Fatal Purity

While this is presumably a biography, it is different from other, recent works of this genre that I have read. There is a paucity of personal details about the central character unlike, say, the numerous books being produced about the American Founding Fathers. This may be attributable to Robespierre's extraordinary, short career. He did not marry and left no children. He was notably isolated most of his life, having made only political "friends" that are better described as temporary allies. Almost everyone he knew disappeared in the chaos of the Revolution: the Revolution ate its children. His speeches and other public works were partially recorded in the news media, but his private papers were hidden, burned or otherwise destroyed. Robespierre left us a terrible, well known reputation, but very little evidence to support the myth of his existence. Perhaps he was a Cheshire cat.

Ms. Scurr does not tell us what sort of person Robespierre was. Rather, we must infer him from his presence in the narrative. In telling the story of the King's trial and execution, the King is scarcely noticed. Louis XVI was in the background of political events that concerned Robespierre. We are told what happened at the Convention and about the manipulations of the revolutionaries who condemned Louis XVI. When the King rolled past Robespierre's quarters in maison Duplay, the doors were closed and windows shuttered. Robespierre hardly noticed that man's last few gasps of breath. I take that description as what Ms. Scurr experiences through Robespierre's senses. All of Robespierre's victims seem to decrease in significance as they approach their demise.

Ms. Scurr does say many times that Robespierre was a man of principle. He perceived himself as one with the revolution. As in Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, for the revolutionary there is no personal life. So, we must take Robespierre as an Incorruptible presence, not a man. In that, he was markedly different from all those around him, possibly excepting Saint-Just. Many other Jacobins used their prominence to do well while doing good, but Robespierre led a monk's life.

Robespierre may have been possessed by ambition. Everything he did can be interpreted as a 'will to power' to which he sacrificed all, in the end himself as well. Robespierre threw friends and allies into the fire, along with his enemies. Anyone who did not agree with him, who crossed his path to dominance, became an enemy. What's clear from this text is that Robespierre was convinced he was right: he suffered no self-doubt. He seems to have been surprised at the end, when the Convention revolted against him, but suffered his fate fairly quietly. That unemotional response to the horrors of the Terror and his own demise suggests a mad man. At any rate, I lean toward that interpretation, since I have met a few political types who were like that. I felt they were crazy, so I distrusted and avoided them. But the French people in revolt clung to their liberators, their sole hope.

Robespierre appointed friends and relatives to important posts. He did not see it as nepotism; rather it was a matter of who he would trust. It was of the greatest importance to him that those in offiice carry out his wishes, even if his appointees benefitted themselves from their offices. He accepted that not everyone was perfect, but virtue lay in the carrying out the Revolution; i.e., his wishes. Robespierre believed the ends of the Revolution justified the means. But what were those ends? He apparently had an image of what France should be like which he never wrote down. (He did write down how he proposed to achieve that.) He believed those who shared his ideals and acted selflessly had the quality of "virtue," which could only be determined by others like himself. That is, virtue is in the character of the person. Virtue is something apprehended by those who know what it is; i.e., those who understand virtue can judge whether one has virtue. That notion justified the methods of the Revolutionary Tribunal which somehow intuited the guilt or innocence of those brought before it. But virtue is otherwise a subjective criterion, not explained in Ms. Scurr's writing or anywhere else. The feeling or concept (if that is what is was) died with the man.

The focus on virtue together with Robespierre's belief in the Revolution as the salvation of humanity suggest the Jacobins were a cult. That would explain the easy shift most of them made to the worship of the Supreme Being when Robespierre wanted it. In Robespierre's mind, there had to be a Supreme Being which justified the Revolution out of compassion (sense of justice?) for human beings. The poor and innocent were the humanity Robespierre raised up, so he ascribed evil to their oppressors: the King, nobles, landlords, lenders, etc. Robespierre was implacable in his hatred of oppressors and the corrupt. He supported proposals for universal education, progressive taxation and welfare programs intended to lift up the disadvantaged. While he was unable to secure those programs, those who opposed him ended up on the scaffold.

He believed the corrupt and counter-revolutionaries were everywhere he looked. At the beginning of his career, it was obvious enough to most French people that their society was grossly unjust. The abuses of the aristocrats, agents of the King and the clergy were well known and hated. So, there was popular support for persecuting them, especially in Paris. As the Revolution proceeded, the order and scruples of the Ancien Regime crumbled. Disorder prevailed almost everywhere. Revolutionaries siezed control of various cities and carried out purges to suit themselves, without guiding principle. Revolutions undo controls, so their proponents tend to splinter into factions. In the chaos, opportunists abound. While most writing about the French Revolution concentrates on Paris, Ms. Scurr points out that provincial revolutionaries also wanted to free themselves of Paris, often for personal reasons. They were the Girondists. They did not want a centralized government, which was not only to oppose the Parisiennes, but, especially, Robespierre's Jacobins. Robespierres' consistent purpose was to hold France together as a unitary State inspired by his idyl. It is a wonder of his work that he succeeded, so the Girondists were last seen entertaining the crowds in the Place de Revolution.

While all of that was going on, being Robespierre was to float above the city, to have an out of body experience. Ms. Scurr does not explain Robespierre's views on most of those matters, perhaps because there is no evidence that would support any explanation. It is only known that he had his views. Robespierre appears as a dictum, a voice from thin air, which was heard now and then giving things direction. The presence of Robespierre's body was almost a coincidence, merely a shell from which his thin voice emanated. So, when he screamed on 10 Thermidor, 1795, he may have released into the French atmosphere once and for all the sounds remaining in his body.

I would have given Ms. Scurr an "A," had she explained the mystery which still is Robespierre. We expect historical figures to be full bodied, complete with heads, arms, legs, stomachs and private parts. They not only say things during the day, but do things at night. We can get an idea of what Rasputin was like by trying out some of his vices and visiting his environment. Robespierre is dauntingly different: almost a disembodied presence who we can only sample by getting into a Guillotine. Yet, as Ms. Scurr points out, he particpated in founding many of our modern ideas, such as the Declaration of Human Rights. He was far ahead of his time in understanding the need for universal education and other .public institutions. He kept France together in spite of enormous centripetal forces, and the attack of the Monarchist powers (Austria, Britain and Spain).

Was he, at once, also the founder of modern tyranny? He predates Hitler, Lenin, Stalin by more than a  century, but he invented the totalitarian vision and forms those later evil geniuses perfected. Robespierre seems to me neither of the Left nor Right in modern terms, but a Utopian visionary. Because he was disconnected from this world, a sort of political priest, he invented a dispassionate worship of ideals. This made it easy to impose terror, suffering and death "in the name of the Revolution," which he believed had the same authority as the people. I think his apparent lack of emotional involvement in his actions suggests he was insane, a schizophrenic. His lust for power, his sense of absolute righteousness and justification, probably defines him as a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic. That classification is further supported by his incessant demands to 'look within' to find the sources of corruption, evil and  counter-revolution, a form of demand copied by Sen. Joseph McCarthy fifteen decades later.

Nonetheless, Ms. Scurr mentions several times that Robespierre disappeared from public view for long periods, the victim of an unknown, severe illness. Early in his career, as a Judge in a Church Court, he had agreed to condemn a murderer despite his conviction that the death penalty was wrong. Subsequently, he quit the position as he had suffered tremendously in coming to that decision. Robespierre was often wracked with indecision. He seems to have been driven by a lust for power, while at the same time repelled by the horrible details of exercising power. Perhaps he had to close the Duplay's doors and windows as the condemned passed to prevent a total breakdown; i.e., to maintain the distance between visionary ideals and bloody practice. Perhaps his absences from public view were times of emotional collapse; times when physical reality imposed itself full force on his ethereal self, when he may have suffered the emotional shock of murdering his friends and other innocent people. His absences, about which we know nothing, may have been the only times Robespierre was a "normal," emotionally connected person. After those vacations, what we see of him in public, as reported by Ms. Scurr, is a cold, calculating presence.

Ms. Scurr's book is timely. She does not politic or in any way suggest the application of her work to current affairs. Nonetheless, much of what happened in the life of Robespierre is germane to our modern predicament. How should we understand suicide bombers? Is it just ignorance, or must we credit a striving for an impossible ideal? Which of those things it is implies vastly different foreign policies.

"Mirabeau  thought that an absolute executive veto over legislation was essential to the future of the monarchy - he did not see how any kind of constitutional monarchy could be viable otherwise  ..." (p. 115) What does this suggest about the claims of the American President and his men over Congress?

Robespierre held two political principles from an early age. (p. 70) First was the principle of election. As we now commonly say, representation is only legitimate with the 'consent of the governed.' Second, the poor deserve justice. This is essentially the principle of the New Deal. Robespierre may have been a bloodthirsty tyrant, but his original motivations and ideas seem to have been pure. Even by current standards, his two principles are still considered worthy by most people.

Ms. Scurr presents us a story of  a character most often stereotyped and discarded. Robespierre's life is difficult, perhaps impossible, to investigate. It is unlikely there are any new evidentiary sources waiting to come to light.  So, maybe it is impossIble to write the definitive biography. It is possible to gain insight from rehearsals of the character, which is what Ms. Scurr directs.