J. M. Thompson (1) (1878–1956)

"Every citizen," he therefore declared, "has an equal claim to representation, whoever he may be. Sovereignity resides in the people - that is, it is distributed among all the individuals composing the people"; and it follows that every citizen has the right to vote - to exercise his part of the sovereignity. The case for manhood suffrage could not be more cogently put; and if the speaker has only added the word citoyennes to his citoyens, he would have been not only three years in advance of the Revolution, which did not abolish the property qualification (and then only on paper) until 1793, but also much more than half a century ahead of France, in which manhood suffrage was first achieved by the revolution of 1848, and in which women are still without the vote.

If the judges need not be lawyers, it is because the law which they have to administer is not, like ours, a formless congeries of legal precedents, but a neatly printed book of rules. Or, if the appointment of jurymen demands elaborate safeguards, it is because they are regarded, not as typical 'men in the street', who will be conducted by considerate counsel along familiar routes of evidence, and directed by an impartial judge at the ultimate cross-roads, but as the audience at a debate, the spectators of a drama, the referees in a judicial contest, where no evidence will be excluded, and no methods left untried, to cheat or bully them into a verdict. They must therefore, even for ordinary purposes, he specially picked men, professional experts in human nature, and, for political trials, staunch supporters of the government of the day, whose duty and right it is to secure a conviction.

The fall of the Gironde, then, was more than the defeat of a political party. It may not unfairly be said to have 'saved the Republic' - saved it from a system of government which could never win the war, from an economic policy which was helpless in the face of the problems that the war had created, and from an unnatural and dangerous disunion between the capital and the country. The situation urgently required what the Girondins could never give - centralised and simplified control - a small despotic Committee, supervising all the activities of government, legislating through a subservient Assembly, and enforcing its will by an army of travelling representatives. The Jacobins alone had the courage to face this need, and to provide an organisation through which it could be met. They alone controlled the necessary driving force - the support of Paris, and of the 'people'. So Paris saved France by destroying the Gironde.

[...] The writings of the Girondist Dispersion make melancholy reading, not only for the story they tell of suffering and persecution, but also for the evidence they afford of the pettiness, bitterness, and incompetence of their authors. The sympathy which has been so freely lavished on them has been partly due, so far as French historians are concerned, to passing reactions against Jacobinism, and to a desire to find precedents for nineteenth century Liberalism; and partly, among English writers, to a chibalrous and sentimental regard for fallen greatness. Too little attention has been paid to the actual character and services of the two parties.

Desmoulins only had his clever and spiteful pen to blame for his fall. He was untrustworthy through and through. Even his penitence was a pretence. When he was arrested, two months later, there were found, among his papers, the uncorrected proofs of a 7th number of the Vieux Cordelier. In it he attacked Robespierre's doctrine that the Republic should be founded on virtue - 'If all the citizens are virtuous, what need is there of a Republic?' - and asserted that, even if the Committee were composed of the wisest and best statesmen in the world, it could not expect to go uncriticised. [...] Accident and interest, not sympathy of mind, had brought Robespierre and Desmoulins together. One now stood for the government - what he regarded as the national government - of his country; the other was deliberately setting himself in opposition, at a time when the overthrow of the Committee was likely to lead to anarchy and disaster. It would be surprising if, under the circumstances, Robespierre has acted otherwise. ...But who would not like him better, if he had?

Somehow and somewhere, he feels, there must be a natural law that is just and permanent, because all known human laws are unjust and unstable. There must be some human rights, because there are so many human wrongs. To Rousseau the poet, to Robespierre the prophet, that is argument enough. What, again, of the character of these rights? Why liberty, why equality, why (although by now he has forgotten it) fraternity? Perhaps because eighteenth century France has suffered so long from arbitrary government, political inequality, and class war? Perhaps because, in the Paris Robespierre knew, the prosperous middle class preserved towards the poor the same attitude of disdain that they had previously resented in the aristocracy? So far as this was so, Robespierre's Declaration is not a treatise on the theory of the State, but a political programme - as Parisian as the Contrat Social was Genevan, or Plato's Republic, for all its greater scope, Athenian. But no doubt it is by condescending to local conditions that truth, like goodness, saves the world.

The Revolution, too, might well seem to have aged prematurely. Into five years the French people had crowded the experiences of two centuries. They had passed from a seventeenth century absolutism of king, church, and nobility, into a nineteenth century constitutional monarchy controlled by the middle classes; and from that to the dictatorship of a political party whose methods have become a model for the twentieth century. They had known civil war and foreign invasion, famine and unemployment. The national administration had at one time been left to the vagaries of local opinion, and at another dragooned by every resource of a centralised bureaucracy. The army had been broken in pieces, and reorganised; the church split into two parts - one powerless and the other persecuted; society from top to bottom had been overturned, wealth redistributed, and the very geography of the countryside, with the memories and habits of centuries, rearranged.

There is little that is fresh and constructive in this eloquent but rambling discourse - a cento of ideas from a hundred previous speeches. It does not suggest that Robespierre has learnt much, in five years of Revolution, except to hate and to suspect. It offers little hope that, if his life is prolonged, he has any policy to lift the country out of the rut of 'virtue by intimidation'. It has been held that he wished to end the Terror, and to inaugurate a voluntary Reign of Virtue. Perhaps; but there is not sign of it here. The Committee is to go on - without the embarrassment of a rival body. The Tribunal is to remain - without any lessening of its powers. The Provisional Government is to continue. There is no mention of a Constitution. Robespierre is not a dictator, but the government of which he is the figurehead is nothing if not dictatorial. [...] There is a programme; yet it is that of a government which has no policy save to increase the doses of a medicine that has already failed.

Since Thompson, other biographers have been attracted to Robespierre. At root, the attraction of this subject is not so much the evidently dominant role he played in Revolution, as the mysterious quality which, all biographers agree, is to be found in a man who revealed so little of himself and yet personified (or 'impersonated' as Thompson has it) the Revolution to so many contemporaries and to subsequent generations. He personified it to such a degree that he appears to contain within himself all the contradictions of an event that was simultaneously libertarian and tyrannical, lofty and base, idealistic and pragmatic. To an unusual degree, therefore, Robespierre imposes upon his biographers a resolution of their own attitude to the Revolution and some kind of selection of what they deem to be its most significant characteristics (whether positive or negative), which they will discover in Robespierre. Biographies of Robespierre diverge widely despite the common ground of documentary material.