Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (8 page)

Rosati is an anagram for Artois, and with its stylized rituals the society may have been linked to one of the local Freemason lodges—both Robespierre and Le Gay were members of the Hesdin Lodge, and Robespierre’s grandfather had been a prominent founder of Freemasonry in Arras.
³⁹
However, the evidence suggests that whatever else might have been going on (and it is notoriously difficult to tell, where Freemasonry is concerned), Robespierre’s participation in the Rosati was largely motivated by personal friendship and literary interest. Elaborate initiation rites involved the postulant’s waiting in a private bower to be presented with a rose, inhaling the fragrance three times, pinning the flower to his jacket, and downing a glass of wine flavored with rose petals before receiving welcoming embraces and hearing speeches by the other members. The Rosati adopted cross-gendered pseudonyms: one lawyer was known as “Sylvie”—the shy beauty, perhaps, addressed in Robespierre’s poem, which also evoked “the noble and brilliant rose,” queen of flowers. His long acceptance speech to the society,
Eloge de la Rose
, concludes:

The manuscript of this affected piece of mumbo-jumbo is full of careful crossings-out and rewordings. Robespierre evidently cared about impressing his fellow society members. He was hardly a natural sybarite and the image of him lying on a river bank composing love poems and joining in drinking games is difficult to reconcile with the nervous austerity that characterized him from early youth to the end of his life. But at this stage he was open to every opportunity for bettering himself that came along. If friends he had made through the Academy of Arras invited him to join their Rosati Society, he joined it. If this meant writing silly poems, he wrote them. Maybe he even enjoyed it; Rosati meetings were not the only occasions on which he participated enthusiastically in sentimental rituals—during the Revolution he even invented several of his own.

EARLY IN 1789 Robespierre had another opportunity to align himself with the forces of progress. The soldier M. Dupond was a victim of familial injustice. Having deserted the French army and served in those of Sweden and Denmark for over twenty years, he returned home to Artois to claim his share of a wealthy uncle’s legacy. His relatives flatly refused to recognize his claim, and when it became clear that the outraged Dupond could not be silenced, they obtained a lettre de cachet against him. Once issued, this notorious document allowed imprisonment without trial for an indefinite period of anyone deemed a nuisance: insistent creditors, cuckolded husbands, errant children, and so forth. It was a form of privilege very easy for noblemen to obtain and, as such, one of the most hated abuses in old regime France—the means by which so many innocents found themselves locked up in prisons like the Bastille. When Dickens’s Dr. Manette is “recalled to life” at the beginning of
A Tale of Two Cities
, he has been buried inside the Bastille for almost eighteen years by a lettre de cachet, “a privilege that…the boldest people are afraid to speak of in a whisper.”
⁴¹

After Dupond was at last released from prison, he engaged Robespierre to press his original claim on the family money. The ambitious young lawyer seized this opportunity for a broadly focused attack on the lettres de cachet and the corrupt system that issued them. In pleading Dupond’s case, Robespierre called upon Louis XVI to complete the work of his illustrious predecessors and move France forward to reasonable, virtuous reform:

Robespierre wrote this plea in February, just months before the outbreak of the Revolution. In 1789 he was far from alone in expecting, or at least hoping, that the king would play a major part in bringing about the changes that were so urgently needed in France. What isolated him from his contemporaries was the degree to which, over the following five years—extraordinary years of revolt, turmoil, hunger, war, and execution—he strove to make the project he had outlined for Louis XVI his own.

(1788–1789)

Between 8 May and 8 August 1788, France changed forever. A chasm opened at the center of power—a void from which the unimaginable might arise, even a revolution to shake the world. On 8 May the monarchy, in a desperate effort to reaffirm its authority after years of mounting fiscal and administrative disarray, sent the Parlement of Paris a set of edicts outlining comprehensive reforms to the structure of the state. These edicts sought to remodel and diminish the powers of the parlements, the thirteen supreme courts of law spread throughout the kingdom. The Conseil d’Artois in Arras, the grandest of the courts in which Robespierre worked, was a distinguished judicial body, exercising some of the same functions as the parlements, but unlike them it did not have supreme jurisdiction.

Under the old regime, the parlements had legal, policing, and political responsibilities. They were composed mainly, though not exclusively, of nobles, who had often used personal wealth to buy themselves public office. The parlements were highly privileged, conservative in disposition, self-interested, and profligate. To their critics, they seemed to go out of their way to defend brutal and inefficient criminal laws and oppressive feudal rights, while responding with reactionary suspicion to innovation in the arts and sciences. Notoriously, the Parlement of Paris had banned inoculation against smallpox within its area of jurisdiction—a third of all France. The parlements were also a thorn in the side of the monarchy because they had the power to deflect or impede royal edicts by simply refusing to register them as laws. Often they produced inflammatory
remonstrances
, and over the course of the eighteenth century they became the focal point for opposition to the monarchy. When Louis XVI inherited the crown in 1775, he found that his predecessor had resorted to exiling the troublesome parlements. The new king immediately recalled them, declaring, “It may be considered politically unwise, but it seems to me that it is the general will.”

Louis XVI’s words proved prescient, because as the century drew to its close, conflict between his government and the parlements (and the doctrines that lent them legitimacy, the
thèse royale
and
thèse nobiliaire)
reached a dangerous deadlock. Successive royal governments had attempted to institute programs of desperately needed fiscal and administrative reform, only to founder, sooner or later, on resistance from the parlements. The Parlement of Bordeaux, for example, refused in May 1788 to register edicts introducing freer trade in grain until they were clarified.
¹
But while the parlements could obstruct royal edicts, they had no power to initiate change for the better in France. This was the crux of the problem: even well-intentioned and progressive royal edicts were treated with suspicion by the parlements, determined as they were to retain and exercise their right to oppose the monarch. Since France was an absolute monarchy, rights of opposition were few and far between. The parlements attracted popular interest and support for standing up to Louis XVI’s governments, even when the reforms they obstructed were sensible. In the meantime, the country teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, with a public debt of well over four billion livres.
²

This immense public debt was incurred by a system of taxation that exempted members of the two privileged orders—the clergy and the nobility—and burdened everyone else, the third estate, with taxes that many could not afford to pay. The debt had been aggravated by the expense of the Seven Years War (which ended in 1763) and France’s involvement in the American Revolution. Lavish public spending, at the court in Versailles and elsewhere, had further compounded the problem. Taxation was at the center of the protracted and damaging struggles between the monarch and the parlements. After the end of the Seven Years War, for example, the parlements vigorously opposed the continuance of wartime taxes. Later they opposed the extension of stamp duty and the establishment of any new permanent taxes. They did so under the popular mantle of objecting to the monarch’s absolute power, but the outcome was the ongoing oppression of the third estate and the frightening prospect of state bankruptcy.

The king’s spokesman, Chrétien François de Lamoignon, aimed to break this deadlock once and for all on 8 May 1788. Lamoignon was the keeper of the seals, a prominent and well-connected nobleman, an intellectual who found himself in Louis XVI’s ministry at the worst of times. Six months earlier, with the nearly bankrupt royal treasury forced to borrow an additional 420 million
livres
but haughtily unwilling to explain precisely why, Lamoignon had stood before the Parlement of Paris outlining “the principles of the French monarchy”:

This was a clear, bold statement of the basis on which Louis XVI held power, or at least thought he did. In retrospect it seems mere wishful thinking. On 8 May Lamoignon set out from his grand house in the Marais Quarter, where literati like Racine and Mme de Sévigné had once come to dine, across an elegant courtyard and through the strong arched gate, to break the power of the institutions that had long formed the bastions of noble privilege in France. He intended to defeat the parlements by introducing an attractive program of reform but simultaneously reasserting the absolute power of the monarchy.

The edicts that Lamoignon presented to the Parlement of Paris on 8 May introduced much-needed reform of the criminal code, substantial restructuring of the judicial system, and an attempt to centralize the legislative process. But they also revived earlier attempts to transfer ultimate judicial authority from the parlements to the royal council, or, as Lamoignon proposed, a new plenary court, and spelled the end of the parlements’ involvement in legislation. As a precaution, the Parlement of Paris was dismissed soon after these edicts had been announced and told not to reconvene until further notice. At first, in Paris and the provinces, there was shock, a stunned realization that the long-threatened coup against the parlements had finally occurred. Then there was uproar. Lawyers throughout the country rejected the new judicial arrangements. People took to the streets and some demonstrations turned riotous—mobs controlled parts of Rennes, people were killed in Grenoble, lettres de cachet were flying everywhere, trying in vain to silence the parlements and their supporters. Amidst the chaos, there was mounting clamor for a meeting of the Estates General, the nation’s largest representative body, which had not met since 1614. By now, it was widely hoped that the fiscal and administrative crises in the kingdom could be resolved by this extraordinary representative assembly, as had happened, allegedly at least, on several occasions in the very distant past. On 5 July the royal government tried to deflect attention from the contentious Lamoignon Edicts by announcing that the king would welcome his people’s views on how the Estates General should be organized when—and if—they finally met.

As a member of the Bishop’s Court in Arras, Robespierre joined his local legal colleagues in protesting the Lamoignon Edicts. In recent years, Robespierre had argued passionately for reform of the criminal code and judicial system, yet in siding with the parlements against the government, he was in fact arguing for the perpetuation of privilege—against the erosion of the parlements’ established rights and against the government’s attempted reforms. This made sense in a situation where the parlements were still the most promising sites of opposition to the absolute monarchy. The full scale of imminent change in France was still unimaginable, so in May 1788 Robespierre dutifully—perhaps even somewhat cynically—joined the demonstration of support for the parlements, knowing, as everyone knew, that they were highly improbable promoters of a less corrupt regime.

Looking back in 1792, Robespierre presented his behavior in Arras rather differently to his revolutionary colleagues, claiming that even though he was nothing more than a humble official in a provincial court, he had challenged the Lamoignon Edicts on the grounds that they contravened the sacred principle of the sovereignty of the people.
⁴
He compared himself favorably with members of larger, grander judicial bodies, who had opposed the edicts on more superficial grounds, objecting merely to the form of the administrative changes. In this way, Robespierre backdated his revolutionary career, his unswerving commitment to the people, his incorruptible patriotism, to the spring of 1788, when signs of the gathering political turmoil first reached Arras. Yet the people were far from sovereign in France in 1788. It was the king who possessed the sovereign power, as Lamoignon had recently reminded the Parlement of Paris, and he answered only to God. When Robespierre joined the protest in support of the parlements, he could not have known that the country was months away from a revolution that would alter everything by seizing power from the king and transferring it to the people.

On 13 July bad weather added to the disruption unleashed by the Lamoignon Edicts. A violent summer storm rained enormous hailstones over northern France, killing people and livestock caught in fields without shelter and destroying most of the grain awaiting harvest. The harvest of 1788 was going to be meager even before the disastrous storm, and the previous year’s harvest had been poor, too. Now the country was facing its second severe winter in a row; there would be hunger, destitution, and the threat of starvation; peasants would be unable to pay their taxes, and the royal treasury would once again find itself bankrupt. Nevertheless, attention was temporarily distracted from these harsh prospects on 8 August, when Louis XVI agreed to convene the Estates General. The meeting was set for 1 May 1789 at Versailles. The king’s announcement was quickly followed by a flood of speculation about how exactly the Estates General should or could be organized. Within weeks, the downfall of the king’s ministers, Lamoignon included, and the realm’s anticipated plunge into bankruptcy lent still more urgency—and hope—to these popular speculations.

Ever since he had raised the enormous loan of 420 million livres in November 1787, Lamoignon had been able to reassure his colleagues, whenever they nervously asked him, “Do we have the cash?” But by August 1788 the cash was completely gone. The royal treasury had no choice but to suspend payments, government funds plummeted, and the markets panicked. On 24 August, Louis XVI recalled the Swiss banker Jacques Necker from exile, in the hope that he could rescue the regime from its wreckage. Though foreign and a Protestant, Necker had risen to high office as director-general of finances earlier in Louis XVI’s reign. His policy of borrowing rather than raising taxes to finance state expenditure had proved successful in the short term but had not solved the country’s ongoing financial crisis, and so he was dismissed in 1781. Now Paris was jubilant at his recall after Lamoignon, the scourge of the parlements, fell from power. While Necker’s portrait swayed through the unruly streets above a triumphant procession, an effigy of Lamoignon was reviled and burned outside the splendid family residence in the Marais, from which the man himself had fled. The following year Lamoignon shot himself, whether deliberately or by accident has never been determined.

When the Parlement of Paris was recalled in September 1788, after Lamoignon’s fall, it discredited itself once and for all as an advocate of progress by calling upon Louis XVI to reconvene the Estates General exactly as it had been composed in 1614. Then the Estates General had met in three almost numerically equal, but separately elected, chambers representing the orders of the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate. They had voted separately by order, and it was easy for the nobility and the clergy to defeat the third estate: two against one. Since 1614 the third estate had grown exponentially in numbers and wealth: it now represented 98 percent of the population, including the rising taxpaying bourgeoisie. So it would be severely underrepresented if the earlier composition of the Estates General were maintained, as the Parlement of Paris demanded. The popular credit the parlements had won through their clashes with the monarch disappeared overnight. Suddenly Robespierre was vitriolic in his denunciations of these old legal institutions. His fury marks the speed with which things were changing, some personal chagrin at the part he had played in shoring up the old order, and a passionate desire to exchange it for something new. Such sudden and violent feelings were far from unique at the time; they were everywhere, and the anger to which Robespierre seemed particularly prone was widespread in the last months of the old regime.

Robespierre was one of thousands to publish a pamphlet with ideas on how the new Estates General should be organized, many of them calling for doubling the number of third estate representatives and for counting the votes by head, not by order. Instead of arguing for the historical, constitutional, or theoretical rights of the third estate nationwide, Robespierre’s pamphlet had a specific, local focus. It was preoccupied with the Estates of Artois, the provincial governing body grandly accommodated inside the city walls of Arras, and its standing claim to represent the province of Artois. This claim had to be undermined if the province’s deputies to the Estates General were to be newly elected. More precisely, unless the claim of the Estates of Artois to represent the province could be overridden, Robespierre had no hope of going to Versailles as a representative of the third estate the following year. What a difference in just three months! Instead of turning out for a local demonstration under the old regime, where there were such unbreachable limits to his ambitions, Robespierre was now within reach of a role in national politics. His recognition of this opportunity—and the ferocity of his determination to seize it—was amazing. In the past he had commented on politics when it intersected with his legal work or arose in the context of his prize essays, and he was certainly well schooled in the political theory of both Montesquieu and Rousseau, but he had never had any hope of even a minor role in national politics. Contemporaries in Arras noted with surprise (and some distaste) the vigor with which Robespierre started campaigning for election. He had had very limited, and largely dismaying, experience of elections before, in the Academy of Arras and the legal profession. He knew there was only one outcome that counted—winning—and in his circumstances, luck was not going to be enough.