One is tempted, almost, to pity poor Robespierre. In The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk squarely identifies Robespierre as the political fruit of the sanguinary philosophy of Rousseau, which separated intellectual virtue from moral virtue, a “loathsome thing.” This “defecated rationality” lead directly to, first, the overthrow of the ancien régime, and second, to the Terror, and from then to a greater or lesser degree to every lesser revolution in the subsequent bloody century.

Robespierre’s France is, for some, the model for murderous dystopia, Orwell’s Oceania avant la lettre. Robespierre himself has been a metonym for faceless tyranny, his life a metaphor for how revolutions eat their own; he was executed in 1794 by orders of the very National Convention he had ruled. But perhaps it is time for a reassessment. The Terror, the show trials, the suppression of half-remembered prison plots, the repeated executions: surely these atrocities were not solely his fault, the revisionists would say. The overheated and anxious atmosphere of France in 1793 and 1794 was more complicated than that. In any event, the horrors were worth the cost—just look at France now (ok, maybe not).

Peter McPhee’s book seems to provide just such a reassessment. He asks, was Robespierre, “the first modern dictator” or a “principled, self-abnegating visionary”—although one can of course be both. McPhee, a former provost at the University of Melbourne, aims to bring the private Robespierre into a light equal to that of his public career,