Patriot or traitor?

The mighty convulsion that was the French Revolution has stirred the blood of historians from Thomas Carlyle to Simon Schama and consideration of it still inflames opinions. At its centre stood Maximilien Robespierre — 5’ 3”, stern, unaffacted in manner or dress, Spartan in his domestic habits — deified by his followers as the ‘Incorruptible’ and vilified by his opponents as a traitor to the ideals of 1789, bent on dictatorship. Peter McPhee spares us speculation (Robespierre left no memoirs or diaries) on his subject’s ‘inner life’. Relying chiefly on Robespierre’s voluminous speeches and articles for the press, he calmly follows his progress, from crisis to crisis, in an austere prose and at a steady pace that are somehow in keeping with his subject’s character.

Born at Arras, to the north-east of Paris, into the provincial bourgeoisie of Artois, Robespierre spent 12 years at France’s premier school, Louis-le-Grand, in Paris. There his high intelligence and industry won him golden opinions and prizes. There, too, drenched in the Roman classicists, especially Cicero, he imbibed the creed of republican virtue, while on the streets of the Latin Quarter he was introduced to the fierce pamphlet war against the scurrility and self-interestedness of the clergy and nobility, the First and Second Estates of the realm. Robespierre left Louis-le-Grand in 1781 and returned to Arras, where he made a modest income at the bar, plunged himself into the political controversies of the last days of the ancien régime and, as a colleague put it, ‘arrested the gaze of his compatriots’.

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He arrived back in Paris in 1789 as a deputy to the Estates General summoned by Louis XVI. At the age of only 31, with almost no political experience and little oratorical skill, he made himself within months the most prominent spokesman of the left in the Third Estate, the uncompromising champion of the oppressed and advocate of liberty and democracy.