Misusing the language...............

 

     But did he see himself as ruthless?  Or as a ghoulish fiend?  This is unlikely.  For one thing, the Terror was an old Roman idea: If a roman legion did not do its duty, then indiscriminate punishment would be meted out.  For another, Robespierre preferred to preach virtue as Rousseau, his model, had done.  Virtue, of course, mandated dedication to family, to work, to civic zeal and the dreams of the revolution.  But it also meant getting rid of the enemies of virtue, whoever they were, wherever they were.  From as early as 1789, he trafficked in a world of conspiracy theories, warning about newly minted "patriots," old traitors and hypocrites ("who flatter you today to betray you tomorrow"), and the need for constant purges.  As the revolution wore on, as the gore deepened, as the daily tumbrels bore victims to the guillotine, Robespierre prophesied that for those who refused to adopt virtue, "the Razor of the republic" awaited.  The Terror, he also declared famously, is nothing, nothing "save justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.  It is an emanation of Virtue." . . .

. . . And even as head of the Twelve, he shrank from blood.  It has been duly noted that the only execution he ever attended was his own.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800