This book about the last years of Robespierre contains a current lesson for the reader ★★★★☆

The historian Marcel Gauchet (1946) is virtually unknown in the Netherlands, but in Paris he is one of the thinkers of the Great Boulevards, over which France has the enviable monopoly. Gauchet is widely educated, wrote about the religious wars and published no fewer than four volumes on the rise of democracy. His biography of Robespierre, now in English translation, was originally published in the series Des hommes qui ont fait la France. Another reason for intellectual jealousy, and who knows a good idea for a Dutch equivalent?

Gauchet’s Robespierre is not an ordinary biography. Two of these have been published in recent years and that is enough. Gauchet summarizes the first 31 years of the life of the man who embodied terror in a single page. He did not write a biography but a study on radicalisation. The book covers only five years, from the beginning of the Revolution in 1789, when a little lawyer moved from Arras (Atrecht) to Paris, to 1794, the year in which Robespierre himself met his inevitable end on the scaffold. In those five years, ‘thought was turned into action’, as Gauchet puts it nicely.

Robespierre was already completely himself in 1789 and would not change in five years. While still in Arras, he had written two pamphlets, one of which dealt with “Unmasking the Enemies of the Fatherland.” A very revolutionary program has been condensed into it. Robespierre stood for the uncompromising implementation of human rights and was the man who suspected a conspiracy behind every tree. One is related to the other. Human rights are the Lord’s Prayer of the French Revolution. The idea that precedes it is borrowed from the philosopher Rousseau: man is good and will in principle do good. In doing so, he must be shown the right way, which in Robespierre’s view meant that evil had to be made short shrift.

The problem with human rights was then – and still is – that no political program follows from it. Robespierre’s interpretation was that he could not be satisfied with the shortcomings of the tough government practice. Revolution meant that the legislature – the people – always had to take precedence over the executive. If something went wrong in public administration, it must have been motivated by self-interest and corruption. The government had to shape the ‘general will’ of the people, but that was impossible as long as it did not coincide with the people and thus knew what the true interests of the people entailed. The accidents were not long in coming.

‘The incorruptible’

Not that Robespierre was a bad person, quite the contrary. He was known as ‘the incorruptible’. He lived, as it were, above his private concerns, completely in the service of the community. His original ideas were liberal, including freedom of the press and the abolition of the death penalty. He was against colonialism. In the Assembly he found his role in the objections to the wars that France was waging. He was opposed to war because he feared that the government would see a pretext in it to declare martial law and thereby eliminate the legislature.

In 1792 he uncovered the first conspiracy against the people. He himself believed he was speaking on behalf of the people, in a sea of ​​enmity and corruption. This was followed by the cry that ‘tribunals’ would be set up. The rest of the story follows almost automatically. While Robespierre was against the death penalty, his virtuous people could not coexist with the selfishness of one person, the king. Thus ‘citizen Louis Capet had to die, that the fatherland might live’.

After a coup d’état, the principled opponent Robespierre, despite his own will, became the ruler himself, as part of the Committee for the General Welfare. Virtue seized power, terror was inevitable. The Revolution could not bear division, so that any contradiction was regarded as a betrayal of the good cause. The guillotine whizzed diligently and—Robespierre himself had predicted it—a year later, the prophet of the Revolution also died on the chopping block.

Political purity as an ideal

Gauchet tells it with gusto, but it is only in the final chapter that the monkey comes out of his sleeve. France has taken two hundred years to come to terms with its Revolution. Because the country always struggled with the grubby politics of everyday life, it was condemned to make the same mistake over and over. Brilliant principles in every revolution (1830, 1848, 1870) again resulted in ruthless practice. In 1979, Gauchet’s famous fellow historian François Furet solemnly declared that the French Revolution was over because communism was dead and nearly buried. The collective illusion of the convergence of people and government was laid to rest on the occasion of the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille.

But Gauchet warns that that other Robespierre, not that of the Committee of the General Welfare but the first Robespierre who acted as a principled opponent of power, is making a surprising return. The idea of ​​the great revolution is dead, while that of political purity as an ideal is alive and kicking. In both Europe and America, the rights policy leads to a whooping mistrust of the executive.

It started with populism, which wanted to drain the ‘Washington swamp’ or sneer at ‘the ruins of Purple’. On the other side of that same coin, the woke ideology has battled political impurity. If even a shred of infringing on supposed individual rights is heard, in the press, politics or at the academy, yellow and preferably red cards are drawn. The only shortcoming of this book is that Gauchet does not elaborate on this idea. His current lesson is no less. Once morality and politics converge, the guillotine, whether real or metaphorical, is not far.