Grassland Sailor

And not just anyone. People who actually know the subject.

So this is not some random person online (me, for instance) telling you what “Robespierreist” is. It is a group of some of the best specialists on the question, all of whom have recent work on Robespierre:

Hervé Leuwers is a historian of the French Revolution and of the history of justice. He is associated with the University of Lille and has been president of the Société des études robespierristes. He wrote, in my opinion, the best recent biography of Robespierre.

Another favourite of mine, though mostly for his work on the Vendée (3), is Jean-Clément Martin. He is Professor Emeritus at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and former director of the Institut d’Histoire de la Révolution française. His biography of Robespierre also looks at the making of his mythology, and at the Thermidorian contribution to that useful little operation.

Peter McPhee is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne and one of the major English-language historians of modern France and the French Revolution. For anyone interested in Robespierre who cannot read French, I cannot recommend Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life enough.

Marisa Linton is Professor Emerita in History at Kingston University. Her work covers the French Revolution, eighteenth-century political culture, virtue, friendship, authenticity, conspiracy, and Jacobin politics. Her book Choosing Terror is one of the most humanising studies of the Jacobins, and a very good account of how revolutionary friendship, trust, fear, and factional suspicion shaped political choices.

Marc Belissa and Yannick Bosc are presented as specialists on the construction of the black legend of Robespierre. Marc Belissa is a French historian of the modern period, now maître de conférences émérite at Université Paris Nanterre. His work focuses on international relations, Enlightenment political culture, the French Revolution, republicanism, and representations of Europe in the eighteenth century. Yannick Bosc is maître de conférences in modern and Revolutionary history at the University of Rouen Normandie. His research deals with the French Revolution, republicanism, natural law, republican political economy, property, the commons, and historiography.

Marion Pouffary is a historian of modern and contemporary history, associated with the Centre d’histoire du XIXe siècle. Her thesis studied Robespierre’s image in political discourse from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century, and her book Robespierre, monstre ou héros ? examines the black and golden legends around him.

Last but not least, Nicolas Soulas organises and questions the exchange. He has worked on political, social, urban, family, and cultural history in the later early modern period and the French Revolution, with a particular interest in politicisation, border spaces, and the Payan family.

As I said, this is not really an article as such. It is closer to an interview, where seven specialists answer seven questions.

So… are you a robespierriste?

This is probably the least interesting point in the article for anyone who has read quite bit about the French Revolution, and a foundational one for anyone just starting to learn about Robespierre. What was robespierrisme? Who were the robespierristes?

Both the article and this random person on the internet (me) will give you the same unsatisfying answer: it depends who used the word, when, against whom, and for what purpose.

Robespierrisme was not, despite how it sounds, Robespierre’s political system. Robespierre had plenty of political beliefs (respect for rights, popular sovereignty, support for male universal suffrage, public virtue, suspicion of executive power, and so on)  which others certainly shared and defended. But these were not labelled robespierrisme during his lifetime. In fact, the word had a few rare polemical appearances before Thermidor (4), but it only really spread after Robespierre’s fall, when it became tied to Tallien’s “system of terror”.  From there, it is extended to the exceptional policies of Year II (5). Thirty years later, in the 1830s and 1840s, admirers of Robespierre give the word a positive meaning, treating it as a democratic or revolutionary inheritance.

The word robespierristes is even more loaded. From the summer of 1794, it was used to stigmatise people as supposed partisans of Robespierre, initially linked to the 108 supposed “accomplices” executed after him. The Thermidorian fanfiction imagines that Robespierre had placed his people ( the robespierristes) in strategic posts and built a dictatorship. 

That said, if you had walked down the street in May 1794, met the man, and told him you were a robespierriste, he would probably have looked at you with a very blank expression. Nobody openly called themselves robespierriste while Robespierre was alive. That self-identification appears much later, especially among nineteenth-century left-wing militants. Before Thermidor, the people later labelled robespierristes would have called themselves Montagnards (6), Jacobins (7), patriots, or republicans (8). Not robespierristes.

That said, Belissa and Bosc make a very good point in the article: although robespierrisme did not exist as a self-conscious doctrine, there was a shared Montagnard political culture. For them, this included democratic control of legislative and executive power, plus an economy regulated by the natural right to existence. In the early Directoire (9), robespierrisme could then come to mean the republicanism of Year II, especially for the left, once former Montagnards who accepted the new regime were cut off from that inheritance.

In the same vein, both McPhee and Leuwers accept that Robespierre had a recognisable republican political philosophy, and that this philosophy had supporters. So, for them, there is no stable Robespierrist doctrine, but there is a Robespierrean democratic orientation.

Jean-Clément Martin makes what is, in my opinion, perhaps the most interesting point, when he discusses robespierriste through the lens of historiographical discourse. As with the others, for him, robespierriste is born from a Thermidorian political operation, like terroriste. It is arbitrary and retrospective. While he accepts that there were people politically close to Robespierre, he rejects the idea that the word is useful as a neutral historical category. More than that, he argues that using it as a scientific category risks accepting Tallien’s (10)  framing of the Revolution.

Wait, what? Robespierre had supporters?

First, let’s clear up one thing that may surprise anyone who has only read biased accounts of Robespierre as a dictator: Robespierre had supporters, friends, people who liked him, people he liked in return. He had a whole network around him. They were not his minions.

Leuwers puts it best when he points out that Robespierre was never isolated. He had successive political companionships with Pétion, Buzot, Coroller, Dubois-Crancé, Billaud-Varenne, Desmoulins, and later the emerging Montagne. These alliances evolved, changed, and, in some cases, ruptured over time. Even by spring 1794, after the fall of Hébert and Danton, Robespierre still had many supporters among the Jacobins, the Paris municipality, the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the departments. Lists of “patriots” found among his papers include more than one hundred names, among them Herman, Dumas, Buchot, Payan, and Jullien. Martin and McPhee expand on this point by making clear that the pool of Robespierre’s supporters was fairly large and heterogeneous.

Linton gives a richer account of how personal connections and trust shaped his work within the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security (11). The most interesting point she makes is that ideology alone does not explain loyalty or rupture among the members of the Committee of Public Safety.

In short, she argues that people within the Committee could sometimes agree on certain issues while distrusting each other, and, conversely, they could disagree on things while still remaining friends. She cautions against equating political alignment with personal relationships. She uses Saint-Just and his undelivered speech of 9 Thermidor to show this. 

Saint-Just carefully avoids identifying himself as a political supporter of Robespierre, and chooses instead to defend him as a friend. She also points out that Saint-Just would not have been chosen to give the speech in the first place if the other members of the Committee of Public Safety had seen him as a “robespierriste”.She suggests that, in the final weeks, a gap had opened between Saint-Just and Robespierre and yet Saint-Just still tried to defend him. It was his decision to defend Robespierre without submitting the report to the committees that made him “robespierriste” in the eyes of Thermidor and posterity, not the other way around.

So what were the supporters called?

We have established that Robespierre’s supporters, during his lifetime, would not have called themselves robespierristes. And it makes sense. Doing so would have amounted to social suicide, even before Thermidor.

Belissa and Bosc explain that labels such as Rolandins, Brissotins, Dantonistes, Hébertistes, and later Robespierristes were usually terms used for enemies. In a political culture where “faction” was dishonourable, nobody wanted to define themselves as the client of one man.

Marisa Linton further stresses that being labelled someone’s follower was dangerous, because republican legitimacy was supposed to come from loyalty to the people and the public good, not from personal patronage. What actually existed around Robespierre, she argues, were networks of friendship, trust, and emotional confidence, rather than a disciplined ideological school.

There was a name for his supporters, but it was meant to mock them: Robespierrots. It was designed to ridicule Robespierre himself by associating him with the theatrical figure of Pierrot. (12)

In Year II, the more common terms for Robespierre and those close to his politics were Jacobins and Montagnards. McPhee says that Robespierre himself thought in terms of patriots, people, Jacobins, and Montagnards, and would probably have been horrified by robespierriste.

The weaponisation of “robespierriste”

As mentioned before, being part of a faction was bad, and it had already been used as an accusation. The Thermidorians did not invent the concept. What they did was apply their propaganda machine and turn “robespierriste” into a weapon of post-Thermidorian purification.

Martin points out that immediately after 9 Thermidor, the concept of “robespierriste” did not yet exist. For roughly a month, letters to the Convention still mixed praise and condemnation of Robespierre. This confusion came from slow circulation of information and censorship. Then the term spread through pamphlets and newspapers, especially alongside “terroriste”. It became a tool for constructing a supposed “faction robespierriste”, even appearing in a decree of 30 Frimaire Year III concerning Fouquier-Tinville, Pache, Bouchotte, and their alleged accomplices.

McPhee highlights how hundreds were arrested or judged as Robespierre’s supposed accomplices, sometimes on very thin evidence. Robespierre and his allies were quickly described as tyrants, conspirators against liberty, enemies of the Republic, or promoters of a “system of Robespierre”. The terms “robespierriste” and “terroriste” became interchangeable in local purges.

Both McPhee and Leuwers show that the label sat inside a broader vocabulary of conspiracy, dictatorship, and cruelty: “drinkers of blood”, “knights of the guillotine”, “knights of the cemetery”, “Cromwell”, “Mahomet”, “theocrat”, “murderous intriguer”. It went so far that, retrospectively and rather dishonestly, men who had fought each other in Year II, Danton, Hébert, Robespierre, Carrier, Fouquier-Tinville, and others, were grouped together as members of one murderous club.

Belissa and Bosc agree that “robespierrisme” and “jacobinisme” were at once counter-revolutionary inventions, Thermidorian political categories, and later historiographical categories. According to them, in Fructidor, “robespierrisme” and “robespierriste” emerge as elastic non-categories, whose boundaries expand or contract according to political need. Under Year III and the Directoire, almost any militant of Year II who had not joined the reaction could be labelled a creature of Robespierre, an agent of anarchy, or an enemy of property.

Were Babeuf, Buonarroti, and the neo-Jacobins robespierristes?

Kind of. Maybe. Partly, but with caveats.

Belissa and Bosc are quite clear on one point: Babeuf explicitly equated robespierrisme with democracy in 1796. Babeuf (13) and Buonarroti (14) rejected the Directoire’s constitution because they saw it as a confiscation of the people’s natural rights, and they rallied around the Constitution of 1793 instead. They were especially interested in Robespierre’s draft Declaration of Rights, because it placed property below the right to existence. Still, overlap is not identity. Babeuf and Robespierre did not have the same ideas, and they certainly did not have the same methods.

Marion Pouffary is careful about the Babeuf-Robespierre connection. For her, it is both political and memorial. Babeuf attacked Robespierre after Thermidor, then changed tone after leaving prison and began praising him. Buonarroti later gave this link a more solid shape in Conspiration pour l’Égalité, where he presented Robespierre as one of the “friends of equality”. This mattered a lot for the radical republican left under the July Monarchy (15) , and for the neo-Babouvists around 1840. But Pouffary warns that the link was doing political work. It was also later given scholarly backing by Mathiez (16), whose socialist commitments were not exactly irrelevant to how he read the past. Her conclusion is careful: yes, the connection exists, but as a political construction. Handle it accordingly.

Martin, as expected, is less accommodating. He reminds us that Babeuf attacked Robespierre after Thermidor, accusing him in connection with depopulationist violence in the Vendée. He also points out that the sans-culotte risings of 1795 demanded the Constitution of 1793 without Robespierre, and that many of the “last Montagnards” persecuted under the Directoire had actually opposed Robespierre in July 1794. For Martin, calling Babeuf robespierriste in 1796 was still often an accusation, not a clear political identity.

What does “robespierriste” mean for the historian?

So we know the Thermidorians were a tad bit biased. Fine. But what about the next two hundred years or so? Surely, with enough distance, people knew better.

Well. Not quite.

I have said this so many times on this blog that I am probably a broken record by now: no one is truly objective. Historians write through the lenses of their politics, environment, preferences, and beliefs. Even when modern historians acknowledge their biases and try to correct for them, sometimes even overcorrect, those biases still colour their analysis and conclusions to some extent. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians were not even especially shy about their political preferences. So the meaning of robespierriste, like the reputation of Robespierre himself, shifted depending on who was writing, and when.

But enough of me waxing poetic. Let’s go back to the experts.

Belissa and Bosc frame the historiographical story through moments when a positive memory of Robespierre returns to public debate. After 1830, radical republicanism and socialism built a golden legend to counter Thermidorian slander. Louis Blanc (17) and Ernest Hamel (18) later associate Robespierre with the concept of republican fraternity.

Unsurprisingly, Pouffary gives the most detailed account of this positive robespierriste memory. Under the July Monarchy, radical republicans disappointed by the conservative settlement used Robespierre as a tutelary figure for political equality, social equality, the right of insurrection, and a religion of fraternity. This produced the golden legend of Robespierre as a secular saint.

Yet Pouffary’s lexicometric (19) analysis shows something interesting: robespierrisme and robespierriste remained rare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century printed material, and were usually negative or neutral rather than positive names for a political current. So even these favourable authors rarely present Robespierre as the leader of a clear group. Linton argues that the stigma created by Thermidorian propaganda was so strong that even admirers of Robespierre found it difficult to claim him openly. A more sympathetic memory owed much to Élisabeth Le Bas and Charlotte Robespierre, though their memories were published late and mediated by men. Naturally.

After 1848, with Michelet (21), Quinet (22), and Aulard (23), much republican historiography distances itself from Robespierre and prefers Danton. Blanquists (24) attack the “Robespierre-priest”. Under the Front Populaire(25), Robespierre returns as a figure of republican danger and mobilisation, while the anti-totalitarian wave of the 1980s revives Thermidorian themes.

That said, McPhee traces the positive historiographical tradition from Ernest Hamel’s great nineteenth-century biography to Mathiez, Gérard Walter (26), Georges Lefebvre (27), Soboul (28), Vovelle (29), and Mazauric (30). In this tradition, Robespierre becomes the uncompromising defender of the principles of 1789 and of the Republic against counter-revolutionary Europe. Vovelle’s 1988 “Pourquoi sommes-nous encore robespierristes ?” consciously echoes Mathiez’s earlier “Pourquoi sommes-nous robespierristes ?”

What does robespierrisme mean today, politically and academically?

In short, the word survives more as a political reference or a historiographical (31) problem than as a living doctrine.

Belissa and Bosc argue that in contemporary France, La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (32) are among the few who openly claim some form of Robespierrist inheritance. In this case, the useful part of Robespierre is his republicanism, his democratic social vision, and his insistence that property must give way to the right to existence and the commons. 

McPhee makes a similar point. For parts of the French left, Robespierre still stands for social justice and civic virtue, especially the refusal to compromise democratic and social principles. But he also warns against pretending that today’s crises are the same as those of the late eighteenth century. They are not. 

Pouffary concludes that Robespierre’s political uses today resemble those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is invoked above all for equality, social justice, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of contesting representatives. During the gilets jaunes (33) movement, his memory could be linked to the right of insurrection. But she does not think there is still a militant robespierriste historiography in the old sense.

There is broad agreement among the historians that current scholarship is far from Hamel’s hagiography, or from the politically marked works of Mathiez and Walter. They are politically subjective, sometimes openly so, but they still circulate because they retain real scholarly value.

No present-day academic historian claims robespierrisme in the Mathiez sense. Mathiez used robespierriste as both a historical and political identity. For him, defending Robespierre meant defending a whole democratic-social tradition: popular sovereignty, equality, the Constitution of 1793 (34), the right to existence, and the revolutionary Republic. When he asked “Pourquoi sommes-nous robespierristes ?”, he was not being coy. He was openly claiming Robespierre as a political ancestor.

Recent scholarship, even when sympathetic, is less hagiographic and more attentive to context, complexity, and choice.

Martin makes a strong methodological point here. He rejects the idea that historians can simply separate the “real Robespierre” from later judgements about him, because the exceptional condemnation of Robespierre is itself part of his historical reality. For him, we cannot understand Robespierre without comparing him to contemporaries such as Brissot, Danton, Barère, Vadier, and others. Nor can we understand him without studying how the monster legend of August 1794 shaped every later reading of the Revolution. 

In conclusion

PSA: be careful who you annoy, because they may turn you and your friends into a dictatorship after your death.

Jokes aside, the article’s strongest conclusion is basically this: robespierrisme is less a stable doctrine than an evolving term. It tells us more about the people using it than about any fixed meaning of its own.

During Robespierre’s life, there were Montagnards, Jacobins, patriots, friendships, committees, patronage networks, shared principles, rivalries, and crises. After Thermidor, all of that was compressed into an accusation: Robespierre had supposedly led a faction and a system of Terror.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that accusation was rejected, reversed, or reworked by republicans, socialists, communists, anti-Jacobins, and historians. Today, the term can still point to a democratic-social republican inheritance. 

From a historian’s perspective, the label should be used carefully: it was created after the fact, shaped by political conflict, and never described a clearly organised doctrine or party.

Notes

(1) Annales historiques de la Révolution française. The leading scholarly journal on the French Revolution, published since 1924.

(2) Literally, “crossed gazes/perspectives”.

(3) He is the leading expert on the civil war in the Vendée.

(4) 9 Thermidor, or 27 July 1794 in the Gregorian calendar, was the day Robespierre was denounced and arrested. He was guillotined the next day.

(5) The Revolutionary Calendar, with Year II, Year III, Frimaire, Fructidor, and so on, was what happened when the revolutionaries scrapped the Christian calendar and started counting again from the founding of the Republic in 1792. As a rough guide: Year II is 1793–94, Year III is 1794–95. Frimaire falls in late autumn, Fructidor in late summer.

(6) The Montagnards, or the Montagne, “the Mountain”, were the most radical bloc in the revolutionary parliament, so called because they sat on the highest benches.

(7) The Jacobin Club was named after the former Dominican, locally “Jacobin”, convent in Paris where it met. It stood at the head of a nationwide network of affiliated clubs, which gave the radicals their organisation and reach. It was shut down soon after Thermidor.

(8) In this period, these were loaded political self-descriptions, not neutral words. A “patriot” meant a supporter of the Revolution; a “republican” meant someone committed to a France without a king.

(9) The government that ran France from 1795 to 1799.

(10) Jean-Lambert Tallien (1767–1820) was a Convention deputy who had himself presided over savage repression at Bordeaux, then turned on Robespierre, partly to save his own neck and that of his lover. He was a ringleader of 9 Thermidor, which is exactly why his self-serving talk of a “system of terror” deserves a healthy dose of scepticism.

(11) The Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security were the two committees that effectively governed France during Year II. The first handled war and high policy; the second ran internal policing and surveillance.

(12) Pierrot was the foolish, lovelorn clown of French pantomime.

(13) Gracchus Babeuf (1760–1797) was a radical egalitarian who took the Roman name “Gracchus” and demanded equality and forms of common ownership. His “Conspiracy of Equals” against the Directory failed, and he was executed, but his programme, transmitted by Buonarroti, made him a founding hero of later communism.

(14) Philippe Buonarroti (1761–1837) was an Italian revolutionary and Babeuf’s comrade. His memoir of the conspiracy, published in 1828, shaped revolutionary movements across nineteenth-century Europe.

(15) The Restoration (1814–1830) brought back the Bourbon monarchy. The July Monarchy (1830–1848) was a more liberal kingship under a different branch of the family, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans. Then 1848 brought yet another revolution and a short-lived republic, followed by the Empire of Napoleon III.

(16) Albert Mathiez (1874–1932) was a supporter of Robespierre who founded the Société des études robespierristes in 1907 and the journal that became the very one this article appears in. He spent his career rehabilitating Robespierre on rigorous archival grounds, while also breaking bitterly with his old teacher Aulard. As one does.

(17) Louis Blanc (1811–1882) was a socialist and a minister in the short-lived revolutionary government of 1848, later an exile in London. His twelve-volume history of the Revolution rehabilitated Robespierre as the prophet of a fraternal, social republic.

(18) Ernest Hamel (1826–1898) was a republican journalist who, in the 1860s, produced the first enormous, wholly admiring biography of Robespierre. It is effectively the founding monument of the “golden legend”.

(19) Lexicometric analysis is a computer-assisted method that counts and maps word frequencies across large bodies of text, to track how usage changes over time.

(21) Jules Michelet (1798–1874) was the great Romantic narrator of the Revolution, whose multi-volume Histoire de la Révolution française cast “the People” as the true hero of the story. He was not much of a fan of Robespierre, whom he portrayed as cold, sterile, and priest-like.

(22) Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) was a historian, philosopher, and republican politician. His La Révolution (1865) argued that the Terror was not only a crime, but a blunder that discredited the revolutionary cause. He also faulted the revolutionaries for failing to give France a new religion to match its new politics.

(23) Alphonse Aulard (1849–1928) was a historian who held the first university chair dedicated to the history of the Revolution, at the Sorbonne, and helped build the discipline’s “scientific”, document-based method. He was a partisan of Danton, and his own student Mathiez broke with him precisely on that point.

(24) Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was an insurrectionist whose followers were called “Blanquists”. He spent more than thirty years in prison for plotting armed risings, and embodied a rival, atheist, conspiratorial strand of the revolutionary left that had little use for Robespierre’s deism.

(25) The Popular Front, or Front populaire, was a coalition of socialists, communists, and radicals that won power in 1936. It is remembered above all for paid holidays and the forty-hour week.

(26) Gérard Walter (1896–1974) was a journalist-turned-historian who wrote a major two-volume life of Robespierre, as well as separate histories of the Jacobins, the Terror, and the coup of 9 Thermidor. He also edited the surviving records of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

(27) Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) was perhaps the most influential academic historian of the Revolution in the twentieth century, and a pioneer of “history from below”, meaning the study of peasants and crowds rather than only leaders. His work gave weight to a broadly sympathetic, socially minded reading of the First Republic.

(28) Albert Soboul (1914–1982) was a Marxist historian best known for his landmark study of the Parisian sans-culottes. He was the leading post-war figure of the classic social interpretation, which read the Revolution as a bourgeois revolution driven by class.

(29) Michel Vovelle (1933–2018) was a Marxist historian of collective “mentalities” who held the same Sorbonne chair, and served as the semi-official historical voice of the 1989 bicentenary, squaring off against the revisionists.

(30) Claude Mazauric (born 1932) was a Marxist historian in the Lefebvre-Soboul line, and editor of collections of Robespierre’s and Babeuf’s writings. He is remembered above all for his fierce public quarrel with François Furet in the 1970s, defending the social interpretation against the revisionist claim that the Revolution had been fundamentally misread.

(31) Historiography is the study of how history has been written: its changing interpretations, schools, and biases. In other words, not the events themselves, but what people have done with them afterwards.

(32) La France Insoumise is a left-wing party founded in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a veteran of the French left.

(33) The gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, were a leaderless protest movement that erupted in late 2018 over fuel taxes and the cost of living. They were named after the high-visibility vests French drivers are required to carry.

(34) The Constitution of 1793 was the most democratic charter of the era, approved by popular referendum, with universal male suffrage and a right of insurrection. It was suspended “until the peace” and never actually applied.