Welcome to 1789...

It's worse than idiotic, if Robespierre never actually said it (and as far as I'm aware, it's famously attributed to Danton) - he uses the words to sum up that the Terror as a sadistic, Robespierrist enterprise. I was looking up the references in 'Citizens' because someone online was praising Schama...his intro to Robespierre says 'these lessons in moral earnestness he learned from his lawyer father' - wtf? Was that before he disappeared? On the next page, he says Robespierre was a provincial nobody, yet immediately describes him as attracting fan letters from Saint-Just in "1789" (he says the letter was "1789" again later in the book, too, and then goes on to describe Saint-Just's "black hair" in the same paragraph). On p815, he says Robespierre wrote to Danton on the death of his wife in Febrary 1794 just before his arrest: even though Schama has already mentioned Danton's second marriage and new wife on p 809! (I've just noticed, flipping through the pages, the line "Miffed at being denied an execution, Fouquier-Tinville..." Miffed? Miffed is a schoolgirl word, dictionary definition 'petulant displeasure/a petty quarrel' - not a word a serious historian should be using to describe the life or death workings of a tribunal. God, he is awful!)