The Terror: The Reign of Robespierre (Part 2)

The Rest Is History

This episode examines the personal history and political ascent of Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution. The hosts trace his

Key takeaways

• Robespierre's political identity was shaped by a childhood marked by the loss of his mother and social instability.
• His ideology was heavily influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, specifically the concepts of civic virtue and the 'general will'.

Main topics

• Robespierre's early life and education
• Rousseau's influence on revolutionary thought

Notable quotes

Let terror be the order of the day.

Conclusion

The episode illustrates how a man driven by high moral principles and

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous abyss, where all things have long been tending, where, having now arrived on the giddy verge, they hurl down in confused ruin, headlong, pell-mell, down, down, till sans-culottesme have consummated itself. And in this wondrous French revolution, as in a doomsday, a world have been rapidly, if not born again, yet destroyed and engulfed. Terror has long been terrible, but to the actors themselves, it has now become manifest that their appointed course is one of terror. And they say, be it so. Que la terre soit l'ordre du jour. Let terror be the order of the day. So what a dramatic moment, a key point in the story. of the French Revolution, the start of the Terror. So this passage, which describes this great turning point, the dawning of the reign of terror, comes from the single most influential history of the French Revolution that has ever been written in our native tongue. And the man who wrote it was one of the absolute intellectual titans of Victorian Britain. He was the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Now, some of you might have found that reading a little bit theatrical, but of course, that was Carlyle's style. Some people might even say a melodramatic style, and I think they'd be right. So he's writing often the present tense, so it gives you this incredibly vivid, palpable sense of immediacy. He puts you right in the heart of the revolution. And as you can tell from that passage, Tom, Carlisle sees the revolution as the equivalent of the flood or the apocalypse in the book of Revelation, this titanic biblical reckoning between the forces of radicalism and violence and the forces of the established order. And the terror, this point in our story, 1793, 1794, is the absolute climax. Speaker 3 (2:31) Yes. So Carlisle casts it as this. kind of immense, unstoppable conflagration that consumes all in its path and even its own profits. So, Saturn devouring its own children, we talked about that in our first episode. And also, Dominic, in our first episode, we talked about how for the British and perhaps for the Anglophone world more generally, the terror is really what the revolution is all about. not a coincidence that Carlyle was a massive influence on Charles Dickens, who said that he'd read it 500 times, Carlyle's book on the French Revolution. And so it's his principal source for Tale of Two Cities, which is amazing, the bestselling novel in English. That is the novel that's imprinted this idea of the revolution as being equivalent to terror, I think, in the British imagination. And this is where our sense of it has streams of blood, tumbrils, all of that that we were talking about yesterday comes from. And I would say that in Britain, far more than any other European country, the terror is actually seen almost as synonymous with the French Revolution itself. So actually, in a lot of European countries, there is an emphasis on the more progressive elements of the revolution. Speaker 2 (3:51) The metric Speaker 3 (3:52) system. The metric system. Not just the metric system, but the language of rights and that kind of thing. But by and large, for the British, it's just mad people chopping each other's heads off. And do you know the person who magnificently, magnificently summed this up? I do. I know what you're going Speaker 1 (4:10) to Speaker 3 (4:10) say. So this is an interview that Madame Thatcher gave in 1989 to Le Monde. And 1989, of course, the bicentennial of Bastille Day, the start of the French Revolution. And it was part of a series of interviews with leaders from the G7 who were attending a summit in Paris. And all the other six leaders were incredibly respectful of the revolution and everything that it had given humanity. So all this language of rights and stuff. Mrs. Thatcher. Speaker 3 (4:49) absolutely uncompromising refusal to be diplomatic. And she said that the revolution was a terrible thing. Up to the final death of Robespierre. Oh, it was an age of terror. It was an age of terror. We did ours much more quietly. She's Speaker 2 (5:06) not entirely wrong, Speaker 3 (5:07) to be fair. Well, I mean, I suppose we... did chop off the head of a king, but I think she's talking about the glorious revolution and there was a lack of guillotining in that. Speaker 2 (5:17) And Speaker 3 (5:17) so you said that in this series, we're going to be looking at the reality behind the myth. And for British listeners, the myth is this notion of the revolution being all about terror. And so listeners may be thinking this idea of terror, is this just a kind of francophobic? Speaker 3 (5:40) British, something that they've imagined, something perhaps made up by Carlyle, one of his rhetorical flourishes, one of his melodramatic flourishes. But actually, it's not at all. Because the idea of terror being the order of the day, it originates with the Speaker 2 (5:57) revolutionaries themselves, doesn't it? Completely, it does. They never use the phrase, they don't call themselves terrorists, as some historians later do, nor do they ever use the expression, the reign of terror. as lots of historians do, and it's very common in the popular imagination. But the word terror, and terror as a positive political policy, as a strategy, as a deliberate choice, is there from 1793, and arguably even earlier, is implicit in a lot of what they're saying, isn't it? So Speaker 3 (6:26) that Speaker 2 (6:26) phrase that Carlisle Speaker 3 (6:27) quotes, let terror be the order of the day, he is quoting a slogan that was publicly pronounced by a man called Bertrand Barre, who was one of the 12 men who sat on the Committee of Public Safety, which we talked about yesterday, this kind of proto-dictatorial institution that had been set up on the 6th of April, 1793. And it was never enshrined as a kind of official policy. It was never an official motion of the National Convention, which in effect was the government of revolutionary France. but it didn't need to be adopted as an official policy. Barre proclaimed it on the 5th of September 1793, so some two months after the murder of Marat, which we were talking about in the previous episode. Barre was offering this policy of terror as a way of dealing with all the multiple interlocking crises that we heard about in that first episode, so war. counterrevolution, civil war, economic collapse, the collapse of the revolutionaries themselves into bloodthirsty faction fighting. And Barre's goal in saying, let terror be the order of the day, was to institutionalize repression against the perceived enemies of the revolution and thereby to save it. Speaker 1 (7:55) And Speaker 3 (7:55) what this meant in practice was to reframe what had hitherto been ad hoc violence, violence that emerged from the streets. Speaker 2 (8:06) Yeah, the September massacres in the prisons, for example. Chaotic, anarchic. All of that. Speaker 3 (8:11) And to reframe it as a formal state policy. But just to reiterate, even this is still fundamentally an attempt at crisis management. It's an emergency measure. It's a response to the crisis that is overwhelming the revolution. It Speaker 2 (8:32) strikes me that there's two different schools of thought here, two different kinds of terror. So what you're describing as the crisis management is terror as defensive. It's terror as in, you know, this is a bulwark against our enemies. But there is another way of thinking about the terror, isn't there? Which is much more almost terror as a positive force, terror on the offensive. Speaker 2 (8:53) as remodeling society or giving you a kind of, I suppose, a philosophy of government. And this brings us to the person at the heart of the story. Speaker 3 (9:03) I mean, you might say literally a blood bath, that the blood washes away the taints of monarchy and aristocracy and superstition, and that you have to have the blood bath so that something pure and better can emerge from it. Speaker 3 (9:19) This is quite a minority position in the beginning of 1793, but it will become increasingly influential. And the person who is most associated with it, probably the most famous or maybe notorious figure in the whole French Revolution, was the one revolutionary that was name-checked by Mrs. Thatcher in that interview with Le Monde. and who on the 5th of September, when Barre proclaimed terror the order of the day, was actually the president of the convention. And that is Maximilien Robespierre. So he is, people can probably have a sense of what he looks like. He is in 1793, 35 years old. He is short. He is slender. He is pale in his appearance. compared by one contemporary to a cat, that at some time he looks like a kind of domestic tabby, at other times like a fierce tiger. Speaker 2 (10:18) In our previous series about the French Revolution, Robespierre has been kind of threaded through it. He's bobbed up from time to time and then gone away again. And he's not really, at that point, the undisputed star of the revolution. But this is the moment, isn't it? The sort of second half of 1793, when he... finds himself cast or casts himself as the absolute central figure in the drama. And he becomes identified with the whole policy of terror. He embodies it. He personifies it, doesn't he? Perceived as its architect, perhaps not always fairly, I would say, actually, but he certainly articulates it more fluently and confidently than Speaker 3 (11:02) anybody else. Yeah. So he becomes the face of the terror. both when it is being prosecuted and in the wake of it. On the one hand, fewer people die in the terror than are killed in the British Army on the first day of the song. That is one way of looking at it. On the other hand, I mean, a lot of people are killed in the terror. So something like 17,000 people across the whole of France get to be executed as traitors and enemies of the revolution. And then you were talking yesterday about the Vendée. I mean, a huge scale of slaughter there. Some French historians compare it to genocide. And certainly in Paris, the center of the revolution, there is a kind of hideous melodrama to the displays of executions that are going on. This is why the guillotining is so memorable. The guillotine was designed to be merciful, to be an enlightened way of killing people. But the speed with which the blade drops onto the neck results in great geysers of blood welling out. So it is a really spectacular, terrifying sight. So much blood ends up flowing over the course of the Terra into the water supply that it becomes poisoned and they have to move the guillotine because the blood is getting into the water system. And I think to his enemies, Robespierre comes to seem the embodiment of everything that is making this happen. A kind of a monster who is threatening to turn the whole of France into a cemetery. And there is a famous cartoon which was published towards the end of the terror, which illustrates this. And it shows Robespierre, to quote the caption, guillotining the executioner. after having had all the French guillotined. So this sense of the terror as something that will end up consuming the entire country. And you mentioned the word terrorist. So it's originally coined in French in 1794, after the terror has formally been brought to an end, to describe a class of person who had never before needed to be described. So this is the birth of our notion of terrorism as a positive because Terrorists obviously think that they are doing often Speaker 2 (13:27) God's work or the work of the people or whatever. They do indeed. But you know, you were talking about Robespierre. This idea that people have of Robespierre is this monster hungry for blood. I mean, it's so common. It's common in political rhetoric. And Robespierre's bloodlust, his desire to sacrifice human life in pursuit of a better world, has become an absolute staple of... conservative political thought, hasn't it really? I mean, he's a sort of monster haunting the conservative imagination. And yet the funny thing about Rob Spierre is when you look at him in so many ways, he is not Stalin or he's not Pol Pot or something. So you give the example, don't you, in your notes. A really obvious point, Rob Spierre is personally extremely squeamish. And this will astound people, this man who is famous for guillotining all these thousands of people. He, all his life, had consistently opposed capital punishment. Speaker 3 (14:20) Completely. We did an episode on the introduction of the guillotine and how Robespierre stood up right the way through all the meetings that were structuring the revolution from 1789 onwards, opposing the death penalty. And he had a profound personal horror of violence. For instance, he had opposed the war. against Austria and Prussia that the Girondins had pushed. He was very against it. Even though ultimately he's part of the institution that is responsible for sending people to the guillotine, he never goes and watches executions himself. He hasn't got the stomach for it. And even during the terror itself, he does disapprove of a lot of the more indiscriminate atrocities that are being perpetrated out in the provinces. We talked yesterday about Marat, how the stress of being in the eye of the political storm brought him out in boils and all kinds of skin complaints. I think Robespierre likewise finds Speaker 3 (15:22) The process of administering the terror, very stressful, which I'm sure won't be much consolation to those who are his victims. But it is notable that he seems to have retired to his bed in a state of kind of nervous collapse throughout the months of the terror. So he's, as you say, he's absolutely not Stalin. He's not cavalier about this. He feels the burden of it, I think, very personally. And also his political opinions. I mean, they are very liberal Democrat. They're very inoffensive. They are exactly the kind of thing that today constitutes the political mainstream for parties in pretty much every Western democracy, I would say. We mentioned how Robespierre opposes the death penalty. He also is a keen supporter of freedom of the press. He's backed this throughout his life. He's in favour of universal male suffrage. not female suffrage, although he is incredibly popular with revolutionary women, as we will see. He supports progressive taxation to support universal education. He supports the idea of human rights. He's a firm believer in them. And he's an abolitionist. He wants to see slavery go. So these are all pretty politically impeccable positions from the perspective of today. Woke, garden-reading snowflake, who knew? A further thing that is strange about him, we were talking yesterday about how Marat dresses in a way that makes him seem the embodiment of the revolution. He dresses as a child of the street and how by 1793, this is something that most revolutionaries are doing. This is not Robespierre's vibe at all. Robespierre's vibe does not remotely seem that of a revolutionary itching to drown the Ancien Régime in blood. So Timothy Tackett in his book on the terror, which we've been quoting a lot in this series, he quotes one of Robespierre's colleagues in 1793, who is very into this notion of kind of repudiating aristocratic fashion. And this guy says, we now all look like beggars, boots and threadbare clothing, such as our stylish costume. These are the clothes that people in the convention are wearing almost as a kind of uniform. But Robespierre, I mean, for him, it might as well be... Versailles in 1781 or something. So he loves a powdered wig. He loves an embroidered waistcoat. He loves a waistcoat. Robespierre loves silk stockings. He loves a handsome blue coat. Speaker 2 (18:01) And Speaker 3 (18:01) the thing about the stockings is interesting because, of course, the culottes are the breeches that the aristocracy used to wear at Versailles to complement the stockings. And so the sans culotte is people who wear trousers, people who can't afford this style. And as early as 1791, Robespierre had been described by a fellow revolutionary as the general of the sans-culottes. But Robespierre himself, despite being the general of the sans-culottes, he's still wearing culottes. He has them. He's wearing his pantaloons. And so it is striking that the man who more than anyone else is associated with sweeping away the old order should affect the fashions. Speaker 2 (18:42) of that very order. Yeah, because he's so prim, he's so meticulous, he's so dapper. Fastidious. Now, what's going on there? How do you reconcile those two things? I mean, it's fascinating from Speaker 3 (18:57) the point of view of personal psychology, but I think it also matters because looking at Robespierre's character and background helps us as well, maybe to get a handle on what's going on. in the terror because Robespierre is so influential on it. Before we carry the story on from the death of Marat, all the turbulent events that will be following that, let's just have a quick look at Robespierre's backstory because we haven't given it yet in the course of our various series on the French Revolution. Maybe see what clues we can find there. Love a clue. Brilliant. Robespierre was born on the 6th of May, 1758 in Arras. which is a town on France's borders with Holland. And it's very prosperous, it's very pious, and it's unbelievably boring. And Robespierre's early life is marked by kind of repeated tragedies and petty humiliations. And reading about them kind of remind me of 19th century novels that Speaker 2 (20:00) always Speaker 3 (20:00) feature these Speaker 2 (20:01) kind of things, Madame Bovary or something like that, Speaker 3 (20:03) where... They're a small scale tragedies, but obviously incredibly personally felt if you are the Speaker 2 (20:09) person experiencing them. And do you remember how we were talking in the Mara episode about how Robert Darnton has this thing about so many of the revolutionaries have a sense of disappointment, frustration, personal, professional in their early lives that gives them a sense of resentment and unfinished business. And I wonder if that's the case with... Robespierre, I mean, he definitely has a, there's something gnawing at him, isn't there? Yeah. So in that context, I mean, Speaker 3 (20:35) let's look at his parents. So his father was a lawyer who was very unstable and very downwardly mobile. And he had got Robespierre's mother, who was the unmarried daughter of a brewer, so considerably lower class to a lawyer. He got her pregnant. So it was a shotgun wedding and Maximilien was born four months after his parents' wedding. and his parents go on to have three more children. So a brother for Maximilien Augustin and two sisters, Charlotte and Henriette. And then father is an increasingly absent presence. His downward spiral continues. Their mother is a continuous presence. and all her children clearly adored her. That means that in 1764, when Maximilien was only six, she dies. The impact is felt, I think, by all four children as a completely crushing blow. Maximilien in particular was devastated. Throughout his adult life, whenever his mother was mentioned, tears would come to his eyes. He would completely tear up. Their father basically by now has vanished. He is not the kind of man who is prepared to shoulder the burden of looking after four motherless children. He vanishes from the scene. And so the children end up being divided up between various relatives. So the two girls go to live with their paternal aunts, and the two boys, Maximilien and Augustin, go to live with their paternal grandparents who were the brewers. Peter McPhee in his biography of Rochefier, brilliant biography, writes that although born into a long line of lawyers and officials, Maximilien was now to be brought up in a milieu of manual work with the sounds of carts and workers shouting in the local Picard dialect in the Rue Ronville. So on the one hand, perhaps this is giving him a sense of identification with the workers, people who are working with their hands. On the other hand, you can understand why he would perhaps have wanted to hold on to the outward signs of respectability. Hence the clothes. So I think there is a kind of intriguing tension there. Yeah. And definitely it generates a sense of insecurity in him, as also does the fact that the same year that his mother dies, so when he's six, he gets small pox and it leaves his face kind of pockmarked. So Speaker