AITA for having my sister escorted out of Paris by the one person she hates most because she was becoming a political liability and also possibly consorting with known criminals?
throwaway because my brother is basically the most famous man in France and i cannot have this traced back to us
OK so. Background. I (31M) am a representative of the people currently on mission with the Army of Italy. My brother (36M, let's call him M) is... you probably know who he is. My sister (28F, let's call her C) has lived with us on and off for the past two years, and things have recently gotten complicated: And while I confess I do not have long, with there being an army to attend to and a Carnot to destroy and approximately seventeen other crises of varying urgency. This situation with my sister has begun to occupy my thoughts in a manner incompatible with the efficient prosecution of the Republic's business and I require an outside perspective.
Let me explain the situation plainly, as I believe in frankness above all things: C and I were very close. When M left for Paris in 1789 we were basically running the household together in Arras, scraping by, genuinely struggling; she was writing to M to send money, I was writing to M to send money, the whole shebang.. When we finally came to Paris in 1792 we moved in together, worked together, supported M together. I say this so that you understand: this is not a case of a brother who has never paid attention to his sister.
The trouble began, I suppose, in Nice. I had been sent on mission to the Army of Italy — an assignment I accepted with pride, knowing it would be difficult and knowing the road would be dangerous. C came with me for company. This was, I think, a reasonable thing. She is my sister. We had always been close. It seemed natural.
While we were in Nice, C and my colleague's wife (let's call her MR) took up the habit of riding horses through the countryside in a manner that attracted extremely unflattering press attention.. You understand the climate. We are trying to make the Mountain beloved, not feared. We cannot have people writing that the representatives of the people are sending their women out to ride like aristocrats while the soldiers go hungry (though, personally, I found rich pun intended given that MR is from Grasse and C is from Arras but ANYWAY). I asked them to stop. C agreed to stop. I trusted her word because she is my sister and her word had always been sufficient.
Then while I was away she went again with MR.
I will.. pass over the details of what followed, except to say that I believed what I was told by someone I had no reason to distrust, and that the rupture between C and myself has its roots here, and that by the time she returned alone to Paris the situation between us had become strained.
Now. Apparently this makes me the villain?? I would simply like to point out that:
C had agreed to stop
The press attention was genuinely damaging
I was managing an active military situation and could not be dealing with this
I believed the person I believed, I'm not a. mind reader.
C returned to Paris shortly after. Possibly because of an administrative letter, possibly of her own accord, the details are disputed and frankly above my current ability to reconstruct clearly.
Anyway. Things were a bit strained but we were all still living together when I came back through Paris in December. Fine. Normal family stuff.
THEN. I go on my second mission (Franche-Comté this time, for different reasons). While I'm gone I start receiving information — intelligence, if you will, though it pains me to use that word about my own sister — about the company she was keeping in my absence.
And this is the part where I think I might be justified but people keep telling me I'm not so I'm putting it to you.
C has been spending time with:
A fellow deputy (G) who M and I have held in serious contempt for years, This is not simply that I find him personally unpleasant, though I do, but he is someone who was expelled from the Jacobin Club for suspected counter-revolutionary connections, and who has documented links to shady financial dealings involving the British: I know this because I have eyes and I have read the reports.
A man currently under house arrest for circulating counterfeit currency (!!!) whose brother was guillotined the previous month for inciting civil unrest, and who is apparently now part of C's social "clique"
Various other people I cannot fully detail here because. of operational security concerns
She has also, apparently, been telling people that M and I are bad brothers, which I find particularly rich given that we are actively managing the defense of the Republic while she is having tea with people on house arrest.
Now I remind you AGAIN that I am on mission with the Army of Italy. My brother is effectively governing the Republic. Our name — and I say this not out of vanity but out of simple political realism — is at this moment one of the few things standing between this country and the chaos that would follow if the enemies of the people regained their footing. We cannot afford associations of this kind. We simply cannot. I do not say C has. bad intentions. I say she has conducted herself with a complete absence of judgment at precisely the moment when judgment was most required.
So I wrote to M and said that C has become our "greatest enemy," that she is abusing our "spotless reputation," and that she needs to be sent back to Arras immediately. Of course, because I had a VALID point, he listened to me and he arranged for this to happen.
She was escorted back to Arras by our colleague who she had been complaining about. I will admit this was perhaps not the. gentlest possible solution. In my defense.. I was busy.
And he was heading there anyways BUT REGARDLESS
She then came back to Paris anyway in July, wrote me a very long letter accusing me of treating her like I hate her, and I did not respond.
I want to be clear about something. I love my sister. I have always loved my sister. I embraced M with tears in my eyes when I feared for his safety and I would do the same for her. This is not about not loving her. This is about the fact that we are in the middle of something enormous, something historic, something that will determine whether this Republic survives or collapses, and I cannot allow personal sentiment to compromise the work.
Here is my case for NTA:
The political associations were genuinely dangerous, not hypothetically dangerous
I'm not saying she had bad intentions, I'm saying she had catastrophically bad judgment at the worst possible time
I did not make up the threat, I had actual information from sources I trusted
The Republic literally cannot function if M and I are being dragged down by association with people under house arrest for fraud
Here is where I'm willing to concede I might be the asshole:
I did not tell her what she'd done wrong at any point. Ever. She wrote to me saying she didn't understand what had happened and I didn't answer.
I sent her to Arras with the one person she disliked most on what I will characterize as a managed escort rather than a gentle conversation
I possibly processed her as a threat rather than as my sister which in hindsight is. a bit much
I literally have not spoken to her since
Regarding that last point.. Yeah yeah, I didn't write to her to tell her what she had done or why I was concerned or what she might do differently. But for what it's worth, when I wrote to M instead, the matter was handled from there. I am aware this is not how one ideally manages a family difficulty. But. There is an army out here. And frankly when I try to imagine sitting down to write C a calm explanatory letter I find I cannot do it without it becoming a denunciation, and she deserves better than that, and so I said nothing.
For what it's worth, I have been extremely busy. For obvious reasons..
But I want to be clear: I have not been a bad brother. I have been a brother in impossible circumstances, trying to protect something larger than any of us, in the only way I knew how.
So. AITA? I leave it to you to decide. I have to go. Carnot is not going to destroy himself.
