Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (15 page)

IF ROBESPIERRE WAS not overtly republican in 1790, he was nevertheless the assembly’s leading advocate of democratic principles. He passionately opposed the plan to divide French citizens into two groups, active and passive (
citoyen actif
and
citoyen passif
), according to whether or not they paid a prescribed amount of direct taxation, equal to the proceeds of two days’ labor. Despite Robespierre’s protests, the assembly went ahead, limiting the franchise to active citizens. In this way an estimated 39 percent of male citizens were denied the vote, most of them
pauvre
, vulnerable, and disadvantaged—the very people Robespierre was determined to help.
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He was further appalled by the suggestion that only active citizens should be eligible to join the National Guard. To his mind the distinction between active and passive citizens contravened the Declaration of Rights, and the assembly, in accepting it, had betrayed the fundamental principle of equality to which it had only recently committed itself. Similarly, he objected to the
marc d’argent
, a qualification the assembly thought of imposing on those who wished to stand for election, restricting eligibility to those who paid taxes worth about fifty-three livres, well over ten times the amount of direct taxation necessary to become an active citizen. Thus Robespierre began the long campaign for universal suffrage in France. Using the example of Artois, he showed that the distinction between active and passive citizens would disenfranchise most residents of the region, who were currently paying more indirect than direct taxation. And he pointed out that there were very few in Artois who would be eligible for election if the
marc d’agent
were introduced. His argument was strong enough to win Artois, and other regions similarly affected, exemption from the electoral qualifications until the country’s whole system of taxation could be reorganized. But he was not universally applauded. In the assembly he was accused of encouraging his constituents not to pay tax, and in Arras he was accused of slandering the region by claiming it had not paid tax.

Indignant, Robespierre drafted a spirited reply to his detractors and had it countersigned by his fellow delegates from Artois: “Although M. Robespierre needs no other testimony to his patriotism than that of his conduct, and of his public reputation, we have much pleasure in giving him proof of the esteem and affection with which he is regarded by all his colleagues…. He has always zealously defended the cause of the people at large, and of public liberty, as well as the special interests of Artois.”
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Be that as it may, it was quite clear that Robespierre’s regionally focused arguments and concerns came second to his passion for abstract political principles. Artois provided him with a convenient argument against the assembly’s electoral proposals, but the people, public liberty, and the inalienable right of every citizen to vote were closer to his heart. Already isolated for his commitment to universal male suffrage, he went on to argue for the rights of excluded groups like actors, Jews, and West Indians living under French colonial rule.

THE RATIONALIZATION OF French administration that had been so long postponed under the old regime was happening at last. The assembly went from strength to strength, its committees working overtime to come up with suitable proposals for this, that, or the other part of the new constitution, which was slowly but surely coming into being. If the new regime was to be genuinely representative of the people, it would need to be securely founded on a nationwide system of carefully organized elections. In the light of the chaos that had characterized the elections to the Estates General in 1789, most deputies agreed that there was a strong case for reorganizing France into new departments, districts, and cantons. Future elections could then be conducted and local government administered in a clearer, fairer, more convenient fashion. The abbé Sieyès was especially interested in these plans and very influential in shaping them. Unlike most—perhaps even all—of his colleagues in the assembly, he had definite ideas about how to institute representative government. In fact, he had been turning them over in his mind for years. “For a long time I have sensed the need to divide the surface of France afresh. If we let this occasion pass, it will never return, and the provinces will keep their esprit de corps, their privileges, their pretensions, their jealousies forever.”
¹⁸
After much discussion, the assembly fixed the boundaries of eighty-three new departments and restructured municipal power throughout the country.

Restructuring municipal power in Paris proved more complicated. During the elections to the Estates General in 1789, the city had been divided into sixty electoral districts. After the elections were over, the electoral assemblies in each of these districts ought to have disappeared. In the course of the eventful year that followed, however, many of them transformed themselves into lively debating clubs and even assumed some of the responsibilities of local government. In this way, the districts became permanent and provided a focus for the political activity of many ordinary Parisians. After the storming of the Bastille, they converged on the Hôtel de Ville and established a new municipal committee for governing revolutionary Paris. The driving force behind this committee (or
Commune de Paris
, as it was known) came from the vocal crowd of political activists who had brought it into being. Some of these activists, George Jacques Danton, for example, and others from the Cordeliers district on the left bank of the river Seine, were far more radical than the moderate majority on the new committee. As captain of the citizens’ militia, or National Guard, in the Cordeliers district, Danton was fast becoming a rabble-rousing force to be reckoned with in his own right. A tall, broad, athletic man with a rugged face and rough, loud voice, he clashed bitterly with General Lafayette, the commander in chief of the National Guard, over the organization of Paris. Lafayette wanted to see a strong municipal authority at the city’s center, supported by well-disciplined National Guardsmen whereas Danton championed the right of Paris’s sixty districts to a greater amount of representative and administrative independence. Danton saw no reason to back down.

At first it was unclear whose side the assembly was on. Many of the deputies were grateful to the radical Paris districts for bringing about the fall of the Bastille and thus augmenting their own authority over the king. But when it came to discussing the reconstitution of Paris’s municipal power, the assembly proposed abolishing the sixty districts and replacing them with forty-eight sections that would elect the municipal authority. This seemed a deliberate attempt to break up groups of political activists; certainly Danton saw it as a direct attack on his local power base. Inside the assembly, Robespierre was a staunch defender of the districts. Addressing his colleagues, he argued for retaining the sixty districts, at least until the new constitution had come into effect, especially for the purpose of surveillance:

If he hoped to frighten the assembly or help the Cordeliers with such rhetoric, Robespierre failed. Mirabeau answered him in an ironic, scornful tone: “M. de Robespierre has brought to the tribune a zeal that is more patriotic than reflective…. We must not mistake the exaltation of principles for sublime principles.” In other words, Mirabeau warned his colleagues to be careful, to identify the actual content of Robespierre’s arguments and not merely merely respond to his passionate presentation. Several of the newspapers commented on Robespierre’s hysterical and anxious tone. In the assembly, reactionary deputies who usually opposed him applauded loudly on this occasion. Maybe they thought he had discredited himself by intervening so bizarrely or perhaps they believed that retaining the sixty districts would lead to a backlash against radical deputies like him. By the end of the debate, however, the districts were a lost cause. The assembly voted to abolish them, and the Cordeliers were merged into the new section of the Théâtre français before the end of the year. Since the Cordeliers had a policy of deferring to the assembly’s decisions, they focused their hatred and resentment elsewhere—on General Lafayette, on Bailly, the mayor of Paris, and on the Commune. Their constructive energy went into forming the Cordeliers Club, to keep alive the district’s revolutionary spirit. It met on the left bank of the Seine, in the monastery church of the Cordeliers (or Franciscan Observantists). Danton, who lived nearby, went there every morning at nine, when the tocsin was rung. Already it was his club, a rallying point for workingmen, who paid just a penny a month to belong. Its doors were always open.

THE FUTURE OF the church and its enormous wealth (sixty million livres, according to one mid-eighteenth-century estimate) was the next divisive issue facing the assembly. When the deputies dismantled the remnants of feudalism on the euphoric night of 4 August 1789, they had agreed to redeem church tithes, instead of simply abolishing them without compensation. But since then there had been signs of reneging on this promise. “They wish to be free, but they do not know how to be just,” complained the abbé Sieyès about some of his colleagues in the assembly.
²⁰
It was obvious to everyone that the clergy could not continue as a separate privileged order now that the nation had asserted its inviolable right to sovereignty. But, Sieyès insisted, this did not mean that its property could be appropriated illegally—the right to property, after all, was one of those recently enshrined in the Declaration of Rights. Besides which, the clergy (unlike the nobility) was not simply a parasitical elite: it provided crucial services in areas of health and education and cared for the poor, in addition to organizing the religious ceremonies still central to the lives of most French people. From this perspective, the church was a branch of public administration that would need to be incorporated into the new constitution or remodeled under it: the assembly must reconcile the remnants of the old regime’s religious institutions with its new revolutionary principles. These arguments drew down torrents of abuse on Sieyès’s head. Could the radical theorist of 1789 have turned reactionary overnight? Was the author of the incendiary pamphlet
What Is the Third Estate?
first and foremost a conservative priest after all? “Are you going to abandon the role of legislators to reveal yourselves as—what? Antipriests?” sneered Sieyès in response to his critics.
²¹
But as so often, his biting cleverness and sharp reasoning were wasted on the unruly assembly, cheered on by anticlerical journalists and spectators in the public gallery.

Robespierre was neither antipriest nor anticlerical. Indeed, it is often hard to tell where he stood on the future of the church. On the motion to confirm Roman Catholicism as the state religion he was silenced: “M. de Robespierre was about to speak, when someone demanded a vote.”
²²
Tantalizingly, we will never know what he might have said. On other occasions, when he did manage to make himself heard, Robespierre’s interventions were idiosyncratic. Sometimes he was as vehemently critical as he had been when he lost his temper with the archbishop of Nîmes back in Versailles, and often he returned to the interpretation of Christian doctrine he had put forward on that occasion. Christianity, in his view, was the religion of the poor and the pure at heart—conspicuous wealth and luxury should have no part in it. Sell everything and give to the destitute—this was the advice Jesus Christ gave his followers, and Robespierre echoed it in the assembly’s constitutional debates. When the question of what was to be done with church lands and revenues arose, he urged the nation to appropriate them: “Church property belongs to the people; and to demand that the clergy shall use it to help the people is merely to put it to its original purpose.”
²³
In itself this line of argument was common enough, but Robespierre added his peculiar stamp to it—according to him, the poor were oppressed not only by their hunger and other neglected needs but also by the spectacle of self-indulgent clerics insensitively squandering what was rightfully theirs. The poor were scandalized and their moral outrage was more than justified.

A few weeks later he made another characteristically odd intervention, arguing that ex-monks were entitled to more generous pensions than they were being offered by recently suppressed religious orders. It was impossible, he said, to estimate the real wealth of these orders. They had been living in fear of the Revolution and had long been preparing for it by carefully concealing their wealth. Here was an early example of Robespierre’s growing tendency to suspect hidden conspiracies. Church wealth was indeed difficult to quantify, but more because it took so many different forms and was diffused throughout the whole country than because counterrevolutionary monks and clerics had been scheming to conceal it. Later in 1790, the assembly published a list of the revenues of all the archbishoprics, bishoprics, and abbeys, including the information that the abbey of Saint-Vaast in Arras had an income of 400,000 livres and the bishop of Arras drew a stipend of 92,000 livres. Such figures would have confirmed Robespierre in his perceptions of ecclesiastical decadence.