The Robespierre-Danton duel reconsidered

How do modern historians view relationship between Danton and Robespierre?  

Here is a translation/ summary of Hervé Leuwers's article, "Danton et Robespierre: le duel réinventé", published in Biard & Leuwers (ed): Danton: le mythe et l'Histoire (2016).  A close reading of the evidence suggests that there was no profound conflict between the two men and that Robespierre moved against Danton only reluctantly, when he felt that the  elimination of factions was "necessary to the Revolution."

Hervé Leuwers - like Colin Jones in The Fall of Robespierre (2021) - moves away from the idea of Robespierre as the victim of personal neurosis or emotional pressure.  Instead  we see the dedicated Revolutionary who was both an idealist and a skilful and calculating political player.  This Robespierre is more human, but perhaps all the more formidible. 

"Even unto death" - Robespierre's letter to Danton

In March of last year an iconic piece of Revolutionary history went under the hammer when the Versailles auction house Osenat offered for sale the original manuscript of Robespierre's famous letter of 5th February 1793 to Danton.  Heavy with the resonances of betrayal to come, Robespierre offers his condolences for the death of Danton's wife and expresses his friendship and love "even unto death".

5 February 1793. If, in the troubles that can shake a soul like yours, the certainty of having a tender and devoted friend can offer you some consolation, I offer you this. I love you more than ever and unto death. In this moment, I am yourself. Do not close your heart to the accents of friendship that feel all your pain. Let us cry over our friends together, and let us soon show the effects of our deep sorrow to the tyrants who are the originators of our public misfortunes and our private misfortunes. My friend, I have sent you this letter from my heart to Belgium; I would have come to see you, if I had not respected the first moments of your just affliction. Embrace your friend.  Robespierre
ROBESPIERRE (Maximilien de). Autograph letter... - Lot 18 - Osenat

Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, vol.III-1, p.160.
https://archive.org/details/oeuvrescomplte03robe/page/160/mode/2up?view=theater

Robespierre - what's new?

May 2022 saw the publication of Volume 12 of the critical edition of the works of Robespierre, containing - among other items - the long awaited transcripts by Annie Geoffroy of the Le Bas manuscripts acquired by the French state in 2011. [On which see my post of 15.05.2015]

The event was marked on 8th February 1793 with a lecture by Hervé Leuwers, given at Arras as part of a series hosted by the ARBR-Les Amis de Robespierre. Here is a summary/English translation of his talk which has been made available on YouTube.  As always, it is a great pleasure to rediscover that the foremost French expert on the Incorruptible is such a cheerful and unassuming scholar.

Professor Leuwers  begins by reviewing briefly the background to the present publication.  The work of editing the complete works was begun by the Société des Études Robespierristes as long ago as 1910.  Ten volumes were eventually published, followed in 2007 by a supplementary volume edited by Florence Gauthier. Until the unexpected discovery of the Le Bas collection in 2011, it was thought that the Robespierre corpus was more or less complete.

Tissot on Robespierre

Here is an analysis of Robespierre's career and the events of Thermidor taken from P.-F. Tissot's history of the Revolution, published in 1835.  Tissot was a committed Revolutionary and an assiduous political observer, who must have known many of the participants personally: as he himself writes, "An inquisitive, attentive and impassioned witness, I did not cease for a moment to study and follow the Revolution."  It is interesting to note how close Tissot's view of Robespierre is to that of modern biographers like Hervé Leuwers and Peter McPhee.

Max Adamo, Fall of Robespierre in the Convention on 27th July 1794 (1870)  Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
File:Max Adamo Sturz Robespierres.JPG - Wikimedia Commons

Hervé Leuwers: the rehabilitation of Robespierre

I have just acquired the "must-have" 2016 biography of Robespierre by Hervé Leuwers.   .

Since there is no translation yet, and hardly even a book review in English, I thought a I would translate this interview which I found (from the website of the newspaper L'Humanité).

Hervé Leuwers teaches at the University of Lille III, and has written widely on French legal history. He is chief editor of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française. 

What was your starting point?

The initial inspiration for the book was the availability of new archive resources, in particular, unedited judicial memoirs which shed new light on Robespierre's career as a lawyer in Arras.  
I also felt that it was time for a new approach.  I wanted to avoid the reduction of Robespierre's life to the years 1793-4 and  to recover his identity as "a man of the 18th century".

Robespierre, bird lover

Robespierre's fondness for birds, throughout his life, is a trivial but telling piece of evidence for his essential gentleness. Without the all-invasive trajectory of the Revolution, so at least the theory goes,  there might have been a different Robespierre, a private man enjoying ordinary 18th-century pleasures, rearing his birds in the back garden. 

Robespierre in the rue de Saintonge

View of 64 rue de Saintonge, from Google Maps

From October 1789, when the Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris, until July 1791 Robespierre lodged with his friend Humbert in the rue de  Saintonge, a long street which crosses the northern part of the Marais near the Temple.  This was a distance of two miles to the Assembly, a long trudge on foot though fairly swiftly accomplished in a horse-drawn cab.

A meeting with Robespierre - recollections of Paul Barras

In Spring 1794  Paul Barras and Stanislas Fréron returned from their victorious Mission in Toulon to face the opprobrium of the Committee of Public Safety.  Many years later Barras recalled a unannounced visit that he and Fréron made at this time to Robespierre in the protective sanctuary of the Duplays.  They met a strangely unresponsive Robespierre who, in these final months, evinced, as Peter McPhee has it, "the physical toll taken by his mental distraction" (McPhee, p.194)

A Norwegian sea captain meets Robespierre

In 1793 a sympathetic Robespierre  helped the Norwegian merchant seaman,  Nicolay Linde (1755-1821)  to regain his ship which had been impounded by the Revolutionary authorities.  The circumstances of the Norwegian's encounter with Robespierre were recounted by his son, who died in 1879, and published in the journal Morganbladet in 1928 (translated for the Annales historiques de la Révolution française in the same year.) 

An Englishman meets Robespierre

The Recollections of  the army surgeon and author John Gideon Millingen (1782–1862) first published in 1848 contain a rare and fascinating personal account of an interview with Robespierre at the height of the Terror.  Millingen, himself outlines the circumstances of their meeting. Millingen's father Michael Van Millingen, who was Dutch in origin, had moved to Paris at the beginning of 1790 and taken lodgings in the Hôtel de France, rue Vivienne (p.25).  The family was favourably  disposed towards the Revolution but came under suspicion when the war with England began; the elder son James, who was a clerk in the Mint, was arrested and detained first in the Luxembourg, then in the Collège des Écossais which served as a prison during the Terror.  The parents, ordered to leave Paris, moved to St-Léger.  Vouched for by the Albitte brothers, Montagnard deputies, they were subsequently allowed to return to the capital. Although only ten or eleven at the time, the young John attempted to intercede with various members of the Convention to secure his brother's release from prison.  He reports that saw Robespierre "two or three times"  and was received distanty but cordially, but that he talked often to his sister Charlotte and to Eleanore Duplay (p.292).

Robespierre chez Duplay - No.366 rue Saint-Honoré

On 17th July 1791, following the Champs-de-Mars massacre, the Minister of Justice denounced Robespierre's discourse to the public accuser and threatens him with pursuit.  According to Fréron, when the Jacobins broke up at 11pm, municipal troops had gathered and Robespierre had some difficulty in forcing his way through the assembled crowd.  He was understandably reluctant to return to to his lodgings, a mile and a half away in the Marais and the deputy Lecointre,  at his request, arranged for him to spend the night with the Jacobin and master-carpenter Maurice Duplay in the rue Saint-Honoré.  In Charlotte Robespierre's account, Duplay rescued him from a crowd of well-wishers in the street. He was eventually induced  to stay permanently.  His new hosts send for his trunk, "la malle du départ d'Arras" and his books from his lodgings in the rue Saintonge.  From this time on, apart from a short interlude when he set up house with Charlotte in the rue Florentin, he enjoyed the familial atmosphere and pious attentions of the Duplay family and "became more or less invisible".

The debate over Robespierre's health

In 2013 the popular TV forensic anthropologist Philippe Charlier - unchastened by the debacle over Louis XVI and his DNA - caused yet more controversy  by  his collaboration with Philippe Froesch in the now-notorious  Robespierre "facial reconstruction". Not content with proving Robespierre was an ugly thug, he also pronounced him to have been victim to a hitherto little known disease called "sarcoidosis". Historical diagnoses are always highly speculative but Charlier meant to be taken seriously - he even managed to publish his findings in The Lancet.  Not surprisingly historians were quick to criticise;  Peter McPhee was particularly affronted, since he found his article on Robespierre's "medical crises" cited as Charlier's chief authority.

Sarcoidosis, we learn, is "an autoimmune disorder involving the abnormal collection of chronic inflammatory cells that form as nodules in multiple organs" (most usually the lungs and skin.)  The disease was not described until 1877, so naturally it would not have been recognised in Robespierre's time.  There are wide variations in presentation.  According to NHS Choices, the most common symptoms are tender red bumps on the skin, shortness of breath and a persistant cough, though some sufferers have no symptoms at all.  In some cases the condition clears spontanously, and there are both acute and chronic forms of the disease. All of which makes it hard to diagnose without x-ray and detailed medical examination.

Arras, Robespierre and modern memory

A new Robespierre museum is promised in Arras.  Some might say, "At last".  To the outsider, unaware of the fraught legacy, it comes as a real surprise to learn that Arras does not already have a Robespierre museum.  The ARBR, set up in 1987,  has campaigned for 30 years.  In December 2016 the Mayor of Arras and his Council  finally agreed that the Arras Office of Tourism should take direct control of the Maison Robespierre and a committee of experts was set up to steer the museum project.....

Is this the end of a fraught conflict?

The SER and the plaque on the Maison Robespierre

"Arras has never felt comfortable with its most illustrious native son" (Kaplan, p.450). This is something of an understatement.   Rejected throughout the nineteenth century as a bloodthirsty monster, in the nineteenth century Robespierre was held responsible for local as well as national depradations.  Plans to erect a statue to his memory in Arras, formulated in 1848 and reiterated by Louis Blanc in 1870s, fell on deaf ears.

In the early years of 20th century Albert Mathiez and Charles Vellay founded the Société des Études Robespierristes, with the objective of rendering Robespierre "the justice that is due him", mainly through critical editions of his work and scholarly studies.  In October 1923, after sixteen years of lobbying,  the SER succeeded in having a plaque erected on the Maison Robespierre.  The ceremony was presided over by by Mathiez and the Left-wing mayor of Arras. Gustave Lemelle.  The favourable press reported that five hundred persons attended;  according to opponents,  there were fifty "drinkers of blood", "mostly foreigners".


For  a commemorative statue...

 Mathiez's further plan to erect a statue continued to meet with stiff opposition.  In 1925, just as he was on the brink of success, the plaque on the Maison Robespierre was vandalised and had to be removed removed. (It was later replaced but so high up that no-one could read it.).  Finally in 1932 the municipal council, which was controlled by the Radical Socialists, agreed to a monument to be furnished by the SER and annonced a solemn ceremony of dedication to be held on 15th October 1933.  The road in which the Maison stood was also renamed rue Maximilien Robespierre. Local politicians tried  to play down political significance of the move, casting Robespierre as a distinguished local lawyer, academician and member of the Rosati.

A bitter quarrel ensued. A committee of opposition was formed and the head of the order of lawyers and the president of the Academy both refused to participate in the dedication ceremony.  When members of the Rosati agreed to co-operated, their president, Émile Poiteau, resigned. The Arras newspaper Le Courrier published lists of local victims of the Terror - 1,675 names in all - and there were demandsfor the ceremony to be banned in deference to the dead.  Poiteau's call for a boycott was seconded by the bishop of Arras.

Clodel's Robespierre in the Hôtel de Ville -
sternly ignoring the flowery wallpaper

Robespierre's Arras cont.

It is hard to find many traces of Robespierre in Arras. The Association des Amis de Robespierre pour le Bicentenaire de la Révolution [ARBR] has produced a bilingual walking guide with various sites itemised which I have followed it diligently on Google maps but, apart from the imposing central squares, it is mostly a tour of shopping streets, road works and wheelie bins.  Nor is there much official recognition of the town's most famous son - a 19th-century statue stands in the the Hôtel de Ville but there are no municipal plaques and, to the surprise of many visitors, no real Robespierre museum.

Here, such as they are, are the highlights:

Robespierre's Arras

The Arras which Robespierre knew in the 1780s was a bustling provincial capital. Following annexation to the French crown in 1652 the Artois had flourished, with a thriving textile trade and one of the biggest grain markets in the country. In the years after 1730 the clergy and nobility of Arras, with their vast rural estates, benefitted from a boom in grain production and an accompanying rise in land prices. The town was still on a relatively small scale, with population of just over 20,000 and, within the confines of its medieval ramparts, could be traversed in fifteen minutes.  Nonetheless, it was already divided into distinct districts: well-to-do central parishes; the crowded streets of the poor along the River Scarpe and its tributary the Crinchon, the military "citadelle" and the "town" which housed a plethora of lawcourts and administrative buildings.

Robespierre's manuscripts "saved for the Nation"

On a happier note:

 Here is a video containing a preliminary description of the manuscripts of Robespierre which entered the Archives Nationales in 2011 after an unprecedented national subscription enabled the French state to pre-empt their sale. (I have looked for a video in English, but I can't find one.)

THE SALE

The hitherto unknown manuscripts had been preserved intact by the descendants of Philippe Le Bas. The sale, which was held at Sothebys in Paris on 18th May 2011, comprised two lots:  Lot 31 (Fonds Le Bas)  contained letters of Augustin Robespierre and Le Bas and Lot 32, the papers of Robespierre himself. The latter comprised 116 densely written and heavily corrected pages containing drafts or notes for some of Robespierre's central speeches including the "Discours sur la guerre" delivered at the Jacobin Club on 25th January 1792 and his final speech to the Convention on 8th Thermidor.  In one paper he outlines the case for the execution of Louis XVI and notes the division of the Convention into "Left" and "Right".  A single letter, to an unknown correspondent, discusses the relationship between Happiness and Liberty.

 Both lots made well over their estimates. According to the rules of preemption, the state was obliged to match the winning bids,totalling 979,400 Euros in all.  The representatives of the Archives Nationales literally stepped up at the last minute, to the general applause of the crowd in the auction house.

 These documents, kept in the family of Le Bas and Élisabeth Duplay, are particularly valuable as, although there are sizeable holdings of manuscript material in various public archives, the originals for much of Robespierre's vast Oeuvre have long been presumed lost. After Thermidor a Committee of Twelve headed by E.B. Courtois was appointed to examine Robespierre's papers. Many were seized at this time and thought to have been subsequently destroyed by his former associate Armand Guffroy. It was believed that others in the house were successfully hidden by Éléonore Duplay only to be destroyed  - along with the Gérard portrait - by  Simon Duplay in 1815. Just three copies of speeches, along with a few letters, escaped..  Where there are no published versions, Robespierre's modern editors have had to rely on reports and transcripts made when the speeches were delivered, many of which contain considerable textual variations.  The speech of 8 Thermidor, Robespierre's last, was edited after Thermidor from the rough copy in his own hand which was found by Courtois.

CONTENT OF THE MANUSCRIPTS

Inevitably, there will now be a long pause whilst the new manuscripts are subject to scholarly appraisal.  A preliminary assessment was published  in a special Robespierre edition of the  Annales historiques de la Révolution française in January 2013 by Annie Geffroy, who is working on a digital copy of the manuscripts on behalf of the Société des études robespierristes.  The final tally of the Archive Nationale's new Robespierre collection 683 AP/1 is 126 pages, since it includes a report "on finances" dating from the last days of the Constituent Assembly which was acquired at a separate auction on 12th May. The papers, mostly single sheets, have been arranged into 12 files. 

 Robespierre by Boze
 (Musée de Versailles/AFP)

The greater part of the material represents rough drafts of articles and commentaries subsequently published in Robespierre's two newspapers, the Défenseur de la Constitution and the Lettres à ses commettants. In addition there are fragments from five speeches:
Two were made to the Jacobin Club:
File 3:  The speech "on war", dated  25th January 1792
File 6:  Speech(?) dated 28 October 1792  

Three represent key speeches delivered to the Convention:
File10: "Response to the manifestos of the kings united against the Republic", 5 December 1793/15 Frimaire Year 2
File 6:  Speech of 7 May 1794/ 18 Floreal Year 2 on the cult of the Supreme Being.
File12: The final speech of 26 July 1794/ 8 Thermidor

Most of the material has already been published in Robespierre's Oeuvres, but with some inaccuracies and no clear idea of authorial process.  According to Annie Geoffrey, the pages recently purchased by the National Archives must now be added to the already large number (several hundred sheets)  in the public archives (AN F7 and F17, BNF Manuscripts, AD Pas de Calais), or sold since 1800. She suggests initial cataloguing on the French database MUSE ["Manuscrits, Usages des Supports et de l'Ecriture"] which has suitable provision for detailed physical description.  Even at a glance, however, the manuscripts are eloquent testimony to Robespierre's attention to detail, the thoroughness of his preparation, and the laborious reworking which went into his articles and speeches. 

Letter on liberty

Annie Geffroy ends her article with a preliminary transcript of File 2, the unpublished letter  "on happiness and virtue".  Robespierre addresses his unknown correspondent as a solitaire who erroneously thinks he has found happiness by resisting political involvement: he is wrong because virtue is the "basis of true happiness" and the overthrow of tyranny was necessary in order that all men might be free to be virtuous. Robespierre commends the Convention as an "august senate" though hints at corruption (there may be members who have rejected virtue and favour crime)

References
."French rain terror on Robespierre manuscripts sale" post on The History Blog, May 17th 2011
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/11135

Annie Geffroy, “ Les manuscrits de Robespierre/The Robespierre manuscripts”, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 1/2013 (No. 371) , p. 39-54
https://journals.openedition.org/ahrf/12679

Robespierre's speech to the king.

In 1775 the schoolboy Robespierre was chosen from among five hundred pupils at the Collège Louis-le-Grand to deliver compliments in Latin to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette who stopped briefly as their coach crossed Paris following their coronation in Reims. It rained and the royal couple did not deign to descend from their carriage. This is the stuff of myth: the future regicide slighted by his future victim, nursing his inferiority complexes and unaware of the Revolutionary events to come.

Here is the episode as depicted in the film The French Revolution (1989) directed by Richard T. Heffron: . 

McPhee on Robespierre

I didn't much want to read another biography of Robespierre. I didn't think it could add much to Ruth Scurr's chatty Fatal purity or Hilary Mantel's sympathetic imaginary reconstruction in A Place of Greater Safety. 

However, I was given Peter McPhee's book for Christmas, just started reading and have changed my mind.  This is a brilliant book! 

Here are some of the reasons why.





1. McPhee self-consciously avoids a teleological approach: "Write of the past as though it was the present rather than read history backwards". (How would this biography read if we didn't know...?) 

Madame Tussaud encounters Maximilien

By the time her Memoirs were written in 1838, Madame Tussaud was well advanced in modelling her own legend -  Revolutionary history repackaged into tempting tableaux for a Victorian audience, with our heroine centre-stage.  Who is to know whether she even met Maximilien?  Nonetheless her  Robespierre is interesting and possibly quite close to the man himself  - reserved, careful of his appearance, thoughtful and courteous, not at all the stereotypical caricature of the bloodthirsty Terroriste.