Maximilien Robespierre

• 1. Introduction

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  Maximilien Robespierre was born in Arras on the 6th of May 1758. Thirty-six years later, on the 28th of July 1794, he was executed without trial, sent to the guillotine along with around 90 others by the very revolutionary movement he had helped build. Between those two dates lies one of the most contested lives in modern history. Was he a principled champion of the poor and the disenfranchised, or a paranoid zealot who dragged France through rivers of blood? Was terror, as he himself insisted, nothing other than justice made swift and inflexible? Or did it betray every ideal he claimed to serve? The man who coined the phrase "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" also authorised a law under which 156 people were sent to the guillotine in just three days. He denounced the death penalty from the floor of the Assembly and then worked fervently to ensure a king's execution. He spoke up for Protestants, Jews, people of African descent, actors, and domestic servants at a time when few politicians would, and then silenced colleagues with the line "whoever trembles at this moment is guilty." The questions Robespierre raises are not comfortable ones. They still do not have settled answers.

• 2. Arras to Paris

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  Robespierre's mother died on the 16th of July 1764, after delivering a stillborn son. She was twenty-nine. Charlotte Robespierre's memoirs suggest that loss shaped her brother in ways that never quite healed. Their father left Arras a few years afterward, and Maximilien and his brother were raised by their maternal grandparents while his sisters went to live with paternal aunts. He was eight years old when he started at the Arras College. In October 1769, a recommendation from the bishop secured him a scholarship at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where Camille Desmoulins was among his classmates. At school Robespierre developed a deep admiration for the Roman Republic and for the rhetorical craft of Cicero, Cato, and Lucius Junius Brutus. In 1776 he earned the first prize for rhetoric. He found his political philosophy in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, taking from it the idea that the general will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of government. He graduated from the Sorbonne in July 1780, receiving a special prize of 600 livres for academic achievement and exemplary conduct. When he was admitted to the bar and appointed as one of five judges in the local criminal court in March 1782, he resigned quickly. He opposed the death penalty and could not bring himself to adjudicate capital cases. The Academy of Metz gave him a medal in 1784 for an essay on collective punishment. Two years later he was criticising lettres de cachet, imprisonment without trial, and the exclusion of women from academic circles. The social connections he built in Arras would matter later: Lazare Carnot, Joseph Fouché, and Martial Herman all moved through his circle before any of them reached Paris.

• 3. The Voice in the Assembly

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  On the 6th of June 1789, Robespierre delivered his first speech in the Estates-General, attacking the hierarchical structure of the church. Observers noted that this young man was "unaware of when to cease, but possesses an eloquence that sets him apart from the rest." He had secured his seat on the 26th of April as one of 16 deputies representing French Flanders. By the 13th of June he had aligned with the deputies who declared themselves the National Assembly, claiming to represent 96% of the French nation. Week after week he argued positions his colleagues refused to adopt. On the 22nd of October he challenged property requirements for voting, drawing on Rousseau: "sovereignty resides in the people, in all the individuals of the people. Each individual therefore has the right to participate in making the law which governs him." Through December and into January he drew attention to the plight of Protestants, Jews, people of African descent, domestic servants, and actors. He championed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen when doing so was unfashionable among many deputies. He rarely won majority votes in this period. In 1791 he gave 328 speeches, almost one a day, on subjects ranging from the National Guard to the rights of free people of colour. On the 15th of May 1791, when the Constituent Assembly declared full and equal citizenship for all free people of colour, Robespierre declared: "I feel that I am here to defend the rights of men; I cannot consent to any amendment and I ask that the principle be adopted in its entirety." He descended from the rostrum to prolonged applause from the left side of the chamber and from the galleries. On the 30th of May he delivered a speech against the death penalty that Hillary Mantel would later describe as "perfectly constructed, a brilliant fusion of logic and emotion, as much a work of art as a building or a piece of music could be." The Assembly did not support it. He also coined "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" in this period, adding the word fraternity to the flags of the National Guard. His physical appearance was a deliberate contradiction of his politics: knee-breeches, a curled and powdered wig tied in a queue, the fastidious dress of the old order he was working to dismantle. Some described him as "nervous, timid, and suspicious."

• 4. War and the Commune

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  Austria and Prussia issued the Declaration of Pillnitz on the 27th of August 1791, warning France not to harm Louis XVI. When Brissot began pushing the Legislative Assembly toward war, Robespierre stood nearly alone against it. On the 18th of December 1791 at the Jacobin Club, he warned that military commanders who won wars tended to turn their power against the governments that sent them: "If they are Caesars, Catilines or Cromwells, they seize power for themselves." On the 2nd of January 1792, he went further: "The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt its laws and their constitution. No one loves armed missionaries." On the 17th of May 1792, he launched a weekly periodical, Le Défenseur de la Constitution, printed by his neighbour Nicolas, to spread his arguments and counter Brissot's influence. When the war he had predicted went badly, Robespierre demanded on the 23rd of April that Lafayette, head of the Army of the Centre, step down. He urged the creation of a people's army of at least 20,000-23,000 men to defend Paris. On the 10th of August 1792, roughly 30,000 Fédérés and sans-culottes stormed the Tuileries palace. Robespierre called it a triumph for the "passive" citizens who had previously been excluded from the vote. That night he secured a position in the Paris Commune. On the 16th of August he submitted a petition to establish a provisional Revolutionary Tribunal to deal with suspected traitors, then declined to preside over it as a judge, citing a lack of impartiality. When Robespierre was elected to the National Convention on the 5th of September, Danton and Collot d'Herbois received more votes than he did. Madame Roland wrote to a friend: "We are under the knife of Robespierre and Marat, those who would agitate the people."

• 5. Virtue and Terror

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  On the 5th of November 1792, facing accusations that he was preparing a dictatorship, Robespierre turned the charge on its head. He asked the Convention: "Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?" The Jacobins and Cordeliers had already seized the upper benches of the former Salle du Manège, earning the name the Montagnards, or the Mountain. Below them sat the Girondins; the independent majority in between was called the Plain. When a secret cache of 726 documents belonging to Louis XVI was discovered after the Republic's proclamation, opinion hardened rapidly. On the 14th of January 1793 the king was voted unanimously guilty of conspiracy. Louis XVI was guillotined on the 21st of January. When Robespierre joined the Committee of Public Safety on the 27th of July 1793, he was the Committee's most recognisable figure, though it functioned without a hierarchical structure. France was simultaneously at war with external enemies and fighting aristocratic uprisings in Vendée and Brittany, federalist revolts in Lyon, Normandy, and Le Midi, and the secession of Corsica. On the 5th of February 1794, Robespierre delivered what may be his most consequential statement in his Report on the Principles of Political Morality: "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. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible." Scholars like R. R. Palmer and Donald C. Hodges argued that this report, first delivered on Christmas Day 1793 and developed through February, was the first important statement in modern times of a philosophy of dictatorship. Others read it as a desperate response to real conspiracies and genuine military crisis. The German journalist K. E. Oelsner watched him in this period and wrote that Robespierre behaved "more like a leader of a religious sect than of a political party." From the 13th of February to the 13th of March 1794, Robespierre withdrew from the Committee entirely, suffering what McPhee describes as acute physical and mental exhaustion.

• 6. Danton and the Descent

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  Camille Desmoulins had been Robespierre's classmate at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. Robespierre had witnessed his marriage in December 1790, alongside Pétion and Brissot. On the 5th of December 1793, Desmoulins launched a new journal, Le Vieux Cordelier, in which he compared Robespierre to Julius Caesar and pleaded for an end to the Terror. He wrote directly to his old friend: "My dear Robespierre... my old school friend... Remember the lessons of history and philosophy: love is stronger, more lasting than fear." Robespierre did not relent. On the 30th of March 1794, the two committees decided to arrest both Danton and Desmoulins. When Legendre stood in the Convention and asked for the prisoners to be heard before any report was delivered, Robespierre silenced the chamber: "It would be violating the laws of impartiality to grant to Danton what was refused to others, who had an equal right to make the same demand." No friend of the Dantonists dared speak after that, for fear of being accused of putting friendship before virtue. The trial of Danton, Desmoulins, and others ran from the 3rd to the 5th of April before the Revolutionary Tribunal, presided over by Martial Herman. Desmoulins was dragged up the scaffold by force. On the last day of the trial, his wife Lucile was imprisoned. Following the executions on the 5th of April, Robespierre withdrew partially from public life and did not reappear until the 7th of May. The Law of 22 Prairial, introduced by Georges Couthon on the 10th of June 1794, stripped suspects of the right to legal counsel and offered only two verdicts: acquittal or death. Within three days, 156 people were sent to the guillotine, including all the members of the Parlement of Toulouse. Over 8,000 suspects were confined in Paris by the start of Thermidor.

• 7. 9 Thermidor

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  Robespierre's opponents in the Convention had learned a lesson from every confrontation he had won: to hesitate was to appear guilty. On the 9th of Thermidor, Year II, they did not hesitate. Accusations of excess had been building inside the Convention for weeks. Members who had survived the Terror by staying silent now calculated that Robespierre was more dangerous alive than the risk of moving against him. He was arrested, along with around 90 others. The man who had declared "whoever trembles at this moment is guilty" was not given a trial. He was executed on the 28th of July 1794 at the age of thirty-six. The label "the Incorruptible" had been given to him by Madame Roland, who had grouped him with Pétion de Villeneuve and François Buzot for their modest lives and refusal to take bribes. The tricoteuses, the women who had knitted beside the guillotine and formed a core of his popular support in Paris, mourned him. His enemies celebrated. The question of what to make of him never closed. Condorcet had described him as a cult leader. Moore observed that he appeared when he could make a figure and disappeared when others occupied the stage. His progressive positions, including his advocacy for the rights of free people of colour, his attack on lettres de cachet, and his opposition to the death penalty at a moment when few dared say it, sit alongside the Law of 22 Prairial in the same biographical record. The ashes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were transferred to the Panthéon at Robespierre's request in April 1794, weeks before the end. Rousseau's general will had been Robespierre's guiding idea from the Collège Louis-le-Grand onward, and he carried it to its most violent conclusion.