Books: Sea-Green Monster

ROBESPIERRE AND THE FOURTH ESTATE—Ralph Korngold—Moderr Age ($3.75).

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were Act I of a European melodrama of which the Russian and German Revolutions and the two World Wars are Act II. Act I was so terrifying that people prefer to remember it as something written by Thomas Carlyle or Victor Hugo, something out of War and Peace, The Dynasts or The Charterhouse of Parma.

They have rationalized the guillotine into a lethal contrivance at least no more shocking than the electric chair. They have rationalized the Jacobin Club into an organization of earnest, overzealous patriots who, when it came to offering a human neck to the knife, simply could not say no.

People also have tried to forget the characters, who mouthed their lurid lines in the worst school of European ham acting. There was Camilla Desmoulins (he longed to “embrace Liberty on a heap of dead bodies”); Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (“for Revolutionists there is no rest but in the tomb”); Danton (“I wanted the youth of Paris to arrive in Champagne covered with blood . . .”). People even managed to forget Jean Paul Marat ‘”When a man lacks everything … he is justified in cutting another’s throat and devouring the palpitating flesh”). But one man they never could forget—Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre, “the sea-green, incorruptible” monster, France’s dictator during the Terror.

When the creak of the tumbril was heard again last spring in Europe, it was almost inevitable that a biography of Robespierre would not be far behind.

Last week the biography appeared in the U. S. The author was Ralph Korngold, a naturalized Hollander, who has also written a biography of Saint-Just. He called his book Robespierre and the Fourth Estate, his fourth estate being not the press but the proletariat. The book is important because: 1) it is one of the few biographies of Robespierre in English; 2) into its 417 pages Biographer Korngold squeezes a synoptic history of the jumbled French Revolution for which Carlyle required two volumes; 3) it shows Robespierre as the prototype of Lenin and Hitler.

For some 25 years (1789 to 1814), the French Revolution kept most of Europe almost continuously at war. In the name of liberty, equality, fraternity, it changed a flabby monarchy into a despotic dictatorship. It went to war with England, narrowly missed war with the U. S. A coalition of most of the old, moribund, and (by Revolutionary standards) decaying nations of Europe was required to stop the French Revolution. Before that time, the revolutionary armies in the name of the new order overran the Low Countries, invaded Egypt, threatened to invade England. Its fifth columns operated even in the U. S. (Citizens Genet and his Jeffersonian friends).

Four years after Robespierre’s death, the looting of Europe was still going on.

Robespierre did not make the Revolution, as Napoleon said, but he did “drive many people to madness who without him merely would have been fools.” He followed the now-familiar course—from reformer to revolutionist. Like Lenin he transmuted a rabid hatred of his own class into a social system based (at first) on a sentimental love for the proletariat. Like both Lenin and Hitler, Robespierre knew that revolutions never stop at the point where reformers would like to freeze them. And he thoroughly understood revolutionary politics. “To dare!” he said, “is all the politics of the Revolution.” His attitude toward a republic was genuinely Naziistic. Madame Roland describes how he once gnawed his nails and asked with a snicker: “What is a republic?” “Who would,” he asked like an echo of Hitler, “exchange the sublime destinies of the people of France for the constitution of the United States . . .?”

With the execution of the King, and Danton out of the way, Robespierre began to suffer from the dictators’ disease—the belief that he was an indispensable man. “His respect for the people—his belief that the voice of the people is the Voice of God—has hardened into a dogma, which in his heart, he no longer believes. What he believes is that Virtue was always in the minority.’ ” The next step would be a police state to enforce the virtuous minority’s will oh the unvirtuous majority.

Robespierre never took that step. In keeping the minority virtuous, he had purged so many revolutionary bigwigs that the little wigs, in self-defense decided to purge him. On the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794), his comrades outlawed Robespierre, seized and bound him. The fallen dictator lay on the floor of the Commune, his jaw shattered by a poorly aimed bullet.

“Your Majesty suffers?” asked one of his former friends. “It seems you no longer have the floor.” “Bandage him well,” said another, “so he will be in condition to undergo his punishment.”

Next day through a shouting, hooting mob the tumbrils brought Robespierre and 21 colleagues to a hastily erected guillotine. Unlike Danton, Robespierre said nothing even when a child, “carrying a pailful of ox’s blood and a whisk broom,” stepped up to Robespierre’s house and sprinkled the wall. “The crowd,” says Author Korngold, “howled its approval.”