"Moments before Robespierre's death, the executioner noticed that his head would not fit into the guillotine with the bandages applied to his jaw wounds, so he brutally ripped them off; from Robespierre's ruined throat emerged a ghastly piercing scream, only cut short as the blade fell upon his neck. The status of this last scream is legendary: it gave rise to a whole panoply of interpretations, mostly along the lines of the terrifying inhuman screech of the parasitical evil split which signals its impotent protest when it is losing possession of its host human body - as if, at this final moment, Robespierre humanized himself, discarding the persona of revolutionary virtue embodied and emerging as a miserable scared human being.
