I begin with a confession. Despite the historical memory we have inherited of this disdained and much-maligned man, with all the negative associations that go along with him: a petty, puritanical character (that could verge at times into envy and vengeance), an uncompromising revolutionary zeal that did not even spare his closest friends, ostensibly tyrannical leadership, and his undoubted involvement in the excesses of the French Revolutionary Terror, I love Maximilien Robespierre. Now, it is true that his history is more complex and nuanced than the loathsome caricatures popularly presented in the West, but my admiration for him will tend to somewhat optimistic judgements where others would see only darkness. So, accordingly, please excuse any bias that follows in this article.
Robespierre is a polarising historical figure. For some, his fame arises as a champion of the underdog, an ardent defender of the rights of the downtrodden; for others, he is the infamous instigator of a government that presided over the execution of tens of thousands. For our purposes, he is not simply a politician but stands as a model of all that can go right or wrong with classical education. For better or worse, Robespierre embodied classical learning – one of the last generations in Europe to do so before the educational revolution of the 19th-20th centuries – and so this post-mortem can help reveal something of what went wrong with this pedagogical model when it did.
Born to an erstwhile but rather hopeless lawyer and his wife (a brewer’s daughter who died when the boy was six) in mid-18th century Arras (a charming Flemish city in northern France), Maximilien Robespierre is a man of his time. Although his background was firmly middle-class, the family was poor. Fortunately, he was able to receive a first-rate education (on scholarship) at the famed Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand in Paris. (As a quirk of history, the young student Robespierre gave the welcome oration to the newly crowned Louis XVI as his carriage drove by in the pouring rain of 1775, the very monarch he would one day have a hand not only in dethroning but beheading!) At school, Robespierre learned the typical classical curriculum, becoming soaked in the values, history and great persons of Ancient Greece and Rome; he especially enjoyed rhetoric and worked to emulate speeches by Cicero and Cato, for which he was awarded first prize in public speaking in 1776. It was at this time that Robespierre encountered Rousseau, whose influence on him would be phenomenal, while also distancing himself from his Catholic upbringing. Upon graduating, he followed the typical bourgeois path of the time and became a lawyer. The cases he took were, however, were noteworthy in that they often featured some defence of the poor and marginalised against institutionalised injustice.
When the Estates General was convened in Versailles in 1789, Robespierre stood as a deputy for the Third Estate (the Commons). Over the course of the following two years, he gained a reputation for speaking his mind, defending the principles of just and equal government, and exhibiting unimpeachable virtue when other deputies were more prone to corruption (for which he gained the moniker “the Incorruptible”). At first, he opposed the war with Austria and Prussia (which would later be expanded to encompass most of Europe) that was looming in 1792, only to then embrace it as a revolutionary crusade that would free other states from the despotism of kings. His role in the Convention (elected 1793) was significant: not only was Robespierre a pivotal player in removing and executing Louis XVI but he also helped the radical Jacobins to come to the ascendancy and led the Committee of Public Safety (the de facto government at the time), during which the Terror occurred. By mid-1794, Robespierre had become sidelined and the principal target of several factions within the Convention and government that identified him as a threat. He and his associates were declared dictators and traitors, found guilty before the Revolutionary Tribunal and then beheaded during the Thermidorian Reaction of July 1794. His memory since has mostly been a tarnished one.
A brief biography could never truly demonstrate the influence classical learning had on Robespierre. This is shown more clearly in some of the ideas presented through his speeches, though perhaps more impactful is realising the classical air that he breathed living in the 18th century. We often think of Renaissance Italy as the period that re-lived the classical past through its art, literature and discourse. However, France in the 1700s was similarly swimming this sea. One need only look to the work of some of the philosophes (French Enlightenment philosophers) to see this. Montesquieu, famous for his The Spirit of the Law (1748) also wrote a history on Ancient Rome (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, 1734). The Abbé Mably, remembered today primarily for his economic thought, wrote works on the histories and politics of Ancient Greece and Rome. In the art world, Jacques-Louis David was stunning crowds with paintings like the Oath of the Horatii (1784) and the Death of Socrates (1787). Incidentally, he was a close friend and supporter of Robespierre’s (having helped design the latter’s Festival of the Supreme Being) and, in true classical fashion, shouted upon Robespierre’s arrest: “If you drink hemlock, I shall drink it with you!” (which, fortunately for art lovers, he managed to avoid). As a final example, the cameo above shows the “patriotic triumvirate” of Robespierre, Pétion and Roederer, garbed in togas and wreaths, in clear imitation of the more famous triad of first century BC Rome.
Robespierre frequently sourced the classical past in drawing parallels with his own situation. In a speech against the death penalty in June 1791, he uses on the example of the Ancient Athenians to argue capital punishment’s inhumanity in violating natural law: “The news having been brought to Athens that citizens had been condemned to death in the city of Argos, people ran to the temples, where the gods were called upon to turn Athenians away from such cruel and dire thoughts. I come to ask, not the gods, but legislators — who should be the organs and the interpreters of the eternal laws that the divinity dictated to men — to erase from the code of the French the blood laws that command judicial murders, and that their morals and their new constitution reject.”
Likewise, in a speech on political morality he delivered to the Convention in February 1794, Robespierre defers to his classical education for the foundation and promotion of civic virtue and equality, qualities that must be engendered in people for governmental, social and individual flourishing. He states: “Now, what is the fundamental principle of popular or democratic government, that is to say, the essential mainspring which sustains it and makes it move? It is virtue. I speak of the public virtue which worked so many wonders in Greece and Rome and which ought to produce even more astonishing things in republican France – that virtue which is nothing other than the love of the nation and its laws… Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, and since your goal is to found, to consolidate the Republic, it follows that the first rule of your political conduct ought to be to relate all your efforts to maintaining equality and developing virtue; because the first care of the legislator ought to be to fortify the principle of the government. Thus everything that tends to excite love of country, to purify morals, to elevate souls, to direct the passions of the human heart toward the public interest ought to be adopted or established by you.”
Against cultural relativists (then and now), this lawyer from Arras recognised that the maintenance of societal and individual virtue, love of the patrie and a providential sense of mission that he believed underpinned the Revolution, required belief in God. He could join hands with the framers of the Declaration of Independence when he asserted: “The Author of Nature has bound all mortals by a boundless chain of love and happiness. Perish the tyrants who have dared to break it!” The Supreme Being – whose cult Robespierre would inaugurate in June 1794 – assured that morality was grounded, that justice ultimately triumphed and that the poor, whose lot was often pathetic in this life, would find eternal solace. For him, “atheism is aristocratic, whereas belief in a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes the crimes of the oppressor is popular”. Thus, in reply to the de-Christianisers in France, who profaned cemeteries and turned churches into temples of reason, Robespierre could only offer this incisive reply: “O Frenchmen! O my countrymen! Let not your enemies, with their desolating doctrines, degrade your souls, and enervate your virtues!... Death is not ‘an eternal sleep’!... Inscribe rather thereon these words: ‘Death is the commencement of immortality!’”
It is at this point when talking of death that we must sober our praise of Robespierre. It cannot – this ugly truth! – be avoided: he was an integral part of the government and police system that executed thousands of people, many likely innocent, during the months of 1793-1794. Blaming him solely or even chiefly for this is ludicrous but exonerating him completely is also folly. Instead, it is here where Robespierre’s lack of a complete education makes it mark. To re-purpose some fine words from Pope St John Paul II, a classical education elevates the human spirit towards truth when it flies on the two wings of faith and reason. Now, in the Western tradition, reason can best be seen in the thinking of Ancient Greece and Rome, and Robespierre accepted and incorporated these graces into his life. Unfortunately, these pagan virtues “such as justice and temperance, are the sad virtues”: they are as hard and unrelenting as the centurions’ swords that conquered much of the Mediterranean world; alone they lack “the mystical virtues of faith, hope, and charity” which are “gay and exuberant virtues” and lighten the spirit (Chesterton, Heretics). This “harsh reality” – such a common expression in the modern world – is evident in one of Robespierre’s most famous speeches: “If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time [both] virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most pressing needs.” Thus, terror by the government takes the role of the angel of death meting out justice severely and implacably. He said, on another occasion: “To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”
The tragedy of Robespierre and other figures of his time (and since) betrays the failure of incomplete classical learning in missing the synthesis of reason and faith: of Greco-Roman philosophy and the truths of the Judeo-Christian religion (or, indeed, Islam in other areas). A half-finished building of these foundations causes the temple of liberal learning to teeter and eventually collapse like a stool missing one of its legs. Why is this a problem? Because the goods of classical education can do as much damage as the deficiencies. As Chesterton remarked: “The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
And so, Robespierre, who rejected the Judeo-Christian faith, could not mingle pity, mercy and love of neighbour with his passion for vertu, truth and justice. Jesus was a heroic sans-culottes but not the God-man, not the saviour who removes our sin and renews the world: instead, politics (and ultimately the Revolution) is the only saviour and there is no forgiveness for sin. Additionally, truth became more and more wedded to partisan politics (in Robespierre’s time and our own), so that all that remains for political sinners is death (and not even an atoning one). We see a similar lack of charity and forgiveness in our own contemporary political arena, though we are more cynical today having lived to witness the senseless dreams of political utopia in the Soviet Union and other places. Of course, just like nature, supernature abhors a vacuum, and Robespierre adopted Rousseau as his Messiah, whose deleterious influence on educational philosophy need not be elaborated upon here.
As I began this article, I have a deep respect for Robespierre. However, it is not a blinded one: I can hopefully recognise and point out the best and worst parts of his personality and the role he played in French history. Classical education too shares this burden. We should not be starry-eyed about the triumphs of this pedagogical model without acknowledging its limitations and the mistakes made by those who applied it in the past. If educators are to reap the benefits of classical learning, we must always be open to humility, criticism and marry together the reason and faith, human and divine, aspects of classical learning. Let us end, then, with some words of Robespierre we can all agree on and heed as sound advice: “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
