Man is free at the moment he wishes to be

An archive of… stuff on 18th and 19th-century French History. Current obsession: the French Revolution

[amateurvoltaire]

Using poor Robespierre to get my point across: I love answering questions! It helps me focus my thoughts, and honestly, it’s just fun.

So, as Maximilien kindly mentioned, if you’ve got any questions about the French Revolution or the War in the Vendée, drop them in my ask box, and I’ll do my best to get back to you with an answer ASAP!

[amateurvoltaire]

This weekend my oldest gremlin had a birthday party because she is now almost six and has friends and a social life far more active than mine. The youngest gremlin was left at home to sulk without her older sister because, at three, she does not yet have a social life. So I loaded the youngest gremlin into the car and went somewhere she could find an enriching activity that lets me feel reasonably competent as a mother, without making me want to repeatedly bang my head against the nearest available surface because it is too loud and smells wrong: a museum.

Namely, La Boverie in Liège, for its tenth anniversary exhibition.

I had wanted to see the exhibition for a while because, instead of merely lining up famous paintings, it also looks at what makes a museum work: conservation, restoration, scientific imaging, loans, storage, exhibition design, the whole quiet bureaucracy of museum life.

And there, in the middle of this very modern lesson in museum work, while the small gremlin was pointing at a still life and screaming “bunny”, stood this fine gentleman: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Napoléon Bonaparte, Premier Consul, painted in 1804.

Napoleon in Liège

It is a big thing, almost absurdly so, and therefore entirely Napoleonic. Bonaparte is shown full-length, life-size, wrapped in very fetching red, one hand tucked into his waistcoat, the other resting on the document promising the reconstruction of Amercœur, the Liège suburb devastated during the wars of the 1790s. Behind him, through a window, appears the cathedral of Saint-Lambert, although by 1804 the cathedral was no longer standing. It had been destroyed after Liège’s Happy Revolution.

In August 1789, almost in step with Paris, the city rose against its prince-bishop, César-Constantin de Hoensbroeck, in what local memory rather optimistically called the Heureuse Révolution, the Happy Revolution. It was “happy” in the eighteenth-century sense, meaning fortunate or auspicious, not in the sense that people were having an unreasonable amount of fun rebelling. The movement forced the prince-bishop to flee, briefly opened the way to republican and constitutional experiments, and was crushed by imperial intervention in 1791. Yet the old ecclesiastical principality never quite recovered and kept changing hands between the Austrians and the French, depending on who was winning the French Revolutionary War at the time. The cathedral of Saint-Lambert had begun to be destroyed in 1794, when the city was in French hands.

Liège had been absorbed into revolutionary France in 1795 as part of the département de l’Ourthe. Bonaparte visited the city in August 1803, and the reconstruction of Amercœur became a useful scene of governmental benevolence. The suburb had been destroyed by Austrian troops during their retreat in 1794, and Napoleon’s 1803 decree made 300,000 francs available for reconstruction. The words on the paper in Ingres’s painting, Faubourg d’Amercœur rebâti, refer directly to that decree.

Bonaparte does not appear as the young general of Arcole, hair flying, sword drawn, soldiers following behind him with suicidal enthusiasm. He appears as a statesman. A lawgiver. A man who signs decrees, repairs suburbs, and reconciles churches. The sword is still there, of course. The sword is always there. But it is not the star of the performance. The document is.

Which makes sense. This painting was a gift in 1805 from Bonaparte himself to the city of Liège. It was a work for the citizens of Liège, for their eyes. The message was for them.

The cathedral in the background is even more eloquent. Saint-Lambert appears whole, but conveniently as a background piece. This is a symbolic nod to the Concordat of 1801, the agreement between Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII which restored public Catholic worship in France while keeping the Church firmly under state supervision. The Catholic religion was recognised as that of the great majority of French citizens, but the settlement gave the state enormous leverage over bishops, salaries, and ecclesiastical administration.

The message of the painting is clear. It does not say, “I have conquered Liège.” That would be vulgar. It says, “I have repaired Liège.” It does not say, “The Church submits.” That would be crude. It shows the cathedral framed by curtains, subordinated by scale, and made decorative. It does not say, “I am becoming a monarch.” It places Bonaparte in a red costume, beside a throne-like chair, with an ornamental sword, and lets the viewer draw their own conclusions.

Ingres was only twenty-three when he painted this. He had trained within the academic tradition and under the long shadow of Jacques-Louis David. Bonaparte did not sit for Ingres. The young painter relied on an earlier 1802 portrait by Antoine-Jean Gros. Gros’s Bonaparte, First Consul had already presented the general transformed into chief of state. Ingres takes some of those elements and reuses them in his own version, but gives Bonaparte a more stately, less lively look. To me, Ingres’s Bonaparte looks like he could use a few cups of coffee.

The scientific display beside the painting is one of the best parts of the exhibition. Infrared reflectography reveals the underdrawing, the decisions, the hesitations, and the second thoughts of the artist. Bonaparte was moved closer to the centre of the composition; the costume, especially the collar, was adjusted; the carpet once had star motifs; the window originally had no curtain.

As someone who dabbles in painting, I actually enjoyed reading the pigment analysis. The exhibition lists lead white, Naples yellow, chrome yellow, carbon black, Prussian blue, vermilion, and earth pigments based on iron and manganese oxides. It is a very rich palette that skews rather warm, which I presume was a conscious choice to make Bonaparte appear more approachable.

Personally, I am not a big fan of his expression. To me he looks a bit dead, and I think Ingres’s later paintings, including the one of Napoleon on his imperial throne, do a better job of conveying emotion in the face. But the details of the waistcoat, the room, and the background are gorgeous. I spent a good five minutes admiring the waistcoat and the throne before the little gremlin screamed “mama bunny” to show me another painting with a dead bunny (the joys of parenting...).

The painting now belongs to La Boverie’s collection and has been classified as a Trésor of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles since 2012. I think it is part of the regular collection, so it is worth a visit. Plus, the rest of the collection is quite good as well and very diverse: local artists, some Picasso, some Gauguin, some nice Impressionist work.

[amateurvoltaire]

The new June issue of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française (1)  is out, and it has one of the best articles I have read in a while: a study of the history and political use of the terms Robespierreism and Robespierreist, from the French Revolution to today.

Even better, it is a regards croisés (2) round table, not a standard essay. Several people give their views on what “Robespierreist” means.

And not just anyone. People who actually know the subject.

So this is not some random person online (me, for instance) telling you what “Robespierreist” is. It is a group of some of the best specialists on the question, all of whom have recent work on Robespierre:

Hervé Leuwers is a historian of the French Revolution and of the history of justice. He is associated with the University of Lille and has been president of the Société des études robespierristes. He wrote, in my opinion, the best recent biography of Robespierre.

Another favourite of mine, though mostly for his work on the Vendée (3), is Jean-Clément Martin. He is Professor Emeritus at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and former director of the Institut d’Histoire de la Révolution française. His biography of Robespierre also looks at the making of his mythology, and at the Thermidorian contribution to that useful little operation.

Peter McPhee is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne and one of the major English-language historians of modern France and the French Revolution. For anyone interested in Robespierre who cannot read French, I cannot recommend Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life enough.

Marisa Linton is Professor Emerita in History at Kingston University. Her work covers the French Revolution, eighteenth-century political culture, virtue, friendship, authenticity, conspiracy, and Jacobin politics. Her book Choosing Terror is one of the most humanising studies of the Jacobins, and a very good account of how revolutionary friendship, trust, fear, and factional suspicion shaped political choices.

Marc Belissa and Yannick Bosc are presented as specialists on the construction of the black legend of Robespierre. Marc Belissa is a French historian of the modern period, now maître de conférences émérite at Université Paris Nanterre. His work focuses on international relations, Enlightenment political culture, the French Revolution, republicanism, and representations of Europe in the eighteenth century. Yannick Bosc is maître de conférences in modern and Revolutionary history at the University of Rouen Normandie. His research deals with the French Revolution, republicanism, natural law, republican political economy, property, the commons, and historiography.

Marion Pouffary is a historian of modern and contemporary history, associated with the Centre d’histoire du XIXe siècle. Her thesis studied Robespierre’s image in political discourse from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century, and her book Robespierre, monstre ou héros ? examines the black and golden legends around him.

Last but not least, Nicolas Soulas organises and questions the exchange. He has worked on political, social, urban, family, and cultural history in the later early modern period and the French Revolution, with a particular interest in politicisation, border spaces, and the Payan family.

As I said, this is not really an article as such. It is closer to an interview, where seven specialists answer seven questions.

So… are you a robespierriste?

This is probably the least interesting point in the article for anyone who has read quite bit about the French Revolution, and a foundational one for anyone just starting to learn about Robespierre. What was robespierrisme? Who were the robespierristes?

Both the article and this random person on the internet (me) will give you the same unsatisfying answer: it depends who used the word, when, against whom, and for what purpose.

Robespierrisme was not, despite how it sounds, Robespierre’s political system. Robespierre had plenty of political beliefs (respect for rights, popular sovereignty, support for male universal suffrage, public virtue, suspicion of executive power, and so on)  which others certainly shared and defended. But these were not labelled robespierrisme during his lifetime. In fact, the word had a few rare polemical appearances before Thermidor (4), but it only really spread after Robespierre’s fall, when it became tied to Tallien’s “system of terror”.  From there, it is extended to the exceptional policies of Year II (5). Thirty years later, in the 1830s and 1840s, admirers of Robespierre give the word a positive meaning, treating it as a democratic or revolutionary inheritance.

The word robespierristes is even more loaded. From the summer of 1794, it was used to stigmatise people as supposed partisans of Robespierre, initially linked to the 108 supposed “accomplices” executed after him. The Thermidorian fanfiction imagines that Robespierre had placed his people ( the robespierristes) in strategic posts and built a dictatorship. 

That said, if you had walked down the street in May 1794, met the man, and told him you were a robespierriste, he would probably have looked at you with a very blank expression. Nobody openly called themselves robespierriste while Robespierre was alive. That self-identification appears much later, especially among nineteenth-century left-wing militants. Before Thermidor, the people later labelled robespierristes would have called themselves Montagnards (6), Jacobins (7), patriots, or republicans (8). Not robespierristes.

That said, Belissa and Bosc make a very good point in the article: although robespierrisme did not exist as a self-conscious doctrine, there was a shared Montagnard political culture. For them, this included democratic control of legislative and executive power, plus an economy regulated by the natural right to existence. In the early Directoire (9), robespierrisme could then come to mean the republicanism of Year II, especially for the left, once former Montagnards who accepted the new regime were cut off from that inheritance.

In the same vein, both McPhee and Leuwers accept that Robespierre had a recognisable republican political philosophy, and that this philosophy had supporters. So, for them, there is no stable Robespierrist doctrine, but there is a Robespierrean democratic orientation.

Jean-Clément Martin makes what is, in my opinion, perhaps the most interesting point, when he discusses robespierriste through the lens of historiographical discourse. As with the others, for him, robespierriste is born from a Thermidorian political operation, like terroriste. It is arbitrary and retrospective. While he accepts that there were people politically close to Robespierre, he rejects the idea that the word is useful as a neutral historical category. More than that, he argues that using it as a scientific category risks accepting Tallien’s (10)  framing of the Revolution.

Wait, what? Robespierre had supporters?

First, let’s clear up one thing that may surprise anyone who has only read biased accounts of Robespierre as a dictator: Robespierre had supporters, friends, people who liked him, people he liked in return. He had a whole network around him. They were not his minions.

Leuwers puts it best when he points out that Robespierre was never isolated. He had successive political companionships with Pétion, Buzot, Coroller, Dubois-Crancé, Billaud-Varenne, Desmoulins, and later the emerging Montagne. These alliances evolved, changed, and, in some cases, ruptured over time. Even by spring 1794, after the fall of Hébert and Danton, Robespierre still had many supporters among the Jacobins, the Paris municipality, the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the departments. Lists of “patriots” found among his papers include more than one hundred names, among them Herman, Dumas, Buchot, Payan, and Jullien. Martin and McPhee expand on this point by making clear that the pool of Robespierre’s supporters was fairly large and heterogeneous.

Linton gives a richer account of how personal connections and trust shaped his work within the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security (11). The most interesting point she makes is that ideology alone does not explain loyalty or rupture among the members of the Committee of Public Safety.

In short, she argues that people within the Committee could sometimes agree on certain issues while distrusting each other, and, conversely, they could disagree on things while still remaining friends. She cautions against equating political alignment with personal relationships. She uses Saint-Just and his undelivered speech of 9 Thermidor to show this. 

Saint-Just carefully avoids identifying himself as a political supporter of Robespierre, and chooses instead to defend him as a friend. She also points out that Saint-Just would not have been chosen to give the speech in the first place if the other members of the Committee of Public Safety had seen him as a “robespierriste”.She suggests that, in the final weeks, a gap had opened between Saint-Just and Robespierre and yet Saint-Just still tried to defend him. It was his decision to defend Robespierre without submitting the report to the committees that made him “robespierriste” in the eyes of Thermidor and posterity, not the other way around.

So what were the supporters called?

We have established that Robespierre’s supporters, during his lifetime, would not have called themselves robespierristes. And it makes sense. Doing so would have amounted to social suicide, even before Thermidor.

Belissa and Bosc explain that labels such as Rolandins, Brissotins, Dantonistes, Hébertistes, and later Robespierristes were usually terms used for enemies. In a political culture where “faction” was dishonourable, nobody wanted to define themselves as the client of one man.

Marisa Linton further stresses that being labelled someone’s follower was dangerous, because republican legitimacy was supposed to come from loyalty to the people and the public good, not from personal patronage. What actually existed around Robespierre, she argues, were networks of friendship, trust, and emotional confidence, rather than a disciplined ideological school.

There was a name for his supporters, but it was meant to mock them: Robespierrots. It was designed to ridicule Robespierre himself by associating him with the theatrical figure of Pierrot. (12)

In Year II, the more common terms for Robespierre and those close to his politics were Jacobins and Montagnards. McPhee says that Robespierre himself thought in terms of patriots, people, Jacobins, and Montagnards, and would probably have been horrified by robespierriste.

The weaponisation of “robespierriste”

As mentioned before, being part of a faction was bad, and it had already been used as an accusation. The Thermidorians did not invent the concept. What they did was apply their propaganda machine and turn “robespierriste” into a weapon of post-Thermidorian purification.

Martin points out that immediately after 9 Thermidor, the concept of “robespierriste” did not yet exist. For roughly a month, letters to the Convention still mixed praise and condemnation of Robespierre. This confusion came from slow circulation of information and censorship. Then the term spread through pamphlets and newspapers, especially alongside “terroriste”. It became a tool for constructing a supposed “faction robespierriste”, even appearing in a decree of 30 Frimaire Year III concerning Fouquier-Tinville, Pache, Bouchotte, and their alleged accomplices.

McPhee highlights how hundreds were arrested or judged as Robespierre’s supposed accomplices, sometimes on very thin evidence. Robespierre and his allies were quickly described as tyrants, conspirators against liberty, enemies of the Republic, or promoters of a “system of Robespierre”. The terms “robespierriste” and “terroriste” became interchangeable in local purges.

Both McPhee and Leuwers show that the label sat inside a broader vocabulary of conspiracy, dictatorship, and cruelty: “drinkers of blood”, “knights of the guillotine”, “knights of the cemetery”, “Cromwell”, “Mahomet”, “theocrat”, “murderous intriguer”. It went so far that, retrospectively and rather dishonestly, men who had fought each other in Year II, Danton, Hébert, Robespierre, Carrier, Fouquier-Tinville, and others, were grouped together as members of one murderous club.

Belissa and Bosc agree that “robespierrisme” and “jacobinisme” were at once counter-revolutionary inventions, Thermidorian political categories, and later historiographical categories. According to them, in Fructidor, “robespierrisme” and “robespierriste” emerge as elastic non-categories, whose boundaries expand or contract according to political need. Under Year III and the Directoire, almost any militant of Year II who had not joined the reaction could be labelled a creature of Robespierre, an agent of anarchy, or an enemy of property.

Were Babeuf, Buonarroti, and the neo-Jacobins robespierristes?

Kind of. Maybe. Partly, but with caveats.

Belissa and Bosc are quite clear on one point: Babeuf explicitly equated robespierrisme with democracy in 1796. Babeuf (13) and Buonarroti (14) rejected the Directoire’s constitution because they saw it as a confiscation of the people’s natural rights, and they rallied around the Constitution of 1793 instead. They were especially interested in Robespierre’s draft Declaration of Rights, because it placed property below the right to existence. Still, overlap is not identity. Babeuf and Robespierre did not have the same ideas, and they certainly did not have the same methods.

Marion Pouffary is careful about the Babeuf-Robespierre connection. For her, it is both political and memorial. Babeuf attacked Robespierre after Thermidor, then changed tone after leaving prison and began praising him. Buonarroti later gave this link a more solid shape in Conspiration pour l’Égalité, where he presented Robespierre as one of the “friends of equality”. This mattered a lot for the radical republican left under the July Monarchy (15) , and for the neo-Babouvists around 1840. But Pouffary warns that the link was doing political work. It was also later given scholarly backing by Mathiez (16), whose socialist commitments were not exactly irrelevant to how he read the past. Her conclusion is careful: yes, the connection exists, but as a political construction. Handle it accordingly.

Martin, as expected, is less accommodating. He reminds us that Babeuf attacked Robespierre after Thermidor, accusing him in connection with depopulationist violence in the Vendée. He also points out that the sans-culotte risings of 1795 demanded the Constitution of 1793 without Robespierre, and that many of the “last Montagnards” persecuted under the Directoire had actually opposed Robespierre in July 1794. For Martin, calling Babeuf robespierriste in 1796 was still often an accusation, not a clear political identity.

What does “robespierriste” mean for the historian?

So we know the Thermidorians were a tad bit biased. Fine. But what about the next two hundred years or so? Surely, with enough distance, people knew better.

Well. Not quite.

I have said this so many times on this blog that I am probably a broken record by now: no one is truly objective. Historians write through the lenses of their politics, environment, preferences, and beliefs. Even when modern historians acknowledge their biases and try to correct for them, sometimes even overcorrect, those biases still colour their analysis and conclusions to some extent. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians were not even especially shy about their political preferences. So the meaning of robespierriste, like the reputation of Robespierre himself, shifted depending on who was writing, and when.

But enough of me waxing poetic. Let’s go back to the experts.

Belissa and Bosc frame the historiographical story through moments when a positive memory of Robespierre returns to public debate. After 1830, radical republicanism and socialism built a golden legend to counter Thermidorian slander. Louis Blanc (17) and Ernest Hamel (18) later associate Robespierre with the concept of republican fraternity.

Unsurprisingly, Pouffary gives the most detailed account of this positive robespierriste memory. Under the July Monarchy, radical republicans disappointed by the conservative settlement used Robespierre as a tutelary figure for political equality, social equality, the right of insurrection, and a religion of fraternity. This produced the golden legend of Robespierre as a secular saint.

Yet Pouffary’s lexicometric (19) analysis shows something interesting: robespierrisme and robespierriste remained rare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century printed material, and were usually negative or neutral rather than positive names for a political current. So even these favourable authors rarely present Robespierre as the leader of a clear group. Linton argues that the stigma created by Thermidorian propaganda was so strong that even admirers of Robespierre found it difficult to claim him openly. A more sympathetic memory owed much to Élisabeth Le Bas and Charlotte Robespierre, though their memories were published late and mediated by men. Naturally.

After 1848, with Michelet (21), Quinet (22), and Aulard (23), much republican historiography distances itself from Robespierre and prefers Danton. Blanquists (24) attack the “Robespierre-priest”. Under the Front Populaire(25), Robespierre returns as a figure of republican danger and mobilisation, while the anti-totalitarian wave of the 1980s revives Thermidorian themes.

That said, McPhee traces the positive historiographical tradition from Ernest Hamel’s great nineteenth-century biography to Mathiez, Gérard Walter (26), Georges Lefebvre (27), Soboul (28), Vovelle (29), and Mazauric (30). In this tradition, Robespierre becomes the uncompromising defender of the principles of 1789 and of the Republic against counter-revolutionary Europe. Vovelle’s 1988 “Pourquoi sommes-nous encore robespierristes ?” consciously echoes Mathiez’s earlier “Pourquoi sommes-nous robespierristes ?”

What does robespierrisme mean today, politically and academically?

In short, the word survives more as a political reference or a historiographical (31) problem than as a living doctrine.

Belissa and Bosc argue that in contemporary France, La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (32) are among the few who openly claim some form of Robespierrist inheritance. In this case, the useful part of Robespierre is his republicanism, his democratic social vision, and his insistence that property must give way to the right to existence and the commons. 

McPhee makes a similar point. For parts of the French left, Robespierre still stands for social justice and civic virtue, especially the refusal to compromise democratic and social principles. But he also warns against pretending that today’s crises are the same as those of the late eighteenth century. They are not. 

Pouffary concludes that Robespierre’s political uses today resemble those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is invoked above all for equality, social justice, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of contesting representatives. During the gilets jaunes (33) movement, his memory could be linked to the right of insurrection. But she does not think there is still a militant robespierriste historiography in the old sense.

There is broad agreement among the historians that current scholarship is far from Hamel’s hagiography, or from the politically marked works of Mathiez and Walter. They are politically subjective, sometimes openly so, but they still circulate because they retain real scholarly value.

No present-day academic historian claims robespierrisme in the Mathiez sense. Mathiez used robespierriste as both a historical and political identity. For him, defending Robespierre meant defending a whole democratic-social tradition: popular sovereignty, equality, the Constitution of 1793 (34), the right to existence, and the revolutionary Republic. When he asked “Pourquoi sommes-nous robespierristes ?”, he was not being coy. He was openly claiming Robespierre as a political ancestor.

Recent scholarship, even when sympathetic, is less hagiographic and more attentive to context, complexity, and choice.

Martin makes a strong methodological point here. He rejects the idea that historians can simply separate the “real Robespierre” from later judgements about him, because the exceptional condemnation of Robespierre is itself part of his historical reality. For him, we cannot understand Robespierre without comparing him to contemporaries such as Brissot, Danton, Barère, Vadier, and others. Nor can we understand him without studying how the monster legend of August 1794 shaped every later reading of the Revolution. 

In conclusion

PSA: be careful who you annoy, because they may turn you and your friends into a dictatorship after your death.

Jokes aside, the article’s strongest conclusion is basically this: robespierrisme is less a stable doctrine than an evolving term. It tells us more about the people using it than about any fixed meaning of its own.

During Robespierre’s life, there were Montagnards, Jacobins, patriots, friendships, committees, patronage networks, shared principles, rivalries, and crises. After Thermidor, all of that was compressed into an accusation: Robespierre had supposedly led a faction and a system of Terror.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that accusation was rejected, reversed, or reworked by republicans, socialists, communists, anti-Jacobins, and historians. Today, the term can still point to a democratic-social republican inheritance. 

From a historian’s perspective, the label should be used carefully: it was created after the fact, shaped by political conflict, and never described a clearly organised doctrine or party.

Notes

(1) Annales historiques de la Révolution française. The leading scholarly journal on the French Revolution, published since 1924.

(2) Literally, “crossed gazes/perspectives”.

(3) He is the leading expert on the civil war in the Vendée.

(4) 9 Thermidor, or 27 July 1794 in the Gregorian calendar, was the day Robespierre was denounced and arrested. He was guillotined the next day.

(5) The Revolutionary Calendar, with Year II, Year III, Frimaire, Fructidor, and so on, was what happened when the revolutionaries scrapped the Christian calendar and started counting again from the founding of the Republic in 1792. As a rough guide: Year II is 1793–94, Year III is 1794–95. Frimaire falls in late autumn, Fructidor in late summer.

(6) The Montagnards, or the Montagne, “the Mountain”, were the most radical bloc in the revolutionary parliament, so called because they sat on the highest benches.

(7) The Jacobin Club was named after the former Dominican, locally “Jacobin”, convent in Paris where it met. It stood at the head of a nationwide network of affiliated clubs, which gave the radicals their organisation and reach. It was shut down soon after Thermidor.

(8) In this period, these were loaded political self-descriptions, not neutral words. A “patriot” meant a supporter of the Revolution; a “republican” meant someone committed to a France without a king.

(9) The government that ran France from 1795 to 1799.

(10) Jean-Lambert Tallien (1767–1820) was a Convention deputy who had himself presided over savage repression at Bordeaux, then turned on Robespierre, partly to save his own neck and that of his lover. He was a ringleader of 9 Thermidor, which is exactly why his self-serving talk of a “system of terror” deserves a healthy dose of scepticism.

(11) The Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security were the two committees that effectively governed France during Year II. The first handled war and high policy; the second ran internal policing and surveillance.

(12) Pierrot was the foolish, lovelorn clown of French pantomime.

(13) Gracchus Babeuf (1760–1797) was a radical egalitarian who took the Roman name “Gracchus” and demanded equality and forms of common ownership. His “Conspiracy of Equals” against the Directory failed, and he was executed, but his programme, transmitted by Buonarroti, made him a founding hero of later communism.

(14) Philippe Buonarroti (1761–1837) was an Italian revolutionary and Babeuf’s comrade. His memoir of the conspiracy, published in 1828, shaped revolutionary movements across nineteenth-century Europe.

(15) The Restoration (1814–1830) brought back the Bourbon monarchy. The July Monarchy (1830–1848) was a more liberal kingship under a different branch of the family, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans. Then 1848 brought yet another revolution and a short-lived republic, followed by the Empire of Napoleon III.

(16) Albert Mathiez (1874–1932) was a supporter of Robespierre who founded the Société des études robespierristes in 1907 and the journal that became the very one this article appears in. He spent his career rehabilitating Robespierre on rigorous archival grounds, while also breaking bitterly with his old teacher Aulard. As one does.

(17) Louis Blanc (1811–1882) was a socialist and a minister in the short-lived revolutionary government of 1848, later an exile in London. His twelve-volume history of the Revolution rehabilitated Robespierre as the prophet of a fraternal, social republic.

(18) Ernest Hamel (1826–1898) was a republican journalist who, in the 1860s, produced the first enormous, wholly admiring biography of Robespierre. It is effectively the founding monument of the “golden legend”.

(19) Lexicometric analysis is a computer-assisted method that counts and maps word frequencies across large bodies of text, to track how usage changes over time.

(21) Jules Michelet (1798–1874) was the great Romantic narrator of the Revolution, whose multi-volume Histoire de la Révolution française cast “the People” as the true hero of the story. He was not much of a fan of Robespierre, whom he portrayed as cold, sterile, and priest-like.

(22) Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) was a historian, philosopher, and republican politician. His La Révolution (1865) argued that the Terror was not only a crime, but a blunder that discredited the revolutionary cause. He also faulted the revolutionaries for failing to give France a new religion to match its new politics.

(23) Alphonse Aulard (1849–1928) was a historian who held the first university chair dedicated to the history of the Revolution, at the Sorbonne, and helped build the discipline’s “scientific”, document-based method. He was a partisan of Danton, and his own student Mathiez broke with him precisely on that point.

(24) Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was an insurrectionist whose followers were called “Blanquists”. He spent more than thirty years in prison for plotting armed risings, and embodied a rival, atheist, conspiratorial strand of the revolutionary left that had little use for Robespierre’s deism.

(25) The Popular Front, or Front populaire, was a coalition of socialists, communists, and radicals that won power in 1936. It is remembered above all for paid holidays and the forty-hour week.

(26) Gérard Walter (1896–1974) was a journalist-turned-historian who wrote a major two-volume life of Robespierre, as well as separate histories of the Jacobins, the Terror, and the coup of 9 Thermidor. He also edited the surviving records of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

(27) Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) was perhaps the most influential academic historian of the Revolution in the twentieth century, and a pioneer of “history from below”, meaning the study of peasants and crowds rather than only leaders. His work gave weight to a broadly sympathetic, socially minded reading of the First Republic.

(28) Albert Soboul (1914–1982) was a Marxist historian best known for his landmark study of the Parisian sans-culottes. He was the leading post-war figure of the classic social interpretation, which read the Revolution as a bourgeois revolution driven by class.

(29) Michel Vovelle (1933–2018) was a Marxist historian of collective “mentalities” who held the same Sorbonne chair, and served as the semi-official historical voice of the 1989 bicentenary, squaring off against the revisionists.

(30) Claude Mazauric (born 1932) was a Marxist historian in the Lefebvre-Soboul line, and editor of collections of Robespierre’s and Babeuf’s writings. He is remembered above all for his fierce public quarrel with François Furet in the 1970s, defending the social interpretation against the revisionist claim that the Revolution had been fundamentally misread.

(31) Historiography is the study of how history has been written: its changing interpretations, schools, and biases. In other words, not the events themselves, but what people have done with them afterwards.

(32) La France Insoumise is a left-wing party founded in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a veteran of the French left.

(33) The gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, were a leaderless protest movement that erupted in late 2018 over fuel taxes and the cost of living. They were named after the high-visibility vests French drivers are required to carry.

(34) The Constitution of 1793 was the most democratic charter of the era, approved by popular referendum, with universal male suffrage and a right of insurrection. It was suspended “until the peace” and never actually applied.

Source: Marc Belissa, Yannick Bosc, Hervé Leuwers, Marisa Linton, Jean-Clément Martin, Peter McPhee, Marion Pouffary, Nicolas Soulas, « Robespierrisme/robespierristes », Annales historiques de la Révolution française Nº424 (2/2026)

[amateurvoltaire]

Did I have a lot of work today? Of course I did.

Is this an art blog? Not really.

Do I have 19,990 unfinished drafts on various interesting topics (imo)? Naturally.

Is there an unfinished Bonchamps in the room judging me? Of course there is.

Did I spend 50 minutes sketching what I choose to believe is Lucille in charcoal because I randomly found an old charcoal set? Of course I did.

[amateurvoltaire]

Still a work in progress, but it is moving.

Anyway, since I started experimenting with paint earlier this year, I have had to get used to the idea that art has an “ugly phase”, and that the ugly phase can last for a while.

This is the ugly phase of my Bonchamps.

This portrait is basically a study, in my own style, of La Mort de Bonchamps by Thomas Degeorge, 1837. The original is a gigantic painting, which I had the opportunity to see at the Historial de Vendée two years ago. It is very impressive, and the photo really does not do it justice.

In the painting, the dying Bonchamps, surrounded by his most faithful soldiers, gives his second, Charles d’Autichamp, the order that will make him famous. He orders that the 5,000 republican soldiers who were to be executed before the defeated Vendéens crossed the Loire be spared. He tells d’Autichamp that this is the last order he will give, and that he would like it to be obeyed. They obey it.

I do have an issue with it. Not with its artistic merit. It is very much of its period, and the Bonchamps here is clearly inspired by the classical figure on the tomb by David d’Angers. My issue is simpler: Degeorge’s Bonchamps is too pretty. Too composed. Too noble.

Death is not pretty. And I feel making him look so graceful takes something away from the gesture itself.

At Cholet, on 17 October 1793, Bonchamps was shot in the abdomen. It was a fatal wound. It also meant a long, agonising death, lasting more or less a day. There were very few options for pain relief. Very little that could be done. (1)

The man was in agony. And in his agony, he ordered 5,000 prisoners spared.

The Bonchamps of the original painting looks a little too composed for my taste. Mine is still unfinished, but one of the things I want to work on is making his face look more like that of a dying man, without making it grotesque.

And the best part about painting (and, frankly, the useful lesson for someone who likes planning and has perfectionist habits) is that I have no idea how this is going to end up looking. I hope it will looks good.

Notes

(1) There is a post on this blog dedicated to Bonchamp's death and his impressive tomb by David d'Angers. Just take a look at the Bonchamps tag.

[amateurvoltaire]

I meant to show off that I’ve framed Robespierre and put him on my office wall, but my dog has commandeered the armchair, and I’m not about to move my fluffy tyrant.

So here …my dog, aesthetically fitting into the study decor 😅

[amateurvoltaire]

What about Lucile? How did Robespierre feel about Lucile’s arrest and execution?

Hi, thank you so much for the question!

Unfortunately, as with Camille’s execution, Robespierre left no record of his feelings. All we can do is speculate from his actions, and even then with caution, given that there were several overlapping factors that may have influenced him during that period, beyond Lucile’s execution alone.

What we do know for certain is that Robespierre was one of the eight committee members who signed Lucile’s arrest warrant on the eve of Camille’s execution. She was executed on 13 April 1794. At that point, Robespierre and the whole Committee of Public Safety were still dealing with the aftermath of the prison plot.

When Lucile’s trial began, her mother, Mme Duplessis, wrote to Robespierre in despair and begged him to save her daughter. She clearly seems to have thought he might be able, and willing, to intervene in the affair. Her letter, as quoted by Hervé Leuwers, reads:

"O Robespierre, if there is still time, save the most innocent of creatures, save the unfortunate wife of Camille from death! It is a mother in despair who appeals to you. My daughter is on the verge of succumbing under the weight of the most infamous of slanders. Today she is to be judged. Tell the judges to suspend their verdict, tell them to spare innocence, candour, and every virtue combined. […] You are the only person in the world to whom I can turn with confidence, because I know the greatness of your soul and because I am ready to succumb under the weight of misfortune."

Whether he received the letter or not, as far as I know, he made no attempt to save her. Why …is quite honestly, anyone’s guess. 

For one thing, there is a case to be made that Robespierre did save people implicated in the same plot. Albert Mathiez speculates that, while he allowed the executions of Lucile Desmoulins and others to proceed, he actively tried to save the former constituent Jacques Guillaume Thouret, who had also been implicated in the prison conspiracy. The main basis for this is that Robespierre’s signature was the only one missing from Thouret’s arrest warrant. Robespierre also shielded Madame Philippeaux from being drawn into her husband’s trial.

Hervé Leuwers has, in my opinion, a reasonable position when he suggests that Robespierre had been able to shield Mme Philippeaux because she had not yet come under suspicion. Lucile, by contrast, was already before the tribunal, and he had played a role in her arrest and in the accusatory report against her husband.

Take that as you wish. In my opinion, his actions can be interpreted in several different ways. 

After the fatal verdict that sent Lucile to the guillotine, Madame Duplessis was so distraught that she allegedly wrote an unsent letter to Robespierre, calling him a tiger with a human face and accusing him of murdering both Camille and his wife. 

In the aftermath of the trial and executions, his health seems to have deteriorated sharply. He continued to appear in public until 19 April, then withdrew completely and remained absent until 7 May. How much Lucile’s execution contributed to this mental strain is anyone’s guess.

Sorry that I cannot give a more conclusive answer, but the best I can say is that we do not really know.

Sources:

Hervé Leuwers, Camille et Lucile Desmoulins. Un rêve de république, Paris, Fayard, 2018

[amateurvoltaire]

WIP acrylic painting: Grâce aux prisonniers !

[amateurvoltaire]

If you’re new to this corner of the internet, and what you’ve mainly seen is the sensationalist side of French Revolution history, you probably picture Paris as a continuous procession of carts rolling toward the guillotine. And, by the same logic, you’re probably imagining the Revolutionary Tribunal as a kind of legalised abattoir: a place where everyone arrived as a suspect and left with their head in a basket.

Unfortunately, despite what some books, films, and even documentaries would have you think, the Tribunal was, for quite a long time, a fairly dull bureaucratic institution where you had a respectable chance of being told to go home.

And today, because I like numbers, I’m not going to spend much time getting lyrical about the intricacies of the Tribunal or its most important cases. I’m just going to show you the statistics of the cases it handled.

The Start in March

The Tribunal was created on 10 March 1793 while the Republic was pretty much a mess. France was fighting most of Europe and losing at its borders, and people at home were getting restless.

The idea was pushed by Georges Danton (1), who famously argued that the state needed to be terrible so the Parisian mobs would not have to be. In other words, he wanted a formal court to deal with traitors before the public decided to deal with them itself, with pitchforks, as it had during the September Massacres (2).

In its first year, the Tribunal was very... judicial.

In fact, in 1793, most people brought before the Tribunal were acquitted. The Tribunal handled its highest volume of cases in July 1793, with a total of 66. That same month also saw the highest number of acquittals: 47. Death sentences reached their high point in September 1793 at 17. Seventeen for the whole month. Not exactly an abattoir, is it?

The Great Centralisation

By the spring of 1794, the revolutionary government decided to shut down most of the special provincial courts. Revolutionary justice would now be dispensed, strictly, in Paris. Decrees passed in April and May ordered that suspects from across the Republic be sent directly to the capital.

This created a serious bottleneck.

But to secure convictions in high-profile political show trials, the government had already started stripping away legal protections in a fairly methodical way. During the trial of the Girondins (3) in October 1793, the Convention decreed that juries could simply stop deliberating after three days if their consciences had been sufficiently enlightened. When Danton used his oratorical skill to dominate his own trial (4), the Convention passed another decree allowing the court to silence and remove defendants who resisted or insulted the justice of the nation.

In other words, the protections given to suspects were already being worn away before what is so often presented as “the law of the Great Terror,” and as the final proof that Robespierre wanted to become a dictator and purge his enemies: the Law of 22 Prairial.

The Law of Prairial

First, let me state my bias plainly: I am not especially fond of the Law of Prairial. I think parts of it should have been thought through a good deal better (for example, the whole acquit-or-die arrangement... the military-court atmosphere... I understand why those things are there, but on moral grounds, I am not a fan). That said, I also do not really see it as some uniquely bloodthirsty innovation. If anything, it looks more like a continuation of what had already been happening for several months.

The law redefined several basic parts of the judicial process. It officially removed the old category of “suspects,” replacing it with a new one: “enemies of the people.” However, this new definition remained extremely broad, covering anyone accused of trying to destroy public liberty, deceive the people, protect traitors, spread defeatism, or obstruct food supplies.

To speed trials up, the law removed the right to defence counsel and allowed juries to convict on the basis of moral, verbal, or written proof, using their own common sense, sometimes without even hearing witnesses. Judges and juries were also limited to just two possible outcomes: full acquittal or death, with no possibility of appeal.

Now, if you are looking at your screen or phone and thinking, well, whoever wrote this must have been insane, bloodthirsty, or angling for dictatorship, allow me a moment.

I will not go into too much detail here, because I think the law deserves an article of its own, but in brief, Couthon (5) (because it was Couthon who wrote it) and Robespierre did not simply wake up one morning and say: “muahhahahahah, we shall now dismantle a fair justice system so we can kill whoever we want”.

The law was not written in a vacuum. It was not some legal novelty appearing from nowhere. In fact, for the deputies of the Convention, the actual substance of the Law of Prairial was not necessarily a shocking innovation, because it directly repeated provisions from the decree of 23 Ventôse. The Ventôse decrees (6) had already begun the process of centralising revolutionary justice by suppressing existing tribunals and setting up six central commissions to judge the enemies of the Revolution under the tight supervision of the government committees.

The Law of Prairial effectively completed that process, bringing an end to the administrative confusion of earlier laws and to the incoherence of having several overlapping courts.

In fact, the only “innovation” that scandalised members of the Convention was the provision allowing deputies to be sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal without prior parliamentary approval. That was the real panic. (7)

Given that Paris was now responsible for all the cases coming before the Revolutionary Tribunal, both the workload and the number of death sentences went up. In six weeks, the court handed down 1,376 death sentences. Prosecutors used prison informers to draft indictments grouping together multiple suspects who were often entirely unrelated. During the month of Messidor, 796 death sentences were pronounced.

That is a sharp increase. That is a great many deaths. That is something that needs to be put in context.

France had, at the time, 28 million people and was at war.

The Numbers in Context

After Robespierre’s death and the Thermidorian Reaction, the Revolutionary Tribunal survived for less than a year, until May 1795. In that span, between 1793 and 1795, the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal pronounced exactly 2,639 death sentences, while acquitting almost as many people: 2,357 individuals.

Again, more than 2,500 people is not a trivial number. But in a country of 28 million, in a national state of emergency, it is not exactly abattoir-level either.

In fact, when you look at the broader picture of the Terror across France as a whole, the total number of official death sentences handed down by all revolutionary courts and commissions was 16,594. Which means the Paris Tribunal accounted for only 16% of the official executions, while the vast majority, 84%, or 13,955 death sentences, took place in the provinces, especially in regions in the midst of civil war, like the Vendée (8).

If you widen the statistics to include incidental victims, such as those who died of disease in overcrowded prisons (usually estimated at between 10,000 and 12,000), and those summarily executed without any formal trial at all (another 10,000 to 12,000), the overall death toll of the Terror rises to somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people.

To put the Tribunal’s numbers in perspective, the 2,639 death sentences handed down in Paris over the course of the Terror is actually fewer than the 2,700 individuals condemned by French military courts during the First World War. Likewise, the total 16,594 official executions across all of France during the entire Reign of Terror is roughly equivalent to the 15,000 to 17,000 Communards executed in Paris in a single week in May 1871 (9)

Notes

(1) Georges Danton (1759–1794) was a major French revolutionary politician and orator, especially prominent in 1792–93. He was later tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal and executed in April 1794.

(2) The September Massacres were the killings of prisoners in Paris between 2 and 6 September 1792. They were carried out by crowds who feared invasion, counter-revolution, and plots inside the prisons.

(3) The Girondins were a loose group of republican deputies associated with provincial interests, economic liberalism, and distrust of Parisian radicalism. Their trial in October 1793 ended with the execution of leading members after a strongly political prosecution.

(4) Danton’s trial took place in late March and early April 1794 and ended with his execution on 5 April. It happened in the context of the Indulgents, who were the more moderate revolutionary faction associated with a wish to ease the measures of the revolutionary government.

(5) Georges Couthon (1755–1794) was a deputy, member of the Committee of Public Safety, and close ally of Robespierre.

(6) The Ventôse decrees were laws passed in February and March 1794, mainly associated with Saint-Just, providing for the confiscation of property from those classed as enemies of the Revolution and its redistribution to needy patriots.

(7) Tellingly, the very first piece of the law to be repealed immediately after Robespierre’s execution was the article allowing deputies to be arrested without a prior Assembly hearing. Self-preservation, it turns out, is a powerful legislative motivator.

(8) The Vendée War was a civil war in western France from 1793, fought between the revolutionary government and a largely Catholic and royalist insurgency. It was the bloodiest conflict of the Revolution. I talk a lot about it on this blog, so check out the "vendee war" tag if interested.

(9) In May 1871, Paris was in the final phase of the Paris Commune, an insurrection against the government based at Versailles. The month ended with the Bloody Week, when government troops retook the city and killed large numbers of Communards.

Sources Greer, Donald. The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935

Walter, Gérard, editor. Actes du tribunal révolutionnaire. Mercure de France.

[amateurvoltaire]

How did Robespierre feel about Camille's arrest and subsequent execution? This was his friend and I am very curious about how he felt during and especially afterwards. How did Camille feel about Robespierre during the trial though? I know he blamed Saint-Just, at least I believe so, and Lucille blames both Saint-Just and Robespierre.

First of all, thank you so much for the question, and sorry it took me forever to answer. Since this past week marked the trial and execution of the Indulgents, it felt like the right moment to do it.

As usual, I’m going to give a bit of context for anyone who is not very familiar with Desmoulins and Robespierre, so feel free to skip straight to the fourth section if you just want the actual answer. Yes, I know, I’m unbearably long-winded as usual. :-)

How close were Camille and Robespierre?

Before we look at the messy, tragic business of April 1794, it is worth establishing just how close these two men actually were.

They started out as scholarship boys at the prestigious Louis-le-Grand college in Paris. Robespierre was a couple of years older, but they became fast friends.(1) By the early years of the Revolution, they were fighting alongside one another. They were so politically aligned that in March 1791, Camille proudly declared in print that he and Robespierre were the “Jacobins of the Jacobins.” Camille frequently used his journal to praise his “dear college comrade,” famously calling him one of the “two Catos (2) of the Legislature.” He worshipped the man, praising his absolute incorruptibility and describing his speeches as “sublime.”

Their bond was not just political. When Camille married Lucile Duplessis on 29 December 1790, Robespierre was one of the official witnesses. Shortly afterwards, he wrote to tease Camille for getting too wrapped up in married life and neglecting politics:  Robespierre informed "Monsieur Camille" that Lucile's beautiful eyes were no excuse for ignoring his work on the national guards. That is not the tone of a distant acquaintance. He even bounced their infant son, Horace, on his knee.(3)

Robespierre also sometimes gave Camille feedback on his work before it went to print. Before the publication of the highly influential Histoire des Brissotins (4), for instance, he read the proofs and urged him to remove certain passages attacking the Committee of Public Safety, warning him not to lose sight of the real target. Camille listened.

The Fracture

So how does a friendship like that unravel? Very publicly.

Things began to go wrong in the winter of 1793-1794. Alongside Georges Danton, Desmoulins launched a campaign for moderation and clemency through his new journal, Le Vieux Cordelier. At first, Robespierre approved. He even read and approved the proofs of the second issue, which attacked the “exaggerated” revolutionaries driving the de-Christianising movement. For a brief moment, Le Vieux Cordelier was widely seen as reflecting the line of both Danton and Robespierre.

Then Camille published the third issue.

There, drawing on Tacitus (5), he sketched a thinly veiled and deeply unsettling parallel between revolutionary France and the paranoid despotism of imperial Rome. Robespierre was clearly alarmed. But even then, he was not yet ready to abandon his friend.

As the backlash mounted in early January 1794, Robespierre tried to contain the damage. The Jacobins (6) summoned Camille to explain himself, and Robespierre stepped in to calm the room. He described Desmoulins as an enfant étourdi, a spoiled or heedless child, well intentioned but led astray by bad company.

It was a patronising defence, but it was still a defence. Robespierre offered the club a compromise: the offending issues of the journal should be burned, but Camille himself should remain among the Jacobins.

It was, politically speaking, a lifeline. And Camille, demonstrating a truly spectacular lack of survival instinct, refused it.

Proud and unwilling to retreat, he answered Robespierre with a line from Rousseau: “Burning is no answer!” (7) The rebuke landed badly. Robespierre, stung and angered, warned that if Camille were anyone else, such writings would not have been treated so lightly.

What is striking, though, is that even after this very public humiliation, Robespierre still did not entirely let him go. On 8 January, he tried to prevent the Jacobins from reading and discussing yet another controversial issue of the journal. And when the club voted on 10 January to expel Desmoulins, Robespierre intervened at the last moment and secured his reinstatement.

The Downfall of the Indulgents

The public dressing-down did nothing to stop Camille. He kept publishing.

He remained a leading voice among the Indulgents, the faction arguing that, now that the Republic was winning its wars, the worst of the crisis had passed (8). Danton wanted, quite simply, to enjoy the Republic. He thought the time had come to negotiate peace, which in turn meant making France appear a little less ferociously revolutionary. The Indulgents called for a general amnesty and the mass release of suspects.

Robespierre thought all this dangerously premature. He argued that it was frivolous to treat a few military victories as proof that the danger had passed. He feared, not without reason, that opening the prisons would unleash a violent counter-revolutionary reaction and tear the young Republic apart.

He was also thoroughly unimpressed by Danton’s vision of a more relaxed Republic. Robespierre accused the Indulgents of treating the people like a herd to be exploited for their own luxury.

But his loudest attacks were aimed mainly at Danton. So why was Camille executed?

Because Robespierre was not a dictator.

For all the mythology that grew up around him, Maximilien did not possess absolute power over life and death. He was only one member of a committee of twelve, and Camille, with his viciously sharp pen, had managed to alienate a great many of them. Men like Barère, Billaud-Varenne, and Collot d’Herbois had every reason to fear what he might write if left at liberty. Saint-Just despised him, which did not help.

Camille, or rather his writings, was also becoming dangerous to the Revolutionary Government, because they publicly undermined both its justification and its methods at a time when Robespierre still believed severe measures were essential to save the Republic.

All this led to an arrest and trial that was, to put it mildly, procedurally dubious.

Danton and Desmoulins were deliberately bundled into a show trial alongside foreigners and corrupt financiers. The government wanted to compromise the political defendants by association, leaning heavily on the idea of a vast “Foreign Plot” (9).

The difficulty was that the trial was public. Danton rose to the occasion and used his formidable gifts as an orator to batter the prosecution and win the sympathy of the galleries. He demanded that sixteen members of the Convention be called as witnesses. The court officials, alarmed by the possibility of an acquittal, turned to the Committee of Public Safety.

To stop Danton from swaying public opinion any further, a rumour was spread that a prison uprising was being prepared (10), and the Convention passed a decree allowing any prisoner who “resisted or insulted” national justice to be silenced.

The tribunal used that decree to exclude the defendants from the proceedings. They were stripped of the right to defend themselves. Then, with the accused removed, the judge and prosecutor further manipulated the jury by secretly showing them a mysterious forged letter at the last moment.

The death sentence was delivered on the fourth day. The Indulgents were sent to the guillotine that same afternoon, on 5 April 1794.

Did Desmoulins blame Robespierre? 

So how did Camille actually feel about his arrest and impending execution? After that long detour, we finally come to your question.

You might expect him to have felt utterly betrayed by his old friend. You might imagine him cursing Robespierre to hell. And yes, the sense of betrayal was clearly there. In an unsent letter to Lucile, written from prison, he seems shocked: “But Robespierre, who signed the order for my dungeon! But the republic, after all I have done for it! That is the price I receive for so many virtues and sacrifices!”

He did blame Robespierre for his imprisonment. But he did not blame Robespierre alone. In fact, he seems to have clung, even then, to the hope that his old college friend might still intervene and save him.

From his cell, he told Lucile that he was writing to Maximilien, adding: “no doubt he will answer you.” Lucile herself shared that hope, drafting her own appeal to Robespierre and reminding him of their long closeness.

When Camille drafted notes for his defence, he did not direct a single reproach at Robespierre. Instead, he reserved all his anger at the other men on the Committee (11). Politically, he seems to have tried to align himself, at least in part, with Robespierre. Whether that reflected genuine belief, or a last attempt not to estrange the only man he thought might still save him, we cannot know.

Camille was not blind to the reality of his situation. He seems to have understood that his fall was not simply the work of one man, but the result of a broader political purge, helped along by his own choices. In his final letter, he wrote that he was dying for two very specific things: his sharp, mocking pen, and his steadfast friendship with Danton. He denounced his “assassins” and the cowardice of his colleagues in the Convention, who had abandoned him and Danton to slander. Right to the end, he seems to have seen himself as a man destroyed for his courage.

Did Robespierre feel guilty? 

While Camille left behind a clear paper trail from prison that allows us to glimpse his state of mind, Robespierre did not. There are no personal diaries, and no private letters in which he set down what he felt about the condemnation of two of his oldest political companions. If we want to understand his reaction, we are therefore forced to look at what he did, not at what he may have felt.

On 5 April 1794, the day Danton and Desmoulins went to the guillotine, Robespierre presented a public face of complete firmness. Nineteenth-century writers loved to dramatise the moment, imagining him pale and shaken in his room at the Duplay house, deeply affected by the sound of the carts carrying the condemned to execution (12). It is, for sure, an evocative image, but as far as I know, there is no real evidence for it.

What we do know is that he went to the Jacobin Club that very evening. There, he spoke, urged the members to remain vigilant, and insisted that the Republic could not relax its severe measures. In public, at least, he showed no sign of grief.

That said, it is possible that the whole episode took a heavy physical toll on him. Robespierre had a long history of falling ill during moments of extreme political strain. His punishing workload and austere way of life already left him physically fragile, prone to exhaustion and nervous collapse (13).

After the trial and executions, his health seems to have deteriorated sharply. He continued to appear in public for about ten days, then suddenly disappeared. By 19 April, he had withdrawn completely and would remain absent until 7 May.

When he returned, just after his thirty-sixth birthday, several contemporaries thought him changed. Paul Barras, who saw him during this period, described a man so pale and unnaturally still that he compared his face to marble and to the dead. Barras is hardly a neutral witness, and his testimony should be treated with caution, but the basic fact remains: Robespierre was away for three weeks because he was, apparently, seriously unwell.

Was this because of Camille’s loss? There is no way to know for certain, and we can only speculate. My educated guess (so do not take it as absolute truth) is that the physical decline was most likely due to an accumulation of factors (14) but the loss of a close friend certainly did not help.

Notes

(1) In Twelve Who Ruled, R. R. Palmer goes so far as to describe their dynamic like this: “Maximilien looked on Camille, who was two years his junior, almost as on a younger brother who must be protected from his own caprices.” This strikes me as a bit exaggerated, but it is safe to say they were exceptionally good friends.

(2) Cato was Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Younger), a Roman statesman famous for his fierce moral integrity, stoicism, and unwavering defence of the Roman Republic against Julius Caesar.

(3) In 1794, when Camille was in prison, Lucile drafted a heartbreaking, unfinished letter to Robespierre begging for her husband's life. She reminded him of their intimacy, recalling how he had joined their hands in marriage and bounced their son on his knees.

(4) Histoire des Brissotins was a highly influential and fiercely satirical pamphlet published by Camille Desmoulins in mid-1793. It ruthlessly attacked the Girondin faction (often called Brissotins after their leader, Jacques-Pierre Brissot), successfully destroying their public reputation and paving the way for their political purge and eventual execution.

(5) Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman historian who chronicled the reigns of the Roman emperors, heavily focusing on the corruption, paranoia, and tyranny of absolute power. By using Tacitus, Camille was not-so-subtly implying that the Committee of Public Safety had become the very despots they claimed to be fighting.

(6) The Jacobin Club was the most famous and influential political club of the French Revolution.

(7) Robespierre famously was very into Rousseau, so quoting Rousseau at him was a “burn” in modern terms.

(8) It is worth noting their motives were not exactly pure. The Indulgent campaign was heavily motivated by corruption and self-preservation. They were actively seeking to protect political allies implicated in massive financial scandals, such as the liquidation of the India Company.

(9) The "foreign plot" refers to a persistent, paranoid conspiracy theory that alleged that various domestic factions were secretly funded by hostile foreign power, primarily William Pitt's Britain, to deliberately destabilise and destroy the Republic from within.

(10) The gist of the "prison plot" was that inmates across Paris, coordinated by people on the outside like Lucile Desmoulins, were stockpiling weapons and plotting to break out, slaughter the government committees, and overthrow the Republic. It ends up being the basis for Lucile's arrest and execution.

(11) He directed his fury entirely at men like Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Bertrand Barère, and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois.

(12) Nineteenth-century historians like Jules Michelet and Romain Rolland largely invented these vivid, psychological scenes to add dramatic flair to the narrative. The execution carts carrying Camille and the other condemned men did pass in front of the Duplay residence on the rue Saint-Honoré, which is where Robespierre lived. However, the dramatic scene where Danton and Desmoulins are shown in the same cart, shouting insults, threats, or pleas at a silent Robespierre hiding behind closed shutters is a myth. There are no direct testimonies or immediate historical accounts that support these dramatic exchanges having actually happened

(13) His doctor, Joseph Souberbielle, regularly treated him for a bleeding varicose ulcer on his leg, but unfortunately did not investigate or manage the nature of his deeper, more systemic exhaustion.

(14) ...his incredible workload being a primary one. 

Sources 

Leuwers, Hervé. Camille et Lucile Desmoulins. Un rêve de république. Fayard, 2018.

Leuwers, Hervé. Robespierre. Fayard, 2014.

McPhee, Peter. "« Mes forces et ma santé ne peuvent suffire ». Crises politiques, crises médicales dans la vie de Maximilien Robespierre, 1790-1794." Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 371 (janvier-mars 2013): 137-152.

Palmer, R. R. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. Princeton University Press, 1941. First Princeton Classic Edition, with a new foreword by Isser Woloch, 2005

[nesiacha]

Survey: Which Woman of the French Revolution Do You Prefer Physically?

I was able to find descriptions of Manon Roland, Claire Lacombe, Elisabeth Le Bas, and Lucile Desmoulins. The description of Simone Evrard is thanks to @anotherhumaninthisworld.

Here are some women reputed either for being charming or very beautiful during the French Revolution (I will make another one about men of the french revolution next time). Which of these women would you prefer based on physical appearance?

Among the Enragés: Claire Lacombe

While imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie, her physical appearance is described as: “height of 5 feet 2 inches (168 cm). Brown hair, eyebrows, and eyes, medium nose, large mouth, round face and chin, plain forehead.” She is described as “pretty” by Pierre Joseph Roussel in Histoire secrète du tribunal révolutionnaire. Even Marc-Antoine Baudot and Choudieu, who often describe her pejoratively (and sometimes in a sexist manner), admit she is beautiful.

Among the Hébertists: Sophie Momoro

Sophie Momoro played the role of the Goddess of Reason, according to her contemporaries such as Herlaut, Avenel, and Jean-Clément Martin, suggesting she had a graceful appearance. A report cited in Lenôtre’s works says that “she was noted for the beauty of her figure, as well as for the freshness and radiance of her complexion”, while another source describes her as “graceful” and “Raphaelesque”. According to the Maitron website, Sophie Momoro was considered very beautiful.

Jean-Baptiste Laboureau, while she was imprisoned at Port-Libre, stated that she “is very mundane; passable features, terrible teeth, the voice of a fishwife, an awkward appearance, that’s what constitutes Madame Momoro.” However, Laboureau was a spy who testified against Momoro and may have been deliberately cruel, so his description is likely unreliable—especially since playing the Goddess of Reason required at least a minimally graceful physique.

Among the Montagnards after Thermidor: Anne-Angélique Doye (wife of Billaud-Varenne)

Conte describes her as: “Blonde, with a porcelain complexion, she radiates beauty and charm.” Bernard, an aide-de-camp of Victor Hugues, describes her as “a lady of moving beauty.”

Among the Babouvists: Sophie Lapierre

Robert Legrand, in his book Babeuf et ses compagnons de route, describes her as a "pretty woman with Venetian blond hair".

Among the “Maratists”: Simone Evrard

Simone Evrard, widow of Jean-Paul Marat, is described in a 1792 police report as: “Height: 1.62 m, brown hair and eyebrows, ordinary forehead, aquiline nose, brown eyes, large mouth, oval face.” In Marat et ses calomniateurs ou Réfutation de l’Histoire des Girondins de Lamartine (1847) by Constant Hilbe, her neighbor describes her as “very distinguished,” “very fine,” and “of angelic sweetness,” although Souberbielle claims she “was extremely plain and could never have had any good looks.”

Among the Robespierrists: Elisabeth Le Bas

According to Alphonse Esquiros, she had dark eyes. Even if it is uncertain that Hamel met her personally, he describes her as “one of the most charming blondes one could see.”

Among the Dantonist : Lucile Desmoulins

According to Hervé Leuwers’ book devoted to her and her husband, Camille et Lucile Desmoulins: un rêve de république, she is described as “height of five feet one and a half inches (166 cm). Brown hair, eyebrows, and eyes. Medium-sized nose and mouth. Round face and chin. Ordinary forehead. A mark above the chin on the right.” Le Journal Générale de la Cour et de la Ville in 1791 describes her as pretty, and the deputy of the Convention Pierre Paganel calls her beautiful. Amandine Rolland, Louis Marie Prudhomme, and Théodore de Lameth also describe her as beautiful. Maximilien Robespierre, in a letter he wrote to Camille Desmoulins on February 14, 1791, says that Lucile has “beautiful eyes” and is “charming,” as you can see here:Une lettre de Robespierre à Camille Desmoulins (14 février 1791) on JSTOR

Among the Girondins: Manon Roland

Although she describes herself in her memoirs as “of little beauty,” she notes that she had “a firm and graceful posture.” She describes her physical appearance when she was 14 in these terms:

”At fourteen, like today, I was about five pieds (162 cm) tall; my size had acquired all its growth; the leg well shaped, the foot well placed, the hips very raised, the chest broad, the shoulders effaced, the attitude firm and graceful, the walk rapid and light; this is what first hit the eye. There was nothing striking about my face, only great freshness, a lot of softness and expression. By detailing each of the features, one can ask oneself: Where is the beauty? Nothing is regular, everything pleases. The mouth is a little big; there are a thousand prettier ones; not one has a more tender and seductive smile. The eyes, on the contrary, are not very large, their iris is a grey-chestnut; but placed not very deep in the sockets, with an open, frank, lively and gentle gaze, crowned with brown eyebrows the same colour as the hair, and well defined, they vary in their expression, like the affectionate soul whose movements they paint; serious and proud, they sometimes surprise; but they caress much more, and always wakes you up. My nose was causing me some pain, I found it a little big at the tip; however, I considered that overall, and especially in profile, it did not spoil anything else. The broad, bare forehead, little covered at that age, supported by the very high orbit of the eye, and in the middle of which veins in Greek vanished at the slightest emotion, was far from the the insignificance that one finds on so many faces. As for the fairly upturned chin, it has precisely the characteristics that the physiognomies indicate for those of voluptuousness; when I bring them together with everything that is particular to me, I doubt that anyone was ever more made for it, and enjoyed it less. Bright rather than very white complexion, dazzling colors, frequently enhanced by the sudden redness of boiling blood, excited by the most sensitive nerves; the soft skin, the rounded arm, the pleasant hand, without being small, because its elongated and slender fingers announce skill and retain grace; fresh, tidy teeth; the plumpness of perfect health: such are the treasures that nature had given me.I have lost many, especially those who are plump and fresh; those who remain with me still hide, without me using any art, five to six of my years; and the very people who see me every day need me to tell them my age, to believe that I am over thirty-two or thirty-three. […]My portrait has been drawn several times, painted and engraved: none of these imitations gives the idea of ​​my person; it is difficult to grasp because I have more soul than face, more expression than features. […]Camille Desmoulins was right to be surprised that at my age, and with so little beauty, I had what he calls admirers ».

Helena Maria Williams describes her as “still handsome”, and Honoré Riouffe, who saw her at the Conciergerie prison, describes her as “a pretty woman” with “an elegant figure.”

Among the Thermidorians: Théresia Tallien

Described by her jailers during her incarceration in 1794: “Thérèse Cabarrus, femme Fontenay, (…) native of Madrid, Spain, without occupation, residing in Versailles, height 5 feet 15 inches, brown hair and eyebrows, ordinary forehead, brown eyes, medium nose, small mouth, round chin.” The Queen of the Directory was also known for her exceptional beauty.

Claire Lacombe

Sophie Momoro

Simone Evrard

Lucile Desmoulins

Elisabeth Le Bas

Manon Roland

Theresa Tallien

Which Woman of the french revolution do you prefer physically

Claire Lacombe

Sophie Momoro

Anne-Angélique Doye

Sophie Lapierre

Simone Evrard

Elisabeth Le Bas

Lucile Desmoulins

Manon Roland

Theresia Tallien

Voting ended onApr 13

[amateurvoltaire]

Item: The Bindle Rarity: ⏶ Common

What video game world would be your #1 travel destination?

Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.

Assassin’s Creed Unity , for obvious reasons 😅

[amateurvoltaire]

The death of Charette

29 March 1796, 230 years ago today, François-Athanase Charette de la Contrie was shot by firing squad in Nantes. His death, coming soon after the execution of Jean-Nicolas Stofflet in February, marked the definitive end of the Vendée War that had begun in 1793 and brought its main military phase to a close (1).

After the destruction of the main “Grand Army” during the Virée de Galerne (2) in late 1793, Charette and Stofflet had kept the rebellion going by carving out near-untouchable fiefdoms from which they launched continual ambushes. Their executions removed the last irreconcilable bands that had fought to defend the region, and to avenge it, against the Republic’s repression.

For all their complete military defeat, the near-simultaneous deaths of Charette and Stofflet bound them together in a common tragic fate that counter-revolutionaries would memorialize at length. In later “white” (royalist) historiography, their legends were fixed in place, with Charette especially recast as a flamboyant dandy and peerless master of guerrilla war, set against Stofflet’s reputation (3) as a harsh, brutal soldier.

Suffice it to say, as actual human beings, in life, both were more than those stereotypes.

More information about Charette and Stofflet's executions and what happed to their bodies here:

Post by @amateurvoltaire · 30 images

💬 4  🔁 11  ❤️ 62 · A Practical Guide to Tracking Down Vendéan Generals · It’s a popular saying that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its

Notes:

(1) The war would continue in other forms until 1832, though increasingly in ways, and for reasons, only loosely connected to 1793.

(2) The ill-fated crossing of the Loire into Brittany and Normandy by the Vendéan army and its dependants followed the crushing defeat at Cholet on 18 October 1793, after which approximately 90,000 people were dead.

(3) The fact that he was merely a gamekeeper, and that he was disliked by the lady who more or less fixed the narrative of the wars, obviously had nothing whatever to do with his subsequent reputation. /s

[amateurvoltaire]

My portrait of Robespierre is finished now, varnished and waiting for me to work out how to frame him. He turned out way better than I expected, and I am genuinely pleased with how he looks. No really. I can’t stop looking at him. 

Anyway, that is enough self-congratulation. This is not an art blog (at least not reliably, though I have been dabbling… as usual, I struggle to have one hobby at a time). This is a history blog, so I will turn the painting into a question: what did Robespierre actually look like? And, more importantly, how do we know how he looked like? 

What did Robespierre look like?

Modern biographers tend to agree that Maximilien Robespierre was not a physically imposing man. 

He was slight, thin, and of average or slightly below-average height. His complexion was pale, lightly marked by smallpox. His eyes were green. His eyesight was poor; he wore spectacles often, at times even two pairs to see at a distance. 

Some portraits show these pushed up on his forehead. He also used tinted lenses, blue or green, to protect his eyes  (as someone whose eyes water uncontrollably in any sort of sunlight, I can only empathise).

Observers frequently mentioned an involuntary nervous tic affecting his eyes and occasionally his mouth, along with a habit of constant blinking and an avoidance of direct eye contact. His voice, somewhat inconveniently for someone who spoke for a living, was not especially strong and did not carry well.

For someone cast as a champion of the people, his personal appearance was careful and precise, and firmly rooted in the fashions of the Ancien Régime (1). 

He avoided the fashions of the revolution, namely the sans-culotte (2) dress entirely, with no trousers, no carmagnole, no red cap (3). Instead, he remained powdered, neatly styled, and well dressed. He favoured culottes, white stockings, buckled shoes, and a sharply arranged white cravat or jabot (4). Portraits show him in the well-known striped suit, the one I painted, in black and blue. At the Festival of the Supreme Being (5), he appeared in a sky-blue coat, a white silk waistcoat embroidered with silver, and nankeen breeches.

How do we know what he looked like? 

You can reasonably ask: how do we know any of this? How do we know his appearance, his voice, his manner? The answer is not especially clever. Robespierre was not an unicorn. By which, I mean, he existed.  People saw him, heard him, dealt with him. Quite a lot of people, in fact, since he was a public figure and, for a time, a popular one.

Descriptions of his appearance fall into two broad categories: written accounts, often memoirs from contemporaries, and visual works produced during his lifetime.

You might assume that those who saw him would describe him most accurately. Unfortunately, that is not how history tends to work.

A small exercise (indulge me): think of your best friend. Fix their image clearly and try to describe them. Now imagine that, years later, a multitude of voices, confident, numerous, and seemingly well documented, insists that your friend became a bloodthirsty tyrant. Your description will shift. Either you drift toward the new narrative and begin to notice features that fit it, or you resist and shape your description against it. In short, people are never objective about contentious things.

So, with Robespierre, we have to separate what can be established from the “black legend” constructed by his Thermidorian (6) executioners and counter-revolutionary writers, among others, and from the “golden legend” assembled by sympathetic figures. 

None of these sources can be taken at face value, nor selectively mined for convenient anecdotes.  They should be read in context, and with a healthy dose of suspicion.

There is, however, another route, more direct at least on the surface: visual art. That is where I want to focus.

Robespierre has been depicted in visual art hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. To keep this manageable (and vaguely useful), I will not attempt an exhaustive catalogue. Instead, in the spirit of my own exercise with paint, I will focus on painted portraits and consider whether they plausibly represent him. Some were produced during his lifetime; in some cases, he actually sat for them. As a bonus, many are in colour

A brief disclaimer: I will not be touching post-Thermidor imagery here. That is a separate animal, and it can wait.

Robespierre in Arras (7)

According to the historian Jules Michelet (8), the earliest known portrait of Robespierre showed him as a young man, probably in connection with his time in the Rosati (9) literary society in Arras. In this image, once in the collection of M. de Saint-Albin, Robespierre is said to look very young, gentle, and rather bland. He is shown holding a rose in one hand, with the other resting on his heart, beneath the romantic motto: “Tout pour mon amie !” (“Everything for my beloved”). I would very much like to see this painting, but I could not find it, and from what I can tell neither could any of his biographers.

Lost Rosati romance aside, the first supposed oil portrait of Robespierre was painted and signed by Louis-Léopold Boilly (10) in Arras in 1783, when Robespierre was twenty-four. The man in the portrait is turned to the left but looking almost straight ahead. He wears a dark blue coat with large buttons, a white cravat with a falling lace knot, and a yellow waistcoat.

The twentieth-century historian Hippolyte Buffenoir claims that the painting remained in the Robespierre family for a long time before being bought by the Musée Carnavalet (11) in Paris. He also believes that is strong evidence of the fact that the painting indeed portrays Robespierre. At present, however, this portrait is more often thought to depict Robespierre’s brother Augustin.

Anyway, for a very long time people seemed convinced that Boilly really had painted the correct Robespierre, and that this was the picture now in Lille.

The painting shows a man in a blue late eighteenth-century coat sitting at a desk. He is looking toward the viewer, holding a snuffbox in his left hand while resting his other arm on a Louis XV armchair. A small dog stretches up toward his hand for attention, and a trunk sits in the background.

However, it is highly doubtful that this painting actually depicts Robespierre.

The identification of the sitter as Robespierre rests entirely on a 1928 article by Fernand Beaucamp. Beaucamp’s case was, to put it mildly, not overwhelming. It relied on little more than a vague physical resemblance, the sitter’s elegant hair and posture, the austerity of the room, and the presence of the trunk in the background, which he decided must symbolise Robespierre’s move to Paris. 

On this basis, the fashionable gentleman with the snuffbox and attentive dog was promoted into Maximilien Robespierre before Paris. Which is possible, I suppose, in the same loose sense that many things are possible. But on the evidence itself, the far more likely conclusion is that this is simply not him.

David and the deputy

If neither of Boilly’s portraits is in fact of him, then the first known image of Robespierre would date from the start of his political career in Paris. And, chronologically at least, his first depiction would not be a simple portrait but something much grander: a suitably dramatic appearance as part of an ensemble.

I am speaking, of course, of Jacques-Louis David’s (12) drawing of the Oath of the Tennis Court (13), shown at the Salon (14) in September 1791. Robespierre stands to the right of Jean-Sylvain Bailly (15). David gives him his right foot forward, chest thrust out, head tilted slightly back, eyes lifted toward the sky through the high windows. His hands are spread across his chest in a pose of admirable restraint. He looks like a man fully prepared to die for the Constitution.

That was not David’s only image of Robespierre. He also seems to have painted a full-length portrait of him sometime in 1791, though the original has disappeared, which is inconvenient. Because the painting itself is missing, it is known mainly through an engraving by an artist named Fischer.

Based on that engraving, David’s portrait showed Robespierre standing at the Jacobin Club (16), just about to take the floor, with his right hand raised in an oratorical gesture. In the shadowy background, citizens listen attentively. He is dressed in the official costume of a representative of the people, complete with a broad sash tied at the waist, a sword with a Phrygian cap on the hilt, a large white cravat, a long-tailed coat, and cuffed boots. His left hand rests on a table holding papers marked Droits de l’homme (17).

This is, of course, an engraving of a lost painting, so we have no real way of knowing how faithfully Fischer reproduced the original. 

Still, in his version Robespierre looks properly heroic, very much in keeping with the way David staged him in the Oath of the Tennis Court, if perhaps a little taller than reality seems to have allowed.

The Incorruptible 

At that same Salon in 1791, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (18) exhibited a pastel portrait of Robespierre. He appears elegantly dressed in the black clothes associated with deputies of the Third Estate (19). His face is young, smiling, at ease, and faintly pink. At the bottom of the work, the artist inscribed the title “The Incorruptible.”

Robespierre did in fact sit for this portrait. In a very courteous, rather charming letter of 13 February 1791, now kept in the British Museum, he accepts a sitting:

I have been told that the Graces wished to paint my portrait. I should count myself most fortunate to receive such a favour, since I so keenly appreciate its value. Yet, whether because an excess of difficulties and business, or because some jealous god, has so far prevented me from showing them all the eagerness I feel, my apologies must come before the homage I owe them. I therefore beg them kindly to accept the former, and to let me know on what days and at what hours I might offer them the latter.

The portrait was a major success at the 1791 Salon. Contemporary art critics praised its truthfulness and its drawing. Another artist, Joseph Boze, exhibited his own pastel of Robespierre at the same exhibition, but one critic remarked that Boze’s attempt failed beside Labille-Guiard’s, and advised the deputy to keep having his portrait done by women.

Unfortunately, Labille-Guiard’s original pastel is now lost, and historians do not know what became of it.

Because the original is lost, there has been considerable confusion in the art world, since the only thing that remains of it is this reproduction by Pierre Roch Vigneron, now in the collection of the Museum of Versailles, and at times attributed to Henri-Pierre Danloux.

The main argument critics make against Vigneron’s reproduction being taken for her painting is that her work was, in fact, a pastel. Given that, it is also doubtful whether the subject of the painting at Versailles is really Robespierre.

Robespierre by Boze

Joseph Boze (20) was a French portrait painter who worked at the court of Louis XVI and continued into the Revolution. He is generally credited with three portraits of Robespierre: one pastel and two drawings.

Boze showed a pastel portrait of Robespierre at the Salon des Tuileries in September 1791. It presents him in an oval frame, turned three-quarters, wearing a blue coat with a generous lace cravat. The background and the face are dominated by warm golden-brown tones.

I tend to like this pastel. The expression is thoughtful, almost pensive.

Contemporary critics were less receptive. They judged it inferior to the pastel shown by Madame Guyard at the same Salon. One remarked that it made Robespierre look “all yellow and all pale,” while another said Boze had “failed” the likeness and suggested he leave such portraits to women. The pastel is now kept at the Musée Lambinet in Versailles.

Boze is also associated with two drawings of Robespierre.

The first, noted by Hippolyte Buffenoir, was apparently given to the Cabinet des Estampes (21) by Marat’s sister, which led him to suppose it may once have belonged to Marat. It shows Robespierre in an oval medallion, facing forward against a dark ground, in a coat with broad lapels and a full white cravat. Usually dated to the time of the Constituent Assembly (22), it is valued for its youthful but severe expression and its steady gaze.

The second is a drawing in two pencils on pink paper, now at the Musée de Versailles. Donated by Ch. Vatel, a note on the reverse states that it came from Boze’s own collection and records a “striking” and “natural” likeness of the Incorruptible.

The man disguised as robespierre

At the Musée Carnavalet, there is a painting that long passed as a portrait of Robespierre (not the one you’re thinking of! We’ll get there). It came to the museum through the collection of Ernest Hamel.

It was a life-size oil, signed and dated 1792, and it showed a seated man with papers in his hands. The canvas also carried the signature of the artist, H. Lefèvre and an inscription identifying the sitter as “MAX. ROBESPIERRE, DÉPUTÉ DU DÉP DE PARIS (23)”. 

During cleaning in 1988, it became clear that the painting had been altered. The sitter’s features had been painted over to make him resemble Robespierre, and the identifying inscription had been added later as well. Those additions were not original.

So this painting of Robespierre is now the painting of a random 18th century guy. 

The Lost Gerard Painting

François Gérard (23) painted a full-length portrait of Robespierre that apparently served as the main decoration in the salon of the Duplay (25) family. Tragically, this painting was only preserved until 1815, when it was destroyed in a fire.It is unknown if any engravings were ever made that captured this specific full-length composition. That being said, fortunately, a second work by Gérard survives: a half-body sketch drawn from life during a session of the National Convention (26), which the artist enhanced with watercolor.

This sketch, which later belonged to the collection of Georges Duruy, is believed to have possibly served as a preparatory study for the destroyed full-length painting. It also became a highly influential image in the 20th century, as it was the primary portrait chosen to represent Robespierre in the widely used Malet-Isaac (27) school textbooks.

It also happens to be my favourite representation of Robespierre. 

Unlike most portraits which omit them, Gérard's sketch specifically depicts Robespierre with his signature small, round tinted glasses pushed up onto his forehead.

The bottom of the sketch features a specific handwritten note describing his colouring and attire: "Green eyes, pale complexion, green-striped nankin (28) coat, blue-striped white waistcoat, red-striped white cravat".

Did Fragonard paint Robespierre?

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (29), of The Swing fame, was a prolific eighteenth-century French painter whose late Rococo style is almost emblematic of the elegance of the pre-revolutionary French elite. Not exactly the most obvious choice for a portraitist of Robespierre.

According to Buffenoir, he had a masterful oil bust of Robespierre whose technique and expressive workmanship strongly recall Fragonard’s style. This portrait shows Robespierre facing forward but turned to the left, wearing his signature blue coat and a high cravat with a jabot. His face appears emaciated, meditative, and sad, which led him to think it was painted during a period of exhaustion shortly before his downfall on 9 Thermidor.

That being said, Buffenoir does not claim that the painting in his possession is by Fragonard, only that it resembles one. He is, however, quite sure that Fragonard did paint Robespierre in a round fresco medallion on the grand staircase of the Maison Malvilan in Grasse, the artist’s hometown. That portrait shows a bust of Robespierre in profile, with a strikingly youthful, smiling expression, along with a high white cravat and jabot.

The identity of the subject sparked a lively debate in the journal La Révolution française in 1900. The critic M. F. Rabbe attributed the work to Fragonard, arguing that the artist was struck by the youthful regularity of Robespierre’s features. By contrast, the playwright Victorien Sardou argued that while the fresco may have been painted by Fragonard, the subject was certainly not Robespierre.

The historian J. Guillaume defended the attribution by noting that Fragonard visited Grasse around 1790 or 1791, when Robespierre was already famous. Guillaume suggested that Fragonard likely painted the Incorruptible from memory, which neatly explains the unusually smiling and relaxed depiction. Buffenoir agreed with this view, concluding that until proven otherwise, the fresco is an authentic depiction of Robespierre.

As for me, my family lived near Grasse for almost ten years (they moved away five years ago), and I visited the Musée Fragonard more than once. I don’t recall ever seeing this portrait. It may well still be there; if so, I missed it.

The Marseille Portrait

A little-known possible portrait of Robespierre is an 18th-century oil on canvas now held at the Musée de Longchamp in Marseille, which acquired it in 1898. It is officially catalogued as a “Presumed portrait of Robespierre.” The work came from the Nadar (30) family.

Unlike the usual profile images of the Incorruptible, this one shows him almost full-face, shoulders turned slightly to the left against a muted green ground. The sitter has powdered hair and a pale complexion, with a faint flush at the cheekbones. He wears a greenish-grey coat with a high, open collar and broad lapels, and a white cravat edged in red, laid flat without knot or bow.

Paul Nadar, the donor’s son, said the painting had been in the family since his childhood, though how his father obtained it was unclear. He did recount one episode: sometime between 1868 and 1870, a maid employed by their landlord on the Boulevard des Capucines stole the painting. His father later recovered it after visiting her during an illness and finding the portrait in her room.

The painting was identified by the historian Joseph Letaconnoux, who based his claim on the expected features: pronounced cheekbones, flat cheeks, a forehead compressed at the temples, a slightly upturned nose with broad nostrils, a short, pointed chin, and deep-set eyes under heavy lids.

The artist is unknown. When the museum acquired the work, its director attributed it to the 19th-century Provençal painter Philippe Tanneur, but that has not held; neither style nor date align. Other suggestions include Fanny Boze, perhaps working in hopes of leniency for her imprisoned father, Joseph Boze, or the Arras painter Doncre.

The wig-less Robespierre by Bouteville

Another now-lost original portrait of Robespierre, painted by Bouteville, was a contemporary oil. It showed him as a bust in left profile, with a youthful face and a severe expression. Notably, he appears without a wig, or with one at least less heavily powdered than usual.

The painting itself is lost, or at least untraced. Buffenoir suggested it may still exist somewhere in England. What remains is an English engraving made from it in 1794 by an artist named Jones.

The surviving engraving by Jones takes the form of an oval medallion, 12.5 centimetres high and 10 centimetres wide, with a double framing line and a border hatched in horizontal strokes. Robespierre’s bust appears in left profile against a dotted black ground.

Beneath the frame is the signature “Jones Sculft.” Below that, a two-line English inscription reads: “M. Robbespierre , From an original Picture by Bouteville”.

Yet Another Versailles Portrait

There is another portrait at Versailles, better known, at least to me, as the one used on the cover of Hervé Leuwers’s 2014 biography, Robespierre.

The painting is an anonymous oil on canvas showing Robespierre in three-quarter view, dressed in a brown jacket set off by a fairly plain white cravat.

What makes this anonymous painting notable is its striking resemblance to a well-known contemporary engraving by Vérité. That engraving, titled Maximilien Marie Isidore Robespierre, député de la province d’Artois, was explicitly presented as having been drawn “from life”. It shows him with a somewhat full face, reflecting, as Buffenoir puts it, (I’m paraphrasing) a serious, virile gravity and a contained strength.

Because the two works are so close, historians such as Leuwers suggest that the painting and the engraving probably share a common history. The exact relationship, though, remains obscure. It is not clear which came first. So we do not know whether the anonymous painter used Vérité’s engraving as the model for the canvas, or whether the oil painting came first and served as the original source for the engraving.

The most famous of them all: Carnavalet Painting

We cannot talk about the imagery of Robespierre without talking about his most famous portrait: the one I used myself as the basis for my own rendition.

The anonymous oil painting at the Musée Carnavalet is undoubtedly the most famous and most widely reproduced image of Robespierre today, fixing the modern visual cliché of him as an elegant gentleman dressed in the style of the Ancien Régime. The portrait shows him in a three-quarter bust view, with a pleasant, faintly smiling face. He is carefully dressed in a striped nankeen coat, a green-and-white striped waistcoat, and a high white cravat with a large knot and jabot, notably without his signature round glasses.

It is an image that has since become iconic, and has appeared in all sorts of media, including, in my view, the very well-done Terreur et Vertu (31).

That said, for all its fame now, not much is known about when this portrait was painted. The Carnavalet dates it to “around 1790,” and that is about it. As far as I can tell, there is no solid evidence that this portrait was drawn from life. Even so, it is remarkably close to a lithograph that does seem to have been fairly faithful to Robespierre: the 1824 lithograph by Delpech (32), drawn, by Grevedon (33).

Like the painting, the lithograph shows Robespierre in a three-quarter bust view, turned to the right. He is not wearing the striped coat, though, but instead a plain dark coat over a lighter striped waistcoat with wide lapels. His neckwear is again a high white cravat tied in a large, bunched knot, along with a prominent shirt frill or jabot.

The Delpech lithograph carries a bit more historical weight because Robespierre’s sister strongly endorsed it. Charlotte Robespierre wrote in her memoirs that, despite the large number of portraits published of her brother, the one by Delpech was the most accurate and the closest likeness of all. When Charlotte died in 1834, the modest inventory of her belongings included a lithographed portrait of Maximilien, which Buffenoir confidently believed was this very Grevedon-Delpech print that she valued so highly.

So, in short, the Musée Carnavalet painting resembles the Delpech engraving, which was based on a drawing by Grevedon that his sister recognised... so it might be accurate-ish. Maybe. Who knows. Anyway, it is a great portrait.

Random Paintings

As I said, Robespierre was painted a great many times, and these are a few extra portrait paintings I could find, though not all of them could be properly identified from the sources I had. Quite a few were gathered by Hippolyte Buffenoir in a study from the 1910s, which does not seem to have been seriously revisited since, so I will leave the degree of Robespierre-ness to your judgement.

This is an original drawing done in three crayons in the manner of a pastel. It is slightly under life-size and shows Robespierre in right-facing profile. He wears a powdered wig with a queue tied in a bow, and a high-collared embroidered coat. Buffenoir notes that the eyes are rendered with particular mastery, capturing a concentrated inner life and an indomitable force of will. The artist is unknown, and the work was in Buffenoir’s own collection. 

This is an unsigned, life-size oil painting, which Buffenoir acquired after the death of its previous owner, the writer Arsène Houssaye. It shows Robespierre as a bust in profile facing right, though turned slightly toward the viewer. He wears a blue coat and a large white cravat with a puffed knot. The figure is placed against an oval background, itself set within a painted square frame. It was exhibited publicly at the Galerie Georges Petit in June 1893.

From the Gaston Calmann-Lévy collection (and previously in the Montesquieu family), this near life-size oil painting shows a three-quarter bust of Robespierre facing right. He wears a blue coat with large buttons, a prominent jabot, and a powdered wig against a pale grey background. The painting sits in an oval frame decorated with a ribbon bow. The face is full of life and serious, though without any severe stiffness. Because of its highly expressive and virile handling, Buffenoir firmly attributes it to Ducreux, who is known to have exhibited a portrait of Robespierre at the Salon of 1793.

This is an oil painting, which Buffenoir dates to late 1790 or early 1791. The composition is unusual: the body is turned completely in profile to the right, but the face looks directly back over the shoulder at the viewer. He gives off youth and sympathy, wearing a puce-coloured coat with wide lapels, a folded collar, and a high white cravat. The background is a light, watery grey-green, set off by a painted puce oval frame. On the back of the canvas is an old inscription summarising his life, noting that he was “attacked and defeated by a 10 Thermidor.”

This unpublished painting from Buffenoir’s collection is a very small oil on canvas (0.14 m wide by 0.19 m high). It shows Robespierre half-length, in profile facing right, caught in the lively posture of an orator about to begin. He wears a buttoned blue coat, wide lapels edged by the striped lapels of the waistcoat underneath, a high white cravat with a puffed knot, and a jabot. His head is tilted slightly back, and his grey-black eyes are wide open, rendering perfectly his fine and simple elegance.

Considered by Buffenoir one of his most historically precious artefacts, this small, anonymous painting shows Robespierre inside his actual modest room in the Duplay house, at 398 Rue Saint-Honoré. For Buffenoir, the exactness of the detail suggests the artist painted it on the spot. It shows the simple bed, the work table, portraits on the wall, and an open window looking onto the Duplay workshop with its planks of wood. A flowering potted plant sits on the sill. Though it is often described as showing him meditating “at” his desk, the painting in fact shows him standing, one hand resting on the table and the other supporting the right side of his face. He is dressed in his cornflower-blue coat, nankeen trousers, white stockings, buckled shoes, and lace jabot.

This one, I have no idea where it actually comes from, but the notice at the Bibliothèque nationale de France says it is the work of Jean Urbain Guérin and that it is a painting of Robespierre from 1794. Now, to me, it does not look like him at all. The clothing has some resemblance, yes, but I cannot imagine a man that fastidious allowing himself to be painted like this. If anything, given the date, I would assume it belongs to the wave of Thermidorian propaganda imagery that followed Robespierre’s death. But that is a problem for another day.

And because I cannot let that be the last image in this very long article about Robespierre’s portraits, here again, and in better detail, is the portrait of him I like best and cannot stop staring at... I mean, I'm super biased, but it's so much prettier than the previous one...

Notes

The Ancien Régime means the political and social order of pre-Revolutionary France, that is, the monarchy, the system of legally privileged estates, and the social hierarchy that existed before 1789. 

The sans-culottes were an urban political movement, especially strong in Paris, associated with militant popular radicalism during the Revolution. Their name literally means “without knee-breeches”, since they favoured long trousers rather than the silk breeches of the social elite; 

The carmagnole was a short jacket associated with Revolutionary activists, and the red Phrygian cap became a widely recognised emblem of liberty and popular Revolution. 

These are all items of late eighteenth-century dress. Culottes were knee-breeches; a cravat was a neckcloth tied round the throat; a jabot was the frilled linen or lace front at the shirt opening; and nankeen was a light, usually yellowish cotton cloth originally associated with Nanjing in China. 

The Festival of the Supreme Being was a civic-religious festival held in Paris on 8 June 1794, created under Robespierre’s influence as part of an attempt to promote a state-backed deistic civic morality. It became one of the most famous and controversial spectacles of the late Revolution

Thermidor was a month in the French Republican calendar. 9 Thermidor Year II corresponds to 27 July 1794, the day on which Robespierre was arrested in the National Convention; he was executed the next day.  When I am talking about Post-Thermidor , I am referring to the the political and cultural aftermath of his fall, when many hostile images and narratives about him were produced

Arras is the city in northern France where Robespierre was born and later trained and worked as a lawyer before the Revolution. It belonged to the historical province of Artois. 

Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was one of the great nineteenth-century historians of France and a hugely influential historian of the French Revolution.

The Rosati were a literary and convivial society founded near Arras in 1778, remembered for verse, sociability, and a mildly playful pastoral culture rather common during the period. 

Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845)  was a prolific French painter and draughtsman known for portraits and genre scenes. 

The Musée Carnavalet is the City of Paris museum devoted to the history of Paris. It has a substantial collection on the French Revolution.

Jacques-Louis David (1748 - 1825) was the most celebrated painter of the French Revolution and later of the Napoleonic period.

The Tennis Court Oath was the pledge made on 20 June 1789 by deputies who had been locked out of their usual meeting hall and moved instead to an indoor tennis court at Versailles, where they swore not to separate until France had a constitution. The episode became one of the foundational moments of the Revolution because it showed that sovereignty lay in the nation rather than solely in the monarch.

The Salon was the principal official art exhibition in Paris, organised under academic and state authority. In late eighteenth-century France, to show a portrait there was to present it to the widest and most influential public audience available, including critics and political observers. 

Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793) was an astronomer and statesman who presided over the assembly at the Tennis Court Oath. 

The Jacobin Club was the best-known and most politically influential club of the French Revolution. Founded in 1789, it evolved from a debating society of deputies into a nationwide political network, and by 1793 it had become closely associated with republican politics.

 Droits de l’homme refers to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, one of the Revolution’s foundational texts.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749-1803 )was a major French portraitist of the late eighteenth century and one of the most important women artists of her generation. 

The Third Estate was the legally defined estate that included everyone in the kingdom who was not clergy or nobility, and in 1789 its deputies became central to the opening phase of the Revolution. Deputies of the third estate would wear black clothing. 

Joseph Boze (1746-1826) was a famous portrait painter who worked under Louis XVI and continued through the Revolutionary years. 

The Cabinet des Estampes is the historic prints and photographs department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

The National Constituent Assembly was the assembly that ruled France from 1789 to 1791 while drafting the country’s first written constitution of the Revolution. Formed out of the National Assembly in July 1789, it belonged to the phase of the Revolution that sought to replace absolute monarchy with a constitutional one

This means “député du département de Paris”, that is, deputy for the department of Paris, the capacity in which Robespierre sat in the National Convention after his election in September 1792

François Gérard (1770-1837) was a French painter, later famous under Napoleon, who also worked during the Revolution. 

The Duplay family were Parisian carpenters and householders with whom Robespierre lodged for years at 398 rue Saint-Honoré.

The National Convention was the assembly that abolished the monarchy and governed France from September 1792 to October 1795. 

Malet-Isaac refers to the immensely influential French school history textbooks associated with Albert Malet and Jules Isaac.

Nankin or nankeen was a pale yellow or buff cotton cloth, originally imported from China and named after Nanjing, though the term was later also used for European imitations. In late eighteenth-century dress it was commonly used for light, fashionable garments such as breeches and coats.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) was one of the best-known painters of the late French Rococo, now especially famous for The Swing. Rococo refers to the ornate, elegant, playful style associated with much elite mid- and late eighteenth-century art.

The Nadars were a famous nineteenth-century French family of photographers and cultural figures, closely associated with a celebrated studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris.

La Terreur et la Vertu was a two-part French historical television drama directed by Stellio Lorenzi and first broadcast in 1964 as part of the series La caméra explore le temps. The first part is about Danton, the second about Robespierre. Go watch them. They're great!

François-Séraphin Delpech (1778-1825) was a French lithographer and publisher

Pierre Louis Grevedon (1776-1860) was a French painter, lithographer and illustrator

Sources:

Les Portraits de Robespierre (Suite) by Hippolyte Buffenoir. Published in the journal Annales révolutionnaires, T. 2, No. 1 in 1909.

Les Portraits de Robespierre (Suite et fin) by Hippolyte Buffenoir. Published in the journal Annales révolutionnaires, T. 2, No. 3 in 1909.

Les Portraits de Robespierre : étude iconographique et historique, souvenirs, documents, témoignages (Book) by Hippolyte Buffenoir. Published by Ernest Leroux in 1910.

Un portrait inconnu de Robespierre by Joseph Letaconnoux. Published in the journal Annales révolutionnaires, T. 4, No. 2 in 1911.

Un portrait inconnu de Robespierre au musée de Lille by Fernand Beaucamp. Published in the journal Revue du Nord, tome 14, n° 53 in 1928.

Images de Robespierre by Hervé Leuwers. Published in the journal Humanisme, N° 325 in 2019.

 Robespierre by Hervé Leuwers, 2014

[amateurvoltaire]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Maurice d’Elbée is a bit like the middle child of the Vendéan generals. He is not a peasant leader people half-believe is magical, like Cathelineau, and he is not out there climbing walls with his bare hands like Monsieur de La Rochejaquelein (yes, we know, you are absurdly brave and athletic, Henri). He is not a gruff gamekeeper building his own woodland kingdom like Stofflet, or “the king of the Vendée” like Charette. He does not have Bonchamps’s grand tomb, and he was not married to the woman who would end up shaping the story of the war, like Lescure.

But he was a genuinely remarkable man who had a fair amount of military experience, took command after Cathelineau died, managed to win some of the most striking victories in the Vendée, showed restraint and mercy toward his enemies, and died with dignity while defending an innocent man. And for the past month or so I have been working on an annotated translation of a biography of him by Ferdinand Charpentier.

So today, on the forgotten commander-in-chief’s birthday, I would like to share the first chapter of that book, which, even if it is not 100% historically accurate, does capture the spirit of the man rather well and, more importantly, shows that not everyone in the Vendée was a crazed royalist pining for the Ancien Régime. Some were. D’Elbée was not. He was, in his own way, a democrat.

So, happy birthday to the man known as General Providence!

LETTER FROM M. EDMOND BIRÉ

Nantes, 4 February 1905

Monsieur l’Abbé,

I have just finished reading the advance sheets of your book, and I hasten to tell you the impressions it has left upon me.

D’Elbée, whom you have so justly chosen for your hero, is one of the noblest figures of the Vendéan epic, of that epic greater than the Iliad: nescio quid majus Iliade(1). In History, the Crusades alone may be compared to that war of the Vendée, wherein entire populations, men, children, women, old men, were seen advancing to every immolation, sacrificing their lives and their goods, rushing to death and to tortures, with no motive save devotion to their beliefs, to their Catholic and Royalist faith.

If ever there was a popular movement, it was that one. Far from having drawn the peasants after them, the nobles were drawn by the peasants. It was not the leaders, as commonly happens, who enlisted the soldiers; on the contrary, it was the soldiers who enlisted the leaders. The signal of resistance, of struggle, and of glory did not descend from the château to the cottage; it rose from the cottage to the château.

It was thus for all those gentlemen, former officers, who distinguished themselves in the war of the Vendée, and in particular for Bonchamps(2) and for Henri de La Rochejaquelein(3) for Lescure(4) and for Charette(5). I knew, in my childhood, at Luçon, one of the bravest officers of the Army of the Centre(6), the Chevalier de Chantreau: he was in the courtyard of his modest country house, playing a game of bowls(7) when the peasants of the surrounding district came to beg him to place himself at their head. He did everything in his power to dissuade them from taking up arms, and yielded to their entreaties only after having convinced himself that their resolution was unshakable.

Likewise, when, on 13 March 1793, the young men of Beaupréau and of the neighbouring parishes came to implore d’Elbée to be their leader, he replied:

“My friends, as an officer of the King, I know what is required of me. I shall die in his defence; but I will lead no man into my devotion. My duties are not yours. Believe me: remain in your farms and in your homes.”

It was only on the following day, when the peasants returned in even greater numbers than the day before, that he consented to depart with them.

Far from being a fiery champion of the ancien régime(8), d’Elbée, like so many gentlemen of the old monarchy, had at the outset embarked with ardour in the reforming movement, and went so far as to approve the Civil Constitution of the Clergy(9). He was not long, however, in recognising his error; he immediately resigned the municipal functions with which the confidence of the inhabitants had invested him, and, withdrawn to his house of La Loge, he gave shelter there to the non-juring priests. Thankfully, religion reclaimed him from the Revolution, which was henceforth to have no braver adversary.

Companion and friend of Cathelineau, d’Elbée was called upon to succeed him, on 19 July 1793, as Generalissimo(10) of the Catholic and Royal Armies. He was to command them for no more than three months, from 19 July to 17 October 1793. Yet those three months were enough to win him immortal renown, to secure, against the ablest generals of the Republic, Marceau(11), Kléber(12), Aubert-Dubayet(13), the resounding victories of Chantonnay, Coron, and Torfou. On 17 October he was defeated at Cholet; but his conqueror, Kléber, paid him tribute in his Mémoires in these terms: “The enemy has lost his best leaders; d’Elbée and Bonchamps are mortally wounded; never have they delivered a battle so obstinate, so well ordered.”

On that day d’Elbée had received fourteen wounds, one of them through the chest. Unfit to take the field for many months, and conscious that he could now serve only as a burden to the army, he determined to withdraw until the day when he might again bear arms.

Charette had just taken the island of Noirmoutier and it was here that the Generalissimo was taken. On 4 January 1794, while he was still far from healed of his wounds, the island fell into the power of the Republicans. On 8 January, borne in his armchair to the place of execution, clad in the green uniform of the Vendéan chiefs and wearing his white-plumed hat, he was executed by firing squad, together with his brother-in-law M. Duhoux d’Hauterive, his friend M. de Boisy, and a Republican officer, M. Wieland, whom the Representatives of the People(14), Bourbotte(15) and Prieur(16), had added to the group “that the reckoning might be even.” on both his sides(17). The death of the Generalissimo was that of a hero and of a saint.

By your complete and exact narration of the facts you have clearly demonstrated, Monsieur l’Abbé, that d’Elbée, as a soldier and as a commander, was worthy of the rank and of the charge to which his comrades in arms had raised him. Even his adversaries, those whose testimony carries weight, have acknowledged his lofty and exceptional merit. It is General Hoche(18) who declares, in the celebrated proclamation by which he calls the inhabitants of the countryside to peace: “Who are your leaders? Have they the talents of d’Elbée, the gentleness of Bonchamps, the courage of Stofflet, the energy, the resource, and the local knowledge of Charette?”(19)

After Kléber, it is General Turreau(20) who writes in his Mémoires: “A consummate soldier, he had trained the Vendéans in the mode of warfare best adapted to the country and to the character of that people.” It is Jomini(21), the great military historian, who, in his Guerres de la Révolution, singles out “the most remarkable expeditions directed by the Generalissimo d’Elbée.”

His humanity equaled his courage and his talents. Faced with adversaries who multiplied massacres, pillage, and arson everywhere, he refused all reprisals. You show him more than once calming the fury of his own men. Take Chemillé, for example, on 11 April 1793: before soldiers thirsting for vengeance and shouting for death, he rose and commanded, “Soldiers, on your knees. Let us recite the Pater.(22)”

When he reached the words, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he turned to the still-kneeling men and said, “You ask God for forgiveness, yet you will not forgive. Who will take vengeance now?” And they all, weeping with remorse, fell at the feet of the Christian hero and begged his pardon.

What men they were. What a war, to have witnessed such scenes. And how well inspired you were, Monsieur l’Abbé, to make them live again with such communicative emotion.

In the end, D’Elbée was a modest man, and it is above all for that reason that it was good, necessary, and just to restore him, as you have done, to full light, in a setting worthy of him. Was it not Bossuet(23) who said: “There is nothing greater than a great man who is modest?”

Once again, I cannot congratulate you enough on having chosen so fine a subject and so noble a hero. As an old and faithful Vendéan, I allow myself to add to my congratulations my heartfelt thanks.

Please accept, Monsieur l’Abbé, the assurance of my profound and devoted respect.

Edmond BIRÉ.

Notes

(1) Latin phrase meaning “I know not what greater than the Iliad,”

(2) Charles de Bonchamps (1760–1793), Vendéan general noted for his clemency, especially his pardon of Republican prisoners after the battle of Cholet.

(3) Henri du Vergier, Comte de La Rochejaquelein (1772–1794), young nobleman and one of the principal commanders of the Vendéan insurgents, who will succeed d’Elbee as Commander in Chief

(4) Louis-Marie de Salgues, Marquis de Lescure (1766–1793), Vendéan general admired for his piety, personal bravery, and moral authority among the insurgent forces.

(5) François-Athanase Charette de La Contrie (1763–1796), Royalist leader particularly active in the coastal and marsh regions of western France.

(6) One of the main divisions of the Catholic and Royal Army during the Vendéan uprising, operating chiefly in the central districts of the insurgent territory in 1793.

(7) Jeu de boules is a traditional French throwing game in which players aim to toss or roll heavy metal balls, called boules, as close as possible to a small wooden target ball, known as the cochonnet.

(8) The political and social order of France before 1789, characterised by absolute monarchy, hereditary privilege, and a hierarchical estate system.

(9) Legislation from 1790 reorganising the Catholic Church in France under state authority. Clergy were required to swear an oath to the Constitution; those who refused were termed prêtres réfractaires (non-juring priests).

(10) Commander-in-chief

(11) François Séverin Marceau (1769–1796) young Republican general distinguished in the Vendée.

(12) Jean-Baptiste Kléber (1753–1800) Republican general, later commander in Egypt under Bonaparte.

(13) Jean-Baptiste Aubert-Dubayet (1759–1797) Republican general active in western France in 1793.

(14) Deputies of the National Convention sent on mission (représentants en mission) with extensive civil and military powers.

(15) Pierre Bourbotte (1763–1795), deputy to the National Convention and Representative on Mission in the Vendée, involved in the repression of the Royalist uprising and later executed after the fall of Robespierre.

(16) Pierre-Louis Prieur, known as Prieur de la Marne (1756–1827), deputy to the National Convention, member of the Committee of Public Safety and Representative on Mission in the western armies

(17) In the original « afin que la partie fût carrée », the implication is that M. Wieland was not guilty of the charges against him and was executed arbitrarily

(18) Lazare Hoche (1768–1797): Republican general who later pacified the Vendée.

(19) The text refers to General Lazare Hoche’s proclamation addressed to the “habitants des campagnes”, dated 19 prairial an III (7 June 1795)

(20) Louis Marie Turreau (1756–1816): Republican general associated with the “infernal columns” sent to devastate the Vendée in 1794.

(21) Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779–1869): Swiss-born military historian and theorist; author of Histoire critique et militaire des guerres de la Révolution.

(22) The Lord’s Prayer, recited in Latin in Catholic liturgy.

(23) Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), French bishop and preacher, renowned for his eloquence and moral aphorisms.

[jacobintranslationsarchive]

From « Association pour la sauvegarde de la maison de Saint Just »:

Dear members and friends,

Since its inception, our association has been dedicated to studying, promoting, and preserving the work of Saint-Just.

This is why we are now appealing to you for your support to finance the restoration of one of his most important manuscripts, the draft of Republican Institutions. Volume NAF 24136 of the National Library of France, which contains this manuscript as well as the preparatory notes for the Speech of 9 Thermidor, has indeed deteriorated severely since entering the public collections in 1941, as we explain in the attached appeal. It requires urgent restoration costing €7,650, which our association hopes to raise through this fundraising campaign.

Because we know of your attachment to the work and personality of Saint-Just, we hope we can count on your generosity. Every contribution, however small, will be invaluable, and we thank you most sincerely in advance. Your contribution will entitle you to a receipt allowing for a tax deduction of 66% of the amount donated. We would also be grateful if you would spread the word about this fundraising campaign. If our appeal is successful, the funds raised, in addition to those needed for the restoration of the manuscript, will finance its scientific study using the new technologies now available for research on ancient manuscripts.

Please accept, dear members, dear friends, our warmest greetings, with our gratitude for your help,

—By The Board, Anne Quennedey, President.

APPEAL FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE PRESERVATION OF THE HOUSE OF SAINT-JUST LET US SAVE THE MANUSCRIPT OF THE REPUBLICAN INSTITUTIONS

Volume NAF 24136 of the National Library of France contains the manuscript of Saint-Just's draft Republican Institutions, conceived in consultation with Robespierre, as well as the preparatory notes for his Speech of 9 Thermidor. Having suffered from deterioration that has worsened in recent years, it requires urgent restoration, for which the Association for the Preservation of the House of Saint-Just is launching a fundraising campaign.

The historical and heritage value of volume NAF 24136 cannot be overestimated: written between April and July 1794, the Republican Institutions constituted the "grand project" which, for Saint-Just and Robespierre, was to give a new direction to the Revolution. In this unfinished manuscript, Saint-Just sets forth his ideas for deepening democracy and refounding society for the benefit of the most vulnerable.

His notes for the Speech of 9 Thermidor, for their part, bear witness to Saint-Just's reflections on the crisis within the Committees and on the course of action to adopt in these circumstances. These manuscripts are all the more interesting because their numerous erasures reveal the development of his thought. The deterioration suffered by these manuscripts results from the combination of two factors.

Firstly, the high acidity of the conservation binding, produced during the Second World War at a time when good quality paper was unavailable, attacked the pages on which Saint-Just wrote. Secondly, the iron-gall ink used by Saint-Just caused deterioration of the paper and, in places, holes and tears that have already resulted in the loss of several sections of his text.

Through this appeal, the Association for the Preservation of the House of Saint-Just seeks to fund the restoration that will bring this process to a close. As the services of the National Library of France are unable to undertake this restoration quickly, the manuscript will be entrusted to the Coralie Barbe workshop, with which the institution regularly collaborates.

The workshop will dismantle the current binding, remove the folios from their acidic supports, consolidate them, and remount them on neutral paper, finally creating a more robust binding. We thank all those whose generosity will allow this important revolutionary manuscript to be saved and preserved under optimal conditions. If the sum of €7,650 needed for the restoration is exceeded, the additional amount will be devoted to the scientific study of the manuscript (analysis of the inks and papers, deciphering the text beneath the erasures) and to its diplomatic and facsimile edition.

Original document published by: Tourism in Blerancourt.

Translator's note: If you can collaborate or share this post and the original Instagram post on any platform you like, it would be appreciated.

[amateurvoltaire]

hi, i don’t know if you’ll know this, but when was it that saint-just lied about his age and ran for election, before being called out and removed? or is this apocryphal? tysm!!

Hi! Sorry it took me forever to reply. Life was a bit of a mess for a while.

As far as I know, it isn’t apocryphal. I haven’t personally checked the primary sources (there are people in this community far more knowledgeable about Saint-Just than I am who probably have), but both Bernard Vinot and Antoine Boulant mention it in their biographies, and it wasn’t a one-off. He tried the same thing more than once across 1790–1791.

First of all, why did he need to lie about his age? Under the laws of the early Revolution, a man had to be twenty-five to qualify as an “active citizen”, which meant the right to vote in certain elections and to stand for office. Saint-Just was ambitious, wanted to leave his provincial life and take part in politics, and probably thought the rule was idiotic. Which, to be fair, it was. So he lied about his age and obscured it when challenged.

One of the earlier episodes came in May 1790, when he acted as a delegate for his canton at the assembly in Chauny that was deciding whether Soissons or Laon would become the chef-lieu (capital) of the Aisne department.

Then, in October 1790, during the election of a justice of the peace in his home canton of Blérancourt, the question of his age seems to have become public. Saint-Just was trying to control the primary assembly so that one of his allies would be elected, and his supporters even had him chosen as president of the assembly. At that point Gabriel Liret publicly denounced him for not being old enough to qualify as an active citizen. Saint-Just’s response was actually quite clever. He resigned gracefully, vaguely mentioning his “youth” and his love of order and the law, but also insisted that the minutes record that his accuser had not actually stated his precise age. In other words, he admitted to nothing.

In this context, as a delegate for the Blérancourt canton at an electoral assembly held in the church of Saint-Martin at Chauny, he gave a speech in favour of Soissons becoming the departmental capital. His rival Antoine Gellé objected that he was under the legal age of twenty-five. Saint-Just still managed to have the text of his speech entered into the official minutes, but he signed it “Florelle de Saint-Just”. The point seems to have been to muddy the waters. If anyone decided to investigate his age properly, they would be looking for the baptismal or birth record of a man named Florelle, which would obviously get them nowhere.

The major episode, however, that people are usually referring to was the election to the Legislative Assembly in 1791.

Under the system at the time, active citizens met in primary assemblies to choose electors, and those electors then went on to the departmental assembly to elect the national deputies. Saint-Just wanted to become a deputy to the new Legislative Assembly. In June 1791 he managed, despite being underage, to get himself elected as an elector with the support of his local supporters. His rivals, however, were not amused. Antoine Gellé, together with his lot, denounced his age again and demanded his removal. This time Saint-Just didn’t manage to get out of it. The procureur-syndic of the district of Chauny opened an investigation and obtained definitive proof of Saint-Just’s real date of birth.

The final blow came at the departmental electoral assembly in Laon in September 1791. The question of his age was raised formally, the assembly demanded proof, and Saint-Just could not legally justify his eligibility. On 7 September 1791, the president of the assembly, Jean Debry, struck him from the list of electors. A few days later, Antoine Gellé produced the documents supporting the invalidation and took his place.

In the end, with a bit of luck for him, the problem solved itself. The fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 led to new elections for the National Convention under universal male suffrage, and by a rather convenient stroke of timing, Saint-Just turned twenty-five on 25 August 1792, literally a day before the primary assemblies met on 26 August.