Maximilien Robespierre

“ Attested to by the entire revolution, this virtue would not alone suffice to reassure us against the factions who attempt without cease to corrupt and tear apart the republic. What is the reason for this? It’s that there are two peoples in France. The one is the mass of citizens, pure, simple thirsting for justice and friends of liberty. It is this virtuous people that spills all its blood to found the republic that is imposing to internal enemies and shakes the thrones of tyrants. ”

“ If they were to reign one day the Fatherland would be lost. In saying these things I sharpen daggers against myself, and it is precisely for this that I say them. You will persevere in your principles and in your triumphal march. You will put down crime and you will save the fatherland... I have lived long enough... I saw the French people rise up from degradation and servitude to the heights of Glory and Freedom. ”

“ The Convention punished their accomplices and rose triumphant on the ruins of factions and under the aegis of the French people. But assassination remains to them. They attempted to deprave public morality and to extinguish the generous sentiments of which the love of freedom and of the fatherland are composed by banishing from the republic good sense, virtue and divinity. We proclaimed the divinity and the immortality of the soul; we commanded virtue in the name of the republic. Assassination remains to them. ”

“ They were lavish with these crimes: assassination and yet more assassination still remain to them. Let us then rejoice and give thanks to heaven since we have so well served our country as to have been judged worthy of the daggers of tyranny. We thus have glorious dangers to run! The city offers as many such dangers as the battlefield. We have nothing to envy our brave brothers in arms; we pay, in more than one way, our debt to the fatherland. ”

“ I only hold to fleeting life by the love of the fatherland and the thirst for justice and, separated more than ever from any personal considerations, I find myself better disposed to attack with energy the villains who conspire against us and humankind. The more they hurry to terminate my career down here, the more I hasten to fulfill those actions useful to the happiness of my like. At least I will leave a testament whose reading will make tyrants and their accomplices tremble. ”

“ When the powers of the earth league together to kill a feeble individual he must not insist on living; it is thus that living a long time doesn’t enter into our calculations. It’s not in order to live that we declare war on all tyrants and, what is even more dangerous, on all crimes. What man on earth has ever defended the rights of humanity with impunity? A few months ago I said to my colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety: “If the armies of the Republic are victorious, if we unmask the traitors, if we put down factions, they will assassinate us.” ”

“ Accomplish, Citizens, accomplish your sublime destiny. You have placed us in the vanguard to bear up under the first efforts of the enemies of Liberty; we will be worthy of this honor, and with our blood we will trace the route of immortality. ”

“ May you constantly deploy that unquenchable energy which you need to put down the monsters of the universe that conspire against you, and to then enjoy in peace the benedictions of the people and of the fruits of your virtues. ”

“ I myself find that the situation in which the enemies of the republic have placed me is not without its advantages, for the more uncertain and precarious are the lives of the defenders of the fatherland, the more independent they are of men’s evil. ”

“ The other is a mass of the ambitious and intriguers, it’s the chatting, charlatan, artificial people who show themselves everywhere, who persecute patriotism, who grab onto the tribunes and often the public functions; who abuse the learning that the advantages of the ancien regime gave them in order to fool public opinion. It’s this people of rogues, of foreigners, of hypocritical counter-revolutionaries who place themselves between the people and their representatives in order to fool the one and slander the other ”

“ It is not the pomp of denominations, not victory, nor riches nor fleeting enthusiasm that constitute the republic; it is the wisdom of laws and especially the goodness of mores; it is the purity and the stability of the maxims of government. ”

“ If one of these things is missing there is in a state naught but errors, pride, passions, factions, ambitions and cupidity. Far from repressing vices the republic would then only allow them freer expansion, and vice necessarily returns us to tyranny. Whoever is not master of himself is made to be the slave of others. ”

“ In the state of equilibrium in which things are it is easy to consolidate liberty, and it is easy to lose it. If France were to be governed for a few months by a corrupted legislature, freedom would be lost. Victory would fall to the factions and immorality. ”

“ When we will have fallen under their blows, you would either complete your sublime enterprise or share our fate. Or rather, there is not one Frenchmen who would not want to stand over our bloody corpses to swear to exterminate the last of the enemies of the people. ”

“ It is not we who will complain of the kind of war you make, and we recognize that it is worthy of your august prudence. In fact, it is easier to take our lives than to triumph over our principles and our armies. ”

“ They once hoped to succeed in starving the French people; the French people still lives and will survive all its enemies. Subsistence was assured, and nature, faithful to Liberty, already presents it abundance. What resource then remains to them? Assassination. ”