26 The New York Reviewof the arguments he wants to make
about modern democracy and the
way that he often goes about making
them. Modern democracies, he main-
tains, emerged as the religious founda-
tions of collective existence crumbled;
religion did not disappear, of course,
but it no longer provided the crucial
legitimation for the political and social
order. Modern democracies therefore
face the challenge of explaining to the
citizenry what holds society together
in the absence of any transcendental
justification.
Gauchet is not convinced that human
rights can fill the void, and his one
overriding concern is that the modern
emphasis on the individual and his or
her rights will wear away the necessary
foundations for a functioning
social order. The fuzzy ab-
straction of his prose has left
open the possibility, despite
his disavowals in interviews,
that he supports those who
oppose the rights of women,
gays, or minorities. The lan-
guage in “The Child of De-
sire” is a case in point. He
seems to criticize the right to
choose whether or not to have
a child, but at the end of the
piece he makes clear that he
has no wish to return to an
authoritarian past; he does,
however, want to consider
what the costs of emancipa-
tion might be, both for society
and for the individual.
Similarly, he wants to con-
sider the difficulties faced by
democracies, whose very ex-
istence depends on emancipa-
tion from traditional sources
of authority. Democracy is
inherently fragile because of
the difficulty of explaining
what holds people together in
a secular world, and as a con-
sequence, Gauchet maintains,
it has a predisposition toward
authoritarianism and even totalitarian-
ism. Robespierre is therefore a perfect
foil for Gauchet, because “he embodied
the attempt to give liberty and equality
their most complete expression” while
personifying “the failure to make a vi-
able system of government from these
principles.” At a time when democra-
cies face external and internal threats
around the world, Robespierre is more
relevant than ever.Both the virtues and the defects of
Gauchet’s approach are on view in
Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us
Most, which is mercifully short in com-
parison with many of his other books.
The defects are easily recounted: he
largely ignores what has been written
by others about his subject (whether
democracy in general or Robes pierre
in particular) and glides past the nitty-
gritty of everyday politics and social
tensions in order to concentrate on the
ways in which Robespierre fits into his
larger arguments about democracy.
This is not an unknown strategy in
French writing about history and pol-
itics; the more polemical the essay, the
less attention is paid to competing ac-
counts or supporting documentation.
(Gauchet provides virtually no foot-
notes.) In this spirit, he leaves aside
any examination of Robespierre’s biog-
raphy and considers only his writings
and speeches.Given the steady stream of biogra-
phies of Robespierre, many of them
excellent, such an approach can be
warranted only if it provides a fresh
perspective. The virtue of Gauchet’s
book is his laser- like focus on the one
belief that shaped Robespierre’s con-
stantly evolving opinions and actions:
that government should reflect the will
of the people, but particular interests,
often involving conspiracies, stand in
the way of the triumph of that general
will. Viewing this prissy lawyer from
northern France as a political philos-
opher would be a stretch, since the
exigencies of the situation left him lit-
tle time for writing essays, much less
books or memoirs. Gauchet therefore
aims at a middle ground where ideasmeet events: “The innermost impulses
that gave rise to Robespierre’s conduct
are inseparable from a body of ideas
that coalesced with them to form a
system.”
Robespierre’s peculiar hold on his
fellow deputies has long been one of the
greatest mysteries of the entire French
Revolution: How could this unprepos-
sessing, previously unknown lawyer
come to incarnate the Revolution in its
most intense period? Gauchet is right
to argue that Robespierre’s “manner
of expression communicated the prom-
ise of the moment with a clearness and
a precision that gradually elevated
him to a preeminent place among his
peers.” But he downplays the paradox
involved, which was best captured by
one of Robespierre’s erstwhile friends
turned enemies, Marie- Jeanne Roland,
who wrote while awaiting her execu-
tion in 1793:His talent as an orator was worse
than mediocre; his commonplace
voice, his bad turns of phrase,
his defective manner of speaking
made his delivery extremely bor-
ing. But he defended principles
with warmth and tenacity; he had
the courage then [the king’s at-
tempted flight in June 1791] to con-
tinue [to defend those principles]
at a time when the defenders of the
people were tremendously reduced
in number.In other words, though Robes-
pierre’s views evolved over time, he
never stopped portraying himself as the
mouthpiece for the will of the people.
He was not being inconsistent, there-
fore, when he held back at first from
supporting the creation of a republic;
he could imagine kings as “delegates”
or “agents” of the people, even if Louis
XVI could not. He proposed few laws yet
soon gained a reputation for constantly
reminding the deputies of the gap be-
tween “what the Revolution promised
and what it had so far achieved.” Be-
fore long, however, as Gauchet shows,
Robes pierre’s “craving for popularity”
deepened his identification with the gen-
eral will. “The interest, the desire of the
people is that of nature, of humanity; it
is the general interest,” he ar-
gued in a speech in December- He believed he knew the
meaning and direction of that
interest and that those who
opposed the people (or him)
represented only their own
“ambition, pride, cupidity.”
Robespierre combined this
unshakable confidence in the
will of the people and his abil-
ity to interpret it with an obses-
sive dread of conspiracy, which
he proclaimed from the first
days of the Revolution. He did
not invent the fear of treach-
ery, but he certainly contrib-
uted to its credence. Alarm
about secret plotting, some-
times delusional, sometimes
not, would eventually justify
ever more drastic measures of
repression. It also fueled what
Gauchet calls Robespierre’s
“sacrificial narcissism,” his
ostentatious self- abnegation
combined with repeated ref-
erences to himself as a martyr.
These reached their zenith
right before his fall, when he
replied to those who accused him of
seeking dictatorial powers, “Who am I,
I who am accused? A slave of liberty, a
living martyr of the Republic, as much
the victim as the enemy of crime.”
Gauchet takes the dictator charge se-
riously but in the end argues that “his
language was dictatorial, not his per-
son.” Robespierre resembled a dictator
in his ability to intimidate, but the in-
timidation did not include actual dicta-
torial powers. Gauchet’s way of putting
this is characteristically abstract:History provides us with no other
example of someone who suc-
ceeded in objectively exercising a
kind of dictatorship without sub-
jectively putting himself in the
position of a dictator, which is to
say, as a practical matter, without
providing himself with the means
of actually exercising dictatorial
power.Because the deputies had been brought
up reading Roman history and had
the example of Oliver Cromwell even
closer to hand, they worried inces-
santly about a dictator emerging from
their midst. One was coming, but not
until Robespierre had lain in his grave
for more than five years.
Given Gauchet’s interest in the moral
foundations of modern democracy, it
is perhaps not surprising that he attri-
butes Robespierre’s eventual downfallto his differences with other members
of the Committee of Public Safety over
religion. Robespierre viewed the cam-
paign for de- Christianization in late
1793 with growing alarm and even-
tually denounced it. He then tried to
inaugurate a Rousseau- style deistic
alternative known as the Cult of the
Supreme Being, whose festival he pre-
sided over in early June 1794.
Robespierre had in effect antici-
pated Gauchet’s own line of argument.
Gauchet argues that Robespierre “ran
up against the vicious circle to which
any attempt to found a new regime on
the basis of revolutionary principles
is bound to lead.” In late 1792 Robes-
pierre had concluded, “In order to form
our political institutions, we would
need to have the morals that one day
they ought to give to us.” Gauchet calls
this statement prophetic, but it comes
right out of Rousseau’s Social Contract
(1762). In his section on the need for a
supreme legislator, Rousseau argued:For a young people to be able to
relish sound principles of political
theory and follow the fundamental
rules of statecraft, the effect would
have to become the cause; the so-
cial spirit, which should be created
by these institutions, would have to
preside over their very foundation;
and men would have to be before
law what they should become by
means of law.Rousseau then concluded that this
paradox explains why the fathers of
nations “have recourse to divine inter-
vention and credit the gods with their
own wisdom.”
Although Gauchet emphasizes the
differences between Robespierre and
his enemies on the subject of religion,
he cannot ignore the many other fac-
tors that contributed to Robespierre’s
fall: the shock that followed the arrest,
trial, and execution of Georges Danton
and his followers, all of them staunch
republicans, as traitors in April 1794;
the spectacle of Robespierre as pres-
ident of the National Convention
presiding over his cherished Cult of
the Supreme Being just two days be-
fore the infamous Law of Suspects
deepened the dread among the depu-
ties; and then, in a politically suicidal
move, his withdrawal from public view
for six weeks, only to reappear with
vague threats against unnamed dep-
uties. His enemies needed no further
encouragement.
Gauchet’s Robespierre is a tragic
figure because he brought an “ancient
ideal of religious unity” to what would
become modern problems. But he was
not the only one who failed to establish
a lasting republic in France in the 1790s;
his successors failed, too. The only sus-
tainable one on view, in the new United
States of America, was very precarious,
and it had the advantage of no aristoc-
racy, no heritage of feudalism, suppos-
edly unlimited land and resources, and,
above all, distance from Europe. The
American republicans barely managed
to learn the lesson that is crucial to any
democracy’s life expectancy: the alter-
nation of power through an electoral
process. Robespierre could not conceive
it because he could not imagine that a
political party was anything other than
a particular interest, and therefore it
was incompatible with the general will
of the people. It is a lesson that is veryhard to learn. (^) Q
The execution of Robespierre; engraving by Giacomo
Aliprandi after Giacomo Beys, circa 1799
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