Rie Isidore
a French revolutionist; born of a family of Irish origin, in Arras, May 6, 1758. His mother died in 1767, his broken-hearted father two years later, and the four children were brought up by their maternal grandfather, an Arras brewer. Maximilien, the eldest, early showed unusual promise, and was educated at Arras and at the College Louisle-Grand at Paris. He was admitted avocat in 1781, and next year was named criminal judge by the Bishop of Arras, but resigned his place soon after to avoid passing a sentence of death. All through life a fanatical devotee of the Gospel according to Rousseau, his sentimentality and taste for verses made him popular among the Rosati at Arras. He drew up the cahier or list of grievances for the guild of cobblers, and was elected to the States-General in 1789 as one of the deputies for the tiers état of Artois. He soon ROBESPIERRE attached himself to the extreme Left the "thirty voices," and though his first speeches excited ridicule, it was not long before his earnestness and his high sounding phrases commanded attention. Indeed his influence grew daily, both in the Jacobin Club and in the Assembly.
Three days after the death of Mirabeau he called on the Assembly to prevent any deputy from taking office as minister for four years, and in the following month (May, 1791) carried the motion that no member of the present Assembly should be eligible for the next.
Next followed Robespierre's appointment as public accu accuser, the king's flight to Varennes (June 21), Lafayette's last effort to control the sacred right of Insurrection on the Champ-de-Mars (July 17), the abject terror of Robespierre, his sheltering himself in the house of Duplay, a carpenter, his hysterical appeal to the club, the theatrical oath taken by every member to defend his life, and his being crowned with chaplets, along with Pétion, and carried home in triumph by the mob at the close of the Constituent Assembly, Sept. 30.
He went to Arras, where he sold his small patrimony and returned to Paris, to the house of Duplay, where he remained till the last day of his life. He was much beloved in the family, and a passion quickly sprung up betwixt himself and his host's eldest daughter, Elénore, a romantic girl of 25. Alone among the patriots he was noted for the carefulness of his dress-powdered hair, a bright blue coat, white waistcoat, short yellow breeches, with white stockings and shoes with silver buckles.
Meantime the Girondist party had been formed in the new Legislative Assembly, its leaders-the loudest, Brissot-eager for war. Robespierre, who ever feared and disliked war, offered a strenuous opposition in the debates of the Jacobin Club. Fundamentally an empty pedant, inflated with words which he mistook for ideas, in his orations he is ever riding in the air on theories, his foot never on the solid ground of the practical. In April, 1792, he resigned his post of public prosecutor. He was invisible during the crisis of August 10, but joined the Hôtel-de-Ville faction, and on August 16 he presented to the Legislative Assembly its petition for a Revolutionary Tribunal and a new Convention. He was elected first deputy for Paris to the National Convention, which opened on Sept. 21.
The bitter attacks on him by the Girondists were renewed only to throw Robespierre into a closer union with Danton and his party, but the final struggle was interrupted for a little by the momentous question of the king's trial. Robespierre ROBESPIERRE opposed vigorously the Girondist idea of a special appeal to the people on the king's death, and his execution (Jan. 21, 1793) opened opened up the final stage of the struggle, which ended in a complete triumph of the Jacobins on June 2 of the same year. The first Committee of Public Safety-a permanent Cabinet of Revolution-was decreed in April, 1793, but Robespierre was not elected till July 27.
He was now for the first time one of the actual rulers of France, but it is open to question whether for the whole 12 months from this time to the end he was not merely the stalking horse for the more resolute party within the Twelve.
His vaunted respectability, his great popularity with the mob, and his gift of fluent, if vague and windy, oratory, made an admirable cover for the truculent designs of strong and completely unscrupиlous men like Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois and at least it is certainly the case that Couthon and Saint-Just were the only members whose political and social ideals coincided with his own.
The next scenes in the dark drama of Revolution were the intrigues and desperate struggles that sent Hébert and his friends to the scaffold on March 24, 1794, and Danton and Robespierre's school-fellow, Camille Desmoulins, on April 5. Danton he at once hated and feared with that fierce and spiteful hatred he ever felt instinctively for men with natural gifts beyond his own. The next three months he reigned supreme, but his supremacy prepared the way for his inevitable fall. He nominated all the members of the government committee, placed his creatures in all places of influence in the commune of Paris, sent his henchman Saint-Just on a mission to the armies on the frontier, assumed supreme control of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and completely revolutionized its method of operation by the atrocious measure introduced by his creature Couthon on the 22d Prairial (June 10), to the effect that neither counsel nor witnesses need be heard if the jury had come otherwise to a conclusion.
But, in accordance with the law that governs all human things, as Robespierre's power increased his popularity decreased. His declaration on May 7 of a new religion for the State the foundation of a new régime of public morality -awakened in the mind of Paris the slumbering sense of humor. The Convention at Robespierre's instance agreed to compliment the Supreme Being with an acknowledgment of His existence and themselves with the Consolatory Principle of the Immortality of the Soul, to be celebrated in 36 annual festivals. The ROBESPIERRE first of these was held on June 8, when Robespierre, glorious in a new light-blue coat, walked in front of the procession and delivered his soul of a vapid harangue, and set fire to pasteboard figures representing Atheism, Selfishness, Annihilation, Crime, and Vice. Meantime the pace of the guillotine grew faster, though apparently Robespierre hoped to bring it to a close as soon as all his more dangerous enemies, like Tallien, Fouché, and Vadier, were cut off.
At the same time the public finance and the work of government generally drifted to ruin, and Saint-Just openly demanded the creation of a dictatorship in the per-
MAXIMILIEN M. I. ROBESPIERRE son of Robespierre as alone possessing intellect, energy, patriotism, and revolutionary experience enough. On July 26 (8th Thermidor), after about a month's absence, the dictator delivered a long harangue complaining that he was being accused of crimes unjustly. He was listened to in deep unsympathetic silence, and the Convention, after at first obediently passing his decrees, next rescinded them and referred his proposals to that committee, and the sitting ended without anything being concluded. That night at the Jacobin Club his party again triumphed, and the Tallien party in despair hurried to the members of the Right, the Girondist remnant, and implored their help against the common enemy at this desperate juncture. Next day at the Convention Saint-Just could not obtain a hearing. Tallien, Billaud-Varennes, and Vadier vehemently attacked Robespierre, and the voice of the dictator himself was drowned with cries of "Down with the tyrant." Turning to the Right, "I appeal ROBIN to you whose hands are clean," he cried, but the Right sat in stony silence. "President of Assassins, I demand to be heard," he cried, but his voice died down in his throat. "The blood of Danton chokes him," cried Garnier. An unknown deputy named Louchet proposed that Robespierre should be arrested, and at the fatal words his power crumbled into ruins. His younger brother and Lebas demanded to be included in the honorable sentence.
Vain attempts were made by the Jacobin Club and the Commune to save their hero, but Paris refused to move, and even Henriot's artillerymen to obey. Robespierre broke his arrest and flew to the City Hall, whereupon the Convention at once declared him out of the law. The National Guard under Barras turned out to protect the Convention, and Robespierre had his lower jaw broken by a shot fired by a gendarme named Méda. Next day (July 28; 10th Thermidor, 1794) he died, with Saint-Just, Couthon, and 19 others by the guillotine.