Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (13 page)

Bailly met the king at the city gates and presented him with the historic keys to Paris. Then the procession moved on to the Hôtel de Ville. There, on the steps recently stained with the blood of de Flesselles, Bailly welcomed the king again, together with General Lafayette, veteran of the American Revolutionary War and commander of the newly formed citizen militia, now named the National Guard. Lafayette was tall and thin, with a long nose and reddish hair. His background was aristocratic, but at nineteen he had abandoned his comfortable life in France to fight for freedom in America. Here he impressed George Washington, who remarked, “I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner among us, except the Marquis de Lafayette.”
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Back in France and a popular hero, Lafayette was poised to apply his experience of revolution on home soil. He adapted the red and blue cockade for the uniforms of his National Guard by adding white, the color of the Bourbon monarchy. Outside the Hôtel de Ville, Bailly presented Louis XVI with one of these cockades: “I did not know quite how the King would take this, and whether there was not something improper about such a suggestion; however, I felt that I was bound to present the cockade, and that the king was bound to accept it.”
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This he did, and gamely pinned it on his hat, despite the arch disapproval of his queen, who said, “I did not think I had married a commoner.” Robespierre records scenes of great joy and shouts of “Long live the king and the nation!” but nothing could disguise the fact that the terms on which Louis XVI held power had changed dramatically in a matter of weeks. He returned afterward to his court of Versailles, but his visit to Paris was testament to the capital’s ascendancy over the Revolution.

ONE OF THE first things the deputies did after arriving in Paris was to go on a guided tour of the Bastille. Mirabeau led them, mindful of his own days of internment for immorality inside the prison of Vincennes, when “the voice of his despair reverberated from dead stone walls.”
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As the crowd in the rue Saint-Antoine parted before the triumphal procession, people threw flowers and poems in its path. Books and manuscripts found in the Bastille were piled into Mirabeau’s carriage. Inside the prison, he asked to see the dungeons. His servant, prevented from accompanying him, sobbed hysterically at the entrance to the dungeon, fearing an attack on the leader of the commons in that dark and somber place.
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But Mirabeau went on boldly, moving slowly through the underground cells, knocking on the walls to check for secret underground passages from which enemies of the Revolution might suddenly burst forth. Then he came blinking into the light, climbed one of the towers, lifted a pickax, and brought it down on the battlements. Robespierre remarked on how delightful the Bastille seemed now, in the hands of the people and under demolition: “I could not tear myself away from the place; the sight of it produced such feelings of pleasure and ideas of liberty in all good citizens.”
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As Robespierre stood rooted to the spot, his gaze fixed on abstract ideas, the triumph of liberty and demise of oppression, others around him saw commercial opportunities in the Bastille’s rubble. The stone-mason Pierre-François Palloy had been among the nine hundred who originally stormed the fortress, fighting alongside carpenters and other tradesmen, many from the faubourg Saint-Antoine, where there had been violent riots over bread earlier in the year. After the fall of the Bastille, Palloy and four other construction specialists were put in charge of demolition. Very soon the ground was strewn with debris that would be recycled as Bastille memorabilia; inkwells, paperweights, commemorative daggers, and decorative models of the prison carved from its own stone were to prove popular and lucrative over the coming years. Spectators came to gawk at chains and manacles, to touch instruments of torture and lock themselves in dank cells where their fellow citizens, plagued by rats, had rotted to death. Robespierre was above all that. He was not much interested in money or, as far as we can tell, in sex. He was not commercially minded, not a connoisseur of thrills. He did not, like Mirabeau, have personal memories of imprisonment to lay to rest or fears about the threat the Bastille might still pose. To him the captured fortress was simply a vast monolith onto which his ideas could be projected. Just as when he first stood up to speak in Versailles the assembly went blank before him, so standing at the Bastille he saw only what was already in his mind. The picks and shovels fell silent as did the workers’ banter; the gaping crowd disappeared. The glorious figure of liberty appeared to him on the crumbling ramparts and Robespierre stood there hypnotized.

ALL SPRING AND early summer hope helped fill empty stomachs as people throughout France waited on news from Versailles. But after the Bastille fell there was precious little calm left. Angry mobs marauded through the towns and countryside looking for food or work, barely restrained by detachments of the National Guard.
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This volunteer force of amateur soldiers that had started in Paris after the fall of the Bastille was now being imitated throughout France. The purpose of the National Guard was to contain spontaneous mob violence of the kind that had killed de Flesselles and de Launay—it was, from the beginning, a prorevolutionary but peacekeeping association of civic-minded people, and for this reason membership was generally restricted to taxpaying citizens who were eligible to vote. Lafayette reduced the number of Parisian National Guardsmen to twenty-four thousand and stipulated that they must buy their own uniforms (which necessarily excluded the poor from joining). He also integrated six thousand professional soldiers into the guard.
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But outside Paris, Lafayette had less control. Following the Parisian example, the citizens in Versailles and other cities organized their own people’s army. “We hope all France will adopt this essential institution,” comments Robespierre in a letter to Buissart, before urging him to promote it in Arras.
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Since the new battalions of National Guards, springing up all over France in a piecemeal, spontaneous, and chaotic fashion, had suddenly become the main instrument of law and order in a nation succumbing to revolution, Lally-Tollendal (a conservatively minded member of the National Assembly) suggested excluding anyone likely to be reckless, anyone with nothing to lose, anyone too poor to have an interest in avoiding anarchy. Robespierre at once objected. “It is necessary to love order but not to harm liberty,” he began. Insurrection, he argued, had saved Paris and the nation from despotism. To his mind it was wrong—or perhaps just too early—to condemn insurrection or distinguish it sharply from patriotism. There had been deaths, he admitted, a few heads had been lost, but they were guilty heads and no cause for reproaching the insurgent mob. Whatever he had understood liberty to be in the past—an idea, a legal concept, a beleaguered individual right more often breached than observed—it was now linked inextricably with the Revolution. He saw that insurgency was useful to the Revolution, so defended it in the name of liberty.

The right to privacy, on the other hand, was not particularly useful to the Revolution—it might indeed be downright dangerous where its enemies were concerned. And Robespierre had no qualms about overriding the right to privacy when Bailly forwarded from Paris to the National Assembly a packet of sealed letters addressed to the Count of Artois, who had recently fled abroad. These letters had been dramatically snatched from the French ambassador to Geneva in the middle of the night and probably contained details of a counterrevolutionary plot. As the scrupulous deputies stood about discussing whether or not it was permissible to open them, Robespierre was incredulous; to him it was obvious that the Revolution must come first—in circumstances where national liberty was at stake, crime itself could “become an action worthy of praise.” Similarly, he agreed with other radicals in the assembly, just days after the crowd murdered Foulon outside the Hôtel de Ville on the place de Grève, that extraordinary courts to try crimes against the state were now needed; what was wrong in a time of peace and stability might be justified during a revolution. The original aim of the Revolution may have been civil liberty, but already in 1789, this was far from being its primary means. Robespierre grasped early, rapidly, intuitively the conflict between ends and means that was destined to blight the Revolution, cause tens of thousands of deaths, and haunt the consciences of the survivors. His response was passionate and political. He was vehemently committed to the Revolution and anything it entailed, passing quickly over moral scruples, intellectual incoherence, and political doubts. In short, he behaved like someone with nothing whatever to lose outside the Revolution itself—the kind of person more conservative members of the Assembly thought unsuited to the citizen militia, let alone positions of power.

As unrest spread through France and pillaging increased in the provinces, the assembly launched into lengthy theoretical discussions about the new constitution that would not have been out of place in the Sorbonne. At the top of the agenda was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which was to head the constitution and serve as both the death certificate of the old regime and the birth certificate of the new. “I well remember the long debate on the subject, which lasted many weeks, as a period of mortal ennui,” wrote one witness. “There were silly disputes about words, much metaphysical jumbling, and dreadfully tedious prosing.”
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Even before 1789, many in France had watched the revolution in America with intense interest, and the deputies were well aware of the bills of rights preceding many of the constitutions adopted by the American states between 1776 and 1783, as possible models for the French.
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Thomas Jefferson was in Paris and a good friend of General Lafayette’s; Benjamin Franklin was still alive and corresponding with his many friends in France; opportunities for personal and intellectual exchanges between the two countries were increasing all the time. But when, after long discussion, the National Assembly settled on a draft for the French Declaration of Rights, it differed considerably from the American—it was more condensed, more abstract, and more suited to France’s specific circumstances. It morally condemned the old regime and its vestiges of feudalism and laid the ethical foundations for France’s new constitution. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” it asserted, repudiating legal and hereditary differences of rank or order.
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In the vision of the future embodied in the declaration, social distinctions could only be justified to the extent that they served the nation: France must become a meritocracy, sovereignty belonged to the nation, and the law would express the general will. There was also a hint of an international crusading mission, since the declaration proclaimed the universal rights of all, not just French men. By the time Mirabeau presented the projected declaration to the assembly, however, he had become skeptical about it: “I can safely predict,” he said, “that any Declaration of Rights ahead of the constitution will prove but the almanac of a single year!”
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On 4 August, in the absence of both Mirabeau and the abbé Sieyès, the assembly abruptly decided to intervene to halt the widespread discontent that had been growing during the weeks since the fall of the Bastille. Hoping to reassure the people that, contrary to appearances, they were really going to benefit from the Revolution, the delegates decided to abolish formally the remaining traces of feudalism in France. As the assembly went into extraordinary session, a spirit of abandon took over. All day and all night, deputies, weeping tears of joy, renounced the offending features of the old regime, demolishing it piece by piece, like the Bastille. When he heard about their decisions, Mirabeau reflected, “The assembly resembled a dying man who had made his will in a hurry, or, to speak more plainly, each member gave away what did not belong to him and prided himself upon his generosity at the expense of others.”
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The payment of church tithes was stopped; seignorial relations between landlords and tenants ended; manorial forms of income and property were no more; differences in the taxes and legal penalties applied to nobles and commoners disappeared; the special exemptions and liberties of particular provinces were abolished; hunting rights and game laws favorable to landlords were dissolved. There was to be no more confusion between public authority and private position, no more purchasing of public offices; the trade guilds would be radically reformed and the parlements abolished. Rarely has so much legislative work been accomplished in such a short space of time. Yet, in the sober light of morning, Mirabeau and Sieyès were dismayed. “This is just the character of our Frenchmen, they are three months disputing about syllables, and in a single night they overturn the whole venerable edifice of the monarchy,” complained Mirabeau.
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For his part, Sieyès was most annoyed by the abrupt abolition of church tithes, which, as he saw it, would simply further enrich private landowners at the expense of the church. The two disgruntled men went for a walk together, lamenting that the assembly had failed to act in accordance with their wishes or advice. “My dear Abbé,” said Mirabeau to Sieyès, “you have let loose the bull and you now complain that he gores you!”
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It took weeks for the assembly to work out the fine details of all its decrees. Robespierre did not play a prominent part in the debates. He intervened to insist that executive officers should be held accountable if they abused the power entrusted to them.
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He championed freedom of conscience when members of the clergy tried to limit provisions for religious freedom in the new Declaration of Rights.
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And, inspired by the American example, he argued for unlimited freedom of the press.
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He envisaged government through legislative and executive powers, carefully separated from one another, both strictly responsible to the sovereign people and financed through equitably distributed taxes. In the moderate newspaper the
Courier français
, he was commended as someone who often made very positive contributions to these discussions without getting worked up or overheated.
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Clear, precise, and calm as he was, however, there was little to distinguish him from other radicals in the National Assembly, patiently fighting their more conservative colleagues over the new constitution, line by line, article by article, day after day.