Hilary Mantel, whose "A Place of Greater Safety" is the best fictional version of the French Revolution I've read, on Robespierre--

"The Revolution is not over, any more than history is at an end. Whenever Robespierre was interrupted, something is missing still. Whenever he was silenced, we are listening to the silences. Whatever else he was, he was a man of conviction and a man of principle. We are not now attuned to principle or conviction, but to the trivia of politics and the politics of trivia. This is why we cannot understand the Islamic world, or the conviction of its militants, their rage for purity, their willingness to die. What they have, the heirs to the liberal tradition have let slip away; we're ironical, comfortable, self-absorbed and fatally smug. We think justice has been done; good enough justice, anyway - and we hope that charity will fill the gaps. Robespierre had no holy book, but he had a militant faith, not in a Christian god, but in a good revolutionary god who had made men equal. He did not see his "Supreme Being" as a figure who offered consolation alone, but as an active force for change. Revolutionaries were to enjoy an afterlife; death, he said, was "their safe and precious asylum". His ferocity of intent, his fierce demand for martyrdom, are suddenly familiar to us; he appears to be our contemporary."