The Fall of Robespierre

A review of Colin Jones' new book by Caroline Weber at the London Review of Books:

Robespierre had achieved national prominence in the winter of 1792-93, when he led the Montagnards in making the case for regicide. In 1790, he had coined what would prove the enduring motto of the Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – and now he sealed the king’s fate with a maxim: ‘Louis must die so that the republic might live.’ When the Convention was stormed six months later, he exhorted the people of Paris to take up arms ‘against all corrupt deputies’, calling it a ‘moral insurrection’.

With his diminutive stature (he was five foot three), awkward manner (he avoided eye contact and suffered from nervous tics in his neck, shoulders, eyelids and hands), unimpressive appearance (pointy features, hooded eyes and sallow, pockmarked skin) and cold, priggish disposition (more than one critic likened him to a priest), Robespierre was an unlikely revolutionary hero. Beside the Comte de Mirabeau and Georges Danton, two burly, lusty firebrands, he cut a puny figure (if Mirabeau was ‘the Torch of Provence’, the joke went, Robespierre was ‘the Candle of Arras’). But his fierce populism won him the loyalty of Paris’s municipal authority, the Commune, and its most influential political club, the Jacobins, a militant organisation with close ties to the lower-class sans-culottes. Both these groups had mobilised for the purge of the Girondins – as they had for other Parisian uprisings, known as revolutionary ‘journées’ – and their backing gave Robespierre a formidable advantage. This became a cause of resentment and distrust among his fellow deputies, most of whom, like him, belonged to the educated bourgeoisie. Some began to mutter about his autocratic aims, speculation that would continue to dog him.

In July 1793, Robespierre, aged 35, joined the Committee of Public Safety, a twelve-member administrative arm of the Convention that soon assumed effective control of the government. His position on the committee consolidated his political supremacy, despite the fact that, according to one of his detractors, ‘he never had the slightest idea about government, administration or diplomacy.’ ‘Money frightens Robespierre,’ his friend-turned-foe Danton remarked, and this didn’t help either, given the problems affecting the French economy, from runaway inflation to widespread poverty and famine. His ignorance of military strategy was also unfortunate, since France was fighting wars on two fronts: abroad (against a coalition of European monarchical superpowers) and at home (against Catholic royalist rebels in the provinces). In fact, before the founding of the republic Robespierre had argued forcefully against war. His volte-face formed part of a larger pattern of political flip-flopping that might have fatally damaged the credibility of other political leaders.

Robespierre wasn’t interested in the finer points of ideology or administration, but in the grand, abstract principles of Rousseau’s Social Contract. The ideal polity Rousseau envisioned drew its legitimacy from the general will; as such, it required the rigorous sacrifice of all private interests on the altar of the public good. To citizens shirking this imperative, the Rousseauist state assigned the ‘right to death’; to its legislators, it prescribed unimpeachable morality. These principles animated the frequent addresses Robespierre delivered at the Convention, the Jacobins and other political clubs, in which the force of his eloquence and the loftiness of his vision transfixed his audiences. Anatole France evoked one such appearance in his novel The Gods Will Have Blood (1912):

A young man with ... a pockmarked face and an air of cold self-possession slowly mounted the tribune ... Speaking in a clear voice, he delivered an eloquent, logical attack on the enemies of the Republic. He dealt forcibly [with them] by means of uncompromising and metaphysical arguments ... He spoke at great length, his sentences flowing smoothly and harmoniously. Soaring into the rarer spheres of philosophy, he hurled his thunderbolts at the base conspirators crawling on the ground. [He] raised his [listeners’] thoughts far above gross material happenings [and] simplified everything, revealing the good and the evil in simple, clear terms.

In these moments, Jules Michelet wrote, ‘it was much more than a man that had spoken.’ Robespierre transformed into the people itself: the Revolution’s transcendent collective hero.

In the autumn of 1793, seeking to maintain control of an increasingly restive and fractious country, the Convention declared a state of emergency. Invoking semi- dictatorial war powers, Robespierre and his cronies on the Committee of Public Safety suspended the constitution they had drafted only months earlier. Instead, they made ‘terror the order of the day’. This is the way Robespierre explained it:

The resource of a people’s government [‘gouvernement populaire’] during a revolution is simultaneously virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.

In late September, a decree was issued mandating the arrest of counter-revolutionaries. This Law of Suspects was broad enough to apply to almost anyone. (Read more.) 

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