Robespierre quit as a judge because he opposed the death penalty
As a young magistrate in Arras, Maximilien Robespierre resigned rather than rule in capital cases, and in 1791 he urged the French Assembly to abolish execution altogether. Within three years he was arguing for the harsh measures of the Reign of Terror, and in July 1794 he was himself executed without trial.
Robespierre was baptised in Arras on 6 May 1758, the eldest of four children of a lawyer. His mother died when he was six, and his father soon left the children, who were split between grandparents and aunts. A scholarship took him to the elite Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where classmates included Camille Desmoulins and where he fell for the Roman Republic, Cicero and Cato. He absorbed Rousseau's Social Contract and its idea that legitimacy flows from the general will of the people. After law studies he won a 600-livre prize on graduating in 1780.
Elected in 1789 as one of 16 deputies for French Flanders to the Estates-General, he struck observers as inexperienced and unable to stop talking, yet unusually eloquent. He spoke for Protestants, Jews, people of African descent, servants and actors, and fought property qualifications for voting, insisting every man had the right to help make the laws governing him. In 1791 alone he gave 328 speeches, almost one a day. He added fraternity to the National Guard's flags, giving France the motto of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Oddly for a radical, he never adopted revolutionary dress. He kept to knee-breeches and a curled, powdered, perfumed wig, and some described him as nervous, timid and suspicious. His 1791 speech against capital punishment failed to persuade the Assembly; the novelist Hilary Mantel later praised it as a perfectly built fusion of logic and emotion.
Elected to the National Convention in September 1792 and appointed to the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793, he grew disillusioned with fellow revolutionaries and defended the Terror's repression. The Convention turned on him on 9 Thermidor, arresting him with about 90 others, including his brother Augustin and Saint-Just, and he was executed on 28 July 1794. Historians still argue over how to weigh his progressive ideas against the violence.
Source: Maximilien Robespierre
