Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (23 page)

At Arras there was an even bigger crowd. The people were in high spirits; they had waited excitedly all day; and some of them were probably rather inebriated by the time the coach—with Robespierre in it this time—rolled into view. Once again there was an attempt to detach the horses at the city gate so the appreciative crowd could pull their returning hero across the city threshold. Seeing this commotion through the window, Robespierre had one of his attacks of irritation and got out immediately. He proclaimed priggishly to his brother and sister that he did not approve of free citizens taking on the role of animals and debasing themselves in this manner—all his hard work in the assembly had been for nothing if the people of his own hometown were still so unenlightened. Undeterred by his disapproval, the crowd at Arras, now joined by the crowd that had followed the coach from Bapaume, surged through the streets toward his old home in the rue des Rapporteurs shouting, “Vive Robespierre! Long live the defender of the people!” This was exactly what he had not wanted. He had hoped for a discreet private homecoming, fearing that any public feting would be reported in the Parisian press and turned against him by his growing number of political enemies. With immense relief he finally closed the front door behind him and was alone again with his strange small family.

(1791–1792)

Robespierre got home on a Friday evening. By the end of the weekend, when he wrote to the Duplays, all his irritation had been forgotten and he described his homecoming in glowing terms. “I was enchanted by the patriotism of the National Guard,” he wrote. The people of Arras had received him “with demonstrations of such affection as I cannot express and cannot recall without emotion.” Even his enemies, the aristocrats, had illuminated their houses in his honor, “which I can only attribute to their respect for the will of the people.” (A local newspaper, however, attributed it to the aristocrats’ fear of having their windows smashed.) The following day an unarmed battalion of National Guardsmen had danced and sung patriotic songs outside his house. All of this, he gleefully remarked, must have been very disagreeable for Feuillant ears. The split at the Paris Jacobin Club earlier in 1791 had reached Arras. Here as in many other places throughout the country, former members of the local Jacobin Club had followed the Feuillant example and formed new, more moderate clubs on hearing the news of the massacre on the Champ de Mars. According to Robespierre, the Feuillants now dominated the local government, which was increasingly hostile to the people, the patriots, and their Jacobin champions, including the most famous—himself. In fact, once the initial excitement of his homecoming had died down, many in Arras gave him the cold shoulder. He went to visit one old friend, only to find him distant and completely changed. Robespierre was upset to see that the Revolution had destroyed some of his connections from his days as a member of the Academy of Arras and the Rosati literary society.

According to Charlotte, he was also upset to discover that, in his long absence, Anais Deshorties (the stepdaughter of one of their aunts, whom he had courted before the Revolution) had married another local lawyer—but if the news broke his heart, there is no evidence in his surviving correspondence. Instead his mind was full of two political subjects: the National Guard and the church. It was all very well to have battalions of National Guardsmen trooping about, singing and dancing and dressing up in their new uniforms, but were they really ready to defend the country? Some of them were not even armed, let alone trained—how could they repel an invading army? Arras was close to the frontier and Robespierre’s sense that revolutionary France was dangerously unready for war grew stronger as he traveled around during his six-week holiday, visiting Lille, Béthune, and environs. He also noticed, on these short trips, that the roadside inns were full of émigrés. Dropping in for refreshment on his travels, he was horrified to overhear well-bred voices at the surrounding tables discussing their discontent with the Revolution and their plans for abandoning the country. As the uncompromising defender of liberty in the assembly, he had argued for freedom of movement—if anyone (except the king) wanted to leave the country, they must be free to do so.
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When he saw the émigrés for himself, however, he was disconcerted. He interrogated the innkeepers. Was this typical? Yes, they told him, for quite some time people had been leaving in droves. His uncomfortable suspicion that the country’s borders were vulnerable and insecure became more intense. The counterrevolution was growing in strength and at Coblenz, just across the German border, the Prince de Condé was continuing to amass troops.

Equally disturbing to Robespierre was the religious resistance to the Revolution gathering strength across provincial France. In Arras he had grown up in an atmosphere pervaded by Catholicism. He owed his education to the church, his intervention in the National Assembly in the interest of the lower clergy might have been an expression of gratitude, and he still sometimes spoke as though residual religious belief were the bedrock of his political convictions. When he returned home to the ecclesiastical center of Artois, he cannot have expected to find it transformed beyond recognition. What he did find, however, shocked him deeply. Months ago, his brother had written to him about the provincial clergy’s opposition to the Revolution. But in Paris, where the majority of priests had sworn to uphold the controversial Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Robespierre and his fellow radicals had little direct experience of that opposition. Not so in Arras, where there had recently been a reenactment of the Crucifixion with revolutionaries cast as Roman soldiers offering vinegar to the lips of the dying Christ. Refractory priests (priests who had followed the pope in rejecting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy) were flagrantly turning their congregations against the Revolution. Confronted now with the force of religion, Robespierre wrote to an unidentified friend in Paris:

Robespierre’s view was not so different from that of the Revolution’s most articulate foreign critic, the conservative philosopher and politician Edmund Burke, who thought that the counterrevolution could rely on the priests to establish “peace and order in every parish.”
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Burke’s great hope was Robespierre’s worst nightmare. To Robespierre’s surprise and irritation, this opinion, expressed in a private letter, was published the following week in not one but two Parisian newspapers—whoever Robespierre’s friend was, he or she had betrayed him. From Arras he wrote at once to the editors to complain at the infringement of his privacy, but he made no attempt whatsoever to disown the opinion itself.
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In a letter to Maurice Duplay—a more reliable friend—Robespierre described another recent religious sensation in Arras. A refractory priest was celebrating Mass in the Chapel of Calvary when a crippled man in the congregation suddenly threw down his crutches and walked freely. The man’s wife fainted when she heard the astonishing news and, after she had recovered consciousness, gave thanks to heaven for the miracle. Interestingly, Robespierre does not flatly reject the concept of a miracle, as Mirabeau and other determinedly secular revolutionaries certainly would have done, often with ribaldry. Instead, he comments that it is not so surprising that a miracle should have occurred in that particular chapel, since others had occurred there in the past. There is perhaps a note of sarcasm in his next remark. “I do not propose to stay long in this holy land,” he tells his carpenter friend. “I am not worthy of it.”
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But this is not the letter of someone who simply sneers at religion. His provincial holiday had served to remind Robespierre of religion’s immense social power. Before the holiday was over, he concluded that the Revolution must harness the church for its own purposes or risk destruction. At the very end of his letter, he sends his greetings to Georges Couthon, another of Duplay’s Jacobin lodgers, himself a cripple as well as a prominent member of the circle of friends who now surrounded Robespierre in Paris. In Arras, he was homesick for that circle.

ROBESPIERRE RETURNED TO Paris on 28 November. He went first to the Duplays, deposited his modest luggage, and refreshed himself in his low-ceilinged timber-framed bedroom, which looked out over the carpenter’s yard. Later that evening, he went to dine with Pétion. There had been some big changes in Pétion’s life since Robespierre last saw him. He had been elected mayor of Paris in the recent municipal elections, receiving 6,728 votes to General Lafayette’s 3,126. Perhaps it was general disaffection, perhaps confusion about voting eligibility, but whatever the case about 70,000 people who were eligible to vote abstained and 100 voted for Robespierre even though he wasn’t a candidate: flattering or frustrating, depending on how he looked at it. Dinner chez Pétion was a much grander affair than it had been on the day after the king’s flight to Varennes. As mayor, Pétion was now living in a magnificent Parisian house, “but his spirit is as simple and pure as ever,” Robespierre reassured himself, nervously.
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He spoke freely in a letter to Buissart of the new configuration of power in Paris: Pétion had taken on an exacting role, but his personal virtue and love of the people equipped him well for it; the recently elected Legislative Assembly, according to Robespierre, was full of promise and a real improvement on its predecessor in the Manège; public opinion was turning against the Feuillants, among them Barnave, who had befriended the king on the difficult journey back from Varennes, and people were rightly suspicious of the king’s new Feuillant ministers. Chosen by the king, these ministers were men Louis XVI thought he could trust to bolster his own precarious constitutional role, including the Comte de Montmorin (the foreign affairs minister, who soon resigned) and the Comte de Narbonne (war minister). Popular opinion was increasingly hostile toward the monarch and concerned that he might try to reassert his power and strengthen his position under the new constitution. All in all, Robespierre’s first impression on arriving back in the capital was that things looked good for the patriotic party.

Despite his long day traveling, Robespierre visited the Jacobin Club before dining with Pétion. Here he was greeted with rapturous applause. No sooner had he entered the old convent than the Jacobins made him their president: he had truly come home. The following evening one of the club members raised the matter of confession—surely this Catholic sacrament was dangerous and should be discouraged. Robespierre, fresh from Arras, disagreed—it was pointless attacking religious customs beloved by the people, he warned his fellow Jacobins.
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Better to hope that over time the people would mature and abandon such prejudices. In the meantime, the club should stick to discussing issues raised by the Legislative Assembly, just as it had followed the National Assembly in the past; in this way it was sure to focus on urgently relevant business. And nothing, Robespierre insisted, was more relevant than the threat of war. He was far from alone in worrying about the émigrés at the frontier. Rumors of war, of a royal plot to restore despotism, were circulating wildly. Louis XVI appeared before the assembly on 14 December and promised to send 150,000 French troops to protect the frontier within a month. In fact, he had already written to the major European powers requesting their armed intervention to save his throne. Robespierre did not know this for certain, but he suspected as much and ended the year 1791 as the de facto leader of an antiwar campaign.

Brissot, who, unlike Robespierre and Pétion, had been eligible for election to the new legislative body (never having been an official member of its predecessor), was the leader of the pro-war party. He had not attended a Jacobin meeting for several months when he suddenly decided to confront Robespierre on his own territory. On the night of 16 December, having set the case for war before the assembly earlier in the day, Brissot told the Jacobins that only war could save the Revolution and stop France from becoming a plaything for Europe’s tyrants. War, as he saw it, would consolidate the Revolution in France by carrying it into foreign countries in the wake of an invading army. Robespierre intervened to prevent Brissot’s speech being printed and circulated to the affiliated clubs until he had had a chance to reply.
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Two days later he harangued the Jacobins with his twenty-page response:

On and on he went, insisting that France was teetering on the brink of a foreign, civil, and religious war, all equally menacing to the Revolution. The king and his ministers must not be trusted. But always it was the hidden enemy—the enemy within—that preoccupied Robespierre. Turning on Brissot, he asked what security the journalist could offer against such alarming dangers. None. “Mistrust is a shameful state,” Brissot had argued. Now Robespierre riposted that mistrust was a good deal less shameful than “the stupid confidence” (a phrase borrowed from Danton) that might lead the nation over the edge of a precipice. “Patriot legislators, do not slander mistrust,” he warned Brissot and the rest of the assembly. Finally, mindful of what he had seen in and around Arras, he pointed out that in any event France could not go to war until it was ready: weapons would need to be manufactured, the National Guard would have to be properly armed, the people themselves would need to be armed too, albeit only with pikes. All of this was a direct development of Robespierre’s earlier speech on the National Guard. Now as then, he drew on the idea of a democratic war, waged exclusively in the general interest by the whole people in arms. The war that, for different reasons, Brissot, the king, and his ministers were all proposing could not have been more different.

Mutual friends at the Jacobin Club effected a personal reconciliation between Robespierre and Brissot early in the New Year, but no one could reconcile their positions on war. “I shall continue to oppose Brissot’s views whenever they seem contrary to my principles,” Robespierre announced. “Let our union rest upon the holy basis of patriotism and virtue; and let us fight as free men, with frankness and, if necessary, determination, but also with respect for friendship and each other.”
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And this is exactly what he did when, against all his warnings, the assembly approved the first ultimatum to Marie Antoinette’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. The ultimatum demanded that Leopold II disassociate himself from the counterrevolutionary émigrés and all European powers hostile to the Revolution. If, by 1 March, he had still not publicly declared his support for France, war would ensue.
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Snapping straight into his Nostradamus mode, Robespierre prophesied to the Jacobins: