Maximilian Robespierre was born on May 6th, 1758, to an upper middle-class family in the Kingdom of France. As a boy, he excelled academically, receiving a scholarship to a prestigious school in Paris where he studied law and philosophy. In his education, Robespierre was greatly influenced by the enlightenment philosophers of the age such as Baron de Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He took on such ideals as the general will, constitutionalism, and freedom of the press; quite a revolutionary position to take in the absolutist France of the 18th century.
Robespierre graduated from law school in 1780, having received considerable recognition for his outstanding academic accomplishments and became a lawyer like his father before him. In his legal career, inspired by his study of enlightenment philosophy, Robespierre was a vocal critic of what he saw as the injustices in the legal system of the Ancien Régime such as arbitrary imprisonment, royal privileges under the law, censorship of the press, and capital punishment. Throughout his career, he became known as a master orator, able to induce a crowd into thunderous applause with ease. When King Louis XVI summoned the Estates General to Versailles in 1789 to settle France’s financial crisis, Robespierre was elected a representative of his locality and attended the assembly as a member of the Third Estate.
After the revolution of 1789, he became one of the inaugural members of the newly formed National Assembly of France and a founding member of the revolutionary intellectual circle, the Jacobin Club. In 1792, Robespierre voted in favour of the abolition of the French monarchy and in 1793, the execution of Louis XVI. After the fall of the monarchy, the radical wing of the Jacobin Club rose to power in the new republican government with Robespierre at the helm, essentially making him the most powerful man in France.
With the revolution under siege from both foreign armies abroad and counterrevolutionaries at home, Robespierre attained a spot on the newly formed Committee of Public Safety in 1793, a 12-member committee with effectively dictatorial powers to accuse, try, and execute perceived enemies of the revolution. The Committee, under the leadership of Robespierre, ushered in the infamous Reign of Terror which resulted in tens of thousands of French citizens being deprived of their heads, courtesy of the guillotine. He oversaw a ten-month long stretch from September 1793 to July 1794 during which dozens were sent to the guillotine daily, including his political enemies within the government such as his former ally turned rival Georges Danton and his supporters. The Reign of Terror only came to an end once Robespierre and his allies themselves met the same fate which they had condemned so many to.
How did Robespierre, who so quickly rose to being the most powerful man in the most powerful country in Europe, just as quickly lose his power (and his head)? He primarily fell due to the excesses of the Reign of Terror. In summer, 1794, everyone in Paris was afraid of being accused of counterrevolutionary crimes and summarily guillotined as a result, including members of the National Convention. While he was not solely responsible for the Reign of Terror, his name became heavily associated with it due to his popularity at the time and his position on the Committee of Public Safety. In July 1794, he was overthrown in the Convention by representatives fearful of accused of being part of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. But in weeks leading up to his arrest, there is an interesting detail in the history of the period which I think is worth exploring.
The French Revolution not only dismantled the French Monarchy, but also the influence of the Catholic Church in France. The revolutionary government embarked on a campaign of dechristianization in which churches were shut down, worship was forbidden, and clergy members were executed. Even the calendar was changed in order to eliminate the memory of Christianity. Months were renamed, weeks were made ten days instead of seven, and years were to be counted from the founding of the Republic, making September 22nd, 1792, the first day of Year I.
To fill the void left by the destruction of the Catholic Church in France, not one, but two different revolutionary civic religions were created. The first was the atheistic Cult of Reason, instituted in 1793, in which people would gather in former cathedrals to worship concepts like “reason” or “liberty” and prey to martyred revolutionaries such as Jean-Paul Marat. The following year, Robespierre, at the height of his power, almost singlehandedly created deistic variant known as the Cult of the Supreme Being, which replaced the Cult of Reason as a compromise between militant atheist revolutionaries and those unhappy with dechristianization. It was made the official religion of France on May 7th, 1794.
To inaugurate this new religion, the National Convention organized the Festival of the Supreme Being for June 8th, 1794 (or 20 Prairial, Year II as it was known to the republican calendar). This was marked by massive festivities in Paris, led by none other than Robespierre himself. It was said that Robespierre was lit up with joy throughout the day. The celebration included a parade through the streets of Paris in which Robespierre joyously marched at the head of a group of fellow deputies of the Convention who lagged behind, not quite sharing his enthusiasm for the event.
They then marched to the Champ de Mars where a giant paper mâché mountain had been built. Robespierre stood atop the monument and delivered a speech in praise of the deity of the new state religion and the revolutionary ideals he had bestowed upon France to a cheerful, albeit confused crowd of Parisians. While Robespierre newly contrived religion failed to convert the masses into true believers, Parisians reportedly enjoyed the festivities of the day as a welcome pause in the brutality of the Reign of Terror. But for Robespierre’s growing list of political enemies in the Convention, the Festival of the Supreme Being gave them a feeling of both concern at Robespierre’s immense power and embarrassment that they had been forced to partake in such an absurd event.
While this nonsensical religion was more of an attempt by Robespierre to find compromise between France’s religious faithful and antireligious radicals, it made it quite easy for his rivals to accuse him of trying to elevate himself to godlike status. Robespierre’s antics on that day became a point of ridicule which his enemies ruthlessly exploited. One of his political rivals, Jacques-Alexis Thuriot said as he watched the proceedings:
“Look at the bugger. It’s not enough for him to be master, he has to be God.”
In his personal diary, Robespierre wrote furiously of another deputy of the Convention, Bourdon de l’Oise, who had lampooned him with sarcasm in front of the public during the day.
Only days after the festival, Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier, one of his critics in the government, gave a speech in the Convention in which he satirically accused a delusional old woman, Catherine Théot, who had prophesized that Robespierre was the redeemer of mankind, of plotting to overthrow the government. This speech was not intended so much to warn of danger of this woman as much as it was to mock Robespierre and his Cult of the Supreme Being. The Convention burst into laughter and Robespierre was humiliated. The master orator, accustomed to receiving rousing ovations, had now become a laughing stock.
The guillotine fell on Robespierre’s neck on July 28th, 1794, one day after his arrest and seven weeks after his embarrassing display at the festival to his crackpot religion. The degree to which the Festival of the Supreme Being contributed to Robespierre’s downfall is disputable. Some have identified it as a key event leading up to the Thermidorian Reaction which overthrew him in July of 1794.
Germaine de Staël, the daughter of King Louis’s former finance minister, Jacques Necker, said of the event:
“Robespierre conceived the idea of celebrating a festival in honour of the Supreme Being, flattered himself, doubtless, with being able to rest his political ascendency on a religion arranged according to his own notions as those have frequently done who have wished to seize the supreme power. But in the procession of this impious festival, he decided to walk at the head of the procession in order to claim pre-eminence over his colleagues; and from that time, he was lost.”
The most obvious thing which can be said about this ill-conceived festival celebrating such a phoney religion is that it felt really forced. The over-the-top grandeur of an event thrown in the name of a religion Robespierre had singlehandedly established only weeks prior which put himself at the front and centre was excessive to say the least. Robespierre, once a critic of unrestrained power, arbitrary confinement, political censorship, the influence of the Catholic Church, and capital punishment was now at the helm of a regime copiously issuing death sentences to thousands of political opponents without due justice. And with this festival, he had essentially made himself the high priest of a new state religion.
This was the point in which the revolution had reached its most radical phase. The revolution didn’t end with the death of Robespierre, but it put an end to the increasing radicalism from 1792 to 1794. The vapid and uninspiring Festival of the Supreme Being signified that the revolution had become stale. The Reign of Terror made many revolutionaries lose respect for Robespierre. After his festival, some were beginning to question his sanity. After such a display, they were probably having a hard time taking him seriously. His shameless self-promotion on June 8th was the pride before the fall. The boomers would say he jumped the shark. The zoomers would say he posted cringe.
The word ‘cringe’ has become a mainstay in the lexicon of the internet over the past decade (to the point of overuse, in my opinion, but that’s neither here nor there). There are two definitions of the word ‘cringe’. The first and more literal definition is ‘to bend one's head and body in fear or apprehension or in a servile manner’. The second, and more commonly used definition is ‘to have an inward feeling of acute embarrassment or awkwardness’. This is usually used to describe second-hand embarrassment at the actions of someone else. ‘Cringe’ is primarily a verb, but it can also be used as a noun. The corresponding adjective is ‘cringeworthy’, but in internet slang, the word ‘cringe’ is also used as an adjective. Rather than saying “This is cringeworthy.”, the kids these days say, “This is cringe.” When they say something is cringe, they typically mean that they would be embarrassed to be associated with it.
I’m not a historian, but I imagine this is how Robespierre’s contemporaries in the National Convention must have felt being forced to participate in the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794. They were made to participate in a festival to celebrate a half-baked, phoney religion contrived only weeks earlier by a madman losing his grip on reality yet possessing the power the send them to the guillotine. That’s probably why several of Robespierre’s opponents met the event with such sarcasm and used it as a weapon of cutting ridicule against him.
The Cult of the Supreme Being ceased to exist immediately after Robespierre’s death and instantly lost all state sanction. It became nothing more than a bizarre detail in the history of the era which symbolizes the point when Robespierre and the radicalism of that phase of the revolution crossed over into the absurd, or if you will, became cringe. If he had lived longer, Robespierre probably would’ve been kept awake at night, reliving that day in embarrassment, the same way you do when you’re reminded of the love poem you wrote about your high school crush when you were 15.
The now dated idiom ‘jumping the shark’ was inspired by an episode of the American sitcom Happy Days when a character jumps over a shark while waterskiing. Wikipedia defines ‘jumping the shark’ as such:
“The idiom "jumping the shark" or "jump the shark" is a pejorative that is used to argue that a creative work or entity has reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with, or an overexaggeration of, its original purpose.”
The phrase “jumping the shark” is going out of use seeing as the show which birthed it was cancelled decades ago, but in contemporary terms, it is the point where a TV show becomes cringe. While this phrase was primarily used to describe entertainment, I think the same feeling of awkwardness and exhaustion at lack of originality which it is used to describe can be applied to political movements and their representatives as well. A political movement becomes cringe when it’s goals no longer seem relevant or beneficial to the broader society and its declining number of curators insist on doubling down on the faulty premises on which it was predicated, making them look out of touch and ridiculous. From there, people begin disassociating themselves with the movement and feel second-hand embarrassment for those who continue to associate with it.
This could explain why the Cult of the Supreme Being fell flat. Preying to the spirit of Marat in a former cathedral, turned into a shrine of “reason” also seems pretty cringe in hindsight, but in 1793, the revolution fervour as at fever pitch. But by mid-1794, the revolution had already uprooted the Ancien Régime and was now spiralling out of control into a ferocious radicalism. People were starting to get burnt out on revolution. This contrived religion was the opposite of what was needed. France didn’t need more revolution, but a return to stability, which is why the Cult of the Supreme Being was what the internet would refer to as cringe.
Are there any examples of this happening in the modern world? I could think of a few political movements in recent years which had initial success, but are looked back on as cringe today. One is the New Atheist movement. Intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins became popular in the 1990s for their debates with fundamentalist Christians, but their popularity reached its height in the 2000s during the Bush administration and the War on Terror. They accumulated a following with their attacks on the religious right, radical Islam, and the institution of religion in general. This intellectual movement really took off with the rise of social media. The atheist response video garnered huge numbers of views on YouTube and built massive followings for YouTubers such as The Amazing Atheist or Thunderf00t.
With this rise in popularity online, New Atheist intellectuals and content creators, along with their fans, began to build up a reputation for egotistical boastfulness and unbearable smugness. Being a movement mostly relegated to the internet, New Atheism jumped the shark in 2013 when an anonymous teenage Reddit user, quite literally posted cringe. On January 4th, 2013, a Redditor under the username Aalewis posted the following quote in /r/atheism.
“In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.”
This was reposted into /r/cringe and led to a flood of memes ruthlessly mocking the inflated sense of self-importance and smugness of the New Atheist community who had built up quite the list of enemies at that point. Their criticisms of Christianity became mute as the ruling atheistic progressivist morality which they endorsed took full control over the culture. The burning question of the present day is whether this morality was correct or not and simply repeating “religion is bad” ad nauseum is not a sufficient position. Most of New Atheism’s former adherents joined either the social justice left or dissident right and largely dropped the label of ‘atheist’ as a vital part of their identity. Today, loudly declaring oneself an atheist on the internet is associated with intellectual laziness, pretentiousness, and narcissism.
Another movement which has gone down a similar path in recent years is libertarianism. The word ‘libertarian’ has meant a variety of things and been employed by both the right and the left, but I’m primarily referring the right-leaning libertarian movement of the 2010s and the degree of success it had in the United States with the Libertarian Party. The appeal of libertarianism was that it offered a third option for those unhappy with the binary choice of Republicans or Democrats and it harkened back to one of America’s founding ideals; limited government. It garnered a following among those who favoured free market economics while holding socially liberal views and those who were unhappy with overbearing government bureaucracy and regulations.
The fundamental belief of libertarianism was that the power of government should be limited, and that societal issue could be solved more effectively through the free market. But libertarians became increasingly ideological and took this premise to its absolute extreme, arguing for policies such as legalizing all vices and black markets, ending all taxation, and dissolving the government all together.
The Libertarian Party had many cringe moments such as booing a candidate for saying it should be illegal to sell heroin to a five-year-old or a supporter standing up and declaring they should adopt Dobey from Harry Potter as their party’s mascot. But if there was a moment when libertarianism truly jumped the shark, it was at the at the 2016 Libertarian Party convention when one of their candidates, an overweight neckbeard who was running for party chairman, took of his clothes on stage and danced in his underwear as a demonstration of his devotion to a so-called “free society”. This wasn’t a random person on the internet, but a candidate who had run in elections hoping to attain a high-ranking position within the party, which really demonstrated how unserious of a political movement libertarianism had become.
Libertarianism has become largely irrelevant as an ideology today. In the era of woke capital and the private-public partnership, big business and the state have more or less merged into one entity and the prospect of being hauled off to a gulag owned by Amazon isn’t any less appealing than if it were run by the state. Furthermore, a lot of former libertarians realized that their vision of a “free society” did not include obese male strip shows and adopted more socially conservative positions. Libertarianism had more substance than New Atheism and did offer some legitimate critiques of government overreach, so some of its ideas could be incorporated into a more complete worldview. However, the anti-statist creed of libertarianism no longer has the aura of an intriguing alternative to a dreary binary but unserious quixotism.
One more example is the faux patriotism which was used to justify neoconservative US foreign policy in the 2000s. Following 9/11, the United States was overcome with a naïve patriotic furvour which gave large swathes of support to the War in Afghanistan and later the War in Iraq as righteous crusades for freedom and democracy. But after the dust of 9/11 had settled, this aggressive foreign policy came under criticism both at home and abroad.
If this movement had a jumping the shark moment, it would’ve been when two Republican congressmen, in order to protest France’s refusal to support the Invasion of Iraq, launched an initiative to change the name of ‘French Fries’ to ‘Freedom Fries’ on the menu of the House of Representatives’ cafeteria. This made both the supporters of the war and their insincere appeals to patriotism look ridiculous. The difference with this example is that neoconservative foreign policy remains in place within the American establishment. They’ve just dropped the star-spangled veneer and replaced it with a rainbow one. Consequently, post-9/11 patriotic rhetoric used by neoconservatives in the 2000s is looked back on as pretty cringe today.
The difference between the first two examples of political movements turning cringe and the devolution of the French Revolution into lunacy is that they were relatively minor political fads while the revolutionary ideology in France had ascended to power (neoconservatism remains in power under a different image). So, it didn’t just wither and die like New Atheism or libertarianism, but it stagnated until it was overthrown by Napoleon who, while maintaining some of the revolution’s victories, brought the country back to sanity. Could the ruling globalist egalitarian ideology today undergo a similar process? Could it have its own Festival of the Supreme Being moment soon? Have they already jumped the shark and posted cringe?
If this does happen (or if it already has), it won’t be an immediate fall, but a drawn out one. After all, this ideology is hegemonic among all the most powerful individuals and organizations in the Western world. However, the narratives on which it is based seem to be stagnating and are feeling increasingly forced and desperate. That’s not to say that there isn’t a dedicated group of true believers devoted to upholding its narratives, but they don’t seem to inspire the same zeal which they did only a few years ago. The momentum which stirred the public into a frenzy following the death of Saint George Floyd in 2020 could be running out of steam.
Take the phrase “diversity is our strength”. I remember that phrase being used regularly by elected politicians on the left and even the mainstream right around 2016. Now I seldom hear it uttered unless it is being used ironically to mock the idea of diversity being a strength. The word “diversity” doesn’t invoke a feeling of cultural richness, but just comes across as administrative jargon for forceful social conditioning, so much so that it is now often referred to using the bureaucratic acronym DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
This year, I wrote an article in June noting that LGBT Pride Month had been noticeably toned down from previous years in the wake of the Bud Light controversy. Someone at Anheuser-Busch decided it would be a good idea to plaster the image of a man in a dress on a commemorative beer can for the iconic brand which resulted in a massive boycott and plummeting sales. Several months later, Anheuser-Busch’s sales have still yet to recover, suggesting the damage done to their Bud Light brand by their over-the-top woke messaging could be permanent.
The establishment continues to come out with evermore inordinate offerings to the ruling ideology to diminishing fanfare. Another random black person elevated to the status of national hero overnight. Another city with a new Holocaust Museum and another 100-year-old vegetable put on trial in Germany. Another day of recognition for the latest debauched sexual perversion. In a pathetic attempt to impart the mythology of wokeism onto the youth, they’ve gone so far as to use the popular game Fortine to host in-game virtual events to commemorate Martin Luther King and the Holocaust. Needless to say, such cringe exhibitions have not been able to get the zoomers to take the sacred idols of progressivism as seriously as past generations did.
All of this is reminiscent of the desperation of the Cult of the Supreme Being during the French Revolution. Like a lunatic raving about the liberty and virtue bestowed by upon France by the deity of his made-up religion while sending thousands off to the guillotine. It comes across as a forced and contrived attempt to prolong the zeal of a ruling ideology which its rapidly losing its grip on both control and reality. Have we already reached peak progressive insanity? Will the summer of Floyd in 2020 be remembered as such? Or is that point on the horizon now? Only time will tell.
Historical Citations:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maximilien-Robespierre
https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/cult-of-the-supreme-being/
https://www.worldhistory.org/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being/
https://books.openedition.org/pupvd/3204?lang=en
https://crozieronstuff.com/de-stael
Best book on Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety is R. R. Palmer's Twelve Who Ruled, The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (1941). Palmer shows that the Committee saved France and the Revolution from foreign invasion and domestic counter-revolution. That crushing and unexpected success is what gave Robespierre the prestige to press on with increasingly poorly conceived ideas, ending with his death. But if you don't see the stunning success, the crazy excess is inexplicable. Plus, the book is simply a thrilling story of an incredibly dangerous time faced and overcome by bold and ruthless men. Highly recommended.
Simply brilliant, thanks for the article. Ngl the French Revolution sounds like it was a nigthmare of epic proportions. Almost demonic. Incredible how just 50 years later when Napoleon (the third) got in pow3r France enjoyed a golden age that lasted 90 or so years. I want to write more articles exploring the Belle Epoque. The amount of soft power comming out of France in the year 1900 is hollywood levels of crazy.