Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (5 page)

The statutes were normative, not descriptive, and Robespierre’s school doubtless had its fair share of sadistic masters ready to vent their frustrations on vulnerable children. But at least some of the teachers were open to progressive thinking and keen to encourage it in their pupils. Before the Revolution, the abbé Proyart wrote in defense of this aspect of Louis-le-Grand and the nine other colleges that had come under the direction of the University of Paris:

Serenely unaware of the revolution to come, Proyart even praised the sense of equality that prevailed at Louis-le-Grand, which he fondly termed a “little republic.” No wonder he became so bitter. Looking back in 1800, Proyart insisted that Louis XVI had been effectively dethroned, before even becoming king, by a godless and subversive generation nurtured in the Parisian colleges. He wrote a retrospective diatribe against the expulsion of the Jesuits in which the revolutionary careers of Robespierre, the prefect Audrein who supposedly surprised him with the forbidden book and turned a blind eye, and other famous ex-pupils are presented in apocalyptic terms. Imagining himself back in 1762, he wrote:

IN 1793, AS the Revolution slid into the Terror and the republican constitution of France was suspended, Robespierre looked back on his schooling. He claimed that the colleges directed by the University of Paris had been “nurseries of republicanism, which formed the mind of the Nation and made it worthy of liberty.” This was overstating the case, as he of all people must have been aware: on the brink of the Terror the mind of France was incoherent with factional strife, far from ready for the particular brand of liberty that Robespierre espoused. But his friend and fellow pupil Camille Desmoulins said similar things about their shared experience at Louis-le-Grand, citing masters who taught them to hate their own government and love republican liberty.

One master in particular may have played such a part—the abbé Hérivaux, nicknamed the Roman, whose subject was rhetoric. Well respected and holding a responsible position at the college, Hérivaux apparently saw no glaring incompatibility between his ardent admiration for the heroes of ancient Rome and the confident teaching or practice of Catholicism. Robespierre spent two years in his class, possibly because his performance in the first year was mediocre and he longed to assuage his injured pride and redeem his reputation. With characteristic determination and application, he did manage to win a prize in the second year. But in the meantime his amour propre had been further inflamed by Hérivaux’s repeated and only partly playful assertions that there was something distinctively Roman in Robespierre’s character and countenance. Robespierre was clearly flattered by Hérivaux, glad of the attention from an approving teacher, and perhaps further reinforced in his fondness for classical literature.

One day in 1775, Louis-le-Grand all but exploded with excitement: Louis XVI had decided to pay a state visit to the school on the way back from his coronation at Reims. The news quickly spread through the corridors, classrooms, and dormitories—everyone talked of it. Louis XVI was just four years older than Robespierre, twenty-one at the time of his accession. He set out with youthful optimism to win acclaim and affection from his subjects. As he put it, “I wish to be loved.” France, unfortunately, was not in a particularly loving condition. Public spending was spiraling out of control. Attempts to reform and liberalize the grain trade during the first year of his reign led to panic buying, rioting, a dramatic rise in the price of bread, and unrest that ended with a spate of public executions. In the circumstances, the new king had been advised to scale down and modernize the traditional coronation ceremony that was planned for June 1775—perhaps even move it to Paris, where it might raise more revenue from public participation.

There were limits, however, to Louis XVI’s willingness to please public opinion and the coronation was duly enacted in full accordance with ancient custom in the cathedral at Reims, where French kings had been anointed and crowned for a thousand years. He had, in fact, already ruled for ten months by the time of his coronation, and many of his subjects were already seriously querulous. The ceremony was supposed to disguise such rifts in a show of unity and religious respect for the absolute monarch of France, God’s representative on earth, in whom sovereign power resided. Instead it inadvertently highlighted the deepest source of the nation’s discontent. French society was divided into three orders: the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate (or commons). Everyone who was not a member of either the clergy or the nobility was a member of the third estate, which included professional families like Robespierre’s, as well as artisans, manual laborers, and peasants. There were approximately 130,000 members of the clergy, 110,000 members of the nobility, and 24,750,000 members of the third estate. The clergy and the nobility each owned about a fifth of the nation’s land but paid no taxes, while the third estate shared the rest of the land and carried the entire tax burden. This unjust arrangement was deeply resented—it meant privileges for the minority and poverty for the majority of French people. At the king’s coronation the third estate was further insulted by being barred entry to the cathedral. Afterward Louis XVI was not even presented to them in his full regalia for fear they might get ideas above their station. Among the disappointed crowd outside the cathedral was the young George Jacques Danton from Arcis-sur-Aube, playing truant from his school in Troyes. He had come all the way to the cathedral on foot, hoping to see for himself “how they made a king.” But rather than greet the crowd, the new king chose to participate in a series of smaller, more controlled encounters with his public. He laid a commemorative stone at the University of Reims before leaving the city, and he stopped on his way back to Versailles at Louis-le-Grand.

Out of five hundred pupils in the school, Robespierre was chosen to deliver a ceremonial speech of welcome to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He was the master of rhetoric’s favorite prize-winning student, so hardly a contentious or unlikely choice. But the abbé Proyart read more into it, suspecting that in choosing Robespierre for such a prominent encounter with the new king, Hérivaux (the Roman) hoped to inspire the heart and soul of a future assassin like Brutus or a conspirator like Catiline. On the day of the visit, Robespierre, much rehearsed and very nervous, knelt outside Louis-le-Grand at the head of the assembled body of the University of Paris, which was also kneeling and waiting for the royal party to arrive. It was June, but it was raining. Possibly it was for this reason that the royal couple remained inside their coach, acknowledged the speech of welcome with polite smiles, and promptly drove on toward the Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Robespierre, along with everyone else, had probably been waiting in the street for many hours. The new or borrowed clothes he was wearing would have been soaked through. It’s plausible to assume he felt a sense of anticlimax mingled with relief that his speech was over, or perhaps a twinge of disappointment that the king had not spoken directly to him.

While he was away at school, Robespierre’s younger sister Henriette died. In her memoirs, Charlotte remarks that their childhood was awash with tears, almost every year marred by the death of someone close and dear: “This fatal destiny influenced Maximilien’s character more than one would think. It left him sad and melancholy.” He threw himself into his work, redoubled his efforts to succeed, and, according to Charlotte, “always carried off first prize,” which is certainly not true. She claims that despite his sadness and his devotion to his studies, her brother was affable and popular with both his teachers and peers: “his disposition was so even and sweet that he never had a single fight with his fellow pupils; he appointed himself the protector of small boys against older ones, intervening on their behalf and even fighting in their defense when his eloquence did not prevail.” Charlotte was so biased in her brother’s favor she did not notice the contradiction here—one minute he never quarreled, the next he was brawling to defend the vulnerable in the courtyards of Louis-le-Grand. He was, however, protective of younger boys: Camille Desmoulins, two years his junior, was one of the students who came under his wing. This clever, attractive boy from Guise in Picardy, whose lieutenant-colonel father saved hard to buy him a superior education, became Robespierre’s closest companion. Their friendship deepened dramatically during the Revolution—until it went disastrously wrong.
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Another schoolmate with a revolutionary future was Louis Marie Stanislaus Fréron, whose memories of Robespierre were distinctly unfavorable:

This retrospective account is hostile and sour, but it echoes many of the characteristics attributed to Robespierre by his friends and sister. He was melancholy, serious, reserved, and stubborn: a loner, a dreamer, someone who never forgot an offense or participated in games. Charlotte insisted that she often saw him laugh until he cried, but the haunting judgment that “there was nothing young about him” could be drawn as easily from her own account of Robespierre’s childhood as from Fréron’s. Friends and enemies see different things in a person, and when they see the same things they interpret them differently. For Charlotte and Desmoulins there was nothing sinister in Robespierre’s reserve. For the abbé Proyart and Fréron there was nothing admirable in his stubbornness.

Whatever the character he exhibited at school, not even Robespierre’s worst enemy could doubt his academic success. When he left Louis-le-Grand with his law degree at twenty-three, he was awarded a special prize of six hundred livres (a value in excess of a whole year’s scholarship). The college’s administrative board gave him this prize in recognition of his outstanding abilities—twelve years of good conduct and sustained academic achievement. Even more flattering was the rare concession allowing Robespierre to transfer his scholarship to his younger brother, Augustin. The abbé Proyart, looking back after the Revolution, insists that those who gave Robespierre such honors did not really know him, had no idea how his misshapen character would one day bring a blood-drenched France to her knees. Yet at the time, the board’s decision was unanimous. Everyone believed that the young lawyer going home to Arras, with enough capital to set himself up in practice and to offer his sister a home of her own at last, was a credit to the charitable institution that had formed him.

Robespierre moved back to Arras in 1781, the same year his sister Charlotte finished her schooling at a charitable institution for impoverished girls in Tournai, the religious center of medieval Flanders, sixty miles northeast of Arras.
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Throughout most of their childhood the two had seen each other only in the summer holidays, but even so the bond between them was very strong. It was strengthened further by the changes they found in Arras. Together they grieved for their sister Henriette and missed Augustin, who had taken up his brother’s scholarship at Louis-le-Grand. They grieved, too, for their maternal grandparents, who had both died recently, and for the family brewery in the rue Ronville, which had been sold. The sale of the Carraut brewery resulted in a legacy, but before it could be made available to the three surviving orphaned grandchildren—Maximilien, Charlotte, and Augustin—who were greatly in need of it, their aunt and uncle on their father’s side, with whom Robespierre had been planning to live, laid claim to a share. The de Robespierres were still trying to recover the debts accrued by the children’s father, whose irresponsibility and misfortune had left them so close to destitution.

This painful reminder of his father’s shame and his own vulnerability at a point when he was deep in mourning must have stung Robespierre for he refused to support his aunt and uncle in their claim and hurried to rent a house of his own in the rue du Saumon, just around the corner from the old brewery that had been his childhood home. But the rent here proved too high for a newly qualified lawyer, so a year later Robespierre and Charlotte moved into rooms opposite the abbey of Saint-Vaast, in the home of the aunt and uncle whose tactlessness had caused such offense. No one can tell if this was because the quarrel had healed or if Robespierre, unable to make ends meet despite his legacy, handsome school prize, and growing legal practice, moved there with resentment and humiliation in his heart. It was another five years before he settled in the rented house in the rue des Rapporteurs that is known today as the Maison Robespierre.

His daily routine as Charlotte remembered it was rigid and austere. Rising early, he worked at home until one of the town’s many hairdressers arrived at eight. He had bread and milk for breakfast and then worked before dressing and leaving for the courts by ten. He dined lightly in the afternoon, watering down his wine, consuming lots of coffee (which he could not do without), and displaying a particular fondness for fruit, especially oranges. Some infer from this that he was dyspeptic or frequently constipated, but his sister, unsurprisingly, offers no comment. He took a walk before resuming his work and ate again late in the evening. He often seemed absentminded or preoccupied. Charlotte recalls his indifference to food: “Many times I asked him what he would like to eat at dinner, and he would reply that he had no idea.” Not noticing a missing bowl, he once served himself some soup straight onto the tablecloth. Uninterested in games as he had been in childhood, he often sat in the corner during the after-supper cards or conversation—thinking, planning, or perhaps just dreaming. It has become commonplace to claim that, without the Revolution, Robespierre would have continued on this sensible path, living out his natural life as an increasingly respected provincial lawyer. Eventually he might have developed a stomach ulcer, bowel cancer, a respiratory illness spread by the river Crinchon, or some other contagious disease. After a couple of ineffective trips to local doctors and pharmacists (one of them still, in the mid-eighteenth century, stocked “common dragon blood,” oil of scorpion, toad powder, and human brains), he would have disappeared into obscurity forever after receiving the last rites of the Catholic Church.
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But the rigidity of Robespierre’s daily routine, far from restricting his prospects, left him free to take advantage of any opportunity for self-betterment or advancement that came his way, and he stuck to it.

During Robespierre’s short life he lived in only two places, Arras and Paris. He was briefly in Versailles at the start of the Revolution, but otherwise there were remarkably few changes of scenery. This partially explains the high-spirited excitement with which he described a short trip to visit friends or relatives in Carvins in a letter of June 1783:

The letter continues in hyperbolic mode. Robespierre leans out to raise his hat and bestow a gracious smile on some watchmen who have been on duty all night or else are still half asleep on the early shift. They respond with surly indifference. He remarks, “I have always had an infinite self-love; that mark of contempt cut me to the quick; and for the rest of the day my temper was unbearable.” He can, it seems, laugh at himself. At Sens, while his traveling companions pause for breakfast, he avoids visiting the tourist sites and climbs a hill to survey the plains over which the Prince of Condé, still in his early twenties, led France to victory against the Spaniards in 1643. Then he rouses a porter with keys to the Hôtel de Ville. Of all the things to see in Sens—the famous cathedral where Saint Thomas à Becket spent time in exile, the Palais Synodal, with its rose windows and battlements—the Hôtel de Ville was a curious choice. The building, Robespierre notes, is neither remarkable nor grand, but he is fascinated to see where the great T——(he does not give the name), who combined the roles of judge and medical doctor, administered justice and afterward prescribed medical treatment for the criminals:

The identity of “the great T——” is unclear, but the reason Robespierre was so impressed by him is explicit in the letter: “This great man enjoyed, by virtue of his double office, the most extensive power that a man ever exercised over his compatriots.” Achilles, Alexander, Caesar were conquering heros of a kind, but the sort of power Robespierre admired was more sophisticated and philanthropic. He was excited by the idea of intervening in the lives of criminals and sick people—making a difference for the better.

Arriving at last at Carvins, Robespierre is immensely flattered by the interest and enthusiasm with which his party is greeted:

Robespierre is certainly sending himself up, but at the same time his florid rhetoric is an evident source of self-regarding delight. The letter also captures his readiness to suspect others of disrespecting him. The surly watchmen are a minor example, and even Robespierre could see the joke. Yet the theme of misunderstood, unrecognized, or slighted greatness haunts his early writings just as it recurs over and over again in later speeches, pamphlets, and letters. As he says in one of his poems:

Law was the traditional profession of the de Robespierre family and in Arras there were still contacts and patrons to help Robespierre at the beginning of his career, despite the disrepute into which his father had fallen. While at school he had written to the head of the Paris bar for advice: “I want to be a lawyer. Of all the qualities needed for distinguishing oneself in that profession, I at least possess keen ambition and an unqualified desire for success.”
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According to Charlotte, though, Robespierre’s attraction to the law was motivated by more than familial tradition, pragmatism, or ambition: he had a personal predilection for what he believed to be the most sublime profession in the world, when practiced impartially and humanely. She remembers him saying:

Even if it is true that Robespierre made such declarations in the privacy of his home, in front of the mirror, or in the hearing of his sister, her account was composed long after the Revolution. At the time, Robespierre’s motives for choosing the law were more likely a mixture of high-minded principle and straightforward personal ambition for ordinary things like status, respect, income, and independence. It is possible, too, that he wanted to prove to his de Robespierre relatives that he could be every bit as impressive as his grandfather had been, and considerably more so than his father ever was.

The judicial system, like so much else in old regime France, was extremely intricate and confusing. Arras had nine separate courts and Robespierre’s work generally took him to three of them: the Conseil d’Artois (Council of Artois), the
Echevinage
(Magistrate’s Court), and the
Salle Episcopale
(Bishop’s Court). The courts met in the morning—after Mass—in expansive halls connected by dark passages and arcades: here the counts of Flanders had resided before Artois became part of France; now the walls were hung with portraits of distinguished local nobles and public officials. Illicit lovers, duelists, beggars, and criminals took refuge in the shadows, just feet away from the rooms in which justice was done. The arcades were a particularly dangerous place to be at night and the rubbish strewn about festered on hot summer days. Robespierre, adequately patronized and intent on advancement, quickly established himself in his chosen profession, losing relatively few cases. His sister claims people often asked her to explain the secret of his success. He had some natural talents: he was fluent and logical, but according to Charlotte it was his choice of cases that contributed most of all to his growing reputation. “He took on only just cases, never unjust, and he almost always won them.” He preferred to represent the poor. When opposing parties approached him, he chose to represent the poorest of them, even if it meant he might never be paid. “The supporter of the oppressed and the avenger of the innocent,” Charlotte called him, making a direct connection between the boy who protected the vulnerable at school and the young lawyer.
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One of Robespierre’s friends in Arras was a lawyer, twenty years older, nicknamed “Barometer” Buissart on account of his keen interest in experimental science. Robespierre corresponded with Antoine Buissart and his wife throughout his political career—a fact overlooked by his detractors, who insist he was incapable of lasting friendship and eager to renounce his provincial provenance. Buissart helped to bring Robespierre his first taste of fame beyond the city walls by involving him in the legal defense of one M. de Vissery de Bois-Valé. M. de Vissery was a lawyer, painter, botanist, amateur scientist, and inventor: among the many forgotten things he invented was a technique for preserving pure water for over a year. In 1780 he designed and positioned a lightning conductor on the roof of his house at Saint-Omer. This consisted of a pointed piece of a gilded sword screwed onto a sixteen-foot iron bar, decorated with a weathercock at the join, and connected to a metal pipe running the length of the neighboring house. The neighbor complained and a rumor spread that the conductor threatened the lives of all in its vicinity. One woman started a petition to have it removed, provoking an early example of Robespierre’s sarcasm: “Many refused the glory of associating themselves with this initiative,” he commented dryly. There were, in fact, only six or seven signatories. G. H. Lewes, one of Robespierre’s English biographers, joined him in sneering at “these obese and stupid citizens of Arras.”
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It is more charitable, though, to assume that the ordinary, provincial neighbors simply failed to understand the purpose of the eye-catching novelty on M. de Vissery’s roof. The fact that the decorative weathercock featured figurative bolts of lightning cannot have reassured those of nervous dispositions.
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When the Magistrate’s Court decreed that the conductor must come down, M. de Vissery appealed to the higher Council of Artois, engaging Robespierre as his advocate on Buissart’s advice. Barometer Buissart himself wrote a detailed paper on the subject after seeking guidance from experts in the field, among them the distinguished philosophe the Marquis de Condorcet, then secretary to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and the future revolutionary journalist Dr. Jean-Paul Marat, a candidate for the directorship of the new Academy of Science in Madrid, known at the time for his experiments with optics and electricity. Robespierre drew heavily on Buissart’s carefully researched paper in his pleadings of 1783—science, after all, had not been his subject at school. In court, however, he gave the performance of his early career, evoking the persecution of Galileo, Harvey, and Descartes and calling on the judges to side with the forces of progress and enlightenment. Scathingly he belittled those who thought lightning conductors disturbed the peace and threatened public safety; appealing to national pride, he insisted that such instruments were already commonplace in England, and France must not lag behind. French scientists had contributed to the discovery of electricity—M. Dalibard, for example, had proved Benjamin Franklin’s theory that lightning and electricity are one and the same during an experiment at Marly-la-Ville in 1752. Ignorance must not deprive the nation of its right to benefit from scientific advances.