Maximilien Robespierre

Maximilien Robespierre was a French lawyer and politician who became one of the most influential leaders of the French Revolution. A champion of democracy and equal rights in the early years of the Revolution, he became, as a member of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793 and 1794, a leading figure of the Reign of Terror, in which tens of thousands of people were executed or died in prison. He was overthrown and guillotined in July 1794.

Robespierre was born on 6 May 1758 in Arras, in the northern French province of Artois, the eldest son of a lawyer. His mother died when he was six, and his father soon left the family; Maximilien and his siblings were raised by relatives. A scholarship took him to the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where his fellow pupils included Camille Desmoulins, later a revolutionary journalist. He qualified in law in 1781 and returned to practise in Arras, where he took on cases for poorer clients, joined the local academy and wrote essays on legal reform. He was deeply influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas of popular sovereignty and civic virtue shaped his politics, and more broadly by the Age of Enlightenment.

In 1789 Robespierre was elected to the Estates-General as a deputy of the Third Estate for Artois. In the National Constituent Assembly he was a prominent voice of the left. He argued for votes for all adult men rather than only for property owners, for civil rights for Jews and actors, for freedom of the press, and against slavery in the French colonies. In 1791 he called for the abolition of the death penalty. His modest way of life and refusal of bribes earned him the nickname the Incorruptible. His main power base was the Jacobin Club in Paris, where he became the most influential speaker.

Robespierre successfully proposed that members of the Constituent Assembly should be barred from the next legislature, so he held no seat from late 1791. That winter he opposed the war that the Girondins, a rival group of revolutionaries, were urging against Austria, warning that it would bring defeat or military dictatorship. War was declared in April 1792 regardless.

After the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, Robespierre sat in the insurrectionary Paris Commune and was elected a deputy for Paris to the new National Convention. With the Montagnards, the radical left of the Convention, he argued that Louis XVI should be executed without trial, since the people had already judged him by overthrowing him. The king was tried and guillotined in January 1793. The struggle between Montagnards and Girondins ended on 2 June 1793, when crowds and National Guards surrounded the Convention and forced the arrest of leading Girondin deputies. Robespierre supported their expulsion.

On 27 July 1793 Robespierre joined the Committee of Public Safety, the twelve-member body that became the effective government of the French First Republic. France was at war with most of Europe, a royalist and Catholic uprising was raging in the Vendée in western France, and several cities, including Lyon and Marseille, had rebelled against Paris. In September 1793 the Convention declared terror the order of the day, and the Law of Suspects allowed the arrest of anyone thought hostile to the Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of people were imprisoned. The Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris sent the queen, Marie Antoinette, the Girondin leaders and many others to the guillotine. In the provinces, representatives of the Convention carried out mass executions, including mass shootings in Lyon and the drowning of thousands of prisoners in the Loire at Nantes, while republican armies killed very large numbers of people, many of them civilians, in the Vendée.

Robespierre defended the Terror as a necessary, temporary weapon of a republic fighting for survival. In a speech of February 1794 he argued that a popular government in revolution needed both virtue and terror, virtue without terror being powerless and terror without virtue being harmful. In March and April 1794 the Committee turned on rivals within the Revolution: the Hébertists, radical leaders of the Paris sections, were executed, and then the Indulgents, led by Georges Danton and Robespierre's old schoolfellow Desmoulins, who had called for the Terror to be relaxed.

On 8 June 1794 Robespierre presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being in Paris, the launch of a civic religion of a deist kind that he hoped would replace both Catholicism and the atheist campaigns of the radicals. Two days later the Law of 22 Prairial, introduced by his ally Georges Couthon, removed defendants' right to counsel and to call witnesses and allowed only acquittal or death. In the following seven weeks, known as the Great Terror, about 1,400 people were guillotined in Paris alone, more than in the previous fourteen months. Across France about 17,000 people were executed after formal sentence during the Terror, and perhaps 10,000 or more died in prison; many more were killed without trial.

French victories, above all at Fleurus in June 1794, removed much of the justification for emergency rule, while many deputies feared they would be next. Robespierre was also in conflict with other members of the Committee and stayed away from it for weeks. On 26 July he gave a speech in the Convention attacking unnamed enemies, which convinced many that a new purge was coming. The next day, 9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar, the Convention ordered his arrest. He was taken to the Hôtel de Ville, where supporters from the Commune gathered, but troops loyal to the Convention stormed it that night, and Robespierre was wounded in the jaw by a pistol shot. On 28 July 1794 he was guillotined without trial, together with his brother Augustin, Couthon, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and others; about 70 more of his supporters were executed in the following days.

The fall of Robespierre was followed by the end of the Terror and a political reaction known as the Thermidorian period, and the men who had overthrown him blamed him personally for its excesses. For two centuries he has divided historians and the public in France. To some he was a bloodthirsty dictator and a forerunner of the totalitarian leaders of the twentieth century; to others, especially on the left, a sincere democrat and defender of the poor who was swept along by war and civil war. Most historians now stress that the Terror was a collective policy of the Committee and the Convention, but agree that Robespierre was among its chief architects and defenders.