In the spring of 1794, as the Terror claimed its victims, the revolutionary police uncovered a clandestine sect in Paris. It was led by Catherine Théot, an elderly seeress who called herself the "Mother of God" and announced the imminent coming of a regenerating messiah. For her followers, that messiah had a name: Maximilien Robespierre.
For the enemies of the Incorruptible it was an unhoped-for gift. Robespierre had just instituted the Cult of the Supreme Being, presiding over its festival like a high priest; the Théot affair made it possible to paint him as a fanatic who believed himself a prophetess's chosen one. Ridicule, in politics, kills: a few weeks later, on 9 Thermidor, the Convention outlawed him. On 28 July 1794 he went to the guillotine.
The prophecy that toppled a regime
Catherine Théot died in prison soon after, and historians still debate how much her cult truly weighed on Robespierre's fall. But the paradox remains carved in stone: in the age that had proclaimed the goddess Reason, it was a prophecy that supplied the weapon to bring down the most powerful man in France.