Part II (Section Fourteen)

[montagnarde1793]

XIV

Robespierre’s power.—His incorruptibility.—Unanimity of the testimony.—The Cult of the Supreme Being vs. the Cult of Reason.—Le Bas’s virtue and tolerance.

Here we are at the eve of 9 Thermidor.
To measure the fall, one must say to what prodigious heights Robespierre and his followers rose. It is necessary to see the apotheosis before witnessing the collapse.
What must be said also, to explain the hate suddenly unleashed upon these men, is how the mistrust of virtue and the fear of incorruptibility were hidden within their enemies, under a pretended fear of dictatorship.
I am not giving a panegyric here. Less yet did I have the idea to exalt Robespierre’s doctrines: I try, simply, to recount the place he had acquired in the popular soul.

* * *

From the year 1791, the name of Robespierre had become, for all France, a symbol of liberty and justice. The popular societies and journals sang his praises, the theaters even put him in plays and lent his person to the citizens’ frenetic applause; “he was the apostle, the Messiah,” says Hamel[1] with his intransigent enthusiasm. And his methods of seducing the people had nothing in common with those of a dictator: he imposed himself by his sole incorruptibility.
I reproduced, early, his curious letter to Duplay, relating his triumphal voyage to his home province. The same evening of this return to Paris, the 28th November, he went to the Jacobins: his presence excited an extraordinary enthusiasm; Collot d’Herbois, who occupied the president’s chair, rose and asked “that this member of the Constituent Assembly, justly nicknamed the incorruptible,” preside by extraordinary circumstances, over the session. This proposition, put to a vote, was adopted unanimously[2].
Since his success was renewed, his triumphs do not count; the number of his admirers grew with that of his enemies; his power became considerable; at a certain moment he was at once president of the Convention and president of the Jacobins.
“An enormous popularity,” says Billaud-Varennes (manuscript cited by Taine), “a popularity, which, founded under the Constituent, did naught but grow during the Legislative, and later yet more, so much that, in the National Convention, he soon found himself the sole who fixed the gazes of all on his person… With this ascendancy in the public opinion… with this irresistible preponderance, when he arrived in the Committee of Public Safety, he was already the most important being in France[3].”
When, the 18th Floréal (7 May, 1794), he descended from the tribune of the Convention after his discourse on the rapport of religious and moral ideas with republican principles, the Assembly, in its enthusiasm, ordered the impression to the charges of the Republic and that it be sent to all the departments, to the armies, and to the popular societies; Couthon decreed that this discourse be translated into all languages and affixed to placards on all the walls[4]. The Moniteur and the next day’s journals reproduced it. By order of the Committee of Public Safety the following day, 200,000 copies were circulated. They are bought in brochure form with a portrait; later new editions of it were published, containing the Robespierres discourses at the Festival of the Supreme Being. An order of the Committee of Public Safety enjoined all the national agents of all the communes of France to make them read publicly for a month, each décade, from public edifices, with the Convention’s decree that consecrated them. A concert of praises rose from all over France; Robespierre was saluted as the greatest defender of liberty and equality; innumerable letters were written to him, and all are homage to his incorruptibility.
At the moment of the Festival of the Supreme Being, his power was at its height. One of the writers who was the most severe and often the most unjust concerning him[5], wrote: “Robespierre disposed of a prodigious force; the low people, who saw the revolution in his person, supported him as the representative of its doctrines and its interests; the armed force of Paris, commanded by Henriot, was under his orders. He reigned at the Jacobins, whom he formed and purified at his whim; all places where occupied by his creatures; he had formed himself the revolutionary tribunal and the new Commune in replacing the procurer general Chaumette with the national agent Payan, the mayor Pache by the mayor Fleuriot.”
After this estimation where the lack of indulgence breaks out, Mignet adds: “But what was his aim in according the functions which gave the most influence to new men in separating the committees? Did he aspire to dictatorship? Did he only want to attain his democracy of virtue by the ruin of what kept the Montagnards immoral and factious of the Committee?”
Searching for virtue, ruin of immorality, the most malevolent critics are obliged to note this conclusion.
“Why was it given to him,” Thiers asks himself, “to survive all these famous revolutionaries?... Robespierre had integrity, and one needs a good reputation to captivate the masses.”
Nodier concedes that he had acquired popularity by two great qualities of a statesman: “austerity of mores” and “the most felt disinterestedness.”
Taine himself—this is characteristic—is obliged to make the same admission, but it is not without recourse to interminable circumlocutions:
“If one wants to understand him,” he says[6], “it is necessary to look at him in context and amid his surroundings. At the last stage of intellectual vegetation which ended on the terminal branch of the eighteenth century, he is the supreme little runt and the dried fruit of the classical spirit. Of the exhausted philosophy, he kept naught but the dead residue…”—and ten lines further, Taine, having insufficiently meditated on the fable of the straw and the beam, added that Robespierre “simulated the absent thought by a borrowed jargon.”
Let us say, in passing, that if Robespierre had had naught but hollow ideas, learned formulas, swollen phrases with no significance, it would be necessary to admit that the mentality of Saint-Just and Le Bas, who were docile to his inspirations, had been singularly inferior and depraved: now, no one is advised to deny the profound intelligence of Saint-Just, the level-headedness and foresight of Le Bas.
Why does Taine come to add that “at his side the other Jacobins also spoke this schoolboy jargon”? Why does he include, in his calumnious reprobation, all those he accuses of being Robespierre’s blindly devoted followers? Of whom does he wish to speak, first of all? Is it of Couthon? Is it of Saint-Just? Would it be of Le Bas, whose voluntary silence has never inspired any critique? And then, why is this epithet of “vain and ridiculous pedant” applied to Robespierre? Is Taine well qualified to discern this in him, he who, to evaluate one of the reports of the famous conventionnel, amused himself by “counting the rhetorical devices” and remarking that they were addressed not only to the living and the dead, but “to a substantive abstract,” like Liberty or Friendship.
If Taine had loved Liberty, if he had understood Friendship, he would have seen other things than substantive abstracts there, and he would have grasped, at the same time, the grandeur of these young men who, like Le Bas, wanted to live and die for them.
And yet the writer has pronounced the word “irreproachable,” and the obsessive fear of this term pursuing him, he continues:
“Irreproachable, there is the word that, since his first youth, an inner voice repeated in low to tones to console him for his obscurity and his expectation; he was it, he is it, he will be it; he says this to himself, he says it to others, and all of one piece, on this foundation, his character was formed. He would not be seduced, like Desmoulins by tithes, like Barnave by caresses, like Mirabeau and Danton by money, like the Girondins by the insinuating attractions of the former politesse and of chosen society, like the Dantonistes by the appeal of living large and complete license: he is incorruptible. He would not be stopped or deterred like the Feuillants, the Girondins, the Dantonistes, the statesmen, the special men, by considerations of a secondary order, attention to interests, respect of acquired situations, the danger of undertaking too much at one time, the necessity of not disorganizing the services and leaving the game to human passions, motives of utility and opportunity: he is the intransigent champion of what is right.”
One of the historians whose opinion a bit suspect I cited earlier, wrote yet: “The decemvirs, after the fall of the Hébertists, had had justice and probity put on the order of the day, because these were from impure factions; after the fall of the Dantonistes, they had placed there the terror and all virtues, because they called to them the party of the indulgent and the immoral[7].”
If it’s impossible, in effect, to forget that Robespierre had banished indulgence from his principles, because he believed it, wicked and destructive of the salutary idea of sanction, one cannot belittle the other principles which inspired Robespierre and his friends, from the same admission of their most severe detractors: they were justice, probity, the study of virtues, and by consequence hatred of hypocrisy, of injustice, and of the corruption then so frequent.
Moreover, was this admission of the writers not also the admission of Robespierre’s worst enemies?
The licentious Louvet, taking part in a session of the Convention, cried: “Robespierre, I accuse you of having libeled the purest patriots without cease! I accuse you… (and here is his conclusion) of having constantly produced yourself as an object of idolatry, of having suffered that, before you, you should be designated as the only virtuous man in France who could save the people…” It does not come to Louvet for an instant to mistrust the exactitude of this allegation.
The conventionnel Baudot[8], speaking of the pretended conspiracy of Robespierre and his friends on 9 Thermidor, wrote: “There is not a shadow of truth in this accusation. Robespierre spoke openly at the National Convention, at the Jacobins; he took no precaution in coming to the Assembly the 9th Thermidor. …Seeing himself overwhelmed, he appealed to virtue: a conspirator calls to arms. He was quite often enough surrounded by satellites, but these satellites who walked with daring, presented themselves and never used ruses and shadows… the morning of 9 Thermidor, Duplay the father, who had gotten warning of the storm, who had received advice concerning it, told Robespierre to take precautions in the discourse he had to pronounce to the National Convention: “No, no,” said Robespierre, “there is still enough virtue in the Convention to support me…”
Alone, a virtuous being can make many illusions about the virtue of his enemies for himself; and when that of a public man encounters similar unanimity of opinions, it can no longer be doubted, especially if this unanimity is among family and friends (it arrives from this that affixed or outside virtue hypocritically hides domestic vices): now we have seen what the affectionate admiration of the Duplay family was for him; we know from Lamartine (very well schooled in this regard), that Le Bas “believed in his virtue and his infallibility”; additionally Baudot said of Robespierre the younger “that he regarded his brother as the most virtuous of men”; and if the implacable Charles Nodier[9] qualifies Saint-Just as the “blind, faithful, and sincere follower of Robespierre, whose integrity and incorruptible austerity were submissive to him,” it is necessary to believe that Gateau, who was Saint-Just’s secretary, did not exaggerate in say that this last made a sort of cult of his friend[10].
His misfortune and his crime were also to have too good a reputation. I do not believe that these yet significant commentaries of 9 Thermidor, published in the Moniteur Universel two days later: “In vain do the eternal libelers of the People wish to profit from these events to accuse it of versatility. The People are always just in their judgments. They want liberty and love only those who defend it. The more it makes idols of individuals, the less it will be constant in love for the patrie. The more precarious individual reputations are, the more the public liberty will be affirmed. Whoever renders himself powerful enough to try to put himself above the law, should find in his fellow citizens such as Brutus. The excessive influence of a single man is the most dangerous scourge of a Republic.”
This is a defense and an admission; by this note, Robespierre’s enemies well mark a troubled conscience; they look for vain subtleties, but speak less clearly of what, for them, was the principal crime of this public man: he did not have “an enough precarious individual reputation” to their tastes; they wanted to punish him for this and—monstrous iniquity—they consented to have the repression of the honest and gentle Le Bas, guilty of friendship towards the one they name “the dictator.”

* * *

Another grief: Robespierre has been accused of wanting to make himself the high priest of a new religion.
This is (I believe, at least) an absolute error. He had already fought against the intolerance of the priests; in opposing the Cult of the Supreme Being to the Cult of Reason, whose manifestations turned into scandalous orgies, he wanted to combat the intolerance of the atheists. Thus he made himself a new and numerous class of enemies, while yet looking to set up a climate of tolerance.
It would be unjust to discuss his sincerity: we have seen the advice he gave to his hosts’ children—Mme Le Bas’s manuscript leaves us an irrefutable proof of this.—Robespierre believed in a superior divinity, and his religion was yet further removed from the retractions of Clootz and Chaumette, of the mystical ceremonies of the Catholic cult: he was sickened by the turpitudes and masquerades for which Paris and the provinces were the theater.
How did it manifest itself, this Cult of Reason?
Fouché, in the Nièvre (the province, this time, regressing Paris) put in place a statue of Slumber at the entry of each cemetery—which seems contradictory enough to atheism, since slumber supposes an awakening.—From the Rochelle, the representatives wrote to the Convention that the city would have from then on but one temple, that of the Truth. Gobel, bishop of Paris, and nine of his vicars (out of sixteen) publicly renounced the exercise of the functions of the Catholic cult; many bishops imitated them. Sections of Paris declared this cult abolished and decreed the closing of the churches[11].
The 20th Brumaire (10 November, 1793), in the middle of the church of Notre-Dame, on the summit of an artificial mountain, a temple was elevated whose façade bore these words: “To philosophy.” Liberty, represented by the traits of young and pretty woman, sat upon a seat of greenery, having about her two rows of young girls dressed in white, “all the pretty damned women of the Opera,” as Hébert said. For the attributes of Catholicism, the emblems and the stature of Reason were substituted. When the ceremony ended, the assistants marched on the Convention, and, on a platform carried by four citizens, la Maillard, one of the most famous actresses of the time, represented the goddess Reason, whom the procurer of the Commune presented to the Convention, and who was going to sit in the bureau, not without having received a fraternal kiss from the president and the secretaries; after which, on Chabot’s proposition, the Convention decided that Notre-Dame of Paris would be from then on consecrated to the new divinity[12].
Almost every church would have a goddess Reason from then on, small or large, gross or meager; “the movement degenerated into orgies,” Louis Blanc wrote (which could but resume all that we have reported of these saturnalias). Reason, represented first by an artist beloved of the public, soon looked for her personification in impure courtesans. She was enthroned on the tabernacles, surrounded by artillery-men who, pipes in their mouths, served her has high priests. She had corteges of bacchantes who followed with drunken step, through the streets, her chariot filled with blind musicians, and, rolling by its side, another chariot where figured, at the summit of a trembling cliff, a Hercules of the opera armed with a cardboard club.” Representatives of the people danced in the crossings with girls dressed in sacerdotal habits: relics of Saint Genevieve were burned because they had contributed to “making the pot of idle kings boil” and Fayau sent the pope an account of this ceremony. The demolition of the sculptures of Notre-Dame was ordered: Mercier assures that the tableau of the Last Supper long formed the awning of a cobbler’s shop. Hebert proposed that the Commune take down the steeples, where were, he said, an insult to Equality. The devotees of the new cult mounted mules bearing crosses, stoups, and incense holders; they let the donkeys in chasubles drink from sacred vases and organized fish markets in the sanctuaries. In the middle of the churches, they made love, they danced to the sound of the trumpet and the organ; Saint-Eustache was transformed into a giant cabaret. And priests, new converts, took part in these orgies.
Were these not there manifestations of intolerance—humiliating for Paris and for France in its entirety?
Robespierre alone stopped this folly.
The 20th November, 1793, he made violent protests heard at the Jacobins, which he renewed at the Convention the following 5th December (15 Frimaire, Year II). He spoke as master: “We will not suffer,” he said, “that the standard of persecutions shall be raised against any religion, that people shall look to substitute religious wars for the great cause that we defend…” “The Republic is not atheist,” he also said; “it’s under the auspices of the Supreme Being that she has proclaimed the immutable principles of human societies, the laws of Eternal Justice.” And elsewhere: “Priests have been denounced for saying mass; they will say it for longer it they are prevented from doing so. He who wishes to stop the saying of the mass is more fanatical than he who says it… the idea of a great Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular… This sentiment is that of Europe and of the Universe, it’s that of the French people. The French people are attached neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to religious ceremonies; but they are to the idea of an incomprehensible power, terror of crime and support of virtue.” And he recalled that session of the Jacobins of the 26th March, 1792, when Guadet made it a crime for him to have said the word Providence[13] and in which, already, he exposed his ideas of tolerance.
This discourse preceded by several months the famous report of the 18th Floréal and the Festival of the Supreme Being (20 Prairial, Year II: 8 June, 1794).

* * *

I have signaled, that at this date, the popularity and the power of Robespierre were at their height; I have explained his reputation for virtue and his ideas of tolerance.
Is it useful to note that his formidable power never served his particular interests or those of his friends?
Has it not been sufficiently averred that this virtue, so striking in Robespierre, was common to the greater part of his followers, and especially Le Bas?
All these men died poor, and their families, who were never honored, had their share of pain: there are convincing proofs, if I am not mistaken.
Is it necessary, finally, to give examples of the tolerance which was proved in these same friends—and Le Bas, in particular?
We have seen the conduct of Le Bas with the armies: his moderation, his goodwill, quite often correcting Saint-Just’s severity. But from before this time, he had given non-equivocal proof of his generous tolerance: it is thus that in leaving the post of administrator to which he had been called by the directory of Pas-de-Calais, in December 1791, Le Bas removed from the register of denunciations of the commune of Arras many papers concerning the unfortunates, accused of protecting non-juring priests or assisting in their offices: these papers have been saved; they concern fifteen people of the districts of Calais and Montreuil who owed their lives to their administrator[14].
They were not alone, besides. When, in 1806, Le Bas’s son was placed in the college of Juilly by his mother, he was presented to M. Balland, Father of the Oratorians, then head prefect of the studies of that establishment, and who was later inspector general of the University; in the name of Le Bas, he old Oratorian cried: “Madame, would this child be the son of the deputy to the National Convention from the Pas-de-Calais?” On the affirmative response he was given, the priest took the child in his arms, and pressing him against his chest said, “Ah! Madame, I will not know how to take care of your son too well; his father saved my life[15].”

[1] Histoire de Robespierre, I, p. 561.—Notably they put on, in September 1791, in the Theater Molière, a play where Rohan and Condé found themselves listening to Robespierre, who struck them down with his logic and his virtue. (Revolutions de Paris no. 113, p. 450)
[2] Journal des débats de la Société des amis de la Constitution, no. 102.
[3] I have drawn this citation voluntarily from Taine (Revolution, III, p. 201), even in respecting the points of suspension-perfidious traps by which displeasing opinions are avoided.
[4] Journal des débats et des décrets de la Convention, no. 595.
[5] Mignet: Histoire de la Révolution française, II, p. 69.
[6] La Révolution, III, p. 190 and following.
[7] Mignet, loc. cit., chapter VIII, in fine.
[8] Loc. cit., p. 152 and 242.
[9] Souvenirs, I. p. 1.
[10] Préface des Institutions républicaines de Saint-Just, p. 154.
[11] Dareste: Histoire de France, VII, p. 540 and following. (2nd ed.)
[12] Hamel: Histoire de Robespierre, III, p. 219.—V. Moniteur of 25 Brumaire (15 November, 1793).
[13] See, on the religious opinions of Robespierre, Dr Robinet’s book: The Religious Movement in Paris during the Revolution, t. II, which reports, notably, after the Journal of the Debates of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution Sitting in the Jacobins, and with commentaries lacking in indulgence for Robespierre and his principles, that famous session of the 26th March.
[14] I give here the names of the denounced: one cannot be too precise in this matter: Guillaume-Francois Payelville, clerk of the justice of the peace of Mannequeber; Joseph Ducrocq, administrator of the district of Calais; Pierre-Antoine Milloir, mayor of Sainte-Marie-Querque, and Pierre Anieree, notable of this municipality; Duclay, justice of the peace of Capelle; the parish priest of Huby-Saint-Leu and the syndicated procurer of the canton of Montreuil (not named); Nobert-Carpentier, mayor of Saint-Remi; David, Riquier, Cossarts, and Warnin, administrators of the district of Montreuil, and Leblond, syndicated procurer of this district; Hesdin, mayor of Enquinicourt, and the maid Solvic.
[15] Dialogue reported by Le Bas’s son.

There's probably not too much original there, but since it was requested...

Comments

[sesana]

It's always good to read a defense of Robespierre, even if it isn't anything new. Thank you!

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

You're quite welcome. I agree; it's nice to see someone defending Robespierre for a change--along that line, have you read any Mathiez?

[sesana]

Sadly, I haven't. He's on my summer reading list, though.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Is anything of his translated into English, do you know?

[sesana]

I swear I saw it at my old college library. I could be mistaken, however. I ought to look into this before I try to get my hands on it.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Oh, probably... I wasn't aware that anything of his had been translated, except for one book about the Thermidorian Reaction.

[sesana]

I really don't remember what I saw, actually. I just remember seeing something when I did my paper on Robespierre (who else?) a few years ago.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Well, you never know; I could be wrong.