Virtue, the people, and terror before the 2027 presidential elections: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Robespierre, and the legacy of the revolution

Robespierre's dual nature

Jean-Luc Mélenchon/Cécile Amar, De la vertu (Paris: L'Aube, 2017).
Jean-Luc Melenchon, L'ère du peuple (Paris: Fayard, 2014).

A year before the 2027 French presidential elections, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is leading his fourth bid for the Élysée Palace – officially declared, trailing the conservative Édouard Philippe in the polls, with real potential to reach the second round against Jordan Bardella, but perceived by seven out of ten French people as a liability for the left. This paradox – undeniable mobilizing power on the one hand, deep divisions within his own political family on the other – cannot be explained solely by Mélenchon's temperament: it is the continuation of a political logic he consciously derives from Robespierre's legacy, from the principle of "vertu" (virtue/goodness) as the republican foundation, the people as a moral entity, and corruption as the true enemy of the state. For Mélenchon, Robespierre is not a historical figure but an operational theory of the political – and therefore, the dialogue between the two, spanning over two hundred years, provides a key to understanding the current state of the French left.

Examples of Mélenchon-Robespierre's visual language in France:

No name in the history of the French Revolution is as much a battle cry as Robespierre's. This is because he embodies two seemingly mutually exclusive concepts, yet he fused them into a single political project: Vertu and Terreur, virtue and terror. The Jacobin thesis from which Robespierre derived this connection was: the Republic can only exist through the virtue of its citizens; but virtue has no power without terror, and terror without virtue is mere tyranny. In his famous speech before the Committee of Public Safety on February 5, 1794, he formulated this idea in a way that remains disturbingly sharp to this day: "If the driving force of a people's government in peacetime is virtue, then the driving force of a people's government in revolutionary times is both virtue and terror: terror without virtue is disastrous; virtue without terror is powerless." ¹ For Robespierre, virtue and terror are not two different policies, but two sides of the same republican coin – this inevitably makes him problematic for any subsequent reception.

Robespierre's duplicity can be explained by the structure of his political thought, which was shaped by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Social contract He adopted the idea that the general will ("volonté générale") is not the result of compromises between particular interests, but a moral truth that expresses the true interest of all. The opponent of the general will is therefore not simply a political adversary, but an enemy of the people themselves, someone who, through corruption or selfishness, tears the bond of the Republic apart. From this premise, it necessarily followed that whoever defiles the Republic with vice is no longer a legitimate actor—he is an enemy. Virtue thus becomes the prerequisite for political participation, and its preservation a duty of the state. From this logic, the transition to the Reign of Terror is not arbitrary, but a consequence.

Historiographically, Robespierre is caught between two poles that run through the entirety of French historiography. On the one hand, there is the romantic-republican tradition from Jules Michelet to Jean Jaurès, which saw Robespierre as a tribune of the people, a man without compromise in the service of equality, whose downfall came in Thermidor: Maximilien Robespierre, one of the leading figures of Jacobin rule, was arrested in the National Convention on 9 Thermidor of Year II. The very next day, he was executed by guillotine. This marked the end of the Reign of Terror, the period of radical revolutionary politics with mass executions that betrayed the truly revolutionary energy of the French Revolution and paved the way for Bonapartist reaction. On the other side is a conservative-liberal tradition, from Adolphe Thiers to François Furet, which sees Robespierre as the prototype of the modern political terrorist: the ideological fanatic who, in the name of utopian virtues, had thousands guillotined, thereby turning the democracy he claimed to be founding into its opposite. Furet's thesis that 20th-century totalitarianism had its origins in the Jacobin Reign of Terror—a thesis he developed in Penser la Revolution française (1978) developed –, which still determines the conservative interpretation pattern today.

Furet wrote in his introductory chapter:

Furet demonstrates that Robespierre's function was not to desire violence, but to be the sole guarantor of the identity of the people, of representation, and of virtue—a mythical transparency between the sovereign and his spokesperson that is structurally unstable and therefore must be constantly secured through the elimination of the impure. The Reign of Terror is thus not a product of Robespierre's character, but the institutional consequence of his practice of defining the people: whoever draws the line between the virtuous people and their enemies fills the prisons—and whoever simultaneously stages the Fête de l'Être suprême makes it clear that exclusion and consecration are two sides of the same legitimizing operation.

The historiographical division into a dual-faced Robespierre is not a purely academic matter. As the following sections will show, it is directly political – and it lives on in the debate surrounding Mélenchon.

It is no coincidence, however, that perhaps the most intelligent literary engagement with Robespierre in our time comes not from political science or history, but from literature: Pierre Michon's narrative Les Onze (Verdier, 2009) revolves around the fictional painting by a fictional painter – François-Élie Corentin, “le Tiepolo de la Terreur” – who is said to have painted the Committee of Public Safety of 1794 on behalf of accomplices of Thermidor: Billaud, Carnot, Prieur, Prieur, Couthon, Robespierre, Collot, Barère, Lindet, Saint-Just, Saint-André, “invariables et droits”. ² Michon's Robespierre is the opposite of the political figure that Mélenchon portrays in L'ère du peuple He is quoted. He is almost entirely omitted from the text – “qu'on ne commente pas” – this demonstrative silence is deliberate in Michon's work: Robespierre is in Les Onze The empty center of the picture, the spot that, through omission, draws all energy to itself. Michon shows him solely as the intersection of virtue and absence, as a "habit de pékin" beneath a pale face—the only one of the eleven who wears neither a plumet nor a houppelande, neither military splendor nor romantic darkness. He is, in the picture, the bourgeois among bourgeois, the incorruptible of all incorruptibles, but precisely for that reason the most monstrous: "l'homme individuel est un monstre, comme disaient dans leurs différentes façons Sade et Robespierre." ³ This parallel is a central interpretive element of Michon's book: Robespierre and Sade as two sides of the same anthropological extreme – one through absolute moral exclusion, the other through absolute moral disinhibition. Both absolutize the individual, and both thereby destroy the social. Les Onze What Michon demonstrates is not Robespierre's virtue as a political program, but his virtue as pathology: the logic of will that, in the name of a homogenous people, extinguishes all resistance. The fact that Michon presents his painting as a commission from Robespierre's enemies—Collot, Bourdon, Proli—as a political trump card for Thermidor or apotheosis, depending on the circumstances, doubles the irony: the image meant to depict Robespierre as a tyrant must simultaneously show him as a towering figure; the proof of his guilt and his monument are the same canvas. This is Michon's real point for the present day: every image that portrays a political figure as the epitome of virtue already contains the instrument of their condemnation. For the reception of the Mélenchon-Robespierre connection, this reveals what political debates usually omit: that Jacobean iconography is not merely a pantheon of heroes, but remains structurally ambiguous—monument and indictment in one.

The traditional camps in the French Jacobinism debate

France debates Robespierre not despite, but because of its vibrant republican self-image. In France, the Revolution is not a closed chapter of the past, but rather the founding myth of the Republic itself – meaning that each generation must renegotiate which aspects of this myth it claims. Over the decades, four relatively stable traditions of interpretation have emerged.

The first and oldest is the Jacobin-republican tradition of the left, stretching from Jaurès through the French Communist Party to La France Insoumise (LFI). It views the Jacobins as the executors of the revolution's true social promise: universal equality, popular sovereignty against the landed aristocracy, and secularism against the Church. In this interpretation, Robespierre is not a culprit but a victim: he was overthrown by the treachery of the Thermidorian bourgeoisie, who preferred to accommodate the old moneyed aristocracy rather than implement the egalitarian program of the 1793 Constitution. This tradition cultivates a deliberate narrative of continuity: from Robespierre to Jaurès, from Jaurès to the Resistance, from the Resistance to the program of the National Council of the Resistance, which laid the foundation for the postwar welfare state.

The second is the liberal Orléanist tradition, which extends from Thiers and Tocqueville to Raymond Aron and François Furet. It views 1789 as a great moment of liberty, which the Jacobins in 1793–1794 turned on its head. For this tradition, Robespierre is not the subject, but the first victim of a logic he himself unleashed: the logic of political absolutism in the name of the people. It sees the Reign of Terror as proof that radical demands for equality and political freedom are incompatible. This tradition is structurally anti-Jacobin and justifies its stance by pointing to the historical connection drawn by Furet: Jacobinism – Blanquism – Bolshevism.

The third is the Gaullist tradition, which is ambivalent towards Jacobinism. De Gaulle adopted Jacobin centralism and the idea of ​​national unity against particular interests, but rejected the social-revolutionary dimension. Gaullism is thus a kind of depoliticized Jacobinism: it adopts the form of government (strong, centralized, sovereign) without sharing the social radicalism. Mélenchon himself noticed this and occasionally uses Gaullist vocabulary—especially in foreign policy and in his criticism of NATO dependence—which further complicates his ideological positioning. Mélenchon's rejection of the extensive powers granted to the president in the Fifth Republic by De Gaulle and his direct appeal to his people, bypassing parliament, is actually inconsistent. Mélenchon criticizes the "presidential monarchy" of the Fifth Republic sharply and consistently—in De la vertu as “système pyramidal de la monarchie présidentielle”, in L'ère du peuple as a system that has developed “all its technocratic and authoritarian tendencies.” He calls for a Sixth Republic with a Constituent Assembly, thus a return of sovereignty from the president to the people. This is structurally anti-Bonapartist and anti-Gaullist. The claim that he himself engages in direct plebiscitary dialogue with the people like de Gaulle – and that this is “inconsistent” – is a finding of observers such as Lepenies, Altwegg, and Halévi.

The fourth is the anarcho-libertarian tradition, which opposes both Jacobin centralism and the Thermidorian compromise. It sees Robespierre less as a people's tribune than as a state apologist who suppressed the rebellious sectarian movements of the Parisian banlieues – the Enraged around Jacques Roux – suppressed and thus betrayed the most radical potential of the revolution. This tradition, which extends from Proudhon to contemporary social movements, is a minority in France, but culturally influential; it explains why Mélenchon, despite his Jacobin rhetoric, encounters skepticism in anarchist and autonomous circles.

These four traditions are not sharply separated camps, but rather overlapping interpretations that are activated to varying degrees depending on the political climate. The debate surrounding Mélenchon's Jacobin legacy has reactivated all four.

Vertu as a political program – Mélenchon's Robespierre complex

Marcel Gauchet's study Robespierre: l'homme qui nous divise le plus (2018) does not explicitly focus on Mélenchon. He develops a structural portrait of Robespierre that captures Mélenchon's political identity with an accuracy that surpasses any direct polemic. The fundamental thesis is that of an irresolvable tension between adherence to principles and the capacity to govern: Robespierre is "the actor through whom what was at stake in those fiery years is most clearly expressed: the driving force of that era and, at the same time, that which drove the immense effort to establish the realm of happiness and freedom into a murderous dead end." ⁴ What distinguished Robespierre was the complete identification of the political “moi” with the cause of the people – an identification that Gauchet describes as “narcissisme sacrificiel”: “radically blind to himself in the endeavor to disappear behind a higher cause, which in the end only increases his own exceptional position.” ⁵ Anyone who remembers how Robespierre, in 1792, articulated the formula before the Jacobins that Gauchet quotes: “I am not the defender of the people; I am the people, I have never been anything else, I never will be; and I despise anyone who wants to be more than that” ⁶, to which the echo character of Mélenchon's own Robespierre quote in L'ère du peuple do not miss it.

Gauchet's second key diagnosis concerns the political epistemology of Jacobin thought: the construction of a homogeneous, virtuous people as the antithesis of a structurally corrupt power elite. The problem that Gauchet sharply identifies is the logic of exclusion that follows from this construction: "This vision of an ideal people, spontaneously inclined towards the common good, defines the goal of the revolution: a society in which the citizens would be one with the common good – from which everything that is not the people would have been removed." ⁷ Applied to Mélenchon, this means that the strength of his political mobilization power—the clear image of the people against the oligarchy, of virtue against corruption—structurally contains the same logic that Gauchet holds responsible for Robespierre's failure. The problem Gauchet diagnoses is not a readiness for violence, but rather an epistemic inability to conceive of the political opponent as a legitimate actor instead of an enemy of the people. Gauchet's concluding formula thus provides the theoretical framework that the essay offers for Mélenchon's limit in democratic theory: the strength of the Jacobin tradition is simultaneously its dilemma—it gives the most radical voice to freedom and equality, and fails precisely where it is to be translated into governmental responsibility.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Essay De la vertu (2017), a collection of interviews with the journalist Cécile Amar, is not an ideological manifesto in the traditional sense. It is rather a moral-philosophical declaration, the core of which, however—upon closer inspection—reveals a discreet but unmistakable continuity with the Jacobin tradition of the French Revolution. The text begins with the corruption of the present and ends with a theory of political virtue that comes strikingly close to Robespierre's terminology without explicitly mentioning his name. This absence itself is significant.

The question Mélenchon poses to himself and to the reader is: What is virtue? His answer is structurally identical to Robespierre's before the Committee of Public Safety: virtue is not a religious concept or a private ideal, but a principle of collective living oriented towards what is good for everyone. ⁸ “Vertigo is therefore the bridge between what is good for everyone and what is good for oneself” – with this formula, Mélenchon programmatically breaks with liberal individualism and adopts a motif that Robespierre had developed in his speech on the principles of political morality from February 1794: that democracy is only viable through the virtue of its citizens and their representatives, and that corruption is not only a moral offense, but kills democracy at its root.

It is significant that Mélenchon places the Cahuzac affair—the tax evader who, as Minister of the Budget, was responsible for combating tax fraud—at the center of his moral and political diagnosis. “Celui qui était chargé de la vertu publique, c'est-à-dire de faire payer les impôts et de faire respecter la loi commune, était celui qui mentait et trichait sur l'objet même de son mandat”—in this sentence, the Jacobin verdict against Danton and the Indulgents (the moderates) resonates: the worst corruption is that of the one entrusted with public confidence. ⁹

In L'ère du peuple (2014) quotes Mélenchon Robespierre directly and emphatically: "Je suis du peuple. Je ne veux être que cela et je méprise ceux qui voudraient être quelque chose de plus." ¹⁰ He frames the quote as a response to the accusation of populism: anyone who invokes the people is immediately branded a demagogue in the current debate – but that was precisely the verdict against Robespierre by his opponents. Mélenchon's self-image as a tribune of the people, who confronts the particular interests of the oligarchy with the common good, is structurally Jacobin, even if he naturally distances himself from the Reign of Terror in terms of content.

In De la vertu The Constitution of 1793 – the Jacobin constitution adopted by the Montagnards and inspired by Robespierre, which never came into force – appears as a central positive reference document: “Il existait un droit à l'insurrection dans la Constitution de 1793. Sa valeur vertueuse est intacte selon moi.” ¹¹ This is no incidental historical note. Reference to this constitution is highly coded in French political semantics: it represents the radical, uncompromised promise of the Revolution, suppressed by the Thermidorian reaction. Mélenchon implicitly places himself among those who are reviving the unfulfilled promise of 1793.

Mélenchon’s Robespierre in the original sound – the interview “Face à Robespierre”

More revealing than any external attribution is Mélenchon's own voice on Robespierre – and a rich source for this is a long television interview he gave nine years ago for the Toute l'Histoire program "Et si c'était vous", in partnership with Le Monde, moderated by Nicolas Truong. The setting is a thought experiment: Mélenchon is to imagine that he is on July 27, 1794, the day Robespierre was arrested, one day before his execution. ¹²

The first and most important statement of the interview concerns the Reign of Terror. Mélenchon doesn't evade the question, but he refuses to condemn it. He provides context: the Reign of Terror wasn't an invention of fanatics, but a reaction to invasion, royalist conspiracies, and the de facto lawlessness of the time—and he emphasizes that Danton himself invented the Revolutionary Tribunal, originally to prevent the lynchings of the September Massacres of 1792. "We are judging it with a resentment that the protagonists didn't have," he says. The Reign of Terror should be understood as an escalation, not as a plan. Regarding Robespierre himself, he emphasizes – supported by the historian Cécile Obligi, who was present – ​​that Robespierre was against the de-Christianization campaign, had spoken out against the death penalty early on, and was only made into a monstrous figure of sole guilt by Thermidor: “It is Robespierre who puts everything on his back the day after his death, by guillotining 120 people more in 24 hours.”

Mélenchon's interpretation of the famous ending is particularly striking: Robespierre, after his arrest, responds to the call for insurrection with "Au nom de qui?" – and thus falls silent. Mélenchon interprets this question not as cowardice, but as the expression of a profound logic of legitimation: Robespierre could act in the name of the people as long as he was convinced he represented popular sovereignty – but the moment the revolution itself turned against him, his authority to act ceased. "Tout d'un coup, au nom de qui? Come si la question se posait." This is not a defeat of the will, but a final act of republican consistency. Mélenchon says he would have acted differently: he would have called on Henriot to insurrection. Perhaps it would have failed – but it was the only consistent option.

What makes the interview particularly valuable for the article are two programmatic lines that Mélenchon draws from Robespierre to himself, without explicitly naming them as such. First: the question of political violence. He rejects armed struggle not for moral reasons, but for strategic ones – “in armed struggle the best die first” – and professes his support for “revolution by ballot.” In doing so, he repeats almost verbatim what he had said in De la vertu He writes, thus placing himself in a continuity with Robespierre before the Reign of Terror, not with Robespierre of the Committee of Public Safety. Secondly: the question of the left's defeat. Mélenchon sharply diagnoses that the left has lost the "ideological battle" since 1981 – "we disarmed ourselves slowly, without a critical spirit, in an atmosphere of guilt" – and concludes that reclaiming cultural ground is the prerequisite for any political renewal. This, too, is a Jacobin legacy: the conviction that consciousness – political language, education, collective memory – is the true arena of struggle.

At the end of the interview, Mélenchon reads from Robespierre's last speech: "People, consider this: if justice does not reign fully in the Republic, and if this word does not mean love of equality and of the fatherland, then freedom is just an empty word." ¹³ The moment is calculated, but not dishonest: Mélenchon reads Robespierre's words as his own. This is precisely the structure of his political identity.

Robespierre as an identification figure of LFI – self-positioning and programmatic logic

Mélenchon's Jacobin legacy is not merely a rhetorical pose. It possesses a coherent programmatic depth. The positions that Mélenchon takes in De la vertu and in L'ère du peuple Developed – state sovereignty of the people against oligarchy, radical equality on a material basis, political morality as a republican foundation, secular-universalist civic life – structurally correspond to the Jacobin project, which received its most pointed form through Robespierre and Saint-Just in the phase of the Committee of Public Safety.

Alexis Corbière, a long-time associate of Mélenchon and a historian of education, published a work in 2012 together with Laurent Lévy with the programmatic title Robespierre, come again! published. In it, the authors rehabilitate Robespierre against what they call a “légende noire” fueled by conservative historiography, a negative portrayal of a historical figure solidified by opposing tradition: the “monstre froid et sanguinaire” to whom all the excesses of the Reign of Terror were attributed. ¹⁴ Corbière's book is not philology, but political theology: it provides the intellectual legitimacy to claim Robespierre as a moral reference figure for the contemporary left.

The historian Éric Anceau, who in Current Values Writing about “Le fantasme révolutionnaire de Mélenchon”, he succinctly names Mélenchon’s identification: “His two great role models are Robespierre and Saint-Just, as is also the case for one of his most important comrades, Alexis Corbière.” ¹⁵ He describes Mélenchon as a politically educated man who was "swept up by the shockwave of 1789" and considered himself a "Jacobin, revolutionary, republican and passionate Frenchman". ¹⁶ label. ¹⁷ The rhetoric of the LFI chief is reminiscent of that of certain revolutionaries: "In the face of a 'social coup' and the failure of the ruling elite, he calls for an uprising in the streets." ¹⁸

The historical resonance is intense. When the LFI deputy paid tribute to Robespierre's memory on Twitter on the anniversary of his execution, it sparked controversy. When Mélenchon scheduled a march for January 21 – the anniversary of Louis XVI's execution – it was, for historian Ran Halévi, Le Figaro The starting point of a long analysis: "January 21st is nothing other than the anniversary of the beheading of Louis XVI." ¹⁹, wrote Halévi, who recognized in it “the Robespierrist moment of La France insoumise” and drew a “parallel between LFI and the Jacobin phenomenon during the Revolution”. ²⁰ This semiotic condensation – revolutionary date, march, Popular Front – was, for Halévi, a conscious staging.

France: A discourse between rehabilitation and condemnation

The French reception of the Mélenchon-Robespierre connection runs along two parallel tracks that hardly engage in dialogue: an academic-rehabilitative one and a journalistic-polemical one.

On the academic side, Jean-Clément Martin, with his critical biography of Robespierre (2018), has redefined the terrain: Historically, responsibility for the Reign of Terror cannot be attributed to single perpetrators, but rather is the result of a complex committee system operating under enormous pressure. That Current Values LFI members respond with a cover story “Among the Insoumises Robespierre is canonized” ²¹ and The Point in Giesbert's editorial with "Next year: the revolution and ... the guillotine? The terror" ²² This alarming situation shows how far apart the different interpretations are.

On the right side of the political spectrum, a clear narrative dominates: Mélenchon, as a contemporary Robespierre, represents the potential for terror. Franz-Olivier Giesbert, in his exaggerated style, asserts the connection between moral absolutism and political violence: the demand for unconditional virtue produces the exclusion of the immoral – and this exclusion has a well-known endpoint in the history of revolution. Saïd Mahrane writes in The Point under the title “From Robespierre to Mélenchon – the origins of violence” ²³ and draws a direct, albeit not unproblematic, line from the Jacobin terror to the verbal excesses of the LFI leader.

Figaro's camp regularly diagnoses the "radicality of the project" behind the facade of moderate rhetoric. The historian Loris Chavanette puts it succinctly: "Mélenchon is a Jacobin by nature, but in his political program he is a proponent of communitarianism." ²⁴ And as for the strategy in the run-up to the 2027 presidential elections, he demonstrates that Mélenchon's tactic of appearing moderate "is reminiscent of the political technique of Robespierre, the Incorruptible" – ²⁵ The mask of the moderate over the face of the relentless one.

The historian Thierry Lentz states in Figaro The direct question: "Would the Insoumis put terrorism on the agenda if they could?" ²⁶ He recalls the massacres and executions of the Reign of Terror and warns against the uncritical identification of LFI deputies with the Jacobin legacy. This stance is polemically exaggerated, but it touches a raw nerve: the question of whether a political culture that constructs the enemy of the people as an Other to be eliminated is compatible with democratic pluralism.

On the left, however, the Robespierre association is either dismissed as a political weapon of reaction or taken up productively. The communist historian Bertrand Rothé published "Robespierre Without Prohibitions". ²⁷ Nicolas Bouzou, on the other hand, analyzes in The Express the instrumentalization of Robespierre. ²⁸ The left-liberal forces – Glucksmann, Vallaud, Faure – are attempting to portray the Jacobinism-driven stance as a problem specific to the Liberal Forum (LFI), one not shared by the broader democratic left. After the 2024 legislative elections, Raphaël Glucksmann promised: there would be a government “sans Robespierre et sans Jupiter” – meaning: without Mélenchon and without Macron. ²⁹

Le Monde The paper, committed to the tradition of the independent left-liberal press, published a widely cited dossier entitled "Jean-Luc Mélenchon: l'adieu aux jacobins" in the context of the 2022 presidential elections. The article, which also appeared in La Gazette des Communes Synoptically documented, it describes how Mélenchon presented himself throughout his life as a self-proclaimed Jacobin – centralist, secularist, and statist – before abandoning this stance in favor of a communitarian approach to appealing to voters. The tension between the convinced Jacobin of his early career and the later strategist of the multicultural Union Populaire is for Le Monde The real problem is not the Robespierre reference as such, but its instrumental function where it is disruptive. ³⁰ This interpretation – Mélenchon as an ex-Jacobin who selectively cultivates the legacy – distinguishes Le Monde Fundamentally, the right-wing media see Robespierre as having an immutable political DNA. A telling source is cited in a scholarly contribution to the debate, published in the Revue française d'histoire des idées politiques, which explicitly draws on Mélenchon's self-presentation in blogs and interviews: In 2019, Mélenchon wrote on his blog that the historian Furet had engaged in "a global intellectual terrorism" that had blocked free debate about Robespierre for two decades. ³¹ Le Monde discusses this intellectual defense of Robespierre as a legitimate contribution to the discourse, without deriving a diagnosis of political danger from it.

The earliest and most revealing evidence comes from the 2012 election campaign. The journalist Raphaëlle Besse Desmoulières describes Mélenchon as a candidate who openly claims Robespierre and Saint-Just as political heroic figures - "deux personnages controversés pour leur rôle dans la Terreur et auxquels l'eurodéputé se plaît à rendre homage" -, and quotes Michel Onfray, who accuses Mélenchon of a “lecture strictement Jacobine”, as well as Laurence Parisot from Medef, who describes him as “héritier d'une forme de Terreur”. The newspaper lets Mélenchon himself answer: “Je suis totalement Jacobin, révolutionnaire, républicain et français par passion.” ³² The self-confession is thus from Le Monde documented, not commented on – an editorial stance that the newspaper maintained through the following years.

That this identification is not a rhetorical pose is shown by a blog post from Mélenchon from 2013, which Le Monde quoted in a media studies article about Robespierre facial reconstruction. When researchers created a digital portrait of Robespierre's death mask, Mélenchon reacted indignantly on his blog: "Une tête bien peu engageante, si j'en juge par la photo publiée. Vieille ruse de l'iconographie, dont je fais les frais plus souvent qu'à mon tour: la laideur du visage est censée révéler la laideur de l’âme!” ³³ The sentence is revealing in several respects: Mélenchon identifies with Robespierre to the point of iconographic affront – “dont je fais les frais plus souvent qu'à mon tour” – and he diagnoses the technique of bestialization that he already encountered in De la vertu Theoretically, it will describe the face as an instrument of political delegitimization.

The conversation is particularly important for the essay, which Le Monde in September 2024 with the historian Emmanuel de Waresquiel, on the occasion of his book Il nous fallait des mythes. The revolution and its imaginaries of 1789 today (Tallandier, 2024). In it, Waresquiel formulates a structural diagnosis that historically embeds the Mélenchon-Robespierre connection: The French Revolution left France with “a political culture of confrontation more than compromise.” The basic mechanism is inherent in the Jacobin understanding of popular sovereignty: “Individuality and unanimism prevent us from thinking of opposition in any other way than by bringing it about. This leads us to all rights of terror.” Regarding the French Revolution (LFI), he notes that the movement’s relationship to the revolution is “fraught with ambiguity, or rather, amnesia”—in particular, the tension between Jacobin universalism and what he calls the communautarism of some LFI representatives. ³⁴ This is one of the most impartial diagnoses in the entire discourse – and, significantly, it appears not in the politics section, but in the ideas section.

Marcel Gauchet, in Le Monde on the occasion of his Robespierre biography (Robespierre. L'homme qui nous divise le plusGauchet, who portrays Robespierre in detail (Gallimard, 2018), deepens this structural diagnosis. He sees in Robespierrism the root of a specifically French political style: the elevation of virtue (as devotion to the common good) to a political program, combined with the "permanent sumanent de corruption qui pèse sur tous les gouvernants" (permanent suspicion of corruption that weighs on all governors). "Il ya en France, où pourtant on déteste la dictature, une espèce de vision autoritaire du pouvoir, au nom du salut public" (There it is in France, where, however, dictatorship is despised, a kind of authoritarian vision of power, in the name of public well-being). Gauchet names the politician who most explicitly invoked Vertu and Robespierre in 2018: Jean-Luc Mélenchon. With a characteristic twist, however, he remarks that Mélenchon personally resembles Danton more than Robespierre—something the latter would not appreciate, since Danton was responsible for the indulgence stands, which condemned Robespierre. ³⁵

Finally, in January 2026, it was quoted Le Monde the chairman of the business association U2P, Michel Picon, after a Mélenchon colloquium with the succinct sentence: “Ils ont voulu montrer qu'ils n'étaient pas les Robespierre que l'on décrit, que les PME n'avaient pas à avoir peur de l'arrivée de LFI.” ³⁶ The Robespierre comparison has thus arrived in everyday economic policy discourse – one year before the 2027 presidential elections – not as historical scholarship, but as an immediate motive for fear and demarcation. The fact that Mélenchon is attempting to neutralize it through a colloquium with small business owners demonstrates that he himself is aware of the power of this image.

Le Monde Overall, this paints a picture that is neither condemnation nor apology: Mélenchon's reference to Robespierre is taken seriously as a political and cultural phenomenon, historically contextualized, and linked to the long-term structural consequences of Jacobin political culture. The Glucksmann formula "Jupiter et Robespierre, c'est fini!" (Jupiter and Robespierre, it's over!), which Le Monde documented in August 2024, ³⁷ and Glucksmann's self-positioning as "girondine" in October 2024 ³⁸ This shows how far this historical semantics has now migrated into the current camp conflict of the left: The revolution is not an archive, but an active battleground.

Le Monde The paper, committed to the tradition of the independent left-liberal press, published a widely cited dossier entitled "Jean-Luc Mélenchon: l'adieu aux jacobins" in the context of the 2022 presidential elections. The article, which also appeared in La Gazette des Communes Synoptically documented, it describes how Mélenchon presented himself throughout his life as a self-proclaimed Jacobin – centralist, secularist, and statist – before abandoning this stance in favor of a communitarian approach to appealing to voters. The tension between the convinced Jacobin of his early career and the later strategist of the multicultural Union Populaire is for Le Monde The real problem is not the Robespierre reference as such, but its instrumental function where it is disruptive. ³⁹ This interpretation – Mélenchon as an ex-Jacobin who selectively cultivates the legacy – distinguishes Le Monde Fundamentally, the right-wing media see Robespierre as having an immutable political DNA. A telling source is cited in a scholarly contribution to the debate, published in the Revue française d'histoire des idées politiques, which explicitly draws on Mélenchon's self-presentation in blogs and interviews: In 2019, Mélenchon wrote on his blog that the historian Furet had engaged in "a global intellectual terrorism" that had blocked free debate about Robespierre for two decades. ⁴⁰ Le Monde discusses this intellectual defense of Robespierre as a legitimate contribution to the discourse, without deriving a diagnosis of political danger from it.

The earliest and most revealing evidence comes from the 2012 election campaign. The journalist Raphaëlle Besse Desmoulières describes Mélenchon as a candidate who openly claims Robespierre and Saint-Just as political heroic figures - "deux personnages controversés pour leur rôle dans la Terreur et auxquels l'eurodéputé se plaît à rendre homage" -, and quotes Michel Onfray, who accuses Mélenchon of a “lecture strictement Jacobine”, as well as Laurence Parisot from Medef, who describes him as “héritier d'une forme de Terreur”. The newspaper lets Mélenchon himself answer: “Je suis totalement Jacobin, révolutionnaire, républicain et français par passion.” ⁴¹ The self-confession is thus from Le Monde documented, not commented on – an editorial stance that the newspaper maintained through the following years.

That this identification is not a rhetorical pose is shown by a blog post from Mélenchon from 2013, which Le Monde quoted in a media studies article about Robespierre facial reconstruction. When researchers created a digital portrait of Robespierre's death mask, Mélenchon reacted indignantly on his blog: "Une tête bien peu engageante, si j'en juge par la photo publiée. Vieille ruse de l'iconographie, dont je fais les frais plus souvent qu'à mon tour: la laideur du visage est censée révéler la laideur de l’âme!” ⁴² The sentence is revealing in several respects: Mélenchon identifies with Robespierre to the point of iconographic affront – “dont je fais les frais plus souvent qu'à mon tour” – and he diagnoses the technique of bestialization that he already encountered in De la vertu Theoretically, it will describe the face as an instrument of political delegitimization.

The conversation is particularly important for the essay, which Le Monde in September 2024 with the historian Emmanuel de Waresquiel, on the occasion of his book Il nous fallait des mythes. The revolution and its imaginaries of 1789 today (Tallandier, 2024). In it, Waresquiel formulates a structural diagnosis that historically embeds the Mélenchon-Robespierre connection: The French Revolution left France with “a political culture of confrontation more than compromise.” The basic mechanism is inherent in the Jacobin understanding of popular sovereignty: “Individuality and unanimism prevent us from thinking of opposition in any other way than by bringing it about. This leads us to all rights of terror.” Regarding the French Revolution (LFI), he notes that the movement’s relationship to the revolution is “fraught with ambiguity, or rather, amnesia”—in particular, the tension between Jacobin universalism and what he calls the communautarism of some LFI representatives. ⁴³ This is one of the most impartial diagnoses in the entire discourse – and, significantly, it appears not in the politics section, but in the ideas section.

Marcel Gauchet, in Le Monde on the occasion of his Robespierre biography (Robespierre. L'homme qui nous divise le plusGauchet, who portrays Robespierre in detail (Gallimard, 2018), deepens this structural diagnosis. He sees in Robespierrism the root of a specifically French political style: the elevation of virtue (as devotion to the common good) to a political program, combined with the "permanent sumanent de corruption qui pèse sur tous les gouvernants" (permanent suspicion of corruption that weighs on all governors). "Il ya en France, où pourtant on déteste la dictature, une espèce de vision autoritaire du pouvoir, au nom du salut public" (There it is in France, where, however, dictatorship is despised, a kind of authoritarian vision of power, in the name of public well-being). Gauchet names the politician who most explicitly invoked Vertu and Robespierre in 2018: Jean-Luc Mélenchon. With a characteristic twist, however, he remarks that Mélenchon personally resembles Danton more than Robespierre—something the latter would not appreciate, since Danton was responsible for the indulgence stands, which condemned Robespierre. ⁴⁴

Finally, in January 2026, it was quoted Le Monde the chairman of the business association U2P, Michel Picon, after a Mélenchon colloquium with the succinct sentence: “Ils ont voulu montrer qu'ils n'étaient pas les Robespierre que l'on décrit, que les PME n'avaient pas à avoir peur de l'arrivée de LFI.” ⁴⁵ The Robespierre comparison has thus arrived in everyday economic policy discourse – one year before the 2027 presidential elections – not as historical scholarship, but as an immediate motive for fear and demarcation. The fact that Mélenchon is attempting to neutralize it through a colloquium with small business owners demonstrates that he himself is aware of the power of this image.

Le Monde Overall, this paints a picture that is neither condemnation nor apology: Mélenchon's reference to Robespierre is taken seriously as a political and cultural phenomenon, historically contextualized, and linked to the long-term structural consequences of Jacobin political culture. The Glucksmann formula "Jupiter et Robespierre, c'est fini!" (Jupiter and Robespierre, it's over!), which Le Monde documented in August 2024, ⁴⁶ and Glucksmann's self-positioning as "girondine" in October 2024 ⁴⁷ This shows how far this historical semantics has now migrated into the current camp conflict of the left: The revolution is not an archive, but an active battleground.

Germany: The new Jacobin – between fascination and disquiet

The German and German-language reception of the Mélenchon-Robespierre nexus is structurally different from the French one. It lacks the immediacy of domestic politics; it is more contemplative, more cultural-historical, and interested in understanding a phenomenon that Germany observes from the outside but understands as a European problem.

Wolf Lepenies has in The World Early on, he coined the decisive interpretive formula with "The New Jacobin": "One wonders about the radicalism of the French socialists, but when one then follows the ideas of the communist Mélenchon, it is clear: France is different." ⁴⁸ This formulation carries within it a twofold cognitive interest: First, the diagnosis of a genuine distinctiveness of French political culture—a legacy that was lacking in Germany after 1945. Second, an implicit warning: Jacobinism did not arise by chance; it is the expression of a structural tension in republican thought, which was reactivated by Mélenchon. In a later essay by Lepenies, "The Old Hats of the Jacobins," this diagnosis is further developed: The French left still lives with the "ghosts of the past" and is incapable of freeing itself from a revolutionary self-image that has become politically dysfunctional. ⁴⁹

Rudolf Balmer writes in the New Zurich newspaper Regarding Mélenchon's event in Le Havre entitled "Popular Anger as an Election Program": "The left-wing populist presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon recalls France's revolutionary heritage in Le Havre." ⁵⁰ This is a sober observation, not a condemnation – the NZZ correspondent sees Mélenchon primarily as a gifted mobilizer who expresses a genuine, albeit dangerous, sentiment. The Swiss newspaper tends to treat the Jacobinism question as a cultural phenomenon and less as a political threat.

Martina Meister, France correspondent, reports for World on Sunday in their reception a different emphasis. In an extensive interview with the Charlie HebdoCo-founder Philippe Val directly links Robespierre's line to the anti-Semitism of the radical left: "Since Robespierre, this anti-Semitism has continued among the radical left and its intelligentsia in France," with the corollary that Mélenchon was not a Trotskyist by chance. ⁵¹ This is one of the harshest German interpretations: it places the Mélenchon-Robespierre connection in a genealogy of left-wing anti-Semitism, which – despite its polemical exaggeration – reflects the political debate after October 7, 2023, in which LFI actually came under heavy criticism.

The Frankfurter Rundschau He chooses a lighter tone. In 2022, Stefan Brändle describes a mayor in northern France who refuses to fly the flag at half-mast for the English queen's funeral, and he sounds "as if he were sitting next to Robespierre in the Committee of Public Safety of the French Revolution"—an ironic but not polemical remark that shows how commonplace the Jacobinism reference has become in German journalism about France. ⁵² Mélenchon himself appears briefly in the article: He “openly expresses his annoyance at the extensive coverage given by the Parisian media to the death of Elizabeth II” – an anti-monarchist reflex, as if continuing the story from 1793.

The basic (Vienna) published “Dreaming of Red – A French Passion,” a feuilletonistic text that treats revolutionary memory as an anthropological constant in political France. The term “passion” is deliberately chosen: it is not about rationality, but about an affective structure that extends from 1793 to Mélenchon’s hologram performances. ⁵³ Finally, in Switzerland, there is the succinct NZZ formula by Thomas Maissen: "The procedures and positions in the election campaign show how great France's institutional crisis and uncertainty is" – a view that treats Mélenchon less as an isolated phenomenon than as a symptom of a structural legitimacy crisis of the Fifth Republic. ⁵⁴

The NZZ had already highlighted the connection between Mélenchon, Robespierre, and the concept of virtue earlier – in connection with the Yellow Vest protests of 2018/19: “Mélenchon is an avowed fan of Robespierre. The politician has even written a book about Robespierre’s favorite concept, ‘virtue,’ and last autumn he explicitly stated his intention to translate the great revolutionary’s thinking into the present day.” ⁵⁵ The article sharply analyzes the structural problem: Robespierre fantasized about the people as a homogeneous, virtuous entity and sought to reconcile the complex reality with this image through increasingly brutal means – with the consequence that anyone who did not meet the self-defined criteria of the people had to be eliminated. The formula "In France there are only two parties: the people and their enemies" ⁵⁶ This thus becomes a structural warning to Mélenchon: The binary division of the world into people and enemies is not a rhetorical device, but a dangerous epistemic stance.

In German media coverage, the taz newspaper represents a special case in some respects: As a left-leaning cooperative newspaper, it structurally shares more sympathy for Mélenchon's political project than most other leading German media outlets – which makes its assessment of the Robespierre connection more nuanced, but also more ambivalent. In her campaign report for the 2017 presidential election, taz correspondent Lilian Alemagna – who is also a Mélenchon biographer – described the candidate as an intellectual and "a man of action with nothing to hide," and posed the crucial question laconically and without answering it: whether voters would take the risk of electing "a man who, like Robespierre before him, announces a 'revolution.' A bourgeois revolution, admittedly, with ballots instead of weapons. But a revolution that promises a genuine break in French history." ⁵⁷ The comparison with Robespierre appears in the taz This is neither an accusation nor praise, but rather an openly formulated risk signal – a question mark that the newspaper leaves to its readers. This editorial restraint distinguishes the taz fundamentally different from the alarmist pronouncements in the Figaro milieu or the grand cultural-historical diagnoses of a Wolf Lepenies: The taz It takes Jacobinism seriously as a political tradition without condemning it outright, and deliberately leaves the normative question open – is Mélenchon's reference to Robespierre a threat to democracy or legitimately revolutionary?

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung The Mélenchon-Robespierre connection is not treated as an isolated phenomenon, but rather embedded in a broader diagnosis of French political culture – a diagnosis developed by correspondent Jürg Altwegg in two major essays and continued by Michaela Wiegel in a political reporting style. Altwegg delivers the most concise analysis in a FAZ Sunday edition essay of December 10, 2018, on the Yellow Vest movement. He quotes Marcel Gauchet's programmatic statement about Robespierre as the "father of populism" – someone who "linked a political principle, the sovereignty of the people, with a moral one, the imperative of virtue" – and places this formula directly alongside the Yellow Vest revolt: "Thirty years after François Furet proclaimed the 'end of the revolution,' it is back." ⁵⁸ Mélenchon appears as the political actor who, according to him, succeeded in doing what he himself had failed to do since Macron's election victory – driving the people into the streets. The connection is implicit, but clear: Mélenchon's Jacobin rhetoric prepared the semantic arena in which the Yellow Vests then actually marched, brandishing guillotine props.

In a second major cultural essay from July 2020 – “Messiah, Martyr, Macron” – Altwegg picks up the same thread and delves into it historiographically. ⁵⁹ He, too, takes Furet's "end of the revolution" as his starting point: Furet had drawn a direct line from Robespierre to Lenin and proclaimed the end of this connection in 1989. Altwegg views Gauchet's 2018 rehabilitation of Robespierre as an intellectual counter-revolution—and as a sign that Furet's diagnosis is obsolete. The term Gauchet uses for Robespierre—"Christ of the Revolution"—is adopted by Altwegg in his own analysis, who makes it a key to Macron's failure: "How much politics in France is still celebrated as a substitute for religion is also demonstrated by Marcel Gauchet, who calls Robespierre a 'Christ of Democracy.'" Mélenchon appears in this essay as a recurring overarching concept: He is the actor who appropriates the Jacobin vocabulary of the "rebellious people" against Macron's "social coup," thereby connecting to a tradition that Altwegg describes as a structural feature of the Fifth Republic.

Particularly revealing for the essay is Altwegg's observation that Mélenchon, in an LFI threat, equates Macron with Louis XVI: "Louis XVI was beheaded. We could start all over again," is how "France Unbowed" is supposed to announce itself. For Altwegg, this is not merely rhetoric, but a symptom: Jacobin guillotine rhetoric is not a dead archive in the LFI milieu, but an active political tool of coercion.

Michaela Wiegel takes a different approach in her essay “Vive la Révolution!” (February 2023) about the pension reform protests. ⁶⁰ Mélenchon appears here as a "walking encyclopedia of revolutions," his comrade Corbière as the author of a book that celebrates Robespierre, Danton, and Saint-Just as the "inventors of the Republic." Wiegel's diagnosis is structural: the confrontation between the people and the rulers is a legacy of the French Revolution that continues to shape thought and action to this day—"and explains the often eruptive nature of French politics." Within this framework, Mélenchon's Jacobinism is not an aberration, but rather an expression of a deeply ingrained national self-image that all parties—including Macron with his book "Révolution"—utilize.

Finally, on the occasion of the 2024 legislative elections, Michaela Wiegel quotes MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, who immediately after the election compares Mélenchon to Robespierre: “Robespierre’s time is over,” said Glucksmann – appalled by Mélenchon’s claim to immediately assume governmental responsibility. ⁶¹ The sentence appears in the FAZ report as a political judgment without historiographical commentary – which shows that the Robespierre comparison is no longer a scholarly argument in 2024, but everyday vocabulary of party struggle.

The FAZ thus paints an overall picture that differs from that of the NZZ in its greater depth of cultural essayistic focus: Where the NZZ focuses analytically on the concept of virtue, the FAZ connects the Mélenchon-Robespierre nexus with the structural question of the end of Furet's "Republic of the Middle" and the return of the revolutionary paradigm in the early 21st century.

The NZZ In May 2026, coinciding with Mélenchon's official candidacy for 2027, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) published an analytically dense portrait under the programmatic title "The Jacobin: France's Last Left-Wing Agitator Wants to Be President," which illustrates the conceptual similarity between the FAZ's perspective and the NZZ's coverage of France. The central thesis is: "In the 'new France,' Mélenchon assumes a very old role: that of the revolutionary Jacobin. For him, politics is primarily a moral struggle between the people and the elite, republic and oligarchy, virtue and treason. Therefore, compromises, such as those sought by the moderate left, appear as weakness in his world." ⁶² This interpretation corresponds to the tenor of the FAZ Even in their election-year commentaries, they cultivate the image of Mélenchon as a political fossil, whose longevity is owed to an archaic but functional grammar of conflict. The term Jacobinism is not used alarmistically—it lacks an explicit analogy to terrorism—but rather as a cultural-historical category that explains why this politician structures French politics like no other. Also telling in this context is the FAZ's debate on Michel Onfray's essay "Mélenchon, dernier avatar du jacobinisme" (Mélenchon, the last avatar of Jacobinism), in which the philosopher draws a direct line from Robespierre through Marxism to LFI: The FAZ observed this debate with commentary and distance, without endorsing Onfray's sweeping condemnation. ⁶³

Assessment from different political camps

The Mélenchon-Robespierre reference activates four distinct logics of evaluation in both French and German-language discourse.

The republican-conservative camp (Figaro, Le Point, Valeurs Actuelles)

…sees in the Jacobin self-positioning proof of a fundamental democratic deficit. The argument goes like this: Robespierre ruled in the name of the people and killed in the name of virtue. Anyone who invokes him signals a willingness to construct political opponents as enemies of the common good – which is delegitimized in a pluralistic democracy. The term "populism" is used as an accusation, which Mélenchon himself in De la vertu countered by pointing out that Robespierre had received the same verdict. ⁶⁴

The social democratic camp (PS, Glucksmann)

…treats the accusation of Jacobinism instrumentally: it serves to distinguish LFI. The statement “il faut tourner la page Mélenchon” is inextricably linked to the assertion that LFI’s revolutionary legacy makes a governmental left impossible. But the Social Democrats are not without ambiguity here: they themselves claim the legacy of 1789, only in its moderate, Girondist variant.

The left-liberal milieu (Libération, L'Obs, Mediapart)

… considers the reference to Robespierre structurally unproblematic as long as it is not linked to a willingness to engage in political exclusion. The crucial question is whether Mélenchon combines radical criticism of the oligarchy with democratic means. The publication Marianne She maintains an ambivalent position here: fundamental sympathy for republican critiques of capitalism, but growing skepticism towards LFI's authoritarian internal structure.

The extreme right camp (Valeurs Actuelles, Zemmour)

Eric Zemmour uses the accusation of Jacobinism to equate Mélenchon and Robespierre as representatives of a terrorist structure within the left. He wrote in Marianne a column entitled “Encore un effort pour être révolutionnaire” ⁶⁵ – an allusion to Sade's and Robespierre's revolutionary rhetoric. The equation "Mélenchon = Robespierre = terror potential" functions here as a polemical, simplistic argument that flattens historical complexity for partisan tactical purposes.

The French Revolution and the contemporary left – a structural analogy

One year before the 2027 presidential elections, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at the constellation of actors within the current French left – and at the structural parallels to the time of the French Revolution. These parallels are not literal, but revealing as a heuristic model.

The Montagnards (LFI)

Mélenchon and La France Insoumise structurally correspond to the Mountain Party—the most radical bloc of the Revolutionary Assembly, which pressed for immediate, uncompromising change, linked parliamentary majorities with plebiscitary mobilizations, and combined criticism of particular interests with the claim to the “true” common good. The strength of this model lies in its mobilizing power; its weakness lies in the fact that it produces a political culture of exclusion, which makes alliances difficult and fosters the construction of enemies. The Thermidorians of 2023–2024 are the renegade LFI representatives Ruffin, Autain, Corbière, and Garrido—those who distanced themselves from the “junte qui entoure Mélenchon,” as one PS strategist put it. ⁶⁶ wanting to liberate without abandoning social radicalism.

The Girondins (PS, Glucksmann)

The socialists under Olivier Faure and the social-liberal movement around Raphaël Glucksmann represent the Girondist pole – a left that strives for parliamentary governmental responsibility and advocates a pluralistic coalition policy, but does not want revolutionary escalation. Glucksmann's European social democracy is oriented more towards Pedro Sánchez than Robespierre. However, just as the Girondins were ultimately ousted by the Montagnards in 1793, this faction now faces the problem that the Liberal Forum (LFI) claims the authority to interpret the left-wing milieu, forcing the social democrats into either vassal loyalty or isolation.

The Indulgents (Communists, Greens)

The Communists and the Greens (EELV) embody that part of the left-wing spectrum which is prepared for tactical cooperation with LFI, but does not share its programmatic uncompromising stance. Structurally, they are reminiscent of the Dantonists – men of compromise and compromise who shared neither Montagnardian rigor nor Girondist governmentality and were therefore often caught between the blocs.

The Marais (technocratic center)

In this analogy, the Macron camp is the silent swamp—the vast center, exposed to the extremes that drown it out, and unable to deny its own exhaustion. The Fifth Republic itself, structurally weakened by Macron's Bonapartist governance, corresponds to the monarchical Ancien Régime in its final stage: an institutional form whose legitimacy is fragile and which is being challenged from both the left and the right.

The deeper parallel to the revolution, however, lies not in the roles of the actors, but in the question of political language. Mélenchon has in De la vertu diagnosed that “the corruption of society begins with the corruption of words” ⁶⁷ – with Plato – and that the devaluation of political language is the real democratic problem. ⁶⁸ This diagnosis isn't wrong, but it overlooks the other side: Vertu's morally charged political vocabulary itself produces exclusions. Those who portray the enemy as corrupt, as traitors to the common good, as paltoquets Brandmarkt – Mélenchon's preferred insult for his critics – constructs a political world in which compromise is considered treason. This was precisely the dynamic of 1793–1794.

The crucial difference lies in the institutional framework. The Fifth Republic is not an unstable transitional phase like the Convention; it possesses institutions that structurally preclude an escalation towards terror. Mélenchon's program of a "citizen revolution" through ballot papers – "even if it leads to a coup of vote bulletins" – is institutionally contained. ⁶⁹ But the culture of political conflict that LFI has fostered, and the normalization of delegitimizing rhetoric, are real democratic costs that even those who do not vote for Mélenchon must pay.

Vertu without a republic – an open ending

The question that De la vertu Ultimately, the question that remains open is the question of the limits of virtue. Mélenchon writes: “There is no virtuous society without virtuous citizens. Just as there is no republic without republicans.” ⁷⁰ This sounds almost tautological – but it contains a problem in democratic theory: Who defines the Vertueux? For Robespierre, it was the committee. For Mélenchon, the answer remains deliberately vague: the people, the citizens, those who commit themselves to the common good.

But in the political practice of LFI—its autocratic internal structure, the exclusion of dissenting voices, the binary worldview—it becomes clear that the moral rhetoric of virtue produces an exclusionary political logic that is structurally closer to the Jacobin legacy than Mélenchon would like to admit. German observers like Lepenies diagnosed this with analytical detachment; French critics charged it with polemics. Both were right to see something correct.

What unites Mélenchon and Robespierre—regardless of the differences between their eras—is not a readiness for violence, but the profound conviction that democracy cannot survive without a moral foundation. This conviction is not wrong. But it contains a danger: when morality becomes the measure of politics, politics tends to become irreconcilable. With the presidential election in a year's time, this is the real question that will determine the fate of the French left: whether it can find a common candidate who understands how to channel the movement's moral energy without lapsing into the language of absolutes that makes coalitions impossible and damages democracy.

History has shown what happened to Robespierre when Thermidor came. The history of the left – from Jaurès and Mitterrand to Mélenchon – shows how difficult it is to reconcile revolutionary energy with governmental pragmatism. De la vertu Mélenchon's attempt to theoretically resolve this contradiction – or at least to make it manageable – will be seen in 2027. Whether this will have political viability remains to be seen.