Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution by Ruth Scurr Page B

several thousand victims of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, from its institution on 10 March 1793 until the fall of Maximilien Robespierre on 27 July 1794. He compiled some grimly fascinating statistics: in the last five months of Robespierre’s life, when he supposedly secured tyrannous power over France and the Revolution, 2,217 people were guillotined in Paris; but the total condemned to death in the eleven months preceding Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was only 399. On the basis of these statistics, Croker concluded that the executions “grew gradually with the personal influence of Robespierre, and became enormous in proportion as he successively extinguished his rivals.” 3 In awed horror he recalled, “These things happened in our time—thousands are still living who saw them, yet it seems almost incredible that batches ( fournées —such was the familiar phrase)—of sixty victims should be condemned in one morning by the same tribunal, and executed the same afternoon on the same scaffold.”
    Although Peel pressed his friend to write a popular and accessible book about the French Revolution, Croker never did so. When he got back from his holiday in 1835 he published his seaside musings in an article for the Quarterly Review . Here he acknowledged the enormity of the problem Robespierre still poses biographers: “The blood-red mist by which his last years were enveloped magnified his form, but obscured his features. Like the Genius of the Arabian tale, he emerged suddenly from a petty space into enormous power and gigantic size, and as suddenly vanished, leaving behind him no trace but terror.” 4

Part I

Before the Revolution
    (1758–1788)

Part II

The Revolution Begins
    (1788–1789)

Part III

Reconstituting France
    (1789–1791)

Part IV

The Constitution Fails
    (1791–1792)

Part V

The Terror
    (1793–1794)

Coda
    A few days later, in England, the poet William Wordsworth was crossing Morecambe Bay after visiting the grave of his former school-teacher. Like his compatriot the agronomist Arthur Young, Wordsworth had traveled in France on the eve of the Revolution, and he, too, had been to Arras in 1789:
    I paced, a dear companion at my side,
    The town of Arras, whence with promise high
    Issued, on delegation to sustain
    Humanity and right, “that” Robespierre,
    He who thereafter, and in how short a time!
    Wielded the sceptre of the Atheist crew.
    Wordsworth resented that memory of joy and hope in the streets of Arras. It seemed to mock him in the wake of all the horror and bloodshed that the Revolution brought with it. Wordsworth had seen some of it for himself. He was there at the Convention watching in 1792 when Louvet rose before the tribune and said, “Yes, Robespierre, it is I who accuse you!” He wrote about it afterward, and about the storming of the Tuileries palace, the royal prisoners in the Tower, the September Massacres, the war, and the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is all in Book 10 of The Prelude . It was in Morecambe Bay that he heard the news of Robespierre’s death:
    As I advanced, all that I saw or felt
    Was gentleness and peace. Upon a small
    And rocky island near, a fragment stood
    (Itself like a sea rock) the low remains
    (With shells encrusted, dark with briny weeds)
    Of a dilapidated structure, once
    A Romish chapel, where the vested priest
    Said matins at the hour that suited those
    Who crossed the sands with ebb of morning tide.
    Not far from that still ruin in the plain
    Lay spotted with a variegated crowd
    Of vehicles and travellers, horse and foot,
    Wading beneath the conduct of their guide
    In loose procession through the shallow stream
    Of inland waters; the great sea meanwhile
    Heaved at a safe distance, far retired. I paused,
    Longing for skill to paint a scene so bright
    And cheerful, but the foremost of the band
    As he approached, no salutation given
    In the familiar language of the day,
    Cried, “Robespierre is dead!”
    Wordsworth uttered a hymn to