Maximilien Robespierre: Right

“When a nation has been forced to resort to the right of insurrection, it returns to the state of nature in relation to the tyrant. How can the tyrant invoke the state of nature in relation to the tyrant. How can the tyrant invoke the social pact? He has annihilated it. The nation can still keep it, if it thinks fit, for everything conserving relations between citizens; but the effect of tyranny and insurrection is to break it entirely where the tyrant is concerned; it places them reciprocally in a state of war. Courts and legal proceeding are only for members of the same side.”

Maximilien Robespierre

Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792)
Source: https://ihrf.univ-paris1.fr/enseignement/outils-et-materiaux-pedagogiques/textes-et-sources-sur-la-revolution-francaise/proces-du-roi-discours-de-robespierre/ Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792)

en.wikiquote.org - Maximilien Robespierre / Quotes / Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792) https://ihrf.univ-paris1.fr/enseignement/outils-et-materiaux-pedagogiques/textes-et-sources-sur-la-revolution-francaise/proces-du-roi-discours-de-robespierre/

Thinking , Nature , Relation ships , War

“It is a gross contradiction to suppose that the constitution might preside over this new order of things; that would be to assume it had itself survived. What are the laws that replace it? Those of nature, the one which is the foundation of society itself: the salvation of the people. The right to punish the tyrant and the right to dethrone him are the same thing; both include the same forms. The tyrant’s trial is the insurrection; the verdict, the collapse of his power; the sentence, whatever the liberty of the people requires.”

Maximilien Robespierre

Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792)
Source: https://ihrf.univ-paris1.fr/enseignement/outils-et-materiaux-pedagogiques/textes-et-sources-sur-la-revolution-francaise/proces-du-roi-discours-de-robespierre/ Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792)

en.wikiquote.org - Maximilien Robespierre / Quotes / Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792) https://ihrf.univ-paris1.fr/enseignement/outils-et-materiaux-pedagogiques/textes-et-sources-sur-la-revolution-francaise/proces-du-roi-discours-de-robespierre/

Law , Nature , People

“What is a person who, among men equal in rights, dares to declare his fellows unworthy of exercising theirs, and to take them away for his own advantage!”

Maximilien Robespierre

On the Silver Mark (1791)

Personality , Men , Exercises

“XXIX. When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is, for the people and each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Maximilien Robespierre

"Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proposed by Maximilien Robespierre" (24 April, 1793)
Original: (fr) XXIX. Dans tout état libre, la loi doit surtout défendre la liberté publique et individuelle contre l'autorité de ceux qui la gouvernent. Tout institution qui ne suppose pas le peuple bon et le magistrat corruptible est vicieuse.

People

“I defy the most scrupulous defender of property to contest these principles, short of declaring openly that he understands this word as the right to despoil and assassinate his fellows. So how have people been able to claim that any sort of restriction, or rather any regulation of the trade in wheat, was an attack on property, and disguise that barbaric system under the specious name of freedom of trade? Do the authors of this system not perceive that they are inevitably in contradiction with themselves?”

Maximilien Robespierre

On Subsistence, (2 December 1792)

People , Understanding , Freedom

“What is the first object of society? It is to maintain the imprescriptible rights of man. What is the first of those rights? The right to life.”

Maximilien Robespierre

On Subsistence, (2 December 1792)

Life

“Things have been said to you about the Jews that are infinitely exaggerated and often contrary to history. How can the persecutions they have suffered at the hands of different peoples be held against them? These on the contrary are national crimes that we ought to expiate, by granting them imprescriptible human rights of which no human power could despoil them. Faults are still imputed to them, prejudices, exaggerated by the sectarian spirit and by interests. But to what can we really impute them but our own injustices? After having excluded them from all honours, even the right to public esteem, we have left them with nothing but the objects of lucrative speculation. Let us deliver them to happiness, to the homeland, to virtue, by granting them the dignity of men and citizens; let us hope that it can never be policy, whatever people say, to condemn to degradation and oppression a multitude of men who live among us. How could the social interest be based on violation of the eternal principles of justice and reason that are the foundations of every human society?”

Maximilien Robespierre

"On Voting Rights for Actors and Jews" (21 December 1789)

Justice , History , Suffering , Hope

“Every citizen fulfilling the conditions of eligibility that you have prescribed has the right to public office.”

Maximilien Robespierre

"On Voting Rights for Actors and Jews" (21 December 1789)

“Offences committed by people’s representatives should be severely and promptly punished. No one has the right to claim to be more inviolable than other citizens.”

Maximilien Robespierre

Original: (fr) XXXIII. Les délits des mandataires du peuple doivent être sévèrement et facilement punis. Nul n'a le droit de se prétendre plus inviolable que les autres citoyens.
Source: "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proposed by Maximilien Robespierre" (24 April, 1793)

People

“How would the man born blind not have the idea of light? Nature has refused them a soul; they have some right to doubt, not only the immortality of the soul, but its existence.”

Maximilien Robespierre

Last Speech to the National Convention (26 July 1794)

Soul , Light , Nature , Idea

“Man is born to be happy and free, and everywhere he is enslaved and unhappy! Society exists for the purpose of conserving his rights and perfecting his being, and everywhere society degrades and oppresses him! The time has come to remind him of his true destiny.”

Maximilien Robespierre

Quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Misc Quotes

Happiness , Perfection , Time

“To be armed for personal defence is the right of every man, to be armed to defend freedom and the existence of the common fatherland is the right of every citizen.”

Maximilien Robespierre

On the organisation of the National Guard (5 December 1790)
Misc Quotes