#Jean Artarit

[robespapier]

Jean Artarit: Robespierre was a repressed homosexual.

Olivier Dutaillis: YES! He liked watching the young, joyful, sturdy, pretty carpenters who worked for Maurice Duplay, often shirtless or with their clothes sticking to their muscles with sweat!...AND he also liked Saint-Just, who looked like an angel! AND WAS A GOTH!!!

Artarit:......

Dutaillis: He was a repressed homosexual of many tastes.

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Me and my teacher have been talking about Robespierre and he told me that there are rumors that he might've been homosexual. He then asked me if that would've affected his reputation. Who made the rumors and who is the subject that made people think that Robespierre was possibly homosexual?

I don’t get how Robespierre being homosexual can be called a rumor when it’s really clear as day? I mean, Robespierre openly admits he’s got a boyfriend in this letter to Maurice Duplay:

Okay, jokes aside, I don’t know when exactly the claim that Robespierre could have been homo first showed up, but as far as I’m aware it wasn’t one that circulated during his life nor one that was among the slanders thrown against him in the aftermath of his death. So if today, the idea of him possibly being gay is not unheard of, I don’t think it was one that affected him and his reputation during his lifetime.

When trying to find exactly from where and when this idea originates, I actually only found somewhat recent works (that said, I know it dates back far earlier than that, I just don’t know who first came up with it). According to Peter McPhee, Jean Artarit presents the following thesis in his Maximilien Robespierre ou l’impossible filiation from 2003:

The psychoanalyst Jean Artarit is at an extreme, offering the insight that Robespierre’s misspelling in an electoral pamphlet of a shoemaker’s name Lantillette as Languillette (“baby eel”) shows a longing to cut off the penis. For Robespierre was apparently a repressed homosexual with a castration complex, a misogynist and pathological narcissist constantly searching for a good father and an all-powerful mother.

There’s also this passage from The Alyson Almanac (1989):

Although Robespierre may have never acted on his homosexual feelings, his strong attraction to members of his own sex is indisputable. His attachment to the handsome Saint-Just, known as "The Archangel of the Revolution,” was the source of frequent rumors.

There’s basically the answer to your question regarding who (most often?) is the subject who made people think Robespierre was homosexual — his nine years younger co-worker Louis Antoine Saint-Just. Although, again, I’m pretty sure the author is mistaken here and that no rumors regarding them being a thing are proven to have existed while they were still alive (right @frevandrest…?)

What makes up the idea of Robespierre and Saint-Just as a couple is mostly a bunch of circumstantials which to be boring fair can be interpreted in a bunch of ways that aren’t romantically and/or sexually linked as well. These include (but are not limited to) both Saint-Just and Robespierre being unmarried (the latter even allegedly shouting ”I will never marry!” in an anecdote, and this despite the fact that we have clues of marriage plans between him and several women, none of which ended in a wedding), contemporaries admitting a certain closeness between the two (examples: 1, 2, 3), Robespierre’s host claiming Saint-Just would go straight to Robespierre’s chamber without talking to anyone else in the family, later allegations of Saint-Just being super handsome (despite the fact that contemporaries just appear to have described him as average looking) and finally the fact that Saint-Just stayed with Robespierre until the bitter end, going out with the aim to defend him on 9 thermidor and dying with him on the scaffold one day later.

[after-zeno]

{ifag note} Did Robespierre, revolutionary, have a castration complex?

Image: Maximilien Robespierre bust sculpted from terracotta by Claude-André Deseine 1791 based on watching him speak to the Jacobin Club.

Extract #1

Does Robespierre’s “childhood [especially the collapse of his family when he was six] give us the clues to the Robespierre enigma: the young man who articulated the highest ideals of individual rights, tolerance and democracy in 1789 but who was a prominent member of a government in 1794 which abused civil liberties, incarcerated many thousands of “suspects” and oversaw thousands of executions which can only be described as political?

Extract#2

“Assertions about Robespierre’s intimate life have varied wildly....The psychoanalyst Jean Artarit is at an extreme, offering the insight that Robespierre’s misspelling in an electoral pamphlet of a shoemaker’s name Lantillette as Languillette (“baby eel”) shows a longing to cut off the penis. For Robespierre was apparently [according to Artarit] a repressed homosexual with a castration complex, a misogynist and pathological narcissist constantly searching for a good father and an all-powerful mother”.

Extracts from Peter McPhee’s ‘Integrating Private and Public in the Life of Maximilien Robespierre‘ in his academic biography of the revolutionary including the reference to Jean Artarit, Maximilien Robespierre ou l’impossible filiation (Paris, 2003), for example, 55, 66, 68, 79, 81, 106-7, 112-14, 170, 366-67.

Execution of Robespierre, Saint Just and others 28 July 1794. Maximilien Robespierre,1758-1794. Jacobin leader during French Revolution. Louis Antoine Leon Saint-Just,1767-1794.French politician. Engraved by Jonnard after H. Renaud. From ‘Histoire de la Revolution by Louis Blanc.

Image: sonofhistory.tumblr.com via for-the-duke-of-paris.tumblr.com

[mali-umkin]

Has anyone read Jean Artarit's Robespierre, or Joël Schmidt's Robespierre? Are they worth buying?

[robespapier]

Fred, Fred, Fred (Fred Vargas, the author), have you read something fucked up like Jean Artarit's "psychoanalysis" of Robespierre or what? (I haven't read it myself, but I know what specific kind of bullshit is in it)

Anyway, I know this is fiction, and the author needs Robespierre to be as "weird" as possible for the ~aesthetic, I guess? But we should, as a society, stop pathologizing people based on their sexuality. Besides, there's no proof Robespierre couldn't fuck. Maybe he just wouldn't. But there's no proof he wouldn't either. Maybe he did. Maybe he did not. In any case that shouldn't be the problem these bigoted takes make it out to be...

[robespapier]

The description of Robespierre in Vargas’ crime novel are so bad and over-the-top it’s comical 

“It’s so interesting that we’ve started groundbreaking researches. Exploring the phenomenon no historian has ever explain: How the deathly pale and icy Robespierre, devoid of charisma and empathy, with his sharp [sour?] voice et his lifeless body could have caused such adoration? With his gloomy face and his empty eyes blinking behind his glasses? Well then, that’s what we’re observing, what we’re recording.”

I’ll try unpacking all this concisely (I will fail): 

No historian pierced the mystery because there’s no mystery: Robespierre was liked for his political ideas. Wild, I know. 

Vargas’ idea of academia seems to be Jean Artarit’s psychoanalytic bullshit, but I’m sure Historians devoted researches to how Robespierre became a great orator despite having an unimposing voice. 

On the subject of Robespierre being particularly liked by women (because there’s sth in Vargas book about it too, but I haven’t bookmarked the page and can’t find it atm): I haven’t read it yet but  ALL OF HIS POWER LIES IN THE DISTAFF: ROBESPIERRE, WOMEN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, seem to be an interesting article. 

Deathly pale Robespierre: he was born in Arras; a lot of Northerners are very pale (lots of redheads too) and there’s nothing wrong with it? Also since here it’s described like an illness, it’s worth noting Robespierre had varicose problems on his legs (so blood issues) and according to Louis Saurel (I have to do researches on that) his little sister Henriette died of anemia, so it’s possible Robespierre had health issues that made him paler than normal. Still, it’s not, as written here, a sign something was wrong with his character. 

Same for “icy” Robespierre: Contemporary descriptions of people who were close to him and liked him indicate he could laugh, smile and be a friendly, warm person. 

Define charisma? his speeches are charismatic, and I’m sure he worked on his delivery because, as well-showed in the movie Un peuple et son roi, he went from being a nobody to being very much listened to by the whole Convention. 

No empathy: NO EMPATHY? Why the hell does Vargas think he did the Revolution? For the power-trip?!! He did the Revolution because he loved humanity and wanted a better, fairer world for us. He died because he cared. His empathy killed him. 

Lifeless body: ah yes, if you don’t eat lots of food, drink lots of alcohol and have a lots of sex your body is “lifeless”. Sure. 

Blinking is evil when it’s Robespierre doing it: Robespierre allegedly had facial tics, as someone who suffers from them too I can assure everyone it’s an neurological discorder usually worsen by stress, but not directly caused by it. Again, it says nothing on Robespierre’s character. And it’s common, even for people unaffected by facial tics, to blink a lot in stressful circumstances (like giving a speech in front of a full assembly). Alternatively, maybe he had dry eyes.