The Revolutionaries: From Robespierre to Che Guevara

What is a revolutionary? Not simply someone who wants change - many want that. A revolutionary is someone who believes the current system is so corrupt, so unjust, that it cannot be reformed. It must be overthrown. By force if necessary. And a new world built on its ruins.

This conviction has animated men and women throughout history. Some became heroes, others tyrants - sometimes both. Robespierre wanted a Republic of Virtue and ended up sending his friends to the scaffold. Lenin dreamed of worker emancipation and created a police state. Che Guevara sought to liberate peoples and died in a Bolivian ambush, betrayed and alone.

Their stories fascinate and trouble us. They raise questions with no simple answers: can good be done through violence? Does the end justify the means? How can the most beautiful ideals produce the worst horrors?

Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794): The Incorruptible and the Terror

The Advocate for the Poor

Before becoming the symbol of the Terror, Robespierre was “the Incorruptible” - a provincial lawyer who defended the voiceless. Born in Arras in 1758, orphaned at six, raised by family, he became a lawyer and distinguished himself by pleading for the humble against the powerful.

Elected to the Estates-General of 1789, he stood out for his eloquence and intransigence. While other revolutionaries came from nobility or the wealthy bourgeoisie, Robespierre spoke for the people. He opposed the death penalty, defended universal suffrage, demanded the abolition of slavery. His positions seemed utopian at the time.

He lived modestly, refused bribes, didn’t enrich himself. In a revolution where many made fortunes, this probity was remarkable. He was called “the Incorruptible” without irony. He embodied the revolutionary ideal: a man devoted to the cause, without personal interests.

The Logic of Terror

But the Revolution spiraled out of control. War against European monarchies, internal revolts, the king’s betrayal led to radicalization. In 1793, Robespierre became a member of the Committee of Public Safety - the de facto revolutionary government.

To save the Republic, he thought, its enemies had to be eliminated. First the royalists and obvious traitors. Then the moderates who slowed the revolution. Then the extremists who compromised it. The list of enemies grew endlessly.

Robespierre developed a theory of “revolutionary virtue.” Terror without virtue is disastrous, he said, but virtue without terror is powerless. In revolutionary times, clemency toward the people’s enemies is betrayal of the people. The guillotine became the instrument of purification.

In one year, about 17,000 people were officially executed, perhaps 40,000 counting deaths in prison and summary executions. Among them, aristocrats and priests, but mostly common people - Vendean peasants, Lyon artisans, suspects of all conditions.

The Fall

Most troubling is that Robespierre sincerely believed he was doing good. He took no pleasure in violence, wasn’t a sadist. He saw himself as the servant of a sacred cause, ready for any sacrifice - including that of his humanity.

But the machine ran away. When Robespierre turned on Convention deputies, they understood they would be next. On 9 Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794), they had him arrested. The next day, Robespierre was guillotined with his supporters.

The Incorruptible died at 36, convinced he was right. His last words remain unknown - his jaw had been shattered by a bullet. His body was thrown into a common grave, covered with quicklime. The Revolution devoured its children.

Simón Bolívar (1783-1830): The Liberator

The Rebel Heir

Simón Bolívar was born into one of the wealthiest families in colonial Venezuela. An aristocrat, slave owner, educated in Europe, he had everything needed to become a pillar of the established order. He chose to destroy it.

His tutor, Simón Rodríguez, had instilled in him Enlightenment ideas. During a trip to Europe, the young Bolívar witnessed Napoleon’s coronation. On Rome’s Sacred Mount, he made a solemn oath: to free South America from Spanish domination.

He kept his word. For fifteen years, from 1811 to 1826, Bolívar waged an epic war of independence. He crossed the Andes with a ragged army, lost everything several times, went into exile, returned. He liberated Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, founded Bolivia which bears his name.

The Reluctant Dictator

But Bolívar discovered that winning the war was only the beginning. Building nations on the ruins of the colonial empire proved far more difficult. The former colonies tore themselves apart between and within themselves. The independence generals became rival caudillos.

Bolívar dreamed of a great Latin American federation, a counterweight to the United States and Europe. He failed. Local nationalisms, particular interests, personal rivalries shattered his dream. The Greater Colombia he had created fragmented.

Facing chaos, Bolívar became increasingly authoritarian. He granted himself dictatorial powers, suppressed revolts, escaped assassination attempts. The man who had liberated millions became unpopular, accused of wanting to become king.

Final Bitterness

In 1830, sick and exhausted, Bolívar left power and prepared to go into exile. He died of tuberculosis before embarking, at 47. His last words, according to legend: “I have plowed the sea.”

The Liberator died convinced he had failed. “America is ungovernable,” he wrote. “Those who have served the revolution have plowed the sea.” He had freed a continent but hadn’t known how to build it.

Today, Bolívar is venerated throughout Latin America. Chávez claimed his legacy, as do Maduro and many others. His image is everywhere, his name on squares, currencies, an entire country. But his contradictions remain: the authoritarian liberator, the dictator democrat, the disappointed dreamer.

Lenin (1870-1924): The Architect of Communism

The Professional Revolutionary

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, came from an educated minor noble family. His older brother, Alexander, was hanged for participating in a plot against the Tsar. This execution radicalized young Vladimir. He was 17 and swore to avenge his brother.

Lenin became what he called a “professional revolutionary.” Not a dreamer, not an occasional agitator, but someone who devoted every moment of his life to revolution. He studied Marx with almost religious intensity, lived in exile, organized clandestine networks, waited for his hour.

His genius was organizational. Lenin understood that revolution wouldn’t come spontaneously from the masses. A disciplined, centralized vanguard party was needed to guide the proletariat. This party - the Bolsheviks - would be history’s instrument.

The Seizure of Power

In February 1917, Tsarism collapsed. Lenin returned from exile to Russia, in a sealed train provided by the Germans who hoped he would destabilize their enemy. He arrived with a simple program: “Peace, land, bread.”

In October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in a nearly bloodless coup. Lenin became the head of history’s first socialist state. He was 47 and thought world revolution was imminent.

It didn’t come. Instead, Russia plunged into an atrocious civil war. Lenin and his comrades had to improvise, repress, terrorize. The Cheka, political police, eliminated “class enemies” by the tens of thousands. Concentration camps appeared. Red terror answered white terror.

The Poisoned Legacy

Lenin justified violence by historical necessity. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a necessary stage, he said. Once class enemies were eliminated, the state would wither away. Communism would come.

But the state didn’t wither. It grew, strengthened, became tentacular. Lenin himself worried about this toward the end of his life. In his political testament, he warned against Stalin, whom he found too brutal, too hungry for power.

Lenin died in 1924, at 53, after several strokes. His body was embalmed and displayed in a mausoleum - a personality cult he would probably have disapproved of. Stalin took power and transformed the USSR into a totalitarian machine. Lenin had created the tools; Stalin used them.

Was this inevitable? Historians debate it. Some see Lenin as Stalin’s direct precursor. Others think another path was possible. What’s certain is that the revolution he had dreamed would be emancipatory became one of history’s greatest tyrannies.

Che Guevara (1928-1967): The Tragic Icon

The Wandering Doctor

Ernesto Guevara was born in 1928 into an Argentine middle-class family. Asthmatic, he read enormously during his attacks - and developed an iron will to overcome his weakness. He studied medicine and, diploma in hand, set off to explore Latin America by motorcycle.

This journey transformed him. He saw the misery of Bolivian miners, Peruvian peasants, Amazonian lepers. He understood that medicine wasn’t enough. To heal these ills, the system had to change. He became a revolutionary.

In Mexico, he met Fidel Castro, who was preparing an expedition to overthrow Cuban dictator Batista. Guevara enlisted as the expedition’s doctor. He became much more: a guerrilla commander, a strategist, one of the architects of the Cuban revolution.

Cuba and After

The Cuban revolution triumphed in 1959. Guevara, now “Che,” held important positions: president of the National Bank, Minister of Industry. But he was bored in offices. The Cuban revolution was done; he wanted to export it.

For Che believed in permanent revolution. Capitalism was a global system; it had to be fought everywhere. One, two, three Vietnams, he said. Create guerrilla focos around the world, exhaust American imperialism.

He left Cuba in 1965 to bring revolution elsewhere. First to Congo, where his guerrilla attempt failed miserably. Then to Bolivia, where he hoped to spark a continental uprising.

Death of a Myth

The Bolivian guerrilla was a disaster. Local peasants didn’t rise up. The Bolivian army, trained by the CIA, hunted the guerrillas. Sick, isolated, betrayed, Che was captured in October 1967.

He was executed the next day, by order of Bolivian authorities with American assent. He was 39. His last words, according to his executioners: “I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man.”

Che’s death transformed him into an icon. His face, photographed by Alberto Korda, became one of the most reproduced images of the 20th century. Symbol of rebellion for some, terrorism for others, he still embodies the revolutionary ideal today - and its contradictions.

For Che was also ruthless. He supervised summary executions in Cuba, considered violence a necessity, despised “bourgeois” democracy. The man with the romantic face was also hard, convinced that the end justified the means.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919): The Red Rose

The Revolutionary Intellectual

Among these male figures, one woman stands out. Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871 into a Polish Jewish family. Small, lame, she compensated for her physical handicaps with extraordinary intelligence and energy.

She became one of the greatest Marxist theorists of her time. Her writings on imperialism, capital accumulation, revolutionary democracy still influence left-wing thought. She was the only one who dared contradict Lenin, criticizing his authoritarianism and defending revolution from below, not from above.

Luxemburg believed in the spontaneity of the masses. Revolution would come from workers themselves, not a vanguard party. Democracy wasn’t a bourgeois luxury but a revolutionary necessity. “Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently,” she wrote.

Spartacism

In 1918, Germany collapsed. Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the Spartacist League, then the German Communist Party. In January 1919, they attempted an insurrection in Berlin.

The insurrection failed. The Social Democratic government, allied with far-right Freikorps, suppressed the uprising. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested, tortured, murdered. Rosa’s body was thrown into a canal. She was 47.

Her assassination marked the German left for decades. If Luxemburg had lived, would history have been different? Could she have counterbalanced the rise of Stalinism, proposed another path? We’ll never know.

What These Stories Teach Us

The Revolutionary’s Tragedy

All these revolutionaries shared a conviction: the world is unjust, and it must be radically changed. All were ready to die for this conviction - and to kill. That’s where problems begin.

For revolutionary violence has its own logic. Once unleashed, it’s hard to stop. Enemies multiply, paranoia grows, terror sets in. Robespierre guillotined his friends. Lenin created the Cheka. Even Che Guevara, the romantic, supervised executions.

The revolutionary often begins by wanting to free the oppressed. He sometimes ends up becoming an oppressor himself. The revolution devours its children - but also, often, the peoples it claimed to liberate.

The Question of Means

Rosa Luxemburg asked the right question: can a free society be built by authoritarian means? Her answer was no. Democracy isn’t an obstacle to revolution, but its condition. A party that takes power by force will keep it by force.

History proved her right. Revolutions that suppressed democracy didn’t create freer societies, but tyrannies. Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia: the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century were born from revolutions that claimed to liberate humanity.

This doesn’t mean all radical change is impossible or bad. It means that means matter as much as ends. A better world cannot be built on mountains of corpses.

The Persistent Appeal of Revolution

Yet the revolutionary idea persists. Every generation produces young people convinced the system is rotten, everything must change, violence is sometimes necessary. Faces change - Robespierre, Lenin, Che - but the conviction remains.

That’s because injustice remains too. The world is indeed unjust. Billions live in poverty while a few accumulate obscene fortunes. Gradual reforms always seem too slow, too timid. The temptation of the revolutionary shortcut endures.

But the revolutionaries we’ve studied warn us. Their stories show that the shortcut often leads to a dead end - or a precipice. Changing the world is necessary; doing it through violence and authoritarianism generally produces the opposite of what was hoped.

Conclusion: Between Ideal and Reality

From Robespierre to Che Guevara, revolutionaries fascinate us because they dared. They refused the world’s injustice, risked their lives for their ideals, sometimes transformed history. Without them, we might still live under absolute monarchies or colonial empires.

But they also trouble us because they failed - or because their success spawned new horrors. The French Revolution gave birth to the Terror. The Russian revolution produced the gulag. Che’s guerrillas liberated no one.

Perhaps the lesson is that changing the world is harder than it seems. That unjust systems defend themselves, that revolutions go off track, that humans aren’t as malleable as ideologies suppose. That politics is the art of the possible, not the desirable.

Or perhaps the lesson is different. Perhaps these revolutionaries show us we must fight for justice - but differently. Through patient organizing, non-violent resistance, building alternatives. Gandhi and Martin Luther King changed the world without taking up arms.

What’s certain is that injustice continues to exist and people will continue wanting to fight it. Some will choose the revolutionary path, with its promises and dangers. Others will seek different ways.

History isn’t finished. It continues to be written - by all of us.