Twelve Who Ruled: a classic history book

 

Twelve Who Ruled is a truly remarkable book. It covers a single year in the French Revolution, the period of the Committee of Public Safety (July 1793-July 1794. It was published back in 1941, yet does not feel in the least out of date. Why is this book so gripping? I can think of several reasons:

• It goes beyond the first few months of the French Revolution where most attention is directed, such as the fall of the Bastille. Instead, it concentrates on the period 1793-1794, the period when the Committee of Public Safety (CPS) was in charge.
• Secondly, it avoids the tendency either to sanctify or to demonize Robespierre. Robespierre must be one of the most polarising figures in modern history. You don’t have to look far for examples of both views:
• To Palmer’s credit, he does not give the impression that Robespierre was mainly in charge of the CPS (even though the Wikipedia entry I read for the CPS states it was “the provisional government in France, led mainly by Maximilien Robespierre, during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794)”
• It’s quite a challenge to write a biography of two people, let alone 12, especially when the minutes of the CPS have not survived (or were never recorded).
• Palmer tells a story, and what a story! France is threatened by every other state in Europe. There is little agreement within France about what the Revolution means. The Committee have no time to discuss niceties. The survival of the nation depends on those 12 committee members. The narrative is so skilfully told that the end of each chapter is a lead-in to the next episode. You feel with anticipation that major events about to happen, whether the execution of Danton, or the victory at Fleurus, or the tragic conclusion – that solved nothing.
• Palmer’s verdict on Robespierre, and the Committee  of Public Safety, is that was a paradox. By loading all responsibility for the Terror onto Robespierre’s shoulders after his death, it became possible for France to move away from the Terror. Yet, for all his faults, Robespierre believed in the power of virtue, and the CPS was “the first dictatorship whose stated aim was the complete regeneration of society”; its goal was to found the “republic of virtue”.
• Hence this book provides a chilling postscript to the age of Enlightenment; not that the principles of the Enlightenment were in any way wrong, but to see the very principles of virtue so appallingly applied by a government casts some doubt on the political abilities of the Enlightenment chief thinkers: Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, all good for a book or a play, but don’t hand them the reins of power. It can be said, perhaps, that the Enlightenment was for the most part an opposition movement. Enlightenment principles did not gain power in Western Europe except for France during the Revolutionary period. Perhaps every student of the Enlightenment ought to read about the period 1794 to 1795 to see how noble principles can sometimes have horrific results when linked to executive power.
• Palmer identifies strands in the Revolution that I had not expected to encounter. All through the period 1794-1795 there was tension between those aiming to exterminate the Catholic religion, and those wanting simply to tolerate it while removing its privileges. Robespierre was in favour of toleration, something that paradoxically was one of the factors that led to his downfall: insufficiently radical. Too soft towards Danton and Desmoulins.
• Even more distasteful is the strain of xenophobic nationalism the Revolution promoted. In Alsace, there was an attempt to enforce French as the only acceptable language of “patriots” – something that would not go down well with German speakers. You expect episodes of offensive nationalism in England after Brexit, but not in Revolutionary France.
• Above all, Twelve Who Ruled casts Robespierre as the principal actor in a tragedy, and like all tragic heroes, Robespierre has his faults.  Chapter 11 includes a major speech by Robespierre, based on a quote by Saint-Just:

The tragic misconception was R’s idea of the people … the French people was not like what R imagined. It ws not all compact of goodness; it was not peculiarly governable by reason … R’s “people” was the people of his mind’s eye, the people as it was to be when felicity was established. [p277]

The only citizens in the Republic are the republicans. Royalists and conspirators are foreigners, or rather enemies, in its eyes.” … A republic so conceived must remain at war with a large part of its own population. [p277]

• Palmer, writing in the darkest days of World War II, skilfully makes comparisons between totalitarianism and democracy in 18th- and 20th-century flavours.

All of which goes to explain how a book published 60 years ago can still be labelled as the best guide to the subject: for professor of French history Lynn Hunt, “my single most favourite book on the French Revolution”, describing people who were “trying to do something really important, coming up against enormous obstacles in the course of trying to do it, failing, but completely understanding why this would happen in this particular way.”