Robespierre

ro'bes-peer (1758-1794), a famous French Revolutionary leader. He was born at Arras, a city of northeastern France, formerly noted for the manufacture of tapestry. His father's family was of Irish descent--emigrants from Ireland at the time of the English Revolution. He was educated for the law at Paris and took up the practice of his profession successfully in his native city. In strange contrast with his later career, he is said to have resigned a lucrative and honorable judgeship to avoid passing a sentence of death on a wretched criminal. He became a member of various local learned societies and wrote a number of essays on public questions.

In 1789 he was sent to Paris as a member of the States-General, then summoned to consider the distressed condition of the nation. At this period he is described as nervous, timid, and earnest to the verge of fanaticism. Mirabeau said of him, "That young man believes what he says: he will go far." He spoke frequently. He became the center of a band of young men of extreme views, called contemptuously the "thirty voices." Finding his ideas not likely to prevail in the French assembly, he turned to the people of Paris and became a member of the famous revolutionary organization known as the Jacobin Club. Although a bitter revolutionist, he is said to have taken no part in the sack of the Tuileries and to have consented reluctantly to the execution of the king. His words were, "It is with regret that I pronounce the fatal truth, Louis ought to perish rather than a hundred thousand citizens. Louis must die that the country may live." Robespierre was a central figure in opposition to the Girondists, and in 1793 he was made a member of the Committee of Public Safety.

The defenders of Robespierre's character are willing to admit that he was a fanatic, but they deny that he was the promoter of the Reign of Terror. They call attention to the fact that he belonged to a minority of the Committee of Public Safety. However that may be, it is certain that Marat, Danton, and Robespierre were the master spirits of this terrible period, and that after Marat had fallen under the dagger stroke of Charlotte Corday, Robespierre sent Danton to the block and was supreme for several months, during which the number of daily executions reached its greatest height. Whatever sentiments of mercy may have moved the younger man, history cannot fail to record that during his period of responsibility thousands of persons were sent to the guillotine, and that the very gutters of the Place de la Concorde ran with the best blood of France. It is a relief to read that he refused to permit the execution of a rival lawyer who had in earlier days won a literary prize over his head and had boasted of his victory in the Paris newspapers. Robespierre, it is said, declared that personal feelings had no place at a time of such public extremity, that the blood of aristocrats must flow, not for reasons of hatred, but for the good of oppressed France. Finally his day of reckoning came. France triumphed over the mob element of Paris. July 28, 1794, Robespierre, Saint-Just, a devoted and scholarly adherent, and nineteen associates were sent to the fatal place of execution.

In his private life, Robespierre carried himself with respectability. He had a soft, cultured voice, and, though a leader of the mob element, he always dressed like a French gentleman, wearing silk stockings and silver buckles to the last. He was not a coarse, ferocious man. His life was simple and industrious. His word was true, his honesty unimpeachable. Had Marie Antoinette and the aristocracy shown a grain of sympathy for the poor of France, or had any other practical way of righting wrongs opened, there is no reason to believe that Robespierre would ever have been connected with the atrocities of which the historian holds him guilty. The starving, mutilating, maiming, and murdering of peasants had gone on unnoted for centuries in the byways and villages of France. Retribution, not always just, simply burst out like a flame in the most public place of the most public city in the world. Robespierre was a witness--an instrument--but not the creator of the Reign of Terror.

See Marat; French Revolution