THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Robespierre's "liberalism," if we can call it that, was decidedly marred by its rejection of the "wisdom of Montesquieu" and his increasing identification of himself with the purity of revolutionary principles. Gauchet tellingly calls one of his chapters "I, the People." Robespierre began to divinize himself because he divinized the revolutionary people. After Louis XVI's flight to Varennes in June 1791, Robespierre and the Jacobins attacked the King with inhuman ferocity. Robespierre tells the Convention that the King is by definition a tyrant and that his mere existence entails an "insurrection" against the nation and the revolutionary state.

In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke stated the real truth. At the end of the ancien regime, the French monarchy was "rather a despotism in appearance than in reality." And the famed English statesman added that the reign of Louis XVI should not be confused with "Persia bleeding under the ferocious sword of Thamas Kouli Khân." But that was precisely how Robespierre saw things, confusing the gentle and conscientious Louis XVI, a Christian of authentic conviction, with a brute and a monster. The King was transmogrified into a tyrant who must "die in order that the fatherland may live." In the name of absolute, inviolable, fanatical "principles" the King must die, so the people could live. There was a reason why Alexander Hamilton bristled when he heard the American Revolution compared to the French Revolution. The leaders of the latter revolution--even some of its much-lauded moderate leaders--were in Hamilton's views "fanatics in political science," as he wrote in 1794. Bereft of the moderation that flows from prudence, Robespierre came to identify liberty with Virtue, and Virtue with Terror. That identification is literally deadly.

One of the strengths of Gauchet's book is the way it continually emphasizes the inability of Robespierre and his fellow fanatics to give serious thought to the art of governance in a political order at once popular and representative. Once Robespierre joined the Committee on Public Safety on July 27, 1793, his (and the Revolution's) metamorphosis was complete. In place of governing, Robespierre and his allies searched for enemies, discerning corruption and conspiracy everywhere. Robespierre made clear that he preferred an "excess of patriotic fervor" over "the stagnation of moderantism." Moderation was the disposition of soul and civic stance that Robespierre loathed above all. His full embrace of fanaticism in the name of virtue and revolutionary principle reached a morally insane apex in his infamous speech of February 5, 1794. There, he announced that the Revolution was endangered by "depraved men" who regarded the Revolution "as a trade and the Republic as a spoil."

He saw ill-defined conspiracies everywhere. "Virtue and Terror" were the only legitimate response to such corruption and such conspiracies. Desmoulins had accused the Jacobins and the sans-culottes, the Parisian revolutionary mob, of succumbing to out-and-out despotism. Robespierre did not dispute the point. But he insisted that "the government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny," a distinction that was specious in these circumstances. Robespierre had once thought the death penalty an abomination. Now he confused justice--"prompt, severe, inflexible," with Terror and loudly proclaimed Virtue without Terror to be weak and ineffectual. Robespierre's fanatical defense of Terror in the name of the "Rights of Man" and Virtue properly understood is the quintessence of ideological despotism.

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