Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (27 page)

The view that the refractory priests were a threat to the Revolution was far from eccentric, and it would be unreasonable to blame Brissot’s faction for the trouble it caused the king in this respect. But the faction went a step beyond troubling Louis’s conscience to menacing his person, when it persuaded the assembly to abolish his personal bodyguard. Holed up inside the Tuileries, pinning their hopes on a foreign invasion, and maintaining a stalwart sense of humor as the tide of hostility flowed round them (“a pike with a
bonnet rouge
walked about the garden…and did not stay long”) was all very well, but none of the royals could ignore the implications of the removal of their guards. They were even more alarmed to hear that the bodyguards were to be replaced not by ordinary Parisian National Guardsmen (most of whom were headed for the front line) but by members of a new federalist army, called to Paris from the provinces and selected by local Jacobin Clubs. This new institution was as offensive to the National Guard as it was threatening to the king and his family. Many people—thousands of National Guards among them—thus urged him to use his veto and put a stop both to the new army and to the persecution of the priests. On holiday in Arras in the autumn of 1791, Robespierre had fixed on two main sources of revolutionary anxiety: France’s armed forces and its refractory priests. Six months later, his twin anxieties were proving prophetic.

The idea of a new patriot army, summoned to Paris to supplement if not actually replace the National Guard, was originally Robespierre’s. He had first suggested something of the kind in one of his antiwar speeches to the Jacobins, when he imagined a new federation of civilian soldiers from all over France regenerating public spirit on the Champ de Mars.
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Since then, in the very first issue of his newspaper, he had called for an army of sixty thousand veteran soldiers to be assembled and garrisoned close to Paris. To his dismay, Brissot’s friend in the ministry (Joseph Servan, the new minister for war) was calling for something disconcertingly similar: a new national army of twenty thousand men chosen and sent to Paris by local Jacobin Clubs throughout France. The problem, from Robespierre’s point of view, was to determine which of the Jacobin factions would do the choosing—his own or Brissot’s? Where would the loyalties of the new troops really lie? For all his exertions on the Jacobin Correspondence Committee, there was next to nothing he could do to ensure the outcome he desired. Instead, he channeled his energy into an elaborate theoretical discussion of military discipline that filled twenty pages of the next issue of his journal. From this it emerged that he was as intent on applying democratic principles to the armed forces as to any other sector of society.

Every soldier was also a citizen and every citizen a member of the human race, Robespierre insisted. He envisaged duties attached to each of these three spheres in ascending order: the professional duties of a soldier were narrower than his duties as a citizen, which in turn were narrower still than his duties as a human being. Yet Robespierre completely evaded the real issue in this area: what would happen if, or when, the spheres of duty collided? The one example of such a collision that he mentioned was ludicrous. He imagined an off-duty soldier chatting up a woman at a party and being ordered by his superior officer to stop: “Your presence here displeases me. I order you to return to barracks and forbid you to talk to this woman. I reserve for myself alone the pleasure of conversing with her.”
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Irritating as such a scenario would no doubt be for the frustrated soldier, it hardly got to the heart of the problem of military discipline in a country slipping into civil war. The first anniversary of the Champ de Mars massacre was just weeks away. In the immediate aftermath of that massacre, Robespierre had done well to remind the Jacobins that the National Guardsmen who obeyed General Lafayette and fired on unarmed civilians were not to blame for their orders, were themselves still citizens and patriots too. But there was a huge difference between struggling to limit the bloodshed in a political crisis and delineating a coherent theory of how soldiers could be held to their duties. Unexpectedly, fragile, bookish Robespierre turned out far more talented at the practice than at the theory of politics. Before the Revolution he had been a competent lawyer and a second-rate essayist; in its maelstrom he was emerging as a quirkily brilliant politician. As the spring of 1792 ripened into summer, he was still overshadowed by Brissot’s faction.

The inner circle around Brissot was presided over by Mme Roland, who was growing ever more imperious in her modest parlor. They now planned a republic for part, if not all, of France. “We spoke often,” Mme Roland reported,

Roland’s wife had come a long way since she married an obscure bureaucrat twenty years her senior out of intellectual respect. Now she was poring over maps of France and helping the ministry to divide it into putative republican and monarchical segments. On 10 June she prompted Roland to write an open letter to the king denouncing his threat to use his veto to delay the assembly’s decrees on the refractory priests and the new federal army (due to arrive in Paris in time for the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July). She may even have drafted the words in which Roland effectively accused the king of treason: “Much more delay and a grieving people will see in its king the friend and accomplice of conspirators.”
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Unsurprisingly, the king responded, two days later, by dismissing Roland and his friends from the ministry. They had lasted just three months in office.

General Lafayette heard the news on the front line. The war continued to go badly. Lafayette struggled more than ever to integrate new rank-and-file soldiers recruited from the National Guard with remnants of the old regime army. There were not enough funds or weapons; the frontier moved closer to Paris every day. In an open letter to the capital, he welcomed the fall of Brissot’s friends and blamed all France’s recent troubles, including the grim news from the front, on the Jacobin Club: “This sect, organized like a district empire, in its metropolitan and affiliated societies, blindly guided by ambitious chiefs, forms a separate corporation in the midst of the French people, whose power it usurps by governing its representatives and proxies.”
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What did Lafayette have in mind—a military coup to coincide with the 14 July observation, as Robespierre feared? Might he sweep down from the north on his white charger and put a stop once and for all to the relentless bickering in the capital when the nation already had its work cut out fighting a foreign war? If so, there would be bloodshed again on the Champ de Mars, for Paris meanwhile was planning a popular protest in support of the dismissed ministers. Robespierre disapproved. He hated and feared Lafayette. “Strike at Lafayette and the nation will be saved,” was his improbable advice to the Jacobins.
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But he hated Brissot’s faction just as bitterly, so he stood at the tribune and denounced the forthcoming protest:

He might as well have said that Brissot was not worth a drop of patriotic blood. But no one was listening to him. The demonstration in favor of the dismissed ministers and against the king’s veto—widely vilified ever since it was first discussed in 1789—was planned for 20 June, the third anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. The Jacobin and Cordelier Clubs, the municipal government of Paris, the electoral assemblies of the city’s forty-eight sections were all involved. The plan was to present a petition to the assembly asking for the reinstatement of the ministers and plant a tree of liberty in the Tuileries. But the petitioners also wanted permission to bring their weapons, a request refused by the municipal government. As mayor of Paris, Pétion found himself in a very difficult position. He did not want to be blamed for suppressing the protest, but nor did he want responsibility for the bloodshed that might result if the crowd was armed. He referred the problem on to Pierre-Louis Rœderer, now the chief legal adviser of the Department of Paris, which had wider responsibilities than the municipality. Rœderer had the courage to ban the proposed demonstration, calling on the National Guard to stop the protestors from going ahead illegally: another massacre loomed on the Champ de Mars. Pétion, having passed the problem to Rœderer, now disputed his solution, said no power on earth should be allowed to prevent the demonstration, and suggested that the National Guard march alongside the petitioners, rather than against them. The National Guardsmen themselves were divided: some were delighted to join the petitioners, others refused.

At five on the morning of 20 June a mob began to assemble at the site of the fallen Bastille. Later in the day it set off with a tree of liberty in the direction of the Tuileries. Rœderer, furious at the flouting of his advice, got there first, entered the Manège, and told the assembly that had it not recently broken a constitutional rule to admit armed men into one of its own sessions, the impending crisis would never have loomed.
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One of Brissot’s friends stood up and retorted that since the assembly had indeed recently received armed men, when the Châteauvieux soldiers marched through the Manège, it would be a gross insult to the people of Paris if their petition was rejected merely because it came accompanied by arms. Before the deputies could decide how to settle the argument, the mob arrived and forced its way into the hall. The demonstrators were persuaded to leave peacefully, but only on the condition that they would be allowed to march back in later. And so they did, drums, weapons, pikes, banners, and all, and for the second time in three months the assembly applauded the rabble-rousing music of the people in arms. It drew the line only at a bloody bullock’s heart skewered on a pike and inscribed, THE HEART OF AN ARISTOCRAT. This was one popular emblem too many for the deputies and they sent it straight outside, where it was paraded instead at the gates of the Tuileries. The single pike, which the king’s sister had laughed at in April, was back in the garden in June, covered in blood: DEATH TO VETO AND HIS WIFE, the crowd menaced from below. When it came to the planting of the tree of liberty—which, after the presentation of the petition to the assembly and the king, was the ostensible point of the demonstration—a new problem arose. There were twenty-four battalions of National Guardsmen strategically positioned in and around the Tuileries, and the palace gates were closed.
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The petitioners had no hope of forcing their way into the gardens, and anyway it would have been absurd to risk a bloody confrontation over planting a tree, even if it was a tree of liberty. They compromised and planted it instead behind the assembly in the courtyard of the Capuchin convent on the south side of the rue Saint-Honoré, almost directly opposite the Duplays’ house. If Robespierre was at home in his room that day—and very likely he was—he could have watched the planting from his first-floor window. Otherwise he played no part.

Given the number of National Guardsmen defending the Tuileries—ten battalions on the western terrace of the palace alone—it was, and remains, something of a mystery how the demonstrating mob managed to get inside. One explanation is that a delegation of municipal officers went to the king and complained that the locked gates were offensive to the people, who were merely holding a peaceful demonstration on the anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. They may, or may not, have pointed out that back in 1789 it was the king’s attempt to lock the third estate out of its own meeting hall in Versailles that led to its reassembling on a tennis court and swearing never to be disbanded until the nation had received a new constitution. Three years later, to the very day, it was locked out again and definitely no less offended. In another letter to her friend the Marquise de Raigecourt, the king’s sister wrote her account of that frightening day, from the perspective of those trapped inside the Tuileries: