Maximilien Robespierre attended the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris when he was eleven years old. He was “a model student” and excelled in his scholastic studies, particularly Latin. His fellow classmates referred to him as “The Roman,” because of his excellent pronunciation of Latin words and phrases. In 1781, one year after his graduation from his three-year study of law at the Sorbonne, Robespierre was admitted to the bar in his hometown of Arras. His law practice provided a comfortable living, and he was professionally respected. When Robespierre was elected as a deputy for the Third Estate in the Estates General in May, he witnessed the onset of the Revolution that broke the monarchy just two months later. It consumed him.
As the fate of the Revolution–and who was on his side–became less and less clear throughout the early 1790s, Robespierre consolidated power. He “began his campaign to forge the Jacobin clubs of France into an instrument of the revolution.” Additionally, he used the Jacobin club as the testing ground for what would become his precise formula for denunciations:
His purity gave him great moral authority…He pushed his new standards in oblique fashion by attacking various proposed candidates on a number of grounds…He proposed that a list be drawn showing a man’s present profession and his position before the revolution; his past, he said, must be “above suspicion. …He was not hampered by any rules of logic; events that occurred in the past were lumped with attitudes of the present to damn individuals…Robespierre’s first purge, though bloodless, was deadly. It destroyed men’s reputations and their political careers, branded them, and consigned them to the enemy camp.
The radical journals and pamphlets together with the lengthy speeches given at the revolutionary clubs paved the way for manipulation of the press and the learning of the methods of mass psychology, indoctrination, and incitement of mob violence.
Jean-Paul Marat took his cue from Robespierre and began “perpetual denunciations of traitors” in his journal, L’Ami du Peuple. He even went so far as to “call openly for violence against fellow Frenchmen.” Another radical journalist, René Hébert, followed suit and used his newspaper, Le Père Duchesne, to arouse and agitate the French populace.
Despite incessant references to the virtue of the people, Robespierre trusted their virtue solely as an abstract concept or when their passions could be mobilized to serve the purposes of the revolution. In his eyes, mob violence was justified if it answered his personal call to carry out political riots or revolutionary insurrections. Robespierre no longer had any further use for the mob, and his references to the people became a total abstraction.
From 1792 to 1794, ‘The Incorruptible’ was instrumental in setting the stage for and presiding over the Reign of Terror. His technique was simple and time-tested–the Machiavellian tactic of “divide and conquer” (divide et impera). He did so with gruesome efficiency eliminating one by one his divided opposition–first the monarchists followed by the Feuillants and the Girondins; next the Hébertists; then the Dantonists; and finally, anyone who stood in his way and the continuation of the Terror. Robespierresucceeded in establishing institutionalized terror as an instrument of state power. He presided over it and used it against his enemies. For him, the end justified the means.
Robespierre might not have worshipped on the altar of wealth and indulgence, but he certainly sacrificed human beings to misconstrued ideals, and, like other tyrants, in the interest of total control. He trampled the rights of others, obliterated liberty, and presided over mass murder purportedly to create a better world. Robespierre believed in his end and would use any means to get there.
Robespierre should be judged by historians not by his purported intentions as divined by admiring scholars or by the lofty ideals conveyed in selected passages from his writings or speeches, but by the violence that his words and denunciations incited. Robespierre was a bloodthirsty tyrant, who in the end misjudged the scornful and ferocious reaction of the desperate men around him–men who had been forced to denounce friends or associates and watch them go to the guillotine and who felt cornered, and their lives were now in mortal danger.
On 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794), the cries of “Down with the tyrant” were finally heard in the National Convention. The event resulted in a prompt and short trip to the guillotine for Robespierre and his allies. Scott is correct when he wrote:
Robespierre simply died, but folly has a virulence that outlasts its inventor. He inspired more Communes, more voices of virtue, more Vladimir Lenins, Fidel Castros, and Mao Tse-tungs, more murder and hatred, more death and misery, than any other of the sacred fools that have emerged to plague honest men.
Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921), the foremost theorist of anarchist communism, wrote: “What we learn from the study of the Great Revolution is that it was the source of all the present communist, anarchist, and socialist conceptions.” The French Revolution (until the Thermidorean Reaction) showed the world and violently put into practice the scissor strategy of forcing radical change upon society, using fear and ultimately terror as its basis–a methodology that Karl Marx later expounded into dialectical materialism and communism. That philosophy cost an excess of 100 million lives in the turbulent 20th century.
The historian Kuehnelt-Leddihn correctly acknowledge that all types of dictatorships, including Nazism and communism, were “cancerous outgrowths of the French Revolution… Without the leading men of 1792–1794, Marx and Engels are hardly imaginable.”
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