June 23, 2022 25I, the People
Lynn HuntRobespierre: The Man
Who Divides Us the Most
by Marcel Gauchet, translated from
the French by Malcolm DeBevoise,
with a foreword by David A. Bell
and Hugo Drochon.
Princeton University Press,
199 pp., $35.00Before Hitler and Stalin (and Putin),
there was Maximilien Robespierre, the
leader of the French Revolution during
the period in 1793–1794 known as the
Terror. If Napoleon Bonaparte had not
come to power and made war on much
of Europe between 1799 and 1815,
Robespierre would have been the most
controversial figure of his time. Yet he
did not rule for long, did not govern
alone, and began his political career
as a staunch proponent of liberal de-
mocracy: he argued against slavery, the
death penalty, and poll taxes; favored
freedom of religion and the press; and
opposed France’s rush to declare war
on Austria in 1792. Known to his fol-
lowers as “the Incorruptible” because
he disdained those who profited from
the circumstances of revolution and
war, he nonetheless became the face
of all that was most repugnant in the
French Revolution.
Was he just a scapegoat, the sacri-
ficial victim who could be blamed in
retrospect for the Terror—for the many
thousands who were executed and the
hundreds of thousands imprisoned
as suspects, for the muzzling of the
press and the repression of all dissent?
Robespierre fell from power on July
27, 1794, when his fellow deputies in
the National Convention, the legisla-
ture that governed France from 1792
to 1795, ordered his arrest. Declared
an outlaw after his supporters got him
released from custody, he was recap-
tured and guillotined the next day. His
fall set in motion a startling change of
direction, much to the surprise of those
who had brought him down. They had
intended only to rid themselves of a
political enemy who seemed poised
to act against them. Their leaders in-
cluded some who had undertaken bru-
tal purges of their own in the provinces,
rivals further to Robespierre’s left on
the Committee of Public Safety, which
ran the government, and deputies who
feared for one reason or another that
they would be next on the list of those
declared traitors.
The deed once done, they tried at first
to portray it as a victory for the people
of Paris and the deputies over a de-
termined tyrant and his small band of
followers. But the repercussions could
not be contained, and almost immedi-
ately the most objectionable policies
were dismantled. The draconian law of
June 10, 1794, limiting the rights of de-
fendants and broadening the definition
of “suspects” was repealed; in addition
to the usual “enemies of the people,” it
had included those who “sought to in-
spire discouragement,” those who “dis-
seminated false news,” and those who
sought “to undermine the energy and
the purity of revolutionary and republi-
can principles.”
The chief prosecutor of the revolu-
tionary court was tried and executed.
Some of those who had conspired to
remove Robespierre faced detentionin their turn, while suspects in Parisian
prisons found themselves free again.
The Convention curbed the powers of
the Committee of Public Safety, and
when the cascade of changes further
emboldened those who opposed the
repressive policies, the deputies closed
the Jacobin Club, which had been the
political base for so many of them
during five tumultuous years.
A s pa r t of t he ef for t to move for wa rd ,
the deputies needed to construct a con-
vincing narrative about the events of
the previous year. Since it was impos-
sible to blame Robespierre for every-
thing—his only claim to institutional
power was membership on the twelve-
man Committee of Public Safety—they
had to dig deep in order to portray him
as the chief architect of the regime of
terror. The official report on him and
his “accomplices” claimed that though
Robespierre was “timid and fearful,”
“he wanted to drive men to tyranny” by
pushing for social leveling; denouncing
merchants, property owners, and the
rich in general; undermining discipline
in the armies through the dissemina-
tion of radical newspapers to soldiers;
setting up an elaborate network of do-
mestic spies to report on any possible
dissent; and accusing of “moderation-
ism” anyone who opposed the mass
indiscriminate executions. Perfidy fol-
lowed from Robespierre’s character,
according to the report: his desire for
domination, corrosive envy of his ri-
vals, personal lack of talent and hatred
therefore of those with any merit, vin-
dictive pride, and dislike of any celeb-
rity other than his own.
In order to make sense of Robes-
pierre’s supposed ascendancy, the
report also had to lay out the litany
of praises found in the letters sent by
individuals and popular clubs to their
“idol,” “their new god, Maximilien.”The report’s author laments having seen
“everywhere, the same prostitution of
incense, best wishes, and homages” in
encomiums such as “the contribution
of his rare talents,” “the incorruptible,”
“the virtuous” Robespierre “who cov-
ers the cradle of the Republic with the
aegis of his eloquence,” and “the firm
support and unshakeable pillar of the
Republic.”
Although insincere glorification of
tyrants is certainly not unknown, Robes-
pierre’s opponents were effectively ac-
knowledging the deep division of opinion
that would haunt debates for more than
two hundred years. Was he just what
the fledgling republic required in order
to survive civil conflict and unrelenting
war with virtually all of France’s neigh-
bors, as his adherents believed? Was he
a temporary aberration whose removal
would set the republic back on course, as
his gravediggers hoped? Or was he proof
that violent revolution in the name of
rights and social justice could only re-
sult in terror, violence, and ultimately
authoritarianism, as some later com-
mentators argued?These questions are, as might be ex-
pected, especially troubling in France,
which is why Marcel Gauchet subtitles
his book “The Man Who Divides Us
the Most,” “us” being the French. Yet
the French are not the only ones con-
cerned, since Gauchet’s preoccupa-
tion with Robespierre follows from his
decades- long study of the philosoph-
ical underpinnings of modern democ-
racy more generally. His work is not
well known in the Anglophone world,
though the controversies provoked by
some of his opinions about current is-
sues do echo more widely.
Although he began his career
on the antitotalitarian left and stillclaims to be a socialist, Gauchet has
been denounced in some French cir-
cles as reactionary, misogynistic, and
homophobic. His 2004 essay on the
potential negative consequences of
increasing human control over pro-
creation, rather than making do with
what happens, prompted especially
heated responses. Titled “The Child
of Desire” and published in the jour-
nal he edited, Le Débat, known for its
hard- line centrism, the essay seemed
to bemoan the end of patriarchy, with
its subjugation of women, by advancing
the claim that “many children of desire
will never know clearly who they are
nor what they want,” because “they
will remain forever dependent on this
desire that brought them to life.”^1
The accusations against Gauchet
came to a head when he was asked to
open the annual “rendezvous with his-
tory” in 2014. It is not easy for Ameri-
cans to comprehend the popularity and
influence of this festival, which is held
in the Loire Valley town of Blois every
October and draws some 40,000 avid
participants to lectures, interviews,
films, and panel discussions focused
on recently published history books.
An op- ed by a group of scholars in Le
Monde in October 2014 insisted that
Gauchet could hardly speak credibly
about that year’s theme of “rebels,”
since he encouraged conformism to
“hierarchy, moral order, [and] tradi-
tion,” values brandished by the far
right.^2
Such characterizations of Gauchet’s
positions are mistaken, I believe, but
hardly surprising, given the stakesThe festival inaugurating the Cult of the Supreme Being as France’s new state religion, organized by Jacques-Louis David
and presided over by Maximilien Robespierre, Paris, June 8, 1794 ; engraving by G. Te xier, 1794Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris/Alamy(^1) “L’Enfant du désir,” Le Débat, No. 132
(November–December 2004), p. 120.
(^2) “Contre ‘le coup de force’ de Marcel
Gauchet,” Le Monde, October 8, 2014.
Hunt 25 27 .indd 25 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 48 PM