Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (47 page)
Read Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution Online
Authors: Ruth Scurr
After the meeting, he went off on his own. Secluded in his room above the carpentry yard, he wrote for three days and nights preparing the text of a new speech. He consulted no one, not even Saint-Just. Perhaps he was offended by the younger man’s opening to compromise inside the Committee of Public Safety, or perhaps, however close they seemed to outsiders, Robespierre had kept something back from even this, the most significant of his personal and political alliances. On the morning of 8 Thermidor (26 July) he got dressed carefully, as he always did, drank coffee, and went out for the first time in days. It was a very short distance to the Convention. There he spoke for two hours—sincerely, passionately, truthfully—explaining what he had done in the Revolution and why. Who knows if before he opened his mouth the unwelcome thought crossed his mind that it was precisely this privilege—this opportunity to defend himself before the Convention—that he and Saint-Just had denied Danton. “I am going to unveil the abuse that is bringing about the ruin of the country, the abuse that your probity alone can repress.”
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This was his familiar vocabulary. His audience had heard him say such things before. This time was going to be different:
The French Revolution is the first to have been founded on the theory of the rights of humanity and the principles of justice. Other revolutions required nothing but ambition; ours imposes virtue. Ignorance and power absorbed the others in a new despotism; ours, emanating from justice, stands alone. The republic, led insensibly by the force of circumstance and by the struggle of the friends of liberty against continually reborn conspiracies, has slid, so to speak, through all the factions…. It has been persecuted constantly since its birth, as have the men of good faith who have fought for it. And so, to preserve the advantage of their position, the heads of the factions and their agents have been obliged to hide themselves behind the edifice of the republic…. All the deceivers have adopted, each more convincingly than the last, all the formulas and all the rallying words of patriotism.
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Here was the problem that had driven Robespierre mad: How can you tell a sincere man in politics? When the language of those who work for the public good is so easily adopted by those who work only for themselves, who can tell a true from a false patriot? And how? Robespierre, absolutely sincerely, did not see himself as the leader of just another faction. He saw himself as one of the persecuted, someone who had fought for the republic against “tyrants, men of blood, oppressors of patriotism.”
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After his death his enemies turned the very same words against him—he became the tyrant, the man of blood, responsible for the worst excesses, if not the entire system, of the Terror. He would not have been surprised. The slipperiness of language, that great gulf between what is said and what is true, was precisely what he complained of in this last of his astonishing speeches.
He went on to defend the actions of both the executive committees. Each had only
charged
people—it was the Revolutionary Tribunal, in the name of the Convention, that had actually
condemned
them. Quite why Robespierre thought there was a valid distinction to be made between charging and condemning people under the Law of 22 Prairial, is a difficult question to answer. He was personally implicated in passing the infamous law that transformed the Revolutionary Tribunal’s work into something still more brutally perfunctory. Was his statement pure hypocrisy? Complete self-delusion? Or did he, insanely, believe that a true patriot would have been acquitted by the Revolutionary Tribunal despite everything? By now he certainly knew that innocent people had died. The best he could come up with was to say: It was not my fault, not even the fault of the Committee I sat on, it was the fault of the Convention to which I now appeal. His strategy was not admirable, but he did think his claim was true. Moreover, he believed there was a case for continuing with the Terror: “The guilty complain of our rigor—the country, more justly, complains of our weakness.”
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Robespierre’s was a characteristically personal speech. He spoke of the ridiculous calumnies against him: who could believe that he wanted the Convention “to cut its own throat with its own hands” and so open the bloody path to his dictatorship? “The monsters who charge me with such insanity are the real cutthroats who meditate the sacrifice of all the friends of their country.” It hurt him deeply “to become an object of terror” to the people he loved and revered:
They [the real conspirators] call me a tyrant. If I were one, they would grovel at my feet. I would shower them with gold and they would be grateful. When the victims of their perfidy complain, they excuse themselves by saying, “Robespierre will have it so.” To the nobles they say, “He alone persecutes you.” To the patriots they say, “Robespierre protects the nobles.” To the clergy they say, “He’s the one persecuting you.” To the fanatics they say, “He’s the one who destroyed religion.” All the grievances that I have tried in vain to redress are still imputed to me: “He did all of it,” “He won’t prevent it,” “Your fate is in his hands alone.” Spies are hired and stationed in our public places to propagate these calumnies. You see them at the sittings of the Revolutionary Tribunal. You find them around the scaffold when the enemies of the people expiate their crimes—you hear them saying, “These are the unhappy victims of Robespierre.” Above all, they strive to prove that the Revolutionary Tribunal is a tribunal of blood, created and guided by me alone…. When a deputy on mission to a department is recalled, they tell him it is I who recalls him. Obliging persons have been found to attribute to me more good than I have done in order to impute to me mischief in which I had no hand. They kindly repeat to my colleagues everything that I happened to say, and, above all, everything that I did not say. If any measure of the government was likely to displease anyone, it was I who did all, exacted all, commanded all! It was never to be forgotten that I was the dictator.
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“You see, it is always me,” Robespierre had complained to his colleague Bertrand Barère in a bookshop earlier that year—always him whom people blamed. Why was he surprised? He identified himself with the Revolution. He had insisted over and over again, in the Estates General, the National Assembly, the Jacobins, the Commune, the Convention, and the Committee of Public Safety, that there simply was no distinction: he was the living embodiment of the eternal principles upon which the Revolution was founded. Of course people blamed him for its excesses and failures. In his own mind, Robespierre had slid (as he put it) with the Revolution past all the factions that had tried to possess it for their own corrupt purposes. He and the Revolution had remained pure, and together they had eluded all those grasping hands that sought to sully his beautiful dream of a just and virtuous democracy. Now, inevitably, he thought the time had almost come to move against the latest set of conspirators:
You will ask who are the authors of this system of calumny [against himself]. I answer, in the first place, the Duke of York, Mr. Pitt [the British prime minister], and all the tyrants who are in arms against us. But who next? [Long, dramatic pause.] Ah! I dare not name them at this moment and in this place—I cannot bring myself to a resolution to tear away altogether the veil that covers this profound mystery of iniquity.
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Everyone in the room had a good idea whom he meant: Fouché, Tallien, Vadier, and perhaps even Barère, among others. Not naming, but only alluding to them at this point in his speech was extremely imprudent, leaving the whole Convention to tremble with fear. Whatever did he hope to achieve by it? In his isolation, perhaps he had failed to recognize that the time for insinuation at the Convention was long since past, since none of the deputies felt safe from the tribunal. Terrified and divided, they spent their days whispering the names of the soon-to-be-proscribed along the benches. Many had stopped sleeping at home, scared of a knock on the door in the middle of the night and an arresting hand on their shoulder. Now Robespierre, last seen in the Convention on 24 Prairial, two days after the infamous law was passed, had reappeared, speaking with devastating passion, but stopping short of actually naming names. Saint-Just, hearing only at the last minute what Robespierre intended to do, probably rushed to the Convention to watch his friend bare his soul and expose both their lives. Sitting there listening, Saint-Just would have felt like putting his head in his hands in a gesture of black despair. Camille Desmoulins had once jeered at him for carrying his beautiful head about like a sacred host, but those days, too, were gone.
Robespierre even hinted that the list on Vilate’s desk was part of the plot against him: “Inoffensive, ordinary people are tormented and patriots are every day cast into dungeons. Have not even members of the Convention been designated as victims on secret and odious lists of proscription? Has not this imposture been propagated with such combined artifice and audacity that a great number of deputies have not ventured to sleep in their own residences?”
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Next he discussed the plot to make him look ridiculous by association with Catherine Théot. Then he gave heartfelt thanks to the Convention for supporting his new religion of the Supreme Being:
Immortal thanks to the Convention for that decree, which is in itself a revolution and has saved the country. You have struck with the same blow atheism and priestly despotism!…You have won over to the Revolution every pure and generous heart!…O day forever fortunate! When the French people rose altogether to offer to the Author of Nature the only homage worthy of him, what a touching assemblage was there of all the objects that can fascinate the eyes or attract the hearts of men! O honored old age! O generous and ardent youth! O pure and playful joy of childhood! O delicious tears of maternal fondness! O divine influences of innocence and beauty! O the majesty of a great people, happy in the contemplation and enjoyment of its own strength and glory and virtue!
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If anyone had been in any doubt that the Festival of the Supreme Being was the happiest day of Robespierre’s life, they were no longer. Remembering it, he was moved to pray aloud in the Convention: “Being of beings, was the day on which the universe came forth from your creative and almighty hands brighter or more acceptable to your eyes than that recent day when the first People of the world, bursting the bonds of crime and error, appeared before you worthy of your favor and of its own destiny?” The best of his friends must have wondered what on earth he thought he was doing. What had “delicious tears of maternal fondness” got to do with the desperate crisis he found himself in? French mothers had wept ever since the Revolution began. Marie Antoinette had appealed to them when the Revolutionary Tribunal accused her of child abuse; the mothers of those lynched in the street, the mothers of those killed in battle, the mothers of those massacred in prison, the mothers of those sent to the guillotine—who could find their tears delectable? For the last time, Robespierre publicly described his vision of the republic as he thought it should be. The reality—as he was the first to admit—was far removed. Finally he turned on his enemies:
No, Chaumette! No, Fouché! Death is not an eternal sleep. The French people will not submit to a desperate and desolating doctrine that covers nature itself with a funeral shroud, that deprives virtue of hope, and misfortune of consolation, and insults even death itself. No, we will efface from our tombs your sacrilegious epitaph and replace it with the consolatory truth DEATH IS THE BEGINNING OF IMMORTALITY.
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Interestingly, and in the face of plentiful hints to the contrary, Robespierre did not feel himself close to death at this point. As usual, he announced that he was more than willing to sacrifice his life for the Revolution. And, as Danton had done when close to the end, he claimed life had become a burden: “Why should I regret escaping from the eternal torture of seeing this horrible succession of traitors, who, concealing the turpitude of their souls under the veil of virtue, and even of friendship, will leave posterity in doubt which was the greater, their cowardice or their crimes?”
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His conclusion was a self-referential remark of superb insight: “I was made to oppose crime, not to control it.” He knew and understood himself as no biographer ever could. However, when the Convention discussed its response to his two-hour address, Robespierre was genuinely shocked that it turned against him. Instead of immediately lauding, printing, and circulating his speech, the Convention referred it to the Committees of Public Safety and General Security. He had serious enemies on both. He tried to protest: “What! My speech is to be sent to be examined by the very deputies I accuse!” And so, in one spontaneous sentence, he suddenly revealed what he had tried to bury so carefully in the text of his long, bizarre oration. He had returned to the Convention to swing it against its own committees. There was no further need for him to name the conspirators—their identities were clear to everyone listening. Pierre Joseph Cambon, head of the finance commission and one of the few “monsters” who were eventually mentioned by name in Robespierre’s speech, was the first to denounce him. He began by defending himself and other members of the finance commission against Robespierre’s implicit charges of corruption and conspiracy, but then he went a step further and announced: “It is time to tell the whole truth: one man is paralyzing the National Convention; that man is the one who has just made a speech; it is Robespierre.” Soon afterward Barère intervened to distract everyone with a buoyant speech about recent military victories and the republic’s bright future. Barère’s purposes were unclear—and his feelings about Robespierre at best ambivalent—but he succeeded in deflecting the immediate crisis, and there was no call for Robespierre’s arrest.
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