Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (6 page)

Robespierre won the case and his success was reported in the Parisian newspaper
Mercure de France
. M. de Vissery was pleased, despite renewed threats of prosecution or vandalism by his still disquieted neighbors, and he offered to finance the publication of the pleadings to make them available for wider circulation. Robespierre gratefully accepted the offer and sent a personal copy to Franklin, who was in Paris at the time, addressing him as “one whose least merit is to be the most distinguished scientist in the world.” Franklin’s reply, if there was one, is lost.

While the lightning conductor case shows Robespierre as an ambitious lawyer, his defense of Marie Sommerville in 1786 shows him championing the poor and oppressed. Marie Sommerville was an Englishwoman, the young widow of Colonel George Mercer, lieutenant governor of South Carolina. She had lived in Saint-Omer as a child, returned many times during her marriage, and moved back permanently after her husband’s death. Here she fell into serious debt. Unfortunately for her, the adoptive town, of which she had always been so fond, was one of a small number in the province of Artois where it was legal both to seize a debtor’s belongings and imprison him or her without a warrant, even when the debtor in question was a foreigner. Sommerville was duly taken into custody on May 24, 1786. She complained that she had been humiliatingly arrested in her own home, escorted roughly to prison, followed by a crowd of curious onlookers, and refused medication during her few days of incarceration. Robespierre argued her case flamboyantly, claiming that women should be exempt from Saint-Omer’s draconian debtors law:

Robespierre’s opponents were skeptical of his gallantry. Truth and justice, they complained, would not have required such decorative rhetoric. Allegedly, Sommerville had been spotted leaving prison happy and well in the company of a doctor, and the only change in her condition was that she had been forced to settle some of her debts. In the event, there was no ruling on the case because the special privilege of arresting debtors in Saint-Omer was revoked in August that year. Perhaps this was one of the many occasions on which Robespierre, according to his sister, received no payment. Instead there was the satisfaction of seeing the law, to which he had so eloquently objected on his client’s behalf, abolished. Even before the Revolution there were many such attempts to rationalize the legal system of the old regime, and Robespierre was fast forging a distinguished, if controversial, career through his own efforts in this direction. Already he tended to be long-winded and markedly sentimental. But he also had a ready sneer and could be cuttingly condescending—skills required by his profession. He was an adversarial advocate, so even though he invoked the principles of eternal truth and justice, it was not his job to be impartial.

Very soon after he began practicing law in Arras, Robespierre was chosen as one of five judges in the Bishop’s Court. In the course of his routine work for this court, Robespierre was required to sentence a murderer to death. The death was to be a hanging, possibly preceded by a protracted breaking on the wheel, nothing like the comparative speed and merciful efficiency that the guillotine would bring. Before the Revolution, decapitation was considered a privilege, reserved for noble criminals who died as they had lived, carefully segregated from commoners. Robespierre went home that evening to Charlotte in a terrible state with “despair in his heart.”
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He did not eat for two days and paced the house muttering over and over again, “I know he is guilty, that he is a villain, but even so, to cause a man to die!” Intent on proving that Robespierre was anything but the bloodthirsty charlatan vilified by his detractors, Charlotte claims that he was so disturbed by this case that he resigned his post immediately—a claim not borne out by the facts, since he still held the position in 1788.

Charlotte perhaps exaggerates her brother’s qualms about capital punishment, yet there is no reason to believe that she invented them. Robespierre prided himself on progressive and enlightened views, he would have been familiar with the strong arguments against the death sentence made by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Cesare Beccaria, and he was squeamish by nature. In an essay published in August 1784, he argued for extending the privilege of decapitation—“a punishment to which we have come to attach a sort of éclat”—to commoners.
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Here he anticipated the revolutionary demand for the right to efficient, dignified, and equal capital punishment. “Crimes of the same kind will be punished by the same kind of punishment,” Dr. Guillotin would assert in 1789, “whatever the rank and status of the guilty man may be.”
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In the meantime a reluctant Robespierre went ahead and condemned the murderer to a hideous end—his signature is on the death warrant.

As much as this incident discloses Robespierre’s attitude toward capital punishment, it also reveals his habitual response to nervous strain. Throughout the Revolution he suffered periods of physical and mental collapse, usually precipitated by the need to make an important decision. Sometimes these seem strategic; his enemies were (and remain) convinced that feigning illness was one of the many manipulative techniques he used to get his own way. But even in Arras he suffered at least one episode of psychosomatic illness. In this early example, as in many later ones, Robespierre struggled to reconcile his public actions with his personal principles and convictions. When this proved impossible, he collapsed, stopped eating, and brooded obsessively. The demands of public responsibility and power filled him with anxiety. He was, in important respects, constitutionally and temperamentally ill suited to assume either—but nevertheless intent on pursuing them both.

ANTOINE BUISSART’S PATRONAGE did not stop with bringing Robespierre legal cases; he also helped him win election to the Academy of Arras, a gathering of the city’s “best brains,” who met regularly to present and discuss academic papers. Established in 1773 on the foundations of a local literary society, the academy thrived for a decade before Robespierre was invited to join. His inaugural speech in 1784 was devoted to attacking the tradition of bad blood whereby a criminal’s family was shamed and disgraced by association with his or her crime. He wrote up his speech afterward and entered it in a prize competition organized by the Academy of Metz. Undoubtedly, the subject of bad blood evoked the circumstances of Robespierre’s childhood and the injured pride that dogged him throughout his life. Professionally, too, he was drawn to ponder the individuation of guilt and the principles and processes through which people apportion blame. Shame by association, he insisted, was simply an extension of the natural tendency to regard all individuals as intimately connected to their family, friends, and fellow citizens, but its implications varied depending on the form of government. It was characteristic of democratic government to treat people as individuals, to liberate them from shame by association, or at least provide them with opportunities to regain personal dignity through independent acts of merit, heroism, and public service. The key to republican or democratic government was patriotic virtue, Robespierre argued: the triumph of the general good over private interests or personal relationships. “A man of high principle will be ready to sacrifice to the State his wealth, his life, his very nature—everything, indeed, except his honor.”
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In his essay, Robespierre drew directly on the political theory of the Baron de Montesquieu, who, in his
De l’esprit des loix
(
The Spirit of the Laws
, published in 1748) argued that honor was the mainspring of a well-ordered monarchy, virtue the mainspring of republican government, and fear the mainspring of despotism. Honor and its opposite—shame—made sense under a monarchical form of government where individuals were closely connected to one another through personal and familial loyalties. But what place was there for honor in a democratic republic of patriotic individuals ready to sacrifice their personal relationships to the public good of the state? This question would return to trouble Robespierre during the Revolution as he tried to put theory into practice, but in this early essay he answered it abstractly, introducing a curious distinction between “philosophical honor” and “political honor.” Philosophical honor, as he defined it, was none other than a pure soul’s exquisite sense of its own dignity—an entirely private sentiment based on reason and duty, existing in isolation, far from the vulgar gaze of mankind—a matter of purely personal conscience. It was, no doubt, Robespierre’s own “philosophical honor” that caused him to suffer so much when passing the death sentence on a murderer. In contrast, “political honor,” of the kind Montesquieu identified in monarchies, was the desire for social distinction, grandeur, and esteem—more to do with vanity than with virtue at an individual level, even if it was useful in producing unintended social benefits. Here Robespierre showed off his learning, echoing Francis Bacon: “No nobles, no monarchy: no monarchy, no nobles.”
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And he made the link between the temptation to respect someone merely because he came from a grand or noble family and the equally irrational or unjust tendency to despise the children of a condemned man.

As a young lawyer, Robespierre was far from calling for a new social and political system based on philosophical honor. His essay did suggest that there were serious limitations to monarchies founded on political honor, but if he harbored ideas about the kind of system that might one day replace the monarchy in France, he kept them to himself. Like almost everyone else, he argued for incremental reform and insisted that “there is no need for us to change the whole system of our legislation; it is dangerous to look for the remedy for a specific ill in a general revolution.”
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What is more distinctive, however, in this early essay, is the close connection Robespierre envisaged between politics and morality. He regretted politicians’ habitual contempt for moral precepts and instead insisted that:

The Academy of Metz’s judges had some reservations about Robespierre’s essay, but while they could not bring themselves to award him first prize, they decided to give him a second, equal in monetary value though not in glory. Robespierre spent the prize money (four hundred livres, approximately 230 dollars today) getting his essay printed.
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In retrospect, it is ironic that it was Pierre-Louis Rœderer, an enterprising member of Metz’s supreme court, who donated funds for the prize awarded to Robespierre. Later, looking back on the Revolution, Rœderer would argue that the French, with their love of social distinctions, were “more antipathetic than any other people to democracy.”
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Robespierre, in contrast, would stake his career and his life on the opposite view.

In his essay, Robespierre ranked the personal purity of philosophical honor far above the social benefits of political honor. But was he deceiving himself? From an early age, social distinction meant a great deal to him. Competitive, determined, ambitious as he was, how else could he hope to measure his own success if not in relation to that of his peers? An incident at the Academy of Arras gave a hint of his competitive streak. After the death of the academy’s permanent secretary, Alexandre Harduin, in 1785, elections were held to select a replacement. Of the twelve academicians present, ten voted for a distinguished local landowning noble, Dubois de Fosseux, one for Robespierre, and one for another candidate. On the same occasion, three other officials were elected, Barometer Buissart among them, but once more, Robespierre was passed over with only one vote. Perhaps he voted for himself.

Things became tense with the creation of an additional three chairs soon after Dubois de Fosseux assumed his post. Someone proposed Le Gay, a talented young lawyer already winning a reputation as an accomplished poet. At twenty Le Gay had founded his own literary society in Arras, the Rosati; at twenty-four he was a practicing lawyer in the Council of Artois, and it seems that he played some small role on the opposite side from Robespierre in the famous lightning conductor case.
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When Le Gay’s name was put forward, Robespierre and Buissart were strongly opposed. The evening before the vote was to take place Dubois de Fosseux received a visit from Robespierre to discuss the matter in private. The next day, when the vote went ahead, the two friends absented themselves from the proceedings. After Le Gay was elected, Buissart threatened to resign his chair. However, Dubois de Fosseux, proving himself a felicitous choice as permanent secretary, refused to be discouraged by such squabbles and diplomatically restored peace to the academy. Why were Robespierre and Buissart so adamantly against Le Gay? Robespierre’s motive may have been simple loyalty to his chief friend and supporter in Arras. Or it might have been more personal rivalry or irritation over Le Gay’s part in the lightning conductor case. But whatever it was, he showed no reluctance to engage in factional strife. His visit to Dubois de Fosseux the evening before the academy’s vote foreshadows many such personal visits during the Revolution: “If Monsieur Robespierre comes to call, tell him I’m not at home!” said the great political theorist the abbé Sieyès in his dotage, years after Robespierre was dead, still haunted by the fear of a knock on the door.