On Robespierre and Saint-Just's Relationships with Women
For some reason @sincerelyjennie I cannot reply to your post which I had saved in my drafts. It took me a few days to get it done because there was a lot of material to go over, and also because there was a second mini-heatwave.
Anyway, here's my response.
Most of these stories are unconfirmed rumors, gossip and hearsay.
The story that Robespierre might have married Éléonore and that Saint-Just was a witness came from Simon-Edme Monnel:
It has been rumored that this daughter [Éléonore] had been Robespierre’s mistress. I think I can affirm she was his wife; according to the testimony of one of my colleagues, Saint-Just had been informed of this secret marriage, which he had attended.
- Mémoires d’un prêtre regicide (1829) by Simon-Edme Monnel, page 337-338
He is the only one who claims this. He doesn't tell us who the colleague is. There is no way to verify this. It should be treated with the same sort of validity as any rumor. You want to believe it? You can. But that's all it is: a belief based on one testimony of some guy who might be writing a sweet story.
The only person who could have confirmed this is Éléonore Duplay herself, but she never wrote anything. Third parties have said she called herself Robespierre's widow - but that information doesn't come from her sister, the only one who actually left writings behind. Élisabeth only wrote: "My older sister had been promised to Robespierre." That's it. Nothing more.
Buonarroti, who was close to the sisters, wrote this in 1830:
I seem to gather that the widow’s sister has personal reasons for refusing to discuss the great man with whom she was once friends; based on some information I received a long time ago regarding her brother, I would not be surprised if he were the cause of her behavior.
- Armando Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, contributi alla storia della sua vita e del suo pensiero, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1950-1951, vol. 2, p. 53.
He says she was his friend, which is a very ambiguous and large term, and that she refuses to talk about him. He suspects her brother is to blame.
On the other hand, Charlotte Robespierre refuted it:
There are in regard to Éléonore Duplay two opinions: one, that that she was the mistress of Robespierre the elder; the other that she was his fiancée. I believe that these opinions are equally false; but what is certain is that Madame Duplay would have strongly desired to have my brother Maximilien for a son-in-law, and that she forget neither caresses nor seductions to make him marry her daughter. Éléonore too was very ambitious to call herself the Citizeness Robespierre, and she put into effect all that could touch Maximilien’s heart. But, overwhelmed with work and affairs as he was, entirely absorbed by his functions as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, could my older brother occupy himself with love and marriage? Was there a place in his heart for such futilities, when his heart was entirely filled with love for the patrie, when all his sentiments, all his thoughts were concentrated in a sole sentiment, in a sole thought, the happiness of the people; when, without cease fighting against the revolution’s enemies, without cease assailed by his personal enemies, his life was a perpetual combat? No, my older brother should not have, could not have amused himself to be a Celadon with Éléonore Duplay, and, I should add, such a role would not enter into his character. Besides, I can attest it, he told me twenty times that he felt nothing for Éléonore; her family’s obsessions, their importunities were more suited to make feel disgust for her than to make him love her. The Duplays could say what they wanted, but there is the exact truth. One can judge if he was disposed to unite himself to Madame Duplay’s eldest daughter by something I heard him say to Augustin:
“You should marry Éléonore.”
“My faith, no,” replied my younger brother.
- Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1834) page 90-91
So we have a standstill on the sources: his sister says no, her sister says yes. These are the only two sources I would trust to speak on this topic, and they disagree. Therefore the answer is: we will never truly know. Do you believe Charlotte or Élisabeth? Again, it's a matter of choice.
As for other women, there were rumors. But that's all there is. I never read the story about a woman with a tobacco shop but this is where you heard the story about a woman he paid and threw out of his apartment:
As for [Robespierre’s] continence, I only knew of a woman of about twenty-six years, whom he treated rather badly, and who idolized him. Very often he refused her at his door; he gave her a quarter of his fees.
- Souvernirs d’un déporté (1802) by Paul Villiers, who claimed to have served as Robespierre’s secretary for a few months in 1790.
Even if this man claimed he was his secretary, we have no way to know if this story is true. It could be. It could also not be.
You're probably asking yourself: well, why are these people telling these stories then? It's the simplest explanation: to make themselves interesting. Revealing some great secret about "The Tyrant Robespierre" was a currency. It's the late 18th-early 19th century equivalent of giving an "exclusive" interview to a tabloid. Some of them, like Georges Duval and Laure d'Abrantès, turned their own memories into novelizations which arguably became best-sellers. There was a whole market for this.
As for Saint-Just? He had one girlfriend. Perhaps. There is no love letter, no poem dedicated to her, no correspondence between them. There's a letter from his childhood friend Thuillier saying there's a rumor that Saint-Just kidnapped her, and Saint-Just tells him to shut that down. Everything else is conjecture.
There's Marc-Antoine Baudot who tells us a wild story that Saint-Just had a lover who saw that Baudot was on Saint-Just's "list of animosities" and she went to tell Baudot... must I really explain why this is nonsense? Now I don't know if they mean there was an actual paper list or it's just a figure of speech... but it's still absurd. As Baudot says, he already knew Saint-Just disliked him. Moreover, Saint-Just was extremely private and we already struggle to know anything about him. He was excessively conscious about his private reputation - if he could have wiped Organt from existence, he probably would have done it. So you tell me the one time he had a lover who blabbed, it was just to warn Baudot about something he already knew? Nothing else? Now why would Baudot invent this? I honestly have no idea. Maybe there was a young woman who told him this extraordinary tale and he believed her. Maybe she sought Baudot's favors or protection, and this was the story she chose to tell, and he chose to believe her. That's the best guess I have, because that makes more sense to me than the story itself. You have to consider that, much like today, sometimes people believe what they want to hear, will decide it's the "truth, and write it down for posterity.
Saint-Just was also very briefly engaged to Henriette Le Bas, but broke it off on what sounded like a pretext (she used tobacco - the story came from Élisabeth who told Hamel). Élisabeth Duplay-Le Bas believed they might have gotten back together, yet when Alphonse de Lamartine started spinning tales of their grand romance writing about "his stormy and passionate feelings for Le Bas' sister" (le sentiment orageux et passionné de Saint-Just pour la sœur de Le Bas), she immediately corrected him with "say [instead]: very calm feelings" (dites : sentiment très calme.)
Anything else about Saint-Just being with other women is fanfiction, usually royalist propaganda trying to paint him (and every other revolutionary) as sexually depraved. It's the myth of the Brutish Commoner Revolutionary forcing himself on the Innocent Noble Maiden - it's a dark fantasy rooted in classist and ideological anxieties.
It's not easy to evaluate these testimonies. You need to study the core principles of source criticism and historiography. The principles noted here when discussing a secondary source also apply to primary sources.
First you must evaluate the type of document: are they memoirs or archival records?
Memoirs written decades later are not objective diaries; they are highly curated, polished, edited, subjective narratives shaped by faulty memory, personal grudges, hindsight and sometimes other testimonies. They are at the crossroads between literature and history. On the other hand, contemporary evidence (letters written during the period, police reports, official registries) doesn't have the benefit of hindsight or the need to cater to a 19th-century reading public. But we have a notorious problem when it comes to Robespierre and Saint-Just: a lot of their personal letters, Saint-Just's especially, were destroyed both by the Thermidorians and reportedly by Jacques-Maurice Duplay, most likely in 1814-1815. However, because the Thermidorians got to them first, we can guess one certain thing: if there had been anything scandalous, they would have used it. And the fact is: there isn't.
Then, you need to evaluate the proximity of the witness (did they see it themselves or is it hearsay?) and their motive. Writing salacious stories about Robespierre and Saint-Just wasn't just a hobby; like I said, it could be a survival strategy or a lucrative business.
You also need corroboration. In history, a single source making a wild claim is usually a red flag, especially if it sounds fantastic or out of character. Robespierre marrying Éléonore secretly? Great romance novel. But you must ask yourself: why would he do that? There's no reason for a secret wedding; he already lives in her house. If anything, it would have been much more respectable for this marriage to be public record.
If a claim is true, it usually leaves a paper trail or is mentioned by multiple independent parties who had no reason to coordinate their stories. This is why there's some reasonable belief that there perhaps was something between Saint-Just and Thérèse Gellé, though most of it relies on the small talk of a small village, which is inherently not the most reliable type of testimony. (Small villages like to make stuff up, or to take a possibility for a fact.)
When a story exists only in one person's memoirs and is contradicted or ignored by everyone else who, say, lived in that house, the burden of proof isn't met. It remains a rumor, not a fact. Villiers' story about Robespierre having a lover once could be true, but we cannot know.
It might take years of study, reading and reading these sources again, in order to evaluate them. It's not a perfect method. I don't claim to know the truth. But this is what I have after 20 years on the topic.
prguitarman
stormborns
