- Scurr, Ruth.
Fatal Purity.
London: Vintage Books, 2006.
ISBN 0-09-945898-5.
-
In May 1791, Maximilien Robespierre, not long before an obscure
provincial lawyer from Arras in northern France,
elected to the Estates General convened by Louis XVI in
1789, spoke before what had by then reconstituted itself as
the National Assembly, engaged in debating the penal code
for the new Constitution of France.
Before the Assembly were a number of proposals by a certain
Dr. Guillotin, among which the second was, “In all cases
of capital punishment (whatever the crime), it shall be of
the same kind—i.e. beheading—and it shall be
executed by means of a machine.” Robespierre argued
passionately against all forms of capital punishment: “A
conqueror that butchers his captives is called barbaric. Someone
who butchers a perverse child that he could disarm and punish
seems monstrous.” (pp. 133–136)
Just two years later, Robespierre had become synonymous not only with
the French Revolution but with the Terror it had spawned. Either at
his direction, with his sanction, or under the summary arrest and
execution without trial or appeal which he advocated, the guillotine
claimed more than 2200 lives in Paris alone, 1376 between June 10th
and July 27th of 1793, when Robespierre's power abruptly ended, along
with the Terror, with his own date with the guillotine.
How did a mild-mannered provincial lawyer who defended the indigent
and disadvantaged, amused himself by writing poetry, studied
philosophy, and was universally deemed, even by his sworn enemies, to
merit his sobriquet, “The Incorruptible”, become
an archetypal monster of the modern age, a symbol of the
darkness beneath the Enlightenment?
This lucidly written, well-argued, and meticulously documented
book traces Robespierre's life from birth through downfall and
execution at just age 36, and places his life in the context
of the upheavals which shook France and to which, in his last
few years, he contributed mightily. The author shows the direct
link between Rousseau's philosophy, Robespierre's
inflexible, whatever-the-cost commitment to implementing
it, and its horrific consequences for France. Too many
people forget that it was Rousseau who wrote in
The Social Contract,
“Now, as citizen, no man is judge any longer of the
danger to which the law requires him to expose himself, and
when the prince says to him: ‘It is expedient for the state
that you should die’, then he should die…”.
Seen in this light, the madness of Robespierre's reign is not
the work of a madman, but of a rigorously rational application
of a profoundly anti-human system of beliefs which some people
persist in taking seriously even today.
A U.S. edition is available.
May 2007 