You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [22]
True, the country was in debt from foreign wars and extravagant expenditures on the elegant lifestyle of the ruling family, but such matters really did not concern the peasant class, whose hard-lot lives were relatively consistent from year to year. The group that was really affected was the aristocracy, who were still licking their wounds from years of gelding impotence at the hands of Louis XIV, who kept his nobles powerless and preoccupied. Now the nobles saw the present weaker monarchy of Louis XVI, who was neither as bright nor as politically savvy as his predecessors, as an opportunity to make a power grab.
Unfortunately their years of gilded confinement in Versailles had made them less savvy and capable of governing, which opened the door to authority to a new class of educated non-nobles who had embraced the philosophic theories of the Enlightenment that called for a new social order. The most dangerous members of this newly empowered bourgeoisie were the lawyers, and in particular one by the name of Robespierre.
Maximilien-François-Marie-Isadore de Robespierre was born, the product of the seduction of a brewer’s daughter by a smooth-talking lawyer, at Arras in 1758. His parents reluctantly wed and continued on a downward spiral that produced three more children, who along with Maximilien were eventually raised by relatives after their mother died in childbirth, while their father never recovered from the grief of her loss.
The relatives secured young Robespierre a good education and he eventually advanced to the College of Law in Paris, which enabled him to return to Arras and establish his own legal practice in a much more successful manner than his father had ever achieved.
His eloquence both verbally and scripturally was all too apparent through his involvement in numerous philosophic circles and literary societies. This so impressed his local constituency that he was eventually elected to the position of deputy of Artois to the Estates General on the eve of the French Revolution. He quickly advanced through the other bourgeoisie power brokers to the National Constituent Assembly, where his oratorical skills fully blossomed in the public eye, distinguishing him from much of the political rabble that was jockeying for position and advancement within the anarchical situation that was getting more and more dangerous by the moment.
Robespierre’s own political views had been greatly influenced by the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose maxims and theories on equality and community he quickly appropriated, impressing many of his lesser-well-read contemporaries.
Robespierre’s greatest weapon was his tongue, which he wielded with eloquent and deadly precision. When the National Constituent Assembly was dissolved in 1791, he had amassed a devoted following, not just among his “equals” but among the street-level rabble as well, who regarded him as an “incorruptible patriot,” a designation thought by many to be quite paradoxical given his societal position as both an attorney and a politician. At the show trial for King Louis XVI that followed the mobs taking over Paris in the name of the people, Robespierre put forth the argument that Louis’s fate was not to be charged in reference to that of a single man but as a matter of public safety for all of the people of France:
“Louis must die that the country may live.”
Even if the rabble didn’t understand the lawyerly and philosophical underpinnings of his argument, they did understand what he was advising and the former king was sent to the guillotine on January 21, 1793.
As the Revolution moved to the left, many aristocrats were forced into exile or prison, and many bourgeoisie politicos who had served in the government under the king and during the interim were forced to seek safer circumstances outside of France in order to avoid fates similar to those they originally condemned. After that Robespierre managed to continue to ride the revolutionary wave propelled by his gilded