Robespierre

by J.M. Thompson

Using the rich documentation of the period, Thompson aims to give a detailed account of the play of intrigue and manipulation that characterized the Revolution. The biography attempts to combine historical accuracy with the excitement of a novel.

Genres: History, French Revolution, Biography, France, Nonfiction, 18th Century

656 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

James Matthew Thompson was a historian and theologian.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been planning to read this 1935 biography of Robespierre for ten years, since I found a copy in an Oxfam bookshop. It caught my eye because J.M. Thompson's The French Revolution kicked off my obsession with France 1789-1794 and Robespierre in particular. A pity that my local library didn't have this biography back in 2001, as it would have been great research for my A-level French coursework (a defence of Robespierre). Still, better late than never. I read the first fifty-odd pages in May last year, put it aside for nearly 18 months, then read the remaining 600 pages in a couple of weeks. Don't ask me why, as I read based on vibes. As the length suggests, this is a detailed biography that draws on a great deal of archival evidence including Robespierre's surviving letters. Once I got into the rhythm of it, I was immersed once again in the world of revolutionary Paris and fascinated by Thompson's analysis of the Incorruptible. This immersion was only interrupted occasionally by reminders that this biography is almost 90 years old:

"Every citizen," he therefore declared, "has an equal claim to representation, whoever he may be. Sovereignity resides in the people - that is, it is distributed among all the individuals composing the people"; and it follows that every citizen has the right to vote - to exercise his part of the sovereignity. The case for manhood suffrage could not be more cogently put; and if the speaker has only added the word citoyennes to his citoyens, he would have been not only three years in advance of the Revolution, which did not abolish the property qualification (and then only on paper) until 1793, but also much more than half a century ahead of France, in which manhood suffrage was first achieved by the revolution of 1848, and in which women are still without the vote.

According the wikipedia Women's suffrage timeline, women in France got the vote in 1945. Thompson takes a strictly narrative approach, in which half of the book's pages cover his birth until mid-1793 and the remainder the final year of his life. I found a number of his insights striking and interesting, an excellent supplement to the various books I've previous read about Robespierre (e.g. Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution, and In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution). Thompson was an English historian, so makes thoughtful comparisons between French and English legal systems, in the context of 1790 legal reform:

If the judges need not be lawyers, it is because the law which they have to administer is not, like ours, a formless congeries of legal precedents, but a neatly printed book of rules. Or, if the appointment of jurymen demands elaborate safeguards, it is because they are regarded, not as typical 'men in the street', who will be conducted by considerate counsel along familiar routes of evidence, and directed by an impartial judge at the ultimate cross-roads, but as the audience at a debate, the spectators of a drama, the referees in a judicial contest, where no evidence will be excluded, and no methods left untried, to cheat or bully them into a verdict. They must therefore, even for ordinary purposes, he specially picked men, professional experts in human nature, and, for political trials, staunch supporters of the government of the day, whose duty and right it is to secure a conviction.

The sentences in that paragraph get pretty long, but Thompson also has a good line in epigrams, such as: 'He had not been tactful. But tact is a virtue of majorities: in a minority it is taken as a sign of weakness.' I was intrigued by his scorn for the Girondins, who often get away with being treated as martyrs that, had they survived, could have saved the Revolution from itself:

The fall of the Gironde, then, was more than the defeat of a political party. It may not unfairly be said to have 'saved the Republic' - saved it from a system of government which could never win the war, from an economic policy which was helpless in the face of the problems that the war had created, and from an unnatural and dangerous disunion between the capital and the country. The situation urgently required what the Girondins could never give - centralised and simplified control - a small despotic Committee, supervising all the activities of government, legislating through a subservient Assembly, and enforcing its will by an army of travelling representatives. The Jacobins alone had the courage to face this need, and to provide an organisation through which it could be met. They alone controlled the necessary driving force - the support of Paris, and of the 'people'. So Paris saved France by destroying the Gironde.

[...] The writings of the Girondist Dispersion make melancholy reading, not only for the story they tell of suffering and persecution, but also for the evidence they afford of the pettiness, bitterness, and incompetence of their authors. The sympathy which has been so freely lavished on them has been partly due, so far as French historians are concerned, to passing reactions against Jacobinism, and to a desire to find precedents for nineteenth century Liberalism; and partly, among English writers, to a chibalrous and sentimental regard for fallen greatness. Too little attention has been paid to the actual character and services of the two parties.

This judgement also extends to Camille Desmoulins:

Desmoulins only had his clever and spiteful pen to blame for his fall. He was untrustworthy through and through. Even his penitence was a pretence. When he was arrested, two months later, there were found, among his papers, the uncorrected proofs of a 7th number of the Vieux Cordelier. In it he attacked Robespierre's doctrine that the Republic should be founded on virtue - 'If all the citizens are virtuous, what need is there of a Republic?' - and asserted that, even if the Committee were composed of the wisest and best statesmen in the world, it could not expect to go uncriticised. [...] Accident and interest, not sympathy of mind, had brought Robespierre and Desmoulins together. One now stood for the government - what he regarded as the national government - of his country; the other was deliberately setting himself in opposition, at a time when the overthrow of the Committee was likely to lead to anarchy and disaster. It would be surprising if, under the circumstances, Robespierre has acted otherwise. ...But who would not like him better, if he had?

That passage reminded me of a key thesis of Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, that the politicians of 1789-94, '...never succeeded, at any stage of the revolution, in agreeing to disagree, in recognising that conflicts in a society are at the origin of its working and not a vice to be eradicated.' Of course, any tolerance for disagreement is radically reduced during times of war, which 1793 was. Desmoulins did not read the room.

As these passages indicate, Thompson is sympathetic to the the Jacobins in general and Robespierre in particular. However, this admiration does not make him unwilling to identify his failings, weaknesses, and deviations from his stated ideals. Thompson digs into Robespierre's political philosophies and what influenced them (predominantly Rousseau). He quotes Robespierre's Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens in full and analyses it in detail:

Somehow and somewhere, he feels, there must be a natural law that is just and permanent, because all known human laws are unjust and unstable. There must be some human rights, because there are so many human wrongs. To Rousseau the poet, to Robespierre the prophet, that is argument enough. What, again, of the character of these rights? Why liberty, why equality, why (although by now he has forgotten it) fraternity? Perhaps because eighteenth century France has suffered so long from arbitrary government, political inequality, and class war? Perhaps because, in the Paris Robespierre knew, the prosperous middle class preserved towards the poor the same attitude of disdain that they had previously resented in the aristocracy? So far as this was so, Robespierre's Declaration is not a treatise on the theory of the State, but a political programme - as Parisian as the Contrat Social was Genevan, or Plato's Republic, for all its greater scope, Athenian. But no doubt it is by condescending to local conditions that truth, like goodness, saves the world.

I enjoyed being reminded of some favourite lines from the Declaration: 'The charity necessitated by the existence of poverty is a debt that the rich owe to the poor: it is the business of the law to settle the manner in which this debt shall be paid'.

As the biography approaches the last few months of Robespierre's life, Thompson sums up a lot of what makes the French Revolution so addictively fascinating to study:

The Revolution, too, might well seem to have aged prematurely. Into five years the French people had crowded the experiences of two centuries. They had passed from a seventeenth century absolutism of king, church, and nobility, into a nineteenth century constitutional monarchy controlled by the middle classes; and from that to the dictatorship of a political party whose methods have become a model for the twentieth century. They had known civil war and foreign invasion, famine and unemployment. The national administration had at one time been left to the vagaries of local opinion, and at another dragooned by every resource of a centralised bureaucracy. The army had been broken in pieces, and reorganised; the church split into two parts - one powerless and the other persecuted; society from top to bottom had been overturned, wealth redistributed, and the very geography of the countryside, with the memories and habits of centuries, rearranged.

To this litany of change I would add the restructuring of the calendar, which must have been disorientating. I love the French Revolutionary calendar; there's a mastodon bot that posts celebration days from it here.

Thompson takes the view that Robespierre could have survived Thermidor, for at least a bit longer, had it not been for a number of mistakes and pieces of bad luck. As often seems to be the way in history, the momentum of a major events was a compounding of small parts rather than one large simple factor. His final speech gave the impression of exhaustion and absence of new ideas:

There is little that is fresh and constructive in this eloquent but rambling discourse - a cento of ideas from a hundred previous speeches. It does not suggest that Robespierre has learnt much, in five years of Revolution, except to hate and to suspect. It offers little hope that, if his life is prolonged, he has any policy to lift the country out of the rut of 'virtue by intimidation'. It has been held that he wished to end the Terror, and to inaugurate a voluntary Reign of Virtue. Perhaps; but there is not sign of it here. The Committee is to go on - without the embarrassment of a rival body. The Tribunal is to remain - without any lessening of its powers. The Provisional Government is to continue. There is no mention of a Constitution. Robespierre is not a dictator, but the government of which he is the figurehead is nothing if not dictatorial. [...] There is a programme; yet it is that of a government which has no policy save to increase the doses of a medicine that has already failed.

After concluding the narrative with Robespierre's ignominious death, Thompson keeps his concluding remarks to a surprisingly brief 9 pages. These summarise the immediate posthumous designation of Robespierre as scapegoat for anything that anyone wished to condemn about the revolution, which is covered in more detail by Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre. My 1988 edition also includes a helpful appendix briefly summarising the subsequent fifty years of Robespierre scholarship since publication of this biography:

Since Thompson, other biographers have been attracted to Robespierre. At root, the attraction of this subject is not so much the evidently dominant role he played in Revolution, as the mysterious quality which, all biographers agree, is to be found in a man who revealed so little of himself and yet personified (or 'impersonated' as Thompson has it) the Revolution to so many contemporaries and to subsequent generations. He personified it to such a degree that he appears to contain within himself all the contradictions of an event that was simultaneously libertarian and tyrannical, lofty and base, idealistic and pragmatic. To an unusual degree, therefore, Robespierre imposes upon his biographers a resolution of their own attitude to the Revolution and some kind of selection of what they deem to be its most significant characteristics (whether positive or negative), which they will discover in Robespierre. Biographies of Robespierre diverge widely despite the common ground of documentary material.

One of the most significant indicators of this personification is the most commonly used date for the end of the French Revolution: Robespierre's death. Even hostile writers appear to accept that it died with him. He was an extraordinary figure and remains fascinating. Unless you already share this fascination, however, I would recommend reading a more general history of the French Revolution (such as Thompson's) before tackling this extensive and fairly dense biography. I also highly recommend Robespierre's own writings, collected in English as Virtue and Terror, and Hilary Mantel's magnificent novel A Place of Greater Safety.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

As difficult as it is to find works that present an objective perspective on the French Revolution while one is living in countries subjected to the British version of history, occasionally a work such as this one finds its way up and out of the accepted mainstream. Even more surprising is that it is by an English historian who only occasionally reverts to opinions aligned with the entrenched narrative. Following Robespierre’s upbringing in Arras and early legal career, Thompson captures the tumultuous events of the 1790s with authoritative detail.
From Robespierre himself we are treated to the truly inspirational oratory of an idealist as he confronts the political intrigue and hostility surrounding the struggle for freedom by the French, before the inevitable capitulation of a people’s revolution that resulted from the overwhelming power, wealth and aggression of the European monarchies.
Enlightening.