Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (34 page)

Throughout the whole protracted process, Robespierre worked zealously to ensure the king’s execution. On 16 January, as he was polled for his opinion, he gave what was, by his standards, a short speech, advocating death:

It was not enough for him to argue that Louis XVI was an exception to the general case he had made against capital punishment; for the sake of his own sense of perfect consistency, Robespierre had to go a step further and argue that the same principle underpinned his two conflicting opinions. The following morning, before the first count of the votes, the Convention received a letter from the king’s lawyers asking to be heard again. Danton said yes, after the result was known. Robespierre said no, the Convention should proceed straight to other business: “Never when an accused person is definitively condemned do his defenders have the right to an extension; I demand the order of the day.” When the result was known later that day, he spoke again, insisting there must be no further appeal beyond the Convention:

After this, the only hope for the king was a reprieve, or postponement of his sentence. For twenty-four hours the Girondin leaders tried to save him this way—tried also to secure their own victory over the Jacobin faction. Robespierre intervened three times to make sure they did not succeed. Most notably, on the night of 19 January, he led the Paris deputies in voting against the reprieve, and it was defeated 380 votes to 310. In the circumstances, 70 votes was a narrow enough margin to mean that, without Robespierre’s special exertions, Louis XVI might have lived. Robespierre fought for the king’s death with a religious solemnity that had nothing in common with the ribald vulgarity of the brandy-swilling public in the galleries. It is true that he was backed all the way by the radical Paris sections, backed in their turn by revolutionaries throughout France. But his sensibility was all his own. The evening before the execution, scheduled to occur as soon as possible on 21 January, Robespierre told the Jacobins to present in the morning “a calm demeanor, so dignified and formidable that it will freeze with fear the enemies of freedom.” The Girondin Condorcet had been absolutely right to identify Robespierre as the high priest of Revolution.

Louis XVI’s chief lawyer was Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the great-grandfather of Alexis de Tocqueville, who would write one day of the inevitable progress of equality and democracy in France (and America) that Robespierre, in advance of his time, fought for with such passion. After the Convention had counted and recounted its votes, Malesherbes ascended the narrow winding stairs of the Temple tower to tell the king he must die. Halfway through their interview, he broke down and fell weeping to the floor. Recovering himself, he said, “But, Sire, these wretches are not yet our masters, and every honest man will endeavor to save Your Majesty or to die at your feet.”
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The king replied:

“The king is dead! Long live the king!” This famous cry had echoed through the centuries down the long line of French monarchs, marking the times when they passed the crown uninterruptedly one to another: to Louis XVI from his grandfather Louis XV, to him from the Sun King Louis XIV, to him from Louis XIII, the successor of Henry IV, the first of the Bourbon branch of the Capetian dynasty founded by Hugues Capet in 987 after the demise of Frankish power.
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It was this cry that sustained the last of their line when he learned that, like none of his predecessors, he was to die on the scaffold. He saw his family for the final time on the evening of Sunday, 20 January, told his son never to think of avenging his death, and gave both his children his blessing. Marie Antoinette wanted the family to stay together all night, but the king needed to be alone with his priest. He told his wife he would see her again in the morning—the tenderest of marital white lies, for he knew he could not stand to confront her grief on his way to execution. After they left, he asked the guards not to permit his family to return. He spent until midnight with the abbé Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont, a Roman Catholic priest of Irish birth whom he had specially requested.

He was awoken by drums outside at 5:00 a.m. The priest said Mass and administered Holy Communion. On his way to execution, Louis XVI read more prayers, the special ones for those at the point of death. He wanted to address the people from the scaffold, but the drums beat loud to prevent him. He was asked to remove his coat and resisted at first—surely they could execute him as he was? When it was explained that the collar of his coat might obstruct the blade of the guillotine, he consented and removed it himself. Then they wanted to tie his hands. Again, he resisted—surely that gratuitous humiliation was unnecessary? The abbé Edgeworth helped him by reminding him that Christ’s hands had been tied at the Crucifixion. He helped him again by proclaiming as the blade fell: “Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!” The executioner showed the king’s head to the people. Some of them surged forward to dip handkerchiefs or pieces of paper in his blood. One was inspired to mimic a priest blessing the congregation with holy oil:

Alone in her room, Marie Antoinette had not slept, had not even undressed for bed. At 6:15 a.m. guards had come, to take her to the king, she thought, but they were only looking for a prayer book for the King’s last Mass. She had waited all morning, still thinking she would see him again, until shouts of joy from the crowd below told her he was dead. Hearing the jubilant cries, Marie Antoinette stood like a statue in a state of silent, choking agony. When at last she roused herself, she asked to see one of the men who had been in the king’s rooms until he was taken away. This man gave her back her wedding ring with a message from the king—he would never have parted with it but with his life. She turned it over in her hand. Inside it was engraved: M.A.A.A. 19 Aprille, 1770.
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Marie Antoinette, archduchess of Austria, had married the heir to the French throne twenty-three years earlier. Now she had to ask his executioners’ permission to wear mourning.

Robespierre had breakfast as usual that day with the Duplays. Elisabeth, the younger of the daughters, to whom he was always so kind, asked him why there were so many people out in the street at that early hour. He told her something was happening that she should not see and asked one of the household servants to shut the great outer door that opened from the carpenter’s courtyard onto the rue Saint-Honoré. Later in the morning, Louis XVI passed that closed door with his priest, guards, and a vast, silent crowd of the French people. It was in the name of those people that the king was guillotined, just around the corner from the Duplays, on what had once been the place Louis XV and was now the place de la Révolution. Robespierre had counseled solemnity to the Jacobins. He was solemn himself that morning: he turned his back on the public spectacle that he had persuaded the Convention was indispensable for the future of the republic but that he did not himself care to witness.

(1793–1794)

News of Louis XVI’s execution spread like a stain across Europe. In England Prime Minister Pitt pronounced it “the foulest and most atrocious deed which the history of the world has yet had occasion to attest.”
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In Russia Catherine the Great, shocked and grieving, took to her bed and decreed six weeks’ mourning for her whole court. Spain immediately recalled its ambassador. Public opinion in all these countries turned unremittingly against the Revolution. The reaction in America was more ambivalent—distant support for the embattled new republic, mingled with sorrow for its regal victim, who, in his time, had supported the colonists in their struggle to found their own modern republican government on the other side of the Atlantic. “As Americans we regret the loss of the life of the King,” wrote the religious minister and diarist William Bentley, “but we remember the liberties of mankind are dearer than any life whatever.”
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The regicide transformed the war. By November 1792, after the battle of Valmy and one subsequent victory at Jemappes, French forces had overrun the entire Austrian Netherlands. French armies in the south and on the Rhine were also advancing the new republic’s borders. Brissot’s vision of a proselytizing war to consolidate the Revolution by carrying it abroad seemed realized, and the Convention promised to “accord fraternity and help to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty.”
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It also demanded that the territories it “liberated” contribute to the cost of France’s conquests. Danton went on mission to the armies in the Austrian Netherlands in December 1792 and saw blood flowing freely at the front line. He declared that “the limits of France are marked out by nature. We shall reach them at their four points: at the ocean, at the Rhine, at the Alps, at the Pyrenees.” Belgium would have to be incorporated into France.

Ten days after Louis XVI’s execution, the Convention declared war on England and the Dutch Republic. This was a preemptive strike, since Prime Minister Pitt had already cleared funds with Parliament for war against a country prepared to murder its king, and the Dutch Republic, situated between France and the Rhine, was also preparing for war. In March war was declared on Spain also. Danton—who had rung the tocsin and roused the people to fight before Valmy—left again on a mission to the army in the north, this time burdened by concern for his gravely ill wife, Gabrielle, whom he had once wooed romantically in Italian and still deeply loved. He arrived in Belgium, demanding its annexation to France, on 3 February and began the journey back to Paris on 15 February. He returned to a cold, empty house: no fire, no children, and no wife. In his absence, Gabrielle had died and the children had been taken to their grandmother. Danton went straight to the graveyard and dug Gabrielle’s coffin out of the dank earth in which she had been lying for four days. He prized off the lid to hold her and see her face one last time. He summoned a sculptor to the grisly scene and commissioned not a death mask but a bust of the lifeless woman. Then he went home to the letter from Robespierre that said, “I love you more than ever, I love you until death. At this moment, I am you.”
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His mind macabre and full of battlefields, his heart ravaged by grief, his eyes distracted by hungry, rioting, destitute Parisians, and his ears ringing with reports of the Royalist and Catholic discontent in the Vendée (an especially religious region south of Brittany), Danton now did something that a year later he would beg forgiveness for at the foot of the guillotine. He persuaded the Convention to revive the Revolutionary Tribunal, with its extraordinary powers to condemn people to death (the Convention had disbanded the Revolution’s first extraordinary tribunal at the start of the king’s trial). Now Robespierre fully supported Danton’s call for its reestablishment and further proposed that capital punishment be meted out for counterrevolutionary acts of any kind directed “against the security of the state, or the liberty, equality, unity and indivisibility of the Republic.”
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A majority of the Convention deputies opposed the reconstitution of the tribunal. After long debate, the project was nearly abandoned when, toward midnight, Danton hastened to the Manège. Speaking ominously in the candlelight he warned his exhausted colleagues that there was no longer any alternative to the tribunal, except a bloodbath in the streets. This was not a strong but a desperate argument. During its first incarnation, at Robespierre’s instigation after 10 August 1792, the tribunal had done nothing to prevent the September Massacres; what reason was there to believe it could—or would—prevent further bloodshed by resuming its summary powers over life and death? Danton saw the tribunal as an overwhelmingly powerful weapon in the hands of the government, the last hope for restoring order in a starving, anarchic country rent by civil strife and foreign war. He never expected it would be used against himself, but on the scaffold before his execution he said: “This time twelve months ago I proposed that infamous tribunal by which we die and for which I beg pardon of God and man.”
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The Convention agreed to the Revolutionary Tribunal on 10 March. It consisted of twelve jurors, a public prosecutor (Antoine Fouquier-Tinville), and two substitutes; there could be no appeal against its judgments. By law the Paris sections were supposed to elect the members of the tribunal, who officiated wearing dark clothes and black plumes in their hats, but this never happened. Instead, the Commune chose them.
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At Fouquier-Tinville’s own trial (in 1795, after the fall of Robespierre) it emerged that many of the jurors on the tribunal had been unable to read or write and were often drunk.

Conditions in Paris were indeed deteriorating rapidly. On the evening of 9 March, armed bands had marauded through the city, smashing the print shops that produced Girondin journals.
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The Girondins were hated in Paris for trying to diminish the city’s role in the Revolution. The next day, the mob attempted another insurrection. The city gates were closed. The tocsin was rung. Disaffected Parisians demanded the arrest of all suspect army generals, ministers, and all the leading Girondin deputies. Even more radical than the sans-culottes, these petitioners wanted a “maximum” price imposed on basic commodities that were increasingly difficult to obtain due to the economic strains of war and rapid inflation; recently there had been a wave of attacks on grocery shops and warehouses. They demanded an end to private property, radical social leveling through price controls and redistribution of wealth. The Girondins blamed Marat for inciting such violence, but the Jacobins and the Mountain deputies distanced themselves from it, referring to the radical petitioners as rabid
enragés
. There is no evidence that Robespierre wanted or approved of the new insurrection, and the Commune decided not to support it. The National Guard was instructed to maintain order, and the insurgent
enragés
failed in their objectives on 10 March.

Meanwhile, the news from the front line was not encouraging. The French were struggling. The invasion of Holland began in February. At first all went according to plan, but then at the battle of Neerwinden on 18 March, French troops under the command of General Charles Dumouriez, the hero of the battle of Valmy, were routed by the enemy and fled headlong from the field. Holland had not been conquered and now Belgium was almost lost. By this point, Dumouriez felt little more sympathy with the Girondin or Jacobin factions than General Lafayette had before him. Unlike Lafayette, Dumouriez had had allegiances with both factions in the past and had accepted the destruction of the monarchy on 10 August. But he remained a royalist at heart and threatened now to march back to the capital and preside over a regency for young Louis XVII, who was currently ailing in the Tower. Amid the panic in Paris the Convention decided to set up surveillance committees (
comités de surveillance
) in every municipality throughout the country to scrutinize the activities of foreigners and suspects.
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Soon after the fiasco of Neerwinden, Danton set off to the army for a third time, to meet with Dumouriez and attempt to reconcile him to the republican government. His mission was not successful and he was back in Paris when Dumouriez finally deserted to the Austrians at the beginning of April. The time had come to put the new weapon of the Revolutionary Tribunal into hands capable of wielding it, and to this end Danton, again speaking dramatically by candlelight at midnight, urged the Convention to create the Committee of Public Safety, a provisional revolutionary government briefed to supervise and accelerate the exercise of ministerial power. When the Convention had first met in September 1792 it had established a Committee of General Security with extensive policing responsibilities. But now a smaller, more dynamic executive committee was called for, not to replace the Committee of General Security but to work alongside it.
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Over time the relationship between the two committees, both of them formally responsible to the Convention, became extremely fraught. Nine deputies were chosen for the new Committee of Public Safety, whose members had to be reelected every month. Danton was one of them. The others were Bertrand Barère, Jean Delmas, Jean Bréard, Pierre Joseph Cambon, Louis Guyton, Jean-Baptiste Treilhad, Jean Delacroix, and Jean Lindet. Significantly, none were Girondins, who opposed the creation of such a committee, fearing in advance that they would be excluded from it. And so the factional fight that had begun when Robespierre first opposed Brissot’s war policy at the end of 1791 entered its last phase with the Girondins at a serious disadvantage. They had failed to save the king, failed to prevent the resurrection of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and failed to avert the Committee of Public Safety. These three failures together were soon to lead to the death of Brissot, of twenty of his colleagues in the Convention, and of Mme Roland, who once pored over a map of France imagining how it might be divided.

The new republic urgently needed a bigger army if it was going to recover from recent defeats and win the foreign war. To provide recruits the Convention resorted to conscription—a levy of three hundred thousand—and decreed a quota for each of the eighty-three departments: if there were not enough volunteers, unwilling men were to be drafted by drawing lots. At this, the discontent in the Vendée escalated into horrifying civil war. Earlier in the year the Convention had begun dispatching some of its members to visit and report on the provinces, but now, in the hands of the new Committee of Public Safety and with the outbreak of civil war, these “representatives on mission” were invested with new repressive powers. Personally entrusted with the exercise of sovereign authority, they were sent out in pairs to designated departments to oversee the levy, mandated to do whatever was necessary to ensure its success. In theory their purpose was to strengthen the republic’s centralized government, but in practice the Committee of Public Safety found it hard to control its own representatives on mission, who, in some cases, deviated sharply from official policies, imposing extraordinary taxes, raising private armies, and committing shameful acts of spoliation, violation, and murder.
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Another emergency measure that would prove hard to control over time was Danton’s suggestion for a Revolutionary Army of sansculottes to go out into the countryside and requisition grain and other food supplies.

Robespierre was now more publicly hysterical than ever, obsessed with death, convinced he was about to be assassinated, and constantly offering himself for martyrdom, as though that would resolve any of the Revolution’s problems. Fear most the enemy within, he warned the Jacobins again; the most dangerous traitors were not on the front line but mingling in disguise among the patriots in Paris. The time had come to choose between slavery and death: “We know how to die, and we will all die,” he announced triumphantly at the end of a speech on 13 March.
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“All! All!” echoed voices around the hall. Then Marat stood up and said, “No! We are not going to die; we will give death to our enemies, we will erase them!”
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Two weeks later, Robespierre had imbibed some of Marat’s fighting spirit. Speaking again at the Jacobins on the dangers menacing France, and the vigorous measures required to combat them, he asked, “Must we despair of the safety of the republic? No! Tyrants unmasked are nothing. The French people are only betrayed because they want to be; the French people are stronger than all their enemies. One republican who knows how to die can exterminate all the despots.”
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Such flamboyance went down well with his audience, who applauded vigorously, but in itself it hardly amounted to a strategy for saving the Revolution. Yet Robespierre had such a strategy, one that converged with Danton’s. He, too, wanted a strong government, an end to the separation of power between the legislature and the executive, in this time of crisis. But here even the Jacobins thought Robespierre had gone too far, while the Girondins accused him of aspiring to dictatorship. He retorted by denying even that he wanted to become a minister. At this someone in the Convention laughed openly.
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When news of Dumouriez’s treachery reached Paris, Robespierre seized on yet another weapon in the fight with the Girondins, striving to implicate Brissot, Pétion, and their associates in the general’s spectacular betrayal of France. His move was both aggressive and self-defensive. The Girondins would happily have held Dumouriez against Robespierre, Danton, and the rest of the Jacobins if they could, and questions were already being asked as to why, when Danton went to the army a third time and met with Dumouriez, he had failed to denounce him as a traitor. Robespierre was exposed, too, for just weeks earlier he had publicly expressed full confidence in Dumouriez and his command of the foreign war. Characteristically, he did not say he had been wrong. Instead he deftly reworked the reasons he had given for trusting Dumouriez so that, in retrospect, they sounded far more conditional and skeptical than they had at the time. Simultaneously he insisted, over and over again, that Dumouriez had been collaborating with Brissot—surely the time had come at last to take action against the man responsible for plunging the country into a disastrous war well over a year ago. “Dumouriez and Brissot were the first apostles of the war,” he told the Convention, bending the facts to his advantage.
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As ever he spoke of plots and hidden enemies. “If you wish, I will raise a corner of the veil,” he tantalized his colleagues. “Raise it all!” they pleaded.