The Explosion of 1789 349
course to which no acceptable alternative seems to exist. If their behavior becomes
abnormal, it is because such behavior represents the reaction of normal minds to
extraordinary conditions. It would be hard to explain otherwise how whole peoples
turn revolutionary.
Rousseau is rightly considered the father of the Revolution, at least in the sense
of those who like to single out ancestors among a multitude of actual forebears. He
had expressed the main idea: that individual human beings, as free and equal citi-
zens, make up the community and the law by the unforced action of their own
moral will. He had also been deeply alienated from society, which he thought
hardly worth preserving, believed himself to be virtuous and others bad and dis-
honest, thought himself surrounded by enemies, felt himself to be misunderstood,
disliked, conspired against, and betrayed. His sentiments make a certain sense
when seen against the social environment in which he lived; yet it is undoubtedly
true that, by later standards of mental health, Rousseau would have been a candi-
date for psychiatric treatment. He was entirely non- political. In France there was
no chance for him to take any political action, but even at Geneva, when explicitly
asked, he had refused to join the group that made the little Geneva revolution of
- We have seen also the combination of insight and moderation in his recom-
mendations for Poland.
Maximilien Robespierre developed many of the traits of Rousseau, and some of
these are disagreeable to well- balanced people under favorable conditions, but it is
doubtful that Robespierre had any need for psychiatric attention. Thirty- one years
old in 1789, a reasonably successful self- made man in the American phrase,
Robespierre, unlike Rousseau, was a lawyer coping adequately with the problems
of life at Arras in northern France. The province of Artois was one of the few in
which Provincial Estates had continued to meet. Robespierre believed that the
Estates did not represent the inhabitants. This belief was shared by many others,
including parish priests who did not sit in the First Estate, or elect those who did,
and nobles non- entrants who did not sit in or vote for the Second. He believed (and
it was true) that the Third Estate was represented ex officio by officeholders who
bought or inherited their posts and were in some cases of noble status. The Estates
of Artois, like those elsewhere, took advantage of the royal embarrassment to ad-
vance their own claims. Robespierre suspected an aristocratic maneuver. He began
his revolutionary career in January 1789 with a pamphlet, A la nation artésienne, in
which he called the Provincial Estates “a league of a few citizens” against the peo-
ple. In March, during the elections for the Estates General, he gave legal assistance
to the shoemakers’ gild, thus already identifying himself with the common people.
When the town dignitaries, some of them noble, tried to control the elections of
the Third Estate in Arras, he published a second pamphlet with the ominous title,
Les ennemis de la patrie démasqués. Elected to the electoral assembly of the prov-
ince, where the clergy and nobility offered to give up certain privileges, to the ap-
plause of the Third Estate, Robespierre refused to take part in the vote of thanks.
No thanks were due, he said, for the surrender of abuses which had always been
indefensible. In June, at the Estates General at Versailles, he quite unfairly de-
nounced the clergy as “subversive.” In August, when the assembly was discussing
consent to taxation, Robespierre rose to insist (nor was he mistaken according to