Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (22 page)

THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY of the fall of the Bastille was nothing like the first. Thursday, 14 July 1791, was a beautiful summer’s day without a spot of rain, but the spirit of festive unity that had characterized the celebrations on the Champ de Mars a year earlier was nowhere in evidence. The king and queen did not attend. And the assembly, instead of turning out en masse as it had before, sent a delegation of just twenty-four deputies—one of them Robespierre. General Lafayette remained prominent on his white charger, but even he could scarcely ignore the suspicion and open hostility with which many in Paris now regarded him because of his continued support for the king. On the Champ de Mars the stadium had been expanded to hold more spectators than the year before, and the Altar of the Fatherland had been remodeled. In 1790 its dedication read, “the Nation, the Law, the King”; in 1791 it read, “the Nation, the Law, the——”: the last word was effaced.

Gossec composed some music for the occasion: something less mournful than for Mirabeau’s funeral and aptly entitled
La prise de la Bastille
(
The Fall of the Bastille
).
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During the ceremony there were occasional cries of “No more king!” And back in the Manège the Assembly, meeting for business as usual despite the celebrations, heard a petition—one of many—from Danton’s Cordeliers Club, demanding a national referendum on the fate of the king who had tried to abandon the Revolution. In his newspaper, Marat wrote that he suspected the assembly had included Robespierre in the delegation to the Champ de Mars to keep him away from the tribune. While his back was turned it might try to exonerate the king, that “crowned brigand, perjurer, traitor, and conspirator, without honor and without soul.” Vigilance, vigilance, screamed the
Ami du peuple
.
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Robespierre wanted to put Louis XVI on trial. Submitting to the rule of law could degrade no one, he insisted, not even the king. But more moderate deputies were concerned about the impact such a trial would have on the constitutional monarchy, which, after two long years of discussion and disagreement, was at last ready to come into effect. The moderates were helped by the unexpected arrival of a letter from General Bouillé taking the blame for the flight to Varennes on his own shoulders, from the safe distance of Luxembourg. “I arranged everything, decided everything, ordered everything. I alone gave the orders, not the king. It is against me alone that you should direct your bloody fury.”
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This was the excuse the assembly deputies who advocated exonerating the king needed. The day after the Festival of Federation, inside the Manège, they made a case for leniency, for putting the past behind and allowing Louis XVI to assume the role allotted him under the forthcoming constitution. But the Cordeliers Club was outside, banging on the door, again demanding a referendum. Robespierre and Pétion went out to negotiate. They told the petitioners it was too late. They gave them a discouraging letter to take back to their club: petitions like this were not a helpful contribution; please could they stop.
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This letter—signed by both Robespierre and Pétion—did not have its intended effect. Instead, it inspired the Cordelier and Jacobin Clubs to unite behind a new petition calling for the deposition of the king. This was drafted by Brissot in terms that cleverly avoided calling for a republic by demanding the “replacement of Louis XVI by constitutional means.”

Standing at the Altar of the Fatherland, where General Lafayette had stood two days before to celebrate the fall of the Bastille, Danton read the text aloud to crowds assembled on the Champ de Mars on 16 July. The same day, the deputies in the Manège voted to suspend the king, but only until he had approved the new constitution. The petition for his dethronement was therefore now illegal, since it contravened the assembly’s decree. Realizing this, the Jacobins rapidly withdrew their support and canceled the printing of the petition before it left the printer’s shop. The Cordeliers were less cautious. Reassembling the following day at the Altar of the Fatherland, they drew up yet another petition, demanding the trial of the king. There was a disturbing incident early in the morning, before the crowds arrived: two men were found hiding under the altar, assumed to be spies, and summarily hanged
à la lanterne
. However, since it was Sunday, many of the petitioners arrived later in the day with their wives and children, and the prevailing atmosphere that afternoon was peaceful and festive. By early evening over six thousand people had signed the petition and the crowds showed no sign of dispersing. At around seven, General Lafayette and Mayor Bailly arrived at the Champ de Mars. Authorized by the assembly, they came accompanied by armed National Guardsmen, ready to suppress the demonstration. About fifty of the signatories were shot on the steps of the altar; their blood splattered across what was left of its dedication: “the Nation, the Law, the——” was illegible now. A matching red mark of terror and repression appeared simultaneously above the Hôtel de Ville—the red flag of martial law was flying and the prominent revolutionaries ran for their lives.

Eighty years later, in the middle of another revolution in 1871, a fire in the Hôtel de Ville destroyed the soiled petition of 17 July 1791. Reputedly, Danton’s name was not on it, nor was Robespierre’s. After the petition on dethronement was outlawed, Danton had had nothing to do with organizing the next one. He may not even have been on the Champ de Mars that Sunday. Nonetheless, on learning that his enemy, General Lafayette, had taken charge of Paris, he fled to Arcis-sur-Aube (where he had been born), then to London, where he lived in Soho on Greek Street for a month, until it was safe to return. Robespierre spent the evening of 17 July in the Jacobin Club. Hearing the news of bloodshed on the Champ de Mars, he wept unapologetically:

Was this perhaps ignoble? Given that he had supported—if not actually initiated—the idea of putting the king on trial for his flight to Varennes, why wasn’t Robespierre there among the men, women, and children on whom the National Guard opened fire? Why was he weeping at the Jacobins, instead of with the wounded at the Altar of the Fatherland? Like Danton, Robespierre had had nothing to do with the petition that had caused the bloodshed. Critical of the Assembly as he was, he recognized the legal force of its decision on the king and the forthcoming constitution. In his speech to the Jacobins it was right and responsible to point out that the National Guardsmen were citizens too—volunteer soldiers following orders. Those who gave the orders, not those who carried them out, were the proper objects of the people’s anger.

Robespierre was speaking, as darkness fell on the Champ de Mars, to only a handful of Jacobins. Pétion was still there and so was Pierre-Louis Rœderer (a lawyer in the Parlement of Metz before the Revolution and afterward a supporter of progressive reform in the National Assembly). But most of the other liberal deputies—the abbé Sieyès among them—were in the Feuillants Club, across the street, where they professed themselves more moderate than the Jacobins and more unequivocally committed to upholding the proposed constitutional monarchy. Suddenly there was a disturbance outside—shouting and the clash of arms in the rue Saint-Honoré. It was the National Guard returning to the city center in shock and disarray. Some of the citizen soldiers made their way into the Jacobins’ courtyard and shouted abuse at the radicals within—the radicals whom they blamed for inviting civil unrest and bringing Paris to the brink of civil war. For the first but by no means the last time, there was complete panic inside the club. Robespierre managed, somehow, to talk it down, and Mme Roland was present to hear him do it. Later that evening she sat at home thinking about him, how terrified he had been, but also how brave, and wondered if he had managed to get safely home to the rue Saintonge, “in the depths of the Marais.” On a daring but foolhardy whim, she decided to go check. She persuaded Roland to go with her, and they reached Robespierre’s lodgings just before midnight, to find him still out. How surprised he would have been to find Mme Roland on his doorstep at that hour! Robespierre, as we have seen, did not do well with women on the doorstep, and it had been an unusually long and terrible day. Since he was not there, however, there was nothing Mme Roland could do except go home again with her husband and resume worrying that the leader of the Jacobins—on whom she was developing one of her many crushes—had been arrested or worse.

In fact, he was fine. Another member of the Jacobin audience that night was a master joiner and cabinetmaker named Maurice Duplay, originally from Auvergne but now living just doors from the Jacobins in the rue Saint-Honoré. As Robespierre was about to leave the club that night and step out into the unruly streets, Duplay intercepted him and offered sanctuary in his home close by. Robespierre, certainly exhausted and possibly frightened too, accepted the kind offer. Duplay lived modestly in a two-story house centered on a small courtyard in which he kept the tools and materials of his trade. Stepping over planks of wood and a saw pit on his way in, Robespierre was greeted by Duplay’s wife and family, a son and three daughters. In this simple household he felt instantly at home. As his sister Charlotte pointed out, he had been accustomed to her own domestic ministrations in Arras. Since moving away he had lived as a bachelor, but that life did not suit him. “Mme Duplay and her daughters expressed toward him the most vivid interest and surrounded him with their thousand delicate concerns. He was extremely susceptible to all those sorts of things. My aunts and I had spoiled him with an abundance of the little attentions that women alone are capable of.”
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Charlotte was jealous at the very thought of the Duplay women looking after her brother. He, however, was very comfortable—close to the Jacobins, close to the Manège, and living with the kind of skilled artisan whose straightforward work and home life seemed to embody the very essence of the political principles he believed in. After the massacre on the Champ de Mars, Robespierre lodged with the Duplays until he died. He had found his last home.
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THE ROYAL FLIGHT to Varennes was tactfully forgotten and the constitution, so long in the making, was finally finished and formally accepted by Louis XVI in September 1791.
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A hot-air balloon trailing tricolor ribbons floated over the Champ de Mars announcing the fact. The gesture was suitably ephemeral, since the constitutional monarchy relied on a tenuous partnership between the king and the people’s new representatives, tied together but no better coordinated than the ribbons flapping in the sky. Because of the self-denying edict put forth by Robespierre, he and his fellow assembly deputies were not eligible to stand for election to the new legislature. On the last day of the assembly, in the atmosphere of relief and celebration overtaking Paris, Robespierre and his friend Pétion, the acknowledged leaders of the radical faction, were crowned with wreaths of laurel and led through the city streets by a jubilant crowd. People who had yet to set eyes on Robespierre went to look at the portrait by Mme Labille-Guyard hanging in the Paris Salon. He had entered the assembly an unknown in 1789 but now left it a popular hero—a bold spokesman for liberty and equality, the defender of the poor, an advocate of democracy, that rare and admirable thing in politics: an incorruptible man. For the time being, however, he was not needed and could take his first holiday in over two years. Robespierre, unlike Danton, Pétion, Brissot, and others whom he knew in Paris, had never been abroad. He could have gone at this point. He had enough money at last and his health, strained by the daily grind in the Manège and the late nights at the Jacobins, might have benefited. Instead, he answered the call of family duty and went home to Arras.

Robespierre wrote to tell his sister that he was coming and that he wanted, if at all possible, to avoid a public welcome. She treated his request with characteristic seriousness but could do nothing to prevent Augustin’s announcing their brother’s imminent return from the tribune at the local Jacobin Club. On the designated day, Charlotte and Augustin set out early in the morning to meet Maximilien, accompanied by Mme Buissart, the wife of his closest friend in Arras.
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They hired a coach and took the road to Paris as far as the small town of Bapaume. But though they waited all day, their brother did not arrive. They went back to Arras that evening, very disappointed. At the city gates a crowd had assembled, having heard a rumor that the famous deputy had finally returned. As the coach pulled up, the people began detaching the horses so as to pull it inside the city walls themselves as a mark of respect and gratitude. Everyone was quite embarrassed when they discovered that it was only Charlotte, Augustin, and Madame Buissart inside. On 14 October, the small welcome party set off again, even earlier this time, hoping to avoid attracting further attention. Camped at an inn at Bapaume, keeping out of sight, they waited for Robespierre. Although the inn was on the road from Paris, they were afraid of missing him so posted a lookout in the street.

Bapaume was already in a turbulent state because a battalion of National Guardsmen from Paris, among them some of the original heroes from the fall of the Bastille, were currently garrisoned in the town. Over the past week, there had been bitter conflicts between these soldiers, full of revolutionary enthusiasm, and the locals—many of whom, as Robespierre was soon to discover, were considerably less enthusiastic. Suddenly the Incorruptible—away for over two long, eventful years—was in the arms of his nearest and dearest. Outside the inn the lookout had spread the word. The National Guardsmen were delighted and gathered to congratulate Robespierre on his democratic principles, his tireless fight against the enemies of the people, his outstanding political courage. They set about organizing an impromptu banquet, which detained Robespierre in Bapaume for several hours, so that it was dark before he set off again with his proud siblings beside him.