Robespierre

10 Key excerpts on "Robespierre"

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  Robespierre

  The Man Who Divides Us the Most

  • Marcel Gauchet, Malcolm DeBevoise, Malcolm DeBevoise(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  All of this gives some idea of the thickness of the sedimentary layer that must be drilled through in order to approach the underlying truth of how the course of events appeared to the actors of the French Revolution themselves. The conviction that has guided my inquiry is that most of the studies available to us, however admirable they may be in establishing a factual record, neglect a crucial aspect of it: ideas put into action. It is true that we are seldom able to grasp this dimension of history. Generally we do not know exactly what actors were thinking, with the result that historians are unaccustomed to pay attention to it. But the French Revolution is exceptional in this regard. It was, to begin with, an experiment in making a political idea incarnate, an attempt to reimagine the conditions under which people can live together in obedience to a body of principles. What is more, the men of the Revolution continually reflected upon and talked about what was happening—and no one said more and reflected more deeply than Robespierre himself. He was the very embodiment of this revolution of principles. Not content to make himself its spokesman through his speeches, he sought as far as possible to epitomize in his person the austerity it required. It was to this dual quality of mind and example that he owed the moral authority that was acknowledged to be uniquely his—until finally it led him to practice an extraordinary type of dictatorship. Insofar as the words Robespierre left behind allow, we must attempt to penetrate the mystery of this period of five years, between his rise and fall, which contains in concentrated form the political problem that France was to spend the next two centuries trying to resolve. Otherwise we will be unable to free ourselves from the peculiar fascination, whether tinged with awe or horror, that Robespierre’s career has exerted these many years and whose hold over the nation’s imagination is scarcely diminished still today.

  In Pursuit of a Mirage

  Seen in the context of what he said and what he did, as I trust these pages have made clear, Robespierre ceases to be either the saint or the demon that he has so comprehensively and so complacently been made out to be. The roles of heroic martyr or bloodstained monster in which most historians have tried to confine him are of little use in discovering who he was and what his life meant. The categories through which Marxist historians have sought to account for what they take to be the objective meaning of his positions and his behavior, in the light of his class background and the grand struggle between the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and emerging proletariat, are no more helpful. Nor are the groupings in which traditional accounts have enshrined the memory of the Convention (Girondins and Montagnards, federalists and Jacobins, to say nothing of Thermidorians), whose weakness—if not actually inadequacy—is plain on closer inspection, of any greater value.

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  Infamous Speeches

  From Robespierre to Osama bin Laden

  • Bob Blaisdell, Bob Blaisdell(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  MAXIMILIEN MARIE ISIDORE Robespierre

  “The Principles of Political Morality”

  Address to the National Convention

  (“Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible . . . an emanation of virtue; . . . a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country”)

  Paris, France February 5, 1794

  Maximilien Marie Isidore Robespierre (1758–1794) was among the French Revolution’s most important leaders and most spellbinding of orators. As a member of the deadly Committee of Public Safety, he continues his advocacy for the “Reign of Terror” against those fighting or challenging the social and legal upheavals the Revolution has wrought. Robespierre saw enemies everywhere and desired the power of terror to obliterate them. Five and a half months later, after his foes gained power, he was executed.

    Citizens/Representatives of the People: We laid before you some time ago the principles of our exterior political system; we come today to develop the principles of our interior political morality.

  After having long pursued the path which chance pointed out, carried away in a manner by the efforts of contending factions, the Representatives of the French people have shown a character and a government. A sudden change in the success of the nation announced to Europe the regeneration which was operated in the national representation. But to this point of time, even now that I address you, it must be allowed that we have been impelled through the tempest of a revolution, rather by a love of goodness and a feeling of the wants of our country, than by an exact theory, and precise rules of conduct, which we had not even leisure to sketch.

  It is time to designate clearly the purposes of the revolution and the point which we wish to attain. It is time we should examine ourselves the obstacles which yet are between us and our wishes, and the means most proper to realize them, a simple and important idea that appears not yet to have been contemplated. Eh! How could a base and corrupt government have dared to realize it? A king, a proud senate, a Caesar, a Cromwell; of these the first care was to cover their dark designs under the cloak of religion, to covenant with every vice, caress every party, destroy men of integrity, oppress and deceive the people in order to attain the end of their treacherous ambition. If we had not had a task of the first magnitude to accomplish; if all our concern had been to raise a party or create a new aristocracy, we might have believed, as certain writers more ignorant than wicked asserted, that the plan of the French Revolution was to be found written in the works of Tacitus and of Machiavelli; we might have sought the duties of the representatives of the people in the history of Augustus, of Tiberius, or of Vespasian, or even in that of certain French legislators; for tyrants are substantially alike and only differ by trifling shades of treachery and cruelty.

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  The French Revolution

  • Ian Davidson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Pegasus Books

    (Publisher)

  23THE FALL OF Robespierre

  IN THE THREE MONTHS following the fall of Danton, Robespierre tried desperately to ride the Revolution by intensifying the Terror and by advancing more and more arguments to explain the steady dismantling of the laws underpinning the state. Eventually, the atmosphere of fear became so frenzied that his enemies brought him down.

  The intensification of the Terror went hand in hand with a further centralisation of the government. After Robespierre’s victories in the spectacular show trials in March and April 1794, first of the Hébertistes, then of the Dantonistes, the CSP moved swiftly to tighten control of all political institutions, and in particular to rein in any activities which were most directly influenced by the sans-culottes. The armées révolutionnaires, which had been created the previous autumn in direct response to the demands of the sans-culottes, were now closed down, as were the special commissioners for investigating food hoarding (commissaires aux accaparements); both were deemed too close in political sympathy to the Hébertistes. The government also removed virtually any outlet for the expression of popular anger: all denunciations to the Tribunal révolutionnaire would now come directly from one of the two governing comités, at first, officially, from the Comité de sûreté générale (CSG) and soon, encroachingly, after it set up its own police department, from the CSP.

  One significant date in the insanity of the Terror was April 22, 1794, when the Tribunal révolutionnaire sent to the guillotine two notable and thoroughly respectable Revolutionaries, together with an extremely distinguished public servant of the ancien régime.

  Jacques Guillaume Thouret was a leading constitutional lawyer who had played a key role, in the early days of the Revolution, in the reorganisation of France into its eighty-three départements and in the development of the new French judicial structure, notably the jury system. His crime under the Terror was simply to become a suspect. Isaac René Guy Le Chapelier was another Revolutionary lawyer, who left his name to posterity with the Loi Le Chapelier, which forbade the formation of trade unions, earning him the hatred of the sans-culottes. His crime before the Tribunal révolutionnaire was modérantisme, or moderation, which was newspeak for being an anti-revolutionary. The Montagnards

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  Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre

  • David P. Jordan(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 9 Robespierre the Ideologue PLATE XI (Phot. Bibl. nat. Paris) T HE PERIOD FROM June 2 till July 27, 1793, from the purging of the Convention to the election of Robespierre to membership on the Committee of Public Safety, his first (and only) official position of authority, is the last time he can be contemplated performing the tasks he believed providence had set him. Once he joined the inner circles of government, disappeared into the Green Room of the Tuileries where the great committee met secretly, he not only spent less time in the public gaze, but he ceased to be a critic of the government. He had been made, he several times declared, to criticize and correct those who ruled, but not to rule himself. He was the representative of the people and had consistently declined all offices and appointments that might make him the representative of government. The purge changed everything. “I am utterly tired of the Revolution; I am ill; the country was never in greater danger, and I doubt whether it will survive.” 1 Thus did he lament on the eve of June 2, confounding self and circumstance. But the purge revitalized him as had August 10. His vigor of mind and body returned. Insurrection again made him whole. Urban uprising had rearranged the Revolution, created new possibilities. There was ideological work to be done. Running on nervous energy and willpower, he once more emerged to explain and cajole and seduce. The purge had to be given intellectual coherence, fit into the ongoing history of the Revolution. June 2 did not give Robespierre personal power but the purge destroyed the most stubborn opposition to the Mountain. The way to Jacobin dominance lay open, and Robespierre’s years of cultivation of the Society were about to bear fruit

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  The French Revolution

  • Albert Goodwin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 The trial lasted from 2nd to 5th April and had to be hurriedly terminated as Danton’s eloquence made a deep impression on the jury. In the last analysis, the accused were condemned on political grounds and were guillotined on 5th April. Having decided on the elimination of the Hébertists, the government could not have allowed the Dantonists to survive, for their acquittal would have meant its downfall. The weight which was placed on the destruction of both factions was indicated by a decree of 1st April, putting an end to the executive council of ministers and substituting for it twelve executive commissions rigidly controlled by the Committee of Public Safety. This constitutional reorganization was a political blow directed against Hébertist influence in the War Department and Dantonist influence in the ministries of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs.

  (iv)

  The ascendancy and fall of Robespierre (13th April–21th July ,1794)

  The period between the final extermination of the Dantonist faction on 13th April and the overthrow of Robespierre on 27th July was dominated by three political factors of primary importance. These were the deep rift which appeared among the members of the Committee of Public Safety, the increasing friction between this committee and the Committee of General Security and Robespierre’s failure to command the continued support of the “Plain” or moderate section in the Convention. It is largely in terms of these developments that the crisis of 9th Thermidor may be best understood.

  For the time being, the elimination of the rival factions left the Committee of Public Safety, and particularly Robespierie, in a position of unchallengeable authority. Much depended, however, on the committee’s ability to restrain the multiplying differences of its members on matters of general policy, and on Robespierre’s use of his personal ascendancy in the government. A split in the committee had already developed over social and economic policy. At the end of February and the beginning of March St. Just, Couthon and Robespierre had identified themselves with a project for the free distribution to impoverished patriots of the landed property of proved “suspects”. It seems probable that this scheme, together with a new law for the control of general commodity prices and further legislation against the monopolists, formed part of a programme of social reforms designed to rob the Hébertists of the support of the sans-culottes . If such was the intention, the policy failed, since the Hébertists had to be dealt with by force and the sans-culottes

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  Unbearable Life

  A Genealogy of Political Erasure

  • Arthur Bradley(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  past .

  To return to the philosophical backdrop to the Revolution we explored earlier, Robespierre’s very idea of “the people” completes the retroactive entification or substantialization of the general will begun in Rousseau. It subtracts popular sovereignty from any political metric or count and retrofits it into a preexisting state of virtue. According to Rousseau, recall, the general will still emanates into the view of the majority—thus allowing us to safely ignore the minority as “mistaken.”33 Yet, Robespierre completes the détournement of number by virtue in his second speech on the trial of Louis when—seeking to prevent a popular referendum on the king’s fate that he knew could well end up sparing his life—he famously declares that “virtue was always in the minority on the earth” (la vertu fut toujours en minorité sur la terre ).34 If Robespierre consistently invokes the figure of the “people” in all his public speeches, it is thus a people that clearly preexists or postdates the empirical or countable people of France themselves.35 In a speech to the Convention on 27 Brumaire, Year 2, Robespierre explicitly defines “the people” as what Jon Cowans nicely calls a revolutionary “vanguard of the virtuous”36 who transcend the mass of empirical humanity and prepare the ground for a people-to-come: “Which of us does not feel all his faculties enlarged, which of us does not feel raised above humanity itself, on reflecting that we are not just fighting for one people, but for the universe; for the men who are alive today, but also for all those who will exist [pour tous ceux qui existeront ].”37

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  Glory and Terror

  Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution

  • Antoine de Baecque(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This, minus the solemn pomp, is the same procedure that Romain Rolland uses. In the finale of his play, first the “Chariot of the Revolution” appears, an image undoubtedly drawn from Abel Gance’s “Napoléon,” in which all the famous dead of 1793 and 1794 come to offer France its revolutionary heritage. Here Robespierre’s final vision before execution is projected on the great screen that backs the stage. Death itself attains that blinding flash refused by the Thermidorian narratives, with Robespierre’s execution invisible on the stage but punctuated by an “enormous cry” emitted by the actors. Finally the Robespierrists, as if resuscitated, grouped around their hero, take the center of the stage, joined by the main figures of the “Chariot of the Revolution,” such as Collot d’Herbois or François Noël Babeuf. All struggle together against “the hydra of royalism,” make a barricade with their bodies faced with the rising tide of perils (remember we are in December 1938). Thus, mingled by the fight, the Robespierrists now form one single body, that of the revolutionary bloc that faces the traditional enemy. This united body is the vital force of Robespierre as exalted by his most ardent defenders, close to the Communist Party in 1938. Ever after, in the cart, then on the scaffold, and finally in his posterity, Robespierre carries this glory through his serenity when faced with suffering, through his visions and his immortality. He has become a pure fantasy of life answering, feature for feature, the morbid fantasy of Thermidor.

  It is this vision that Hector Fleischmann portrays, offering his own account in 1909 of the scene of Robespierre’s journey to the scaffold, transforming it into a tale of the “heroic age” of France: “It is well that his throat was cut on the eve of decline. With Robespierre dead, the heroic age is finished. It is right that the jolting cart dragged him to the Place de la Révolution, since he is not made for those times! France gave itself to the Directory. What did he still have to ask of posterity, this Robespierre standing upright, his jaw broken, livid, bloody, silent in the storm of vociferations? Certainly, he had sinned; certainly, he had failed; but in his role of expiation, what brilliance, and on his blood-covered body, what majestic horror! He, Catiline, the tiger, the dictator, Robespierre, he dominated them all with the loftiness of his double execution, with that heroic majesty endured by his dying, yet upright, straight, proud body. Men were in the street, women rested in windows. He saw them wavering, he saw rising up before him the innumerable faces of the crowd; he saw them leaning towards him as the cart went by, those throats open to the sun of Thermidor. He saw the fury of these men’s eyes, insensate with outrage, shouting at his crimson agony. He also saw the lure of those feminine charms that he himself had till then rejected. And, his eyelids half-shut, he dreamed of his destiny, this sacrifice of his person to his country, as if offered to those women’s bodies. Climbing the already sticky steps of the guillotine, the man of Thermidor could feel in himself a consciousness and a bliss lofty enough to acquit his judges.”

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  Demos Assembled

  Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880

  • Stephen W. Sawyer(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  42 With the notion of representative man, Blanc introduced the idea that Robespierre could be representative, serve the people and the social norms captured by the Revolution at the same time that he outstripped the institutions of the government. Through the idea of representative men, Blanc was able to separate the means employed by the regime from the social norms that created and animated the revolution itself.

  Blanc’s analysis of Robespierre as representative man was also part of the larger set of international influences he explored during his time in London and in particular the debate between Carlyle’s theory of the Hero and Emerson’s response in Representative Men, both of which had given special importance to the French Revolution.43 Though both had focused on the Revolution, Carlyle had focused on “modern revolutionists” and the Terror, while Emerson’s essay included a chapter on Napoleon. Carlyle shared Blanc’s conviction that the French Revolution had been a social phenomenon—when his French Revolution44 was translated into French for the first time by one of Louis Blanc’s former republican collaborators, Elias Regnault in 1866 wrote: “Nowhere, among none of our French writers, do we encounter such a profound insight into the causes of this great social movement.”45 He then concluded, “If it were possible to introduce such an original spirit into our contemporary political classifications, he would be placed first among those we call socialists.”46 It should be kept in mind that Mill had also congratulated Blanc on his “socialist” history of the French Revolution.47

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  The French Revolution

  A Short History

  • R. M. (Robert Matteson) Johnston(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Robespierre, blind and satisfied, went on his way rejoicing. On the 8th of June, as President of the Convention, he took the chief part in a solemn inauguration of the new religion. There were statues, processions, bonfires, speeches, and Robespierre, beflowered, radiant in a new purple coat, pontificating over all. But beneath the surface all was not well. The Convention had not been led through the solemn farce without protest. Words of insult were hissed by more than one deputy as Robespierre passed within earshot, and the Jacobin leader realized fully that behind the {213} docile votes and silent faces currents of rage and protest were stirring. For this, as for every ill, there was but one remedy, to sharpen the knife.

  Two days later, on the 10th, new decrees were placed before the Convention for intensifying the operations of the Revolutionary Tribunal. New crimes were invented "spreading discouragement, perverting public opinion"; the prisoner's defence was practically taken away from him; and, most important, members of the Convention lost their inviolability. The Convention voted the decree, but terror had now pushed it to the wall and self-defence automatically sprang up. From that moment the Convention nerved itself to the inevitable struggle. Billaud, Collot and Barère, the impures of the Committee of Public Safety, looked despairingly on all sides of the Convention for help to rid themselves of the monster, whose tentacles they already felt beginning to twine about them.

  Just at this critical moment a trivial incident arose that pierced Robespierre's armour in its weakest joint, and that crystallized the fear of the Convention into ridicule,—ridicule that proved the precursor of revolt. Catherine Théot, a female spiritualist, or medium, as we {214} should call her at the present day, highly elated at the triumph of the Supreme Being over the unemotional Goddess of Reason, had made Robespierre the hero of her half-insane inspirations. She now announced to her credulous devotees that she was the mother of God, and that Robespierre was her son. It became the sensation of the day. Profiting by the temporary absence of St. Just with the army in the Netherlands, the Committee of Public Safety decided that Catherine Théot was a nuisance and a public danger, and must be arrested. Robespierre, intensely susceptible to ridicule, not knowing what to do, pettishly withdrew from the Convention, confined himself to his house and the Jacobin Club, and left the Committee to carry out its intention. Every member of the Convention realized that this was a distinct move against Robespierre.

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  Character Assassination throughout the Ages

  • M. Icks, E. Shiraev, M. Icks, E. Shiraev(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Character assassination, however, was much in evidence in the new government’s efforts to justify the Robespierristes’ arrest and execution in the days, weeks, and months that followed. In his seminal study of the Thermidorian republic, Bronisław Baczko relates how, already in the night of 9 to 10 Thermidor, Robespierre’s enemies disseminated the rumor that the Incorruptible had planned to marry the daughter of Louis XVI and become king of France. 37 How, Baczko asks, could this “absurd” idea of “Robespierre-roi” have fallen on such fertile ground, especially given that he had been one of the republic’s most respected politicians? 38 Part of the answer lies in France’s long prerevolutionary and revolutionary history of character assassination. Sustained slander campaigns not only against the Girondins in 1793, but also against popular public figures, such as the Hébertistes and Dantonistes in 1794, had suggested that politicians were naturally untrustworthy. The pamphlet Vie secrette, politique et curieuse de M. J. Maximilien Robespierre, for example, lamented that “one has made the sad experience that the nation has almost always been fooled and betrayed by men whom it entrusted with its government.” Robespierre, this publication argued, was no exception. The self-proclaimed defender of democracy had, in reality, been a “modern Catiline,” a “new Cromwell,” and at least as bloodthirsty as Charles IX. 39 A report on the papers of Robespierre and his allies, given to the Convention by Courtois, a former Dantonist deputy, made similar claims: it suggested that Robespierre had, already in childhood, exhibited ambitious and domineering character traits: “An anxiety, a vague and restless desire, avid for domination and renown, devoured him.” Robespierre, the schoolyard tyrant, Courtois concluded, had grown up to become cruel as Sulla. 40 Thermidorian attacks on the Incorrutible frequently focused on the idea that Robespierre had deceived the French people

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