Fouquier-Tinville and Robespierre
Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville (June, 1746 – May 1795) was born in Pérouel, Picardy. He became a lawyer, like Robespierre, and rose rapidly from minor legal offices during the rising tides of the French Revolution. He was appointed Public Prosecutor (March, 1793) at the Revolutionary Tribunal during what is called the Reign of Terror. He was a close friend of the revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins.
Historians have described Fouquier-Tinville as ruthless, zealous and hard-working. He supervised the ‘documentary’ evidence which led to the trial and subsequent execution of more than 2000 ‘counter-revolutionaries’. This double-entendre meant, just as it means today, anyone not in agreement with the presiding government. Today the word would be ‘counter-socialist’.
F-T. personally superintended the end of the foreign Queen Marie Antoinette, as well as that of his friend Desmoulins. He eliminated almost all the opposition – the Girondins – with the angled knife of the guillotine. But as seems to happen with all psychopaths who prefer politics to lonely city alleys to indulge in their whim, Fouquier-Tinville himself was prosecuted after the inevitable fall of Robespierre. The ‘Thermidorians’ arrested their own Public Prosecutor and put him on trial for his life. In the dock, he denied any acts of personal violence, claiming he had only obeyed orders given by the Revolutionary Government’s committees. It is said he died still shouting his innocence. He was thirty-nine.
Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore de Robespìerre (May 1758 – July 1794) was born in Arras. Proclaiming himself the leader of the Jacobins, he virtually led the Revolution in France, playing a leading rôle in the Reign of Terror.
Robespierre was a reformist lawyer from northern France, elected to the Estates-General in 1789. Accepted into the Jacobin Club, he became known as ‘the incorruptible’. At the National Convention he spoke for the radical Montagnard Faction, and by 1793 he dominated the Committee of Public Safety, a kind of court set up to destroy all opposition to the Revolution. Without such committees, the confiscation of estates, the judicial murder of men, women and children, it has been deemed possible by many historians that a peaceful revolution leading to organised and intelligent democracy might have emerged in France by 1800.
But through the demonised efforts of revolutionaries like Robespierre, Barras, Marat, Danton and Fouquier-Tinville, what could have been an important and bloodless change to Socialism became a massacre which led to the Napoleonic Wars, leaving millions of Europeans dead.
Robespierre instituted economic controls (confiscation of private property), and offered death to all opponents of the Revolution. He even surprised the Catholics by replacing God with a ‘Supreme Being’. He went too far, of course, and was arrested on a charge of being a dictator. He was guillotined in the Thermidorian Reaction, in 1794. He was 36.
Following his execution, most of the radical leaders among the Jacobins were judicially eliminated or murdered. Robespierre’s colleague Marat was stabbed in his bath by his fellow revolutionary Charlotte Corday.
