In Thompson's book, Robespierre and the French Revolution, the author notes:
Robespierre was no apocalyptic visionary. He did not believe in letting the tares and the wheat grow together until the harvest. He believed it possible and necessary to root up the tares here and now; and he thought that he saw an end to the business, if revolutionary justice could avoid undue clemency on the one hand and undue severity on the other. His idealism was confined to the people he did not know—the workers. His own class, the bourgeoisie, he viewed realistically.
He had nothing of the bureaucrat’s belief that committees, departments, and boards are above bribery or injustice.
He had always held that the chief danger to the republic would come from its governing class, not from the masses. He disliked armies, because discipline made officers into bullies and esprit de corps enabled generals to become military dictators. He suspected every popular political leader of aiming at supreme power, and saw dictators everywhere—all the more so perhaps if he was fighting his own subconscious desire for dictatorship. What had excluded Marat from the Jacobin fellowship, and especially from Robespierre’s circle, was not his sordid life or his bloodthirstiness, but his candid avowal that a dictator was needed and that he was ready to play the part. Dictatorship was the nightmare that beset the Jacobin bedside: the Revolution had begun as a great liberation from royal-feudal “tyranny”; its second act had been the abolition of the “despotic” monarchy; its third the overthrow of the Girondin bid for absolute control.
It looked as though it would go full circle and end as it began. Robespierre’s draft for a “shadow” Constitution in 1793 had taken every precaution against this danger— partly by making every office accessible to the ordinary citizen, partly by providing popular checks on misgovemment.
“The right of resisting oppression [said his Article 25] is a corollary of the other rights of men and citizens”;
Article 27, “When a government violates the rights of the people, it becomes the most sacred duty of the whole people, and of each separate portion of it, to revolt against it”; and
Article 28, “When a citizen can no longer rely upon the State to safeguard his rights, he falls back on his natural right to defend all his rights for himself”.
The final form of the Constitution of 1793, though in some points it fell below Robespierre’s ideals, was in this respect even more plain-spoken. In a series of laconic Articles it declared that:
“Sovereignty resides in the people: it is one and indivisible, imprescriptible and inalienable”
“No part of the people can exercise the power of the whole”
“Any individual who usurps the sovereignty may at once be put to death by free men”
“Public office is essentially temporary, and must not be considered as a distinction or a reward, but as a duty”
“Crimes committed by the people’s representatives or agents must never go unpunished. No one has the right to claim more inviolability than other citizens”
“Resistance to oppression follows from the other rights of man”
And finally, in words even stronger than Robespierre’s,
“When the government violates the right of the people, insurrection is for the people, and for any part of it, the most sacred of its rights and the most indispensable of its duties”
A year later the decree constituting the Revolutionary Government, i.e. the Jacobin regime (December 4, 1793), contained not only an elaborate system for ensuring the efficient supervision of government and local officials, but also a section headed “De la penalite des fonctionnaires publics et des autres agens de la Republique”, which enumerates in twelve Articles the penalties incurred for official offences; they range from deprivation of civic rights and A Republic of Virtue confiscation of property to imprisonment in irons and death. Nor can there be any doubt that Robespierre, whilst disliking the wholesale shooting of rebels, took a special interest in the discriminating execution of Government and local officials.
It is interesting to see the flow from Monarchy, to Girondins, to Jacobins then Napoleon. Just a set of observations.
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