The ObserverBiography books This article is more than 12 years oldReviewRobespierre: A Revolutionary Life by Peter McPhee – review
This article is more than 12 years oldAttention to the details of Robespierre's early life make this a worthwhile studyThe problem for Robespierre's biographer was best stated by the 19th-century historian John Wilson Croker. "Of no one of whom so much has been written is so little known," Croker boldly asserted, before brilliantly characterising the peculiar shape of Robespierre's revolutionary life: "The blood-red mist by which his last years were enveloped magnified his form but obscured his features. Like the Genius of the Arabian tale, he emerged suddenly from a petty space into enormous power and gigantic size, and as suddenly vanished, leaving behind him no trace but terror."
Peter McPhee's new book is a steady, scholarly attempt to get behind the blood-red mist and see Robespierre's features in a more ordinary light. For the most part, it is a careful sifting of existing evidence. It is McPhee's bad luck, as he honestly acknowledges, that the most important advance for Robespierre scholarship in recent years (the acquisition of early drafts of some of Robespierre's speeches by the French national archives in May 2011) occurred too late to include in his book.
Robespierre's provincialism has previously drawn most comment from his detractors. His pronunciation of the word "aristocratique", for example, was mocked in the Royalist press. McPhee presents Robespierre's childhood and early adulthood in the town of Arras positively and without condescension. Robespierre was conceived out of wedlock but spared the tribulations of illegitimacy by the marriage of his parents before his birth on 6 May 1758. Three more children were born, and a baby that did not survive, before Robespierre's mother died and his father absconded. The children were brought up by extended family. Robespierre worked hard and won a scholarship to finish his schooling at Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Afterwards he came back to Arras to become "a reasonably successful, at times brilliant, but often troublesome provincial lawyer". There must have been hundreds, thousands, of men like this, all over France, and as McPhee points out, lots of them were elected to represent the Third Estate (or the Commons) in 1789. What made Robespierre stand out from this throng?
Robespierre's habitual use of the term vertu (virtue) is a thread of continuity between his earliest writings in Arras and his pronouncements from the tribune at the height of the Terror. As an aspirant lawyer and member of the Academy of Arras, Robespierre participated in the widespread 18th-century preoccupation with the creation and promotion of social virtue. He knew the writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau well; his imagination (like those of his schoolmates) was fired by classical antiquity: Cicero's account of the Catiline Conspiracy, especially. Later, in his speeches and writings, Robespierre insisted over and over again that the people were good and virtuous; that the revolution would not be finished until the poor were protected and the weak made safe. "It is revolting that the rich man and all that surround him, people, dogs and horses, lack nothing in their idleness, while those who live by working, men and animals, succumb under the double burden of work and hunger," complained a parish priest from Mauchamps; Robespierre supported him, and others who raised their voices against endemic injustice.
Did Robespierre support those raising more than their voices? McPhee takes Robespierre's famous (or perhaps infamous) question as one of his chapter headings: "Did you want a Revolution without a Revolution?" He argues that Robespierre was not like Antoine Barnave, who sneeringly asked after a memorable lynching in 1789: "What then, is the blood which has just flowed so pure?" Instead, McPhee finds in Robespierre a rigorous justification of violence directed towards revolutionary ends: virtuous ends that would supposedly justify such perturbing means. What that longed-for virtuous polity, inhabited by a regenerated people, would actually have been like remains a complete mystery. Robespierre could not be drawn on agrarian policy. He wanted to make poverty honourable, rather than attempt social levelling. He dared defend the Terror as an emanation of virtue.
The historian Colin Jones writes of McPhee's book: "Robespierre emerges less as the man who ruined the Revolution than as a man the Revolution ruined – by the time of his death in 1794 he was an ailing exhausted husk very different from the bright-eyed, committed and courageous politician of 1789." This is fair and true. The revolution ruined many men, and a large number of women too. To be ruined by a revolution can hardly count as an achievement in the annals of history. To be a man (or woman) suspected of ruining a revolution is altogether more significant. Robespierre wrote and spoke as though he believed the destiny of the revolution ran through him. Yet he was often ill and frequently protested that the task was beyond him. Certainly, he was exhausted by 1794: an old man of 36 who had given his last five years to some of the most feral politics the world has ever seen.
But the lasting grandeur of his life rests in the coincidence he believed existed between himself and the revolution. Others believed it too: from the most influential of his Jacobin colleagues to the most insignificant of his uneducated female fans, the idea that the revolution would be ruined without Robespierre carried conviction. McPhee has been a friend to Robespierre in focusing sharply on the details of his ordinary, early life: those features that Croker complained were obscured. But it is still the magnified form, the enormous power, the gigantic size of his revolutionary life and reputation that fascinate.
Ruth Scurr is the author of Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution
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