Maximilien Robespierre Quotes

French revolutionary lawyer and politician (1758–1794)

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Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (6 May 1758 – 28 July 1794) was a French lawyer and statesman who was one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. As a member of the Constituent Assembly and the Jacobin Club, he campaigned for universal manhood suffrage and the abolition both of celibacy for the clergy, and slavery. In 1791, Robespierre was elected as "public accuser" and became an outspoken advocate for male citizens without a political voice, for their unrestricted admission to the National Guard, to public offices, for the right to petition and the right to bear arms in self defence. Robespierre played an important part in the agitation which brought about the fall of the French monarchy on 10 August 1792 and the summoning of a National Convention. His goal was to create a one and indivisible France, equality before the law, to abolish prerogatives and to defend the principles of direct democracy. A divisive figure during his lifetime, Robespierre remains controversial to this day. His legacy and reputation continue to be subject to ongoing academic and popular debate. To some, Robespierre was the Revolution's principal ideologist and embodied the country's first democratic experience, marked by the often revised and never implemented French Constitution of 1793. To others, he was the incarnation of the Terror itself, and provided in his speeches a justification of civilian armament.

Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alternative Names: Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre • Maximilien de Robespierre • Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore de Robespierre • Robespierre • The Incorruptible

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Whoever tries to stop the saying of mass is a worse fanatic than the priest who says it.

The people only ask for what is necessary, it only wants justice and tranquility, the rich aspire to everything, they want to invade and dominate everything. Abuses are the work and the domain of the rich, they are the scourges of the people: the interest of the people is the general interest, that of the rich is a particular interest...

The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.

It is indeed a great interest, the conservation of your colonies, but even that interest is connected with your constitution; and the supreme interest of the nation and of the colonies themselves is that you conserve your liberty and do not overturn the foundations of that liberty with your own hands. Faugh! Perish your colonies, if you are keeping them at that price. Yes, if you had either to lose your colonies, or to lose your happiness, your glory, your liberty, I would repeat: perish your colonies.

Mean spirits, you whose only measure of value is gold, I have no desire to touch your treasures, however impure may have been the source of them.

Citizens, it is you who will have the glory of making genuine principles prevail, and giving the world just laws. You are certainly not here to plod servilely along the rut of tyrannical prejudices traced by your predecessors; rather you are starting a new career in which no one has preceded you.

XXIX. Lorsque le gouvernement viole les droits du peuple, l'insurrection est pour le peuple et pour chaque portion du peuple, le plus sacré des droits et le plus indispensable des devoirs.

Death, so much Death! And the wretches cast it upon me. What a memory I shall leave behind if this lasts. Life is a burden to me

The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance.

I defy the most scrupulous defender of property to contest these principles, short of declaring openly that he understands this word as the right to despoil and assassinate his fellows. So how have people been able to claim that any sort of restriction, or rather any regulation of the trade in wheat, was an attack on property, and disguise that barbaric system under the specious name of freedom of trade? Do the authors of this system not perceive that they are inevitably in contradiction with themselves?

Offences committed by people’s representatives should be severely and promptly punished. No one has the right to claim to be more inviolable than other citizens.

The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Let tyranny reign a single day, and there will be no more patriots the day after. Yet one or the other has to yield.

Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are its own work, does for itself all that it can do properly, and through delegates all that it cannot do for itself.

Citizens whose incomes do not exceed what is required for their subsistence are exempted from contributing to state expenditure; all others must support it progressively according to their wealth.