Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (7 page)

ROBESPIERRE’S NEXT ATTEMPT to win a literary prize came in 1784 when, for the fourth year running, the Academy of Amiens announced a competition for the best eulogy of the town’s most famous poet, Jean Baptiste Gresset. None of the submissions had been deemed of high enough quality to merit an award, so Robespierre thought it prudent to solicit some strategic advice from Buissart, who had an influential friend in Amiens. This time the prize was worth twelve hundred livres (approximately seven hundred dollars), and Robespierre doubtless needed the cash as much as he yearned for the glory. Gresset was best known for his mock-heroic poem
Ver-Vert
, published in 1734 while he was still a Jesuit priest teaching at Louis-le-Grand. Soon afterward he was expelled from the order and led a successful secular life writing for the stage, before retiring to Amiens, where he lived austerely, atoning for the frivolity of his youth. (Voltaire quipped:
“Gresset se trompe, il n’est pas si coupable”
—Gresset is wrong, he is not as culpable as all that.
²³
)
Ver-Vert
is about a parrot, the cloistered pet of one convent that is sent on a visit to another, learns profane expressions on the way, shocks the nuns on arrival, and is sent back in disgrace to repent and die. Aside from money and glory there was much to attract Robespierre to Gresset as a subject: the connection to Louis-le-Grand, literature, the theater, birds, and the poet’s celebrated visit to Arras in 1740, when he attended a meeting of the literary society that later became the academy. Robespierre’s essay drew a flattering comparison between Gresset and Alexander Pope, pointing out that
The Rape of the Lock
relied on the formulas of epic convention, whereas in
Ver-Vert
Gresset challenged his imagination to slip through the convent grille and animate the sedate life of the cloister. Robespierre also claimed to find Gresset’s verse natural, unaffected, and more appealing than Voltaire’s. He stopped short of placing him on the same level as Rousseau but insisted that he stood far above the crowd of lyrical poets.

Somewhat wistfully, Robespierre quoted Rousseau’s enthusiastic praise of Gresset earlier in the century: “What marvel in a man of twenty-six years! How dismaying for our supposed modern wits!”
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Such affirmation from his revered hero is what Robespierre would have wanted for himself—in 1784, he, too, was twenty-six years old. He also praised Gresset’s respect for religious sentiment. Criticizing poets whose work, by unleashing irreligious passions, jeopardized the peace and tranquillity of their own and future generations, he held Gresset up as the exception, the defender of religion in the face of its detractors. Robespierre sincerely approved—the fact that Gresset was expelled from the Jesuit order only added to his admiration: here was a fellow spiritual loner, unafraid to follow his conscience. Nevertheless, with a backward glance perhaps to the beloved library at Louis-le-Grand, he described the Jesuit order in very fond terms as “this famous society…offering such a gentle retreat to men who are devoted to the charms of study and literature,” such as “the poet of the Graces [Gresset].”
²⁵

Despite advice from Amiens via Buissart (overdo the praise since Gresset “is never spoken of here except with veneration, and they think it a crime if one expresses any doubts as to his celebrity”), Robespierre chose to concentrate more on the poet’s outstanding character than on his literary achievements:

Not for the first or last time Robespierre identified with a great man whom he believed to be despised, slighted, and isolated. There was something more than faintly risible in Robespierre’s repeated insistence that Gresset should be admired for choosing duty over glory and eschewing worldly trophies that only the vulgar prize, while striving so hard himself to win a literary competition. Besides which, the judges in Amiens could hardly be expected to view their town’s literary celebrity as a vulnerable victim of sarcasm in need of a valiant and virtuous advocate. Robespierre’s eulogy protested too much and failed to concentrate on the merits of Gresset’s verse. He did not win the prize but paid to have his essay published even so—perhaps in the hope of making some money from it, perhaps out of wounded pride or vanity. On receiving a copy, Dubois de Fosseux wrote to thank Robespierre in lighthearted verse, politely expressing astonishment that he had not been awarded the prize, which may or may not have been a comfort to the sensitive and disappointed author.

ROBESPIERRE’S LITERARY INTERESTS also led him to try his hand at poetry. Surviving examples reveal his talent as modest and his sensibility as effete, even silly on occasions. His sister evidently thought so when she advised against publishing a poem about spitting and nose blowing that might undermine his growing reputation as a lawyer.
²⁷
Most of his poems are addressed to women. The only one published in his lifetime was a madrigal to “young and beautiful Ophelia.” It exalted innocent modesty and ended with the unworldly, indeed positively misleading, piece of advice: “You will only be better loved / if you fear you are not.”
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Another began, “Do you want to know, O charming Henriette / Why Love is the greatest of gods?”
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There were melancholy lines concerning the marriage of a girl named Emilie to someone else, and more of the same addressed to the shy beauty Sylvie. Unless Robespierre was using a number of synonyms for the same woman or simply addressing figments of his imagination, the young lawyer was busy composing gallant poetry for any and all—he was either frivolously self-indulgent, narrowly focused on improving his poetic skill, or far cooler at heart than his words imply. An early portrait depicts him with a rose in one hand and the other on his heart, above the motto All for my love. “Which one?” a cynical recipient of his missives might ask.

Beyond the safe allusiveness of verse, Robespierre’s interaction with women was markedly stilted and formal. In December 1786, for example, he wrote this letter to accompany a copy of one of his professional speeches—not everyone’s idea of a courting gift:

There is considerably more in this letter about the sender than about the recipient. His gratitude is well expressed, but the woman concerned is not invoked personally; her contribution is defined solely in relation to Robespierre’s own work. And yet, if he was emotionally self-absorbed, his theoretical views were egalitarian and feminist far ahead of the times. A woman’s contribution to academic discussion, he argued in one of his papers to the Academy of Arras, was the natural complement to a man’s and of equal value. For this reason he thought members of both sexes should be admitted to the academy.
³¹

Shy and reserved in character, busy and ambitious at work, socializing primarily with other men, Robespierre must have had limited opportunities to build friendships with women, romantic or otherwise. One friend of Charlotte’s bred some canaries for Robespierre and received in return a letter of thanks that was both mildly flirtatious and faintly disturbing:

According to Charlotte, many women were interested in her brother and he could have easily made an advantageous marriage with one of the local heiresses. But at the time there was only one girl he wanted to marry, his sister claims. This was Anais Deshorties, the stepdaughter of one of their aunts on the de Robespierre side of the family. Perhaps Robespierre, being sensitive and awkward, found it easier to contemplate intimacy with a member of his extended family. Even so, he courted Anais for two or three years without making much progress, in strong contrast to his father’s conduct at a similar age. Two letters sent in June 1787 to an unnamed girl, who may have been Anais, show Robespierre sad and dejected. The first alludes to a rejection:

This is the letter of someone with rather contorted emotions. The undying fidelity in response to the beloved’s perceived cruelty, the peculiar sense of duty, the self-righteous integrity, and, above all, the self-regard, are all highly reminiscent of the love letters in Rousseau’s
La Nouvelle Héloïse
.
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Published in Paris in 1761, this astonishingly popular novel—in France alone there were seventy-two editions before the end of the century—tells the story of Julie, who loves the unsuitable Saint-Preux but in the end renounces passion in favor of a virtuous life of marriage and motherhood. Rousseau described the process of writing it in his
Confessions
:

Rousseau projected his own romantic passions onto Saint-Preux, whose letters could have served as models for Robespierre’s:

Robespierre’s second letter to the unnamed woman from June 1787 further suggests the influence of Rousseau:

So much earnest renunciation! Yet if these letters were addressed to Anais, as Charlotte’s testimony suggests, what were the obstacles to Robespierre’s love? Were his feelings not reciprocated? Did he think he had to further establish himself professionally and financially before proposing marriage? Or did he, like Rousseau, project his most intense feelings into a one-sided relationship that was really only part of his fantasy life and elaborate self-image? Charlotte claimed that when he returned to Arras in 1791 for his first visit since the Revolution and found Anais married to another local lawyer, he was heart-broken. In his sister’s eyes, Anais, fickle and cruel, was entirely to blame for the failure of the relationship. But it seems possible that Robespierre gave her only scant and confused grounds for hope. He was—as Rousseau had been—exceptionally self-absorbed.

Robespierre’s early love poems may have had little or nothing to do with actual romantic entanglements in Arras, but one certain source of his inspiration was his membership in the Rosati, the elite literary society founded by Le Gay, with whom Robespierre had probably patched up his quarrel. The Rosati met every June in a garden at Blanzy on the banks of the river Scarpe. The meetings were languid and foppish affairs involving the ceremonial smelling of roses, courteous exchanges of lighthearted verse, singing, a bit of dancing perhaps, and elegant al fresco consumption of good food and wine. Dubois de Fosseux said of Robespierre at this time:

Queen Marie Antoinette, organizing her courtly attendants into charming pastoral tableaux in the woods around Versailles, was aiming for similar aesthetic effects, though the image of Robespierre prancing on the village green in a shepherd’s smock is considerably more incongruous.