Yesterday we posted about Robespierre’s “Festival of the Supreme Being.” We actually have the speeches that the French Revolutionary leader gave on that holiday. I can’t resist quoting that speech and giving you a little more context for that oh-so-solemn celebration.
So-called Committees of Public Safety were set-up to eliminate everyone who opposed the revolution. The accused would be allowed no defense lawyers, no evidence was necessary to convict them, and the only permitted verdicts would be “not guilty” or “death.” And the verdicts were almost always “death,” using the “Enlightened,” ostensibly humane execution technology of the guillotine. Nearly 40,000 met that fate.
So Robespierre was feeling pretty good on June 8, 1794, when the Festival of the Supreme Being was inaugurated. He had just guillotined two other revolutionary leaders, Danton and Hébert, the terror having expanded to include eliminating political rivals, so he felt supreme himself. Here is the first speech that he shared with the people all lined up in their perfect formations on that day:
The eternally happy day which the French people consecrates to the Supreme Being has finally arrived. Never has the world he created offered him a sight so worthy of his eyes. He has seen tyranny, crime, and deception reign on earth. At this moment, he sees an entire nation, at war with all the oppressors of the human race, suspend its heroic efforts in order to raise its thoughts and vows to the Great Being who gave it the mission to undertake these efforts and the strength to execute them.
Did not his immortal hand, by engraving in the hearts of men the code of justice and equality, write there the death sentence of tyrants? Did not his voice, at the very beginning of time, decree the republic, making liberty, good faith, and justice the order of the day for all centuries and for all peoples?
He did not create kings to devour the human species. Neither did he create priests to harness us like brute beasts to the carriages of kings, and to give the world the example of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery, and falsehood to the world. But he created the universe to celebrate his power; he created men to help and to love one another, and to attain happiness through the path of virtue.
The Author of Nature linked all mortals together in an immense chain of love and happiness. Perish the tyrants who have dared to break it!
Frenchmen, Republicans, it is up to you to cleanse the earth they have sullied and to restore the justice they have banished from it. Liberty and virtue issued together from the breast of the Supreme Being. One cannot reside among men without the other.
Generous people, do you want to triumph over all your enemies? Practice justice and render to the Supreme Being the only form of worship worthy of him. People, let us surrender ourselves today, under his auspices, to the just ecstasy of pure joy. Tomorrow we shall again combat vices and tyrants; we shall give the world an example of republican virtues: and that shall honor the Supreme Being more.
This was on June 8, 1794. The next month, on July 28, 1794, he himself would be guillotined. He was a victim of the very terror that he himself unleashed.
Note Robespierre’s moralism. Terrorists convince themselves that their cruelty and their murders are justified by the highest moral principles. Note his idealism. Terrorists think in terms of lofty abstractions so as to not think about the concrete, actual human beings they are butchering. Note his appeal to a transcendent good. I suspect Robespierre wanted to honor a “Supreme Being”–who was emphatically not the God of the Christians whom he was exterminating–in order to give himself a divine mandate for what he was doing, just as Islamic terrorists invoke Allah. (Yes, and just as Christian terrorists invoke the Triune God.) Communists reject all gods, but they invoke transcendent principles such as History and the People.
The utopia that Robespierre thought he was building ended as all such utopias do: in terrorism, dictatorship oppression, and self-destruction. This is because they never factor in the reality of human sin, as the American revolutionaries did, with their provisions for checks and balances, limited government, and individual rights. Whether we can sustain that without the faith that brought those safeguards remains to be seen.
Portrait of Maximilien Robespierre (ca. 1790) by Unidentified painter – https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-carnavalet/oeuvres/portrait-de-maximilien-de-robespierre-1758-1794-homme-politique#infos-principales, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=187181
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