Living the revolutionary melodrama: Robespierre's sensibility and the construction of political commitment in the French revolution

Discussions of the “sentimentalism” of the French revolutionaries have risked oversimplifying the historical moment of sensibilité. Study of the career of Robespierre shows how such ideas formed a major structuring component of self-conception for him, while also inserting that self in a lived and shared narrative with profound emotional and political consequences.