Robespierre’s radicalism was only incipient in 1789, but it was there. Gauchet does not state it in such explicit terms, but that is the thrust of his argument. Why? Robespierre was possessed by a psychology that blinded him to the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the ideology to which he adhered, ones that proved fatal when he tried to put it into practice. Robespierre may not have meant to be a tyrant, but he became one anyway. Gauchet indicts him for “doctrinaire intransigence,” “egotism,” “exhibitionism,” and “self-pitying narcissism.” Yet if Robespierre was all these things, Gauchet is insistent about something he wasn’t: a demagogue, at least not in the conventional sense his critics then and now accuse him of being. Robespierre’s was not an especially attractive personality. Nonetheless, some conclusions can be drawn. Or so claims Gauchet, whose penchant for insisting that many of Robespierre's true intentions, motivations, and thoughts “will forever remain impenetrable to us” can become frustrating.
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Two hundred years after Robespierre’s death, much about him is still shrouded in mystery. Rather, it is an attempt, drawing almost exclusively on Robespierre’s own speeches and writings, to interpret his revolutionary career according to his own understanding of it, as someone who started out as the “defender of revolutionary principles and spokesman of the people” yet ended up nearly destroying both. Given that “the events of 1789 made him a new man,” he writes, there’s little point in looking at Robespierre’s pre-French Revolution life for answers to his revolutionary activities. Gauchet’s volume is not a traditional history or biography. Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most By Marcel Gauchet Princeton University Press 224 pp., $35.00 The dualism of his legacy and the breach it continues to cleave between the French and their past is the subject of Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most, a book by Marcel Gauchet, one of France’s leading contemporary intellectuals, first published in French in 2018 and now in English translation. In the French imagination, another idea of Robespierre competes with our more familiar view of him as the “precursor of totalitarianism.” This second Robespierre “embodies the French Revolution in its most original aspect,” that of “the Revolution of the Rights of Man.” Robespierre thus represents both the “most inspirational and the most repellent” parts of France’s history. That is, in the English-speaking world, at any rate. And both, in the popular mind, made the French Revolution. Robespierre made the guillotine the guillotine made Robespierre. It is the lawyer from Arras, therefore, who was arguably the leading actor on the revolutionary stage. No man is more responsible, or culpable, if one prefers, for transforming the guillotine into the symbol of the French Revolution than Maximilien Robespierre, the revolutionary orator and Jacobin who became the de facto leader who oversaw la Grande Terreur. More often than not, the first thing that pops into a person’s head when he or she hears the words “French Revolution” is the guillotine, that exsanguinary instrument that, two centuries later, still looms over the revolution’s legacy as it once did over its enemies.