Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (3 page)

Many allude to Robespierre’s vanity and fastidiousness about clothes. Before the Revolution he was registered as a customer in a clothing shop in Arras, but he was not rich, and his purchases there were few and modest. Political power did not diminish his preoccupation with appearance. At the height of his career he wore a beautiful sky-blue coat, more suited to the courts of the old kings of France than to a revolutionary assembly negotiating with violent mobs in the streets.
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But Robespierre would make no sartorial concessions to the times. He was particularly fond of elaborately embroidered waistcoats—an unlikely taste in a political activist who rose to power championing democracy and the rights of the poor in the face of aristocratic privilege.

“He was five feet two or three inches tall”—not especially small by eighteenth-century standards—someone else remembered.

He looked at his audience though. He carried a second pair of large-rimmed eyeglasses to fit on top of the green-tinted ones when he wanted to fix his listeners better with his feeble green eyes. He was both near-and farsighted, so everything he saw was slightly blurred. His glasses helped him focus, they filtered the harsh sunlight, and they were also props used to dramatic effect as he stood at the tribune speaking. As a fellow deputy recalled, “His delivery was slow, and his phrases so long that every time he paused and pushed his glasses up onto his forehead one might have thought that he had no more to say; but, after looking all around the Hall, he would lower his spectacles again, and add a phrase or two to sentences which were already long enough when he broke them off.”
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For the last years of his life, Robespierre lived in a house in the rue Saint-Honoré with a Parisian furniture maker and his family, the Duplays. They adored him. Here he was surrounded by representations of himself: a little god in a domestic setting. There were many mirrors, his full-length portrait, his bust in metal or terracota, and—rumor has it—print after print of him all over the walls.
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It was the kind of shrine that Robespierre’s remaining friends would still like to have. I hope one day we get it. It would be very interesting to see what it feels like to be in a room dominated by him; to look again at all those images of him; to stand by the window and wonder what it was he saw, gazing at obsessively repeated representations of himself as the French Revolution unfurled outside the door. It is the pictures in Robespierre’s mind that are the key to his story. Two of them are more vivid than any of the others: his picture of an ideal society and his picture of himself. The Revolution superimposed the two and he believed, to the point of insanity, that he was the instrument of Providence, charged with delivering France to her exalted future. If the French were not yet worthy of such a future, it was clear to him that they must be regenerated—through virtue or terror—until they became what destiny demanded of them. And yet, even in this extreme and fanatical state of mind, he hesitated, holding something back. He knew that his ideal society was ultimately greater than himself. If his life had coincided with its birth, if he had played his part in realizing it in history, he could go tranquilly to his death, as he did, many times, in his imagination, before his body went under the guillotine.

(1758–1788)

Robespierre’s story begins in the small city of Arras, in the province of Artois, in northern France. Located on the border between France and the Netherlands, Arras changed hands many times before it was firmly annexed by the French monarchy in 1659. Then the city walls were fortified and Arras settled down to a more peaceful existence as the province’s ecclesiastical and judicial center. It was known as “the city of a hundred steeples” because visitors, approaching across the surrounding fields or on the fine gravel road from the nearby town of Béthune, saw from afar the tall spires of Arras’s Gothic bell tower, the cathedral, the abbey, eleven parish churches, over twenty monasteries and convents, numerous hospices, chapels, and charitable institutions.
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Conservative piety pervaded the narrow cobbled streets like the smell of incense, as some twenty thousand men, women, and children went about their daily devotional duties.

Robespierre’s birth in 1758 coincided with the beginning of an economic boom in Arras: work had begun to connect the eastern and western sides of the city, which were separated by a branch of the river Crinchon. There were ambitious schemes to clean the river, a seething channel of infection, and to dam or bridge the many places where it seeped insistently into the streets. There were elaborate plans to reconstruct the cathedral, which dated back to AD 687, and to renovate the abbey of Saint-Vaast, which, along with a lavish income and considerable personal power, made the bishopric of Arras an attractive post for the younger sons of France’s nobles. Alongside the new public buildings, wealthy investors commissioned new town houses several stories high, to meet growing demands for accommodation. Every Wednesday and Saturday even more people crowded inside the city walls to attend the twice-weekly markets trading in regional produce: hemp, flax, wool, soap, lace, porcelain—and especially grain.

The grain trade was the main cause of this economic vibrancy. In the distant past Arras’s wealth had come from the beautiful tapestries that adorned Europe’s medieval castles. But while Shakespeare’s Hamlet may have immortalized these tapestries by lunging at a rat behind the arras, they were not the source of the city’s eighteenth-century wealth. Rather, local landowners, most of them nobles, had grown extremely rich from the rents on their arable land. The facades of their fine new buildings were decorated with stylized sheaves of corn signaling the source of the money that financed them. These well-to-do landowners were responsible, too, for Arras’s atmosphere of optimism and urban refinement. Paris was less than twenty-four hours away by courier.

Behind all this prosperity there lay an onerous system of privilege by which the upper classes lived at the expense of the community, a system of taxation that placed the heaviest burden on those least capable of bearing it, outdated restrictions on manufacture and commerce, and the vestiges of feudalism, which weighed heavily on the peasants in the countryside. Along with the economy, crime thrived in Arras. The city’s three prisons were crammed full, and processions of beggars, criminals, and prostitutes were often seen leaving the city under armed guard, heading north for the house of correction in Lille.

The de Robespierres, established in the province for over three centuries, were respectable but not noble.
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They did not own arable land, so did not benefit directly from Arras’s economic boom. The family had a coat of arms (which appears on a document of 1462), but the particle “de” included in its name indicated only that they were not manual laborers. One early record mentions Robert de Robespierre, living near Béthune in the mid–fifteenth century and working as
un homme de justice
. In the sixteenth century there was another Robert de Robespierre in Béthune, a grocer. His great-grandson was a notary and attorney, in Carvins, where the main branch of the family lived until the first Maximilien de Robespierre (grandfather of the revolutionary) moved to Arras as a barrister, married an innkeeper’s daughter, and through her acquired some property in the city. The first Maximilien proved canny at self-advancement. It happened that in 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender in exile, spent six months in Arras. On his departure, he bequeathed the city a Masonic lodge, in gratitude for the hospitality he had received, and appointed Robespierre’s grandfather an official of the lodge—of all the people in Arras, he had been particularly ingratiating. Everything went well enough—though there were eight children to feed and clothe and never quite enough money for comfort. But gradually it became clear that the eldest son, the second Maximilien (father of the revolutionary), was a bit dissolute and unstable.

Encouraged by his family to begin a novitiate with the Premonstratensians of Dommartin (a religious order founded in northern France by Saint-Norbert in the twelfth century), he gave up when he realized he had no vocation. Sent to Douai to read law, he came home to Arras to work as a barrister but almost immediately got Jacqueline Marguerite Carraut, the daughter of a local brewer in the rue Ronville, pregnant out of wedlock. The shame and scandal associated with illegitimacy in a small conservative city like Arras was considerable. Traditionally it was common for families to ostracize their wayward children or even request their imprisonment. The church was ubiquitous. Public and private libraries were full of religious texts outlining appropriate codes of spiritual and moral conduct, while the homes of nobles, bourgeois lawyers, and artisans were crammed with material objects evoking them: crucifixes, missals, and images of the life of Christ and the saints, before which a pious wife might kneel on an ornate prie-dieu.

Robespierre was rescued just in time from the serious penalties of illegitimacy (which he would help to dismantle in the course of the Revolution) by his parents’ hasty marriage on 2 January 1758, when his mother was already five months pregnant. His paternal grandparents refused to attend the wedding. Four months later, they relented and agreed to act as witnesses at the baptism of their grandson, Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre, born on 6 May 1758 to a family whose wealth and status were declining steadily at a time when the city, in general, was flourishing. After her first son, Robespierre’s mother gave birth to a baby almost every year: two daughters, Charlotte, then Henriette, another son, Augustin, and a fifth child, who did not survive. She died on 14 July 1764 at the age of twenty-nine, an ordinary eighteenth-century woman defeated by pregnancy and childbirth. Robespierre was six.

In the sentimental memoirs of his sister Charlotte, the death of their mother was the pivotal emotional crisis in Maximilien’s life. She remembered that their younger brother, Augustin, not yet two, was still away from home with a wet nurse. So as the older siblings watched the funeral preparations they were at least spared the screams of a hungry infant denied its mother’s breast. Robespierre was inconsolable in a more complex and lasting way: he treasured the memory of a gentle woman lost to her young children when they most needed her. Before she died she found time to teach him to make lace skillfully, but little else.
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Whenever he spoke of her to Charlotte later in life, his eyes always filled with tears.

Soon after their mother’s death, their father began abandoning his young and grieving family for long periods of time, sometimes reappearing briefly in Arras to borrow money and on one occasion even renouncing his own and his children’s claims on the de Robespierre estate in order to raise some ready cash. Charlotte excuses this behavior by claiming that her father was demented with grief, but it is equally likely that he was still the profligate and unstable character who had caused his own parents so much concern. Deprived of their mother and without any independent means of support, the four siblings whom grief had drawn so close together were soon to be physically separated. The two boys went to live with their maternal grandparents in the brewery, and aunts on their father’s side took in Charlotte and Henriette, who went on Sunday visits to their brothers, a few streets away across the smaller of Arras’s two market squares. The fact that these children were shared out between their relatives like an unwelcome burden did not escape Robespierre. According to Charlotte, his character underwent a complete transformation: where previously he had been boisterous, careless, lighthearted just like other children, he became serious, poised, responsible, and diligent. From this point on he joined in his siblings’ childish games only to explain or enforce the rules. He preferred solitary pursuits like building model chapels and reading. He had a small collection of pictures and engravings that he liked to arrange in exhibitions for his sisters, delighting in their admiration. He was also given some sparrows and pigeons that he raised and cherished as pets. He would place them very gently one after the other into his sisters’ cupped hands, during their visits.

Charlotte and Henriette once asked to borrow one of these birds, assuring their brother that they would care for it in their aunts’ house and return it safely the following week. Robespierre was hesitant, but they were persistent, begging, promising to look after it, so he agreed. Inevitably, the bird was left in the garden, a storm blew up, and it died. Robespierre was furious. “At the news of this death, Maximilien’s tears flowed,” Charlotte reported. “He showered us with reproaches, which we more than deserved, and vowed never again to entrust us with one of his precious pigeons.” Sixty years later, Charlotte herself recalled this timeless childhood drama, “the tragic end of the poor pigeon,” tearfully. How could her brother’s detractors imagine that his early years in Arras were spent cutting off the heads of small birds with a toy guillotine? How could they so besmirch the kind and sensitive soul, the character full of
le bon naturel
she had loved all her life?

Besides his bereavement and heightened sense of responsibility, it is reasonable to assume that Robespierre grew up with a vague but persistent sense of familial shame. His father came from a long line of provincial lawyers, but he had wasted his promising start in life, failed to build on the achievements of his own father, and left his sons to build their lives with appreciably fewer advantages than those he had himself enjoyed. In 1772 he disappeared for good and his children never knew where or when exactly he died. On top of the practical difficulties Robespierre faced as an orphan—the uncomfortable dependency and penury—he had three siblings to care for and his father’s reputation for irresponsibility to live down. He grew up among relatives who could scarcely utter his father’s name without regret and disappointment. Gazing out the window of his grandparents’ house in the rue Ronville, down the busy street to the Church Jean-Baptiste, he must sometimes have wished it was his mother’s more modest name, Carraut, that he was carrying forward into the unknown future, not that of his disgraced father and disappointed grandfather, Maximilien de Robespierre.

ROBESPIERRE’S FIRST SCHOOL was the local Collège d’Arras, where he went at the age of eight already having learned to read and write. Founded in the sixteenth century and richly endowed, the school had over four hundred pupils, all boys. A small number boarded at the school, but most, like Robespierre, were day pupils, the sons of the province’s professional families. One old school fellow later remembered Robespierre as “a conventional good boy,” another claimed he had a detestable character and an inordinate love of domination, but these are the trite kinds of characterization anyone might make about a distantly recalled school acquaintance. The Collège d’Arras was governed by a committee that included the bishop of Arras, the teachers were priests, and the pedagogical emphasis was on learning the rudiments of Latin. Robespierre worked hard for three years, then distinguished himself by winning a scholarship to the elite Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, whose illustrious alumni included the playwright Molière, the philosophe Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade. Here he would stay until the age of twenty-three, receiving both the rest of his schooling and vocational training in law.

The scholarship was one of four given by Arras’s abbot of Saint-Vaast, who was personally known to Robespierre’s pious aunts. Those who doubt Robespierre’s natural talents and intellect suspect that it was really these family connections—not merit or achievement—that secured him this first important opportunity. Even his sister Charlotte, whose memoirs are usually so biased in his favor, comments that of her two brothers, the elder was the less academically gifted. He was, however, far more diligent and determined to succeed than the younger Augustin. His siblings saw Robespierre off on the public coach to Paris in October 1769, deeply distraught at the parting. Robespierre cried a great deal, too, but there was already something firm and resolute in his character that helped him focus on the long road stretching out before him. In the emotional last days before he left Arras, he gave his sisters all his toys—the model chapels he had constructed, the pictures and engravings he had collected, everything with which he had amused himself as a child—except his birds, for which he found a more trustworthy home. He loved his sisters, would miss them dearly, but they had already killed one of his pigeons, and there were to be no second chances. He was not the kind of person to forget being let down by anyone.

At the time of Robespierre’s schooling, education in France was in an unusually chaotic state. In 1762, only seven years before Robespierre left Arras, the controversial Jesuit order had been expelled from its hundreds of educational establishments. Political and theological opponents of the order—the more puritan and morally severe Jansenists and other detractors who denounced the Jesuits’ loyalty to Rome as anti-French—had finally prevailed on a reluctant Louis XV to act against them. Throughout the country Jesuit school buildings, property, and facilities were suddenly deserted, the order accused of teaching dangerous theology, promoting sin, amassing wealth, and perverting young boys. The Jesuits had only a single college in Paris, but it was an important one: the large and prestigious Louis-le-Grand, founded in the mid–sixteenth century in the heart of the Latin Quarter, just across the street from the much older Sorbonne. In the administrative confusion that followed the Jesuits’ expulsion, Louis-le-Grand came under the direction of the University of Paris and was reinvented as a college particularly dedicated to the encouragement of scholarship students “whose means do not allow them to enjoy the same advantages as others.”
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