Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (29 page)

That evening Robespierre was at the Jacobins as usual. Here he offered his views on the events of the last twenty-four hours, afterward publishing them in his paper for wider circulation. For him it was a new beginning, like the fall of the Bastille, but better, wiser, purer:

Robespierre urged his audience to believe that the promise of 1789 had been redeemed with the fall of the Tuileries. Everything that had gone wrong in the Revolution since the Bastille fell, all those departures from true principles that he had disputed so fervently in Versailles and afterward in Paris, all the compromises of the new constitution and its flawed enactment after 1791, all the disruption, misdirection, and confusion caused by factional fighting at the Jacobins, all the life already squandered in an incipient civil war, all the life wasted on the front line in a foreign war that was going badly wrong—it would all be canceled and redeemed now that the Revolution had recovered its true course. There is no reason whatsoever to suspect Robespierre’s revolutionary optimism. He was speaking and writing from his heart, and those who dispute his interpretation of events cannot deny his sincerity. Mirabeau had said of him in 1789, “That man will go far, he believes everything he says.” Quite how far, now that the monarchy had finally fallen, not even Mirabeau could have guessed.

Several weeks after the storming of the Tuileries, Paris was still in turmoil. Pétion remained mayor. Lafayette had fled the country. The Legislative Assembly continued to meet in the Manège. France was again without a constitution or government. To acquire these a new nationally representative body would need to be elected and invested with constituting power. In the interim, the assembly recalled Brissot’s friends Roland, Servan, and Clavière to ministerial office and formed a provisional government. Danton was made minister of justice, in recognition of the part he had played in ending the monarchy. It was possible for Danton to serve alongside Brissot’s friends because there was no personal animosity between him and them, but Robespierre could never have done so.
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Instead, he threw himself into the politics of his section, the place Vendôme, soon renamed Section des Piques (pikes). Meetings were daily and increasingly dominated by sans-culottes determined to further the revolutionary demands of the poor and disadvantaged. From here Robespierre was elected to the Insurrectionary Commune, a body of 288 members formed by the election of six representatives from each of the forty-eight sections of Paris. Like Robespierre’s, many of these sections were radical and so sent to the Commune representatives likely to push for radical measures, such as economic redistribution and price controls on essential commodities. But neither the sections nor the Commune, the mayor, the Legislative Assembly, or the provisional government could reliably control the streets, filled with panic after the Duke of Brunswick kept his promise and marched into France on 19 August.

By the beginning of September the invading army was at Verdun (only fifteen miles from Varennes), where the last fortress on the road to Paris surrendered. Less than a month before, the Jacobins had laughed at the duke’s manifesto and its threat to raze Paris. But no one was laughing now. Black flags flew from the towers of Notre-Dame and above the Hôtel de Ville, with the word
Danger
(the same in French and English) emblazoned in white letters. The city gates were closed. The prisons were crammed with royalists, refractory priests, and other suspects summarily arrested since the fall of the monarchy. The patriots were afraid to leave the city to fight Brunswick’s forces in case the counterrevolution took hold in their absence. Nor could they sit and wait calmly for the destruction of Paris. Toward the end of another restless weekend, there was a sudden crescendo of violence:

• Twenty-four priests, conveyed in four carriages to the prison of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près, on Sunday afternoon, 2 September 1792, were set upon by a mob and murdered.
  
• One hundred and twenty-two other prisoners inside the abbey were condemned to death later that evening by an informal tribunal. They were taken outside and killed with pikes.
  
• About a hundred and fifty priests held at the convent of the Carmelites, including the archbishop of Arles and the bishops of Saintes and Beauvais, were murdered.
  
• Two hundred thieves and debtors held at the Châtelet prison were slaughtered.
  
• On Monday, 3 September, the queen’s friend the Princesse de Lamballe and others held at La Force prison were butchered. The princess’s severed head was then paraded on a pike outside the windows of the Temple, the medieval fortress in the Marais where the royal family were now incarcerated.
  
• An unknown number of convicts awaiting deportation were murdered.
  
• So, too, were an unknown number of priests held at the monastery of Saint-Firmin.
  
• One hundred and sixty inmates at the Bicêtre reformatory, forty-three of them between the ages of twelve and eighteen, were murdered.
  
• On Tuesday, 4 September, thirty-five women incarcerated at La Salpêtrière on charges of prostitution were sexually assaulted and killed.
  

So much then for the people’s justice: well over a thousand victims, some from the weakest and most vulnerable sectors of society, were put to death in the first weeks of the new republic to satisfy the blood lust of the mob that brought down the monarchy. Men, women, and children who did not matter to the Revolution, whose names have been forgotten by history, were sacrificed to the braying crowd. Danton claimed he saw them afterward in his dreams, shaking their gory locks at him.

How much did Robespierre know about the September Massacres? Did he, during those horrific three days, do anything to try to stop the slaughter? He was definitely present at the meeting of the Insurrectionary Commune on 2 September when reports came in about what was happening at the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près. That day, the Commune did nothing. On 3 September, in response to news of the killings at La Force, the Commune sent someone to investigate “the excitement.”
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As the week wore on, the Commune made no attempt to restrain the violence: it left the most radical of Paris’s forty-eight sections to do as they liked, perhaps because restraint was impossible or perhaps because members of the Commune genuinely thought the people had earned their right to bloody vengeance. It did, however, send Robespierre across to the Temple, close to his former residence in the rue Saintonge, to make sure that “everything was quiet there.” The royal family were potentially valuable hostages if the advance of Brunswick’s invading army could not be stopped; they must not be perfunctorily cut down in the general bloodletting. When he got to the Temple, Robespierre found everything in order, if not exactly quiet. There was no reason for him to ascend the narrow winding stair of the tower in which the deposed King and his family were imprisoned and guarded by sans-culottes. Outside, the patriot Palloy, who had turned the demolition of the Bastille into such a profitable business, was contemplating demolishing the buildings surrounding the tower and erecting a new perimeter wall for extra security, in case the royal family tried to escape. In 1789 Palloy had destroyed a prison; three years later he was building one.
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Robespierre, who had seen liberty appear like a vision on the crumbling battlements of the Bastille, probably did not linger looking up at the Temple tower.

Aside from checking that no unauthorized acts were being committed at the Temple, Robespierre intervened in the Commune’s deliberations for only one purpose: to try and get his opponents—Brissot and Roland—arrested and taken off to prison. There, as he well knew, they would very likely be killed immediately, along with the other prisoners condemned by the improvised tribunals set up by the sans-culottes. These makeshift tribunals inside the prisons acquitted a few fortunate victims, but the rest were hacked to death as they left the temporary courtrooms. Danton saw to it that the arrest warrants for Robespierre’s personal enemies were withdrawn. To sanction, or even encourage, the alarming spectacle of the people’s vengeance was one thing; to use it to settle personal scores was quite another. As Danton already knew, however, this was a difference lost on Robespierre. Yet the Duplay family doctor, years later, said Robespierre could never speak of the September Massacres without horror. “Blood again! Nothing but blood,” he remembered him saying, in the privacy of the Duplay household.
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Perhaps Robespierre, like Danton, also had nightmares. After all, he was still the same squeamish man who collapsed in Arras when his legal duties there required him to condemn a man to death. But now he was also a committed revolutionary leader who knew that he owed his power to the people’s propensity for violence. Without it, the monarchy would not have fallen on 10 August. Robespierre, for all his refined sensibility, was too astute a politician either to deny this fact or to ignore it: mob violence was there to be compromised with, not censured by the revolutionaries whose careers it had done so much to promote. His solution was to demand the establishment of an official revolutionary tribunal, which, he insisted, would maintain the peace, satisfy the people’s impatience for justice, and investigate promptly all counterrevolutionary activities. He got his way, and in the short period between the collapse of the monarchy on 10 August and the end of 1792, this tribunal sentenced a total of twenty-eight people to the guillotine.

The guillotine had first been used publicly in Paris on 25 April 1792, to execute a criminal named Nicolas Jacques Pelletier. Erected on scaffolding, it was positioned outside the Hôtel de Ville on the place de Grève, where Damiens and others had been gruesomely dispatched under the old regime. On that day, anticipating a large crowd at this new public spectacle and worried about maintaining order, Rœderer had written to General Lafayette asking him to ensure that National Guardsmen would remain in place until the execution was over and the scaffolding had been dismantled (when it was first introduced the guillotine was kept in storage and out of sight when not in use). The day had been long in coming. Pelletier had been condemned for robbery and murder soon after the National Assembly made decapitation the only legal capital punishment. He had had to wait in jail for over three months while the guillotine was built in Strasbourg according to the design of the surgeon Antoine Louison, at a cost of thirty-eight livres. Some more weeks passed while the public executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, tested the machine on corpses in the Bicêtre hospital. Sanson favored the guillotine because he knew the practical problems of decapitation by sword—the nobility’s old regime privilege:

After 10 August and the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal that Robespierre demanded, the guillotine was set up closer to the Tuileries palace, on either the place du Carrousel or the place de la Révolution. As it turned out, very few of the twenty-eight condemned by the new tribunal were executed for political crimes: like the murderer Pelletier, most were just ordinary criminals.

WHEN HE FIRST outlined his idea of a democratic war—a war of defense, not conquest, conducted by the whole people, armed with pikes, if nothing more—Robespierre’s was an isolated eccentric voice at the Jacobins. One year on, the people rose up as he had said they would, to grab whatever weapons they could and meet the invading army on the road from Valmy. During those early days of September, as bodies were piled up in the prisons, thousands of patriot volunteers collected on the Champ de Mars, ready to die for the fatherland. Danton urged them on with the most famous speech he ever made, this man with stentorian lungs to equal Mirabeau’s who spoke five languages but none so fluently as the language of the crowd. His speech ended: “Audacity! Yet more audacity! Always audacity—and France will be saved.”
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(Danton’s heavy engagement in trying to save revolutionary France might account for his reported callousness with regard to the prison victims. When asked what to do about them, he replied, according to Mme Roland, “Let them save themselves.”)
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The tocsin rang out as it had before. The royal family listened to it in their beds in the Temple. They heard it accompanied by Marie Antoinette’s anguished cries for her murdered friend, whose beautiful blond head had been paraded on a pike at the window. Fortunately for the Revolution, unfortunately for the royal family, the fighting at Valmy went well—the French forces, an amalgam of old army professional soldiers, National Guardsmen and new volunteers, repelled the Duke of Brunswick’s troops, charging into battle and shouting above the cannon fire, “Vive la nation!” The poet Goethe was with the invading army. On the night of 20 September, as the autumn chill was drawing in, he sat with other downcast Prussian soldiers, huddled around a campfire. They asked him what he made of the day’s events and he pronounced: “Here and today a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.” Europe’s first concerted attempt to end the Revolution had failed.
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Robespierre, of course, was far from the battlefield. It is doubtful whether he even knew how to fire a musket or would have lasted an hour in the mud at Valmy. Instead, he was doing something at which he had, over the last three years, become extremely skilled: electioneering. He was in the vanguard of those demanding a new representative assembly to draft France’s first republican constitution. Soon after 10 August he had published his own call to arms in his journal:

Robespierre now devoted himself to getting elected. The existing Legislative Assembly, diminished in power since 10 August, had nevertheless managed to decree that the new elections must be indirect, like the elections of 1789 and 1791. Primary assemblies would elect members of an electoral body to choose their delegates for them. However, the distinction between active and passive citizens—ones with the vote and ones without—to which Robespierre had always strongly objected, was abolished. Instead there was universal male suffrage: the electoral assemblies were to be chosen by primary assemblies composed of all independent male citizens over the age of twenty-one, and they were to deliberate in public. In the primary assembly for his Section des Piques (which had already elected him to the Commune), Robespierre was chosen first of the sixteen electors. His landlord and friend Duplay was another of the sixteen. Rabble-rousing Marat, who had openly approved of the prison massacres, was chosen in another section. When the whole body of 990 electors for all the sections and suburbs of Paris met, radical patriotic candidates dominated. The electors first assembled on 2 September—the day the massacres began—in the archbishop’s palace, where the National Assembly had originally convened for a brief period after moving to Paris from Versailles. Robespierre remembered that this hall had proved very unsuitable and that the National Assembly had soon had to abandon it for the Manège. Indeed, he had been working since the end of August to persuade the electors to ask permission of the Jacobin Club to meet in its more publicly accessible hall, where it would be much easier for the people—and of course the Jacobins—to oversee the proceedings. He succeeded. Not yet content, he also proposed, in the name of the primary assemblies, that any of their chosen electors who had previously displayed monarchist sympathies—who had joined the Feuillants, for example, after the Champ de Mars massacre—should be excluded immediately. The majority of radical patriots hastened to agree and expelled the dubious minority whom the primary assemblies had only just elected. This time, evidently, the Jacobins would take no chances.