Albert Mathiez often comes across as Robespierre's biggest cheerleader. In 1924 at the request of Leo Poldes he delivered a speech designed to defend him. This speech is obviously biased in favour of Robespierre, but Mathiez does make some interesting points that have been echoed by subsequent historians.
Before reading this fragment of the speech, please remember that Mathiez delivered it 100 years ago, in the aftermath of the First World War. It goes without saying that some perspectives might not fully necessarily align with those of modern audience.
Warning: Lots of text
English Translation
(...)
These are, if I am not mistaken, the three fundamental grievances that allow some republicans to condemn Robespierre(1). As none of these republicans would dare claim that the Terror, that is the set of exceptional measures imposed on the Convention by foreign and internal war, was the personal creation of Robespierre – as they well know that the responsibility lies with the entire revolutionary party, or rather with the circumstances – I can be quite brief in my response to this first reproach. Reserving for later the cases of Danton and Hébert, I simply ask Robespierre's censors if they think that his participation in the establishment and functioning of the revolutionary dictatorship was inspired by personal rancor, by unspeakable ambitions, by a taste for blood? In a word, did he use the Terror for selfish ends? Now, I ask them to first consider that Robespierre was the personification of disinterest, dying penniless, leaving only the value of 800 livres in assignats as his legacy. I ask them to reflect on the fact that the men of blood, those who wanted to cut through all difficulties with the guillotine – and I mean by this not only the Hébertists but also the Enragés who preceded them – had no more constant adversary than Robespierre, who denounced them to the Convention and to the Jacobins with courage and perseverance beyond all praise, for he could have lost his popularity, since the Enragés and Hébertists had behind them the starving and wretched masses. The truth is that Robespierre, whose heart was humane and even tender, and whose faith in liberty was deep and sincere, only accepted the Terror gradually and with regret as a temporary and deplorable regime, unfortunately necessary. He intervened whenever he could to snatch victims from the knife who he judged innocent or merely misled. I can only cite a few examples here. When Amar, on October 3, 1793, had the Girondin deputies who had stirred up the departments indicted, a friend of Danton, Osselin, proposed adding to the list the names of the 73 deputies who had protested against the Parisian day of June 2. The prohibited Assembly was about to vote for the death motion, when Robespierre stood up to fight it. He had been the enemy of the Girondins, who had horribly slandered him. He saved the 73, but not without difficulty, for he had to fight against the murmurs of the Mountain at the outset. Robespierre's calumniators indeed excel at turning against him the acts of humanity that do him the most honor. If he saved the 73, they say, it was not out of humanity, but out of ambition. He wanted to win their gratitude and rely on them to achieve dictatorship. To this charitable reasoning, there is a simple and decisive answer. When Robespierre courageously opposed, on October 3, the indictment of the 73, they were already in prison, no longer participating in any voting. They were all replaced by their substitutes and did not return to the Convention until several months after the fall of the man who had saved them. Having no vote, how could they have been of any assistance to the ambition of their protector?
Numerous and significant facts prove that while Robespierre was inexorable in striking the enemies of revolutionary France, he at least strove to minimize repression to the bare necessity. He attempted, in vain, to save Louis XVI's sister, Mme Elisabeth, contesting against Hebert at the Jacobins on 1st Frimaire. He tried to save Constituent Thouret, compromised in the prison conspiracy, with only his signature missing from Thouret's arrest warrant. He saved the signatories of the royalist petitions of the 8,000 and 20,000 at the Jacobins' session on the 29th Ventôse. His brother, Robespierre the Younger, during his mission in Franche-Comté in the month of Pluviôse, year II, freed hundreds of suspects from overcrowded prisons. Napoleon at Saint Helena told Las Cases that he had seen long letters from Robespierre the Elder to Robespierre the Younger, then on mission in Toulon and the Italian army, where the former wrote to the latter that the excesses of the proconsuls "dishonored the Revolution and would kill it." An agent of the Committee of Public Safety, Eve Demaillot, recounts that the abbé Le Duc, the natural son of Louis XV, about to go to the scaffold, owed his life to Robespierre. It is an undeniable fact that Robespierre, informed by Julien of Paris about the excesses committed by Carrier in Nantes and by Tallien in Bordeaux, had them both recalled immediately. He likewise recalled Barras and Fréron, who had sullied themselves with blood and plunder during their mission in the South, Rovere and Poultier, who in the Vaucluse directed the black bands organized for the plundering of national assets; the sinister Fouché, who, after having the Lyon aristocrats mass-fired for months, found it more convenient in the end to sell them freedom and incarcerate in their place the Lyon patriots, friends of Chalier, their victim.
These recalled proconsuls, upon returning to Paris, prepared the intrigue of the 9th Thermidor.
But I hear the major objection. If Robespierre wanted to moderate the Terror, then to abolish it, how is it that he voted with Couthon for the atrocious law of Prairial? I have no intention, of course, of defending this law which eliminated defenders and allowed jurors to be satisfied with moral evidence in the absence of material evidence. But it is important to specify the exact part of responsibility of Robespierre and Couthon and to understand their reasons.
After Thermidor, when Collot, Billaud, and Barère were persecuted by the reaction they had unleashed, they claimed that the law of Prairial was the sole work of Robespierre and Couthon, who had allegedly presented it to the Convention without consulting the Committee of Public Safety. This claim is inadmissible. The law of Prairial only extended to the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris provisions already decided by the Committee of Public Safety for the Commission of Orange, which was to punish counter-revolutionaries of Vaucluse. The decree creating the Commission of Orange, dated 21st Floréal, bears the signatures of Collot, Barère, Billaud, alongside those of Robespierre and Couthon. The instruction, the regulation that completed the decree, is signed only by Carnot, Billaud, and Couthon. According to Lecointre, Courtois, and Saladin, this instruction served as a model for the law of Prairial. The same provisions and expressions appear in both. When reproached by Lecointre on the 13th Fructidor for signing documents related to the Commission of Orange, Billaud-Varenne firmly claimed his responsibility, saying it was Couthon who authored the decree establishing the Commission of Orange; he wasn't sure if he had signed it but declared he would do so immediately if he hadn't. Furthermore, Billaud and Barère both defended the law of Prairial in sessions on the 22nd and 24th of Prairial. It is thus beyond doubt that this infamous law was not the particular work of Couthon and Robespierre, but the result of deliberations by the entire Committee.
But what necessities did the exceptional measures prescribed by the law respond to in the minds of its authors? To understand their mindset, one must not be unaware of the nature of the jurisdiction of the Revolutionary Tribunal. It was an exceptional jurisdiction, a political jurisdiction, similar to our High Court or military tribunals. It could only fulfill its purpose, which was to prevent plots by terrifying the enemies of the regime, by striking them with speed and severity. The task of the Revolutionary Tribunal was particularly burdened since the law of the 27th Germinal, voted on Saint-Just's report, had abolished all the revolutionary tribunals in the provinces to transfer all the accused to Paris. Saint-Just and Robespierre, with this measure, wanted to reduce the arbitrariness that had prevailed in the provinces even more than in Paris. The accused from the provinces were thus flooding into the capital. One of the objectives of the law of Prairial was to allow the tribunal to function more rapidly.
Couthon supported the abolition of defenders with two reasons, one political and the other sentimental. Allowing defense speeches, he said, was to provide a platform for royalism and the enemy. "The tribunal set up to punish conspirators resounded with blasphemy against the Revolution and deceitful declamations aimed at prosecuting it in the presence of the people." And here is the sentimental reason: "Defenders extorted the accused in a scandalous manner; one had demanded 1,500 livres for a plea - the poor were not defended."
As for Robespierre, he reminded that for two years the Convention had been under the knife of assassins, thus referring to the assassination of Le Peletier and Marat, and the recent attempts against Collot d'Herbois and himself. "We expose ourselves," he said, "to individual assassins to pursue the public assassins. We are willing to die', but let the Convention and the patriots be saved." In other words, Robespierre presented the new law as a law of retaliation, and it seems undoubted to me that the successive attempts by Admiral and Cécile Renault at the beginning of Prairial did indeed provoke in Robespierre, who was recovering from illness, a sort of feverish exaltation.
To judge this terrible law, one must put oneself back in the atmosphere of the time. It may be easier for us since we have seen, after Charleroi, courts-martial organized without recourse to grace, revision, appeal, without jurors! by a simple decree signed by Millerand. Anatole France, who effortlessly transports himself into the revolutionary past that is so familiar to him, has pleaded for indulgence for Robespierre in these remarkable terms: "One cannot hold him responsible for everything that was done then, any more than for public spirit and customs. The law of Prairial, we are told, behold his crime! Come on, let's not be hypocrites. We would revolt today against a law that would eliminate defenders and witnesses before the tribunal, it is understood; evidence, defense, those are sacred guarantees for the accused, agreed; but we all know well that in the full Terror, these guarantees were only apparent and that the defender was then the scourge of the accused and that the witnesses could never serve him. The law of Prairial, - it eliminates phantoms!" The word of Saint-Just testifies to a deep conviction: "The law gives as defenders to slandered patriots, patriotic jurors; it grants none to conspirators." What is needed at that time, what is suitable, is not the ordinary, formalist and slow justice, but an expeditious, yet sentimental justice, a patriarchal justice. It becomes increasingly difficult to attribute to one or another man of the Revolution more natural cruelty or more deliberate malice than to any other; whether Girondist or Dantonist, the only means of action known then was proscription or death. Re-read André Chénier, this constitutional royalist:
O virtue! This dagger, the only hope of the earth, Is my sacred weapon! ...
Chénier, Marat, Hébertists or Feuillants, they are all for violence; all advocate the same means and the author of Jeune Captive appears comparatively to have been among the most fierce. Robespierre was not known to be crueller than the others, and he was not." Do you not think, citizens, that Anatole France often has more historical insight than many historians?
One would be greatly mistaken to believe that the indignation shown by some deputies during the deliberation of the law was inspired by a horror of arbitrariness. These deputies were primarily concerned with themselves. Of all the articles of the law, they only took issue with the one that seemed to allow the Committee of Public Safety to directly transfer them to the Revolutionary Tribunal without a preliminary vote from the Convention, and they obtained an interpretation from the Convention that protected them.
From then on, the political objective that Robespierre undoubtedly had in mind with the law of Prairial escaped him. It seems hardly doubtful to me that after the Festival of the Supreme Being, he was resolved to stop the Terror. Even on the eve of the festival, the 20th Prairial, the deputy Faure had written to him to propose a general amnesty. Faure would not have given this advice if he had not been sure that his suggestion would be welcomed. Another deputy, the Girondin Girault, one of the 73 imprisoned at La Force, also wrote to him on the 26th Prairial, inviting him to "finish his work," that is, to hasten his and his colleagues' release. Robespierre declared to the Jacobins on the 23rd Messidor that his principles were "to stop the effusion of human blood shed by crime." Many other signs prove that he had resolved to stop the sinister work of the guillotine at the very moment when he was having the law of Prairial voted, which, however, accelerated it! How to resolve this apparent contradiction? Robespierre "had suffered, as Jaurès has well said, both in his dignity and in his self-esteem, and in his pure love of the Revolution, from the atrocious violence that had dishonored here and there the revolutionary government. He could not forget them, he hated them all the more because, having been unable to prevent them, he might appear to be complicit." With a high sense of justice and equality, he wanted to end the Terror with a grand example by striking down the five or six corrupt and bloodthirsty proconsuls who had abused their functions. He thought thus to reconcile the people with the Revolution by showing them that those who had turned the dictatorship to their personal profit were not below the common law since they would atone for their crimes like the multitude of simple convicts. The law of Prairial was supposed to allow him to reach these five or six rogues, who were protected by parliamentary immunity. The Convention's interpretation having thwarted his plan, Robespierre stopped attending the Committee of Public Safety, he lost interest in his law, perhaps he regretted having voted for it. In any case, he remained totally estranged from the batches of the great Terror. His action was then null on the government. He was in the minority in the Committee of Public Safety, and he had almost the unanimous opposition of the Committee of General Security. The public accuser Fouquier-Tinville, who was the main operative of the Revolutionary Tribunal, was very hostile to him. In vain had he tried to obtain his replacement on the 8th Messidor; he had not succeeded. The Committee had kept Fouquier in office, and by doing so, it bears the responsibility for the great Terror. Even M. Aulard had to recognize this. The 9th Thermidor was not made by men who wanted to stop the Terror, but on the contrary by men who had abused the Terror and who wanted to prolong it for their benefit, to protect themselves. What do they reproach him for, in fact, in the session of the 9th Thermidor? Is it for having dragged innocent victims to the scaffold? Billaud-Varenne accuses him on the contrary of indulgence, notably for having initially opposed the arrest of Danton. He is also reproached for having protected former nobles and for having dismissed the most impetuous of the revolutionary committees of Paris. The obscure Louchet, who proposed the decree of accusation, would claim, three weeks later, as the only means of public salvation, the implementation of the Terror.
The royalist Beaulieu, who was in prison on the 9th Thermidor, tells us that his first impression and that of the other detainees upon learning of Robespierre's death was the fear of an escalation of the Terror. "Occupied in our prisons with looking for hope in the speeches made, either at the Jacobins or in the Convention, we saw that everything that was said was disheartening, but that Robespierre still seemed the least extreme."
Because the Terrorists were outdone after the event, because they failed to stop the reaction they had involuntarily unleashed, and because they cleverly later projected the responsibility for their own crimes onto their victim, the odious legend formed that Robespierre was the incarnation of the Terror and the supplier of the guillotine.
"The name of the vanquished," said Louis Blanc, "is exposed to the stain of many lies when the victors reign, who speak or hold the pen. Woe to him who succumbs after having made everything tremble! Hatred descends with him into the tomb, settles there, and long after the worms of the sepulcher have finished gnawing at his body, calumny is there, continuing to besmirch his memory."
French Source:
Défense de Robespierre Author(s): Albert Mathiez Source: Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 1ère Année, No. 2 (Mars-Avril 1924), pp.97-114
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41924280
Extra notes
(1) Mathiez’s premise for the defence is that there are 3 things people accuse Robespierre of: 1- the terror, 3- the death of the indulgents and herberists , and 3- the dechristianization.
Le Comité de sureté générale arrête que le député Prieur de la marne Sera en éx.on [exécution] du Decret d’hier arrêté à L’instant & Conduit au Comité de sureté G.le [générale] & les Scellés apposés Sur Ses papiers Charge de L’ex.on [l'exécution] du present La Comm.on [Commission] de Police administrative
Les Rep.ts [représentants] &ca signé Mathieu [Matthieu], Pemartin [Pémartin], Pierre Guyomar[,] Cales [Calès], Courtois, auguis & Delecloy./
Arrêté du CSG du 2 prairial an III (AN F7 4774 83, dossier Prieur de la Marne, député).
