Psychology question involving Robespierre...

[celine-carol.livejournal.com]

Hola, long time lurker, first time posting...

I've recently been pretty obsessed with the French Revolution (particularly Robespierre), and I've been reading quite a bit on him and his contemporaries, and I've noticed that a lot of people have jumped to diagnose several other revolutionaries and analyze every possible psychological inclination they may have had.  (I've read a lot of theories on what made Marat blister up, and there seems to be something of a consensus that Mirabeau probably had every venereal disease known to mankind, and sexual preferences that would have been considered rather deviant at the time have been attributed to Camille...)

But I've searched the internet rather thoroughly, and I have yet to find any explanation for Robespierre's behavior that really amounts to anything other than "He was a jerk" or "He was weird" or "He was just fanatical".
But a lot of his traits:  Jerky walk, fist clinching, facial twitching/grimacing, head/shoulder rocking, light filtering problems, issues with voice modulation, nervous breakdowns, gastrointestinal issues, social awkwardness, trembling hands, issues with unexpected social calls, not liking to be touched, absentmindedness, odd food preferences, not liking to look people in the face, refusal to change clothing/habits, and his tendency toward obsession ---
Seem to point toward something that could be diagnosed.

I was just curious if anyone else thought that his behavior could have been symptomatic of a disorder (or syndrome)?

Comments

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

I'm still in the process of studying all of this, so excuse the summarized form of this explanation:

Psychology/Psychoanalysis and History are a big fashion couple of the 20th century. There's actually been a lot of psychoanalysis attempts of Robespierre, in many languages (I spotted one dating from the first decades of the 20th century, in German, pondering Robespierre's (homo)sexuality). Closer to us, in French, there is Jacques André who tried to psychoanalyse the revolutionary process (La Révolution Fratricide - Essai De Psychanalyse Du Lien Social, 1993), and there is Jean Artarit who published a huge psychoanalytical "biography" of Robespierre (in 2003 -- it was reedited last year). As far as I understood, both are influenced by Lacan, who revived Freudian theories. So to answer, according to André and Artarit, Robespierre wasn't just "a jerk/weird/fanatical", he had a "particular psychological profile, etc."

However, as Jacques André himself did end up saying: you can't psychoanalyse a historical figure. You can't make a psychoanalysis without the person in front of yourself revealing his own psyché. This is not how it works.

The main problem with all of these attempts (and it shows in Artarit a lot) is that they will take the most anecdotes they can, coming from various sources, without evaluating the worth of the sources, and stick them all together to build a "psychological portrait". Only, when it comes to Robespierre, you have to understand that we will never know who was the real Robespierre. Our knowledge of Robespierre's personality is blurred both by his "black legend" (his negative legend built by the Thermidorians) and by his idealization by his would-be revolutionary/republican heirs in the 19th century.

So to speak, all these traits you mention may come from Thermidorian accounts, memoirs of the contemporaries or unreliable "witnesses" (written long, long after the events), or were often just made up during the 19th century either by the pseudo-historians themselves or by novelists/playwrights. To conclude, I don't think these traits help at all in understanding Robespierre's role in history, or in understanding the Terror/the French Revolution: at the very least, it can be useful for novelists or filmmakers, as the many films and books produced in our period sufficiently prove. Finally, I don't think we're going anywhere or learning anything in diagnosing post-mortem (and long, long post-mortem, might I say) a disorder or a syndrome for Robespierre: psychological history is only an updating of the good old 19th century "history of the great figures" (i.e. certain individuals caused this event or that massacre because of their particular traits/because they were crazy/amazing/etc.) and it's also very much fitting to our present period in which we try to reduce the social to the maximum so to give the main priority to the total triumph of the individual.

[sibylla-oo.livejournal.com]

Sorry, for "not liking to be touched": is the movie "Danton" your historical source? And for the other "symptomps"?