All my bonbon ramblings, and I'm still being asked DUMBASS questions like this, about DUMBASS figures who i FUCKING HATE!!! /j
sighhhhh lets answer this here bc i don't want to flood the chat
I know you're also referring to the question of the name Florelle for Saintjust, so i'm going to zero in on that;
also i'm writing from memory so. coughs. excuse me.
the short answer is: Florelle is real. Léonard-Florelle is not — or at least, we cannot prove it is.
here is what we actually know:
"Florelle" appears — once, in 1790 — used by Saint-Just himself. Anne Quennedey notes that it was almost certainly a nom de fantaisie, something with poetic consonances he pulled out for a single occasion, probably to maintain ambiguity about his age. that's it. one time. used it. moved on..
Now now I hear you.. ouuuu what about "Léonard"? Well per Quennedey's research, it does not appear in a single document from his lifetime.
so where did "Léonard-Florelle" as a COMBINATION come from? Maurice Dommanget. who claimed that after publishing Organt, Saint-Just hid in Paris for two months under the name "Léonard Florelle de Saint-Just." sounds fun! sounds dramatic! sounds extremely him!!
Dommanget's source for this claim is an article by Gustave Laurent on the Reims law faculty. and when you go find that article — which, to be clear, is the kind of work most historians don't bother doing and frankly I respect anyone who does — Laurent does not mention Saint-Just's life in Paris at the page Dommanget cited. OR anywhere else in the article.
the source is just. not there. Dommanget either misread it, misremembered it, or cited something that simply did not say what he needed it to say
this is unfortunately extremely normal in historiography and it's genuinely one of the scarier parts of doing this kind of work: a historian says "X source says Y," you trust them because!!! why wouldn't you, the claim propagates for decades, and then someone finally goes back to the primary source and finds that Y is simply not in X at all. no malice necessarily — just the slow compounding of corners cut: and then suddenly "Léonard-Florelle" is all over fandom as established fact.
so where does that leave us?
Florelle is: verified. real. used once. chaaaarming. Léonard: unverified. no archival support from his lifetime.. Léonard-Florelle together: sourced to a historian who cited something that doesn't say what he said it says
do I think this means you're evil and wrong for using it?? imo no.
there's a meaningful difference between archival fact and anecdote, and sometimes anecdotes are all we have — and sometimes we choose to believe them because they fit, because they feel true, because the alternative is giving up a detail we love: I do this with figures I'm attached to constantly and I will not pretend otherwise
but you should know you're doing that
the line is: "this is an unverified but charming claim that some people choose to use" versus "this is established historical fact." Dommanget's Léonard-Florelle lives in the first category and yew shouldn't let anyone tell you it's the second
anyway. florelle real. léonard fake (probably). dommanget sent on a one-way trip to historiographical purgatory
