"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."