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 Rh the vacillating figures of the Revolution; they stand between the parties; they have no sharply defined economic strata behind them. Ideologically, they stand close to the Girondistes, but it is their misfortune that, although externally they are more radical than the Girondistes, they cannot, being petty bourgeois and intellectuals, have any economically clear and attainable goal. They constitute the rigid mental phalanx of the Revolution, the revolutionaries on principle, having a different motive, therefore, than the Girondistes, the "truly virtuous and pure revolutionaries." And of them Robespierre is the most austere, the most truly virtuous, the disciple of Rousseau, the "Roman," equally radical and inexorable both as regards the Right and the Left, and as regards those ambiguous figures who would endanger and defile this moral principle of the Revolution: "Virtue and Reason." Thus, as an "incorruptible," he proceeds even against his friend Danton, likewise against Hébert, the anarchistic, ultra-Left, representative of the petty bourgeois intellectuals, who, in Robespierre's opinion, was endangering the Revolution by his atheistic radicalism, which antagonized the peasants and the unenlightened in general.

Robespierre's Reign of Terror, however, was directed in the first place against the Girondistes, who wished to limit the Revolution and the Republic in the sense of the economic interests of the large