Stand and Deliver, Against All Odds

One of the most maligned figures in all of modern history also happens to be one of my greatest heroes when it comes to standing for what he believed, against all adversity, right to the end. The guy pictured above was so passionate about what he believed, so unbending in his principles that it tragically cost him his life at the age of 36.

Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a French lawyer and statesman by trade who is best-known as one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution. As a member of the Constituent Assembly and the Jacobin Club, he campaigned for universal suffrage and the abolition both of celibacy for the clergy and slavery. In the textbook history of the French Revolution that one reads today, however, Robespierre is portrayed as a fanatic and megalomaniac dictator, and is blamed for the Great Terror that sent approximately 17,000 people to the guillotine in the six weeks preceding his own death in the same manner. His legacy, regrettably, is that he embodied all that was evil during the French Revolution.

Robespierre was primarily a man of words, in a time when eloquence was a political act, when speeches could actually change the opinion of politicians, and sometimes even win over a whole assembly. He was a great writer as well as a great orator. Not even his enemies doubted the sincerity of his passionate defense of the poor and downtrodden. His speeches, delivered at the Jacobin Club or at the Convention, were printed and widely distributed, and had a huge following all over France. He was a well-respected advocate of the common man.

In the spring of 1793, he reluctantly joined the Committee of Public Safety, a revolutionary tribunal responsible for sending conspirators against the new Republic to their death, at a time when the Republic was at war against Austria, Prussia, Spain and England. Robespierre’s responsibility in the Great Terror that marked the last two months of the Committee continues to be a hotly debated subject, but it is admitted that he was absent from Committee meetings, probably sick, during its last six weeks of existence.

In his final speech to the Convention, just before being shot, arrested, and decapitated, Robespierre denounced the plot to get rid of him by spilling blood on his behalf. He claimed that his enemies, in order to rally enough politicians against him, had circulated fake lists of suspects allegedly written by himself, and spread the rumor that he was preparing a major purge, when in fact he wanted to end the Terror. Even Napoleon Bonaparte later confirmed this accusation, and believed that “Robespierre was the real scapegoat for the Revolution.” Robespierre’s enemies “covered him, for forty days, with the blood they shed to disgrace him.” 

The point I wish to make here is that his evil portrayal is completely the product of an elaborate and massive propaganda campaign by those who overthrew him. There are many parallels here with the propaganda campaign by the deep state/mass media that we see as fake news against President Trump. It is unfortunate that the caricature of Robespierre as a despicable monster made by his comrades and successors to evade their own opprobrium has proven durable. Let us hope that the opprobrium of the dark players in today's political fray land them all behind bars.

When one measures the man by his writings instead of his misapportioned legacy one essentially finds the French version of America's own Thomas Jefferson. Robespierre was the heir and probably the most articulate advocate of a long tradition of thinkers who equally disliked religious dogmatism and atheism, not only as too narrow for their own minds, but as harmful to society. In his view, both were symmetrical forms of fanaticism. His beliefs would make him an enemy of both the Catholic Church and Atheists.

Jefferson once wrote to John Adams: “Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god.” Modern atheism is, to a great extent, a reaction to the disgusting character presented as “God” in the Old Testament... or as Darwinian high-priest Richard Dawkins so aptly phrased, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Only six weeks before his execution, Robespierre attacked the Church fathers with: “I know of nothing so close to atheism as the religion that [the priests] have made: by disfiguring the Supreme Being, they have destroyed him as much as it was in them; […] the priests created a god in their image; they made him jealous, temperamental, greedy, cruel, relentless.”

Today’s French traditionalist Catholics insist that Robespierre’s idea of a Supreme Being had nothing to do with the God of the Catholic Church, pretending that it has Freemasonic overtones. They even confuse it with the deification of Reason, a cult that Robespierre fought against. There is no evidence that Robespierre was ever a Freemason. He borrowed the expression Supreme Being from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he admired greatly, who never was a Freemason either. The phrase had been used since the Renaissance and was of common usage.There is no reason to consider that, in Robespierre’s speeches, Supreme Being meant anything other than God. His suggestion to engrave in the Constitution that the French people have “faith in the Supreme Being” was seen as an outrage by the Church fathers.

Robespierre castigated the irreligion that prevailed in the aristocracy and the high clergy with his oration. A gap had widened between the clerical hierarchy and the country priests. Among the latter, many were responsible for drafting the peasants’ grievance books. The high clergy claimed that the Revolution was “started by the bad priests.” For Robespierre, they were the “good priests” whom the people of the countryside followed and needed.

Robespierre was inflexible against the priests who submitted to the pope by refusing to take an oath on the Civil Constitution. But he also opposed, until his last breath, any plan to abolish the funds allocated to Catholic worship under the same Civil Constitution. He also opposed, but in vain, the new Republican calendar, with its ten-day week aimed at “suppressing Sunday.”

Robespierre’s worst enemies weren't the Church high priests, but the militant atheists, who unleashed the movement for dechristianization in 1793, and started closing the churches in Paris or transforming them into “Temples of Reason”, with the slogan “death is an eternal sleep” posted on the gates of cemeteries. Robespierre condemned “those men who have no other merit than that of adorning themselves with an anti-religious zeal,” and who “throw trouble and discord among us”.

Robespierre castigated the grotesque cults of Reason instituted in churches by atheist fanatics: “By what right do they come to disturb the freedom of worship, in the name of freedom, and attack fanaticism with a new fanaticism? By what right do they degenerate the solemn tributes paid to pure truth, in eternal and ridiculous pranks? Why should they be allowed to play with the dignity of the people in this way, and to tie the bells of madness to the very scepter of philosophy?”

“There are men who, on the pretext of destroying superstition, want to make a kind of religion of atheism itself. Any philosopher, any individual can adopt whatever religious opinion he likes. Anyone who wants to make it a crime is a fool; but the public figure, but the legislator would be a hundred times more foolish who would adopt such a system. The National Convention abhors it. The Convention is not a book writer, an author of metaphysical systems, it is a political and popular body, responsible for ensuring respect, not only for the rights, but for the character of the French people. 

 

Furthermore, in a defensive yet disarming remark, Robespierre said that, “It may be said that I am a narrow mind, a man of prejudice; what do I know, a fanatic. I have already said that I speak neither as an individual nor as a systematic philosopher, but as a representative of the people. Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a Great Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime, is popular. This feeling is engraved in all sensitive and pure hearts; it always animates the most magnanimous defenders of freedom. I repeat: we have no other fanaticism to fear than that of immoral men, bribed by foreign courts to awaken fanaticism, and to give our revolution the veneer of immorality, which is the character of our cowardly and fierce enemies.”

Robespierre’s religious policy weighed heavily on the motivations of those who plotted against him and saw to his execution. They even accused him of aspiring to the office of the Pontiff itself. On the day before his death, July 28, 1794, at age 36, Robespierre made one final principled appeal to the people of France that he stood by so passionately to the end: “O Frenchmen! O my countrymen! Let not your enemies, with their desolating doctrines, degrade your souls, and enervate your virtues! No, Chaumette, no! Death is not ‘an eternal sleep!’ Citizens! Erase from the tomb that motto, engraved by sacrilegious hands, which spreads over all nature a funeral crape, takes from oppressed innocence its support, and affronts the beneficent dispensation of death! Inscribe rather thereon these words: ‘Death is the commencement of immortality!’”

Robespierre's immortality is surely enshrined. Where do we find men of such resolve today? I look no further than the patriots leading America's Second Revolution in these critical days. Robespierre would have fit in well with this group.

Adapted from the writings of Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D, in UNZ Review, April 5, 2020