(b. May 6, 1758, Arras, France—d. July 28, 1794, Paris)
M
aximilien de Robespierre was one of the principal figures in the French Revolution. He was part of the Committee of Public Safety, the principal organ of the Revolutionary government during the Reign of Terror.Robespierre received a law degree in 1781 and became a lawyer in Arras, where he was noted for his ability and honesty. In March 1789 the citizens of Arras chose him as one of their representatives to the National Assembly. In April 1790 he presided over the Jacobins, a political club promoting the ideas of the French Revolution, and in October he was appointed a judge of the Versailles tribu-nal. Robespierre nevertheless decided to devote himself fully to his work in the National Assembly, where a new constitution was being drawn up. Grounded in ancient history and the works of the French philosophers of the Enlightenment, he welcomed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which formed the pre-amble of the French constitution of Sept. 3, 1791, and he insisted that all laws should conform to it. He became notorious as an outspoken radical in favour of individual rights. When the National Assembly dissolved itself, the people of Paris organized a triumphal procession for
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Robespierre. Although he had excluded himself and his colleagues from the new Legislative Assembly, Robespierre continued to be politically active. Henceforth, he spoke only at the Jacobin Club, where he was to be heard about 100 times, until August 1792.
That year, Paris mobs stormed the palace of the Tuileries and dethroned King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette. Robespierre helped organize the new revolu-tionary governing body, the National Convention. From the first sessions of the new body, a faction known as the Girondins, who favoured political but not social democ-racy and who controlled the government and the civil service, accused Robespierre of dictatorship. Robespierre was a leading member of the faction known as the Montagnards, the deputies of the extreme left. On May 26, 1793, Robespierre called on the people “to rise in insurrec-tion.” Five days later he supported a decree of the National Convention indicting the Girondin leaders. On June 2 the decree was passed against many of them.
After the fall of the Girondins, the Montagnards were left to deal with the country’s desperate position. In April 1793 the Committee of Public Safety had taken over the rule of the country to suppress royalist uprisings and to repel the Prussian-Austrian invaders on its borders. The com-mittee employed harsh measures against those suspected of being enemies of the Revolution. The bloody three-year rule of this body was known as the Reign of Terror, during which some 300,000 suspects were arrested. About 17,000 were executed, and many others died in prison. Robespierre took his place on the committee in June.
Robespierre was not entirely to blame for the excesses of the Committee of Public Safety. He was not a man of action. He rarely attended its sessions and had almost no part in its routine work. His love of power and narrow
self-righteousness, however, made him feared and hated by many of his associates.
A deist, Robespierre disapproved of the anti-Christian movement. In a report to the National Convention in May 1794, he affirmed the existence of God and the immortal-ity of the soul and strove to rally the revolutionaries around a civic religion and the cult of the Supreme Being. The National Convention elected him president June 4, 1794.
Political opposition to Robespierre grew. Meanwhile, unremitting work and frequent speeches in the Legislative Assembly and at the Jacobin Club had undermined Robespierre’s health, and he became irritable and distant.
He stayed away from the National Convention and then, after June, from the Committee of Public Safety, confin-ing his denunciations of counterrevolutionary intrigues to the Jacobin Club. At the same time, he began to lose the support of the people, whose hardships continued despite the recent French victories.
Weary of the mounting executions (1,300 in June alone), on July 27 deputies in the National Convention decreed the arrest of Robespierre and other members of the Committee of Public Safety. Robespierre was taken to the Luxembourg prison, but the warden refused to jail him. Later he went to the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall). The soldiers of the National Convention attacked there and easily seized Robespierre and his followers. In the evening of July 28, Robespierre and others were guillotined before a cheering mob on the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde).
napoleon i
(b. Aug. 15, 1769, Ajaccio, Corsica—d. May 5, 1821, St. Helena Island)
O
ne of the most celebrated personages in the history7 Napoleon I 7
first consul (1799–1804), and emperor of the French (1804–1814/15). Known as the Little Corporal because of his short stature, Napoleon revolutionized military orga-nization and training. He also sponsored the Napoleonic Code, the prototype of later civil-law codes; reorganized education; and established the long-lived concordat with the papacy.
Napoleon was born on Corsica shortly after the island’s cession to France by the Genoese. He was the fourth, and second surviving, child of Carlo Buonaparte , a lawyer, and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. His father’s family, of ancient course was completed he joined the French promoted to brigadier general in 1793. The threat of revolt brought him the command of the army of the
inte-The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, oil on can-vas by Jacques-Louis David, 1812;
in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © Photos.com/
Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole, 17 November 1796, oil on canvas by Antoine-Jean Gros, 1796; in the Versailles Museum. © Photos.com/
Jupiterimages
7 Napoleon I 7
commanded the army of Italy in several vic-torious campaigns.
In 1798 Napoleon persuaded the willing French government to send him and a large army to Egypt. He won the Battle of the Pyra-mids in July 1798, but his fl eet was destroyed by the British in the of Turkey held out, and Napoleon retreated to Egypt. In July 1799 he defeated 10,000 Turks in the Battle of Aboukir.
Shortly after, unrest at home forced him to return.
The unrest turned out to be a coup that brought Napoleon to supreme power in 1799, and he instituted a military dictatorship, with himself as First Consul.
Napoleon introduced numerous reforms in government.
He established the University of France and reformed the educational system. He founded the Bank of France and the Legion of Honor. Most signifi cantly, he created the
Napoleon on the Battlefi eld at Eylau, February 1807, oil painting by Antoine-Jean Gros, 1808; in the Louvre, Paris. © Photos.com/Jupiterimages
reformers throughout the world. He negotiated the Concordat of 1801, which restored friendly relations with the papacy.
After victory against the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo (1800), he embarked on the Napoleonic Wars, which lasted from 1799 to 1815. This series of confl icts pit-ted France against shifting alliances of European powers.
The formation of coalitions of European countries against him led Napoleon to declare France a hereditary empire and to crown himself emperor in 1804. His greatest vic-tory, the Battle of Austerlitz, against Austria and Russia, came in 1805. In 1807 Napoleon was able to impose the
7 Napoleon I 7
1814, the Campaign of France, by Ernest Meissonier, 1864; in the Louvre,
Napoleon led the French army into Austria and defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram in 1809, signing the Treaty of Vienna. Thereafter, except for tem-porary setbacks in Spain, he was successful, consolidating most of Europe as his empire by about 1810. In 1812, to enforce the Treaty of Tilsit, he led an army of about 600,000 into Russia. Napoleon’s forces won the Battle of Borodino, but were forced to retreat from Moscow with disastrous losses. His army greatly weakened, he was met by a strong coalition of Allied powers, who defeated him at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813.
On March 30, 1814, the Allies captured Paris itself.
Napoleon’s generals refused to continue the hopeless
struggle despite all the emperor’s pleading, and he was forced to abdicate on April 6, 1814. Napoleon was exiled to Elba. However, he remained on Elba for only 10 months.
In March 1815 he escaped and landed in France. Escorted by a thousand of his old guard, he began a triumphant march on Paris, picking up support along the way.
Hundreds rallied to his side. For a brief time, known as the Hundred Days, Napoleon enjoyed a return to his former glory, but it ended at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, where he suffered his final defeat by a combined English and Prussian force. He was forced to abdicate once again. He was sent into final exile to St. Helena Island, where he died in 1821.