The Legacy of History (II)
Wednesday, 30 January 2008 13:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
montagnarde1793Revolutionary Monsters
In a footnote to his Histoire de la Révolution française, Michelet reported this anecdote: “A young man … one day asked old Merlin of Thionville, how he had brought himself to sentence Robespierre. The old man seemed to experience some remorse. But then, rising suddenly with a violent moment, he exclaimed: ‘Robespierre! Robespierre! … Ah! If you had seen his green eyes, you would have sentenced him just as I did.”[1]
By the time Merlin remembered Robespierre’s eyes for posterity, much had already been written on Robespierre’s fateful physiognomy. In her 1818 Considérations sur la Révolution française, Madame de Staël described Robespierre in the following terms: “I once spoke with Robespierre at my father’s house in 1789. He was then known as a lawyer from
Robespierre, who was then thirty-one years old, is presented like a ghost: the paleness of his face and the green color of his veins betray the contemporary fascination with vampires, and would become an integral part of his legend.[3] These details are reproduced, with variations, in countless works on the Revolution. In fact, they may have been inspired not only by Madame de Staël’s unlikely encounter with Robespierre but also by a Thermidorian engraving, done by Tassart and showing Robespierre “drinking blood.”[4]
In 1821, the Marquis de Ferrières described Robespierre as follows: “He was somber, mournful, suspicious, irascible, vindictive, considering events only in relation to himself. His face had something of the cat and the tiger about it.”[5] The feline characteristics of Robespierre’s face were taking hold of both the popular and aristocratic imagination. They echoed a Thermidorian expression according to which the last months of Robespierre’s political life were a “tigrocratie.”[6] The demonic quality of Robespierre’s gaze was meant to express, better than any political argumentation, both Robespierre’s ascendancy over the Revolution – an hypnotic, mesmerizing effect – and the necessity of destroying him for posterity.
By 1831, when Nodier drew his physical portrait, Robespierre, once observed as measuring over six feet, had become “a fairly small, spindly man.” “His gaze, was an indescribable shaft of light that flashed from a wild eye, between two convulsively retractile eyelids,” Nodier added, “a shaft of light that wounded when it struck…. With his dreadful good faith, his naïve thirst for blood, his pure and cruel soul, Robespierre was the Revolution incarnate.”[7] Robespierre’s “retractile eyelids” clearly suggest a bird of prey, a thought later echoed by Michelet when he wrote of Robespierre: “He swooped down like a hawk on an already paralyzed bird, and bit the tender flesh.”[8]
In his 1847 Histoire des Girondins, Lamartine contributed as well to the construction of Robespierre’s monstrosity:
Robespierre was small of stature; his limbs were puny and angular, his walk jerky, his attitudes affected … his rather sharp voice sought for oratorical effects but found only fatigue and monotony…. His eyes, very much veiled by the eyelids, and very piercing, were deeply embedded in their sockets; they had a bluish look, rather soft but vague, like steel gleaming in a bright light … his mouth was big, his lips thin and disagreeably contracted at the corners, his chin short and pointed, his complexion a deadly yellow, like that of a sick man, or one exhausted by night watches and meditations.[9]
We can see in these lines the simultaneous shrinking of Robespierre’s physique and the progression of his monstrosity.[10] The eyes in particular have kept their animal quality, but a new element has been invoked; they gleam like steel, a direct evocation of the guillotine, one that Michelet will also repeat a few years later: “His anxious eyes … casting a pale gleam of steel” (2: 61). In the popular imagination fired by early accounts of the French Revolution, Robespierre, like Frankenstein’s creature, was death among the living, an unnatural being betrayed by his green veins and his yellow skin, his deep eye sockets and his mechanical gestures. “His automatic gait was that of a man of stone,” Michelet would add, punning on Robespierre’s name (61).[11]
By the end of the nineteenth century, Robespierre’s metamorphosis was complete, and he was unrecognizable. Hippolyte Taine, in his passionate hatred of Robespierre, may have given us the most fantastic vision of the revolutionary thinker. Describing Robespierre’s withdrawal from the political scene during the months of the Great Terror, he wrote:
In vain he detaches himself from the action, and raises his preacher’s eyes to heaven, he cannot help hearing and seeing all around him, beneath his immaculate feet, a cracking of bones and a flowing of blood, the insatiable gaping mouth of the monster he has trained and he bestrides. This mouth grows more ravenous each day, and needs a more ample feast of human flesh, and it is good, not only to let it eat, but even to supply it with food, often with his own hands…. This butchery awakens destructive instincts that civilization had long held in check. His cat’s physiognomy, which was a first that of a worried, but fairly gentle house cat, became the ferocious expression of a tiger-cat.[12]
The now familiar feline qualities of the portrait are meant to suggest an untamable creature, a man-eating tiger with a suggestion of rabid disease, “foaming at the mouth when he speaks.”
[1] Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, ed. Gérard Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 2: 61, emphasis in original. This extraordinary reply was widely circulated in the nineteenth century and is reported, with minor variations, by different writers.
[2] Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (Paris: Delaunay, Bossange et Masson, 1818), 2: 140-41.
[3] Ann Rigney discusses the pallor of Robespierre’s face in Louis Blanc’s account of the Revolution, and shows how it is interpreted as a sign of his willingness to sacrifice himself. For Michelet, she suggests, it supports his view of Robespierre as a man of “colorless talent” (“Icon and Symbol,” p. 113).
[4] Engraving by Tassart, collection De Vinck, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.
[5] Charles-Elie de Ferrières, Mémoires, 3. vols. (Paris, Baudoin: 1821-1822), I: 343-44. Quoted in E. L. Higgins, The French Revolution as Told by Contemporaries (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1938), p. 135.
[6] See the engraving in the Collection De Vinck: “Miroir du passé pour sauvegarder l’avenir / Tableau parlant du Gouvernement cadavero-faminocratique de 93, sous la Tigrocratie de Robespierre et Compagnie.” Paris, Germinal, Year V. Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.
[7] Charles Nodier, Portraits de la Révolution et de l’Empire ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Tallandier, 1988), vol. I, p. 191.
[8] Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2: p. 667.
[9] Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins (Paris: Hachette, 1870) I; pp. 41-42. I quote the translation published by Henri Béraud, Twelve Portraits of the French Revolution, trans. Madeleine Boyd (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), p. 66.
[10] Moreover, if Lamartine’s description sounds vaguely familiar, it may also be because, in its style, it echoes the description of Frankenstein’s monster, published a few years before: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set.” Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 52.
[11] Thomas Carlyle himself would be influenced by the now-familiar monstrous legend. Commenting on the terrible days that preceded Thermidor, he describes “a seagreen Robespierre converted into vinegar and gall.” The French Revolution: A History (
[12] Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1885), 3: pp. 209-10.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: Thursday, 31 January 2008 18:20 (UTC)It sounds like something Hamel might have cited. I'll have to check.