As sibylla_oo rightly points out, the FdlES was a popular success, but it's also important to remember that Robespierre was not the only Conventionnel who supported it. Too often it's been presented as Robespierre's pet project that he imposed on a kind of modern, secularist Convention. There were certainly atheist Conventionnels (and, less, openly, those who remained Catholic as well) who thought the idea was harmful and/or ridiculous, but a great many of them were deists like Robespierre, albeit with varying degrees of conviction. They placed the Constitution of 1793 under the auspices of the Supreme Being without Robespierre's instigation, and though he was a strong supporter of the FdlES and played an important role in the ceremony as president of the Convention - his religious convictions were assuredly not foreign to his election to this position at that particular moment - it was not originally his idea.
Whatever *we* might think of the idea of the FdlES, we need to keep that separate from how it was perceived at the time. If the question is, why didn't Robespierre's friends and allies stop him from supporting and then presiding the FdlES, then the answer is likely, a) many of them thought it was a good idea too, b) they didn't necessarily recognize, lacking the hindsight of historians, that this would contribute to his downfall (remember, they don't know about Thermidor at that point), and c) even if they did feel that the FdlES would be impolitic, people tend to forget just how idealistic the Robespierristes were; not everything was raw political maneuvering with them: sometimes they just did things because they accorded with their principles. (On the political side of it, however, there's also the issue that Robespierre throughout his career always thought it more important to be popular with the people than with his colleagues in whatever assembly he belonged to, and by that criterion, the FdlES was a success, as mentioned above.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-10-21 11:18 pm (UTC)Whatever *we* might think of the idea of the FdlES, we need to keep that separate from how it was perceived at the time. If the question is, why didn't Robespierre's friends and allies stop him from supporting and then presiding the FdlES, then the answer is likely,
a) many of them thought it was a good idea too,
b) they didn't necessarily recognize, lacking the hindsight of historians, that this would contribute to his downfall (remember, they don't know about Thermidor at that point), and
c) even if they did feel that the FdlES would be impolitic, people tend to forget just how idealistic the Robespierristes were; not everything was raw political maneuvering with them: sometimes they just did things because they accorded with their principles. (On the political side of it, however, there's also the issue that Robespierre throughout his career always thought it more important to be popular with the people than with his colleagues in whatever assembly he belonged to, and by that criterion, the FdlES was a success, as mentioned above.)