Robespierre: Embodiment of the French Revolution

4,989 words

Marcel Gauchet
Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most
Princeton University Press, 2024

This 191-page study of Robespierre’s revolutionary career is not a biography in the usual sense. Such works have already patiently collected everything that can be known about the man’s life before the French Revolution, but the main lesson to be drawn from them is that nothing from Robespierre’s formative years is of much use for explaining his political behavior. Orphaned at an early age, a brilliant scholarship student at the Collège Louis-Le-Grand in Paris for twelve years, he was busy building up a respectable legal practice in his hometown of Arras for most of the 1780s. As regards personality, biographers speak of his “moral solitude”:

[T]he sense of a separate destiny; an indifference to everyday comforts bordering on asceticism; and the lack of emotional attachment displayed by a chaste bachelor who enjoyed the company of women without feeling a need for them, any more than he sought to cultivate friendships with men.

Like so many others, he got caught up in the excitement surrounding elections to the Estates General planned for the Spring of 1789. He was unusually quick to suspect the momentous character of events, writing that April that he felt himself to be in the presence of one of “those unique revolutions that mark an era in the history of empires and decide their destiny.” As Gauchet puts it: “He threw himself into his work on its behalf utterly and completely . . . determined to live for nothing else.”

No outside observer could have suspected this as yet, however: when the thirty-one-year-old lawyer arrived in Versailles as one of nearly 1200 deputies of the Third Estate, nothing distinguished him from the crowd. When, locked out of their assembly hall by royal command, they met at a nearby tennis court and swore a revolutionary oath not to disband until they had given France a constitution, Robespierre’s signature appeared forty-fifth on the list.

Some fundamental aspects of his thinking are clear from his earliest interventions in the debates of what was now known as the Constituent Assembly, for example his intransigent opposition to established authority and idealization of le peuple: “What does it matter to us what the ministers say, what the ministers think? It is the will of the people that must be inquired into; the force of the people resides in themselves; it is in the incorruptible probity of their representatives.” Already we find what Gauchet characterizes as “a delusional overestimation of the strength of the opposition to the Revolution” when he warns darkly of an “unprecedented conspiracy formed against citizens themselves,” as well as an indulgent attitude toward popular excesses targeting such real or imagined enemies (“a few heads chopped off, but the heads of guilty people”). In the debate on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Robespierre intransigently opposed all limitations or qualifications; such rights must be “clear, decisive, definitive, and without any modification.” “For him,” writes Gauchet, “the principles of the Declaration were the raison d’être of the Revolution, next to which everything else paled in comparison, not least the outbursts of violence that accompanied it and that he was constantly at pains to downplay.”

At this point, no one was publicly advocating a republic, but during the September debates on the royal veto, Robespierre was already defining monarchy in the narrowest possible terms as “a state in which executive power is confided to a single person.” Unlike the founders of the American Republic, he did not conceive of the executive and legislative branches as balancing one another, but championed total legislative supremacy: the executive power, even if referred to by the term “king,” was only legitimate insofar as it obediently carried out the people’s will as expressed through their legislative representatives. This amounted to republicanism, as Gauchet notes:

If, as [Robespierre] wrote, governments are established only by and for the people, so ‘that all those who govern, and therefore kings themselves, are only the agents and delegates of the people,’ what then was left of royalty in the usual sense? For in that case it had been wholly emptied of its spirit—the supernational unction and continuity of tradition.

The legislature ought to enjoy a similar supremacy over the judiciary in Robespierre’s view. He even considered it unacceptable for deputies accused of misconduct to be tried by the courts, believing only their peers should have the authority to judge them. When it was proposed that a court be established to rule on “the conformity of statutes currently in force with prior rulings,” Robespierre countered that “it can only be the person who makes the law who is in a position to say that the law has been misunderstood and violated.” He therefore proposed that the power in question be entrusted to a specialized committee within the legislature itself. Gauchet comments: “the idea proved unworkable and eventually was abandoned.”

In October, 1789, the King and the Constituent Assembly were forcibly relocated from Versailles to Paris. Robespierre rented a third-floor apartment in the Marais district. In addition to his duties as a delegate in the Assembly, he became involved with the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, soon to be nicknamed the Jacobin Club from its headquarters in a disused Jacobin monastery. Although endowed with no official power, this private club became an important venue where questions to be decided by the Constituent Assembly were debated in advance and political plans concerted.

Over the course of 1791, Robespierre gradually began to attract notice as an uncompromising defender of revolutionary principles, yet he enjoyed little influence on the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly. His campaign against Jacques Pierre Brissot and the war party ended in failure when France declared war on Austria April 20, 1791. But Gauchet notes that he “did not speak so much to convince his colleagues as to make himself heard outside the Assembly by the people.” He was so little interested in the exercise of power at this point that he supported a law to forbid members of the Constituent Assembly such as himself from serving in the Legislative Assembly that succeeded it in October 1791. His election as public prosecutor in the Paris Criminal Tribunal offered him a more practical role, yet he scarcely performed his duties and resigned less than two months after being sworn in. “There remained to him the Jacobin Club, where he regularly spoke and where he could hope to enjoy the power over opinion to which he aspired—from now on to the exclusion of all else.”

This devotion to the spoken word cannot be explained by any outstanding talent:

Robespierre was an orator, but certainly not a great one. He had neither an imposing appearance nor a commanding voice—all witnesses are in agreement about this—nor, above all, a captivating style, as his writings make clear. His impeccable but cold rhetoric and his dense style of argumentation were scarcely suited to stirring up and exciting crowds. [He] was the opposite of an ordinary demagogue, the sort of rabble-rouser that Paris was filled with during these years.

His speeches at this time focused mainly on the establishment of personal rights and freedoms. Gauchet says they

[F]orm a corpus remarkable for its breadth and coherence. If it were possible to isolate this body of work from what followed—imagine that he had died at the end of 1791—his place among the great figures of liberal thought would be guaranteed.

From the early months of 1792, however, we find Robespierre “increasingly preoccupied with an idealized image of the people and of himself as their spokesman.” It followed that his opponents must be enemies of the people: “the opposition encountered by a man devoted to virtue could only be suspected of arising from shameful motives.” Such priggishness, not unrelated to the “virtue signaling” of today’s progressives, was widely noted and mocked by Robespierre’s contemporaries. Brissot’s faction heaped ridicule on his celebration of a cult “of which he is at once the priest and the god, […] burning insipid incense on his own altar,” and even his allies noted his “weakness for praise administered in large doses.”

On August 10, 1792, a revolutionary mob stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris, an action which led directly to the abolition of the monarchy. Robespierre took no part in this insurrection—“in keeping with his legalistic scruples,” as Gauchet phrases it. But “it was as though the event had suddenly changed his personality. The orator, the man of principles, was transformed into a man of action.” The very next day he was elected to the Commune of Paris, “the new power that had emerged from the popular movement.” The day after, August 12, he became the Commune’s spokesman before the Legislative Assembly (of which, remember, he was not himself a member).

Shortly thereafter, as head of the electoral assembly charged with nominating deputies from Paris for election to the Convention, the successor to the Legislative Assembly, he arranged matters with consummate tactical skill. The noble appeals of the past to disinterestedness were now forgotten. He was determined to play a leading role in the work of the Convention and to place his allies in positions of influence. It was as a party leader, imperious and wily, that he now set to work.

The Convention met on September 20 and promptly declared France a Republic. Within days, provincial deputies allied with Robespierre’s old nemesis Brissot were denouncing the “despotism of Paris” and accusing Robespierre of leading a dictatorial party bent on exploiting the capital’s power. These accusers became known as the Girondins (from the origin of several leaders in the Gironde département), while Robespierre’s own faction, aligned with the Paris Commune, was labeled the Montagnards (from their seats on the highest benches). Between them sat a group of uncommitted delegates known as the Plain. The Montagnards were the largest and most unified group, but could be outnumbered whenever the Girondins convinced the Plain to side with them.

Robespierre’s first response to the Girondin challenge was to accuse them of attempting to weaken France by reducing it to a confederation of regions. “On this point,” writes Gauchet, “he was to prevail: at the end of the session, the Convention decreed that the Republic is ‘one and indivisible.’” But the factional struggle continued for several months. The Girondins protested the emergency measures of the Paris Commune, including arrests, suspension of civil rights, and unlawful proscriptions. Robespierre coolly responded: “All these things were illegal, as illegal as the Revolution, as the fall of the throne and of the Bastille, as illegal as liberty itself. Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?” If only the people of Paris took part, that was because “a great nation cannot rise up in a single movement,” and the Parisian mob “must be regarded as tacitly acting on behalf of society as a whole.” Irregularities of the sort “inseparable from so great an upheaval” did occur, but “the world, posterity, will see the sacred cause and the exalted results of these events.” In short, “all the arguments that were to be employed by the revolutionary rhetoric of the next two centuries are found” in Robespierre’s speeches of this period, “from the conjuring trick of describing action by a minority as the expression of a majority will to the pardoning of arbitrary, indeed monstrous means by appeal to the nobility of the ends.”

The issue now arose of what was to become of “Louis Capet,” as the revolutionaries were pleased to call the former king. Brissot and the Girondins favored sparing his life after “a trial conducted in strict accordance with regular procedure in order to neutralize royalist sentiment.” Robespierre absurdly accused them of wanting to restore the monarchy, arguing that

[T]he king’s execution was essential if royalist prejudice were to be eradicated. The matter of Louis XVI did not come under the head of ordinary justice; it was an extraordinary case in which the law that regulates the relations of citizens among themselves does not apply. This law supposes that a social pact has already been established. But here it was the very establishment of such a pact that was in question, against the background of a state of nature where the right of a nation to defend itself against “an enemy that conspires against it” took precedence.

Bitter debate continued until the king was tried and put to death on January 21, 1793.

The Convention should then have turned to the task of establishing workable institutions for the new republic, and the Girondins did in fact make a proposal for a republican constitution on February 15. But besides the insuperable suspicion of the Montagnards, circumstances were not favorable to dispassionate discussion of constitutional issues. England, Holland, and Spain had joined Prussia and Austria in their war against the new republic; the revolutionary currency known as the assignat was quickly losing value; resistance to conscription was widespread; a general uprising was flaring up in the Western region known as the Vendée; and food shortages were becoming acute, especially in the capital. While Robespierre and the Mountain made some half-hearted constitutional suggestions of their own, they were more interested for the present in establishing a regime with emergency powers that would leave them free to respond to the exigencies of the moment in an ad hoc manner.

In a fierce speech of May 8, 1793, Robespierre denied that his Girondin opponents were any different from the Vendée insurgents or the hostile foreign armies at the frontier: “There are now only two parties in France, the people and their enemies. All these rogues and scoundrels, who eternally conspire against the rights of man and against the happiness of all peoples, must be exterminated.” Between May 31 and June 2, an insurrection by the Paris Commune resulted in the purging of twenty-nine Girondin members from the Convention, politically destroying the faction. Robespierre complacently endorsed this development as an authentic expression of the popular will.

On July 27, Robespierre was appointed to the Committee of Public Safety, a body set up the previous April but which only now assumed crucial importance. “Officially,” explains Gauchet, “the Committee existed only to give impetus to the executive power which resided in the six ministries, and to supervise their operations. In fact, it took all the important decisions.” Deliberating and voting in secret, the Committee acted in the name of the Convention, a “dictatorial executive that pretended not to be one.”

A new republican constitution was “cobbled together in haste from various existing drafts.” Approved by popular referendum on August 4, this document “was meant to be judged on its ultrademocratic intentions rather than its practical plausibility. It was, so to speak, a promise made in order not to be kept.” Robespierre vehemently rejected any suggestion to implement the new constitution since this would have involved replacing the Convention, now conveniently rid of Girondins, with a new elected assembly. He was explicit about his fears in an August speech to the Jacobin Club: the new assembly “would surely be composed of two parties. The men who have been expelled from [the Convention] with so much difficulty would now come back in greater force than ever, and perhaps another 31 May would not suffice to drive them out a second time.”

Robespierre and his allies acknowledged that their government represented a revolutionary state of exception:

The aim of constitutional government is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to found it. […] The revolution is the war of freedom against its enemies; the Constitution is the regime of victorious and peaceable freedom. […] The provisional government of France will be revolutionary until peace has been achieved.

Robespierre thus invited his hearers, in Gauchet’s words, “to look forward, beyond the bloody rage of the present, to a peaceful future.”

In September the Commune of Paris brought considerable pressure to bear on the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. Their demands included an end to food shortages and the creation of a Revolutionary Army to combat “internal enemies, traitors and starvers” (the last a reference to the shadowy grain-hoarders imagined to be responsible for the lack of bread), as well as the “promptest possible arrest of all suspect persons.” The Convention gave way on all points, enacting price and wage controls and a new “Law of Suspects.” The terror had begun.

The radicals of the Paris Commune were also the driving force behind the dechristianization campaign of late 1793. In November, one delegation after another came before the Convention to exhibit wealth plundered from the churches as trophies of its victories over “fanaticism.” The head of the Commune organized a “Festival of Reason” at the former Cathedral of Notre-Dame, ordering the rest of Paris’s churches closed. This did not suit Robespierre, who declared: “Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great being who cares for the innocent downtrodden and who punishes crime triumphant is wholly popular.” In his view, rationalistic deism was the proper religious attitude for a revolutionary.

In the absence of any formal faction opposed to the Montagnards, attitudes toward the terror itself came to divide opinion among the revolutionaries. There were some, especially those involved with the Paris Commune, who considered that far too few suspected public enemies were being arrested and executed, while others urged that “the blood of men be shed sparingly,” and warned that sincere patriots were being unjustly punished. Followers of these tendencies became known as exagérés and indulgents respectively. Robespierre impatiently claimed that their disagreement was only apparent: both sets of critics were in reality working together on behalf of France’s foreign enemies. Loyal citizens should be able to see that the revolutionary government had got the pace of the terror precisely correct. In mid-March 1794, the leadership of the Commune and the exagérés was arrested and guillotined; two weeks later, the same fate befell the indulgents.

The best known of the indulgents was Georges Danton, whom Robespierre had defended against his exagéré critics as recently as the previous December. Gauchet writes that Danton’s arrest, trial, and April 5 execution “constitutes the least glorious chapter of Robespierre’s career.” Unlike the exagérés, he posed no threat to the Committee of Public Safety. Furthermore,

[T]he manner in which the trial was conducted and the role that Robespierre played in it are proof of an indefensible arbitrariness that even his most unconditional supporters have had a very hard time justifying. Obviously the Dantonists were no more guilty than the [exagérés] of carrying out a foreign plot. The indictment was a shear fabrication, the fantastic unlikelihood of which no amount of overbearing rhetoric could disguise.

Robespierre and his allies were aware of rising disgust at the bloodshed. Once Danton and the indulgents were gotten rid of, they promised the Convention, “you will no longer have any examples to give; you will be at peace; intrigue will no longer enter this sacred chamber.” This was, in other words, the proscription to end all proscriptions; the time when “only patriots would be left” was allegedly at hand.

In the weeks following Danton’s execution, Robespierre and his allies increasingly devoted their attention to the need to unite the country. On May 7, Robespierre delivered a major speech on religious and moral ideas, calling for a “republic of virtue,” where virtue meant the primacy of public over private interest, the identification by each citizen of his own fate with that of the fatherland. Robespierre believed that a religion of some kind was indispensable for promoting such a civic spirit:

The idea of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul is a continual summons to justice; it is therefore social and republican. The man who could replace the deity in the system of social life would be, in my eyes, an impossible genius.

Robespierre’s speech was quickly followed by the issuance of a “Decree on Worship of the Supreme Being” that declared: “the French people recognize the existence of a Supreme Being [whose] proper worship consists in fulfilling the duties of man.” Such duties include: “to detest bad faith and tyranny, to punish tyrants and traitors, to rescue the unfortunate, to respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, to do to others all the good one can without being unjust toward anyone.”

This talk of duties was new for Robespierre. He had consistently rejected efforts to couple pronouncements about “the rights of man” with recognition of his duties, repeating such opposition as recently as the previous summer’s debate over the Constitution of 1793. The exercise of power seems to have given him a new perspective.

The Decree on Worship of the Supreme Being uneasily combined an official deistic cult with guarantees of freedom of worship which included traditional Catholicism. Gauchet comments: “What was chiefly at stake was winning over the people in the countryside,” alienated by the dechristianization campaign of late 1793. “Robespierre remained vague about the precise form that free expression of religious faith would be permitted to assume and how established religion would be allowed to coexist with the official civic religion.”

None of Robespierre’s acts was more an expression of his personal convictions than this Cult of the Supreme Being. Most of his colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety were either uninterested in or hostile to the sort of official deistic worship he had in mind, and (contrary to the claims of hostile propaganda) he was never a personal dictator who could afford to ignore the wishes of his colleagues. Gauchet remarks:

His colleagues were interested above all in the political aims his policy was meant to achieve and with which they could only be in agreement. The metaphysical foundations of the Republic may not have preoccupied them to the same degree, if at all, but as a practical matter its stabilization and reorganization certainly did.

Two weeks later, a young woman attempted to gain access to the house where Robespierre was lodging. Her behavior aroused suspicion, and a search of her person uncovered two small knives. She was quickly arrested. In speeches before the Jacobin Club and the Convention shortly afterwards, Robespierre emphasized his readiness to sacrifice his life for his convictions, but this was more than balanced by a determination to sacrifice others: to “identify the traitors” and “attack the scoundrels who conspire against my country and against the human race.” Robespierre had won victory after victory, and no longer had any avowed opponents, but his triumph served only to convince him that ever-greater numbers of enemies were plotting against him in secret. The time when “only patriots would be left” seemed farther away than ever. His listeners were beginning to grasp that any of them might soon be “unmasked” as one of his supposed hidden enemies.

On June 4, Robespierre was elected president of the Convention, which allowed him to preside over the Festival of the Supreme Being four days later. The organizers described the event’s underlying message in lyrical terms: “All the French merge their sentiments in a fraternal embrace; from now on they have but one voice, whose general cry—Long Live the Republic!—rises up to the deity.” The festivities seemed to herald an era of reconciliation, and the gaiety of the masses was sincere.

Just two days later, on June 10, a terrified Convention obediently enacted a decree proposed to it by the Committee of Public Safety to centralize all political trials in France under the authority of the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. This massive increase in the Tribunal’s case load required greatly simplified and expedited procedures, but Robespierre saw nothing questionable in this:

For him it went without saying that “the conscience of jurors enlightened by love of country” sufficed to recognize an “enemy of the people.” An authentic patriot could not be mistaken when it was a matter of distinguishing between another “oppressed [i.e. falsely accused] patriot” and a conspirator against the Republic.

Prisoners were soon pouring into Paris from the provinces and executions sharply increased. “Whereas 1231 death sentences had been handed down by the Revolutionary Tribunal between 6 April 1793 and 10 June 1794, a period of more than a year, the number for the six weeks between 11 June and 27 July 1794 was 1376.”

Debate on this law continued for two days after it was passed, clearly inspired by the Convention’s fear that its vague language could be used against themselves. It was the beginning of the crisis that would culminate in Robespierre’s fall. On June 12, he barely succeeded in intimidating the Convention into reaffirming the text of the decree without any changes. It was to be his last intervention for six weeks, and he may even have stopped attending meetings.

On June 26, the Army of the Republic won an important victory at the Battle of Fleurus, “the turning point of the war on the northern front,” according to Gauchet, “which was received by the people of the capital as a signal of imminent peace and therefore, in its wake, of the end of revolutionary government.” The Committee of Public Safety had different ideas.

Three days later, at a stormy Committee meeting, Robespierre was denounced as a “dictator.” Nothing sent him into a rage faster than the suggestion that any act of his might be despotic; the very idea would not fit into his mind. He stormed out of the meeting in protest.

For most of July, he limited his public appearances to the Jacobin Club. There he dismissed fears of a new round of purges, while attributing such fears to rumors spread by conspirators who would have to be hunted down—and purged! Though he sensed his growing isolation, he remained prisoner of a mindset that interpreted all resistance as proof of a conspiracy against himself and “the people.” Gauchet writes:

It seems probable that he spent the first weeks of July carefully planning an offensive that he knew would be decisive, assuring himself of his alliances, sizing up the forces against him, and waiting for the right moment to act. Those who knew they were his targets, or feared they might be, were surely no less busy.

From the various personal, often self-interested testimonies that have survived, historians can only dimly sense the complicated and interlocking intrigues that must have been going on behind the scenes in these tense days.

Finally, on July 26 (the 8^th of Thermador on the new revolutionary calendar) Robespierre reappeared at the Convention. In a rambling two-hour speech, he portrayed himself as a victim of persecution and warned once again of concealed enemies of the who had to be unmasked and destroyed. These included not merely delegates to the Convention itself, but even members of the Committee of Public Safety. Yet he refused to name names.

Robespierre’s behavior in the hours following this speech

[Wa]s astonishing. He had depicted his enemies often enough as “scoundrels” not to imagine that they would idly stand by—all the more as the choice he had left them was perfectly clear: resist or die. Just so, they spent the night conferring, planning, dividing up assignments, making contact with the deputies of the Plain in the hope of gaining their support. Robespierre did nothing of the sort.

Was he indulging a false sense of security or had he, consciously or unconsciously, resigned himself to fate? We can never know. “He went to the Convention on 27 July (9 Thermidor) as if it were business as usual, without doing anything more, it would appear, than prepare a new speech, of which no good could possibly come.”

His enemies had decided on the simple tactics of keeping Robespierre’s usual supporters out of the public galleries and preventing him and his allies from speaking. One of the plotters rose to claim that “the intention of slaughtering the National Convention” had been exposed at the previous night’s meeting of the Jacobin Club. “There followed a formal indictment of the authoritarian behavior of Robespierre and his network of accomplices. Robespierre tried to respond. He was shouted down with cries of ‘Down with the tyrant!’”

Robespierre and four of his allies were arrested. The prisons, under the control of the more radical Commune of Paris, refused to accept them, and the men were temporarily lodged at the Hôtel de Ville. But that night supporters of the Convention assaulted the ill-defended building and re-arrested the men. They were guillotined along with a few dozen supporters the next day, 28 July/10 Thermidor.

The fall of the revolutionary government was as inevitable as any historical event can be. As Gauchet acknowledges, Robespierre still enjoyed significant support in July of 1794, and it is not farfetched to imagine that better concerted plans might have foiled the coup of 9 Thermidor. But the end of his rule would only have been postponed slightly:

The supply of conspirators, factionists, and scoundrels needing to be gotten rid of would only have proved more clearly than ever to be a bottomless pit. The ninth day of Thermidor did not mark the interruption of a program that otherwise might have been carried through to a successful conclusion. It signaled the failure of a plan that could not possibly have succeeded.

The utopian element in Robespierre’s thinking and guarantee of the failure of his political project was surely the notion of a perfectly virtuous and public-spirited “people.” Republican institutions can certainly be made to work, but only when the legitimacy of distinct private interests is acknowledged and some reasonable compromise between them is allowed to inform public policy.

Robespierre was not the most radical figure of the French Revolution: others were more bloodthirsty as well as more radically opposed to the nation’s religious inheritance. Yet he participated in the revolution from its beginnings and remained the most dominant voice in the revolutionary government during its most radical phase, and that gives his life a special significance for anyone trying to grasp the significance of this world historical event.

Robespierre’s career sums up everything the Revolution represented, from its dazzling beginnings until its fateful miscarriage. For this reason he stands out as the only one of the Revolution’s actors in whom its course as a whole can be grasped.