Read Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution Online
Authors: Ruth Scurr
Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (12 page)
Louis XVI’s royal session went ahead on 23 June, a day later than the posters had promised.
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Necker was absent. Aware of the king’s intentions, he had advised strongly against any attempt to dissolve the National Assembly and was, once again, ignored. All the political and fiscal concessions that the court and government could think of were overshadowed by the king’s uncompromising declaration that the divisions between his realm’s three orders must remain. At the end of his speech, he ordered the deputies to return to their separate assemblies. The clergy and nobles obeyed, some of them smirking with pleasure at what looked like the demise of the National Assembly. But Mirabeau leapt to his feet and declared: “We are here by the power of the people, and we will not leave except by the force of bayonnets.”
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These words signaled a rapturous renewal of the Tennis Court Oath. Meanwhile, the king was informed of Necker’s resignation. The third estate’s truculence seemed temporarily less important and for the rest of the day Louis XVI’s priority was to get Necker to return to his post. He did, but it was too late: Paris had exploded in disgust. Necker, whose portrait had been paraded by a jubilant crowd after the fall of Lamoignon in 1788, once again inspired the people, but this time they wanted and demanded the National Assembly, which he viewed only as an inconvenient compromise in the circumstances. On June 27 a tearful Louis XVI finally gave in and ordered the nobility and clergy to join the third estate. Fireworks lit the sky over Versailles and Paris. Given Mirabeau’s prominent role it is not surprising that Robespierre, in his next letter to Buissart (dated 23 July), entirely revised his opinion: he no longer saw Mirabeau as dissolute and negligible but as the charismatic unofficial leader of the National Assembly. “The present Revolution,” his letter began, “has produced greater events in a few days than the whole previous history of mankind.”
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DESPITE THE KING’S climb down, the royal troops now assembling in and around Paris—which included some regiments of foreign soldiers willing to fire on French civilians if necessary—were making the newly triumphant deputies very nervous. By early July there were more than enough soldiers present to quell an uprising in the capital. Mirabeau drew up a petition of protest and Robespierre was one of the deputies who presented it in person to the king. The petition, he assured Buissart, was “sublime, full of majesty, truth, and energy.” It had no effect whatever. The ominous military buildup continued, and on 11 July, despite his popularity and public standing, Necker was dismissed and sent into exile, blamed for the Revolution by many in Louis XVI’s court. At this Paris, predictably, rioted. Robespierre’s close friend from school, Camille Desmoulins—at twenty-six an attractively boyish man always known by his first name—addressed the crowd in the Palais-Royal gardens. Standing on a table in the Café de Foy, which had become a center of political discussion to rival the National Assembly, he cried: “Citizens, you know that the Nation asked for Necker to be retained, and he has been driven out! Could you be more insolently flouted? After such an act they will dare anything.” As the crowd cheered and applauded, Camille raged against the monarchy, comparing himself to Othryades, a warrior of the ancient world who wrote “Sparta has triumphed” in his own blood on a captured standard: “I, too, would write in my own blood ‘France is free!’”
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Later, in his letter to Buissart, Robespierre described the mounting fear in the National Assembly as it went into permanent session for three days and nights, ready to respond immediately to events as they unfolded.
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He told of a patriotic army of 300,000 rising, as if by magic, from the streets of Paris, including every class of citizen, of French and Swiss Guards and other soldiers going over to the people’s side. He marveled at the speed with which, on 14 July, this people’s army took the Bastille, the chief fortress in the “tax farmers” customs wall around Paris—a symbol of oppression before the Revolution, an iconoclastic triumph ever since its fall. Under the old regime most of the Bastille’s prisoners had been snatched from freedom by lettres de cachet and detained indefinitely inside the imposing fortress with its eight round towers and walls five feet thick. A recent vogue for anti-Bastille literature—lurid accounts of life inside by ex-prisoners—had further secured it as a place of horror in the popular imagination.
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By 14 July 1789, however, there were only seven prisoners left inside. The most famous of all, the Marquis de Sade, had been transferred elsewhere on 5 July after adapting his slop and urine funnel into a megaphone for haranguing passersby with lurid revolutionary bulletins: massacre was imminent inside the prison; its governor, de Launay, was butchering the inmates; the people must storm the walls before it was too late. Despite such colorful incitements, the infamous fortress had to wait its turn while first the people attacked the tollgates, the city wall that impeded free trade, the abbey of Saint-Lazare, where firearms were stockpiled, and the Invalides for its cannon and other weapons.
The siege of the Bastille did not begin until early in the morning of 14 July and it was all over by early evening. It involved only about nine hundred citizens, many of them tradesmen—joiners, carpenters, cobblers, and so forth—from the Saint-Antoine district of Paris, which lay outside the city wall. Ranged against these patriots were apprehensive prison officers, regular prison guards, and some reinforcements from the Swiss Salis-Samade regiment that had arrived on 7 July. Lieutenant Deflue was in charge of these reinforcements and for a whole week he observed Governor de Launay’s preparations for defending the Bastille with surprise and dismay:
I could see clearly, from his perpetual uneasiness and irresolution, that if we were attacked we should be very badly led. He was so terrified that at night he mistook the shadows of trees and other objects around him for enemies, and on this account we had to be on the alert all night. The staff officers, the lieutenant du roi, the regimental adjutant and I myself often argued with him, on the one hand to reassure him about the weakness of the garrison, of which he complained constantly, and on the other to induce him not to bother about insignificant details while neglecting important matters. He would listen to us, and seem to agree with our advice; then he would do just the reverse, then a minute later he would change his mind; in a word, his whole behaviour gave proof of the utmost irresolution.
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On 14 July the two sides at first negotiated for control of the fortress. Fighting broke out in the afternoon, but the morale of those inside was low. Their leader was hopelessly indecisive, they had neither the food nor the water supply to survive a real siege, the moat between them and their attackers was dry, and anyway many of the guards really sympathized with the assailants. Soon after five o’clock the Bastille fell.
The people promptly punished Governor de Launay for having fired the Bastille cannon “at those deputed by the inhabitants of Paris to seize the firearms and gunpowder that menaced them.”
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They also punished the city’s chief magistrate, Jacques de Flesselles,
prévôt des marchands
, who was widely suspected of conspiring with the court against the people and attempting to hide the city’s ammunition stores. Governor de Launay died in the street from multiple stab and shot wounds, and de Flesselles was murdered on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. The “livid and bloody” severed heads of both men were carried through Paris on pikes for twenty-four hours and only thrown into the river Seine on 15 July.
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In his account to Buissart, Robespierre seems entirely comfortable describing their fate as the people’s unmediated justice. He comments enthusiastically that “the terror inspired by this national army, ready to present itself in Versailles, determined the Revolution.”
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In a postscript, he explicitly sanctions mob violence. “M. Foulon was hanged yesterday by the people’s decree,” he writes, referring to the fate of Joseph François Foulon, one of the ministers chosen by Louis XVI to replace Necker. Allegedly, Foulon had claimed that “the country would be best governed where the common people should be compelled to feed upon grass” and had boasted that when he was minister “he would make the people of France live upon hay.”
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He was lynched by the Parisian mob, then his severed head was paraded through the streets, the mouth stuffed with grass because people blamed him for the famine now sweeping the country, even though it had been predicted long before he came to power. In truth, Robespierre’s calm assessment of these deaths at the hands of the mob was not unusual among the deputies in the National Assembly, still meeting in Versailles days after the revolutionary initiative had moved to Paris. Antoine Barnave, a deputy from Grenoble and a future enemy of Robespierre’s, quipped: “What, then, is their blood so pure?”
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Against this, Robespierre’s understanding of revolutionary violence, justice, and terror looks sophisticated. In his account, Governor de Launay, de Flesselles, Foulon, and others were lynched by the will of the people; the status of their blood, whatever Barnave meant by it, was irrelevant. From now on the will of the people was to be everything.
ON LEARNING OF the day’s events, the National Assembly expected Louis XVI to recall Necker. This he failed to do, despite expressing regret for the bloodshed in Paris and beginning to withdraw his troops from the city center. On the following morning, 15 July, Mirabeau had just finished delivering a brilliant speech on the threat of foreign invasion, when Louis XVI himself arrived at the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, unexpectedly on foot, accompanied only by his two brothers, the Counts of Provence and Artois. There was still no mention of recalling Necker, though the removal of troops from Paris was enough cause for celebration. Robespierre tells of the king returning to his palace amid “demonstrations of enthusiasm and intoxication that are unimaginable.”
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Then on the evening of 16 July the Count of Artois and other members of the court suddenly fled the country. The following day Louis XVI and his family returned to Paris: the Parisians wanted him back in their city. The king was not yet a prisoner, but he was in a plain coach drawn by six black horses, at the mercy of the National Assembly and flanked by a hundred of its delegates, walking solemnly with a slightly funereal air. One of the hundred was Robespierre, who later evoked this journey to the Hôtel de Ville for Buissart. “It is,” Robespierre wrote, “impossible to imagine a spectacle so august and so profound, and even more impossible to convey the impressions it made on a responsive spirit.”
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“Imagine for yourself,” he continued, “a king whose name only yesterday made the entire capital and nation tremble, who hears for the first time cries of ‘Long live the Nation! Long live Liberty.’” As he processed to Paris, Louis XVI could see his own soldiers amid the newly formed citizen militia lining the route. Just weeks ago the crowd’s cry was “Long live the king” as he arrived to open the Estates General. Now the nation with its claim to liberty had displaced him.
Paris was jubilant, with joyous citizens hanging from buildings and trees, women leaning out of high windows, all welcoming, applauding, and delighting in the procession. Robespierre called it a national festival. His responses were deeply emotional, his heart and imagination engaged. He noticed with particular pleasure some monks who had pinned on their cassocks the new patriotic cockade—a rosette of red and blue, the twin colors of Paris. (In the Café du Foy, the incendiary Camille Desmoulins attached a different significance to these colors: red for the blood shed for freedom and blue for the celestial constitution that would enshrine it.) Passing churches on the way, Robespierre saw robed and surpliced clergy competing with the crowd in their displays of patriotic gratitude. There were even cockades attached to stoles and this, he promised Buissart, was fact, not fiction. Why was he so thrilled by these signs that the clergy endorsed the Revolution? Perhaps because he had not expected it and was pleasantly surprised or simply because what the clergy thought or felt still mattered a great deal to him.
Robespierre already knew the astronomer Bailly as the president of the National Assembly, but now he watched him take on a new role as the mayor of revolutionary Paris, welcoming Louis XVI. Bailly had been elected by the capital’s electoral college, originally established to choose deputies to the third estate but now the de facto municipal government in permanent session in the Hôtel de Ville. In his memoirs Bailly wrote:
I rose very early, intending to leave for Paris at seven o’clock, and before that to prepare what I was to say to the King on receiving him at the gates of Paris. I was sorry to leave Versailles; I had been happy there in an Assembly whose temper was excellent, and which was worthy of the great functions that it was called upon to fulfill. I had seen great things done, and had had some share in them. I was leaving all these memories behind: that day, my happiness was over. I have known splendid days since then and moments of satisfaction, but I have not been happy.
I had sent for a carriage. I was kept waiting to leave; I could not conceive why. When I went out, I was met by all the court coachmen, who offered me a tree loaded with flowers and ribbons…. I had to allow them to fasten this tree to the front of my coach; all the coachmen accompanied me, letting off fireworks although it was broad daylight…. Finally I left them at the end of the avenue, much touched by their friendly pageantry, and much relieved to be able to go on my way freely after being somewhat delayed. I incurred much praise in the newspapers for the simplicity with which, though chief official of the capital, I arrived in Paris in one of those carriages vulgarly known as “chamber-pots.”
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