Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (2012) by Peter McPhee

Nearly a quarter-millennium after his public beheading Maximilien Robespierre remains a controversial figure. There are over 50 schools, streets and buildings named after “The Incorruptible” in France today, but none within the city limits of Paris. A 2009 attempt to get a street named after him in the City of Lights was voted down by the municipal council.

In this 2010 biography by the distinguished Australian scholar of the French Revolution, Peter McPhee, Robespierre is treated objectively and, on the whole, sympathetically. The author pays particularly close attention to Robespierre’s early years and seeks to place his subject in proper historical perspective in the French Revolution overall and not merely as the driving force behind the Reign of Terror, which he wasn’t.

“Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life” addresses three topics of note. First, McPhee rejects the harsh psychoanalysis many historians have applied to Robespierre in past biographies. Indeed, he claims that few historical figures have been written about so tendentiously over the centuries. Other biographers, in his opinion, have written Robespierre’s story in reverse, so to speak. Knowing how his life ended and the role he played in the Terror, they seek to show how his humble upbringing and second-class status led inexorably to the bloodbath of 1794. McPhee sneers that such an approach has led others to see him as “a repressed homosexual with a castration complex, a misogynist and pathological narcissist … whose self-identification with the Revolution was a classic case of Freudian ‘displaced libido.’” The author concedes that “Robespierre was formed by the difficult circumstances of his upbringing and by his adult experience of the distinctive social structures of his province,” but argues that “there is no clear evidence” to support the wild claims of other historians.

Robespierre’s rise to national political prominence was certainly improbable. He was conceived out-of-wedlock in 1758. His mother died when he was just six-years-old. His father essentially abandoned the family (he died alone in Munich in 1777) and left his children to be reared by his dead wife’s sisters in the back of his father-in-law’s brewery in the provincial town of Arras. Other biographers have argued that this hardscrabble childhood produced Robespierre’s later need for acceptance and phobias about personal appearance and physical intimacy. McPhee simply notes what is known: that Robespierre was a serious young man and an exceptional student who, at the age of 11, earned a prestigious scholarship to study in Paris. He returned to Arras in 1781 at the age of 23 to start his law practice and quickly established a strong reputation as an attorney and progressive voice on social issues. He was quirky, aloof and physically unprepossessing, perhaps just 5’3” and suffering from a nervous twitch in his eye and neck, but McPhee doesn’t try to read too much into how his adolescence and personality influenced his future political decisions.

Second, the author stresses that Robespierre’s unshakable belief in the inherent goodness and virtue of the people is what really set him apart, not his childhood or unique psychological makeup. This tenacious belief in the general will and the need to regenerate French society forms the basis of McPhee’s analysis. Robespierre took his worldview from his hero, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was further refined by his reading of the classics, particularly Plutarch’s “Life of Lycurgus” and Cicero’s speeches on the conspiracy of Catiline. Robespierre’s faith in the people and their innate goodness never wavered, nor did his belief that he alone understood the people’s general will. And therein lies the rub, as McPhee sees it. For if the people were by nature good, then any gaps in societal behavior between its natural state of goodness and reality could only be explained by the direct influence of malignant forces. And Robespierre saw malignant forces at work everywhere. The émigré French nobility were scheming to topple the Revolution by force; France’s traditional rivals, Austria and England, were waiting to carve up the French Empire overseas; greedy aristocrats hoarded grain to starve the people and extract excessive profits; the Catholic Church churned up counter-revolution in the provinces in the hopes of one day reclaiming their confiscated property; the radical deputies of the National Assembly pushed an agenda of radical de-Christianization in an attempt to undermine popular support for the Revolution at home and abroad. The so-called “Foreign Plot” amounted to a conspiracy theory of faked-moon-landing dimensions, but Robespierre never doubted it for a second, according to McPhee. The author is quite charitable in his assessment of Robespierre on this issue. It made him seem like a delusional paranoid schizophrenic to me.

Finally, why did Robespierre fall when he did? In short, McPhee claims that his health and political instincts failed him in the summer of 1794. He spent the last months of his life “in stressed exhaustion and fear of assassination” and made a series of miscalculations that doomed him in the end. On June 8th he held the elaborate Festival of the Supreme Being during his two-week term as president of the National Convention and exposed himself to mutterings about his attempt at deification. Two days later he pressured the Convention to pass the Law of 22 Prairial that tightened his grip over the prime institution of the Terror, the Revolutionary Tribunal (future treason trials could only be held in Paris, no defense witnesses were allowed, and the only possible verdicts were innocence or death). Next, he remained committed to pursuing the Terror even after news of the decisive French victory over the Austrians at Fleurus on June 28th, which many saw as an opportunity to map out a return to constitutional rule. Moreover, during these fateful events Robespierre was absent from the Jacobin Club and the floor of the National Convention as he convalesced in a private apartment in Paris. Finally, in his final speech on July 27th Robespierre made wild threats about bringing to trial counter-revolutionary members of the Convention, but failed to name names. Thus, everyone had reason to fear. “No one was safe when Robespierre was now plainly unable to distinguish between dissent and treason,” McPhee says. “The Convention had had enough.”

The author ends on a generally sympathetic note. “Far from the emotionally stunted, rigidly puritanical and icily cruel monster of history and literature, [Robespierre] was a passionate man.” His tireless efforts had helped the French Revolution deliver on many of the core principles of 1789: popular sovereignty, constitutional government, legal and religious equality, and the end to corporate and aristocratic privilege. Other policies he championed – such as free and secular public education, and social welfare for the sick and unemployed – would eventually come to pass. And, perhaps most important of all, McPhee says, “Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety had led the Republic and the Revolution to security.” It just so happened that by the time that safety had been secured “Robespierre was ill, exhausted, irrational and in despair.”