Maximilien Robespierre

A provincial lawyer from Arras, raised by relatives after his mother died and his father left. He won a scholarship to Paris, built a reputation for refusing every favour and bribe — the nickname 'the Incorruptible' stuck — and was elected to the Estates-General in 1789. He joined the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793 and led it through the Terror until the Convention turned on him on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794); he was guillotined the next day, jaw shattered by a gunshot, with twenty-one followers.

In the Convention he pushed for universal male suffrage, the abolition of slavery in the colonies (voted February 1794), and price ceilings demanded by the sans-culottes.

The Law of 22 Prairial (June 1794) removed defence counsel and broadened 'enemy of the people' — executions accelerated sharply in his final seven weeks.

He founded the Cult of the Supreme Being, a civic religion to replace Christianity, and staged its Festival in June 1794.

Under the Terror about 17,000 people were executed by official sentence, with roughly 10,000 more dying in custody or killed without trial.

He became the face of revolutionary dictatorship: his fall ended the Terror and began the Thermidorian reaction.

His own formula — virtue enforced by terror — is the template every later revolutionary regime has been measured against.

The 1794 abolition of slavery he helped pass was the first in Europe, though Napoleon restored it in 1802.

Whether the jaw wound before his execution was self-inflicted or a gendarme's shot is still disputed.

Historians remain split between Robespierre the defender of the Revolution and Robespierre the architect of the Terror; the evidence supports both readings of the same man.