More often than not, the first thing that pops into a person’s head when he or she hears the words “French Revolution” is the guillotine, that exsanguinary instrument that, two centuries later, still looms over the revolution’s legacy as it once did over its enemies. No man is more responsible, or culpable, if one prefers, for transforming the guillotine into the symbol of the French Revolution than Maximilien Robespierre, the revolutionary orator and Jacobin who became the de facto leader who oversaw la Grande Terreur. It is the lawyer from Arras, therefore, who was arguably the leading actor on the revolutionary stage. Robespierre made the guillotine; the guillotine made Robespierre. And both, in the popular mind, made the French Revolution.