Book Review: The Fall of Robespierre

[osprey_archer]

It took me a while to get through Colin Jones’ The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris, partly because the book is long but also partly because I kept getting lost in the welter of names. I don’t have a lot of background in the French Revolution, and even if I did, Jones is drawing on testimony from a lot of smaller actors as well as the big guns, which I appreciate as a historian but sometimes found confusing as a reader.

However, eventually I sorted things out, more or less, and the story really picks up when we hit the early afternoon, when Robespierre’s ally Saint-Just rose to make a speech. One of the deputies interrupted this speech, using the occasion not only to launch an attack on Saint-Just but also Robespierre, who had recently been calling for yet another purge of the Convention, which meant another wave fo deputies sent to the guillotine.

With stunning swiftness, it became clear that Robespierre had almost no support. His own leftist allies were sick of him; the rightists had always hated him; and the general public in the galleries, who were generally believed to adore him, made no move to support him when the deputies shouted down his attempts to speak. (Robespierre, of course, had not allowed Danton to speak in his own defense at his trial.) In a matter of a couple of hours, the most powerful man in France was under arrest, with his four closest allies.

The Convention had learned something from its constant evocation of Brutus: when you topple Caesar, you have to take out Marc Antony as well. So the Convention decided to remove Robespierre’s ally, the National Guard commander Hanriot. Hanriot, no fool, knew that this would ultimately mean his death. Rather than quietly leave his post, he charged the Convention with tyranny and tried to set up another revolution, centered on the Commune, the seat of the Paris municipal government.)

At first, all seemed to be going well for Hanriot. He summoned National Guard forces to the Commune, and they came. They even managed to rescue Robespierre and the other arrested deputies. However, as the afternoon wore into evening, word got out that Robespierre had been arrested and Hanriot sacked. The National Guardsmen realized that Hanriot was no longer legally their commanding officer, and that by siding with the Commune, they were siding with Robespierre. They began to defect to the Convention. By the time the Convention stormed the Commune, around midnight, it was almost unprotected.

Thus, the Convention and the people of Paris rose in something stunningly close to unanimity to overthrow Robespierre. People from all over the political and economic spectrum had come to see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, and whatever else they disagreed on (pretty much everything) they wanted him gone.

However, even as he is proving thoroughly that Robespierre’s tyranny had made him one of the most hated men in Paris, Jones also appears to be attempting… a partial rehabilitation of Robespierre? By Jones’ own pen Robespierre stands convicted of spearheading purge after purge, sending hundreds of people each day to their death, and using it all to set himself up for some sort of one-man rule, “marking out with purges to road to some form of personal power, that [his colleagues] were happy to call tyranny.”

Yes? Yes, they were happy to call it “tyranny,” because that generally is what you call it when one man appears to be angling to set himself as sole ruler? We say this sort of thing about Trump all the time, and the man hasn’t managed to guillotine a single elected representative yet. What would you prefer to call it, Mr. Jones?

In the last paragraph of the book – the note he wants to leave in his readers’ memory – Jones says, “In crushing what they named the Terror, the Thermidorians also destroyed much of the democratic promise and the progressive social and economic policies that have also characterized the period of Revolutionary Government before 9 Thermidor. The ultimate irony was that the person who, in the early part of his career, expressed belief in those values most luminously – and in a way that can still speak to us all – was Maximilien Robespierre, the great loser of 9 Thermidor.”

I mean, okay, sure, history is written by the victors, and Jones has a point that no one during the Terror called it the Terror… because, as Jones himself points out, Robespierre and company had squelched freedom of the press, opposition to the government was punishable by death, and publicly admitting to being terrified was itself a punishable offence, because of course the innocent have nothing to fear. The Thermidorians didn’t destroy the democratic promise of the revolution. Robespierre had already destroyed it.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wowww, wanting to rehabilitate Robespierre seems like wanting to be the edgiest of edge lords.

I hope we can have a sic semper tyrannis moment with Trump before any guillotining can happen.

[osprey_archer]

It's weird, because the book makes such a powerful case that Robespierre was awful! And then is like "Okay, so Robespierre had just led a bunch of bloody purges, and was probably in the midst of planning another bloody purge, and everyone is Paris was so scared of him that more or less the entire city was delighted to see him dead... but was he really that bad?" And... yes? Based on the evidence presented in this very same book, yes he was? I don't know how anyone could write even briefly about, say, the purge of the Dantonists from the Convention, and not come away with the conviction that Robespierre is The Worst.

[kore]

//waves small Danton flag due to seeing movie at college movie night in the eighties

[skygiants]

idk, I actually appreciated the nuance -- to me Jones' points are less about Robespierre As A Guy and more about the backlash against the early ideals of the Revolution generally, and I do think there's a historiographic point to be made that later writings about the Revolution have seized on opportunity to demonize Robespierre As A Guy in order to demonize the entire revolutionary project, bring back a more conservative social order, etc. I think it's possible to both think that Robespierre needed to go and also mourn for the end of his early potential and the revolutionary experiment that he represented.

[troisoiseaux]

I second this. (Thanks for eloquently making the point I've been trying to draft in my head since last night!)

[osprey_archer]

I think the point about the backlash against the ideals of the Revolution would have been more strongly made if he had left "but was Robespierre a tyrant, really?" out of it, because the people and the delegates were so astonishingly unanimous that the answer was "yes." (Truly struggling to imagine anything that would get such broad spectrum of Americans to agree about, well, anything at this point in time.) Robespierre hurt his own cause by embodying it in a form so objectionable that he ended up roundly rejected across the political spectrum.

[skygiants]

honestly, it was actually quite startling (and a salutory lesson in Spheres of Discourse) for me to me that you & various people over here are finding "was Robespierre a tyrant, really?" such a shocking question to ask .... I have just enough connection to Deep Les Mis/French Revolution fandom to know that many people would argue passionately that much of our current perception of Robespierre as The Single Figure who could be blamed for all the worst excesses of the Revolution is post-Thermidorian propaganda -- and indeed on reading this book I was like "well I don't have the deep knowledge to argue with Jones' takes here and it seems a pretty reasonably measured analysis to me, but I bet I have friends who would take objection to Jones' profoundly anti-Robespierre slant!"

[osprey_archer]

Jones does go for the "perhaps much of our current perception of Robespierre is post-Thermidorian propaganda," but unfortunately he needed to accompany this with some actual evidence that Robespierre was Not That Bad, rather than a pile of evidence that Robespierre was in fact so bad that people were dancing in the streets with joy at being rid of him.

Then again, on the "Robespierre: not such a tyrant after all?" side, he *did* signally fail at the bit of being a tyrant where people who should be relieved at your death sob at your funeral. If only someone had given him a tip to be sure to pin the blame for the guillotinings on someone else.

[kore]

"The ultimate irony was that the person who, in the early part of his career, expressed belief in those values most luminously – and in a way that can still speak to us all – was Maximilien Robespierre, the great loser of 9 Thermidor.”

UM. I mean I've seen academic revisionist history before but that's a new one!

[osprey_archer]

I mean to be fair it's entirely possible that young Robespierre DID speak luminously of the values of freedom and democracy and social justice, but at this point what I would actually find ironic and surprising is a figure who spoke luminously of freedom etc., spearheaded a revolution, and then didn't end up accidentally embodying the opposite of his own ideals with purge after bloody purge. It's an astonishingly common failure mode.