The tomb of Napoleon is a Paris landmark and tourist attraction.  You will not find anything remotely like it for Robespierre – and Napoleon was not even French.  Such are the ways of memory and history – and the voice of the people.  And the Marseillaise so righteously intoned by Paul Henried in Casablanca.

Maximilien Robespierre was a little-known French provincial lawyer.  As a consequence of a series of events that we label as ‘the French Revolution’, Napoleon became the Emperor of France, with more power than any Bourbon king ever held, and sought to become ruler of the world.  The battle of Waterloo was, in the words of his Grace, the Duke of Wellington, a ‘damned nice thing – the closest thing you ever saw in your life’.  But it was enough to see off the Corsican, who died in the exile generously allowed him by the Allies.

The images of Napoleon are many and consistent – and they fit nicely into the flowering of the Romantic movement, and the celebration – salutation, even – of the ego. 

This has never been so with Robespierre, a shy man born to serve a cause.  He was the definitive French ideologue and bearer of the gospel of Jean Jaques Rousseau.  Through his dedication and transparent commitment to the revolution, Robespierre rose above the herd to become the de facto leader of the French nation. 

Nothing in his life, or that of any other person, could have equipped Robespierre to deal with the issues facing someone in his position.  He had served as a part time judicial officer, but he had given up that when he had had to sentence a man to death.  Was he cut out for high office – let alone leadership of a nation in chaos?

The French nation was simply not ready for the nation-shattering changes that followed in the five years after the fall of the Bastille.  To secure those kinds of changes, the English had spent about six hundred years house training their kings, nobles and priests. 

France under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety was surrounded by life threatening enemies from within and without.  Its response was the Terror, and the guillotine, and horrors that prefigured the worst of those in Europe of the following century. 

We can see ourselves as Hottentots dancing round the rim of a live volcano – and no mere human has found a way to avoid the risk of falling in.  The canvas is masterfully painted by Thomas Carlyle, at times in terms that prefigure the horrors of Nazi Germany. 

Robespierre, the ‘sea green incorruptible’, was sanctified, and then hardened, and then, like Macbeth, rendered devoid of his humanity.  It was kill or be killed – and the others through blind fear finally found enough nerve to get him.  The unkillable Fouché, who survived to serve Napoleon, whispered in their ears that their leader had delusions of godliness – and a list.  ‘Is your name on it, Citizen?’ 

Robespierre died by the guillotine, and he comes down to us now as the archetypal terrorist.   He was a decent young man who got crushed in an earthquake.  ‘O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? …A man fitted in some luckier settled age to have become one of those incorruptible, barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble tablets and funeral sermons……May God be merciful to him and to us!’  (Carlyle).

By the time Robespierre was killed, his naïve obsession with ideology and the Supreme Being were as childlike as his sky-blue jacket.  His cat-like features did not mask his capacity to inspire dread, and his conviction of the infallibility of his faith was at best dangerous when he preached about ‘virtue’ and ‘terror’ to a politically naïve audience.  He had no mates.  Dr J M Thompson said:

No one was so admired by his fellow citizens, no one so little loved…. he was too small-minded to forgive, and yet powerful enough to punish.  But punishment is a measure of despair.  It may cause conformity; it cannot produce conviction…. So, he failed and fell – the victim of men who had no convictions, and who were in most respects worse than himself.

As ever with that teacher, there is much wisdom.  Punishment as ‘a measure of despair’ may be seen as the dilemma underlying our whole criminal justice system.

You will not, therefore, find in Paris, or even Arras, a great monument to the person seen as the author of that lethal cancer called the Terror.  But that does not make it any easier to deal with the lingering wistful charm of the Corsican, who wanted to conquer and rule Europe, India, and the world.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men.  Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance.  With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands.  With Napoleon, the number runs into millions. 

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

But Robespierre had an insight into people and history, and the sense and courage to espouse the lessons of history, that are not sufficiently remembered.

At the beginning of 1792, the French were discovering that it was very hard to translate the glory days of 1789 into a body of government that worked.  The nation was simply not politically mature enough.  But the French knew that they were surrounded by foreign and internal forces that would punish them and restore the old regime.

Having declared war on the Crown, the Nobility, and the Church, the fledgling government embarked on a war against Europe.  France declared war on Austria in April 1792.  In hindsight, some kind of showdown looks to have been inevitable, but declaring war was another thing. 

The war party was led by Brissot and Vergniaud.  The king went along with it.  He and Lafayette thought that one way or another, a war might assist the cause of the king, win or lose. 

Their motives were very different.  The people’s war party had this fixed idea that their revolutionary principles had universal application.  Brissot, a later victim of the Terror, got carried away.  He called for another crusade, ‘whose name is nobler and holier, a crusade on behalf of universal liberty.’ 

Well, if that sounds like moonshine that would warm the hearts of Shelley or Byron, it was also the kind of guff spread later by Napoleon and his disciples.  Nor have the French entirely dropped this noble aspiration from their world view.

Since France hardly had an executive government, the war was voted on by the Assembly.  The Declaration said that it followed a formal proposal of the king and that ‘the Court of Vienna, in contempt of treaties, has continued to grant open protection to French rebels; that it has instigated and formed a concert with several European powers against the independence and security of the French nation.’  The thinking was that a war would pull together a nation that was dividing.  That was true – but at what cost? 

Robespierre was almost on his own in opposition.  He showed real fibre, and he was nothing if not consistent.  ‘The source of the evil is not in Coblenz – it is among you, it is in your midst.’ 

There was some dreadful pride on show.  Brissot wrote to his general saying they should not act like ministers of the Old Regime: ‘How can their petty schemes compare to the uprisings of the whole planet and the momentous revolutions that we are now called upon to lead’.  He thought they would be marching into Berlin next year.  Vergniaud spoke in terms that are revoltingly familiar: ‘Men have died in the recent fighting.  But it is so that no one will ever die again.  I swear to you in the name of the universal fraternity which you are creating, that each battle will be a step towards peace, humanity, and happiness for all peoples.’ 

They really thought they had the answer for the liberation of all Europe.  They thought that when they crossed the Rhine, they would be greeted with acclimation by the oppressed peoples of Germany.  (Before they started the war that ended so badly at Sedan, and scarred the French psyche permanently, they all bought Baedeker Guides for touring and sight-seeing in Berlin!)  On the eve of war, people go off their heads.

The decision to go to war became fundamental to the way that what we call the Revolution unfolded, and to the implementation of what we know as the Terror.  And it was taken over the vigorous, sustained, and courageous protest of the young and highly principled provincial lawyer from Arras, who was also opposed to capital punishment on moral grounds.  This says a lot for the true character – the character devant le déluge – of the young avocat from Arras.

Robespierre said the king hoped to use the war to restore the old regime; Brissot wanted to set up a bourgeois republic – but the kind of bourgeois a little above Robespierre and his followers in the social scale; and Lafayette wanted war to help set up a military dictator ship.  These were not charges of small change.

Robespierre expressed his opposition in terms that might usefully be etched into the front door of both the White House and 10 Downing Street, and even at Canberra.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution.  No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.

‘No one likes armed missionaries.’  How on earth could any sane person suggest otherwise?  Well, George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard did with Iraq.  Do you remember all that nonsense about a ‘beacon of democracy’ or a ‘freedom deficit’? 

If you are being bayoneted or raped, or you are watching your husband or children being tortured, do you stop to inquire into the political bona fides or ideological driver of the leader of the invading army? 

It is not just that the Americans saw this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – they had seen it all at home it in their own war of independence.  That conflict had its own ghastly brand of civil war.  Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists.  There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’  Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides.’

There is one other thing to say of Robespierre and his role in the governance of France from 1789 until his death in 1794.  He did not seek or obtain any position or power by force or falsehood.  (That very humane English historian, J M Thompson, said Robespierre was impervious ‘to any bribe except flattery.’)

Let us look back, not with the eye of eternity, but with hindsight.  We now know that the French people suffered breakdowns and agonies for about a century after the apocalypse of 1789.  It is not a matter for a mere mortal to compare the various infamies suffered by and in France in that time, but it may allow us to get a clearer view of the position of Robespierre if we look at five critical factors that dominated the period of time traditionally labelled ‘the French Revolution’ and continued to give rise to instability, pain, and war for about 100 years. 

Those five factors are: the uselessness and desertion of the royals and the nobility; the outbreak of a state of war with the Church; the declarations of war by and against Europe; the betrayal of the French nation by the king and his family and by leading generals; and the rise to power of man of military genius the like of which we had not seen.

Nevertheless, the resistance to invasion – by ‘armed missionaries’ or whoever – remains constant.  It is part of the human condition – part, if you like, of la comédie humaine. 

But it is with us yet again.  In the current war involving Iran, what armed force would repel the people of Iran more – that commanded by Donald Trump, or that commanded by Benjamin Netanyahu?  Could your average Iranian imagine any person on earth more Satanic than either of those two people?

When I visited Moscow in 1988, I took a tour of the Kremlin.  When we climbed to a spot that gave an aerial view, our guide got very emotional.  ‘That is the gate he came in by – and that is the gate that he left by.’ 

He was not referring to Hitler – who had not learned the lesson of the defeat of Napoleon by winter and the peoples of Russia.

But it is Napoleon who gets the monument. 

We refuse to learn.

Robespierre and Iran

The tomb of Napoleon is a Paris landmark and tourist attraction.  You will not find anything remotely like it for Robespierre – and Napoleon was not even French.  Such are the ways of memory and history – and the voice of the people.  And the Marseillaise so righteously intoned by Paul Henried in Casablanca.

Maximilien Robespierre was a little-known French provincial lawyer.  As a consequence of a series of events that we label as ‘the French Revolution’, Napoleon became the Emperor of France, with more power than any Bourbon king ever held, and sought to become ruler of the world.  The battle of Waterloo was, in the words of his Grace, the Duke of Wellington, a ‘damned nice thing – the closest thing you ever saw in your life’.  But it was enough to see off the Corsican, who died in the exile generously allowed him by the Allies.

The images of Napoleon are many and consistent – and they fit nicely into the flowering of the Romantic movement, and the celebration – salutation, even – of the ego. 

This has never been so with Robespierre, a shy man born to serve a cause.  He was the definitive French ideologue and bearer of the gospel of Jean Jaques Rousseau.  Through his dedication and transparent commitment to the revolution, Robespierre rose above the herd to become the de facto leader of the French nation. 

Nothing in his life, or that of any other person, could have equipped Robespierre to deal with the issues facing someone in his position.  He had served as a part time judicial officer, but he had given up that when he had had to sentence a man to death.  Was he cut out for high office – let alone leadership of a nation in chaos?

The French nation was simply not ready for the nation-shattering changes that followed in the five years after the fall of the Bastille.  To secure those kinds of changes, the English had spent about six hundred years house training their kings, nobles and priests. 

France under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety was surrounded by life threatening enemies from within and without.  Its response was the Terror, and the guillotine, and horrors that prefigured the worst of those in Europe of the following century. 

We can see ourselves as Hottentots dancing round the rim of a live volcano – and no mere human has found a way to avoid the risk of falling in.  The canvas is masterfully painted by Thomas Carlyle, at times in terms that prefigure the horrors of Nazi Germany. 

Robespierre, the ‘sea green incorruptible’, was sanctified, and then hardened, and then, like Macbeth, rendered devoid of his humanity.  It was kill or be killed – and the others through blind fear finally found enough nerve to get him.  The unkillable Fouché, who survived to serve Napoleon, whispered in their ears that their leader had delusions of godliness – and a list.  ‘Is your name on it, Citizen?’ 

Robespierre died by the guillotine, and he comes down to us now as the archetypal terrorist.   He was a decent young man who got crushed in an earthquake.  ‘O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? …A man fitted in some luckier settled age to have become one of those incorruptible, barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble tablets and funeral sermons……May God be merciful to him and to us!’  (Carlyle).

By the time Robespierre was killed, his naïve obsession with ideology and the Supreme Being were as childlike as his sky-blue jacket.  His cat-like features did not mask his capacity to inspire dread, and his conviction of the infallibility of his faith was at best dangerous when he preached about ‘virtue’ and ‘terror’ to a politically naïve audience.  He had no mates.  Dr J M Thompson said:

No one was so admired by his fellow citizens, no one so little loved…. he was too small-minded to forgive, and yet powerful enough to punish.  But punishment is a measure of despair.  It may cause conformity; it cannot produce conviction…. So, he failed and fell – the victim of men who had no convictions, and who were in most respects worse than himself.

As ever with that teacher, there is much wisdom.  Punishment as ‘a measure of despair’ may be seen as the dilemma underlying our whole criminal justice system.

You will not, therefore, find in Paris, or even Arras, a great monument to the person seen as the author of that lethal cancer called the Terror.  But that does not make it any easier to deal with the lingering wistful charm of the Corsican, who wanted to conquer and rule Europe, India, and the world.

Robespierre and Napoleon were very different men.  Not least in the number of those who died as a result of their acts of governance.  With Robespierre, the number runs into thousands.  With Napoleon, the number runs into millions. 

These numbers pass all understanding and would only be matched by monsters like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  And it was Stalin who had that most shocking insight: ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic’.

But Robespierre had an insight into people and history, and the sense and courage to espouse the lessons of history, that are not sufficiently remembered.

At the beginning of 1792, the French were discovering that it was very hard to translate the glory days of 1789 into a body of government that worked.  The nation was simply not politically mature enough.  But the French knew that they were surrounded by foreign and internal forces that would punish them and restore the old regime.

Having declared war on the Crown, the Nobility, and the Church, the fledgling government embarked on a war against Europe.  France declared war on Austria in April 1792.  In hindsight, some kind of showdown looks to have been inevitable, but declaring war was another thing. 

The war party was led by Brissot and Vergniaud.  The king went along with it.  He and Lafayette thought that one way or another, a war might assist the cause of the king, win or lose. 

Their motives were very different.  The people’s war party had this fixed idea that their revolutionary principles had universal application.  Brissot, a later victim of the Terror, got carried away.  He called for another crusade, ‘whose name is nobler and holier, a crusade on behalf of universal liberty.’ 

Well, if that sounds like moonshine that would warm the hearts of Shelley or Byron, it was also the kind of guff spread later by Napoleon and his disciples.  Nor have the French entirely dropped this noble aspiration from their world view.

Since France hardly had an executive government, the war was voted on by the Assembly.  The Declaration said that it followed a formal proposal of the king and that ‘the Court of Vienna, in contempt of treaties, has continued to grant open protection to French rebels; that it has instigated and formed a concert with several European powers against the independence and security of the French nation.’  The thinking was that a war would pull together a nation that was dividing.  That was true – but at what cost? 

Robespierre was almost on his own in opposition.  He showed real fibre, and he was nothing if not consistent.  ‘The source of the evil is not in Coblenz – it is among you, it is in your midst.’ 

There was some dreadful pride on show.  Brissot wrote to his general saying they should not act like ministers of the Old Regime: ‘How can their petty schemes compare to the uprisings of the whole planet and the momentous revolutions that we are now called upon to lead’.  He thought they would be marching into Berlin next year.  Vergniaud spoke in terms that are revoltingly familiar: ‘Men have died in the recent fighting.  But it is so that no one will ever die again.  I swear to you in the name of the universal fraternity which you are creating, that each battle will be a step towards peace, humanity, and happiness for all peoples.’ 

They really thought they had the answer for the liberation of all Europe.  They thought that when they crossed the Rhine, they would be greeted with acclimation by the oppressed peoples of Germany.  (Before they started the war that ended so badly at Sedan, and scarred the French psyche permanently, they all bought Baedeker Guides for touring and sight-seeing in Berlin!)  On the eve of war, people go off their heads.

The decision to go to war became fundamental to the way that what we call the Revolution unfolded, and to the implementation of what we know as the Terror.  And it was taken over the vigorous, sustained, and courageous protest of the young and highly principled provincial lawyer from Arras, who was also opposed to capital punishment on moral grounds.  This says a lot for the true character – the character devant le déluge – of the young avocat from Arras.

Robespierre said the king hoped to use the war to restore the old regime; Brissot wanted to set up a bourgeois republic – but the kind of bourgeois a little above Robespierre and his followers in the social scale; and Lafayette wanted war to help set up a military dictator ship.  These were not charges of small change.

Robespierre expressed his opposition in terms that might usefully be etched into the front door of both the White House and 10 Downing Street, and even at Canberra.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in the mind of a politician is the belief that a people need only make an armed incursion into the territory of a foreign people, to make it adopt its laws and its constitution.  No one likes armed missionaries; and the first counsel given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.

‘No one likes armed missionaries.’  How on earth could any sane person suggest otherwise?  Well, George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard did with Iraq.  Do you remember all that nonsense about a ‘beacon of democracy’ or a ‘freedom deficit’? 

If you are being bayoneted or raped, or you are watching your husband or children being tortured, do you stop to inquire into the political bona fides or ideological driver of the leader of the invading army? 

It is not just that the Americans saw this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – they had seen it all at home it in their own war of independence.  That conflict had its own ghastly brand of civil war.  Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists.  There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’  Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides.’

There is one other thing to say of Robespierre and his role in the governance of France from 1789 until his death in 1794.  He did not seek or obtain any position or power by force or falsehood.  (That very humane English historian, J M Thompson, said Robespierre was impervious ‘to any bribe except flattery.’)

Let us look back, not with the eye of eternity, but with hindsight.  We now know that the French people suffered breakdowns and agonies for about a century after the apocalypse of 1789.  It is not a matter for a mere mortal to compare the various infamies suffered by and in France in that time, but it may allow us to get a clearer view of the position of Robespierre if we look at five critical factors that dominated the period of time traditionally labelled ‘the French Revolution’ and continued to give rise to instability, pain, and war for about 100 years. 

Those five factors are: the uselessness and desertion of the royals and the nobility; the outbreak of a state of war with the Church; the declarations of war by and against Europe; the betrayal of the French nation by the king and his family and by leading generals; and the rise to power of man of military genius the like of which we had not seen.

Nevertheless, the resistance to invasion – by ‘armed missionaries’ or whoever – remains constant.  It is part of the human condition – part, if you like, of la comédie humaine. 

But it is with us yet again.  In the current war involving Iran, what armed force would repel the people of Iran more – that commanded by Donald Trump, or that commanded by Benjamin Netanyahu?  Could your average Iranian imagine any person on earth more Satanic than either of those two people?

When I visited Moscow in 1988, I took a tour of the Kremlin.  When we climbed to a spot that gave an aerial view, our guide got very emotional.  ‘That is the gate he came in by – and that is the gate that he left by.’ 

He was not referring to Hitler – who had not learned the lesson of the defeat of Napoleon by winter and the peoples of Russia.

But it is Napoleon who gets the monument. 

We refuse to learn.