Title: Robespierre and the Reign of Terror
Headings: Robespierre and the Reign of Terror
Robespierre and the Reign of Terror
Content: His father was a lawyer or as the French say avocate. Maximilien followed suit in 1781 after attending some impressive schools including a stint at the Lycee de Louis le Grande, for which he had a scholarship. His early law career including several cases where he argued not just the legal aspects of the case, but the struggle of his clients, "victims in a Manichaean struggle between virtue and vice, freedom and tyranny." 1


Like many great figures of the French Revolution, Robespierre was taken with the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau. He believed not only in the "rights of man", but that in his natural state man was virtuous. It had been the monarchy that corrupted humanity. Robespierre saw it as his life's work to institute a republican virtue into the government and people of France. As a Deputy from Artois, he attended the Estates-General of 1789 in Paris as part of the Third Estate (the commoners). He was active in the Jacobin Club, which was a radical party espousing extreme measures of republican virtue. The Jacobins were closely aligned with the sans coulottes or the Paris mob, which seemed to drive the successive revolutionary governments to more and more extreme measures.