The Failure of Leadership: The Tyrannical Revolution of Robespierre

“If virtue be the spring of popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution should be combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which terror is impotent.” -Maximilien Robespierre

July, 1794: the Thermidor. The Paris streets are mobbed with people — rejoicing people, reacting to the Terror imposed upon them by a man now being dragged in a tumbling death cart behind their dancing strides. This man is Maximilien Robespierre, now en route to his execution — and he is defenseless to remark any objection to it, as he’s been shot in the jaw. It is unclear whether it was Robespierre that pulled the trigger or revolutionary soldiers, but this is of no importance. The true importance resides in notion that it is time for him to know for himself the difference between virtue and paranoia, and which of the two is the true pretext behind employing the tactful ruse of terror; and it is the blade of the guillotine that will ultimately and swiftly sever the distinction’s divide. The headlining demo here is symbolic of the notion that terror is not the salubrious counter to invigorate the societal virtue but, instead, its terminal enemy.

Of course Robespierre wasn’t always a “blood-thirsty dictator.” A member of the Third Estate in France’s monarchical hierarchy, he had beliefs. One belief, paradoxically, was his opposition to the death penalty.  Likewise, having become a lawyer, he believed in defending the those breathing common air. But like any belief system, his was a sponsored one. It was the virtuous writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that became the Jacobin gospel. He believed so greatly, in fact, in the Rousseauean vision that he would stop at nothing to see its implementation in French society — even if it meant savagely executing those that made it up one head at a time.

But the most efficient way to deeply and truly confound a belief is to vividly highlight the idea that it may not be true. The greatest of voices, thus, have a devout understanding of this committed to the verbiage of their tongues’ and to the ink of their quills’ expressive natures. Over all else, they pander to the notion of something better. They loudly explain the simplest pictorial of the actualities in order to release blindness from its enslaved stare. But in doing so, a cause comes forth to be defined, and so the voices that birth these ideas become obligated to react with even greater bouts of verbal/written strength, but, ironically, they eventually encounter the notion that the task of making an idea a reality is determined by how well the voices can spike the potency of the belief. Voltaire was capable of doing this … Rousseau and others writers, too — but still others: Robespierre, Danton, St. Just, etc. — were more inclined to verbalize their concerns. They were able to make the French citizens drunk on the nectar of their own outrage, and the outcome is where a windy air meets a chilly day.

In the late era of the 18-century, revolutions were taking place. What is today called America was, of course, fighting a war against Britain — pursuing liberty through revolution. It was 1775 — the same year that saw the coronation of Louis XVI, the King of France.  During his reign, Louis XVI funded the American Revolution and, largely due to it, bankrupted France. Because of the financial tribulation taking place, the starving people of France decided to have their own revolution on July 14, 1789, when they took control of and disassembled the Bastille — a prison that the French people deemed a torture den and a gratifying symbolism of the Rousseauean notion that: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

No one was aware in July of 1789 that in January of 1793 they’d be drinking the King’s blood in the streets of Paris after he was guillotined — but their thirst for liberty was inherent of enough esteem that they indeed were. No. Before the storming of the Bastille, it was generically perceived that the King would always be the King. Save for some of the heavily enlightened, the inclination of revolution was mere in the common consciousness of the French people. Perhaps it is so that people gathered in fortified conglomerations can breech the ironic, albeit common, birth begotten by the poor gait maneuvering the parental stability over caste and commerce. But, as were the bread-lacking, famine-ridden French people living under the economically inept Louis XVI, so too are the people making up the political movements of today — like the Tea Party. But the people that make up that group are really mild aristocrats looking to restore the monarchy, as it were. They are people who subscribe to a much too strict constitutional construction to uphold in these present times. But it is the Occupy Movement that’s advocating a Tennis Court Oath.

And perhaps it is so that they’ve made one that imitates the assertion of this historical account, because occupying the laissez-faire grounds of bourgeois American capitalism (Wall Street) is pretty much the same thing the National Assembly of France did in Versailles in 1789. It was “Occupy the Tennis Court.” Same method, different period. This revival of rebellion suggests that what can be arranged form these gatherings is that history is repetitive.  Robespierre was the first Stalin, for instance. The philosophies of Rousseau and Marx are very similar in certain ways, too. But what can be arrived at, almost certainly, is that Rousseau’s idea of society was to remove individualism from liberty, and instead make individuals into constituents of a one dimensional class — a way of life that one may not care for but, as a duty, must obey.

These, indeed, are chains, then. Socialism … Communism, Marxist literature was inspired partly by Rousseau. The Social Contract was Robespierre’s manifesto. He would lead the Reign of Terror as a dictator, killing upwards of 40, 000 people — most of whom went the very same way that he is just about to: beheaded via guillotine. Yes that moment is coming. St. Just and some of his other Jacobin cronies have already met this fate and await the headless body of Robespierre in a cart that will bring them to be dumped into a mass grave. The revolutionary soldiers force him up scaffold; they tie him to a plank of wood standing upright; the blood-soaked cloth is pulled from his wounded face (he screams in agony); they tilt the board forward and slide his head into the Machine; the crowd is cheering as the executioner releases the blade and, thus, them from terror.

Social movements very often end up dictatorships if they succeed, and Occupy Movement’s people seem to dig Marx. Strong leadership should be constructed before revolutionary acts are put into practice. Due to hunger, the revolutionaries of France failed to torque that fundamental facet and ended up with a fanatical personality in charge of them. No matter what format the leadership is presented in, it must be under the care of a true and understanding command, and it must never hinder the individual.  But this is a difficult — perhaps impossible — condition to create, because together and individual are contravene to each other’s existence. But, in a synergistic sense, one does require the other. What should be noted, in summation, is that just because a war for independence has been won: movement, without which leadership is futile.