Maximilien Robespierre
Maximilien Robespierre directed the Terror and was guillotined by it. Born in Arras in 1758, he was orphaned effectively at six — his mother died and his father abandoned the children — and was raised by relatives. He won a scholarship to Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where Camille Desmoulins was a schoolfellow, and was chosen to deliver a Latin address to Louis XVI in the rain. He practised as a lawyer in Arras, took cases for the poor, and resigned a judicial post rather than pass a death sentence. He was elected to the Estates-General in 1789 and spoke over five hundred times in the Constituent Assembly, arguing consistently for universal male suffrage, for the rights of Jews, Protestants and free men of colour, against slavery, against the property qualification, and for the abolition of the death penalty. He also opposed the war with Austria in 1792, correctly predicting that it would produce a general. He joined the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793, with the country invaded, in revolt in the Vendée, and starving. The Committee's measures — the levée en masse, price controls, the Law of Suspects — were effective and lethal; some seventeen thousand were executed and many more died in prison or without trial. He destroyed the factions in turn, sending Hébert and then Danton and Desmoulins to the guillotine in the spring of 1794, and instituted the Cult of the Supreme Being. The Law of 22 Prairial removed defence counsel. Six weeks later, on 9 Thermidor, the Convention turned on him. He was shot in the jaw during the arrest and executed the next day.
- Lived: 1758 CE – 1794 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: revolutionary, lawyer, politician
