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The Lawyer-Poet Back Home

ROBESPIERRE MOVED BACK to Arras in 1781, the same year that his sister Charlotte finished her schooling at a charitable institution for impoverished girls in Tournai, the religious centre of medieval Flanders, sixty miles north-east of Arras.¹ Throughout most of their childhood the two had seen each other only in the summer holidays, but even so the bond between them was very strong. It was strengthened further by the changes they found in Arras. Together they grieved for their sister Henriette, and missed Augustin, who had taken up his brother’s scholarship at Louis-le-Grand. They grieved too for their maternal grandparents, who had both died recently, and for the family brewery in the rue Ronville, which had been sold. The sale of the Carraut brewery resulted in a legacy, but before it could be made available to the three surviving orphaned grandchildren – Maximilien, Charlotte and Augustin – who were greatly in need of it, their aunt and uncle on their father’s side, with whom Robespierre had been planning to live, laid claim to a share. The de Robespierres were still trying to recover the debts accrued by the children’s father, whose irresponsibility and misfortune had left them so close to destitution.

This painful reminder of his father’s shame and his own vulnerability at a point when he was deep in grief must have stung Robespierre, for he refused to support his aunt and uncle in their claim, and hurried to rent a house of his own in the rue du Saumon, just around the corner from the old brewery which had been his childhood home. But the rent here proved too high for a newly qualified lawyer, so a year later Robespierre and Charlotte moved into rooms opposite the Abbey of Saint-Vaast, in the home of the aunt and uncle whose tactlessness had caused such offence. No one can tell if this was because the quarrel had healed, or if Robespierre, unable to make ends meet despite his legacy, handsome school prize and growing legal practice, moved there with resentment and humiliation in his heart. It was another five years before he settled in the rented house in the rue des Rapporteurs that is known today as the Maison Robespierre.

His daily routine as Charlotte remembered it was rigid and austere. Rising early, he worked at home until one of the town’s many hairdressers arrived at 8 a.m. He had bread and milk for breakfast and then worked before dressing and leaving for the courts by 10 a.m. He dined lightly in the afternoon, watering down his wine, consuming lots of coffee (which he could not do without) and displaying a particular fondness for fruit, especially oranges. Some infer from this that he was dyspeptic or frequently constipated, but his sister, unsurprisingly, offers no comment on this. He took a walk before resuming his work and ate again late in the evening. He often seemed absent-minded or preoccupied. Charlotte recalls his indifference to food: ‘Many times I asked him what he would like to eat at dinner, and he would reply that he had no idea.’ Not noticing a missing dish, he once served himself some soup straight on to the tablecloth. He was uninterested in games as he had been in childhood, and often sat in the corner during the after-supper cards or conversation – thinking, planning or perhaps just dreaming. It has become commonplace to claim that without the Revolution Robespierre would have continued on this sensible path, living out his natural life as an increasingly respected provincial lawyer. Eventually he might have developed a stomach ulcer, bowel cancer, a respiratory illness spread via the river Crinchon, or some other contagious disease. After a couple of ineffective trips to local doctors and pharmacists (one of them still, in the mid-eighteenth century, stocked ‘common dragon blood’, oil of scorpion, toad powder and human brains), he would have disappeared into obscurity for ever after receiving the Last Rites of the Catholic Church.² But the rigidity of Robespierre’s daily routine, far from restricting his prospects, left him free to take advantage of any opportunity for self-betterment or advancement that came his way, and whatever else changed he stuck to it.

During Robespierre’s short life he lived in only two places, Arras and Paris. He was briefly in Versailles at the start of the Revolution, but otherwise there were remarkably few changes of scenery. This partially explains the high-spirited excitement with which he described a short trip to visit friends or relatives at Carvins in a letter of June 1783: ‘We started at five in the morning. Our car quitted the gates of the city at precisely the same moment as the chariot of the sun sprang from the bosom of the ocean. It was adorned with a cloth of brilliant white, one portion of which floated, on the breath of the zephyrs.’³ The letter continues in hyperbolic mode. Robespierre leans out to raise his hat and bestow a gracious smile on some watchmen who have been on duty all night or else are still half asleep on the early shift. They respond with surly indifference. He remarks, ‘I have always had an infinite self-love; that mark of contempt cut me to the quick; and for the rest of the day my temper was unbearable.’ He can, it seems, laugh at himself.

At Sens, while his travelling companions have paused for breakfast, he avoids visiting the tourist sites, and climbs a hill to survey the plains over which the Prince of Condé, still in his early twenties, led France to victory against the Spaniards in 1643. Then he rouses a porter with keys to the Hôtel de Ville. Of all the things to see in Sens – the famous cathedral where St Thomas à Becket spent time in exile, the Palais Synodal with its rose windows and battlements – the Hôtel de Ville was a curious choice. The building, Robespierre notes, is neither remarkable nor grand, but he was fascinated to see where the great T—— (he does not give the name), who combined the roles of judge and medical doctor, administered justice and afterwards prescribed medical treatment for the criminals: ‘I rush into the hall. Seized with a holy awe, I fall on my knees in this august temple and kiss with transport the seat that was formerly pressed by the rump of the great T——. It was thus that Alexander knelt at the tomb of Achilles, and that Caesar paid his homage to the monument that contained the ashes of the conqueror of Asia!’⁴ It is unclear exactly who ‘the great T——’ was, but the reason Robespierre was so impressed by him is explicit in the letter: ‘this great man enjoyed, by virtue of his double office, the most extensive power that a man ever exercised over his compatriots’. Achilles, Alexander, Caesar were conquering heroes of a kind, but the kind of power Robespierre admired was more sophisticated and philanthropic. He was excited by the idea of intervening in the lives of criminals and sick people – making a difference for the better.

Arriving at last at Carvins, Robespierre is immensely flattered by the interest and enthusiasm with which his party is greeted: ‘How pleasant it is to travel! I said to myself. It is a great truth that one is never a prophet in one’s own land. At the gates of your own town you are despised; six leagues beyond it you are a personage worthy of public curiosity!’⁵ Robespierre is certainly sending himself up, but at the same time his florid rhetoric is an evident source of self-regarding delight. The letter also captures his readiness to suspect others of disrespecting him. The surly watchmen are a minor example, and even Robespierre could see the joke. Yet the theme of misunderstood, unrecognised or slighted greatness haunts his early writings just as it recurs over and over again in later speeches, pamphlets and letters. As he says in one of his poems:

The just man’s torment, at his final hour,

The only pang he feels – and I shall feel –

Is the dark breath of calumny and blame

Breathed by a grimmer ghost than death himself:

The hate of those for whom he gives his life.⁶

Law was the traditional profession of the de Robespierre family and in Arras there were still contacts and patrons to help Robespierre at the beginning of his career, despite the disrepute into which his father had fallen. While at school he had written to the head of the Paris Bar for advice in his studies: ‘I want to be a lawyer. Of all the qualities needed for distinguishing oneself in that profession, I at least possess keen ambition, and an unqualified desire for success.’⁷ According to Charlotte, though, Robespierre’s attraction to the law was motivated by more than familial tradition, pragmatism or ambition: he had a personal predilection for what he believed to be the most sublime profession in the world, when practised impartially and humanely. She remembers him saying:

To defend the oppressed against their oppressors, to plead the cause of the weak against the strong who exploit and crush them, this is the duty of all hearts that egoism and corruption have not made gangrenous … It is so sweet to devote oneself to one’s fellows that I do not know how there can be so many unfortunates still without support or defenders. In my case, my life’s task will be to help those who suffer, and to pursue through my avenging speech those who, without regard for humanity, take pleasure in the pain of others. How happy if my feeble efforts are crowned with success, and if, at the price of my devotion and sacrifices, my memory is not tarnished by the crimes of the oppressors I will fight!⁸

Even if it is true that Robespierre made such declarations in the privacy of his own home, in front of the mirror or in the hearing of his sister, her account is composed with hindsight long after the Revolution. At the time, Robespierre’s motives for choosing the law were more likely a mixture of high-minded principle and straightforward personal ambition for ordinary things like social status, respect, income and independence. It is possible too that he wanted to prove to his de Robespierre relatives that he could be every bit as impressive as his grandfather had been, and considerably more so than his father ever was.

The judicial system, like so much else in Old Regime France, was extremely intricate and confusing. Arras had nine separate courts and Robespierre’s work generally took him to three of them: the Conseil d’Artois (Council of Artois), the Échevinage (Magistrates’ Court) and the Salle Épiscopale (Bishop’s Court). The courts met in the morning – after Mass – in expansive halls connected by dark passages and arcades: here the Counts of Flanders had resided before Artois became part of France; now the walls were hung with portraits of distinguished local nobles and public officials. Illicit lovers, duellists, beggars and criminals took refuge in the shadows, just feet away from the rooms in which justice was done. The arcades were a particularly dangerous place to be at night and the rubbish strewn through them festered on hot summer days. Stepping over it on his way to work Robespierre, adequately patronised and intent on advancement, quickly established himself in his chosen profession. He lost relatively few cases and his sister claims people often asked her to explain the secret of his success. He had some natural talents: he was fluent and logical, but according to Charlotte it was his choice of cases that contributed most of all to his growing reputation. ‘He only took on just cases, never unjust, and he almost always won them.’ He preferred to represent the poor. When opposing parties approached him, he took on the poorest of them, even if this meant he might never be paid. ‘The supporter of the oppressed and the avenger of the innocent’ Charlotte called him, making a direct connection between the boy who protected the vulnerable at school and the young lawyer.⁹

One of Robespierre’s friends in Arras was a lawyer, twenty years older, nicknamed ‘Barometer’ Buissart on account of his keen interest in experimental science. Robespierre corresponded with Antoine Buissart and his wife throughout his political career – a fact overlooked by his detractors, who insist he was incapable of lasting friendship and eager to renounce his provincial provenance. Buissart helped to bring Robespierre his first taste of fame beyond the city walls by involving him in the legal defence of one M. de Vissery de Bois-Valé. M. de Vissery was a lawyer, painter, botanist, amateur scientist and inventor: among the many forgotten things he invented was a technique for preserving pure water for over a year. In 1780 he designed and positioned a lightning conductor on the roof of his house at Saint-Omer. This consisted of a pointed piece of a gilded sword screwed on to a sixteen-foot iron bar, decorated with a weathercock at the join and connected to a metal pipe running the length of the neighbouring house. The neighbour complained and a rumour spread that the conductor threatened the lives of all in its vicinity. One woman started a petition to have it removed, provoking an early example of Robespierre’s sarcasm: ‘Many refused the glory of associating themselves with this initiative,’ he commented drily. There were, in fact, only six or seven signatories. G.H. Lewes, one of Robespierre’s English biographers, joined him in sneering at ‘these obese and stupid citizens of Arras’.¹⁰ It is more charitable though to assume that the ordinary provincial neighbours failed to understand the purpose of the eye-catching novelty on M. de Vissery’s roof. The fact that the decorative weathercock featured figurative bolts of lightning cannot have reassured those of nervous dispositions.¹¹

When the Magistrates’ Court decreed that the conductor must come down, M. de Vissery appealed to the higher Council of Artois, engaging Robespierre as his advocate on Buissart’s advice. Barometer Buissart himself wrote a detailed paper on the subject after seeking guidance from experts in the field, among them the distinguished philosophe the Marquis de Condorcet, then Secretary to the Academy of Sciences in Paris; and the future revolutionary journalist Dr Jean Paul Marat, a candidate for the directorship of the new Academy of Science in Madrid, known at the time for his research on optics and electricity. Robespierre drew heavily on Buissart’s carefully researched paper in his pleadings of 1783 – science, after all, had not been his subject at school. In court, however, he gave the performance of his early career, evoking the persecution of Galileo, Harvey and Descartes, and calling on the judges to side with the forces of progress and enlightenment. Scathingly he belittled those who thought lightning conductors disturbed the peace and threatened public safety; appealing to national pride he insisted that such instruments were already commonplace in England, and France must not lag behind. French scientists had contributed to the discovery of electricity – M. Dalibard, for example, had proved Benjamin Franklin’s theory that lightning and electricity are one and the same during an experiment at Marly-la-Ville in 1752. Ignorance must not deprive the nation of its right to benefit from scientific advances.

Robespierre won the case and his success was reported in the Parisian newspaper Mercure de France. M. de Vissery was pleased, despite facing renewed threats of prosecution or vandalism from his still disquieted neighbours, and he offered to finance the publication of the pleadings to make them available for wider circulation. Robespierre gratefully accepted the offer and sent a personal copy to Franklin, who was in Paris at the time, addressing him as ‘one whose least merit is to be the most distinguished scientist in the world’. Franklin’s reply, if there was one, is lost.

If the lightning conductor case shows Robespierre as an ambitious lawyer, his defence of Marie Sommerville in 1786 shows him championing the poor and oppressed. Marie Sommerville was an Englishwoman, the young widow of Colonel George Mercer, Lieutenant-Governor of South Carolina. She had lived in Saint-Omer as a child, returned many times during her marriage, and moved back permanently after her husband’s death. Here she fell into serious debt. Unfortunately for her, the adoptive town of which she had always been so fond was one of a small number in the province of Artois where it was legal both to seize the belongings of a debtor and to imprison them without a warrant, even when the debtor in question was a foreigner. Sommerville was duly taken into custody on 24 May 1786. She complained that she had been humiliatingly arrested in her own home, escorted roughly to prison, followed there by a crowd of curious onlookers and refused medication during her few days of incarceration. Robespierre argued her case flamboyantly, claiming that women should be exempt from the draconian law for debtors in Saint-Omer.

The gullibility and inexperience of their sex allows women to enter too lightly into contracts detrimental to their liberty; their weakness and sensibility means they are more vulnerable to the shame and rigour of imprisonment; the terrible impression imprisonment must make on their natural timidity; the fatal consequences of such treatment, especially during pregnancy – what more can I say? Women’s delicate honour, publicly, legally, irreversibly debased in the eyes of men whose tenderness disappears along with their respect … What compensation could there be for such inconvenience and cruelty, beyond simply expediting the payment of a civil debt?¹²

Robespierre’s opponents were sceptical about his gallantry. Truth and justice, they complained, would not have required such decorative rhetoric. Allegedly, Sommerville had been spotted leaving prison happy and well in the company of a doctor, and the only change in her condition was that she had been forced to settle some of her debts. In the event, there was no ruling on this case because the special privilege of arresting debtors in Saint-Omer was revoked in August that year. Perhaps this was one of the many occasions on which Robespierre, according to his sister, received no payment. Instead there was the satisfaction of seeing the law, to which he had so eloquently objected on his client’s behalf, abolished. Even before the Revolution there were many such attempts to rationalise the legal system of the Old Regime, within which Robespierre was fast forging a distinguished, if controversial, career. Already he tended to be verbose and markedly sentimental. But he also had a ready sneer and could be cuttingly condescending – skills required by his profession. He was an adversarial advocate, so even though he evoked the principles of eternal truth and justice, it was not his job to be impartial.

Very soon after he began practising law in Arras, Robespierre was chosen as one of five judges in the Bishop’s Court. In the course of his routine work for this court, he was required to sentence a murderer to death. The death was to be a painful hanging, possibly preceded by a protracted breaking on the wheel, nothing like the comparative speed and merciful efficiency that the invention of the guillotine would later bring. Before the Revolution, decapitation was considered a privilege, reserved for noble criminals who died as they had lived, carefully segregated from commoners. Robespierre went home that evening to Charlotte in a terrible state with ‘despair in his heart’.¹³ He did not eat for two days and paced the house muttering over and over again the thought, ‘I know he is guilty, that he is a villain, but even so, to cause a man to die …!’ Intent on proving that Robespierre was anything but the bloodthirsty charlatan vilified by his detractors, Charlotte claimed that he was so disturbed by this case that he resigned his post immediately – a claim not borne out by the facts, since he still held the position in 1788.

Charlotte perhaps exaggerates her brother’s qualms over capital punishment, yet there is no reason to believe that she invented them. Robespierre prided himself on progressive and enlightened views, he would have been familiar with the strong arguments against the death sentence made by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Cesare Beccaria, and he was squeamish by nature. In an essay published before the Revolution, he argued for extending the privilege of decapitation: ‘a punishment to which we have come to attach a sort of éclat’.¹⁴ Here he anticipated the revolutionary demand for the right to efficient, dignified and equal capital punishment. ‘Crimes of the same kind will be punished by the same kind of punishment,’ Dr Guillotin would assert in 1789, ‘whatever the rank and status of the guilty man may be.’¹⁵ In the meantime a reluctant Robespierre went ahead and condemned the murderer to a hideous end – his signature is on the death warrant.

As much as this incident discloses Robespierre’s attitude to capital punishment, it also reveals his habitual response to nervous strain. Throughout the Revolution he suffered periods of physical and mental collapse, usually precipitated by the need to make an important decision. Sometimes these seem strategic; his enemies were (and remain) convinced that feigning illness was one of the many manipulative techniques through which he got his own way. But even in Arras he suffered at least one comparable episode of psychosomatic illness. In this early example, as in many later ones, Robespierre struggled to reconcile his public actions with his personal principles and convictions. When this proved impossible, he collapsed, stopped eating, and brooded obsessively. The demands of public responsibility and power also filled him with anxiety. He was, in important respects, constitutionally and temperamentally ill-suited to assume either – but nevertheless intent on pursuing them both.

Antoine Buissart’s patronage did not stop with bringing Robespierre legal cases; he also helped him win election to the Academy of Arras, a gathering of the city’s ‘best brains’ meeting regularly to present and discuss academic papers. Established in 1773 on the foundations of a local literary society, the Academy thrived for a decade before Robespierre was invited to join. His inaugural speech in 1784 was devoted to attacking the tradition of bad blood whereby a criminal’s family was shamed and disgraced by association with his or her crime. He wrote up his speech afterwards and entered it in a prize competition organised by the Academy of Metz. Undoubtedly the subject of bad blood evoked the circumstances of Robespierre’s childhood and the injured pride that dogged him throughout his life. Professionally too he was drawn to ponder the individuation of guilt and the principles and processes through which people apportion blame. Shame by association, he insisted, was simply an extension of the natural tendency to regard all individuals as intimately connected to their family, friends and fellow citizens, but its implications varied depending on the form of government. He argued that crime in itself was less shameful under a hateful despotism than under democracy. However, it was characteristic of democratic government to treat people as individuals, to liberate them from shame by association, or at least provide them with opportunities to regain personal dignity through independent acts of merit, heroism and public service. The key to republican or democratic government was patriotic virtue, Robespierre argued: the triumph of the general good over private interests or personal relationships. ‘A man of high principle will be ready to sacrifice to the State his wealth, his life, his very nature – everything, indeed, except his honour.’¹⁶

In his essay, Robespierre drew directly on the political theory of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, who in his De l’esprit des loix (The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748) argued that honour was the mainspring of a well-ordered monarchy, virtue the mainspring of republican government, and fear the mainspring of despotism. Honour and its opposite – shame – made sense under a monarchical form of government where individuals were closely connected to one another through personal and familial loyalties. However, in a democratic republic of patriotic individuals ready to sacrifice their personal relationships to the public good of the state, could there be any honour at all? This question would return to trouble Robespierre during the Revolution as he tried to put theory into practice, but in this early essay he answered it abstractly, introducing a curious distinction between ‘philosophical honour’ and ‘political honour’. Philosophical honour, as he defined it, was none other than a pure soul’s exquisite sense of its own dignity – an entirely private sentiment based on reason and duty, existing in isolation, far from the vulgar gaze of mankind – a question of purely personal conscience. It was, no doubt, Robespierre’s own ‘philosophical honour’ that caused him to suffer so much when passing the death sentence on a murderer. In contrast, ‘political honour’ of the kind Montesquieu identified in monarchies was the desire for social distinction, grandeur and esteem – more to do with vanity than virtue at an individual level, even if it was useful in producing unintended social benefits. Here Robespierre showed off his learning, echoing Francis Bacon: ‘No nobles, no monarchy: no monarchy, no nobles.’¹⁷ And he made the link between the temptation to respect someone merely because he came from a grand or noble family, and the equally irrational or unjust tendency to despise the children of a condemned man.

As a young lawyer, Robespierre was far from advocating a revolution to establish a new social and political system based on philosophical honour. His essay did suggest that there were serious limitations to monarchies founded on political honour, but if he harboured ideas about the kind of system that might one day replace the monarchy in France, he kept them to himself. Like almost everyone else, he argued for incremental reform and insisted that ‘there is no need for us to change the whole system of our legislation; it is dangerous to look for the remedy for a specific ill in a general revolution’.¹⁸ What is more distinctive, however, in this early essay is the close connection Robespierre envisaged between politics and morality. He regretted the contempt of those involved in politics for moral precepts, and instead insisted that ‘The laws of God [l’être suprême] need no other sanction than the natural consequences he himself has attached to the audacity of those who infringe them and the fidelity of those who respect them. Virtue produces happiness as the sun produces light. Crime results in unhappiness as certainly as filthy insects issue from the heart of corruption.’¹⁹

The Academy of Metz’s judges had some reservations about Robespierre’s essay, but while they could not bring themselves to award him first prize, they decided to give him a second, equal in monetary value though not in glory. Robespierre spent the prize money (400 livres, approximately £130 today) getting his essay printed.²⁰ With retrospect, it is ironic that it was Pierre-Louis Rœderer, an enterprising member of the Metz Parlement, who had donated funds for the prize awarded to Robespierre. Later, looking back on the Revolution, Rœderer would argue that the French, with their love of social distinctions, were ‘more anti-pathetic than any other people to democracy’.²¹ Robespierre, in contrast, would stake his career and his life on the opposite view.

In his essay, Robespierre ranked the personal purity of philosophical honour far above the social benefits of political honour. But was he deceiving himself? From an early age, social distinction meant a great deal to him: competitive, ambitious, determined, how else could he hope to measure his own hard-won success if not in relation to his peers? An incident at the Academy of Arras gave a hint of his competitive streak. After the death of the Academy’s permanent secretary Alexandre Harduin in 1785, elections were held to select a replacement. Of the twelve Academicians present, ten voted for a distinguished local landowning noble, Dubois de Fosseux, one for Robespierre, and one for another candidate. Three other officials were elected, Barometer Buissart among them, but once more Robespierre was passed over with only one vote. Perhaps he voted for himself.

Things became tense with the creation of three new chairs soon after Dubois de Fosseux assumed his post. In considering who should fill them, someone proposed Le Gay, a talented, precocious young lawyer, already winning a reputation as an accomplished poet. At twenty Le Gay had founded his own literary society in Arras, the Rosati; at twenty-four he was a practising lawyer in the Council of Artois, and was involved on the opposite side from Robespierre in the famous lightning conductor case.²² When Le Gay’s name was proposed, Robespierre and Buissart were strongly opposed. The evening before the vote was to take place Dubois de Fosseux received a visit from Robespierre to discuss the matter in private. The next day, when the vote went ahead, the two friends absented themselves from the proceedings. After Le Gay was elected, Buissart threatened to resign his chair. However, Dubois de Fosseux, proving himself a felicitous choice as permanent secretary, refused to be discouraged by such squabbles and diplomatically restored peace to the Academy.

Why were Robespierre and Buissart so adamantly opposed to Le Gay? Robespierre’s motive may have been simple loyalty to his chief friend and supporter in Arras. Or it might have been more personal rivalry and irritation over Le Gay’s part in the lightning conductor case. But whatever it was, he showed no reluctance to engage in factional strife. His visit to Dubois de Fosseux the evening before the Academy’s vote foreshadows many such personal visits during the Revolution: ‘If Monsieur Robespierre comes to call, tell him I’m not at home!’ said the great political theorist the abbé Sieyès in his dotage, years after Robespierre was dead, still haunted by the fear of a knock on the door.

Robespierre’s next attempt to win a literary prize came in 1784 when, for the fourth year running, the Academy of Amiens announced a competition for the best eulogy of the town’s most famous poet, Jean Baptiste Gresset. None of the submissions had been deemed of high enough quality to merit an award, so Robespierre thought it prudent to solicit strategic advice from Buissart, who had an influential friend in Amiens. This time the prize was worth 1,200 livres (approximately £400), and Robespierre doubtless needed the cash as much as he yearned for the glory. Gresset was best known for his mock-heroic poem Ver-Vert, published in 1734 while he was still a Jesuit priest teaching in Paris at Louis-le-Grand. Soon afterwards he was expelled from the Jesuit order and led a successful secular life writing for the stage, before retiring to Amiens where he lived austerely, atoning for the frivolity of his youth. Voltaire quipped: ‘Gresset se trompe, il n’est pas si coupable’ – ‘Gresset is wrong, he is not as culpable as all that.’²³ Ver-Vert is about a parrot, the cloistered pet of one convent, that is sent on a visit to another, learns profane expressions on the way, shocks the nuns on arrival and is sent back in disgrace to repent and die. Aside from money and glory there was much to attract Robespierre to Gresset as a subject: the connection to Louis-le-Grand, literature, the theatre, birds, and the poet’s celebrated visit to Arras in 1740 when he attended a meeting of the literary society that later became the Academy. Robespierre’s essay drew a flattering comparison between Gresset and Alexander Pope, pointing out that The Rape of the Lock relied on the formulae of epic convention, whereas in his Ver-Vert Gresset challenged his imagination to slip through the convent grille and animate the sedate lives of the cloister. Robespierre also claimed to find Gresset’s verse natural, unaffected, and more appealing than Voltaire’s. He stopped short of placing him on the same level as Rousseau but insisted that he stood out from the crowd of lyrical poets.

Somewhat wistfully, Robespierre quoted Rousseau’s enthusiastic praise of Gresset earlier in the century: ‘What marvel in a man of 26 years! How dismaying for our supposed modern wits!’²⁴ Such affirmation from his revered hero is what Robespierre would have wanted for himself – in 1784, he too was twenty-six years old. He praised Gresset’s respect for religious sentiment, he criticised poets whose work, unlike Gresset’s, harmed the peace and tranquillity of their own and future generations by unleashing terrible irreligious passions. He saw Gresset as the exception, upholding religion in the face of its critics. Robespierre sincerely approved – the fact that Gresset was expelled from the Jesuit order only added to his admiration: here was a fellow spiritual loner, unafraid to follow his conscience. Nevertheless, with a backward glance perhaps to the wonderful library at Louis-le-Grand, he described the Jesuit order in very fond and complimentary terms: ‘this famous society … offering such a gentle retreat to men who are devoted to the charms of study and literature. The poet of the Graces [Gresset] formed himself in the shadow of a cloister.’²⁵

Despite advice from Amiens via Buissart (overdo the praise since Gresset ‘is never spoken of here except with veneration, and they think it a crime if one expresses any doubts as to his celebrity’), Robespierre chose to concentrate more on the poet’s outstanding character than on his literary achievements.

I have counted it a merit in Gresset to have drawn upon himself the sarcasm of a number of literary men; for I have been so bold as to insist upon his virtue, upon his respect for morality, and upon his love of religion. This will undoubtedly expose me to the ridicule of the witty majority; but it will win me two votes which are more than a recompense – that of my conscience, and that of yours.²⁶

Not for the first or last time, Robespierre identified with a great man whom he believed to be despised, slighted and isolated. There was something more than faintly risible in his repeated insistence that Gresset should be admired for choosing duty over glory and eschewing worldly trophies that only the vulgar prize, while striving so hard himself to win a literary competition. Besides which, the judges in Amiens could hardly be expected to view their town’s literary celebrity as a vulnerable victim of sarcasm in need of a valiant and virtuous advocate. Robespierre’s eulogy protested too much and failed to concentrate on the merits of Gresset’s verse. He did not win the prize, but paid to have his essay published even so – perhaps in the hope of making some money from it, perhaps out of wounded pride or vanity. On receiving a copy, Dubois de Fosseux wrote to thank Robespierre in light-hearted verse, politely expressing astonishment that he had not been awarded the prize, which may or may not have been a comfort to the sensitive and disappointed author.

Robespierre’s literary interests led him to try his hand at poetry. Surviving examples reveal his talent as modest and his sensibility effete, even silly on occasions. His sister evidently thought so when she advised against publishing a poem about spitting and nose-blowing that might detract from his growing reputation as a lawyer.²⁷ Most of his poems are addressed to women. The only one published in his lifetime was a madrigal to ‘young and beautiful Ophelia’. It exalted innocent modesty and ended with the unworldly, indeed positively misleading, piece of advice: ‘You will only be better loved/ if you fear you are not.’²⁸ Another began, ‘Do you want to know, Oh! Charming Henriette/ why love is the greatest of gods …?’²⁹ There were melancholy lines concerning the marriage of a girl named Émilie to someone else, and more of the same addressed to the shy beauty Sylvie. Unless these were all synonyms for the same woman or addressed to a figment of Robespierre’s imagination, the young lawyer was busy in Arras composing gallant poetry with little discrimination – he was either frivolously self-indulgent, narrowly focused on improving his poetic skill, or far cooler at heart than his words imply. An early portrait depicts him with a rose in one hand and the other on his heart, above the motto ‘All for my love’. ‘Which one?’ a cynical recipient of his missives might ask.

Beyond the safe allusiveness of verse, Robespierre’s interaction with women was markedly stilted and formal. In December 1786, for example, he wrote this letter to accompany a copy of one of his professional speeches – not everyone’s idea of a courting gift.

Madame

I have dared to think that a speech dedicated to the defence of the oppressed would be homage not unworthy of your acceptance, so I have decided to present this to you. The interest you were kind enough to take in the matter that is the subject will suffice to justify this homage, were justification required. In the midst of the painful labours necessitated by this work, you, Madame, were with me during some moments that I shall never forget, and your presence renewed my courage. Today, when I have finished my work, I seek the reward that is its due, and find it in offering this to you …³⁰

There is considerably more in this letter about the sender than the recipient. His gratitude is well expressed, but the woman concerned is not invoked personally; her contribution is defined solely in relation to Robespierre’s own work. And yet, if he was emotionally self-absorbed, his theoretical views were egalitarian and feminist far ahead of the times. A woman’s contribution to academic discussion, he argued in one of his papers to the Academy of Arras, was the natural complement to a man’s and of equal value. For this reason he thought members of both sexes should be admitted to the Academy.³¹

Shy and reserved in character, busy and ambitious at work, socialising primarily with other men, Robespierre’s opportunities to build friendships with women, romantic or otherwise, must have been limited. One friend of Charlotte’s bred some canaries for him, and received in return a letter of thanks that was both mildly flirtatious and faintly disturbing.

What was our surprise when, approaching their cage, we saw them dash themselves against the wires with an impetuosity which made us tremble for their lives! That is what they do whenever they see the hand that feeds them. What plan of education have you adopted with them, and from where have they acquired their wild character? … A face like yours, has it not reconciled the canaries to the human countenance? Or is it that they can support the sight of no other, having once seen it?³²

According to Charlotte, many women were interested in her brother and he could have easily made an advantageous marriage with one of the local heiresses. But at the time, his sister claimed, there was only one girl he wanted to marry. This was Anais Deshorties, the stepdaughter of one of their aunts on the de Robespierre side of the family. Perhaps Robespierre, rather sensitive and awkward, found it easier to contemplate intimacy with a member of his extended family. Even so, he courted Anais for two or three years without making much progress, in strong contrast to his father’s conduct at a similar age. Two letters sent in June 1787 to an unnamed girl, who may have been Anais, show Robespierre sad and dejected. The first alludes to a rejection:

As to the cruelties that your letter contains, I will respond by honestly exposing my feelings. The interest I take in people does not have a fixed term, when they are people like you. That which you inspire in all those who know to appreciate you, will not cease in me until I do, because I do not know anyone more deserving of it than you. In addition, the goodness that is always clear in your dealings with me places me under a sort of obligation, and to abjure such a feeling would make me unjust and ungrateful, and I wish to be neither …³³

This is the letter of someone with pretty contorted emotions. The undying fidelity in response to the beloved’s perceived cruelty, the peculiar sense of duty, the self-righteous integrity, and above all, the self-regard, are highly reminiscent of the love letters in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse.³⁴ Published in Paris in 1761, this astonishingly popular novel – in France alone there were seventy-two editions before the end of the century – tells the story of Julie, who loves the unsuitable Saint-Preux, but in the end renounces passion in favour of a virtuous life of marriage and motherhood. Rousseau described the process of writing it in his Confessions: ‘Forgetting the entire human race, I invented for myself whole companies of perfect creatures, whose virtue was as celestial as their beauty, and of true, tender and faithful friends, such as I had never known here below.’³⁵ Rousseau projected his own romantic passions into Saint-Preux – whose letters could have served as models for Robespierre’s:

An indefinably sweet and consoling idea eases my suffering in being far from you, when I think that you have commanded it. The pain you cause me is less cruel than if fortune had sent it. If it serves to make you happy, I would be sorry not to have felt it. It is the guarantee of its reward, for I know your soul too well to believe you capable of cruelty for its own sake.³⁶

Robespierre’s second letter to the unnamed woman from June 1787 further suggests the influence of Rousseau: ‘The situation in which you are does not matter to me, providing you are happy. But are you? I doubt it a little and this doubt afflicts me, since when one is not personally happy, one consoles oneself with the happiness of others, one wants at least to see those who most deserve it enjoy happiness …’³⁷ So much earnest renunciation! Yet if these letters were addressed to Anais, as Charlotte’s testimony suggests, what were the insurmountable obstacles to Robespierre’s love? Were his feelings not reciprocated? Did he think he had to further establish himself professionally and financially before proposing marriage? Or did he, like Rousseau, project his most intense feelings into a one-sided relationship that was really only part of his fantasy life and elaborate self-image? Charlotte claimed that when he returned to Arras in 1791 for his first visit since the Revolution and found Anais married to another local lawyer, he was heartbroken. In his sister’s eyes, Anais, fickle and cruel, was entirely to blame for the failure of the relationship. But it seems possible that Robespierre gave her only very scant and confused grounds for hope. He was – as Rousseau had been – exceptionally self-absorbed.

Robespierre’s early love poems may have had little or nothing to do with actual romantic entanglements in Arras, but one certain source of his inspiration was his membership of an elite literary society, the Rosati. This was the society founded by the lawyer Le Gay, with whom Robespierre probably patched up his quarrel. The Rosati met every June in a garden at Blanzy on the banks of the river Scarpe. The meetings were languid and foppish affairs involving ceremonial smelling of roses, courteous exchanges of light-hearted verse, singing, a bit of dancing perhaps and elegant al fresco consumption of good food and wine. Dubois de Fosseux said of Robespierre at this time: ‘One cannot but acknowledge his fitness for membership of the Rosati when one sees him taking part in the pastoral revels of the village, and enlivening the dancers by his presence. See! The god of eloquence himself mixes familiarly with mortals, and reveals, beneath the shepherd’s smock, the gleam of his divinity.’³⁸ Queen Marie Antoinette, organising her courtly attendants into charming pastoral tableaux in the woods around Versailles, was aiming for similar aesthetic effects, though the image of Robespierre prancing on the village green in a shepherd’s smock is considerably more incongruous.

Rosati is an anagram of Artois, and with its stylised rituals the society may have been linked to one of the local freemason lodges – both Robespierre and Le Gay were members of the Hesdin lodge, and Robespierre’s grandfather had been a prominent founder of freemasonry in Arras.³⁹However, the evidence suggests that whatever else might have been going on (and where freemasonry is concerned it is notoriously difficult to tell), Robespierre’s involvement in the Rosati was largely motivated by personal friendship and literary interest. The rather camp initiation rites involved the postulant waiting in a private bower to be presented with a rose, inhaling the fragrance three times, pinning the flower on his jacket, and downing a glass of wine flavoured with rose petals before receiving welcoming embraces and speeches from existing members. Rosati members adopted cross-gendered pseudonyms: one lawyer was known as ‘Sylvie’ – the shy beauty, perhaps, addressed in Robespierre’s poem, which also evoked ‘the noble and brilliant rose’, queen of flowers. Robespierre’s long acceptance speech to the society, ‘Eloge de la Rose’, concludes: ‘It is happiness that I wish for you. Such happiness awaits you if, true to the charm of your vocation, you prove zealous in fulfilling the sacred obligations it imposes on you, in short: love the rose, love your brothers; these two precepts contain the whole law … In his duobus tota lex est.’⁴⁰

The manuscript for this affected piece of mumbo-jumbo is full of careful crossings-out and rewordings. Robespierre evidently cared about impressing his fellow society members. He was hardly a natural sybarite and the image of him lying on a river bank, composing love poems and joining in drinking games, is difficult to reconcile with the nervous austerity that characterised him from early youth to the end of his life. But at this stage he was open to every opportunity for bettering himself that came along. If friends he had made through the Academy of Arras invited him to join their Rosati society, he joined it. If this meant writing silly poems, he wrote them. Maybe he even enjoyed it; Rosati meetings were not the only occasions on which he participated enthusiastically in sentimental rituals – during the Revolution he even invented several of his own.

Early in 1789 Robespierre had another opportunity to align himself with the forces of progress. The soldier M. Dupond was a victim of familial injustice. Decades earlier, Dupond had deserted the French army and served in those of Sweden and Denmark for over twenty years before returning home to Artois to claim his share of a wealthy uncle’s legacy. His relatives flatly refused to recognise his claims, and when it became clear that the outraged Dupond could not be silenced, they obtained one of the notorious lettres de cachet against him. Once issued, these official documents allowed imprisonment without trial for an indefinite period of anyone deemed a nuisance: insistent creditors, cuckolded husbands, errant children and so forth. These letters were a form of privilege, very easy for influential noblemen to obtain, and as such one of the most hated abuses in Old Regime France – the means by which so many innocents found themselves locked up in prisons like the Bastille. When Dickens’s Dr Manette is ‘recalled to life’ at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, he has been buried inside the Bastille for almost eighteen years by a lettre de cachet, ‘a privilege that … the boldest people are afraid to speak of in a whisper’.⁴¹

After Dupond was at last released from prison, he engaged Robespierre to press his original claim on the family money. The ambitious young lawyer seized this opportunity for a broadly focused attack on the lettres de cachet and the corrupt system that issued them. In pleading Dupond’s case, Robespierre called upon Louis XVI to complete the work of his illustrious predecessors and move France forward to reasonable, virtuous reform:

To lead men to happiness through virtue, and to virtue by a legislation founded on eternal principles of justice, and so framed as to restore human nature to all its rights and all its dignity; to renew the immortal compact which is to bind man to his Creator and to his fellow citizens, by removing all the causes of oppression which now create throughout the world fear, distrust, meanness, selfishness, hatred and cupidity; behold, Sire, the glorious mission to which you are called.⁴²

Robespierre wrote this plea in February, just months before the outbreak of the Revolution. In 1789 he was far from alone in expecting, or at least hoping, that the king would play a major part in bringing about the changes that were so urgently needed in France. What isolated him from his contemporaries was the degree to which, over the following five years – extraordinary years of revolt, turmoil, hunger, war and execution – he strove to make the project he had outlined for Louis XVI his own.