Terror Robespierre and the French Revolution Part 1

In the early hours of July 28, 1794,

the leaders of French Republic’s Committee of Public Safety had gathered for one last time,

their once colossal power evaporating with every minute.

The twelve months Maximilien Robespierre had ruled revolutionary France in the name of the people.

The convention has ceased to represent the people. We must sign in the name of the people!

But now in the name of the people, soldiers were on their way to seize him, his dictatorship was over.

Do you think we should sign in the name of the people?

And he was about to become the final victim of his own bloody reign of terror.

What happens next to Robespierre is not fully known.

Two shots were fired

and one hit him flush in the mouth.

A badly wounded Robespierre was ultimately finished off by the guillotine

but arguments about the man still rage.

Had his revolution created the modern world, or betrayed it?

It was really a system of loathsome paranoia,

which was responsible for the butchering of tens of thousands of perfectly innocent lives.

Wait a minute.

In the liberal way, not liberals in the way of people who are ready to sacrifice themselves,

for them if you are too radical, you are one step to total totalitarianism.

At stake is the status of Robespierre as a founding father of state terror.

The first in a line of modest men with access to a higher truth.

Men who loved humanity so much,

they felt entitled to exterminate the human beings who stood in its way.

One year to the day before his grisly death,

Maxi Robespierre was appointed to the committee of public safety.

The innocuous four words disguising the most awesome institution in revolutionary France.

A provincial lawyer from Aras, he had been destined for a life of obscurity until 1789,

when he was propelled into the storm center of the greatest event in history

since the fall of the Roman Empire: The French Revolution.

The revolutionaries had challenged the might and arrogance of the French court in Versailles;

they had executed their king and created a republic whose watch words were

“liberty, equality, and the rights of man.”

A government whose sovereignty was based in the people.

But the revolutionaries also creamed of a new type of society,

one where human nature might be born again.

Where men and women, freed from tyranny and social custom could achieve moral perfection.

No one believed in this republic of virtue more than Robespierre himself,

but in Robespierre, the Jacobin, the world got its first glimpse at a new type;

a man who believed that the road to virtue led not through persuasion but through terror.

Virtue without terror is impotent; terror without virtue is blind, no?

I don’t have any problem with it.

The crucial point of every radical movement is to have terror through virtue.

In order to establish the fundamentals of democracy,

you have to go through this zero level of Jacobinism.

You cannot say, “We could have done it in a much easier way.”

Have we learned nothing from the Golak?

Have we learned nothing from the Third Reich?

It is conscionable and horrifying in the name

of intellectual fashion and a kind of partition remoteness,

the sense in which above all it doesn’t really matter

if thousands and thousands of people are slaughtered

as long as some are bourgeois notions of liberal individual rights are overthrown.

The use of violence to perfect humanity was the brain child of the committee of public safety.

In 1793, the unruly energies released by the revolution had been bottled up in this room.

And it was here, in 12 murderous months, that the modern idea of state terror was born.

It’s a moment in time when a society really does try to change itself without a model to fall back upon,

without a real sense of eddies of possibility.

And seeing how that can go very badly wrong is of course an object lesson.

The men on the committee of public safety

who worked the levers of this powerful machine included Lazare Carnot,

mathematician, engineer and natural born bureaucrat.

His rival was the pure tyrannical Saint Just,

whose astonishing maiden speech in the Assembly had called for the execution of the king.

Take the liquor out of the convention hall and you get more rational debates.

Perhaps, but I have also known crashing balls who only swear allegiance to lemonade.

A third member was the crippled lawyer George Couthon.

On his very first day of deputy, Couthon had proposed the abolition of royalty.

And before the revolution, he had won a literary prize for an essay on patience.

Come on! Come on! Put your backs into it!

Another lawyer was Herault de Schelles,

who in some ways the committee’s most surprising member; Herault’s godmother was Marie Antoinette.

He said to me, “Do you have shortages of soap in Paris as we have in Neem?”

So I said to him, “Are you making a comment about the capital in general or just about me?”

] It was this group of men who Robespierre joined on the 27th of July, 1793.

Honored citizens! Salutations!

Yes, welcome to the queen’s bedroom.

So this is where she powdered her cheeks?

All four of them!

[Laughter among the actors]

There are people who are absolutely consumed by the public work of pushing the revolution onwards.

They really do come out of obscurity.

These essentially obscure provincials find themselves running a country,

running the war effort and in a sense, grow into that role.

But also very clearly you are always wrestling

with the immensity of the task they had set before themselves.

Revolutionary France had declared war on its neighbors.

By 1793, the Republic was fighting for its life.

Five imperial armies were amassed on her borders,

with the Austrians to the north with just three days march from Paris.

Each imperial army had promised to crush the regicides and annihilate the new Republic.

A ruiness economic blockade had reduced much of the country to famine

and civil war was simmering in Vondae and the south.

There are those who say that the state terror that was about to unfold

was not the result of an excessive idealism but this incredible external duress.

The committee member appointed to organize France’s defense was Lazare Carnot.

There are some figures, like Lazare Carnot, who are really bureaucrats,

who make sure that enough bread, flour and salt fish

gets to the soldiers out on the field where they freeze their rear ends off in misery.

I would begin with the state of affairs, unless you of course wish to, uh…

No, no. Please, why don’t you…I would prefer to listen.

Very well.

The army of the north, this was captured two days ago from the Austrians just outside Antiope.

It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already suspect.

England has permanent designs on Dunkirk and Keilon.

The Duke of York would not reject the crown if it were offered.

Austria and Prussia want to take bites out of Arden and Lorraine

and the Dutch will be allowed to nibble some of the north. No one will be left out.

They all want a piece of beautiful France.

Yes. Even the little king of Sardinia has dreams that he will one day place his fat ass in Provence.

[Actors laughing]

That land is to dismember this country.

We are not Poland. This committee is not just a group of futile students in Warsaw.

The French Republic exists.

It is a product of philosophy but it is also a product of real events.

And behind the idea is a sovereign people.

Twenty million French men aching to enter the age of Rousseau.

Very good.

They are not short of speeches in the army; we are however nearly short on everything else.

The army of the north has two million pounds of gunpowder.

It requires thirty million pounds of gunpowder.

The army of the Mizell is constantly short of bread.

Almost all the other armies are short of shot, cartridges, shoes, horses,

and most importantly, copper.

God made France beautiful, but He did not supply us with copper for our cannon.

You will notice that we are in the seat of a small supply from Hungary.

From between the legs of the Hapsburg Emperor.

We can always count on our enemies to stab each other in the back.

Most of our cannon are forged from copper that is scavenged from our own barns.

From French churches, from the altars. From icons, from confessional boxes.

Cannons out of confessional boxes; I call that progress.

As for gunpowder, this committee must act now to enforce a national search for Sal-peter.

Every French citizen must scrape every attic, every cellar, and it must be made an act of Patriotic duty.

This can be done.

Good.

But our real problem, the real supply problem is with our generals.

Damn them!

I cannot use a single cavalry regiment in confidence because I know royalists hide there.

I cannot entirely trust a single battalion of infantry

because I know an officer may take those men across the line to fight on the other side.

Faith, citizen. Remember Valme.

We do not need another Valme, George.

Valme was a patriotic sensation.

And very nearly a military catastrophe.

One hundred thousand volunteers walking towards the sound of gunfire.

I would take another Valme, citizen.

What? Men who should have been at the harvest?

Men, who would be better employed airing the robes so that are artillery could get to the front.

Men who were told to march to the sound of gunfire. Men who had never heard the sound of gunfire.

And when they did, they were useless. Not one single weapon the same.

Hundreds of different caliber, many men carrying pitchforks to march against the king of Austria.

No! Chaos!

We do not need another Valme! These men only understood one command:

to march against the aristocrats.

That is a good command.

That is an excellent command morally, citizen, but it is no substitute for organization.

One forgets how good the late (?) was at mobilizing forces.

There were a lot of beady eye precursors of necessary stuff.

Those sort of people had a lot to be getting off with, they are busy busy busy busy.

They are all about how to deliver gunshots and cannons and guns

and you can’t really have a complete bloody Looney really calling the shots.

My God! If you read some of the attacks of Robespierre, they exerted the full dictatorship,

they played this game of how can we kill more people?

Are people aware that practically, literally, the whole of Europe declared war on France?

Foreign powers effectively were deeply involved in helping, contributing,

to say the republic was in danger. It wasn’t the stylish excuse to kill a million people, and so forth.

Robespierre was in particular always

warning of the dangers of letting one man have too much military power.

He looked back to classical antiquity and said, “Look what happened to Julius Cesar.”

Who crossed the Rubicon and turned the army on Rome.

And this is something that might happen in France.