“I come to ask, not the gods, but legislators…to erase from the code of the French the blood laws that command judicial murders” (Robespierre, 6). These impassioned words, spoken by Maximilien Robespierre before France’s National Constituent Assembly on 22 June 1791, urged the abolition of the death penalty, which Robespierre referred to as barbaric, pointless, and an antithesis to justice.
