In her great novel A Place of Greater Safety (1992), Hilary Mantel describes one of the most haunting scenes in the history of the 18th century: the schoolboy Robespierre standing in the rain waiting for the coach carrying Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to arrive at the gates of the school, Louis-Le-Grand, in order to receive an address on behalf of the staff and pupils.
Robespierre had arrived at the school from provincial Arras thanks to a scholarship and the boy’s seriousness of purpose made a great impression on his teachers, one of them calling him ‘my Roman’. The ‘Roman’ was the obvious representative to make a speech to the king, but someone’s timing was out. For two hours, the boy waited and waited, getting wetter and wetter. The coach finally arrived and stopped beside the shivering boy who knelt and read out the speech of welcome to the king. What Louis said or even looked like at this moment is impossible to say, as although the coach door was open, the curtains were kept firmly closed. Louis received the speech in silence; and when it was over, the coach drove off (this does put Louis in a poor light, but he was a shy monarch).
There was to be no further encounter until the king’s trial, and Louis – warm and safe as he was behind his coach curtains – was to have no visual memory of the boy who was to grow into the man who was to send him and his loved ones to the scaffold in 1793. Robespierre argued at the trial of ‘citizen Louis Capet’ that the purpose of the trial was not to pass sentence on an individual but to protect the state. The ‘fatal truth’ was that Capet should die to protect the lives of thousands of virtuous French citizens: Louis had to die in order that the Revolution should live.
Robespierre was against capital punishment in principle. but the ‘incorruptible’ one was prepared to make the noble sacrifice of accepting purely temporary exemptions to that principle for the sake of the state. Robespierre did not attend the execution of the ex-monarch he once loyally addressed in the rain, but stayed home. As the coach carrying the ex-king passed his residence, Robespierre shooed a young girl in his house away from the window. closed the shutters and told the child that something was happening ‘which you should not see’.
What Happened Next
Thousands were to die during Robespierre’s Terror, until the wave of killing consumed the man himself. Those who escaped by fluke include the Marquis de Sade and Tom Paine (see 1777: The Marquis de Sade insults Count Mirabeau; 1797: Napoleon invites Tom Paine to dinner and asks him how to invade England). Then Napoleon happened, and then Louis’s Bourbon dynasty was restored, having, as Talleyrand said, forgotten nothing and learned nothing. See also 1774: Edmund Burke is enraptured by Marie-Antoinette.