goddammit, you started the Jacobin tankie bit without me!
I'll be the stick in the mud for you then. Robespierre and company were libs. Not just libs, arch-libs who persecuted liberalism with admirable vigor and brutality. This was indeed a revolutionary project in their time, but it's important to temper this with the fact enlightenment liberalism was extremely hostile to egalitarian government. The Jacobins did wield their power against reactionaries, but also against the 'left' as represented by the Parisian commune, and the Enrages in the assembly
Robespierre was a proto-socialist essentially. And in socialist fashion, there was infighting amongst the Jacobins, one of the faction being at his left (the Enraged), pro-Terror, and extremely zealous; the other one being the Pacifists, lead by Danton, who wanted an end to revolutionary terror. Sadly, the entirety of the party fell into infighting, Robespierre purging it with the help of the center of the assembly (nicknamed the "Swamp") only led to his demise in the end, as there was simply no one left to defend him when the Thermidorian Reaction happened, which paved the way for the Rise of Bonaparte, and the Napoleonic Wars, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And while he was an inherently flawed man of his time, he was the guardian of the spirit that lead to the French Revolution, akin to Thomas Paine when it came to the American Revolution. He was anti-slavery, anti death penalty, wanted to create a truly egalitarian society, freed of the monarchist influence and of poverty. To this day, he is still considered as a bloodthirsty tyrant thanks to decades of propaganda in the French educational system, and is the only original revolutionary without a square or monument to his name. It is noteworthy to consider only 20 000 people were executed, and while some of these executions were arbitrary and targeted innocents occasionally, it allowed France to get a shot at ridding itself of monarchists once and for all. Some other things are often pinned on him, such as the "Infernal Columns", aka revolutionary armies that went rogue against the monarchist uprising in Bretagne, mercilessly killing scores of innocents and razing entire villages, and his wish to create a modern, united French nation, at the expense of the numerous cultures and languages from which France was once comprised of.
TLDR : Robespierre mostly good, it'd be great if the modern left could stop the petty infighting when there are people who desperately need to be sent to the guillotine.
only 20 000
this don't count the terror in the Vendeé, in which considerably more were slaughtered and without the pretense of trial or anything. it wasn't all Jacobin there, but horrible nonetheless
Robespierre didn't even know what was going on until it was too late unfortunately, and I feel that pinning these massacres on him is simply wrong. But the 20000 figure is actually correct when it comes to people being sentenced to death through the Great Terror.
you can't pin it on him only because the bloodshed went on after his tenure, the committee signed off on massacre-ing of Vendeans--I wouldn't know if he personally voted for it tho
I thought Age of Napoleon did a good job presenting a comprehensive view of Robespierre, check it out if you haven't it's a good podcast
