1 Child of Arras Robespierre's story begins in the small city of Arras, in the province of Artois, in northern France. For centuries Arras was on the border between France and the Netherlands, changing hands many times before it was firmly annexed by the French monarchy in 1659. Then the city walls were fortified and Arras settled down to a more peaceful existence as the province's ecclesiastical and judicial centre. It was known as 'the city of a hundred steeples' because visitors approaching across the surrounding fields, or on the fine gravel road from the nearby town of Beacute;thune, saw from afar the tall spires of Arras's gothic bell tower, the cathedral, the abbey, eleven parish churches, over twenty monasteries and convents, numerous hospices, chapels and charitable institutions. Conservative piety pervaded the narrow cobbled streets like the smell of incense, as some twenty thousand men, women and children went about their daily devotional duties. Robespierre's birth in 1758 coincided with the beginning of an economic boom in Arras: work had begun to connect the eastern and western sides of the city, which were separated by a branch of the river Crinchon. There were ambitious schemes to clean the river, a seething channel of infection, and to dam or bridge the many places where it seeped insistently into the streets. There were elaborate plans to reconstruct the cathedral, which dated back to AD 687, and to renovate the Abbey of Saint-Vaast, which, along with a lavish income and considerable personal power, made the bishopric of Arras an attractive post for the younger sons of France's nobles.

Alongside the new public buildings, wealthy investors commissioned townhouses several storeys high, to meet growing demands for accommodation. The price of land was rising. Every Wednesday and Saturday even more people crowded inside the city walls to attend the twice-weekly markets trading in regional produce: hemp, flax, wool, soap, lace, porcelain - and especially grain. The grain trade was the main cause of this economic vibrancy. In the distant past Arras's wealth had come from the beautiful tapestries that adorned Europe's medieval castles. But while Shakespeare's Hamlet may have immortalised these tapestries by lunging at a rat behind the arras, they were not the source of the city's eighteenth-century wealth. Rather, local landowners, most of them nobles, had grown extremely rich from the rents on their arable land. The faccedil;ades of their fine new buildings were decorated with stylised sheaves of corn signalling the source of the money that financed them.

These well-to-do landowners were responsible too for Arras's atmosphere of optimism and urban refinement. Paris was less than twenty-four hours away by courier. Behind all this prosperity there lay an onerous system of privilege by which the upper classes lived at the expense of the community; a system of taxation that placed the heaviest burden on those least capable of bearing it; outdated restrictions on manufacture and commerce; and the vestiges of feudalism that weighed heavily on the peasants in the countryside. Along with the economy, crime thrived in Arras. The city's three prisons were crammed full, and processions of beggars, criminals and prostitutes were often seen leaving the city under armed guard, heading north for the house of correction in Lille. The de Robespierre family, established in the province for three centuries at least, was respectable, but not noble. It did not own arable land, so did not benefit directly from Arras's economic boom. The family had a coat of arms (which appears on a document of 1462), but the particule 'de' included in its name indicated only that they were not manual labourers.

One early record mentions Robert de Robespierre, living near Beacute;thune in the mid-fifteenth century and working as un homme de justice. In the sixteenth century there was another Robert de Robespierre at Beacute;th.