page_title: Maximilien Robespierre
section_title: Execution
hierarchical_section_title: Maximilien Robespierre / Downfall / Execution
context_page_description: Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a French lawyer and statesman who was one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. As a member of the Constituent Assembly and the Jacobin Club, he campaigned for universal manhood suffrage and the abolition both of celibacy for the clergy, and slavery. In 1791, Robespierre became an outspoken advocate for the citizens without a political voice, for their unrestricted admission to the National Guard, to public offices, and for the right to carry arms in self-defence. He played an important part in the agitation which brought about the fall of the French monarchy on 10 August 1792 and the summoning of a National Convention. His goal was to create a united and indivisible France, equality before the law, to abolish prerogatives and to defend the principles of direct democracy.
  As one of the leading members of the insurrectionary Paris Commune, Robespierre was elected as a deputy to the French Convention in early September 1792 but was soon criticised for trying to establish either a triumvirate or a dictatorship.
context_section_description: For the remainder of the night, Robespierre was laid in an antechamber of the Committee of General Security. He lay on the table with his head on a deal (pine) box, bleeding profusely.  At 5 a.m. his brother and Couthon seem to have been taken to the nearest hospital, Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, to see a doctor. Barras denied that Robespierre was sent there too; the circumstances did not permit it. A military doctor was invited and removed some of his teeth and fragments of his broken jaw. Robespierre was then placed in the cell in the Conciergerie and deposited on the bed in which Danton had slept while detained.
  In the afternoon of 10 Thermidor (28 July, a décadi, a day of rest and festivity) the Revolutionary Tribunal condemned Robespierre and 21 "Robespierrists" (c.q. 13 members of the insurrectionary Commune) to death by the rules of the law of 22 Prairial, only verifying their identity at the trial. Halfway through the proceedings, Fouquier-Tinville, who did not want to pass judgment on his friend the mayor Fleuriot-Lescot, took off his official robe. In the late afternoon, the convicts, whose average age was 34 years old, were taken in three carts to the Place de la Révolution to be executed along with  the cobbler Antoine Simon, the jailer of the Dauphin. A mob screaming curses followed them right up to the scaffold. His face still swollen, Robespierre kept his eyes closed throughout the procession. He was the tenth called to the platform and ascended the steps of the scaffold unassisted. When clearing Robespierre's neck, executioner Charles-Henri Sanson tore off the bandage that was holding his shattered jaw in place, causing him to produce an agonising scream until the fall of the blade silenced him. Sanson's grandson wrote that while his grandfather did this carefully, Robespierre nevertheless roared like a tiger in response. After he was beheaded, applause and joyous cries arose from the crowd and reportedly persisted for fifteen minutes. Robespierre and his guillotined associates were later buried in a common grave at the newly opened Errancis Cemetery near what is now the Place Prosper-Goubaux.
caption: Lying on a table, wounded, in a room of the convention, Robespierre is the object of the curiosity and quips of Thermidorians, painting by Lucien-Étienne Mélingue (Salon de 1877)(Musée de la Révolution française)
exif: {}