Robespierre’s Lists: Power and Connection in the French Revolutionary Terror

Colin Jones is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He has written many books on French history, most recently The Fall of Robespierre (2021), French Revolutionary Lives (2024) and The Shortest History of France (2025). For 2025-26 he is John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

In the last months of his life, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94), then a major figure on the Committee of Public Safety that was running the Terror, drew up a number of lists of what he called ‘patriots with more or less talent’. Identifying the nearly 200 individuals on these lists and calculating their connections to Robespierre allows us to explore how he built a political network and how this affected the operations of the Terror. It also offers a perspective on why Robespierre was overthrown in July 1794.