French lawyer Maximilien Robespierre became involved in politics
when he was elected to the Estates-General in 1789. In 1790 he became a leader
of the Jacobins, a radical group that played a dominant role in the French
Revolution (1789-1799). When King Louis XVI was overthrown in August 1792,
Robespierre called for a republic to replace the monarchy. Robespierre spoke
before the National Convention on December 3, declaring the king a traitor to
his people and demanding his death.
“Louis Must Perish Because Our Country Must Live!”
What is the conduct prescribed by sound policy to cement the
republic? It is to engrave deeply into all hearts a contempt for royalty, and
to strike terror into the partisans of the King. To place his crime before the
world as a problem, his cause as the object of the most imposing discussion
that ever existed, to place an immeasurable space between the memory of what he
was and the title of a citizen, is the very way to make him most dangerous to
liberty. Louis XVI was king, and the republic is established. The question is
solved by this single fact. Louis is dethroned by his crimes, he conspired
against the republic; either he is condemned or the republic is not acquitted.
To propose the trial of Louis XVI is to question the Revolution. If he may be
tried, he may be acquitted; if he may be acquitted, he may be innocent. But, if
he be innocent, what becomes of the Revolution? If he be innocent, what are we
but his calumniators? The coalition is just; his imprisonment is a crime; all
the patriots are guilty; and the great cause which for so many centuries has
been debated between crime and virtue, between liberty and tyranny, is finally
decided in favour of crime and despotism!
Citizens, beware! you are misled by false notions. The
majestic movements of a great people, the sublime impulses of virtue present
themselves as the eruption of a volcano, and as the overthrow of political
society. When a nation is forced to recur to the right of insurrection, it returns
to its original state. How can the tyrant appeal to the social compact? He has
destroyed it! What laws replace it? Those of nature: the people's safety. The
right to punish the tyrant or to dethrone him is the same thing. Insurrection
is the trial of the tyrant—his sentence is his fall from power; his punishment
is exacted by the liberty of the people. The people dart their thunderbolts,
that is, their sentence; they do not condemn kings, they suppress them—thrust
them back again into nothingness. In what republic was the right of punishing a
tyrant ever deemed a question? Was [6th-century-bc
Roman king] Tarquin tried? What would have been said in Rome if any one had
undertaken his defence? Yet we demand advocates for Louis! They hope to gain
the cause; otherwise we are only acting an absurd farce in the face of Europe.
And we dare to talk of a republic! Ah! we are so pitiful for oppressors because
we are pitiless towards the oppressed!
Two months since, and who would have imagined there could be
a question here of the inviolability of kings? Yet today a member of the
National Convention, Citizen [Jérỗme] Pétion, brings the question before you as
though it were one for serious deliberation! O crime! O shame! The tribune of
the French people has echoed the panegyric of Louis XVI. Louis combats us from
the depths of his prison, and you ask if he be guilty, and if he may be treated
as an enemy. Will you allow the Constitution to be invoked in his favour? If
so, the Constitution condemns you; it forbids you to overturn it. Go, then, to
the feet of the tyrant and implore his pardon and clemency.
But there is another difficulty—to what punishment shall we
condemn him? The punishment of death is too cruel, says one. No, says another,
life is more cruel still, and we must condemn him to live. Advocates, is it
from pity or from cruelty you wish to annul the punishment of crimes? For
myself I abhor the penalty of death; I neither love nor hate Louis; I hate
nothing but his crimes. I demanded the abolition of capital punishment in the
Constituent Assembly, and it is not my fault if the first principles of reason
have appeared moral and judicial heresies. But you who never thought this mercy
should be exercised in favour of those whose offences are pardonable, by what fatality
are you reminded of your humanity to plead the cause of the greatest of
criminals? You ask an exception from the punishment of death for him who alone
could render it legitimate! A dethroned king in the very heart of a republic
not yet cemented! A king whose very name draws foreign wars on the nation!
Neither prison nor exile can make his an innocent existence. It is with regret
I pronounce the fatal truth! Louis must perish rather than a hundred thousand
virtuous citizens! Louis must perish because our country must live!
Source: The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches.
MacArthur, Brian, ed. Penguin Books, 1996.
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