Maximilien Robespierre

The lawyer from Arras

Maximilien de Robespierre was born in Arras, in the northern province of Artois, on 6 May 1758, the eldest child of a lawyer. His mother died when he was six, and his father soon drifted away from the family; the children were brought up by grandparents and aunts. A scholarship took him in 1769 to the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he was a brilliant, solitary pupil who read Rousseau with devotion.

He qualified in law in 1781 and went home to practise in Arras. He took on poor clients, won a celebrated case defending a man's right to keep a lightning conductor on his house, and wrote essays for the local academy. In the spring of 1789 the Third Estate of Artois elected him one of its deputies to the Estates-General at Versailles.

The Incorruptible

In the National Assembly he was at first a minor figure: a slight, precise man in a powdered wig who spoke too often and was often mocked. He argued for the vote for all men regardless of wealth, for the rights of Jews and actors, against slavery in the colonies and against the death penalty. In May 1791 he persuaded the Assembly that none of its members should stand for the next one — which left him free, from that autumn, to build his power outside it.

His base was the Jacobin Club in Paris, which he held together when most of its moderate members walked out in July 1791. That summer he took lodgings with the family of Maurice Duplay, a carpenter on the rue Saint-Honoré, and lived there simply for the rest of his life. His indifference to money and comfort earned him his name: the Incorruptible. Through the winter of 1791–92 he argued, almost alone, against the war that Brissot and his friends wanted, warning that it would bring generals and dictators rather than liberty.

The Convention and the king

After the monarchy fell on 10 August 1792 he sat on the insurrectionary Commune of Paris, and in September Paris elected him first among its deputies to the new National Convention. There he led the Mountain, the radical deputies on the high benches, against the Girondins. At the king's trial he argued that there was nothing left to try: the people had already judged Louis by overthrowing him. “Louis must die, because the country must live,” he told the Convention on 3 December 1792 — the man who had asked for the abolition of the death penalty a year and a half before.

The feud with the Girondins ended in June 1793, when armed crowds surrounded the Convention and forced the arrest of their leaders. Robespierre had encouraged the rising at the Jacobins days before, and came out of it the winner.

Virtue and terror

On 27 July 1793 he joined the Committee of Public Safety, the twelve-member body that governed France through war on its borders, revolt in the Vendée and the provinces, and hunger in the cities. He was never its dictator — the Committee decided together, and its members signed one another's orders — but he was its best-known voice and its moral spokesman. Under its rule the Revolutionary Tribunal and the courts like it in the provinces passed some 17,000 death sentences; many more people died in prison or were killed without trial.

In February 1794 he set out the philosophy of the government he served.

That spring the Committee turned on the Revolution's own factions. The Hébertists, who wanted a harsher Terror and a war on religion, were guillotined in March; Danton and his friends, who wanted the Terror to end, followed in April. Robespierre, who had defended Danton at the Jacobins in December, let him go to the scaffold.

The fall

From the Festival of the Supreme Being to 9 Thermidor, in seven weeks

He disliked the campaign to dechristianise France, which he thought would turn the people against the Revolution, and believed a republic needed faith in God and in the immortality of the soul. In May 1794, on his report, the Convention recognised a Supreme Being, and on 8 June, as the Convention's president, he led the Festival of the Supreme Being, staged by the painter Jacques-Louis David in the Tuileries gardens and on the Champ de Mars. Some deputies muttered that he was making himself a high priest. Two days later the Law of 22 Prairial took away the defendants' right to counsel and made witnesses optional, opening the Great Terror: for the next seven weeks the guillotine in Paris worked faster than ever.

Tired, suspicious and absent from the Committee for most of July, he returned to the Convention on 26 July (8 Thermidor) with a long speech denouncing unnamed traitors among the deputies. He would not name them, and every deputy with something to fear assumed he was on the list. The next day, 9 Thermidor, he was shouted down in the Convention and arrested with his brother Augustin, Saint-Just and Couthon. The Paris Commune had them freed and they gathered at the Hôtel de Ville, but the Convention outlawed them and, in the small hours, its troops broke in. A pistol shot shattered Robespierre's jaw; whether he fired it himself or a gendarme did is still disputed.

On the evening of 28 July 1794 he was guillotined on the Place de la Révolution with twenty-one of his followers. The Terror was dismantled within weeks, and the men who had brought him down, some of them among its most brutal agents in the provinces, laid all of it at his door. Historians have argued over him ever since: a defender of democracy and the poor, or the first modern dictator of virtue.