Part III
5
ROBESPIERRE’S LODGINGS IN the rue Saintonge were on the second floor, a sign of relative impoverishment in status-conscious Paris, where ground- or first-floor apartments were highly prized, as they still are today.1 Since 12 August, he had been paid 18 livres a day as a deputy to the National Assembly, plus arrears backdated to 27 April which would have amounted to a lump sum of over 2,200 livres – more money than he had ever had in his life. And yet he still felt himself to be poor and seemed so to others. A penurious journalist and playwright named Pierre Villiers, who claimed to have worked as Robespierre’s secretary for seven months in 1790, included some rare domestic details about Robespierre’s life in his memoirs.2 Villiers remembered: ‘He was very poor and had not even proper clothes. When the Assembly decreed mourning for Benjamin Franklin I asked a young friend of mine to lend him a black suit, which he wore, though its owner was 4 inches taller than he was.’3 The secretary’s memoirs, like those of Charlotte Robespierre, are unreliable, and should be treated cautiously as suggestive rumours – not robust facts – about Robespierre’s home life. ‘I had some quarrels with him,’ Villiers recalled, ‘and later he would have killed me if he had remembered me.’4 As in more ordinary households, some of their bitterest fights were over money. Charlotte had noticed her brother’s lack of interest in money when she kept house for him in Arras, and his renowned indifference to bribes was one of the sources of his nickname the Incorruptible. Villiers, who claimed to have worked for Robespierre free of charge, was irritated by his unworldly attitude to finances: ‘Several times I have known him refuse offers of money which required from him no return, not even thanks, and if sometimes I allowed myself to insist on his accepting, he abused me. He was of a fiery temper which he always fought to control, and nearly every night he bathed his pillow in blood.’5 Perhaps Robespierre had nosebleeds (people with high blood pressure and fiery tempers often do). These certainly would have left him anaemic and contributed to the unusual pallor of his skin that many contemporaries noticed.
Each morning, Villiers arrived to help him with the volume of correspondence he received as an increasingly prominent member of the National Assembly. Deputies could frank letters or reclaim their expenditure on postage associated with the Assembly’s business. Robespierre, parsimonious by nature, was fastidious about his record-keeping. He always took the Assembly’s business seriously, which was more than could be said for some of its other members. Villiers remembers one of them, a deputy from the department of Mont Blanc, franking a parasol for his mother ‘which travelled in consequence free of cost’.6 It was inconceivable that Robespierre would behave like this – his principles forbade it. And yet admirable as they were, there was already something unnervingly vehement about these principles. ‘I arrived one morning at his house earlier than usual,’ Villiers writes. ‘He was striding about his room. “Good heavens!” I said, “Your Assembly has held a regular witches’ Sabbath last night, a fine piece of work!” “What is the matter my fine aristocrat?” he replied. “Your colleagues”, I said, “have abolished titles of nobility, ribbons and sashes.” “Ah”, he said “you should have been there to shout out Hang yourself Robespierre! Too bad you were not there to do it.”’7
According to Villiers (a dubious but evocative source), one of the first things Robespierre did when he got to Paris was to find a mistress, a woman of twenty-six who worshipped him. In the Assembly and public press he was already acquiring the reputation for irreproachable purity that was another source of his enduring nickname: the Incorruptible. For this, or other more personal reasons, his relationship with his mistress, whoever she was, came to an abrupt end. As Villiers remembers, the end was ugly. For a time, Robespierre diverted about a quarter of his modest funds towards supporting this woman (which suggests that she was even poorer than he was), then suddenly cut her off after refusing to admit her into the house.8 Perhaps he sat at his desk and pretended, as many do in the aftermath of a failed or indiscreet love affair, that nothing whatsoever had happened. Villiers says he found himself in the unenviable position of facing the distraught woman on the doorstep when she tried repeatedly to talk to Robespierre; he concluded that she had been ‘treated pretty badly’. No other trace of the affair remains, but someone embarrassed, priggish, callous or just frightened enough to refuse kindness to his former lover would surely have destroyed any material evidence well in advance of posterity.9Throughout his short life, women loved Robespierre: his combination of strength and vulnerability, ambition and scruples, compassion and refinement attracted women with strong defences against obviously vulgar men, but none against the seemingly sensitive.10 It is entirely plausible that, after an initial rush of tenderness, Robespierre felt guilty and ashamed of his emotional or sexual liaison, so ended it with brutal efficiency, sparing his own feelings first, and reminding himself that he was, after all, a public figure with responsibility towards the future of France. If so, his behaviour was not admirable, but at least understandable.
About his busyness at this time, however, there can be no question. In November 1789 he wrote again to Buissart after an interval of many months:
My dear friend, I know you are sulking with me; and I cannot blame you. Despite all the good reasons I could give you to justify the long silence there has been between all my friends and me, I am forced to recognise that you deserve to be an exception, and I ought to do the impossible and find the time to write to you. There is nothing more I can do except ask your forgiveness and make good my negligence.11
Buissart can hardly have been as much in need of a word from Robespierre as the distraught woman outside his door. But this was a far more agreeable letter for him to write, detailing as it did the steady rise in his reputation within the National Assembly and his precious contributions to its debates. The letter reveals someone entirely devoted to current politics, swept up in the Assembly’s affairs and completely out of touch with his former life: ‘What is going on in Artois? What is said? What is thought? … Who is in charge? Please inform me on these matters and tell me if the National Assembly’s decrees, especially those concerning provisional reforms in the criminal procedures, are registered and observed by the courts.’ Robespierre wrote as if he had almost forgotten that practising law in Artois had once been the summit of his professional ambitions. He had moved very far away in the six months since he left, so after apologies for his long silence, and perfunctory enquiries about how the Revolution was going in Arras, his letter soon turned to the constitutional debates.
These debates had begun before the Assembly departed from Versailles and followed the king to Paris. They were conducted in an inefficient manner; instead of arguing their points against one another and advancing their understanding of the constitutional question under discussion, the deputies spent their time reading out prepared speeches. Repetition, redundancy, refutation of points that no one had yet asserted and so on abounded. At the heart of these poorly arranged discussions there was the problem of Louis XVI: how could he be incorporated into the new constitution? Could he be trusted? Would a monarch who was accustomed to absolute sovereignty play the more limited role of constitutional monarch in good faith? In his letter to Buissart, Robespierre explained his grave reservations about the Assembly’s decisions so far. He was moved by these doubts to raise a deep and politically subversive question that seemed to him no less urgent in the autumn of 1789 than it had ever been: ‘Are we free?’12 The new constitution was beginning to take shape. The Assembly had already firmly rejected the British constitutional model with its dual legislative chambers, the House of Commons and House of Lords. An aristocratic second chamber would have been too inflammatory and dangerous in France where noble privileges had only recently been abolished. So the deputies decided that under the new constitution legislative power should be entrusted to a single body of 745 elected representatives. This raised the question of an executive veto over legislative decisions. What was the best way to build safeguards into the legislative process? Should the king be given an absolute veto, or only a suspensive veto? The latter would allow him to delay new laws for a fixed period of time, but not to permanently prohibit any he disagreed with. Would Louis XVI use either kind of veto in the interests of the people?
Mirabeau thought that an absolute executive veto over legislation was essential to the future of the monarchy – he did not see how any kind of constitutional monarchy could be viable otherwise, and he intended to argue the case before the Assembly. Mirabeau was a brilliant orator. Unlike Robespierre’s weak, wheedling voice, Mirabeau’s was ‘full, manly and sonorous; it filled and pleased the ear. Always powerful, yet flexible, it could be heard as distinctly when he lowered as when he raised it.’13 His intellect wasflexible too and he could so easily incorporate pencilled notes passed to him from the floor as he spoke that one contemporary compared him to a magician who tears a piece of paper into twenty little bits, swallows each of them separately, then finally produces the piece whole again. But as he mounted the tribune to deliver a speech on the veto, his gifts failed him. Working and playing harder than ever, despite being plagued by bad health, Mirabeau had fallen into the habit of relying on other people to write most of his speeches and journalism, and was now faced with a text he had not even read. Later he confided to a friend that this was the only time in his entire political career that he broke into a cold sweat at the tribune. The speech before him was almost unintelligible, dry, obscure and completely unsuited to the general mood in Paris, where, urged on by the popular press, people were frenziedly opposing the ‘monstrous’ prospect of an absolute veto. Mirabeau tried to extemporise. He digressed. He inveighed against despotism in general. Then he cut his speech short. The prime opportunity for strengthening Louis XVI’s position under the new constitution had just been lost through the inattentive overconfidence of the king’s most powerful ally inside the Assembly.
The abbé Sieyès argued that the king should have the power to sanction the law; but any law he refused to sanction should be subjected to an alternative checking mechanism – it was, after all, the people who were sovereign. Earlier in 1789, Sieyès’ lucid intellect had had a dramatic effect on the deputies, altering the terms and course of their debates, by redefining the Third Estate as the nation. Now he was trying to redirect them again by attacking the widespread assumption that in the absence of a House of Lords to regulate legislative decisions, the king must be given a veto of some kind. Robespierre was one of the few who immediately recognised the radical potential of Sieyès’ argument – not the finer details of his ideas for organising legislative power, but his forthright assertion of the principle of popular sovereignty. This was one of the political principles to which Robespierre was vehemently attached, and he was inspired to compose a passionate and lengthy speech of his own on the veto question.
He began by berating the misguided pragmatism of many of his fellow deputies. Thinking that some kind of executive veto was inevitable in the circumstances, they were prepared to vote for the lesser of two evils: a suspensive rather than absolute veto. Instead, Robespierre invoked fundamental principles: the power of truth, the safety of the people, liberty, equality, justice and reason. He insisted that the Assembly must remain faithful to these principles when making its constitutional decisions – anything less would be a disgraceful abuse of its authority. The all-important power to make the laws belonged to the sovereign people and must only be exercised by their representatives. Of course it was important to make sure that the laws created would be good, fair and useful, but that outcome could not be achieved by executive veto. Robespierre outlined some alternative methods: representatives elected to the legislature should serve for only short periods of time, after which they would rejoin ordinary citizens, and so have an interest in passing only impartial laws. Citizens should be elected only on grounds of virtue and merit, with no other distinctions taken into consideration. No representative should continue in the legislature beyond the initial period for which he was elected.
Having worked hard to set out his principles with clarity, Robespierre was frustrated to find himself prevented from delivering his carefully planned speech. Increasingly desperate to do so, he tried convincing the Assembly that every deputy should have the opportunity to speak on a matter as important as the veto before voting could begin. Other members of the Assembly were impatient with his suggestion and keen to move on to other constitutional questions, so despite some dissent and disorder, the voting soon went ahead without the benefit of Robespierre’s speech. The proposal for the king’s suspensive veto was passed, 673 votes in favour, 325 against. This meant that when the constitution came into effect, Louis XVI would be able to delay new laws for the duration of two successive legislative sittings (a maximum of three years).14 Robespierre consoled himself by publishing his speech at the end of September and applying his political principles rigorously to the remaining constitutional questions facing the Assembly.
Some months later, in the rue Saintonge, there was yet another early-morning row. Villiers arrived keen as always to gossip about the Assembly’s constitutional debates before settling down to work. ‘I cannot conceive how any subjects can treat their king so unworthily,’ he remarked to Robespierre, sure of provoking a testy response, no doubt. ‘They will finish by killing him like the English did their unhappy Stuart.’ ‘So you see yourself a subject do you?’ Robespierre asked him. ‘Yes I do,’ replied Villiers provocatively. ‘You have spoken of Charles,’ came the reply, ‘well, the English freed by his death should have put an end to his line.’15 It is likely that Villiers embellished this anecdote. Publicly, Robespierre was working hard to establish a constitutional monarchy. Like everyone else, he could see that the presence of Louis XVI made it impossible to draft a constitution with a wholly new executive power, as the Americans had done in their revolution. Instead the Assembly had to compromise and design a new role for their existing monarch. The radical deputies did so grudgingly and with a great many suspicions. Even so, there was never any suggestion in the Assembly (and almost none outside it either) that the king should simply be deposed, still less executed, and France declared a republic.
If Robespierre was not overtly republican in 1790, he was nevertheless the Assembly’s leading advocate of democratic principles. He passionately opposed the plan to divide French citizens into two groups, active and passive (citoyen actif and citoyen passif), according to whether they paid a minimal amount of direct taxation. Despite Robespierre’s protests, the Assembly went ahead, limiting the franchise to active citizens and withholding it from passive citizens whose tax rating was not equal to the proceeds of two days’ labour. In this way an estimated 39 per cent of male citizens were refused the vote, many of them pauvre, vulnerable and disadvantaged: the very people Robespierre was determined to help.16 He was further appalled by the suggestion that only active citizens should be eligible to join the National Guard. To his mind the distinction between active and passive citizens contravened the Declaration of Rights. In introducing this distinction between the free and equal citizens of France, the Assembly, he insisted, had betrayed the fundamental principles to which it had only recently committed itself. Similarly, he objected to the marc d’agent, a further qualification the Assembly thought of imposing on those who wished to stand for election that would require them to pay taxes worth about 53 livres, well over ten’ times the amount of direct taxation necessary to become an active citizen. In this way Robespierre began the long campaign for universal suffrage in France. Using the example of Artois, he showed that the proposed distinction between active and passive citizens would disenfranchise most of the region, currently paying much more indirect than direct taxation. And he pointed out that there were very few in Artois who would be eligible for election if the marc d’argent were introduced. His argument was strong enough to win Artois, and other regions similarly affected, exemption from the proposals until the country’s whole system of taxation could be reorganised. But he was not universally applauded. In the Assembly he was accused of encouraging his constituents not to pay tax, and in Arras he was accused of slandering the region by claiming it had not paid tax.
Indignant, Robespierre drafted a spirited reply to his detractors, and had it countersigned by his fellow delegates from Artois:
Although M. Robespierre needs no other testimony to his patriotism than that of his conduct, and of his public reputation, we have much pleasure in giving him proof of the esteem and affection with which he is regarded by all his colleagues … He has always zealously defended the cause of the people at large, and of public liberty, as well as the special interests of Artois.17
Be that as it may, it was quite clear that Robespierre’s regionally focused arguments and concerns came second to his passion for abstract political principles. Artois provided him with a convenient argument against the Assembly’s electoral proposals, but the people, public liberty, and the inalienable right of every citizen to vote were closer to his heart. Already isolated for his commitment to universal male suffrage, he went on to argue for the rights of excluded groups like actors, Jews and West Indians living under French colonial rule.
The rationalisation of French administration that had been so long postponed under the Old Regime was happening at last. The Assembly went from strength to strength, its committees working overtime to come up with suitable proposals for this, that or the other part of the new constitution, which was slowly but surely coming into being. If the new regime were to be genuinely representative of the people, it would need to be securely founded on a nationwide system of carefully organised elections. In the light of the chaos that had characterised the elections to the Estates General in 1789, most deputies agreed that there was a strong case for reorganising France into new departments, districts and cantons. Future elections could then be conducted and local government administered in a clearer, fairer, more convenient fashion. The abbé Sieyès was especially interested in these plans and very influential in shaping them. Unlike most – perhaps even all – of his colleagues in the Assembly, he had definite ideas about how to institute representative government. In fact, he had been turning them over in his mind for years. ‘For a long time I have sensed the need to divide the surface of France afresh. If we let this occasion pass, it will never return, and the provinces will keep their esprit de corps, their privileges, their pretensions, their jealousies, for ever.’18 After much discussion, the Assembly fixed the boundaries of eighty-three new departments and restructured municipal power throughout the country.
Restructuring municipal power in Paris proved more complicated. During the elections to the Estates General in 1789 the city had been divided into sixty electoral districts. After the elections were over, the electoral assemblies in each of these districts ought to have disappeared. However, in the course of the eventful year that followed, many of them transformed themselves into lively debating clubs and even assumed some of the responsibilities of local government. In this way, the districts became permanent and provided a focus for the political activity of many ordinary Parisians. At the storming of the Bastille, they converged on the Hôtel de Ville and established a new municipal committee for governing revolutionary Paris. The driving force behind this committee (or Commune de Paris, as it was known) came from the vocal crowd of political activists who had brought it into being. Some of these activists, Georges Jacques Danton, for example, and others from the Cordeliers district on the left bank of the river Seine, were far more radical than the moderate majority on the new committee. As captain of the citizens’ militia, or National Guard, in the Cordeliers district, Danton was fast becoming a rabble-raising force to be reckoned with in his own right. A tall, broad, athletic man with a rugged face and rough, loud voice, he clashed bitterly with General Lafayette, the commander-in-chief of the National Guard over the organisation of Paris. Lafayette wanted to see a strong municipal authority at the city’s centre, supported by well-disciplined National Guards, whereas Danton championed the freedom of Paris’s sixty districts to a greater amount of representative and administrative independence. Danton saw no reason to back down.
At first it was unclear whose side the Assembly was on. Many of the deputies were grateful to the radical Paris districts for bringing about the fall of the Bastille and thus augmenting their own authority over the king. But when it came to discussing the reconstitution of Paris’s municipal power, the Assembly proposed abolishing the sixty districts and replacing them with forty-eight sections. This seemed a deliberate attempt to break up groups of political activists; certainly Danton saw it as a direct attack on his local power base. Inside the Assembly, Robespierre was a staunch defender of the districts. Addressing his colleagues, he argued for retaining the sixty districts, at least until the new constitution had come into effect, for the purpose of surveillance.
In this city, the home of principles and opposed factions, it is not possible to rely on the resources of ordinary means against those who menace liberty; it is necessary for the city in general to conserve its achievement and yours. Think of where you are: although you have done a great deal, you have not done everything yet. I dare say that you ought to be more anxious now than if you had not already begun your [revolutionary] work … Do not be seduced by a deceptive calm – peace must not be mistaken for the sleep of carelessness.19
If he hoped to frighten the Assembly or help the Cordeliers with such rhetoric, Robespierre failed. Mirabeau answered him in an ironic, scornful tone: ‘M. de Robespierre has brought to the tribune a zeal that is more patriotic than reflective … We must not mistake the exaltation of principles for sublime principles.’ In other words, Mirabeau warned his colleagues to be careful; to identify the actual content of Robespierre’s arguments and not merely respond to his passionate presentation. Several of the newspapers commented on Robespierre’s hysterical and anxious tone. In the Assembly, reactionary deputies who usually opposed him applauded loudly on this occasion. Maybe they thought he had discredited himself by making such a bizarre intervention, or perhaps they believed that retaining the sixty districts would lead to a backlash against radical deputies like Robespierre. By the end of the debate, however, the districts were a lost cause. The Assembly voted to abolish them, and the Cordeliers were merged into the new section of the Théâtre Français before the end of the year. Since the Cordeliers had a policy of deferring to the Assembly’s decisions, they focused their hatred and resentment elsewhere: on General Lafayette, on Bailly, mayor of Paris, and on the city’s Commune. Their constructive energy went into forming the Cordelier Club to keep alive the district’s revolutionary spirit. It met on the left bank of the Seine, in the monastery church of the Cordeliers (or Franciscan Observantists). Danton, who lived nearby, went there every morning at 9 a.m. when the tocsin was rung. Already it was his club: a rallying point for working men who paid just a penny a month to belong. Its doors were always open.
*
The future of the Church and its enormous wealth (60 million livres according to one mid-eighteenth-century estimate) was the next divisive issue facing the Assembly. When they destroyed the remnants of feudalism on the euphoric night of 4 August 1789, the deputies had agreed to redeem Church tithes instead of simply abolishing them without compensation. But since then there had been signs of reneging on this promise. ‘They wish to be free, but they do not know how to be just,’ complained the abbé Sieyès about some of his colleagues in the Assembly.20 It was obvious to everyone that the clergy could not continue as a separate privileged order now that the nation had asserted its inviolable right to sovereignty. But, Sieyès insisted, this did not mean that its property could be appropriated illegally – the right to property, after all, was one of those recently enshrined in the Declaration of Rights. Besides which, the clergy (unlike the nobility) was much more than a parasitical elite: it provided crucial services in areas of health and education and cared for the poor, in addition to organising the religious ceremonies still central to the lives of most French people. From this perspective, the Church was a branch of public administration that would need to be incorporated into the new constitution or remodelled under it: the Assembly must reconcile the remnants of the Old Regime’s religious institutions with its new revolutionary principles. These arguments drew down torrents of abuse on Sieyès’ head. Could the radical theorist of 1789 have turned reactionary overnight? Was the author of the incendiary pamphlet What is the Third Estate? first and foremost a conservative priest after all? ‘Are you going to abandon the role of legislators to reveal yourselves as – what? Anti-priests?’ sneered Sieyès in response to his critics.21 But as so often, his biting cleverness and sharp reasoning were wasted on the unruly Assembly, cheered on by anti-clerical journalists and spectators in the public gallery.
Robespierre was neither anti-priest nor anti-clerical. Indeed, it is often hard to tell where he stood on the future of the Church. On the motion to confirm Roman Catholicism as the state religion he was silenced: ‘M. de Robespierre was about to speak, when someone demanded a vote.’22Tantalisingly, we will never know what he might have said. On other occasions, when he did manage to make himself heard, Robespierre’s interventions were idiosyncratic. Sometimes he was as vehemently critical as he had been when he lost his temper with the Archbishop of Nîmes back in Versailles; and often he returned to the interpretation of Christian doctrine that had been evoked on that occasion. Christianity, in his view, was the religion of the poor and the pure at heart – conspicuous wealth and luxury should have no part in it. Sell everything and give to the destitute – this was the advice Jesus Christ gave his followers, and Robespierre echoed it in the Assembly’s constitutional debates. When the question of what was to be done with Church lands and revenues arose, he urged the nation to appropriate them: ‘Church property belongs to the people; and to demand that the clergy shall use it to help the people is merely to re-apply it to its original purpose.’23 In itself this was a very common line of argument, but Robespierre added his peculiar stamp to it – according to him, the poor were oppressed not only by their hunger and other neglected needs, but also by the scandalous spectacle of self-indulgent clerics insensitively squandering what was rightfully theirs. The poor were scandalised and their moral outrage was more than justified.
A few weeks later he made another characteristically odd intervention, arguing that ex-monks were entitled to more generous pensions than they were being offered by recently suppressed religious orders. It was impossible, he said, to estimate the real wealth of these orders. They had been living in fear of the Revolution that had now arrived and had long been preparing for it by carefully concealing their assets. Here was an early example of Robespierre’s growing tendency to suspect hidden conspiracies. Church wealth was indeed difficult to quantify, but more because it took so many different forms and was diffused throughout the whole country than because counter-revolutionary monks and clerics had been scheming to conceal it. Later in 1790, the Assembly published a list of the revenues of all the archbishoprics, bishoprics and abbeys, including the information that the Abbey of Saint-Vaast in Arras had an income of 400,000 livres and the Bishop of Arras drew a stipend of 92,000 livres – such figures would have confirmed Robespierre in his perceptions of ecclesiastical decadence.
Robespierre made his longest and most interesting speech on the Church in May 1790 when the Assembly was embroiled in discussions about the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This document had taken a year to draft and would – it was hoped – reconcile what remained of the Church with the Revolution. In fact, it plunged France into violent strife and would later be regarded (by the abbé Sieyès among others) as the Assembly’s first really serious mistake. In essence, the proposals rejected the Pope’s authority over the Church in France; reduced the number of dioceses from 137 to 83 (thus aligning them with the country’s new administrative departments); stipulated that the clergy would now be paid by the state; and provided for the election of priests and bishops by the people. Robespierre spoke in support of all these changes. As usual, he argued from clear principles to destructive effect. He defined priests as public officials, ‘simply magistrates whose duty it is to maintain and carry on public worship’.24 Any aspect of the Church that was not useful to society must go. Cathedrals, religious colleges, even bishops and priests, if they were not publicly useful, would have to disappear. Robespierre was especially pleased by the prospect of the people electing their own Church officials. In accordance with his strict democratic principles he dismissed the suggestion that the existing clergy might play a prominent role in such elections; instead the clergy should be chosen through the pure unmediated expression of popular will.
Towards the end of his speech, Robespierre suddenly did something outrageous: he raised the issue of married priests. Many of his colleagues agreed with him that the clergy could not continue as a privileged order, that ministers of the Church were not substantially different from any other public officials and should be chosen by the people – but an end to celibacy and all the trouble this would cause with the Pope in Rome was a step too far for the Assembly: a barrage of disapproval cut off Robespierre’s speech. It is somewhat puzzling that he took it upon himself to propose something so contentious. One possible explanation is that he was attempting to steal Mirabeau’s thunder because he had designs on the radical leader’s mantle. The great orator himself had commissioned one of his several ghostwriters (a Swiss man named Reybaz) to prepare a speech on priestly celibacy, and he was furious when Robespierre pre-empted him by ineffectually raising the matter in the Assembly.25
Back in Arras, Augustin was particularly unnerved by this development. He wrote warning his brother:
Your motion for the marriage of priests has given you the reputation of an unbeliever among all our great philosophers in Artois … You will lose the esteem of the peasantry if you renew this motion. People are using it as a weapon against you and talk of nothing but your irreligion, etc. Perhaps it would be better not to support it any more … Let me know if you would like me to come to Paris.26
For all his concern about Robespierre’s local reputation, Augustin was desperate to join him in Paris at the centre of the Revolution. Meanwhile, at his desk in the Marais, Robespierre was inundated with letters: ‘Poems in Latin, French, Greek and even Hebrew arrived from the four corners of France, poems of 500, 700, 1500 couplets rained down upon the rue Saintonge.’27 Wry as ever, he remarked to his secretary across his bursting postbag, ‘Do you still believe there is a shortage of poets in France? They are, at any rate, pouring forth from the cloisters and monasteries.’ According to Villiers, Robespierre dutifully acknowledged all these missives and meticulously reclaimed the postage. Whether or not they supported his views, they were evidence that his reputation outside the Assembly continued to grow. ‘I doubt if a single law that he has proposed has ever been carried,’ said his old school friend Camille, as the constitutional debates drew to a close in 1791.28 But despite this Robespierre was fast becoming a figure in national politics.
The journalists and spectators who came to observe the Assembly from the public galleries at the Manège were not the only source of Robespierre’s growing reputation. He also owed his fame to the Jacobin Club, an outgrowth of the Breton Club that had met in Versailles at the Café Amaury. After the move to Paris, some of the original members of the Breton Club rented the refectory of a Dominican monastery, conveniently close to the Manège, as their new venue.29 In Paris, the Dominicans were nicknamed the Jacobins because their first religious house in the city was in the rue Saint-Jacques. Over time this nickname was transferred to the political club meeting in the monastery, but initially the remnants of the Breton Club called themselves the Society of the Friends of the Constitution.30 Whereas the organisation of the Breton Club had been obscure, the new club established clear rules and regulations. There was to be a president, four secretaries and a treasurer, and all these offices were to be rotated. The club would admit members who were not deputies to the National Assembly, but charged a relatively high price for membership (12 livres to join and 24 livres annual subscription), intending to attract only educated and serious-minded male supporters of the Revolution (women were restricted to spectator seats). Aside from covering the club’s running costs, the membership subscriptions were used to finance the publication of important speeches, which broadened the club’s influence. The candlelit meetings in the old monastery gradually acquired a central role in revolutionary politics. At the Jacobins, most evenings a week, there was the opportunity to analyse in close detail the progress of the Assembly’s constitutional debates. It was here that the self-appointed guardians of the Revolution continued to define its objectives. Any member of the club whose revolutionary principles were deemed inadequate could be expelled. From 1790 political clubs all over France began affiliating themselves to the Paris Jacobins, and a nationwide correspondence network came into existence. Robespierre rapidly grasped its political potential. The counter-revolution was gathering momentum throughout the country following the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He could see that a network of affiliated clubs of active revolutionaries was just what was needed to combat the threat posed by recalcitrant clergy and their supporters.
In Arras, Augustin helped establish a patriotic club and wrote to Robespierre seeking affiliation with the Paris Jacobins. He painted an alarming picture of counter-revolution in Artois, where the patriots were strong but isolated and embattled. Exaggerating wildly, Augustin claimed that they were surrounded by flames, following a series of unexplained arson attacks throughout the region: ‘We are not able to discover the instigators of these fires, but are convinced that they are enemies of the public good …’31 He complained of the local government’s indifference to libels launched against the National Assembly. In particular he recounted an anecdote about Robespierre’s ex-friend Dubois de Fosseux, now mayor of Arras. A road-builder in the village of Aire had received a libellous document that he reported at once to the mayor. ‘You have done well to bring it to me, it is very bad,’ said Dubois de Fosseux. However, upon returning home, the road-builder found an anonymous letter explaining that the libel against the National Assembly had been sent to him so that he could read it to other peasants in his village, not report it to the mayor. Augustin implied that Dubois de Fosseux himself had sent the letter encouraging libel against the National Assembly. Robespierre was only too willing to think ill of Dubois de Fosseux after their falling-out in Arras during the elections to the Estates General in 1789, so Augustin’s insinuation would not have been unwelcome.
Even more striking was Augustin’s hatred of local clergy. ‘It is absolutely necessary to ransack our abbeys,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘For it is among the monks that one finds monsters wanting to stain France with blood.’32 In another letter, Augustin mentions plans to convert the resources of the Abbey of Saint-Vaast into more scholarships for local children, of the kind both he and Robespierre had benefited from in their youth. But, echoing his brother’s preoccupation with the plight of the poor, Augustin remarked that it would be more fitting to use the money to alleviate the suffering of the indigent over the coming winter. He also shared his brother’s penchant for dark foreboding: ‘I cannot hide my fears from you, dear brother, you will seal the cause of the people with your blood.’33
Even at this comparatively early point in the Revolution, Robespierre was so suspicious of ‘spies in every quarter of the city, and murderers assigned to assassinate patriots’ that he feared the name ‘Robespierre’ on the outside of an envelope would attract malicious attention. The intoxicating paranoia that would eventually permeate almost all his tactical decisions is already evident. ‘Reply to me, and put your letter in an envelope marked President of the National Assembly,’ he tells his friend Buissart in March 1790.34 In April, he writes, ‘Put your letters in an envelope addressed to the Deputies of Artois to the National Assembly.’35 And in May, he tells Buissart, ‘I am going to send you a letter for my brother. I do not want to address it to him directly from fear that my name will entice aristocratic hands to violate the privacy of the post.’36 Still it is important to note that Robespierre was not alone in entertaining such concerns. The daily newspaper Chronique de Paris carried this advertisement in October 1790:
Coded Messages
Anyone who wants to procure a method for rendering correspondence impenetrable contact M. Loppin, Rue l’Evêque … By this method you can confidently dictate a letter to your secretary, or any public scribe, without fearing that he will be able to guess your thoughts. Five minutes suffices to put this method into operation.37
It is not surprising that Robespierre grew more suspicious by the day. Like many other patriots at this time, he feared an aristocratic plot. He had made an irreversible personal commitment to the Revolution, so anything that menaced it menaced him too. He was afraid that if the Revolution’s enemies succeeded in plunging France into a foreign war, all would be lost.
In the spring of 1790, the threat of war was suddenly real. Back in 1778, towards the end of his last voyage of discovery, Captain Cook had sailed his ship Resolution into Nootka Sound in the Pacific, to what is now British Columbia. Though the Spaniards had arrived before Cook and taken formal possession of the coastline, English ships followed in his wake and set up a lucrative trade in animal pelts. These English adventurers had the full approval of their government and Prime Minister Pitt. So when Spanish forces arrived to reclaim possession of Nootka Sound, Pitt prepared his fleet for war. Spain demanded French support under the Bourbon alliance that united the two countries. Louis XVI acknowledged his obligation and ordered his foreign minister to ready the French fleet for action. There was only one problem: if Louis XVI was still in charge of foreign policy and could single-handedly commit the country to war, where did that leave the National Assembly? Somewhat surprisingly, from the point of view of his radical colleagues, Mirabeau urged the Assembly to accept the king’s exclusive right to declare war and make peace. He was still hoping to reconcile the king and the Assembly and thought such a move would be a step towards establishing a secure constitutional monarchy. Robespierre, among others, vigorously opposed him.
Robespierre wanted to see the Assembly take foreign affairs into its own hands and act in a conciliatory manner that would bring about peace. Beyond this, he disputed the king’s right to declare war on behalf of France, referring to him in derogatory terms as a delegate of the nation who must do what he was told. As so often, his contentious intervention was greeted by both murmurs and loud applause. Mirabeau, however, rose to the occasion and gave one of the most brilliant oratorical performances of his by now distinguished career. He insisted that even if decisions on war and peace were to rest ultimately with the Assembly, the right to initiate or propose such decisions must remain with the king. Mirabeau won this point and the Assembly went on to decide that ‘War can be declared only by a decree of the Legislature, passed after a formal proposal by the King, and subsequently sanctioned by him.’38 The outcome was not as radical as Robespierre would have liked, but it was still a blow to the monarchy, and on the evening of 22 May Robespierre, his friend and fellow radical Jérôme Pétion and other leading Jacobins processed through the Tuileries gardens escorted by a jubilant crowd. Pétion, the son of a lawyer at Chartres, was two years older than Robespierre and like him had been a lawyer with literary ambitions before the Revolution. In the Assembly the two were increasingly paired as the up-and-coming leaders in Mirabeau’s shadow. As the friends walked through the gardens, enjoying the spring blossoms on the cherry trees, the evening light and the admiration of the crowd, they saw someone watching at one of the tall windows of the Tuileries palace. It was the small figure of the Dauphin, waving and clapping his hands.
Louis XVI and his family were already effectively prisoners in the Tuileries. This magnificent palace on the right bank of the Seine was connected to the even older Louvre palace by a riverside gallery. Commissioned in 1564 by Henry II’s widow, Catherine de’ Médicis, and named after the tile kilns or tuileries that had previously occupied the site, the Tuileries palace, for all its splendour, was certainly not a desirable abode. It had stood vacant, and been used only as a theatre, for a century before the royal family were dragged from Versailles and forcibly installed in it. The palace was within spitting distance of the Manège, where the Assembly and its throng of interested onlookers met every day, even on Sunday. And there were many service buildings – porters’ lodges, barracks, domestic offices and stables – clustered against the palace walls, which meant that almost all its doors and windows opened on to a public thoroughfare. There was little chance of privacy for the royals. Marie Antoinette complained that even in high summer she ‘could not open the windows for a little fresh air without being exposed to the grossest invectives and menaces’.39 For the same reason, it was difficult for her family to take any exercise, except on the terrace next to the river, and here the air was soon thick with insults and jeers from the angry Parisian mob.
Louis XVI’s relations with the Assembly were becoming more and more fraught as the weeks went by and rumours of foreign invasion or ‘the aristocratic plot’ multiplied. Yet, to the noisy crowd accompanying Robespierre and Pétion through the Tuileries gardens that evening in May, the innocent applause of the six-year-old Dauphin at the window seemed a good omen: here was the heir to the throne cheering the radical deputies. Here was hope, perhaps, that the constitutional monarchy might be made to work, that king and Assembly could agree a stable form of government for France.
In Camille Desmoulins’ report of these events, he has Robespierre sneering at the revellers: ‘Why gentlemen! Upon what are you congratulating yourselves? The decree is hateful – as hateful as can be. Let that brat at the window clap his hands if he will: he knows what he is doing better than we do.’40 When he opened the paper and read this, Robespierre was indignant. He wrote at once to Camille, pointing out that he had spoken his mind in the Assembly, but had left it at that, and would never have been so indiscreet in public. In fact he had not addressed the crowd in the garden at all. At Robespierre’s request, Camille printed his complaint, but added a long editorial note:
If I insert these errata, my dear Robespierre, it is solely to flaunt your signature before my fellow-journalists, and to warn them not to mutilate in future a name rendered famous by the patriotism of its bearer. There is a righteousness about your letter, and a senatorial weightiness, which rather hurts me, as an old College friend. You are proud, and you have a right to be, to wear the toga of the National Assembly. I like this noble conceit, and I am only sorry that all the deputies are not as conscious of their dignity as you are. But you might at least have given an old comrade like myself something more than a nod of the head – not that I love you any the less for it; because you are faithful to your principles, however it may be with your friends. All the same, why this insistence on my recantation? I may have slightly altered the facts in the story I told; but it was all to your credit; and if you never actually used the words I put in your mouth, still they certainly express your thoughts … You are not one of those poor creatures described by J.J. Rousseau, who hate to have their thoughts repeated, and who say what they really think before their butler or their valet, but never in the National Assembly, or the Tuileries gardens.41
Camille was still Robespierre’s closest friend in Paris. At the end of the year, Robespierre acted as a witness at his wedding to Lucile Horace. Their old headmaster, a priest from Louis-le-Grand, officiated.42 (Civil marriages had not been introduced at this stage in the Revolution, so the ceremony was a traditional Roman Catholic one, even though Camille had recently made some disparaging remarks about Christianity in his newspaper. When questioned about these remarks before the wedding, he cheekily expressed surprise that the clergy read his paper: ‘Only sometimes,’ came the priest’s wry response.) There was even talk of Robespierre marrying the bride’s sister and making it a double wedding. Yet despite the continuing friendship, Robespierre’s newly acquired ponderousness was beginning to irritate Camille. While Camille was a poet and a journalist, Robespierre was a deputy to the National Assembly; if at Louis-le-Grand they had been equals, now Robespierre seemed to think he was more important. In these circumstances, it was very clever of Camille to quote Rousseau. He knew how strong an impression Rousseau’s books – with their emphasis on equality and integrity – had made on Robespierre. This was also a sly way of warning his friend against the vice of hypocrisy: another of Rousseau’s obsessions. But the charge ‘you are faithful to your principles, however it may be with your friends’ is serious. Had Robespierre really been disloyal to his friend? In this instance there is no evidence against him at all. Camille was hurt and his accusation exaggerated. Robespierre was certainly not the only revolutionary vulnerable to injured pride.
Not long after this public tiff with Camille, a letter arrived on Robespierre’s chaotic and heavily laden desk that marked the beginning of another important friendship with a younger man. The letter was from an officer in the National Guard of the Aisne, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just – nine years younger than Robespierre, four years younger than Camille. Wild, handsome, transgressive, he was a most unlikely friend for Robespierre. Before the Revolution, Saint-Just had written a long obscene poem called Organt and mischievously dedicated it to the Vatican. He wrote it while languishing in prison for six months, having been convicted of stealing and selling his widowed mother’s silver. His completely ludicrous excuse for mistreating his mother was that he needed money to consult a doctor about a disease brought on by overwork. Nevertheless, the preface to his poem was penitent: ‘I am twenty; I have done badly; but I shall be able to do better.’ With the Revolution came Saint-Just’s chance at a fresh start. He became involved with local politics, specifically the issue of choosing a capital for the new department of the Aisne, as the Assembly’s plans for reorganising and redividing France were taking shape. Like many throughout the country, he swore the new civic oath of ‘Fidelity to the Nation, the Law and the King’. He had already contacted Camille Desmoulins when he decided to write to Robespierre as well:
You who uphold our tottering country against the torrent of despotism and intrigue, you whom I know, as I know God, only through his miracles – it is to you, Monsieur, that I address myself, to entreat you to unite with me in saving my poor land … I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not merely the deputy of a province, you are the deputy of the Republic, and of mankind.43
All Saint-Just actually wanted Robespierre (whom he had never met) to do was to sign a petition in support of his village in the Aisne, Blérancourt, which was engaged in a dispute over trade with the neighbouring town of Couci – it would have been hard to find a more parochial problem. So why did Robespierre keep this short letter, from someone he did not know, on a topic of little interest to him? It was found among his papers after he died when so many other letters had been lost or disposed of. Perhaps it was true, as Camille claimed, that Robespierre in 1790 was already getting above himself. And Saint-Just had, after all, just compared him to God! Still, the friendship that later developed between these two men centred on their shared ideas and political passions: they had an intellectual affinity aside from any more personal emotional or sentimental attachment. ‘You are the deputy of the Republic, and of mankind,’ said Saint-Just, and this is exactly how Robespierre saw himself, even if he had not yet put it so clearly. He might have been simply flattered by the letter. Or it could be only an accident that it survived. Or perhaps Robespierre somehow sensed the beginning of a deep and mysterious friendship that would last until the day he died.
The first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was close. How would Paris celebrate? Ever since Louis XVI had agreed to become a constitutional monarch, Festivals of Federation had been in vogue throughout France. They varied greatly in size and grandeur, but centred on ordinary citizens and members of the National Guard jubilantly swearing patriotic oaths – any excuse for a public holiday as revolutionary optimism swept across the country. Why not celebrate the fall of the Bastille with a grand-scale Festival of Federation? Why not turn the Champ de Mars parade ground, a vast open space close to the centre of Paris, into an amphitheatre with tiered seating for spectators, a triumphal arch at one end and an ‘Altar of the Fatherland’ in the middle? The king and National Assembly deputies could sit together in a specially built pavilion and watch the National Guards pass beneath the arch and swear their patriotic oath at the altar. The only difficulty was that things had been left very late and these plans were approved just three weeks before 14 July. However, there was public spirit and goodwill in abundance at this point in the Revolution, so volunteers from all walks of life flocked to the Champ de Mars to clear and level the ground. Robespierre would have been pleased to see monks with cockades pinned to their cassocks trampling the earth alongside soldiers, labourers and well-dressed women. Excitement, cooperation and holiday spirit accomplished the necessary, and by 14 July everything was ready.
In the midst of these last-minute preparations, Augustin wrote to Robespierre hinting, once again, that he would like to come to Paris. He thought he ought to try and join the local delegation to the national Festival of Federation, since he was sure to be deprived of any patriotic celebrations in conservative Arras. Life there for him and Charlotte was hard, Augustin complained.44 They had little money and no prospects. There is no record of Robespierre’s response, but if Augustin got his way and arrived in Paris for 14 July, he would have been proud to catch sight of his brother at the heart of the celebrations. On the day it rained, so Louis XVI and the National Assembly deputies were glad of the pavilion above their heads as they watched mud-splattered battalions of National Guards troop past the Altar of the Fatherland and swear allegiance to ‘the best of kings’. One of the deputies later remembered, ‘I was standing behind his majesty’s seat and almost cheek by jowl with that famous rascal Robespierre.’ Had Louis XVI turned to glance over his shoulder, he might have noticed the pallid feline features of the lawyer from Arras, whose reputation was growing steadily, week by week. Probably Louis XVI could not have said when exactly he had started to recognise the name Robespierre and attach importance to it. Certainly he did not recall the very first time he had set eyes on him, fifteen years earlier, when Robespierre was kneeling in the street outside Louis-le-Grand to greet the king on the way back from his coronation. But Robespierre must have remembered. Standing beneath the sodden canvas, so close to the king, on this first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, he could feel confident that he would not have to get down on his knees before anyone ever again. ‘All mortals are equal; it is not by birth but only virtue that they are distinguished. In every state the Law must be universal and mortals whosoever they be are equal before it.’45 These were the words inscribed on the Altar of the Fatherland. Robespierre was too short-sighted to read them from where he was standing, but the sentiments they expressed were emblazoned on his heart.
Despite the weather, Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord, Bishop of Autun, said Mass at the open-air altar and blessed the tricolour banners flapping hard against their poles like great wet towels. Talleyrand was lame, and for this reason had been forced into a clerical career by his family.46After the Mass, General Lafayette, emblematic citizen-soldier and head of the National Guard, took over. The sun broke through the clouds and the rain – almost miraculously – stopped. Glamorously mounted on a white charger, Lafayette looked down his long nose and surveyed the assembled ranks below him: forty thousand National Guards, a battalion of children, one of veterans, companies of professional soldiers and sailors, and delegates from France’s eighty-three new departments. He turned his horse toward the pavilion, the guards parted to let him through, and there he dismounted to receive the king’s permission to administer the patriotic oath. This he did back at the altar. The heady blend of religious sentiment and militarism went down well with the crowd, and in this symbolic way the whole country gave its support to the revolutionary actions of Paris. Afterwards, the king in turn swore to uphold the decrees of the National Assembly. Lafayette was acting as the intermediary between the people and their king. For someone who had volunteered to cross the Atlantic and fight in the American Revolution at the age of twenty-one, he remained remarkably sanguine – his motto was still ‘Why not?’47 He wanted harmony between Louis XVI and the Revolution; he believed it possible; he fancied himself the man who could bring it about. ‘Royalty can only preserve itself by being in unison with the Revolution: otherwise it must be destroyed, and I will be the first to contribute to its destruction. The king is king neither of the aristocrats nor of the factions; he is king of the people and of the Revolution; otherwise he may be dethroned either by the former or by the latter.’48 Robespierre agreed, but he already disliked Lafayette – and within a year he would hate him.
The Festival of Federation did not impress everyone. In his newspaper, Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Camille Desmoulins derided it as an opportunity for Lafayette to show off, then mocked the ceremony with his depiction of a humiliated, supplicating king being dragged through the mud behind the chariot of his conquerors. A leading reactionary deputy, Pierre-Victor Malouet (who had been identified by Robespierre at the very beginning of the Revolution as ‘the most suspect, the most odious of all the patriots’), decided that radical sectors of the Parisian press had gone too far. In addition to Camille pouring scorn on the Festival of Federation, there was also the poisonous Marat, who day after day vehemently denounced the National Assembly in his paper. ‘IT’S ALL OVER FOR US’ (C’en est fait de nous), screamed the Ami du Peuple on 26 July, when a detachment of Austrian troops asked permission to cross the border into France. This was not yet an invasion, but a sharp reminder that the Revolution had foreign enemies. Austria, France’s old rival for territory in Europe, was now poised to take advantage of the chaos the Revolution had brought. In addition, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman emperor Leopold II, was anxiously watching events unfold in France – if necessary he would intervene to save the monarchy. Just in case anyone had missed the paper, Marat posted placards all over Paris with the same message, ending with ominous forebodings of war: ‘Five or six hundred [aristocratic] heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers.’49 Marat claimed that he was only trying to make a strong impression on people and destroy their complacency or ‘fatal’ sense of security in the face of the growing counter-revolution, and was not really calling for bloodshed in the street.50 However, his tactics appalled most of the deputies in the Assembly.
On 31 July, Malouet urged his colleagues to censor Marat’s paper along with that of Camille Desmoulins. He moved that all authors, printers and distributors of writings inciting the crowd to revolt against the law or disrupt the drafting of the constitution should be prosecuted for crimes against the nation. Marat responded with vitriolic fury in his paper, but Camille, who was a somewhat milder character, sent an address to the Assembly defending himself. After it was read, Malouet thundered: ‘Is he innocent? Let him prove it. Is he guilty? I will conduct the case against him, and against anyone who takes up his defence. Let him justify his conduct if he dare.’ From the public gallery, Camille shouted, ‘Yes, I dare!’ This was an unprecedented flouting of the Assembly’s protocol, and the president (whom the deputies elected from among themselves each month) ordered his immediate arrest. In the ensuing chaos, Robespierre intervened in his friend’s defence. ‘Do not confuse imprudence and inconsiderateness with crime,’ he entreated his colleagues.51 Camille managed to escape and no charges were pressed. Robespierre could sleep soundly that night, knowing that he had proved his loyalty to his friend and that Camille now had reason to be ashamed of having doubted him back in May.
But if Marat was chastised for having spread panic with his apocalyptic posters, the fact remained that Austrian troops were waiting to cross the border into France. Who was to blame? Who was behind this threat to the Revolution? Discussion in the Assembly now turned to these questions. Louis XVI’s war minister was one possibility; another was the leader of the émigrés in exile, the Prince de Condé. Robespierre dismissed both suggestions. He argued that the Assembly must not be too hasty in identifying a single individual as responsible for the plot against the nation. Instead, it should urgently address the problem of how to deal with ‘all the enemies of the Revolution’.52 The royalist press was delighted that Robespierre, of all people, had deflected blame from Louis XVI’s ministry and the Prince de Condé, and derisively congratulated him on his new aristocratic credentials. This, no doubt, irritated him; yet he was more worried by his suspicion that the most dangerous enemies of the Revolution were not the most obvious ones, but were those with the best disguises. Prominent individuals hostile to the Revolution were less menacing, he insisted, than the hidden enemies who were the real vanguard of counter-revolution. People were beginning to notice and remark on his recurring paranoia. Robespierre ‘once again enlarged on the plots and conspiracies of which he alone held the secret’, reported the Mercure de France.53 ‘M. de Robespierre, as usual, spoke of plots conspiracies etc. etc.,’ remarked a fellow deputy earlier in 1790, bored but slightly amused.54 This distrustfulness was not, however, just a passing whim of Robespierre’s, or further evidence of his peculiar personality: it was a political obsession that would intensify throughout the rest of his career: ‘I blame those less who out of romantic enthusiasm justify their attachment to former principles they cannot abandon [i.e. defenders of the Old Regime] than those who cover their perfidious designs with the mask of patriotism and virtue.’55 Seek first the enemy within, he enjoined his colleagues. Beware of hypocrisy and corruption.
Robespierre was more prescient than he knew, since, just weeks before the Festival of Federation, Mirabeau (still the most famous deputy in the Assembly) had accepted a substantial retainer from the court, plus payment of the overwhelming debts he had accrued over a lifetime of drinking and womanising. In return, he agreed to secretly advise the king on how to strengthen his standing vis-à-vis the Assembly. The king had promised him a further million francs when the Assembly was at last disbanded. The historian J.M. Thompson has argued that it is unlikely that any of the deputies would have refused such an offer at this point in the Revolution – except, of course, Robespierre. For all his concerns about corruption and plots, Robespierre seems not to have suspected Mirabeau. In Versailles he had been wary of Mirabeau’s close connections with the court. But over the intervening months his admiration for him had grown, even when they disagreed – as they often did – over a particular decree or detail of the constitution. The royalist press was quick to notice. ‘Mirabeau’s monkey’ was one of its many nicknames for Robespierre, and he was even accused of copying the older man’s hairstyle and following him about in the street like a puppy. Mirabeau wore an enormous quantity of false black hair which dramatically increased the volume of his already enormous head: ‘When I shake my terrible locks, no one dares interrupt me!’ he bragged.56 It seems highly unlikely that neat, slight, fastidious Robespierre set out to copy him in this way. Really their relationship was more distant and mutually respectful. ‘He will go far because he believes everything he says,’ was what Mirabeau said of Robespierre – conscious certainly that the same was not true of himself.57
When the royal family was brought to Paris from Versailles back in October 1789, Mirabeau had immediately noted that they were effectively prisoners in the Tuileries palace as winter approached and Paris was in chaos. He wondered then what the city would be like in three months’ time, and answered himself grimly: ‘Certainly a hospital, perhaps a theatre of horrors.’58 He foresaw strife between radical Paris and the more moderate provinces – he understood the ‘profound immorality’ of Paris as only someone who had led his kind of dissolute life could; and he concluded that the king would somehow have to leave the capital if there was to be any hope of recovering his power and dignity. Once this proved impossible, Mirabeau tried to reconcile Louis XVI to the constitution as it was taking shape in the Assembly. But in this he had no more success than General Lafayette, and was soon wringing his hands, exasperated by the incessant intrigue at court: ‘What woolgatherers they are! What bunglers! How cowardly! How reckless! What a grotesque mixture of old ideas and new projects, of petty scruples and childish whims, of willing this and not willing that, of abortive loves and hates!’59 Now a year had passed and the winter of 1790 was approaching. There was still a serious threat of war: civil war, war with a foreign power, or both. Discontent was mounting in the provinces. There was terrible trouble brewing over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the oath to uphold it imposed on the recalcitrant priests. The Assembly was increasingly fragmented and frustrated. The country was even more bankrupt than it had been before the Revolution. And Mirabeau was seriously ill – his personal degeneration a match for the general disintegration of France.
At the beginning of the Revolution, Mirabeau suffered from jaundice, hereditary nephritis, intestinal troubles, rheumatism, swollen legs, and a recurrent infection in his left eye. His friend Dr Cabanis remembers him drinking vast quantities of lemonade, the only treatment he had time for. The Assembly’s long daily meetings were extremely insalubrious. At the best of times the Manège was very poorly ventilated, but the quality of the air deteriorated still further in winter when the doors and windows were kept closed and heating stoves belched smoke into the atmosphere. There were epidemics of eye and stomach infections, affecting everyone from the most robust deputies to the curious members of the public crowded into the spectator galleries. At one point, Mirabeau’s infected eyes were so sore that he covered them with bandages when he addressed the Assembly. The soiled bandages came off for his secret audience with the queen on 3 July when he kissed her hand and declared, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, ‘Madame, the Monarchy is saved!’ But even so, Marie Antoinette shivered in horror at the sight of the huge vulgar sick man on whom her family’s future had come to depend. ‘You know not all the power of my ugliness!’ Mirabeau liked to boast to his friends. Yet for all his bravado, he was desperate by the end of 1790, and his advice to Louis XVI became increasingly hare-brained, unpatriotic, even treasonous. Stir up trouble between the National Guard and the Paris mob, he suggested; embarrass the Assembly so as to suborn it; undermine General Lafayette; tamper with the press; revive the royal army, starting with the Swiss and German regiments. Exacerbate, in other words, the extent to which France was already ungovernable, so that power might, by default, be returned to the throne. Robespierre, in his darkest nightmares, scarcely imagined such treachery.