Part I
1
ROBESPIERRE’S STORY BEGINS in the small city of Arras, in the province of Artois, in northern France. For centuries Arras was on the border between France and the Netherlands, changing hands many times before it was firmly annexed by the French monarchy in 1659. Then the city walls were fortified and Arras settled down to a more peaceful existence as the province’s ecclesiastical and judicial centre. It was known as ‘the city of a hundred steeples’ because visitors approaching across the surrounding fields, or on the fine gravel road from the nearby town of Béthune, saw from afar the tall spires of Arras’s gothic bell tower, the cathedral, the abbey, eleven parish churches, over twenty monasteries and convents, numerous hospices, chapels and charitable institutions.1 Conservative piety pervaded the narrow cobbled streets like the smell of incense, as some twenty thousand men, women and children went about their daily devotional duties.
Robespierre’s birth in 1758 coincided with the beginning of an economic boom in Arras: work had begun to connect the eastern and western sides of the city, which were separated by a branch of the river Crinchon. There were ambitious schemes to clean the river, a seething channel of infection, and to dam or bridge the many places where it seeped insistently into the streets. There were elaborate plans to reconstruct the cathedral, which dated back to AD 687, and to renovate the Abbey of Saint-Vaast, which, along with a lavish income and considerable personal power, made the bishopric of Arras an attractive post for the younger sons of France’s nobles. Alongside the new public buildings, wealthy investors commissioned townhouses several storeys high, to meet growing demands for accommodation. The price of land was rising. Every Wednesday and Saturday even more people crowded inside the city walls to attend the twice-weekly markets trading in regional produce: hemp, flax, wool, soap, lace, porcelain – and especially grain.
The grain trade was the main cause of this economic vibrancy. In the distant past Arras’s wealth had come from the beautiful tapestries that adorned Europe’s medieval castles. But while Shakespeare’s Hamlet may have immortalised these tapestries by lunging at a rat behind the arras, they were not the source of the city’s eighteenth-century wealth. Rather, local landowners, most of them nobles, had grown extremely rich from the rents on their arable land. The façades of their fine new buildings were decorated with stylised sheaves of corn signalling the source of the money that financed them. These well-to-do landowners were responsible too for Arras’s atmosphere of optimism and urban refinement. Paris was less than twenty-four hours away by courier.
Behind all this prosperity there lay an onerous system of privilege by which the upper classes lived at the expense of the community; a system of taxation that placed the heaviest burden on those least capable of bearing it; outdated restrictions on manufacture and commerce; and the vestiges of feudalism that weighed heavily on the peasants in the countryside. Along with the economy, crime thrived in Arras. The city’s three prisons were crammed full, and processions of beggars, criminals and prostitutes were often seen leaving the city under armed guard, heading north for the house of correction in Lille.
The de Robespierre family, established in the province for three centuries at least, was respectable, but not noble.2 It did not own arable land, so did not benefit directly from Arras’s economic boom. The family had a coat of arms (which appears on a document of 1462), but the particule ‘de’ included in its name indicated only that they were not manual labourers. One early record mentions Robert de Robespierre, living near Béthune in the mid-fifteenth century and working as un homme de justice. In the sixteenth century there was another Robert de Robespierre at Béthune, a clerk and a grocer. His great-grandson was a notary, attorney and clerk in Carvins, where the main branch of the family lived until the first Maximilien de Robespierre (grandfather of the revolutionary) moved toArras as a barrister. Canny at self-advancement, he married an innkeeper’s daughter and through her acquired some property in the city. It happened that in 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender in exile, came to Arras and stayed six months. When he was leaving he bequeathed the city a masonic lodge, in gratitude for the hospitality he had received. He appointed Robespierre’s grandfather as an official of the lodge – of all the people in Arras, the first Maximilien had been particularly ingratiating. Everything went well enough, though there were eight children to feed and clothe and never quite enough money for comfort. But gradually it became clear that the eldest son, the second Maximilien (father of the revolutionary), was a bit dissolute and unstable.
At the age of seventeen, Robespierre’s father was encouraged by his family to begin a novitiate with the Premonstratensians of Dommartin (a religious order originally founded in northern France by St Norbert in the twelth century). He gave up when he realised he had no vocation. After reading law at Douai he came home again to Arras to work as a barrister, but almost immediately got Jacqueline Marguerite Carraut, the daughter of a local brewer in the rue Ronville, pregnant out of wedlock. The shame and scandal associated with illegitimacy in a small conservative city like Arras were considerable. Traditionally it was common for families to ostracise their wayward children, or even request their imprisonment. The Church was ubiquitous. Public and private libraries were full of religious texts outlining appropriate codes of spiritual and moral conduct, while the homes of nobles, bourgeois lawyers and artisans were crammed with material objects evoking them: crucifixes, missals, and images of the life of Christ and the saints, before which a pious wife might kneel on an ornate prie-dieu.
Robespierre was rescued just in time from the serious penalties of illegitimacy (which he would later help to dismantle in the course of the Revolution) by his parents’ hasty marriage on 2 January 1758, when his mother was already five months pregnant. His paternal grandparents refused to attend the wedding. Four months later, they relented and agreed to act as witnesses at the baptism of their grandson: Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre, born in Arras on 6 May 1758, to a family whose wealth and status were declining steadily at a time when the city, in general, was flourishing. After her first son, Robespierre’s mother gave birth to a baby almost every year – two daughters, Charlotte then Henriette, another son, Augustin, and a fifth child that did not survive. She died on14 July 1764 at the age of twenty-nine – an ordinary eighteenth-century woman defeated by pregnancy and childbirth. Robespierre was six at the time.
In the sentimental memoirs of his sister Charlotte, the death of their mother was the pivotal emotional crisis in her elder brother’s life. She remembered that their younger brother, Augustin, was under two, and still away from home with a wet-nurse. So as the older siblings watched the funeral preparations they were at least spared the screams of a hungry infant denied its mother’s breast. Robespierre was inconsolable in a more complex and lasting way: he treasured the memory of a gentle woman lost to her young children at the time they most needed her. Before she died she found time to teach him to make lace skilfully, but precious little else.3 Whenever he spoke of her to Charlotte later in life, his eyes always filled with tears.
Soon after their mother’s death their father began abandoning his young and grieving family for long periods of time, sometimes reappearing briefly in Arras to borrow money, and on one occasion even renouncing his own and his children’s claims on the de Robespierre estate in order to raise some ready cash. Charlotte excuses this behaviour by claiming that her father was demented with grief, but it is equally likely that he was still the profligate and unstable character who had caused his own parents so much concern. Deprived of their mother and without any independent means of support, the four siblings whom grief had drawn so close together were soon to be physically separated. The two boys went to live with their maternal grandparents in the brewery; and aunts on their father’s side of the family took in Charlotte and Henriette, who went on Sunday visits to their brothers a few streets away across the smaller of Arras’s two market squares. The fact that these children were shared out between their relatives like an unwelcome burden did not escape Robespierre. According to Charlotte, his character underwent a complete transformation: where previously he had been boisterous, careless, light-hearted just like other children, he became serious, poised, responsible and diligent. From this point on he joined in his siblings’ childish games only to explain or enforce the rules. He preferred solitary pursuits, like building model chapels and reading. He had a small collection of pictures and engravings that he liked to arrange in exhibitions for his sisters, delighting in their admiration. He was also given some sparrows and pigeons that he raised and cherished as pets. He would place them very gently one after the other into his sisters’ cupped hands during their visits.
Charlotte and Henriette once asked to borrow one of these birds, care for it in their aunts’ house and return it safely the following week. Robespierre was hesitant, but they were persistent, begging, promising to look after it, so he agreed. Inevitably, the bird was left in the garden, a storm blew up and it died. Robespierre was furious. ‘At the news of this death, the tears of Maximilien flowed,’ Charlotte reported. ‘He showered us with reproaches which we more than deserved, and vowed never again to entrust us with one of his precious pigeons.’ Sixty years later, Charlotte recalled this timeless childhood drama, ‘the tragic end of the poor pigeon’, tearfully. How could her brother’s detractors imagine that his early years in Arras were spent cutting off the heads of small birds with a toy guillotine? How could they so besmirch the kind and sensitive soul, the character full ofle bon naturel she had loved all her life?
Besides his bereavement, depression and heightened sense of responsibility, it is reasonable to assume that Robespierre grew up with a vague but persistent sense of familial shame. His father came from a long line of provincial lawyers, but he had wasted his promising start in life, failed to build on the achievements of his own father and had left his sons to build their lives with appreciably fewer advantages than those he had himself enjoyed. In 1772 he disappeared for good and his children never knew where or when exactly he died. On top of the practical difficulties Robespierre faced as an orphan – the uncomfortable dependency and penury – he had three siblings to care for, and his father’s reputation for irresponsibility to live down. He grew up among relatives who could scarcely utter his father’s name without regret and disappointment. Gazing out of the window of his grandparents’ house in the rue Ronville, down the busy street to the Church of Jean-Baptiste, there must have been times when he wished it was his mother’s more modest name, Carraut, that he was carrying forwards into the unknown future, not that of his disgraced father and disappointed grandfather, Maximilien de Robespierre.
Robespierre’s first school was the local Collège d’Arras, where he went at the age of eight having already learnt to read and write. The Collège d’Arras was founded in the sixteenth century and richly endowed. It had over four hundred pupils, all boys. A small number boarded at the school, but most, like Robespierre, were day pupils, the sons of the province’s professional families. One old school fellow later remembered Robespierre as ‘a conventional good boy’, another claimed he had a detestable character and inordinate love of domination, but these are the trite kinds of characterisation anyone might make about a distantly remembered acquaintance from school. The Collège d’Arras was governed by a committee that included the Bishop of Arras, the teachers were priests, and the pedagogical emphasis was on learning the rudiments of Latin. Robespierre worked hard for three years, then distinguished himself by winning a scholarship to the elite Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, whose illustrious alumni included the playwright Molière, the philosophe Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade. Here he would receive the rest of his schooling, and vocational training in law, between the ages of eleven and twenty-three.
The scholarship was one of four given by Arras’s Abbot of Saint-Vaast, who was personally known to Robespierre’s pious aunts. Those who doubt his natural talents and intellect suspect that it was really these family connections – not merit or achievement – that secured Robespierre this first important break from a constrained provincial childhood. Even his sister Charlotte, whose memoirs are usually so biased in his favour, comments that of her two brothers the elder was the less academically gifted. He was, however, far more diligent and determined to succeed than the younger Augustin. His siblings saw Robespierre off on the public coach to Paris in October 1769, deeply distraught at the parting. Robespierre cried a great deal too, but there was already something firm and resolute in his character that helped him focus on the long road stretching out before him. In the emotional last days before he left Arras, he gave his sisters all his toys – the model chapels he had constructed, the pictures and engravings he had collected, everything with which he had amused himself as a child – except his birds, for which he found a more trustworthy home. He loved his sisters, would miss them dearly, but they had already killed one of his pigeons, and there were to be no second chances. He was not the kind of person to forget being let down by anyone.
At the time of Robespierre’s schooling, education in France was in an unusually chaotic state. Only seven years before Robespierre left Arras, the controversial Jesuit order had been expelled from its hundreds of educational establishments. Political and theological opponents of the order – the more puritan and morally severe Jansenists, and other detractors who denounced the Jesuits’ loyalty to Rome as anti-French – had finally prevailed on a reluctant Louis XV to act against them. Throughout the country Jesuit school buildings, property and facilities were suddenly deserted when their order was officially suppressed, accused of teaching dangerous theology, promoting sin, amassing material wealth and perverting young boys. The Jesuits had only a single college in Paris, but it was an important one: the large and prestigious Louis-le-Grand, founded in the mid-sixteenth century in the heart of the Latin Quarter, just across the street from the much older Sorbonne. In the administrative confusion that followed the Jesuits’ expulsion, Louis-le-Grand came under the direction of the University of Paris and was reinvented as a college particularly dedicated to the encouragement of scholarship students ‘whose means do not allow them to enjoy the same advantages as others’.4
Here, at least, among a throng of other scholarship students from backgrounds as modest as his own, the proud and serious young Robespierre, with his paltry wardrobe and conspicuous lack of familial wealth, would feel not wholly out of place. Twice during his time at Louis-le-Grand he had to apply to his préfet d’études, or director of studies, for money to buy decent clothes. Perhaps this meant he was significantly poorer than lots of the other boys, or perhaps he preferred to spend his money on books. As he tried to settle into the new school, with its austere entrance gateway, eight quadrangles, private chapel and lecture rooms, it might have helped that in 1763 the Collège d’Arras was one of a number of provincial schools affiliated with Louis-le-Grand, making the move to Paris a natural next step for a promising pupil from the town. From Robespierre’s point of view, the expulsion of the Jesuits was a piece of good luck – a benign historical contingency that helped him break free from the restrictive circumstances into which he had been born.5
The year of the Jesuits’ expulsion from their schools, 1762, saw another upheaval in educational thinking with the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sensational novel Émile. Part fiction, part treatise on education, the book was almost immediately condemned by the Archbishop of Paris and publicly burnt. Despite this, and perhaps in part because of it, Émile became a bestseller, plunging the country further into debate about the schooling of its young and all that was morally, spiritually and politically at stake. Rousseau escaped arrest and imprisonment only by fleeing France in the middle of the night. It was the ‘heretical’ discussion of religion in Émile that caused so much trouble. The Archbishop especially objected to Rousseau’s insistence that mankind is naturally good but corrupted by society.
Rousseau was of a particularly sensitive and emotional temperament. He, like Robespierre, lost his mother prematurely, from complications following childbirth, and spent his early childhood reading her collection of sentimental novels, before moving on to philosophy at which, unexpectedly, he proved to be a genius. In his own words Émile was ‘merely a treatise on the original goodness of man, intended to show how vice and error, alien to his constitution, are introduced into it from outside and imperceptibly distort it’.6 His aim was to set out the kind of education that might preserve and protect the natural goodness of man from the corrupting influences of society. It was not a practical programme of reform, but a bold and subversive study of the influences that shape a child that remains topical to this day. ‘We know nothing of childhood,’ Rousseau insisted.7 He thought childhood was completely misunderstood because people were always ‘looking for the man in the child, not thinking of what he is before he becomes a man’. Émilewas a radical departure from existing approaches to education, and arguably the most important treatise on the subject since Plato’s Republic.
Rousseau opens the novel with a controversial argument for maternal breast-feeding. Even comparatively impoverished urban women like Robespierre’s mother dispatched their babies to wet-nurses, usually in the countryside. Rousseau thought this ill-advised and unnatural:
These gentle mothers, having got rid of their babies, devote themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town. Do they know how their children are being treated in the villages? If the nurse is at all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business. Children have been found in this position purple in the face …8
Any mother would feel panic and guilt reading this. Rousseau wanted to shake a society that seemed to him complacent in its corrupt practices, so Émile was full of clever, carefully aimed provocation. ‘I hate books’ is an odd statement to find in a treatise on education. And some of Rousseau’s advice is so far-fetched it is ridiculous: ‘The only habit the child should be allowed to contract is that of having no habits.’ Yet at the centre of this important book is the revolutionary idea that mankind is not the being blighted by original sin that lies at the core of Christianity. Although the Jesuits certainly had a positive view of human nature, none of them went as far as Rousseau in his defence of the idea of natural, healthy, unsullied mankind: ‘Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced.’
We do not know when Robespierre first read Rousseau, but very probably it was during his time at Louis-le-Grand. What is indisputable though is that when he did, he took him into his mind as a companion for life. In the Mémoires authentiques de Maximilien Robespierre, a forgery from 1830, there is an account of the young Maximilien’s pilgrimage to see the aged, isolated, persecuted author in the final years of his extremely strange life. While the source is discredited, almost no one who writes about Robespierre can simply ignore it: the apocryphal meeting with his lifelong hero, who died in 1778, is too alluring to pass over.
I saw you during your last days, and the memory remains a source of joy and pride. I contemplated your august features, and saw on them the marks of the dark disappointments to which you were condemned by the injustice of mankind. Thus I understood all the pains of a noble life dedicated to the cult of truth. They did not scare me. Awareness of having wanted the good for others is the virtuous man’s reward; next comes the recognition of those who surround his memory with the honours that his contemporaries denied him. Like you I want to purchase such goods at the price of an arduous life – even at the price of a premature death.9
The meeting might have taken place in the woods near the Parisian suburb Ermenonville, where Rousseau went to live and think about his final book, Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker). Or indoors in an attic in the rue Plâtrière: the author bedridden, the frail student breathless from climbing the stairs, overwhelmed with emotion when he reached the top. Both scenes are fanciful, but the spell Rousseau cast over Robespierre is not. It can be traced in’ many different ways throughout his life. In the end its political consequences were devastating, but it began as a personal sentiment, nothing more or less than a temperamental affinity. Rousseau had a profound love of individual liberty and a fear of coercion so intense that he was almost allergic to power. Robespierre identified with the victims of injustice – those misunderstood, isolated, denied or despised by their peers. What the two men shared was compassion for the vulnerable and a fierce censoriousness toward those less principled in their attitudes to power than they were confident of being themselves.
The regime at Louis-le-Grand gave equal attention to the moral characters of the school’s charges and their academic attainment. Both objectives were pursued through a rigid daily timetable with strong emphasis on devotional duties.10 During his schooldays, Robespierre rose from his dormitory bed, freezing cold in winter, at 5.30 a.m., attended prayers at 6 a.m., scripture study at 6.15 a.m. and Mass at 10.30 a.m. After a long day of lessons there were more prayers and devotional readings at 8.45 p.m., after which the boys undressed for bed while listening to a reading from the life of the saint whose feast occurred the following day. They were expected to go to confession once a month, and the college brought in clergy from outside who were not members of staff for this purpose, hoping perhaps to bolster the boys’ trust in the confidential nature of the sacrament. How did Robespierre respond to these devout routines? Some of his enemies have imagined him waging a silent bitter protest: standing with the Book of Hours in his hands, the pages resolutely unturned, refusing to pray or sing, shunning the confessional and Holy Communion. But if his own testimony can be believed, he was a more passive and conventional schoolboy. He later rated himself ‘a pretty poor Catholic ever since my time at College’, which suggests that, whether by force or inclination, he must still have been a practising Catholic at school.
The pupils were effectively cloistered inside the walls of Louis-le-Grand, and their contact with the exciting city of Paris outside the main gate on the rue Saint-Jacques was severely limited. Earlier in the century, Rousseau had described Paris as a city of ‘small, dirty and stinking streets, ugly black houses, an air of filth, poverty, beggars, carters, seamstresses, women hawking tisanes and old hats’.11 But with a population of around 600,000, Paris was the largest city in Europe after London, and it is hard to believe that the students at Louis-le-Grand felt as negatively about it as Rousseau did. The boys went on outings only infrequently and always under the strict supervision of chaperons. Aside from external clergymen to hear confession, the only regular visitors to the school were tailors, shoemakers, launderers and hairdressers. Some of these could be persuaded to smuggle proscribed books, like Rousseau’s Émile, into the college, concealed inside washing baskets or under piles of repaired clothes. And for this reason, pupils were expressly forbidden to commission errands of any kind without official permission. Despite these strictures, soon after he arrived in Paris Robespierre managed somehow to develop a close friendship with a canon of Notre-Dame, M. Delaroche. He was a distant relative, and Robespierre’s aunts encouraged Maximilien to get in touch in hope of finding a sympathetic confidant in the big city. According to Charlotte, their relationship got off to an excellent start, with Robespierre finding a mentor in the older man and M. Delaroche discerning rare qualities in the young boy. Within two years, however, the canon was dead, and Robespierre had lost yet another adult protector. Once again he consoled himself with the solitary pursuit of reading.
The college library, where he spent so many hours, was beautiful. Light streamed in through its twenty-five large windows and fell across the desks and open books. Looking up from his page, a dreamy or distracted schoolboy might grow fond of the paintings that adorned the library walls. Robespierre already loved paintings, but these were far more intriguing than any he could have owned, or perhaps even seen, in Arras. Also in the library stood two pairs of globes, made by the Italian cartographer Coronelli for Louis XIV in the seventeenth century: reminders of the immensity of the world beyond the college walls. When he wasn’t dreaming, Robespierre could choose from an impressive range of approved books. The Jesuits had begun the collection of over 35,000 volumes. When they were expelled from the college most of their books were repurchased for the library. All of them were confiscated during the Revolution when Louis-le-Grand was renamed Equality College, but the revolutionary librarian in charge of the operation was moved to acknowledge that they were ‘… an assortment of the best works in all fields. It is evident that the library was brought together by men of learning.’ The books were later returned to the University of Paris where they have remained ever since. The report on the confiscation also lists two old microscopes, good-quality lenses, a strong magnet, a glass case for natural history specimens and some animal horns and claws. But in Robespierre’s day the curriculum still centred, as it had done for decades, on the classic literatures of Greece and Rome. These were the subjects that really interested him, not the newer, tentatively introduced opportunities to study experimental science.
The most detailed account of Robespierre’s school days can be found in an embittered early biography that still turns up in Arras from time to time. It drew on the memories of the abbé Proyart, who taught at Louis-le-Grand during Robespierre’s time there, and was first published in 1795 by Le Blond de Neuvéglise, then amended and reissued in Arras in 1850 by the abbé Proyart’s nephew. According to this source, Robespierre was the kind of boy with whom parents preferred their sons not to associate. He was seething with envy and a subversive egoism that constantly put him at odds with the school rules. When he troubled himself to conform, it was only because his excessive pride made him dread humiliating reprimands. He viewed his school as a prison, its pupils as captives and the teachers (priests or lay clergy) as despotic oppressors of liberty. But he was far from audacious in the face of this oppression. One day, for example, a prefect, Yves-Marie Audrein, came upon Robespierre reading a forbidden book in an unfrequented corner of the school – Émile, perhaps, or another of Rousseau’s works illicitly smuggled in. The frightened boy threw himself at the prefect’s feet, begging not to be exposed. Since the prefect was himself interested in new and progressive ideas, he took mercy on the young boy.
If this incident, or something even remotely similar, actually occurred, abject panic would almost certainly have been a histrionic response. The proscription of books at Louis-le-Grand was taken seriously and covered by the institutional statutes drawn up after the Jesuits were expelled. Article 10 under Title 5 stipulates: ‘Each assistant master will often examine the books that his pupils are reading; he will take away those that are dangerous to morals or religion, and not allow even those that are simply useless or might engender a taste for frivolity. He will prevent his pupils from lending books to each other without his consent.’ There were many such statutes, excessively detailed, covering everything from religious exercises to personal hygiene and behaviour on school outings, where pupils were to ‘walk neither too fast nor too slowly, nor raise their voices, nor offer provocation to anyone’. But those who found themselves in contravention of the statutes (and there must have been many) were unlikely to receive corporal punishment as severe as that dealt out in some other Parisian colleges. Article 5 under Title 1 directs that masters ‘will use no severity until they have exhausted all other means of making an impression on an honest and sensitive mind’.
The statutes were normative, not descriptive, and Robespierre’s school doubtless had its fair share of sadistic masters ready to vent their frustrations on vulnerable children. But at least some of the teachers were open to progressive thinking and keen to encourage it in their pupils. Before the Revolution, the abbé Proyart wrote in defence of this aspect of Louis-le-Grand and the nine other colleges that had come under the direction of the University of Paris: ‘I have looked everywhere for the Émile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and I find him nowhere but in his book. But the Émiles formed by the University of Paris I can find at the head of church and state; I can show them to you, standing out from the crowd, in every walk and condition of society.’12 Serenely unaware of the Revolution to come, Proyart even praised the sense of equality that prevailed at Louis-le-Grand, fondly terming it a ‘little republic’. No wonder he became so bitter. Looking back in 1800, Proyart insisted that Louis XVI had been effectively dethroned before even becoming king, by a godless and subversive generation nurtured in the Parisian colleges. Imagining himself back in 1762, he wrote a retrospective diatribe against the expulsion of the Jesuits in which the revolutionary careers of Robespierre, the prefect Audrein who supposedly surprised him with the forbidden book and turned a blind eye, and other famous ex-pupils are presented in apocalyptic terms.
Remember that it is the educational establishment called Louis-le-Grand, from which you are today expelling the Jesuits, that will send forth twenty-five years from now, furies armed with torches to burn their country, firebrands who will sound the tocsin against kings and their ministers. The same establishment will send forth an apostate priest, whose sacrilegious hand will violate the secret portfolio of his king, to draw from it charges justifying regicide and forge capital crimes: his name will be Audrein. And it is from this establishment that there will come, in human form, a more atrocious being than any known to the barbarism of antiquity, who, after having, more than anyone else, determined the murder of his king, will himself rule over you and yours by daggers and assassinations, and will drink the blood of a million men … his execrable name will be Robespierre.13
In 1793, as the Revolution slid into the Terror and the republican constitution of France was suspended, Robespierre looked back on his schooling. He claimed that the colleges directed by the University of Paris had been ‘nurseries of republicanism, which formed the mind of the Nation and made it worthy of liberty’. This was overstating the case, as he of all people must have been aware: on the brink of Terror the mind of France was incoherent with factional strife, far from ready for the particular brand of liberty that Robespierre espoused. But his friend and fellow pupil, Camille Desmoulins, said similar things about their shared experience at Louis-le-Grand, citing masters who taught them to hate their own government and love republican liberty: ‘We were brought up in the schools of Rome and Athens, and in the pride of the Republic, only to live in the abjection of the monarchy … It was foolish to imagine … that we could admire the past without condemning the present.’14
One master in particular may have played such a part – the abbé Hérivaux, nicknamed the Roman, whose subject was rhetoric. Well respected and holding a responsible position at the college, Hérivaux apparently saw no glaring incompatibility between his ardent admiration for the heroes of Ancient Rome and the confident teaching or practice of Catholicism. Robespierre spent two years in his class, possibly because his performance in the first year was mediocre, and he longed to assuage his injured pride and redeem his reputation. With characteristic determination and application, he did manage to win a prize in the second year. But in the meantime his amour-propre had been further inflamed by Hérivaux’s repeated and only partly playful assertions that there was something distinctively Roman in Robespierre’s character and countenance. Robespierre was clearly flattered by Hérivaux, glad of the attention from an approving teacher, and perhaps further reinforced in his fondness for classical literature.
One day in 1775, Louis-le-Grand all but exploded with excitement: Louis XVI had decided to pay a state visit to the school on the way back from his coronation at Reims. The news spread like wildfire through the corridors, classrooms and dormitories – everyone talked of it. Louis XVI was just four years older than Robespierre, twenty-one at the time of his accession. He set out with youthful optimism to win acclaim and affection from his subjects. As he put it, ‘I wish to be loved.’ France, unfortunately, was not in a particularly loving condition. Public spending was spiralling out of control. Attempts to reform and liberalise the grain trade during the first year of Louis XVI’s reign led to panic buying, rioting, a dramatic rise in the price of bread, and unrest that ended with a spate of public executions. In the circumstances, the new king had been advised to scale down and modernise the traditional coronation ceremony that was planned for June 1775 – perhaps even move it to Paris, where it might raise more revenue from public participation.
There were limits, however, to Louis XVI’s willingness to please public opinion, and the coronation was duly enacted in full accordance with ancient custom in the cathedral at Reims, where French kings had been anointed and crowned for a thousand years. He had, in fact, already ruled for ten months by the time of his coronation, and many of his subjects were by now seriously querulous. The ceremony was supposed to disguise such rifts in a show of unity and religious respect for the absolute monarch of France, God’s representative on earth, in whom sovereign power resided. Instead, it inadvertently highlighted the deepest source of the nation’s discontent. French society was divided into three orders: the Clergy, the Nobility and the Third Estate (or Commons). Everyone who was not a member of either the Clergy or the Nobility was a member of the Third Estate, which included professional families like Robespierre’s, artisans, manual labourers and peasants. There were approximately 130,000 members of the Clergy, 110,000 members of the Nobility, and 24,750,000 members of the Third Estate. The Clergy owned about a fifth of the nation’s land but paid no taxes, the Nobility owned another fifth but paid no taxes, and the Third Estate shared the rest of the land between them and carried the entire tax burden. This unjust arrangement was deeply resented – it meant privileges for the minority and poverty for the majority of French people. At the king’s coronation the Third Estate was further insulted by being barred entry to the cathedral. Afterwards Louis XVI was not even presented to them in his full regalia for fear they might get ideas above their station. Among the disappointed crowd outside the cathedral was the young Georges Jacques Danton from Arcis-sur-Aube, playing truant from his school in Troyes. He had walked all the way to the cathedral on foot, hoping to see for himself ‘how they made a king’. But rather than greet the crowd, the new king chose to participate in a series of smaller, more controlled encounters with his public. He laid a commemorative stone at the University of Reims before leaving the city, and he stopped on his way back to Versailles at Louis-le-Grand.
Out of five hundred pupils in the school, Robespierre was chosen to deliver a ceremonial speech of welcome to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He was the master of rhetoric’s favourite prize-winning student, so hardly a contentious or unlikely choice. But the abbé Proyart read more into it, suspecting that in choosing Robespierre for such a prominent encounter with the new king, Hérivaux (the Roman) hoped to inspire the heart and soul of a future assassin like Brutus or conspirator like Catiline. On the day of the visit, Robespierre, much rehearsed and very nervous, knelt outside Louis-le-Grand, at the head of the assembled body of the University of Paris, which was also kneeling and waiting for the royal party to arrive. It was June, but it was raining. For this or other reasons, the royal couple remained inside their coach, acknowledged the speech of welcome with polite smiles, and promptly drove on towards the Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Robespierre, along with everyone else, had probably been waiting in the street for many hours. The new or borrowed clothes he was wearing would have been soaked through. It is plausible he felt a sense of anticlimax mingled with relief that his speech was over, or perhaps a twinge of disappointment that the king had not spoken directly to him. But there is no reason to suppose, as his hostile biographers have, that Robespierre was already someone of such spectacular egocentricity as to feel personally insulted by what occurred that day in the rue Saint-Jacques.
While he was away at school, Robespierre’s younger sister Henriette died. In her memoirs, Charlotte remarks that their childhood was awash with tears, almost every year marred by the death of someone close and dear: ‘This fatal destiny influenced Maximilien’s character more than one would think: it left him sad and melancholy.’ He threw himself into his work, redoubled his efforts to succeed, and, according to Charlotte, ‘always carried off first prize’, which is certainly not true. She claims that despite his sadness and his devotion to his studies, her brother was affable and popular with both his teachers and his peers: ‘his disposition was so even and sweet that he never had a single row with his fellow pupils; he appointed himself the protector of small boys against older ones, intervening on their behalf and even fighting in their defence when his eloquence did not prevail’. Charlotte was so biased in her brother’s favour she did not notice the contradiction here – one minute he never quarrelled, the next he was brawling to defend the vulnerable in the courtyards of Louis-le-Grand. He was, however, protective of younger boys: Camille Desmoulins, two years his junior, was one of the students who came under his wing. This clever, attractive boy from Guise in Picardy, whose lieutenant-colonel father saved hard to buy him a superior education, became Robespierre’s closest companion. Their friendship deepened dramatically during the Revolution – until it went disastrously wrong.15
Another schoolmate with a revolutionary future ahead of him was Louis Marie Stanislas Fréron, whose memories of Robespierre were distinctly unfavourable:
He was the same [at college] as he was in later days – melancholy, bilious, morose and jealous of his comrades’ successes; never taking part in their games, but going for solitary walks, striding along, in the manner of a dreamer and an invalid. There was nothing young about him. His restless face already showed the convulsive grimaces we came to know so well. Uncommunicative, reserved, unbending, secretive, his most marked qualities were a self-centred amour-propre, invincible stubbornness, and fundamental dishonesty. I can’t recall seeing him smile, not once. If anyone offended him he never forgot it. Vindictive and treacherous, he had already learnt to conceal his resentment.16
This retrospective account is hostile and sour, but it does echo many of the characteristics attributed to Robespierre by his friends and his sister. He was melancholy, serious, reserved and stubborn: a loner, a dreamer, tenacious of offence and unwilling to participate in games. Charlotte insisted that she often saw him laugh until he cried, but the haunting judgement that ‘There was nothing young about him’ could be drawn as easily from her own account of Robespierre’s childhood as from Fréron’s. Friends and enemies see different things in a person, and when they see the same things they interpret them differently. For Charlotte and Desmoulins there was nothing sinister in Robespierre’s secretive reserve. For the abbé Proyart and Fréron there was nothing admirable in his unbending stubbornness.
Whatever the character he exhibited at school, Robespierre’s worst enemy could not doubt his academic success. When he left Louis-le-Grand with his law degree at the age of twenty-three, he was awarded a special prize of 600 livres (a value in excess of a whole year’s scholarship). The college’s administrative board gave him this prize in recognition of his outstanding abilities: twelve years of good conduct and sustained academic achievement. Even more flattering was the rare concession allowing Robespierre to transfer his scholarship to his younger brother Augustin. The abbé Proyart, looking back after the Revolution, insists that those who gave Robespierre such honours did not really know him – had no idea how his misshapen character would one day bring France to her knees in pools of blood. Yet at the time the board’s decision was unanimous. Everyone believed that the young lawyer going home to Arras, with enough capital to set himself up in practice and to offer his sister a home of her own at last, was a credit to the charitable institution that had formed him.