Robespierre: “The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”

Bastille Daze

by Daniel Flynn 

How did “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” Chamfort wondered, become “Be my brother or I’ll kill you”?

The former secretary of the Jacobin Club, who had been among the first to rush inside the Bastille, eventually harbored second thoughts. 

He embodied a live-free-or-die ethos, so when the Terror began terrifying him he shot himself in the face and stabbed himself in the neck and chest. 

But he proved less efficient at killing than his former guillotine-enthusiast comrades. 

Chamfort’s slow suicide took more than six months. The Revolution’s took more than a decade.

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