Law & Liberty has posted an interesting review by Daniel J. Mahoney of the English translation of the awkwardly titled Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most (Robespierre: L’homme qui nous divise le plus) by French political philosopher Marcel Gauchet. The Italian translation has a more descriptive title: Robespierre: L’incorruttibile e il tiranno. Tra libertà e Terrore: le memorie divise della Rivoluzione francese. If I had been the publisher, I would have called it Robespierre: The Union of Liberty and Terror.
Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) began his career as a provincial lawyer and advocate of humanitarian causes. One of his early works was “Discours sur les peines infamantes” (1784), which denounced the degrading punishments meted out by French criminal courts. In March 1789, he was elected to the Estates-General, the body that fomented the French Revolution. He swiftly became one of its most prominent members and rose to the top of the political scrum during the turbulent years that followed. By 1793, he was the leading member of the Committee of Public Safety and the most eloquent proponent of the Reign of Terror.
His ascendancy didn’t last. On July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II, in the Revolutionary calendar and, ironically, exactly one year after he took his place in the Committee of Public Safety), the National Convention, France’s legislative assembly, accused him of tyranny and ordered his arrest. The next day, after one of the wildest and most memorable nights in all of French history, he and a score of his followers were executed by the guillotine, that emblem of Revolutionary “justice”.
As Professor Mahoney observes, “Robespierre and the Jacobins have their contemporary partisans (and even imitators)”, both inside and outside of France.
For Robespierre is no ordinary tyrant, no man of unhinged ambition striving for power at any cost. In the early years of the Revolution, Robespierre spoke of nothing but the “rights of man,” of popular government, and the need to eschew any compromise with the remnants of the ancien regime. In his view of things, before 1789 one sees only tyranny, darkness, and oppression; on the other side of the chronological divide there is liberty, emancipation, and the dawn of the reign of the “rights of man.” But the transition required rivers of blood to flow. The “killing machine” that Robespierre became is inseparable from his uncompromising dedication to the “rights of man.” The “hero” and the “monster” are one and the same man fanatically dedicated to the same principles. This ought to give us pause.
Several of Robespierre’s traits have eerie echoes in our present day turmoil.
Immense political power was not accompanied by much interest in the mundane tasks of government. “In place of governing, Robespierre and his allies searched for enemies, discerning corruption and conspiracy everywhere.” Rarely attending sessions of the Committee or the Convention, paying scant attention to such crises as spiraling inflation, Robespierre warned in speech after speech that everyone who questioned his opinions was a conspirator against the principles of the Revolution. He often sounded much like Joe Biden excoriating “MAGA Republicans” while ignoring trivial matters like a looming rail strike, a porous Southern border and, by the bye, inflation.
Another audible echo is Robespierre’s rejection of all tradition and history. His principles were, like those of the today’s Woke fanatics, plucked out of his own head. He attributed them to Reason, while the Woke regard rational thought as one of the evils of Western civilization, but the consequences are the same in each case: a set of dogmas that rests on ipse dixit and justifies, indeed demands, the persecution of dissenters. Contemporary persecution is milder than Madame Guillotine, but exclusion from the Public Square and the destruction of livelihoods are far from benign.
Robespierre believed, too, that the nation should possess “une volonté une” (“one single will”). He would have nodded in agreement with the White House press secretary’s declaration, “If you are not with where the majority of Americans are, that is extreme.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to aver that the parallels between President Biden and Citizen Robespierre are exact. For one thing, the “Big Guy” doesn’t qualify for Robespierre’s sobriquet, “l’Incorruptible”. Nor does he possess Robespierre’s intellect, energy, eloquence and charisma. Nor is he in much danger of a Ninth Thermidor, however stridently he may proclaim the imminent danger of insurrection. He is the Revolutionary tyrant recreated as a Twenty-First Century caricature.
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