ROBESPIERRE, MAXIMILIEN MA RIE ISIDORE, a French revolutionist; born of a family of Irish origin, in Arras, May 6, 1758. His mother died in 1767, his 13; el:en-hearted father two years later, and the four children were brought up by their maternal grandfather, an Arras brewer. Maximilien, the eldest, early showed unusual promise, and was edu cated at Arras and at the College Louis le-Grand at Paris. He was admitted avo cat in 1781, and next year was named criminal judge by the Bishop of Arras, rut resigned his place soon after to avoid passing a sentence of death. All through life a fanatical devotee of the Gospel ac cording to Rousseau, his sentimentality and taste for verses made him popular among the Rosati at Arras. He drew up the cahier or list of grievances for the guild of cobblers, and was elected to the States-General in 1789 as one of the depu ties for the tiers etat of Artois. He soon attached himself to the extreme Left— the "thirty voices," and though his first speeches excited ridicule, it was not long before his earnestness and his high sound ing phrases commanded attention. In deed his influence grew daily, both in the Jacobin Club and in the Assembly.
Three days after the death of Mira beau he called on the Assembly to pre vent any deputy from taking office as minister for four years, and in the fol lowing month (May, 1791) carried the motion that no member of the present Assembly should be eligible for the next. Next followed Robespierre's appointment as public accuser, the king's flight to Varennes (June 21), Lafayette's last ef fort to control the sacred right of In surrection on the Champ-de-Mars (July 17), the abject terror of Robespierre, his sheltering himself in the house of Duplay, a carpenter, his hysterical appeal to the club, the theatrical oath taken by every member to defend his life, and his being crowned with chaplets, along with Petion, and carried home in triumph by the mob at the close of the Constituent Assembly, Sept. 30.
He went to Arras, where he sold his small patrimony and returned to Paris, to the house of Duplay, where he re mained till the last day of his life. He was much beloved in the family, and a passion quickly sprung up betwixt him self and his host's eldest daughter, Ele n ore, a romantic girl of 25. Alone among
the patriots he was noted for the care fulness of his dress—powdered hair, a bright blue coat, white waistcoat, short yellow breeches, with white stockings and shoes with silver bucl-les.
Meantime the Girondist party had been formed in the new Legislative Assembly, its leaders—the loudest, Brissot—eager for war. Robespierre, who ever feared and disliked war, offered a strenuous op position in the debates of the Jacobin Club. Fundamentally an empty pedant, inflated with words which he mistook for ideas, in his orations he is ever riding in the air on theories, his foot never on the solid ground of the practical. In April, 1792, he resigned his post of public prose cutor. He was invisible during the crisis of August 10, but joined the Hotel-de-Ville faction, and on August 16 he presented to the Legislative Assembly its petition for a Revolutionary Tribunal and a new Con vention. He was elected first deputy for Paris to the National Convention, which opened on Sept. 21.
The bitter attacks on him by the Giron dists were renewed only to throw Robes pierre into a closer union with Danton and his party, but the final struggle was interrupted for a little by the momentous question of the kind's trial. Robespierre opposed vigorously the Girondist idea of a special appeal to the people on the king's death, and his execution (.Jan. 21, 1793) opened up the final stage of the struggle, which ended in a complete tri umph of the Jacobins on June 2 of the same year. The first Committee of Public Safety—a permanent Cabinet of Revolution—was decreed in April, 1793, but Robespierre was not elected till July 27.
He was now for the first time one of the actual rulers of France, but it is open to question whether for the whole 12 months from this time to the end he was not merely the stalking horse for the more resolute party within the Twelve. His vaunted respectability, his great popu larity with the mob, and his gift of fluent, if vague and windy, oratory, made an admirable cover for the truculent de signs of strong and completely unscrupu lous men like Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois and at least it is certainly the case that Couthon and Saint-Just were the only members whose political and social ideals coincided with his own.