Fall of Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien Robespierre helped run the Committee of Public Safety, the government body behind the French Revolution's Terror. In late July of 1794, within about three days, that same government turned against him completely. He had helped build the machinery that sent his political rivals to the guillotine. Now something turned that machinery back on him. What broke down between Robespierre and the men who had once followed him? Who moved against him, and what was left of the revolutionary government once he was gone?
On the 27th of July 1793, the National Convention placed Robespierre on the Committee of Public Safety. He kept that seat for the rest of his life. Between September 1793 and July 1794, the Committee's power grew fast. New measures, including the Law of Suspects and the Law of 14th Frimaire, propped it up. It became the government's true executive branch, even though the Convention technically still supervised it.
Jacques Hébert led one of two rival factions inside this reshaped government, drawing support from the Paris Commune and the most extreme members of the Cordeliers Club. They pushed for harsher repression than the Terror already provided and campaigned to strip religion from public life. Georges Danton anchored the opposing faction, joined by Camille Desmoulins and the more moderate Cordeliers members known as the Indulgents. They rejected the machinery of the Terror and the Committee of Public Safety's policies outright. Both factions were tried as conspirators against the government. The Hébertists were guillotined on the 24th of March, the Dantonists on the 5th of April.
Danton and Desmoulins had once been close friends of Robespierre, and losing them took a visible toll on him. Paired with the growing demands of the Committee and the Convention, the strain wore down his health, both mental and physical. He responded by cutting back his appearances at the Jacobin Club and in the Convention itself.
That absence would leave the government's next moves largely in other hands.
Robespierre did not reappear in the National Convention until the 7th of May, a day he had set aside for a speech on religion, morality, and republican principles. He wanted the Convention to replace the Cult of Reason, promoted by dechristianizers like the Hébertists, with a new Cult of the Supreme Being. On the 21st of May 1794, the government decided to centralize the Terror, closing almost every provincial tribunal and moving all trials to Paris.
Robespierre led the processions at the Festival in Honor of the Supreme Being on the 8th of June. Crowds welcomed the festival, but Robespierre's prominent role in it struck some deputies as suspicious, and talk began of his fanaticism and hunger for power.
Two days after the festival, Robespierre pushed the Convention to pass the Law of 22 Prairial, which he had drafted with Georges Couthon. The law sped up trials and extended the death penalty to a new category, 'enemies of the people.' This included anyone seeking to restore the monarchy, disrupting food supplies, discrediting the Convention, or communicating with foreign powers. On the 23rd and the 24th of May, two assassination attempts targeted Robespierre and Collot d'Herbois. The murders of Lepeletier and Jean-Paul Marat still weighed on the Convention's memory.
Not everyone in the Convention accepted the new law. Critics of Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just would soon turn it against them.
The Committee of General Security had not been consulted before the Law of 22 Prairial passed, and its members resented being left out. They already felt threatened by the Committee of Public Safety's new power to issue arrest warrants. They resented the Police Bureau too, a body Saint-Just had created and Robespierre ran during his absence, whose duties overlapped their own.
In response, the Committee of General Security produced a report tying an English enemy to Catherine Théot, a woman calling herself the 'Mother of God.' Théot had prophesied that Robespierre was a new Messiah. The report aimed to diminish Robespierre and mock both his religious stance and the Cult of the Supreme Being.
On the 28th of June, Saint-Just returned from the northern front with news of victory. The Revolutionary Army had beaten the Austrians at the Battle of Fleurus, opening the road to Paris. The victory marked the end of the war with Austria, and with it, the argument for keeping the wartime Terror government in place. Robespierre objected to disbanding it, wanting to root out both internal and external enemies first.
The next day, in a joint meeting of the two Committees, Lazare Carnot reportedly shouted at Saint-Just that he and Robespierre were 'ridiculous dictators.' After that exchange, Robespierre stopped taking part in the Committee of Public Safety's deliberations.
He had already stopped attending the Convention regularly once his term as its president ended on the 18th of June. He would not return until the 23rd of July, for one last failed attempt to mend the rift between the two Committees.
Robespierre spent June and July, the month the revolutionary calendar called Messidor, away from both the Convention and the Committee, preparing a speech. He delivered it on the 26th of July, first to the National Convention, then that same day to the Jacobin Club. In it, he defended himself against rumors that had followed him since the Terror began. He also warned of an anti-revolutionary conspiracy that he believed reached into the Convention and the governing Committees.
He named three deputies directly: Pierre-Joseph Cambon, François René Mallarmé, and Dominique-Vincent Ramel-Nogaret. Yet his words seemed to point at several others besides, and because he never named the rest, fear spread through the chamber. Deputies began to suspect Robespierre was preparing another purge like the ones that had claimed the Hébertists and the Dantonists.
At the Jacobin Club that evening, the speech won overwhelming support despite some early pushback. Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois, who had objected to printing the speech, were driven out of the club.
By morning, that same speech would be turned against the men who thought it was aimed at them.
On the 27th of July, Parisian workers staged a demonstration against wage limits set by the Law of the General Maximum. At noon, Saint-Just began addressing the Convention without having shown his speech to either Committee beforehand.
Jean-Lambert Tallien interrupted him, accusing both Robespierre and Saint-Just of breaking with the Committees and speaking only for themselves. Billaud-Varenne interrupted next, describing how the Jacobin Club had driven him and Collot out the day before, and accusing Robespierre of conspiring against the Convention. Robespierre tried to answer but was drowned out by deputies shouting that he was a tyrant and a conspirator.
The Convention voted to arrest five deputies: Robespierre, his brother, Couthon, Saint-Just, and Le Bas. It also ordered the arrest of François Hanriot and other officials loyal to Robespierre. Guards took them before the Committee of General Security and sent them to separate prisons. None of the city's prisons would hold them, though. A delegation from the Paris Commune, risen in Robespierre's defense, demanded the officers refuse the prisoners, and the officers gave in.
A little after midnight, about fifty people, including the five deputies, Hanriot, and René-François Dumas, gathered on the first floor of the Hôtel de Ville.
Word soon reached the Convention that Robespierre and his allies had not been imprisoned. Still in permanent session, the Convention declared Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the other arrested deputies outlaws, and sent armed forces to the Hôtel de Ville. By 2:30 in the morning, the troops had broken in and made the arrest.
Two different accounts explain how Robespierre was wounded that night. One says he tried to shoot himself; the other says an officer at the scene, Charles-André Meda, shot him. Either way, he left the Hôtel de Ville with a broken jaw. He spent what remained of the night in the antechamber of the Committee of General Security.
The next day was, by the French Revolutionary calendar, meant to be one of rest and celebration. Instead, around 2 in the afternoon, Robespierre was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal alongside 21 fellow Robespierrists, including Hanriot, and condemned to death. In the early evening, the condemned were loaded onto three carts and driven to the Place de la Révolution. A mob screamed curses at the procession the whole way.
Robespierre kept his eyes closed, his face still swollen from the injury. He was the tenth person called to the platform, and he climbed the scaffold steps without help. As executioner Charles-Henri Sanson cleared his neck, he tore off the bandage holding Robespierre's shattered jaw in place. Robespierre let out an agonized scream before he died. He was guillotined on the very spot where King Louis XVI, Danton, and Desmoulins had gone before him.
Robespierre's fall cleared the way for a more moderate turn in the Convention, a period historians call the Thermidorian Reaction.
Central Paris has no street named for Robespierre, one of the few revolutionaries left off its map. Paris's municipal council was elected on the 29th of April 1945, with 27 communists, 12 socialists, and 4 radicals among its 48 members. On the 13th of April 1946, that council voted to rename the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré as Place Robespierre. Prefectural approval followed on the 8th of June, but political shifts in 1947 reversed the decision. The square reverted to its old name on the 6th of November 1950.
Streets bearing his name still stand in the so-called 'Red Belt' around Paris, including Montreuil. Montreuil is also home to a Metro station named Robespierre on Line 9, dating to the era of the Popular Front. Numerous other streets, roads, and squares across France carry his name as well.
During the Soviet era, Russia built two statues of Robespierre, one in Leningrad and one in Moscow, commissioned by Vladimir Lenin. Lenin called him a Bolshevik ahead of his time. Poor construction, made of tubes and concrete, meant the Moscow monument crumbled within three days of its unveiling and was never rebuilt. The Robespierre Embankment in Saint Petersburg, across from Kresty prison, reverted to its original name, Voskresenskaya Embankment, in 2014.
In Arras, on the 14th of October 1923, a plaque went up at 9 Rue Maximilien Robespierre. The three Robespierre siblings had rented that house between 1787 and 1789. A separate 1994 plaque marks the Carrauts' brewery on Rue Ronville, where Maximilien and his brother Augustin were raised by their grandparents. A marble bust by Maurice Cladel, once meant for the gardens of the former Abbey of Saint-Vaast, now sits in the Salle Robespierre. It moved there after years in a tribunal room at the Hôtel de Ville. Bronze casts made for the bicentenary are displayed at his former home and at the Lycée Robespierre.
Paris holds two plaques of its own, one on the former Duplay house at what is now 398 Rue Saint-Honoré, the other inside the Conciergerie. A 1909 proposal for a Tuileries statue, backed by René Viviani and Georges Clemenceau, collapsed after press hostility and weak public support. Robespierre still appears in François-Léon Sicard's 1913 marble Altar of the National Convention, now housed in the Panthéon.
A 1949 stone bust by Albert Séraphin in Saint-Denis carries the inscription 'Maximilien Robespierre l'Incorruptible 1758-1794.' In the 1980s, Charles Correia cast a bronze sculpture at the Collège Robespierre in Épinay-sur-Seine. It shows Robespierre and Saint-Just at work on the 1793 Constitution and Declaration of Human Rights. In 1986, a 1791 terracotta bust by Claude-André Deseine, Robespierre's only surviving contemporary portrait, was bought for the Musée de la Révolution française at Vizille. Casts of it now stand in the Conciergerie in Paris and in Montpellier.
During the Second World War, French Resistance fighters carried his name into battle: the Robespierre Company in Pau, under Lieutenant Aurin. The Robespierre Battalion in the Rhône served under Captain Laplace, and a maquis in the Ain formed under Marcel Claeys.
Common questions
What happened to Maximilien Robespierre in 1794?
Maximilien Robespierre addressed the National Convention on the 26th of July 1794, was arrested the next day, and was executed by guillotine on the 28th of July 1794. His fall led to more moderate policies during the Thermidorian Reaction that followed.
Why was Maximilien Robespierre arrested by the National Convention?
Robespierre was arrested after his speech on the 26th of July 1794 alarmed deputies, who feared he was preparing another purge like those against the Hébertists and Dantonists. Jean-Lambert Tallien turned the Convention against him and demanded his arrest the following day.
Where and how was Maximilien Robespierre executed?
Robespierre was executed by guillotine at the Place de la Révolution, the same site where Louis XVI, Georges Danton, and Camille Desmoulins had been executed. Executioner Charles-Henri Sanson carried out the execution.
What did Maximilien Robespierre say in his speech on the 26th of July 1794?
In his speech to the National Convention on the 26th of July 1794, Robespierre spoke of internal enemies, conspirators, and calumniators within the Convention and the governing Committees. He refused to name most of them, which alarmed deputies who feared another purge.
How is Maximilien Robespierre remembered in France today?
Robespierre is one of the few revolutionaries without a street named for him in central Paris, though streets bear his name in the Red Belt, including Montreuil, and elsewhere in France. Plaques and monuments honoring him stand in Arras, Paris, Saint-Denis, Épinay-sur-Seine, and Vizille.
What law did Maximilien Robespierre push through before his fall?
Robespierre pushed the National Convention to pass the Law of 22 Prairial, which he drafted with Georges Couthon. The law sped up trials and extended the death penalty to a new category of 'enemies of the people.'
All sources
10 references cited across the entry
- 1BookThe Life of Maximilien Robespierre: With Extracts from His Unpublished CorrespondenceGeorge Henry Lewes — Adamant Media Corporation
- 4BookThe French Revolution: An Economic InterpretationFlorin Aftalion — Cambridge University Press — 22 March 1990
- 5Memoirs of the Sansons: From Private Notes and Documents (1688–1847)Henri Sanson — Chatto and Windus — 12 March 1876
- 6JournalMemorandum from the Visual Arts Section of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment to the Soviet of People's Commissars: Project for the Organization of Competitions for Monuments to Distinguished Persons (1918)V. Tatlin et al. — 1984