原文：By all accounts, Napoleon regarded the Robespierre brothers very highly. He was somewhat well-acquainted with Augustin, younger brother to Maximilien, whom he met through another mutual acquaintance - a fellow Corsican named Antoine Christophe Saliceti. Napoleon and Augustin met each other at Toulon, during that fateful siege in which Napoleon would show himself to be a highly capable commander. Augustin wrote to his brother, “I would add to the list of patriots the name of citizen Buonaparte, general in chief of the artillery, an officer of transcendent merit. He is a man who resisted Paoli’s caresses, and who [as a result] saw his property ravaged by this traitor.”
Being praised with such a strong language marked Napoleon early on, even more-so than the better-known Lazare Hoche, or one of his most capable marshals in later years, André Masséna.

Napoleon for the first few years of the Revolution was a dedicated Jacobin and a strong admirer of the elder Robespierre. During a famous dinner in February 1797 at Ancona in which Napoleon was in attendance, he eulogized Robespierre as “this man who was superior to all around him,” and “the creator of the only strong government France has had since the start of the Revolution!” He would often strongly criticize the Directory that followed Robespierre’s rule in such a vein.
He never met Maximilien. On 9th Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794), Robespierre and a few associates within the Committee of Public Safety, as well as other supporters from the Paris Commune, fell from power and were guillotined the next day. Soon after, Napoleon, having had the now unfortunate association with Augustin, was arrested for suspicion of treason, no doubt through the contrivance of Saliceti to save his own neck. He was released due to lack of evidence, but the event simply immortalized Robespierre for Napoleon. He never truly abandoned his own “jacobinism” and would at times display the same ruthless vengeance that Robespierre was once capable of. This was markedly true during the Iberian war, in which jacobin ideology played a large part in Napoleon’s geo-strategic thinking, especially as regards the Spanish Bourbons and the Catholic clergy that led the resistance against him.

Little could be doubted of the sincerity of this admiration, for he carried it on for much of the rest of his life, even up to his exile at St. Helena. He would often ruminate about them and urge his listeners not to judge so easily “a character who belongs to the domain of history. Despite what is commonly said against them, they are singular, and do not have despicable characters. Few men have left the mark that they have.”