The mainspring of popular government in revolution is at once virtue and terror — virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.
Le ressort du gouvernement populaire en révolution est à la fois la vertu et la terreur ; la vertu, sans laquelle la terreur est funeste ; la terreur, sans laquelle la vertu est impuissante.
Politicians
Maximilien Robespierre
French revolutionary lawyer and statesman (1758-1794). A provincial barrister from Arras steeped in Rousseau, he rose as the most influential voice of the Jacobin left in the National Convention and led the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror (1793-94), which produced an estimated 16,000 to 40,000 executions. He simultaneously championed universal male suffrage, the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, and free public education. Known as "the Incorruptible" for his austere private life and refusal of all bribes, he was overthrown on 9 Thermidor and guillotined at thirty-six, becoming the dual symbol of revolutionary idealism and revolutionary terror.
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Maximilien Robespierre's Other Quotes
Terror is nothing other than justice — prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.
Whoever does not hate crime cannot love virtue.
The Supreme Being has not decreed monarchy, nor aristocracy, nor wealth, nor slavery. He has decreed equality.
To love justice and equality, the people need no great virtue; it is enough that they love themselves.
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Terror is nothing other than justice — prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.
-- Maximilien Robespierre
Whoever does not hate crime cannot love virtue.
-- Maximilien Robespierre