Ruth Scurr: ‘Fatal Purity’ and dangerous identity

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

The most innovative biography of 2015 was Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life, and it is still reverberating (it was published in the U.S. last month and following this Scurr lectured on it in America). Long-term followers of Calderonia will remember my enthusiastic posts about it last year (29 April and 5 May), and my no less enthusiastic ones about Scurr’s published views on biography as ‘an art form open to constant experiment’ (6 March). I became curious, therefore, about her other biography, which was of Maximilien de Robespierre and published in 2006 by Chatto & Windus. It is available in paperback by Vintage and I have now read it.

I must immediately admit to a phobia for the French Revolution. It literally makes me feel sick.  As a young Russianist, I had to study the Bolshevik Revolution for three years, I then lived in Communist Russia for two and a half, and in the late 1960s/early 1970s the air there was still rancid with fear pheromones. Although not an historian, I subsequently had to make a minute study of Stalinism and the Great Terror. I am aware of how consciously the Bolsheviks imitated the French revolutionaries. At Moscow University in 1970 I once woke up terrified from a dream I had very similar to the one Wordsworth recounts in The Prelude, of ‘long orations which […] I pleaded/Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice/Labouring, a brain confounded’. I have only to read the word ‘executed’, therefore, whether it is by bullet in the back of the head or by guillotine, and I go tense and pale. The French revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks disgust me.

Ruth Scurr opens her biography of Robespierre with a short Preface in which she quotes a list of those condemned to death during the Reign of Terror — ordinary people, guillotined for things like ‘writing’, or ‘sawing down a tree of liberty’ — and then examines the Paris statistics for the last five months of Robespierre’s reign, when as many as sixty people were condemned by a single tribunal in a morning and judicially murdered on the same scaffold in the afternoon. It is an opening that will shock any reader, not just me, and presumably Scurr intends it to. However, in the Introduction that immediately follows she describes her biographical approach thus:

Fatal Purity […] expresses neither partisan adulation nor exaggerated animosity; instead it is motivated by the open-minded interest Robespierre deserves. It tries, whenever possible, to give him the benefit of any rational doubt. […] I have tried to be his friend and to see things from his point of view. But friends, as he always suspected, can be treacherous; they have opportunities for betrayal that enemies only dream of.

I think the least one can say of this statement is that it is ‘contrapuntal’. Of course Robespierre deserves ‘open-minded interest’, but is it possible to give manifest psychopaths like Robespierre, Lenin or Stalin ‘the benefit of rational doubt’? What does it mean to do so? Similarly, one should never write a man’s biography if one does not attempt 100% to ‘see things from his point of view’, but what does ‘try to be his friend’ mean? It sounds gauche and the suggestion that such a biographer has undreamt-of ‘opportunities for betrayal’ looks like coy self-dramatisation.

As I see it, this counterpoint undermines the success of what, I agree with Stuart Kelly in the TLS of 25 February 2015, is a ‘slyly radical biography’ — an original experiment that takes the kind of risks from which Scurr has rightly said ‘good books result’ (The Guardian, 6 February 2016).

Historians have told us that Robespierre is enigmatic because little is known of his pre-revolutionary life and many of his personal documents were destroyed after his execution. In that case, Scurr has performed wonders of investigation, discovery and collocation, because this does read like a detailed cradle to grave biography, despite its reliance on the published political speeches of Robespierre and those addicted to the sound of their own voices around him. Although there are discontinuities, there is certainly a narrative spine, which is even reinforced by a five-page Chronology right at the end.

But there is a great psychological and moral vacuum at the heart of this book, and the reason in my opinion is that it is not only a biography in the traditional sense. Along the journey we may be told that ‘Robespierre became the living embodiment of the Revolution at its most feral’, that he believed he was the instrument of Providence ‘to the point of insanity’, or that he increasingly suffered from paranoia; but we are also fed extraordinarily ingenuous comments like ‘by all accounts he was remarkably odd’. If Scurr’s book were a traditional biography, the process of sustained empathy with her subject would have produced a comprehensive diagnosis of his psychosis and a detailed analysis of his ethics. She does not actually practise authorial empathy in this book, however, but a degree of professional identification with her ‘friend’.

Its title is not Robespierre: A Life, but Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. The ‘purity’ is the ‘perfection’, the ‘incorruptibility’, of the disembodied ideas that Robespierre and the Revolution were equally possessed by (truly in the Dostoyevskian sense). Ruth Scurr is an academic. More particularly, she is an historian of Political Thought, i.e. an historian of ideas. There is an understandable impersonality, therefore, about her interest in ideas that, whilst of course qualitatively different from Robespierre’s, dangerously hovers over it. This nebulous identification is dangerous for two reasons. First, biography is about the life of a person, therefore if this person is obsessed with ideas the biography should address the ontology of their ideas, not the metaphysics. After all, the words ‘democracy’ and ‘virtue’ — two of Robespierre’s favourite shibboleths — are merely abstract nouns describing actions: democracy is a way of doing things without killing people, virtue is the enactment of your moral values. Scurr’s focus on political ideology therefore etiolates her biography. The other danger of detaching political ideas from reality is…fatally obvious.

I need to stress that, like my other posts on biographies, this is not a review. Scurr’s experiment in combining life-story with history of ideas is without doubt innovative and interesting. What particularly interests me is her use of self-identification with/being a ‘friend’ to her subject, rather than empathy (whose limits must be understanding). There are long stretches of her book that are written with superb pace, and as she says, ‘no backdrop can match the French Revolution’. I am also struck by the fact that both Charlotte Bronte and Fatal Purity are enclosed by prologues and codas (is this a fashion?), and both Harman and Scurr end their books with what are in effect extended hypotheses of their own. But these hypotheses could not be more different in kind.

Harman presents the empirical evidence for Charlotte Brontë’s French professor having communicated/not communicated with her as Rochester communicates from afar with Jane Eyre, or Cathy with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and leaves the hypothesis open. The hypothesis is based on fact and Harman does not tell us whether she believes it.

When the badly wounded Robespierre was laid on the plank of the guillotine, his executioner removed the bandage that was holding Robespierre’s face together and Robespierre screamed an animal scream, seconds before being decapitated. Scurr then gives us a final paragraph almost a page long in which she speculates about what this scream ‘was’. It was ‘the point of severance, when Robespierre’s precious vision of a democratic republic, pure and founded on virtue, finally left him […] perhaps his vision went out into the world on the back of that scream […] [perhaps it was] the end of the bright hope for a democratic Republic […] as a biographer, I hear it as the agonised separation of Robespierre and the Revolution: the man and what he lived for’.

I’m sorry, but this is novelistic speculation and even romantic fantasy. Robespierre’s scream was a scream.