Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (37 page)

CHARLOTTE CORDAY WAS guillotined four days after her crime, with a beatific smile on her face. The executioner held her severed head up to the crowd and, in a fit of pro-Marat enthusiasm, slapped her cheek. Allegedly, she blushed—both her slapped and unslapped cheeks reddened—and those who were watching gasped in amazement.
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Physiologists several years later were inspired by this story to speculate on whether human sensation ends instantly at decapitation or not. But at the time, political interests eclipsed scientific ones. From the execution of Charlotte Corday the Girondins acquired a secular saint of their own—the Jacobins had Marat, but they had a pure and beautiful young woman whose modesty did not desert her even in death. The fight between the two factions entered its final throes. It had long been a mortal combat. Now it was simply a question of how much more damage would be done to the Revolution—how much more bloodshed there would be in the provinces and at the frontier—before it was over. To try to assess the state of affairs, the Convention sent various deputies out on mission to the detachments of the army deployed on home soil. After the levy of three hundred thousand in February, the official number of men in arms had risen to 645,000, but by the summer of 1793 this was still not enough. The Convention decreed an unprecedented program of national mobilization: the
levée en masse
.
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In August Lazare Carnot, a member of the Committee of Public Safety with special responsibility for the army, decreed that “the republic is a great city in a state of siege: France must become one vast camp and Paris its arsenal.” He set out the war effort in graphic terms:

Robespierre himself could not be parted from Paris, but his brother, Augustin, left for the south, heading for Nice via Lyon and Marseille, to report on the extent of the support for the Girondins, who were now calling openly for a federalist revolt against the capital.

When Charlotte Robespierre heard that Augustin was about to leave as a “representative on mission” together with Jean François Ricord (deputy to the Convention from Var), who was taking his wife, she demanded to be included in the party. Charlotte got her way and the four set off accompanied by only two soldiers.
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Lyon was in revolt, but when their coach pulled up outside the town hall, things seemed calm enough. The two women waited outside while Augustin and Ricord went in. A crowd began gathering around the stationary coach and the women were drawn into conversation. “We know that the Parisians say we are counterrevolutionaries,” someone said, “but they are mistaken—look at our cockades.”
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Charlotte expressed suspicions, as her elder brother would have done; after all, counterrevolutionaries, indeed the king himself, had worn the tricolor cockade back in 1789. As the women’s exchange with the tense and increasingly angry crowd deteriorated, the two men were involved in a fierce altercation with municipal officers inside the town hall. It was apparent that sympathy with the Girondins was running very high in Lyon. Returning to the coach, Augustin and Ricord decided it was not safe to spend the night and they must press on to Nice. Since it was likely news of their mission had gone before them—Charlotte’s conversation with the crowd was, in hindsight, very unwise—they did not dare take the main road but went cross-country via the small town of Manosque.

When they reached the bank of the river Durance, the soldiers who had gone ahead to check if it was safe to cross came rushing back warning that there were armed men from Marseille with cannons on the other side. There was no choice but to turn back to Manosque. Here, trying to be helpful, the mayor offered the party an escort of fifty local National Guardsmen. Uncertain of the sympathies of these local men, Augustin and Ricord politely refused. During their flight to Varennes, the royal family had encountered the same problem: it was always difficult to know how battalions of National Guardsmen would act since they were just ordinary citizens in arms, not professional soldiers. So the party set off again for Nice unaccompanied. En route they received a message from the well-disposed mayor that the Marseille insurgents were in pursuit. At this, they abandoned the coach and fled on horseback into the mountains bordering the Department of Vaucluse. Twelve local patriots went with them as guides—they had no choice but to trust them—and they journeyed all night through the difficult passes. By the following evening they had reached the old fortified village of Sault. Here they encountered a young doctor who had been elected to the new convention in exile that the Girondin leader Guadet was planning to convene as soon as possible at Bourges.

This doctor took Augustin and Ricord to the local Jacobin Club, where they were enthusiastically received. Considerably cheered, the party then decided to return to Manosque, this time with a band of twenty or so patriots. Their two guards went ahead to prepare their arrival. To frighten the people who had been so unwelcoming before, the guards spread the rumor that the two deputies, one of them the brother of the famous Robespierre, were about to arrive with an army of six thousand. The town of Manosque would be razed to the ground and its inhabitants slaughtered in punishment for their treatment of the national representatives. Wisely, the party moved on again before the emptiness of the rumor could become apparent. Half an hour later the men from Marseille arrived, searched everywhere for the Parisians, then fell upon their abandoned coach, dragging it off to their hometown in triumph. Augustin and Ricord demanded the return of the coach and it was sent back, vandalized. Finally they got to Nice. Here, Charlotte recalled, “public spirit was no better.”
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But the presence of a detachment of professional soldiers from the French army, as opposed to unreliable battalions of local National Guardsmen, meant that the party was at least safe from counterrevolutionary attacks. Indeed, under the protection of the army’s General Dumerbion, they even felt safe enough to attend the theater. The third time they went they were pelted with rotten apples. Sympathy for the Revolution was dying in the provinces. Back in Paris, Robespierre himself described the situation in apocalyptic terms:

THE MEMBERS OF the Committee of Public Safety were reelected by the Convention every month, and Danton was voted off on 10 July. One of the reasons was his optimism in the face of the federalist revolt. Rejecting Robespierre’s apocalyptic vision, refusing to condone Jacobin threats of violent repression in Bordeaux and elsewhere, he acted as though effort and compromise might be enough to reunite the country. Danton, for all his ferocity in the streets, understood compromise. In June he had married the young woman his first wife had picked out for him and their two small children before she died. Noting this remarriage, only four months after the extraordinary scene in the graveyard over Gabrielle’s coffin, his critics conjectured that Danton was still unbalanced, distracted from public affairs, swept up in the solace of a new sexual liaison, no longer really in control of what he—still less the Revolution—was doing. Unlike Robespierre, Danton valued his private life. In a conversation between the two men during which Robespierre was speaking, as he did so often, about the importance of virtue and its role in revolutionary politics, Danton quipped, “Virtue is what I do every night in bed with my wife.”
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Robespierre, not amused, jotted this down in his notebook for future reference. Perhaps Danton did not mean it as a joke. In the circumstances in which he found himself, in the context of the life he had led since 1789—all that bloodshed, all those shattered dreams, the revolutionary fight still so far from won—sex, love, intimacy may indeed have seemed to him the best there is for human beings to hope for. Robespierre emphatically did not share that view. He may not have been as interested in sex as Danton was—he almost certainly had less experience of it, but his vision of the good life clashed drastically with Danton’s despite the fact that the two men had been such close revolutionary allies. When they were together in opposition to the old regime, the king, the Feuillants, the Girondins, their differences did not matter so much. Once the Jacobins came to power and had to decide what to do with it, they became enormously significant.

ON 27 JULY, Robespierre was at last elected to the Committee of Public Safety. Now, though he had more power than ever before, he was one of twelve trying to rule France. When Danton had established the committee earlier that year, it had only nine members. Its personnel had changed over the intervening months, and three extra places had been added around the oval table at which it met in the Tuileries. There were four more changes of personnel soon after Robespierre joined, but then no more additions until after he fell.
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Some of his fellow members were close friends: Saint-Just, Couthon (who had to be carried into meetings up what was once known as the queen’s staircase), Jacques Billaud-Varenne, and Jean Marie Collot d’Herbois. The others were Barère, the honey-tongued lawyer, Carnot, Marie Jean Hérault de Séchelles, Lindet, Jean Bon Saint-André, and two unrelated men both with the surname Prieur. “Stranger set of cloud-compellers the earth never saw,” Thomas Carlyle remarked of the twelve.
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In addition to internal clashes of vision and temperament, the committee as a whole was thoroughly embattled: its power and legitimacy were disputed abroad and in the provinces. In Paris there were also clashes with the Commune, with some of the city’s forty-eight sections, with the clubs, the factions, and the streets.

Robespierre began assiduously attending the committee’s meetings, which were usually held in the evening, in a green-papered room inside the former palace. Elsewhere in the building the intimidated Convention still went through the motions of assembling during the day, even though the republican constitution it had been called to design was indefinitely suspended, filed away on a dusty shelf awaiting happier times. As the first anniversary of the monarchy’s end approached, hope, power, and fear were focused on the nocturnal debates behind closed doors. Paris celebrated the 10 August anniversary by smashing the royal tombs at Saint-Denis. The already meager food rations for the surviving royal prisoners in the Tower were reduced further, and Marie Antoinette was transferred to the Conciergerie, pending trial. Danton’s policy of conciliation in the provinces was replaced by one of repression—Lyon, where Robespierre’s siblings had recently been made so unwelcome, was under siege a week after he joined the Committee of Public Safety. On the eve of his ascension to power, he had drafted a personal revolutionary catechism. It provides a window into his mind at this frenzied time:

In Lyon and elsewhere there were plenty of terrible examples: horrific mass executions by grapeshot fired from cannons and group drownings in the Vendée—crimes against humanity that the revolutionaries would today be called to answer for under the European human rights legislation they themselves pioneered. Robespierre had argued consistently since 1789 that in a time of revolution the end justifies the means, and even his advocates have to acknowledge that he did not flinch from the bloodiest implications of his position. In 1792 the Commune of Paris had attempted to encourage France’s second-largest city to imitate the Parisian September Massacres. A friend of Robespierre’s named Joseph Chalier had been sent to Lyon as an emissary. Well received at the municipal level, Chalier met with resistance from the department and the National Guard. He asked for reinforcement from Paris and corresponded regularly with another close friend of Robespierre’s, Léopold Renaudin. When the counterrevolution finally triumphed in Lyon in May 1793, the members of Chalier’s circle were shattered to learn that he had been executed. Afterward, Robespierre led the Committee of Public Safety’s policy of repression against the rebellious city. The siege of Lyon lasted until 6 October, and in its wake the Committee decreed mass executions and the destruction of all buildings, except the houses of the poor. “Lyon is no more,” said Robespierre. His friend and colleague Collot d’Herbois admired his turn of phrase.
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Even so, Robespierre’s stance on Lyon was not the most extreme. When Couthon and Collot d’Herbois tried to convince him that there were sixty thousand individuals in Lyon who would never make good patriots unless they were forcibly resettled elsewhere in France and that even then “the generations born of them would never be entirely pure,” Robespierre resisted. He continued to insist that ordinary people—including the poor of Lyon—were intrinsically good. But to those deemed counterrevolutionary, he showed no mercy.