In his
personality and appearance, Maximilien de Robespierre was never a brute. Barely
into his thirties when he became the French Revolution’s leading crusader, he
was much too thin and pale, much too feline in his posture, to count amongst
history’s ogres. How, then, can we explain his metamorphosis from champion of
virtue to undisputed master of the guillotine? It is this crucial contradiction
that Marcel Gauchet, a leading French liberal intellectual, has skilfully
explored in his terse and thorough work Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the
Most.
Between the
joining of the Estates General in 1789 and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793,
Robespierre represented the very best of the Revolution. With his leatherbound
Rousseau clutched to his breast, he was the figure in whom the mantra of
“liberty, equality and fraternity” was purest. What he lacked in charisma he
made up for in conviction. At the core of his being was a vision of the masses
– le peuple – idyllic and good; the font of the Revolution’s legitimacy, and
its greatest dreams.
It was this
view of a mythic and united people which gave Robespierre strength, Gauchet
observes, but it also divorced him from reality. No such people existed.
Instead, a gulf separated the pious peasants of the countryside and the
insurrectionary squadrons of the Paris quarters. And a firm sense of reality
was desperately needed when multiple crises reached their apex in 1793 and
those virtuous people could no longer afford bread. All of Europe declared war
on France. Counterrevolution scorched the fields. Above all, the king had been
beheaded. In Louis’ wake, there was a crisis of legitimacy.
Robespierre,
the consummate man of theory, suddenly had to wield real power. As the
architects of a new republic, his Montagnard faction ought to have faced the
conundrum succinctly phrased by Gauchet: “How could the power of popular
sovereignty be firmly established, firmly enough that the power of the king
would be forgotten?” Instead, under assault on multiple fronts, Robespierre abandoned
every principle that had won him admiration. He plunged into what Gauchet calls
“the tempestuous seas of radicalism without any shore on the horizon”.
Robespierre’s
faith in himself as the spokesman for France’s sacred masses became intertwined
with his tendency to see treachery everywhere. If the people were the source of
all virtue and he was their anointed tribune, then anyone perceived to be
standing in the way during a national emergency deserved to die.
Thus, the
Committee of Public Safety was established and the year-long bloodlust now
known as the Great Terror ensued. Even then, Robespierre’s “despotism” was
peculiar. Gauchet notes that, historically speaking, Robespierre was the only
figure “who succeeded in objectively exercising a kind of dictatorship without
subjectively putting himself in the position of a dictator.” Not that his
enemies cared for such trivia. It was Robespierre and a clutch of devotees
alone – not the Committee – who went to the gallows the morning after they were
ousted in the coup of Thermidor.
Where he
fails is in his conclusions. He believes we can now transcend the 200-year-old
argument: on the one hand, Robespierre as the incorruptible man of rights; on
the other, the advocate of sacred and necessary terror. But his plea to move
beyond these competing images is founded on a false hope: that the principles
of “liberty and equality . . . have been firmly established.”
Not so
fast, professeur. Gauchet’s fault, like Robespierre’s, is to believe there is
an end point, when the inherent truth of liberty and justice has defeated all
challengers. In fact, the debate about Robespierre’s character and legacy is
still worth having today precisely because it reveals and reaffirms those first
principles – and our commitment to them should always be made anew, especially
in moments of crisis. That, after all, is what Robespierre failed to do.
Robespierre:
man of virtue or terror? By James Robins. New Humanist, September 22, 2022.
In
Robespierre : The Man Who Divides Us the Most, Marcel Gauchet explores the
legacy of Robespierre as a tragic figure whose dual character embodied the
contradictions of the French Revolution in representing both liberty and
tyranny. With France today divided by political polarisation, this is a timely
and provocative intervention, writes Leon Hughes.
Robespierre
: The Man Who Divides Us the Most. Marcel Gauchet (translated by Malcom
DeBevoise). Princeton University Press. 2022.
On 27 May 2022 Fanny Lescureux, President of the ‘amis de Robespierre’ (‘Friends of Robespierre’) association, accused a member of a militant and pro-Zemmour extreme right organisation agitating for a ‘France blanche’ (‘White France’) of attacking her and her mother in their home in Feuchy, Pas-de-Calais. Four weeks earlier, Marcel Gauchet published his translated work on Robespierre. Its subtitle, The Man Who Divides Us the Most, is a timely indictment of a France that is increasingly politically polarised.
Gauchet,
Professor Emeritus of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS),
proposes a striking argument in his book: that Robespierre was a tragic figure.
Attempting to give liberty and equality ‘their most complete expression’, he
failed to make a system of government from these principles, and instead had to
‘resort to terrorist violence in order to fill the gap between idea and
reality’ (3). This led to two Robespierres: one inspirational, one repellent.
This is not
a conventional biography: Gauchet makes clear that he will only consider
Robespierre’s career from the start of the French Revolution as post-1789
Robespierre was ‘another man, as though he had undergone a conversion’ (10).
Over six chapters, this bifurcated Robespierre is traced alongside the
Revolution which, to Gauchet, he intimately embodied. The first five chapters
detail his ‘ideas put into action’ (167), the sixth moves forward into
encapsulating the continuing division that Robespierre causes in French society
today.
In his
first chapter, Gauchet details how, in 1789, ‘unbeknownst to him’,
Robespierre’s discourse ‘contained the seeds of the utter destruction of an
entire society and system of government’ (12). This seed was contained in his
commitment to the Declaration of Rights and its grounding in legislative power
as a hopeful ‘incorruptibility’ over the suspected despotism of a royal or
ministerial executive. Robespierre begins to emerge as the embodiment of the
promise of the Declaration.
Gauchet
develops this in his second chapter as, in early 1792, Robespierre increasingly
allied himself with ‘an idealised image of the people, and of himself as their
spokesman’ (44). As the guide to the people, Robespierre developed a
‘sacrificial narcissism’ in which he ‘blinded him to himself’ (55) and produced
a ‘dictatorial language’ of which ‘he became a prisoner’ (56). He became locked
within Manichean logics: ‘between virtue in the service of the public welfare
and corruption that knows only selfish self-interests, there was no middle
ground’ (57).
Chapter
Three details how, after 10 August 1792, Robespierre’s conviction that the
people were the vehicle of virtue became confirmed. Yet, with the trial of King
Louis XVI and Girondin-Montagnard factionalism, Robespierre’s growing
conspiratorialism led him to necessarily conclude a ‘fight to the death’ (62)
was developing. However, despite the people attaining a greater rhetorical
power in his speeches, their conceptual vagueness ‘opened up the possibility of
a regime with emergency powers’ (80).
Consequently,
by 1793-94, Robespierre had become trapped within his own logics of conspiracy
and came up against ‘the futility of his own vision’ (179). In his fourth and
fifth chapters, Gauchet details the final stages of Robespierre’s career. He
shows how Robespierre, installed in a position of power, no longer just spoke
on behalf of the people, but began to exercise power in their name. Making a
distinction between despotism for its own sake and temporary despotism for its
own abolition, Robespierre resorted to attempting to save the Republic by
institutionalising virtue through the Cult of the Supreme Being and
increasingly violent attempts to cleave the virtuous from the unvirtuous.
Gauchet
explains that Robespierre increasingly became ‘a prisoner of a way of thinking
that transformed all resistance […] into a sign of despotism’ (145). He locates
this mental imprisonment in the Declaration. With his only way of explaining
himself from ‘first principles’ (145) on 8 Thermidor, Robespierre was
imprisoned under charges of tyranny the day after by his fellow deputies who
demanded tangible political answers. This is the culmination of Robespierre’s
paradoxical ‘ideas put into action’: to himself he was the modest guide to an
impersonal truth; however, his listeners heard the dictatorial monster that was
to become his posthumous myth following his execution by guillotine in 1794.
In
assessing Robespierre’s early ideas to explain the internal political dynamics
of the Revolution, Gauchet aligns with the neo-Tocquevillian paradigm of his
late mentor, François Furet. Yet, Gauchet sets a slightly different tone from
Furet who, writing in the 1970s and explicitly critiquing totalitarianism, saw
the Declaration as inevitably leading to the Terror of 1793-94. Gauchet agrees
with Furet (1978) that the Declaration ‘took on a life of its own, until
finally it succeeded in toppling a throne that had been secure for centuries’
(169). However, he holds more sympathy for the revolutionaries and their
project, and his Robespierre becomes a tragic figure fatally caught up in his
own self-aggrandising logics.
Despite
being hugely influential in the historiography of the French Revolution, Furet
has declined in popularity in Anglo-American scholarship which has increasingly
moved away from his revisionist poststructuralism. Lynn Hunt (2009) saw this as
one pole, the other being Marxist approaches, which has led studies of the
French Revolution into an ‘interpretative cul-de-sac’. Translating Gauchet’s
work into English hence holds potential to reintroduce Furetian revisionism
into a firmly empiricist Anglophone context.
However,
this still has its difficulties. Gauchet’s work is provocative, but also
suffers from a poststructuralist inertia, especially around the idea of ‘the
people’. After some active engagement in Chapter One, this becomes a rather
static term in the later chapters. Moreover, by only considering Robespierre’s
ideas, Gauchet can justify his limited and unreferenced source base: the
Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre (eleven volumes) with some
supplementary material from fellow Montagnard Saint-Just and several assembly
debates. This also leads to an implicit recognition of prior scholarship
without critical engagement, Gauchet’s repeated use of Giorgio Agamben’s term
‘state of exception’ being one example.
The real
promise in Gauchet’s work is with Robespierre-as-hauntology: a ghost the French
are still trying to figure out how to exorcise. Gauchet considers this in his
last chapter: should Robespierre be left to fall away in the hope of starting
afresh, or must one come to terms with the Revolution through ‘trying to make
sense of [Robespierre’s] dual character’ (4)? This is the continuing problem of
the French Revolution for both Gauchet and Robespierre: how to finish it.
Gauchet concludes rather hopefully that the division between idealism and realism ‘seems at least in part dispelled’: ‘France appears to have found a way, if not to resolve the dilemma, then at least to make it more tractable’ (8). Yet, given the contexts of the deeply divided recent French legislative elections and the alleged attack on Lescureux, the delay in translation between 2018 and 2022 has left Gauchet’s more hopeful conclusions seeming dated. However, this does not weaken Gauchet’s argument: Robespierre is still the man who continues to divide the French, and this work is a timely intervention in a France which continues to be fatally politically polarised.
Book
Review: Robespierre : The Man Who Divides Us the Most by Marcel Gauchet. By
Leon Hughes.. London School of Economics Review of Books, July 26, 2022
Before Hitler and Stalin (and Putin), there was Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the French Revolution during the period in 1793–1794 known as the Terror. If Napoleon Bonaparte had not come to power and made war on much of Europe between 1799 and 1815, Robespierre would have been the most controversial figure of his time. Yet he did not rule for long, did not govern alone, and began his political career as a staunch proponent of liberal democracy: he argued against slavery, the death penalty, and poll taxes; favored freedom of religion and the press; and opposed France’s rush to declare war on Austria in 1792. Known to his followers as “the Incorruptible” because he disdained those who profited from the circumstances of revolution and war, he nonetheless became the face of all that was most repugnant in the French Revolution.
Was he just
a scapegoat, the sacrificial victim who could be blamed in retrospect for the
Terror—for the many thousands who were executed and the hundreds of thousands
imprisoned as suspects, for the muzzling of the press and the repression of all
dissent? Robespierre fell from power on July 27, 1794, when his fellow deputies
in the National Convention, the legislature that governed France from 1792 to
1795, ordered his arrest. Declared an outlaw after his supporters got him
released from custody, he was recaptured and guillotined the next day. His fall
set in motion a startling change of direction, much to the surprise of those
who had brought him down. They had intended only to rid themselves of a
political enemy who seemed poised to act against them. Their leaders included
some who had undertaken brutal purges of their own in the provinces, rivals
further to Robespierre’s left on the Committee of Public Safety, which ran the
government, and deputies who feared for one reason or another that they would
be next on the list of those declared traitors.
The deed
once done, they tried at first to portray it as a victory for the people of
Paris and the deputies over a determined tyrant and his small band of
followers. But the repercussions could not be contained, and almost immediately
the most objectionable policies were dismantled. The draconian law of June 10,
1794, limiting the rights of defendants and broadening the definition of
“suspects” was repealed; in addition to the usual “enemies of the people,” it
had included those who “sought to inspire discouragement,” those who
“disseminated false news,” and those who sought “to undermine the energy and
the purity of revolutionary and republican principles.”
The chief
prosecutor of the revolutionary court was tried and executed. Some of those who
had conspired to remove Robespierre faced detention in their turn, while
suspects in Parisian prisons found themselves free again. The Convention curbed
the powers of the Committee of Public Safety, and when the cascade of changes
further emboldened those who opposed the repressive policies, the deputies
closed the Jacobin Club, which had been the political base for so many of them
during five tumultuous years.
As part of
the effort to move forward, the deputies needed to construct a convincing
narrative about the events of the previous year. Since it was impossible to
blame Robespierre for everything—his only claim to institutional power was
membership on the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety—they had to dig deep in
order to portray him as the chief architect of the regime of terror. The
official report on him and his “accomplices” claimed that though Robespierre
was “timid and fearful,” “he wanted to drive men to tyranny” by pushing for
social leveling; denouncing merchants, property owners, and the rich in
general; undermining discipline in the armies through the dissemination of
radical newspapers to soldiers; setting up an elaborate network of domestic
spies to report on any possible dissent; and accusing of “moderationism” anyone
who opposed the mass indiscriminate executions. Perfidy followed from
Robespierre’s character, according to the report: his desire for domination,
corrosive envy of his rivals, personal lack of talent and hatred therefore of
those with any merit, vindictive pride, and dislike of any celebrity other than
his own.
In order to
make sense of Robespierre’s supposed ascendancy, the report also had to lay out
the litany of praises found in the letters sent by individuals and popular
clubs to their “idol,” “their new god, Maximilien.” The report’s author laments
having seen “everywhere, the same prostitution of incense, best wishes, and
homages” in encomiums such as “the contribution of his rare talents,” “the
incorruptible,” “the virtuous” Robespierre “who covers the cradle of the
Republic with the aegis of his eloquence,” and “the firm support and unshakeable
pillar of the Republic.”
Although
insincere glorification of tyrants is certainly not unknown, Robespierre’s
opponents were effectively acknowledging the deep division of opinion that
would haunt debates for more than two hundred years. Was he just what the
fledgling republic required in order to survive civil conflict and unrelenting
war with virtually all of France’s neighbors, as his adherents believed? Was he
a temporary aberration whose removal would set the republic back on course, as
his gravediggers hoped? Or was he proof that violent revolution in the name of
rights and social justice could only result in terror, violence, and ultimately
authoritarianism, as some later commentators argued?
These
questions are, as might be expected, especially troubling in France, which is
why Marcel Gauchet subtitles his book “The Man Who Divides Us the Most,” “us”
being the French. Yet the French are not the only ones concerned, since
Gauchet’s preoccupation with Robespierre follows from his decades-long study of
the philosophical underpinnings of modern democracy more generally. His work is
not well known in the Anglophone world, though the controversies provoked by
some of his opinions about current issues do echo more widely.
Although he
began his career on the antitotalitarian left and still claims to be a
socialist, Gauchet has been denounced in some French circles as reactionary,
misogynistic, and homophobic. His 2004 essay on the potential negative
consequences of increasing human control over procreation, rather than making
do with what happens, prompted especially heated responses. Titled “The Child
of Desire” and published in the journal he edited, Le Débat, known for its
hard-line centrism, the essay seemed to bemoan the end of patriarchy, with its
subjugation of women, by advancing the claim that “many children of desire will
never know clearly who they are nor what they want,” because “they will remain
forever dependent on this desire that brought them to life.”
The
accusations against Gauchet came to a head when he was asked to open the annual
“rendezvous with history” in 2014. It is not easy for Americans to comprehend
the popularity and influence of this festival, which is held in the Loire
Valley town of Blois every October and draws some 40,000 avid participants to
lectures, interviews, films, and panel discussions focused on recently
published history books. An op-ed by a group of scholars in Le Monde in October
2014 insisted that Gauchet could hardly speak credibly about that year’s theme
of “rebels,” since he encouraged conformism to “hierarchy, moral order, [and]
tradition,” values brandished by the far right.
Such
characterizations of Gauchet’s positions are mistaken, I believe, but hardly
surprising, given the stakes of the arguments he wants to make about modern
democracy and the way that he often goes about making them. Modern democracies,
he maintains, emerged as the religious foundations of collective existence
crumbled; religion did not disappear, of course, but it no longer provided the
crucial legitimation for the political and social order. Modern democracies
therefore face the challenge of explaining to the citizenry what holds society
together in the absence of any transcendental justification.
Gauchet is not convinced that human rights can fill the void, and his one overriding concern is that the modern emphasis on the individual and his or her rights will wear away the necessary foundations for a functioning social order. The fuzzy abstraction of his prose has left open the possibility, despite his disavowals in interviews, that he supports those who oppose the rights of women, gays, or minorities. The language in “The Child of Desire” is a case in point. He seems to criticize the right to choose whether or not to have a child, but at the end of the piece he makes clear that he has no wish to return to an authoritarian past; he does, however, want to consider what the costs of emancipation might be, both for society and for the individual.
Similarly,
he wants to consider the difficulties faced by democracies, whose very
existence depends on emancipation from traditional sources of authority.
Democracy is inherently fragile because of the difficulty of explaining what
holds people together in a secular world, and as a consequence, Gauchet
maintains, it has a predisposition toward authoritarianism and even
totalitarianism. Robespierre is therefore a perfect foil for Gauchet, because
“he embodied the attempt to give liberty and equality their most complete
expression” while personifying “the failure to make a viable system of
government from these principles.” At a time when democracies face external and
internal threats around the world, Robespierre is more relevant than ever.
Both the
virtues and the defects of Gauchet’s approach are on view in Robespierre: The
Man Who Divides Us Most, which is mercifully short in comparison with many of
his other books. The defects are easily recounted: he largely ignores what has
been written by others about his subject (whether democracy in general or Robespierre
in particular) and glides past the nitty-gritty of everyday politics and social
tensions in order to concentrate on the ways in which Robespierre fits into his
larger arguments about democracy. This is not an unknown strategy in French
writing about history and politics; the more polemical the essay, the less
attention is paid to competing accounts or supporting documentation. (Gauchet
provides virtually no footnotes.) In this spirit, he leaves aside any
examination of Robespierre’s biography and considers only his writings and
speeches.
Given the
steady stream of biographies of Robespierre, many of them excellent, such an
approach can be warranted only if it provides a fresh perspective. The virtue
of Gauchet’s book is his laser-like focus on the one belief that shaped
Robespierre’s constantly evolving opinions and actions: that government should
reflect the will of the people, but particular interests, often involving
conspiracies, stand in the way of the triumph of that general will. Viewing this
prissy lawyer from northern France as a political philosopher would be a
stretch, since the exigencies of the situation left him little time for writing
essays, much less books or memoirs. Gauchet therefore aims at a middle ground
where ideas meet events: “The innermost impulses that gave rise to
Robespierre’s conduct are inseparable from a body of ideas that coalesced with
them to form a system.”
Robespierre’s
peculiar hold on his fellow deputies has long been one of the greatest
mysteries of the entire French Revolution: How could this unprepossessing,
previously unknown lawyer come to incarnate the Revolution in its most intense
period? Gauchet is right to argue that Robespierre’s “manner of expression
communicated the promise of the moment with a clearness and a precision that
gradually elevated him to a preeminent place among his peers.” But he downplays
the paradox involved, which was best captured by one of Robespierre’s erstwhile
friends turned enemies, Marie-Jeanne Roland, who wrote while awaiting her
execution in 1793:
“His talent as an orator was worse than
mediocre; his commonplace voice, his bad turns of phrase, his defective manner
of speaking made his delivery extremely boring. But he defended principles with
warmth and tenacity; he had the courage then [the king’s attempted flight in
June 1791] to continue [to defend those principles] at a time when the
defenders of the people were tremendously reduced in number.”
In other words, though Robespierre’s views evolved over time, he never stopped portraying himself as the mouthpiece for the will of the people. He was not being inconsistent, therefore, when he held back at first from supporting the creation of a republic; he could imagine kings as “delegates” or “agents” of the people, even if Louis XVI could not. He proposed few laws yet soon gained a reputation for constantly reminding the deputies of the gap between “what the Revolution promised and what it had so far achieved.” Before long, however, as Gauchet shows, Robespierre’s “craving for popularity” deepened his identification with the general will. “The interest, the desire of the people is that of nature, of humanity; it is the general interest,” he argued in a speech in December 1790. He believed he knew the meaning and direction of that interest and that those who opposed the people (or him) represented only their own “ambition, pride, cupidity.”
Robespierre
combined this unshakable confidence in the will of the people and his ability
to interpret it with an obsessive dread of conspiracy, which he proclaimed from
the first days of the Revolution. He did not invent the fear of treachery, but
he certainly contributed to its credence. Alarm about secret plotting,
sometimes delusional, sometimes not, would eventually justify ever more drastic
measures of repression. It also fueled what Gauchet calls Robespierre’s
“sacrificial narcissism,” his ostentatious self-abnegation combined with
repeated references to himself as a martyr. These reached their zenith right
before his fall, when he replied to those who accused him of seeking
dictatorial powers, “Who am I, I who am accused? A slave of liberty, a living
martyr of the Republic, as much the victim as the enemy of crime.”
Gauchet
takes the dictator charge seriously but in the end argues that “his language
was dictatorial, not his person.” Robespierre resembled a dictator in his
ability to intimidate, but the intimidation did not include actual dictatorial
powers. Gauchet’s way of putting this is characteristically abstract:
“History provides us with no other example
of someone who succeeded in objectively exercising a kind of dictatorship
without subjectively putting himself in the position of a dictator, which is to
say, as a practical matter, without providing himself with the means of actually
exercising dictatorial power.”
Because the
deputies had been brought up reading Roman history and had the example of
Oliver Cromwell even closer to hand, they worried incessantly about a dictator
emerging from their midst. One was coming, but not until Robespierre had lain
in his grave for more than five years.
Given
Gauchet’s interest in the moral foundations of modern democracy, it is perhaps
not surprising that he attributes Robespierre’s eventual downfall to his
differences with other members of the Committee of Public Safety over religion.
Robespierre viewed the campaign for de-Christianization in late 1793 with
growing alarm and eventually denounced it. He then tried to inaugurate a
Rousseau-style deistic alternative known as the Cult of the Supreme Being,
whose festival he presided over in early June 1794.
Robespierre
had in effect anticipated Gauchet’s own line of argument. Gauchet argues that
Robespierre “ran up against the vicious circle to which any attempt to found a
new regime on the basis of revolutionary principles is bound to lead.” In late
1792 Robespierre had concluded, “In order to form our political institutions,
we would need to have the morals that one day they ought to give to us.”
Gauchet calls this statement prophetic, but it comes right out of Rousseau’s
Social Contract (1762). In his section on the need for a supreme legislator,
Rousseau argued:
“For a young people to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before law what they should become by means of law.”
Rousseau
then concluded that this paradox explains why the fathers of nations “have
recourse to divine intervention and credit the gods with their own wisdom.”
Although
Gauchet emphasizes the differences between Robespierre and his enemies on the
subject of religion, he cannot ignore the many other factors that contributed
to Robespierre’s fall: the shock that followed the arrest, trial, and execution
of Georges Danton and his followers, all of them staunch republicans, as
traitors in April 1794; the spectacle of Robespierre as president of the
National Convention presiding over his cherished Cult of the Supreme Being just
two days before the infamous Law of Suspects deepened the dread among the
deputies; and then, in a politically suicidal move, his withdrawal from public
view for six weeks, only to reappear with vague threats against unnamed
deputies. His enemies needed no further encouragement.
Gauchet’s
Robespierre is a tragic figure because he brought an “ancient ideal of
religious unity” to what would become modern problems. But he was not the only
one who failed to establish a lasting republic in France in the 1790s; his
successors failed, too. The only sustainable one on view, in the new United
States of America, was very precarious, and it had the advantage of no
aristocracy, no heritage of feudalism, supposedly unlimited land and resources,
and, above all, distance from Europe. The American republicans barely managed
to learn the lesson that is crucial to any democracy’s life expectancy: the
alternation of power through an electoral process. Robespierre could not
conceive it because he could not imagine that a political party was anything
other than a particular interest, and therefore it was incompatible with the
general will of the people. It is a lesson that is very hard to learn.
I, the
People. By Lynn Hunt. The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2022.
Princeton University Press
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On 9 Thermidor, Robespierre’s rivals in the Committee of Public Safety, France’s emergency ruling body, and the Convention, the national legislature, turned against him and crushed his support in the Commune, Paris’s city government, and the radical Jacobin Club. Along with Louis de Saint-Just, Georges Couthon and other allies, Robespierre was executed the next day. The Terror and militant political extremism gave way to a more conservative regime that Napoleon Bonaparte swept aside in 1799.
It is testimony to the central place occupied by the French Revolution in the world’s imagination that the events of 9 Thermidor continue to be retold generation after generation. In The Fall of Robespierre, Colin Jones achieves the exceptional feat of putting 9 Thermidor in a new perspective with an hour-by-hour, at times almost minute-by-minute, account of the struggle for power. A professor at Queen Mary University of London and a prominent scholar of 18th-century France, Jones injects pace and verve into his book by writing in the historical present tense, but he also provides the background necessary for readers less familiar with the revolution’s main personalities and themes.
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who believed that only by getting ‘up close’ to the ‘infinitely small’ details would it be possible to understand the truth about a Revolution that was stranger than fiction.
Mercier (1740-1815) was an early science fiction novelist, a journalist, politician and Parisian. He was not an eyewitness to the fall of Robespierre because he was in prison in 1794, one of 73 moderate members of the governing Convention who had been arrested and held as ‘Robespierre’s hostages’. The Convention was a representative body of 749 deputies, charged with designing a republican constitution for France. But only 200 were required for quoracy, so the Convention could function without the 73 moderates and without the many others who had been sent out ‘on mission’ to impose order on a country riven by foreign and civil war.
On 28 July 1794, 9 Thermidor, Mulberry Day in the revolutionary calendar, Robespierre and his close colleague Saint-Just planned to make speeches at the Convention that would lift the veil on the most recent counter-revolutionary conspiracies, foreign plots and corruption. Saint-Just was known for carrying his head around as though it was the holy sacrament, and Robespierre was nicknamed ‘the Incorruptible’.
Saint-Just stayed up into the early hours of the morning perfecting his speech, whereas Robespierre slept soundly and reassured the artisan family with whom he lodged in the rue Saint-Honoré that there was nothing to fear as he set off for the Convention after an abstemious breakfast. However, both men were prevented from delivering their speeches; instead arrest warrants were issued for them and their closest associates. There then ensued a further 24 hours of uncertainty, during which Mulberry Day turned into Watering Can Day, and it only gradually became clear that the people of Paris would ultimately support the Convention, not side with Robespierre, Saint-Just and the city’s Commune which had risen, or half-risen, in their defence.
Jones is clear that this is a book as much about Paris as about Robespierre. The hour- by-hour constraint he adopts allows him to broaden the narrative to include a panorama of Parisian life. Many were expecting 9 Thermidor to be a day of protests against the imposition of a wage maximum for Paris, an economic levelling policy that would have led to massive wage decreases for carpenters, blacksmiths and other workers. The police were busy with routine tasks: a locksmith and his wife, for example, were arrested at 3 a.m., while Robespierre was sleeping soundly, for possessing an Old Regime coin with Louis XVI on it, and a bunch of suspicious keys. ‘People have been guillotined for less,’ Jones remarks, deploying the historic present to electrifying effect. Later that morning, the revolutionary tribunal is about its grimly normal business. Forty-four people are sentenced to death, as well as the Princesse de Monaco, left over from the day before when she pretended to be pregnant to extend her life by just one day so she could cut her own hair off and bequeath it to her children.
Jones, whose previous books include The Smile Revolution in 18th-century Paris, notes that the hardened executioner Henri Sanson, descended from a family of executioners under the Old Regime, finds that many of his charges, struggling to master their feelings, smile as they mount the scaffold: ‘On the road to the guillotine, the smile has become a silent weapon of symbolic resistance.’
Assembling a wealth of detail from a vast range of archival resources, Jones sometimes revivifies the intensity of those revolutionary days in a way reminiscent of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. But ultimately he is a historian, and there are questions that he wants to answer. Was Robespierre mad in the run up to 9 Thermidor? He had been absent from the Convention for six weeks before he announced his forthcoming speech on the need for another purge. He spoke of ‘unburdening his heart’, but in fact he was committing political suicide.
Jones argues this was not madness: it was typical of Robespierre’s abstract reasoning about the will of the people, which he claimed to vocalise without dominating. ‘A man who has never managed much in his life is unlikely to be able to manage an insurrection,’ Jones scathingly remarks. For him, Robespierre emerges a charismatic incompetent with the highest of all possible moral tones. In contrast, Mercier saw Robespierre as a ‘sanguinocrat’, or ruler by bloodshed.
The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France. By Ruth Scurr. The Spectator, August 28, 2021.
In this brilliantly analytical episode, Professor Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, takes us back to one of the most dramatic episodes in all political history: 9-10 Thermidor in the Revolutionary Calendar, or 27-28 July in ours.
As Jones explains, Robespierre began 9 Thermidor feeling relatively secure as he went to sleep in his austere lodgings near the Place de la Révolution. By the time the sun set into the summer horizon, his position was parlous. The next day he would be dead.
The story and characters that feature in this episode of Travels Through Time are drawn from Jones’s forthcoming book, The Fall of Robespierre: twenty four hours in Revolutionary Paris, which will soon be published by Oxford University Press. Peter Moore talks with Jones.
Colin Jones: The Fall of Robespierre (1794). Travels Through Time, July 28, 2021.
Still more eccentric is the book’s organisation. Traditional chapters are abandoned entirely. Instead we get five lengthy ‘parts’, each subdivided into a series of ever-faster-paced scenes, the shortest only a few paragraphs long. Each is headed merely by a simple indication of time and place: ‘10:45 am: Robespierre’s lodgings, 366 Rue Saint-Honoré’; ‘11:00 am: Tuileries palace and gardens’; ‘11:30 am: Vestibule to the Convention hall and environs’, and so on. One can almost hear the ticking of all those Parisian ormolu clocks.
Two things prevent all this from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day.
For 27 July 1794, ‘9 Thermidor Year II’ in the new republican calendar, has long been recognised as a ‘pivotal moment’ in the French Revolution. Until that point, the course of the revolution had been marked by increasing radicalism: France had gone from constitutional monarchy after the fall of the Bastille in 1789, to kingless republic in 1792, to wartime police state from 1793. After the events of 9 Thermidor, the trend was towards increasing conservatism. The democratic and reformist energies of the early revolution were mostly dissipated. Within a decade, France was again a monarchy, with a Corsican-born emperor in place of a Bourbon king.
This sudden bouleversement has conventionally been explained as a reaction to the guillotine-fixated excesses of the Revolutionary Government of Year II (1793–4) and the austere, donnish 35-year-old bachelor lawyer from Arras, Maximilien Robespierre, who was its malign presiding genius. With real power transferred after September 1793 from France’s revolutionary parliament, the National Convention, to a twelve-man Committee of Public Safety dominated by Robespierre, the regime had resorted to ‘terror’ as its principal means of deterring royal insurrection and purging ‘counter-revolutionary’ elements within its own ranks. After the new Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794), the rate of executions soared, with more ‘enemies of the state’ sent to the guillotine in Paris in June and July 1794 than in the whole period since the fall of the Bastille. When, on 26 July 1794, Robespierre addressed the Convention, urging the need for yet further purges, extending even to the Convention’s own members, his enemies in the government were provoked to act. They needed to neutralise Robespierre before he did the same to them.
The events of the following twenty-four hours provide the subject of Jones’s minutely detailed and unfailingly gripping new book. Robespierre’s fall was swift. On 9 Thermidor he was denounced in the Convention as a ‘tyrant’ and placed under arrest. There was unexpected resistance from Robespierre’s Jacobin allies in the city government, the Paris Commune, and its forces briefly secured their hero’s release. But the opposition was short-lived. By the middle of the night of 27–28 July, the city government’s headquarters had been overrun and Robespierre recaptured. Before sunset the following day, Robespierre and his principal supporters had been decapitated on what is now the Place de la Concorde.
In most accounts, that day of action is represented as a ‘kind of parliamentary coup d’état’. The speed of the regime’s fall and the Parisian citizenry’s apparent ‘indifference’ to its fate attested to its political and moral bankruptcy. With hindsight, the regime’s use of terror during the period of emergency rule was ‘essentialized’ as its defining characteristic. It became ‘the Terror’ with a capital T, with Robespierre singled out as its moving spirit: a ‘bestial, demonic specimen’, a buveur de sang (‘blood-drinker’).
But the French Revolution, as the playwright Louis-Sébastien Mercier observed, was ‘all about optics’. Jones’s superbly researched and strikingly original book produces an optic of a radically different kind. ‘Only by getting “up close” and drilling down into the “infinitely small” details of the revolutionary process’, its author insists, can the day’s course and outcome be understood. And for once this counsel of perfection can be put into practice. Interrogatories demanded by Paris’s military commander in the days immediately after the coup from officials in each of the city’s forty-eight administrative sections produced ‘micro-accounts’ from vantage points all over the city, many of them broken down into ‘quarter-hourly chunks’. Almost two hundred survive, along with voluminous newspaper sources and memoirs. There is probably not ‘another day in the whole of the eighteenth century’, Jones notes, for which ‘sources are so copious and dense’. And from this vast array of little-used archival material, a new and very different narrative emerges.
The purpose of the coup was not to topple the existing revolutionary regime, Jones contends, nor to end the use of terror, but rather to strengthen the regime by the removal of one dangerously over-powerful and increasingly erratic member. In reality, argues Jones, there was little or no ideological difference between Robespierre and the instigators of the coup against him. Most were fellow members of the central executive and as complicit in the use of terror as Robespierre himself.
Personality clashes, in particular resentment of Robespierre’s chilly and imperious style, proved more influential than questions of revolutionary principle. Far from being parties to a carefully worked-out conspiracy, his accusers in the Convention had no concerted plan of action and were blindsided when Robespierre’s arrest was challenged by his supporters within the Paris Commune. They ‘were improvising throughout the day’, and Robespierre’s allies were equally unprepared.
* * *
It is in the vivid detailing of these improvisations – chaotic, heroic, sometimes farcical – and the response to them by the Parisian citizenry that Jones’s book comes into its own. ‘The tendency among many historians’, he writes, ‘to see the night as one in which Parisians revealed political indifference is quite wrong.’ The outcome ‘depended on a million micro-decisions made by Parisians across the expanse of the city’.
Jones reveals how close those Parisians came to conferring victory on Robespierre and his partisans. By nightfall on 27 July, they had not only rescued their hero from his Convention-appointed jailers but also deployed a force over two thousand-strong to the streets near the Tuileries palace, where the Convention, still in session in the palace’s former theatre, was at their mercy. But again there was no clear plan. Lacking any orders as to what to do next, the force’s hapless commander decided to withdraw his troops and return to the Maison Commune (just two kilometres to the east) for further instructions. The Robespierrists’ strategic advantage was never recovered.
These fatal difficulties in communication affected the day’s outcome at least as much as attitudes towards the Robespierrian regime. ‘Torpidity in the traffic of information seems to have been critical,’ writes Jones. Amid the confusion over the legality of orders, which side was prevailing and what the crisis was really about, control of print was vital. When it came to issuing orders, the Convention had a sophisticated printing establishment just two hundred metres away in the Place Vendôme; in contrast, ‘word of mouth and manuscript transmission’ were ‘pretty much all the Commune [could] manage’. Changes of side were frequent, as in the case of the artillery officer Cosme Pionnier, who at 8pm had his Robespierrist guns primed to bombard the Convention but by the end of the night had them aimed at the Maison Commune. So numerous were these ‘changes of heart’ that they undermine any explanation of 9 Thermidor simply in terms of ideology or popular hostility towards ‘the Terror’.
Jones handles this vast cast and the multiple locations with formidable directorial skill. Emancipated from the traditional chapter structure, he builds the narrative (and the tension) by cutting from scene to scene, observing his actors and bringing details into focus like a master of cinéma vérité. Even his use of the narrative present tense (usually the hammiest of literary devices) actually works.
If all this evokes the world of cinema, it is even more striking how clearly Jones’s drama manifests the formal characteristics of a tragédie, as prescribed by Corneille and Racine. It strictly observes the ‘three classical unities’: of action (a single great event), time (twenty-four hours) and place (Paris). Even its five-part structure corresponds to the five-act format insisted upon by the tragedians of the grand siècle.
Although this model is never overtly acknowledged, Jones is far too thoroughly steeped in French ancien-régime literature for this classicism of form and exposition to be entirely coincidental. Indeed, the book’s tragic dimension is essential to its revisionist purpose. Post-Thermidorian polemic dehumanised Robespierre as an animalistic ogre. As the tragic protagonist of Jones’s drama, Robespierre is not exonerated from the revolutionary regime’s excesses. But he is restored to his humanity and endowed with a kind of flawed greatness – a man of nobility and goodness who, in pursuit of a fine ideal, is induced to do what is monstrous and wrong.
This is not an airbrushed Robespierre. But in Jones’s account, Robespierre is, controversially, a figure of real pathos: a man whose earlier championing of Enlightenment principles, universal male suffrage, religious toleration, rights for women, emancipation for slaves and even (ironically) the abolition of the death penalty offered an ‘inspiring vision of a new, regenerated world of political virtue’. Robespierre was the man who expressed the ideals of the early French Revolution ‘most luminously’ and ‘in a way that can speak to us still’.
Those are fighting words, and it is not the least of this book’s virtues that they are destined to provoke much skirmishing on the historical barricades – not only about Robespierre, but also about the relative virtues and evils of the Revolutionary Government of Year II and whether there was a better future for France which those twenty-four hours of 9 Thermidor tragically foreclosed.
Night of the Guillotine. By John Adamson. Literary Review, July 2021.
During the USI (Unexpected Sources of Inspiration) conferences, Marcel addressed a parallel between this founding event of modern democracy and the gilets jaunes movement (yellow vests movement, a French political movement for economic justice), which is seen as a contemporary revolution. Maddyness took a moment to discuss the role of innovation, new technologies, and social media in our current day democracies with him.
Maddyness. Are we programmed to reinvent
Marcel Gauchet. We have the choice between being subject to a resurgence of the past, which psychanalysists call suppressing, or we can take control of our past. We are faced with this challenge in our cultural situation today. For decades we’ve experimented with a sort of power takeover by knowledge which justifies the expression “knowledge society.” We don’t live through past glories. Yet, past events are susceptible to being called into question in terms of optimising knowledge, capable of providing better answers than those that have always existed.
The inconvenient part about this method, which won’t disappear anytime soon, is that it’s just the initial stage. It leaves out some important questions: what’ll be left of this past that we’re trying to improve upon if we don’t ask ourselves how it was created, to begin with? When we forget about it or we don’t take it into account, it has a tendency to keep coming back to remind us. We must reclaim the past so that we’re not subject to it or we’ll become puppets who have a grasp of reality but who’re always exposed to the debate of a past that we don’t control.
MG. This expression is the fruit of ignorance. When we’re aware of the past, we don’t have a tendency to think that it was better before! Nostalgia is the fruit of disregarding the past. It’s a daily debate, represented by opposition between technophiles and technophobes, who’re both wrong. Saying that it was better before doesn’t give any idea about what it was like before. It isn’t a good start.
MG.This is the cultural challenge of our times. We’re entering a new period of the relationship between technology and the future that we’ve been building over the last few decades. There isn’t one solution, but we’ll need to find meaning in the past. It isn’t about being obsessed with the past, but we do need to understand that the past continues to dwell within us. Collective psychoanalysis should be done, which doesn’t mean taking care of ourselves but giving ourselves the best way to approach and enrich the future. Individuals who do this personally are already giving themselves an advantage.
Some have understood it; their actions are guided by a sort of search for balance. They ask themselves questions about end results and have a better vision of these results. In terms of economic-political efficiency, what you ignore from the past will confront you and you have to be prepared. The constant surprise of political figures about things they did not even seem to suspect was possible is one of the features of our society. However, it’s generally not very hard to foresee them.
MG. I think that he would’ve been interested in it for sure. Yet there’s something that would’ve shocked him, which is that, contrary to one of his favourite guiding principles, people aren’t united. In fact, they’re very divided. This is the biggest difference between the yellow vests movement and the sans-culottes (literally “people without breeches”, the lower-class people who revolted against the French government because of the poor quality of life in late 18th century) who thought that the people were united and had a common idea: the general interest. Through democracy, yellow vests think that it’s not necessary to try to create unanimity, which would’ve been artificial. They’re still unified, but they admit that they don’t agree on everything. This would’ve deeply disturbed Robespierre.
MG. This is the nature of social media. Everyone communicates with everyone, but a unanimity can’t be reached. Democracy teaches us that unanimity never leads to very reasonable political decisions. There are always contradictions to consider, which is necessary for political excellence. This is why the yellow vests movement should be studied; they are perfectly conscious of this.
First of all, they don’t want representatives. But why? Not just because the representatives will inevitably be drawn into the official political scheme, but also because it’s impossible to represent so many differences. Power is an enormous challenge. When you have so many different complaints, it’s even harder to respond to them. This is the society that we must live with.
MG. Of course! But they’re just at the starting point. They provide the raw material. The approach would be to create unity from diversity without destroying the latter. This is an almost mathematical problem, but maths is simpler than a real-life situation!
MG. They already are, but this rudimentary control isn’t used to the best of its abilities. Control isn’t about insulting, systematic bad-mouthing, a hostile frenzy, or hate. It’s the drive to go deeper into why decisions are taken in order to better challenge them and be reasonable. We’re in a learning process where we’re rather relaxed about control, but later on, we’ll reach a second phase, where we’ll be more reasonable.
Social media is extraordinary, but we must know how to use it and for the moment, we don’t know how to use it well. We’re realising that it’s just as difficult to represent honest people as it’s to control representatives honestly. It takes time to build, yet this isn’t easy. I like to think that we’re at the beginning of something important. I find a lot of young people who struggle to find a way to start a true political or civic discussion through social media, a discussion about the control of government action as well as how we can fix these issues.
It’s not enough to criticise or condemn what the government does, but there are many solutions that can stem from a vast number of domains. We naively thought that collective intelligence was going to magically sprout from social media. This is not the case. These platforms can be used to achieve collective intelligence, but intelligence is a shared job that still needs to be worked on! We’re at a tipping point because everyone is tired of this surge of insanity that even tires those who produce it. The moment of insanity has passed, and the time of exercising rights has started to take off.
MG. Absolutely! We also forget that collective intelligence has rules, a discipline, and elaborate workings that are anything but obvious; it’s quite complicated. The more that we enlarge the circle – and that’s the idea of social media – the harder it’ll get to produce something with a genuine consensus, which means something that doesn’t come from higher up, but is born lower down, among the people. The challenge is finding a way to allow a common thought or at least a shared diagnosis to circulate among many people since there’ll always be a divide of opinions in a democracy.
I think that this could be one of the main functions of civic discussions about social media. We’re aware of the difficulties of democracy, yet we’re trying to navigate through them. Occasionally, we find solutions to problems that we weren’t even aware of, yet we still have problems that we can’t seem to find solutions to. We’ve gone from the era of people who could inspire a large number of people by professing personal judgements – and I think that we won’t see any more of this – to a world where everyone can speak out. We’re no longer obligated to turn to people who know better than us.
MG. In a democracy, there are always two stages. The first stage comes from the activists who feel like they were born to talk on behalf of others. They speak out and we realise that no one identifies with what they’re talking about. The second stage is an awakening of what’s been falsely called the silent majority, which is made up of people who’re a little less sure about their ideas that they’ve thought about a little too much. These people will express themselves in the end. I recently read an article about the effects of Twitter that said that the biggest mistake of political figures is thinking that what they post on Twitter reflects the public opinion. Not even close! This shows the most extreme points of view in these famous bubbles.
Political figures need to get this fallacy out of their heads. But the problem now is to give shape to the majority who must stop being silent and speak out. We’re arriving at this point. By definition, these activists are intolerant, extreme, radical, and biased, but the population isn’t like that. They can see both sides of the story and this is what stops them. When you’re without nuances, you can express yourself freely and in the complete intolerance of those who don’t think the same way as you.
The real function of social media in relation to its oversimplification will be to help these perplexities, doubts, and interrogations develop better. We must realise the evolutions that have happened so far though. Social media has already allowed movements and processes to evolve. We haven’t reached the final stage of social media yet; it’s still in its joyful childhood.
MG. I don’t think so, no. The democratic process is an argument between two fundamental elements: peoples’ differing interests and unity among them. Social media increases diversity, separations, and variety to such a point that some say it is chaos. This makes creating coherence even more necessary. Representatives should work towards this and must keep in mind what may come from this societal expression and what may be amplified by social media.
If you just put everything that emerges in this new public space end to end, you’re unable to define any definite and consistent direction or priorities! Because if there are only extreme emergencies and you have limited resources, you can’t do anything.
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