Few historical characters excite the degree of controversy that surrounds Maximilien Robespierre, a mild-mannered 5'3" provincial lawyer who only lived to be 36. But Robespierre's apparent lack of conspicouty belies what he has come to represent; the soul of the Revolution itself. Robespierre was there when the Estates General convened in May 1789, and when he died, the idealism that had sparked the Revolution, for better or worse, died with him. Through the years, Robespierre has come to embody the changing course of events in the Revolution. One cannot fully admire the entire Revolution without fully admiring Robespierre, and this is a hard thing to do. Robespierre was a very real man, with very real flaws and virtues, but his common humanity is often far surpassed by the psychological need to incarnate forces far beyond the control of any individual in the person of one man. And perhaps that is why Robespierre still inspires such a passionate dichotomy of love and hatred. Like the man himself, those who have judged him have been inclined to view the world in black and white. As Peter Vansittart said in Voices of the Revolution:
Robespierre, so unimaginable in sabots and red cap, has been rated as the first modern dictator, Rousseau in action, a paranoic and a constipated eunuch, a morose Hamlet.To Hamel he displayed democracy at its loftiest and noblest; for Acton he was the most hateful celebrity since Machiavelli and the Renaissance; for George Sand 'the greatest man not only of the Revolution but of all known history'; for Victor Hugo, 'the algebra of the Revolution--the immense power of the straight line.' (Elsewhere, Hugo remarked that a straight line is unique in its brutality) Robespierre has been considered a suffering Messiah, speaking of enemies 'preparing me the hemlock.' Southey called him a ministering angel sent to kill thousands in order to save millions. Robespierre himself entrusted his reputation 'to the belated help of Time.' His own bi-centary provoked fury in the French Assembly.
Maximilien Francois Isidore Marie de Robespierre was born on May 6, 1758 in Arras. He was born only four months after the declassé marriage between his father, Francois Derobespierre a lawyer, and his mother, Jacqueline Carraut, a brewer's daughter. His mother, to whom he seems to have been very close, died when he was six and his father, being increasingly philandering and alcoholic, fled to the Continent soon after. Maxime was left the eldest of a family of four. Maxime was raised by his maternal grandparents and developed into a very shy, responsible, bookish boy who loved keeping doves. His sisters Charlotte and Henriette once begged to have one, after some hesitation he relented only to have the bird killed a few weeks later when the cage was left out in a storm. Charlotte says that Maxime was very upset about this and his grandparents had to reprimand him for being unmanly. Maxime was very intelligent and diligent and at 12 won a scholarship to prestigious Louis-le-Grand in Paris. There he met Camille Desmoulins, who would be the best friend he ever had. Maxime was such a good student at Louis-le-Grand that he was allowed to address the King and Queen when they came to the school in 1774. It was raining, and the royal carriage drove away while he was speaking, leaving the scholarship boy with a face full of mud. Twenty years later, he would ask for the King's death.
After leaving Louis-le-Grand, he set up a law practice, once helping a servant of a certain Lazare Carnot. One time he was offered a lucrative judicial position, but has to turn it down after having to put a man to death. Even though he knew the man was guilty, the thought made him physically ill for days. (Maxime's nervous system was always in hyper-drive, while his immune system appears to have been virtually non-existent...he suffered psychosomatic illnesses all the time) He lived with his sister Charlotte and an ever-present dog (Maxime always had a dog). Charlotte was for some time engaged to Fouche who, ten years later, would be the prime mover in the death of Robespierre. Maxime was always a very neat man. He kept his hair carefully powdered even during the height of the Revolution, when such dress was enough to get one executed. He was extremely absent-minded. He would be walking some place with his sister, she'd stop to talk to someone and he'd go back home. When she finally finished looking for him, he'd be at the house wondering wherever she had gone. He loved Rousseau. He slept with a copy of On The Social Contract under his pillow.
When the Revolution broke out, Robespierre was elected as a deputy to the Third Estate. Despite being laughed at for his lack of rhetorical devices, his incorruptibility and progressive thinking attracted the sans-culottes...most noticeably the women, among whom he always had a strong following. In 1790, he was given the nickname "the Incorruptible" which stuck for the rest of his life. Robespierre always had strong opinions about things; he spoke out against the death penalty, against the European war, against slavery, for universal primary education, for universal suffrage. Robespierre soon became the voice of the powerful Jacobins Club, but did not accept an official place in the government until July 1793 when he joined the Committee of Public Safety.
It is during the one year spanning from July 1793 to July 1794 that Robespierre was supposed to have exercised dictatorship over the entire country. While the Committee of Public Safety was indeed a dictatorship, Robespierre was only the spokesman and his control over his contentious colleagues was uncertain at best. Furthermore, Robespierre was becoming increasingly sick as a result of overwork and because a diet whose staples are very strong coffee, very watered down wine, bread and oranges isn't exactly meeting all the food groups. He was often at the Duplay House, where he lived with a carpenter's family who had found him after the Champ de Mars Massacre in 1791(he was supposedly engaged to Eleanore Duplay, his landlord's daughter. When he died, she wore black for the rest of her long life). Robespierre's exact attitude towards the Terror is difficult to pinpoint. In his speeches and private notebooks, he at once realized that republican government must contain, "vertu without which terror is sinister, terror without which virtue is impotent." Very few men in the Convention found the Terror personally more disagreeable than Robespierre, but Robespierre also strongly believed that the inevitable conclusion of a Revolution for which so many lives had already been sacrificed had to the long-hoped-for
Republic of Vertu. Hence, although he spoke out against the excesses of proconsuls, he was also invented the Prairal Law. The devout nature of his faith in the Revolution, which led him to create the
Festival of the Supreme Being, further alienated many deputies. On 9 Thermidor, several factions within the Convention joined and Robespierre was arrested. He screamed with pain as the executioner tore off the bandage that held on his jaw, which had been shot off either by himself or by a National Guardsman named Merda. Perhaps the best reflection on Robespierre's life and character is given by Lucile Desmoulins in Marjorie Coryn's novel The Incorruptible
He had been great in her eyes too, not so long ago. She had been dazzled by him. She had seen him shut up behind his walls of isolation as a man is shut up in a lighthouse-a spark of divinity within a strong tower, sending its great beam of light out into a storm-darkened world for the saving of men's souls. Not so long ago he had been like that in her eyes, too. But now she saw him differently. There had been too many shipwrecks at the foot of that silent tower....
Now she saw him as a man enclosed within himself as in a little room whose windows, being of mirror instead of clear glass, were as incapable of receiving light as of giving it. She saw him, his tallow-dip in his hand, going from mirror to mirror, thinking he was looking out through them over a vast outside world, but seeing in reality only his own reflection-himself, his virtues, his ideals, his system.... A man hiding from God inside his own soul, and practising there the abominable blasphemy of self-worshi , of self-sacrifice upon his own altar.
Part of the mystery that envelopes Robespierre is the source of his power. He lacked all the instruments necessary to a dictatorship. He did not control the army, he did not control the media, he did not have an official position, he was not personally charming, his oratory was criticized as verbose and dry. What was it that allowed this man such authority over not only the government but over the Parisian populace? Robespierre's myth. Robespierre built around himself, whether with a conscious political motive or out of sheer psychological need, the drama of the "living martyr for the Revolution", of a man willing and able to give up everything for the higher good. His frugality, integrity and incorruptibility were only the smallest outward signs of his willingness to abnegate everything he loved , including his very humanity itself, for the Republic of Virtue. (This is one of the reasons why he was so offended when Danton made comments such as "Virtue is what I do with my wife every night.") Robespierre gave the impression of a man who could rise above all earthly pleasures; he wasn't interested in sex, he scorned bribes, he hardly ate or drank, he could not be cajoled. It was perhaps purposive that people began making a comparison between him and Jesus Christ. This comparison would be developed on in posthumous representations, most strikingly in Buchner's Danton's Death, but also present in Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety (where Camille states, "The Revolution is your bride as the Church is the bride of Christ") and Lee's The Gods Are Thirsty where Maxime is described in the following passage:
The legend of the ascetic revolutionary, who suffers so much because he hates to cause suffering but believes that this is the only way to a world where no suffering exists, was perhaps begun by Robespierre. It was Robespierre's amazing ability to incarnate the revolutionary obsession with sacrifice for the greater good that allowed him a quasi-spiritual power over his colleagues.
Ah, Maxime, poor Maxime. They all desert you. There in your Gethsemane, the only one awake, the rest asleep and locked in the toils of their unconscionable dreamings.
What is it you wanted? An end to bloodletting by a letting of blood. To keep the ultimate weapon of the guillotine in order to eradicate every plotter, expunge every blemish on the body of the Revolution. Hang death by the neck until it be alive.
Making your omelet.
Like the flawless knight in the legend, your strength and power sprang from your purit y. Even the vision was pure. You wanted the best and most beautiful thing for your world, and would kill a world to get it.
After Robespierre was executed, he became the scapegoat for the collective actions undertaken by the Convention, Revolutionary Tribunal, Committees and Jacobin Clubs during the Reign of Terror. As his former colleague Betrand Barere pleaded, "Isn't his grave wide enough for us to empty into it all our hatreds?" Robespierre became the bloodthirsty tyrant of legend. He was made responsible for the madness of 1793-1794 through his supposedly mesmeric control of the Convention. And yet while posterity ascribed to Robespierre a chilling and immense power that led France into a bloodbath for an entire year, it also belittled him as a person. The star pupil of Louis-le-Grand became "intellectually mediocre", one of the most successful orators of the Revolution he was said to have "foamed at the mouth when he speaks." As Ann Rigney notes in her article "Icon and Symbol: The Historical Figure Called Maximilien Robespierre" ever aspect of Robespierre's physique, pallor, weak green eyes with spectacles, thinness, had taken on a symbolic significance in describing the Revolution and his role in it, to Robespierrists and Anti-Robespierrists alike. In Marie-Helene Huet's brilliant study of Robespierre's changing historical depiction, she notes that "Robespierre, like Frankenstein's creature, was death among the living, an unnatural being by his green views and his yellow skin, his deep eye sockets and his mechanical gestures." The Anti-Robespierrists exaggerated his slight, pale form to make him some sort of monster. Most prominently, his personal gentility became a sign not of kindness but of hypocrisy and effeminancy. This effimancy could then be contrasted to the aggressive masculinity of Danton and helped to explain how the Terror was not a "natural" outcome of the Revolution. "Robespierre simply can't fuck and money scares the hide off him" was how Danton had explained Robespierre and historians seemed to adopt that viewpoint. Robespierre was fundamentally impotent and sterile, as the folllowing quote from Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety suggests:
Making Robespierre into such a figure served a very definite purpose; sound sleep. It so much easier to believe that one superhuman aberration is the reason for a terrible incident of brutality than to ponder that perhaps there is something intensely wrong in the very core of humanity itself. Furthermore, it allowed those who had been as involved, if not more, than Robespierre in the Terror to assuage their guilt. Although among historical circles the image of Robespierre has been completely undermined in the past century, in popular culture he remains a type of vampire completely responsible for the exsanguination of a country and the corruption of a beautiful cause. (see the July 1989 copy of National Review above)
"You are a cripple," Danton said at last. His voice was weary, flat. "It's not Couthon who's a cripple, it's you. Don't you know, Robespierrel don't you know there's something wrong with you? Do you ever ask yourself what God left out, when he made you? I used to make jokes at your expense, I used to say you were impotent, but it's more than balls you're missing. I wonder if you're real, I see you walk and talk, but where's the life in you?"
"I do live." Robespierre looked down. He touched his fingertips together, like a nervous witness. "I do live. In my fashion."
