Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being

The search for a republican morality

Jonathan Smyth

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781526103789
• eBook ISBN: 9781526103819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Explores Robespierre's vision and the events held across France on this day, which he declared a national day of celebration to inaugurate the state religion of the new French Republic, the Cult of the Supreme Being. It redefines the importance of the Festival in the development of the Revolution.

1

Towards a new republican morality

Any attempt to follow the development of Robespierre’s thinking, leading finally to the speech of 18 Floréal (7 May 1794) and proclamation of the festival in honour of the Supreme Being on 20 Prairial Year II (8 June 1794) has to try to answer two main questions. The first is whether progress in his thinking on the importance of the problem which the lack of any acceptable national moral system through the early years of the Revolution had created can be traced. The second is why he chose a Revolutionary Festival to launch his vision of a new attitude towards religion, rather than attempting to renovate the failing Constitutional Church to incorporate his ideas or simply replacing it with a new, but this time viable, version of a faith-based state church.

Robespierre, in common with the other ‘men of virtue’ who were the driving force of the Revolution, used a specific form of language when discussing public and private morality.¹ Any examination of Robespierre’s speeches and writings shows his constant use of the word ‘virtue’ when discussing morality. In his speech establishing the Cult of the Supreme Being he used it a total of fifteen times, many more times than the sum of his combined references to the Supreme Being, the Divinity, the Creator, Nature or God. For Robespierre, virtue was all; his speeches and writings are imbued with it, and it is the word he uses again and again whether speaking of politics, religion, patriotism or public morality. This vision of a new moral authority from which Revolutionary France would advance towards the final goal of the truly virtuous state did not come from the deliberations of a committee of academic philosophers, it came from Robespierre’s personal conviction that such a system was vital if the Revolution were to continue towards this goal. He endlessly extolled virtue: a quality which he regretted as no longer being the civic selflessness of antiquity, but reduced to something which was constantly and unavoidably diluted by the subjective nature of contemporary republican political morality.

Robespierre himself had always been clear as to his ultimate aim; nothing less than the establishment of the Republic of Virtue. He was equally aware of the fact that any such visionary ideal was increasingly weakened by the combination of the disappearance of a valid system of public morality, the growing power of the atheists and de-Christianisers, the difficulties in the practice of religious observance, and the failure of the Constitutional Church to fill the vacuum created by the disestablishment of the state church in August 1789. One constant problem, when attempting to assess why Robespierre chose a particular course of action during his political career, is that of trying to separate the moralist from the man of action, to try to evaluate his motives without falling into the popular concept of him simply as the butcher of the Terror, the cold and unfeeling dictator steeped in innocent blood. Robespierre himself always insisted that he was neither a philosopher nor a mystic; he was essentially a political animal and, when at the peak of his powers, as he was in the late Spring and early Summer of 1794, he was a politician to his fingertips, as evidenced by his actions in the Committee; a man capable of making swift decisions based on a rapid evaluation of information received, allied with an intuitive ability to seize the moment.²

Robespierre had a very singular and personal sense of rightness of action, both public and private, and this led him to an almost circular concept of morality. For him, an action could be classified as ‘good’ for no other reason than that it arose from ‘good’ principles, and if it was then performed by a ‘virtuous’ man the circle was complete. If these criteria were fulfilled, any action, however stark, however apparently unfeeling, however heedless of any claims of friendship or of the solidarity owed to close associates must, by definition, be in and of itself ‘virtuous’, and therefore something from which only good results could flow. It was this particular view of the moral imperative which gave rise to the popular vision of Robespierre as a man driven solely by reason, personally cold and unfeeling and with a total lack of any humanity.³

It was again this unyielding assurance of the rightness of his own moral purpose which allowed him, apparently without qualm or emotion, to accept the necessity to execute not just open opponents like Hébert and Chaumette but once-close colleagues, such as Danton, with whom he had wept at the loss of his wife, and one of his oldest and closest friends and supporters, Camille Desmoulins. Robespierre’s public and private life was firmly underpinned by the political and moral principles he assimilated from his reading of Rousseau, Montesquieu and Locke, to which he added an idealised vision of the glories of Athenian democratic thought under Demosthenes, and the stern public morality of the early Roman republic. This strict and unbending ethical construct was the rock on which he built his vision of public life and it was this rigid morality which would finally force him to the conclusion that it was both his right and his moral and political duty to attempt to impose his personal ethical base as the ‘official’ morality of the Revolution. Only then could the Revolution continue towards the ultimate aim of making the Rousseauvian dream of the Republic of Virtue a reality.

There is little evidence of Robespierre’s actual religious beliefs before 1784. He was admittedly a scholar at the College of Louis-le-Grand on a nomination from an ecclesiastic in Arras, but the person concerned seems to have been acting more as a family friend than with any view of a later ecclesiastical career for the young Robespierre. With his fellow scholars he would have been expected to attend Mass regularly and take at least some part in the greater festivals of the church. The only account of his time at Louis-le-Grand is that written by the deputy principal at that time, one of his most noted vilifiers, the Abbé Proyart.⁴ Writing under the pseudonym of Leblond de Neuvéglise, Proyart claims in his Life and Crimes of Robespierre that any faith Robespierre may have had was soon lost and that he gave up Easter communion as soon as he could. Proyart is hardly a reliable source but this does agree with Robespierre’s later remarks in his speech of 1 Frimaire (21 November 1793) that he was ‘a fairly bad Catholic since his schooldays’.⁵ There is however compelling evidence that from a young man Robespierre had clear views on both private and public, or political, morality. On the question of political morality, the definition which he gave in his ‘Plaidoyer’ of April 1784, and repeated in his essay ‘Sur les peine infamantes’, published in 1785, clearly lays down the principle he was to follow all his life: ‘The necessary mainspring of republics is virtue, … which is nothing less than love of law and of one’s country, and whose very nature requires that all special interests, all personal relationships, should give way to the general good.’⁶

In a speech to the Jacobin Club on 2 January 1792, Robespierre stressed his allegiance to the principles of public morality, and it was this speech which led to his being called the Incorruptible. Referring to the unpopularity of his view on war, he said: ’Two opinions have been raised in this assembly, one encompasses all the aspects which flatter the imagination, all the shining ideas which arouse enthusiasm … the other is based on cold reason and hard fact. To please, one must defend the first, to be useful the second, in the certainty of displeasing those who may cause you harm; I stand for the second.’⁷ On 26 March of the same year during a speech to the Jacobin Club opposing the proposed declaration of war, Robespierre, while showing no signs of following any particular spiritual path other than the generalised Deism of Rousseau, publicly accepted that there is something outside Man which can act as an inspiration towards public and private virtue when he said ‘I myself uphold those eternal principles by which human frailty can find strength to make the leap to virtue.’⁸ Later in the same speech when he referred to ‘Providence’ striking down the Emperor Leopold, he was immediately attacked by the Girondin Guadet, an associate of Brissot, for propagating superstition. Robespierre, instead of ignoring the accusation, launched into an apparently unprepared defence of Deism, despite some serious murmurings from his audience. ‘To invoke the name of providence and offer the idea of an eternal being who specifically influences the destiny of nations, and who, it seems to me, specially watches over the French Revolution, is not a dangerous idea, it is a heartfelt belief, one I need to hold.’⁹

Although the general theme of morality is never far from his mind, his concentration on it as the single most important facet of public life occurs after the autumn of 1793. Between November 1793 and May 1794, Robespierre took every opportunity to speak on the general theme of morality, although it was not until after the establishment of the Terror in his speech of 5 February and the subsequent struggle with Danton and his followers that the first indication of his intention to offer some form of ethical system appeared. During 1793 not only Robespierre but also other Jacobins, who had become concerned about the fast-growing progress of the destruction of religion, began to express openly their anxiety at the way that in several parts of France the de-Christianisers, apparently acting on their own and without reference to the capital, were effectively ignoring, if not actively opposing, the centralising authority both of the Convention and of the Committee of Public Safety. When Chaumette ordered the inauguration of a Festival of Reason to be held in Notre Dame de Paris on 20 Brumaire, Year II (10 November 1793), and persuaded the Convention to decree that all churches throughout France should become Temples of Reason, Robespierre realised that the time had come when he must speak out. He must have now felt himself strong enough to openly oppose the rising tendency towards atheism and to show publicly his increasing distaste for the activities of the de-Christianisers; a decision which was also fuelled in no small measure by his personal disgust at the manner in which that particular festival was conducted.

From this point onwards Robespierre began to take every opportunity to express publicly his moral and spiritual position and his open support of religious toleration, a position in which he was originally backed by Danton and Cambon, both of whom would add their voices to his by speaking in the Convention during November and December 1793 in support of the guaranteed liberty of all citizens to practice their religion. The first major instance of him speaking publicly on this theme was at a meeting of the Jacobin Club held on 1 Frimaire (21 November 1793). Robespierre was due to speak immediately after a speech by Momoro in support of the anti-clerical position advanced by Hébert and Chaumette in which they maintained that the worst enemies of the Revolution were still the clergy. In the event, Momoro chose to speak on a completely different subject. Robespierre did not however recast his speech in order to respond to the new subject raised by Momoro; he delivered a speech which opened up the whole debate on the process of de-Christianisation and the necessity, as he saw it, to respond to the underlying feeling in the nation of the need for some generally acceptable system of public morality to replace the previous faith-based system. In this speech Robespierre had three main themes; beginning with an outright attack on atheism and its supporters, he then defended both the right and the principle of freedom of worship, proceeding, to the probable surprise of his listeners, with a defence of the unexpressed feeling of a considerable proportion of the nation for the need of the consolations of religion, and finishing by offering a statement of his own position and beliefs.

He began by dismissing Hébert’s openly expressed fear of the resurgence of the old religion, asserting that most of the remaining priests were far too busy seeking lucrative posts as municipal administrators and as secretaries or even presidents of Sociétés Populaires, to be in any position to offer any real threat to the Revolution. He then made a direct attack on the organisers of the Festival of Reason: ‘What right have they to attack freedom of worship in the very name of Liberty and attack bigotry with a new bigotry? By what right do they denigrate the genuine homage paid to truth with a series of ridiculous caricatures?’¹⁰ He proceeded to warn the atheists that any attack on the right of priests to hold services openly, far from having the desired effect, would only make them more determined to celebrate their religion, since what is not permitted to be done openly, will inevitably be done clandestinely.

It is at this point that Robespierre, for the first time in his public speeches, uses the term ‘Supreme Being’, reminding his hearers that this name was specifically included in the preamble to the constitution of 1793, which repeated the words used in 1789, when it was formally stated that the proclamation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was made ‘in the presence of the Supreme Being’.¹¹ He then proceeded to attack the heart of the argument, not, as might have be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• The Revolutionary Calendar – An II
• Introduction
• 1 Towards a new republican morality
• 2 The national response to Robespierre’s proclamation
• 3 The celebrations in the capital
• 4 The celebrations outside Paris
• 5 Financing a national festival
• 6 Contemporary comments on the Festival
• 7 After the Festival
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index