Maximilien Robespierre educated at Lycée Louis-le-Grand
Early life
Maximilien de Robespierre was baptized on 6 May 1758 in Arras in the French province of Artois. His father, François Maximilien Barthélémy de Robespierre, a lawyer, married Jacqueline Marguerite Carrault, the daughter of a brewer in January 1758. Maximilien was born five months later as the eldest of four children. His siblings were Charlotte Robespierre, Henriette Robespierre, and Augustin Robespierre. In July 1764, Robespierre's mother, having given birth to a stillborn daughter, died  at the age of 29. For unknown reasons his father left the children around 1767. His two daughters were brought up by their paternal (maiden) aunts, and his two sons were taken in by their maternal grandparents.Already literate at age eight, Maximilien started attending the collège of Arras. In October 1769, on the recommendation of the bishop Louis-Hilaire de Conzié, he received a scholarship at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His fellow pupils included Camille Desmoulins and Stanislas Fréron. In school, he came to admire the Roman Republic and the rhetoric of Cicero, Cato and Lucius Junius Brutus. In 1776 he was awarded first prize for rhetoric.
His study of the classics prompted him to aspire to Roman virtues, but he sought to emulate Rousseau's  citizen-soldier in particular. He was attracted to the ideas of the popular philosophe on political reforms explained in his Contrat Social. With Rousseau, Robespierre considered the "volonté générale" or the general will of the people as the basis of political legitimacy.  Robespierre's conception of revolutionary virtue and his program for constructing political sovereignty out of direct democracy came from Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Mably.
studied at graduated from attended enrolled at completed education at