Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (43 page)

Danton was turning the tide of the crowd—its currents responded to the pull of his powerful voice. It was exhausting work and he had to pause briefly to rest. But when he did so, the president of the tribunal, a friend of Robespierre’s named Martial Joseph Armand Herman, immediately called him to order and warned him to defend himself with proof, not rhetoric. More quietly, Danton replied:

Saint-Just was out of earshot. He was in the Convention preparing a motion even more stringent than the three-day rule that ended the trial of the Girondins. He proposed that “any prisoner who resists or insults national justice shall at once be debarred from pleading his case.”
¹¹⁵
The intimidated deputies gave their consent. In addition to all their other anxieties they were frightened by a rumored revolt in the Luxembourg jail, where the Dantonists had been held after their arrest. Robespierre suggested that Saint-Just’s report, and the new decree, should be taken to the tribunal and read aloud to the audience there. On the last morning of the trial this was duly done, and the prisoners were prevented from finishing their defense. The trial was summarily closed. Danton roared, “We are going to be judged without being heard.”
¹¹⁶
Camille tore to pieces the text of the speech he had intended to make, and to avoid further trouble the prisoners were hustled out of the court before they could hear the sentence—which was death.

Danton spent most of the last twenty-four hours of his life trying to calm Camille, who was crying like a distraught child and asking distractedly, “Will they kill my wife too?” She was only twenty-three. He wrote her a long final letter that ended:

Lucile never received the letter. She had already been arrested and accused of trying to incite the rumored revolt in the Luxembourg jail. A week later she did indeed follow her husband to the guillotine, as he had feared.

By the time the carts and an armed guard came for the Dantonists, late on the afternoon of 16 Germinal (5 April), Camille was more composed. The condemned saw the beauty of Paris for the last time: the soft golden light reflected from the tall windows of the houses on the right bank of the Seine, the lilac and cherry blossoms in the Tuileries gardens, the Café de l’Ecole, where Danton sat before the Revolution wooing his first wife and dreaming of life as a lawyer. Then they turned into the rue Saint-Honoré and there in the street was an artist, daring to draw the violence that was still in Danton’s face. Danton lost control of himself, ranting and raving violently, only when they came to No. 366, the Duplay household, shuttered tight against the crowd as it had been on the day Louis XVI went past on his way to execution. Somewhere inside—silent, alone—was Robespierre.

One eyewitness saw the prisoners passing along the rue Saint-Honoré and ran back afterward through the Tuileries gardens, to stand at the railings from where it was possible to get a good view over the place de la Révolution. There stood the guillotine, waiting for the prisoners beside the statue of liberty. By now it was nearly 6:00 p.m. and the sunset had turned the plaster statue red. Danton was the last to die. His shadow was immense. He told the executioner to be sure to show his head to the crowd, and he muttered, “I shall never see her again…no weakness.”
¹¹⁸
He might have meant his new wife or some other woman who, for whatever reason, meant the world to him. More likely, he meant France, the country he loved passionately and had long been prepared to die for. He had already begged pardon of man and God for his part in establishing the Revolutionary Tribunal that sent him to his death. In the last few moments, another eyewitness, closer to the scene, saw him scan the crowd before lying down beneath the guillotine. She saw someone in that crowd catch his gaze, then a hand raised quickly in the priestly gesture of sacramental absolution.

Robespierre now found himself deeply preoccupied with punishment.
¹
Within hours of Danton’s death he was back at the Jacobins, insisting they speak of nothing else that evening except conspiracy. “Let us now frighten aristocrats in such a way that they not only are afraid to attack us but do not even dare to try and deceive us,” he suggested to the applauding audience.
²
He may have been instrumental in the immediate promotion of his friend Martial Herman from president of the Revolutionary Tribunal to the Commission for Civil Administration and Police. Like Saint-Just, Claude Payan at the Commune, and Robespierre himself, Herman was a stringent moralist.
³
The son of the registrar of the old Estates of Artois and a fellow lawyer, he had almost certainly known Robespierre in Arras long before the Revolution. Herman was at the top of Robespierre’s list of patriots, “an enlightened and honest man capable of the highest employment,” the perfect person to put in charge of a commission that, among other far-reaching powers, oversaw the operation of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Ten days (one revolutionary week) after Danton’s death, Robespierre supported Saint-Just’s recommendations to the Convention to revise and tighten police laws. Foreigners and ex-nobles were to be expelled from Paris and from all strategic towns on the republic’s borders. All political trials would henceforth be held in Paris, so the punishment of counterrevolutionary suspects could be standardized. This centralization may have been an attempt to halt the atrocities of the Terror in the provinces, but it had severe implications for the capital. There were already nearly seven thousand people crammed into the prisons of Paris, and the new laws would greatly aggravate the crisis. Nonetheless, Robespierre was determined to implement the measures and spread the news of the changes. “The more rigorous the law, the greater the need for it to be known by all citizens.”
⁴
And so, Augustin set off again to the army (this time taking along a mistress instead of the uncongenial Charlotte). His letters to his brother were full of disturbing news from the provinces: food shortages, hunger, corruption, soldiers wracked by venereal disease, anticlerical vandalism, counterrevolutionary plots. Meanwhile in the Vendée, the civil war still festered, with burning, pillage, massacre—scenes of apocalyptic horror that Robespierre himself never saw but had no difficulty at all imagining late at night in the rue Saint-Honoré.

After supporting the fierce new police laws, Robespierre was absent from the Jacobins and the Convention between 30 Germinal (19 April) and 18 Floréal (7 May). As always, it is possible he collapsed, the strain of condemning Danton taking its toll on his overworked mind and body. Yet rumor has it that he spent the day before his reappearance, his thirty-sixth birthday, celebrating out in the countryside with the Duplays and his dog, Brount, perhaps even visiting one of Rousseau’s renowned retreats at Montmorency. Robespierre, by this point, looked much older than his years. The contemporary pictures of him all show sunken, heavily lined cheeks around a grimly set mouth; his eyes were more variable—sometimes simply intense, at other times terrifyingly severe. According to another rumor, on his return to the Convention he stood at the tribune with a newfound calm and control; for the first time, there was none of the convulsive twitching, or the neurotic fiddling with his glasses, or the other agitated mannerisms of someone who, despite everything, still found it a challenge to raise his voice in public.

Robespierre’s speech on 18 Floréal addressed the relationship between republican principles, religion, and morality, consolidating the public professions of personal faith he had made in the past. There was, he had no doubt, a God and an afterlife for human souls. More than this, he attempted to show how the religion of patriotism that had been implicit in the Revolution ever since the great Festival of Federation on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille might now be developed, institutionalized, and used to secure the social foundations of the still very precarious Republic. Here it was, at last, Robespierre’s presentation of his most profound personal beliefs, his ardent faith in a public religion that he thought could save the Revolution, and the close—to some minds suspiciously close—connection between the two. Officially, he was representing the views of the Committee of Public Safety, but as so often, his approach was blazingly personal. He began with appropriate grandeur: “The world has changed. It must change again.”
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He listed evidence of man’s progress and mastery of the physical world: the development of languages, the advances of agriculture, the discovery of electricity (he had not forgotten his triumph in the lightning conductor case back in Arras), the construction of terrestial and celestial maps (he had not forgotten the Coronelli globes in the library at Louis-le-Grand either), the discoveries of Newton, the artistic achievements of his friend the revolutionary artist David. Everything had changed in the physical order, and now everything must change in the moral and political order, too. He compared man’s reason to the globe half in light and half in darkness; so far only the arts and sciences had been touched by enlightenment, but Robespierre wanted to venture further into the shadowy realms of morality. This was by no means an eccentric desire. The abbé Sieyès (temporarily retired from politics), the Marquis de Condorcet (dead in prison), and a fair number of the other revolutionaries Robespierre had met or known shared it, too. What made his vision distinctive was the peculiar coincidence of three major obsessions: his interest in moral development, his belief in God, and his passionate commitment to democracy. Addressing the Convention, especially those deputies inclined toward atheism, he demanded to know:

No one could call Danton innocent—though he was not guilty of the crimes for which he was executed. No one knows if his last breath was an appeal to eternal justice—though this was certainly part of his rant outside Robespierre’s door on the way to the guillotine. How, in all seriousness, could Robespierre square his passionate belief in God and eternal justice with his part in a regime of terror that was claiming more and more lives by the day? He did it by convincing himself that not a single innocent person had been condemned. “And who says anyone innocent has perished?” he had asked Danton coldly at their last meeting. But it was increasingly difficult to maintain this contorted position. The strain became obvious when, in the middle of his speech proposing public worship of the Supreme Being, Robespierre suddenly lashed out at Danton’s ghost:

This defamation of a former friend, in the midst of a speech on patriotism and religion, may simply reflect Robespierre’s habitual impulse to suborn anything and everything fresh in the public’s mind to his current political purpose. Or perhaps it was a more personal exorcism of his confused regret at Danton’s death. Either way, it was a clear warning that the new progressive and democratic religion he envisaged was perfectly compatible with the continuation—perhaps even the intensification—of the Terror.

At the same sitting the Convention approved the decree establishing worship of the Supreme Being. Article 7 outlined the festivals to be celebrated by the republic on successive
décadis
, or Sabbaths, occurring once every ten days:

These festival plans were a straight projection of Robespierre’s own sober system of values. He saw the long-suffering ordinary people of France as modest, stoical, and oppressed by misfortune. For them, he wanted to inaugurate a democratic regime in which poverty would be honorable, not shameful, and glory more meaningful than sensual gratification. Ultimately, his model of family life was traditional: conjugal fidelity, fatherly affection, mother love, and filial piety—all the things that were missing from his own disrupted childhood. The secure foundation for his values was, as it had always been, belief in God. Earlier that year, he had been horrified to hear that the gates of cemeteries in Lyon and Nevers were being inscribed with the atheistic motto “Death is an eternal sleep.” Now, with deep gratification, he saw, as he walked through Paris, men on ladders painting in gold letters over the doors of abandoned Christian churches, article 1 of the new religion:

Three days after delivering his momentous speech, Robespierre and Barère, his colleague on the Committee of Public Safety, were browsing in a bookshop near the Palais-Royal. The talk that day was of Louis XVI’s sister, Mme Élisabeth, who was on her way to the guillotine after nearly two years’ imprisonment in the Tower. Out in the street people were blaming Robespierre for her death, although he, in fact, had argued against it on the committee. Bitter or just despondent, he turned to his colleague and said, “You see, it is always me.”
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He had done more than anyone to identify himself wholly with the Revolution, and now that the Revolution had become the Terror, he found himself identified with that, too. The next day, 22 Floréal (11 May), he decided to make an impromptu visit to the Tower. No one knows why he went. When they heard about it, his enemies spread the rumor that he was contemplating marriage to the deceased king’s daughter, Mme Royale, and scheming to secure his tyranny over France by mixing his blood with that of the Capet dynasty. The princess left her own report of the incident, which mentions no such ludicrous designs:

Whatever he was doing, or looking for, it was typical of Robespierre to be momentarily distracted by the spines of some books. Another source claims that the princess managed to pass her distinguished visitor a note:

There is no record of Robespierre’s having visited the young heir to the abolished throne, Louis Capet, as he was now known. The nine-year-old boy, living in squalid solitary confinement, severely beaten for saying his prayers at night, degraded, and sick, might have touched the Incorruptible’s heart. What would Robespierre have said if he had known that Capet had been allowed to raise three canaries in his dank and lonely prison cell? If he had heard that those tamed and treasured birds were suddenly taken away because the pastime that had brightened his own childhood was considered too aristocratic for poor Capet? But no one bothered Robespierre with such details or dared ask him what was on his mind when he walked away from that terrible place, its child prisoners and abusive guards.

THE FIRST FESTIVAL of the Supreme Being was scheduled for 20 Prairial (8 June). Amid the frenzy of preparation—revolutionary stage sets by David and music by Gossec, as usual—there were two attempts to assassinate Robespierre. Neither was very determined. In the first, on 3 Prairial (22 May), a man named Admiral hung about in the street all day, hoping to fire at Robespierre, but ended up aiming at another member of the Committee of Public Safety, Collot d’Herbois. The gun misfired and the only person injured was a locksmith who ran to help Collot. The second attempt occurred the following evening. At about nine, a sixteen-year-old girl named Cécile Renault knocked on the Duplays’ door and asked to see Robespierre. She acted very suspicious, babbled something about the old regime, and was soon arrested and found to be in possession of a knife (a fruit knife, not the kind of blade that had killed Marat). When questioned she said she had only “wanted to see what a tyrant looked like,” rather as Danton had once skipped school at the time of Louis XVI’s coronation “to see how they made a king.” Renault’s testimony was as confused and confusing as Damiens’s had been after his attempt to assassinate Louis XV back in 1757. It was not even clear that she planned on murdering Robespierre, still less what her motives for doing so might have been. A rumor went around that he had staged the whole affair to boost his popularity with the people, who loved a near martyr almost as much as they loved a real one.