside the Committee of Public Safety too. The Committee of General Security, angry at not having been consulted over the Law of 22 Prairial, began scheming to expose the Incorruptible as a dictator. Many deputies in the Convention were now frightened of being sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal – especially those who had been called back in disgrace from their provincial missions, among them Joseph Fouché and Jean Lambert Tallien, both notorious for their cruelty. Sensing so much ill-feeling, Robespierre increasingly withdrew from the Convention and from meetings of the Committee of Public Safety. Instead he turned his attention to running the Committee’s new Police Bureau, which he had taken over on 14 Floréal (3 May) when Saint-Just left Paris again to supervise the army in the north. Saint-Just had set up the Police Bureau one revolutionary week earlier on 4 Floréal (23 April), an act that caused immediate friction with the Convention’s other executive committee, the Committee of General Security, which had had responsibility for policing ever since it was first established in September 1792. That committee had not been pleased when the Committee of Public Safety acquired the right to issue arrest warrants back in July 1793, but it was yet more threatened by the new Police Bureau.

Internal security – eradicating the insidious threat of the enemy within – had been a concern of Robespierre’s from the outset of the Revolution. Now, in charge of the Police Bureau, he spent hour after hour assessing the reports of informers – sifting through the denunciations of unpatriotic enemies of the people pouring in from all over France. His small staff summarised each case for him, leaving a margin for his decision. This work must have played on his worst nightmares. It forced him to confront on a daily basis the revolutionary question he found most tormenting: how could true and false patriots be distinguished? Who was more likely to look at a tree of liberty with indifference: the hypocrite or the real patriot? In some cases he dutifully asked for more information before making a decision; in others he simply authorised an arrest. For example, when the mayor of Mont-Rouge was accused of incivisme or lack of public spirit during the local Festival of the Supreme Being, and more specifically of saying as he watched the celebrations ‘this rabble don’t wear underwear, see how they dance’, Robespierre directed, ‘Arrest the mayor of Mont-Rouge and have Herman interrogate him.’ However, when the popular society of Valence denounced the quartermaster of the Armée des Alpes as immoral, Robespierre questioned the esprit of the popular society, and asked for more information on this point from his friend Payan.²¹

Increasingly Robespierre fell back on networks of patronage – friends and friends of the friends whom he already knew (or thought he knew) as pure of heart, ‘au courant’ with his ideas and ‘one of us’.²² His landlord Maurice Duplay, for example, was appointed to the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is rumoured that once, when Duplay returned home, Robespierre asked him what he had been doing on the Tribunal that day. ‘I have never tried to find out, Maximilien, what you do on the Committee of Public Safety,’ replied the carpenter correctly.²³ Robespierre, in acknowledgement of Duplay’s irreproachability, silently shook his hand. But virtue like this was rare. Robespierre was now in a position to appoint a considerable number of public officials to administrative jobs, but he knew comparatively few people and was soon running out of candidates. Some he summoned from Arras; his pre-revolutionary acquaintance Herman recommended to Robespierre another member of the Arras Criminal Tribunal: ‘I propose one Carron for your consideration … he is a good sans-culotte republican, whom I consider to be one of us [que je crois propre à être avec nous].’²⁴Robespierre’s printer Nicolas, the Duplays’ doctor Souberbielle and even their grocer Lohier also found themselves appointed to the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Duplays’ next-door neighbours at number 365, rue Saint-Honoré proved another source of loyal personnel. Here lodged a hat merchant, Louis Emery, and a manufacturer, Didier Fillion, who were closely linked to a faction of Lyonnais Jacobins, ‘the friends of Chalier’ with whom Robespierre had been connected since his friend Marie Joseph Chalier was executed during the revolt in Lyon in 1793. Robespierre ended up appointing some members of this faction to administrative jobs in Paris. The fact that a provincial faction gained such influence with him highlights the essentially domestic nature of his patronage networks. Politically, he relied on those he thought he could judge instinctively, and unsurprisingly they turned out to be his friends, his neighbours, the friends of his neighbours and so on. At the end of one of Robespierre’s lists of potential candidates for appointment or promotion there is Saint-Just’s brother-in-law, described as ‘energetic, patriotic, pure, enlightened’.²⁵ These were the personal attributes the Incorruptible most admired. To hostile eyes, his appointments look nepotistic, his values empty excuses for promoting friends and acquaintances into positions of power. To him, this seemed the only way of finding upright, trustworthy patriots for all the urgent jobs that needed doing. He wanted to surround himself with people who believed as he did that ‘Duty comes first when it comes to serving the Republic.’²⁶ But his labours in the Police Bureau were a daily reminder that such people were difficult to find, very few and far between.

By now there were unmistakable signs that Robespierre would soon turn on the deputies in the Convention whom he considered corrupt. Two in particular stood out: Tallien and Fouché. Both had been recalled from their missions to quell the counter-revolution after perpetrating infamous atrocities: Tallien in the Vendée and Bordeaux; Fouché in Nevers and Lyon. After the successful repression of Lyon, authorised by the Committee of Public Safety, Fouché remained behind in the city. His attempts to continue and even extend the repression with new excesses of brutality had led to conflict between him and ‘the friends of Chalier’, who thought it was time for local Lyonnais patriots to resume control. Tallien for his part had felt personally menaced even before the Law of 22 Prairial was passed. His mistress, Thérésa Cabarrus, had been arrested earlier in the month. She was a twenty-one-year-old Spanish girl who had been married to a French nobleman at the age of fifteen. Tallien had met her when he was organising the Terror in Bordeaux, spared her life, fallen in love with her and brought her back to Paris. In his small, fastidious handwriting, Robespierre himself had written out the warrant for Therezia’s arrest. Considering that France was at war with Spain and the revolutionaries regarded ex-nobles as intrinsically suspicious, the arrest of Tallien’s mistress may not have reflected personal animosity on Robespierre’s part. But Tallien was convinced it did. Similarly, Fouché, a militant atheist, knew he was loathed by the Incorruptible. While on mission, he had vigorously overseen the ransacking of the churches in Nivre, and delighted in having the motto that Robespierre so hated, ‘Death is an eternal sleep’, inscribed on the cemetery gates. More recently he had dared to jeer openly at the Festival of the Supreme Being. In addition to these personal reasons for hostility towards Fouché, Robespierre was encouraged to move against him by ‘the friends of Chalier’, who now that Fouché had been recalled to Paris openly hoped he might be sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined.²⁷

In her memoirs, Charlotte Robespierre claims that she was present during the bitter conversation between Robespierre and Fouché that took place when the latter returned from Lyon.²⁸ She says her brother severely reproached Fouché for all the bloodshed he had caused in the Republic’s second city. Fouché trembled, went pale and babbled excuses for his cruelty. Robespierre told him there were no excuses for the crimes he was guilty of. True, Lyon had rebelled against the National Convention, but that did not justify killing crowds of unarmed civilians with grapeshot. According to Charlotte, Robespierre and Fouché were enemies from this day. Earlier in the Revolution, Robespierre had thought Fouché a sincere patriot and stalwart democrat, and had even encouraged him to court Charlotte. Too beady-eyed to be swept up in a fanciful romance, Charlotte had understood immediately that Fouché was simply hoping to further his career by aspiring to become Robespierre’s brother-in-law. She told him coldly that the idea of marrying him was not ‘repugnant’ to her, and she would, of course, be guided by her brother. Fouché withdrew his interest, and later Charlotte felt she and Maximilien had been equally duped by this ‘hypocritical, treacherous man without convictions, without morality, capable of doing anything to satisfy his wild ambition’. Her account is biased as so often, but the souring of relations between Robespierre and Fouché that she describes certainly occurred. Robespierre may have thought Fouché had gone too far in Lyon, but he himself was not innocent of the bloody repression – indeed, through his connections with ‘the friends of Chalier’ he was seriously implicated in the city’s politics – much more so than Charlotte knew or understood.

At the Jacobins on 23 Prairial (11 June), when the infamous law was just one day old, Robespierre indignantly denounced Fouché for preaching atheism. The next day in the Convention he warned of a new faction trying to infiltrate the Mountain Jacobins: ‘a member of the Mountain is a pure, reasonable, sublime patriot’; nothing could be worse for the country or the people, he insisted, than a plot to corrupt his own supporters. One deputy, Léonard Bourdon, a fervent supporter of de-Christianisation, sensed that, along with Tallien, Fouché and several others, he was being threatened without being named, so interrupted Robespierre to ask outright if he was calling him a scoundrel. ‘I demand, in the name of the country, not to be interrupted. I have not named Bourdon; shame on him who names himself.’ Then Robespierre continued with words to the effect of ‘if the cap fits wear it’, whereupon another voice cried, ‘Name them!’ ‘I will name them when it is necessary,’ he replied, meaning if and when he could be sure of arresting and guillotining them. He continued speaking in vague abstract terms about the false patriots conspiring night and day to destroy the Mountain. He appealed to the Convention for unity and called on it to support the Committee of Public Safety: ‘Give us your help; do not permit anyone to come between you and us, since we are a part of you and nothing without you. Give us the strength to carry the immense burden, almost beyond human effort, that you have imposed on us.’²⁹ Tallien interrupted him to say that he and another deputy had been mocked in the street: the people no longer thought of them as their representatives. Robespierre turned on him – that was not true, he insisted; but what was true was that Tallien himself now spoke endlessly of using the guillotine as something to degrade or menace the Convention. According to Robespierre, he had recently said: ‘They want to guillotine us, but first we are going to guillotine them.’³⁰ By this point, what members of the general public thought of the Convention was entirely beside the point. What Robespierre and Tallien were really arguing about was the fact that under the Law of 22 Prairial, the Convention’s three hundred or so deputies were no longer immune from arrest and execution. Robespierre had just made it clear to anyone still in doubt that Tallien’s name was on his latest list of proscriptions.

Some of the atheists and supporters of de-Christianisation, whom Robespierre so hated, decided to try and strike him before he struck them. It was obvious that a scandal would destroy his career, established as it was on personal purity. But there were no scandals where the Incorruptible was concerned, so one would have to be fabricated. There was at that time an old woman in Paris who had been arrested many times under the Old Regime, and even interrogated in the Bastille at one point, for describing the extraordinary visions she had. Catherine Théot had grown up a serving-girl in a convent. Convinced that she was destined to be the second virginal mother of God, she prophesied the final coming of the Messiah and was still expecting to give birth to him well into her eighties. Alternatively she predicted his sudden appearance near the Panthéon amid flashes of lightning. She was almost certainly insane, but since the Revolution her sect of devoted followers had grown – those were, after all, times of tremendous turmoil and insecurity. One of her followers was an ex-monk, Dom Gerle, who had lodged with the Duplays before Robespierre did, had been a member of the National Assembly, and more recently had tried to involve himself in planning the worship of the Supreme Being. This Dom Gerle had close links to Robespierre’s most intimate circle, and recently the Incorruptible had been instrumental in obtaining him a certificate ofcivisme (or public spirit).

These were the raw materials from which the Incorruptible’s enemies in the Convention’s Committee of General Security tried to concoct an embarrassing scandal. That they were driven to such desperate measures is testimony to the aptness of Robespierre’s nickname. Théot was arrested on 23 Floréal (12 May), just five days after Robespierre asked the Convention: ‘Who commissioned you to announce to the people that God does not exist?’ Then, on 27 Prairial (June 15), Marc Guillaume Albert Vadier, an atheist deputy, read a report on the Théot sect (renaming it the Theos sect by a clever slip of the pen) in the Committee of General Security. Later he planned to back up the report with the news that under Théot’s mattress the police had found a letter dictated but not written by the illiterate and partially paralysed old woman that congratulated Robespierre on all he had done – by restoring belief in God – to prepare the way for her forthcoming son the Messiah. The timing of this report was no accident: it was three days after Robespierre had publicly menaced Tallien and Fouché. According to one account Vadier went to the green room in the old Tuileries palace the evening before he delivered his report, and announced what he intended to do the next day in the Committee of General Security. Robespierre was mortified. Unsurprisingly a row ensued, Vadier called Robespierre a tyrant, and Robespierre, with tears of anger in his eyes, said, ‘I’m a tyrant, am I! Well, I shall release you from my tyranny and come here no more.’³¹ And that was the last time he attended the Committee of Public Safety. This story is exaggerated. Robespierre remained president of the Convention until 1 Messidor (19 June) and in the following week he signed a great many documents in the Committee of Public Safety. After this he does seem to have withdrawn.³² But it is certainly true that within just a few weeks of appealing to the Convention to unite behind the Committee in its awesome task of saving the Republic, he effectively distanced himself from both bodies and fell back on the older sources of his political support: his friends in the Paris Commune and, of course, the Jacobins.

Whether or not he absented himself from Committee meetings, Robespierre was still a highly influential member of the government, and as such he succeeded in preventing the trial of the Théot sect. Fouquier-Tinville was sent for in the middle of the night and told by Robespierre himself that the trial was not to go ahead. The public prosecutor informed Vadier and the other conspirators that: ‘He, he is against it,’ which can hardly have come as a surprise to them.³³ What was surprising, indeed frightening, was that one man had this power to impose his will on the Convention and its Committee of General Security, even when he was personally embattled in the smaller Committee of Public Safety. Robespierre’s formidable power derived from both formal and informal sources: his reputation for patriotism, patronage networks, revolutionary experience, official responsibilities, control of the Police Bureau, popularity at the Jacobins and support in the Commune. But taken together these do not add up to the powers of a dictator. Nevertheless, this was how his enemies perceived him. And when he quashed the trial of the Théot sect, he did indeed appear dictatorial. Soon afterwards, Robespierre’s supporter in the Commune, Claude Payan, wrote urging him to secure his victory over the conspirators with a denunciation of fanaticism. Payan, like Saint-Just and Robespierre, was interested in the possibility of centralising moral as well as physical government. But these were long-term objectives. Much more pressing was the need to eliminate the faction in the Convention that had dared to strike at Robespierre.

Two days after the atheists failed to embroil the Incorruptible in their fabricated scandal, there was a terrible scene at the guillotine, even by the standards to which Paris had become accustomed (not for nothing had the royalist abbé Maury, back in 1791, warned against depraving the people by familiarising them with the sight of blood). It was now two and a half revolutionary weeks since Cécile Renault’s confused attempt to assassinate Robespierre, and the days were getting warmer with the approach of mid-summer. The inhabitants of the rue Saint-Honoré must have been relieved that the guillotine was still positioned outside the city centre, so they no longer had to contend with the noise and stench of the crowd accompanying the tumbrils past their doorsteps every day. As a result, Robespierre probably did not see his would-be assassin on her way to execution on 29 Prairial (17 June). She was accompanied by her father, brother and aunt, along with a random assortment of other prisoners, all clothed in the red shirts of parricides. Before the Revolution, Robespierre had written his first essay for the Academy of Arras against the tradition of bad blood. Under the Old Regime, the concept of guilt by association, used to implicate a criminal’s entire family in their shame, had been repugnant to him. Had it lost its horror for him under the Republic? No wonder people began to suspect him of wanting to become king when they saw Cécile Renault and her family go by, costumed for their execution.

Also among the prisoners that day were three members of the outstandingly good-looking Sainte-Amaranthe family: a widowed mother and her two children aged nineteen and seventeen. It was unclear why. The Sainte-Amaranthes were acquainted with the Duplays and a story went round that Robespierre had been to dinner at their house, got uncharacteristically tipsy, spoke somewhat indiscreetly about his political intentions, and so had the whole family condemned to death to keep them quiet. But there is another story to set against this. Allegedly, on the night that Vadier went to the Committee of Public Safety to announce his forthcoming report on the Théot sect, he also threatened to propose the indictment of the Sainte-Amaranthe family. ‘You will do no such thing,’ said Robespierre imperiously. ‘I will,’ retorted Vadier. ‘I have plenty of evidence.’ ‘Evidence or not, if you do so I shall attack you,’ came the Incorruptible’s reply. If the first story suggests he was a ruthless tyrant, the second suggests this was exactly how his enemies wanted to make him appear.

Another prisoner among the sixty-one executed in that appalling throng was the underage servant girl of someone who had once been mistress to an Hébertist. When her small body went under the guillotine there were cries of ‘No children!’ from the crowd, whose depravity, despite everything, still knew some bounds. We will never know for sure if 29 Prairial was the revenge Robespierre demanded for a supposed attempt on his life, or if those actively plotting his downfall staged it against his will. His friends and his enemies can choose the version they prefer.

Two days after these executions, Robespierre ceased to be president of the Convention and turned his attention to reorganising the Police Bureau. The Committee of Public Safety agreed to increase the number of staff under him, ordering them to work every day from 8.30 a.m. to 3.30 p.m., and if necessary in the evenings too. Despite this, the paperwork remained chaotic and Robespierre testily complained on 5 Messidor (23 June) that: ‘The absence of dossiers that are mentioned but often found to have gone astray perhaps stems from the poor organisation of the Bureau, which means that the dossiers are not put back where they should have been.’³⁴ He had always been fastidious. He lost his temper when he could not put his hand on the file he needed. It was a great relief when Saint-Just came back from the army in the north and took over the Bureau again at the end of June. Then Robespierre could stay all day in his orderly room at the Duplays’, and Saint-Just could run round the corner and straight up the outside staircase to ask his advice if he needed it.

During this period, the number of people guillotined grew steadily. The sixty-one who died on 29 Prairial set a gruesome new record. It was soon surpassed on 19 Messidor (7 July) when sixty-seven were executed, and almost equalled on 21 Messidor (9 July) when a further sixty went under the guillotine. Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, was often summoned in the night to receive his orders for the next day. He said there were ghosts that trailed him on those dark walks; gruesome ghosts appearing in defiance of the argument against clemency that Barrère presented to the Convention: ‘It is only the dead who never come back.’³⁵ In the month that followed, there were only four days on which fewer than twenty-eight people were executed: one of these was a decadi – a revolutionary day of rest – and another was the fifth anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The Police Bureau shared joint responsibility for this bloodshed with the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. It is impossible to know exactly how the responsibility was divided, but implausible that none of it was Robespierre’s. Yet when he fell from power, those who pushed him gave not his extremism but his moderation as their reason for doing so. The atheist Vadier, for example, accused him ‘of having endeavoured to save from the scaffold the enemies of the people, and of having officiously interfered with Fouquier-Tinville to suspend the execution of conspirators’.³⁶ Vadier may have meant the Sainte-Amaranthe family, over whom he and Robespierre allegedly quarrelled, but there were perhaps others the Incorruptible also wanted to save.

When Saint-Just arrived back in Paris and burst through the doors of the Committee of Public Safety on the night of 10 Messidor (28 June), Robespierre was immensely relieved for both personal and political reasons. Saint-Just brought exciting news. The Revolutionary Army had just won a decisive victory against the Austrian army at Fleurus in Belgium. In doing so, it had secured the road to Paris against the foreign enemy. The battle of Fleurus was the first in history to be won by making use of air surveillance.The French sent up a manned air-balloon, tethered to the ground by two long cables, and in this way observed the enemy’s tactics from on high. The Committee of Public Safety received Saint-Just’s news nervously. Recently it had had to move to a new room on the top floor of the Tuileries palace, so that its violent rows could not be overheard if the windows were open because of the stifling summer heat.³⁷ It was a war government. Once the war was won, there were sure to be calls for a return to constitutional government. Back in 1791, an air-balloon trailing tricolour ribbons above Paris had announced the inauguration of the ill-fated constitutional monarchy. Many now thought the air-balloon floating over the battle of Fleurus should herald the institution of the long-postponed republican constitution of 1793. Robespierre, for all his differences with his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, did not want to see the war government disbanded until all the internal, as well as external, enemies of the Revolution had been dealt with. In this he was supported by his friends in the Commune and the Jacobin Club, and by Saint-Just and Couthon on the Committee of Public Safety.

It was at the Jacobins that Robespierre had always been surest of himself. There on 21 Messidor (9 July) he tried to define patriotism – the heart of virtue and the cornerstone of the dream republic he was still fighting for. His fatigue and disillusionment showed in his speech: ‘There are few generous men who love virtue for itself and ardently desire the happiness of the people,’ he admitted with resignation, obviously numbering himself among the few.³⁸ Reaching imaginatively back to the beginning of the Revolution, he recalled that Necker, Louis XVI’s chief minister, with whom he had once been invited to dine in Versailles, was a tyrant in his own home. Nothing astonishing there – a man who lacks public virtue cannot have private virtue either, remarked the Incorruptible. Similarly the Girondin minister Roland, married to that pretty woman so much younger than himself, displayed the kind of false virtue that Robespierre considered ‘diametrically opposed to heroism and humanity’.³⁹ Then there was Hébert secretly trying to destroy the liberty of France, and the moderate Dantonists endangering the safety of the Revolution. Now there was a new plot against the revolutionary government and Tribunal, to which the Jacobins must alert the Convention.

Robespierre was terribly tired. He urged the Jacobins to be suspicious, to hold fast to their principles, to fight on against the Revolution’s internal enemies: so pernicious and yet always so hard to identify. ‘It is necessary always to return to these principles: public virtue and supreme justice are the two sovereign laws under which all those charged with the interests of the country must bow.’⁴⁰ His words and themes were what they had always been, but much of the vigour had gone. Did any of the Jacobins still bother about Necker or Roland? Why did Robespierre think their names might stir his audience when so many terrible things had happened since the fall of the monarchy? Everyone knew he had more immediate enemies now, and the time was fast approaching when he must move against them or die at their hands. ‘I will name them when I must,’ he had told the Convention weeks ago. The confrontation was long overdue, and still he continued with swirling abstractions, first principles, the public expression of his own private conscience, his pride and his purity.

The fifth anniversary of the Bastille’s fall was imminent. How would Paris – traumatised, frightened, disillusioned – celebrate? Some of the city’s sections organised fraternal banquets (repas fraternels): simple communal meals – ‘a bit of cold beef, a plate of haricots verts and a salad’ – consumed outside in the street on the warm, bright summer evening.⁴¹ A number of Robespierre’s closest associates saw no harm in these alfresco meals: François Hanriot, his friend in charge of the National Guard, Martial Joseph Armand Herman, his friend on the Revolutionary Tribunal, and Claude Payan, his friend in the city’s Commune, all took part in them. Robespierre did not. He celebrated the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall by attending the Jacobins, as usual, and trying for the second time to denounce Fouché. Here he was sure as ever of acting impartially for the public good: ‘I begin with the declaration that the individual Fouché interests me not at all.’ What, he asked, was Fouché afraid of? ‘Is it perhaps the eyes and ears of the people? Is it perhaps that his wretched face proves him too clearly the author of a crime?’⁴² What crime did Robespierre mean? He specified it only in vague terms at the very end of his speech: ‘These men have used the terror to force patriots to keep silent; they have put patriots in prison because they dared break their silence. This is the crime of which I accuse Fouché.’⁴³ This was enough for the Jacobins, and they immediately expelled the ferocious promoter of de-Christianisation whom Robespierre so hated.

Two days later Robespierre criticised the fraternal banquets, reminding the Jacobins that the time for fraternity had not arrived when so many internal enemies still remained. Those who called for an end to revolutionary government in the wake of the battle of Fleurus were false patriots, since Robespierre was convinced the banquets and conspiracies were closely linked. Together beneath the clear blue sky at the Festival of the Supreme Being the people had been united, grand, sublime. But divided into little groups, seated round trestle tables, they were vulnerable to the schemes of intriguers: ‘How indeed could one mistrust a man with whom one has drunk from the same cup, on whose lips one has encountered the language of patriotism?’⁴⁴ Even at this point in the Revolution, the shattered symbolism of the Catholic Mass retained enough power to make it worth fighting over. Robespierre asked the Jacobins to consider whether those who drank from one cup at the fraternal banquets were sincere in expressing unity with the people. ‘Share my fear,’ he had urged the Jacobins in the past. Now he tried asking them again. His associates who had misread the signs and participated in the banquets wrote grovelling letters excusing themselves: ‘Judge, judge what I must suffer at the thought of having involuntarily contributed to placing those instruments of mischief in the hands of our enemies,’ wrote one abject member of the Revolutionary Tribunal.⁴⁵

Soon after, another member of the Tribunal, Joachim Vilate, who had given Robespierre breakfast on the morning of the Festival of the Supreme Being, made a list of those whom the Incorruptible was soon to proscribe. Robespierre’s colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, Bertrand Barère, dictated it – why is a mystery. Even more of a mystery is why Vilate left the list lying on a desk in his charming apartment in the Pavillon de Flore, overlooking the Tuileries gardens, where the trees that shed their leaves early in the year the monarchy fell now sweltered in the heat. The list was still there a few days later on 3 Thermidor (21 July) when the Committee of General Security arrested Vilate. The list is lost, but the names of Fouché, Tallien, Vadier and other members of the Convention probably figured on it. By now there were no walls thick enough, no rooms sufficiently high or soundproof, to conceal the personal and political differences tearing the Convention and its two committees apart. Saint-Just and Barère tried to act as peacemakers. Twice they convened joint meetings of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. Robespierre, now practically a recluse except when at the Jacobins, went to the second of these meetings, on 5 Thermidor (23 July). He was cold and reserved – nothing new – but left his friends and enemies alike with the impression that he was prepared to compromise, that some headway had been made toward uniting the two committees. But he never did compromise. In his thirty-six years there are no examples, except, just possibly, when he agreed to the death of Danton. Compromise, to Robespierre, was corruption – the betrayal of his absolute principles, the stars by which he had steered his extraordinary political career.

After the meeting, he went off on his own. Secluded in his room above the carpentry yard, he wrote for three days and nights preparing the text of his last speech. He consulted no one, not even Saint-Just. Perhaps he was offended by the younger man’s opening to compromise inside the Committee of Public Safety, or perhaps, however close they seemed to outsiders, Robespierre had kept something back from even this, the most significant of his personal and political alliances. On the morning of 8 Thermidor (26 July) he got dressed carefully, as he always did, drank coffee, and went out for the first time in days. It was a very short distance to the Convention. There he spoke for two hours – sincerely, passionately, truthfully – explaining what he had done in the Revolution and why. Who knows if before he opened his mouth the unwelcome thought crossed his mind that it was precisely this privilege – this opportunity to defend himself before the Convention – that he and Saint-Just had denied Danton? ‘I am going to unveil the abuse that is bringing about the ruin of the country – the abuse which your probity alone can repress.’⁴⁶ This was his familiar vocabulary. His audience had heard him say such things before. This time was going to be different.

The French Revolution is the first to have been founded on the theory of the rights of humanity and the principles of justice. Other revolutions required nothing but ambition; ours imposes virtue. Ignorance and power absorbed the others in a new despotism; ours, emanating from justice, stands alone. The Republic, led insensibly by the force of circumstance and by the struggle of the friends of liberty against continually reborn conspiracies, has slid, so to speak, through all the factions … it has been persecuted constantly since its birth, as have the men of good faith who have fought for it. And so, to preserve the advantage of their position, the heads of the factions and their agents have been obliged to hide themselves behind the edifice of the Republic … All the deceivers have adopted, each more convincingly than the last, all the formulas and all the rallying words of patriotism.⁴⁷

Here was the problem that had driven Robespierre mad: how can you tell a sincere man in politics? When the language of those who work for the public good is so easily adopted by those who work only for themselves, who can tell a true from a false patriot? And how? Robespierre, absolutely sincerely, did not see himself as the leader of just another faction. He saw himself as one of the persecuted: someone who had fought for the Republic against ‘tyrants, men of blood, oppressors of patriotism’.⁴⁸ After his death his enemies turned the very same words against him – he became the tyrant, the man of blood, responsible for the worst excesses, if not the entire system, of the Terror. He would not have been surprised. The slipperiness of language, that great gulf between what is said and what is true, was precisely what he complained of in this last of his astonishing speeches.

He went on to defend the actions of both the executive Committees. Each had only charged people – it was the Revolutionary Tribunal, in the name of the Convention, that had actually condemned them. Quite why Robespierre thought there was a valid distinction to be made between charging and condemning people under the Law of Prairial is a difficult question to answer. He was personally implicated in passing the infamous law that transformed the Revolutionary Tribunal’s work into something still more brutally perfunctory. Was this pure hypocrisy? Complete self-delusion? Or did he, insanely, believe that a true patriot would have been acquitted by the Revolutionary Tribunal despite everything? By now he knew for sure that innocent people had died. The best he could come up with was to say: it was not my fault, not even the fault of the Committee I sat on: it was the fault of the Convention to which I now appeal. His strategy was not admirable, but he did think his claim was true. Moreover, he believed there was a case for continuing with the Terror: ‘The guilty complain of our rigour – the country, more justly, complains of our weakness.’⁴⁹

Robespierre’s was a characteristically personal speech. He spoke of the calumnies against him: they were ridiculous, who could believe that he wanted the Convention ‘to cut its own throat with its own hands’ and so open the bloody path to his own dictatorship? ‘The monsters who charge me with such insanity are the real cut-throats who meditate the sacrifice of all the friends of their country.’ It hurt him deeply ‘to become an object of terror’ to the people he loved and revered:

They [the real conspirators] call me a tyrant. If I were one, they would grovel at my feet. I would shower them with gold and they would be grateful. When the victims of their perfidy complain they excuse themselves by saying, ‘Robespierre will have it so.’ To the nobles they say, ‘He alone persecutes you.’ To the patriots they say, ‘Robespierre protects the nobles.’ To the clergy they say, ‘He’s the one persecuting you.’ To the fanatics they say, ‘He’s the one who destroyed religion.’ All the grievances that I have tried in vain to redress are still imputed to me – ‘He did all of it’ – ‘He won’t prevent it’ – ‘Your fate is in his hands alone.’ Spies are hired and stationed in our public places to propagate these calumnies. You see them at the sittings of the Revolutionary Tribunal. You find them round the scaffold when the enemies of the people expiate their crimes – you hear them saying, ‘These are the unhappy victims of Robespierre.’ Above all, they strive to prove that the Revolutionary Tribunal is a tribunal of blood, created and guided by me alone … When a deputy on mission to a Department is recalled, they tell him it is I who recalls him. Obliging persons have been found to attribute to me more good than I have done in order to impute to me mischief in which I had no hand. They kindly repeat to my colleagues everything that I happened to say, and, above all, everything that I did not say. If any measure of the Government was likely to displease anyone, it was I who did all – exacted all – commanded all! It was never to be forgotten that I was the dictator.⁵⁰

‘You see, it is always me,’ Robespierre had complained to his colleague Bertrand Barère in a bookshop earlier that year: always him whom people blamed. Why was he surprised? He identified himself with the Revolution. He had insisted over and over again in the Estates General, the National Assembly, the Jacobins, the Commune, the Convention, and the Committee of Public Safety that there simply was no distinction: he was the living embodiment of the eternal principles upon which the Revolution was founded. Of course people blamed him for its excesses and failures. In his own mind, Robespierre had slid (as he put it) with the Revolution past all the factions that had tried to possess it for their own corrupt purposes. He and the Revolution had remained pure, and together they had eluded all those grasping, egotistical hands that sought to sully his beautiful dream of a just and virtuous democracy. Now, inevitably, he thought the time had almost come to move against the latest set of conspirators:

You will ask who are the authors of this system of calumny [against himself] – I answer, in the first place – the Duke of York – Mr Pitt [the British Prime Minister] and all the tyrants who are in arms against us. But who next? [Long dramatic pause.] Ah! I dare not name them at this moment and in this place – I cannot bring myself to a resolution to tear away altogether the veil that covers this profound mystery of iniquity.⁵¹

Everyone in the room had a good idea who he meant: Fouché, Tallien, Vadier and perhaps even Barère, among others. Not naming but only alluding to them at this point in his speech was extremely imprudent, leaving the whole Convention to tremble with fear. Whatever did he hope to achieve by it? In his isolation, perhaps he had failed to recognise that the time for insinuation at the Convention was long since past, now none of the deputies felt safe from the Tribunal. Terrified and divided, they spent their days whispering the names of the soon-to-be-proscribed along the benches. Many had stopped sleeping at home, scared of a knock on the door in the middle of the night and an arresting hand on their shoulder. Now Robespierre, last seen in the Convention on 24 Prairial, two days after the infamous law was passed, had reappeared, speaking with devastating passion, but stopping short of actually naming names. Saint-Just, hearing only at the last minute what Robespierre intended to do, probably rushed to the Convention to watch his friend bare his soul and expose both their lives. Sitting there listening, he would have felt like putting his head in his hands in a gesture of black despair. Camille Desmoulins had once jeered at him for carrying his beautiful head about like a sacred host, but those days too were gone.

Robespierre even hinted that the list on Vilate’s desk was part of the plot against him: ‘Inoffensive, ordinary people are tormented and patriots are every day cast into dungeons. Have not even members of the Convention been designated as victims on secret and odious lists of proscription? Has not this imposture been propagated with such combined artifice and audacity that a great number of deputies have not ventured to sleep in their own residences?’⁵² Next he discussed the plot to make him look ridiculous by association with Catherine Théot. Then he gave heartfelt thanks to the Convention for supporting his new religion of the Supreme Being:

Immortal thanks to the Convention for that decree, which is in itself a revolution and has saved the country. You have struck with the same blow atheism and priestly despotism! … You have won over to the Revolution every pure and generous heart! … Oh day forever fortunate! When the French people rose all together to offer to the Author of Nature the only homage worthy of him, what a touching assemblage was there of all the objects that can fascinate the eyes or attract the hearts of men! Oh honoured old age! Oh generous and ardent youth! Oh pure and playful joy of childhood! Oh delicious tears of maternal fondness! Oh divine influences of innocence and beauty! Oh the majesty of a great people, happy in the contemplation and enjoyment of its own strength and glory and virtue!⁵³

If anyone had been in any doubt that the Festival of the Supreme Being was the happiest day of Robespierre’s life, they were no longer. Remembering it, he was moved to pray aloud in the Convention: ‘Being of beings, was the day on which the universe came forth from your creative and almighty hands brighter or more acceptable to your eyes than that recent day when the first People of the world, bursting the bonds of crime and error, appeared before you worthy of your favour and of its own destiny?’ The best of his friends must have wondered what on earth he thought he was doing. What had ‘delicious tears of maternal fondness’ got to do with the desperate crisis he found himself in? French mothers had wept ever since the Revolution began – Marie Antoinette had appealed to them when the Revolutionary Tribunal accused her of child abuse. The mothers of those lynched in the street, the mothers of those killed in battle, the mothers of those massacred in prison, the mothers of those sent to the guillotine – who could find their tears delectable? For the last time Robespierre publicly described his vision of the Republic as he thought it should be. The reality – as he was the first to admit – was far removed. Finally he turned on his enemies:

… No, Chaumette, no, Fouché! Death is not an eternal sleep. The French people will not submit to a desperate and desolating doctrine that covers nature itself with a funeral shroud – that deprives virtue of hope, and misfortune of consolation, and insults even death itself. No; we will efface from our tombs your sacrilegious epitaph, and replace it with the consolatory truth, DEATH IS THE BEGINNING OF IMMORTALITY.⁵⁴

Interestingly, and in the face of plentiful hints to the contrary, Robespierre did not feel himself close to death at this point. As usual, he announced that he was more than willing to sacrifice his life for the Revolution. And as Danton had done when close to the end, he claimed life had become a burden: ‘Why should I regret escaping from the eternal torture of seeing this horrible succession of traitors, who, concealing the turpitude of their souls under the veil of virtue, and even of friendship, will leave posterity in doubt which was the greater, their cowardice or their crimes?’⁵⁵ His conclusion was a self-referential remark of superb insight: ‘I was made to oppose crime, not to control it.’ He knew and understood himself as no biographer ever could. However, when the Convention discussed its response to his two-hour address, Robespierre was genuinely shocked that it turned against him. Instead of immediately lauding, printing and circulating his speech, the Convention referred it to the committees of Public Safety and General Security. He had serious enemies on both. He tried to protest: ‘What! My speech is to be sent to be examined by the very deputies I accuse!’ And so, in one spontaneous sentence, he suddenly revealed what he had tried to bury so carefully in the text of his long, bizarre oration. He had returned to the Convention to swing it against its own committees; there was no further need for him to name the conspirators – their identities were clear to everyone listening.

Pierre Joseph Cambon, head of the Finance Commission and one of the few ‘monsters’ mentioned by name in Robespierre’s speech, was the first to denounce him. He began by defending himself and other members of the Finance Commission against Robespierre’s implicit charges of corruption and conspiracy, but then he went a step further and announced: ‘It is time to tell the whole truth: one man is paralysing the National Convention; that man is the one who has just made the speech; it is Robespierre.’ Soon afterwards Barère intervened to distract everyone with a buoyant speech about recent military victories and the Republic’s bright future. Barère’s purposes were unclear – and his feelings about Robespierre at best ambivalent – but he succeeded in deflecting the immediate crisis, and there was no call for Robespierre’s arrest.⁵⁶

If Robespierre decided not to consult Saint-Just before he made his speech because he thought his friend might try to talk him out of it, he was right. Saint-Just thought the way forward was to work with, not against, the committees, which, after all, still formed the locus of revolutionary government. Robespierre’s unilateral and unmistakably personal intervention had seriously damaged any chance of compromise. That evening, Robespierre, accompanied by Couthon, went off to the Jacobins to make sure the club rallied behind him. But Saint-Just went alone to the Tuileries palace and sat in the meeting room of the Committee of Public Safety. Perhaps he had not yet decided what to do. Because he had played such an important role on mission to the army, and been present for the decisive battle of Fleurus, his revolutionary identity was not simply conflated with Robespierre’s. They had been, and still were, personally and ideologically close. They meant the same thing by the reign of virtue and were passionately committed to realising it in France. But if Robespierre was going to fall, there was a good chance that Saint-Just might save himself. Wondering what was going on round the corner at the Jacobins on that warm summer evening, wondering if compromise might still, even now, reunite the two committees, Saint-Just must have turned over in his mind the possibility of betraying the Incorruptible.

Meanwhile at the Jacobins things were, as usual, going in Robespierre’s favour. Despite some initial opposition, he succeeded in rereading his speech to the club. At the end he declared that it was his last will and testament and, identifying now with Socrates, said: ‘If you forsake me see how calmly I shall drink the hemlock.’⁵⁷ At this the artist David, who was very emotional and had once rushed on to the floor of the Convention baring his chest for the blades of Robespierre’s would-be assassins, shouted: ‘I will drink it with you.’ (David, who had been close to the Incorruptible for a long time and deeply involved in designing the Festival of the Supreme Being, survived his fall and lived to be Napoleon’s painter too.) Most of the other Jacobins also backed Robespierre. They turned on Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne, two of his hostile colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, and drove them from the club. The pair, furious and humiliated, stormed off to the Tuileries palace, where they found Saint-Just sitting at the Committee’s table, bent over the text of his speech for the following day. Carnot, Barère and some of the other members of the Committee were there too. There was another loud quarrel – they had become a habit. Finally Saint-Just, ‘cold as marble’, agreed to submit the draft of his speech to the Committee before reading it to the Convention the next morning. Having secured this promise, Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne set off to reassure Fouché, Tallien and the other deputies who were afraid of being proscribed by Robespierre. Saint-Just sat on in the committee room until 5 a.m. – he felt the insults of his colleagues branding his soul. When he left at last, he went to find Robespierre.

Maybe Robespierre persuaded him. Maybe Saint-Just had already decided. But whatever he was thinking as he ascended – perhaps with a heavier tread than had been his wont – the outside staircase that led directly to the Incorruptible’s room, he no longer believed in compromise with the committees when he came back out. On that beautiful summer morning he did not submit to the Committee of Public Safety, as he had promised to do, the draft of the speech he intended to deliver to the Convention. Instead he sent his colleagues a dramatic note: ‘You have seared my heart: I intend to open it to the Convention.’⁵⁸ Saint-Just, who had wavered, had thrown in his lot with Robespierre and that morning would see a fight to the death. Leaving the Duplay household for what everyone knew might be the last time, Robespierre turned to his host and said: ‘Don’t be alarmed, the majority of the Convention is pure; I have nothing to fear.’⁵⁹ Saint-Just, pasty from his sleepless night, went out with him, carrying the amended speech. Together they entered the Convention, where Couthon and Robespierre’s brother were waiting for them. Fouché, Tallien, Bourdon and others determined to bring down Robespierre were there too, rallying moderate or undecided deputies to their cause. Unfortunately for Robespierre and his supporters, Collot d’Herbois happened to be the current president of the Convention. He was going to help Tallien and the others stop Saint-Just and Robespierre speaking.

Saint-Just began. He had scarcely finished his first sentence when Tallien interrupted, complaining that, like Robespierre the day before, the speaker had isolated himself from the committees and spoke only for himself. It was true that Saint-Just’s speech had not been sanctioned by the Committee of Public Safety, still less the Committee of General Security. Before Saint-Just could resume, Billaud-Varenne described how he and Collot d’Herbois had been expelled from the Jacobins the evening before. He accused Robespierre directly of plotting against the Convention. At the tribune, Saint-Just froze. He had stood there before and never trembled when he delivered those razor-sharp interventions on the fate of Louis XVI and later Danton. ‘The words we have spoken will never be forgotten on earth,’ he had announced so proudly.⁶⁰ Now, suddenly, he could find no more words. Robespierre saw and ran forwards to interrupt Billaud-Varenne. But his enemies were prepared for this and by prearrangement shouts of ‘Down with the tyrant!’ rang out round the hall. No one could hear Robespierre in the tumult. From the chair, Collot d’Herbois ignored his requests to speak, and instead allowed Tallien to do so again. Every time Robespierre tried to interrupt, cries of ‘Down with the tyrant!’ deafened him.

After Tallien, who proposed arresting Hanriot (Robespierre’s friend at the Commune), among others, it was Vadier’s turn. Vadier chose this moment to reveal that a letter implicating Robespierre in the Catherine Théot sect had been found under the old woman’s mattress at the time of her arrest. He developed this ridiculous line of attack until Tallien stopped him irritably: ‘I demand the floor to bring the discussion back to the real point.’ ‘I could bring it back’, yelled Robespierre with all his might, making his voice heard at last in the fight. But they would not let him. ‘It is the blood of Danton that chokes you!’ someone shouted, remembering that Robespierre, in his time, had prevented others from speaking, as he now wanted to. ‘Danton! Is it, then, Danton you regret? Cowards! Why did you not defend him?’ yelled Robespierre as the din broke over his voice again and silenced it.⁶¹

They voted for Robespierre’s arrest. Augustin at once asked to be arrested with his brother and no one objected. Next they attacked the crippled Couthon, ‘thirsty for blood’ and hoping ‘to make of our corpses so many steps to mount the throne’. ‘Oh yes! I wanted to get a throne,’ said Couthon, gesturing at his wheelchair with bleak irony.⁶² Finally Saint-Just and Robespierre’s friend Lebas were arrested too. The five were assembled before the bar and had to listen to a moralising speech from Collot d’Herbois, the Convention’s far from neutral president. They were probably still in shock. They all knew what failure meant in a time of revolution. Robespierre and Saint-Just had theorised, justified and legalised the draconian punishment of death for anyone and everyone who failed the Revolution. Both had said they did not value life in and of itself: ‘I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you,’ said Saint-Just before his eloquence deserted him.⁶³ Now they really were very close to death. Despite everything, it came as a surprise.

When news of the events in the Convention reached the Commune, it rose in support of Robespierre. The city gates were closed and the tocsin rang out from the Hôtel de Ville as it had before the fall of the monarchy and later the Girondins. Armed men began assembling and dragging out any cannons that had not yet been sent from Paris to the front line. Robespierre’s friend Hanriot, who had also been threatened with arrest, ordered the city prisons to refuse admittance to prisoners sent by the Convention. Meanwhile the Jacobins went into permanent session, periodically sending messages of support to the Commune throughout the night. The problem was that the Commune did not have complete control over the city’s forty-eight sections, many of which disregarded the orders they received. Some sections went further and came out in support of the Convention. By 10 p.m. that evening, only thirteen of the forty-eight had sent armed men to the Hôtel de Ville to fight for Robespierre. Where was he? Hanriot had set off to find out and discovered the five arrested deputies in the rooms of the Committee of General Security, where they had been given dinner. When he arrived, Hanriot was arrested too, so that made six. For some reason, Lebas was allowed to go home, watch the police seal his papers, and say goodbye properly to his wife Élisabeth and their newborn son. Afterwards he was taken to the prison La Force, where he joined Augustin, whom the prison Saint-Lazare, following orders, had refused to admit. Robespierre was taken to the Luxembourg, close to the flats where Danton and his wife and Camille and Lucile Desmoulins had lived. Couthon was wheeled to the Bourbe, and Saint-Just escorted to the Écossais. Hanriot was still at the Tuileries palace when an armed deputation from the Commune arrived to liberate him. Unexpectedly, this proved quite easy.

The Convention had just begun its evening session when news arrived that the men it had arrested earlier in the day were at large again: none of the prisons had wanted to detain them in defiance of orders from the Commune. Indeed, Robespierre had been spotted getting out of a cab with a white handkerchief over his mouth (perhaps he had been sick on the journey) and walking into the Mairie, where he fell into the arms of the mayor’s staff. They reassured him that he was still among friends. Augustin had given a speech at the Commune. And by 1 a.m. all five, together with Hanriot, were at the Hôtel de Ville waiting for the insurrection to begin. Robespierre had hoped to avoid a resort to violence, would have preferred a proper opportunity to win the Convention round, but eventually he was persuaded that, in the circumstances, there was no alternative. The Convention’s committees responded by declaring the prisoners outlaws, to be taken dead or alive and executed without trial. And so Robespierre and his friends became hunted men, just as the Girondins had been a year before. But unlike the Girondins, who had fled Paris and scattered throughout France, Robespierre and his accomplices remained in a single room in the Hôtel de Ville. From here they sent out rousing proclamations to the Paris sections and arrest warrants for their enemies in the Convention. Robespierre’s own section was to receive the following:

Courage, patriots of the Pikes Section! Liberty is winning the day! Those men whose constancy made them feared by the traitors have already been released. Everywhere the People is showing itself worthy of its reputation. The rallying point is the Commune, where the brave Hanriot will carry out the orders of the Executive Committee [Robespierre and friends] that has been set up to save the country.

Signed: Lerebours, Legrand, Louvet, Payan, Ro …

Robespierre’s signature is incomplete and the document is blood-splattered. There is dispute about whose blood made the stains. Some historians think it was Robespierre’s own. According to one version there he was, carefully adding his signature, when the door flew open and soldiers sent by the Convention fired at him, shattering his jaw and knocking him forward bleeding on to the document. The soldiers had got past the Commune guards by guessing their not very difficult password: ‘Vive Robespierre!’ Other, more sceptical historians think the blood could be just about anyone’s, may not even have got on to the paper during the early hours of 10 Thermidor (28 July), and there will never be a proper explanation for Robespierre’s broken signature. He was, after all, in a pretty catatonic state even before half his jaw was shot off – perhaps he broke off his signature simply to be sick again, and, since there was so much going on, never got back to complete it.

What is certain is that soldiers from the Convention did burst into the room, and one way or another Robespierre suffered a bullet wound that shattered his jaw. The most likely explanation for this outcome is a bungled suicide attempt. When the soldiers came for them, Augustin escaped through a window and edged his way along a ledge overlooking the square below, holding his shoes in one hand, holding on with the other, but slipped suddenly and smashed on to the steps outside the Hôtel de Ville, to the horrified amazement of the people assembled there for the insurrection. An eyewitness observed that ‘the body had fallen on a sabre and a bayonet, and knocked down the two citizens who carried them’.⁶⁴ He was picked up later, half dead. Hanriot jumped, or was pushed, through another window on the third storey of the building, which overlooked an inner court. He landed in an open sewer and was found there several hours later, covered in excrement, in horrendous pain, and begging to be finished off. Couthon, who could not walk, pulled himself out of his wheelchair, only to fall down a staircase and cut his head open. Lebas, the only one who had been home since the defeat in the Convention, had two pocket pistols on him. He handed one to Robespierre and blew his own brains out with the other. Robespierre, who had probably never fired a gun in his life, may have tried to do the same, but pulled the trigger too soon with a very shaky hand. Saint-Just, cold as marble, sat there like a statue, waiting.

Lying on a plank, Robespierre was carried back to the Committee of Public Safety between one and two in the morning. He was bleeding profusely from the wound to his left lower jaw. He tried to stop the blood flow by pressing with a white leather pistol-bag. Later someone noted the words inscribed on it: ‘Lecourt, gun-maker to the king and to the army, Rue St Honoré, near the Rue des Poulies, Paris.’⁶⁵ Probably it was the bag for the pistol that Lebas gave Robespierre to shoot himself with – it might still have been in his left hand after he had pulled the trigger with his right. He was only semiconscious by the time his rough stretcher was carried up the stairs of the Tuileries and put down on a table in the antechamber to the Committee’s meeting room. Someone placed a small box, containing samples of bread intended for the army in the north, under his head as a pillow. He was unconscious for an hour or so and seemed unlikely to last the night. But around three or four in the morning he opened his eyes again and tried to remove some of the blood from his mouth with the pistol-bag. At one point someone handed him some sheets of paper for this purpose. The leather bag must have been too soiled to be of further use. At about 6 a.m. a surgeon was called in to dress the wound. Two or three teeth were extracted and the shattered jaw was bandaged tightly. Sometimes Robespierre looked steadily at the people around him, but mainly he looked up at the ceiling. He made very little noise even though he must have been in terrible pain. Suddenly he sat bolt upright on the table. He pulled up his stockings, which were hanging down round his ankles, stood up, crossed the room and seated himself in a vacant armchair. He was wearing the same sky-blue coat he had worn for the Festival of the Supreme Being. Fastidious to the end, he asked for some clean linen.

At 9 a.m. Couthon was brought to the Tuileries, also on a makeshift stretcher – or, possibly, in a wheelbarrow. Before he was carried up the grand staircase, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varennes and Barère, who were all inside the committee room, decided to send the prisoners to the Conciergerie. By this time, Saint-Just, in much better physical shape than his friends, had joined them. He stood motionless before the framed copy of the Declaration of Rights that hung in the antechamber to the Committee of Public Safety. Finally he raised his arm, pointed and said composedly: ‘And yet it was I who did that.’⁶⁶ It was true. He had helped draft the democratic constitution of 1793 that never came into effect. Robespierre was carried down the stairs in the armchair he was sitting in. Legend has it he struck at the men carrying him, but it seems very unlikely he had the strength left.⁶⁷

Later that morning, what was left of the five deputies who had stood before the bar of the Convention the previous day, been arrested, escaped, and been hunted through the night, was at last assembled before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Augustin may have been dead already; Lebas certainly was; and Couthon and Robespierre were both physically mangled. Only Saint-Just remained on his feet. The five were joined by seventeen other prisoners considered loyal to the Incorruptible, including Hanriot. Outside, the carts were already waiting for them, and the guillotine had been brought back into the city centre and reassembled in the Place de la Révolution especially for the occasion. By early evening, enormous crowds filled the streets and the banks of the Seine. Everyone wanted to see Robespierre go past.

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

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