<!–

–>

November 21, 2022

Lawyer to revolutionary to tyrant to butcher to victim of the forces he himself had unleashed — that was the arc of the life of Maximillian Robespierre.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); }

The architect of The Terror that engulfed France from 1792 until 1794, Robespierre may have been the first despot of the mind.  Throughout history, kings and emperors and such had raged across the world, killing people for power and land and glory and to obliterate opponents.  But Robespierre’s elected dictatorship was the first to systematically kill people in its own territory for not thinking the right way, for not blindly following his lead, for not fully engaging in the mechanisms of their own oppression, and to make them better.

Robespierre was the direct precursor of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and too many others — the list is sadly too long — who saw the state as a single self-defined monolith that must, should, and had the absolute right to destroy anything or anyone it perceived as a threat, as being not committed enough to the state itself, and as even being potentially capable of possessing a self-image and self-worth separate from the state — and its leader.

In his view, the Revolution was not only to overthrow the oppression of the past, but to create a new man, a new citizen of public virtue.  That process must, by necessity, include terror.  He laid this principle out quite clearly in a speech to the National Convention:

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); }

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 terror is fatal; terror without virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice: prompt, severe, inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue … a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.

Robespierre and his Jacobin faction were the French Revolution’s equivalent of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, with the Girondins playing the role — and meeting the same bloody end — of the Mensheviks.  The difference between the two revolutionary groups came down to a simple argument, with the Jacobins maintaining that free speech and liberty must be suspended so France could win the external (and eventually internal) war it was fighting because, otherwise, there would be no Revolution left to defend, while the Girondins believed that destroying the liberties the Revolution was based on in fact destroyed the Revolution itself.

Some arrests and some trips to the guillotine later, the Jacobins could stop worrying about the Girondins, and Robespierre’s ideals were now unfettered.

Robespierre had a personal “catechism” he followed:

What is our aim?

It is the use of the constitution for the benefit of the people.