Maximilien Robespierre

"Robespierre is certainly the most tragic subject which history offers, but also the most comic. Shakespeare has nothing like this."

"Robespierre was the first prototype for the modern European dictator: his sanctimonious vision of republican virtue and terror, and the brutal slaughter he unleashed in its name, were studied reverently by the Russian Bolsheviks and helped inspire the totalitarian mass-killings of the 20th century. Known as ‘the Sea-green Incorruptible’, his name has become a byword for the fatal purity and degenerate corruption of the ‘Reign of Terror’ which followed the French Revolution of 1789 and climaxed with the execution of King Louis XVI on 21 January 1793. The Terror illustrated not only the corrupt dangers of utopian monopolies of ‘virtue’, but how ultimately such witch hunts consume their own children."

"Some see Robespierre as one of the founding fathers of social democracy, his revolutionary excesses occasioned by his championing the cause of the people. Many more though view him as a brutal dictator who manipulated the Parisian mob for his own ends — a hypocritical despot whose terror was the precursor of the totalitarian butchery of Hitler and Stalin in modern times."

"This man will go far, because he believes everything he says."

"Robespierre was by no means the worst character who figured in the Revolution. He was a fanatic, a monster, but he was incorruptible, and incapable of robbing, or causing the deaths of others, either from personal enmity, or a desire of enriching himself. He was an enthusiast; but one who really believed that he was acting right, and died not worth a sou."

"You who supports the tottering country against the torrent of despotism and intrigue, you whom I only know, like God, through his miracles... I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not only the deputy of a province, you are one of humanity and of the Republic."

"Robespierre was quite incapable of separating the personal element from differences of opinion. That every polemical argument became in Robespierre's mouth a torrent of personal denunciation may be explained by his implicit conviction that as there is only one truth, he who disagreed with it was prompted by evil motives. But less explicable seems Robespierre's habit of declaring himself a victim of persecution, of embarking upon a dirge of self-pity and of invoking death as solace, every time he was opposed. Here we are faced with a paranoiac streak, a strange combination of a most intense and mystical sense of mission with a self-pity that expressed itself in an obsessive preoccupation with martyrdom, death and even suicide. It is the psychology of the neurotic egoist, who must impose his will—rationalized into divine truth—or wallow in an ecstasy of self-pity."

"Robespierre I find difficult to admire. It is impossible to find real greatness in him, yet, because of his passionate faith in the principles of the revolution, he was perhaps its representative man. He was never more than the outstanding speaker of Jacobinism, not the creator of Jacobin policy. He was however the only politician ever known in any country to be called by everyone 'The Incorruptible'. Perhaps this quality was more surprising in France than in some other countries. Robespierre was incorruptible over money. He was corrupted by power. He had spoken against power. He had preached democracy. When he joined the Committee of Public Safety, he abandoned his principles."

"So long as the French Revolution is regarded, not as ‘the suicide of the eighteenth century,’ but as the birth of ideas that enlighten the nineteenth, and of hopes that still inspire our own age; and so long as its leaders are sanely judged, with due allowance for the terrible difficulties of their task; so long will Robespierre, who lived and died for the Revolution, remain one of the great figures of history"

"It would be easy to say that the Jacobins were in love with power or that Robespierre established a personal dictatorship. The first statement would be partly true, the second mostly false; neither would really explain what happened."

"To hear Robespierre, he is the only defender of liberty; he is giving up for lost, he is going to quit everything; he is a man of rare modesty (laughter), and he has a perpetual refrain: "I am oppressed; they won't give me the floor"; and he is the only one with anything useful to say, for his will is always done. He says: "So-and-so conspires against me, I who am the best friend of the Republic; therefore he conspires against the Republic." That is novel."