Agreed; equating mental illness with evil is about on the same level with equating unattractiveness with evil (unsurprisingly, the two often show up together).
Though I find the whole concept of Robespierre suffering from a mental illness somewhat baffling. Most other "theories," regarding Robespierre, however crazy, can be traced back to *something* even if that something is just a Thermidorian pamphlet. But I don't even know where this one came from - not only is there, as far as I can tell, absolutely no evidence for it, there don't even seem to have been rumors to that effect in Thermidorian propaganda or the memoirs of people who lived through the Revolution or anything like that.
Maybe they just extrapolated it from those ridiculous psychoanalyses that attribute all of Robespierre's thoughts and actions to his having lost his parents at a young age (as if this were particularly rare in the 18th century), or perhaps from people like Keith Baker's pathologizing of the Revolution in general, but it still doesn't make any sense to me.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-11-07 12:29 am (UTC)Though I find the whole concept of Robespierre suffering from a mental illness somewhat baffling. Most other "theories," regarding Robespierre, however crazy, can be traced back to *something* even if that something is just a Thermidorian pamphlet. But I don't even know where this one came from - not only is there, as far as I can tell, absolutely no evidence for it, there don't even seem to have been rumors to that effect in Thermidorian propaganda or the memoirs of people who lived through the Revolution or anything like that.
Maybe they just extrapolated it from those ridiculous psychoanalyses that attribute all of Robespierre's thoughts and actions to his having lost his parents at a young age (as if this were particularly rare in the 18th century), or perhaps from people like Keith Baker's pathologizing of the Revolution in general, but it still doesn't make any sense to me.