Read an Excerpt

ROBESPIERRE

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

Arras 1758–69

Like other French provincial centres, Arras today is a sprawl of new suburbs and retail shopping complexes fanning out from its quiet old neighbourhoods. Its distinctiveness derives from its special attraction as a tourist centre, especially for those interested in the protracted battles and ingenious defences of the First World War. By contrast, in the eighteenth century the town of twenty thousand people could be walked across in fifteen minutes. The elegant Flemish-style houses that line its famous squares today are faithful copies of the eighteenth-century edifices mostly destroyed in the bloody bombardments of May–July 1915, but in every other way Arras is unrecognizable. Today it is the quiet prefecture of the department of Pas-de-Calais; in the 1750s it was a swirl of activity as the capital of the province of Artois. Despite its compactness, it was then a tapestry of small neighbourhoods with a distinctive social and occupational character: the well-to-do parishes of noble and bourgeois families; the crowded streets of the poor along the polluted arms of the River Scarpe and its tributary the Crinchon; the army 'citadelle'; and a separate 'town' clustered with the edifices of administration, the Church elite and the judiciary.

Several hundred children were born in Arras in 1758. One of them was Maximilien-Marie-Isidore Derobespierre, who would come to be known simply as Maximilien Robespierre. He was born and baptized on 6 May, the son of François Derobespierre, a lawyer, and Jacqueline Carraut, daughter of a brewer. A family drama had played out in the months beforehand, for Jacqueline had been five months pregnant at the time of her marriage on 3 January, and François' parents had refused to attend the ceremony in the well-to-do parish church of St-Jean-en-Ronville in the south of the old town. This may have been from the shame of such a marriage in a devout town dominated by the Catholic Church, or from vexation at the results of François' improper behaviour. One can only speculate about the conversations that might have taken place in the months between the realization of Jacqueline's pregnancy and the marriage. The parish priest of St-Jean had obliged the families by dispensing with two of the three announcements of marriage banns, and announced the single bann just two days before the wedding. But this was published both at St-Jean and at St-Géry, the other wealthy parish of Arras, and everyone in the Derobespierres' social circles knew of the scandal.

Born in 1732 in Arras, François had received his education from a religious order in Tortefontaine, west of Arras, but at age seventeen renounced his vocation shortly before his final vows and was further educated in law at Douai. He became a lawyer in the Council of Artois, the highest court in the province. One of eight children, he was regarded by some as the difficult member of a reputable and distinguished judicial dynasty. According to a priest who knew the family well, François 'was reputed, in the town of Arras, to be somewhat scatterbrained, and above all, fond of his own opinions'. He came from a long-established and highly respectable family, and his rushed marriage to Jacqueline Carraut would have been deeply embarrassing for his parents. (It was not the first such scandal in the family: François' uncle Robert had fathered an illegitimate child in nearby Carvin several decades earlier.)

The trajectory of the infant Maximilien Robespierre's paternal family over the preceding three centuries has much to tell us about the structures of power and privilege in Artois. Like bourgeois dynasties across the kingdom, they had been adept at making themselves useful to the pillars of society: the Church, the seigneurial nobility and the monarchy itself. The Robespierre family—also known as de Robespierres, DRobespierres or Desrobespierres—were long established in the towns of Artois, for example, at Béthune, Lens and Carvin. The family may have been related to a Bauduin de Rouvespierres, a canon in Cambrai Cathedral in the early fifteenth century, but the lineage may be traced with more certainty back to Robert de Robespierre, a legal officer for the seigneur of Vaudricourt, near Béthune, in the 1460s. It may well have been as a result of holding this office that the family was accorded the right to add the prefix 'de' normally reserved for noble families. Across the following century the Robespierres established themselves as merchants in Lens, eleven miles north of Arras, working as grocers and hoteliers. But from another Robert de Robespierre (1591–1663), the males of the family fathered a long line of men of the law, working as much for the royal and seigneurial system as in private practice.

Robert and his descendants held official legal posts in the small towns of Artois at a time when it was part of the Spanish Netherlands and when the armies of Spain and France swept across the region during the Thirty Years War (1618–48). In 1659 the Treaty of the Pyrenees between France and Spain recognized Artois as French. Despite the uncertainties of frontier life, Robert and his descendants established themselves as royal notaries in Carvin, a small administrative centre of 3,500 people northeast of Lens, before Maximilien de Robespierre moved the twenty-two miles to Arras in 1722 to become a lawyer in the Council of Artois, the pinnacle of success for a man of the law. This was the grandfather of the revolutionary.

Maximilien became solidly embedded in the legal fraternity of the provincial capital, an 'Arrageois', but his legal practice seems to have been of secondary importance to his income from urban and rural property. Like previous generations of Robespierres, he was attracted to a woman from the world of commerce. In 1731 he married Marie Poiteau, an innkeeper's daughter from the wealthy parish of St-Géry. Maximilien and Marie settled in another well-to-do parish, St-Aubert, and had eight children there, one of whom, François, as we have noted, married Jacqueline Carraut in January 1758.

The Carrauts were from a less comfortable and distinguished lineage, even if they were as solidly Artésien as the Robespierres. They first appear in parish records in the little village of Hestrus, then as weavers in Étrun, just four miles west of Arras. They remained tied to the land, even as they established themselves more firmly in the capital. Maximilien's maternal grandfather Jacques (born in 1701) was a brewer who in 1732 married Marie (born 1693), daughter of a tenant farmer in Lattre-St-Quentin, nine miles west of Arras. Robespierre's cousins on his mother's side were children of an oil-grain merchant in Arras. When Jacqueline married François Derobespierre in 1758, Jacques Carraut was running a small brewery in the Rue Ronville, on the edge of the wealthy parish where his daughter was to marry. Unlike François' father, Jacques was at the wedding.

At the time of their marriage François and Jacqueline were aged twenty-six and twenty-two respectively. It seems that the Robespierres became reconciled to their son's behaviour, since François' father agreed to be Maximilien's godfather a few months later, just as Jacques Carraut's wife Marie agreed to be the boy's godmother. Despite the inauspicious beginnings to their married life, and the long delay before their marriage once Jacqueline found she was pregnant, they then had a fecund relationship. After Maximilien, Jacqueline gave birth in quick succession to Charlotte (1760), Henriette (1761) and Augustin (1763). The children were baptized in different parishes, suggesting that François struggled to settle with his young family, even though he had enough legal cases to establish a successful practice: thirty-four in 1763 and thirty-two in 1764.

In the year after Augustin's birth, 1764, tragedy struck hard at the young family. A fifth child died during childbirth on 7 July; Jacqueline, aged twenty-nine, died of complications nine days later, on the 16th, and was buried in St-Aubert in the presence of an officer from the army garrison and her brother. Her death devastated the young family.

For whatever reason, François did not attend his wife's funeral. In December of that year he took a position at Oisy-le-Verger fifteen miles east of Arras as the legal officer of a vast feudal estate. After this position ended in July 1765 he reappeared sporadically in Arras. It is unlikely that he saw his four surviving children during these visits, or that he was in a position to provide for them. In November 1765 François was back in Arras debating with his peers whether the corporation of lawyers should offer condolences to Louis XV on the illness of the dauphin. François reappeared in March 1766 to borrow 700 livres from his sister Henriette. In October 1768 his mother, widowed since 1762, agreed to give him his part of her modest estate before he left and headed east to work across the border in Mannheim. He was again back in Arras in February–May 1772, with fifteen cases to plead; by then, however, Maximilien and Charlotte were away at schools far from Arras.

The children were dispersed. Maximilien's paternal aunts looked after Henriette and Charlotte, while Maximilien and Augustin, aged six and one, went to live with their elderly grandparents and maternal aunts Henriette and Eulalie at the Carrauts' brewery. So, although born into a long line of lawyers and officials, Maximilien was now to be brought up in a milieu of manual work, with the sounds of carts and workers shouting in the local Picard dialect in the Rue Ronville. It was at the age of six, too, that he caught smallpox, leaving him with a slightly pockmarked face.

It is tempting to see in the desperately sad circumstances of Maximilien's childhood the clues to the character of the man he became, and many biographers have warmed to such a temptation. After all, he may have been the offspring of a couple who had only married from social necessity. Then a loved mother had died in childbirth when he was just six, leaving him as the oldest of four children who were split up between the families of relatives. His father, often described as unstable or dissolute, seems never to have seen his children again. Did such a childhood produce a boy who was starved of parental affection and whose position as the eldest of four 'orphans' turned him into a prematurely serious, anxious and hardworking child suspicious of intimacy and resentful of those in happier circumstances? When did he realize that a family heritage of professional success and eminence had also been snatched away by personal tragedy?

Some have seen in the supposed 'traumas' and 'poverty' of his childhood the clue to the man. Most famously, the biography by the French politician and writer Max Gallo has interpreted the collapse of Maximilien's immediate family in 1764 as the clue to his 'pathological sensitivity' and 'terrible need for acceptance': he never recovered from the distress of his father's guilt and his mother's death. Others have seized the chance to project supposed personal traits—none of them attractive—onto the small boy on the basis of these few scraps of evidence about the loss of both parents during his childhood. Laurent Dingli has articulated the view of a traumatized little boy who lost a loved mother (who nevertheless, he claims, took no notice of him because she was preoccupied with having more children) and was then abandoned by a 'lunatic, dissipated' father. For Dingli, this explains why Robespierre would always be particularly sensitive to what he saw as treachery or corruption, and why he would always be obsessed by his fantasy of an ancient world peopled by heroes. The sadness of his childhood sowed the seeds of an incapacity to develop intimate relationships, even of phobias about appearance, cleanliness and physical intimacy.

There is no clear evidence to provide the basis for these conclusions; nor do we know much in general about the bonds of affection that might have existed in a middle-class family in Arras. One could as readily assume that Maximilien had a loving relationship with his mother in the crucial first six years of his life and was subsequently raised by caring relatives who helped him cope with a devastating loss and ensured that the children saw each other regularly. That is certainly the implication of the one account that we have of his childhood, by his younger sister Charlotte, pieced together before her death in 1834. Her memoirs are riveting, redolent of her deep affection for her brother and written when she was living a modest existence in the shadows of Paris.

Twenty months younger than Maximilien, Charlotte recalled how her brother's eyes would fill with tears whenever they spoke of their mother Jacqueline, 'as good a wife as she was a mother'. Charlotte insisted, however, that her father was a good and decent man, 'honoured and cherished by the whole town'. He was utterly devastated by his wife's death and unable to continue to practise law effectively. The children did not see him again. Charlotte recalled that the death of her mother was deeply distressing for Maximilien and made him a rather serious, obedient child. From a typically 'noisy, boisterous and light-hearted' little boy, he became 'serious, grown-up (raisonnable), hardworking'. He was now more interested in reading and building model chapels than in noisy games: that would accord with the pious surroundings in which his aunts were raising him. Every Sunday the girls were sent to the Rue Ronville to spend time with their brothers, 'days of happiness and joy' when they would look at Maximilien's collections of pictures. Charlotte recalled, too, that he adored his pet pigeons and sparrows and was furious when his sisters neglected one of them, leading to its death.

Maximilien's sisters were living no more than a few minutes away for a small boy running through the town centre towards where he had been born in the wealthier neighbourhood close to the cathedral, courts and administration. What was the urban environment into which the child emerged from infancy?

His immediate physical environment was one of noise, work and movement, for it was dominated by what has been described as the most ambitious church building project of the century. The urban landscape of generations of Arras children before and after him was dominated by the imposing abbey of St-Vaast, but that was not the case for Maximilien, because after the spire of the abbey church collapsed in 1741 the Abbot Armand Gaston de Rohan had resolved to demolish the entire sprawling ensemble and the nearby church of La Madeleine in which Maximilien had been baptized. In its scale and style, this massive project, completed only in 1770, was one of the outstanding examples of neoclassical rebuilding also evident in Paris at the churches of La Madeleine and Ste-Geneviève and in other provincial centres. When Maximilien was a little boy, however, it was just a vast building site.

The town of Arras in which the child Maximilien grew up was, like other centres of similar size—Dijon, Grenoble, Limoges, Poitiers and La Rochelle—a church, government and military centre, with small-scale artisanal industry closely linked to a rural hinterland. This was a provincial capital like many others of the eighteenth century, in which the institutions of the First and Second Estates of the realm—the clergy and nobility—managed the income from their vast rural estates, in all covering about half the region. Despite their right to use the prefix 'de', the Robespierres were not nobles, but they were embedded in the network of power, privilege and wealth of Artésien society through servicing the structures of ecclesiastical and seigneurial power. The lines of social demarcation were too finely drawn for a Robespierre to have been accepted into the Artois nobility. Instead, they had often married people from the trades and small business, a milieu from which they themselves had emerged. François' marriage in 1758 to the daughter of a brewer was unusual only in its timing. The Robespierres were 'cultural intermediaries', a bridge between the privileged elites and respectable commoners.

If the child Maximilien every day had demolition and rebuilding imprinted on his senses, his daily domestic experience, in contrast, was one of ordered, routine calm. Many years later, a priest from Arras who was no friend of Robespierre remembered the two Carraut aunts who cared for Maximilien and Augustin as women 'very well known for their piety'. From his childhood, Maximilien would have been immersed in their religious beliefs and routines in a town where one person in twenty-five was a priest, nun, monk, canon or other religious. His was a thoroughly Catholic childhood in one of the Church's strongholds. It appears that the reformist currents of Jansenism had had little impact on the local clergy, who remained comfortable and conservative.

The 'city of a hundred steeples' dominated its flat hinterland. There were as many as eight hundred members of the First Estate living in Arras, communities linked to St-Vaast, the cathedral, twelve parish churches, eighteen monasteries and convents, a dozen retreat houses, and many hospitals, hospices and small chapels. Arras was a powerhouse of the elite of the Catholic Church. The bishop was among the well-remunerated prelates of the kingdom, with a yearly income of about 40,000 livres, fifty times more than most village priests. Typical of the provincial centres of eighteenth-century France, Arras housed a large number of religious orders: it was atypical, however, in the substantial numbers still resident within them. In 1750 there were almost five hundred religious in the eighteen monasteries and convents. The Church employed directly many of the domestic servants of Arras; indirectly, many of the skilled craftsmen, shopkeepers and tradesmen depended on the First Estate as well.

The parish clergy were at the other end of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in terms of social background and influence, but were a powerful and relatively wealthy body nonetheless. The twelve parish churches of Arras were serviced by forty-eight priests and curates. Thoroughly trained and confident in their theology, they were also far better remunerated than the parish clergy of the countryside, who often survived on no more than 750 livres annually, like smallholding peasants, despite the demands on their time and attention in one of the most observant dioceses in the kingdom. By contrast, priests in the wealthiest parishes in Arras, St-Géry and St-Jean, had yearly incomes of about 9,000 livres by the 1780s. Arras was truly a bastion of the faith.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from ROBESPIERRE by Peter McPhee Copyright © 2012 by Peter McPhee. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---