The sea-green Incorruptible [Robespierre].

Carlyle’s epithet “the sea-green Incorruptible” is his sardonic nickname for Maximilien Robespierre, the revolutionary leader known in France as “l’Incorruptible.” Carlyle uses it in his narrative of the French Revolution to fix Robespierre in the reader’s imagination through a vivid physical detail—his complexion and appearance—while also invoking the moral-political persona Robespierre cultivated: austere virtue, personal probity, and ideological rigidity. The phrase belongs to Carlyle’s broader method in The French Revolution (1837), where he sketches principal actors with striking, often mocking, descriptive tags as the Revolution accelerates toward the Terror and Thermidor.

The phrase compresses Carlyle’s ambivalence about Robespierre into a single image. “Incorruptible” acknowledges the reputation for personal integrity and principled severity that made Robespierre formidable; “sea-green” undercuts it with an almost sickly, unnatural color, suggesting chilliness, pallor, and emotional sterility. Carlyle’s rhetoric implies that a politics of abstract virtue can become inhuman when detached from sympathy and practical judgment. By turning a moral title into a visual caricature, Carlyle also signals his skepticism toward self-proclaimed purity in revolutionary times: the pose of incorruptibility may coexist with, or even enable, coercion and bloodshed.