Foreign observers often call France’s political model “Jacobin” — a byword for a strongly centralized state that imposes a uniformizing civic order from above. Yet, admiration for the real Jacobins of the revolutionary era is hardly unanimous in today’s France. In recent decades, historians like François Furet cast the Terror as the forerunner of modern totalitarianism, and on the bicentennial in 1989, Maximilien Robespierre’s name was largely absent. While the Republic pays lip service to “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the legacy of the Revolution and its different leaders remains controversial.

Not all political forces are similarly willing to reduce the Jacobins and their plebeian supporters to architects of bloodshed and division. An MP for the left-wing France Insoumise, Alexis Corbière is author of Jacobins! Les inventeurs de la République. A former high school history teacher, Corbière emphasizes the emancipatory promise of this era. His account also foregrounds figures like Jean-Baptiste Belley — a former slave who fought in the American and Haitian Revolutions before becoming the first black member of France’s National Assembly.

In an interview for Le Vent se Lève, Corbière spoke to Lenny Benbara, Vincent Ortiz, and Antoine Cargoet about the importance of the Revolution to French republican identity and why defending the Jacobins’ legacy remains a political battleground in the present.