Robespierre Lord Of The Flies Critical Analysis

Freedom is a critical part of any society - without freedom citizens tend to become unhappy and no longer want to associate with their government. However the same goes for order; no order means anarchy and anarchy means that the people will want to disassociate with the community. In Lord of the Flies by William Golding, a group of boys crash land on an uninhabited island in the Pacific in the midst of war and must establish a functioning society based on what little they know about government from civilized life. A new society as had to be formed during the French Revolution, also by people with limited political experience. They based their new government off of Enlightenment ideas that would ensure them their natural rights: life, liberty,

Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the infamous French National Convention, believed that all inhabitants of a society should be free from monarchy, but his call for reform quickly became a reign of terror and 40,000 people were executed by the guillotine, a machine that chopped off people’s heads painlessly and instantaneously. There was very little order in Robespierre’s National Convention, and Robespierre was not a very strong government official, which meant that there was no one to keep people from wreaking havoc and any common sense that anyone had was lost amidst the chaos. This is also seen in Lord of the Flies when Jack and Ralph are arguing about which way of leadership is superior - Jack’s autocratic totalitarian way or Ralph’s direct democracy. The argument gets out of control and a giant boulder is released, hitting Piggy, one of the last boys remaining in Ralph’s group and causes the, “conch [to] explode into a thousand fragments and [cease] to exist [and] Piggy [...] [to travel] through the air [...] [fall] forty feet and [land] on his back” (181). Jack’s tribe varies so much from Ralph’s - Ralph being so focused on rescue and survival while Jack’s group of savages live a much more indulgent and free life. Their argument about Jack’s poor choices regarding his lack of order in the way that he leads causes the conch, a symbol of democracy and order, to be reduced to nothing more than “a thousand fragments”, representing the end of order and the prevalence of total freedom on the island. Jack’s overly free society clashing with Ralph’s orderly society also leads to the death of Piggy, the only reasonable child on the island, which shows that with the remarkable amount of freedom that Jack allows comes the loss of reason and the beginning of suffering. Robespierre and Jack are similar in that they both lead radical new civilizations and both allow for