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by Lucio Villari Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore de Robespierre, known as the Incorruptible (Arras, 6 May 1758 – Paris, 28 July 1794) was a French politician, lawyer and revolutionary, a leading figure in the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Historians and contemporaries have been divided between those who considered him a demagogue and a dictator who caused the numerous executions of those considered enemies of the Revolution, and those who consider him an idealist, raised on the ideas of the Enlightenment, in particular those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, devoted to the revolutionary cause of the Republic to the point of sacrificing his own life. From this perspective, the special laws of Terror, which were not proposed by him, but wanted by the entire Committee of Public Safety, are seen as a necessary measure due to the civil and external war to which France was subjected, blaming instead the excesses of his most ardent followers and rivals, rather than Robespierre himself, and placing his policy within a revolutionary emergency that also required extreme actions to save the new Republic and its very fragile democracy. This more positive vision, compared to that of anti-revolutionary historians, who see him as the guardian of the Republic against the intrigues of the monarchists, as well as a sincere protector of the poor, was highlighted and organically disseminated by Albert Mathiez in the first decades of the twentieth century, who denied the comparison with Oliver Cromwell, the anti-monarchic English dictator of the seventeenth century: the French historian instead indicates Robespierre as one of the fathers of representative democracy with universal suffrage, with more social intentions than the liberal democracy of the American style. (source: Wikipedia)