This is an insightful segment from the powerful French film Danton (1983), by Polish director, Andrzej Wajda

The film is based on the short story, Danton’s Tod by the Romantic German playwright, Georg Buchner, and contrasts two of the leading figures of the French Revolution – Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. The two revolutionaries fall out when Danton, the man of the people, dissents from Robespierre’s post-revolutionary Reign of Terror.

Wajda made the film in France but used Polish actors for Robespierre and his flunkies to convey his contempt for the Communist government in Poland, which was at the time trying to break the popular movement, Solidarity, by imposing martial law on the land. The French actor, Georges Depardieu, is tremendous, especially in the scene before the Revolutionary tribunal that condemns him to die. But this scene too is powerful, if a little black and white, in its contrast of the sickly theorist and vain “idealist,” Robespierre, who claims to speak for “the people,” and the vital, if corrupt, man who is actually one of them.

The scene makes a fitting commentary on a certain malignant strand of liberalism in America today.