Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (16 page)

Robespierre made his longest and most interesting speech on the church in May 1790, when the assembly was embroiled in discussions about the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This document had taken a year to draft and would—it was hoped—reconcile what remained of the church with the Revolution. In fact, it plunged France into violent strife and would later be regarded (by the abbé Sieyès, among others) as the assembly’s first really serious mistake. In essence, the proposals rejected the pope’s authority over the church in France, reduced the number of dioceses from 137 to 83 (thus aligning them with the country’s new administrative departments), stipulated that the clergy would now be paid by the state rather than through tithes, and provided for the election of priests and bishops by the people. Robespierre spoke in support of all these changes. As usual, he argued from clear principles to destructive effect. He defined priests as public officials, “simply magistrates whose duty it is to maintain and carry on public worship.”
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Any aspect of the church that was not useful to society must go. Cathedrals, religious colleges, even bishops or priests, if they were not publicly useful, would have to disappear. Robespierre was especially pleased by the prospect of the people electing their own church officials. In accordance with his strict democratic principles, he dismissed the suggestion that the existing clergy might play a prominent role in such elections; instead the clergy should be chosen through the pure, unmediated expression of popular will.

Toward the end of his speech, Robespierre suddenly did something outrageous: he raised the issue of married priests. Many of his colleagues agreed with him that the clergy could not continue as a privileged order, that ministers of the church were not substantially different from any other public officials and should be chosen by the people—but an end to celibacy, and all the trouble it would cause with the pope in Rome, was a step too far for the assembly: a barrage of disapproval cut off Robespierre’s speech. It is somewhat puzzling that he took it upon himself to propose something so contentious. One possible explanation is that he was attempting to steal Mirabeau’s thunder because he had designs on the radical leader’s mantle. The great orator himself had commissioned one of his several ghostwriters (a Swiss man named Reybaz), to prepare a speech on priestly celibacy, and he was furious when Robespierre preempted him by ineffectually raising the matter in the assembly.
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Back in Arras, Augustin was particularly unnerved by this development. He wrote warning his brother that “your motion for the marriage of priests has given you the reputation of an unbeliever among all our great philosophers in Artois…. You will lose the esteem of the peasantry if you renew this motion. People are using it as a weapon against you and talk of nothing but your irreligion, etc. Perhaps it would be better not to support it anymore…. Let me know if you would like me to come to Paris.”
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Though Augustin was highly concerned with protecting Robespierre’s local reputation, he was desperate to join his brother in Paris at the center of the Revolution. Meanwhile, at his desk in the Marais, Robespierre was inundated with letters on every side of the issue, sometimes in verse. “Poems in Latin, French, Greek and even Hebrew arrived from the four corners of France, poems of 500, 700, 1,500 couplets rained down upon the rue Saintonge.”
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Wry as ever, he remarked to his secretary across his bursting mailbag, “Do you still believe there is a shortage of poets in France? They are, at any rate, pouring forth from the cloisters and monasteries.” According to Villiers, Robespierre dutifully acknowledged all these missives and meticulously reclaimed the postage. Whether or not the correspondents supported his views, the letters were evidence that his reputation outside the assembly was continuing to grow. “I doubt if a single law that he has proposed has ever been carried,” said his old school friend Camille, as the constitutional debates drew to a close in 1791.
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Even so, Robespierre was fast becoming a figure in national politics.

THE JOURNALISTS AND spectators who came to observe the Assembly from the public galleries at the Manège were not the only source of Robespierre’s growing reputation. He also owed his fame to the Jacobin Club, an outgrowth of the Breton Club that had met in Versailles at the Café Amaury. After the move to Paris, some of the original members of the Breton Club rented the refectory of a Dominican monastery, conveniently close to the Manège, as their new meeting place.
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In Paris, the Dominicans were nicknamed the Jacobins because their first religious house in the city was in the rue Saint-Jacques. Over time this nickname was transferred to the political club meeting in the monastery, but initially the remnants of the Breton Club called themselves the Society of the Friends of the Constitution.
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Whereas the organization of the Breton Club had been obscure, the new club established clear rules and regulations. There was to be a president, four secretaries, and a treasurer, and all these offices were to be rotated. While the club would admit members who were not deputies to the National Assembly, the relatively high membership fees (twelve livres to join and twenty-four livres annual subscription) assured that only educated and serious-minded male supporters of the Revolution would join (women were restricted to spectator seats). Aside from covering the club’s running costs, the membership subscriptions were used to finance the publication of important speeches, which broadened the club’s influence. The candlelit meetings in the old monastery gradually acquired a central role in revolutionary politics. At the Jacobins, most evenings a week, there was the opportunity to analyze in close detail the progress of the assembly’s constitutional debates. It was here that the self-appointed guardians of the Revolution continued to define its objectives. Any member of the club whose revolutionary principles were deemed inadequate could be expelled. From 1790 political clubs all over France began affiliating themselves with the Paris Jacobins, and a nationwide correspondence network came into existence. Robespierre rapidly grasped its political potential. The counterrevolution was gathering momentum throughout the country following the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He could see that a network of affiliated clubs of active revolutionaries was just what was needed to combat the threat posed by recalcitrant clergy and their supporters.

In Arras, Augustin helped establish a patriotic club and wrote to Robespierre seeking affiliation with the Paris Jacobins. He painted an alarming picture of counterrevolution in Artois, where the patriots were strong but isolated and embattled. Exaggerating wildly, Augustin claimed that they were surrounded by flames after a series of unexplained arson attacks throughout the region. “We are not able to discover the instigators of these fires but are convinced that they are enemies of the public good.”
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He complained of the local government’s indifference to libels launched against the National Assembly. In particular he recounted an anecdote about Robespierre’s ex-friend Dubois de Fosseux, now mayor of Arras. A road builder in the village of Aire had received a libelous document that he reported at once to the mayor. “You have done well to bring it to me, it is very bad,” said Dubois de Fosseux. Upon returning home, however, the road builder found an anonymous letter explaining that the libel against the National Assembly had been sent to him so that he could read it to other peasants in his village, not report it to the mayor. Augustin implied that Dubois de Fosseux himself had sent the letter encouraging libel against the National Assembly. Robespierre was only too willing to think ill of Dubois de Fosseux after their falling out in Arras during the elections to the Estates General in 1789, so Augustin’s insinuation would not have been unwelcome. Even more striking, though, was Augustin’s hatred of the local clergy. “It is absolutely necessary to ransack our abbeys,” he wrote to his brother. “For it is among the monks that one finds monsters wanting to stain France with blood.”
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In another letter, Augustin mentions plans to convert the resources of the abbey of Saint-Vaast into more scholarships for local children, of the kind both he and Robespierre had benefited from, but comments that it would be more fitting to use the money to alleviate the suffering of the indigent over the coming winter. If he echoed his brother’s preoccupation with the plight of the poor, Augustin also shared a penchant for dark foreboding: “I cannot hide my fears from you, dear brother. You will seal the cause of the people with your blood.”
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Even at this comparatively early point in the Revolution, Robespierre was so suspicious of “spies in every quarter of the city, and murderers assigned to assassinate patriots” that he feared the name Robespierre on the outside of an envelope would attract malicious attention. The intoxicating paranoia that would eventually permeate almost all his tactical decisions is already evident. “Reply to me, and put your letter in an envelope marked President of the National Assembly,” he tells his friend Buissart in March 1790.
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In April he writes, “Put your letters in an envelope addressed to the Deputies of Artois to the National Assembly.”
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And in May he tells Buissart, “I am going to send you a letter for my brother. I do not want to address it to him directly from fear that my name will entice aristocratic hands to violate the privacy of the post.”
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Still, it is important to note that Robespierre was not alone in entertaining such concerns. The daily newspaper
Chronique de Paris
carried this advertisement in October 1790:

Given the political climate of the time, it is not surprising that Robespierre grew more suspicious by the day. Like many other patriots, he feared an aristocratic plot. He had made an irreversible personal commitment to the Revolution, so anything that menaced it menaced him too. At the center of his suspicion was the fear that if the Revolution’s enemies succeeded in plunging France into a foreign war, all would be lost.

IN THE SPRING of 1790, the threat of war was suddenly real. Back in 1778, toward the end of his last voyage of discovery, Captain Cook had sailed his ship,
Resolution
, into Nootka Sound in the Pacific, to what is now British Columbia. Though the Spaniards had arrived before Cook and taken formal possession of the coastline, English ships followed in his wake and set up a lucrative trade in animal pelts. These English adventurers had the full approval of their government and Prime Minister Pitt. So when Spanish forces arrived to reclaim possession of Nootka Sound, Pitt prepared his fleet for war. Spain demanded French support under the Bourbon alliance that united the two countries. Louis XVI acknowledged his obligation and ordered his foreign minister to ready the French fleet for action. There was only one problem: if Louis XVI was still in charge of foreign policy and could single-handedly commit the country to war, where did that leave the National Assembly? Somewhat surprisingly, from the point of view of his radical colleagues, Mirabeau urged the assembly to accept the king’s exclusive right to declare war and make peace. Still hoping to reconcile the king and the assembly, he thought such a move would be a step toward establishing a secure constitutional monarchy. Robespierre, among others, vigorously opposed him.

Robespierre wanted to see the assembly take foreign affairs into its own hands and act in a conciliatory manner that would bring about peace. Beyond this, he disputed the king’s right to declare war on behalf of France, referring to him as a delegate of the nation who must do what he was told. As so often, his contentious intervention was greeted by both murmurs and loud applause. Mirabeau, however, rose to the occasion and gave one of the most brilliant oratorical performances of his—by now—distinguished career. He insisted that even if decisions on war and peace were to rest ultimately with the assembly, the right to initiate or propose such decisions must remain with the king. Mirabeau won this point and the assembly went on to decide that “war can be declared only by a decree of the legislature, passed after a formal proposal by the king, and subsequently sanctioned by him.”
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Though this outcome was not as radical as Robespierre would have liked (and, in the event, France did not go to war to help Spain), it was still a blow to the monarchy, and on the evening of 22 May Robespierre, his friend and fellow radical Jérôme Pétion, and other leading Jacobins processed through the Tuileries gardens escorted by a jubilant crowd. Pétion, the son of a lawyer at Chartres, was two years older than Robespierre and, like him, had been a lawyer with literary ambitions before the Revolution. In the assembly the two were increasingly paired as the up and coming leaders in Mirabeau’s wake. As the friends walked through the gardens, enjoying the spring blossoms on the cherry trees, the evening light, and the admiration of the crowd, they saw someone watching at one of the tall windows of the Tuileries palace. It was the small figure of the dauphin, waving and clapping his hands.

Louis XVI and his family were already effectively prisoners in the Tuileries, the magnificent palace on the right bank of the Seine. Commissioned in 1564 by Henry II’s widow, Catherine de Médicis, and named after the tile kilns or “tuileries” that had previously occupied the site, the Tuileries palace, for all its splendor, was certainly not a desirable abode. It had stood vacant, and been used only as a theater, for a century before the royal family were dragged from Versailles and forcibly installed in it. Connected to the even older Louvre palace by a riverside gallery, the Tuileries was within spitting distance of the Manège where the assembly and its throng of interested onlookers met every day, including Sunday. And there were many service buildings—porters’ lodges, barracks, domestic offices, and stables—clustered against the walls of the palace, so that almost all its doors and windows opened onto a public thoroughfare. There was little chance of privacy for the royals. Marie Antoinette complained that even in high summer she “could not open the windows for a little fresh air without being exposed to the grossest invectives and menaces.”
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For the same reason, it was difficult for her family to take any exercise, except on the terrace next to the river, and here the air was soon thick with insults and jeers from the angry Parisian mob. Louis XVI’s relations with the assembly were becoming more and more fraught as the weeks went by and rumors of foreign invasion, or “the aristocratic plot,” multiplied. Yet, to the noisy crowd accompanying Robespierre and Pétion through the Tuileries gardens that evening in May, the innocent applause of the six-year-old dauphin at the window seemed a good omen: here was the heir to the throne cheering the radical deputies. Here was hope, perhaps, that the constitutional monarchy might be made to work, that king and assembly could agree to a stable form of government for France.