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"Since the day of his death in July 1794, Maximilien Robespierre has been contested terrain for biographers and historians, at once the most notorious leader of the French Revolution and the least comprehensible. Was he a bloodthirsty charlatan or the only true defender of revolutionary ideals? Was his extreme moralism - he was known as "the Incorruptible"--A heroic virtue or a flaw that ruined him and everyone around him? Was he the first modern dictator or the earliest democrat? And how did this unprepossessing bourgeois figure come to embody the most flamboyant and radical of political movements?" "Against the dramatic backdrop of the French Revolution, historian Ruth Scurr follows the trajectory of Robespierre's paradoxical life, from his modest beginnings as a provincial lawyer opposed to repressive authority and the death penalty to his meteoric rise in Paris politics as a devastatingly efficient revolutionary leader, righteous and paranoid in equal measure. She explores his reformist zeal, his role in the trial of the king and the fall of the monarchy, his passionate attempt to design a modern republic, even his extraordinary effort to found a perfect religion. And she follows him into the depths of the Terror, as he makes summary execution the order of the day, himself falling victim to the violence at the age of thirty-six."--Jacket.

Politicians --- Robespierre, Maximilien, --- France --- History --- Revolutionaries