There was certainly no doubt that he was preoccupied with his career. At the end of March 1790 he was elected President of the Jacobin Club and thereafter he was recognized as potentially its most influential member. He was largely instrumental in keeping it alive when so many of its members left to form the rival and more moderate Feuillant Club in protest against the petition for the King’s dethronement. And he received further acclaim both inside and outside the Jacobin Club when the military disasters of 1792 seemed to justify his early opposition to the war in which, he predicted, France would ‘be betrayed, thus defeated’. His strictures upon Brissot and the Girondins carried all the more weight because of these prescient warnings, and now that new military campaigns had to be fought and Danton appeared to be lost in his web of ineffective diplomacy, Robespierre came forward as the man of the hour. He possessed a truly Machiavellian skill, so one of his rivals said, ‘in dividing men and sowing differences between them, of enticing others to test the ground for him and then either abandoning them or supporting them as prudence or ambition dictated’. Some held it against him that he was never to be seen when the Revolution needed journée and men and women took to the streets. The Girondins, taking note of the fact that he played no part in that momentous day of 10 August when the sans-culottes attacked the Tuileries, accused him of having hidden in a cellar. And it was also remarked that on the day the King was guillotined he remained in his sparsely furnished room in the Rue Saint-Honoré; that he asked the Duplays to close the shutters and the gates; and that he replied, when asked by the daughters why he required this to be done, ‘Because there is something that is going to take place today that it is not seemly that you should see.’ As Marat observed, ‘Robespierre avoids any group where there is unrest. He grows pale at the sight of a sabre.’ All the same, in the summer of 1793 he was recognized as being the potential saviour of revolutionary France. He was still an uninspiring orator, but there was something in his feline presence which commanded respect and defied inattention.
Robespierre came slowly forward [recorded a man who heard him speak at the Jacobin Club that year]. He was one of the few men who still wore the clothes that had been in fashion before the Revolution. He resembled a tailor of the ancien régime more man anything else…His delivery was slow and measured. His sentences were so long that every time he stopped to raise his spectacles one supposed that he had finished, but after looking slowly and intently over the audience in every part of the room he would readjust his spectacles and then add some more phrases to those sentences which were already of inordinate length…It was difficult to take one’s own eyes off him.
Under Robespierre’s persuasive leadership the Committee of Public Safety began to prosecute the war against foreign enemies and native rebels with effective vigour, but his Government had to contend with powerful opponents inside Paris as well as beyond its walls. The Insurrectionary Committee which had organized the journées of 29 May to 2 June had been successfully dissolved as a condition of the Government’s offer to honour a promise of forty sous a day as compensation for the sans-culottes’ loss of wages during the demonstrations. The Enragés who had been the guiding force behind the Insurrectionary Committee were, however, still a troublesome group. Both Varlet and Roux continued to castigate the Government for its failure to attend to the needs of the poor, for not stamping out speculation, and for declining to decree the death penalty for hoarding.
‘Why have you not climbed from the third to the ninth floor of the houses of this revolutionary city?’ Roux demanded, as he harangued the Convention. ‘You would have been moved by the tears and sighs of an immense population without food and clothing, brought to such distress and misery by speculation and hoarding, because the laws have been cruel to the poor, because they have been made only by the rich and for the rich…You must not be afraid of the hatred of the rich – in other words, of the wicked. You must not be afraid to sacrifice political principle for the salvation of the people, which is the supreme law.’
Encouraged by the Enragés, crowds of people took the law into their own hands, protesting that while wages had increased, the cost of living had outpaced them, demanding cheaper wine, and a reduction in the cost of butter, which had more than doubled in price since 1790 and of soap, the price of which had almost quintupled. Grocers’ and chandlers’ shops were invaded and their owners forced to sell goods at what was considered a fair price. Worried by the spreading incidence of this taxation populaire, the Committee of Public Safety took action against Roux who was expelled from the Cordeliers Club, repeatedly mauled in the Jacobin press, and eventually disowned by his section. Yet, while Roux was successfully discredited and his influence irreparably damaged, other Enragés continued to attack the Committee of Public Safety, to demand price controls and more severe punishments for hoarders and counter-revolutionary suspects. Their influence was much increased after 13 July when a devoted adherent of the Girondins committed a murder.
This was Charlotte Corday, a tall, strong, mystical yet practical young woman from a noble but poor Norman family, a descendant of the dramatist, Corneille. She had been educated at a convent at Caen and had then gone to live with an aunt in whose house she studied Voltaire and Plutarch and those other authors whose works had exercised so profound an influence on the young Manon Roland. When, after the fall of the Girondins, several of their leaders fled to Normandy to advocate fédéralisme, she attended their meetings, fell under their influence, undertook to work for them in Paris and, without their knowledge, took it into her head to assassinate the man she held principally responsible for their fall, Jean Paul Marat.
On her arrival in Paris she took a room in the Hôtel de la Providence in the Rue des Vieux Augustins and wrote a letter to Marat: ‘Citizen, I have just arrived from Caen. Your love for your native place doubtless makes you desirous of learning the events which have occurred in that part of the republic. I shall call at your house in about an hour. Have the goodness to receive me and give me a brief interview. I will put you in a condition to render great service to France.’
Marat refused to see her both on that occasion and when she called a second time with a promise to reveal important secrets and presenting herself as a victim of counter-revolutionary plots. But she persisted, calling for the third time at 30 Rue des Cordeliers on 13 July. She was ‘dressed in a spotted négligé costume and wore a high hat with a black cockade and three rows of black braid,’ according to Laurent Bas, who worked on L’Ami du peuple and was in Marat’s office folding copies of the newspaper at the time. ‘She descended from a hackney cab and asked to speak to Citizen Marat. She was carrying a fan in her hand. The concierge replied that he was not available at the moment. She said that this was the third time she had called and that it was most tiresome not to be admitted to him…Citizeness Marat then went to ask her brother if the person was to be admitted and Citizen Marat said she was.’