look closer

Robespierre sits hunched on the bench with a handkerchief pressed to his mouth while the men around him shout and point. A day later a pistol shot broke his jaw.

In the summer of 1794 the Terror was running on its own momentum. The law of 22 Prairial had cut a trial down to an accusation and a sentence, with no defense counsel and no witnesses. Executions in Paris rose from about 5 a day to 26. On 26 July the man who ran the machine, Maximilien Robespierre, rose in the Convention. A new list of traitors existed, he said, in his pocket so to speak, and the names would stay withheld for now. It was the one speech he could not afford. Every deputy with a guilty conscience or weak nerves spent that night deciding his own name was on it. Men who are all on the same list stop being afraid of one another. The next day, 9 Thermidor by the Republic's own calendar, Saint-Just got three sentences into the defense before the interruptions began, staged and then real. Tallien waved a real dagger. The hall shouted down with the tyrant. Robespierre stood at the tribune and opened and closed his mouth against a wall of staged noise. When he finally forced a sound out, it cracked, and a deputy supplied the epitaph from the benches: the blood of Danton chokes you. The arrest decree passed at a run, brothers and lieutenants included. That night the fight moved out of the chamber and into the streets. The Paris city government freed the prisoners and gathered them at the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall. The Convention declared them outlaws, which made them legally dead men. Around two in the morning troops took the building, and a pistol shot, from a gendarme or from his own hand, shattered Robespierre's jaw. He spent his last hours on a table in the Committee of Public Safety's antechamber, bandaged, silent, examined by the curious. At the scaffold on 28 July the executioner tore the bandage away before the blade, and the scream that followed was, witnesses agreed, the only sound he had completed in two days. Another 21 heads followed his. Within weeks the machinery of the Terror was taken apart by the same men who had run it without complaint. Adamo painted the scene in Munich in 1870, 76 years after the day itself, and it hangs now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The galleries cheer, the benches lunge, and in the middle of it a seated man presses a handkerchief to his mouth.