Certainly, the evidence of the last two weeks supports the theory. Within the space of only a few weeks, the Obama administration has launched an array of downright revolutionary, even Robespierrian, initiatives aimed at bringing Wall Street into line and filling it full of civic virtue—whether it likes it or not. The first shot across the bow came in mid-January, when Obama announced plans to levy a fee of 0.15 of a percentage point on banks with more than $50 billion in assets. The proceeds would be used to help cover what currently are expected to be about $117 billion of losses from the TARP plan.

Wall Street was furious. Survivors like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had already repaid their share of the TARP loans—with interest at such high rates that some bankers privately described as usurious. Now they were being asked to pick up the bill for the rest of their industry, as well. The first signs of Robespierre began to show in Obama's new tough line with the industry. The banks, he raged, owed their existence to the American taxpayer. "My determination…is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses," he thundered. Civic virtue, it seems, does not go hand in hand with a rapid rebound in profitability.

A week later, the real bombshell fell when Obama, like Robespierre before him, showed he had abandoned moderation and dialogue in favor of dramatic action. Unveiling the "Volcker Plan," the president declared this would be a way to remove the relentless self-dealing on Wall Street, by banning financial institutions from trading for their own accounts, getting too cozy with hedge funds, and administering their own private equity funds. If Wall Street couldn't recognize for itself that these risky activities were incompatible with the new definition of "civic virtue," the president would force them to.

Obama and Robespierre were correct in their basic diagnosis of the problem. Just as France's Ancien Régime would never willingly have abandoned their privileges, so Wall Street would never, of its own free will, contemplate a radical overhaul of its business model. But just as Robespierre became carried away by his zeal for the revolution, attacking even moderates in his quest for absolute virtue, so Obama is in danger of being swept away by populist zeal for change at any price and the general loathing of Wall Street.

The president had already charged the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to look into Wall Street's modus operandi and to report back by the end of the year with recommendations. Perhaps, in light of what Republicans are calling the "miracle in Massachusetts"—their seizure of the Senate seat held for decades by the late Edward Kennedy, a bastion of the left wing of the Democratic Party and one of Obama's earliest supporters—he couldn't afford to wait, just as Robespierre felt impelled to root out those he believed were traitors to the revolution in order to consolidate its gains. Robespierre's fervor doomed him. He met his fate on the same guillotine to which he had dispatched so many that he viewed as antirevolutionaries. Within decades, the Bourbons were back on the throne of France. So, too, Obama's handling of Wall Street may prove deeply flawed and even futile.

The Volcker Plan is, on the surface, an interesting idea. Named for Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman who has been an adviser to the president, it calls for the separation of some of Wall Street's riskiest and most self-serving business divisions from its core utility function of raising and allocating capital. That's appealing because these businesses are the ones that have collectively caused Wall Street to focus more on its own collective self-interest as a profit-making institution than on its broader role, that of serving the economy. Alas, Obama's solution will address the real problem as ineffectively as the whacking off of heads of tailors and hairdressers did in Robespierre's efforts to protect his cherished revolution.

But the Volcker plan doesn't address some of the core issues and leaves too many bolt holes. If Goldman Sachs, for instance, decides it doesn't want to comply with these new edicts, it could simply decide to walk away from being a bank. True, doing so would cost it cheap financing and a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval that comes along with oversight by banking regulators, but faced with losing a large chunk of its profits, can anyone imagine that Goldman and others wouldn't do just that?

At the same time, the Volcker plan doesn't address the real risks to the financial system: that of institutions that are, as the all-too-familiar phrase has it, too big to fail. If risk taking simply shifts to nonbank institutions like hedge funds or former banks that have opted out of the banking system, there is nothing in the plan to guard against what could happen next. The administration, one securities lawyer argues, is going at the problem backwards. "The issue is one of coming to grips with systemic importance and finding a way to regulate all institutions—banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, or whatever they might be—on that basis, not punishing a class of institutions because they happen to grab the headlines with their big profits and bonuses."

Robespierre, with his draconian actions, probably created more antirevolutionary activity in the long run than he managed to curtail by sending those he saw as his opponents off in tumbrels to the guillotine. President Obama might want to heed the lessons of the past if his real interest is in lasting and effective reform rather than a short-lived populist revolution.