Abstract
Abstract In 1788, Maximilien Robespierre was a 30-year-old lawyer in sleepy provincial Arras, overeducated for his prospects, surviving on the occasional earnings of hopeless briefs and a petty part-time judge ship, reading Rousseau, and dreaming of utopia. Six years later, almost as much to his surprise as anyone’s, he dominated the government of France, still dreaming, but now in a position to massacre anybody who did not share his dreams. The French Revolution would be the midwife of countless other life changes scarcely less astonishing. ‘Political writers’, Robespierre would later declare, ‘ ⃛ had in no way foreseen this Revolution’, much less any other sort. For the vacuum of power produced by the collapse of the old monarchy forced everybody who lived in France to rethink every aspect of their existence. The authority to which the French instinctively looked had suddenly disappeared, and they had to reconstruct their world from its very foundations.
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