Robespierre

John Hardman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317874607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Robespierre was one of the most powerful and the most feared leaders of the French Revolution. John Hardman describes the career of this ruthless political manipulator, and in the process explores the dynamics of the French revolutionary movement and the ferocious and self-destructive rivalries of its leadership.This original book gets behind the polished but chilly surface of the public persona to reveal how Robespierre came by his extraordinary power and how he used it.

PART ONE

OPPOSITION

Chapter 1

THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS

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SITUATION OF FRANCE AT ROBESPIERRE’S BIRTH

Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was born in Arras, the capital of the northern province of Artois, on 6 May 1758, into a modest and declining legal family. Shortly before his birth, in November 1757, at the battle of Rossbach, a French army had been destroyed by Frederick the Great of Prussia. The defeat was the worst for France since Agincourt and led to decades of military reform which only served to lower morale. In 1759, a year after Robespierre’s birth, France suffered defeats still greater overseas at the hands of Frederick’s ally and France’s competitor for empire, Britain. France’s losses included India, Canada, and some immensely profitable West Indian sugar islands. 1759 was Britain’s annus mirabilis but France’s annus horribilis. The sense of national decline under Louis XV was intensified in 1772 when Russia, Prussia and Austria seized territory from one of France’s oldest allies in the first partition of Poland. Russia and Prussia and indeed Britain had recently acceded to the ranks of the Great Powers, to the obvious disadvantage of France and Austria, who in consequence replaced their centuries-old enmity in 1756 with an uneasy alliance.

Louis XVI succeeded his grandfather in 1774 and temporarily reversed the decline by assisting Britain’s American colonies to win their independence, which they did in 1782. But it was at enormous financial cost and when Prussia and Britain invaded Holland in 1787 and ousted the pro-French government, Louis did not have the funds to stop them. Frenchmen have always cared about gloire but foreign policy was the essential métier of a king and the failures of the later Bourbons in this field played a part in the collapse of their regime.

France was a rich country but the period of economic expansion under Louis XV, when the population had increased from 20 to 26 million, was coming to an end when Robespierre was born. France still had far greater resources than Britain but her political system did not allow her to mobilize them. France was an ‘absolute’ monarchy; that is to say that her national representative institution, the Estates-General, was in abeyance, having last been summoned in 1614. (The meeting of the Estates-General in 1789 marked the start of the French Revolution.) The king proclaimed his legislative self-sufficiency but, for reasons of propaganda, registered his edicts in 13 appeal courts called parlements (the one in Artois, before which Robespierre would plead, was called the Conseil d’Artois). But, again at about the time of Robespierre’s birth, the parlements began refusing to register the king’s edicts, particularly financial ones.

Unlike the British Parliament, in which the mercantile interest was strong, the parlements, consisting of landowning, noble judges, had no interest in paying for an overseas war to benefit the merchants of Bordeaux. And it was noble landowners who were being asked to foot the bill: it was accepted that the peasants could not pay any more and it was administratively difficult to tax the towns. But the noble riposte was increasingly that of France’s American allies: ‘no taxation without representation’, via the Estates-General. And Louis XVI himself may have come to realize that with the Estates, though he would cease to be an absolute monarch, at least he would have the money to conduct a foreign policy which, as I have said, was his main function.

Before that happened, however, in 1771, Louis XV brutally suppressed the main parlement, the Parlement de Paris, exiled its members to remote areas and replaced it with a puppet body, dubbed the ‘Parlement Maupeou’ after Chancellor Maupeou the architect of the coup, or as it was called at the time the ‘revolution of 1771’. The ease with which the old king had destroyed the Parlement led many Frenchmen to consider they were ruled not by a Christian king but by an oriental or at least Russian-style despot. They expected troops to help in the collection of taxes, believed to be the hallmark of such regimes. A stable system which had endured for hundreds of years (it was believed) had been knocked down like a house of cards. The king died detested, of small pox; it was said he had contracted it from a prostitute. A society with lax morals, at least in its upper reaches, hypocritically censured his sexual excesses. A canon of Notre Dame relates that when Louis had been ill in 1744 6,000 candles had been lit for his recovery, which they had achieved. In 1774 there were only three candles and they had no effect.

Louis XVI recalled the exiled Parlement because, as he said, he ‘wanted to be popular’. But this only gave the regime the worst of both worlds. Maupeou’s ‘revolution’ had created a feeling of impermanence but it had allowed the king’s ministers to start reforming the abuses of the regime – making the nobility pay a fairer share of taxation (though they were still exempt from the main peasant tax, the taille), making justice cheaper and swifter. Maupeou’s secretary, Lebrun, was working on a codification of French law which 30 years later, when Bonaparte was first and Lebrun second consul, became the Code Napoléon. The restored Parlement blocked most of Louis XVI’s reforms but its recall did little to alleviate the sense of instability.

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ROBESPIERRE’S ANCESTRY AND FAMILY

Robespierre, then, was born into a declining family in a declining country. The Robespierres’ finances were as precarious as the king’s. Maximilien was the eldest child of another Maximilien, a barrister, who had married Jacqueline Carraut four months before his son’s birth. Jacqueline was the daughter of a brewer and the Robespierres considered the match something of a mésalliance – in England the disapproval would have come from the other side. The Robespierre family had enjoyed centuries of respectable bourgeois obscurity but had made no further progress since emerging from the ranks of the peasantry in the fifteenth century. Robespierre’s great-great uncle had registered a coat of arms in 1696,¹ but whereas in Britain this would have signalled the entry of the family into the gentry, in France it had little legal significance; as did the use of the particle ‘de’, which anyone could use.

The thing that mattered in the ancien régime was entry into the nobility, a legal category which conferred prestige and fiscal privilege. There were some 250,000 nobles in France, which made them akin to the British gentry rather than the peerage. However, unlike in Britain, the border between the upper bourgeoisie and the gentry was not fluid but legally defined and difficult (and increasingly difficult) to cross. The resentment caused by this difficulty was one of the main causes of the Revolution. ‘Living nobly’, that is like a gentleman, which the Robespierres probably and Maximilien certainly did, was not sufficient; the gulf between them and those, otherwise indistinguishable, who had crossed the technical frontier into the noblesse was vast. And yet the gulf could be leapt and many leapt it; and many were in mid-flight when the Revolution broke out in 1789 and nobility was abolished in 1790.

There were two main methods of entering the nobility, the quick way and the slow way. The quick way was to buy the sinecure office of secrétaire du roi for the equivalent of £10,000. The slow way was via an ascending ladder of legal offices which culminated in the desired object of noblesse. Many of those Robespierre would encounter in the Revolution had travelled some way on this journey, for example Danton and Joseph Payan, whom Robespierre, at the height of his power, had appointed ‘minister for propaganda’. In 1787 Danton bought the office of avocat aux Conseils du roi for the equivalent of £3,500;² this did not confer nobility but preparing cases for the Conseil d’État was prestigious and was only one step away from the offices that did – such as that of conseiller in the Chambre des Comptes of Grenoble which Joseph Payan acquired.

In contrast with the Dantons and the Payans, the Robespierres were stagnating and Robespierre’s own legal career did nothing to reverse the process. The law was the way to attain nobility in the ancien régime, but it had to be used as a ladder of ascent. And it is also worth making the distinction between those who, like Danton and Payan, would have arrived anyway with or without the help of the Revolution, and those like Robespierre who would not. Robespierre himself came to believe that those to whom the Revolution had given most must give it back most.

In 1760 Maximilien was joined by a sister, Charlotte, who survived to provide ‘ghosted’ memoirs of her brother, and in 1763 by Augustin, who through the influence of his elder brother became an ‘MP’ in 1793. In 1765 their mother died after giving birth to a stillborn child; shortly afterwards their father absconded, though he returned at intervals before dying in 1777 at Munich.³ Robespierre and Augustin were brought up by their grandfather, the brewer. At eight Maximilien went to the well-endowed Collège d’Arras and at eleven he won one of the Collège’s four scholarships to the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris.

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LOUIS-LE-GRAND

Louis-le-Grand was the equivalent of a modern secondary school and university rolled into one. So Robespierre spent seven years of general studies before specializing in law for the last three. He went home for the vacations. Louis-le-Grand was one of the most prestigious educational establishments in France, the French Eton, where scholarship boys such as Maximilien rubbed shoulders with the sons of dukes and ministers. Unlike Eton there was no sense of equality between all those privileged to be there. But there were plenty of ‘roturiers’ (commoners) like Robespierre, including future colleagues Camille Desmoulins and Fréron. Fréron was later to depict Robespierre as a moody, misanthropic loner. But he developed a deep friendship with Camille Desmoulins, a boy with a stutter, two years younger than Maximilien.

Robespierre worked hard at his studies and with success – most years he won a prize for classics, though it was usually a second prize. Latin was his forte and he was known as the ‘Roman’. In 1775 he was chosen to read a Latin oration to Louis XVI on his return from the coronation at Rheims. Louis and Marie-Antoinette did not get out of their carriage but Louis, a keen Latinist himself, would have understood the oration. It is hard to overemphasize the influence of classical, and especially Roman history on the course of the Revolution. It was the staple of secondary education and it provided the only parallel of a republican regime in a large country.

In July 1780 Robespierre graduated as a Bachelor of Law and in the following May received his licence to practice. In June 1781 Louis-le-Grand awarded him 600 livres (£25) as recompense for ‘twelve years’ good conduct … [and] good results in philosophy and law exams’.⁴ In addition the college transferred his scholarship to his brother Augustin, who was to lead a more dissolute life. On graduation Maximilien faced a choice of whether to practise in Paris or return to Arras. For an ambitious man the likely decision would have been in favour of the former course of action – many who were to play a part in the Revolution, such as Danton and Desmoulins, did just that. But it was also risky and for many future leaders the gamble did not pay off. At all events Maximilien returned to Arras and set up home with his sister Charlotte.

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PROVINCIAL BARRISTER

In 1781 Robespierre was enrolled as a barrister pleading before the Conseil d’Artois and in 1782 he became a judge in the ecclesiastical court, an unexpected honour for one still only 24. Also in 1782 Robespierre gained a brief national celebrity in defending a man who had installed a lightning-conductor: his neighbour had sought a prohibition on the grounds that it would endanger his life. The case drew the attention of Condorcet and Franklin, the American ambassador, and Robespierre’s client paid for the publication of Robespierre’s presentation. The case caught the public mood as Robespierre was able to present his client as the champion of enlightened thinking and the victim of provincial obscurantism. Many of his cases no doubt were workaday ones, indeed Robespierre acquired something of a reputation as a poor man’s lawyer, but the more celebrated ones illustrated a theme of national interest, turned on an abuse of the regime, and were invariably directed by Robespierre from the particular to the general. He sought to win (and he generally did win) by eloquence rather than legal niceties;⁵ his abhorrence for the latter was to influence his attitude to legal procedure in the Revolution.

As a diversion from his legal pursuits, Robespierre joined two literary societies, the Rosati Club, which wrote poetry in praise of the rose, and the more serious Académie d’Arras, to which Robespierre was elected in 1783. His inaugural paper was the Discours sur les peines infamantes, a discussion of the prevalent notion that a criminal’s shame must be shared by his family. He submitted this for the prize medal of the Metz Academy and came second, using the prize money to pay for publication of the work. Publication was to be of immense importance to Robespierre throughout his career.

Robespierre’s legal and social career, then, began promisingly enough, though he never had many cases: his best year was 1787, with 25. 1787 proved to be a turning-point both in Robespierre’s own career and in national life, and the two impacted on each other. In 1788 he had only ten cases, the lowest number of his career. So in early 1789 he put in for another salaried job, that of procureur du roi in the maréchaussée court to add to his position in the ecclesiastical c...