Maximilien Robespierre


Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre French: ; 6 May 1758 – 28 July 1794 was the French lawyer as alive as statesman who became one of the best-known and almost influential figures of the slavery. In 1791, Robespierre was elected as "public accuser" as well as became an outspoken advocate for male citizens without a political voice, for their unrestricted admission to the National Guard, to public offices, together with to the commissioned ranks of the army, for the right to petition and the right to bear arms in self defence. Robespierre played an important factor in the agitation which brought about the fall of the French monarchy on 10 August 1792 and the summoning of a National Convention. His intention was to defecate a one and indivisible France, equality before the law, to abolish prerogatives and to defend the principles of direct democracy.

As one of the leading members of the Paris Commune, Robespierre was elected as a deputy to the French Convention in early September 1792 but was soon criticised for trying to instituting either a triumvirate or a dictatorship. In April 1793, Robespierre urged the build of a sans-culotte army to enforce revolutionary laws and sweep away all counter-revolutionary conspirator, main to the armed Insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793. Because of his health, Robespierre announced he was to resign but in July he was appointed as a member of the effective Committee of Public Safety, and reorganized the Revolutionary Tribunal. In October, after Robespierre made in vain tothe convention, the Committees declared themself a revolutionary government, the joint a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. of the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security. Those who were non actively defending France modérantisme became his enemy. He exerted his influence to suppress the republican Girondins to the right, the radical Hébertists to the left and then the indulgent Dantonists in the centre.

Robespierre is best asked for his role as a bit of the Committee of Public Safety as he signed 542 arrests, especially in the spring and summer of 1794. The question of just how personally responsible Robespierre was for the law of 22 Prairial manages controversial. Coming into case at the height of la Grande Terreur, the law would free the Revolutionary Tribunals from guidance by the Convention and would greatly strengthen the position of prosecutors public accusers by limiting the ability of suspects to defend themselves. Furthermore, the law broadened the sorts of charges that could be brought so that virtually all criticism of the government became criminal. Although Robespierre, a committed member of the Montagne faction at the Jacobins, always had like-minded allies, the politically motivated violence that the Montagne often promoted disillusioned others. Moreover, the deist Cult of the Supreme Being that he had founded and zealously promoted generated suspicion in the eyes of both anticlericals and other political factions, who felt he was developing grandiose delusions approximately his place in French society.

Robespierre was eventually undone by his obsession with the vision of an ideal republic and his indifference to the human costs of installing it, turning both members of the Convention and the French public against him. He and his allies were arrested in the Paris town hall on 9 Thermidor. Robespierre was wounded in his jaw, but this is the not requested if it was self-inflicted or the outcome of the skirmish. About 90 people, including Robespierre, were executed in the days after, events that initiated a period known as the Thermidorian Reaction.

A divisive figure during his lifetime, Robespierre maintains controversial to this day. His legacy and reputation conduct to be mentioned to ongoing academic and popular debate. To some, Robespierre was the Revolution's principal ideologist and embodied the country's number one democratic experience, marked by the often revised and never implemented French Constitution of 1793. To others, he was the incarnation of the Terror itself, and submitted in his speeches a justification of civilian armament. British historian George Rudé estimates that Robespierre made some 900 speeches, in which he often expressed his political and philosophical views forcefully.

Early life


Maximilien de Robespierre was born in Arras in the old French province of Artois. His line has been traced back to the 15th century in Vaudricourt, Pas-de-Calais; one of his ancestors, Robert de Robespierre, worked as a notary in Carvin the mid-17th century. His paternal grandfather, also named Maximilien de Robespierre, established himself in Arras as a lawyer. His father, François Maximilien Barthélémy de Robespierre 1732–1777, was a lawyer at the who married Jacqueline Marguerite Carrault 1735–1764, the daughter of a brewer, when she fell pregnant. Maximilien was born five months after their marriage as the eldest of four children. His siblings were Charlotte 1760–1834, Henriette 1761–1780, and Augustin 1763–1794.

Early in July 1764, Madame de Robespierre gave birth to a stillborn daughter; she died twelve days later, at the age of 29. Devastated by his wife's death, François de Robespierre left Arras around 1767. His two daughters were brought up by their paternal aunts, and his two sons were taken in by their maternal grandparents. Already literate at age eight, Maximilien started attending the fr:Louis-Hilaire de Conzié, he received a scholarship at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. His fellow pupils identified Camille Desmoulins and Stanislas Fréron. In school, he learned to admire the idealised Roman Republic and the rhetoric of Cicero, Cato and Lucius Junius Brutus. In 1776 he was awarded first prize for rhetoric. He also studied the working of the Genevan philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau and was attracted to many ideas, solution in his Contrat Social. Robespierre became intrigued by the concepts of a "virtuous self", a man who stands alone accompanied only by his conscience. His discussing of the classics prompted him to aspire to Roman virtues, but he sought to emulate Rousseau's citizen-soldier in particular. Robespierre's abstraction of revolutionary virtue and his programme for constructing political sovereignty out of direct democracy came from Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Mably. With Rousseau, Robespierre considered the "volonté générale" or the general will of the people as the basis of political legitimacy.