ROBESPIERRE, MAXIMILIEN-MARIE-ISIDORE. - Political figure, one of the leading protagonists of the French Revolution, born in Arras on 6 May 1758, guillotined in Paris on 28 July 1794. He spent his youth in the provinces, cultivating literature and practising law; elected in 1789 as deputy to the Estates General, on account of his serious and cold temperament and his heavy, sententious eloquence, he did not win excessive sympathy. He nevertheless gradually 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.
As early as 1789 he advocated universal suffrage, absolute equality of rights, the defence of Jews, people of colour, and slaves; he recommended assistance to poor clergy, fought the privileges of the nobility, and acted with a view to the widest and most uncompromising implementation and defence of the principles of the Revolution and its “conquests”; in this sense he delivered several hundred speeches between 1789 and 1791. Appointed on 5 October 1790 president of the Tribunal of Versailles, and on 15 May 1791 public prosecutor at that of Paris, he resolutely supported the exclusion of the “constituents” from the Legislative Assembly; after Varennes, he opposed the restoration of the King to his royal prerogatives. He fought the bellicose policy of the Girondins, which would have divided France and brought about European solidarity against the Revolution; faced with the danger of invasion, he was the driving force behind the movement that demanded the deposition of Louis XVI and the convening of the Convention (July 1792). On 11 August he became a member of the General Council of the Commune and accepted its antagonistic role towards the Assembly, which came under its pressure: on the 17th he refused the presidency of the Revolutionary Tribunal; on 5 September he was elected by Paris at the head of its representatives to the Convention, where he engaged in a long duel with the Girondins. He demanded the swift 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, into the Committee of Public Safety. The situation of France was disastrous: the frontiers open to the coalition of Europe, royalists triumphant in the Vendée, Corsica, Toulon; the Girondins in arms in Normandy and Provence, while the economic crisis worsened, aggravated by alarming rumours of plots and betrayals. R. and the Committee succeeded in facing it through the Terror: by the end of 1793 the revolutionary armies were on the offensive. Order was substantially restored, but at the cost of relentless action in all fields. Opposition was crushed by sending the extreme left (Hébertists) to the guillotine on 24 March 1793, and the moderates (Danton, Desmoulins) on 5 April. He then turned against those who had made a profit from the Revolution. On 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), with the alliance of the Mountain, detached from R., and the Plain, the majority was lost for the Committee of Public Safety and its members were arrested. The Commune, which had risen, was freed; but the troops of the Convention burst into the Hôtel de Ville, and R., who had attempted suicide, was executed the following day with his loyal followers.
Convinced that civil and political equality was irreconcilable with a regime of excessive social inequality, R. aimed at a democracy of small property owners and independent artisans, opposing socialist and communist tendencies. In the religious field, he fought the systematic secularisation of France, which 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 replace the cult of the Supreme Being and of Nature—a “civic”, “patriotic” religion with many Rousseauian resonances—with the traditional religion, in order to eliminate the resistance of the latter and reclaim for the revolutionary State the deep-rooted religious sentiment of the people. An attempt of little success, born, like the separation of Church and State, from the increasingly irreparable failure of the religious policy of the Constituent Assembly of 1789. R.’s work was too centred on his own person; it was not understood by those for whom he worked.