The Red Flag: A History of Communism Read Online Free PDF Page B

the momentum of the revolution going, whilst saving it from the radicals and class division, Robespierre moved against both left and right. Both the
ultra
Hébert and the less radical Danton were arrested and guillotined. Having outlawed both
ultras
and moderates, Robespierre was left with an ever-shrinking base of support. In his efforts to continue the revolution without mass support, he turned to methods that had echoes in later Communist regimes: the persecution of those suspected of being ‘counter-revolutionaries’ andpropaganda, or, in Jacobin language, ‘Terror’ and the promotion of virtue. As Robespierre famously put it:
    If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in the time of revolution is both virtue and terror – virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue has no power… Terror is merely justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue, and results from the application of democracy to the most pressing needs of the country. 29
    Robespierre energetically set about establishing his new reign of virtue. He set up a Commission for Public Instruction, designed to take control of all propaganda and moral education. As Claude Payan, the brother of its boss Joseph, said, the state had hitherto only centralized ‘physical government, material government’; the task was now to centralize ‘moral government’. 30 The Commission produced revolutionary songs, censored plays, and staged political festivals. It also promoted one of Robespierre’s most ambitious projects: the founding of a new, non-Christian state religion – the ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’.
    Robespierre also spent a great deal of his time checking up on officials’ ideological purity. Those with ‘patriotic virtue’ were promoted; ‘enemies’ – vaguely defined – removed and arrested. On 10 June the famous draconian law of 22 Prairial began what became known as the ‘Great Terror’. Repression was now directed not only against actual conspirators, but anybody with ‘counter-revolutionary’ attitudes. The law created a new criminal category, one which was to be revived in the future: the ‘enemy of the people’. Anybody who might threaten the Revolution – whether by conspiring with foreigners or behaving immorally – could be arrested, and the law had a marked effect on the use of political repression. From the beginning of the Terror in March 1794 to the law of 10 June, 1,251 people were guillotined on the orders of the Revolutionary Tribunal, whilst in the much shorter period between 10 June and Robespierre’s fall on 27 July, 1,376 were killed. 31
    Robespierre saw this moralistic purging as a permanent method of rule. Other Jacobins, however, saw it as a wartime expedient, unnecessary now that the French armies were victorious. They were also becoming increasingly anxious about its arbitrariness, for Robespierre alone had the power to decide on the measure of virtue and vice. The deputies understandably became worried that they could be the next targets, andbegan to plot his removal. When Robespierre was finally arrested on the orders of the Convention on 9 Thermidor (27 July), he had little support. By abandoning the
sans-culotte
left, Robespierre had left himself vulnerable to the moderates in the National Convention. When Robespierre died, the victim of the guillotine, so too did the radical phase of the French Revolution. The subsequent ‘Thermidorian’ regime ended arrest on suspicion, and many of those formerly denounced as nobles and counter-revolutionaries were rehabilitated.

V
     
    Looking at engravings of David’s elaborate political festivals, one might be forgiven for assuming that he was the propagandist for a backward-looking, conservative regime. The classical style and static, allegorical scenes suggest a love of order and stability. But the events which David’s festivals were celebrating were revolutionary: they