Oil Painting:on maximilien robespierre
2015年4月14日One of the most easily recognised paintings that emerged during the French Revolution is a portrait. The artist is unknown but the subject is not. With his green-striped nankeen jacket, waistcoat, and flourishing cravat, Maximilien Robespierre looks out at the viewer; a smile rises across his pale face. It is a picture of sartorial elegance, of sobriety, of serenity, and of contentment. Indeed, as Laurent Bihl and Annie Duprat argue in their contribution to Robespierre: Portraits croisés, the elegance of the young Montagnard was remarkable and always remarked upon. In contrast to the bullish Danton and the unsightly Marat, Robespierre was an image of moral probity and certitude, a man who never stopped following his democratic lodestars even when they led him to the abyss.
On 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor Year II by the Revolutionary Calendar), moments before his arrest, he drafted what would be a final directive. A call to arms, it bid the patriots of the Section des Picques, his own neighbourhood in Paris, to join the Paris Commune in a state of insurrection against the National Convention. But, as he began to sign his name, a thought stayed his hand, and underneath the extravagant signatures of Louvet, Payan, Lerebous, and Legrand (other members of the Commune) are the miniature and hesitant beginnings of Robespierre’s own: ‘Ro’. He never finished the rest. Small and compact, one often misses it at first glance. But it is there, undeniable and chilling in its eternal imperfection, the last legend written by the one they called ‘The Incorruptible’. His hand faltered over the page as gendarmes burst into the room, and in the ensuing commotion he was shot (some reports claim that he shot himself in an attempted suicide). The bullet exploded his jaw and the document, covered in blood and cheated of nine letters, now rests in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet.
For his supporters, ‘Ro’ leaves us with evidence of Robespierre’s nobler side: an enduring commitment to democracy. For the truncated signature is not only a visual representation of a revolutionary’s sudden ruin: it also symbolises the spirit of that new age of revolution. Robespierre could have finished the rest before the Convention’s forcesmade their entry, but he paused to ask himself: in whose name should one sign an appeal for insurrection against the legitimate seat of power? Was it to be in the name of the Commune or in the name of the French people? The question is more revealing than the answer because Robespierre knew that, for him, the hour was bleak and nearing its end. Yet, rather than yield to questions of personal survival, he surrendered to the demands of authority and legitimacy. Uncertainty was not a feature of the Montagnard moral code, but the virtue of hesitation in this instance was not lost on the greatest of his nineteenth-century defenders, Louis Blanc: ‘“In whose name?” What a sublime expression under the circumstances! Such hesitations are a man’s downfall, but they immortalise him. Amidst cannon and pikes, at the sounding of the tocsins, when success depended on FORCE alone, Robespierre could think only of saving the idea of LEGITIMACY’.1
Robespierre did not die at the moment of his arrest. He had to wait seventeen hours, jaw mangled, before his anguished moans were silenced by the cold blade of the guillotine. Since then, his legend has been contested by successive generations who have argued over the meaning, nature, and worth of the French revolutionary epic. Indeed, it was not long before a rival image to the portrait emerged—an anonymous Thermidorian caricature titled Robespierre guillotinant le bourreau après avoir fait guillotiner tous les Français. In this drawing he is seen trampling over the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793 while he beheads the last executioner with his own hand. As the French intellectual and revolutionary Régis Debray once said, ‘caricatures travel better than portraits’, and so it is this latter image that has, unfortunately, exerted the strongest, if the least intellectually sophisticated, impression on the public imagination. Moral outrage has led to historical simplification so that the majority of studies on Robespierre constitute a gallery of hostile reproductions, all coloured with the fattest of brushes and the heaviest of crimson dyes.
Michel Biard, the current president of the Société des études robespierristes, and co-editor of the first book under review here, points out in his contribution that such raw and rudimentary attacks began by tracing the contours already laid down in Thermidor. Then, the focus was as much on Robespierre’s alleged hypocrisy and ideological insincerity as it was on his bloodlust. Politicians such as Merlin de Thionville called attention to what many in post-Thermidor France saw as Robespierre’s intellectual mediocrity. But, over time, the image became ever more hideous. Early nineteenth-century studies focused on his role as the prime agent of Terror, casting him as the murderous avatar of a Saturn-like daemon beyond redemption. In the twentiethcentury, and during the revisionist turn of the 1980s in particular, the intellectual assault continued, as historians increasingly spent their critical energies revealing how the revolutionary republicanism of the 1790s was diluted by successive generations eager to exorcise the ghosts of the First Republic. At this time, Robespierre’s enemies were often subtler, and more effective, in their line of attack. François Furet, whose assessment tracked closely that set out by Madame de Staël in her Considérations sur la Révolution française, offered up an opportunistic Robespierre whose deviousness was naked. His oppositions, for example to the death penalty and the war against the monarchies of Europe, were not powered by principles. Instead, Furet argued, they were positions taken up as a way of besting his political rivals, notably Antoine Barnave and Jacques Pierre Brissot. This, then, was not the homicidal, deadly, almost supernatural Robespierre of previous portraits. Instead, it was a depiction in which Robespierre came to embody the cynicism that defined the political class of the Mitterrand years. More recently still, since 2000, a number of biographies published in France have taken analytical crudeness to new depths. As Marc Belissa and Julien Louvrier discuss in their article for the special Robespierre issue of Annales historiques de la Révolution française (the second title under review here), studies by Jean Artarit, Laurent Dingli, Jean-François Fayard and Joël Schmidt rely heavily upon Thermidorian sources without taking into account their function in the creation of the black legend.
In whatever form, the black legend has gained so much traction in the public imagination because it has been propagated by a phalanx of intellectuals and politicians composed not only of right-wing counter- revolutionaries but also of those who celebrated the Revolution and the Republic. Thus, views on Robespierre have not merely aligned along a basic fault-line of revolution versus counter-revolution. As he divided opinion among his republican contemporaries, so his posthumous reputation also opened up divisions among the French Left. As Jean-Numa Ducange and Pascal Dupuy discuss in their chapter in Robespierre: Portraits croisés, anti-robespierrisme on the Left began with the Hébertist challenge to his explicit deism and suppression of their anti-Christian campaigns during the Revolution. In the nineteenth century, Communards such as Gustave Tridon embodied a similar Hébertist sensibility, seeing Robespierre as the person who broke the popular movement of the sans-culottes. Followers of the French socialist Jules Guesde, such as Paul Lafargue, had harsh words for Robespierre for the same reasons. Even the socialist historian and politician Jean Jaurès, who famously defended Robespierre, followed the line taken by one of the Incorruptible’s fiercest critics, the Sorbonne historian Alphonse Aulard, in suggesting that Robespierre’s politics were as much about tactical awareness as they were about principle. The outward commitment to social justice which Robespierre displayed, Jaurès contended, may have been strategic and intended to distance himselffrom his political opponents. Today, Robespierre is far from being the heroic model for those who claim to be upholding the principles of 1789 or even 1792–4. As Jacques Julliard has argued in his recent study, Les Gauches Françaises, 1762–2012 (2013), there were two progressive traditions that arose from the rubble of the Old Regime: the puritanical moralism of Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue, and the modest liberal republicanism of Danton’s deuxième gauche. It is this latter tradition to which the majority of the Left in France now happily subscribe. The attitude of the Dantonists was encapsulated most colourfully by Marcel Debarge, national secretary of the Parti socialiste, who once said: ‘I like Danton because I have always had a weakness for the people who live, who screw, who know how to ally an idealist commitment to a sense of the realities. The visionary side of Robespierre sends shivers down my spine. Danton at least was not too much of a killer’.2 There has, then, been little love for the Advocate of Arras, who, the lack of evidence to the contrary suggests, was probably a virgin when he died, and who always remained ideologically constant to a certain idea of France.
However, Robespierre has not been without allies—though arguably their renderings of him have been equally monochrome in their unchecked admiration. Ardent Jacobin republicans of the late eighteenth century, such as Gracchus Babeuf, celebrated his concept of virtue and gave greater substance to his commitment to defending the poor with a more explicit and muscular egalitarianism. Later on, in the nineteenth century, Neo-Babouvists such as Albert Laponneraye valiantly championed Robespierre’s commitment to social justice and saw him as the paradigm for individual and political emulation.3 In the early 1830s, Laponneraye was responsible for promoting the political thought and action of Robespierre among the working class, focusing on what both saw as the despotism of inequality and the division of France into two camps: one of the prideful and rich; the other of work, misery, and virtue. But the nineteenth century, especially the 1830s, was a time when the pedagogic endeavours of Robespierrists served to land them in trouble—in Laponneraye’s case, this was time served in Sainte-Pélagie prison. Thus efforts to revive Robespierre’s name were perennially challenged by both conservative and moderate republican orders. In the twentieth century, tireless efforts to rehabilitate Robespierre came with far less jeopardy but no less difficulty. Historians such as Albert Mathiez helped give shape and intellectual content to a programme of revival by founding the Société des études robespierristes in 1907, while Georges Lefebvre set to work turning the Sorbonne intoa place of greater safety for the Montagnard. For Mathiez in particular, the Incorruptible was not only someone worthy of rehabilitation in his own right; he could also be pressed into political service, his Republic of Virtue calling attention to the moral turpitude of the Third Republic: ‘Is there any task more urgent’, Mathiez asked, ‘than to set against the republic of appeasement and compromise the republic of conviction and disinterest, against the pork-barrel republic the republic of principles?’4
Still, efforts to commemorate Robespierre in a more public manner— the naming of a street after him, the erection of a statue, or a plaque mounted on his house in Arras—were actively challenged. Right-wing historians, newspapers, and politicians continually blocked attempts to have Robespierre’s name inscribed upon the registers of memory, slowing the pace of rehabilitation (it took sixteen years of petitioning for a plaque to be installed on the wall of his former residence in Arras). Over time, however, the name ‘Robespierre’ came to adorn boulevards, streets, squares, and the occasional impasse, in towns such as Alès, Arras, Aubagne, Belfort, Brest, Saint-Dizier, Saint-Étienne, Marseille, and Quimper. There is also a metro station named after him in Montreuil near Paris.
Arguably, the biggest success of the robespierristes in protecting his memory has come in the last two years. At the end of April 2012, Sotheby’s auction house in Paris was scheduled to sell over 110 unpublished manuscripts of Robespierre’s writings, held previously by the descendants of his fellow revolutionary Joseph Le Bas. The following month, the Société des études robespierristes launched a national subscription to collect the necessary funds to keep the writings in public collections. The monies were raised, the papers purchased and placed in the Archives Nationales. Serge Aberdam and Cyril Triolaire, in considering the variety of subscribers, note in the Robespierre issue of the Annales a number of interesting trends that emerged from this fundraising. Firstly, most of the donations came from the Île-de-France and Paris regions, which aptly corresponds to the fact that Robespierre’s story was a distinctly Parisian affair (unlike many of his fellow Jacobins during the Revolution,5 he rarely ventured outside the capital and, so the evidence suggests, never beyond the Artois region). Secondly, most of the subscribers were old communist and republican militants in the 60/69-year-old age bracket. There were fewer than fifty people who came from the 20/29-year-old range, reflecting the lack of interest in Robespierre—who is usually absent from school history textbooks— and also suggesting, perhaps, that his language of virtue no longer provides the appropriate message to contend with this generation’s present discontents.
What are most interesting, however, are the letters sent back with the donations, because they reveal some of the reasons why a minority of people in France still find Robespierre a person worthy of commemoration and celebration. Many of the responses were shot through with a candid indignation both at the apathy with which the Republic responded to the sale of papers belonging to an important historical figure, and with the general state of economic, political, and social disrepair in France. Like their favourite Jacobin, contributors focused resentment on the deplorable gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, on the greedy, the proponents of capital, the irrepressible sway of the market over public affairs, and, in truly Robespierriste style, the spectre of wealthy and morally dishonest ‘fripons’.
Yet, while Robespierre is held up by many on the radical Left in France as the counter-example to a corrupt and corroded economic and political order, the two works under review show us someone with a decidedly attenuated radicalism. Robespierre’s thinking on the economy, for instance, was far more conservative than that of many of his peers. Nor was the central notion of virtue exclusive to his brand of politics; it was adopted by almost all in the vanguard of Jacobinism. At the same time, there is no conscious attempt on the part of the authors to underplay his determination to effect sweeping political, economic, and spiritual transformation in France. Instead, the impression that emerges from these essays is one that celebrates the sheer complexity of Robespierre and his ambitions. They draw out the tensions in his politics and persona rather than attempt to flatten them. To appreciate his subtle shades in this way is not wholly novel. Back in 1999, Colin Haydon and William Doyle oversaw the publication of a book that also sought to offer a nuanced perspective on the Incorruptible.6 This constituted one of the first attempts to remove some of the ideological overlay that had come to obscure Robespierre and to present a character freighted with a more complex political outlook. But this is not to detract from any of the scholarly verve and originality that defines each of the brilliant essays in both works under consideration here. Together, they constitute the latest attempt to bring into sharp relief the ideological breadth, and contradictions, of Robespierre’s thinking and political practice in the context of eighteenth-century France. Indeed, what we are presented with here is a man very much of his time, whose political beliefs had already begun to take significant shape before the Revolution.
As Hervé Leuwers reminds us in his chapter in Robespierre: Portraits croisés, even before the Revolution, while still a young lawyer in Arras.
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On 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor Year II by the Revolutionary Calendar), moments before his arrest, he drafted what would be a final directive. A call to arms, it bid the patriots of the Section des Picques, his own neighbourhood in Paris, to join the Paris Commune in a state of insurrection against the National Convention. But, as he began to sign his name, a thought stayed his hand, and underneath the extravagant signatures of Louvet, Payan, Lerebous, and Legrand (other members of the Commune) are the miniature and hesitant beginnings of Robespierre’s own: ‘Ro’. He never finished the rest. Small and compact, one often misses it at first glance. But it is there, undeniable and chilling in its eternal imperfection, the last legend written by the one they called ‘The Incorruptible’. His hand faltered over the page as gendarmes burst into the room, and in the ensuing commotion he was shot (some reports claim that he shot himself in an attempted suicide). The bullet exploded his jaw and the document, covered in blood and cheated of nine letters, now rests in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet.
For his supporters, ‘Ro’ leaves us with evidence of Robespierre’s nobler side: an enduring commitment to democracy. For the truncated signature is not only a visual representation of a revolutionary’s sudden ruin: it also symbolises the spirit of that new age of revolution. Robespierre could have finished the rest before the Convention’s forcesmade their entry, but he paused to ask himself: in whose name should one sign an appeal for insurrection against the legitimate seat of power? Was it to be in the name of the Commune or in the name of the French people? The question is more revealing than the answer because Robespierre knew that, for him, the hour was bleak and nearing its end. Yet, rather than yield to questions of personal survival, he surrendered to the demands of authority and legitimacy. Uncertainty was not a feature of the Montagnard moral code, but the virtue of hesitation in this instance was not lost on the greatest of his nineteenth-century defenders, Louis Blanc: ‘“In whose name?” What a sublime expression under the circumstances! Such hesitations are a man’s downfall, but they immortalise him. Amidst cannon and pikes, at the sounding of the tocsins, when success depended on FORCE alone, Robespierre could think only of saving the idea of LEGITIMACY’.1
Robespierre did not die at the moment of his arrest. He had to wait seventeen hours, jaw mangled, before his anguished moans were silenced by the cold blade of the guillotine. Since then, his legend has been contested by successive generations who have argued over the meaning, nature, and worth of the French revolutionary epic. Indeed, it was not long before a rival image to the portrait emerged—an anonymous Thermidorian caricature titled Robespierre guillotinant le bourreau après avoir fait guillotiner tous les Français. In this drawing he is seen trampling over the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793 while he beheads the last executioner with his own hand. As the French intellectual and revolutionary Régis Debray once said, ‘caricatures travel better than portraits’, and so it is this latter image that has, unfortunately, exerted the strongest, if the least intellectually sophisticated, impression on the public imagination. Moral outrage has led to historical simplification so that the majority of studies on Robespierre constitute a gallery of hostile reproductions, all coloured with the fattest of brushes and the heaviest of crimson dyes.
Michel Biard, the current president of the Société des études robespierristes, and co-editor of the first book under review here, points out in his contribution that such raw and rudimentary attacks began by tracing the contours already laid down in Thermidor. Then, the focus was as much on Robespierre’s alleged hypocrisy and ideological insincerity as it was on his bloodlust. Politicians such as Merlin de Thionville called attention to what many in post-Thermidor France saw as Robespierre’s intellectual mediocrity. But, over time, the image became ever more hideous. Early nineteenth-century studies focused on his role as the prime agent of Terror, casting him as the murderous avatar of a Saturn-like daemon beyond redemption. In the twentiethcentury, and during the revisionist turn of the 1980s in particular, the intellectual assault continued, as historians increasingly spent their critical energies revealing how the revolutionary republicanism of the 1790s was diluted by successive generations eager to exorcise the ghosts of the First Republic. At this time, Robespierre’s enemies were often subtler, and more effective, in their line of attack. François Furet, whose assessment tracked closely that set out by Madame de Staël in her Considérations sur la Révolution française, offered up an opportunistic Robespierre whose deviousness was naked. His oppositions, for example to the death penalty and the war against the monarchies of Europe, were not powered by principles. Instead, Furet argued, they were positions taken up as a way of besting his political rivals, notably Antoine Barnave and Jacques Pierre Brissot. This, then, was not the homicidal, deadly, almost supernatural Robespierre of previous portraits. Instead, it was a depiction in which Robespierre came to embody the cynicism that defined the political class of the Mitterrand years. More recently still, since 2000, a number of biographies published in France have taken analytical crudeness to new depths. As Marc Belissa and Julien Louvrier discuss in their article for the special Robespierre issue of Annales historiques de la Révolution française (the second title under review here), studies by Jean Artarit, Laurent Dingli, Jean-François Fayard and Joël Schmidt rely heavily upon Thermidorian sources without taking into account their function in the creation of the black legend.
In whatever form, the black legend has gained so much traction in the public imagination because it has been propagated by a phalanx of intellectuals and politicians composed not only of right-wing counter- revolutionaries but also of those who celebrated the Revolution and the Republic. Thus, views on Robespierre have not merely aligned along a basic fault-line of revolution versus counter-revolution. As he divided opinion among his republican contemporaries, so his posthumous reputation also opened up divisions among the French Left. As Jean-Numa Ducange and Pascal Dupuy discuss in their chapter in Robespierre: Portraits croisés, anti-robespierrisme on the Left began with the Hébertist challenge to his explicit deism and suppression of their anti-Christian campaigns during the Revolution. In the nineteenth century, Communards such as Gustave Tridon embodied a similar Hébertist sensibility, seeing Robespierre as the person who broke the popular movement of the sans-culottes. Followers of the French socialist Jules Guesde, such as Paul Lafargue, had harsh words for Robespierre for the same reasons. Even the socialist historian and politician Jean Jaurès, who famously defended Robespierre, followed the line taken by one of the Incorruptible’s fiercest critics, the Sorbonne historian Alphonse Aulard, in suggesting that Robespierre’s politics were as much about tactical awareness as they were about principle. The outward commitment to social justice which Robespierre displayed, Jaurès contended, may have been strategic and intended to distance himselffrom his political opponents. Today, Robespierre is far from being the heroic model for those who claim to be upholding the principles of 1789 or even 1792–4. As Jacques Julliard has argued in his recent study, Les Gauches Françaises, 1762–2012 (2013), there were two progressive traditions that arose from the rubble of the Old Regime: the puritanical moralism of Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue, and the modest liberal republicanism of Danton’s deuxième gauche. It is this latter tradition to which the majority of the Left in France now happily subscribe. The attitude of the Dantonists was encapsulated most colourfully by Marcel Debarge, national secretary of the Parti socialiste, who once said: ‘I like Danton because I have always had a weakness for the people who live, who screw, who know how to ally an idealist commitment to a sense of the realities. The visionary side of Robespierre sends shivers down my spine. Danton at least was not too much of a killer’.2 There has, then, been little love for the Advocate of Arras, who, the lack of evidence to the contrary suggests, was probably a virgin when he died, and who always remained ideologically constant to a certain idea of France.
However, Robespierre has not been without allies—though arguably their renderings of him have been equally monochrome in their unchecked admiration. Ardent Jacobin republicans of the late eighteenth century, such as Gracchus Babeuf, celebrated his concept of virtue and gave greater substance to his commitment to defending the poor with a more explicit and muscular egalitarianism. Later on, in the nineteenth century, Neo-Babouvists such as Albert Laponneraye valiantly championed Robespierre’s commitment to social justice and saw him as the paradigm for individual and political emulation.3 In the early 1830s, Laponneraye was responsible for promoting the political thought and action of Robespierre among the working class, focusing on what both saw as the despotism of inequality and the division of France into two camps: one of the prideful and rich; the other of work, misery, and virtue. But the nineteenth century, especially the 1830s, was a time when the pedagogic endeavours of Robespierrists served to land them in trouble—in Laponneraye’s case, this was time served in Sainte-Pélagie prison. Thus efforts to revive Robespierre’s name were perennially challenged by both conservative and moderate republican orders. In the twentieth century, tireless efforts to rehabilitate Robespierre came with far less jeopardy but no less difficulty. Historians such as Albert Mathiez helped give shape and intellectual content to a programme of revival by founding the Société des études robespierristes in 1907, while Georges Lefebvre set to work turning the Sorbonne intoa place of greater safety for the Montagnard. For Mathiez in particular, the Incorruptible was not only someone worthy of rehabilitation in his own right; he could also be pressed into political service, his Republic of Virtue calling attention to the moral turpitude of the Third Republic: ‘Is there any task more urgent’, Mathiez asked, ‘than to set against the republic of appeasement and compromise the republic of conviction and disinterest, against the pork-barrel republic the republic of principles?’4
Still, efforts to commemorate Robespierre in a more public manner— the naming of a street after him, the erection of a statue, or a plaque mounted on his house in Arras—were actively challenged. Right-wing historians, newspapers, and politicians continually blocked attempts to have Robespierre’s name inscribed upon the registers of memory, slowing the pace of rehabilitation (it took sixteen years of petitioning for a plaque to be installed on the wall of his former residence in Arras). Over time, however, the name ‘Robespierre’ came to adorn boulevards, streets, squares, and the occasional impasse, in towns such as Alès, Arras, Aubagne, Belfort, Brest, Saint-Dizier, Saint-Étienne, Marseille, and Quimper. There is also a metro station named after him in Montreuil near Paris.
Arguably, the biggest success of the robespierristes in protecting his memory has come in the last two years. At the end of April 2012, Sotheby’s auction house in Paris was scheduled to sell over 110 unpublished manuscripts of Robespierre’s writings, held previously by the descendants of his fellow revolutionary Joseph Le Bas. The following month, the Société des études robespierristes launched a national subscription to collect the necessary funds to keep the writings in public collections. The monies were raised, the papers purchased and placed in the Archives Nationales. Serge Aberdam and Cyril Triolaire, in considering the variety of subscribers, note in the Robespierre issue of the Annales a number of interesting trends that emerged from this fundraising. Firstly, most of the donations came from the Île-de-France and Paris regions, which aptly corresponds to the fact that Robespierre’s story was a distinctly Parisian affair (unlike many of his fellow Jacobins during the Revolution,5 he rarely ventured outside the capital and, so the evidence suggests, never beyond the Artois region). Secondly, most of the subscribers were old communist and republican militants in the 60/69-year-old age bracket. There were fewer than fifty people who came from the 20/29-year-old range, reflecting the lack of interest in Robespierre—who is usually absent from school history textbooks— and also suggesting, perhaps, that his language of virtue no longer provides the appropriate message to contend with this generation’s present discontents.
What are most interesting, however, are the letters sent back with the donations, because they reveal some of the reasons why a minority of people in France still find Robespierre a person worthy of commemoration and celebration. Many of the responses were shot through with a candid indignation both at the apathy with which the Republic responded to the sale of papers belonging to an important historical figure, and with the general state of economic, political, and social disrepair in France. Like their favourite Jacobin, contributors focused resentment on the deplorable gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, on the greedy, the proponents of capital, the irrepressible sway of the market over public affairs, and, in truly Robespierriste style, the spectre of wealthy and morally dishonest ‘fripons’.
Yet, while Robespierre is held up by many on the radical Left in France as the counter-example to a corrupt and corroded economic and political order, the two works under review show us someone with a decidedly attenuated radicalism. Robespierre’s thinking on the economy, for instance, was far more conservative than that of many of his peers. Nor was the central notion of virtue exclusive to his brand of politics; it was adopted by almost all in the vanguard of Jacobinism. At the same time, there is no conscious attempt on the part of the authors to underplay his determination to effect sweeping political, economic, and spiritual transformation in France. Instead, the impression that emerges from these essays is one that celebrates the sheer complexity of Robespierre and his ambitions. They draw out the tensions in his politics and persona rather than attempt to flatten them. To appreciate his subtle shades in this way is not wholly novel. Back in 1999, Colin Haydon and William Doyle oversaw the publication of a book that also sought to offer a nuanced perspective on the Incorruptible.6 This constituted one of the first attempts to remove some of the ideological overlay that had come to obscure Robespierre and to present a character freighted with a more complex political outlook. But this is not to detract from any of the scholarly verve and originality that defines each of the brilliant essays in both works under consideration here. Together, they constitute the latest attempt to bring into sharp relief the ideological breadth, and contradictions, of Robespierre’s thinking and political practice in the context of eighteenth-century France. Indeed, what we are presented with here is a man very much of his time, whose political beliefs had already begun to take significant shape before the Revolution.
As Hervé Leuwers reminds us in his chapter in Robespierre: Portraits croisés, even before the Revolution, while still a young lawyer in Arras.
https://www.paintingmydream.com/turn-photo-into-painting
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