Maximilien Robespierre

#EuropeanBios entry 64 is Maximilien Robespierre, a murderous asshole who was central to the French Revolution, and it's going to be very short because the available audiobook biographies were very poor and he wasn't interesting enough to fall back to paper.

(#EuropeanBios is a series of Twitter threads about famous European historical figures, from 500 BCE to 1963 CE. I mine for fun facts and comedy, people whose reputations don't match their lives, and queer people. The full list of threads and bios is at TKTKTK)

When I say the biographies weren't good: the first one I picked was read by somebody who either couldn't or didn't pronounce French. Robespierre's entire life took place in France, all the names are French, and "Tuileries" is not pronounced "too-lee-eh-rees".

Max was born in 1758 in Arras. Like anybody who could acquire an education in the 1700s, he was born rich, or at least rich-ish. His family name was legally "de Robespierre" but this sounded too much like nobility so he dropped the "de" like he was DeFaceBook.

Max's primary skill seems to have been arguing and like many people with that talent he became a lawyer. He won a lot of cases for the church and dabbled in politics unsuccessfully. He moved to Paris where they made fun of his provincial accent (he was practically Belgian).

When Max was 30 the French Revolution was just kicking off. He got involved and made a bunch of speeches, but they weren't well received. He joined a debating society to get better at this, and it apparently worked because he was later considered a charismatic speech giver.

The speeches eventually got him elected to a position of some influence in the fast-moving new world of the self-declared French revolutionary government. He became known as "the incorruptible" because of his extreme positions of revolutionary purity.

He had a lot of ideals he wanted to promulgate, notably opposition to the death penalty and a belief in a supreme being. He wanted to abolish kings (a popular idea) and slavery (less popular).

What happened next will be familiar to anybody who has spent any amount of time in a group of leftists, which is that they kept striving for greater and greater moral and revolutionary purity until absolutely nobody was good enough, including themselves.

Unfortunately in 1790s France if you weren't revolutionary enough instead of being thrown out of the DSA you were executed by guillotine. They just started executing everybody right and left for increasingly minor infractions, a period known as The Terror.

Eventually enough people who had outranked him were dead that Robespierre was essentially in charge, and he took this opportunity to radically increase the number of executions, including some people who had formerly been his greatest friends and allies.

His opposition to the death penalty was supremely ironic given his later behavior, and his belief in a supreme being clashed with the revolution's atheistic ideals. He tried to square this circle by inventing a vague new pan-theistic state religion that nobody liked.

Predictably, with his most powerful friends and allies now dead he found himself considerably less influential, and also the constant murdering and the new religion were both very unpopular, so he was himself deposed and sent to the guillotine, aged 36.

There's not a lot that's fun or funny about Robespierre's short life. He was a radical with no idea how to actually govern, so he just declared never-ending revolution and murdered people until everyone got sick of his shit.