Maximilien Robespierre Quotes

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.

The king must die so that the country can live.

Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.

A true revolutionary should be ready to perish in the process

A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.

Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue.

Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.

[redacted: no source given].

The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.

Unless you do everything for liberty, you have done nothing. There are no two ways of being free: one must be entirely free, or become a slave once more.

Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.

It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed ... The government of the revolution is liberty's despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime

The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.

Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.

The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.

. . . Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they be, are slaves rebelling against the sovereign of the earth, which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe, which is nature. [trans. G. Rudé; A Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen].

Death is the beginning of Immortality. —MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE

To defend the oppressed against their oppressors, to plead the cause of the weak against the strong who exploit and crush them, this is the duty of all hearts that have not been spoiled by egoism and corruption.

A nation is truly corrupted when having...lost its character and it's liberty, it passes from democracy to aristocracy or to monarchy. That is the decrepitude and death of the body politic...

Is it not He whose immortal hand... has written there the death sentence of tyrants? He did not create kings to devour the human race. He did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery and falsehood. He created the universe to proclaim His power. [The Cult of the Supreme Being]

There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man...We must exterminate all our enemies.

The people asks only for what is necessary, it only wants justice and tranquility, the rich aspire to everything, they want to invade and dominate everything. Abuses are the work and the domain of the rich, they are the scourges of the people: the interest of the people is the general interest, that of the rich is a particular interest.

To defend the oppressed against their oppressors, to plead the cause of the weak against the strong who exploit and crush them, this is the duty of all hearts that have not been spoiled by egoism and corruption… It is so sweet to devote oneself to one’s fellows that I do not know how there can be so many unfortunates still without support or defenders. As for me, my life’s task will be to help those who suffer and to pursue through my avenging speech those who take pleasure in the pain of others. How happy I will be if my feeble efforts are crowned with success and if, at the price of my devotion and sacrifices, my reputation is not tarnished by the crimes of the oppressors I will fight.

This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.

War is always the first object of a powerful government which wishes to increase its power. I shall not speak to you of the opportunity that a war affords for a government to exhaust the people and to dissipate its treasure and to cover with an impenetrable veil its depredations and its errors . . . It is in time of war that the executive power displays the most redoubtable energy and that it wields a sort of dictatorship most ominous to a nascent liberty . . . [trans. G. Rudé; pg. 33].

. . . Equality of rights is established by nature; society, far from impairing it, guarantees it against the abuse of power which renders it illusory. [trans. G. Rudé; A Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen].

The year is now 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched. Camille Desmoulins, 1793: “They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer.” Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: “History is fiction.

Who then shall unravel all these subtle combinations? Who shall trace the exact dividing line that marks off one form of extremism from its opposite? It can be done only by a love of country and a love of truth. Kings and knaves will always try to destroy this love, for they shun reason and truth like the plague. [trans. G. Rudé; On Revolutionary Government (December 25, 1793)].

They call me a tyrant . . . One arrives at a tyrant's throne by the help of scoundrels . . . What faction do I belong to? You yourselves. What is that faction which, since the Revolution began, has crushed the factions and swept away hireling traitors? It is you, it is the people, it is the principles of the Revolution. . . . [trans. G. Rudé, ellipses sic; Last Speech to the Convention (July 26, 1794)].

Thermidorian reaction’, led by Barras and Fréron, overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on July 27 (9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar). Both brothers and sixty other ‘Terrorists’ were guillotined the next day. Had Napoleon been in Paris at the time he might well have been scooped up and sent to the guillotine along with them.

Sólo un criminal despreciable ante sí mismo, repugnante a los demás, puede creer que la Naturaleza no nos puede ofrecer nada más bello que la nada.

Quel est le premier objet de la société? c'est de maintenir les droits de l'homme. Quel est le premier de ces droits? celui d'exister.

It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed.

There were two French Revolutions—the first stage instigated by free-Left elements imbued with toleration, anti-authoritarianism, secularism, individualism, liberty and the revolutionary individualism of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. The second stage of the French Revolution devolved into a bloody, terroristic dictatorship, an all-powerful state amidst a cult of personality, such as the so-called incorruptible Maximilien Robespierre, in a counter-revolution that was anti-liberal and antithetical to the Lumières movement, which became the Age of Enlightenment.

If only,' Robespierre yelled, 'there were more vertu.’ 'More what?' 'Vertu. Love of one's country. Self-sacrifice. Civic spirit.' 'One appreciates your sense of humour, of course.' Danton jerked his thumb in the direction of the noise. 'The only vertu those bastards understand is the kind I demonstrate every night to my wife.' Robespierre's face crumpled, like a child's on the verge of tears. He followed Danton out into the dark passage. MAXIMILIEN Robespierre, private notebooks: 'Danton laughed at the idea of vertu, comparing it to what he did every night with his wife.

Z pozornie nowych pomysłów wyłaniała się stara, gorzka prawda: szczęście ludzkości znajduje się na końcu ponurej, pełnej krzywd drogi. Kto wie, czy to nie ta świadomość wyzwoliła w Robespierze silne emocje religijne? Kto wie czy to nie ta myśl sprawiła, że w późniejszych dziesięcioleciach pewien nastrój religijny bywał mimo wszystko, choć dziwacznie, mocno zakorzeniony w ideologiach lewicowych?

There is in all these connections a prehistory of the Enlightenment. What were the intentions of those who were proud to give themselves the ‘Enlightenment’ label? In one form, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment did indeed set itself against Christianity, proclaiming itself the enemy of mystery and the emancipator of humankind from the chains of revealed religion. Much of this started as being anti-Catholic rather than anti-Christian: a powerful consideration was the memory of the arch-Catholic Louis XIV of France’s great betrayal of trust in revoking the Edict of Nantes. Often doubt, scepticism or hatred of the Church then moved on to become what we would define as atheism. So an anti-Christian Enlightenment encompassed the anger of Voltaire against clerical stupidity, David Hume’s serene indifference to any hope of life after death that so shocked the diarist James Boswell, Maximilien Robespierre’s cold hatred of Catholicism and the French Revolution’s replacement of the Catholic Church with the goddess of reason. The authors of The treatise of the three impostors would have been delighted by all that, and they should also have been humbled by the quality of some of the minds which they had recruited by their clumsy diatribe.

I have just received, Maximilien de Robespierre, he is already compared in this way to President Macron, who recently payed his visit to the country of Georgia, and showed his interest to hospitals.

I would advise Maximilien de Robespierre to visit the Barber and his dentist, just in Time. Please.

Het ligt dat alles vast, in de loop van onze historie der mensheid.

If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time [both] virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.

terror without virtue is murderous , virtue without terror is powerless . terror is nothing else than swift , severe , indomitable justice --- it flows

[N]ul homme n’a le droit d’entasser des monceaux de blé, à côté de son semblable qui meurt de faim.

Do you imagine that simply because one madman is gone, there are no more? Yes, Robespierre is dead. And Marat. Saint-Just. Hébert. But there are always more, waiting on the wings. History always throws off these power-hungry monsters. It’s because of people like them that this little boy suffers.” I think about another Max. And another little boy. I remember the future. “Maximilien R. Peters! Incorruptible, ineluctable, and indestructible! It’s time to start the revolution, baby!” he shouted. I remember the other people who lived with him in the Charles. Poor people, damaged people. I think of how I walked past them every day, not seeing them, not caring. Until it was too late. And I think of how these people, Amadé’s friends, amuse themselves all night long with mannered dances and witty conversation, shutting themselves off from the world, while a helpless child slowly dies. And I say, “No, not because of Robespierre and Marat. Or people like them. Because of people like us.

...if the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror. Virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompts, severe, inflexible. It is there an emanation of virtue. It is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs...is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?... Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without?...