Robespierre eBook

"Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (6 May 1758 - 28 July 1794) was a French lawyer, politician, and one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. As a member of the Estates-General, the Constituent Assembly and the Jacobin Club, he advocated against the death penalty and for the abolition of slavery, while supporting equality of rights, universal suffrage and the establishment of a republic. He opposed war with Austria and the possibility of a coup by the Marquis de Lafayette. As a member of the Committee of Public Safety, he was an important figure during the period of the Revolution commonly known as the Reign of Terror, which ended a few months after his arrest and execution in July 1794. ...His supporters called him "The Incorruptible", while his adversaries called him dictateur sanguinaire (bloodthirsty dictator)."

IN presenting the story of Robespierre this must be attempted at the outset as a key to the whole: the picture of himself. A man of insufficient capacity, bent into the narrowest gauge, tenacious of all that statesmen least comprehend, and wholly ignorant even of the elements of their science, became for a brief time the personification of a vast national movement of which he was but barely in sympathy with one single aspect, and that the least inspiring and the least fruitful. How did such a position come to him, and why did it remain even for those few months? This same man, singularly ill-fitted to his country, to its traditions and its native humour, to its colour, religion, and every essential, fell suddenly from power by no general rising of opinion, by no discovery of discord between himself and those who had worshipped him. He fell by a kind of mighty triviality; a small chance of intrigue and conspiracy that yet carried in itself much of the fate of our civilisation. How is such a fall to be explained?-Introduction.