him—to speak of the armies of the Republic in no other terms than as the armies of Robespierre, to stamp him the bugbear of the entire continent; and yet, without propaganda, without a press, without friendly parties, to the furthest corner of the colonies—down-trodden humans recognized that the Incorruptible was the man in whose hands their principle was being defended. Is there anything more moving than the fact that the first manifestations of the rise of the colonial peoples evinced themselves under the sign of Robespierre; that the Negroes of Madagascar and Guinea sent letters to Paris addressed to Maximilien and containing the naïve entreaty to liberate them from the rule of their white tyrants?
Robespierre as the Realpolitiker of the Revolution
Danton, Marat and Robespierre were the leaders of the Mountain (the Left). In a certain moment, and for a certain time, each of the three embodied the audacity and energy of the French Revolution. History as conventionally written has succeeded in disseminating the most ingenious fabrications concerning each of these three men. Legend relates that Danton was the good-natured, cheerful man, the Mirabeau of the Paris streets, who was basely and vilely consigned to the scaffold by the ambitious Maximilien. According to the same fairy-tale,
