Robespierre, MAXIMILIEN MARIE ISIDORE, was born of a legal family, originally of Irish origin, at Arras, 6th May 1758. His mother died in 1767, his broken-hearted father two years later, and the four children were brought up by their maternal grandfather, an Arras brewer. Maximilien, the eldest, early showed unusual promise, and was educated at Arras and at the Collège Louis-le-Grand at Paris, where Camille Desmoulins was a fellow-student. He was admitted avocat in 1781, and next year was named criminal judge by the bishop of Arras, but resigned his place soon after to avoid passing a sentence of death. All through life a fanatical devotee of the gospel according to Rousseau, his sentimentality and taste for verses made him popular among the Rosati at Arras. He drew up the cahier or list of grievances for the guild of cobblers, and was elected to the States-general in 1789 as one of the deputies for the tiers état of Artois. He soon attached himself to the extreme Left—the 'thirty voices,' and though his first speeches excited ridicule, it was not long before his earnestness and his high-sounding phrases commanded attention. 'That young man believes what he says; he will go far,' said Mirabeau, forecasting his future with the divination of genius. Indeed his influence grew daily, both in the Jacobin Club and in the Assembly, and thousands amongst the mob of patriots outside became fanatical in their admiration of his sincere cant and his boasted incorruptibility. Three days after the death of Mirabeau he called upon the Assembly to prevent any deputy from taking office as minister for four years, and in the following month (May 1791) carried the motion that no member of the present Assembly should be eligible for the next. This policy grew out of the narrow and acrid suspiciousness of his own nature, and reveals the inherent meanness of his aims and his failure to grasp that grand idea of real parliamentary government by a responsible ministry, which had been the dearest dream of Mirabeau. Next followed Robespierre's appointment as public accuser, the king's flight to Varennes (June 21st), Lafayette's last effort to control the sacred right of Insurrection on the Champ-de-Mars (17th July), the abject terror of Robespierre, his sheltering himself in the house of Duplay, a carpenter, his hysterical appeal to the Club, the theatrical oath taken by every member to defend his life, and his being crowned with chaplets, along with Pétion, and carried home in triumph by the mob at the close of the Constituent Assembly (30th September).
After seven weeks of quiet he sold his small patrimony and returned to Paris, to the house of Duplay, where he remained to the last day of his life. He was much beloved in the family, and a passion quickly sprung up betwixt himself and his host's eldest daughter Éléonore, a romantic girl of twenty-five. His room was a humble chamber in which he worked and slept; its decorations, a few busts and portraits of himself. Alone amongst the patriots he was noted for the carefulness of his dress, which never varied in the slightest—powdered hair, a bright blue coat, white waistcoat, short yellow breeches, with white stockings and shoes with silver buckles. Small and feeble in frame, solitary and reserved in habits, he ever wore an anxious look upon his straitened and spectacled face; his complexion was a trabilious, even verdâtre; and he retained to the last the sobriety of the cynic, drinking only water.
Meantime the Girondist party had been formed in the new Legislative Assembly, its leaders—the loudest, Brissot—cager for war. Robespierre, who ever feared and disliked war, offered a strenuous opposition in the debates of the Jacobin Club, and sometimes, if seldom, in his endless and windy harangues rose into the region of real eloquence. Fundamentally an empty pedant, inflated with words which he mistook for ideas, in his orations he is ever riding in the air on theories, his foot never on the solid ground of the practical. In April 1792 he resigned his post of public prosecutor. He was invisible during the crisis of the 10th August, but he joined the Hôtel-de-Ville faction, and on the 16th August we find him presenting to the Legislative Assembly its petition for a Revolutionary Tribunal and a new Convention. It does not appear, however, that he was in any sense directly responsible for the atrocious September massacres in the prisons, or more than a mere accessory after the fact. For his reward he was elected first deputy for Paris to the National Convention, which opened on the 21st September. The bitter attacks upon him by the Girondists were renewed only to throw Robespierre into a closer union with Danton and his party, but the final struggle was interrupted for a little by the momentous question of the king's trial. Robespierre opposed vigorously the Girondist idea of a special appeal to the people on the king's death, and his execution (21st January 1793) opened up the final stage of the struggle, which ended in a complete triumph of the Jacobins on the 2d June of the same year. The first Committee of Public Safety—a permanent Cabinet of Revolution—was decreed in April 1793, but Robespierre was not elected till the 27th July. He was now for the first time one of the actual rulers of France, but it is open to question whether for the whole twelve months from this time to the end he was not merely the stalking-horse for the more resolute party within the Twelve. His vaunted respectability, his great popularity with the mob, and his gift of fluent, if vague and windy, oratory made an admirable cover for the truculent designs of strong and completely unscrupulous men like Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois, and at least it is certainly the case that Couthon and Saint-Just were the only members whose political and social ideals coincided with his own. Destitute of political intuition, without foresight or sagacity, himself the mere dupe of a few borrowed phrases, he was strong because within his narrow limits he was honest, and because he actually had a horizon of social ideals, not nakedly identical with his own advantage. He was astute enough, moreover, to play off one force against another—the Convention, the Commune, and the Committee, while he derived his strength from the constant worship of the Club.
The next scenes in the great drama of Revolution were the dark intrigues and desperate struggles that sent Hébert and his friends to the scaffold on the 24th March 1794, and Danton and Robespierre's school-fellow, Camille Desmoulins, on the 5th of April after. Hébert Robespierre had long disliked, and Chaumette's crazy deification of the Goddess of Reason had filled him with disgust; Danton he at once hated and feared with that fierce and spiteful hatred he ever felt instinctively for men like the great Tribune and Vergniaud with natural gifts beyond his own. 'Robespierre will follow me; I drag down Robespierre,' said Danton with prophetic truth. The next three months he reigned supreme, but his supremacy prepared the way for his inevitable fall. He nominated all the members of the Government Committees, placed his creatures in all places of influence in the commune of Paris, sent his henchman Saint-Just on a mission to the armies on the frontier, assumed supreme control of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and completely revolutionised its method of operation by the atrocious measure introduced by his creature Couthon on the 22d Priarial (10th June), to the effect that neither counsel nor witnesses need be heard if the jury had come otherwise to a conclusion. The fatal significance of this change—a complete abrogation of all law—is seen in the fact that from this time till the day of Robespierre's death the daily tale of victims of the guillotine averaged almost thirty. But, in accordance with the law that governs all human things, as Robespierre's power increased his popularity decreased, and still further he had committed the fatal folly of making himself publicly ridiculous. Already his voluntary bodyguard of Tappe-durs had excited derision and resentment, but his declaration on 7th May of a new religion for the state—the foundation of a new regime of public morality—awakened in the mind of Paris the slumbering sense of humour. The Convention at Robespierre's instance agreed to compliment the Supreme Being with an acknowledgment of His existence and themselves with the Consolatory Principle of the Immortality of the Soul, to be celebrated in thirty-six annual festivals. The first of these was held on the 8th of June, when Robespierre, glorious in a new violet-blue coat, walked in front of the procession and delivered his soul of a vapid harangue, and set fire to paste-board figures representing Atheism, Selfishness, Annihilation, Crime, and Vice. An old mad woman named Catherine Theot, who thought herself the mother of God, now declared Robespierre to be the new divine Saviour of the world, and drew down upon him still further ridicule in the Convention. Meantime the pace of the guillotine grew faster, although apparently Robespierre hoped to bring it to a close as soon as all his more dangerous enemies, like Tallien, Fouché, and Vadier, were cut off. Meantime the public finance and the work of government generally drifted to ruin, and
Saint-Just openly demanded the creation of a Dictatorship in the person of Robespierre as alone possessing intellect, energy, patriotism, and revolutionary experience enough. On the 26th July (8th Thermidor), after about a month's absence, the Dictator delivered a long harangue complaining that he was being accused of crimes unjustly. He was listened to in deep and unsympathetic silence, and the Convention, after at first obediently passing his decrees, next rescinded them and referred his proposals to the committees, and the sitting ended without anything being concluded. That night at the Jacobin Club his party again triumphed, and the Tallien party in despair hurried to the members of the Right, the Girondist remnant, and implored their help against the common enemy at this desperate juncture. Next day at the Convention Saint-Just could not obtain a hearing. Tallien, Billaud-Varennes, and Vadier vehemently attacked Robespierre, and the voice of the Dictator himself was drowned with cries of 'Down with the tyrant!' Turning to the Right, 'I appeal to you whose hands are clean,' he cried, but the Right sat in stony silence. 'President of Assassins, I demand to be heard,' he cried, but his voice died down in his throat.—'The blood of Danton chokes him,' cried Garnier. An unknown deputy named Louchet proposed that Robespierre should be arrested, and at the fatal words his power crumbled into ruins. His younger brother and Lebas demanded to be included in the honourable sentence. Vain attempts were made by the Jacobin Club and the Commune to save their hero, but Paris refused to move, and even Henriot's artillerymen to obey. Robespierre broke his arrest and flew to the Common Hall, whereupon the Convention at once declared him out of the law. The National Guard under Barras turned out to protect the Convention, and Robespierre had his lower jaw broken by a shot fired by a gendarme named Merda, or, as many believed, by his own hand. Next day (28th July; 10th Thermidor 1794), still in his sky-blue coat, the miserable, trembling wretch died with Saint-Just, Couthon, and nineteen others by the guillotine; the day after seventy-one members of the municipality followed, twelve more on the third day, and the Reign of Terror was extinguished in a sea of blood.
See the histories of the Revolution by Lamartine, Michelet, Louis Blanc, Carlyle, Von Sybel, H. Morse Stephens, and M. Taine; the Life by G. H. Lewes (1849); and especially Ernest Hamel's exhaustive and authoritative, although vastly over-eulogistic, Vie de Robespierre (3 vols. 1865-67), also his Thermidor (1891).