April in Paris
‘When we are all of one mind, no one will need to ask “who is my brother?” For everyone will be his brother!’ ‘Could not these words have been spoken by the apostle Paul, or even by Jesus himself?’ asks Anthony Boulton. ‘But they were not.’
It is a sunny spring late afternoon and a young American, attached to his nation’s embassy, saunters back to his apartment in a quiet part of Paris. As a foreign diplomat he is a rare phenomenon in the Paris of 1794, every other embassy having closed its doors and deserted Revolutionary France as an international pariah. Turning a corner his reverie is broken by a scene of menace! Two ragged sansculottes are threatening a respectably dressed, middle‑aged lady.
After seeing off the two ruffians, the young man escorts the lady to her house where she invites him to stay for supper, explaining that her brother Maximilien will wish to thank the young man for rescuing his sister.
Seated at the supper table, listening to the lady extolling her brother’s important work, the young American suddenly realises the quietly spoken, fastidiously dressed, middle‑aged man before him is none other than Maximilien Robespierre, feared leader of the dreaded ‘Committee of Public Safety’, which is currently responsible for making everyone feel decidedly unsafe, and who, incidentally, uttered the words quoted at the beginning of this article.
Historians have condemned Robespierre, but did he simply grasp beyond his reach, fail spectacularly, and crash to earth by relying on the intellectual heritage that underpins our present civilisation – that bequeathed us by Ancient Greece? In line with the political theories advanced in Plato’s Republic and so admired by both Hitler and Stalin, Robespierre called for the execution of all counter‑revolutionaries so that the pure‑revolutionaries could freely ‘instruct’ the people. As a historian remarked in a recent television series: ‘There’s a lot of darkness in Plato!’
Robespierre, realising that a truly enlightened society had to have a spiritual basis, declared that ‘God exists and the Soul is immortal’. Denouncing atheism as counter‑revolutionary, he redefined God as the ‘principal of Absolute Virtue’. In an effort to replicate the ‘direct knowing’ of the mystics, he instructed jurors trying ‘enemies of the revolution’ to rely on their intuition in the absence of evidence.
The attempt to fuse classical reductionism with spirituality having failed, Robespierre descended into a dangerous ‘ego‑mix’ of grandiosity and confusion, which attacks everyone and everything, without reason. France reverted to a more materially based autocracy through Robespierre’s protegé, Napoleon Bonaparte.
No one before or since has ever tried to create a metaphysically transfigured society from ‘a world made plastic’, to use Wordsworth’s description from his poem ‘the French Revolution’. Certainly not Jesus who, throughout his ministry, displayed the utmost contempt and disdain for both politics and militarism, bluntly declaring: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ – which begs the question why Jesus refuses to uphold a world in which we are all busily engaged in ‘spinning within the joy of our own pain’.
Perhaps a clue to the resolution of this question lies in the discoveries of quantum physics that reveal that according to the behaviour of sub‑atomic particles, we inhabit a perceptual or subjective universe in which time and space have no fixed point.
So where is Reality to be found? Surely it is found in God as ‘first cause’ and anything not of God must be unreal and what arrives out of an imaginary world must be, of itself, imaginary. Could it be that rather than the multiplicity of pairs of opposites with which we are continually bombarded, there is in fact only one – the choice between illusion and reality?
However, must not the ability to perceive reality depend on the presence of willingness and honesty? Perhaps, surprisingly, these qualities were exemplified in Socrates, the very apotheosis of classical thought who, finally realising the inherent hollowness lying beyond the glittering facade of intellectual formalism, dashed the poisoned chalice from his lips and declared: ‘The Delphic Oracle says that I am the wisest of all the Greeks; and so I am, because I alone of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing!’
