More often than not, the first thing that pops into a person’s head when he or she hears the words “French Revolution” is the guillotine, that exsanguinary instrument that, two centuries later, still looms over the revolution’s legacy as it once did over its enemies. No man is more responsible, or culpable, if one prefers, for transforming the guillotine into the symbol of the French Revolution than Maximilien Robespierre, the revolutionary orator and Jacobin who became the de facto leader who oversaw la Grande Terreur. It is the lawyer from Arras, therefore, who was arguably the leading actor on the revolutionary stage. Robespierre made the guillotine; the guillotine made Robespierre. And both, in the popular mind, made the French Revolution.
That is, in the English-speaking world, at any rate. In the French imagination, another idea of Robespierre competes with our more familiar view of him as the “precursor of totalitarianism.” This second Robespierre “embodies the French Revolution in its most original aspect,” that of “the Revolution of the Rights of Man.” Robespierre thus represents both the “most inspirational and the most repellent” parts of France’s history. The dualism of his legacy and the breach it continues to cleave between the French and their past is the subject of Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most, a book by Marcel Gauchet, one of France’s leading contemporary intellectuals, first published in French in 2018 and now in English translation.
Gauchet’s volume is not a traditional history or biography. Given that “the events of 1789 made him a new man,” he writes, there’s little point in looking at Robespierre’s pre-French Revolution life for answers to his revolutionary activities. Rather, it is an attempt, drawing almost exclusively on Robespierre’s own speeches and writings, to interpret his revolutionary career according to his own understanding of it, as someone who started out as the “defender of revolutionary principles and spokesman of the people” yet ended up nearly destroying both.
Two hundred years after Robespierre’s death, much about him is still shrouded in mystery. Or so claims Gauchet, whose penchant for insisting that many of Robespierre’s true intentions, motivations, and thoughts “will forever remain impenetrable to us” can become frustrating. Nonetheless, some conclusions can be drawn. Robespierre’s was not an especially attractive personality. Gauchet indicts him for “doctrinaire intransigence,” “egotism,” “exhibitionism,” and “self-pitying narcissism.” Yet if Robespierre was all these things, Gauchet is insistent about something he wasn’t: a demagogue, at least not in the conventional sense his critics then and now accuse him of being.
Robespierre may not have meant to be a tyrant, but he became one anyway. Why? Robespierre was possessed by a psychology that blinded him to the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the ideology to which he adhered, ones that proved fatal when he tried to put it into practice. Gauchet does not state it in such explicit terms, but that is the thrust of his argument.
Robespierre’s radicalism was only incipient in 1789, but it was there. For example, even as everything about the French government and society was being called into question, he retained an absolutist allegiance to the legislature as the repository of the national will and a concomitant “mistrust of executive power.” The idea that sovereignty emanates entirely and indivisibly from the people was one that would cause no end of mischief later, as when, during the height of the Reign of Terror, thousands of men and women were executed by drowning in the “noyades de Nantes” and tens of thousands more were shaved by the “National Razor,” all in the people’s name. If in the early years Robespierre’s radicalism was still “moderate,” that was simply because he had yet to push its implications to their fullest extent. But that extent would come: “the utter destruction of an entire society and system of government.” Already in 1789, asserts Gauchet, “Robespierre was the bearer of an explosive radicalism.”
The explosion came once war began and Robespierre, abandoning his long-standing aversion to doing so, assumed a role in government. This was to be his ruin and nearly that of France. The difficulty was that “the rights of man did not supply the formula for creating a set of political arrangements capable of expressing them.” Robespierre’s alternative formula was popular virtue. A fine ideal when not in power, but it takes on a different cast as soon as it is. For then, any opposition becomes not merely opposition but a threat to the very wellspring of the nation’s existence.
Robespierre, once on the Committee of Public Safety and charged not just with expressing his vision but implementing it, became increasingly absorbed by his self-conception as the people’s messenger, and also their message. Little wonder that as soon as such a personality tasted power, it quickly succumbed to “an authoritarian impulse that escaped his notice by taking cover behind the uncompromising rigor of principles.”
Robespierre saw himself as securing the happiness of mankind, and if that required “the execution of a good many of its members,” so be it. The French Revolution itself had become his highest purpose, above even the rights it was meant to vindicate. But a revolutionary government “founded only at the price of authoritarianism” could never be transformed into one erected upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man. By opting for the former, Robespierre vitiated the possibility of the latter.
Nor was this the only paradox that befell him. Because he had made an unspoken vow to refuse to compromise the Revolution, he trapped himself in a vicious circle. He approved every action taken in the name of the Revolution as a valid manifestation of its principles, and every action taken in the name of the Revolution was a valid manifestation of its principles because he approved it. Ensnared by his own logic, he blinded himself to the obvious: The Revolution of 1793 had drifted so far from that of 1789 as to be almost its opposite. He just couldn’t admit this, for doing so would mean acknowledging that either he or the Revolution had erred.
Robespierre took the laws as they can be but not men as they are. The cost in human suffering was appalling. Gauchet’s judgment is unsparing: “The lack of self-awareness of a tyrant who did not know he was a tyrant engendered an unconscious cruelty toward the sacrificial victims his theory required. They were no concern of his. What could be more frightening than such murderous innocence?”
As Gauchet amply and persuasively demonstrates, the two Robespierres were one and the same. He bound together in his person the French Revolution of the utopian ideals of 1789 and the French Revolution of the mass killing of 1793. Try as he might, Robespierre could never reconcile them. And so one fateful day in July 1794, he too found himself bound to the very guillotine to which he had already sent so many of his countrymen.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter at @varadmehta.
