How France’s ‘Archangel of Terror’ Met His End in 1794

In November 1792, he called for the execution of Louis XVI, declaring, “I see no middle ground: this man must reign or die! He oppressed a free nation; he declared himself its enemy; he abused the laws: he must die to assure the repose of the people.”
“The vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood.”
“A nation generates itself only upon heaps of corpses.”
“Those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own tombs.”
“You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic, and who does nothing for it.”
By the summer of 1794 many French politicians felt that, unless checked, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the Committee of Public Safety might also endanger them. Thus they engineered a coup and saved their own necks by sending Saint-Just and 21 of their erstwhile leaders to the axe.
Few have expressed the mistaken anthropology of the Enlightenment as well as Saint-Just did in a speech to the National Convention in April, 1793:
“Man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.”
This notion, that humanity is born good and requires only a bit of social tinkering to be made happy and free, is at the heart of every “ism” of the last two centuries and leads from the Storming of the Bastille to the Soviet gulags, Auschwitz, the Cultural Revolution, and Critical Race Theory.