What Caused The Shift In Robespierre's Death?

At first, Robespierre wasn’t that bad of a guy. Supporting the abolition of slavery and opposing the death penalty, he was an eloquent lawyer who just happened to have the bad luck to be born into Revolutionary France. His rise and fall from power can be analyzed in any number of ways, but what I am most curious about is what exactly caused the shift in Robespierre’s mental and emotional state which resulted in the brutal execution of 40,000 of his own citizens. Could he sense the shift? Was he helpless to stop his changing attitudes, so hypnotized by the lure of power that he was willing to do anything to keep it? Or did he know what was taking place, the horrors that he was committing, and did he continue to commit them for his own pleasure? Since he is not alive, killed by the very reign of terror he conceived, I think about it.
Someone who watches The Walking Dead and reads 1984 with equal enthusiasm has to be. Imagining fictional worlds filled with fictional people completing fictional actions often intrigues me. Perhaps it is merely a credit to the producers and writers of my favorite shows and books, but I have no trouble whatsoever imagining those worlds as they might exist in the real one we have. I think about how I would react in a zombie apocalypse (I’d hightail it to Canada), or what I would do if I found out that all of established society existed for the purpose of preventing the rise of the living standard for its citizens. My imagination runs up and down and all over the place to the point where sometimes I have to take a step back and wonder how I got where I am. And I love it. How else, I wonder, will the world be improved, than with the innovative and unique ideas of those who dare to dream? With realism, you think, with the viewpoint that some of the world’s problems cannot be fixed, that some are just too complex to be solved with the technology and ideas of today, if they can ever be solved at