“Most arts have produced miracles, while the art of government has produced nothing but monsters.”
The man who spoke those words was one of history’s premiere authorities on the subject. He was a monster himself, made so by the toxin we call “power.” On July 28, 1794, he and a famous cohort departed this earth for whatever reward awaited them.
His name was Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794). His close friend and political ally was Maximilien Robespierre. Together, they engineered The Terror of the French Revolution, a violent spasm of repression and slaughter. Both men rose to supreme power, only to be devoured by the same machine to which they dispatched so many others. A key difference between Saint-Just and Robespierre on the one hand and their numerous victims on the other was that the former earned their grisly conclusions….