Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (40 page)

1 Frimaire (21 November), the day that Robespierre lectured the Jacobins on God, was also the day that Danton returned to Paris. No one knows exactly why: perhaps after five years at the center of the Revolution he simply could not stay away, or maybe friends in Paris persuaded him to return. As soon as he entered the Jacobin Club, Hébert tried to have him expelled. When the Girondins had tried to do the same to Robespierre in 1792, Danton had leapt to his defense. Now Robespierre returned the favor. He did so in measured terms, so it was possible to hear notes of criticism within the overarching message of support. He made a point of mentioning that Danton had misjudged the treacherous General Dumouriez (so, at the time, had Robespierre himself, but this he omitted to note). Danton had also been less than enthusiastic in pursuing Brissot and the other Girondins, his friend reminded the Jacobins, but he was definitely not a traitor. Without this carefully modulated defense, Danton might have been excluded from the Jacobins. Instead, when Robespierre concluded his speech the president of the club embraced Danton and welcomed him back amid loud applause. After this slightly stilted scene of reconciliation, Danton, Robespierre, and their old friend Camille Desmoulins joined forces against Hébert’s faction, which now dominated both the Commune and the Cordeliers Club. The Girondins had not been dead two months, but the Jacobins had already found a new enemy to fight. This time they were fighting against, not with, the Commune and the mob. Marat’s heart was swinging in its urn above the hall of the Cordeliers; it is difficult to guess which side he would have been on had he lived to see the Cordeliers turn on Danton.

On 14 Frimaire (4 December) the Convention passed a law designed to further strengthen and centralize the revolutionary government.
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The new law made the Convention “the sole center of the impulse of government,” and it brought public power throughout the country—departments, districts, and local communes at the lowest level—under the direct control of the Committee of Public Safety. Locally elected administrators now became “national agents” and the militant surveillance committees that had sprung up nationwide to defend republican principles and enforce the Law of Suspects found themselves integrated into a newly hierarchical system of authority. The “representatives on mission” were systematically recalled and replaced with administrators rigorously vetted by the government. From this point no one, anywhere, was allowed to raise a private army, impose taxation, or deviate from national policy—the days when “representatives on mission” could act unchecked in the provinces were over. Meanwhile, popular assemblies in Paris’s forty-eight sections were suddenly answerable to the Convention over and above the municipal Commune. In effect, the Law of 14 Frimaire was an iron-fisted clamp-down on all activism that was not directly sanctioned by the Committee of Public Safety.

Despite the draconian Law of 14 Frimaire, Camille Desmoulins set off on a new course of activism. He started a newspaper called
Le vieux Cordelier
(
The Old Cordelier
) in memory of the Cordelier Club as it had been before Hébert and his ultrarevolutionists took it over. The paper was dedicated to both Robespierre and Danton, “two friends of the editor,” and Robespierre read the proofs of the first issue, which appeared on 15 Frimaire (5 December). The paper was a call for clemency. Under the Law of Suspects, the prisons of Paris were crammed full of ordinary men and women. It was time, Camille declared in his paper, to open the prisons. Recent news from the front line was good, the republic had repelled its foreign enemies, the Terror had served its purpose—let it end. The call for clemency got a rapturous response. The crowd grabbed copies of
Le vieux Cordelier
as they came off the press. Camille, who had roused his audience in the Palais-Royal gardens and defined for them the meaning of the revolutionary cockade in 1789, was working his magic again, this time to end the violence he once incited so passionately. He had never been a cautious person. Feeling himself protected by both Robespierre and Danton (the latter strongly supported the move toward clemency) and emboldened by the public’s enthusiastic response to his paper, Camille went further: in issue 3 he dared to call the Revolutionary Tribunal into question and to hope complete liberty of the press might soon be restored. This time Robespierre had not seen the proofs. Issue 4, fifteen days—one and a half revolutionary weeks—later, was a direct appeal to him:

Not content with asking Robespierre to redirect the policy of the Committee of Public Safety—a dangerous and perhaps impossible undertaking—Camille went on to suggest that his friend had already publicly indicated willingness to do so. It would be wrong of him, Camille recklessly implied, to renege on such good intentions.

It is true that on 30 Frimaire (20 December) Robespierre had raised the possibility of forming a committee of justice to examine some of the more contentious arrests under the Law of Suspects. Camille seized on this and called for something more dramatic: a committee of clemency. Let the prisons open and the Terror resolve itself in love and reconciliation. He knew he would be accused of being reactionary (or excessively moderate), so he evoked Marat, arguing unconvincingly that, at this point in the Revolution, his own extreme clemency was the equivalent of Marat’s extreme violence.
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Robespierre had already warned him obliquely to stop being “so versatile.” Robespierre’s friend the printer Léopold Nicolas had warned him, too: “Camille, you seem very close to the guillotine.”
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But Camille quipped back, “Nicolas, you seem very close to a fortune. It is only a year since you dined on baked apples, but here you are printer to the state.” He was a man of great boyish charm—seemingly still at school, wisecracking in the playground and showing off his knowledge of classical literature. His wife, Lucile, adored him. “Let him save the country in his own way,” she said, covering the mouth of a friend who was counseling caution.
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In the Jacobin Club on 18 Nivôse (7 January), Robespierre finally lost his temper with Camille. The Jacobins, as expected, were critical of Camille’s moderation—it had nothing at all in common with Marat’s revolutionary extremism so far as they could see. Cheekily, Camille offered to burn issue 3 of
Le vieux Cordelier
as long as his forthcoming issue 5 was read. Robespierre apologized for him, telling the club to think of him as an unthinking child who had fallen into bad company: “There is no need to expel Camille. We will burn his pamphlet.”
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Camille, so fond of, and so good at, repartee, could not resist. “Burning is no answer,” he retorted. This, famously, was Rousseau’s response when the Parlement of Paris burned his novel
Emile
. Camille knew exactly what Rousseau and his works meant to Robespierre. He had quoted Rousseau against his friend once before, when they had a public tiff in 1791. It was infinitely more dangerous to do so again now. Any trace of amusement left the Incorruptible’s lips; any glimmer of indulgence in his weak green eyes disappeared instantly. He might not have been Camille’s equal at repartee, but he was much better at anger:

Even Camille could see he had gone too far. He started to panic. Falling back on their long-standing connection, he said to Robespierre: “You criticize me here, but was I not in your home? Did I not give you my proofs to read and solicit your help and advice in the name of friendship?”
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His response could only make things worse by putting Robespierre on the defensive in front of the Jacobins. “You did not show me all your proofs; I saw only the first two. Not wishing to be involved in a quarrel of any kind, I preferred not to read the rest. If I had read them, I would have been accused of dictating them.” Danton intervened to try to limit the damage. He urged Camille to accept Robespierre’s chastisement as well meant. Danton may or may not have believed in Robespierre’s good intentions, but he wanted to end the damaging standoff. It was obvious that Robespierre genuinely cared for Camille; it was equally obvious that the Incorruptible might well pride himself on sacrificing a personal friend to the Revolution. Until now, Robespierre had only sacrificed his enemies. Perhaps Danton had some inkling that this was about to change.

The following evening Fabre d’Églantine was at the club when the discussion of Camille’s
Vieux Cordelier
resumed. Despite the success of his revolutionary calendar, Fabre was feeling very nervous because his involvement in a financial scandal concerning the colonial East India Company had recently become public. As Desmoulins again came under attack, Fabre got up to leave. Robespierre noticed and turned on him as well:

That lorgnette really irritated Robespierre. Fabre had an ostentatious habit of sitting in the Jacobins or the Convention and surveying the proceedings as though he were at the theater. Perhaps he just wanted to remind everyone that he had once been an actor denied civil status under the old regime. Robespierre—egocentrically—had another explanation. He suspected that Fabre was parodying his own habit of fixing the audience through eyeglasses that he moved up and down on his forehead while speaking at the tribune. If this was what Fabre was doing, he must have been as foolish as he was foppish, since the time when it was safe to poke fun at Robespierre had long since past. Stopped in his tracks skulking out of the club, Fabre heard cries of “Guillotine him!” and fled as the Jacobins voted to strike his name from their register.

On 23 Nivôse (12 January) the Committee of Public Safety ordered Fabre’s arrest on charges of corruption and forgery in connection with the East India Company. The original French East India Company (Compagnie des Indes) went bankrupt in 1769 under the old regime. But it was relaunched under royal patronage in 1785 and enjoyed a lucrative trade monopoly. Early in the Revolution this monopoly was canceled in the name of liberty, but the company continued to thrive regardless. It even managed to evade the Legislative Assembly’s attempt to impose stringent taxation on transferable stock after the fall of the monarchy in 1792. In fact, the Girondin ministers had connived in this evasion, believing as they did that prosperous foreign trade was essential to the modern republic they envisaged for France. With the proscription of the Girondin deputies in June 1793, however, the company had lost its protection, and the Convention charged it with profiteering, sealed its warehouses, and forced it into liquidation. Fabre was vocal in the debates and suggested that the company’s attempts to evade taxation had been inspired by foreign enemies, Prime Minister Pitt in particular. Meanwhile a group of speculators bought up falling shares in the company, anticipating that certain interested members of the Convention would force through a decree that would cause the share price to rise before the company finally went into liquidation. Fabre managed to get himself tangled up in this scam. And through Fabre, Danton was possibly implicated.

Fabre was thrown out of the Jacobins on 19 Nivôse (8 January), and two days later Camille was struck off too. Robespierre, having initially convinced his fellow Jacobins to opt for censure, now supported Camille’s expulsion:

There is no reason to think Robespierre spoke in bad faith. He thought the Terror was still needed to control the threat of counterrevolution. Against the violence of Hébert and the Commune, Camille and Danton had launched a cry for clemency. Robespierre thought treading the middle ground between these two extremes more prudent. He was irritable, tired, and unwell—Camille and Fabre (for different reasons) had annoyed him—but he was capable of setting personal feelings aside to concentrate on what he believed best for the Revolution. “Let us not trouble about this or that individual, but only about the country” is a formula as admirable as it is chilling. Robespierre had no intention of defending Camille simply because he was an old school friend, which does not mean he felt easy at the looming sacrifice of his former friends. Soon after the public quarrel with Camille, he collapsed, was ill intermittently for the rest of the month, and then between 22 Pluviôse (10 February) and 22 Ventôse (12 March) scarcely left the Duplay household. In this state of nervous strain he called Saint-Just back to Paris to help him. Saint-Just had gone on mission to the army, but Robespierre’s need took precedence.