ROBESPIERRE
"Their greatest difficulty will be in the construction of their executive" — Thomas Jefferson

AM | @HDI1780

There is a new —and surprisingly sympathetic— biography of Maximilien Robespierre (*). The author, Peter McPhee, sees his work as "a human biography which understands Robespierre as a remarkable young man living through an unpredictable and tumultuous revolutionary crisis. It is a tragic but heroic story. Unlike earlier biographies I place great emphasis on Maximilien’s difficult childhood and youth, asking how they formed the young provincial lawyer who arrived in Versailles in 1789".

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I just checked the Spanish translation at the FNAC bookstore in Barcelona, and I noticed that the Raynal affaire of 31 May 1791 does not feature at all in the book. This is a fascinating episode indeed. Did Raynal betray the Revolution? I don't think so. In calling for a strong executive power, he was mereley defending the point made by Alexandre Deleyre in Histoire des deux Indes [see]. In any republican revolution, the nature of the executive power is bound to be the trickiest and most difficult problem of all. This was precisely the point made by Thomas Jefferson in a hugely prescient letter to Alexander von Humboldt on the South American revolutions (April 1811):

How much liberty can they bear without intoxication? Are their chiefs sufficiently enlightened to form a well-guarded government, and their people to watch their chiefs? Have they mind enough to place their domesticated Indians on a footing with the whites? All these questions you can answer better than any other. I imagine they will copy our outlines of confederation and elective government, abolish distinction of ranks, bow the neck to their priests, and persevere in intolerantism. Their greatest difficulty will be in the construction of their executive.

I suspect that, regardless of the experiment of France, and of that of the United States in 1784, they will begin with a directory, and when the unavoidable schisms in that kind of executive shall drive them to something else, their great question will come on whether to substitute an executive elective for years, for life, or an hereditary one. But unless instruction can be spread among them more rapidly than experience promises, despotism may come upon them before they are qualified to save the ground they will have gained. 

(*) Peter McPhee. Robespierre. A Revolutionary Life. Yale University Press, 2012. See the author interview, and a review by David Bell: "The Conductor", The Book.
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