The tragic misconception was Robespierre’s idea of the people, which he shared with certain philosophes who, living in calmer times, should have known better. The French people was nothing like what Robespierre imagined. It was not all compact of goodness; it was not peculiarly governable by reason; it was not even a unitary thing at all, for only a minority was even republican. Robespierre’s “people” was the people of his mind’s eye, the people as it was to be when felicity was established, and which he now, by a kind of bootstrap philosophy, made the actual and operative cause of what it was
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