Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (26 page)

Three days later, the king’s sister wrote from the Tuileries palace to her friend the Marquise de Raigecourt:

Mme Élisabeth was not alone in finding the festival absurd, and there was some truth to the rumors she had heard about the ambivalence with which the National Guard and Pétion participated. On 20 April, France finally declared war on Leopold II’s son and successor as Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II (Prussia joined in on Austria’s side in June). Pétion immediately wrote to Robespierre imploring him to repair the divisions among the Jacobins that had been caused—Pétion dared suggest it—by his friend’s frustrated ambition and petty jealousy of those in power:

Robespierre did not reply.

This was not Robespierre speaking but Danton, who had returned from London as soon as it seemed safe after the Champ de Mars massacre. Their physiques aside—Robespierre’s slight frame, Danton’s burly one—the two men had a great deal in common. Both were dedicated to the people, above all. Both were operating outside the Legislative Assembly and extremely active in the Jacobins (Danton was also still prominent at the Cordeliers and had an administrative post in Paris’s municipal government). Both were against the war, convinced the country was unprepared, suspicious of the king, and afraid the forces of counterrevolution would triumph with a foreign invasion. Their suspicions were soon justified: after the fighting began at the border, the distressing dispatches that reached Paris, each more alarming than the last, made it clear that the war was not going well and the Revolution was hanging in the balance. Within two weeks the French generals had lost control—French soldiers actually murdered one of them—officers absconded, and the enemy captured entire regiments.

The Jacobins—frightened, angry, hysterical—laid into one another. Their internecine fighting figured so prominently in the press that a letter arrived from the front deploring these distracting divisions at a time of national crisis. It was duly met with hisses in the club. The personal attacks continued. One newspaper held Robespierre single-handedly responsible for the private vendettas and endless denunciations: “M. Robertspierre [
sic
] resigned his position as public prosecutor to prove, as he himself said, that he is not ambitious. Does this not prove, on the contrary, that he is devoured by an immeasurable ambition?”
⁴¹
On 10 May another letter from the front arrived, accusing Robespierre of sullying the tribune at the Jacobins by attacking General Lafayette. Despite fierce dispute and many disruptions, the letter was read aloud. Afterward, Robespierre went up to the tribune and snatched it from the hands of the reader. Chaos broke out again. On another occasion a Jacobin named Jean Baptiste Louvet, the licentious novelist and poetically gifted son of a Parisian stationery shop owner, accused Robespierre of tyrannizing over the club. Danton stepped forward to defend him: “M. Robespierre has never used any tyranny in this house, unless it is the tyranny of reason. It is not patriotism but base jealousy and all the most harmful passions that inspire the attacks against him.”
⁴²
But not even Danton could deny that his friend was always ready with a vicious counterattack.

In the midst of this rancorous strife Robespierre decided to start his own journal. Despite being passionate and opinionated, he was not a natural journalist. Even more long-winded on the page, his speeches also seemed far flatter—almost pedantic—in print. But it was relatively easy to venture into journalism at this time, even with little natural talent; all you needed was a bit of funding and enough stamina to write a couple of thousand words a week. From the middle of May,
Le défenseur de la constitution
(
The Defender of the Constitution
) appeared every Tuesday in an eye-catching red paper cover. As was common practice, the issues were undated. Despite its conservative-sounding name (since when had Robespierre been the defender of a constitution he never ceased to criticize during its drafting in the National Assembly?), what he really wanted was another platform from which to attack Brissot and anyone else who disagreed with him over the course of the Revolution. Readers could subscribe for thirty-six livres a year and were welcome to send in comments or books for review. Initially, the printer was to be another of Duplay’s lodgers, an artisan from that close circle devoted to the Incorruptible. But then Robespierre came to an arrangement with a printer and bookseller in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie Française, who promised to get the paper into every post office in France and all the major bookshops of Europe.

There was something implausible about Robespierre’s prospectus for the paper. His pen, he professed, would be directed only by his love of justice and truth. He would descend from the tribune and “mount the platform of the universe to speak not only to an assembly, which might be agitated by the clash of different interests, but to the whole human race, whose interest is that of reason and general happiness.” He would be like an actor who, leaving the stage and positioning himself in the audience, is better able to judge the play. He would be like a traveler who flees the tumultuous metropolis—or, in his case, revolutionary politics—and climbs to the summit of a mountain so as to feel “the calm of nature sink into his soul and his thoughts broaden out with the horizon.” So
Le défenseur de la constitution
would be nothing like Marat’s or Desmoulins’s or Brissot’s or Louvet’s publications: no, Robespierre’s was to be modeled on the Sermon on the Mount with romantic overtones. Predictably enough, he promised to use it to unmask the enemies of the people: “Placed since the beginning of the Revolution at the center of political happenings, I have had a close view of the tortuous advance of tyranny, I have discovered that our most dangerous enemies are not those who have openly declared themselves, and I shall try to render my knowledge of value for the safety of my country.”
⁴³
For all the declared purity of its manifesto, the journal was really a weapon in a factional fight that Robespierre had no intention of relinquishing.

Brissot and his friends were now openly calling for a republic. In his fight against them, Robespierre went so far as to turn himself into the last defender of the constitutional monarchy. Now that Brissot had made the campaign for a republic in France his own, Robespierre dared to criticize republicanism itself: “I care no more for Cromwell than for Charles I,” he announced flamboyantly. “Surely it is not in the words
monarchy
or
republic
that we shall find the solution to the great problems of society.”
⁴⁴
Brissot had recently started a journal entitled
Le républicain
. There was nothing, Robespierre insisted in the first issue of his own journal, truly populist about Brissot’s new venture except its title. Furthermore, he argued, the very word
republic
had recently caused division among the patriots and given the enemies of liberty an excuse for claiming that there was a conspiracy afoot against the monarchy and the constitution. Indeed, in Brissot’s hands, the word
republic
had led directly to the massacre of innocent citizens, for it was Brissot who had been behind the petition that caused the debacle on the Champ de Mars on 17 July, almost a year earlier. It was Brissot who had insisted on calling for the abolition of the monarchy, when all the Jacobins had wanted was a referendum on the role of the king after his flight to Varennes. This—obviously—was splitting hairs. Robespierre had wanted to put the king on trial in 1791 and the call for a referendum was itself a challenge to the future of the monarchy. Moreover, the Jacobins had joined the call for deposition, however briefly. Here, however, it suited him to implicate Brissot in the bloodshed on the Champ de Mars—of all the crimes in the Revolution so far, the one that would never be forgotten or forgiven. Not even his worst enemy could claim that Brissot had intended the massacre, but he was nonetheless culpable, in Robespierre’s eyes, of inept and impolitic behavior. More recently, Robespierre argued, Brissot was guilty of collaborating with General Lafayette over the disastrous war. According to Robespierre, Brissot’s mask of patriotism had slipped and he now ripped it off. So much for rising above the factional strife and publishing a journal with Olympian impartiality!

Also in the first issue of
Le défenseur de la constitution
was Robespierre’s recent retort to Brissot in the Jacobin Club, delivered just after the declaration of war. Brissot had come again to the Jacobins to put an end to Robespierre’s vituperations. “What have you done,” he asked dramatically, “to give you the right to criticize me and my friends?” Robespierre seized the opportunity to summarize his own contributions to the Revolution so far. Now the readers of his journal throughout France (and beyond, if the bookseller kept his promise) would learn the story of his early revolutionary career:

In Robespierre’s eyes, one overwhelming conclusion followed from these flawless revolutionary credentials: those attacking him three years later, in political circumstances changed beyond all recognition, could only be enemies of the people. By now, Robespierre was personally invested in the public image of himself as incorruptible: he was not and had never been in the wrong. In this context, further comparison with Danton is illuminating. On one of the rare occasions that Danton spoke about himself in public, he was able to say: “If I was carried away by enthusiasm in the first days of our regeneration, have I not atoned for it? Have I not been ostracized?”
⁴⁶
Robespierre could not have spoken these words. Atonement—for all his religious sensibility—was outside his repertoire; martyrdom made more sense to him. Like Danton, he had given himself to the people and could envisage dying for them; but unlike Danton, he could never admit that he might have been wrong. Why? Because he was a self-righteous and hypocritical prig? In some respects, he certainly was. Yet it is the political implications of the differences between the two men that really matter in the history of the Revolution. Both aspired to be popular leaders. Danton’s identification with the people was objective—when he could, he left his flawed, colorful, life-loving self out of politics. For him, the distinction between private and public life was rarely confused. In contrast, Robespierre’s identification with the people was subjective. If he was wrong the people were wrong, and that, as Rousseau had assured him, simply could not be the case. Later in the Revolution, when his wife suddenly died, Danton was plunged into deep personal grief; despite his many alleged infidelities, he had loved her passionately. Robespierre wrote to him, “I love you more than ever, I love you until death. At this moment, I am you. Do not harden your heart to the voice of friendship.”
⁴⁷
To anyone who did not know Robespierre, such a letter at such a time might have seemed a bit gauche and offensively self-centered. Danton, however, did know Robespierre and recognized that that capacity to channel himself into someone or something else—to seamlessly identify with something beyond himself and make it his own—was the very center of his friend’s extraordinary self.

FOR SOMEONE STAKING both his personal and political credibility on never being wrong, Robespierre’s defense of the ailing constitutional monarchy was extremely risky. In 1789 he had argued vehemently but unsuccessfully against giving the king a legislative veto. Now, over matters of religion and the army, the king was on the brink of using his veto against the Legislative Assembly. After their appointment in March 1792, Brissot’s friends had pursued a policy on religion guaranteed to antagonize the king. On 24 April, four days into the foreign war, Jean Marie Roland (supported or perhaps even inspired by his avidly political wife) called for repressive measures against the refractory priests whom Robespierre himself had already identified as a major counterrevolutionary threat. A month later, on 24 May, the assembly approved a decree to banish and deport all members of the clergy who still refused to swear the oath to the Civil Constitution. Effectively, this action sanctioned a nationwide priest hunt, and it was obvious that Louis XVI, already in trouble with his conscience, would balk at approving the persecution of Catholic priests. A showdown between the king and the assembly, at a time when the ministers it had imposed on him were calling for a republic, would certainly have resulted in the collapse of the constitution. Given his recent defense of it, Robespierre would have been left looking foolish, the hapless defender of a hopeless cause. The fact that he was prepared to risk this is testimony to two things, his confidence in himself as a revolutionary leader and his irreconcilable differences with Brissot’s faction, from which he wanted to distinguish himself at any cost.