Justice & Law Quote by Maximilien Robespierre

Robespierre’s line is a cold-eyed bit of revolutionary salesmanship: it flatters the crowd while stripping virtue of its halo. Justice and equality, he implies, aren’t lofty moral achievements requiring saintly discipline; they’re simply self-interest correctly understood. The rhetorical move is surgical. By anchoring egalitarian politics in self-love, he makes it feel inevitable, almost effortless. You don’t need to be morally exceptional to demand a fairer world. You just need to notice who benefits when the world isn’t fair.

The subtext is less cozy. If equality is what any rational person wants for themselves, then opposition starts to look not just mistaken but suspect. In the logic of revolutionary legitimacy, dissent can be recast as selfishness of a different, uglier kind: the self-love of privilege. Robespierre is narrowing the moral bandwidth of politics, turning a contest of interests into a test of character.

Context sharpens the edge. Speaking from the French Revolution’s vortex, Robespierre was trying to stabilize a new order while the old one fought back in courts, churches, and foreign armies. Appealing to “virtue” was common currency, but it was also fragile; virtue is hard, slow, and easy to counterfeit. Self-interest is sturdier. It mobilizes faster, scales better, and can justify extraordinary measures in the name of “the people.” That’s why the line works: it democratizes righteousness. It also hints at the Revolution’s darker corollary - if the people’s true interest is justice, then those deemed enemies of justice can be treated as enemies of the people.