2023-06-08 06:13:59
The last days of the French Great Terror were fraught with paradoxes. Maximilien Robespierre and the leaders of the Convention were arrested and executed on July 28, 1794 in the same square where the Bourbon Monarchs had been guillotined for the simple but powerful reason of preventing a new repression in Paris. Faced with the same human mass that had cheered for the executions of his enemies, the executioner ripped off Robespierre’s bandages that covered a horrible wound on his jaw, the mark of his attempted suicide before allowing himself to be caught alive, which gave rise to a scream animal of pain that could only silence the fall of the sharp blade. Without a voice, the ‘incorruptible’ man was defenseless.
‘The fall of Robespierre’ (Critical) is a real-time Time.news of the most frantic 24 hours of the French Revolution where its author, British historian Colin Jones, narrates the surprising defeat of a man who had as many enemies as supporters in love with a dry but clear speech. «I know that the right, the left, the center are going to attack me, because everyone has their own vision of Robespierre and none of us agree. What I think is that he was someone genuinely committed to social reform. A person who tended towards the liberal left, but who was not excessively leftist. He believed that there was room to make a better society », he explains.
The history of the revolution began as a dream of a better society and ended as a very real nightmare. The so-called period of Terror began on September 17, 1793 when the French Convention voted in favor of measures to suppress counterrevolutionary activities and lasted until the execution of Robespierre. In these ten months, a true genocide was experienced in some regions that affected men, women and children… But even within the repression and anarchy, with some regions rising up against the Convention and foreign armies licking the borders, there was a space of time even bloodier than historians have called Gran Terrorinaugurated in May 1794 with a series of laws, each one more repressive than the previous one.
Colin makes a portrait full of reliefs and contradictions of this jurist of the most disadvantaged causes that with the French Revolution was placed at the mercy of the head of the Committee of Public Safety, an institution that acted as a watchman for the insurgents, and later took charge of the Convention in its bloodiest period. Not surprisingly, the professor at the University of Queen Mary in London discards any label that connects him with the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and recalls in his work the thin wire on which Paris walked in those days. “The revolution started in a very positive way and won the support of the majority of the French population, but then, over the next few years, it evolved into a civil war as bloody as they all are.”
The beginning of the end
Between 1793 and 1794, the revolutionary government responded in an extreme manner to “the bombardment by all the European powers at the military and naval level and to the revolts of peasants and many urban areas of the country.” The aim of the book is to contextualize this violence in a period where blood flowed happily, fueled by hunger and fury: «The level of violence in the period of terror is very comparable, and not much worse, than other civil wars of the same era and, of course, much lower than anything that happened in the 20th century on the scale of the Holocaust or Stalin’s terror”, points out the Briton, who recalls that at that very moment the slave trade from Africa, the Caribbean or North America was causing staggering death tolls. The times, and not only the Revolution, were terribly harsh.
The ideology of the French Revolution it only added further exacerbation to the inevitable tensions in the French political system. “The emphasis from the beginning on the question of the unity of the nation translated into a very high degree of intolerance towards dissidents,” he notes. Robespierre embodied this intolerance early on by serving as an informer against corrupt governments and later associating himself with the radical Parisian sans culottes movement, which lobbied the Jacobins for increasingly extreme reforms. As the country began to unravel from internal and external tensions, the Jacobin leader became convinced that the only way out was to embrace the guillotine.
Nine of Thermidor (1864), by Valery Jacobi, kept in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
This decision triggered the period of terror that did not even abate when the foreign war began to favor France. “In the national assembly Voices arose asking to reduce violence and intimidation while continuing with social reforms, but Robespierre was convinced that the Revolution should continue to be increasingly radical and violence should intensify regardless of military victories,” Colin argues about the exact moment in which the one that this very popular politician lost contact with the Parisians and began his own journey to the guillotine.
Fearing that a new consignment of complaints would start, some deputies began to shout on July 27, 1794 to prevent the Jacobin’s speech at the Convention. Laughter and jeers paralyzed the rigid Robespierre, who in a quick coup was accused of being a dictator and arrested along with two other members of the Salvation Committee. Although they were released from prison by the Paris Commune, finally the group most loyal to Robespierre was sentenced to death and taken to the Plaza de la Revolución (today Plaza de la Concordia), in what was only the beginning of the end: «My book differs from most historians in the sense that his death did not mark the end of the period of terror. That violence continued essentially because those who ousted Robespierre were the most left-wing deputies of all. It would not be until later when the right emerged with another path ».
Although they were released from prison by the Paris Commune, finally the group most loyal to Robespierre was again arrested, convicted and taken to the Place de la Revolution (today Place de la Concorde).
It is not a trivial matter that his defeat at the hands of the most radical left was only possible when he physically lost his voice due to a shot during the government coup that some attribute to a failed suicide attempt and others to an attack. “Robespierre was seen as highly principled, the spokesman and ideologue of terror whose ability to win people over grew from his oratory. His enemies understood that the only way to stop him was to stop his speech. First they silenced him in the assembly and then they shot him in the mouth”, narrates the author of ‘The Fall of Robespierre’ (Criticism).
The revolutionary’s words were deeply seductive to the French of the period and, in Colin’s opinion, his speeches before 1792 would also be shared by most democratic people today. His principles were structured around issues as clear as supporting a liberal regime, respecting law and order, equality before the law… Only after years and the crowded corpses, rational ideas were replaced by violent delusions through a “tremendously uncomfortable language” for today’s ears. “I had the idea that killing your enemies was a virtue, that you have to exterminate your opponent whenever possible,” considers the professor.
What he was not, despite his connection to the people, is a populist politician like Napoleon Bonaparte was going to be in the true Armageddon of the Revolution. «It is true that Robespierre saw himself as a kind of representation of the people and affirmed that whoever was against him was against the people, but he was different from Napoleon, a figure closer to what we understand as populism today. In fact, he was quite reluctant to promote or exploit his own popularity,” Colin points out.
The black legend against his figure presents him as a man with a messianic conception of himself, creator and prophet of a new religion that came to replace traditional creeds. Colin, however, qualifies in his work what the cult of the Goddess Reason and Robespierre’s role as leader in a religion that was no more than performance: «His enemies said that he had invented a cult of the Supreme Being to be its pontiff, but, when you see it from his point of view, it is obvious that he knew that religion was a bone of contention to connect with rural france and he preferred to bet on a cult where Catholics and deists had a place rather than insist on a simple attack against Christianity. What he did was find a way to unify France ».
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