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The popular image of Robespierre is that of a kind of Elephant Man inverted: while the latter had a terribly deformed body hiding a gentle and intelligent soul, Robespierre was a kind and polite person hiding ice-cold cruel determination signaled by his green eyes. As such, Robespierre serves perfectly today's anti-totalitarian liberals who no longer need to portray him as a cruel monster with a sneering evil smile, as it was the case by the 19th century reactionaries: everyone is ready to recognize his moral integrity and full devotion to the revolutionary Cause, since his very purity is the problem, the cause of all trouble, as is signalled by the title of the last biography of Robespierre, Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity.<ref>Ruth Scurr, ''Fatal Purity'', London: Chatto & Windus 2006.</ref> The titles of some of the reviews of the book are indicative: "Terror wears a sea-green coat," "The good terrorist," "Virtue's demon executioner," and, outdoing them all, Graham Robb's "Sea-green, mad as a fish" (in Telegraph, May 6 2006). And, so that no one misses the point, Antonia Fraser, in her review, draws "a chilling lesson for us today": Robespierre was personally honest and sincere, but "/t/he bloodlettings brought about by this 'sincere' man surely warn us that belief in your own righteousness to the exclusion of all else can be as dangerous as the more cynical motivation of a deliberate tyrant."<ref>Antonia Fraser, "Head of the revolution," ''The Times'', April 22 2006, Books, p. 9.</ref> Happy us who live under cynical public-opinion manipulators, not under the sincere Muslim fundamentalists ready to fully engage themselves in their projects... what better proof of the ethico-political misery of our epoch whose ultimate mobilizing motif is the mistrust of virtue! Should we not affirm against such opportunist realism the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as it was clear to Robespierre, a revolution "is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime," the faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre's very last speech on the 8 Thermidor 1994, the day before his arrest and execution: