An excerpt from this essay, “Chrétien de Malesherbes and the Defence of Justice”, on the occasion of Malesherbes’s birthday, 6 December.

Robespierre, who is said to have carried a small copy of Rousseau’s The Social Contract in his pocket like a sacred book, ordered the arrest in December 1793 of one of Rousseau’s important supporters and friends. He ordered the arrest of the reformer Malesherbes and members of his family because Malesherbes had defended Louis XVI at trial.

Malesherbes and members of his family were arrested and taken to Paris. Only a few months later, in April, most of them were sent to the guillotine, while a daughter and granddaughter managed to escape. Malesherbes himself was condemned to witness the deaths of those closest to him one after another before his own execution.

He was beheaded shortly after his daughter. Chrétien de Malesherbes climbed the steps of the scaffold without hesitation. His final words, according to the account presented here, were spoken with a smile: “If a Roman republican saw this scene, he would make a grim prediction.” Less than two months later, Robespierre met the same fate to which he had consigned more than 1,350 others, among them the great chemist Lavoisier and the French poet André Chénier.

I have often wondered what Malesherbes was thinking in his final minutes.

All his efforts in life had apparently failed. His reforms did not succeed and his political life ended in exile. After exile, although he opposed the Revolution, he supported the slogans of equality, fraternity and liberty, despite knowing that such principles entailed the loss of the privileges of his own aristocratic class. His defence of the king at trial also failed.

The end of one of the most benevolent minds of the Enlightenment was to watch those he loved die before his eyes. From one perspective, his life could be read as the complete defeat of his ideals, ending in bitterness. Yet what actually occurred was that he turned his life into a memorable poem that remained in historical memory: a clear sign of faith in goodness and in the capacities of the human spirit. He lived in accordance with his convictions and defended what he believed with admirable courage.

As a father and husband, he was loved and admired by his wife and children. Throughout his life he continued to learn, strive and seek reform in the society in which he lived. He searched for a path not through a simple struggle against power but through using power for reform, without surrendering himself to the temptation of power. He used influence without allowing influence to become his motive or final aim. Twice in his life—once from his aristocratic position and later as a popular reformer—he turned away from political power in order to defend virtue and values. He resisted the temptations that turn politicians into servants of power, and he never placed what others thought of him above the truth and virtue in which he believed.

Years later, through the one daughter and granddaughter who survived the destruction of his family, a descendant was born who became one of the best-known thinkers of the nineteenth century: Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has been described as one of the great works of political foresight before the twentieth century. In speaking of his ancestor, Tocqueville is presented here as saying: “I am the descendant of Malesherbes, the man who defended the people against the king and the king against the people.”

Aydin Areta