Freedom's missed moment

Abstract

On 26 July 1794, the last day of his rule and his life, Maximilien Robespierre sounded a note of doom from the podium of the National Convention. Although he had led the Convention, the Montagnard party, the Committee of Public Safety, and by extension France itself for over a year, Robespierre felt the political tides turning against him and his self-proclaimed "despotism of liberty." Under his stewardship, violence had devastated the French polity. His chief means of establishing freedom-which to him meant a state cleansed of all royalist vestiges and counterrevolutionary impulses-was Terror, that "prompt, severe, and inflexible justice" that sent countless citizens to the guillotine. Once revered as the very embodiment of republican virtue, Robespierre was now a marked man. Sensing that his days were numbered, he made an extraordinary speech about the failures, past and future, of his reign. "We shall perish," he informed his fellow conventionnels,