A Few Historians and Other Writers On Robespierre and Saint-Just's Relationship
“There is little evidence for what Saint-Just really thought during the early weeks of the Convention, so there is now no way of knowing whether he hesitated or not between factions, or what factors inclined him to make up his mind. We only know that he chose Robespierre, unequivocally, and for the rest of his life. His choice was all the more striking since, out of the twelve deputies from the Aisne, he was the only one to align himself with the Montagnards.”
— Marisa Linton, The Man of Virtue: The Role of Antiquity in the Political Trajectory of L. A. Saint-Just (2010).
“Everyone had become accustomed to the fact that immediately after the name of Robespierre came the name of Saint-Just. The politicians of the Parisian coffee houses even came up with a distinction of roles between the two: ‘Robespierre is grand, Saint-Just is strong; Robespierre speaks, Saint-Just acts.’ Saint-Just himself seemed beyond human. At twenty six, he knew no hesitation or doubt. He had one love: the revolution. He had one idol: Robespierre.”
— Anatoly Gladilin, The Gospel of Robespierre (1970).
“[Saint]-Just owed nothing to Robespierre, but Robespierre reattempted his soul in the fiery spirit of this young man who, carried within himself the destinies of the Republic. Robespierre had no real eloquence until he had lived in familiarity with that of [Saint]-Just.”
— A writer on the dynamic between Robespierre and Saint-Just, in J. M. Thompson, Leaders of the French Revolution (1928).
“[Saint-Just] was pushed into the bay of a window, from which he could see, on the other side of the room, a noisy group round a table. ‘Move up a bit,’ someone said, ‘let him see his king lying on a table, like any ordinary man’. There was silence then as they waited to see what Saint-Just would do. He came over to the table, sat down by it, and gazed in silence at his friend. Through the last hours of the night and on into the dawn, he sat there with his bitter thoughts, watching over the wounded man.”
— J. B. Morton, Saint-Just (1939).
“We’ve done a lot of speculating about the extent of the differences between the two men, but it’s clear that Saint-Just’s last speech - the same one he was prevented from delivering - is a vibrant homage to [his] friend and an example of loyalty rare in history. The intimacy between these two men of character was so close that some have gone so far as to suggest it was homosexual in nature.”
— Bernard Vinot, Saint-Just, (1985). [We're not going to talk about the next sentence because I've debunked this already.]