Maximilien Robespierre as retroactive scapegoat

Laurent Guyénot offers a summary of Maximilien Robespierre's theology. Meanwhile he revises the common understanding of 1794 in France.

Robespierre was a key thinker of la Révolution. Guyénot - who is French, which I am not - argues that, nonetheless, Robespierre did not approve the actions for which la Révolution is infamous: the anti-theism and (the full extent of) the mass murders.

The historian can test that. When Robespierre was unseated 31 July 1794, did the coup against the public figure end the public Terror? His immediate successor, as it happens, was Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne - whom Guyénot does not name. This one had been a direct agitator for the Terror. If you haven't heard of JNBV, partly that's because his reign lasted only through August. The next one up was Merlin de Douai, by all accounts a decent sort, who ushered in le Directoire which attempted a restoration of the rule of law. The coup, then, did nothing to end the Terror.

That flawed Robespierre was killed, and so abruptly, where the truly evil JNBV was exiled implies a political murder on the part of JNBV. Over July 1794 JNBV feared that Robespierre might indeed push la Révolution into something other than tyranny - which de Douai, barely more than a month later, would do in truth. Robespierre then, however, was ill and not in direct contact with la Révolution. This weakened Robespierre and allowed more forceful personalities to wrest power.

De Douai was too decent to kill JNBV - and for that, his Directoire needed some means to kill JNBV's career. As Justinian II had proven and as Napoleon would prove, you don't exile Caesar.

Since Guyénot omits JNBV, and since JNBV had only a month to say whatever he was going to say anyway, we do not learn from Guyénot how August 1794 remembered Robespierre. I can, however, take a good guess at le Directoire. This nouvelle régime accepted Robespierre's execution as to make the man a scapegoat for all the evils of la Révolution which it replaced. Napoleon, who usurped le Directoire, admitted as much. By calumniating Robespierre, le Directoire cut down potential support for the true villains starting with JNBV over in Guyana.

Le Directoire made of Robespierre a cautionary tale. Mary Shelley or a Jew would say, he was killed by his own golem. This meme had the powerful rhetorical value of being true.

UPDATE 8/12: On finishing Simon Schama: JNBV was on Robespierre's Right. He was a Girondin holdover. JNBV and his Directoire successors presided, instead, over chaos between Jacobin diehards (now out in the hinterland) and an ever-fumbling Paris.

Schama paints Robespierre instead as a (failed) philosophe. Schama implicates him in that tyrannical 22 Prairial law although he's aware that Robespierre was not in good health at the time. But after the fact Robespierre certainly used the law, being increasingly paranoid, toward the end. Killing Danton was a mistake.