Every point of view is the view from a point. In The Fall of Robespierre (Criticism, 2023), Colin Jones, a professor at the University of Queen Mary (London), has chosen the 24 hours that preceded the execution of the Jacobin leader to draw a broad fresco of the French Revolution.
While recounting the events in real time, the author takes us to every corner of Paris so that we can get to know the political and social forces involved in that turbulent and tragic period known as “The Terror”.
Robespierre, who had seen in the guillotine an instrument for the triumph of democracy against tyranny, ended up devoured by his own politics. What happened for an apparently all-powerful leader to find himself swept along by his enemies?
Jones sets out, in his book, to attend to the very small details in order to better understand the general course of events. The fall of the “Incorruptible” depended, in his opinion, on innumerable microdecisions that all kinds of people made in the French capital. Thus, we go to the Public Health Committee as well as to the prisons of the time.
Meanwhile, we never lose sight of the fact that we are facing a country at war, surrounded by the armies of foreign powers that aspire to reinstate monarchical absolutism. That is why the people suffer deprivation and express their indignation when the political class does not give effective answers to their problems.
A police observer records the following comment from a worker: “We starve while they laugh at us with cute speeches.” The “citizen washerwomen”, in turn, raised similar complaints: “You lack nothing and you call yourselves republicans”.
All this does not mean that the ordinary French were not revolutionaries. What it indicates is that they were demanding with their rulers and demanded that they do their duty every time they rested on their laurels.
In fact, the Parisian people, more than Robespierre, are the true protagonists of the study. We can learn about his actions thanks to archival documentation of incomparable wealth, which allows us to approach the same reality from different angles.
Thus we better understand the acceleration of history in a period in which everything was very fast. So much so that those involved had the impression that, from 1789, the French had lived centuries in a few years.
Robespierre appears before our eyes as a complex character. Capable of great virtues, as he demonstrated by defending an advanced democracy and social justice, but also profoundly Manichaean, incapable of seeing nuances beyond a rigid division between good and bad, revolutionary and reactionary.
He was good at making big speeches about high principles, but afterwards he displayed an incredible lack of practicality, to the point that Danton said he could not have fried an egg if his life depended on it.
Perhaps the government was too big for him despite his appearance as a cold and hard statesman. He didn’t know much about military affairs and even less about economics. According to Jean-Paul Marat, the well-known radical revolutionary, he was more prepared for big words than for the struggle for power: “He has never had more ambition than to expatiate on the rostrum… His status as a party leader is so underdeveloped who flees from any tumultuous situation and turns pale when seeing a saber unsheathed”.
Although his intention was to intimidate the opposition, Robespierre only succeeded in multiplying the hostility of his enemies. People like Fouche or Tallien feared him because they considered that he had become increasingly dangerous or unpredictable. One deputy, Charles Duval, commented that the “spell had been broken.” He wanted to say that the “Incorruptible”, at that time, was no longer enough with his eloquence and his overwhelming personality to stay in power.
Does all this mean that there was a conspiracy to destroy the Jacobin leader? Jones estimates that there is no evidence of it: “Many deputies had to burn with desire to see him dead, but there is a long way from imagination to fact, and the evidence that there was an organized conspiracy against him is meager and to a large extent disposable”.
So if a few did not meet in the shadows to engineer political change, what happened? The most plausible explanation points to a spontaneous movement of public opinion, which was never completely muzzled under the Terror. France, from that moment, began a new stage. Politically more stable, although no longer dreaming of establishing great changes that would benefit the masses.
