Titans of History

ROBESPIERRE

1758–94

That man will go far, he believes everything he says.

Comte de Mirabeau on Robespierre at the outset of the Revolution

Maxmilien Robespierre was the prototype for the modern European dictator: his sanctimonious vision of republican virtue and terror, and the brutal slaughter he unleashed in its name, were studied reverently by the Russian Bolsheviks and helped inspire the totalitarian mass killings of the 20th century. Known as the Sea-green Incorruptible, his name has become a byword for the fatal purity and degenerate corruption of the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution of 1789 and climaxed with the execution of King Louis XVI on January 21, 1793. The Terror illustrated not only the corrupt dangers of utopian monopolies of “virtue,” but how ultimately such witch hunts consume their own children.

Born in the Artois region of northern France, Robespierre’s family was financially secure, but his childhood was not a happy one. His father was a drunk and his mother died when he was just six. Nonetheless, the young Maximilien won a place to study law at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and soon made his name as a populist, defending the poor against the rich.

Like many of the other young professionals who were to drive the French Revolution—such as the fanatical lawyer Louis de Saint-Just (later nicknamed the angel of death) or the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat—Robespierre eagerly absorbed the theories of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notion of a “social contract” held that a government had to be based on the will of the people to be truly legitimate.

Although fussy about his appearance, often wearing the powdered wigs associated with the profligate aristocrats of ancien régime France, Robespierre—with his weak voice, small stature and pallid complexion—did not cut an imposing figure. But as the comte de Mirabeau said of him at the outset of the Revolution: “That man will go far; he believes everything he says.”

In the wake of the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, the event that triggered the Revolution, Robespierre aligned himself politically with the far left. As the representative for Artois in the Constituent Assembly, set up in July 1789 to decide on a new constitution, he became closely involved with the radical faction called the Jacobins, rivals of the more moderate Girondins. His ideas gained a sympathetic hearing among the Parisian bourgeoisie, and he rose swiftly, in 1791 becoming public accuser (giving him the power of life and death over all citizens, without recourse to trial or appeal) and then first deputy for Paris a year later.

An implacable paranoia about potential enemies of the Revolution haunted him and in December 1792, when Louis XVI was brought to trial, Robespierre—a fierce critic of the king—insisted that “Louis must die, so that the country may live.”

Above all, it was as a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety that Robespierre forged his bloody reputation. Set up by the National Convention in April 1793, this was a revolutionary tribunal invested with unlimited dictatorial powers. Robespierre was elected a member in July 1793 and swiftly instigated the so-called Terror. Tens of thousands of “traitors”—ostensibly those who had expressed sympathy with the monarchy or who thought the Jacobins had gone too far in their relentless pursuit of “enemies of the people”—were rounded up without trial and lost their heads on the guillotine. In reality, anyone Robespierre counted an enemy was liquidated, the apparatus of the state ruthlessly employed to silence them. Robespierre himself personally ensured that his rivals Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins were executed in April 1794.

Robespierre and his allies turned their attention to growing opposition to the Revolution in Lyon, Marseilles and the rural Vendée in western France. After more than 100,000 men, women and children had been systematically murdered on Robespierre’s orders the revolutionary general François Joseph Westermann wrote in a letter to the Committee: “There is no more Vendée. I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women … exterminated. The roads are sown with corpses.” For Robespierre, revolutionary virtue and the Terror went hand in hand. As he put it in February 1794: “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.”

Increasingly alienated by his tyranny, the National Convention turned decisively against him when he accused them of a conspiracy to oust him. A warrant was issued for his arrest and he retreated to his power base at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. As troops entered the building to seize him, Robespierre, surrounded by his henchmen Georges Couthon, Louis de Saint-Just, Philippe Le Bas, and François Hanriot, tried to commit suicide but instead shot himself in the mouth, leaving his jaw hanging off. Bleeding heavily, and howling in agony, he was quickly taken away and finished off at the guillotine, suffering the fate of so many of his opponents before him.

Some see Robespierre as one of the founding fathers of social democracy, his revolutionary excesses occasioned by his championing the cause of the people. Many more though view him as a hypocritical despot whose terror was the precursor of the totalitarian butchery of Hitler and Stalin in modern times.