Vituperation:
Dear and gentle readers, I write for you today to exhort you not to follow the example of the tyrannous and bloodthirsty Maximilien de Robespierre, who was responsible for such carnage and corruption as the world had never seen.
The French villain, shame of the Picardan people, was practically a peasant, born in Arras to a lawyer and a brewer’s daughter. He received his education at the Parisian university of Louis le Grand, where he was trained in the laws by the very priests he was soon to attack and behead. Had his schoolmasters known what he was soon to become, they would undoubtedly have nipped the scourge of France in the bud rather than let him become the despot who destroyed their country.
But Robespierre was not content to be a country lawyer. His vanity compelled him to claw his way to the top of French Revolutionary politics and to corrupt the minds of his fellow deputies so as to set them on the road to bloodshed. His rampant hypocrisy caused him to switch between supporting the abolition of the death penalty and calling for his moral superiors to meet their ends at the guillotine. And his physical weakness made him endlessly hungry for political power to counter his plainness and weakness. He judicially murdered the very people he claimed to protect and indiscriminately killed both the guilty and the innocent. Truly this man was as greedy as Midas and as steeped in blood as Macbeth.
Wise readers, do not emulate this wicked and avaricious man. Put the good of your people above your personal advancement and remain in the class you were born into, for indecorous social climbing can end only in disaster.
Encomium:
Friends, join me as I sing the praises of the incorruptible Maximilien de Robespierre, pride of the French people, architect of the First Republic, and slayer of tyrants!
Robespierre was born of provincial, aristocratic stock. This son of a country lawyer and a brewer’s daughter was truly untainted by the corruption of aristocratic heritage or inherited money. He was traditionally-educated in the law by the priests of Louis le Grand in Paris, a laudable educational institution that also produced such great French patriots as Camille Desmoulins.
Robespierre, through his unwavering commitment to the good of the people and his fortitude in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, established a representative republic in France, formerly the seat of corrupt despotism. He used his power and his deserved position at the head of Revolutionary French politics to free the French people from the tyranny of Louis XVI and the ancien regime, establishing freedom of the press, of religious expression, and of conscience among a people recently under the yoke of censorship and oppression. With manly vigor, Robespierre wielded the sword of liberty against the enemies of freedom just as the great American Revolutionaries had done twenty years earlier.
Fellow lovers of liberty, let us emulate this great man in our opposition to oppression and our unwavering pursuit of our ideals against all odds. Robespierre is truly an example for any patriot who sees the need for change in his or her country.
