Maximilien Robespierre: Terror and Oranges

Oranges might seem an unlikely revolutionary symbol. Yet in the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the so-called Terror of 1793-94, they took on an intriguing ideological significance. They did so in two separate ways that nonetheless came together: firstly, citrus fruits, including oranges, were an important crop from the Midi, or south of France, a region in the bloody throes of civil war between locals loyal to the Jacobin government in Paris and the various counter revolutionary forces trying to overthrow it. The fighting was bitter and often interrupted the harvesting and transportation of foodstuffs to the north of France. So, the trading and consumption of oranges (and olive oil and wine) in the capital was a tacit affirmation that the Jacobin government was prevailing and that the extended French Republic remained, against the odds, one and indivisible. This vision of an indivisible, triumphant Republic, founded on the infallible virtue of the revolutionary peuple, was most incarnate at the time in the person and politics of one particular deputy, or representative, in the National Convention: Maximilien Robespierre. And, as it happened, Robespierre was known for an inordinate fondness for oranges.

These two facts converge in February 1794 in one of the most famous speeches made by Robespierre; they also strongly shape his posthumous reputation and infamous association with the Terror. By exploring the identification of oranges with Robespierre, it is possible to gain insight into some of the unwritten, implicit dynamics of identity construction in revolutionary France.

Citrus trade

Let’s begin in Menton, east of Nice, in the winter of 1794. The town’s famous orange and lemon crop was harvested on the steep slopes behind particoloured houses that led down to the port. The fruit was piled on carts to be loaded into small boats where it would begin its journey to Marseille, Lyon, Orleans and Paris. And yet, only a year earlier, Menton and its citrus fruits were not even French. They belonged to the king of Sardinia, in his incarnation as the duke of Savoy. Revolutionaries had annexed Nice, Monaco and Menton in early 1793, creating the new Département des Alpes-Maritimes. In their glowing report to the Convention of July that year, Henri Grégoire and Grégoire-Marie Jagot, representatives from Paris on a mission to the newly conquered territories, praised the magnificent abundance of olive and fruit trees, ‘planted even in rocky crevices and watered with the sweat of peasants’ brows’. Had not the town already instituted in the 1670s a ‘magistracy of the lemons’ whose task was to regulate the prices of this precious crop of up to 30 million pieces of fruit, and thus protect local growers? These oranges and lemons would supplant the imports previously hauled north from Portugal and Spain – not least because the Spanish Bourbon monarchy was now at war with republican, regicide France.

The citrus crop from Menton was shipped along coastal routes to Marseille. From there, the fruit was transported overland to the Rhône where it joined other stocks of olive oil, wine and winter fruit to be carried upstream to Lyon. It was carted to Roanne, taken once more in boats down the Loire and transferred to barges drawn alternately by teams of horses and men the length of the Canal de Briare and Canal du Loing. It joined the Seine in Paris, where, in the small hours of the morning, porters offloaded Menton’s ripe oranges, then wrestled their cargo in carts through the slowly filling streets to La Halle aux Fruits, off the Rue de la Fromagerie. The wholesale fruit was first bought up in batches by factrices, female brokers who divvied it up into basketfuls for sale to the Dames des Halles, wily women stall holders who haggled with the brokers to set the day’s price. These fruit sellers then displayed their oranges and other fruit under red parasols (for the better-off merchants) or under dirty canvas canopies slung over four wooden posts (for the poorest). Nearby a bell chimed to signal the opening of the market to the hunched customers, almost all women. One of them, Eléonore Duplay, might have appeared more entitled than the others, more sure of herself. She would buy a half-dozen oranges from one of the better-off Dames, hugging them to her chest to carry them home to the Rue St-Honoré. The oranges would then be taken upstairs to the second floor and placed on a pewter dish for the Duplays’ lodger, a slight, brittle deputy from the Pas-de-Calais.

Robespierre’s oranges

We know, of course, who this deputy is, and can picture him at the rostrum of the National Convention at this time. We can imagine his hand – stained with ink, smelling faintly of coffee and citrus fruit – extended to point at the blurred mass of 700 heads turned towards it. Tracing the hand back up a striped blue sleeve to slight shoulders and a high white collar, we meet the deputy’s pock-marked face, his green eyes hidden behind green-tinted glasses. And then we hear the tinny, relentless voice of Maximilien Robespierre on 5 February 1794, that is, 17 Ventôse Year II:

What is the goal towards which we strive? It is the peaceful enjoyment of freedom and equality, the reign of that everlasting justice whose laws have been engraved, not in marble or in stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in the heart of the slave who forgets them or the tyrant who denies them.

This is a speech constructed in stark binaries: some implacably antagonistic, stone and flesh, tyrants and slaves; some mutually affirming, like liberty and equality. But it is also a speech about inside and outside, about how feelings found laws and how the human heart underwrites justice in the world beyond it.

During his lifetime and especially after his death, Robespierre was described as a pathologically sensitive individual – ‘sad, bilious, morose, jealous’, as one contemporary put it. Terms of bitterness recur – aigreur, âpreté – sourness in his looks, acerbity in his words, sharpness in his acts. As Mirabeau allegedly quipped in 1789, he looked like a cat that has sipped vinegar; but by 1793 the cat had turned snake, becoming the viper from Arras.

However, his admirers and detractors in the Revolution were not psychologists and psychoanalysts who would understand this portrait of bitterness in terms of a castration complex, repressed homosexuality or extreme narcissism, as some later critics did. Instead, they would subscribe to the more empirical doctrine of sensualisme which held that our character, as with our ideas and emotions, is not innate to us, but is formed from our being immersed in powerful sensations, irresistible stimuli that our body and mind then combine in myriad ways to produce ever more complex thoughts and feelings. Our internal feelings are quite literally impressed upon us from the outside and this includes what we eat. And all forms of interiorisation – including eating – can be suspect in a regime founded on intractable republican transparency.

You are what you eat

In the speech he gave on 5 February, Robespierre included a little-studied passage about foodstuffs. He unmasked those false patriots who, under feigned care to prevent public ills, actively sought to aggravate them. He talked about officials in the north of France who killed hens to save grain for making bread. But for the meagre amounts of grain recovered, the more important trade in eggs collapsed, and public disorder ensued. He then went on to give a further telling example: ‘In the South, there has been talk of destroying mulberry bushes and orange trees on the pretext that silk is a luxury item and oranges a delicacy.’ Yet the vast number of silk-workers and fruit farmers ruined by this act would devastate local economies and quickly arm the people against the revolutionary regime. This was – and he was right here – a counter-revolutionary plot.

Robespierre might have had a more personal reason for choosing this example. He still wore a sky-blue silk frock-coat when many other deputies had given up such finery. It was also common knowledge that he lived on a diet of coffee and fruit, principally oranges. When the fruit was not delivered to him, he bought it from the tin trays of itinerant fruit merchants and would eat oranges on walks with his dog, Brount, in the Tuileries gardens or beyond the city walls.

In death, as in life, oranges became synonymous with his presence. Interrogated after Robespierre’s fall, Louis-Stanislas Fréron, a fellow deputy who had conspired against him, recalled visiting Robespierre in his lodgings:

For dessert, they would attentively serve Robespierre – regardless of the season – a pyramid of oranges that he’d greedily consume. It was easy to see where he’d been sitting at table by the mound of orange peel on his plate.

In defending the legitimacy of the orange trade, Robespierre defended his own suspiciously aristocratic taste. What Robespierre ate was clearly not a matter of indifference to his contemporaries. In keeping with their own notions of identity formation, Robespierre’s oranges might represent a lot more than just a foible for citrus fruits. They become the external markers of his internal bitterness, quite literally feeding his sharpness of judgement and acerbity of speech. In fact, Fréron made this very link explicit. He said of Robespierre’s insatiable appetite for oranges that no doubt ‘their acidity’ – the citrus acidity of oranges, (pH 2.9-4.0) – ‘thinned his bile and let it course more freely through him’.

Politics of envy

Later critics hostile to Robespierre characterise him as a homme de ressentiment – a petty individual whose politics were not founded on a selfless exaltation of the public good, but constituted a series of spiteful acts designed to belittle those who were braver, smarter, better than he was. He only tripped the guillotine’s trigger to level down to his own mediocrity. This is revolutionary equality as the politics of envy. It also begs the question: to what extent did these ideological judgements draw on how the revolutionaries themselves imagined relations between what we eat and who we are? Did they think Robespierre was partial to oranges because they confirmed his own bitter world view? Or did they think that the acidic influence of the fruit he ate fed his jaundiced interpretation of those less committed to the Revolution than he? Both are possible. He might be a deeply controversial historical figure, but the explanations of what made Maximilien Robespierre who he was change over time. This is what the oranges from Menton in February 1794 tell us.

David McCallam is Reader in French Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sheffield.