Augustin Robespierre Regarding the Women Around Him (or: the man who valued women's opinions as long as it didn't cost him anything)
Something I keep coming back to is the gap between how Augustin treated women in the abstract and how he handled them in his actual personal life: Because those are two genuinely different things, and both are documented, and neither fully cancels out the other.
What He Was Capable Of: The Mercy He Extended to Strangers
(or, The Ladies' Man and the Jacobin Jam)
Heh.. Not to uhm,. toot my own horn or anything but.. toot tooottt.. The decree timeline is a useful starting point.. He freed pregnant prisoners: "Citoyenne Delisle: Freed because she is pregnant and has 5 small children." He released women arrested for "simple religious opinions that have never disturbed public order." He freed a man specifically because his sister was blind and depended on him entirely — asking, in his own words, "is he guilty for listening to the voice of nature and holding out his hand to his brother whom he saw thus dying without means of support?" He granted a pension to Widow Barbot. He freed women arrested on the word of jealous neighbors, women whose only crime was wearing a cross.
When women came to him as petitioners — with documented need, with pleas, and with petitions — he almost always listened. The women of Besançon crowded around his carriage as he left, weeping. The women of Vesoul filled the inn courtyard waiting to present petitions as he prepared to depart. "I will come back," he told them, "with an olive branch or I will die."
You could very well say, given the decrees and all, that the warmth was genuine.
And then there's the Besançon Jacobin club.
The La Saudraye Paradox
Augustin brought La Saudraye to the meeting: One would find he'd apparently been bringing her everywhere — to Jacobin club sessions in Vesoul, into daily policy discussions, and into the administrative work of the mission. Suspects had learned to petition her directly, knowing that going to her was going to him. He wrote to Maximilien asking him to receive her and hear what she had to say: "necessary information to come to know certain characters who play a role in the Revolution." He explicitly trusted her political judgment enough to send her to his brother as an emissary.
At Besançon, a tinsmith who was a Bernard de Saintes loyalist stood up immediately as Augustin mounted the tribune, before Augustin even had a chance to establish himself in the room at all:
"Citizens, the regulations of our club prohibit the entry of women. I am married and a father, but I have never dreamed of bringing either my wife or my daughter here. Robespierre, neither husband nor father, has brought his woman here. I ask that she be made to leave, and I ask that it be noted in the minutes that at least one Republican has protested against Robespierre's aristocracy."
Augustin was furious. He signaled to her to leave, and she walked out.
Nodier records that as she crossed the room every eye followed her. He claimed to find her neither beautiful nor even pretty, yet her face nevertheless made a powerful impression on him: there was, he wrote, something penetrating, caustic, almost infernal in both her smile and her gaze. He also repeated the rumor circulating among those present — that she possessed an almost supernatural ability to read souls, and that Augustin had brought her with him as part of a "mystery of redemption," charged with distinguishing the good from the bad. The rumor was absurd, but its existence is revealing. Her presence in political spaces had become conspicuous enough that people felt compelled to invent explanations for it..
And here's where it gets interesting, because we know from Nodier's (dubious as is) account exactly what Augustin was capable of when he actually wanted to fight. That same evening, at that same meeting, he gave a long caustic speech about Bernard de Saintes that Nodier describes as "delivered with a terrifying calm — I was about to say a cruel one." He mocked Bernard's thinness, his smallness, his very physical existence. He said he believed "someone of that name had slipped into the National Convention through the keyhole." He said "narrow and light as Bernard's head may be, mine will weigh no more than his in the scales of justice." He descended from the tribune "amid fresh bursts of laughter and new acclamations, crossed the hall, rejoined his companion, and went to his post chaise."
He rejoined the woman he had just allowed to be expelled.
He was not a man who backed down from confrontation in general. That night he did it deliberately and skillfully and to considerable applause. He chose, specifically, not to fight for her.
The contradiction became even starker moments later, as this is where, according to Nodier, the courtyard outside the inn was crowded with women who had been waiting impatiently to present petitions to him. He could do little for them — his mission technically ended at the departmental border — but he addressed them anyway, promising that he would return with an olive branch or die for them: Women he had never met received a public declaration of devotion from him almost immediately after the woman he trusted enough to carry political intelligence to Maximilien Robespierre had been left to walk out of the Jacobin club alone.
Luzzatto reads the club scene as "proof that the Revolution of men did not always correspond, or did not correspond at all, to a Revolution of women." Which is accurate but also slightly lets Augustin off the hook — it frames it as a general structural failure rather than a specific choice he made. He trusted her observations enough to route them to Maximilien, but he did not trust that trust publicly when defending it would cost him something.
Robespierre enters → mounts the tribune → tinsmith immediately speaks up before he's even said anything → La Saudraye is expelled → "le tumulte s'apaisa" (the tumult calmed) → Robespierre gives his speech (general points first, then Bernard mockery) → president tries to intervene with the "illustration d'une famille" remark → Robespierre attacks both Bernard AND the president → famous tinsmith line → descends, rejoins La Saudraye, carriage → women with petitions at the inn courtyard → "rameau d'or" speech → carriage departs.
The Charlotte/Marguerite Triangle, or: How to Avoid a Problem Using Other People
!!! ohohohoh ain't this what we were all waiting for!!! Everybody knows the horseback ride incident is where the pattern gets explicit.
Charlotte's version: Marguerite suggested the ride. Charlotte reluctantly went. Augustin reproached Charlotte. Charlotte called on Marguerite to testify. Marguerite said it was Charlotte's idea and she'd been taken against her will. Augustin believed Marguerite.
Charlotte: "My brother knew I was incapable of lying. Why then did he not want to believe me?"
We don't actually know whose version is accurate and historians have gone back and forth on it. That's almost beside the point. What's interesting is the mechanism: Augustin accepted one woman's word over another's without investigating, without confronting either of them directly, and importantly without sitting Charlotte down and asking her to explain. He decided — unilaterally — and then acted on the decision by withdrawing rather than engaging.
When he came back to Paris in December 1793, he lodged with the Ricords rather than seeing Charlotte. He used Marguerite's household as a physical reason not to have the confrontation. Charlotte was in the city and he very well consciously chose to sleep somewhere that made seeing her logistically implausible.
Then in spring 1794 he wrote to Maximilien:
"My sister does not have a single drop of blood that resembles ours. I have seen and learned so much about her that I regard her as our greatest enemy. She abuses our spotless reputation to lay down the law on us and threatens to take a scandalous step in order to compromise us. We must take a decisive stand against her. We must make her leave for Arras."
He escalated directly to the maximum available authority rather than having a direct conversation. Charlotte didn't know what she was supposed to have done: He went from silent withdrawal to writing to Maximilien asking to have her removed from the city — without, apparently, telling Charlotte herself what the problem was.
Even if Charlotte were entirely wrong about the ride, Augustin still:
avoided her,
stayed elsewhere,
complained to Maximilien,
sought her removal,
never answered the final letter.
The behavioral pattern survives regardless of who won the original dispute.
Napoleon cultivated Marguerite Ricord specifically because, per Barras's memoirs, she exercised great influence over Augustin. This was apparently visible enough from the outside that a man calculating his career moves concluded that going through her was a viable route to Augustin. Which tells you something about how legible the pattern was even to people who barely knew him, even if Barras isn't the best source here..
Return to Sender: Neither Snow nor Rain nor Sisterly Devotion: The Most Frictionless Goodbye
On July 6, 1794, Charlotte wrote to him:
"Your aversion for me, my brother, far from diminishing, as I flattered myself, has become the most implacable hatred, to the point that the mere sight of me inspires horror to you; also, I must not hope that you will ever be calm enough to listen to me, which is why I will attempt to write to you."
She wrote because she had already given up on him being willing to hear her directly. She was doing the emotional labor of finding the medium he might tolerate — a letter he could read without having to respond in real time, without having to face her. She acknowledged the money dispute. She said she would leave. She said she would forgive him. She said wherever she ended up, even across the seas, if he needed her she would come back immediately.
He didn't respond. And they never spoke again.
What gets me about this is that Charlotte's letter already shows she'd internalized his avoidance. She wasn't demanding a confrontation — she was offering him the most frictionless version of contact she could construct. She'd already adapted her approach to his pattern.
He still didn't answer.
What Pattern Is This, Actually
It's not that he didn't value women or thought them unimportant. The decree timeline argues against that. His trust in La Saudraye's political intelligence, his warmth toward Élisabeth Duplay, the Vesoul women weeping as his carriage drove away — all of that argues against it.
The pattern is more specific. Women who needed something from him — who came to him as petitioners, who needed mercy or justice or advocacy — got his full attention and usually got what they needed. Women who complicated his life — who witnessed things he'd rather not have witnessed (Charlotte watching the Ricord situation), who challenged his public self-presentation (La Saudraye's presence as an accusation of "aristocracy"), who asked him to account for himself (Charlotte's letter) — got avoidance, deflection, or escalation to a higher authority.
He was comfortable dispensing justice to strangers. He was not comfortable being accountable to people he was close to.
My "Not So Sweet Bonbon" post calls this emotional outsourcing, which is right. I'd add that it's not really passive. The Besançon speech is proof he could fight when he wanted to. He chose not to extend that capability to the women in his personal life. He slandered Charlotte to Maximilien rather than talking to her. He let Marguerite's word stand over Charlotte's rather than investigating. He let La Saudraye walk out humiliated rather than defending her.
He was not afraid of confrontation. He was specifically afraid (or, more accurately, avoidant) of the confrontations that would require him to be wrong, or accountable, or responsible for someone else's pain.
The Rosalie Jullien Footnote
Rosalie Jullien observed him at dinner in February 1793 and wrote to her son: "Robespierre jeune is livelier, more open, an excellent patriot; but with a common mind and a contented temper."
The "contented temper" is,, in all honesty,,, the phrase that stays with me. He coasted on goodwill: He was warm, open, charming — probably genuinely those things most of the time. The patterns in this post aren't incompatible with being genuinely warm, they just show what happened when warmth wasn't enough, when the situation needed something harder than charm.. He couldn't do harder. And certainly not with the people who knew him.
Sources:
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre: Il Terrore dal volto umano. Translated by me, 2025. Original Italian edition: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2009. (Especially "Stories of Women" and "Your Brother is No Longer the Same.")
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Chapters 13–14.)
Nodier, Charles. Souvenirs, Portraits, Épisodes de la Révolution et de l'Empire. 2 vols. Paris: Charpentier, 1856. Pages 302–304.
Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1835).
Charlotte Robespierre to Augustin Robespierre, 18 Messidor Year II [July 6, 1794]. Cited in Michon, Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre, vol. 2.
Mémoires de Barras, membre du Directoire (1895), vol. 1, pp. 148–149.
Rosalie Jullien to her son, February 2–3, 1793. Cited in Young, chapter 10.
Decree timeline compiled with the help of mathildeaquisexta.
