Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. Peter McPhee. Yale University Press. [pounds sterling]25.00. xx + 299 pages. ISBN 978-0-300I 1711-7.
The aim of this new biography is to take a fresh look at the man whose
name is most often associated with the horrors of the Terror and the
establishment of the short-lived first French Republic. The French
Revolution and its attendant atrocities contained all the elements of
the revolutions that followed: grand statements followed by regimes
which of necessity had (and have) always to be more repressive and
stronger than the ones they replace, from Paris to Cambodia and from
Petrograd to Tehran. But what of Robespierre? Was he the cold-blooded
prototype of Lenin and Pot Pot or the strong-willed Cromwell who only
killed out of national interest? The answer, Prof. McPhee argues in this
incisive study, lies in the years between his birth in 1758 and 1789
although he wisely avoids over-interpreting his childhood with
post-facto psychological analysis. He also navigates deftly among the
half-truths, legends and attacks made on him during the Revolution and
afterwards. Robe-spierre's actions before and during his membership
of the Committee of Public Safety are always related to the actions of
other major players, thereby shedding new light on these terrible years.
Most important of all he shows that Robespierre was human--'a
passionate man', not 'the emotionally stunted, rigidly
puritanical and icily cruel monster of history'. To Prof. McPhee
the Revolution's achievements were 'enormous' and pari
passu so were the achievements of Maximilien Robespierre. The jury will
always be out on this case but we have here a new portrait of a man and
an era that resonate, and will continue to resonate, for centuries to
come. (M.J.A.)
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