Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (42 page)

ON THE EVENING of 2 Germinal (22 March), Robespierre retraced his steps to the Marais Quarter, where he had lived his first two years in Paris. He went to a dinner at which Danton was also a guest. Robespierre seemed silent and agitated. Bold as ever, Danton asked him directly why there were still so many victims of the Terror: “Royalists and conspirators I can understand, but what about those who are innocent?” “And who says anyone innocent has perished?” Robespierre retorted coldly.
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Danton asked if they could put aside their private differences and think instead of the future of France. He should have known that the Incorruptible already thought of nothing else. If the reports of what passed between them are accurate, Danton tried to talk candidly to Robespierre, tried, as he often did in both his personal and his political life, to compromise. But Robespierre never favored compromise. His principles were paramount; everything, even his conscience, had to be tailored to fit them. To him, the idea that he and Danton were similar kinds of men who might mutually agree to set their differences aside was anathema. “At this moment, I am you,” Robespierre had written when Danton’s wife died. A little over a year later, there was no trace of identification left. “I suppose that a man of your moral principles would not think that anyone deserved punishment,” he said sarcastically to Danton. “And I suppose that you would be annoyed if none did,” came the cutting reply. Robespierre got up and left. Danton’s eyes filled with tears.
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Later that evening Robespierre allowed the committee to add Danton’s name to the list of the proscribed. Before he had violently opposed that action; now he agreed. His signature on the warrant for the arrest of Danton and his followers is the smallest: eleven tiny tight letters and half a neat line underlining them—emphatic or perhaps just resigned. Robespierre could lose his temper. He had lost it with Camille and now he had lost it with Danton. But he was not the kind to send people to the guillotine just because he was angry. He had reached the firm conclusion that his vision of the republic and the conditions for its survival had parted company with Danton’s. Soon afterward, Camille went around to the Duplay household but soon came back to the flat he and Lucile still lived in, upstairs from Danton. “I am done for,” he said. “I have been to call on Robespierre, and he has refused to see me.”
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There were still people loyal to Danton in the Convention and throughout the city. One of them came to tell him the warrant had been signed and he must flee to avoid arrest. Allegedly, he refused, saying, “One does not take one’s country with one on the soles of one’s boots,” a poignant remark from someone who had his own understanding of patriotism.
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Danton’s patriotism was every bit as passionate as Robespierre’s—but fatally different in other respects. He kept repeating over and over, “They will not touch me.”
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Danton was wrong. He was arrested in the middle of the night after a joint meeting of the Committee of Public Safety and the larger but less powerful Committee of General Security. Camille Desmoulins, Fabre, and other close associates of Danton’s were also arrested. They were placed in solitary confinement in the Luxembourg jail, very close to the Cordeliers Club and the building in which Danton and Camille had lived since 1789. As Danton arrived, another inmate, Thomas Paine, famous author of
The Rights of Man
, came up to greet him. Paine had made a distinguished contribution to both British politics and the American Revolution. He had come to Paris hoping for similar success, but after befriending the Girondins he had landed in prison. Danton’s English was better than Paine’s French. He said, “Mr. Paine, you have had the happiness of pleading in your country a cause which I shall no longer plead in mine.”
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In the Convention the next morning, Saint-Just read out a report against the Dantonists. He stood stiffly at the tribune, his text held motionless in one untrembling hand, while he used the other to emphasize main points with a cutting gesture that reminded his audience of the guillotine:

He ended devastatingly with: “The words we have spoken will never be forgotten on earth.” The Convention sat in stunned silence. Saint-Just’s speech drew on a series of hurried notes that Robespierre had jotted down for him, notes that still survive and that show beyond a shadow of doubt the depth of the Incorruptible’s complicity in the attack on his former friends.
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In the wake of recent financial scandals, the evidence against Fabre was so strong that it hardly needed special corroboration. Nevertheless, Robespierre blamed Fabre for inspiring Camille Desmoulins to publish
Le vieux Cordelier
, implicitly repudiated his own involvement with the paper, and suggested it had been part of a counterrevolutionary plot approved by Danton. Moving on to Camille, Robespierre noted his vanity and vibrant imagination, which equipped him well for being Fabre’s and Danton’s henchman. He hesitated to add more—and this in itself suggests that Robespierre’s notes were sincere, however distorted and fantastical; he believed what he was writing.

On Danton, he wrote much more. Danton had once been close to General Lafayette and to Mirabeau; he had associated with Barnave and the Lameth brothers (who sided with the Feuillant reactionaries when the Jacobins split after the king’s flight to Varennes); he had tried to save Brissot and the other Girondins; he had been friends with the treacherous General Dumouriez. All these liaisons looked much more suspicious in retrospect than they had at the time. But this was not the kind of distinction Robespierre’s fevered mind now made. The notes continued: Danton had set himself to imitate Fabre’s theatrical mannerisms and had made himself ridiculous by crying at the tribune and privately in Robespierre’s presence. It is true that at the end of their last meeting, Danton’s eyes filled with tears—how haunted by those tears Robespierre must have been to explain them away in such an extraordinary manner. Moreover, Robespierre went on, Danton’s reputation for patriotism was unwarranted. He had played no part in the rising that ended the monarchy on 10 August 1792, having left Paris for Arcis before it, and on the night itself he had to be dragged from his bed to attend the meeting of his section. In fact, Danton had been in the street that night and had sanctioned murder on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville; afterward he had been to the front line and seen blood flowing. Now Robespierre, who had never personally participated in revolutionary violence, reproached him with physical cowardice. He also accused him of being fat, lecherous, and indolent. There was bile and a touch of madness in this document—even Saint-Just could see that only bits of it could be incorporated into the official report.

After Saint-Just’s speech, one of the deputies broke the silence in the Convention by proposing that Danton should be heard at the bar. Robespierre moved at once to prevent this, arguing that it would be tantamount to granting Danton a privilege because of who he was. The Revolution, Robespierre insisted, was not about men, it was about principles. Danton must be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal as an ordinary prisoner and not given a special opportunity to defend himself before the Convention: “No! We want no privileges! No! We want no idols!”

Long and rapturous applause followed Robespierre’s intervention. His speech was masterful, preaching the rigid application of impersonal principles, but in the distinctively self-referential rhetorical style that he had refined to perfection over the last five years. No one else spoke so insistently, so predictably, or so protractedly about himself in the Revolution. Yet no one else could have been relied upon to put his personal feelings aside with Robespierre’s relentless commitment to what he believed was the common good. No friendship, no bribe, no pleasure, no pain could deflect him from pursuing what he saw as the people’s cause. It is true that Danton’s friends had written to him. Lucile Desmoulins’s mother had even asked him to remember the joy he had felt holding his godson Horace on his knee.
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Surely Robespierre would intervene to save Danton and Camille so they could return to their families? But it was on his ability to scrupulously set aside such feelings that the Incorruptible prided himself. He could speak about himself so often because he identified so completely with the Revolution—the two were not separate in his mind. Even more peculiarly, he was surrounded by others who also believed in this coincidence of Robespierre and the Revolution. It helped that his incorruptibility was genuine, not a fraudulent facade. Had he been implicated in a financial scandal (like Danton or Fabre), taken a bribe, indulged a streak of personal perversity (as Carrier had in Nantes), or even just been spotted, like Mirabeau, with a couple of prostitutes in the Palais-Royal gardens, Robespierre’s career would have disintegrated. The strange combination of his self-centered rhetoric, clean living, clear principles, and passionate political commitment made him seem like the Revolution incarnate.

THE MORNING OF 13 Germinal (2 April) was warm for the time of year, so all the windows were open as the Revolutionary Tribunal assembled at ten to hear the Dantonists accused. They were charged with conspiring to overthrow the government (the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security, both still nominally responsible to the Convention). But these charges were farfetched and conflated with accusations of corruption arising from the East India Company scandal. The public crowded into the vast room, its beautiful gilt ceiling and marble floor resonant of the old regime. Soon there was no more space, but still the people came, lining the grand staircase, pressing up around the walls of the Palais de Justice on its small island at the heart of Paris. The crowd filled the streets and quays outside and stretched back across the span of the Pont Neuf to the left and right banks of the Seine. When he spoke, Danton’s deep, booming voice rang out through the open windows like the tocsin. It is said the crowd could hear him clearly across the river. He was asked for his name and address: “My abode will soon be nothingness. As for my name, you will find it in the pantheon of history.”
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When Camille was asked his age, he replied, “Thirty-three, same age as that sans-culotte Jesus Christ.”
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It was obvious that the Dantonists were going to be defiant to the end. To mitigate their effect on the jury, judges, and crowd, Danton and his five associates (including Camille and Fabre) were put on trial with a selection of ten other prisoners allegedly implicated in the East India Company scam. During the trial a couple more prisoners were added to further confuse matters. Everyone remembered that the Revolutionary Tribunal had acquitted Marat—the outcome here was not a foregone conclusion—and this may have been one of the reasons Robespierre was initially reluctant to agree to Danton’s arrest when it was first proposed in the Committee of Public Safety. On the second day the first witness, a man named Pierre Joseph Cambon, was called. Danton looked him in the eye and said, “Cambon, do you really believe we are conspirators?” Cambon could not suppress a smile. “Look, he’s laughing! Write down that he laughed!” shouted Danton, laughing himself.
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Then he began the defense that reverberated louder than the president’s bell:

Here he was interrupted by a question: “But what did you do against Brissot and his associates?” For it was well known that whereas Robespierre had hated Brissot ever since they disagreed over the war and had fought him to the guillotine, Danton had been less active in the fall of Brissot and his Girondin friends. “I told them that they were going to the scaffold,” Danton retorted. “When I was a minister [of justice] I said it to Brissot in front of the whole cabinet.” He resumed: