secondjulia

[secondjulia]

"You are an infamous crew; I am a rogue and scoundrel because I have no money to give you..."

Help me understand! I came upon That Letter a few days ago in the Morton biography of Saint-Just. I understand it's an unsent vent, basically, but this part about "because I have no money to give you" stuck in my mind. Do you think he caught a glimpse of the (perceived or real) corruption that later shaped his public disdain for a Desmoulins et al? Is there more information not included here that fills in the blanks at all?

[secondjulia]

Ever since that Collot portrait wrenched my brain, I'm thinking about, like, is it weird that in so many European historical periods men are 100% covered up?

Like, when I first saw Camille's darling family portrait, I was kind of impressed that Lucile's sleeves were so short & the dress was moderately low-cut (relative to other pictures I'd seen & the English styles I'm more familiar with). But now I look at it like OH, Camille's baring his neck like a hussy ❤️

But I've just been thinking about how, in the eras I've encountered, you almost never see men in short sleeves or baring their ankles lol or even without some sort of neck-covering; they're consistently covered from chin to toe.

I wish that I were educated enough to interpret this, but I just keep looking for pictures of men with their necks out & thinking about how women's bodies are always so policed & have to be hidden away but what tf was going on with centuries of European men covering every inch of skin below the chin?

Can anybody add context to this/help me interpret my weirdass fixation on 18th century men's throats?

[secondjulia]

oh shit wtf.

Also why does he look so familiar? Like, seriously, who does he look like? I feel like I know him lol

Portrait said to represent Collot d’Herbois, approx. 1780 (source)

[secondjulia]

Oh no! Imagine people making this shit up about you & then journalists & historians — instead of questioning whether it was a little bit of hyperbole or rumor — just ran with it.

Shoutouts to the British for making shit up about Robespierre's himbo little brother being a cannibal because they were salty he took Toulon back from them (with his new bestie Napoleon Bonaparte)

[secondjulia]

How on earth do you have:

"the chief architect of the Terror"

next to:

opposed deChristianisation & moved against extremists

and still not actually paint a complex picture of the reality?!

I keep seeing this in book after book after book — authors drop these hints like "He opposed [extreme person/event/thing]" but then still paint a picture of the bloodthirsty "chief architect of the Terror."

It's like, they have the information — they've literally cited at least a couple relevant facts — but then completely forget about it in their characterization/don't even slightly acknowledge that he was one of many people responsible, not even slightly totally in charge, not bloodthirsty — & not even slightly extreme in many, many respects.

“I learnt this in school” me too. Look at my textbook bruh, we both got fed ts. “Tried, convicted ànd guillotined” very very famously was not tried or convicted what are we doing??? 🥀🥀🥀 I’d argue- 4/8 of these are flat out false or at least misleading 😭

[secondjulia]

"...the required work which I often have to force myself to do — so great is my fear of making the effort — is such that I'll wash my gloves or sharpen kitchen knives when I should be getting started — anything to find an excuse and put off the moment."

—Stanisława Przybyszewska while writing The Danton Case From A Life of Solitude, letter 9 October 1928

Oh, Stanisława, mastering the writer's procrastination!

We all relate.

[secondjulia]

😭 Every time I see reference to this, I think about how not even slightly soft & absorbent paper is. Imagine staunching your wounds with some looseleaf.

He used this bag to remove the coagulated blood which filled his mouth. The citizens who surrounded him watched all his movements: some of them even gave him some white paper (there was no linen at hand) which he employed in the same way - Courtois, Rapport

Image Source: La Terreut et La Vertu (1964)

[secondjulia]

Ah. Possibly an important update.

Google docs isn’t deleting your docs just because they have lewd text.

OP turned off reblogs of the post due to being debunked, but here’s a link of the reblog so you can still read stuff. Hate Google all you want but misinformation helps no one.

[secondjulia]

Apologies for the last one. Hob can have TWO (2) boyfriends.

[secondjulia]

[secondjulia]

DANTON: [grips and squeezes him]...[squeezes him stronger] CAMILLE: [swooning] Mm-n-mm...oh! [DANTON lets him go, but holds him by the arms]

Camille is always getting grabbed in this play & I think he likes it.

[secondjulia]

Literally the only name I knew from the Revolution was Robespierre.

I guess I knew there was a Louis involved, though I could never remember if it was XIV, XV, or VXI. With a gun to my head, I wouldn't have more than a 33.3% chance of getting it right. If someone said the name Marie Antoinette, I guess I'd remember she existed.

And other revolutionaries?

What revolutionaries?

Was it not just Robespierre trying to get power for himself?

I never even heard the name Saint-Just — or thought I hadn't. I was genuinely surprised to look back at the Sandman comics, which I'd read multiple times, & realize he was in it because until about 5 months ago, that name literally meant nothing to me.

It's so sad.

I mean, at this point, I don't expect a lot from my early-2000s American education. But the more I learn after the fact, the more stunning it is that it's all just hidden — forgotten or ignored or pushed away to die in the past. Like we can't learn anything from the people who fought for & theorized & shaped the world at the birth modern democracy.

Continuing with this. I've always wondered why Saint Just is excluded at the international level? It seems more like a conspiracy to make him disappear than anything else. They reduce the Terror to a single page, even though it was the most complex period of the entire revolution, when philosophy was embedded in the revolution.

I think the official history is dismissive of most revolutionaries (I tend to talk about Saint Just because, well, I know him best), but there were so many important revolutionaries with considerable contributions who are simply excluded. How can you summarize the revolutionary period in 2 classes? That’s nefarious.

[secondjulia]

At around 7:30 p.m., the three carts finally arrived at the Place de la Révolution, next to the guillotine. Couthon was the first to be put under the guillotine, followed by Robespierre's brother, Augustin. Amid the cheers of the crowd, one execution followed another. It is no longer possible to determine when Saint-Just's turn came. However, he was executed before Robespierre and Fleuriot-Lescot, who were the last to be led onto the fatal scaffold. This spared him, who refused to close his eyes until the very end, from seeing the executioner brutally tear off the temporary bandage holding Robespierre's shattered jaw before the execution, causing him to cry out horribly. The only mercy shown to all of them that day was that they were not kept waiting long: After half an hour, it was all over, and Saint-Just and his companions had passed into the unchanging world of all that had been.

The mortal remains of the executed were buried that same evening in a mass grave in the so-called "Cimetière des Errancis," a small (now built-over) enclosure in the eastern part of the parkland of the Domaine de Monceau. To prevent any form of later veneration of the remains, the bodies were sprinkled with quicklime. This was an effective measure, because when some Jacobin supporters excavated there several decades later, not a single remains were found. For only 200 livres (including a 7-livre tip for the gravediggers), the young republic thus disposed of forever and ever of the mortal remains of all these men who had sought to "found" it, but whose ideals had overwhelmed it. Yet perhaps Saint-Just would have gladly accepted this nameless mass grave on the edge of a parkland landscape. In the fragments on the "republican institutions" he says about the graves in the republic he anticipated in his mind:

«Les sépultures sont communes et sont Des paysages.»

—Monar “Saint-Just: Sohn, Denker und Protagonistder Revolution”. (1993, pág. 792)

[secondjulia]

That part in Thermidor when Saint-Just tries to bargain with the gods "deep down in his dark consciousness" for an hour of sleep — "I'll give years of my future life for it."

And the gods laugh. "Years? Years?!"

😭

[secondjulia]

Aaa! Thank you for the links to the analysis! I found this article interesting because I hadn't known about the controversy over how to confront the Dantonists & found it fascinating that Saint-Just wanted so badly to do it in person. But the conclusions about his inherent murderousness seem very speculative.

[secondjulia]

Aw! Dream party!

It definitely wouldn't be appropriate to have great food at a frev party. Remember that time Camille went to Mirabeau's and wrote about how the good food & wine was corrupting his republican virtue or whatever? It would only be fitting to have, like, shitty bread & sausage.

Last night I had a dream about a big frev community sleepover (or multiple sleepovers… it was more like a summer camp but in a house) and it was held at @theorahsart.

I remember a beautiful large-format commemorative book where talented people expressed themselves with great pictures, and I wondered what I would do when it was my turn, since I can't paint at all.

It was all good fun - except for the food. That was seriously inedible. (Sorry, @theorahsart! But you didn't cook it yourself, but some of your relatives, or someone from outside, I don't know.)

:-)))

[secondjulia]

Reminder that the 10 thermidor was only the beginning of a purge that ended with 105 persons executed in three days and hundreds more arrested. Some committed suicide or were poisoned in jail.

The Commune was almost entirely purged:

there were 140 members on the general council on 9 thermidor

87 were guillotined

40 imprisoned

only 13 remained free

On 11 thermidor, twelve tumbrils carried 71 people to be executed. Here are their names. 12 more people were guillotined on 12 thermidor. Remember this when you read the traitorous CSP members tell you they did this to "prevent bloodshed" - when the execution toll on 11 thermidor was the biggest in one day ever.

Four months later in November the Club des Jacobins would be attacked by a right-wing militia led by Fréron, who broke the windows and doors down, beat the men, and stripped and whipped the women who were there. These women were ridiculed in crass pamphlets the following days. A deputy's wife was among them, whom Fréron had been personally targetting in his rag for weeks. The Convention punished no one but the Jacobins themselves by ordering the Club to be shut down and destroyed. A market was later built there and named to celebrate Thermidor.

The terrible winter came where tons of people starved because the new useless government of corrupt fiends lifted all regulations to "free" the market. This is the winter where Victor Hugo wrote Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed his sister's children. It's not a coincidence.

Less than a year later, in May 1795, the sans-culottes would rise for the last time in an insurrection that was utterly crushed and, with it, the popular spring of the Revolution.

The Revolution had been dying. It was now truly dead.

The next years were just a corpse they pretended was still alive.