Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "Fatal Purity"

Ruth Scurr studied at Oxford and Cambridge, where she currently teaches politics and history. A prominent literary critic, she has written for the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

Her first book is Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution.

I asked Ruth to put the book to the "page 69 test," and here is what she reported:

Fatal Purity tells a frightening story. It follows Maximilien Robespierre on his journey from obscure origins in provincial Arras, where he worked as a young lawyer, into the heart of the French Revolution, where he became infamous for organising and enforcing the Terror. Robespierre was not a villain like Hitler or Stalin. Many of his ideas are ones we recognise today: liberty, equality, democracy and improving the lives of the poor. He has always sharply divided historians: his friends claim he has become the Revolution’s scapegoat and his valuable contribution to the world we now live in has been forgotten; his enemies say it is not by his principles, but by the bloody consequences of his actions, that Robespierre must be judged. When I began my book, I wanted to be fair to him, to see things from his point of view, but never to excuse him.

On p.69 (Chatto & Windus edition) Robespierre is leaving Arras for Paris at the beginning of the Revolution in 1789. He has packed: “some very clean linen (six shirts, six collars, six handkerchiefs); three pairs of stockings (one almost new); one pair of well-worn shoes and a newer pair; a satin waistcoat (probably pink) and waistcoat of raz de Saint-Maur (a very fine shaven cloth) which was threadbare; a black cloth coat and his lawyer’s gown. There were also clothes brushes, shoe brushes, needles and thread (his mother had taught him to sew as well as to make lace before she died). Everything fitted easily into the trunk he borrowed from one of his sister’s friends.”

Robespierre and his siblings were orphans. They were not destitute, but his meagre possessions inside a borrowed trunk contrast strongly with the grand ideas and principles that inflamed his heart. Lots what we know about him is apocryphal: rumours, exaggerations, embellished memoirs. On p.69 there are two examples:

“According to one story, he turned to the servant who carried his bag to the coach for him and boasted that he would one day make him mayor of Arras. In another version Robespierre threw a celebratory dinner for his friends before leaving and said to a servant nicknamed Lantillette: “Remember, my dear friend, that everything is going to change in France. Yes! … the Lantillettes of this world will become mayors and the mayors will be Lantillettes.” There is more personal spite in this than revolutionary foresight, yet when he left Arras in 1789, Robespierre had reason to expect that he would return to find it dramatically altered.”

In fact, it was not until September 1791 that Robespierre went home again. By then he had become a nationally recognised political hero, crowned with laurel leaves by jubilant crowds. How did his life and career go so badly wrong in the next few years, to end beneath the guillotine in 1794, when he was still only 36?

Many thanks to Ruth for the input.

Read an excerpt from Fatal Purity.

Among the praise for Fatal Purity:

"Ruth Scurr does for Robespierre and the French Revolution what Quentin Bell did for Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: she apprehends the complete personality of the man, the moment, and the movement. A work of genuine scholarship and political literature, Fatal Purity is an electrifying biography of an epoch's vaulting ambitions and wounded pride, radical vision and terrifying uncertainty, bracing heroism and decimating energies."
-- Corey Robin, author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea

"[A] chillingly brilliant biography of Robespierre .... As well as telling the story of how a mild, puritanical provincial lawyer became the inventor of the first modern Murder State, and the forerunner of horrors of the 20th century, Dr Scurr gives a very succinct history of the Revolution itself – no easy thing to do.... I can't recommend her book too highly."
-- A.N. Wilson

"Fatal Purity provides an excellent vantage point from which to observe the period between 1789 and 1794, during which Robespierre’s austere and virtuous Republicanism became dominant.... Scurr deftly shows how Robespierre’s brand of radical popular politics rose to the fore, with its commitment to mass mobilization, social regeneration through virtue, and popular sovereignty."
-- Sudhir Hazareesingh, Times Literary Supplement

Scurr's "book is a straightforward narrative history, and she is a steady guide through complex events. It is judicious, balanced, and admirably clear at every point. Her explanations are economical and precise, her examples well chosen and imaginative, and her quotations from original sources pointed and apt. It is quite the calmest and least abusive history of the Revolution you will ever read. It works well as a general history of the years 1789-94, besides being a succinct guide to one of its dominant figures."
-- Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books

"Ruth Scurr's aim, in this well-written first book, is to provide an accessible, up-to-date biography that draws on all this work, and presents Robespierre as a human being rather than as the monster of legend. She succeeds impressively."
-- Munro Price, Telegraph

"[L]ively and well-written..."
-- David Gilmour, New York Times Book Review

"The life of Robespierre presents an extraordinary challenge for the biographer: right about many things he may have been at the start but he was appallingly wrong about others as he gained power, and a great many of his deeds are surely indefensible.... Ruth Scurr...accepts the challenge with verve. This is a biography that will stimulate all those interested in the subject of state terror and how it develops out of seemingly idealistic origins."
-- Antonia Frasier, (London) Times

"Ruth Scurr allows the evidence of Robespierre's insanity to seep out gradually: his savage, gloating letters to men whose political careers he destroyed; his creation of a rational cult of the 'Supreme Being', who bore a striking resemblance to Citizen Robespierre; the little shrine in which he lived, surrounded by statuettes and pictures of himself.... This splendidly balanced account of an unbalanced mind proves that there are monsters of virtue as well as monsters of vice. It also shows that Robespierre was posterity's scapegoat. He was never a dictator; in fact, he was executed as a moderate. It was not the best of times for a mad idealist."
-- Graham Robb, Telegraph