Maximilien Robespierre

Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was born on 6 May 1758 in Arras, in the Artois region of northern France, into a respectable family of provincial lawyers. His childhood was marked by trauma: his mother died in childbirth when he was six, his father abandoned the children and disappeared abroad, and Maximilien and his three siblings were raised by maternal grandparents and aunts. At twelve he won a scholarship to the elite Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where Camille Desmoulins was a fellow pupil. He absorbed Latin rhetoric from Cicero, the political ethics of Cato and Brutus, and above all the writings of Rousseau, whose Social Contract became his political bible. Rousseau's claim that "the people are naturally good but corrupted by inequality and the selfishness of the powerful" formed the axis of Robespierre's entire later thought.

He qualified as a lawyer in 1781 and returned to Arras, where his practice prospered modestly. As a magistrate he was once required to pronounce a death sentence and afterward told his sister Charlotte, "I know he is guilty. But to condemn a man to death!" — a remark that captures how poorly the popular image of the unfeeling executioner fits the young Robespierre. He gained regional fame by defending the rights of a citizen to install a Benjamin Franklin lightning rod against superstitious neighbours, positioning himself as a defender of Enlightenment science.

Elected to the Estates-General in May 1789 as a deputy for the Third Estate, he settled into Paris and became a regular speaker at the Jacobin Club, which by 1791 he effectively dominated. He pushed through a self-denying ordinance forbidding members of the current National Assembly from standing for re-election to the new Legislative Assembly, which removed him from elected office for a year but burnished his reputation as l'Incorruptible — the Incorruptible. He lived in a modest single room in the home of the carpenter Maurice Duplay, refusing salary increases and never accepting gifts. In September 1792 he won the highest vote total in Paris for the new National Convention. He voted for the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, but his Mountain faction was still smaller than the rival Girondins.

In July 1793, with the First Coalition invading France and the Vendée in open revolt, Robespierre was elected to the twelve-member Committee of Public Safety. He had argued in the past that terror was "the weapon of despots" and contemptible in a republic, but he now reversed himself out of what he called revolutionary necessity. His most famous speech, the "Report on the Principles of Political Morality" of 5 February 1794, gave the Terror its philosophical defence: "The mainspring of popular government in revolution is at once virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue." In the same month, the Convention abolished slavery in the French colonies — the most radical egalitarian act of any eighteenth-century state, which Robespierre supported.

The Terror killed perhaps 16,000 by formal execution and tens of thousands more by extrajudicial means in Lyon, Nantes and the Vendée. Robespierre tried, on balance, to limit rather than expand the killing, but the trial and execution of his old ally Danton on 5 April 1794 marked the point of no return. Exhausted, ill and increasingly isolated, on 8 June he presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being, a deist civic religion meant to ground republican virtue in a notion of God stripped of Catholicism. Many revolutionaries found it preposterous. Provincial deputies recalled from Lyon and elsewhere — Fouché, Barras, Tallien — anticipated their own purging and pre-empted him: on 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II) the Convention voted to arrest him. He was wounded in the jaw, probably by his own pistol, captured at the Hôtel de Ville, and guillotined the next day along with his brother Augustin, Saint-Just and twenty other allies. He was thirty-six.

Within days, Tallien and others invented the concept of a "system of terror" that placed sole responsibility on Robespierre, an interpretation Western historiography only began to dismantle seriously in the late twentieth century, beginning with Albert Mathiez and continued in our own day by Peter McPhee and Sophie Wahnich. In fact Robespierre had no portfolio over military or financial policy; he was one voice in a twelve-member committee that governed by consensus. His speeches use the word mort (death) 747 times and mourir (to die) 119 times — a republican death-aesthetic that ran as a single ground tone through his entire rhetoric, drawn from Cato and Brutus as much as from Rousseau. The coexistence of the Incorruptible's universal-suffrage radicalism with his theoretical defence of state terror remains the great unresolved problem of the French Revolution. His thirty-six-year life remains its sharpest and most disturbing mirror, equally invoked by twenty-first-century democrats and authoritarians.