ROBESPIERRE, MAXIMILIEN-MARIE-ISIDORE. - Politician, one of the protagonists of the French Revolution, b. at Arras on 6 May 1758, guillotined in Paris on 28 July 1794. He spent his youth in the provinces, cultivating letters and practicing law; elected in 1789 as a deputy to the Estates General, because of his serious and cold temperament and his ponderous, sententious eloquence, he did not win excessive sympathy. He nevertheless slowly won over the Assembly and the Société des amis de la Constitution, later the Club des Jacobins, and became its president on 24 March 1790.
Already in 1789 he supported universal suffrage, the absolute equality of rights, the defense of the Jews, of men of color, of slaves; he recommended assistance to poor ecclesiastics, fought the privileges of the nobility, with an action wholly aimed at the broadest and most intransigent implementation and defense of the "principles" of the Revolution and its "conquests": in this sense he delivered several hundred speeches between 1789 and 1791. Appointed on 5 Oct. 1790 president of the Tribunal of Versailles, on 15 May 1791 public accuser at that of Paris, he resolutely supported the exclusion of the "constituents" from the Legislative Assembly: he opposed, after Varennes, the restoration of the King to his royal prerogatives. He fought the warlike policy of the Girondins, which would have divided France and led to European solidarity against the Revolution; faced with the danger of invasion, he was the soul of the movement that demanded the deposition of Louis XVI and the convocation of the Convention (July 1792). On 11 Aug. he became a member of the General Council of the Commune and accentuated its antagonistic function with regard to the Assembly, which submitted to its pressure: on the 17th he refused the presidency of the Revolutionary Tribunal: on 5 Sept. he was elected by Paris at the head of its representatives to the Convention, which witnessed his long duel with the Gironde. He wanted the prompt trial of Louis XVI, for reasons of public health. From 31 May to 2 June he directed the insurrection against the Girondins: on 27 July he entered, victorious, the Committee of Public Safety. The situation of France was disastrous: the frontiers open to a coalesced Europe, the royalists triumphant in the Vendée, Corsica, Toulon; the Girondins under arms in Normandy and Provence, while the economic crisis grew more acute, aggravated by terrifying rumors of conspiracies and betrayals. R. and the Committee succeeded in confronting it me-
during the Terror: at the end of 1793 the revolutionary armies were on the offensive, order substantially re-established, but at the price of ruthless action in every field. Having crushed the opposition by sending the extreme left (Hébertists) to the guillotine on March 24, 1793, and the moderates (Danton, Desmoulins) on April 5, he then turned against those who had made a "lucrative trade" of the Revolution. On 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794), with the alliance of the Mountain, which had broken away from R., and of the Plain, the majority was lost for the Committee of Public Safety and its members are arrested. The Commune, having risen up, frees them; but the troops of the Convention burst into the Hôtel de Ville, and R., who has attempted to kill himself, is executed the following day with his faithful followers.
Convinced that civil and political equality was irreconcilable with a regime of excessive social inequality, R. tended toward a democracy of small property owners and independent artisans, opposing the socialistic or communistic tendencies of the extreme left. In the religious sphere, he fought the systematic de-Christianization of France, because it led to atheism, an "aristocratic" attitude and dangerous for public and private morality: hence his numerous interventions on the subject of freedom of worship; he attempted to substitute the cult of the Supreme Being and of Nature - a "civic," "patriotic" religion with many Rousseauian resonances - for the traditional religion, in order to liquidate at once the resistance of the latter and to recover to the advantage of the revolutionary State the deeply rooted religious sentiment of the people. An attempt of scant success, born, like the separation of Church and State, from the increasingly irremediable failure of the religious policy of the Constituent Assembly of '89. The work of R. was too centered in his own person; it was not understood by those very people for whom he worked.
Bibliography7 works
Francesco Natale