♝ ROBESPIERRE JEUNE

Augustin Robespierre slop account WIP Blog: REMAKE "Nobody loved Maximilien as much as—" COUNTERPOINT!! This whole blog

[robespierrecadet]

Salut et fraternité!!

Welcome to my little corner of the internet dedicated entirely to Augustin Robespierre (Bonbon).

If you've somehow wandered in here by accident: Haallloooo! I'm Abel!!! This blog exists as an archive for my historical writing, source analysis, translations, and ongoing research surrounding one of the French Revolution's most overlooked and underrated figures.

Everything posted here is arranged as is for relatively easy navigation (i'm. still work shopping it). Rather than digging through years of personal posts, memes, and sudden emotional breakdowns because I remembered something from 1794, you'll (hopefully) find a growing collection of organized research in one place!

This is, above all, an attempt to understand Augustin as a historical person rather than a historical footnote.

I try to distinguish clearly between documented history, historiographical interpretation, and my own speculation whenever possible. If I discover that I've misunderstood a source or overstated a claim, I will happily correct it! History deserves that much.

This blog also serves as a home for some translation projects intended to make material more accessible to English readers. I don't believe knowledge should remain inaccessible simply because a source happens to exist only in a select European language.

Above all else.. This is Augustin's space!

You can contact me on Discord, @ 9thermidor

❛ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━･❪ ♝ ❫･━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ❜

> A few quick notes… > I am not a professional historian. I'm simply someone who spends an unreasonable amount of time reading and memorizing material, biographies, memoirs, correspondence, and contemporary newspapers because I adore this ridiculous little man. > because of this aforementioned memorization, most of what i post is often first pass thoughts or information detailed right off the dome / noggin. The way that I organize my thoughts and figure out a direct solid defensible line of thought is dialogically, but I don't have anybody to.. engage in dialogue with.. so to remedy this and the unavoidable mistakes that come from my process: > I welcome corrections, additional sources, and discussion with more than open arms. In fact anybody who makes a comment or addition to my post is guaranteed a first-born from me. If you know something I don't, please tell me! I'd much rather improve a post than leave an error, shoddy wording, or bad pacing standing. > correction simply isn’t opposition to me, and it isn’t a challenge to authority or ego; it’s part of the process itself. It’s how history becomes more accurate, more nuanced, and more honest over time. > More than anything, I want this space to reflect a kind of shared curiosity rather than a one-person authority, I am NOT an authority. If that was even an assumption to begin with, assume it no more!!! If you’re here and you know more, or you see something differently, that perspective has value, as part of the same ongoing attempt to understand the past as clearly as we can. > If you're here from my main blog: yes, unfortunately, it's still, by technicality (Functionally?), 'me♜'. Different room, and different voice, and different person: In the same overall house. This account simply exists so our historical work has a proper home without requiring people to sift through unrelated posts to find it, if the yap-fest above didn't make it clear. > If you've somehow become interested in Augustin or those surrounding him in life because of this blog.. > mission accomplished!!! > This blog is ran on EST / GMT-5 + GMT-4

TAG DIRECTORY ──

✦ #timelines — Chronological reconstructions of Augustin's life and missions.

✦ #historical analysis — Source-based essays and historical discussions.

✦ #historiography — How historians, memoirists, and later writers have interpreted Augustin over time.

✦ #personality analysis — Attempts to reconstruct his character from contemporary evidence.

✦ #political life — Mission work, speeches, committees, decrees, and political activity.

✦ #personal life — Family, friendships, correspondence, and the people around him.

✦ #alternate history / speculation — Clearly marked "what if?" posts and historical speculation.

✦ #blog stuff — musings and housekeeping.

✦ #anon — Anon asks etc etc

PROJECTS ──

⋆ BOOK / TRANSLATION

Dr. Jan ten Brink — Augustin Robespierre Dutch → English Translation Progress: 67 / 251 pages translated (as of Jul. 8)

Started Jun. 10 •

Sergio Luzzatto — Bonbon Robespierre Italian → English Translation Progress: Finished!

Started Oct. 25, 2025 • Finished Nov. 29, 2025

⋆ UPCOMING ESSAYS / POSTS

• Tracing Augustin's Radicalism-to-Moderation Arc

• The Complete Lebon Story

• What Became of Augustin's Circle after Thermidor

• Augustin's Reputation During His Lifetime

• Gambling, Dissipation, and the Origins of a Reputation

• ..and whatever new rabbit hole I accidentally fall into next.

[robespierrecadet]

do you take questions about other figures? if so, whats the difference between saint-just and augustins relationship with the army?

oh, so we're just torturing the Augustin guy with Saint-Just now, huh.. yeah.. let's do that. hahaha. /j

Okay, but I should probably preface this by saying that while, yes, I'm very open to answering questions about other figures (in fact, I just answered one regarding "Robespierre and co." — no matter how convoluted and confusing my answer was), I very obviously have an area of 'expertise' here. So I do appreciate you connecting it back to Augustin in some way, because it gives me a bit more of a foothold with the question. ^^

That said, this comes with one very big disclaimer: I really encourage you to also send this question to someone who's actually a Saint-Just historian: Trust me, you will find them eagerly waiting! When I've said that I learned about the French Revolution and its figures by having to confront these questions headfirst, that was during a period when I had access to people who could give me the correct answers or the necessary corrections. And. I.. don't have that anymore. #PersonaNonGrata #Anathema

Also, compulsory reminder that I am not a historian myself either.

Big disclaimer over? Yeah? Okay, good!

AHEM. Loooooong post incoming: but heres a TL;DR :

Augustin Robespierre and the Army of Italy: A Summary

What His Role Actually Was

When Augustin was appointed representative on mission to the Army of Italy in July 1793, the title covered a genuinely sprawling set of responsibilities. The politic-judicial work: applying emigré laws, supervising the clergy, arresting real counter-revolutionaries, releasing harmless ones. The politico-administrative work: managing relations between local authorities, Jacobin clubs, and civilian producers during a period of controlled prices and supply shortages. The politico-military work — which is what this post is mostly about — was constant: appointing officers, rewarding soldiers, requisitioning workers for war manufacturing, and liaising between the Convention's political directives and the army's operational realities.

That last category is the one I find people underestimate: Augustin wasn't just a political supervisor sent to watch the generals. He was, alongside Ricord, functionally co-managing an army of tens of thousands across two extended missions. The logistical detail in his decrees is significant: the egg decree for wounded soldiers in Nice hospitals, the soap price adjustments to prevent shortages that would affect both civilians and troops, the metalworkers' requisition for arms production, the navigation of Genoese trade to keep supplies flowing without antagonizing a nominally neutral republic the French needed to keep cooperative. These are the decrees of someone who understood supply chains and was paying close attention to them.

Haller — "Papa Haller," the Swiss banker who managed army supplies in Nice from October 1793 — becomes a key figure here. Young describes him as performing "the overwhelming task of feeding the town and army where honesty would not have sufficed." Augustin's relationship with Haller was close enough to become a liability after Thermidor. It was also, during the missions, essential: Haller had the Genoese connections, the commercial intelligence, and the operational flexibility that the army needed and that a purely political administrator couldn't provide. Augustin's comfort working with him — a man whose civisme was, per Ricord's own slightly defensive report to the Committee, "not quite above question" — is consistent with the same pragmatic approach visible in the Franche-Comté decrees. He cared about whether things worked: And he cared less about the ideological purity of the people making them work.

The Officer Question

One of the most repeated details about Augustin's relationship with the Army of Italy is that he identified Napoleon Bonaparte early and championed him explicitly. His April 5, 1794 letter to Maximilien — the only surviving letter in which he mentions Napoleon directly — calls him "citizen Buonaparte, general head of the artillery of transcendent merit," and notes his Corsican origin and his resistance to Paoli's overtures as marks of trustworthiness.

But the championing of Napoleon was part of a broader pattern of officer management that shows consistent judgment. Young draws on Fabry's military history to document that Augustin (and Ricord) repeatedly promoted officers on merit rather than on political connection. They fought, sometimes publicly, against the Committee of Public Safety's practice of appointing generals through Parisian political channels rather than through demonstrated competence in the field. A series of letters from spring 1794 shows them pushing back repeatedly on Committee decisions about officer appointments — insisting on generals who had proven themselves in the specific terrain of the Alps and Liguria rather than whoever the Paris end of the system preferred.

This matters because it's where the Carnot conflict has its deepest roots: Not just about the strategic plan (though the strategic plan is part of it). But about who controls the army's officer corps and through what criteria. Carnot, as the Committee's 'military expert', had strong opinions about both questions. Augustin, who had been living with this army for months and watching which officers could actually perform, had different opinions and less deference about expressing them.

The Strategic Plan: What It Was and Why It Mattered

The Italian campaign plan is the most famous element of Augustin's relationship with the army, partly because Napoleon later claimed it as entirely his own and partly because historians have been arguing about the attribution ever since.

"What do the documents show?" shshshh I hear you: As early as October 23, 1793 — two months before Toulon fell — Augustin was writing to the Committee of Public Safety from Nice about the strategic logic of the Mediterranean theater: that Toulon and the Piedmontese army were functionally the same enemy operating in concert, and that the reconquest of Toulon would open the possibility of an offensive through Liguria and into the Po Valley. The phrase he used: the Army of Italy would no longer "dissolve in the midst of sterile mountains; after so many deserts, it would reach the promised land." This is the kernel of what became the 1796 Italian campaign.

Napoleon arrived at Toulon in October 1793, and by the siege of December he and Augustin were working together. Young cites Colin (the French military historian): "Bonaparte had from the first won the confidence of Augustin Robespierre." After Toulon fell and Napoleon was promoted to brigadier general with the Army of Italy, the collaboration deepened. By spring 1794, Young notes, Tilly (the French consul in Genoa) was describing Napoleon in his dispatches as "the favourite and counsellor of Robespierre the Younger." Napoleon himself told Bertrand at Saint Helena: "Robespierre would never sign anything to do with the army or the supplies without consulting me."

The formal articulation of the full strategic plan comes in the Saorge campaign letters of April-May 1794. After the army took Saorge, Augustin and Ricord wrote jointly to the Committee:

"Now is the time to bring the Army of the Alps into concert with the Army of Italy... The campaign in Piedmont is to be supervised by the independent command of the Representatives who are with the armies... We shall have no trouble in throwing down the Sardinian throne... do not put off till tomorrow deliberations on a matter that will bring the spectacle of a tyrant dethroned by a nation of philosophers."

These are powerful demands. They're asking for effective operational control over two armies, full authority to direct the Piedmontese campaign, cavalry reinforcements, and immediate action.

Carnot said no: Or rather, Carnot said a qualified, apologetic, committee-compromised version of no — the May 8 decree gave them some cavalry, told the Army of the Alps to cooperate "wherever possible," and otherwise avoided committing to the offensive Augustin was pushing for. Colin's assessment, quoted by Young: Carnot "feared the sudden extension of France" and "in renouncing conquest, concluded he must renounce the offensive." Young adds dryly that "prudence in war was made unrewarding because the French had by now ruptured every diplomatic connection" — meaning Carnot's caution was arguably correct in theory and practically irrelevant in practice.

What matters for the Augustin-Carnot conflict: this is not the only or even the primary source of hostility between them: The Guffroy account of the staircase scene shows Augustin trying to get Leblond to present evidence against Carnot — papers and facts "capable of guillotining Carnot fifteen times" — days before Thermidor. Carnot, in his own post-Thermidor self-description, called himself Robespierre's "most declared enemy." The Italian campaign dispute is one layer of a conflict that was also about military appointments, about the Pas-de-Calais crisis (Carnot supported Lebas's endorsement of Lebon), and about the broader Committee of Public Safety power struggle.

But the Italian campaign is where Augustin had invested the most in personal credibility: He'd been on the ground. He'd watched Napoleon develop the plan operationally. He'd pushed for the offensive through channels, formally and repeatedly. When Carnot blocked it — and when Napoleon's later success vindicated the plan completely — the grievance wasn't abstract.

The Italian Soil Letters

Alongside the strategic and operational work, Augustin's actual time with the army in the spring of 1794 produced some of the most interesting writing he left behind — specifically about how French troops were conducting themselves on Italian soil, and what that implied about the Revolution's relationship with religion.

He reported to Maximilien: "The defenders of the fatherland have conducted themselves perfectly; they have not touched a single image in a country where the brush of superstition has covered every wall." The context: the civilian population along the Ligurian Riviera had fled in terror, convinced by émigré propaganda that the French would destroy their religion and massacre them. They had not: The troops had left the churches and roadside shrines alone. This was partly because Augustin had set policy to that effect, and partly because the practical calculation was obvious: armies operating in hostile territory with frightened civilians do better when they're not actively confirming the propaganda against them.

Young cites a letter Augustin sent to the Committee from Oneglia (the first piece of Italian territory the French held) showing him managing relations with local priests, local populations, and local institutions with the same pragmatic-but-principled approach visible in the Haute-Saône. The dechristianization campaign that had been devastating the Pas-de-Calais under Lebon was simply not happening in the territory Augustin controlled.

On April 27, 1794

There's one moment from the Italian campaign that I want to end on because it's both documented and genuinely vivid. The morning before the Saorge operation began, Augustin and Napoleon went together to the advance posts of the army high in the Alps. Young's quote from Colin: "It was Bonaparte who, with Robespierre, directed operations and went round the various columns to assure themselves that all had instructions and would carry out the orders given."

The two of them, in the high Alps on an April morning, going column by column to check that everyone knew what to do. This is not a political administrator watching. This is someone who'd been working with this army for nearly a year, who knew the officers and the terrain and the operational logic, taking responsibility for the final check before a major engagement.

The army took Saorge.

Napoleon would be back with that army in 1796 and do what Augustin had been trying to do in 1794 — the Piedmont campaign, the Italian offensive, the spectacular sweep through the Po Valley that made him famous. Carnot's caution had deferred it. Augustin's death had ended his involvement in it. Napoleon claimed the plan as his own.

Saint-Just and the Armies of the Republic

(Note upfront: for the Saint-Just section I'm drawing on Vinot as the main scholarly biography. This should still be read alongside a Saint-Just specialist since it's outside my core expertise, pPLLEASE I DONT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SAINTJUST IM JUST SAYING SHIT PLEASE. PLEASE. ask a Saint-Just enthusiast.)

What the Role Was, and What Saint-Just Thought It Should Be

Before Saint-Just ever set foot on a military mission, he had already articulated what a representative on mission near the armies ought to be — in writing, to the Committee. The passage is worth quoting at length because it shapes everything that follows:

"The representatives of the people near the armies must be the fathers and friends of the soldier. They must sleep under the tent, they must be present at military exercises, they must be little familiar with the generals, so that the soldier has more confidence in their justice and their impartiality when he approaches them. The soldier must find them night and day ready to hear him. The representatives must eat alone. They must be frugal and remember that they are responsible for public safety and that the eternal fall of kings is preferable to transient softness."

This is the template he sets for himself. The critical detail is "little familiar with the generals" — he is explicitly positioning the representative as the soldier's advocate against the officer corps, not the officer corps's civilian patron. The army's problems, he had diagnosed, were at the top: "the generals are cut off from the nation, the chiefs, corrupted by past habits, are often absent, debauched and contemptuous toward the troops."

He also understood the structural problem at the commissariat level: "On vole la ration des chevaux" — they steal the horses' feed ration. And the administrative bloat: "The ministry is a world of paper; I don't know how Rome and Egypt governed without this resource; they thought a great deal, they wrote very little."

Alsace: The Mission That Made His Reputation

Saint-Just and Lebas arrived in Strasbourg on October 24, 1793. The situation was genuinely dire — the lines of Wissembourg had fallen, the army was demoralized by repeated defeats, and a series of failed generals had installed a culture of incompetence and absence at the officer level. Their first dispatch to the Committee captured the priority immediately: "We are going to purge it, we are going to discipline the chiefs, they need it more than the soldiers."

Three things happened in quick succession that defined the mission.

The tribunal.

They transformed the existing military commission into a rapid-judgment body with vast powers over both civilians and military personnel. Between October 28, 1793 and March 6, 1794, it issued 27 death sentences and 34 sentences of detention until peace. The numbers are striking not for their volume but for their composition: 8 officers among the condemned, including 2 generals. Colonel de Tauzia and Colonel de Béril for royalism. The general administrator of military supplies, Cablès, for corruption and graft. General Isambert for abandoning the strategic fort of Saint-Remy to the enemy. A simple soldier named Réau was executed alongside Isambert — the Strasbourg Popular Society noted: "Equality reigns: a general and a chasseur have been shot." The disciplinary logic ran upward, not downward.

The shoes.

The most famous moment of the mission, and worth reading in the original French rather than in translation because the syntax is the voice: "A la municipalité de Strasbourg. Dix mille hommes sont nus-pieds dans l'armée, il faut que vous déchaussiez tous les aristocrates de Strasbourg dans le jour et que demain à dix heures du matin les dix mille paires de souliers soient en marche pour le Quartier Général." — "Ten thousand men are barefoot in the army, you must remove the shoes from all the aristocrats of Strasbourg today and tomorrow at ten in the morning ten thousand pairs of shoes must be on their way to General Headquarters." The implicit threat was decisive: nearly 17,000 pairs of shoes and more than 21,000 shirts were deposited at the military stores by the Strasbourgeois. Vinot also documents that coats were separately requisitioned — relevant given an Alsatian November, which was bitterly cold.

The loan.

A forced loan of 9 million livres on the wealthy of Strasbourg, progressively distributed across 193 people in proportion to their presumed fortune (from 4,000 to 300,000 livres). 500,000 livres were immediately allocated to the indigent patriots. The logic was explicit to the Popular Society: "We impose the rich to bring down prices." This wasn't just a military supply measure — it was the Ventôse Decrees in embryo, applied at the departmental level under emergency powers before Saint-Just had a name for it.

The promotions were as important as the punishments. Lieutenant-Colonel Argout, noted for bravery at the retreat of Wissembourg; battalion chief Huet and Captain Augier, who had bravely defended Fort Bitche — all promoted to generals of brigade. Promotions frequently came from the same units that had been struck by military justice. The message was consistent: failure was punishable and merit was visible.

An assessment from Legrand, written in Year III at Thermidorian request and therefore not a sympathetic source, is nonetheless striking in what it concedes: "They are beyond doubt the greatest revolutionaries sent to the army, but they were more approachable, more just and I would even say more humane than most of their colleagues... the frank, loyal soldier who did his duty had nothing to fear; they knew how to distinguish talents and merits." Vinot adds: "He had understood the psychology of these men, long defeated, but ready for heroism. 'He wants to make them heroes, he speaks to them as heroes.'"

By December, the army had been reorganized and was pushing the Austrians back. "Il y avait en lui du Bonaparte," Vinot notes, meaning this quality of mobilizing men who've been repeatedly beaten into believing they can win.

Between the Missions: The Ventôse Decrees

When Saint-Just returned to Paris from Alsace in January 1794 and became president of the Convention, the decree that now bears his name was the institutional translation of what he'd been doing by executive order in Strasbourg. The Ventôse Decrees proposed confiscating the property of enemies of the Revolution and redistributing it to needy patriots. Had they been implemented — they weren't, partly because Saint-Just fell before the administrative machinery could be built — they would have been the most structurally radical legislative act of the Revolution, transferring wealth between classes rather than just between individuals. The army work and the legislative work are the same argument operating at different scales.

The Army of the North: Three Missions

The Committee sent him back to a different theater. Between January and June 1794, Saint-Just undertook three separate missions to the Army of the North: in pluviôse (January 22–February 13), floréal (April 29–May 31), and prairial (June 6–29). Together they cover the approach to and culmination in the Battle of Fleurus.

The January mission produced one of his sharpest strategic assessments, in a letter to the Committee of January 31 that Vinot calls "more considered than in Alsace." The army's supply area was insufficient, roads were in poor repair, convoys were badly organized. But the strategic question was the point:

"Are you waiting to be attacked, or do you want to attack? In the latter case, prepare tonight the position of the magazines, your plans, place your cavalry, direct the convoys, to facilitate the unleashing of our forces at the opening of the campaign... It would be very wise of you to make yourselves the aggressors, to open the campaign first, and since your army will be very strong, you could at the same time send one army toward Ostend, one toward Beaumont, surround Valenciennes and attack the Mormal forest. Let us always be the boldest, we shall also be the happiest."

The Committee didn't follow this. Carnot preferred to wait for the Austrians to attack. The price of that delay was paid in the drawn-out spring campaign with repeated crossings and recrossings of the Sambre.

The famous scene at Thuin (night of May 25–26) is Vinot's fullest account of Saint-Just actually directing military operations rather than supervising them. He convened the generals and addressed them: "Generals, you are gathered to conceive and execute something great, worthy of the Republic. Tomorrow there must be a siege or a battle. Decide!" General Kléber's bitter smile reportedly infuriated him. He spent two hours walking in the garden, hatless, in the rain. He had the last word. The army moved at dawn.

At Charleroi, when an Austrian officer arrived with proposals, Saint-Just reportedly replied: "Ce n'est pas du papier que je vous demande mais la place." It's not papers I want from you but the fortress. Commandant Reyniac was reportedly impressed enough by this to surrender unconditionally. The next day, the cannon announced Cobourg's approach.

Fleurus (June 26, 1794) followed: twelve hours of fighting, the observation balloon L'Entreprenant overhead, and then the dispatch to the Committee: "The Army of the Sambre has won today the most brilliant victory on the fields of Fleurus." Vinot notes somewhat dryly that "the proclamation embellished the reality somewhat" — the pursuit didn't happen because the men were too exhausted, and the retreat wasn't exactly a rout. But the victory opened Belgium to the French, and French armies remained ascendant through the rest of the War of the First Coalition.

On the Charging Legend

the History Today article and the World History Encyclopedia describe Saint-Just as having charged personally at Fleurus. Vinot is specifically skeptical of this and it's worth flagging why.

The source is a royalist spy's bulletin: the Drake-d'Antraigues report claims Saint-Just told the Committee he had "charged the Austrians five times at the head of the cavalry." This comes from people who had strong reasons to make their intelligence seem dramatic. Lamartine later embellished it further ("several horses killed under him"). Baudot is repeatedly cited as the eyewitness for the charging legend — but Vinot checked Baudot's own Notes historiques and he says nothing of the kind there. Levasseur de la Sarthe, who was on mission at the Army of the North with Saint-Just, actually contradicts the story entirely, describing him as something close to a coward in the field.

Vinot's verdict: Saint-Just demonstrated courage so consistently throughout his life that Levasseur's hostility doesn't stick. But if he had charged in front of thousands of men, there would be multiple consistent testimonies, and Le Bas or Gateau would have mentioned it. The charging legend belongs to the romantic imagery — imagerie romantique — that formed around him almost immediately. It's not evidence.

What the record does support is that he was physically present at the battles, he conducted himself without apparent cowardice, and his role was directing and haranguing rather than leading cavalry charges. His actual contribution at Fleurus was logistical and strategic — organizing the supply of Jourdan's combined force, insisting on continuing the offensive when others wanted to try a different angle, getting the artillery reorganized during the siege.

Vinot's summary of his military contribution: "He played a determining role in the formation, equipment and supply of the army of Sambre-et-Meuse. He restored discipline there. His severity was exercised essentially against deserters terrorized by Prussian cavalry."

What Kind of Military Administrator He Was

The consistent thread across all three missions — Alsace, the pluviôse inspection, the Sambre campaign — is a man who addressed material need first and ideology second in practice, whatever the rhetoric. Shoes and coats before speeches. Supply lines before battle plans. Officers promoted or shot based on performance. The forced loans directed immediately to the poor as well as the army.

There is also the orphan boy episode, which Vinot cites from the Journal des hommes libres (May 28, 1794): Saint-Just en route to Maubeuge encounters a child of twelve or thirteen in rags, whose mother died on August 10 and father died under the Republic's flags. He takes the child in, has him clothed, keeps him with him. Vinot flags this partly as evidence of the adulation already forming around him — the story was printed in a newspaper while he was still alive, which is unusual — but it's also consistent with a pattern of gestures toward the concretely vulnerable that runs through both missions.

The Legrand assessment from Year III, again: more approachable, more just, more humane than most of his colleagues. Written by a Thermidorian-commissioned investigator with no reason to say this if it weren't what the evidence showed.

The Comparison: Two Representatives, Two Different Wars

The question "what's the difference between Saint-Just and Augustin's relationship with the army?" has a short answer and a long one. The short answer is: they were doing fundamentally different jobs in fundamentally different military situations. The long answer is more interesting.

Different Theaters, Different Problems

This is the structural fact that everything else flows from, and it's underappreciated: That when people compare their army relationships, they often imagine the same kind of emergency being handled differently. But Saint-Just and Augustin were never dealing with the same kind of emergency.

Saint-Just's Alsace mission started with Austrian armies literally on French soil. The lines of Wissembourg had broken. Strasbourg was at risk of falling. There were Austrian officers being arrested inside the city. This is an existential military emergency — the question is whether France holds its own territory in the next six weeks. Saint-Just's Army of the North missions were similarly critical theater: the Sambre valley was one of the main invasion routes to Paris, and the whole spring 1794 campaign was a succession of crossings and recrossings of the Sambre, trying to force a decisive engagement.

Augustin was in Nice and then the Alpes-Maritimes dealing with something categorically different: a peripheral theater, still significantly shaped by federalism and its aftermath, where the question wasn't "can we hold France" but "can we open a new offensive front." The siege of Toulon was the primary military event of his first mission — and even there, he was one of five representatives on mission, alongside Barras, Fréron, Ricord, and Saliceti, all of whom had their own power bases and agendas. He was not the organizing mind of the Toulon operation the way Saint-Just was the organizing mind of the Alsace counter-offensive.

This distinction matters for evaluating everything that follows. Saint-Just's speed — shoes by tomorrow morning, fortress surrendered by tomorrow or else — was appropriate to immediate existential crisis. Augustin's more sustained, relationship-based approach — months of supply management through Haller, building trust with Ligurian contacts, identifying Napoleon over several months of close observation — was appropriate to a theater where the work was institutional construction, not emergency repair.

Approach to the Officer Corps

Both men independently diagnosed the same problem: the corruption and incompetence was at the top, not the bottom.

Saint-Just's phrasing: "We are going to discipline the chiefs, they need it more than the soldiers." He then executed two generals and six officers, shot a simple soldier alongside a general to demonstrate equality, promoted officers from the same units that had been struck by justice. The approach was structural and visible: make it demonstrably true, in front of the troops, that the old protections for rank no longer applied.

Augustin's approach to the same problem looked different. He promoted Napoleon early, pushed for him to command the Army of Italy, built a collaborative relationship rather than a supervisory one. Napoleon's own account at Saint Helena: "Robespierre would never sign anything to do with the army or the supplies without consulting me." This is the opposite of Saint-Just's explicit policy of being "little familiar with the generals." Augustin found one general he trusted completely and essentially fused his authority with that general's operational expertise. He was also dismissing corrupt agents and officers — the Escudier case, the annulment of corrupt supply contracts in Nice — but the overall character was partnership-seeking rather than tribunal-building.

Neither approach was wrong. They were suited to different situations. Saint-Just inherited a command structure full of compromised or incompetent men and needed to replace it fast. Augustin inherited a theater where the right general didn't yet have the right position, and the work was getting him there.

Supply: The Dramatic Gesture vs. The Sustained System

Saint-Just's shoes decree is the most famous single act of practical military administration in the Revolution. It worked. The speed and simplicity of the logic — aristocrats have shoes, soldiers don't, transfer them — and the implied threat made it immediately effective. 17,000 pairs of shoes and 21,000 shirts in less than 24 hours. It's the kind of thing you can point to, explain in a sentence, and immediately understand.

Augustin's supply work is harder to point to because it operated through months of sustained relationship management. Haller — "Papa Haller," the Swiss banker with Genoese connections who managed army supplies in Nice — did "the overwhelming task of feeding the town and army where honesty would not have sufficed," per Young. Augustin's role was sustaining and protecting that relationship, managing the politics around it, navigating Genoese trade to keep supplies flowing without antagonizing a neutral republic the French needed cooperative. It's not a single decree you can quote. It's a months-long administrative infrastructure.

Both produced results. Saint-Just's approach is more legible in the historical record partly because it generated dramatic documents. Augustin's is harder to trace precisely because it worked through informal relationships and a banker's Genoese connections rather than arrêtés.

The Carnot Problem

Both ended up in direct conflict with Carnot, from different angles, at roughly the same time.

Saint-Just's conflict with Carnot over the Charleroi/Army of the North strategy was partly about battle planning — Saint-Just wanted to attack, Carnot preferred to wait — and partly about command appointments. The CSP archives document at least one violent scene in the committee room, Carnot being called a "ridiculous dictator." The conflict was open and mutual.

Augustin's Carnot conflict was about the Italian plan — the proposal to push through Liguria into Piedmont that Carnot blocked in May 1794 with a half-measure — and also about the Lebon situation, where Carnot's support for Lebas meant Carnot was effectively backing Lebon's continuation in the Pas-de-Calais against the Buissart circle's evidence. By summer 1794, Augustin was building a case against Carnot through the Leblond briefings, trying to assemble documentary evidence.

The irony is that both men died on 9 Thermidor in part because of the Carnot conflict, and Carnot survived to write his own self-exculpating memoir and get into the Panthéon. The Italian plan Augustin and Napoleon developed was eventually executed — by Napoleon, in 1796, without Augustin.

Religious and Civilian Policy

This is where the comparison becomes most pointed and where the two men actually disagreed with each other in practice, even if they never articulated it as a disagreement.

Augustin's dechristianization policy was principled and consistent: he released people arrested for religious practice, protected freedom of worship in the Alpes-Maritimes, wrote that his troops had "not touched a single image" in Ligurian territory, opposed Hébert at the Jacobins on January 5 specifically on the religious question. This was a considered position developed from months of watching dechristianization produce civilian resistance.

Saint-Just in Alsace is more complicated. He didn't pursue dechristianization as policy — but he worked alongside Schneider and the "Propagande révolutionnaire" for the first part of the mission, only suppressing them when they became unmanageable and counterproductive. His opposition to dechristianization, to the extent it existed, was pragmatic rather than principled: these people are making the Alsatians harder to govern, not: these arrests are unjust.

This is a real difference in political instinct. Augustin's moderation came from a theory about what the Revolution had passed the point of needing. Saint-Just's approach was more about what worked in a given operational context.

Physical Presence and Personal Courage

Both were physically present near actual fighting, which distinguished them from most Committee members. The bullet in Augustin's scabbard at Fort Balaguier is documented in the military record. The morning of April 27, 1794, he and Napoleon went column by column through the advance posts in the Alps to check that everyone had orders before the Saorge operation.

Saint-Just's charging legend — multiple horses killed under him at Fleurus, charging at the head of cavalry — is, per Vinot, almost certainly false. The source is a royalist spy's bulletin. Baudot, who is consistently cited as the eyewitness, says nothing of the kind in his own Notes historiques. Levasseur de la Sarthe contradicts the story entirely. What's documented is that Saint-Just was present at Fleurus, conducted himself without apparent cowardice, and played a significant role in the preparatory work and the siege of Charleroi.

Neither man was primarily a battlefield figure: Both were civilian administrators who happened to be physically present near sieges and battles. The romantic imagery — Saint-Just charging with the hussars, Augustin the hero of Toulon — in a way, unfortunately, overstates what both of them actually were.

The Bottom Line

Saint-Just's army relationship was urgent, structurally military, and directed at broken institutions in immediate existential crisis. He disciplined from above, executed officers, organized supply through confiscation, and prepared the ground for decisive battles. He was a crisis administrator working on a tight timeline with armies that needed to be functional within weeks.

Augustin's army relationship was longer-term, more institutional, and organized around building something new rather than repairing something broken. He identified and elevated Napoleon, sustained a supply system through Haller, developed a strategic vision for an Italian campaign, and managed the politics of a peripheral theater with neutral states and civilian populations that needed to stay cooperative: He was a theater-builder rather than a crisis-fixer.

Both were effective within their respective contexts. The comparison that makes either one look better than the other usually involves importing one's situation into the other's context — asking why Augustin didn't execute generals the way Saint-Just did, or why Saint-Just didn't build the kind of officer partnership that Augustin did with Napoleon. They were dealing with different wars.

The more interesting question the comparison raises is: what would Augustin have been like in Alsace, or Saint-Just in Nice? Augustin's moderatism was formed by watching what indiscriminate repression produced in practice. Saint-Just in the same departments might have produced a more structured version of what Barras and Fréron produced. Whether his moderating instincts, such as they were, would have survived the specific emergency of a broken army with Austrian forces on French soil — that's genuinely unknowable.

TL;DR

Augustin: "How do we make sure the army has supplies next month?"

Saint-Just: "The army needs shoes now. Who has them, and how do we get them there tomorrow?"

Neither one is inherently more "military"; they are responding to different circumstances.

Saint-Just Sources:

Vinot, Bernard. Saint-Just. Paris: Fayard, 1985. Chapters 16 ("Sauver Strasbourg") and 18 ("Fleurus") throughout. All French quotations my translation.

Philip Tody, "Antoine de Saint-Just, a Fashionable Revolutionary," 1958 — the observation that military activity often seemed to interest him more than politics, and the Baudot/Fleurus quote (which Vinot separately debunks).

History Today (Colin Jones) — the shoes anecdote and general framing of Alsace.

Augustin Sources:

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. Chapters 10, 11, 14, 15, 16. (The source throughout for the Army of Italy material; Young draws heavily on Fabry's military history, Koch's campaign studies, and Colin for the operational detail.)

Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I. (The October 1793 letter about Toulon and the Piedmont strategy; the April 1794 Napoleon letter; the Saorge campaign letters.)

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025. (The Italian campaign chapter; the Tilly letter on Napoleon as Augustin's "favourite and counsellor.")

Bertrand, Henri Gratien. Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène 1816–1821. Vol. 2, 1951. (Napoleon's Saint Helena accounts of his relationship with Augustin, via Young chapter 16.)

[robespierrecadet]

Reading the Précis: Augustin in His Own Administrative Voice

This is a close reading of the Précis des opérations faites par Robespierre jeune dans le département de la Haute-Saône, reproduced in Michon's Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre, vol. I, pp. 257–261. Read directly from the original. All translations mine.

The Précis is the closest thing we have to Augustin writing a sustained, considered account of his own conduct and thinking as a representative on mission. It's not a letter dashed off in the field. It's a formal report to the Committee of Public Safety, written after the Franche-Comté mission concluded, from Commune-Affranchie (Lyon) in February 1794. He had time to decide what to include, how to frame it, and what to leave out. Arguably that makes the choices visible in a way that letters in the heat of action aren't really.

What follows is a section-by-section reading:

“Just Passing Through” (Famous Last Words)

He arrives in Vesoul expecting to be there a mere twenty-four hours. He finds the entire department consumed by one case: twenty-two administrators who'd been dismissed by Bernard de Saintes and Lejeune, then designated as suspects and imprisoned. The phrase he uses is striking: "la presque totalité des habitants distraits de la chose publique par un motif d'intérêt particulier" — "almost all the inhabitants distracted from public affairs by a matter of private interest." He frames the detention of twenty-two people as having effectively paralyzed public life in a whole department: Every commune, every popular society, was occupied by this one thing. Their successors — the new administrators — were the only ones on the other side.

The detail he chooses to include about Bernard: Bernard had refused to come and examine the situation himself, delegating the right of investigation exclusively to someone named Joly, described as "the enemy and denouncer of the detainees." This is exactly the pattern Augustin has been criticizing in his letters — denunciation standing in for investigation, the machine of accusation running without anyone checking whether the accusation is real.

The Revolutionary Filibuster (Or, Delay Is the New Diligence)

The most remarkable passage in the document, and the one that nobody seems to quote enough:

"J'incidentai sous prétexte qu'il n'y avait pas assez de controverse pour que je puisse croire que tous ceux qui pouvaient m'éclairer fussent présents. J'ai plusieurs fois ajourné la discussion, quoiqu'il me fût démontré qu'elle devait être fermée."

"I raised procedural objections on the grounds that there was not enough debate for me to believe that everyone who could enlighten me was present. I postponed the discussion several times, even when it had been demonstrated to me that it should be closed."

He already knew the answer: He'd already concluded the detainees were innocent: And he deliberately delayed closing the inquiry anyway, specifically so that no one could claim he'd rushed to judgment. This is procedural care as political strategy — extending the process not because it was necessary for his own certainty, but because the result needed to be unimpeachable.

Then: "Je demande la vérité avec cet accent et cette disposition d'âme qui l'obtient toujours." — "I ask for truth with that tone and disposition of soul which always obtains it."

This line has been quoted in isolation as evidence of his confidence. Read in context, it's something more specific: confidence in a method, not in a predetermined conclusion. He's saying that if you approach an inquiry with genuine openness — with the right disposition — the truth will surface. The procedural delays above are the practical implementation of that claim.

What He Actually Found

He follows each detained man's history through the Revolution. At every turning point — the early days in Vesoul, the dangerous pre-revolutionary clandestine meetings in cellars, the periods when commitment to the Republic was actively dangerous — the same men appear "les premiers à la brèche," the first into the breach. Their children are now at the frontier. Their houses are full of wounded volunteers who couldn't find hospital beds. "Je vois qu'ils ne savent pas même que ce sont là des sacrifices" — "I see that they don't even know these are sacrifices."

This is the investigative result, but it's also a portrait type. He's describing what a genuine patriot looks like: not someone who performs revolutionary zeal in times of safety, but someone whose commitment predates and exceeds what it was convenient to show. The implicit contrast with the people who'd denounced them — who'd made careers of accusation in the safer period after the Revolution's dangerous early years — doesn't have to be stated.

Bernard vs. Bernard: A Two-Act Tragedy

The most extended section of the Précis concerns Bernard de Saintes, and the way Augustin handles it is worth reading carefully.

He got Bernard to come. They reinvestigated together, in Bernard's presence, with full disclosure of the evidence. Bernard participated, was persuaded, and signed the release decree himself — acknowledging, per Augustin, the "jouissances" (satisfactions) this moment gave him.

And then, immediately, Bernard left for Besançon and publicly accused himself of lâcheté — cowardice — at the tribune, claiming it was "l'influence de mon frère qui lui en a imposé" — "my brother's influence that had overawed him."

Augustin's response to this is textually careful: "par une inconséquence que je ne puis expliquer et que je tairais si elle n'influait sur le repos public" — "an inconsistency I cannot explain and would keep silent about if it did not affect public order."

He is furious. The document makes this completely clear. But he presents the fury as a principled calculation rather than a personal reaction: I would stay quiet about this except that the public order requires me not to. That's an extremely specific rhetorical move. He's framing righteous anger as professional necessity, making the decision to speak about it seem reluctant rather than vindictive. Whether this is genuine or strategic is an open question, but it's sophisticated either way.

Dechristianization Meets Workforce Planning

He describes going personally to every place where dechristianization had created imprisoned people, rather than issuing decrees from a single location. "J'ai cru devoir me transporter dans tous les lieux où le fanatisme et l'intolérance paraissaient être aux prises." — "I felt I must go in person to every place where fanaticism and intolerance seemed to be grappling."

How he frames the releases is interesting: not "these people have a right to their faith" but "the petitions for this were so numerous that I believed it necessary to act" — and then the result is described in terms of economic and social restoration: "à Gray comme à Vesoul, j'ai rendu à l'agriculture tous les bras paralysés pour des messes et des vêpres" — "at Gray as at Vesoul, I restored to agriculture all the arms paralyzed for masses and vespers."

He's making a practical argument, not a theological one. Religious practice is "isolated from the Revolution" — his phrase from the decrees — meaning it no longer constitutes a political threat requiring suppression. The people detained for it can go home because keeping them serves no revolutionary purpose, and because their labor is needed elsewhere. This is the language most likely to persuade the Committee of Public Safety in February 1794, not an argument for freedom of conscience in the abstract.

“Indulgence”: The Tiny Word With a Big Reputation

This has come up in previous posts and I want to settle it properly now that I've read the document directly.

The word "indulgence" appears once. Here is the full context:

"persuadé que la justice est de tous les lieux, que d'ailleurs le gouvernement révolutionnaire nécessite une indulgence pour les agents secondaires, je les ai renvoyés à ceux qui les avaient délégués."

"persuaded that justice operates everywhere, that moreover the revolutionary government requires leniency toward secondary agents, I sent them back to those who had delegated them."

He's writing about the Gray commissioners — low-level agents sent from Commune-Affranchie (Lyon) who had overstepped in organizing grain requisitions and been imprisoned by the local authorities as a result. His position: they were wrong, but not criminally wrong, and punishing them harshly would create more problems than it solved. Send them back to their principals.

This is not a general philosophical statement about his whole approach to governance. It's a specific argument about how to handle overenthusiastic secondary officials. The "indulgence as watchword" framing from Luzzatto — and from some of our earlier posts — overstates what the document actually says.

What IS in the Précis as genuine philosophical statement: the Duroy passage.

The Revolutionary Revolutionary Who Wanted Fewer Revolutions

Duroy passes through Vesoul, apparently unimpressed. Augustin's note: "il m'a paru prévenu contre le département de la Haute-Saône, mais je ne m'en étonne pas, il est donné à si peu d'hommes de sentir qu'on ne peut plus et qu'on ne doit plus révolutionner un pays révolutionné."

"He appeared prejudiced against the department of the Haute-Saône, but I'm not surprised: it is given to so few men to feel that one can no longer and should no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized."

This is the closest thing to a self-articulated governing philosophy in the document. And notice what he's doing: he's not presenting it as a speech he gave or a position he argued. He's presenting it as an observation about Duroy's failure to understand something that Augustin understands. It's condescending in a very specific way — not "I believe X" but "most people can't feel X, but I can." This is the same self-positioning we see in the truth-asking passage earlier. He's confident, and he's confident in a way that includes a belief in his own superior perception.

Flattery, Accusations, and the Art of Not Taking the Bait

He arrives in Besançon where Bernard's accusations have preceded him. He mounts the tribune, confirms he's been denounced, and gives an account of his conduct. Then Viennot-Vaublanc — one of Bernard's people — speaks:

"il n'a réfuté aucun article de mon discours, mais il m'a vanté la hauteur des destinées auxquelles j'avais droit de prétendre et la nécessité où j'étais d'après cela de dédaigner une inculpation quelconque."

"He refuted none of the articles of my speech, but praised the greatness of the destiny I had the right to aspire to, and the necessity, given that, of disdaining any accusation whatsoever."

This is a political trap: flattering him into the position of saying he's above the charges, which makes him look arrogant and confirms the aristocracy-of-names accusation. Augustin sees through it immediately. His reply:

"j'ai déclaré que ma destinée était remplie, puisque j'avais eu le bonheur de servir la cause de la liberté et que... quant aux inculpations je ne les repoussais que parce qu'il ne suffit pas à un Représentant digne de ce titre d'être sans tache, il doit encore paraître tel."

"I declared that my destiny was fulfilled, since I had had the good fortune to serve the cause of liberty, and... as for the accusations, I refuted them not because I'm above them but because it is not enough for a representative worthy of that title to be blameless — he must also appear so."

He accepts the first premise (yes, serving liberty is enough destiny for him) and rejects the second (no, I'm not refuting these accusations because I'm above them — I'm refuting them because public perception of a representative's integrity matters, and I'm obligated to protect that). He's turned the flattery into a statement about duty. That's a sophisticated move and he does it in what was presumably an unrehearsed public exchange.

What the Précis Doesn't Include

Equally revealing: what's absent.

The Besançon Jacobin club scene with La Saudraye being expelled — completely absent. If Nodier's account is accurate, this was one of the more dramatic moments of the mission. Augustin doesn't mention it. Either the scene didn't happen in the dramatic form Nodier describes, or it happened and he made a considered decision to leave it out of an official report. Both options are plausible; the second is perhaps more consistent with someone who spent four pages carefully managing the presentation of his conduct.

La Saudraye appears only at the very end — in the attached letter to Maximilien asking him to receive her. "Il est nécessaire qu'il l'entende pour parvenir à connoître certains personnages qui jouent un rôle dans la révolution et qui devraient cacher leur honte et leur immoralité." — "It is necessary that he hear her to come to know certain individuals who play a role in the Revolution and who should hide their shame and their immorality." She's framed as an intelligence source, not as a personal companion. Whether this framing is strategic or straightforwardly accurate is something the Précis can't tell us.

What the Document Is, Overall

It's a defense. That needs to be said clearly: this is a man who has been publicly denounced as a counter-revolutionary, writing to the Committee that has authority over his life, explaining why he did what he did. Everything in it serves that purpose. The careful procedural delays, the documented inconsistencies of Bernard, the framing of clemency as practical necessity rather than soft ideology — all of it is shaped by the context of self-justification.

That doesn't make it dishonest. It makes it a document read in light of its purpose. What it shows is: a man who understood the political mechanics of the situation he was in, who had a genuine and coherent theory of what he was doing, who was capable of sophisticated rhetorical strategy under pressure, and who was also — in the passages about the detainees' children at the frontier and the men who didn't know their sacrifices were sacrifices — genuinely moved by what he'd seen. Those two things coexist in the document. It doesn't resolve cleanly into either "calculated political performance" or "authentic expression." It's both, because most documents written under political pressure are both.

The Précis is the best evidence we have for what Augustin thought he was doing in the Haute-Saône, in his own words, in a considered form. It should probably be cited more and paraphrased less.

Source:

Robespierre, Augustin. Précis des opérations faites par Robespierre jeune dans le département de la Haute-Saône. In Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I, pp. 257–261. [Read directly from the original French.]

[robespierrecadet]

It's Abel!!

Unfortunately, while working on a filler post, I accidentally.. lost it.

To make up for it, I'll be posting the Google Doc link to my English translation of Bonbon Robespierre by Sergio Luzzatto.

Enjoy!! Vive Robespierre le Jeune!!

Garten of BanBan Robespierre

Index / Table of Contents Title Page Colophon [REMOVED] Drinking the Hemlock Robespierre the Little? Almost a Great Man On a Mission A Reck

Small note, this translation was done in a very short amount of time with a lot on my mind: if there are any errors, please let me know!

[robespierrecadet]

After Thermidor: What Happened to Everyone Around Bonbon

The pattern of who held and who folded after 9 Thermidor is one of the more revealing things about the people in Augustin's life: Nobody comes out of this entirely clean, and the variations are genuinely instructive.

A note on sourcing upfront: this post draws primarily on Mary Young's chapter 19, which is the most comprehensive account of the immediate post-Thermidor fates assembled anywhere. Endnote references are included where the underlying source matters.

Philippe Lebas: Chose Death

He shot himself on 9 Thermidor rather than submit to arrest. This requires no analysis — it's undoubtedly the cleanest data point in the whole file. He had dinner with Augustin, Maximilien, Saint-Just, and David four days earlier on the Champs-Élysées. He chose to die with them rather than survive without them. Young doesn't editorialize, and neither will I.

Jean-François Ricord: Held for Approximately Zero Days

The news reached Nice on 18 Thermidor. Ricord went to Grasse, read a letter, came back: He wrote a proclamation to the people of the Alpes-Maritimes that managed to announce the executions without naming Augustin specifically — letting the Convention's own proclamation carry that weight. Then the next day he wrote to the Committee directly:

"I blush to have been the friend of Robespierre the Younger. It is true that I thought him honest; but from the moment of his treason he had no more implacable enemy than me... I am sorry I was not in the Convention to vote for the deaths of the criminal scoundrels who had the audacity to conspire against liberty."

Young's comment: "It is a vain speculation to ask what Ricord really thought of Augustin. But Augustin had probably cuckolded him. He had also made his colleague's life difficult by prolonged absences in Vesoul and Paris; he had always been a law unto himself. Certainly, Ricord may finally have concluded, he owed nothing to the memory of his friend, now become a dangerous embarrassment."

It also emerged that Ricord had already suppressed a Committee decree ordering Haller's arrest and given him a passport to Genoa. He had, in other words, protected Haller while preparing to denounce Augustin. The surviving and the denunciation were coordinated acts, not impulsive reactions.

Ricord was eventually sent back to Paris and had to defend his actions before the Convention. No serious action was taken against him.

Saliceti: From Artistic Distance to Competitive Denunciation

Saliceti had been absent from the Army of Italy for months, but Thermidor gave him the opportunity to reconstruct his relationship to the whole Midi operation from the safety of Barcelonette. His letter to the Committee: "You know that since the expedition to Oneglia I have not been with the Army of Italy and even asked you to recall me. But I can explain, now that we are free, that I did not wish to participate in the enormous abuses which in this part of the world were authorised with an impudence which made all republicans mourn."

He then joined Laporte and Albitte in a collective letter accusing Augustin, Ricord, Haller, and Bonaparte of betraying military plans to the enemy. The theory is that: Napoleon's mysterious journey to Genoa was cover for delivering the French armies to Piedmont. This is the accusation that got Napoleon arrested for eleven days before it collapsed.

Haller: Made It Out

Ricord's passport got Haller to Genoa before the Committee's arrest warrant could catch him: He made his way to Switzerland. In after years he was employed by Napoleon — which is either poetic justice or the Revolution's standard operating procedure, depending on how you look at it. "Papa Haller," who had been feeding the Army of Italy while making a fortune on the side, outlasted everyone who'd tried to manage him.

Napoleon: The Complicated Clearing of His Name

Napoleon was arrested at Fort Carré at Antibes on 29 Thermidor on the strength of the Saliceti/Laporte/Albitte accusations. He wrote letters protesting his innocence. One of them — to Tilly, the French chargé d'affaires in Genoa — contains the line we've already quoted: "I was somewhat affected by the catastrophe of Robespierre the Younger, since I loved him and believed him pure, but had he been my father I would have stabbed him had he aspired to tyranny."

He was released on 24 August, too useful to stay imprisoned. When he encountered Barras again in October 1795 and needed to clear himself of Robespierrist associations, he did so by telling a story about Augustin's humanity — the orphaned child clothed and brought to his table, the boy refusing to drink to the Republic, Augustin telling Ricord "Respect such a character. You would not do as much in similar circumstances." Young's note: "Perhaps Augustin's reproach to his friend struck home." It's a curious thing, to use the man's decency as your alibi.

Boizot: Congratulated Himself

The National Agent of Vesoul — the man who had written florid Rousseauistic letters to La Saudraye about the beauties of local life while simultaneously trying to build his career around Augustin's connections — immediately sent a congratulatory letter to the Convention on news of Augustin's death. He was "even more delighted," per Girardot (vol. III, p. 157), when shortly after "there was a celebration in which the effigies of the Robespierres were burned to the sound of drums and dancing of the people."

He then composed a letter, supposedly from both himself and Viennot, stating that they had never "merited the horrible favour of the tyrant Robespierre" and that he himself had "resisted them when they had power." He wrote this while sitting on his own letter to Guillodon de La Saudraye, which began "every day they try to destroy you" and called her influence over Augustin irresistible: He could not get Viennot to sign the letter.

Viennot: The One Who Held

Viennot — the apothecary of Vesoul, in whose study Augustin had found copies of all Maximilien's speeches, for whom Augustin had written an impassioned defense when he was arrested by Bernard's people — refused to sign Boizot's letter: He had to send it under his own name alone.

Young: "Viennot behaved with more dignity. He always maintained that Augustin was worthy of a better fate."

That's the entirety of what we have about Viennot's post-Thermidor stance, and it's enough.

Bernard de Saintes: Still Going About It in June 1795

Bernard was "still racked by the thought of his weakness with Robespierre the Younger" months later. He wrote a long statement documenting Augustin's behavior toward him — how Augustin had sworn at Besançon to destroy him, how after Thermidor he had received a "host of letters congratulating me on my escape from this tyrant, who would not have hesitated to denounce me had he not been executed himself." He accused the people of Vesoul of planning to put up a column in Augustin's memory and encase his speeches in a leaden coffer.

The people of Vesoul, by June 1795, had "plucked up enough courage to answer back." They denied the column and the leaden coffer. They said: "Robespierre the Younger never flattered us and we flattered him still less. He treated us as good citizens; he simply gave us justice. We judged him by the civil and moral qualities he showed among us."

This is the closest thing in the record to a defense of Augustin by people with no political stake in defending him. They had every reason to stay quiet. They didn't.

Guillodon de La Saudraye: A Little House Near Sens

M. de La Saudraye died in the spring of 1795. The widowed Guillodon — the "much-talked-about ex-marchioness" who had walked out of the Besançon Jacobin Club when a tinsmith demanded her removal, who had lobbied for the Vesoul patriots after Augustin left, who had tried to use her contacts for the people who'd needed her help — was very badly off. She sold part of her late husband's library and bought herself a small house near Sens.

That's the last we hear of her.

Sauli: "Faithful to the Noble Principles of His Life"

Sauli was arrested immediately on his return to Genoa — "perhaps too ingenuous to make a really good spy," as Young puts it. He was imprisoned for six months. He bore his captivity, per his biographer Pellet, with cheerfulness, writing to his family and reading history. Afterward he became the editor of a liberal newspaper in Genoa. He died in 1841. Pellet's epitaph: "faithful to the noble principles of his life."

The village of Jussey, not content with removing Augustin's name from its minutes, also removed all mention of Sauli on grounds that he had been "close to odious conspirators." He outlived them by nearly fifty years. (wooooo!!!)

Buissart: Attacked, Survived, Respected

Buissart underwent "unpleasant attacks" because of his documented close friendship with the Robespierres. In the end it had to be acknowledged that he had done everything in his power to help Arras during the Terror — those desperate letters to Maximilien, his wife's long stay at the Duplay house, his advocacy for the imprisoned judges. He took no further part in public life: He lived to a respected old age in Arras. His sons — "the little marmots" of Augustin's letters — grew up to be well-known lawyers in the town.

Charlotte: The Longest Arc

Charlotte stayed in Paris, in considerable poverty, until Napoleon received her and granted her a pension. She then, being Charlotte, pestered Napoleon and Joséphine to such a degree that they eventually closed their doors to her. She survived until 1834, accumulating and then repudiating different versions of her brothers' story, eventually collaborating with Laponneraye on the Mémoires that tried to rehabilitate both of them — and in the process, as we've now established at length elsewhere on this blog, sometimes inventing details and sometimes getting things demonstrably wrong about her own testimony.

She compared herself to the mother of the Gracchi: She signed the letter "De Robespierre."

Young's note on her: brief, dry, kind — "poor Charlotte did not return to Arras."

Lebon: Guillotined

After Thermidor, Lebon was recalled and guillotined. Arras was restored to the tranquillity Augustin had spent weeks trying to obtain for it. The petition asking that Augustin be sent to Arras as representative on mission had apparently been delivered on 10 Thermidor. The day he died.

The Pattern / Overview

Looking at the whole list: the people who held — Viennot, Sauli, the citizens of Vesoul, eventually Buissart — were the ones Augustin had done something real for, with his own administrative authority, at actual cost to himself politically. Viennot was defended personally and publicly at a moment when that defense created enemies. The Vesoul citizens got justice when the pressure was all pointing toward denunciation. Sauli was taken seriously as a political interlocutor and treated as an intellectual equal.

The people who folded — Ricord, Boizot, Saliceti, Napoleon in the first instance — were the ones for whom the relationship had been more complicated: mixed with self-interest, or with political calculation, or with the kind of intimacy that could too easily be reframed as manipulation or complicity once the wind changed.

Boizot is the clearest example of the second type. He'd written to La Saudraye calling Augustin irresistible and then burned his effigy while trying to get Viennot to co-sign a letter he'd forged in both their names. Viennot wouldn't sign it and the letter went out with one name.

The relationship between what Augustin actually did for people and how those people responded to his death isn't perfect — nothing in this period is — but it's legible. And it's a more honest memorial than most of what was written about him in either direction.

Sources:

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. Chapter 19 throughout, with endnote sources:

Ricord's proclamation and letter: Recueil des Actes du Comité de Salut Public (Aulard, ed.), vol. 15, p. 721 and 515.

Boizot and Viennot post-Thermidor: Girardot, Le département de la Haute-Saône pendant la Révolution, vol. III, pp. 153, 157, 160.

Bernard de Saintes post-Thermidor statement and Vesoul's reply: Lods, Un Conventionnel en Mission, pp. 258 and 298. [Read directly.]

La Saudraye's fate: Mathiez, "Robespierre Jeune en Franche-Comté." [Now cited directly in Annales, read directly.]

Sauli's fate: Pellet, "La Révolution de Gênes en 1797," in Napoléon, p. 225. (Via Young, not read directly.)

Buissart's fate: Barbier, p. 18. (Via Young, not read directly.)

Charlotte's post-Thermidor fate: Fleischmann, Robespierre et les femmes, p. 269. (Via Young.)

Napoleon's clearing of his name via Barras: Barras, Mémoires, vol. I, p. 310.

Haller's fate: confirmed in Young chapter 19 narrative; Napoleonic employment from same.

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025. ("Only Bonbon" chapter for the Lebon recall timing and miniature guillotines.)

[robespierrecadet]

Speculating About Bonbon: Relationships with peers Including Ones I Can't Quite Confirm

Okay, quick note before we start: I'm way too lazy to rewrite this because I originally wrote it as if I were talking to myself. So, if you see me accidentally say "we," assume it's the royal "WE," not "we" as in. the fandom. This is just the extent of my knowledge.

A companion piece to the Allies and Adversaries posts, but explicitly speculative — these are the figures from the wider frev world whose relationship with Augustin falls somewhere between "definitely something there" and "we literally have no idea." The methodology here is: here's what we know, here's what's documented, here's what can be reasonably inferred, and here's where the inference runs out.

Philippe Lebas: The Closest Thing to a Peer Friendship We Have

Starting here because this one has more documented warmth than almost any other relationship in the file;

Lebas — deputy from Nord, idolizer of Maximilien, eventually Élisabeth Duplay's husband — meets Augustin through the Convention in spring 1793. The oranges-in-the-gallery scene from Young is the first documented moment of them together: Marat's trial day, Charlotte and Élisabeth in the gallery, Lebas and Augustin accompanying them, the oranges being shared, the shy flirtation beginning. Augustin and Élisabeth presumably talked while Lebas tried to work out how to speak to her. (dork)

Then Lebas falls ill and he's confined to his room for weeks. Maximilien comes to visit but Lebas is too. sshhyyy to ask for news of Élisabeth. Then Augustin comes, and Lebas tells Élisabeth later:

"Robespierre the Younger came to see me. What joy for me! I was more familiar with him. We were the same age."

"We were the same age" — they were born within a year of each other, which Lebas is giving as an explanation for why he felt easier with Augustin than with the Incorruptible. With Maximilien he was formal and couldn't ask what he needed. With Augustin he could be "more familiar." Augustin then, apparently unprompted, praised Élisabeth at length — a service to his friend, delivered without being asked.

This is the most relaxed documented interaction Augustin has with any fellow deputy outside his brother. No politics, and no mission logistics, just two young men roughly the same age, one of them visiting the other in illness, the conversation landing on a mutual friend and a woman one of them is falling for. Young doesn't make much of it but I think it matters — it's one of the few moments in the record where Augustin seems to be functioning as someone's friend rather than someone's brother or someone's representative.

Lebas, of course, died on 9 Thermidor, shooting himself rather than submit to arrest. He was 20. On July 25, four days before, he had dinner with Augustin, Maximilien, Saint-Just, and David in a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées.

Saint-Just: Buddies-in-Law, With Complications

The simplest framing: they were probably friendly because they were both Maximilien's people, and that's probably most of it. But there are a few specific things that complicate or texture the picture.

Saint-Just, as far as the record (i have) shows, did something genuinely useful for Augustin during the Army of Italy period: when a general who had fallen foul of Saint-Just had to be reassigned from the Rhine, Saint-Just apparently helped smooth over the complications this created for the Army of Italy operation. Young mentions this briefly. It's a small practical thing, but it's the kind of thing that builds goodwill between political allies.

The July 25 dinner — four days before Thermidor, possibly the last time most of them were together — has Saint-Just at the same table as Augustin. Young says it "is said" (so: reported but not certainly confirmed?) that they dined together at a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées.

The more complicated piece: Saint-Just was working throughout summer 1794 for a reconciliation between Maximilien and the rest of the Committee, trying to prevent an open rupture: Augustin, who was simultaneously trying to build a case against Carnot and push his brother toward confrontation rather than compromise, may have been working at cross purposes to this — or at least operating on a different strategic calculus. Young notes: "Augustin may have feared that his brother might be talked into some sort of compromise." If Saint-Just was the one doing the talking, that's a tension worth noting, even if it never broke into open conflict.

What I don't have: any direct correspondence between them, any recorded conversation, any moment where Saint-Just speaks about Augustin or vice versa in documented form: The relationship is inferred from proximity, shared political position, and the July 25 dinner. Friend-in-law with possible strategic divergence at the end. That's the version..

Couthon: The Complicated One

Couthon is more interesting than Saint-Just for Augustin-watching purposes, because there are two specific documented moments that don't quite go together.

First: Augustin wrote to Couthon in the late spring of 1794 about the treatment of Saliceti, calling him "the true conqueror of Oneglia" and asking Couthon to intervene on behalf of the Army of Italy's operations. This is cordial, professionally warm correspondence — Augustin is using Couthon as a channel to the Committee, which implies a basic trust in his. willingness to be helpful.

Second: Young notes, in the context of the decree governing the armies in spring 1794 (the one where Augustin was trying to support his plans he made with Napoleon, and it got shot down), that it was "also signed by Couthon, Robespierre's friend, but Couthon was a man of independent mind." The qualifier is Young flagging that Couthon signed things Maximilien wouldn't have wanted — meaning he didn't simply follow the Robespierre position. He was an ally but not a satellite.

Third: The Gaillard account of Charlotte's visit in May 1794 includes a scene where she takes Gaillard to see Couthon. The conversation goes badly, Couthon apparently makes a move toward his guards, Charlotte physically stops him like an overly eager TSA agent at the airport (good thinking girl), and Gaillard flees. This is Charlotte's mess rather than Augustin's, but it shows the Robespierre adjacent circle's relationship with Couthon had edges as well as warmth.

Of course. Couthon dies on 9 Thermidor alongside Maximilien and Augustin. Whatever the tensions, they ended up on the same side at the end — whether by shared conviction or by structural inevitability of having been associated with the Robespierre platform.

So. The speculative summary: Augustin probably had a working relationship with Couthon built on genuine shared politics and some practical mutual usefulness, without it being the tight personal bond Maximilien had. Couthon's independence of mind would, I think, have been both useful (he wasn't predictable in a way Augustin could manipulate) and occasionally frustrating (he signed things Augustin didn't want signed).

The Indulgents: Shared Conclusions, Completely Different People

The interesting thing about Augustin's relationship with the Dantonist/Indulgent circle is that he and they arrived at roughly the same political position — the Terror has gone too far, mercy is now the patriotic argument — through completely different routes and from completely different political cultures.

Danton's circle was urban, loud, socially. whats the word. gregarious, financially compromised in ways that gave them complicated motives for wanting the Terror to stop. Camille Desmoulins was Danton's closest friend, a journalist using wit and brilliance to make political arguments that sometimes aimed at actual reform and sometimes aimed at 'protecting people he personally liked'. Their "indulgence" was partly genuine and partly self-interested, and Camille himself — as Young quotes Thompson — was motivated more by mischievousness than by systematic conviction. His aim, in the end, was allegedly to 'not to moderate the government but to destabilize it'.

Now what i can speak for: Augustin's moderation had completely different roots: five months in the departments watching what the Terror actually produced in practice, a body of administrative decisions freeing people from prison, a set of letters to Maximilien articulating a specific theory about what the Revolution had passed the point of needing. He got to "indulgence" through observed consequences rather than through. personal loyalty networks. or journalistic wit.

Does this mean he sympathized with the Dantonists? Young is careful here: "it may be thought that a plea for clemency would greatly appeal to Augustin, but though his opposition to the crude anti-clericalism of Hébert's newspaper continued unabated, he does not seem to have felt much interest in Hébert's journalistic rival."

This is worth sitting with. Augustin's moderation and the Vieux Cordelier's moderation were making similar arguments, but he apparently didn't find Camille's version particularly compelling. Young speculates he may have "mingled at times in the same circles" — Mme Sainte-Amaranthe's gaming house is specifically named as a place where both Augustin and Danton's friends might have turned up — but notes no friendships seem to have grown from these encounters (especially as Augustin himself was banned from going there by Big Brother).

Camille Desmoulins specifically:

Camille made fun of Augustin. The Courtois-quoted Desmoulins line — "the very sound of young Robespierre's voice is foolish" — is hostile, dismissive, and delivered by someone with a nasty wit. Camille was also, as noted, tangled up in Maximilien's orbit in ways that generated complicated feelings all around: He was not someone Augustin had reason to like.

Danton himself:

the April 1794 letter where Augustin congratulates Maximilien on Danton's arrest and announces he "had always known Danton was a traitor" is very revealing. Young describes this as "an astounding insight" — meaning she finds it implausible as a long-held genuine view rather than a retroactive claim designed to demonstrate loyalty to Maximilien's position. It reads (to me) like Augustin performing the correct response to news he hadn't wanted to hear, by going further than the situation required. "Naturally, he was always a traitor" is what you say when you need to demonstrate you're not sad about it.

Hérault de Séchelles:

guillotined with Danton by the time Augustin comes back from his missions. Young notes his seat on the Committee was never filled, creating a gap that affected the Army of Italy operations. Augustin would have had opinions about Hérault, since Hérault had Committee responsibilities that overlapped with areas Augustin cared about, but those opinions aren't. well. preserved.

And then Fabre d'Églantine himself is just too peripheral to Augustin's specific story to speculate usefully on.

The Ruling Pattern

Looking at all of these together: Augustin's closest documented warmth is with people in his immediate physical orbit (Lebas, the Duplay family) rather than with the broader political circles. He was not, apparently, someone who formed friendships through the Convention or the Jacobin Club in any casual networked way. The sociability that gets attributed to him — the gaming house visits, the "fond of the company of women," the bon vivant reputation — doesn't map onto documented Convention friendships the way it might for someone like Danton or Desmoulins, who operated through dense social networks.

His alliances were mostly functional, mediated through Maximilien's connections, or formed on the road during missions among people he was working alongside intensively. Which tracks with what we know about him more broadly: he formed attachments through sustained proximity and shared practical work, not through the salon or the club.

And with figures like Couthon and Saint-Just, where there was enough shared politics to create a working relationship, it stayed at that level — working relationship, ally of the project, person at the same dinner table four days before the end. Not the kind of warmth Lebas's letter captures. Not the kind of enmity Bernard's denunciations capture. Just: people operating in the same political structure, with occasional friction and occasional mutual usefulness, until they died together.

Sources:

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Lebas illness passage chapter 8; Desmoulins/January 5 passage chapter 10; Couthon and the committee decree chapter 16; the July 25 dinner chapter 20; Danton arrest congratulation letter chapter 14.)

Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. (April 1794 letter congratulating Maximilien on Danton's arrest; Couthon correspondence.)

@anotherhumaninthisworld compilations — the Courtois-quoted Desmoulins line; Lebas's letter to Élisabeth quoted in Hamel.

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.

[robespierrecadet]

Augustin and Joseph Lebon: A Political Relationship in Five Acts

The Lebon story is one of the longest continuous threads in Augustin's life — starting before the Revolution in Arras, running through the Convention period, climaxing during the final weeks before Thermidor, and ending with Lebon's execution afterward. It's also one of the clearest illustrations of the difference between Augustin's instincts and Maximilien's, and of what happened when those instincts came into direct conflict.

Act One: The Presbytery Dinner (1791)

Joseph Lebon appears in Augustin's life at a dinner. Maximilien has returned briefly to Arras in late 1791, and Lebon — then a constitutional curé in a nearby parish, prominent in the Arras Jacobins, devoted admirer of Maximilien — invites both brothers to his presbytery. The meal is cooked by his parish clerk, a man named Morel, who would later tell the historian Paris this about the evening:

"Morel never included Robespierre the Younger in the same reprobation as his brother. He was a man of peace who only asked to dine quietly; when he saw [Maximilien] Robespierre and Lebon getting excited he tried to calm them and lead them to other thoughts."

Young finds this slightly surprising given Augustin's "extreme views" at the period, and suggests an alternative reading: "another explanation might be that Augustin had already begun to dislike and distrust Lebon and was not pleased to see Maximilien talking openly to him." Which fits rather well with everything that follows.

(coughs jealousy much /j)

Young's description of Lebon at this stage is pointed: "He had a fund of unclerical language and critical people such as Augustin might have found him to be vulgar, treacherous and pushy." The word "critical" is doing a lot there. Lebon in 1791 is a man performing revolutionary enthusiasm, calculating advancement, trying to attach himself to the Robespierre name. Augustin, who had been watching local Arras politics closely for two years and had a particular sensitivity to people who performed ideology for career purposes, clocked this early.

Act Two: The Jason and Legray Affair (September 1792)

By the fall of 1792, Lebon is Mayor of Arras and Augustin has become provisionally Procureur General. The relationship is structurally collegial but personally difficult. When two commissioners from Paris — Jason and Legray — arrive in Arras and claim to have found financial irregularities, Lebon arrests them: Augustin takes the commissioners' side in the municipal assembly, arguing that since they came from Paris, interfering with them endangered "the progress of the legislative power."

Young's reading of this episode is interesting: she thinks Lebon arrested the commissioners primarily for local political reasons — to establish himself in Arras — and that Augustin's defense of them was about Parisian authority rather than personal loyalty to Lebon. Both men were positioning, using different arguments, for different reasons. The episode shows them capable of operating in the same space without being on the same side.

What's also visible here: Lebon, according to his biographer Jacob, emerged from this episode having "rendered an immense service not only to the town but to humanity." He was very good at getting credit. Augustin, who helped resolve the situation, features mostly as a procedural voice: The dynamic of Lebon absorbing political benefit from situations involving both of them is already present.

Act Three: The July 1793 Letter (July 1793)

By summer 1793, Lebon has become a suppliant to the Convention — an understudy who stepped into a vacant seat. Augustin writes to Buissart, and what he writes is worth reading carefully:

"You mention the new deputy; I've suspected him for a long time; he knows more about intrigue than delicacy or good faith; he will harm the Republic by his extravagances; he's too original for me. I wish you would tell me if it is true that he wishes to convoke the primary assemblies to elect a new Convention... We need to know what is behind the mask."

Three things are notable here. First, "I've suspected him for a long time" — this is retrospective, but credible given the 1791 dinner dynamic. The distrust predates the Convention period. Second, "knows more about intrigue than delicacy or good faith" — a political rather than personal charge. He is describing a man who performs loyalty instrumentally, which is exactly what Lebon was doing. Third, and most revealing: "what is behind the mask." He is asking Buissart to investigate, to gather intelligence: Not venting but rather an attempt to build a case.

Meanwhile, Lebon was still publicly treating Augustin as a dear friend. When admitted to the Paris Jacobins, he made a speech calling it "the happiest day of his life, the anniversary of the day the reactionaries of Arras had sought to arrest Augustin and himself." He was performing intimacy with the Robespierre name for an audience. Augustin, who had just privately described him as a masked intriguer, had to sit through this.

Louis Jacob, Lebon's biographer and defender, claimed Augustin's antipathy was "base jealousy" — that Lebon was surpassing him in the Convention and he couldn't stand it. Young is skeptical, and I think correctly. It's true that Augustin got one vote when he stood for the Colonial Committee that summer (Lebon ironically signed the voting results), which was humiliating: But the distrust predates Lebon's rise and is articulated in substantive terms — intrigue, extravagance, bad faith — rather than in terms of competition.

(coughs/j)

Act Four: The Pas-de-Calais Crisis (Floréal — Messidor Year II)

Lebon's mission in the Pas-de-Calais became one of the most extreme provincial terror operations in Year II. The statistics are documented: 392 executions in a department that had seen no significant federalist revolt. People guillotined to the sound of martial music. Families destroyed for "comic opera crimes" — including one man whose parrot cried "God save the King," though Young notes with grim amusement that the parrot itself was spared (thank god/j).

Buissart wrote increasingly desperate letters to Maximilien. Mme Buissart came to Paris in person, staying at the Duplay house, practically in Maximilien's antechamber. The letters made clear what was happening:

"We are so longing to see Bonbon. When is he coming? Only he can calm the ills that are making your country desolate."

And separately:

"The arrival of Bonbon would no doubt hinder [Lebon]; it is the hope of true patriots and the terror of those who dare to persecute them. He knows the people of Arras too well not to do them justice. His place can't be taken by anyone else."

Meanwhile, Maximilien was receiving letters from Lebas at the front: "Hurry Lebon's return; he has done much good and is worth a garrison in Cambrai." And from Guffroy: "[Lebon] has killed patriotism in Arras... Hébert has not done more harm than he." These two letters directly contradict each other, and Maximilien had to choose which voice to listen to. He chose Lebas. He recalled Lebon to Paris for questioning in floréal, accepted his justification, and sent him back — escorting Charlotte home in the process.

This is the episode that creates what Young calls "a shadow on relations between the two brothers — something the machinations of other intriguers had not managed to achieve." Maximilien's continued support for Lebon against the explicit testimony of Buissart, Guffroy, and eventually Augustin himself, was a genuine rupture in a relationship where Augustin had previously accepted almost every correction without complaint.

Act Five: The Return and What It Might Have Changed (Messidor Year II)

Augustin arrives back in Paris in late June/early July 1794. Mme Buissart is still there, at the Duplays. Guffroy has been trying to reach him. The Arras situation is unresolved..

What happened next is partially documented and partially inference. Luzzatto argues — and it's credited by Young as at least plausible — that Augustin's return was the decisive factor in Lebon finally being recalled definitively. The Committee of Public Safety ordered Lebon's permanent recall on 22 Messidor. That's approximately two weeks after Augustin got back to Paris. Luzzatto writes: "it was only after Robespierre jeune's return from the Midi that the Committee of Public Safety decided to recall Lebon, that is, assumed the responsibility of stopping the slaughter." Young hedges more: she doesn't claim Augustin was definitively responsible, but notes the timing.

Guffroy had written to Augustin directly: "put an end as soon as possible to the pains of those who, in Arras, are true and sincere friends of liberty." We know Augustin agreed to meet the Arras patriots. We know he brought them to Maximilien. We know from Guffroy's own account that Augustin was working the problem. Whether he was the decisive push or one of several converging pressures: the result held. Lebon was recalled. Shortly after, the new revolutionary tribunal in Arras was suppressed. The guillotines that had followed Lebon across the Pas-de-Calais and into Nord were dismantled. A few weeks later, Young notes, the municipal council of Arras ordered the seizure of miniature guillotines — "about two feet high" — that local children had been using to guillotine birds and mice. (yay!)

The petition from Arras asking that Augustin be sent there as representative on mission was reportedly delivered on 10 Thermidor. The day he died.

What the Lebon Story Shows

The long arc from the presbytery dinner to the final weeks makes a few things visible:

Augustin's read on Lebon was correct and early. He flagged him as an intriguer operating behind a mask in July 1793. By summer 1794, Lebon had proven this in the most extreme way imaginable. Being right didn't help — not immediately.

The Lebon situation was one of the very few things where Maximilien and Augustin were genuinely on opposite sides. Not publicly — they never had a public confrontation about it — but structurally. Maximilien accepted Lebas's endorsement. Augustin accepted Buissart's testimony. Both men's information networks were telling them different truths about the same person, and they processed them differently. This is partly a difference in what they prioritized — military effectiveness versus civilian justice — and partly a difference in what they were willing to see.

And there's something specifically interesting in the fact that it was this issue, of all the things Maximilien and Augustin disagreed about, that created what Young calls a genuine shadow between them. Augustin had absorbed the January 5 rebuke in silence. He'd watched his political development be managed and contained through successive missions. But watching Maximilien do nothing about Lebon while Buissart's letters stacked up — watching the people of Arras get destroyed while Maximilien accepted Lebas's cheerful reports at face value — seems to have been the thing he couldn't fully absorb.

The fact that he may have finally moved the needle, in the last weeks of his life, while simultaneously trying to build a case against The Levée en Mass-Murderer Carnot and navigating the most dangerous political crisis of the Revolution — that compression of events is very Augustin. Too much, too late, working too many angles at once, with the clock already running out.

The petition arrives on the day he dies.

Sources:

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Chapters 3, 4, 6, 19 — the presbytery dinner via Morel/Paris; the Jason and Legray affair; the July 1793 letter to Buissart; the Pas-de-Calais crisis chapters; the summer 1794 denouement and Vesoul's post-Thermidor defense of Augustin.)

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025. ("Only Bonbon" chapter — the Lebon crisis in full; the 22 Messidor recall timing argument.)

Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I. (Buissart's letters; Guffroy's letter to Augustin; the July 5 1793 letter to Buissart flagging Lebon.)

Guffroy, Armand Joseph. Les secrets de Joseph Lebon et de ses complices. 1795. (Guffroy's account of approaching Augustin; the Leblond/Maximilien/Carnot meeting; the staircase scene.)

Paris, A.-J. La Terreur dans le Pas-de-Calais et dans le Nord. Arras: Rousseau-Leroy, 1864. (Morel's account of the presbytery dinner; Saint-Pol district statistics.)

Jacob, Louis. Joseph Lebon, 1765–1795. Paris: Mellottée, 1934. (Jacob's "base jealousy" claim; Lebon biographer's perspective throughout.)

[robespierrecadet]

where's your banner from?

ohohohuhuhohh am I ever so glad you asked

At first glance, it might look like your run-of-the-mill excerpt from a fanfiction or something..

..but alas! It is not.

It's actually from the novella I'm currently translating!!

You'll just have to wait and see the context, my friend. 👀

Okay, jokes aside, I am really excited. The first few chapters focus almost entirely on the Indulgents, Robespierre, and everything surrounding them (like the duplays!!!!), and the reason I had to take a two-week break is because I finally reached a chapter that includes Bonbon and absolutely could not contain my excitement

I'm #ill, I know

I have no idea whether Dr. Jan ten Brink knew so much because he actually studied the Revolution in depth, but if he did.. it definitely shows. There's a surprising amount of historical material woven into it that a run of the mill fiction author wouldn't know. It doesn't feel like "generic stereotypical fictional French Revolution stuff, go!!" It actually feels like it was written by someone who understood the period and cared about getting it on the target at least, which has made translating it a lot of fun so far.

I'm planning on continuing some time in the next week, if I'm not melted into my chair soon..

[robespierrecadet]

Tracing Augustin's Radicalism-to-Moderation Arc

A lot of posts about Augustin — including some on this blog — describe him as becoming "more moderate" over the course of Year II as if it were a smooth linear gradient. It wasn't. The shift was uneven, episodic, and left some real ugliness in the record before it completed.

What follows is an attempt to trace it stage by stage, precisely, using what's actually documented at each point:

Stage One: The Aboyeur (October 1792 — June 1793)

The Augustin who arrives at the Convention in September 1792 is not a moderate by any stretch. From the first months, he is identified by hostile observers as one of the "ferocious aboyeurs" — the hecklers who make Girondin speeches impossible. A 1814 commentator recalled him in this period as one of those "who only spoke of killing the Royal Family, their old servants and even well dressed men and women." Young notes this is somewhat overstated and doesn't match his actual speeches, which focused on Girondin politics rather than random aristocratic violence. But the general picture is accurate: this is a man throwing himself into factional warfare with. considerable enthusiasm.

The April 5 Jacobins speech is the clearest document of where he was politically. He is calling on good citizens to come to the Convention and "force us to arrest the unfaithful deputies." Not arrest as a vague future possibility — force it. Now. He wrote to Buissart afterward with what can only be described as glee: "I'm almost a great man since Saturday... don't be surprised if I give myself great airs, the incense is likely to stifle me if I don't disperse the smoke that has gone to my head."

The Catherine Clere case is where this phase is most damning, and Young is characteristically direct about it. Catherine Clere had been sentenced to death for causing a disturbance about food supplies. Several Girondin deputies argued for a reprieve: she was drunk, she knew nothing of politics, the punishment was disproportionate. Augustin opposed the motion. "We have passed a law against Royalism, and those who speak against the law are Royalists." She was executed. Young's note on this: "A Catherine Clere in Vesoul would, at worst, have got a very severe telling-off." The contrast is almost too neat. Not a year later he is doing exactly what he refused to do here — releasing people arrested on thin pretexts, insisting that denunciations motivated by personal grudge rather than real political threat don't justify detention. Catherine Clere in spring 1793 gets the hard line. The women of Vesoul in pluviôse Year II get the careful inquiry.

The pistols in the Convention belong to this same window. Lanjuinais's (iffy) memoirs note that Augustin and others on both sides were waving them around during the heated debates of May-June 1793. On June 2, when Lanjuinais was trying to speak, Augustin and Legendre were among those who physically tried to drag him from the tribune. The Girondin purge was, in its final hours, partly a physical confrontation and Augustin was in it.

Stage Two: The Road Changes Him (July — August 1793)

The Nice mission begins July 19. The first weeks are not yet a moderation story. At Manosque, where the federalist section members had seized their carriage and forced them to flee, Augustin's first letter back to Paris strikes a hard tone — a tone that seems to foreshadow punishment. Young quotes a passage suggesting the municipality of Manosque had "little to look forward to except immediate death." Five days later, however, the same letter had modulated considerably: they had "dispersed the panic," explained the Convention's principles, "spent a long time to do away with all ill-feeling, and now everything is peaceful and enlightened." The shift across those five days is visible in the document itself.

The Aix-en-Provence letter from August 28 is the clearest early evidence of the intellectual shift forming. Augustin sits down to write to Maximilien from "the most beautiful town in the world" and produces something decently analytical:

"One has to be very skilful to do good in these southern departments. You do not well understand the situation of these unhappy countries... People are exalté, incapable of reason... The crimes of some men calling themselves patriots have made it inevitable that other citizens should have united against disturbing vexations... it would be easy to mislead them with the greatest ease. It is obvious to me that if the patriots wish to punish all rebels indiscriminately, the civil war will be interminable."

This is not yet a policy position: It's an observation — and a tentative one, since he ends by asking Maximilien to correct him if he's wrong. But the germ is there: the machinery of revolutionary repression is creating the resistance it claims to be suppressing, and the people running it locally are often "stupidity personified." Young's note on this letter is precise: "it is greatly to his credit that he saw it with so little bias... Paradoxically the passionate South had calmed him."

Stage Three: Nice (September — November 1793)

The Nice period is complicated because the decree record shows two simultaneous things that the later moderatism narrative tends to flatten into one. On one hand, the first documented acts of administrative clemency appear here — the September 26 release of an elderly infirm man, the egg decree for hospital patients, the Genoese trade protections, the careful management of émigré property to prevent corrupt sales. These are the decrees of a man learning to administer rather than to purge.

On the other hand, this is also the period where the Toulon operation is building, and Augustin's letters about Toulon have none of the restraint that will characterize Vesoul. "We will date our next letter from the ruins of Toulon" is in a collective dispatch he signs. He is present at and participant in the political atmosphere that the other representatives are creating. Barras and Fréron have already written to Maximilien in October that they will only be happy when Toulon is "put to fire and blood" — and Augustin is now operating in the same political environment, even if his instincts are pulling in a different direction.

The key evidence that he was already ideologically differentiated from Barras and Fréron at this stage comes from the latter pair themselves. From November 13, before Toulon even falls, Fréron is writing to a friend that it is "essential that Barras and I... can take the frightful measures we have concerted to destroy Toulon without anyone putting spokes in our wheels" — a formulation that only makes sense if there is already someone whose moderation they fear. By the time Toulon falls, Barras and Fréron are explicitly complaining that Ricord and Augustin constitute a moderating pair whom they distrust.

So the Nice period shows: individual administrative decrees of real clemency, an intellectual understanding (formed by August) that indiscriminate repression is counterproductive, but an inability or unwillingness yet to turn either of those things into a public political position. He is moderating in practice in the departments he administers while still moving within the same rhetorical framework as the ultraradicals around him.

Stage Four: Toulon (December 1793)

This is the moment the moderatism narrative is most uncomfortable with, and it deserves direct treatment rather than elision. Augustin signs the Toulon reprisal orders. A letter from him, Ricord, and Fréron, dated December 8, reports that "firing squads are operating non-stop; naval officers have already been exterminated. The Republic will be avenged as it deserves." His signature on that document.

Two days after entering the city, he leaves — unusually early, without telling Barras and Fréron, in a direction they didn't know about. Whether this departure was moral discomfort with what the reprisals were becoming, or political calculation, or simple eagerness to be first to Paris with the news: Young is honest that it's impossible to say definitively. What is documented is that Fabry, the military historian, writes: "he had a heart too highly placed to waste his time in massacres." And that Young herself says simply: "he will have been glad to go."

The gap between what he signed and what he left is real. His position at Toulon is not yet the position he will take in Vesoul: and the shift is not yet complete.

Stage Five: The January 5 Incident (January 1794)

He comes back to Paris having watched all of this operate. He goes to the Jacobins on January 5. The club is mid-flamewar between Hébert and Desmoulins. He doesn't take sides in the personal dispute. He calls out Hébert specifically for his role in "the movements in the departments relating to worship" — the dechristianization campaign that Augustin has been watching devastate communities across the Midi and that he has been quietly opposing in his administrative decisions for months.

Maximilien shuts it down in forty seconds. The public rebuke is immediate. Augustin goes quiet and into society.

What is significant about this moment: it's the first time the intellectual position formed in Aix-en-Provence, practiced in individual decrees in Nice, becomes a public political argument. And it fails instantly. But the argument is now on record, and he takes it with him on his next mission.

Stage Six: Franche-Comté (January — March 1794)

This is where the shift completes, and the decree record from Mathiez's Annales révolutionnaires (1916) makes it legible in granular detail. The pattern is not just release decrees — it's a specific, repeated formula that shows deliberate legal reasoning rather than ad hoc mercy.

Jean-Baptiste Theurey: arrested for refusing to attend mass. Augustin's decree: "considérant que les motifs de cette arrestation sont injustes et intolérants." Unjust and intolerant — not just insufficient evidence, not just procedural error. A moral judgment on the arrest itself. Marie-Anne Euvrard: arrested for religious opinions and preferring refractory priests. Decree: "cette opinion devant être isolée de la Révolution." This opinion must be isolated from the Revolution — meaning it no longer constitutes a revolutionary threat requiring suppression. The Menoux parishioners: fourteen people from one village, arrested for refusing to attend certain masses. Released. The Gray mass release decree: a group arrested "only for simple religious opinions which they did not seek to propagate" — freed collectively, with the reasoning that their existence "ne trouble point l'ordre public." Does not disturb public order.

None of this is vague benevolence. It's a specific legal theory being applied consistently: religious practice has ceased to be politically actionable. Persecuting people for it now is not vigilance, it is manufacturing enemies. He is also, simultaneously, arresting his own agents for overstepping — Maillot and Maignan are seized for abusing their mandate. The moderation is not laissez-faire. It is a harder line against the abuse of revolutionary power by the people supposedly defending it.

The February 24 letter to the Committee of Public Safety from Lyon is the self-articulation: "il est donné à si peu d'hommes de sentir qu'on ne peut plus et qu'on ne doit plus révolutionner un pays révolutionné" — "it is given to so few men to feel that one can no longer and should no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized." And from the Précis des opérations: "Rien n'est plus facile que de conserver une réputation révolutionnaire aux dépens de l'innocence." Nothing is easier than maintaining a revolutionary reputation at the expense of innocence.

What the Arc Actually Shows

The standard framing — Augustin became moderate because he was naturally gentle and the missions revealed his true character — is partially right and partially misleading. What's actually visible is:

He was not gentle in Paris: Catherine Clere happened. The aboyeur period happened. He was a partisan in a vicious factional war and behaved accordingly.

The shift was produced by experience, and not by nature surfacing. The Aix letter is the first evidence of the intellectual position, and it comes specifically from watching the southern departments at close range. The Nice decrees show it being practiced before it's articulated. The January 5 speech shows it becoming a public argument. The Franche-Comté decrees show it becoming systematic policy.

The shift was not linear. He signed Toulon reprisal orders in December 1793. He was releasing religious prisoners in Vesoul in February 1794. That's two months. Between those two things lies the January 5 rebuke by Maximilien, whatever he made of that, and five months of watching what repression actually produces in practice.

And crucially: it was never a retreat from the Revolution. The Précis makes this explicit. He is not arguing that the Terror was wrong in principle, or that the Republic should be softer, or that the enemies of France deserved clemency. He is arguing that the Terror has passed its useful point — that continuing it now serves the Republic's enemies more than its friends, because it fills the jails with harmless people while the actually dangerous ones navigate the machinery of denunciation for their own purposes. It is a revolutionary argument for ending a phase of the Revolution. That's a very different thing from moderation as such.

Which may be why it was so difficult to say out loud at the Jacobins in January, and why Maximilien shut it down so fast.

Sources:

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Chapters 8–13 for the full arc; the Catherine Clere passage and Sainte-Claire Deville commentary; the Aix-en-Provence letter; the Toulon chapter and Fabry quotation.)

Mathiez, Albert. "Les Arrêtés de Robespierre Jeune dans sa mission de Franche-Comté." Annales Révolutionnaires 8 (1916): 79–130. [The Theurey, Menoux, Euvrard, Gray mass release decrees.]

Augustin's Précis des opérations, in Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I, p. 260.

Michon vol. I: the Aix-en-Provence letter (p. 183–84); the February Lyon letter; the Buissart correspondence.

Poupé, Edmond, ed. Lettres de Barras et de Fréron en Mission dans le Midi. Draguignan: Latil Frères, 1910. (The November 13 letter establishing Barras and Fréron's pre-existing fear of Ricord and Augustin's moderation; the post-Toulon letters.)

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.

anotherhumaninthisworlds compilations — the January 5 Jacobins exchange in full, via Jacobin club records.

[robespierrecadet]

yoohiihello hey I suggest that um. people who are on here and who do alot of historical writing or informative posts turn this blog setting on, if you haven't already:

I've already seen a good amount of posts from tumblr be recycled for Google AI overviews through websites like tumgik and tumlook, so this probably also applies to other AI's like ChatGPT or something.

[robespierrecadet]

why do you never use the first names of Guillodon de La Saudraye?

Oh, this is an easy one! It's mostly for recognition and consistency.

Most people who know of her at all will recognize her as Guillodon de La Saudraye, or even more simply La Saudraye.

It's also much easier for people to search my blog or Tumblr in general if I'm consistently using the same name every time!

The same logic applies to Sauli. I generally just call him "Sauli" rather than "Gaspare/Gaspard Sauli," because it keeps posts consistent and makes it easier to recognize that I'm referring to the same person across different discussions.

It's also not a convention that's unique to her. We do this with men constantly without really thinking about it. People usually say Robespierre, not Maximilien Robespierre, and Danton, not Georges Danton, unless there's a reason to use the full name. The surname effectively becomes the person's identifier.

Additionally, her husband isn't really a historical figure of much note, so there's basically no risk of confusion if I just say "La Saudraye." I don't think anyone is going to stop and wonder, "Wait hmmm.. is Augustin making heart eyes at the wife, or the husband?"

If I suddenly started referring to her as Jeanne-Rosalie Guillodon, I think most people would have no idea who I was talking about. She's already a fairly obscure historical figure connected to another obscure historical figure, so using the name she's most readily recognized by just makes communication easier.

There's also a practical reason: historical sources themselves often aren't consistent about given names. Depending on the document, translation, or catalog, you can end up with different forms of the same first name (such as my example with Sauli, two different spellings!!), whereas the surname or territorial designation tends to be the more stable point of reference.

Rest assured, though, Jeanne-Rosalie Guillodon gets plenty of recognition in my personal projects. ^^

Thanks for asking!

[placeholderwhileichange]

Hypothetically, how much legal trouble would I be in if i released my English Translation of Sergio Luzzattos Bonbon Robespierre? I feel a bit bad that I keep referencing it knowing most people don't have access to it or just cannot read italian/french: It feels a little unfair, and I didn't cram-translate it for just myself.. 😔

[robespierrecadet]

Alright!!!!!!! That should be better?????!!?!??

I've completely remade this blog on a different email because Tumblr was giving me way too much trouble with the sideblog.. which is exactly why I never made one in the first place, y'all.

But regardless! I think I'm gonna do it anyway (sharing the translation, I mean). I'm absolutely feral when it comes to sharing anything involving Augustin Robespierre. #sueme

Honestly, that's another reason I made this account on a new email. This account exists for one purpose and one purpose only: devoting myself to the younger Robespierre and, hopefully, getting more people to recognize his..

uh

checks notes

..masculine beauty, rivaled only by Hérault-Séchelles.

This is basically an entirely different person for an entirely different purpose. I am on a mission for AUGUSTIN. Not me.

Umm.

im going to repeat most of this information on my pinned soon. but yeah. thumbs up emoji

yall do me this favor

When/If i post my English Translation of Sergio Luzzattos Bonbon Robespierre should I :

Attach google doc link giving commentor permission

Attach google doc link giving viewer permission

Attach PDF

what are you doing dont post that shit!!!!!!

Voting ended onJul 10

[placeholderwhileichange]

Maximilien and Augustin: A One-Sided Brotherhood

The most useful starting point isn't what Augustin felt about Maximilien — that's been covered — but what the structure of the relationship actually was, and what Maximilien gave back.

An Inherited Structure

The family dynamic was essentially set before either of them had much say in it. Their mother died when Augustin was eighteen months old: Maximilien was five and became, by Charlotte's account, the effective head of the family: "he spoke to us with a sort of imposing gravity; if he joined in our games, it was to direct them." The siblings were then separated — boys with maternal grandparents, girls with paternal aunts — and saw each other only on Sundays. By the time Augustin was old enough to have a relationship with Maximilien, Maximilien had already been cast as the authority figure, the one who directed and corrected.

This is the dynamic they carried into adulthood. Charlotte's memoirs describe both her and Maximilien reproaching Augustin for his idle tastes, exhorting him to work: Proyart — hostile source, i know, i know it's flagged,, this is me flagging it — describes Maximilien addressing a twenty-five-year-old Augustin as "stupid beast." Even accounting for Proyart's agenda, the underlying fact that Maximilien could have been believably seen to be scolding Augustin in something close to a parental register seems consistent with what Charlotte independently describes. It wasn't a relationship between peers, and it never had been.

Patronage and Direction

It's worth looking at the specific things Maximilien did in relation to Augustin, rather than what Augustin said about Maximilien.

He organized his election. Augustin failed to get into the Convention through Pas-de-Calais on his own merits. Maximilien largely controlled the Paris electoral assembly and Augustin was elected nineteenth out of twenty-four. His political career began as an act of nepotism by his brother.

He sent him on mission when he was becoming inconvenient — but the timing here matters and is often glossed over. The first mission to Nice in July 1793 was assigned before Augustin had developed any independent political line. The independence came from the missions, not before them. He spent five months watching the Terror actually operate: the federalist purges in Marseille, the summary executions at Toulon, the dechristianization campaign devastating local communities across the Midi and then the Haute-Saône. He came back to Paris in January 1794 with a formed, substantive position on all of this. That's when he became inconvenient. Young's "kite" image — the kite breaking from the hand and showing signs of floating away — applies specifically to the period after Nice, not before it.

Maximilien was not swayed by Augustin's anxieties. Young's phrase, and it applies repeatedly. Despite Augustin's emotional appeals about the dangers threatening Maximilien, about the damage Lebon was doing in the Pas-de-Calais, about what the Terror was actually producing in the departments — Maximilien calculated and waited. He used Augustin's emotional availability without being reciprocally vulnerable to it.

And when Augustin stepped out of line publicly, the correction was immediate.

The Limits of Independence

Augustin comes back from Toulon and five months in the Midi. He's spent that time, as we now know from the decree record, systematically releasing people arrested for attending the wrong mass, for refusing to attend constitutional priests, for "simple religious opinions which they did not seek to propagate." He has developed a specific, documented position: religious practice has been "isolated from the Revolution," and continuing to arrest people for it isn't vigilance, it's waste. He wrote this in his own administrative summaries and he said it to Maximilien in letters.

On January 5, he goes to the Jacobins and says it in public. The club is mid-flamewar between Hébert and Desmoulins, and Augustin calls out Hébert specifically, asking that he be heard on "the movements in the departments relating to worship" — the dechristianization campaign that had been making Augustin's missions so much harder to manage, and that he'd been opposing in decree after decree for weeks.

It is the most substantive position anyone takes that evening. It is also, at that specific political moment, the wrong move: Maximilien needed Hébert's support and was not ready to break with him publicly. So. The rebuke is immediate:

"It is easy to see that the last speaker has been absent from the Society for a long time. He has rendered great services at Toulon, but he did not sufficiently consider how dangerous it is to still fuel small passions which clash with so much violence."

Young: "it is possible that in his sharp retort he was influenced by the age-old distrust of the politician for the soldier who comes home from the war and makes embarrassing statements to the public press."

This is more specific than the usual "wrong timing, bad optics" reading. The man who'd spent five months watching dechristianization operate on the ground — who'd been releasing its victims in decree after decree — was publicly told he didn't understand the situation by the man who'd read about it in dispatches. Augustin had summarized his own position precisely in his administrative report from Franche-Comté: "il est donné à si peu d'hommes de sentir qu'on ne peut plus et qu'on ne doit plus révolutionner un pays révolutionné" — "it is given to so few men to feel that one can no longer and should no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized." He'd put it in writing and he'd sent the letters and importantly he'd been saying this for months.

And then Maximilien shut it down publicly in forty seconds.

After this, Augustin made no further speech at the Jacobins or the Convention. He went into society. He spent time with Monvoison and other questionable companions and retreated from political participation until he left on his next mission. What he didn't do was push back. He absorbed the public correction and went quiet. Young notes it's useless to speculate whether this was chance or anger. Either reading says something about the relationship — that he deferred even to public humiliation from Maximilien, or that the anger had nowhere to go but silence.

The Logic of Dependence: Why?

The psychological question — why the devotion took the form it did, specifically this form — is probably related to several things operating simultaneously.

One is the early structural dynamic: Maximilien was already the authority figure before Augustin was old enough to negotiate anything different. Deference to Maximilien wasn't a choice Augustin made; it was the water he swam in.

Another is the political dependency: Augustin's entire career was borrowed. He had no independent base, no independent reputation, no path to political significance that didn't run through his brother. The fan devotion and the political necessity were completely intertwined — to separate from Maximilien psychologically would have meant confronting that his political existence depended on Maximilien's goodwill.

But the one Young identifies that's most interesting is the shame at not being calumniated. At the Jacobins in October 1792, when Louvet publicly accused Maximilien, Augustin rushed to speak and in the middle of his speech said this: "I am ashamed to be speaking to you, because the brother of Robespierre should be calumniated, and he is not."

Being targeted meant significance. Being ignored meant oblivion. For someone who had lived in his brother's shadow his entire adult life, to be equally threatened would be — in a terrible way — a form of equivalence. The aspiration in "I swear to deserve it like you" is not just loyalty. It's the desire to be seen as equally significant. Young's reading: "it forces us to face the possibility that, just below the surface of Augustin's devotion, there was an envy of which he was probably never once conscious." He probably would have rejected this entirely. But the word he used was ashamed.

The Stairs at the Duplay House

A few days before Thermidor, Augustin arranges for recently liberated Arras patriots — Leblond, Viennot's allies, the local victims of Lebon's campaign — to brief Maximilien on Carnot. He has worked for weeks to get these people to Paris, specifically to help them. He tells Leblond to talk about Carnot, that Duquesnoy has evidence capable of guillotining Carnot fifteen times.

Leblond doesn't follow the script. He starts talking about the Duquesnoy brothers being despotic and brutal. Maximilien walks up and down, biting his nails. Then: "Let's go." He leaves. The meeting Augustin set up to help his friends from Arras has been redirected toward Maximilien's priority — building a case against Carnot — and when that priority isn't served, it's over.

On the stairs, Augustin turns on Leblond: "Foutue bête! There was only need to speak of Carnot. Why speak of Duquesnoy? My brother and the Committee have the greatest confidence in them. You're lucky to be free."

Two things are visible here at close range. Maximilien redirected the entire meeting away from the purpose Augustin had arranged it for — the Arras people, Buissart's crisis, Viennot's situation — toward his own political priority, and then ended it when that priority wasn't served. And Augustin, on the stairs, defers to Maximilien's framing completely: not "my brother didn't hear what you needed to say," but "you failed to deliver what my brother needed to hear." Even trying to help his own friends, he can't quite hold both things at once.

What Maximilien Gave Back

Access. Purpose. A political reason to exist. The opportunity to be useful to something larger than himself. This is not nothing. But it's also not equality. Maximilien accepted Augustin's total devotion as structurally appropriate and gave back, largely, the chance to keep demonstrating it.

What he didn't give back: protection from public correction. Genuine incorporation into decision-making. The kind of reciprocal emotional vulnerability that Augustin offered constantly. When Augustin's letters shook with anxiety for Maximilien's safety, Maximilien calculated his next move. When Augustin came back from the Midi with substantive conclusions about what the Terror was doing to France, Maximilien shut them down in forty seconds at the Jacobins. When Augustin arranged a meeting for the people of Arras who needed help, Maximilien used it for something else and left.

The relationship ended with Augustin demanding to share the arrest warrant and Maximilien having to take it (granted he was being screamed over at all angles but let me use this rhetorical move). He'd organized Augustin's political career and accepted his total loyalty for fifteen years. At the end, he accepted his death too.

TL;DR :

Augustin's devotion was reciprocal only in the sense that Maximilien gave him political purpose and opportunities; emotionally and intellectually, the relationship remained fundamentally hierarchical, with Maximilien treating Augustin as someone to direct rather than as an equal partner.

Sources:

anotherhumaninthisworlds compilation for easy searching — family dynamics post, primary sources cited therein including Charlotte's memoirs, Proyart (La vie et les crimes de Robespierre, 1795, hostile source), Maximilien at the Jacobins January 5 1794 (Jacobin club records), Augustin's correspondence via Michon.

Augustin's Précis des opérations faites par Robespierre jeune dans le département de la Haute-Saône, in Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I, p. 260.

Mathiez, Albert. "Les Arrêtés de Robespierre Jeune dans sa mission de Franche-Comté." Annales Révolutionnaires 8 (1916): 79–130. [Decree record]

Guffroy, Armand Joseph. Les secrets de Joseph Lebon et de ses complices. 1795. pp. 336–337. (The Leblond/Carnot/stairs scene.)

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (The "kite" metaphor, January 5 analysis, "shame at not being calumniated" reading, chapters 2, 10, 19.)

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.

[placeholderwhileichange]

Augustin Robespierre and Dechristianization: What the Sources Actually Show (Or, The Gospel According to Augustin.)

Hoh alright now this one took me a WHILE.. had to be a little.. hashtag rigorous..

One of the most documented but least discussed aspects of Augustin's time as representative on mission is his consistent, principled, and administratively consequential opposition to the dechristianization campaign. It shows up across three separate geographical contexts, in his own letters, in the actual decree record, and in independent corroboration from hostile witnesses who complained about it.

Let's go through it! Yeaaahhhhh!!! Wooooo!! Whoosss readdayyyy!!!

What Dechristianization Actually Was (Or, A Quick Catechism)

Very briefly, for context: from late 1793 onward, a wave of anti-religious violence swept through France, driven partly by Hébertist ideology and partly by representatives on mission who saw destroying Catholic practice as revolutionary duty. This meant forced abdications of priests, churches converted into Temples of Reason, religious objects confiscated or destroyed, and people arrested for continuing to practice their faith or for preferring refractory (non-constitutional) priests over constitutional ones.

Bernard de Saintes, Augustin's most public opponent in the Haute-Saône, was actively encouraging this in the Doubs. Fouché was doing it in Lyon. Collot d'Herbois in the same region. It was, for a window in Year II, essentially official policy in practice even while Maximilien in Paris was publicly suspicious of it.

Speaking Heresy at the Jacobins

Augustin has just come back from Toulon and five months in the Midi. He goes to the Jacobins on January 5, 1794, and does something nobody was doing at that particular moment: he criticizes Hébert's dechristianization campaign directly and publicly.

His intervention is cut short — Maximilien immediately rebukes him, "he has rendered great services at Toulon but he did not sufficiently consider how dangerous it is to fuel small passions" — and Augustin falls silent. But the position is registered.

What's important here is the timing: The January 5 speech happens before his Franche-Comté mission, not after. He isn't carrying back a conclusion he reached from watching dechristianization operate in the provinces, but arriving in Paris with that conclusion already formed from his months in the Midi — and immediately, at the first opportunity, saying so out loud.

The Paper Trail to Salvation

This is the most concretely documented phase. The decrees published by Mathiez in the Annales révolutionnaires (1916) show a consistent, repeated pattern across the Haute-Saône in pluviôse Year II (roughly February 1794).

The Menoux decree is the most explicit. Fourteen people from the commune of Menoux had been arrested. Their sole stated offense: refusing to attend certain masses, or omitting to attend. Augustin's language in the decree is precise:

"considérant que la détention de tous les prévenus n'a eu pour cause que les refus ou l'omission d'aller à telle ou telle messe, que cette opinion est maintenant isolée de la Révolution" — — "considering that the detention of all the accused has had no cause other than the refusal or omission to attend mass, that this opinion is now isolated from the Revolution."

They are released. The decree notes in passing that one of those freed has a son fighting in the Vendée.

The same formula appears repeatedly. Jean-Baptiste Theurey, cultivator of Cère-les-Noroy: arrested for refusing to attend mass, his name not appearing on the civic roll. Augustin's decree:

"considérant que les motifs de cette arrestation sont injustes et intolérants" — — "considering that the motives of this arrest are unjust and intolerant."

He is released. Jeanne-Claude Thiebaud of Rupt: arrested for refusing to attend mass. Release decree:

"considérant que la détention n'a eu pour cause que le refus d'aller à la messe, considérant que cette opinion est isolée de la Révolution." — — "Considering the detention resulted solely from the refusal to attend Mass, and considering this belief is unconnected with the Revolution."

Marie-Anne Euvrard: arrested for her religious opinions and for preferring refractory priests. Same formula, same release.

Jean-Antoine Boisson, cultivator of Bout: arrested for not liking constitutional priests. Augustin's decree:

"considérant que Jean-Antoine Boisson, cultivateur, paroît n'avoir été mis en arrestation que pour opinion religieuse et parce qu'il n'aimoit point les prêtres constitutionnels, cette opinion devant être isolée de la Révolution." — — "Considering that Jean-Antoine Boisson, a farmer, appears to have been arrested only because of his religious beliefs and because he did not support the constitutional priests, and that this opinion ought to be regarded as separate from the Revolution."

And then the Gray mass release — decree XLVI in Mathiez's numbering — where a group of prisoners "arrested only for simple religious opinions which they did not seek to propagate" are freed collectively, with the reasoning:

"considérant que ces opinions sont isolées de la Révolution et que leur existence ne trouble point l'ordre public" — — "these opinions are isolated from the Revolution and their existence does not disturb public order."

This group includes an ex-priest described as "more than eighty years old."

The formula is consistent enough across all these decrees to be clearly deliberate: "cette opinion est maintenant isolée de la Révolution" — this opinion is now isolated from the Revolution. He is explicitly arguing that religious practice, whatever its theological content, has ceased to be a political threat that requires suppression. The Revolution has moved past the point where Catholicism constitutes a counter-revolutionary danger. Persecuting people for it now isn't vigilance, it's waste.

Epistles of Saint Augustin

Running alongside the decree record are Augustin's letters to Maximilien during and after the Franche-Comté mission, now in the Michon Correspondance.

From Commune-Affranchie (Lyon), 3 ventôse Year II, writing about his mission and about Bernard's denunciation of him:

"Rien n'est plus facile que de conserver une réputation révolutionnaire aux dépens de l'innocence. Les hommes médiocres trouvent, dans ce moyen, le voile qui couvre toutes les noirceurs; mais l'homme probe sauve l'innocence aux dépens de sa réputation." — — "Nothing is easier than maintaining a revolutionary reputation at the expense of innocence. Mediocre men find in this method the veil that covers all their villainy; but the honest man saves innocence at the expense of his reputation."

He is explicitly naming what the dechristianization arrests were, in many cases: careers built on denunciation of the harmless.

From Nice, 16 germinal Year II, writing about his Italian campaign:

"Les défenseurs de la patrie se sont parfaitement conduits; ils n'ont touché à aucune image dans un pays où le pinceau de la superstition a couvert toutes les murailles." — — "The defenders of the fatherland have conducted themselves perfectly; they have not touched a single image in a country where the brush of superstition has covered every wall."

This is from a letter published in the Journal de la Montagne, communicated by Mathiez. It's not private correspondence. He wrote it for wider circulation, knowing what he was describing would be noted.

The context matters: the Ligurian valley Augustin had just passed through had been emptied of its civilian population. Forty thousand people had fled, convinced by émigré propaganda that the French would destroy their religion. His point is practical as much as principled — the dechristianization campaign was creating enemies where none needed to exist, handing a propaganda weapon to people who wished the Republic harm.

Your Honor, I'd Like to Call Bernard de Saintes

The most valuable corroboration, as always, comes from the people who were complaining about his approach rather than praising it.

Duroy, a relatively moderate Montagnard who passed through Vesoul in February, wrote immediately to Maximilien: "I noted with sorrow that your brother is no longer the same." The complaint was specifically about his clemency toward the religiously detained. He "spoke to him the language of friendship, frankness, and civic duty. But I saw that he did not understand." Duroy then left for another department because "my principles are incompatible with those he is manifesting." This is someone who thought releasing people arrested for religious practice was going too far in the moderate direction, confirming from the outside that Augustin's policy was real and consistently applied, not post-hoc reconstruction.

Bernard de Saintes publicly denounced him. Sylvain Lejeune followed. Both specifically attacked what they characterized as senseless clemency, and the decrees show that religious toleration was central to what they were denouncing.

Statistics Are Stubborn Things

For the Alpes-Maritimes, where Augustin spent far longer as representative on mission (two separate stints across the whole period from September 1793 through June 1794), the evidence is statistical rather than decree-by-decree. Luzzatto notes, drawing on departmental studies, that the Alpes-Maritimes was one of the few departments in the south-east that remained essentially untouched by dechristianization practices — including the forced abdication of priests, which was the most spectacular and aggressive element. Seven death sentences executed in Year II in the entire department. In the Haute-Saône, which Augustin administered for five weeks, the total of those condemned to death was zero.

Compare Lebon's Pas-de-Calais: 392 executions, with no significant federalist revolt to explain them. Compare the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Rhône under other representatives. The departmental death statistics are not the whole story — administration is more than execution counts — but they're a meaningful index of how a representative understood his mandate.

The Philosophy Behind the Policy

The Précis des opérations, Augustin's own administrative summary of his Franche-Comté mission — now in the Michon Correspondance, vol. I p. 260 — contains the clearest articulation of what he thought he was doing. The word "indulgence" does appear here, but in a narrow specific context: arguing that "the revolutionary government requires leniency toward secondary agents" who had overstepped. More important is the broader philosophical claim:

"il est donné à si peu d'hommes de sentir qu'on ne peut plus et qu'on ne doit plus révolutionner un pays révolutionné" — — "it is given to so few men to feel that one can no longer and should no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized."

He is not arguing that religion is good, or that Catholicism deserves protection for its own sake, or that the Revolution was wrong to challenge the church. He is arguing that this particular moment has passed the point where anti-religious violence serves any revolutionary purpose. France has been revolutionized. The church has been disestablished and the confiscations are complete..

Continuing to arrest cultivators for attending the wrong mass, or releasing dogs named "le pape" into churches, or burning confessional boxes, doesn't advance the Republic — it manufactures enemies and hands ammunition to the Revolution's real adversaries.

It's a consequentialist argument, not a theological one. And it's an unusual one for its moment, because it requires someone who has actually seen what the Terror is producing in practice — which is exactly what Augustin had, and his brother hadn't.

(A Note on) Sources

Everything in this post rests on:

The decree record in Mathiez, Albert. "Les Arrêtés de Robespierre Jeune dans sa mission de Franche-Comté." Annales Révolutionnaires 8 (1916): 79–130.

Augustin's letters in Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I. [the Commune-Affranchie letter and the Nice letter about religious images.]

Augustin's Précis des opérations, reproduced in Michon vol. I p. 260.

The Duroy letter, in Michon vol. I p. 250.

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Alpes-Maritimes statistics and context.)

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.

Nodier is not a source for this post. Everything above is either primary documents or secondary analysis based on archives. (I'm trying to stray away from using him as often)

[theblackrook]

Who Were the Women in Augustin's Life, Actually

(and, was he really "fond of the company of women" in the way that's come to mean what people think it means)

Wikipedia describes Augustin as "handsome, fond of good food, gaming and the company of women." This has passed through fandom like a game of telephone until it means something like: notorious womanizer, serial charmer, man who had several girlfriends including at least two confirmed and married ones. The truth, when you actually look at the sources, is more interesting and more specific than that — and also raises a question nobody seems to have asked: if Augustin was such a flagrant adulterer, why did none of his many post-Thermidor enemies ever actually say so?

Let's go through this properly.

The Important Women We Actually Know About, and What We Know

Charlotte Robespierre —

his sister, oldest sustained relationship in his life, currently the subject of three separate research spirals on this blog that I will get back to. Not elaborating here.

Élisabeth Duplay (later Lebas) —

the Duplay daughter he was warmest toward. He reportedly told her husband she was "cheerful and good" and that he liked her best of the sisters. She confirmed the origin of his nickname Bonbon in a note written around 1847, which suggests she held memories of him with some care. There is zero evidence of romantic feeling here and significant evidence of genuine sibling-like warmth in both directions. Not everything is romance.

The women of Vesoul and Besançon —

I keep mentioning this and I'll keep mentioning it because it matters. He invited the public to testify directly to him, including women, when deciding detainees' fates. Women petitioned him. The decree record is full of releases where the stated reasoning involves women specifically: pregnant prisoners, mothers of children, women whose only offense was religious practice. A child recognized him arriving in Vesoul and said "here comes someone to give us justice." Women filled his inn courtyard to petition him as he left Besançon. These are not romantic relationships. Moreso evidence of a man who genuinely registered women as people with legitimate claims on him — which in 1794 was not actually the default.

Marguerite Ricord —

Jean-François Ricord's wife, who traveled south with the mission. This is where things get genuinely complicated, so MAYBE let's be precise about what each source actually claims. Can you do that Joachim? Can we try? Yeah? Yeah! Alright.

Charlotte's memoirs: Marguerite made advances, Augustin resisted. This is Charlotte actively exonerating her brother. Her motive for doing so is obvious.

Barras's memoirs: Napoleon paid court to Marguerite specifically because she "exercised great influence" over Augustin. This is Barras, a man who had every reason to paint Augustin's circle as corrupt and importantly susceptible (to manipulation), and who notably stops at "influence" rather than alleging an affair outright.

Mary Youngs Biography: "Augustin had probably cuckolded him." Young is explicit that this is inference. The word "probably" is doing all the load-bearing work.

Now the main circumstantial evidence cited for an affair:

Allegedly, Augustin refused to see Charlotte during his December 1793 Paris stay and "lodged with his colleague Record" instead.

We have now looked at the primary source for this claim, which is Charlotte's 1835 memoir, and found two problems. First, Charlotte spells "Ricord" correctly every single time she mentions him and his wife throughout the memoir — dozens of instances: Now, In the specific December 1793 lodging claim, she writes "Record." Not "Ricord." One anomalous spelling against a background of consistent correct usage.

Second, Mary Young states elsewhere in her biography, debunking a different anecdote entirely, that Ricord and Augustin were never in Paris at the same time after they left together in July 1793. Notably one may find that Ricord's signature continues to appear on Toulon decrees during the period in question.

Third, Charlotte herself, in a conversation with Gaillard in May 1794 recorded in his memoir, says: "when my younger brother passed through Melun, we were all three living together" — directly contradicting her own memoir's account of him refusing to enter the house.

So

the primary piece of circumstantial evidence for the affair doesn't hold up on examination.

The Nice rupture itself — something clearly happened between Charlotte and Augustin during the mission — is real and documented. But "something happened" doesn't resolve to "affair" on the available evidence once you remove the detail that was pulling the most weight.

What does the evidence actually support for Marguerite Ricord? That she had influence over him. That Charlotte disliked her intensely and found the dynamic inappropriate. That Barras found the dynamic politically useful to weaponize. That Augustin was willing to let a colleague's wife shape his administrative approach in ways that made other Montagnards uncomfortable. Whether this was romantic, collegial, or something else: genuinely unknown..

Guillodon de La Saudraye —

the ex-marchioness who accompanied Augustin through the Franche-Comté mission. This is the relationship we have the most on, and it's the one where "mistress" language appears in a relatively contemporary source. Lods (1888), drawing on archival material, calls her explicitly "sa maîtresse" — his mistress — and states she had "the greatest influence" over him, that "he took no important measure without consulting her advice, and often she counseled him toward clemency."

This is the strongest case for an actual intimate relationship. We have:

A near-contemporary scholar using mistress language from archival sources

A contemporary administrative letter (Boizot to La Saudraye, 21 March 1794, Archives Nationales) acknowledging that she has "irresistible power" over Augustin and asking her to use it to prevent Bernard's return

She attended Jacobin club meetings with him and gave a speech that was printed alongside his

She was invited to meet Maximilien as a political informant, in Augustin's own letter to his brother

People seeking rehabilitation wrote to her directly rather than to Augustin

What's also notable: after Thermidor, she apparently did use whatever influence and connections she had on behalf of the Vesoul patriots. Lods specifically notes that following her departure from Franche-Comté, Boizot reached out to her and "thanks to her efforts, Bernard was recalled to Paris." A woman being instrumentalized by a man and then discarded when convenient doesn't typically go on to advocate for his political clients after his death.

Whatever the relationship was, it had something real in it

Nodier (twelve years old at the time, writing forty years later) adds a physical description that he himself flags as possibly contaminated by literary imagination: "something penetrating, caustic, and almost infernal in her gaze and smile." He also records that the room couldn't entirely believe she was his mistress, given how ascetic Augustin's whole bearing seemed to exclude the idea of romantic attachment. This is, again, the twelve-year-old, but it's worth noting that even the contemporary room was uncertain about what exactly the relationship was.

The Dog That Didn't Bark: Why No Adultery Accusation?

Here's the question I find most interesting.. Augustin after Thermidor was one of the most undefended targets available. His enemies threw everything they had: Dumont accused him of financial corruption and converting army funds into gold ingots with no evidence. The British press called him a cannibal. Baudot called him a fool and a. (get this). jar. Le Blond called him without brains, talent, or character. None of these people felt they needed actual evidence for any of it.

And yet: nobody went after him for adultery.

Not Barras in his initial denunciations. Not Fréron. Not the post-Thermidor pamphlets. Not the British press that was happy to invent cannibalism. Not Courtois in his forensic inventory of the Robespierre papers.

Why not?

A few possibilities:

The most boring: maybe it just wasn't particularly scandalous? Representatives on mission traveling with women they weren't married to was, per the historical record, genuinely common. Prieur de la Côte-d'Or cohabited with a woman still legally married to someone else (much similarly to bonbon!!). The France of Year II was not operating on Ancien Régime moral conventions. If everyone was doing some version of it, there's less leverage in the accusation.

The more interesting: maybe it didn't exist in a form that was documentably accusable. The specific post-Thermidor propaganda charges against Augustin were about financial corruption and political conspiracy — things where fabricated evidence could be constructed and presented. Sexual accusation worked differently: it required witnesses, testimony, some kind of specificity.. If the actual nature of his relationships with Marguerite Ricord and La Saudraye was politically useful influence rather than straightforwardly legible adultery, it might have been harder to weaponize.

Additionally.. If Augustin had indeed been accused of sleeping with Mme. Ricord, that accusation would also have implicated Deputy Ricord and his own reputation by making him look like a cuckold whose wife was involved with the man he later denounced. Since Ricord was being used as a credible witness against Augustin and his character after Thermidor, there was little advantage in tarnishing his own reputation.

Or: maybe the weapons chosen (fool, corrupt, nobody's puppet) were simply more effective for discrediting a man whose political identity was "devoted younger brother." Undermining his intelligence and independence simply did more damage than undermining his virtue.

So Was He "Fond of the Company of Women"

Yes, genuinely, in a specific way: he seems to have extended to women something closer to full political and intellectual personhood than most of his contemporaries did in practice. He sent La Saudraye to brief Maximilien as a political intelligence source. He credited women petitioners as valid witnesses to local conditions. He released women detained on thin pretexts while his colleagues were building careers on denunciation. The Besançon crowds weeping as his carriage left were not generic gratitude — many of them were women whose family members he'd freed.

Whether this also meant he was sexually attracted to, romantically involved with, or physically intimate with any or all of the women around him: genuinely, partially, unknowably unclear.. La Saudraye — probably something real there, Lods says mistress and he had access to archives I don't. Marguerite Ricord — possible, but the primary evidence for it has mostly fallen apart under scrutiny. Everyone else — warm friendships and political warmth that keep getting read as romance because the assumption is that a man who enjoyed women's company must have been sleeping with them.

The Wikipedia characterization isn't wrong exactly. But "fond of the company of women" doing the work of "notorious womanizer with multiple married girlfriends" in fandom requires a lot of inference that the primary sources don't cleanly support once you actually read them.

Sources:

Lods, A. Un Conventionnel en Mission: Bernard de Saintes. Paris: Fischbacher, 1888. (pp. 50-51 for the Besançon scene and La Saudraye; pp. 70-74 for the Boizot letter; p. 74 for the aftermath.)

Boizot to La Saudraye, 1 Germinal An II [21 March 1794]. Archives Nationales F7, communicated via Lods.

Robespierre, Charlotte. Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères. Paris, 1835. (The "Record" spelling anomaly confirmed from original text; Laponneraye's footnote confirmed.)

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011.

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.

Gaillard, Maurice André. La Révolution, la Terreur, le Directoire 1791–1799: d'après les mémoires de Gaillard. 1908. p. 263. (Charlotte's own statement that they were "all three living together" when Augustin passed through Melun.)

Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I — Augustin's letter asking Maximilien to receive La Saudraye.

Mémoires de Barras, membre du Directoire. 1895. Vol. I, pp. 148–149. (Napoleon and Marguerite Ricord.)

[theblackrook]

Untangling "Moderate": What Bonbon's Moderatism Actually Was

ok so. I promise more of the Charlotte/family drama deep dive is still coming, I am simply marinating in primary sources at the moment and need a palate cleanser before I subject myself to more of that headache. But something clicked for me recently while reading about Lafayette of all people, and I think it's worth a quick detour before we go back to the sibling trenches..

Here's the thing that got me: Lafayette is constantly described as a "moderate." Augustin is constantly described as a "moderate." And yet these two men are about as politically opposite as it is possible to be within the same six-year window of French history.

Lafayette ends up fleeing the country in 1792; having effectively becoming an 'enemy of the Republic', and getting declared a traitor by the Convention. Augustin is a hardline Montagnard who helped purge the Girondins, signed off on reprisal executions at Toulon, and died voluntarily alongside Robespierre rather than disavow him.

So clearly "moderate" cannot mean one single thing here. The word is doing a lot of unexamined work, and I think it's worth actually taking it apart.

Lafayette's moderation, briefly

Lafayette's moderation is moderation relative to the revolutionary trajectory itself. He wanted a constitutional monarchy, a managed transition, the Revolution stopped at roughly the point where it had already inconvenienced him personally (sorry Lafayette it's true/j). When the Revolution radicalized past that point — when the monarchy fell, when the Republic was declared, when the Terror began — his position essentially no longer aligned with the direction of events (or rather no longer aligned with the political structure that emerged). He did not adapt to the new political structure, and instead moved into opposition from outside it. This culminated in his attempt to resist revolutionary forces militarily and his eventual flight from France after being declared a traitor, when remaining in place would likely have meant arrest and execution. His moderation is a brake applied from above, by someone who fundamentally distrusted where popular sovereignty was heading.

In that sense, his “moderation” functions less as balance within the Revolution and more as a limit placed on it from an earlier political horizon — an unwillingness to follow its logic past a certain point.

This is moderation as retreat from the project.

Augustin's moderation, by contrast

Augustin's moderation was never retreat. He never stopped being a Jacobin. He never stopped believing in the Mountain, in the Republic, in the legitimacy of revolutionary government as an institution: He helped purge the Girondins in 1793. He pointed a pistol at a colleague during that purge, by his own admission. He was present and complicit at the height of the Toulon reprisals, signing orders alongside Barras and Fréron without, as far as the record shows, much hesitation in the moment.

What changed wasn't his commitment to the Revolution. What changed was his read on whether the machinery of the Terror — as actually practiced, in the actual provinces, by actual representatives on mission — was serving that Revolution or destroying it from the inside.

His own language on this is unusually precise for a man who didn't otherwise write like a theorist. He arrived at something close to a formula: that a country which had already been revolutionized could not, and should not, continue to be revolutionized — that endlessly re-applying the Terror past the point of necessity wasn't vigilance, but instead self-sabotage. And he was explicit about the mechanism by which this happened: that nothing was easier than maintaining a reputation for revolutionary zeal at the direct expense of someone else's innocence. He'd watched representatives build careers on denunciation, watched local committees use "counter-revolutionary suspicion" as a vehicle for settling personal scores, watched the whole apparatus of revolutionary justice get hijacked by people who had no actual interest in justice.

So his response, once given administrative authority in the Haute-Saône, wasn't to soften the Revolution's goals. It was to apply something closer to due process within them: investigate whether a denunciation traced back to personal grudge (haine) rather than real counter-revolutionary activity; release the elderly, the pregnant, the economically essential; restore freedom of worship on the grounds that persecuting harmless religious practice wasn't protecting the Republic, it was manufacturing enemies where none previously existed. And, crucially, this came paired with real institutional rigor in the other direction — he annulled a corrupt sale of state property in Nice, arrested his own agents for abusing their authority, pursued anti-corruption measures with the same energy he applied to releasing prisoners. This wasn't generalized leniency buuut a man trying to make the revolutionary government actually function as the thing it claimed to be, rather than as a vehicle for local score-settling and careerism.

This is moderation as internal correction. A believer trying to save the project from the people claiming to defend it most zealously.

The Danton problem

"Isn't this just Dantonism?"

Here's where it gets genuinely interesting, because Augustin wasn't the only one moving in this rhetorical direction. Danton and the so-called Indulgents had been making a structurally similar argument months earlier — that the Terror had outlived its greatest necessity, and that mercy and de-escalation had become the patriotic course.

Augustin arrives at a related conclusion from a different angle. In his own administrative summary of the Haute-Saône mission, he argues that one "cannot and must not revolutionize a country already revolutionized." That's a remarkably concise statement of the principle running through his mission: not that revolutionary government should abandon its objectives, but that continuing to apply emergency measures indiscriminately after the emergency had changed risked undermining the Republic itself.

The word "indulgence" does appear in connection with his mission from Augustins own words, though more narrowly than as a "watchword". In the Précis it is used in an administrative context — arguing for leniency toward secondary agents in a specific case — and later accounts associate him more broadly with the language of indulgence. That still creates an intriguing parallel with Danton, whose political language had become inseparable from the word only months earlier, but the stronger evidence lies in Augustin's administrative practice and in his own formulation that a country already revolutionized should not be endlessly revolutionized.

The mention of indulgence, however, makes the apparent parallel difficult to ignore, even if the evidence is stronger in his administrative practice. The irony is striking, as "indulgence" was the very language that, only months earlier — by his own brother's hand — would cost Danton his head.

The difference in outcome wasn't simply about the substance of the argument. It was also about what that argument became associated with politically. Danton's calls for indulgence became entangled — fairly or unfairly — with allegations of corruption and with suspicion that he was challenging the legitimacy of revolutionary government's emergency structures. Augustin's moderation, by contrast, remained narrowly administrative. He never challenged the authority of the Committee of Public Safety or rejected revolutionary government as an institution, and his efforts at restraint were framed as attempts to make its machinery function more justly rather than to dismantle it. Similar impulses toward de-escalation therefore carried very different political meanings depending on who articulated them, when, and in what institutional context.

The retroactive moderates

And then there's a third category worth flagging, which is the moderation that only shows up after the fact. Carnot is the clean example — The Desk-Chair General who, by his own later self-presentation, was 'always quietly horrified by the Terror's excesses', except this horror only becomes documented and vocal once the Robespierres are safely dead and he needs to explain why he wasn't implicated. This performance by The Paper-Pushing Patriot is moderation as alibi, constructed after the political wind changed, and it's genuinely difficult to distinguish from the contemporaneous, documented version Augustin was practicing in real time, with real administrative and social consequences, while the Terror was still very much ongoing and very much dangerous to be seen restraining.

So, in short

When people call Augustin a moderate, I think it needs a footnote every time: moderate in application, not moderate in conviction. He wasn't a Lafayette, trying to put the brakes on the Revolution from outside it. He was closer to a true believer who'd watched the machinery of his own cause start eating people for sport, and decided that saving the Revolution meant restraining the very instrument — the Terror — that he'd helped build and was still, in other contexts, willing to use.

It is a genuinely strange position to hold, and an even stranger one to die for.

Anyway. Back to untangling Charlotte soon, I promise, once I've. recovered.

[theblackrook]

Augustin in His Own Words: How He Saw Himself

(this is less a quotes compilation and more an attempt to read the self-image underneath the quotes)

The problem with asking how Augustin viewed himself is that most of his self-referential moments are threaded through Maximilien. You pull at one thread and you find the other: But if you're patient about it, a picture does emerge — and it's more complicated than either the devoted younger brother or the charming bon vivant.

I. The Man Who Defined Himself Through His Brother's Fate

The earliest version of this is from 1790, years before any of the events that made it famous:

"I cannot hide my fears from you, dear brother, you will seal the cause of the people with your blood, perhaps even these people will be so unfortunate as to strike you, but I swear to avenge your death and to deserve it like you."

Augustin here was a whopping twenty-six years of age, and Maximilien wasn't yet famous: The guillotine hadn't been invented yet as an instrument of the Terror. And Augustin was already writing about avenging his brother's death and deserving the same fate.. "Deserve it like you" is the phrase that catches me — not just that he'd share the danger but that he'd earn it. That he'd be worthy of the same end.

This thread runs all the way to 1794. At the Jacobins on July 11, sixteen days before Thermidor:

"In vain would they try to separate me from him: as long as he remains the proclaimer of morality and the terror of villains, I aspire to no other glory than that of sharing the grave with him."

And then the Convention declaration on July 27:

"I am as guilty as my brother: I share his virtues; I want to share his fate."

And then the medical deposition, hours before his death, still defining himself in terms of Maximilien: That he never stopped doing his duty well at the Convention, like his brother.

Even dying, with a shattered pelvis and a brain bleed, the frame of reference is: like his brother. His final political testimony named Carnot as a conspirator and defended both of them in the same breath.

If there was any doubt, it becomes clear here that this is not performance; the consistency across a decade is too complete for performance (or atleast a performance NOT grounded in genuine conviction.. The repeated declarations are probably both authentic and rhetorical at the same time). One quote can be rhetoric. Two can be coincidence. A decade of repetition becomes self-concept. He genuinely understood his own life as running parallel to Maximilien's — and his own significance as deriving from that parallel.

II. The Almost-Great-Man: He Said, Modestly

But there's another register, and it's much funnier!! I promise!! No bone breaking required!!

After his speech of April 20, 1793 — the one that helped set the stage for the Girondin purge — he wrote to Buissart:

"Since Saturday I am almost a great man, I receive congratulations from all sides for my speech in favor of the Municipality of Paris, in support of measures denounced by a leader of the faction. Do not be surprised then if I put on airs, the incense actually risks suffocating me, if you do not come and dissipate the fumes that are going to my head."

Aw Shucks, Another Triumph! The self-irony is from The People's Princess over here doesn't make it any better. He's mocking himself for being flattered. But he also wrote it down and sent it, which means he wanted Buissart to know he'd done something worth mocking himself about. The modesty and the pride are operating simultaneously..

The Toulon letter does the same thing. After the fall of Fort Balaguier:

"I am astonished to be a hero. They assure me I am one, though I wasn't thinking about it at all. I was in the ranks; during the action I saw neither bullets, nor cannonballs, nor bombs; I only saw the small fort that had to be taken. To the fort! It is ours, let's go, courage, my friends! I reached its base without even realizing it."

This is charming and probably mostly genuine — but it's also extremely aware of how charming it is. The man who wrote "I am astonished to be a hero" knew exactly what kind of letter he was writing: Astonished to Be a Hero, Delighted to Report It ( ˶ ͡°ヮ ͡°) !!

III. Local Man Understands Revolution Better Than Revolution

This is the self-image I find most interesting, and the one that gets least attention. From Aix-en-Provence, August 1793, writing to Maximilien:

"You do not know the situation of these unhappy regions well. Heads are overheated, incapable of reasoning."

Here, he's twenty-nine, writing to the de facto head of the Committee of Public Safety, telling him he doesn't understand what's actually happening in France. And he's right! But the confidence, brother or not, is rather remarkable.

From Franche-Comté, February 1794, after releasing hundreds of prisoners:

"Rest assured that I have made the Mountain adored, while there are still areas that only fear it, that do not know it, and that only lack a representative worthy of his mission, who educates the people instead of demoralizing them."

(you can sense the living embodiment of the tiktok proud emoji in his words, but ok)

From Lyon, same month, defending his actions against criticism from fellow Montagnards:

"It is given to so few to feel that one cannot and must no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized."

And perhaps the most striking of all, from a letter to Maximilien about provincial conditions:

"Nothing is easier than preserving a revolutionary reputation at the expense of innocence."

This is clear-eyed to the point of being almost brutal. He saw exactly how the Terror was functioning as a reputation machine, and he said it plainly: He seems genuinely to have believed that he was one of the few people who understood this — that his months on the road had given him access to truths that the Paris revolutionaries, including his brother, couldn't access from inside their committees.

He wasn't wrong about this: The tragedy is that being right (and incredibly handsome) didn't really translate into power.

IV. The Unconscious Competitor

Strap in.

This is Mary Young's reading, and I think she's right, and I also think Augustin would have found it completely incomprehensible:

October 29, 1792. Louvet has just accused Maximilien in the Convention, the first serious open attack on him. Augustin rushes to the Jacobins, agitated, his speech confused and jumping from point to point. And in the middle of all of it, he says:

"I am ashamed to be speaking to you, because the brother of Robespierre should be calumniated and he is not."

Young's commentary goes as follows: "It is an interesting statement because it forces us to face the possibility that, just below the surface of Augustin's devotion, there was an envy of which he was probably never once conscious. To be threatened, libelled and become, possibly, the target of murderers means fame; to be ignored means oblivion. I do not for a moment think that Augustin would have accepted my interpretation of his words. He might well have said that he wanted to be seen to be as good a Republican as his brother, one equally ready to die for liberty."

And I agree he would have said exactly that, in fact, I couldn't put my interpretation to any better words. The 1790 letter proves it: "I swear to avenge your death and to deserve it like you." The desire to deserve the same fate. Not to be Maximilien, but to be worthy of standing next to him. To be equally threatened, equally in danger, equally significant. If Maximilien bears the burden alone, then Augustin feels he has not yet paid the same price: If calumny is the tax paid by virtue, then not being calumniated may imply one has not yet proven oneself sufficiently.

But the word he used was ashamed. Not proud of his brother, not indignant on his behalf — ashamed for himself. Ashamed that he was not the target..

The desire to deserve the same fate and the shame at not yet having it are not the same as envy. But they're not entirely separate either..

The three motives in Augustin's choice of wording stick out when one chooses to inspect them.. Envy of prominence, desire for equal sacrifice, and republican honor culture; I suspect all three motives may coexist. As human motives usually do. It is difficult when, even in a time where things are much bigger than oneself — to not feel personally implicated, and assessed on your worth:

If Maximilien is attacked and I am not, what does that say about me?

Have I done enough?

Have I sacrificed enough?

Am I actually as committed as he is?

Am I worthy of standing beside him?

In that reading, the shame comes less from wanting Maximilien's fame than from fearing that the difference between them might be deserved. Whether Augustin experienced the feeling as a problem of worthiness, or, as Young interprets it, as a problem of recognition, isn't the question when it could very easily be both at once..

I don't believe Augustin consciously wanted Maximilien's place (especially as he repeatedly places himself parallel or even beneath him). But I do think he desperately wanted the same moral significance.

If Augustin had said:

"I wish I were calumniated too,"

that would suggest ambition. But he says:

"I am ashamed."

Shame is a peculiar emotion. You feel shame when a situation seems to reveal something about your worth: If I fail an exam, I might feel disappointed. If I believe the failure reveals that I'm stupid, I feel ashamed. Shame is almost always connected to self-evaluation. So 'If Maximilien is receiving the attacks reserved for important revolutionaries and I am not, what does that say about my own commitment?' Ambition says: Why don't people notice me? While shame says: Why haven't I earned what he has earned?

A revolutionary imposter syndrome, and a hidden syllogism: Maximilien is attacked because he serves the Republic. I serve the Republic too. Why am I not attacked? Because If the enemies of the Revolution hate you, you must be doing something right..

Where Young becomes more provocative is in suggesting that Augustin may not have fully understood the nature of his own feelings. This is not an impossible reading. Consider the structure of his devotion: he repeatedly expresses desires such as wanting to share Maximilien's fate, share his grave, and share in his virtues.

On the surface, these declarations appear wholly self-sacrificing. Yet psychologically there may be another dimension at work. Every one of these statements, while framed as acts of devotion, also serves to keep Augustin alongside Maximilien. The relationship remains the central axis of his identity and self-definition.

In that sense, even self-sacrifice can function as a means of preserving proximity. The underlying impulse may not be, "Let me become greater than him," but rather, "Do not separate our stories, and do not leave me behind."

If so, the dynamic is not one of competition for dominance, but of competition for significance — the struggle to ensure that one's life remains inseparable from the life that gives it meaning.

Basically.. Augustin's devotion to Maximilien was genuine. But because he measured his own worth against Maximilien, every attack on his brother became, indirectly, a measure of himself. He wanted not merely to share Maximilien's cause, but to prove that he deserved to share its costs. The resulting feeling contains traces of envy, ambition, loyalty, insecurity, and republican ideals all at once.

In practice, Augustin was not merely an extension of his brother: But in his self-conception, he repeatedly returned to the role of companion, defender, witness, and fellow martyr.

There is almost a tension between the man he was and the man he imagined himself to be:

The man who was an influential representative-on-mission, independent political actor, regional power broker, and experienced revolutionary administrator.

Versus his self concept as the one standing beside Maximilien.

I'm rambling so i'm ending this section.. whistles

What He Would Have Said

If you'd asked Augustin how he viewed himself, I think he would have thought something like (in his deep, dreamy, saucy and stoic voice): I am a man who saw the Revolution clearly, who tried to make it humane, who was loyal to his brother and to the people without sacrificing one for the other, and who chose to share his brother's fate when the moment came..

And it's interesting, because Augustin himself often linked his identity own to Maximilien. That's not merely something historians imposed on him..

He probably wouldn't have mentioned the shame at not being calumniated: He wouldn't have framed the grave-sharing as the central aspiration of his adult life, even though the letters show it was. He wouldn't have acknowledged that his confidence in his own clear vision sometimes shaded into a belief that he alone understood — while the man he defined himself against, the one he swore to deserve, was in the next room making the decisions.

He was more self-aware than most people give him credit for. He was less self-aware than he thought he was. That gap between the two is where most of the interesting things about him live.

Sources:

Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. 2 vols. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. (Letters directly consulted in the 1926 edition.)

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (The "I am ashamed" analysis, chapters 7–8.)

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre: Il Terrore dal volto umano. Translated by me, 2025. Original Italian edition: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2009. (Toulon letter, Franche-Comté letters, July 11 Jacobins speech.)

Augustin at the Jacobins, October 29 1792. Cited in Young, chapter 7.

Augustin at the Jacobins, July 11 1794. Recorded in Mercure français, no. 32 (July 18).

Augustin at the Convention, July 27 1794. Reported in Le Moniteur Universel, no. 311 (July 29).

Medical report on Augustin, July 28 1794, written at the civil committee of the city hall section.