There’s probably no subject that polarises historians more than the French Revolution, and Robespierre’s biography has been used and abused to suit many a view of history. Here, Ruth Scurr gives a balanced if sometimes rather purple account of his life.
The revolution, and Robespierre’s part in it, was over in a flash; he was thirty-six when he died on the guillotine, his jaw already shattered in what might have been a botched suicide attempt, and the revolution itself was only in Year II (i.e. 1795). But in that short time, thousands of people’s lives were ruined by the Jacobins’ blood lust.
All of this is a long way from Robespierre’s early respect for human rights and for the people, and certainly a good distance from the constitution that he helped to prepare which paved the way for a constitutional monarchy in France.
There were several details that I found surprising. The Revolution, like its later Russian counterpart, has always seemed to me to embody atheism as one of its tenets, but Robespierre was violently against atheism and instituted a new religion that worshipped the ‘Supreme Being’. Just weeks before his execution, Robespierre, at the height of his power, officiated at the Festival of the Supreme Being in which a statue to atheism was destroyed. His objection to the church was the petty tyranny of the clergy, not the false hope of an afterlife. Towards the end of his life he seems to have become almost fanatical in his belief in immortality.
Robespierre does appear to have been a puritan of sorts, particularly in his inability to compromise. It was their desire to compromise that condemned two of Robespierre’s closest allies, Desmoulins and Danton. Robespierre apparently had no difficulty in sending them to their deaths, despite their vocal support for him in his own times of need. To us this seems like a dereliction of friendship and, on a pragmatic level, one wonders how long he thought he could maintain his political power if he continued to eliminate his allies as well as his enemies.
It was this Utopian character to his project that doomed it more than any other.
There are striking similarities between Robespierre’s Supreme Being and Hitler’s pseudo-religion, providence. Both became ever more apocalyptic and brought with them the power to cleanse the nation of its impurities. As it was, Robespierre fell and France made the compromise to end all compromises by establishing a new tyranny, that of Napoleon, a far more astute politician than Robespierre, but still a dreamer doomed to overreach his abilities with his ambition. For Robespierre, that ambition was not personal; he seems to have had a genuine love and belief of the people. Like so many tyrants who have followed his example, he used that belief to excuse the unimaginable pain and suffering he inflicted upon them.
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