Unrelenting in his attacks on all those whom he accused of wanting to stop the revolution, and fearless in his denunciation of corruption, Robespierre secured a place on the 12-member Committee of Public Safety, which served as the executive branch of government from 1793 to 1794. In that position, he wielded tremendous power. But his maneuvering space was, in fact, quite narrow. Robespierre faced the same dilemmas that have troubled all democratic revolutionaries ever since: how to uphold the defense of property while also pursuing universal rights, how to balance individual rights with those of the wider community, and how to achieve an outcome consonant with revolutionary ideals without resorting to means that would reproduce the sins of the old order. Fatefully, Robespierre chose to resolve this problem by trying to impose virtuous citizenship on French society by force.
Robespierre's response to resistance (real or imagined) was, in Hegel's formulation, to chop heads off as if they were cabbages. During the Reign of Terror, some 17,000 people were condemned to death by guillotine. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned. And all told, hundreds of thousands died during the civil wars that followed the revolution and which only ended with Napoleon Bonaparte's rise to power in 1799.
. . .
To understand Robespierre, one must see the French Revolution in tragic terms. The revolution did not devolve into the Terror owing to the revolutionaries' zealous pursuit of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. To the contrary: it devolved because by July 1794, the overwhelming majority of the revolutionaries no longer wanted to reach those goals, whose immediate effects for them, they feared, might be the confiscation of their property, or the guillotine, or both. Indeed, once in power, the Jacobins proved completely incapable of resolving the contradictions of their own revolutionary program.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137726/patrice-l-r-higonnet/robespierres-rules-for-radicals
(CrossPosted by : Zim. Entire article is at the link.)
Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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