Robespierre
Subtitle: the voice of virtue
By: Otto J. Scott
Publisher: Transaction Publishers; Routledge
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New Brunswick
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9781412818223
Subjects: Political leadership; Hypocrisy; Revolutionaries; Case studies; Ethics; Political violence; Biography; History
Description: It is a perverse but almost inescapable phenomenon in the history of violent revolutions that after the first heroic days a colorless bureaucrat will inherit the mantle of leadership. In the Russian Revolution, Lenin was followed by a plodding Staling rather than a dazzling Trotsky. Even after the American Revolution the celebrated Jefferson barely made it into office as president between two party regulars. The French Revolution was no exception. After the genius and idealism of Mirabeau, Danton, and others who had created the Revolution, it fell into the hands of an unscrupulous and sententious bourgeois lawyer who had been lost among the back benches of the first Estates-General. Like Stalin, Robespierre rose through tireless party service and meticulous attention to detail and finally through the execution of men who had been the real heroes of the Revolution. Unlike Stalin, however, Robespierre was a brilliant orator who ultimately was destroyed on the guillotine by the very terror he had created to eliminate his rivals. In this book, author Otto J. Scott has created an ironic portrait of hypocrisy in power. This biography is a study in moral arrogance, self-proclaimed virtue, and the effectiveness of brutality in the position of political leadership; it is a reenactment of the events that Robespierre came to personify--the Reign of Terror.
Notes: Originally published: New York, N.Y. : Mason & Lipscomb Publishers, 1974.