Maximilien Robespierre. Virtue and Terror. Intro. Slavoj Žižek. Ed. Jean Ducange. Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso, 2007. ISBN: 184467584X. Price: US$14.95.

Verso’s slim edition of Maximilien Robespierre’s speeches, Virtue and Terror, proves itself to be a doubly invaluable contribution to Romantic studies. Not only do Jean Ducange’s 15 selections (of which 6 are excerpted) provide readers with a brief yet comprehensive view of the revolutionary theory of the perceived leader of the Terror, but also Slavoj Žižek’s introduction alone is worth the cost of the book. We are treated, in only 141 pages of Robespierre’s words, to discussions not only of minority rights, property, and finance, but also to the major moments of his career: the trial of the king, the wars, and, at last, Thermidor. In total, the text provides a necessary companion to related classics, Burke’s Reflections, Paine’s Rights of Man, and Wollstonecraft’s two Vindications, all of which have long been readily available in inexpensive formats and excerpted in the major anthologies. The selections flesh out Robespierre’s thought avoiding any caricatured monstrosity, taking us beyond over-simplifications about the Terror, and complicating the Revolutionary debate in England. Reading Robespierre’s own words, experiencing his rhetorical ticks, we are able to see how thoroughly he straddled the Enlightenment and Romanticism. While obviously fixated on the power of reason to remake society, “The Incorruptible” also reveals a fascination with the personal, with spontaneity, and with the downtrodden that bridges the gap we might otherwise expect to see between him and the British Romantics. Over and over, for example, he stops to ask, “But what am I saying?” creating the sense that he must pause to look within to his own will for the best possible direction for the Revolution, a movement that makes him Wordsworth’s cousin in the broader descent from Rousseau. Contrary, perhaps, to Burke’s assertion in his Reflections that “[t]his sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature,” Robespierre appears intent on testing all his beliefs against his own representative nature, never losing sight of the human in the face of the theoretical (64). Indeed, these selections should prevent anyone from so easily dismissing Robespierre as Burke had previous dismissed Revolutionary thought as “barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is void of solid wisdom” (77). Nor can any reader simply equate Robespierre to the guillotine, despite the stylized image of the instrument on the cover. Instead, for example, the editor chooses to begin with three speeches from the Constituent Assembly that show the future unofficial leader of the Committee for Public Safety to be personally invested in expanding the French “public” to be the most inclusive and democratic such body in human history. In “On the Voting Rights of Actors and Jews,” he asks, “[h]ow can the persecution [Jews] have suffered at the hands of different peoples be held against them? These on the contrary are national crimes that we ought to expiate” (4). Similarly, in arguing against granting slavery constitutional protections, Robespierre reverses the debate, exclaiming, “Perish your colonies, if you are keeping them at that price” (21). In both cases, he accepts a universal equality of all men, and he implies that inequality is not the fault of the marginalized but a result of the injustice of political systems and artificial social hierarchies. This faith in equality he makes explicit in his speech, “On the Silver Mark,” where he gives the most succinct version of this portion of his philosophy, stating simply, “There will never be a lasting constitution in any country where it is, in some sense, the domain of one class of men; …